I’ve thought about this issue before too. The way I see it is that the ruling class produces propaganda to justify standing on the backs of their fellow humans. Then the next generation absorbs this propaganda as if it were, at least in part, fact. They then develop more propaganda based on the old propaganda. This continues on and on as the empire grows. Then, when the empire begins to decline, they keep acting based on the propaganda that has been stuffed into every weak point to shore it up. Except now the propaganda is far out of alignment with the material conditions because they’ve changed. So their perspectives are out of alignment with reality. They are making what appear to them to be rational decisions based on their highly propagandized perspectives. They continue to rationally respond as their conditions demand, but what they think is rational is actually a manufactured fiction. I hope I was able to explain this well enough.
end of empire hallucinations
Ideologies are borne from the material; you do away with the mechanistic approach by understanding that it is a subset of material interacting with other material. To frame the ideology to float separate from the material is to give into metaphysics; a cartesian dualism. The rational is real and the real is rational. I found In Defense of Materialism: The Development of the Monist View of History by Plekhanov useful here. I’m happy to be corrected but the above screenshot just sounds like Great Man Theory with Marxist jargon.
happy to be corrected but the above just sounds like Great Man Theory with Marxist jargon.
What this posits is like the opposite of that, it’s that more and more everybody in charge can’t separate the PR spectactle from the actual thing
What this posits is like the opposite of that [Great Man Theory], it’s that more and more everybody in charge can’t separate the PR spectactle from the actual thing
“As the empire declines the ruling class acts on ideology instead of real material politics” is in the OP’s screenshot?
That can be taken to mean that the ghouls ignore reality and assume their conception of the world (which is borne out of their ideologies) to be true instead.
That can be taken to mean that the ghouls ignore reality and assume their conception of the world (which is borne out of their ideologies) to be true instead.
Their actions are rational in attempt to maintain their class rule?
In that respect they are. But whether the course of action chosen is correct or not for the purpose of fulfilling their goals depends on whether they have a good grasp of reality. If they instead believe in incorrect ideologies (wunderwaffens can alone bring down Iran) they will make mistakes even though they are acting rationally insofar as the end goal is concerned.
Rationality does not have to presuppose correct predictions (ie account for all variables + outside metaphysical observer who believes such an accounting will lead to a particular determined path). Was the Soviet Union not socialist under Stalin because it failed enough to consider a Kruschev taking over? Was Stalin not rational?
Edited to add: this is not to mean that leaders do not have agency but what actions they are allowed to do in powered and enabled by the system that awarded them that power. As marxists we can consider all bourgoisie leaders as “stupid” but that framing is a double edged sword because they were still intelligent enough to be more powerful than us.
There isn’t a universal definition of rationality. How do you expect someone to account for the totality of information? That seems like a high bar.
Rational from an out of touch perspective, yes. In the way that interacting with daturs hallucinations is rational to the person on datura and nobody else
Maybe we consider the bourgeoisie “science” was never a closer approximation to reality than the marxist-leninst one but that that did not exclude their rationality or leverage on power; their “hallucinations” were rational enough to win despite the lack of hallucinations of the marxist-leninist.
Hard to understand it without the context and I don’t want to do the captcha right now on the archive link. But in general here, I think we usually categorize ideology as part of superstructure and a thing like military resources as part of base, as a way of helping to understand it. Both are real, substantial factors in what occurs. But importantly, ideology alone cannot withstand a declining material base; to put it one way, belief won’t stop an ocean wave from sweeping you up in it. However, if you’re in charge of a material base that still has quite a bit of oomph behind it and you not only believe sincerely that you have far more resources than you actually have, but also believe you need to actively use it to subjugate others, you may squander what you do have. You may attack Iran, thinking you can break the people there, and get your imperial bases broken instead.
Trump is definitely not secretly a long-term strategic thinker, but some people in his orbit may be. However, there’s nothing particularly clever about what they did with Iran. There’s no positive spin for the empire on getting debased by Iran or handling navy logistics so poorly that people wanted to jump overboard. Arrogance big, military limited.
After reading Indi’s recent following articles, I think the way I put it is woefully inadequate for explaining what’s going on:
https://indi.ca/the-after-math/
https://indi.ca/the-logistics-war-part-1-the-oil/
https://indi.ca/logistics-war-reserve-fleet/
https://indi.ca/logistics-war-3-the-missile-gulf/
I recommend reading all of them, but if you want a rough TL;DR, I would say the important part as it pertains to what I was saying is: I’m leaving out the grifter angle of things, sans interest in maintaining empire. If we see the empire as first and foremost a profit/power grift, then what happens when people start grifting the empire machine itself? It starts getting hollowed out, rusting, sold for spare parts. Because the point isn’t the empire itself but the profit part. Anyway, read Indi if that doesn’t make sense.
Indi is top teir.
https://indi.ca/the-bust-out-of-america/ Is also a really good part of his analysis on what is going on in usa right now.
That’s a good read, thanks.
I think this is absolutely a process that’s happening, but I don’t think it’s making materialist analysis less useful. We just have to account for this slide into unreality.
Lenin talked about mechanic materialism as worldview which sees a man pulling a lever as just one force, dialectical materialism is knowing that the lever has resistance aka a counterforce so the lever projects its own force onto the man. Its basic physics applied to a philosophical analytical basis.
I quite don’t get it how it is mechanical materialism to use dialectal materialism to analyze the us empire in the future? Because they have ideologues in their elites? That has been the case since the inception of the us.
