The German Ideology
by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels · first published 1939
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…something closer to Lenins actual ideology purged of the Stalinist elements; but in any case it is ambiguous). Under Marxist theory all of these systems are doomed to failure - Marx argued already in The German Ideology (1845) that he saw an advanced capitalist economy with sufficient wealth that redistribution would eliminated poverty, rather than just spread it around, to be an essential precondition for a socialist…
on “Hayekian communism” ↗…tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." --Marx, The German Ideology Just replace 'society' with 'centralized AI'. To keep busy, maybe the reality if you don't need to create real value anymore is that life becomes a half-empty series of paint nights, cooking classes,…
on “China has started a grand experiment in AI education” ↗…advantage for the majority, but sufficient to lift them all out of poverty and provide sufficient wealth that there is little incentive to circumvent societal rules to obtain more. To quote Marx from "The German Ideology" (1845): 'This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e.…
on “US employee 'outsourced job to China'” ↗…except that Marx said that the material conditions of your (as a class) existence shape your ideology. I think the text to look at for N. is "On The Genealogy of Morals" and the text for Marx is "The German Ideology". Regarding the provenance of deconstruction. I'm not about to read "Of Grammatology" any time soon but you are the first person I've heard to assert the Heidegger should be given credit so you need…
on “How To Deconstruct Almost Anything (1993)” ↗…triggered ideological developments out of a growing optimism over the ability of finally doing away with poverty. The birth of socialism was basically rooted in this optimism. Marx made the point in The German Ideology (1845) that a sufficiently well developed capitalism to ensure a level of production that would allow redistribution to eliminate basic wants would be essential for a successful socialist revolution,…
on “Are you paid to look busy?” ↗Why is it that there is not - nor ever was - a single country built on Marxist principles? The answer was quite simply stated by Marx as early as 1845, in The German Ideology, chapter one, part A [1], section 5: "And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local,…
on “Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist (2013)” ↗…system (long story short: he's not). And on a more general level of discussion, I'm not sure there really is a difference between the two. I've read some left-leaning literature (Marx's Capital I, his "German Ideology" and other younger writings of his, Lenin's "What Is to Be Done?", Kołakowski's 3-volume "Main Currents of Marxism", some Lukács, Jacques Rancière's "Nights of Labor: The Workers Dream in Nineteenth Century…
on “My Venezuela Nightmare: A 30-Day Hunt for Food in a Starving Land” ↗…All forms of Socialism rest upon the communal ownership of the means of production, and the gradual removal of power from the state, in the direction of Communism (though let's be sure as Marx said in German Ideology, Communism is not a state of affairs to be established). This relies upon some kind of confiscation of private property. What divides the 'liberal' Socialism from regular old Marx and Engels's Socialism,…
on “How Robert Nozick put a purple prose bomb under analytical philosophy” ↗…reduction wasn't what I was going for. To me Marxism is a tool, just like any other tool. It gives me a clear framework to conceptualize and analyze things, using a very similar analysis Marx used in the German Ideology, Capital etc (which people sometimes say reversed Hegelianism, but this is not very accurate). It's about when you observe the world what you see in abstract. Of course, in real life people still do stuff…
This is the basis for Marx' infamous "hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic" quote from The German Ideology - the notion that wage work alienates people from the work they do and end up controlling them.
on “Could a four-day working week become the norm?” ↗For Marx, alienation had a specific, technical definition, meaning alienation from one’s labor. In The German Ideology, Marx expounds a totally materialistic anthropology, wherein man is material which creates itself through labor, and as such, human history is the history of material. Within this anthropology, alienation…
on “Translation of Xi Jinping's "To Firmly Drive Common Prosperity" Essay” ↗…productivity increases brought by capitalism. So why do you think it was to the chagrin of Marxists? Marx spent decades cheering on the advancement of industrialisation, and specifically argued (in The German Ideology) that socialism would be impossible without these advances in productive forces.
on “All my new code will be closed-source from now on” ↗…1800's was the view that technology would eventually render poverty "obsolete" by making production so efficient that redistribution would leave everyone able to do largely what they want. E.g. in the German Ideology (1845), Marx wrote: " In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus…
on “All around the world, labour is losing out to capital” ↗…arguably most political ideologies are fights for some kind of social justice. If you really want to relate this to Marxism as you have, I must note that Marx considered Communism in the same way in The German Ideology: Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established , an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state…
on “How totalism works” ↗…something that Marx had explicitly warned against: Attempting revolution somewhere that was so poor that redistribution would make want for basic necessities universal. Marx pointed out already in The German Ideology (1845) that this would just cause a return to class struggle, as it creates an immense incentive for people to find ways to accumulate, no matter how much you try to crack down on it. This was one of…
on “On being the right size (1928)” ↗