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   xj9 (xj9@social.sunshinegardens.org)'s status on Saturday, 18-Jan-2025 05:55:04 JST xj9

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   @fuckwork utopia is an ideal and materialists are not idealists. i think you might have some things crossed in there (as do many so-called utopian socialists). the point of analyzing the world in this way is to find patterns that betray the actual nature of the system we live under.

   whether you are actually able to do something about the status quo is a different question. you can be right about something without having the ability to use it to your advantage. there's a reason why propaganda is so necessary, our oppression starts in our own minds. we are much easier to defeat if we are fractured and disillusioned before the struggle even begins.

   it kind of sounds like you're referencing A Nihilist Understanding of Social War which i do think makes some interesting points, but I really don't see why people always turn this into some kind of anti-communist talking point. yes and is way more effective and gains you some (at least temporary) allies in our quest to over throw the capitalist world order.

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     xj9 (xj9@social.sunshinegardens.org)'s status on Sunday, 19-Jan-2025 00:00:33 JST xj9

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     @fuckwork i understand the desire to have a "more scientific" way to grapple with socio-political problems, but this is also a narrow conception of science. grappling with complex problems through logic and analysis is valid even if you can't create a falsifiable experiment. social sciences broadly fall under this category and tend to use statistical models and other tools to extract interesting features from historical data and try to draw conclusions from there. its a less "hard" method, but you can't experimentally verify the way cultures evolve over time or how international conflicts play out depending on different factors. there are too many variables and the events can't be repeated. it just comes with the territory.

     imo one of the many issues with marx is his incomplete understanding of the periphery. his racist and frankly backwards conceptions about the world led him to be overly optimistic about his own people and disregard their relationship to colonization and empire. for example, the french commune failed to overthrow the ruling class and left much of their colonial empire intact. this lack of data is part of why ML fails to correctly predict the evolution of empire. some philosophers may see more clearly, but they are still blinded by the same system that blinds their kin.

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     🄳🄴🅁🅁🄸🄱🄴 🄲🄸🅅 (fuckwork@eattherich.club)'s status on Sunday, 19-Jan-2025 00:00:34 JST 🄳🄴🅁🅁🄸🄱🄴 🄲🄸🅅

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     @xj9

     Not referring to anything specific, but what I have come to on my own after reading Marx, Hegel and Bookchin. I understand the points you're making. However I just don't personally see anything about dialectical reasoning that makes it inherently right or even logical? I don't agree with Marx that communism is the logical conclusion of post-capitalist revolution and that disagreement stems from his use of dialectical reasoning to design communism as if it were inevitable to conclude that capitalism would fall and communism would have to take it's place. In fact it appears that we are instead locked in a capitalism->liberalism/neo-liberalism->fascism->collapse->capitalism cycle that nobody seems to know how to truly escape. There have been several attempted revolutions that resulted in returning to some form of capitalism and reverting to the above cycle. So if you apply the scientific method instead of Hegelian reasoning to the problem, the hypothesis generated by using dialectical reasoning failed to produce the expected results and that means we should be seeking new hypothesis to test. If we have a thesis, being the world of capitalism and an antithesis of anarchism, we need a new tool for thinking about how to proceed from here to there. The old tools don't actually work and we haven't been examining why they don't work or what might work in their place. If dialectical reasoning was going to work, nobody has applied it more thoroughly than Marx and there have been several attempts to implement his ideas following successful revolutions. It would appear that communism is not as inevitable as Marx predicted. He had an acute understanding of capitalism, but he failed to model a transition away from it using dialectical materialism.

     Furthermore I don't think utopia is fundamentally incompatible with the material world. The entire idea of creating utopia is that it will at some point exist in material reality. If that isn't the purpose, then we are just creating works of speculative fiction devoid of characters or story. Furthermore, I think materialists were just as much idealists as anybody else and what they attempted to construct was absolutely a form of utopia.

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     xj9 (xj9@social.sunshinegardens.org)'s status on Sunday, 19-Jan-2025 00:00:43 JST xj9

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     @fuckwork (as an aside, i hope i'm not coming across as argumentative. i actually just like to discuss political philosophy.)