I've thought about this issue before too. The way I see it is that the ruling class produces propaganda to justify standing on the backs of their fellow humans. Then the next generation absorbs this propaganda as if it were, at least in part, fact. They then develop more propaganda based on the old propaganda. This continues on and on as the empire grows. Then, when the empire begins to decline, they keep acting based on the propaganda that has been stuffed into every weak point to shore it up. Except now the propaganda is far out of alignment with the material conditions because they've changed. So their perspectives are out of alignment with reality. They are making what appear to them to be rational decisions based on their highly propagandized perspectives. They continue to rationally respond as their conditions demand, but what they think is rational is actually a manufactured fiction. I hope I was able to explain this well enough.
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end of empire hallucinations
I think this is absolutely a process that's happening, but I don't think it's making materialist analysis less useful. We just have to account for this slide into unreality.
Lenin talked about mechanic materialism as worldview which sees a man pulling a lever as just one force, dialectical materialism is knowing that the lever has resistance aka a counterforce so the lever projects its own force onto the man. Its basic physics applied to a philosophical analytical basis.
I quite don't get it how it is mechanical materialism to use dialectal materialism to analyze the us empire in the future? Because they have ideologues in their elites? That has been the case since the inception of the us.
Ideologies are borne from the material; you do away with the mechanistic approach by understanding that it is a subset of material interacting with other material. To frame the ideology to float separate from the material is to give into metaphysics; a cartesian dualism. The rational is real and the real is rational. I found In Defense of Materialism: The Development of the Monist View of History by Plekhanov useful here. I'm happy to be corrected but the above screenshot just sounds like Great Man Theory with Marxist jargon.
happy to be corrected but the above just sounds like Great Man Theory with Marxist jargon.
What this posits is like the opposite of that, it's that more and more everybody in charge can't separate the PR spectactle from the actual thing
What this posits is like the opposite of that [Great Man Theory], it’s that more and more everybody in charge can’t separate the PR spectactle from the actual thing
"As the empire declines the ruling class acts on ideology instead of real material politics" is in the OP's screenshot?
That can be taken to mean that the ghouls ignore reality and assume their conception of the world (which is borne out of their ideologies) to be true instead.
That can be taken to mean that the ghouls ignore reality and assume their conception of the world (which is borne out of their ideologies) to be true instead.
Their actions are rational in attempt to maintain their class rule?
In that respect they are. But whether the course of action chosen is correct or not for the purpose of fulfilling their goals depends on whether they have a good grasp of reality. If they instead believe in incorrect ideologies (wunderwaffens can alone bring down Iran) they will make mistakes even though they are acting rationally insofar as the end goal is concerned.
Rationality does not have to presuppose correct predictions (ie account for all variables + outside metaphysical observer who believes such an accounting will lead to a particular determined path). Was the Soviet Union not socialist under Stalin because it failed enough to consider a Kruschev taking over? Was Stalin not rational?
Edited to add: this is not to mean that leaders do not have agency but what actions they are allowed to do in powered and enabled by the system that awarded them that power. As marxists we can consider all bourgoisie leaders as "stupid" but that framing is a double edged sword because they were still intelligent enough to be more powerful than us.
There isn't a universal definition of rationality. How do you expect someone to account for the totality of information? That seems like a high bar.
How do you expect someone to account for the totality of information?
We can't; we can be rational without that. And they can be rational from their perspective.
If a driver does not understand how his engine works but finds the throttle no longer working he may then push the car from behind out of the petrol pump station in an effort to move the car forward. We could in turn say the low fuel light was blinking and the driver was stupid for not filling up his car with petrol instead. That does not mean the driver did not act rationally because he did not account for the reality of the warning light.
(Yeah that was a stretched analogy. I'm sticking with it)
Edited to add: to clarify - I'm adopting an Hegelian (-esque? Or at least an attempted marxist twist of it) defintion of rationality and very specifically the US ruling class actions are rational and borne of a material reality, not separate from it.
What if even though the car was out of gas, the driver thought for reason that the problem was with the engine oil and replaced that instead? Would that be rational or irrational?
From his perspective it is still rational. The point of the analogy was the "wrong decision" has an internal logic based on material conditions. His ideas of whether to use engine oil or push the car is not separate to the material but borne out of it.
The idea that ruling classes are not rational is an extension that we who apparently have insight also sit above the material rather than be borne of it. That is wrong.
Our wins may be different to the ruling classes but that does not make theirs any less rational to them. Especially given that is the same rationality that gave them the power in the first place; ie they have more personal evidence of wins than we do for ourselves (unless you live in a socialist country) - their lack of science compared to ours did not stop them from gaining leverage.
Either we have to concede that our truth is less than theirs. Or instead we understand that a more fuller understanding of reality is not sufficient to gain power, and it is in understanding that difference we do then gain power.
This difference is how we not undermine the enemy and minimise our chances of losing, and if we do lose then how we can better our chances of winning next time. Even if one of the enemy administrators is a guffawing buffoon.
Rational from an out of touch perspective, yes. In the way that interacting with daturs hallucinations is rational to the person on datura and nobody else
Maybe we consider the bourgeoisie "science" was never a closer approximation to reality than the marxist-leninst one but that that did not exclude their rationality or leverage on power; their "hallucinations" were rational enough to win despite the lack of hallucinations of the marxist-leninist.
Hard to understand it without the context and I don't want to do the captcha right now on the archive link. But in general here, I think we usually categorize ideology as part of superstructure and a thing like military resources as part of base, as a way of helping to understand it. Both are real, substantial factors in what occurs. But importantly, ideology alone cannot withstand a declining material base; to put it one way, belief won't stop an ocean wave from sweeping you up in it. However, if you're in charge of a material base that still has quite a bit of oomph behind it and you not only believe sincerely that you have far more resources than you actually have, but also believe you need to actively use it to subjugate others, you may squander what you do have. You may attack Iran, thinking you can break the people there, and get your imperial bases broken instead.
Trump is definitely not secretly a long-term strategic thinker, but some people in his orbit may be. However, there's nothing particularly clever about what they did with Iran. There's no positive spin for the empire on getting debased by Iran or handling navy logistics so poorly that people wanted to jump overboard. Arrogance big, military limited.
After reading Indi's recent following articles, I think the way I put it is woefully inadequate for explaining what's going on:
https://indi.ca/the-after-math/
https://indi.ca/the-logistics-war-part-1-the-oil/
https://indi.ca/logistics-war-reserve-fleet/
https://indi.ca/logistics-war-3-the-missile-gulf/
I recommend reading all of them, but if you want a rough TL;DR, I would say the important part as it pertains to what I was saying is: I'm leaving out the grifter angle of things, sans interest in maintaining empire. If we see the empire as first and foremost a profit/power grift, then what happens when people start grifting the empire machine itself? It starts getting hollowed out, rusting, sold for spare parts. Because the point isn't the empire itself but the profit part. Anyway, read Indi if that doesn't make sense.