I am running a campaign involving ironic memetastic gommunism. Soon, magic will be discovered by the proletariat.
The general theme of said magic system is the "unity of opposites" embodied in Marxist dialectic. In-universe, it is the most powerful form of magic, because it can make abstract ideals and concepts that otherwise oppose each other be the same - freedom can become slavery and slavery can become freedom. Unfortunately, it drives a lot of people mad when they attempt to use it and are unworthy and it reduces them to fanatical communist messes.
What other lore should I add to this?
Pic an opposing point of view
Kayden Peterson
Well, if you can use abstract ideas as force, then they must exist in some defined form, so objectivism.
Justin Hill
>That image
>Historical determinism is false As opposed too...what? Faerie magic and great men changing the "natural" course of history?
Dominic Morgan
How can historical determinism explain "backward" events of Soviet collapse or rise of islamic radicalism?
Juan Bennett
>dat pic Seldomly have I seen an user blowing so much hot air. Also, reducing communism to marxism :/
Justin Bell
>How can historical determinism explain "backward" events of Soviet collapse or rise of islamic radicalism?
I don't know what historical determinism is. Marx formulated his philosophical starting point as historical materialism, which means nothing more than that the level of technological development determines the way society is organized. No one really talks about historical materialism anymore outside of Marxist academic circles because almost everyone agrees with it in broad terms.
Numerous works have been written on the economic factors influencing the political dissolution of the Soviet Union. You could probably get a reading list on Wikipedia or something, but I'm not googling shit for you. As for the rise of 'radical Islam', a literature is currently being written on that subject. The focal points of study will probably be the influence of two decades of war on economic and political stability. Mao famously described political power as coming from the barrel of a gun. Follow that axiom to whatever entities are experienced and funded well enough to organize the guns.
You could also bother to read the conversations on this subject that Marxists throughout history have had incessantly. If that's a "tl;dr" for you, I'll summarize: Historical materialism is the starting point of analysis of the past. The lessons of the past can only be projected into the future to a limited degree. The "inevitability of communism" as understood by Marx was the inevitability of a degree of technological development that would deprecate the existing organization of society. You could argue, I suppose, that civilization will end before that point. You might be right, but that's not really outside of the scope of Marxist analysis anyway.
Key points to note: Marx did not invent dialectics, the proletariat, or the words for either of those things. OP's image is pretty fucking laughable, for those and other reasons, if you're even semi-literate.
Hudson Evans
Not sure if this is a b8 thread, but if you don't take the game too seriously this is a hell of a premise for a campaign. I'm imagining it taking place in a giant underground gnome city. Or perhaps goblins.
Definitely include a demonic backlash effect if the caster suffers a critical failure. After all, you may not be interested in dialectics, but dialectics are interested in you.
Read up on the internecine fights between the different communist factions immediately pre- and post- Revolution. The more "people's front of Judea" you have, the better.
The players you pick will be important. They need to know some history, but like I said not take it too seriously.
Nathaniel Brooks
Didn't read the image, but just because one model of historical determinism some guy cooked up in the 19th century is wrong doesn't mean that the underlying process itself isn't deterministic.
And why is that a problem if it isn't? Many processes in nature exhibit path dependency and are highly sensitive to initial conditions and stochastic disruption.
Reading up on history, there are clear cases where larger economic, technological, and cultural forces are in the driver's seat despite the best efforts of great leaders. And then other times when the entire course of history swings wildly on "shit happens".
I don't see a reason to prefer either viewpoint over the other.
David Williams
Marxism is functionally just an attempts to turn Communism into a functional system, rather than an ideal.
Grayson Lee
>He doesn't believe in Great Men theory
Justin Mitchell
As opposed to the interplay of trends and social/historical forces being too complex and un-romantic (not "trying" to do anything, they don't have to lead anywhere that makes sense or have any sense of irony or symmetry) to be understood in any kind of narrative sense until you are looking at past events with hindsight, including the narrative of a dialectic.
Thomas Brooks
>Media and news manipulate people at level unimaginable for XIX century revolutionary thinkers >No theory of how it works at all Seems right. Or maybe postmodernism is a cancer.
Oliver Jackson
You know, this really COULD have been a good thread. Can we take the political crap to /pol/ and concentrate on OP's idea?
Josiah Bennett
Right now we have only one ill-defined reference point. Here, try this flame bait without politics and see how to fix it.
Austin Lewis
>In-universe, it is the most powerful form of magic, because it can make abstract ideals and concepts that otherwise oppose each other be the same - freedom can become slavery and slavery can become freedom.
If a boy is born into the world free, his freedom is negated under the rule and protection of his parents. At a certain age, by violence or the peaceful surrender of his mother and father, parental authority is overthrown, and the first negation is itself negated. A new freedom begins which includes the overthrow of parental authority as part of its being, but no sooner has this freedom become a reality than a new slavery imposes itself upon the young man. Society makes its demands, and he must submit to these demands if he wishes to satisfy his needs through social labor.
In every case, it is only through a form of slavery that a form of freedom is possible. By the first instance, you can see that the boy was born free only because parental authority arrived on the scene as negation. Freedom begins to exist precisely when slavery defines its limitation. In the second instance, you can see the same phenomenon. In order to realize the freedom of adulthood, he must go through the slavery of social being. A child will die without its parents, and a man cannot survive without his fellowmen. It is not merely that one could become identical with its opposite: they constitute a unity of opposites which cannot exist separately. It is only in that context that we can begin to speak of slavery becoming the path to freedom by negation of negation.
cont.
Samuel Nguyen
Incidentally, neither Marx nor Hegel made use of the triadic formula of thesis -> antithesis -> synthesis. For Hegel, dialectics begins with negation, and Marx follows him down that road. In the above example, making use of a "thesis" would imply the existence of an abstract freedom which could have existed but for the intercession of slavery as "antithesis." The big point is that the universe does not exist as an abstract being prior to its differentiation into the multiplicity of forms we experience. It is through the negation of abstract being, the "otherness" of particular objects in juxtaposition to one another, that we can speak of "being" in the abstract. It is through slavery that we speak of freedom, through bad that we speak of good, etc.
Jace Walker
> the "unity of opposites" embodied in Marxist dialectic. Unity _and struggle_ of opposites. Also, it's commonly called "dialectical materialism" or "Marxist dialectical method".
> can make abstract ideals and concepts that otherwise oppose each other be the same - freedom can become slavery and slavery can become freedom. Actual meaning is that IRL nothing ever perfectly fits abstract descriptions. In your example nobody is fully free, or fully enslaved. It might seem like common sense, but it was very weird idea in 19th century. Also, this is partially the reason why "anything could be proved with diamat".
> What other lore should I add to this? The other two memes: Negation of Negation and Quantitative changes become Qualitative. Not sure how can you rape the meaning out of either, but I'm certain you'll manage.
Also, thesis+antithesis = synthesis
> it reduces them to fanatical communist messes. Historically, it reduced them to dogmatic anti-Communists that were out of touch with reality. See Popper as an example. Or your picrelated.
> Pic an opposing point of view I would've advocated mandatory castration of /pol/ in the interests of improving gene pool of humanity, if there was a chance they could breed.
> How can historical determinism explain "backward" events of Soviet collapse or rise of islamic radicalism? Historical materialism. And it explains everything perfectly. It's just Soviets decided to rewrite Marx in 50s because Khrushchev was feeling small in the pants, but shit didn't work out as great as they thought it would.
Adam Wright
holy shit that is amazing and I'm sad I don't know anyone who'd play that with me
Samuel Lee
That's not really what dialectics is. Dialectics is two forces in conflict, wearing each other down until one is gone and the other has changed. Then the survivor enters a new conflict with some other force and the process repeats forever.
Dominic Martinez
>Classical blunder + /pol/ pic OP kind of deserves it.
