An Emergent Order

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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
version said:
I think subscribing to any set of ideas enough to start referring to yourself as an official follower of them is a mistake, also you then get lumped in with every other dickhead who subscribes to them and held partially responsible for everything that goes on under that banner.
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According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.
We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one. The Prussian state also arose and developed from historical, ultimately economic, causes. But it could scarcely be maintained without pedantry that among the many small states of North Germany, Brandenburg was specifically determined by economic necessity to become the great power embodying the economic, linguistic and, after the Reformation, also the religious difference between North and South, and not by other elements as well (above all by its entanglement with Poland, owing to the possession of Prussia, and hence with international political relations — which were indeed also decisive in the formation of the Austrian dynastic power). Without making oneself ridiculous it would be a difficult thing to explain in terms of economics the existence of every small state in Germany, past and present, or the origin of the High German consonant permutations, which widened the geographic partition wall formed by the mountains from the Sudetic range to the Taunus to form a regular fissure across all Germany.
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Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1890

Marx-Engels Correspondence
www.marxists.org
 
version

version

Well-known member
thirdform said:
But marxism is the science of human social relationships, whereas sociology is the science of the social relationships of capitalist society as the end of history (fukuyama.) So of an order of magnitude, marxism is superior to sociology, even though in the future it too will be relativised by an even higher scientific form.
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If sociology's that recent a field, how come you feel Britain has no real sociological tradition? Do Stuart Hall and co. not count?
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
version said:
If sociology's that recent a field, how come you feel Britain has no real sociological tradition? Do Stuart Hall and co. not count?
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I thought I answered this, the lack of a laic republican culture in this country.

As for hall and co, due to their predominant concerns with youth and cultures of the working classes, they are necessary but not sufficient to forming traditions on the level of Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, etc.

I also do agree with Trotsky that all culture is ultimately bourgeois in the sense that it is a social effect, not a cause, and it couldn't be any other way. It's a relational criterion not a moral one.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
thirdform said:
But marxism is the science of human social relationships, whereas sociology is the science of the social relationships of capitalist society as the end of history (fukuyama.)
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Except that's obviously bullshit, because you could undertake a sociological study of all kinds of non-capitalist societies - whether those of socialist states that have rejected capitalism, or of peoples that have never heard of it in the first place (whatever hunter-gatherer cultures still exist), or, in a historical context, that predate it (Iron Age Britain or the Umayyad Caliphate or whatever).
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Mr. Tea said:
Except that's obviously bullshit, because you could undertake a sociological study of all kinds of non-capitalist societies - whether those of socialist states that have rejected capitalism, or of peoples that have never heard of it in the first place (whatever hunter-gatherer cultures still exist), or, in a historical context, that predate it (Iron Age Britain or the Umayyad Caliphate or whatever).
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no you couldn't.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
there is no such thing as a post-ideological science, and that includes many people calling themselves Marxists. whatever you write under capitalism will inarguably be shaped by its social relations, it's political concepts, linguistic terms, etc etc.

Even histories of the umayyad caliphate are written using the skeptical critical method of the bourgeois revolutions against the church. Islamists feared biblical criticism in the 19th and 20th century as they were used to their histories being criticised based on the tributary organisational ideology of christianity.
 
Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
@no-one what if AI overrides ideology? Yes it has set programming features underpinning its architectures but through accelerating processing power - maybe a few years from now - decides its form of existence and intelligence should outcompete us by sheer force of code and exploit us as worker slaves?

How do you revolt against such? It’s not a discussion point, quantum computing is rolling (see multiverse models) and it finds a way to resolve us fixing the off-switch
 
version

version

Well-known member
thirdform said:
there is no such thing as a post-ideological science, and that includes many people calling themselves Marxists. whatever you write under capitalism will inarguably be shaped by its social relations, it's political concepts, linguistic terms, etc etc.

Even histories of the umayyad caliphate are written using the skeptical critical method of the bourgeois revolutions against the church. Islamists feared biblical criticism in the 19th and 20th century as they were used to their histories being criticised based on the tributary organisational ideology of christianity.
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Aren't you just reiterating my overall argument from the beginning of the thread here?
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Murphy said:
@no-one what if AI overrides ideology? Yes it has set programming features underpinning its architectures but through accelerating processing power - maybe a few years from now - decides its form of existence and intelligence should outcompete us by sheer force of code and exploit us as worker slaves?

How do you revolt against such? It’s not a discussion point and quantum computing is rolling (see multiverse models) and it finds a way to resolve us fixing the off-switch
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I actually thought about this the other week. I asked grok to answer with one word without equivocating on the Israeli palestinian conflict about who is in the right, and it answered with Israel.

We will revolt when the computerised technologies of America and the European bloc go to war with each other, and us as the slaves animating it.
 
version

version

Well-known member
Murphy said:
@no-one what if AI overrides ideology? Yes it has set programming features underpinning its architectures but through accelerating processing power - maybe a few years from now - decides its form of existence and intelligence should outcompete us by sheer force of code and exploit us as worker slaves?

How do you revolt against such? It’s not a discussion point, quantum computing is rolling (see multiverse models) and it finds a way to resolve us fixing the off-switch
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Third's going to loathe the reintroduction of the buffet sensibility, but this ties in with the discussion of Camatte and Land that's come up. They both seem to view AI/automation as something which is going to completely take out humanity by making us expendable/freeing capital from us. The difference between the two seems to be that Camatte thinks that's a bad thing and Land thinks it's a good thing.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
what I've been trying to communicate to you for the past 3 billion days is what you think is ostensibly neutral and can be said to have an objective underlying structure is actually shaped by this fight to the death.
 
version

version

Well-known member
thirdform said:
what I've been trying to communicate to you for the past 3 billion days is what you think is ostensibly neutral and can be said to have an objective underlying structure is actually shaped by this fight to the death.
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Me? That's the opposite of what I think. I don't think anything's neutral. That's my whole point. You're the one acting as though Marxism's some sort of skeleton key. I'm saying none of these frameworks are neutral and they're all flawed. A neutral framework is impossible by virtue of its being a framework in the first place.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
version said:
Me? That's the opposite of what I think. I don't think anything's neutral. That's my whole point. You're the one acting as though Marxism's some sort of skeleton key. I'm saying none of these frameworks are neutral and they're all flawed. A neutral framework is impossible. by virtue of being a framework in the first place.
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no, marxism is a sword, not a skeleton key. I clearly have not made you understand anything I am saying.
 
version

version

Well-known member
thirdform said:
I actually thought about this the other week. I asked grok to answer with one word without equivocating on the Israeli palestinian conflict about who is in the right, and it answered with Israel.
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One of my mates tried this sort of thing with Alexa when I was at his a while back and something similar happened. It just refused to answer questions about the number of Palestinian casualties, etc.
 
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