Ironicwarcriminal posted:

i honestly don't see how reverence for the mysteries of the cosmos is any different to worshipping god

haha its funny, cause it's the only thing the the weight of their beloved materialism hasn't pressed flat, declared understood, not special, not important, and then filed away in one of those giant slide out drawers at the natural history museum. Somehow knowing some details about something make it no longer special or good. There's probably some agamben language thing that explains it in a few words but I haven't read that book yet

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

deadken posted:

beckett wasnt english lol

english and irish are the same thing

Some Irish are remnant celtic populations, of course the irish were wracked with famine and malnutrition and further polluted by english raping and scots soldier raping. But they can be very different.

It's sad how the Irish remained unconquered until they started developing and centralizing, undoing the lack of central control that stopped all conquering before.

The english killed something like 1/3 of irelands population and created conditions that led to 1/2 of the population leaving or dying. Tons of irish were taken as slaves to the new world, and they were super cheap. The easiest way to make slave money was to breed a 50 shilling african man with a 2 or 3 shilling irish woman, then sell the children as african, and laugh your way to the bank of Trinidad.

Myfanwy posted:

Some Irish are remnant celtic populations, of course the irish were wracked with famine and malnutrition and further polluted by english raping and scots soldier raping. But they can be very different.

It's sad how the Irish remained unconquered until they started developing and centralizing, undoing the lack of central control that stopped all conquering before.

The english killed something like 1/3 of irelands population and created conditions that led to 1/2 of the population leaving or dying. Tons of irish were taken as slaves to the new world, and they were super cheap. The easiest way to make slave money was to breed a 50 shilling african man with a 2 or 3 shilling irish woman, then sell the children as african, and laugh your way to the bank of Trinidad.

deadken posted:

i only really know his stuff on anti-humanism (good) and that he strangled his wife (not good?) but i wantn to read some of his words on religion + catholicism which would probably be up ur street 2 iono

roland boer talks about althusser in criticism of heaven. also read philosophy of the encounter ftw. ftw. http://www.mediafire.com/?96fyt59c3uz04cy

Althusser insisted throughout his work that a philosophy must be judged by the effects that it produces, all the effects, whether internal or external to whatever disciplinary boundaries might be thought to impose their jurisdiction on it. For Althusser history no more forgives the "misunderstood" or "misinterpreted" philosopher than it does the defeated revolutionary. From a materialist standpoint there is no more a "court of final appeal," as Machiavelli put it, in philosophy than in politics. To grant philosophy a material, practical existence in this way is to admit that "misinterpretations" are not subjective errors (whether malicious or benign) in the minds of one's readers but are rather the objective effects of one's own work, not of course of the intentions behind it but in its real existence and in its unforeseeable encounters with other works, and other forces. It hardly needs to be said that few philosophers have openly endorsed such a position, just as few philosophers have ever written books with the phrase "self-criticism in the title. And more disturbing than the narcissistic injury that results from the recognition that one is not entirely master of one's words and arguments, no matter how painstakingly constructed, is the idea that truth is not enough, that false and harmful ideas are held in place by relations of force that can be changed only by opposing force. In other words, Plato was right to see philosophy as the site of a war that can have no end insofar as one must constantly confront the unforeseeable consequences of one's own work.

while reading i keep wanting to deploy agamben against althusser: that the relation sovreignty has to the bare life it produces--idealist-capitalist or materialist-socialsit--does not obviate that production in the first place

Edited by babyfinland (Aug. 12, 2012 06:22:36)

Simply to mention the arguments of the ‘vulgar materialism’ denounced by Marx, which come down to denying the reality of thought, consciousness, and ideals, is to reject them. Marxist materialism refuses to assimilate thought to matter, and attributes a very important historical role to consciousness (see Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, ch. Ill, in fine, the letter to Conrad Schmidt [of 5 August 18901, etc.).

But let us take a moment to consider another argument. Materialism, it is said, is a ‘metaphysics of nature’ that reconstitutes the world by starting out from a material element regarded as an absolute substance (atom, body, matter). In short, it is an ‘Absolute Knowledge’ in which matter plays the role of the Hegelian idea. Marx and Engels criticise this conception, which they call ‘metaphysical materialism’. Lenin, for example, writes: ‘The recognition of immutable elements, of the immutable essence of things”, is not materialism, but metaphysical, i.e., anti-dialectical, materialism’ (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p. 249). One of the essential features of dialectical materialism is precisely that it refutes all dogmatism grounded in ‘Absolute Knowledge’. Materialism radically rejects the idea that there can be any “immutability”, “essence”, “absolute substance”, in the sense in which these concepts were depicted by the empty professorial philosophy’ (ibid., p. 250). It is not for a metaphysics of nature to deduce the structure of reality; it is the role of the sciences to discover it. Thus only physics can determine and develop the physical notion of matter, with which the philosophical notion of matter must not be confused.

Accordingly, Marxist materialism does not have the same object science does. Its aim is not [il ne répond pas il the discovery of the structure of reality. It responds, says Lenin, to the fundamental ‘epistemological question’: primacy of matter or mind? Primacy of existence or consciousness? The answer to this question – posed and debated in all the theories of classical philosophy that bear on the problem of knowledge – lies, for Marxism, in scientific practice itself. Defining the materialist standpoint’ in opposition to Hegel in Ludwig Feuerbach [Marx and Engels, Selected Works, p. 6181, Engels shows ‘it means nothing more than’ the scientific analysis of the real world, of facts ‘conceived in their own and not in a fantastic interconnection’. Lenin, echoing Engels, tirelessly repeated that ‘the sciences are spontaneously materialist’ (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, passim).

It is nonetheless clear that Lenin’s analysis is not an ‘analysis of essence’ which refers us to its ideal conditions of possibility, or even, from foundation to foundation, to an original intention. Practice, which, for Marxism, is the source and criterion of all truth, and ‘envelops’ the epistemological question, does not provide a de jure foundation for the materialist thesis in the idealist sense of the term. The fact of practice points back, not to an originary legitimation , but to its own real genesis. It is here that materialism is radically counterposed to all transcendental philosophies. No-one, perhaps, has put this better than Engels, in connection with the problem of the definition of life: ‘From a scientific standpoint all definitions are of little value. In order to gain an exhaustive knowledge of what life is, we should have to go through all the forms in which it appears, from the lowest to the highest. ..’ [Anti-Dühring, p. 1041. The same holds for practice. It is not the immediacy of an act or structure, but its own real genesis. Inseparable from human practice (broadly conceived: social production, daily social practice, class struggle) in its contemporaneous forms, scientific practice, which is the most abstract refinement of practice, can be defined only in terms of its real evolution, that is, its history. That is why Lenin also declares that the answer to the Fundamental epistemological question’ is simultaneously provided by human practice and by the history of knowledge (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, pp. 89, 122-4, 143, 147, 217, 239, etc.).

Really Stupid:

One further point needs to be clarified in this connection. Modem writers, taking up, consciously or not, a tradition whose representatives include Sorel and Rogdanov, have described historical materialism as ‘the immanent philosophy of the proletariat’ (Daniel Villey), as a theory that is valid for the proletariat and gives expression to its condition and aspirations. This thesis leads to the following conclusion: Marxism is a subjective (‘class’) theory, having no claim to scientific universality and objectivity; hence it is a myth in the Sorelian sense, rather than a science. Others have sought to ground the scientific nature of Marxism, ‘the ideology of the proletariat’, in the essence of the proletariat, the ‘universal class’ whose condition – whose very impoverishment – marks it out for universality and objectivity. Lenin had occasion to discuss this problem in a famous text, What is to be Done? (especially chs 1 and II; see Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. 5, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1961, pp. 352ff.). Against the advocates of the ‘spontaneity’ of the proletariat, Lenin defends the absolute necessity of ‘scientific theory’. He quotes approvingly the following passages from Kautsky:

(For the spontaneists), socialist consciousness appears to be a necessary and direct result of the proletarian class struggle. But this is absolutely untrue. . . . Modem socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge.... The vehicle of science is not the proletariat [this was written in 19021, but the bourgeois intelligentsia: it was in the minds of individual members of this stratum that modern socialism originated, and it was they who communicated it to the more intellectually developed proletarians, who, in their turn, introduce it into the proletarian class struggle from without ... and not something that arose within it spontaneously (ibid., pp. 383-4).

Lenin shows that, ‘spontaneously’, the proletariat cannot but be influenced by bourgeois ideology, and that Marxism, far from being the subjective theory of the proletariat, is a science that must be taught to the proletariat. Lenin and his followers have often drawn attention to the fact that the proletariat had existed for a very long time, and endured a thousand different ordeals, before assimilating Marxism and accepting it as the science that could account for its condition within the overall framework of capitalist society, securing its future as well as all humanity’s. Only later did the proletariat produce, in its class organisations, intellectuals of its own, who developed Marxist theory in their tum.   This text of Lenin’s is important for the study of Marxism’s relation to the proletariat, class consciousness, the problem of ‘economic consciousness’ and political consciousness, ‘spontaneity’, ‘partisanship’, etc. If we compare it with second Preface to Capital and Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, on the one hand, and the monographs Stalin has written on Marxism and Linguistics and Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, on the other, we can discern, in these theoretical works, a profoundly scientific conception of history, which rigorously defines its own domain while distinguishing it from others, determines the laws of its object, and submits its results to the test of concrete human practice:  

The criterion of practice, i.e., the course of development of all capitalist countries in the last few decades, proves only the objective truth of Marx’s whole social and economic theory in general, and not merely of one or another of its parts, formulations, etc.; it is clear that to talk here of the ‘dogmatism’ of the Marxists is to make an unpardonable concession to bourgeois economics. The sole conclusion to be drawn from the opinion held by Marxists that Marx’s theory is an objective truth is that by following the path of Marxian theory, we shall draw closer and closer to objective truth (without ever exhausting it); but by following any other path we shall arrive at nothing but confusion and lies (Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970, pp. 129-30).

This is doubtless the most profound characteristic of historical materialism: it is a science that not only inspires political action, but also seeks its verification in practice, developing and growing through political practice itself.