timdrake

However CotGP is not a description of communism, but a criticism of Lassalle.

It’s a criticism of Lassalle that also contains a description of communism. These things aren’t mutually exclusive.

Since we can’t possibly imagine what those experiences will be in “communist society” we can’t imagine a communist individual existing in that society.

Marx violates this in TGI.

The issue you seem to be having throughout everything is the comprehension of revolutionary subjects as unconscious pseudo-subjects, where revolution comes about as a mechanical inevitability springing from capitalism, and ““communist society”” (unpredictably) from this (“communist society will be brought about”), hence the ability to preserve the movement towards communist society via ~“revolutionary praxis” but do away with this as the ultimate goal.

So communism isn’t actually defined by a future condition but by a present condition that will continually develop into the central characteristic of individuals in communist society.

For Marx, communism is defined by a present condition (“the premises now in existence” ~ TGI) which carries the possibility for the creation of a communist society (“Looked at historically this inversion appears as the point of entry necessary in order to enforce, at the expense of the majority, the creation of wealth as such, i.e. the ruthless productive powers of social labour, which alone can form the material basis for a free human society.” – Draft Ch. 6 of Capital). This possibility is immanent to these conditions and therefore Marx and Engels can sketch certain features of this possible society through studying present society and its historical premises, which is the actual basis for their call for the proletariat to become organized and unite.

I don’t care if you disagree with Marx but that is what you’re doing.

Ideas only exist in practice.

This isn’t what Marx is saying, nor is it true.

This is a total dismissal of the definition of communism as some future idyllic society. Right here at the beginning of part two of the manifesto.

I already addressed a very similar passage from TGI.

If imagining a better world is the impetus for actually engaging in the here and now, then that’s a subjective factor that is part of the process.

No, it's absolutely not just motivation. Communist society being a real possibility/historical necessity (in what is effectively though not explicitly a moral “should”), is what Marxism rests on–this is where “historical materialism” is supposed to transcend the “social materialism” of classical political economy. You can’t justify the call for global proletarian revolution without this. If it turns out that Marx doesn’t manage to prove this, that it can’t be proven because of when the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings, then the only thing to do is to drop Marxism.

Knows nothing about Democratic Kampuchea award

The only way I can imagine you don’t defend Pol Pot, as a communist, in any regard is if you don’t actually hold to the notion of taking back communist history from “bourgeois historiography”™ and not automatically accepting prepared narratives. "Historical idealism" in the sense Losurdo talks about in "Hegel, Marx, and the Ontology of Social Being."

Because they don't support Pol Pot.

You’re clearly alluding to the words in The German Ideology about communism being the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. And yet in the same work, and in several others, Marx and Engels also do talk about “communist society” and give some rough descriptions of how it would operate. The notion that communism is pure negativity and that it “goes away when capitalism goes away” (or that "the idea of socialism as the achievement of minimum demands, that leads to communism as the realization of maximum demands, is not a Marxist communist theory of change, it is a social democratic one") is something you would have to take up with a lot of works, again, but this is most clearly put down in Critique of the Gotha Programme.

And I don’t think Marx would go so far as to say “communism exists now within the working class,” because there is no world-historic struggle by the collective proletariat to the present state of things; struggle on the individual level is not communism, as is also made clear in TGI, nor would communism exist within the working class semantically regardless, as it is the [which seizes upon the immanent negativity in capitalism and reorganizes production, thereby upheaving capitalist relations of production], it is not some rebellious spirit people come to possess.

You treat alienation/abstract labor in the pre-Marxist (humanist) way as an immoral debasement of human activity (citing “chapter on Alienation” [sic]) rather than (as Marx does in ~maturity) as a necessary historical progression which creates the productive forces necessary for communism and drives the proletariat to revolution. This isn't something you should do if you want to condemn people for not being Marxist enough.

I shouldn’t have to explain that repeating what you already said won’t somehow make it count as a justification.

I shouldn’t have to explain that telling you to read a specific book is not the same thing as saying “read theory” (nor is it a thought-terminating cliche, as just saying “read theory” could be); I shouldn’t have to explain why books aren’t five bullet points long in the first place or why “If their arguments are too complicated to present in a Lemmy post, they’re too complicated to be bothered with.” isn’t something anyone should unironically say.

I shouldn’t have to tell you that reading (thought-terminating cliche) about any nation will show you that the way you think things are presented (“It pretends that you only relate to people of your own ‘nation’, and that nobody in your nation relates to anybody outside of it. It’s drawing hard lines on a spectrum and trying to define portions of that spectrum as homogeneous groups, entirely distinct and different from others just on the other side of that line.”) isn’t actually how they’re presented. If only anyone had realized that ~the delineations between nations aren’t really so rigid and people of different nationalities have things in common and interact with each other! I shouldn’t have to explain that people of different regions have different cultures/languages, that the concept of nations is not a completely ideological invention and that conflicts between nations are not just caused by ideology.

I shouldn’t have to explain the difference between being an Aries and being of a particular nationality, how people of particular nationalities relate to each other in an actual way and how nationality can be changed, but that, as long as you stay in the US/retain US nationality you actually do have a stake in their position wrt other nations, whether you like it or not.

I shouldn’t have to explain to you how it’s arguing in bad faith to write out a condescending spiel about how you “understand” that I psychologically need the concept of nations to make sense of the world and that’s why I made fun of your “alternative.”

It is still bad, and it is still wrong.

You have to actually justify the things you say. Anarchism is truly even worse than communisation theory.

Every state is its own little empire, enforcing its will against the individuals within it just as more powerful states try to impose their will on other states (and their own people).

Read Hegel's Philosophy of Right or any Winfield and you'll immediately realize how philosophically incoherent your position is.

You don’t need national identity. You don’t need national cultural history. You can have individual identity and individual cultural history. These can be defined by yourself and the others you relate to.

Others you relate to! I wonder if this somehow inevitably transforms into national identity!

Agree to disagree, I already said what I had to say on this.

Theses on Feuerbach is also elaborated upon in The German Ideology

It seems by rigour you mean something like “the ability for a theory to be a complete system without any sense of contradictions”

No, I mean rigour in the sense of being free from given assumptions, allowing reason to be fully self-grounding; this is the only possibility for philosophical science, as soon as you proclaim that reason is unavoidably conditioned by some given (as Marx does in the Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital), you rule out the possibility of philosophical science and condemn philosophy to opinion. [explained further in lecture 1 here]

I mean rigour as it being grounded in assumptions derived directly from material experience and describing further the material world.

You can’t do philosophy in this way for the reason above and because you cannot derive from “material experience” that reason is conditioned by material experience, this is why empiricism isn’t philosophy.

Hegels system was more rigorous in the old sense of philosophical rigour, but Marxs was more in the sense of having some direct explanatory power and being able to be used to impact the world.

The notion of a philosophy of praxis violates what (scientific) philosophy (described above) is, Hegel goes over this in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, Maker also does so in ch. 8 of Philosophy Without Foundations but you have to take that with a grain of salt due to the non-metaphysical reading (and also some "doctrine of 'whatever'"-ism (Yibing, Back to Marx, p. xxi), but that doesn't matter for the argument).

It seems your measurement of alienation is more roundabout than the one for commodity fetishist (how did we get from ‘degree to which alienation is felt’ to '[quantity] of proletariat?)

Because the objective historical inversion where dead labor rules over the living is the process by which the proletariat (a class of propertyless laborers) comes into being and becomes the absolute majority (“For [alienation] to become an ‘intolerable’ power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity ‘propertyless’, and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture” (The German Ideology)). The degree to which alienation is felt/is is the degree to which a greater and greater amt of the population is rendered propertyless “cogs” in service of capital.

And lastly, it seems you think of the feelings as someone experience them might be primary, you keep using the word feeling to describe alienation. Is it the feeling which drives the proletariat to action? Or the objective conditions which lead to diverse reasonings to revolutionary potential?

For Marx, it’s the feeling which drives the proletariat to action, but it’s a feeling of “the objective conditions,” which also provide the proletariat with “revolutionary potential” in terms of making communism objectively possible (“material basis”).

“Looked at historically this inversion appears as the point of entry necessary in order to enforce, at the expense of the majority, the creation of wealth as such, i.e. the ruthless productive powers of social labour, which alone can form the material basis for a free human society” (Draft Ch.6 of Capital).

“this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise [for the upheaval of alienation (communism)] because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the ‘propertyless’ mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones” (The German Ideology).

I think it's important to emphasize the feelings side because, despite some things Marx and Engels have said (see "Four Letters by Engels on Historical Materialism"), within Marxism communism is not an inevitability mechanically resulting from the economic conditions of developed capitalism, the proletariat still must actualize their revolutionary potential to take hold of the immanent negativity within capitalism (i.e. there is a "subjective dimension").

I see lacking in information to fully ground an idea as somewhere where idealism still lurks in the background.

I see the notion of “materialism vs. idealism,” where “materialism” is more rigorous and “idealism” is characterized by unscientific/hazy theories that vanish as it becomes more “materialist” as completely incorrect; not to get too far off topic but Marx’s “materialism” is fundamentally less rigorous/scientific than pure idealism due to grounding reason in given determinacy (foundations), eliminating all possibility of scientific philosophy, which can also be seen in Capital resting on assumptions that prevent it from being a fully proper systematic formulation of economic life.

In TGI, and you can see this in my summary, this feeling of being dominated which drives the proletariat to revolution is a product of an objective historical inversion which is necessary to form the ground for communism (Marx also talks about this in the draft ch. 6 of Capital); the degree to which living labor becomes “enslaved” to its own creation (capital), i.e. is ~divorced from control over the objective conditions of labor, is the degree to which alienation is felt, and this is roughly reflected in the relative size of the proletariat as a class. It’s really no less scientific/concrete than the concept of commodity fetishism. Note that the measurement you’re talking about is also indirect.