Ever since I first found out how capitalism worked, seeing how it institutionalized greed and exploitation, I've been a socialist. That would be a socialist, not a Marxist. And, due to the utter confusion of the term "socialist" I've got to point out I'm definitely not a Fabian*. I'm a socialist who believes that the workers should own the means of production and that that ownership should never be allowed to leave the hands of the workers who use those means to produce what is produced. My friend at my former blog pointed out that my socialism was more in line with some branches of anarchism, though I'm anything but an anarchist. As I mentioned, neither am I a Marxist. And here, just for fun, I'll mention that Marx declared he wasn't a Marxist either. Howard Zinn's guess at why he said that sounds plausible to me.
This morning, following up links on lefty blogs, I came to this rather dismal post at Lenin's Tomb giving a wonderfully baroque exposition of why ideology is a material substance. If you want to peruse it in all its tortured citations and reasoning, go ahead. I doubt you'll profit from it, you'd probably get more of use from picking through the dry bones of the Abhidhamma on some esoteric point of Buddhist dogma more profitably gotten from some simple statement of the Dharmapada. It's absolutely nothing. I wouldn't insult the Golden Rule by involving it in a hands down comparison in its favor on the basis of the observation of actual life as compared to the vanity of ideological romance.
Here's the comment I left there after reading through it.
If this is true, there isn't any difference between one ideology and another, they're merely different products of different chance factors of material causation. There isn't even any reason to adopt one over the other because whatever decision is made is merely another product of material causation. You may as well be a Republican-fascist as anything else. Even the idea that your conclusion carries anything like truth or is anything like an objective picture of material reality is illusory.
Why would you think your conclusions could escape the materialist substrate that you conclude your ideological opponents are a victim of? No, that's silly, if your materialist ideology is the product of your peculiar line of causation, as you say your opponents' ideologies are, its being materialist isn't any reason to assume it's any more accurate. Materialist ideologies aren't uniform and there wouldn't be any way to judge one as being more realistic than another one.
You've only sealed up any escape from a maze with no center and no goal. There isn't any more reason to live in that one than there is to spend your life playing a video game. I'd rather take a chance on your materialism being an academic delusion, even if what you're saying has some chance of being true.
* Fabianism is a rich snob's idea of "socialism" from above, preserving upper class belief in their own virtue and the depravity of the poor. It's among the more putrid uses of the word. I'd be in favor of coming up with a different word to name my kind of socialism but that's not in my hands.
First posted April 19, 2012
Update: If you would like to refute what I said why didn't you? Atheists online are pretty much uniformly restricted to parroting ideological dogmas in lieu of making arguments and you boys and gals are only on the mid-brow level of even doing that.
So, do tell me how, if ideas and even ideologies are a material substance, why doesn't that mean that none of them can except, perhaps by the most vanishingly slender of random chances, arrive at anything like an objective truth. Only, as I said, I'll neither hold my breath nor wait up nights. When I made that argument to him, Richard Seymour couldn't argue his way out of it and I doubt you're any Richard Seymour
I will make a prediction that the practice of allowing people granted science degrees, like you apparently hold, to not know how to argue their way out of a wet paper bag is going to be found to have harmed science. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't involved in the replication crisis, not to mention the file-drawer crisis and other massive lapses of methodology that are being discussed in Nature and other venues. But, in the end, it's scientists feeling that they have some kind of exemption from the need admit the truth.
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