cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27603744
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
70 points (62.5% liked)
Memes
56806 readers
847 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Does that matter to the people the UKR military kills in Iran and helps kill in Palestine?
But no, the Ukranian people have not had a choice in anything since having their government surgically replaced in 2014, or for that matter since having their government illegally dissolved in 1991.
My point with this specific post, as an olive branch to people who may not be familiar with the communist position, is not "Ukraine bad" so much as "This is what eventually happens to every American 'ally' no matter what promises have been made to the contrary, and other countries had best take notice".
I don't understand why tankies can't make the logical step from "governments of the west don't care about any peoples' sovereignty (despite justifying their war efforts with claims that they do) because ultimately they just serve whatever keeps them in power" to "no governments care about any peoples' sovereignty because ultimately they just serve whatever keeps them in power"
Because that's a kindergarten understanding of socialist/ML theory and politics in general
Can you think of any non context-dependent dynamics?
I deleted my original comment because it wasn't worded very well and came from a place of frustration and exhaustion. But what I was attempting to get at with "context-dependent dynamics" is that the model of history described by Marx can't be claimed to hold explanatory power in every possible aspect of sociology/anthropology/social sciences generally, because that's not how any model of anything works (as you said). Whenever I get into these conversations with MLs, it feels like they can't conceive of there being an aspect of how the human world works that isn't reducible to class struggle and dialectical materialism. Comparing it to physics, it's like they're hearing about quantum mechanics and all the extra complications and nuances that introduced in order to explain results that classical physics couldn't, and just perpetually going "nah, classical physics has been right about everything else. We must just be mismeasuring these results."
Respectfully, I'm not sure you are appreciating just how expansive the realm of materialist analysis is, considering it's just applying the scientific method to understanding the world. If it can be observed, it can be analyzed. I don't reject the notion of that you'll never quantify everything, but I also don't think it's worth it to let unknowns paralyze us in our actions when we're in such a dire situation, out of time, and 95% sure of our course.
But the realm of materialist analysis is not equivalent to dialectical materialism. If the former is just applying the scientific method to understanding the material world (which, I'll add, doesn't mean much in isolation), dialectical materialism is a specific framework by which the scientific method is applied. Sort of like how physics and chemistry are both just applying the scientific method to understanding the natural world, yet each has their own framework that may capture the truth to different degrees in different situations.
I don't disagree, which is why I happily do mutual aid work with MLs. I know we all want the same things, materially speaking. The problem is that anarchists have the underlying fear that our allies will, at some point, decide to violently enforce their own framework of how the material world works (or can work) onto us, justifying it by claiming you're simply using science. It doesn't help that y'all already take every opportunity to explain how those of us who are rightfully wary of people claiming to have absolute truth are simply misguided or uneducated.
Marx's specific model is not fully explanatory, no, I would agree with that. But I don't get why you're painting this as an attack on dialectical materialism, because dialectical materialism is not a model of history. If you supplemented Marx's model, improved upon it and added more detail, this would still be within the framework of dialectical materialism, or else it's not worth taking seriously. You would still need to stick to a material analysis, and it's impossible to speak on things without categorizing them, so you would still need to introduce labels for categories to talk about, i.e. "classes," and those would still need to be rooted in material reality.
I have seen many analyses that were fairly interesting that were not explicit to Marx. For example, I recall one author argued that people who engage largely in domestic work, such as stay-at-home wives, don't entirely have the same relations to production as those who work under an employer, and so they should be treated as their own class, meaning the differences in their labor and their interests deserve their own analysis, and they further argued that the "domestic economy" in general deserves much more study, since most Marxian texts only tend to focus on the wage labor economy, and older ones with the peasant economy, part of this being due to the fact that domestic labor isn't paid and therefore tends to not be tracked.
Maybe you agree with it, maybe you don't, but I did think it was interesting thing to consider. They were arguing precisely what you siad: in factor of "extra complications and nuances" rather than just ignoring domestic work or lumping domestic laborers into the same category as wage laborers and thus treating them as "the same," which misses the nuance between them. But, they weren't just simply arguing for extra complications a nuances for their own sake, but arguing for it to improve upon and construct a more detailed material analysis.
That is just one example I recall prominently from the top of my head, but it's meant to illustrate a simple point. I will take your "extra complications and nuances" as something worthy of consideration if, and only if, it is still following a dialectical materialist analysis. There are tons of authors, like Bernardo Kastrup, who tries to introduce "extra complications and nuances" into physics, but his complications are all idealist mumbo jumbo incoherent voodoo nonsense, so he's not worth taking seriously.
Additions to physics, as well as additions to historical materialist analysis, should not be idealist nonsense and should still be compatible with dialectical materialism in nature or they are not worth considering.
I don’t even know what you’re saying tbh. Context dependent dynamics? Power is bad and context is bad? Is that from some anarchist theory?