Oh neat, I'm a math professor. The thing is "explanatory power" isn't some nice and neat metric like an L2-norm that everyone can compute themselves and come to the same answer if they do it correctly. When it comes to things like Marxism, it's a much more subjective measure, and I say this not to be critical but to show you examples of how these things seem to work. The Mormon missionaries that have been having a go at me for the past year and half also report incredibly strong feelings of subjective explanatory power, which I have no reason to believe aren't genuine.
So, assuming neither framework has been objectively been shown to be true in some correspondence framework (which they haven't), if I'm looking for belonging, acceptance, and the feeling that I understand the laws that govern history, why would I choose Marxism as opposed to Mormonism?
Marxism in the US has also failed to bring about the revolution it purports to; you can blame that on competing leftist currents from sucking all the oxygen out of the room, but counterfactual hypotheticals aren't really evidence.
Marxism in the US failed for most of its history not just because of subjective factors like competing leftist currents and shitty revisionist leadership but also because of objective obstacles like getting ruthlessly and violently suppressed by the ruling class here. The counterfactuals aren't just hypotheticals Marxists pull out of their ass, they're modeled based on other cases that were more successful or which failed for different reasons.
Marxism as a family of tendencies is by far the most successful group of tendencies when it comes to making revolution happen anywhere on Earth. The Bolshevik revolution in its early stages is still the universally-agreed-upon gold standard, deviation from which is considered a sign of weakness among Marxists. Maybe some Maoists might argue the Chinese revolution is an improvement, but I'm not a Maoist. Anarchists and utopians have never succeeded on any scale even comparable to the early Soviet Union. Social democrats are a joke even compared to the anarchists, and it was precisely the rejection of social democracy which allowed Lenin and co. to succeed at all.
objective obstacles like getting ruthlessly and violently suppressed
These obstacles are only 'objective' if you presuppose some model of their behavior; there are many documented examples in history where violent repression fuels further dissent as opposed to squashing it, so the sort of linear "sufficient repression = successful subversion" doesn't seem to work.
Marxism as a family of tendencies is by far the most successful group of tendencies when it comes to making revolution happen anywhere on Earth.
Has anyone actually tested this though? Like statistically? I'm not trying to Nate Bronze this, but you've got plenty of successful non-communist revolutions to point to, and plenty of unsuccessful Marxist ones, all of which have all sorts of confounding factors to muddle up the whole picture that I've never been convinced that "yep, it's definitely the Marxism that does it" .
I should probably make a note that terms like "subjective/objective" and "revolution" have specific meanings in Marxism.
The subjective factor is a catch-all for factors endogenous to the working class, e.g. the state of worker consciousness, and the state of their leadership. Objective conditions are exogenous and independent from the perspective working class, including truly exogenous features like geography but also elements that would be endogenous from a God's eye perspective like the economy and the behavior of the enemy ruling class, which are in fact modeled in detail in cornerstone Marxist texts like Capital and State and Revolution. We make assumptions about what to expect from our oppressors based on what their material class interests are (profit maximization, capital accumulation, the use of the state as a weapon to protect private property) and factor that into our analysis.
In a Marxist context, "revolution" is shorthand for a political and social revolution wherein the working class gains or attempts to gain total control of the state and begins the process of changing the main mode of production away from one based on class hierarchy and towards one which is less exploitative and unequal (except to the previous rulers, who can't be trusted) with the ultimate aim of dissolving the class hierarchy altogether and ending oppression. By this standard the only revolutions that count as actual revolutions are socialist or communist revolutions, and liberal people's revolutions like the French revolution (maybe the American one, if we're being charitable, though a better comparison might be something like the Civil War that ended slavery) are incomplete revolutions, and CIA color revolutions are counter-revolutions.
We make assumptions about what to expect from our oppressors based on what their material class interests are (profit maximization, capital accumulation, the use of the state as a weapon to protect private property) and factor that into our analysis.
Yeah, you're admirably attempting to model the behavior of a very complex system, but like I said at the beginning, there needs to be a level of humility in doing so. If the model gives you an outlook of the world that essentially saps your will to live, then the focus on that particular model needs to be tempered for your own sake. Otherwise it takes on the character of some Lovecraftian truth, at which point, what good is it? You aren't responsible for the dynamics of the system, and you as an individual cannot change the dynamics of the system. You can work as an individual toward strengthening the power of systems agents (classes in Marxism), but letting the class scale analysis percolate down into how you treat and act to individuals is a recipe for an entirely different kind of alienation altogether.
working class gains or attempts to gain total control of the state and begins the process of changing the main mode of production away from one based on class hierarchy and towards one which is less exploitative and unequal (except to the previous rulers, who can’t be trusted) with the ultimate aim of dissolving the class hierarchy altogether and ending oppression
These metrics aren't any more solid. You can substitute "purported aim" for "ultimate aim" to make it something more tangible, but those aren't the same thing, and it further renders a revolution unclassifiable until some unspecified date in the future when it fizzles out it open capitalism (like the USSR) or achieves abolition of the class hierarchy and the ending of oppression (no where yet). You can state that someplace like China was closer to this ideal, but then we're back to the original problem; we're not in some well metric space where distance is meaningfully defined. The USSR was you can say that the USSR was much closer to this ideal than say the US at a certain point in time, but what good is that now that they're further away? This is a bit like taking the limit as x -> 1E10 and substituting that for x -> infinity.
I love talking to Mormons. It’s the worst when they try to just stick to the script and fast track you into baptist. Ain’t gonna be that easy boys!
I've had some sets try that actually, and they told me if I committed to a date then I'd receive a special witness and believe. I said sure, lets give it a go. Date comes up, they ask the baptismal interview questions, I vomit out a load of epistemology, and they say, "on second thought, lets keep working". We've been at it for over year now.
Sometimes they swap out, some have gone home (I always send them off with a book like The Structure of Scientific Revolutions or The Brothers Karamazov based on their personalities) and others get transferred around the region. Longest I've had a single one is about 5 months. The official transfer schedule is every 6 weeks, but some get assigned to the same region for more than 1 transfer.
Oh neat, I'm a math professor. The thing is "explanatory power" isn't some nice and neat metric like an L2-norm that everyone can compute themselves and come to the same answer if they do it correctly. When it comes to things like Marxism, it's a much more subjective measure, and I say this not to be critical but to show you examples of how these things seem to work. The Mormon missionaries that have been having a go at me for the past year and half also report incredibly strong feelings of subjective explanatory power, which I have no reason to believe aren't genuine.
So, assuming neither framework has been objectively been shown to be true in some correspondence framework (which they haven't), if I'm looking for belonging, acceptance, and the feeling that I understand the laws that govern history, why would I choose Marxism as opposed to Mormonism?
Marxism in the US has also failed to bring about the revolution it purports to; you can blame that on competing leftist currents from sucking all the oxygen out of the room, but counterfactual hypotheticals aren't really evidence.
Marxism in the US failed for most of its history not just because of subjective factors like competing leftist currents and shitty revisionist leadership but also because of objective obstacles like getting ruthlessly and violently suppressed by the ruling class here. The counterfactuals aren't just hypotheticals Marxists pull out of their ass, they're modeled based on other cases that were more successful or which failed for different reasons.
Marxism as a family of tendencies is by far the most successful group of tendencies when it comes to making revolution happen anywhere on Earth. The Bolshevik revolution in its early stages is still the universally-agreed-upon gold standard, deviation from which is considered a sign of weakness among Marxists. Maybe some Maoists might argue the Chinese revolution is an improvement, but I'm not a Maoist. Anarchists and utopians have never succeeded on any scale even comparable to the early Soviet Union. Social democrats are a joke even compared to the anarchists, and it was precisely the rejection of social democracy which allowed Lenin and co. to succeed at all.
These obstacles are only 'objective' if you presuppose some model of their behavior; there are many documented examples in history where violent repression fuels further dissent as opposed to squashing it, so the sort of linear "sufficient repression = successful subversion" doesn't seem to work.
Has anyone actually tested this though? Like statistically? I'm not trying to Nate Bronze this, but you've got plenty of successful non-communist revolutions to point to, and plenty of unsuccessful Marxist ones, all of which have all sorts of confounding factors to muddle up the whole picture that I've never been convinced that "yep, it's definitely the Marxism that does it" .
I should probably make a note that terms like "subjective/objective" and "revolution" have specific meanings in Marxism.
The subjective factor is a catch-all for factors endogenous to the working class, e.g. the state of worker consciousness, and the state of their leadership. Objective conditions are exogenous and independent from the perspective working class, including truly exogenous features like geography but also elements that would be endogenous from a God's eye perspective like the economy and the behavior of the enemy ruling class, which are in fact modeled in detail in cornerstone Marxist texts like Capital and State and Revolution. We make assumptions about what to expect from our oppressors based on what their material class interests are (profit maximization, capital accumulation, the use of the state as a weapon to protect private property) and factor that into our analysis.
In a Marxist context, "revolution" is shorthand for a political and social revolution wherein the working class gains or attempts to gain total control of the state and begins the process of changing the main mode of production away from one based on class hierarchy and towards one which is less exploitative and unequal (except to the previous rulers, who can't be trusted) with the ultimate aim of dissolving the class hierarchy altogether and ending oppression. By this standard the only revolutions that count as actual revolutions are socialist or communist revolutions, and liberal people's revolutions like the French revolution (maybe the American one, if we're being charitable, though a better comparison might be something like the Civil War that ended slavery) are incomplete revolutions, and CIA color revolutions are counter-revolutions.
Yeah, you're admirably attempting to model the behavior of a very complex system, but like I said at the beginning, there needs to be a level of humility in doing so. If the model gives you an outlook of the world that essentially saps your will to live, then the focus on that particular model needs to be tempered for your own sake. Otherwise it takes on the character of some Lovecraftian truth, at which point, what good is it? You aren't responsible for the dynamics of the system, and you as an individual cannot change the dynamics of the system. You can work as an individual toward strengthening the power of systems agents (classes in Marxism), but letting the class scale analysis percolate down into how you treat and act to individuals is a recipe for an entirely different kind of alienation altogether.
These metrics aren't any more solid. You can substitute "purported aim" for "ultimate aim" to make it something more tangible, but those aren't the same thing, and it further renders a revolution unclassifiable until some unspecified date in the future when it fizzles out it open capitalism (like the USSR) or achieves abolition of the class hierarchy and the ending of oppression (no where yet). You can state that someplace like China was closer to this ideal, but then we're back to the original problem; we're not in some well metric space where distance is meaningfully defined. The USSR was you can say that the USSR was much closer to this ideal than say the US at a certain point in time, but what good is that now that they're further away? This is a bit like taking the limit as x -> 1E10 and substituting that for x -> infinity.
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I've had some sets try that actually, and they told me if I committed to a date then I'd receive a special witness and believe. I said sure, lets give it a go. Date comes up, they ask the baptismal interview questions, I vomit out a load of epistemology, and they say, "on second thought, lets keep working". We've been at it for over year now.
deleted by creator
Sometimes they swap out, some have gone home (I always send them off with a book like The Structure of Scientific Revolutions or The Brothers Karamazov based on their personalities) and others get transferred around the region. Longest I've had a single one is about 5 months. The official transfer schedule is every 6 weeks, but some get assigned to the same region for more than 1 transfer.