So what IS wrong with idealism? I'm not saying materialism is wrong...

The agnostic will smugly proclaim that we can't know whether God exists or not but will think, act and live like any atheists.

agnostic is full of shit because he thinks he can't know for sure whether god exists even though his real issue is that he can't know for sure what he thinks god even would be if it existed

Same goes for the retard who goes "but what if it's like, not real." It doesn't matter.

what matters is that I can disprove god's existence on the sole point that god is just a word that describes absolutely nothing

What does that even mean?

What the fuck?

Do you even know what those words mean?

nice try socrates

jews, christians and muslims can provide their descriptions of god, and assorted "proof". agnostic doesn't, his idea of god is general and therefore meaningless

Marxists can not and to this day have never even explained what "value" is supposed to be. Expecting them to grasp any of their other pseudophilosophical slogans is laughable, considering it's all meaningless from square one.

isn't the entire point to prove that material shit is worthless?

What's wrong with materialism? That clearly not everything that exists or has causal efficacy is material.

What's wrong with idealism? That unfortunately for most people on the Left, here being no exception, thinking you have an answer because of some abstract theory is not in fact the same as having an answer, no matter what leftcoms say. Idealism on the Left is the gap between your wished ideals and the reality of the material and social possibility of those ideals.

Most of you are practically idealists of the worst kind.

From this: existentialcomics.com/comic/74

From my experience, idealism is a detriment only when it's the dominant ideological position. You get so caught up in spooks that you think these spooks and your perceptions of them are reality. This sort of position makes creating theory that actually reflects reality impossible, much less shaping reality itself.

I deal with people all the time that behave this way. Without basing their worldviews in a materialist examination of the world around them they are ideologically lost and almost completely incapable of making sense of the world.

Utopia is never going to happen. The ideal you seek simply isn't possible.

the amount of time it takes to create a commodity when working in conditions that reflect the average level of technical sophistication and development in a given economy you illiterate dunderfuck

Because material conditions are what incentivize certain behaviors over others, what allow certain ideas to spread or not spread, and are what allow certain kinds of knowledge, cultural practices, and attitudes to establish themselves.

That's not an explanation, that's just an assertion you retard. This is why we can't have good theory. Morons who don't know what words mean, smh.

Riddle me this, theorylet, how does a material structure first get established? Hint: it sure doesn't establish itself.

On the contrary, "God" is a word that describes Absolutely everything: robertmwallace.blogspot.com/2014/04/hegels-god-how-we-know-it-and-why-it.html?m=1

Okay so you have given a (semi-)quantitative formulation from Capital III, completely ignoring the qualitative dimensions which is crucial to the theory, unless it is just to be form of classical economics that makes observations any literally socialist in Marx's time could have and did make. Wow, the rich tend to try get richer, run the state, and exploit people, and there are boom/bust cycles. Not exactly rocket science. Ignoring the true essence of the Marxist theory to recast it as some kind of economism means there can be no SUBSTANTIAL projections about the post-capitalist future either way (thus rendering "Communism", and especially Marx and Engels' depiction of it, meaningless), nor any analysis on the qualitative effects of capitalism on the mind, and ethics, and so forth, and I don't think I need to explain why this is really the point.
In what unit? Define "time".
So this is more correctly a temporal theory of value. Why is this ignored? The Noetherian dual of time is energy after all.
Definition of Commodity-Form requires value. So this is circular.
Define "working"? Value, as this social substance and Form, is the engine of the whole system, it's what suffuses into Commodities to make them commodities, it's what generates all the social relations that produce "false consciousness"/reification/merchandization of the subject, it's what drives Capital to detatch itself from human agency and become its own self-perpetuating, machinic, alien entity, attaining a systematicity in the material. Thus we must be VERY precise on what it actually IS, and HOW it can come to be transferred from "human labor power" in social work.
Here's your chance to elaborate on the mechanism by which material conditions contribute.
How do they "reflect"? What does this notion mean? Only electromagnetic radiation reflects in material reality.
Is this a magnitude or a quantity? If quantity, what units? If not unital, how is it possible to define any notion of AVERAGE?
What does this even mean? How do you measure this?
Is this deterministic according to the wheels of motion of history or not? If so, this is again a vicious circularity as the trajectory of "value", which as Marx noted, Aristotle had already talked about, underlies the historical materialist notion of historical development.
How is it possible to isolate this analysis to "a given" economy? I thought socialism in one country was theoretically impossible, not just because of the likelihood of endless capitalist subversion, but Marxism can only be a theory of the WHOLE social totality and this is what Marx himself intended. Indeed, this is a prequisite condition for the TSSI reformulation, which is behind your infograph "proving" the TRPF.

Instead of just pretending there was no controversy, can you explain the whole debate on the Value-form and Law of Value, producing like 100 warring sects each with their own separate and often entirely incompatible and polemical interpretation? WHY did Althusser declare the great crisis of Marxism? What do YOU suddenly just seem to know, that they all clearly had severe difficulties figuring out among themselves ever since Capital was published, despite there being dogmatic authorities to defer to on the matter at the time (with the Internationals and Communist Bloc explicitly and even violently opposed to any non-Marxian socialism)?

Intriguing.

You are deceived. He only comes here to play haughty with others, in a similar fashion to A.W.. I wouldn't be surprised if they were the same.

I'm haughty because it's a taste of your own medicine. Marxists can't disprove the fact they completely fucked up socialism and most likely made humanity miss their chance, and their theory is so much useless academic hogwash, because it's true, and they now are BACK at a time fucking it up AGAIN, washing their hands of any suggestion their internal dysfunctions are inherent to the dogma. Mods here are Marxists, and behave like it: ban even joking criticism of Marxism while the other (real) socialists here just slowly internalize it "haha well I know they'll kill me come revolution but boy they do have the most developed theory, and they got results in the past!" or hemorrage out. Look at the consensus: Cockshott's literal Skynet to run a (physically impossible, btw) emulation of capitalism is taken more seriously than Bookchin, than the actual socialist movement in Kurdistan (muh imperialism!) This is what Marxists ALWAYS do. They infiltrate, create false consensus, then crush opposition with brute force. Western Marxists became the neoliberal postmodernists, further eating the left from the inside. They are fucking cancer.

Quality post. Not being ironic either. Whoever you are, we likely disagree with great violence, but I commend your criticality.

Before anyone takes this out of context in an autistic fit. He is not claiming that Marx is useless, he claims that Marxists are the problem. Instead of learning from what Marx had to say, and to lay rest to some of the dogmatism or issues Marx's theory has, they claim it to be an eternal truth. I have noticed a trend regarding self-proclaimed Marxists. They often consider communism the end of history. A society where no further transition is possible. An extremely bold claim, since material conditions don't disappear once communism is established. The issue of management will likely be an immense issue, which will incite an array of issues.

what the fuck
they literally don't understand what the other poster meant by saying "reflect"

You're an illiterate of the worst kind.

I understand what reflect means colloquially. But as this is the basic ontological core of the theory that has already greatly altered our collective past and thus the whole constellation of possibilities accessible to us now, and may still yet describe and guide our whole future as a species, at a time when we face possible immanent extinction according to many. And the fact unironic Marxists still exist, is surely enough to ask of them what exactly mean and to explain their own history.

If you don't get why precision to the greatest degree possible might be important here, in supposedly describing the locus of the break between material and phenomenal reality, the atomic building block of all human society including all exploitation, in a materialist (implying closer to physics than mysticism) account… if you just don't seem to care or see what the big deal is, then how could you expect anyone take you seriously? It's meant to be post-critical, dialectical LOGIC, not "quick sketch u know what i mean xd".

OP here, not the guy you're replying to

well, how DOES it get established according to you? If for example history of man started from might makes right, or deteriorated to it like Ocalan suggested, then we can infer that material conditions developed from the preceding ones all the way to the simple imperative that set the stage. Or, again like Ocalan suggested, the fact that men could gather more than they would need by themselves and thus lay the groundwork for surplus.

And notice something? You leave out the account of the history of the mind in your account. Why is that? Why are Marxists seriously blind to one of the MOST OBVIOUS reasons: that we are beings who could reason.

If at first we were hunter gatherers, how did we shift to agriculture? Well, it sure wasn't because it just happened. It happened because we developed a certain level of knowledge that allowed this, and further this knowledge was shared among a community, and this knowledge was built upon. Activity and life precedes mind, but it is the mind which generates the superstructure according to its own generated means of life. As we learned to manage nature, we likewise opened the possibility for new arrangements of culture and society.

Is this something against your basic conclusions? No, it's just the obvious reality that our capacity to reason and think is as immediately fundamental to our original history and development. It wasn't that there was the material base first and then an ideology, no. There is activity and mind as one unity as labor. Labor IS ideal activity, there is no reduction. A type of labor like hunter gathering has an immediate corresponding ideality, a metaphysics, a type of learning, a culture, which is tied to this labor but which is not merely constituted by this labor. It takes into itself far more than what we simply do for living, but conceives a view of the world and relations to that world.

Mind is the only possible form of matter. Most obvious false dichotomy of all time.

Marx himself wrote that what seperates man from the animal kingdom is that he shapes his enviroment after ideas. Unlike the ant who mindlessly create to support immediate needs, men first make a plan in their heads that they follow. So there's nothing wrong with idealism, Marx said so

GILLES DELEUZE: We do not use the terms 'normal' or 'abnormal'. All societies are rational and irrational at the same time. They are perforce rational in their mechanisms, their cogs and wheels, their connecting systems, and even by the place they assign to the irrational. Yet all this presupposes codes or axioms which are not the products of chance, but which are not intrinsically rational either. It's like theology: everything about it is rational if you accept sin, immaculate conception, incarnation. Reason is always a region cut out of the irrational – not sheltered from the irrational at all, but a region traversed by the irrational and defined only by a certain type of relation between irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, drift. Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself. The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious, it's mad. It is in this sense that we say: the rational is always the rationality of an irrational. Something that hasn't been adequately discussed about Marx's *Capital* is the extent to which he is fascinated by capitalists mechanisms, precisely because the system is demented, yet works very well at the same time. So what is rational in a society? It is – the interests being defined in the framework of this society – the way people pursue those interests, their realisation. But down below, there are desires, investments of desire that cannot be confused with the investments of interest, and on which interests depend in their determination and distribution: an enormous flux, all kinds of libidinal-unconscious flows that make up the delirium of this society. The true story is the history of desire. A capitalist, or today's technocrat, does not desire in the same way as a slave merchant or official of the ancient Chinese empire would. That people in a society desire repression, both for others and *for themselves*, that there are always people who want to bug others and who have the opportunity to do so, the 'right' to do so, it is this that reveals the problem of a deep link between libidinal desire and the social domain. A 'disinterested' love for the oppressive machine: Nietzsche said some beautiful things about this permanent triumph of slaves, on how the embittered, the depressed and the weak, impose their mode of life upon us all.

Deleuze totally sounds like a cuckold.