So /lit/. What's your view on Materialism? Specifically

>>8941046
An ok idea but not conclusive. Sheds some light on historical processes, but to say economics is the be all and end all is misguided. See Max Weber for evidence that economics can be determined by culture as well.

>inb4 but economics influenced the Protestant Reformation

chicken and egg. They influence each other.

>>8941046
hogwash

marx correctly classified the major conflict of civilization as urban vs rural
though

It's scary how much of Marx's writings are still relevant today.

With the middle class now dissapearing and wealth inequality increasing, one does notice people are being more and more divided between haves and have-nots.

>>8941063
>See Max Weber for evidence that economics can be determined by culture as well.
Interesting. Where should I begin?

>>8941111
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is the classic. He also wrote similar books on how cultural practice helped determine the economic makeup of China (The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism) and India (The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism)

>>8941093
>middle class now dissapearing
The middle class is exploding outside of your suburban bourgeois community.

>>8941046
It's retarded

>>8941119
Thanks.

>>8941143
Could you please elaborate?

Historic materialism in the orthodox marxist sense of history progressing towards the revolution has been outdated for a long time, hence why the frankfurt school, and most progressive marxists, afterwards, started critiqueing it. Marx historical analysis of the emergence of capitalism is still pretty damn solid though.

To Marx' credit, he kind of killed idealism since Hegel was really the last full blown idealist. There are marxists now which are more culture-focussed but none of them can really be considered idealists in the full sense since nobody denies the importance of material factors.

>>8941126
A growing middle class is emerging in newly developing countries but that's to be expected because they are still emerging economies but they'll mature soon to

>>8941167
Materialism in general is stupid. Marxists bash consumerism and try to replace it with the light version of it.

>>8941182
??? materialism and bashing consumerism have nothing to do with each other. most neoliberal economists and capitalism-lovers are full blown materalists (ie homo economicus)

>>8941046
Its a spook.
Unironically, its dumb.

>>8941177
To run with the suburban theme, what's actually happening is more middle class people are transitioning to more expensive environments, they believe spending 80% of their paycheck (instead of say 60%) on a better living environment is superior to purchasing luxuries.

Politicians like Ben Carson are a result of this.

>>8941169
>Historic materialism in the orthodox marxist sense of history progressing towards the revolution has been outdated for a long time
The frankfurt school dorks were writing during the economic prosperity of the 50s/early 60s at the hight of a business cycle and thought all economic issues had been solved and the only issues left to be faced was a technocratic society. None of them saw neoliberalism coming. Feudalism lasted hundreds of years don't write off historic development yet.
Read Paul Mattick's critic of Marcuse's One Dimensional Man:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1972/marcuse.htm

>>8941046
Great, but it was terribly vulgarised in Stalinist times. I am currently reading Althusser who tries to rescue it from dogmatism.

I think it's a very good.

>>8941204
adorno and horkheimer at least didn't say there was never going to be a revolution ever, they just didn't believe that capitalism is going to disintegrate through a historic process / workers revolution during their lifetime. and I'm not sure it's going to happen in ours

Daily reminder that all leftists are mentally ill

>>8941193
That's what I'm saying.

>>8941063

All economic activity is productive, but not all productive activity is economic. The Marx of the Manifesto is a naive Hegelian—the mature historical materialism of Capital has a much broader and more penetrating scope.

>>8941093
>>8941126

You're both wrong for different reasons. It is not so much that the middle class is growing, but that the actually productive class, the class whose lot is to produce NEW values, is shrinking due to higher organic composition of capital—this means that more capital is invested in machinery than in labor to operate it. Hence today a single laborer can have the output of 200 over the course of the working day, but each commodity he produces will be worth peanuts. This results in two things: 1. A declining RATE of profit coupled with an EXPANDED MASS of profits. Capitalists can produce and capitalize on more absolute value than ever before—but the rate of growth between the investment and the payoff is demonstrably shrinking among commodity producers. I leave out financial/speculative industries because 2. You also see an explosion of the so-called middle class, which neither owns the means of reproduction, nor produces new value, but simply manages existing capital. Desk jockeys, book keepers, interns, retail associates, used car salesmen—this is the non-productive class and is predicted by Marx in Capital III. Part of the reason it exists is that producing huge masses of value requires huge masses of consumers to keeps it profitable. This is what bourgeois economists mean when they argue that deregulating business """helps the economy"""—it simply lubricates the revolving door of value and forestalls the crisis engenders by the declining rate of profit. Nonetheless, the bourgeois economists also note that the middle class is "disappearing"—this doesn't mean, as the post I quoted would like to imply, that there is an increasing disparity between the industrial proletariat and the bourgeois class. On the contrary, the non-productive class is simply being disenfranchised as value continues to dry up and require more concentration in proper to remain profitable. It must be maintained that the working class not be defined by income, but by role in the productive process. And the current lowest of the low in the post-industrial nations are not producers, but extremely low level managers. This is part of the reason working class politics can't get off the ground. Middle class ideology is closer to bourgeois ideology than proletariat class consciousness.

>>8941182
>>8941193
Materialism is the belief that the material world dictates the ideal world. It is the opposite of what most economics believe which is that an ideal world (homo economicus) determines reality. A materialist approach to economics is biological, an ideal is mathematical. Consumerism and capitalism are subversion of reality to ideal forms while materialism is grounded in reality.

>>8941200
It's a method not a set of principles. It can't be a spook.

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>>8941046
We are living in a material world and I am a material girl

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>>8941046
Historical Materialism is anthropology. Marx is more in line with Charles Darwin than Adam Smith. His vie was to take an holistic view of history and include the impacts of geology and biology to analyze history. One could expand on this with a better understanding of other physical sciences and updates to the fields previously mentioned.

>>8941306
heres a (you) for your hard work

>>8941242
Thanks for your contribution to the thread, true intellectual.

>>8941306
So... what does all this imply? Is revolution impossible nowadays?

>>8941354
Liberal economists will argue that the humo economicus is based on some kind of biological, natural state though (not that I agree)

>>8941046
Unfalsible bullshit

Autistic gargle that tunnelvisions human life into nickels and dimes, ignores all other motivators and historical phenomena that dominates history and if it comes across such phenomena it hand waves it away as 'they r sekretly/are really motivated by muh money' or 'it's a conspiracy concocted by the capitalists'

>>8941201
>Politicians like Ben Carson are a result of this.

Could you elaborate

>>8941677
Can you give an example/examples of historical phenomena with an important hand in shaping the development of human society that you feel are undermined by the theory of historical materialism?

>>8941712
Carson is a victim of class tourism, instead of living comfortably in a affordable neighbourhood his mother lived in poverty in a suburban middle class community.

Liberals do the exact opposite, weathly career politicians own a home in underdeveloped cities so they can grandstand about living in detroit.

>dude all collective identity outside class consciousness is false lol

It's basically the New Atheism of its time