Did the Marxist project/teleology have a "universal" application, or a universal endpoint?

Did the Marxist project/teleology have a "universal" application, or a universal endpoint?

Attached: download.jpg (231x218, 16K)

>Marxist teleology
Such thing doesn't exist

>historical materialism
>not teleological

wew lad

extremely stupid self-referential logic produced this statement, this is what happens when your mind can't get outside its own presuppositions. This is like atheists who think naturalist metaphysics isn't just spinoza's pantheism

Historical materialism is a method of analysis of how history was made, not a justification of why things are the way they are and neither a objective guiding the hand of civilization.
In other words, you can see why societies went through they went, not where they are going or should go.

You mean OP's statement or the moronic idea that Marx was a historical determinist?

Good discussion, boys. Lovin it, truly. I'll be francois with you though and admit that I'm ghostwriting a major term paper for a Chinese student who doesn't get the shit but needs a B+. The question is whether the writing of early Marx has any sort of "universal application".

As far as I can manage, I interpret that question as leading me to discuss Marx's adoption of Hegel's "universal class" at the endpoint of the dialectic (Hegel's bureaucratic state, and Marx's stateless Communism). I also am leaning toward writing about how class struggle cuts across all other identifiable categories (i.e. gender, race, ability) in a unified revolutionary consciousness. Therefore, it is universal in a way that modern identity politics SJW-related movements are not.

Am I off the mark here?

Attached: 800px-Stazione_Sant'Elia.jpg (800x986, 252K)

not seeing the implications in historical materialism is stupid you fucking passive aggressive nancy

Marx analysis of history diverges veemently from Hegel's one, specially in the sense that it doesn't have an objective. Marx's point, and after him Benjamin's and Gramsci's, is that history is just the "succession of generations" and everything that happened was just the choice of people with needs, objectives and desires of their own. Nothing was ever certain and history doesn't or isn't a guiding hand leading humanity to "freedom" or "communism".
Marx didn't say that we WILL have communism, he said that we MUST have communism. Those are two different things.

Stop being deliberately misleading you faggot. We both know that a core feature of Marxist theory is that capitalism will eventually become socialism, and socialism will eventually become communism, just like feudalism became capitalism, and that is explicitly teleological.

Fucking moron, I study Marx. He never said that history was determined by the material conditions of people, but said that it plays a gigantic role in it.

>We both know that a core feature of Marxist theory is that capitalism will eventually become socialism, and socialism will eventually become communism, just like feudalism became capitalism

You have never read a single line of Karl Marx if you think that

That's not an argument faggot.

If you don't want to talk to other people but simply want to flaunt how much you read, you can fuck off to Reddit.

Thanks, man. This is/ought distinction was not apparent to me according to the scant reading that the course required us to do.

Would you happen to be familiar with the specific texts in which Marx established this?

You misunderstand Marx's theory of history and I point out why, not my problem that you take it so personally

>Marx didn't say that we WILL have communism, he said that we MUST have communism.
By must do you mean uncertainty?

Either way
>The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
>What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
Source: The Communist manifesto Ch. 1


Yes I'm going to reddit space on this post. Not having some division between the two ideas would be retarded

by must do you mean necessity*

Marx never did actually write a theory of history, but in The German Ideology he and Engels critique these idealistic notions that includes in the midst a critique of the philosophy of history. I recommend you to read it or at least articles about it.

OP here, thanks for the quotation. It definitely seems to reinforce my prior interpretation.

>The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

That sounds very ominous and a lot like some contemporary critiques of technology related to its social functions. Maybe I should have read that thing instead after all

I’m a bit uneducated on this subject but can you explain to me how marx said that we need communism instead of it being inevitable because I was taught in school that marx thought that communism was inevitable

>The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association.
What does that even mean?
I get that
>The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie
Bourgeoisie need to keep growing their capital but I can't understand what point he's making afterwords.

>By must do you mean necessity/uncertainty
Yes, both. Marx realised that the only way to emmancipate the proletariat is by them being the owners of the machines and the apparatus that make them able to work

What Marx meant in the excerpt you posted is that, by uniting the labourers in the same place, the capitalists promote union between those from who they buy the labour from, they were promoting the union of those that, before it, competed with one another to sell their labour at the lowest cost to the capitalist.
That union would, after the proletariat understand the condition it's in, lead to a revolution, just like the very capitalists did in the english and french ones. He isn't saying such conditions will be eternal, he isn't saying that capitalism will die anyway. He's saying that, by putting everyone in the same physical space, the industry, the capitalists are uniting the labourers.

In addition to that, but just to point a thing out, not meant to be my point, the Manifest was just that, a Manifest. Wasn't meant to be Marx magnum opus, just a political pamphlet to stir things up.

He meant that, in other to bring true freedom, not just political freedom, equality and fraternity, we can't live in a economic system where a group of people exercise the economic power to explore another group that produces the things that everyone needs but can only do that by selling their time and labour to the first group.
It doesn't mean such thing will happen, only that such thing need to happen for we to achieve fraternity.

Finishing the first paragraph:
>Yes, both. Marx realised that the only way to emmancipate the proletariat is by them being the owners of the machines and the apparatus that make them able to work
but that isn't inevitable or impossible to not happen

>he isn't saying that capitalism will die anyway. He's saying that, by putting everyone in the same physical space, the industry, the capitalists are uniting the laborers.
And he clearly thinks uniting the labourers will lead to " Its fall and the victory of the proletariat"

Yes, but that condition can be avoided by just separating them again. Nationalism, racism, xenophobia, the destruction of unions, literally killing people or just moving the industry to another place have been strategies to avoid that.

> He's saying that, by putting everyone in the same physical space, the industry, the capitalists are uniting the labourers.

I guess that capital did learn the lesson from him very well then. He probably wasn't expecting or at least hoping we wouldn't come up to the level of atomization and disenfranchising we have today. His proletariat was elevated to the level of a sub-bourgeoise with "stable job security" and everyone else was deprecated to the level of revolution-less lumpenproletariats. Could this be extrapolated as an universal endpoint though, or are we heading yet somewhere else?

>I guess that capital did learn the lesson from him very well then
That's one of the greater ironies of marxism, capitalists read him too.

The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination
He, at least here, thinks that no longer an option because they need to keep working.

Eternal materialism

Because Marx wasn't a prophet a able to see the future of communications. Right now, this physical separation is the most alarmant in the US and European industries that move to China and other developing countries because there that solidarity of workers haven't caught up, and in the other countries people can work in their houses or cars

>Could this be extrapolated as an universal endpoint though, or are we heading yet somewhere else?
If I understand your question correctly and you mean that, even though the endpoint wasn't the desired one by Marx, we still have an endpoint, the answer is no, it can't be extrapolated as an endpoint.

I like to think the historical analisys of Marx as him going down to the boat of society and understanding how it's motor works (class struggle), going back to the deck and by looking at a map of where the boat went and with the new knowlegde about the boat's motor, understanding why the boat went where it went and how it changed course. However, Marx still doesn't know where the boat is heading, only hopeful somewhere good.

This is bullshit. Agitation for a move towards something is ultimately the same as advocating for that something in particular. The level of pedantry that Marxists will go to in order to obfuscate Marx's normative statements as descriptive in the name of "scientific" Marxism is truly nauseating.

It's not because you can't understand something that makes it less true

the implication is the thing you don't get which is why I said you're an ideological schizo who doesn't understand that certain logic has ultimate implications which have to be worked out. For instance Fascism ultimately necessitates total war against outsiders and annihilation. Historical materialism necessitates and end of history with communism. You can say whatever you want, that's exactly what is implied. I don't fucking care at all if you study marx you effete nigger

Well yeah. Marx was wrong

>Marx couldn't see into the future, therefore everything he wrote was wrong

Attached: 1509740339366.jpg (645x968, 153K)

Where was my misunderstanding? Marx makes normative statements in multiple works, and defends them as inevitabilities.

If his methodology is only usable for the making of predictions that did not come to pass, then there is a strong chance that his methods of analysis rely on flawed premises. I don't expect Marxists to understand deductive logic, as they seem to fail to grasp even inductive logic.

No, it doesn't, because historical materialism doesn't make predictions about the future. It's only a method of analyzing history through the material needs of peoples and societies to understand why things happened in history and to understand where we CAN go, not where we WILL go. Historical Materialism isn't an ideology or a political movement such as fascism or communism.

>If his methodology is only usable for the making of predictions that did not come to pass, then there is a strong chance that his methods of analysis rely on flawed premises.
I didn't said it's used only to make predictions, you did.

>No, it doesn't, because historical materialism doesn't make predictions about the future
It sort of does actually
>t's only a method of analyzing history through the material needs of peoples and societies to understand why things happened in history and to understand where we CAN go
Yes, but we all know where he and almost all Marxists implied it was going
>not where we WILL go
completely irrelevant
>Materialism isn't an ideology or a political movement such as fascism or communism.
cut off a finger for me pumpkin have your grad professor do it or one of your students

Making one or many nominative statements doesn't mean that historical materialism is teleological or that's what he used to make that statement.

Alright, you're just trolling.

What philosophy or economics is not used to make predictions? What knowledge of any kind? What is the point of an observation if not to get a better sense of what you will see in the future?

Then what is it for? Exclusive analysis of past history? I could devise a theory of history conceived entirely from solipsism in such a way that it would be internally consistent, but without a way to compare its validity against other theories of history (induction) or to draw conclusions from its premises that are reflected in the real world (deduction), then it's a pretty useless theory. Much like Marxist historicism.

No, go into your research building, find a sharp of some kind, cut off a finger, preferably little finger, and then take a picture and post it here for me, you owe me that much
it is, doesn't matter what its intended to be. Fascism is supposed to help the nation, it doesn't it helps the ruling party sieze resources and eliminate other elites efficiently, its extremely damaging to national identity and ruins the ability of the people to subsist in relative peace. Something's stated goals mean nothing. Christians claim to want divine love, they just want an explanation and a cohesion mechanism, intent and action are not the same. People who take everyone at their word are as bad as people who don't trust anyone at all

It is when you start throwing around words like "inevitable."

>a more generic thing that isn't what we're discussing doesn't necessarily mean what you are specifically putting forward, so let's ignore the fact that it could, and that you've demonstrated that in this case, based on the author's own explicit statements, it does.
The time has come where this defense will no longer stand. The important part of the claim, which you cannot deny, is that Marx defends these statements as inevitable. That a necessary component is not sufficient does not mean the whole argument is insufficient.

Alright, I was using "predictions" wrong. The correct would be "assertives" in the sense of "furfilment of an objective".
Thanks for pointing that out.

Ok, so in that case, I would like to reiterate what I said here:

Ah, yes, that makes things better. Oh, wait, no it doesn't. Pleas explain how changing Prediction to Synonym of Prediction is a fundamental change of your argument, and not a moving of goal posts? Marx used his analysis of history to predict/assert what would happen in the future, so he could recommend what should be done. What he predicted/asserted didn't happen. This means his analysis was fundamentally flawed.

We were talking about his belief that communism would be inevitable because of a united work force, and as such, I was clearly referring to him being wrong about the subject of our conversation. Try to get at least a little bit of reading comprehension for next time.

Attached: 1486977476233.jpg (198x235, 7K)