Yeah it still depends on the person. What qualifies as scientific and material doesn't always hit universally, like the Greek Communist Party keeps being transphobic and their explanation is trans people deny materialism. One time I had a very bitter argument with a well known transphobic Marxist (whose name rhymes with Small Dockshott) and he tried using the "ruthless criticism of all that exists" line on me.
Ideology is a fuck, even our own. Best you can do is constantly examine yourself and find people you really really trust and whose experiences you value. Never ever get trapped inside your own mind, because that's when your brain starts melting.
Call me a Gramsci-ite but I'm not convinced of a person's ability to completely distance themselves from their own experiences and the thoughts floating in their head. I don't really believe in what folk call objectivity. I'm much more drawn to what Gramsci called "inter-subjectivity", where materialism is at best a way of coordinating individual experiences by comparing notes, as it were. We can make a best guess about things, and that extends to ideological frameworks. They're best guesses, made by people who are sharing their own observations that absolutely do depend upon who they are as people.
No matter what, you're a person in a historical moment, and Marxism is coalesced observations from certain experiences and is not free from biases, subjectivity, or anything else that colors everything humans do. Even the scientific method is itself done through people, who have built-in biases and social status. There's not some grand idea of "science" that exists outside of people, that itself would be an immaterial claim.
I'd like to bring up how Marx said it, the famous quote about "“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 of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
Same thing to me. Marxism isn't some set of rules outside of the individuals who are part of it, it's a real movement of real people and we have to grapple with the contours and extent of it. We can talk more in DMs if you want
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that's basically any ideology
see: the sheer number of marxists who don't like the gays
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Yeah it still depends on the person. What qualifies as scientific and material doesn't always hit universally, like the Greek Communist Party keeps being transphobic and their explanation is trans people deny materialism. One time I had a very bitter argument with a well known transphobic Marxist (whose name rhymes with Small Dockshott) and he tried using the "ruthless criticism of all that exists" line on me.
Ideology is a fuck, even our own. Best you can do is constantly examine yourself and find people you really really trust and whose experiences you value. Never ever get trapped inside your own mind, because that's when your brain starts melting.
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Call me a Gramsci-ite but I'm not convinced of a person's ability to completely distance themselves from their own experiences and the thoughts floating in their head. I don't really believe in what folk call objectivity. I'm much more drawn to what Gramsci called "inter-subjectivity", where materialism is at best a way of coordinating individual experiences by comparing notes, as it were. We can make a best guess about things, and that extends to ideological frameworks. They're best guesses, made by people who are sharing their own observations that absolutely do depend upon who they are as people.
No matter what, you're a person in a historical moment, and Marxism is coalesced observations from certain experiences and is not free from biases, subjectivity, or anything else that colors everything humans do. Even the scientific method is itself done through people, who have built-in biases and social status. There's not some grand idea of "science" that exists outside of people, that itself would be an immaterial claim.
I'd like to bring up how Marx said it, the famous quote about "“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 of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
Same thing to me. Marxism isn't some set of rules outside of the individuals who are part of it, it's a real movement of real people and we have to grapple with the contours and extent of it. We can talk more in DMs if you want
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Jesus agrees with me that Half-Life 1 is the best game ever, by the way.