Why do so many revolutionary leftists treat Das Kapital as infallible gospel? Is it because Marxism a civil religion...

Stirner ate cheezbooger wif potato chip in it.

Stirner's egoism blew the concept of altruism to fucking Mars, which by association blew Marxism out to Pluto.

Marx couldn't handle the fact that someone much poorer than him had such a different, more concrete ideology so he wrote a 500 page shitpost attacking Stirner's character.

Why do rightists think this?

>Why do so many revolutionary leftists treat Das Kapital as infallible gospel
Oh really? Name ten examples. Make sure to provide citations where the author says "Das Kapital is infallible gospel". Thanks.

...

Why are they thinking out of their shoulders?

Because Marxism has never been implemented successfully, so obviously it must work. This is the only illogical thing that doesn't make sense, according to liberals.

Cause her muffin's busy at the moment.

Because Capitalism has never been implemented successfully, so obviously it must work. This is the only illogical thing that doesn't make sense, according to ancaps.

Because body is conscience itself.

Get thee hence trips, if you think capitalism hasn't worked you should probably throw out your modem, turn off your electricity, throw away your phone, unplug the toaster, and never go to the doctor again

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Capitalism has nothing to do with science and technology, moron.

>unplug the toaster
Who the fuck owns a toaster? Get back to the old folk's home grandpa.

bitch suck my dick, technology increases GDP, go take a basic level economics course ya ignorant cunt. you o
we modern medicine to capitalism, and those railroad guys that donated t it.

wow, i bet you think youre SO SPECIAL because you dont have a toaster, how the fuck do you even get toast then

0/10.

>wow, i bet you think youre SO SPECIAL because you dont have a toaster
No, I think I'm normal.
>how the fuck do you even get toast then
I don't, because I'm born after the October revolution.

yea so pretty much libfag BTFO cant come up with an argument

You think not having a toaster is normal? What kind of sick, twisted world do you live in?

going to add onto my complete annihilation of user , go back to your failed nuclear experiments, commies suck DICK at science and starve their citizens on purpose

Post Berlin wall Europe.

No wonder you don't know shit about capitalism, keep taking products invented by americans for granted why dont ya europoor?

>invented by americans
>The first electric bread toaster was invented by Alan MacMasters in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1893.

>europoor
lol .I'm Norwegian. We're all oil sheiks here.

>Alan MacMasters in Edinburgh, Scotland
Americunt owned!

care to actually provide any examples of that? People didnt quote it even during the cold war

Soviet space program>>>American space failure

Actully I googled that before I even posted, i was talking about The Internet

Historical materialism is probably the least religious aspect of Marxism, it's Marx's specific extrapolation of this idea which can be dubious. Using the interplay of material conditions and ideology is logical and very useful for sociology. It promises to bring some structure to the usually opaque progression of history. The allure is clear: we cannot empirically analyze human ideas yet, but we can analyze material conditions. If we can draw a connection between the two, then we can begin to understand what was previously beyond understanding.

This is why I am a Marxist, but not really a Socialist/Communist. I think it is a useful tool for understanding the past, and plenty of interesting works have been published since Marx using his ideas to analyze contemporary or historical periods.

If one buys wholeheartedly into Marx's book, then it becomes prophecy. Those people who are looking forward to a utopian existence are given a framework to realize it. This is the religious element: it organizes reality around a promise.

>Initial concepts of packet networking originated in several computer science laboratories in the United States, United Kingdom, and France.

>In the 1980s, the work of British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web theorised protocols linking hypertext documents into a working system, marking the beginning of the modern Internet.

>The principle of the modern computer was first described by computer scientist Alan Turing, a pioneering English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and theoretical biologist.

>The first modern analog computer was a tide-predicting machine, invented by Sir William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, in 1872.

>Charles Babbage KH FRS (/ˈbæbJdʒ/; 26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English polymath.[1] A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage, along with Ada Lovelace, is best remembered for originating the concept of a programmable computer.

>In 1642, while still a teenager, Blaise Pascal started some pioneering work on calculating machines and after three years of effort and 50 prototypes[9] he invented a mechanical calculator.

>Wilhelm Schickard, a German polymath, designed a calculating machine in 1623

The development and construction of the Internet was funded by the US Government, jackass. ARPA is a government agency. So much for capitalism.

Marxism is by and for the classroom. It's the type of ideology that checks all the boxes intellectuals like to see. It has been a failure because it's hard to manage from the top of the ivory tower where you can't even see the ground.

It has been successful in preserving its own ideology for the same reason Christianity has: it plays on people's sense of righteousness. For a Marxist the most brutal means will always be justified contrasted to such utopian ends.

Ironically Marxism (and the many philosophies it spawned) is strongest in the most bourgeois institutions, upper class urban academia.

Your inability to make mental connections is doubly evident here.

It would be hard to treat Capital as infallible gospel because it doesn't actually recommend communism as an alternative. Capital, I guess with the exception of just part of Volume I, is a critique of capitalism and doesn't concern itself as much with delineating the communist system that Marx and Engels would like to see replace it.

>Marxism has no connection to the working class meme

Marxism has historically had its strongest appeal to the world's poorest. As for the fact that most early revolutionaries are typically students, this is almost universally the case only because the educated are by definition the first with widespread exposure to a new idea. The same was true for the Nationalist Liberals in the 1800s, who explicitly conceived of their role as guiding the poor European peasants into a better future they could not see.

>Academia is a bourgeois institution meme

Certainly the bourgeoisie go to college, but they rarely stick around to become instructors.

Are you always so proud for uncritically consuming propaganda? That Veeky Forums has become an echo-chamber for opinions I could get from cable news and talk radio is disheartening. I don't care if you're a Marxist or not, I'm not even a Socialist myself, but if you're going to spend your time spouting cliches then just go back to Facebook.

You sound pretty assblasted and everything you said is false.

Marxism is extremely disconnected with reality and with the working class itself. Why do you think the intelligentsia typically get purged?

It is literally by and for the bourgeois, not only by Marx's definition, but by the original definition as well. It serves nobody but the self-righteous intelligentsia who love to pat themselves on the back for guiding the stupid proles into utopia.

Seems like the one who's uncritically devouring propaganda is yourself, m8.

Capitalism is the most destructive ideology ever devised.

Your post is a muddle of self-contradictory blathering.

Honestly, as much as I want to say OP is a baiting shitposter, I must concede that his post was very well spoken, and incised the argument like an entomologist to a butterfly.

What about the ideology of destroying everything?

You see here, the capitalists always claim to enjoy excess, but their true desire is austerity for everyone else.

Im hungry

So you've conceded to being a simpleton.

>You sound pretty assblasted and everything you said is false.
> it's this guy again
You're upset but because you want him to he upset instead (because you would be "winning" I guess?) Then you make believe the other user as upset. Pretty much the same deal on the false bit too.

I've seen this with real life autism so I assume you have something like that?

>the educated are by definition the first with widespread exposure to a new idea
we're in the 21st century and people still act like academia = education
Marxism thrives in universities because that's the only place it can thrive

>Why do you think the intelligentsia typically get purged?

Probably because most Socialist countries have been brutally authoritarian and try to silence the dissenters. Typically the dissenters are educated, because the educated are the ones who are exposed to new ideas. Again, this is why in Capitalist countries universities are the largest nexus of Marxists.

>It serves nobody but the self-righteous intelligentsia who love to pat themselves on the back for guiding the stupid proles into utopia.

How the fuck does it serve them if they're getting purged? Also, in what sense do you mean "the original definition"?

Is right, you are a self-contradictory, blathering idiot. Go back to consuming mass media you normie.

Please, do tell, how Marxism cannot survive the working environment. One would think that the only places to ever have Marxist revolutions would be coddled first-world countries, and yet the opposite is true.

>the educated are the ones who are exposed to new ideas.
Marxism is such a new idea.

>How the fuck does it serve them if they're getting purged?
It serves them until they get purged. Academics play a clerical role within communist and socialist societies, which is why Marxism is so popular with them. They get to circlejerk in the ivory tower until people realize they're pretentious parasites.

>in what sense do you mean "the original definition"?
Confirmed delittante. I mean the original French definition, upper-middle class urbanite. Marx hijacked the word and redefined it, but Engels was still bourgeois as fuck even by Marx's definition.

Educate yourselves simpletons, and stop gobbling up whatever narrow point of view was fed to you by tenured charlatans.

because it's failed everywhere it's been implemented?
>muh third world
are you stuck in the 1970's?
Asia and South America have both taken a decidedly right wing turn while China takes over Africa with it's special brand of capitalism
now that Venezuela has crumbled (but it was capital's fault right?) Cuba is the only Marxist stronghold left

>and yet the opposite is true.
Well, most communist countries could have been first world nations if they had not become communist.

Contrast South Korea and Japan with North Korea and Venezuela.

New as in novel to a given society, did you also believe I thought Capitalism was a recent idea in Socialist societies?

The second I will contend for the same reason I did before. The bourgeoisie are educated, but the educated are not the bourgeoisie. It is hardly surprising that the leaders of these societies were educated people. This holds true for leaders in most societies. But educational institutions are also a hotbed for dissenters in all societies, and the more authoritarian the society, the more contempt they have for academia. Fascism and Communism alike shared this trait. Your consistent inability to grasp these concepts is worrying. It's not hard, really.

Did I say they succeeded? Surely you are replying to someone else.

Also, while I've been replying in your terms, I maintain the difference between Marxism and Socialism as I first tried to outline here:

I am not a Socialist/Communist, and am interested in Marxism as a tool for trying to understand human societies. If you want a defense of Socialism/Communism look elsewhere.

Well, before Stirner's book, Marx was a Feuerbachian idealist. Now you probably now how adamant Marxists are about being materialists... after reading Stirner's book, Marx wrote a bunch of texts which were published as Die Deutsche Ideologie only much later (after Marx was died, Stirner died a lot earlier still). In the chapters of DDI on Feuerbach and the other Young Hegelians, Marx largely adopts Stirner's critique of them (sometimes almost verbatim). By far the largest chapter is the on on "Saint Max", it's longer than Stirner's book itself, and it's extremely acerbic (he calls Stirner the emptiest skull of all the Young Hegelians etc.). Now DDI is often seen as the first (and a pretty thorough) exposition of historical materialism (Hegel and dialectics only came back into Marx' thought later, the Young Hegelian context of the 40s was very much about growing out of Hegel). While outlining this new philosophy, Marx went to great lengths in order to caulk his thought against any connection to Stirner's argument, which is why the concrete individual is so marginalized in Marxist thought. Many problems of modern Marxism actually stem from this very move (tacitly taking ten steps away from Stirner), you can read about it in Wolfgang Essbach's Gegenzüge, I don't think it exists in English. I might actually write a piece about this for bunkermag, I'll post a link here if I do.

This break in DDI from Feuerbach's humanism and the division into Young Marx and "Marx Marx" was noticed by Althusser and used to justify his anti-humanist (structuralist) Marxism.

Now if Marxism hadn't from the outside treated Stirner as "He who must not be named", the debates around ideological hegemony (Gramsci, Althusser, later Zizek) might have benefitted from a radical perspective on the individual as the interface between idea and matter (where ideology or class consciousness are turned into action) that wasn't determined by the (falsely pessimist and theoretically dubious) influence of (bourgeois) Psychoanalysis and structuralist linguistics.

>educational institutions are also a hotbed for dissenters in all societies
Certainly not in the west today, where academia is ideologically homogeneous.

The rest of your post means literally nothing, as I have already explained to you the original meaning of bourgerois.

>>educational institutions are also a hotbed for dissenters in all societies
>Certainly not in the west today, where academia is ideologically homogeneous.

Well, academia works both for and against radical thought. You can literally compare it to a trashcan:

Yes, the trashcan contains scraps of meat at room temperature, traces of eggs and enough nutrients for all the bacteria to grow you could hope for. So in a way a trashcan is a "hotbed" for the growth of bacteria and generally unsanitary things. On the other hand, there's a plastic bag in there for a reason: All the filthy shit is in one place and stays there. You sweep the counter and all those crumbs can mildew in the trashcan, out of sight. And you take out the trash before you get to flies and maggots.

Academia is the same. It's where society keeps the lefties in the darkness of the trashcan so that they can keep the countertop clean.

>Academia is the same. It's where society keeps the lefties in the darkness of the trashcan so that they can keep the countertop clean.
That's a really weird analogy.

We have to swim through the trash in order to get degrees and well-paying jobs.

Well, we're talking about 'radical/leftist academia" so these are mostly humanities departments. If you exclude the tiny minority who reach tenure, this doesn't exactly equate to "well-paying jobs". A friend of mine didn't understand it, so here is the more explicit version of what I mean:

people in literature departments write papers about how hollywood cinema's depiction of women/poverty/ethnic ppls is bad and contributes to sytematic oppression and exploitation.

these academics think they are thereby contributing to the 'struggle' against this exploitation and oppression

In reality, society is just using academia as a 'safe space' for these people to vent their sentiments without any impact on 'real society', so the system of oppression and exploitation is not in danger.

>We have to swim through the trash
Let's not kid ourselves here. We are the trash.

>the system of oppression and exploitation is not in danger.
Idk man, muh diversity in hollywood is pretty big nowadays. But i think i get what you're saying, although I've always thought that society gets academia to focus student's political energy unto very trivial things like microaggressions, tokenism in media, tubman on the $20 etc. while much bigger issues are ignored. I think this is by design, and it kind of plays into what you're saying.

yeah that was just an example, desu I think some sociology professor who writes books about Lenin is probably still an instance of 'containment', where his radical impetus is neutralized through tenure.

>A Qu'ran for the marxists.

I am not a muslim, but do you know anything of the koran? or do you presume it to be just another 'bible'

Can we make this a meme now?

very interesting post. after reading ego and its own and saint max it is clear that it was a defining moment in marxist thought compare the economic and philosophic manuscripts with what comes after and its clear as day

S/he already has an ED page.

Marx is thought of as an implacable foe of capitalism. But go back and read the first section of the Communist Manifesto. Notice how it contains a paean of praise for the way capitalism and the bourgeoisie have both enriched the human powers of production and also enabled us to see with clear vision the nature of human society and human history. It has taken me a long time to realize where I most disagree with Marx. His assessment of capitalism is far too favorable. He took its instability, inhumanity and irrationality to be signs that it was a merely transitional form, which had delivered into humanity’s hands the means to a much better way of life than any that have ever existed on earth. Marx could not bring himself to believe that our species is so benighted, irrational and slavish that it would put up with such a monstrous way of life. He thought that it was inevitable that people would find a better way. We now see that this was not so. Capitalism has not proven to be a transitional form, a gateway to a higher human future. Capitalism now seems more likely a swamp, a bog, a quicksand in which humanity is presently flailing about, unable to extricate itself, perhaps doomed to perish within a few generations from the long term effects of the technology which seemed to Marx its greatest gift to humanity. Capitalism has proven to be a far more terrible system than Marx could ever bring himself to imagine. Those who are so deluded as to find something good in it, or even feel loyalty toward it, are its most pitiful victims.

capitalism was much more cruel back then too

this desu

Why is wojak thinking of naked kids while showering?

>Those who are so deluded as to find something good in it, or even feel loyalty toward it, are its most pitiful victims.
Yeah, capitalism is just completely awful. Being a prole is so much worse than an Aztec slave, feudal serf, subsistence farmer, or a South Asian untouchable.

"Better than horrible" isn't automatically "good"

They don't treat it as an infallible gospel. They take it seriously because it's very insightful and intellectually productive.

But if you want to engage seriously with this idea, I recommend Aron's "L'Opium des intellectuels".

No, but it can still be the best.

Any deterministic philosophy has to be teleological and unless you want to embrace some form of vitalism you have to embrace that the universe is subject to some form of deterministic development.

Unless you believe economic laws don't actually exist and are just an illusion you need some form of methodological approach to understanding them. If you want to call methodology religion then all science is religion and there's no difference between science and religion.

>Aron's "L'Opium des intellectuels".
My nigga

But it is just another bible. A much more comprehensive bible.

>subsistence farmer, or a South Asian untouchable

You can be both those things within capitalism.

Somewhat true, but they are better off within capitalism than any other economic system.

please do explain, then, why there are a bunch of marxists either-working-class-or-undergrads on tumblr complaining about pretentious academics

>Marxism is such a new idea.
>the dissenters are educated
>Socialist countries ... silence the dissenters
learn to read

Because the Critique of Political Economy is quite possibly the richest field for the articulation of theory, the development of critical philosophy, and the production of scientific knowledge of our definite social formation.

nice post. if you're looking for a more harsh critique of capitalism, try society of the spectacle.

That's patently false.

>undergrads
so subject to academia?
the working class doesn't give a shit about Marxism

that is some impressive hair (and lips)

>all this talk about muh schools are liberal leftie hotbeds
>been to school in the bay and socal and everyone has been normie as fuck, at most only small groups of maybe slightly outspoken people
>no one irl gives a shit about muh sjw muh liberals, the pc shit has only now reached somewhat of a common awarness

SOMEONE EXPLAIN LENIN'S INJUNCTION TO REVOLUTION TO ME LIKE IM A FUCKING RETARD

WHAT EXACTLY WAS HE SAYING THE PROLETARIAT SHOULD DO AND WHAT WOULD/SHOULD HAPPEN TO THE STATE