Hi Holla Forums

Hi Holla Forums

Social democrat economics student here.

Let's talk about Guy Debord

I like Society of the Spectacle but I'm not sure if it's because I enjoy the 60s' eurocommunist aesthetic, or if its because I actually agree with him

Let's also talk about my SJW 'anarchist' 'friends' on facebook - are they detrimental to the broad cause?

Tell me your opinions on these two things and maybe we can talk

Other urls found in this thread:

clogic.eserver.org/2007/verikukis.pdf
socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.ca/p/below-is-list-of-links-on-my-blog-to.html
socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.ca/2015/08/two-instances-where-marxs-theory-of.html
youtube.com/watch?v=d2-CZQnBRYs
ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-03-microeconomic-theory-and-public-policy-fall-2010/lecture-notes/MIT14_03F10_lec03.pdf
link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4020-9338-8_12
ia601501.us.archive.org/22/items/Against.Social.Networks/Against.Social.Networks.pdf
wsws.org/en/articles/2015/07/23/dnbo-j23.html
mehring.com/the-frankfurt-school-postmodernism-and-the-politics-of-the-pseudo-left.html
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

read marx and then come back

fuck off capitalist shill, read Bookchin

read Popper and then come back fuck boy

What are your thoughts on the LTV?


What about Marx conflicts with Popper that isn't common to all schools of bourgeois economics? What value theory is not in some way, tautological?

Also, Poppers "rationality principle" ran into the same "problems" he said Marx's theories ran into which is why he abandoned it later. Social sciences can't be held to this strict standard of falsification.

I consider myself a situationist.

clogic.eserver.org/2007/verikukis.pdf

Agree morally and emotionally; disagree economically and logically. Redistribution is key


I have no idea what you mean by this. If you mean to imply that LTV is tautological because it refers to 'socially useful labour' which is in itself a hollow term that ultimately devolves into supply-demand then I would agree with you - but I fail to see how that is relevant to price setting and value determination through supply-demand


I think they can; Popper may not be perfectly rigorous enough in his approaches when examined 60 years later but the general gist of a scientific approach to the social sciences is, as he has described, tremendously useful. It is imperative to distinguish the metaphysical and purely theoretical from application in social sciences because, although it may be difficult to create a powerful framework decisively separating them within the philosophy of science, as Popper said, making decisions on the empirical on a foundation of the philosophical is dangerous and can lead to the application of faulty epistemology and the deaths of millions

Socdems will allways fail as they ignore all the other problems of capitalism, giving everyone a bunch of money doesnt fix shit

I think that RP is meant as a non-rigorous manner of thought that Popper did not intend to be a legitimate scientific approach.

Even if he were to legitimately use it as a purportedly scientific approach in the face of its unfalsifiability, it doesn't make Marxism valid on the grounds of Popper being a hypocrite; it simple means that both RP and Marxist approaches to social sciences are unscientific.

Who is this guy, anyway? Why are you giving me a paper by someone at York University? That is considered a school for silly people here in Canada

Sorry, meant for

Yeah but all the other problems are only problems because you say they're problems.

Commodity fetishism? Commoditization? Alienation? Are those not just self-fulfilling, unfalsifiable concepts?


Socdems win in life and in politics because they're the smartest people.

Also, here

socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.ca/p/below-is-list-of-links-on-my-blog-to.html

Read some of this; its on your reading list ffs

My votes go to socdems and if they succeed with saving capitalism then thats great. But I doubt it so I rather look for alternatives that can permanently enshrine democracy, ecologism, and self determination into a stable system.

I see the flaws obviously

Have any of you read Capital in the 21st Century?

I think wealth taxes and a sort of hard limit on inequality would be a good way to ensure socdem societies moving forward without the corruption of democracy or exploitation of workers

LK's "Debunking Marxism" series is probably one of the funniest things I've ever seen. It's an evolution of him getting BTFO in the comments by internet Marxist as he slowly starts to change his views on one thing, only to move onto the next strawman.


Marx's law of value is not a theory of what should happen, it's a theory of what IS happening.

I have no idea what you mean by this. If you mean to imply that LTV is tautological because it refers to 'socially useful labour' which is in itself a hollow term that ultimately devolves into supply-demand then I would agree with you - but I fail to see how that is relevant to price setting and value determination through supply-demand
I mean the "values in the aggregate = cost price + average ROP" is tautological meme.

I disagree fundamentally. Economics is not falsifiable you should know that. Any set of economic data can be interpreted in a way that vindicates any theory because of unseen factors that could very likely play a part, or of which a correlation can be drawn up with (even if the correlation is meaningless).

If I remember in his Chapter 16 (or maybe Chapter 25?) "critical" examination of Volume 1 of Capital, he says workers would be getting "less exploited" if real wages go up. After years of Marxist trying to explain basic conceptions of Capital to him, he still manages to fuck up one of the most basic aspects of Capital - that exploitation is the rate of unpaid over paid labour. Real wages make no difference in this case.

Eurocommunism doesn't mean what you think it means

...

How does that in any way run counter to what I said?


That's a pretty heterodox formulation I've never seen before… value refers to subjective judgements of utility that are priced through aggregates using S-D


It is, though. You're talking about historicism which is something that Popper shits on quite aggressively. If an economic theory lays out a premise that can be proven wrong, it is falsifiable. We make theories based on historical data, sure; but a scientific approach to them implies that if they are proven false, we abandon them and reformulate them. And as time moves on, we develop more rigorous and tested economic frameworks.


I think he isn't misunderstanding; I think he's just fundamentally disagreeing with your concept of labour's value and is more inclined towards utility based explanations of exploitation

Correct me if I'm wrong, but does eurocommunism not find its origin in Mai 68 and Situationist Internationale?

Are you talking about George Lucas or something?

also can we get back to the OP?

What do you guys think of Guy Debord, is he just a memester or is he a legitimate philosopher in the current wild world of Marxist theory

And do you guys think SJWs that lack any understanding of critical theory OR economics are detrimental to progressive causes in general? I would say that the modern youth cultural fascism movement was created directly in response to SJWism

Eurocommunism was a revisionist political movement in some decaying european communist parties (like the the French Comunist Party for example).

May 68 was more of a students movement formed by the "new left", french maoists, and situationists. Situationists could be classified as a lef-communist movement.

It doesn't validate Marxism yes, but Popper's criticism is fuggin trash which is the point that the doc is trying to make.

Oh and read the damn document boi.

I like his ideas though his prose is god awful to read.

I see, I see

I guess I'm really just more into the broader early postmodern aesthetic

Pop art and shit. I was at the MoMA a few months ago and there was a Bruce Conner Exhibit and I got all into it.

I did read it

It focuses on a pretty tenuous claim that Popper's RP was regarded by Popper as a scientific alternative to Marxist analysis and then attacks him being hypocritical

In reality even if that WAS true it doesn't fuck up the falsifiability criticism, which is still valid and I think quite useful

Because "the morality" of the law of value is irrelevant.

To quote Marx:

This is a key part of Marx's value theory and the explanation for the transformation of values into prices of production.

I'm not actually talking about historicism. I'm talking about his disagreement with Marx's "countervailing tendencies" within economic theories. And what do you mean by "proven" false? Do you think you can account for all endogenous and exogenous factors when interpreting a set of data? And how can you prove an economic theories "axioms" wrong? As someone who's into Popper, you should be familiar with his argument against scientific theories having to "justify" every single premise, which is precisely what Popper faults him for not doing. Popper is a hypocrite and a meme philosopher my friend. No one has been able to formulate an approach to social sciences that makes use of Poppers unity of method which is why falsification (even in the hard sciences) is something that has been abandoned by large swaths of scientist, particularly those in theoretical sciences.

You're right. He's an ideologue he doesn't misunderstand Marx. He misrepresents Marx, which is what I implied with "strawman". Take a look at his "More Mystical Labour theory of Value Nonsense" post. He gets the concept repeatedly explained to him over and over, yet still puts words in Marx's mouth that Marx never said. Or for example, this post: socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.ca/2015/08/two-instances-where-marxs-theory-of.html

I commented on the post telling LK that translating from German is difficult because Germanic languages often use words we don't even have in English. I posted another translation of Capital where they used the word "pure" instead of "normal". I then went over the German word, "reinen" to show that it doesn't mean "normal" but rather a pure, or unaffected state. Then I showed an example in Volume 2 where Marx refers to "pure capitalism" as a simplified model where values = prices for the sake of outlining general laws. Of course, LK is not interested in changing his beliefs - he wants to look like a manly internet PK. A respectable person would delete the post after it was shown to be completely wrong. Instead, LK never published my comment and left the post up so we can all bask in his pseuodointellectual glory.

Also, he did very clearly misunderstand it. What he said was wrong - he didn't understand Marx's theory of exploitation. It was a blatant misinterpretation of Marx, not a fundamental disagreement.

Zizek made a good argument as to why this thinking is actually far more utopian than even the communist argument.
youtube.com/watch?v=d2-CZQnBRYs

No, it shows that Popper was unable to come up with a method of conducting social sciences that adhered to his own criteria. Therefore, we can conclude his critiques of Marxism were either:
- in bad faith
- naive

The falsification axion can't be falsified, right?

Truly this is the darkest timeline.

I wouldn't say it is far more utopian; no more utopian than the global enactment of income taxes, which only started in the early 20th century but which is now considered standard. Or even think about the abolition of feudalism. Furthermore, the globality of the wealth tax isn't a 100% requirement because of regulations (both existing and potential) associated with foreign asset ownership.

What I mean when I say that I agree morally is that I believe individual compensation and utility shouldn't be tied to price-based value creation.


??? What is this supposed to mean? Prices of production? I really don't understand what you are trying to say here.


Popper's criticism of countervailing tendencies is valid but non-rigorous. Does it not make sense that constant revision to a doctrine to create increasingly broad premises approaches unfalsifiability? At least, when compared to doctrines that predict results more consistently similar to those that are empirically observed? Is that not logical?


See the above. Consistent failure to predict results similar to those empirically observed should be considered falsification. I think that you are approaching this with too binary of a view and insisting that since there is no perfect approach to a given field of study, they are all equally as invalid. The reality is, when we are researching in order to create better empirical outcomes to raise people's quality of life, we must simply seek the strongest possible option as opposed to striving for absolute perfection.

"He does not argue that any such conclusions are therefore true, or that this describes the actual methods of any particular scientist. Rather, it is recommended as an essential principle of methodology that, if enacted by a system or community, will lead to slow but steady progress of a sort (relative to how well the system or community enacts the method)."

You are talking about Kuhn's criticism - a valid one but ultimately one that reinforces the power of falsificationist thought. It shows that the historical progression of science and the betterment of human lives is based on the informed decision by the practitioners of science to accept or reject a hypothesis - this being the most essential component of falsifiability.

ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-03-microeconomic-theory-and-public-policy-fall-2010/lecture-notes/MIT14_03F10_lec03.pdf


I don't think that is what Popper's primary criticism of Marxism is - Popper also does not argue against the concept of axioms but instead focuses his criticisms on the level of theories and their predictive power i.e Marxist economic and social theory


Ok, I'm going to be completely honest with you on this part and just tell you that I'm not a student of philosophy or anything so I'm basically just reading these things as I go. But from what I have read:

Popper is the most influential philosopher of science in the 20th century and forms the heart of postpositivist and critical rationalist thought, which IS commonly accepted. He's not a meme - he was incredibly important and has since had his theories extended by contemporary philosophers of science.

link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4020-9338-8_12

Here is a study that also talks about that, if you're interested. From what I gather, your criticisms of Popper are largely nitpicking at smaller contradictions while brushing over the gist of Popper's thought.

And about that guy's blog, I haven't even read it. I just posted it here because I was looking at the reading list at the exact same time as I was ITT.

If I can ask, what do you study? Just curious.

Just curious to see if you should mentally dismiss him as an ignorant pleb because he hasn't made a job out of capitalist apologia?

It's amazing how I have this primal revulsion and immediate gag reflex when it comes to SocDems.

No I just want to see if you guys study this shit full time or if it's just a side thing

You are very insecure

I'm interested in exactly what parts of Marxist thought Popper "disproved." As far as I'm concerned, Marxism has been, and still is one of the most influential and important ideologies/analyses in regards to advancing academia. Marxist thought is also largely historical hence peoples love for the "revisionism" of Marx's thoughts.

If you want to talk about Marxian economics, I fail to see how it's any more or less falsifiable than all the economic theories that preceded, and succeeded it (especially the Austrian, and Classical school). I simply hold more faith in LTV which can accommodate the STV into its analyses, rather than the other branches which isolate value to some arbitrary spooky vacuum.

I would argue that although it's influenced it from a radical point of view and helped promote upheaval which brought us the modern society we have today, actual Marxist thought (just like psychoanalysis) is largely irrelevant in the modern fields it was originally important in (i.e economics, sociology, anthropology, history).

The Austrian school is widely considered heterodox by economists; falsifiable modern economics are a stream of thought derived from Keynesian and Monetarist principles.

Also, incorporating STV into LTV is, as Nozick points out, just a roundabout way of expressing normal factors of supply and demand and totally discarding any actual meaning in LTV.

I'm not the person you originally responded to.

I think you're missing the point. It doesn't matter if the falsifiability criterion isn't falsifiable by its own standards because it's meant to demarcate science from non-science. It's not itself a scientific claim; it's a philosophical claim pertaining to science, concerning what can and cannot be called science.

The reason Popper's falsifiability criterion sucks is that we can, if we wanted, create a "theory" that is, by its standards, scientific even if it's false. And we should be clear here: Popper doesn't consider only true theories to be scientific, hence why even Newton's theories, though some are wrong, are still scientific. So I can have a "scientific" version of, say, a fortune cookie fortune that adheres to the criteria Popper laid out. I can go out and try to refute said theory, as Popper demands we do for scientific theories, and so long as the criteria of falsifiability are met, voila: I've got a scientific theory. But this is the exact type of pseudo-science Popper tried to separate from actual science, so the theory is shit.

Yeah but the whole point is that in its scientificness, it can be decisively proven wrong and thrown into the dust bin. If it is stupid but falsifiable, then it will be falsified and it will no longer be relevant.

Same poster.

I don't think falsifiability is useless; I think it's obviously useful, but it doesn't solve the demarcation problem; nor do I think Popper put forward the theory in earnestness. He thought he had a good argument for why Freud, Marx, etc. were wrong about the scientificity of their theories, and he made a theory to shit on them. It didn't work, obviously, but here we are over half a century later discussing an obviously wrong idea.

But this argument misses my point: if Popper allows things that are patently stupid and useless to be "scientific" albeit irrelevant theories, then he's clearly not done a proper job demarcating science from pesudo-science.

Not entirely, there are more factors that go into determining value of commodities than just the individuals isolated exchange between the market process. Wages, scarcity (brought upon by labor), societal conditions all affect the values of commodities more than whether or not I want to purchase a steak or some wings.

You say Marx is more or less irrelevant in modern fields, yet that couldn't be further from the truth. His ideas are still being revisited today, and he is always being studied by academics, and I will never be able to see a socialist society succeed if it removes itself from a materialist basis.

But your argument misses his point: any testable hypothesis can be deemed scientific - but you can distinguish between good science and bad science empirically.

Pseudoscience is something that, as Pauli would put it, is not even wrong - it is not bad science, it is simply a meaningless truism. That is what Popper wanted to communicate with his concept of the psuedoscience and the falsification demarcation.

So wages, scarcity and societal conditions all impact utility that you derive from it and therefore demand? As in supply and demand?


He is always being studied by marxist academics.

Modern orthodox economics is not based on Marxian thought whatsoever.

Modern orthodox psychology is not based on Marxian analysis or psychoanalytic thought whatesover.

Anthropology and sociology have largely adopted the practices of other sciences and have focused largely on observablility and empirical analysis.

Marx has had a huge initial influence on all of these - but today he is just history.

But he doesn't want to distinguish merely between good and bad science, otherwise that'd be what we are discussing. He wants to distinguish science from pseudo-science. He says in the work I linked:

"The problem which troubled me at the time was neither, "When is a theory true?" nor "When is a theory acceptable?" my problem was different. I wished to distinguish between science and pseudo-science; knowing very well that science often errs, and that pseudoscience may happen to stumble on the truth…. I often formulated my problem as one of distinguishing between a genuinely empirical method and a non-empirical or even pseudo-empirical method — that is to say, a method which, although it appeals to observation and experiment, nevertheless does not come up to scientific standards."

Not entirely, the basis for supply and demand is entirely founded on the organization, and reorganization of labor. Supply and Demand don't operate on a magical basis, they're brought into effect due to the signals sent from the market process in coordinating the labor process. S-D signals is what allows for the transformation of private labor into social labor.
Not true, I can't think of any contemporary thinker other than Nietzsche who has attracted as much criticism as he has.

Fair enough.


I thought you were more familiar with Marx's LTV than this. Or with the classical "transformation problem" in general.

No. It implies that humans act mechanistically. If you outline countervailing tendencies (but it's possible to identify those tendencies through empirical analysis), there is nothing unscientific about this. Only for Popper, because his theory is shit. I asked if you could account for all endogenous and exogenous factors when making predictions. You didn't answer that question, I presume to be on purpose. If you can't, the critique of countervailing tendencies is irrelevant when applied to the social sciences. Determining which factors led to X happening can only be done post-hoc. Predictions made in economics have to be flexible, precisely because it is a social science.

I'm not at all. I'm arguing that with a field of study like economics, we should be more concerned with explanatory power than with "predictive results" because you can't control for anything in economics. Everything is subject to change. I'm arguing that Poppers approach is shit.

Agreed.

I think the other posters and summed this up pretty well.

A lot of what he wrote was not written in good faith. Particularly the way he misrepresents past philosophers in "The Open Society and Its Enemies".

Economics.


Only if you are using some strawman version of the LTV. Marx is trying to explain how the way we exchange in Capitalism apportions our ability to perform socially valid labour, and therefore how the laws that regulate the physical expenditure of labour shape the outcomes of exchange relationships. STV was always a part of the LTV because if something isn't a use value it is not even a commodity.

I'll quote Marx here:

And lastly, if we really want to talk about predictive power, I think the more or less decennial crises we've experienced since the 1840's vindicate Marx's theory far more than any other economist.

Actually to end my autism I'm going to point out that if countervailing tendencies is a valid criticism when applied to Marx's theory of economics, it is when applied to evolution.

Debord was the only relevant thinker to come out of the Situationist Movement. Those petty bourgs couldn't even handle theory.

Hit the nail on the head here.

Capitalism is literally destroying the world as the gulf between private profit and social need inexorably widens, amidst the best policy by the brightest capitalism apologists the world has to offer.


Yes
Yes
Critical theory in general is just a thinly veiled psychoanalytic critique of misperceived power structures brought on by a misunderstanding of Marxism, though. Read North.

Important, yes. Influential? In the sense of several revolutions, yes, and legions of professional anti-Marxist academics tripping over themselves to lay claim to the "post-Marxist" intellectual lineage, but it has otherwise been systematically purged from modern academia during the Cold War.
Sections of the rationally self-interested bourgeoisie control the private universities directly, through financial support, and the public ones, through the government. Naturally, hiring and policy decisions will reflect class interest. And a theoretical approach, no matter how effective, that contravenes class rule, is not likely to get much a platform carved out from bourgeois academia.
Marxist thought has been divorced from these fields, but Marxist approaches, for all their forced underappreciation, seem to be the most fertile ground for the real development of predictive social sciences beyond the bourgeois standstill sciences we have come to expect. See cultural materialism, Trotsky's surprisingly rich work on art and culture, etc.

Neglecting the material basis of all human activity is an extraordinary surrender to solipsism, and its achievements, and the social science replicability crisis, starkly reflect this.

what other problems are you talking of specifically? the main problems imo can be addressed with financial regulation, a degree of central planning (especially with developing nations, central planning is really effective for industrialization), good monetary policy, regulation of private firms, and the systematic incentivization of worker controlled firms

Actually, this post made me want to leave one final note to address what I see as the poverty of "science" - or specifically Poppers science.

The reason the falsification axiom is complete garbage isn't because it disproves things I like, but because of how limiting it is. It reduces all knowledge down to the reduction of ignorance rather than addition of truth. It's also limiting precisely because it limits what science can be. Popper reduces science down to what can be done in a lab. He was a bourgeois ideologue who oh-so-heroically came out unscathed after flirting with the devil of Marxism only to stick it to all us Marxist with the truths he garnered but we rejected.

But that's not all, Popper doesn't stop there. Popper prefers to mystify everything, which is ironically what he accuses Marxist of doing. The proposition that there are any self evident truths the individual must act on ran counter to Popper's bourgeoisie liberalism, thus he reduces us all down to animals of "volition" and atomistic. There can be no material reality for the idealist, because that dethrones the primacy of ideals.

The reason I love pointing out to Popperfags how he spectacularly failed to offer anything but a less comprehensive method of conduction sociology, historicism, economics or anything else despite being at the forefront of Marx's critics (along with other hero's of anti-communist ex-marxist such as Kola) is not to demonstrate some "poverty" of Poppers method like you remarked. Rather it is to show that for all of Popper's gusto and dismissal of Marx, he could not move past Marx. In fact, he regressed. He offered a castrated and atomistic method of social science. A retrospective logic that was not scientific by his own standards and wasn't scientific by the standards of any Marxist either. This is because Marx represents a new paradigm of science. Kuhn is right in saying science moves forward socially. But if you'd prefer me to humour you, "the falsification axiom has will be falsified" and already has been with Marx. This is all the more impressive that Marx refuted Popper before Popper tapped pen to paper to write out his drivel.

You as a "student of Social Democratic economics" which I presume to mean Post-Keynesian, have been sucked in the bourgeois illusion that you are conducting lab work when you compare average productivity in the dildo and steel industry with the real wages of the Shareholders, CEO's and workers and then go on to conclude that we should redistribute the income because it depreciates marginal utility as it increases. Really, the step towards truth is to be honest with yourself and admit you are far from doing that. In fact, you aren't even half way there to lab work and never will be. But if economics becomes a "pseudoscience", the way the bourgeoisie have been able to banish Marx from the annals of the economics professors starts to collapse in on itself, being shown to be composed of nothing but hot air.

Really, your request we "read Popper" is vulgar. Why should we read someone who was so obviously wrong?

Alienation is so pervasive in every element of society, its hard to even see it. It is this limitless alienation (for example between labour and product, between person and time, between people etc) that is the biggest problem with capitalism. The situationists wrote a ton about it, dwarfing the economical inequality aspect of capitalism.

I have trouble understanding how someone can be a social democrat yet have read SOTS (like op).

Maybe post a pdf instead of that image if you want people to read it.

Good thread for lurkers to read

Willful ignorance, and a lazy refusal to recognize that radical change is needed to stop society from going to hell.

I remember one of my professors saying (so if someone can fact check this) that Popper started his project with a personal hatred of Freud. His project was essentially to design a framework in which to discredit freud & marxism. The popular le rational reddit guy wants to believe his 'skepticism' of Freud and Marx etc is because it 'isnt proper science' while in fact the hatred of revolutionary theory was the very start of the demarcation between 'proper science' and 'unfalsifiable drivel'.

Popper's project was a mission to discredit Marx because he dislikes Marx's self appointed disciples. Nevertheless, most of his ideas were accepted uncritically.

The idea that the "science" of Freud of Marx is not "sciency" enough because it doesn't make testable predictions is bizarre. How can we predict that which we are apart of? In what way can historical events be reproduced in a lab? In what way can you "predict" whether Popper's (and others!) bourgeois sense of volition will lead to a rash military or financial decision? How can you predict the plethora of ways this affects our reproduction? Apparently, any knowledge gained retrospectively no matter how hard you try to formalize and develop the logic with which it's examined isn't scientific.

Not OP, but can you clarify what you mean by this? As what increases? Income inequality?

Citing Popper is so effective because its exactly the kind of paralysing nihilism that plagues capitalism. Guess what doesnt pass Poppers test?All of economics! I honestly think that if Popper didnt sound so much like the word 'proper' he wouldve never gotten that much traction.

when?

capitalist shill ree fuck off

In philosophy, he's taken as a serious philosopher of /science/. He's not taken too seriously in social science, nor political philosophy, etc. The vast majority of people who throw around the "lol ur theory [patriarchy, dialectical materialism, idealism, any philosophy really] isn't falsifiable therefore it's to be dismissed" are people who probably haven't even read Popper, but also aren't actually philosophers, social scientists, or even scientists.

If you are familiar with marginalism, one of the arguments for redistribution of income is that a income increases after a certain point the marginal utility will stop increasing after a certain point of income in reached. It's a socdem argument.


When Marx came up with a superior method and when Popper utterly failed to come up with anything remotely as complex as Marx's theories. In that sense, Marx beat him before he even started his crusade against le ebil lefties.


His test also wouldn't pass astronomy, several theoretical test, really it wouldn't pass evolution. This is why I cal Popper a meme philosopher, because any interesting contributions he would've made to science of philosophy were selectively applied for ideological reasons.


I know he is, but I still don't like him as a philosopher of science. Kuhns critique of Popper is still true today. The OP would prefer to look at the evolution of science as an evolution of "falsifiability" rather than an evolution of changing social circumstances. I think this demonstrates the ad-hoc nature most Popperites use to justify the worst parts of his theory which coincidentally, are also the parts good at "refuting" Marx.

WEW
I just got up sorry. After a certain point, the marginal utility of the income will stop increasing directly in proportion to the income. Diminishing marginal returns, but with income. Hence why Socdems use to justify (and rightly so) redistribution policies.

Do you do anything more than consider?

The Spectacle is fucking real

If you still consider yourself a social democrat after reading SotS you either missed the whole argument or don't agree with him at all. Or did you just watch the film version and dig all those vintage nudie pix and kind of feel a connection to adbusters or something?

Yes they are. All "facebook activists" are cancer.

related:
ia601501.us.archive.org/22/items/Against.Social.Networks/Against.Social.Networks.pdf

Here is a link to the forward which is posted on the World Socialist Website in 3 parts: wsws.org/en/articles/2015/07/23/dnbo-j23.html

The book can be purchased on Mehring.com as an e-book for $9.99 USD: mehring.com/the-frankfurt-school-postmodernism-and-the-politics-of-the-pseudo-left.html

Is there any empirical evidence backing up the claims made in "Society of the Spectacle"?

I might typeset it in LaTeX for you guys

CTRL + F "Read"

Debord is not just a meme

"It is the ultimately metaphysical and ontological nature of the concept of the
Spectacle that impelled Debord to give so many different definitions for what the
Spectacle is, without which it would have been hard to see how they can all agree and unite into an organic whole. Debord, like the majority of revolutionary theoreticians up to now, did not want or was unable to acknowledge that he was operating on metaphysical terrain so as to critique commodity metaphysics. And nevertheless it is precisely this fact and its necessity that Critical Metaphysics reveals."

Therefore "The critique of the Spectacle is either metaphysical or not a critique at all. And it must be explicitly metaphysical, or else it will turn against itself and reinforce the Spectacle."

this aside, I guess it's pretty easy to agree with his view of the worker movement. his final outlook is pretty grim however – are the masses supposed to spontaneously realize their status and revolt? how can affects develop between these new urban peasants? his view seems to preclude the possibility of worker's councils.

as for your friends on facebook…probably half of them are or claim to be mentally ill then will get mad at people for denying them leadership roles or for criticizing them at all. they will hamstring anything you do with cries of "[email protected]/* */", they will not take action for lack of "consensus" (while running informal hierarchies and trying to accumulate social capital). many anarchists, even though they shed their liberal tendencies, cannot into class or base/superstructure. not to say that Marxists or other leftists are perfect, you just asked about anarchists.