Dialectical materialism won

[Gigafly]

>race dosen't matter and we are all equal or something

I don't need to hear from a self-hating brown person about how class doesn't matter and it's actually aryan vril sorcerers that determine history

 

[Fagon]

I don't need to hear from a self-hating brown person about how class doesn't matter and it's actually aryan vril sorcerers that determine history

>we're one race the human race

 

[Lism]

This was never common sense or a popular belief. Ethnic conflict cannot explain dialectical processes, and I don't know anyone who says history is the result of ethnic struggle. Racial categorizations exist as an incorrect analysis of the material world, it exists as an idea and that's why there's been hundreds of different racial systems that seek to explain differences between groups of people. This is unlike class .

>Racial categorizations exist as an incorrect analysis of the material world, it exists as an idea and that's why there's been hundreds of different racial systems that seek to explain differences between groups of people

That's completely irrelevant to the question at hand. We're asking "what moves history" and what moves history is ethnic conflict. There doesn't have to be one true set of ethnic groups for this to be the case, what matters is that people organize and conflict with each other based on ethnic lines. Even behind historical class differences pre-1800 there was an ethnic element. The French Revolution for instance was a genocide just as much as it was a classicide.

>This was never common sense or a popular belief. Ethnic conflict cannot explain dialectical processes, and I don't know anyone who says history is the result of ethnic struggle.

Again, this was literally common sense among Archaeologists and Anthropologists before the faggot ideologues had to start developing more circus tricks to get funding. And now that we have population genetics we are seeing a lot of these old theories being vindicated. The Neolithic Revolution was literally a massive series of racial replacements, for example.

Culture-historical archaeology - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I was just listening to a podcast where someone mentioned a book related to this topic, maybe I'll try to find it for yuo but it is subtle about what it is promoting

What "dialectical processes" need explaining, exactly?

 

[Hitler]

It is funny how materialists will condemn idealism for being an inaccurate way of viewing history and being incompatible with dialectical materialism rendering idealism null and void, and then in the same breath condemning idealism for horribly interfering with what they expect to happen as result of material conditions.
>inb4 idealism is the result of material conditions

 

[Gigafly]

It is funny how materialists will condemn idealism for being an inaccurate way of viewing history and being incompatible with dialectical materialism rendering idealism null and void, and then in the same breath condemning idealism for horribly interfering with what they expect to happen as result of material conditions.
>inb4 idealism is the result of material conditions

Communists aren't talking about philosophical idealism in that sense, they mostly just use idealist as a buzzword to people they don't like

 

[Gigafly]

>Racial categorizations exist as an incorrect analysis of the material world, it exists as an idea and that's why there's been hundreds of different racial systems that seek to explain differences between groups of people

That's completely irrelevant to the question at hand. We're asking "what moves history" and what moves history is ethnic conflict. There doesn't have to be one true set of ethnic groups for this to be the case, what matters is that people organize and conflict with each other based on ethnic lines. Even behind historical class differences pre-1800 there was an ethnic element. The French Revolution for instance was a genocide just as much as it was a classicide.

>This was never common sense or a popular belief. Ethnic conflict cannot explain dialectical processes, and I don't know anyone who says history is the result of ethnic struggle.

Again, this was literally common sense among Archaeologists and Anthropologists before the faggot ideologues had to start developing more circus tricks to get funding. And now that we have population genetics we are seeing a lot of these old theories being vindicated. The Neolithic Revolution was literally a massive series of racial replacements, for example.

Culture-historical archaeology - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I was just listening to a podcast where someone mentioned a book related to this topic, maybe I'll try to find it for yuo but it is subtle about what it is promoting

What "dialectical processes" need explaining, exactly?

It is relevant because it shows the race is based on preconceived notions and ideas rather than an understanding of the material world. You can't analyze anything meaningful through ethnic boundaries because it's mostly arbitrary and itself based on class relations. I'm not sure how you could explain how the French Revolution was an ethnic one rather than a revolution of the bourgeois.

I'm not sure why you brought up culture-historical archaeology because it goes against your point. It went against earlier evolutionist archaeology and said that current societies were reflections of their historic ancestors and were unable to change. It was a romanticist idea that developed as a response to the industrial revolution and movements like socialism.

 

[Lism]

It is relevant because it shows the race is based on preconceived notions and ideas rather than an understanding of the material world. You can't analyze anything meaningful through ethnic boundaries because it's mostly arbitrary and itself based on class relations. I'm not sure how you could explain how the French Revolution was an ethnic one rather than a revolution of the bourgeois.

I'm not sure why you brought up culture-historical archaeology because it goes against your point. It went against earlier evolutionist archaeology and said that current societies were reflections of their historic ancestors and were unable to change. It was a romanticist idea that developed as a response to the industrial revolution and movements like socialism.

1. Arbitrary delineations are a cornerstone of scientific analysis. We create arbitrary delineations between a "normal sized heart" and an "enlarged heart" even if there isn't a great deal of difference between them at the limit point because there is clearly a diversity in heart sizes which has real world significance and needs to be categorized for practical reasons. Class delineations are also increasingly arbitrary especially in this day and age where many wage laborers are much more wealthy and influential than the petit bourgeoisie and large swathes of people who make their living off of wage labor simultaneously own significant assets like houses and stock indexes. But this was obviously a problem in historical societies which organized themselves on dialectical materialism as well, ex: the Russian free peasantry in early 20th century.

Historical races were based on an understanding of the material world just as much as historical physics were based on an understanding of the material world. You cannot expect them to be 100% accurate, but they are not simply generated justifications of class differences or byproducts of class conflict. Historically, which is why I brought up the French Revolution, it was generally the other way around. Elite groups either are initially a foreign nation, or they create a sort of "nation within a nation" which differentiates itself from the lower classes based on blood relations. Also, let me clarify that I am not trying to say "class plays no role in history" or "ideology plays no role in history" or "everything in history loops back to national conflict". Again, I am a proponent of *no* theory of history. All of these things can play a role but there is not one "prime mover" which determines everything else. The French Revolution, for example, was clearly inspired both by class differences and from a (perhaps not entirely correct, but very fairly reasoned) ethnic difference between the Aristocracy, which descended from the Franks, and the Gallo-Roman general population.

2. Culture history beat out evolutionist archaeology because they correctly identified new archaeological and linguistic discoveries with the progression of history coming with the overwriting of group A by group B. People will blame it on ideology and yet the classifications that those archaeologists made are still widely in use today and often reflect the movement of peoples. A simple look at world history makes mincemeat of the evolutionary model. Human history is near-stagnant in the ways that matter with the exception of two, maybe three, events: The Neolithic Revolution, the Bronze Age/Eneolithic rise of civilization, and the "European Revolution" from 1400 to 1900. All of these events were spurred on by only a handful of peoples, who then used their advantage to conquer and colonize large swathes of the world. Even the advent of the Mesolithic (which is hardly a universal world event, many band societies were still living in the paleolithic in the 1800s technically speaking) coincided with massive changes in European genetics

 

[Gigafly]

1. Arbitrary delineations are a cornerstone of scientific analysis. We create arbitrary delineations between a "normal sized heart" and an "enlarged heart" even if there isn't a great deal of difference between them at the limit point because there is clearly a diversity in heart sizes which has real world significance and needs to be categorized for practical reasons. Class delineations are also increasingly arbitrary especially in this day and age where many wage laborers are much more wealthy and influential than the petit bourgeoisie and large swathes of people who make their living off of wage labor simultaneously own significant assets like houses and stock indexes. But this was obviously a problem in historical societies which organized themselves on dialectical materialism as well, ex: the Russian free peasantry in early 20th century.

Historical races were based on an understanding of the material world just as much as historical physics were based on an understanding of the material world. You cannot expect them to be 100% accurate, but they are not simply generated justifications of class differences or byproducts of class conflict. Historically, which is why I brought up the French Revolution, it was generally the other way around. Elite groups either are initially a foreign nation, or they create a sort of "nation within a nation" which differentiates itself from the lower classes based on blood relations. Also, let me clarify that I am not trying to say "class plays no role in history" or "ideology plays no role in history" or "everything in history loops back to national conflict". Again, I am a proponent of *no* theory of history. All of these things can play a role but there is not one "prime mover" which determines everything else. The French Revolution, for example, was clearly inspired both by class differences and from a (perhaps not entirely correct, but very fairly reasoned) ethnic difference between the Aristocracy, which descended from the Franks, and the Gallo-Roman general population.

2. Culture history beat out evolutionist archaeology because they correctly identified new archaeological and linguistic discoveries with the progression of history coming with the overwriting of group A by group B. People will blame it on ideology and yet the classifications that those archaeologists made are still widely in use today and often reflect the movement of peoples. A simple look at world history makes mincemeat of the evolutionary model. Human history is near-stagnant in the ways that matter with the exception of two, maybe three, events: The Neolithic Revolution, the Bronze Age/Eneolithic rise of civilization, and the "European Revolution" from 1400 to 1900. All of these events were spurred on by only a handful of peoples, who then used their advantage to conquer and colonize large swathes of the world. Even the advent of the Mesolithic (which is hardly a universal world event, many band societies were still living in the paleolithic in the 1800s technically speaking) coincided with massive changes in European genetics

Read literature instead of skimming Wikipedia to find people that agree with you. The historical materialist conception posits that history is the history of class struggles, it is a process that seeks to look at the material world, but it is not just the physical factory or mill that is subsumed under the material label, the social relations that determine productions also exist as material relations. You can analyze class contradictions in modes of production, but you cannot analyze racial relations under this same view because race itself is entirely arbitrary.

The rest of your reply is word salad but ill go over some parts

Marx, Engels, and Lenin wrote about the labor aristocracy and their relation to production, they're not a new thing and you're not special for mentioning them

Your only example for "elite groups" being an ethnic in-group is by bringing up Boulainvilliers. The French Third-Estate were not entirely Gaullic, they had Frankish blood just like the 2nd Estate. Boulainvilliers died 70 years before the French revolution, you look for random people on Wikipedia that support your view and use them as evidence, it's confirmation bias that leads to you bringing up insanely retarded shit. I notice what you're saying is very similar to Foucalt, a French pedophile who died from AIDs.

Most racists were in support of evolutionist archaeology, Gobineau for instance. Cultural-history archaeology itself is deprecated, and what you ascribe as being found by said archaeology has nothing to do with it all. Even then, bringing archaeological theories up at all is totally irrelevant to what we're speaking about.

Historical materialism is not an evolutionary or teleological view of history, I'm not sure why you say it is. By saying that human history was stagnant for literally thousands of years, you're claiming there were little to no progress in technological and productive forces in that time, which is unequivocally false. The societies of the neothic up until the Late Bronze age collapse had changed considerably in economic and political forces, and to say that slave-owning mediterranean societies were essentially the same as 13th century feudal gentry societies is insanely retarded. I don't think i need to comment on this "European revolution" because you make no effort in explaining what it actually was. You contradict yourself in your last paragraph by endorsing both great man theory and vague comments about advantageous peoples. Were they more advantegeous because they harnessed racial vril energy?

 

[vagtanam]

Dialectical materialists trying to understand linear time (it's not a real tangible physical thing so it can't be real)

 

[King of kyrgyzstan]

Shit nobodys cares about award

 

[Gigafly]

Dialectical materialists trying to understand linear time (it's not a real tangible physical thing so it can't be real)

erm but dr fauci said spacetime is a real thing

 

[ossi]

Shit nobodys cares about award

everybody cares about this award

 

[Lism]

Read literature instead of [...]

>Read literature instead of skimming Wikipedia to find people that agree with you. The historical materialist conception posits that history is the history of class struggles, it is a process that seeks to look at the material world, but it is not just the physical factory or mill that is subsumed under the material label, the social relations that determine productions also exist as material relations.

I don't understand what your issue is here -- I am primarily focusing on the social relations that determine production and *not* the physical side of material conditions, which in my opinion is a much more liberal and fair interpretation of historical events. Albeit, still contrived. And just to clarify, there is no way I would have found culture-history by "skimming wikipedia", I first learned about it in college and did more research

>You can analyze class contradictions in modes of production, but you cannot analyze racial relations under this same view because race itself is entirely arbitrary.

This is irrelevant because I'm not arguing in favor of "dialectical racialism". The reason this is problematic is only if you interpret history as a dialectical process, and not a more discrete series of semi-chance events. When I say "racial historicism is more reasonable than dialectical material historicism" (which again, is not a justification of racial historicism because I'm against "historicism" in general) I am basically giving the following to analyzing history as a series of racial struggles:
1. The reason human beings organize into groups is because of the darwinistic benefit of kin selection, while the development of social class systems is secondary (even Marx would agree with this, although he is incorrect about Primitive Socialism)
2. Major innovative periods of human history were spread through inter-societal conflict and group expansion rather than intra-societal processual development.
3. Human beings have innate group differences which heavily influence the trajectories of their societies

None of this means that history is "racially determined" but simply why it makes sense to analyze history through the study of cultures and particularly kinship groups rather than as a pan-cultural process.

>Your only example for "elite groups" being an ethnic in-group is by bringing up Boulainvilliers.

Okay, one of my original points was to discredit the idea of "example-picking" to prove theories of history because history is so full of content and different potential causes for events that you can construct anything, but for the record the French elite are among the lesser examples. The Spartiate, the Szlachta, the Brahmins/Kshatriyas, the Spanish Aristocracy, the Patriciate, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, the Hellenistic aristocracy, the pre-Hellenistic Macedonian aristocracy, the Tutsis, the Seljuk Turks, the Yuan Mongols, the Manchu, the Arabs, all practiced this behavior.

>Boulainvilliers died 70 years before the French revolution, you look for random people on Wikipedia that support your view and use them as evidence, it's confirmation bias that leads to you bringing up insanely retarded shit. I notice what you're saying is very similar to Foucalt, a French pedophile who died from AIDs.

I didn't even know who Boulainvilliers was but thank you for introducing me to him. It's always been common knowledge that the French aristocracy originated from the Franks and it's always been intuition that the French peasantry originated from the Gauls. Not that this is particularly relevant, the main point is that the French aristocracy organized itself as a collection of families with special privileges which bothered the bourgeoisie, who were potentially just as wealthy and powerful but were not ennobled. It's not that relevant, I've already told you I think the French revolution was not largely an ethnic conflict, it just had a more child ethnic element to it. Also, I repeat:
<The French Revolution, for example, was clearly inspired both by class differences and from a (perhaps not entirely correct, but very fairly reasoned) ethnic difference between the Aristocracy

>Most racists were in support of evolutionist archaeology, Gobineau for instance. Cultural-history archaeology itself is deprecated, and what you ascribe as being found by said archaeology has nothing to do with it all. Even then, bringing archaeological theories up at all is totally irrelevant to what we're speaking about.

Again, I don't know how this is a response to what I said. My point was "the culture-history crowd wasn't especially racist, they were just observing correct history" and your response is "well yeah actually they were less racist than the predecessors". Bringing up archaeological theories is obviously relevant because a lot of the most important changes in human history are pre-historical or only sparsely and unreliably recorded in history. But I'll get into this in a second, since you seem to still be under the spell of thinking there was an even slightly linear element to human progress.

>Historical materialism is not an evolutionary or teleological view of history, I'm not sure why you say it is.

Dialectical narratives of history are pretty clearly evolutionary. For Hegel, the end of history came in the form of the "universal freedom" of Protestant Northern Europe. For Marx, it was the creation of the new socialist man (a word I understand he never actually used, albeit) and global communism. I don't know how else you can describe it other than "evolutionary"

>By saying that human history was stagnant for literally thousands of years, you're claiming there were little to no progress in technological and productive forces in that time, which is unequivocally false. The societies of the neothic up until the Late Bronze age collapse had changed considerably in economic and political forces, and to say that slave-owning mediterranean societies were essentially the same as 13th century feudal gentry societies is insanely retarded.

Feudal societies are not a progression from the slave-based societies of the ancient Mediterranean, feudal-type systems existed sporadically in China before the "Slave-Based Societies" you speak of even began. I would say that feudalism in Europe is mostly a reaction to the rise of heavy cavalry, which allowed battles to be decided by a small clique of knights, but it is hard to call it a progression from prior systems when these systems continued to exist parallel to feudalism. Also, it certainly didn't arise for the same reasons elsewhere. Maybe in Japan, but the Samurai were not really heavy cavalry, they were very successful but they were horse archers (albeit, I've heard the Scythians had a somewhat Feudal society as well, but IDK). Definitely not in Iron Age China.

Human history from the period of the Bronze Age to ~1700 is not literally stagnant, but almost every important thing to happen in creating our modern world happened after 1200, in the West. Genuine economic growth -- not caused by agglomeration, population growth, or territorial expansion, was not common in this period. What happened in the West was genuinely unique and there is no reason to think it would have happened anywhere else in the world any time soon, because it was already predated by a unique explosion of European genius beginning in the 15th century. The Neolithic Revolution was the other actual extremely radical event, for obvious reasons. This is visible in GDP, GDP growth, population sizes, life expectancy, etc etc

Speaking of which, THIS is the European Revolution:

You might also know it as the "Great Divergence" but the European Revolution more particularly refers to the entire period from the renaissance to modern day, while the Great Divergence focuses mostly on the period after 1850.

 

[Gigafly]

>Read literature instead of skimming Wikipedia to find people that agree with you. The historical materialist conception posits that history is the history of class struggles, it is a process that seeks to look at the material world, but it is not just the physical factory or mill that is subsumed under the material label, the social relations that determine productions also exist as material relations.

I don't understand what your issue is here -- I am primarily focusing on the social relations that determine production and *not* the physical side of material conditions, which in my opinion is a much more liberal and fair interpretation of historical events. Albeit, still contrived. And just to clarify, there is no way I would have found culture-history by "skimming wikipedia", I first learned about it in college and did more research

>You can analyze class contradictions in modes of production, but you cannot analyze racial relations under this same view because race itself is entirely arbitrary.

This is irrelevant because I'm not arguing in favor of "dialectical racialism". The reason this is problematic is only if you interpret history as a dialectical process, and not a more discrete series of semi-chance events. When I say "racial historicism is more reasonable than dialectical material historicism" (which again, is not a justification of racial historicism because I'm against "historicism" in general) I am basically giving the following to analyzing history as a series of racial struggles:
1. The reason human beings organize into groups is because of the darwinistic benefit of kin selection, while the development of social class systems is secondary (even Marx would agree with this, although he is incorrect about Primitive Socialism)
2. Major innovative periods of human history were spread through inter-societal conflict and group expansion rather than intra-societal processual development.
3. Human beings have innate group differences which heavily influence the trajectories of their societies

None of this means that history is "racially determined" but simply why it makes sense to analyze history through the study of cultures and particularly kinship groups rather than as a pan-cultural process.

>Your only example for "elite groups" being an ethnic in-group is by bringing up Boulainvilliers.

Okay, one of my original points was to discredit the idea of "example-picking" to prove theories of history because history is so full of content and different potential causes for events that you can construct anything, but for the record the French elite are among the lesser examples. The Spartiate, the Szlachta, the Brahmins/Kshatriyas, the Spanish Aristocracy, the Patriciate, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, the Hellenistic aristocracy, the pre-Hellenistic Macedonian aristocracy, the Tutsis, the Seljuk Turks, the Yuan Mongols, the Manchu, the Arabs, all practiced this behavior.

>Boulainvilliers died 70 years before the French revolution, you look for random people on Wikipedia that support your view and use them as evidence, it's confirmation bias that leads to you bringing up insanely retarded shit. I notice what you're saying is very similar to Foucalt, a French pedophile who died from AIDs.

I didn't even know who Boulainvilliers was but thank you for introducing me to him. It's always been common knowledge that the French aristocracy originated from the Franks and it's always been intuition that the French peasantry originated from the Gauls. Not that this is particularly relevant, the main point is that the French aristocracy organized itself as a collection of families with special privileges which bothered the bourgeoisie, who were potentially just as wealthy and powerful but were not ennobled. It's not that relevant, I've already told you I think the French revolution was not largely an ethnic conflict, it just had a more child ethnic element to it. Also, I repeat:
<The French Revolution, for example, was clearly inspired both by class differences and from a (perhaps not entirely correct, but very fairly reasoned) ethnic difference between the Aristocracy

>Most racists were in support of evolutionist archaeology, Gobineau for instance. Cultural-history archaeology itself is deprecated, and what you ascribe as being found by said archaeology has nothing to do with it all. Even then, bringing archaeological theories up at all is totally irrelevant to what we're speaking about.

Again, I don't know how this is a response to what I said. My point was "the culture-history crowd wasn't especially racist, they were just observing correct history" and your response is "well yeah actually they were less racist than the predecessors". Bringing up archaeological theories is obviously relevant because a lot of the most important changes in human history are pre-historical or only sparsely and unreliably recorded in history. But I'll get into this in a second, since you seem to still be under the spell of thinking there was an even slightly linear element to human progress.

>Historical materialism is not an evolutionary or teleological view of history, I'm not sure why you say it is.

Dialectical narratives of history are pretty clearly evolutionary. For Hegel, the end of history came in the form of the "universal freedom" of Protestant Northern Europe. For Marx, it was the creation of the new socialist man (a word I understand he never actually used, albeit) and global communism. I don't know how else you can describe it other than "evolutionary"

>By saying that human history was stagnant for literally thousands of years, you're claiming there were little to no progress in technological and productive forces in that time, which is unequivocally false. The societies of the neothic up until the Late Bronze age collapse had changed considerably in economic and political forces, and to say that slave-owning mediterranean societies were essentially the same as 13th century feudal gentry societies is insanely retarded.

Feudal societies are not a progression from the slave-based societies of the ancient Mediterranean, feudal-type systems existed sporadically in China before the "Slave-Based Societies" you speak of even began. I would say that feudalism in Europe is mostly a reaction to the rise of heavy cavalry, which allowed battles to be decided by a small clique of knights, but it is hard to call it a progression from prior systems when these systems continued to exist parallel to feudalism. Also, it certainly didn't arise for the same reasons elsewhere. Maybe in Japan, but the Samurai were not really heavy cavalry, they were very successful but they were horse archers (albeit, I've heard the Scythians had a somewhat Feudal society as well, but IDK). Definitely not in Iron Age China.

Human history from the period of the Bronze Age to ~1700 is not literally stagnant, but almost every important thing to happen in creating our modern world happened after 1200, in the West. Genuine economic growth -- not caused by agglomeration, population growth, or territorial expansion, was not common in this period. What happened in the West was genuinely unique and there is no reason to think it would have happened anywhere else in the world any time soon, because it was already predated by a unique explosion of European genius beginning in the 15th century. The Neolithic Revolution was the other actual extremely radical event, for obvious reasons. This is visible in GDP, GDP growth, population sizes, life expectancy, etc etc

Speaking of which, THIS is the European Revolution:
View attachment 21245
You might also know it as the "Great Divergence" but the European Revolution more particularly refers to the entire period from the renaissance to modern day, while the Great Divergence focuses mostly on the period after 1850.

I don't think anything you say here is very supportive of your argument. Kin selection being a factor for humans organizing into groups is irrelevant when analyzing. It's kind of a given that groups of people exist and that that people in those groups generally similar to each other. Class struggle isn't limited to intrasocietal class conflict, it's kind of irrelevant bringing it up. I fundamentally disagree that there are innate group or biological differences, scientific racism has been a marginalized belief for a century and even if it was infallibly true it would still be secondary to class relations.

The establishment of communism isn't the end of human development and contradictions, it's the end of class struggle, not the end of history. Dialectical materialism isn't a teleological system like Hegel's dialectic, history isn't necessarily moving towards a goal, that's what I mean by it not being evolutionary. You're misunderstanding me fundamentally by think history moves in a linear progression with mechanistic and deterministic events set to happen occurring rather than being based on human development and productive forces.

I never said that European feudal societies were a direct progression from those systems, I just used it to show there is undoubtedly a difference between those periods in the gap between the events you stated. I don't doubt the significance of the European divergence, neither do I think It could have happened anywhere else at the time, but it only happened because of the hundreds of years of background and development of productives forces leading to the industrial revolution. It wasn't because of a "European genius". Also, the European divergence started far sooner than what you stated. The true divergence pretty much only started with the rise of the bourgeoisie and the spread of the industrial revolution in Europe starting in the early 1800s

I don't know whats your point with that last graph. You could've just said you believed in great man theory from the start.

 

[Lism]

I don't think anything you say here is very supportive of your argument. Kin selection being a factor for humans organizing into groups is irrelevant when analyzing. It's kind of a given that groups of people exist and that that people in those groups generally similar to each other. Class struggle isn't limited to intrasocietal class conflict, it's kind of irrelevant bringing it up. I fundamentally disagree that there are innate group or biological differences, scientific racism has been a marginalized belief for a century and even if it was infallibly true it would still be secondary to class relations.

The establishment of communism isn't the end of human development and contradictions, it's the end of class struggle, not the end of history. Dialectical materialism isn't a teleological system like Hegel's dialectic, history isn't necessarily moving towards a goal, that's what I mean by it not being evolutionary. You're misunderstanding me fundamentally by think history moves in a linear progression with mechanistic and deterministic events set to happen occurring rather than being based on human development and productive forces.

I never said that European feudal societies were a direct progression from those systems, I just used it to show there is undoubtedly a difference between those periods in the gap between the events you stated. I don't doubt the significance of the European divergence, neither do I think It could have happened anywhere else at the time, but it only happened because of the hundreds of years of background and development of productives forces leading to the industrial revolution. It wasn't because of a "European genius". Also, the European divergence started far sooner than what you stated. The true divergence pretty much only started with the rise of the bourgeoisie and the spread of the industrial revolution in Europe starting in the early 1800s

I don't know whats your point with that last graph. You could've just said you believed in great man theory from the start.

First of all, kin selection is not just "a factor" in human group organization, it is the cause. Human beings would not be social or empathetic animals at all, and would never have developed any political institutions, if it was not for the darwinian benefit of helping people who have a higher degree of kinship with yourself. Secondly, particular class conflict as a mover of internal societal dynamics isn't that controversial. What is controversial is the univocity of class as discussed by the DM crowd. Workers A and Workers B are united in the participation of being a worker, which transcends national boundaries. Everything else is simply sort of a petty result of the overarching class conflict. Which is why even if Marx is not giving a spiritual or ideal meaning to history the way Hegel does, you still end up with a functionally teleological view of history. Class is the ultimate division which drives human history, and so the more petty divisions can largely be resolved (at least over a long period of time) through the resolution of class. Marx was maybe more of a realist about this post-class world but he sewed the seeds for more and more soteriological interpretations of DM both as a means to lure in the masses and to fight back against anti-Communist pundits.

Race realism is 100% true and explains many different national outcomes in the world today. It is a socially marginalized belief but not an uncommon one among the psychometrics community (most field experts believe that at least half of the black-white IQ gap is genetic). But that shouldn't really matter, it's true and difficult to deny to anyone who isn't engaged in motivated reasoning. Even Marx acknowledged the real biological differences between human races, despite having an incentive to do otherwise.

My issue with suggesting that Europe's explosion was only because of productive forces leading to the industrial revolution, is that this divergence clearly began several centuries before the Industrial Revolution in the intellectual sphere. You are correct that the returns on investment only start showing up during the 19th century. Which is why I bring up Human Accomplishment... The productive causes for the Industrial Revolution were also rooted this deep in the past, but they are clearly two different currents contributing to the same event. Anyone in a STEM class should know sort of intuitively how outsized Europe's discoveries were even as early as the 1500s and 1600s, far before Europe had the largest cities, the wealthiest freedmen, or the most powerful militaries. I mean... During the 1600s alone, two Western Europeans simultaneously invented the coordinate system and fused geometry and algebra. And on top of that, two completely different Western Europeans simultaneously invented calculus. And one of those Western Europeans also laid the groundwork for modern physics.

 

[Gigafly]

First of all, kin selection is not just "a factor" in human group organization, it is the cause. Human beings would not be social or empathetic animals at all, and would never have developed any political institutions, if it was not for the darwinian benefit of helping people who have a higher degree of kinship with yourself. Secondly, particular class conflict as a mover of internal societal dynamics isn't that controversial. What is controversial is the univocity of class as discussed by the DM crowd. Workers A and Workers B are united in the participation of being a worker, which transcends national boundaries. Everything else is simply sort of a petty result of the overarching class conflict. Which is why even if Marx is not giving a spiritual or ideal meaning to history the way Hegel does, you still end up with a functionally teleological view of history. Class is the ultimate division which drives human history, and so the more petty divisions can largely be resolved (at least over a long period of time) through the resolution of class. Marx was maybe more of a realist about this post-class world but he sewed the seeds for more and more soteriological interpretations of DM both as a means to lure in the masses and to fight back against anti-Communist pundits.

Race realism is 100% true and explains many different national outcomes in the world today. It is a socially marginalized belief but not an uncommon one among the psychometrics community (most field experts believe that at least half of the black-white IQ gap is genetic). But that shouldn't really matter, it's true and difficult to deny to anyone who isn't engaged in motivated reasoning. Even Marx acknowledged the real biological differences between human races, despite having an incentive to do otherwise.

My issue with suggesting that Europe's explosion was only because of productive forces leading to the industrial revolution, is that this divergence clearly began several centuries before the Industrial Revolution in the intellectual sphere. You are correct that the returns on investment only start showing up during the 19th century. Which is why I bring up Human Accomplishment... The productive causes for the Industrial Revolution were also rooted this deep in the past, but they are clearly two different currents contributing to the same event. Anyone in a STEM class should know sort of intuitively how outsized Europe's discoveries were even as early as the 1500s and 1600s, far before Europe had the largest cities, the wealthiest freedmen, or the most powerful militaries. I mean... During the 1600s alone, two Western Europeans simultaneously invented the coordinate system and fused geometry and algebra. And on top of that, two completely different Western Europeans simultaneously invented calculus. And one of those Western Europeans also laid the groundwork for modern physics.

I'm not sure how that's supposed to be supportive of dialectical materialism being an inherently teleological process. I think you fundamentally misunderstand me what I mean by a teleological view of history, because that seems totally irrelevant to what I'm discussing.

Claiming that you're somehow not free from motivated reasoning unlike mainstream science and academics is absurd. Claiming that everyone who doesn't think like you is brainwashed and seeks to push their ideology is the reasoning only used by redditors. Marx wouldn't have an incentive to do so otherwise because anthropology in 19th-century Europe was very much based on race science, he would've believed part of it regardless. It's irrelevant because I'm not Marx and I don't have to parrot every thought he had.

Why does the timeframe of the divergence change anything? All it shows is that the industrial revolution was compounded by hundreds of years of economic development and events. Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, etc. could only do what they did with the thousands of years of mathematical and technological development (often not from Europe). The 15th-16th centuries had a lot more going on than the discoveries by these people. For example, you're ignoring major events like the Protestant Reformation.

 

[Lism]

I'm not sure how that's supposed to be supportive of dialectical materialism being an inherently teleological process. I think you fundamentally misunderstand me what I mean by a teleological view of history, because that seems totally irrelevant to what I'm discussing.

That? What is that. Consider using arrows or formatting how I am formatting. If I am misunderstanding you then explain how.

Claiming that you're somehow not free from motivated reasoning unlike mainstream science and academics is absurd. Claiming that everyone who doesn't think like you is brainwashed and seeks to push their ideology is the reasoning only used by redditors. Marx wouldn't have an incentive to do so otherwise because anthropology in 19th-century Europe was very much based on race science, he would've believed part of it regardless. It's irrelevant because I'm not Marx and I don't have to parrot every thought he had.

Of course I'm not free from motivated reasoning, but I'm not making the positive claims you are. I'm just harping the null hypothesis. I don't think Historians are brainwashed, but I think that Historians have an incentive to inflate the importance of their stupid degrees by pretending to be Augurs. This is actually how a lot of things work in the academic mafia. Historians are no where near as bad as psychologists, but history as a subject is again so broad that the more you know about it the easier these belief systems become to propose. And being intelligent also encourages this sort of history formation. "B caused A because B coincided with A, and because I can string together some reasons for why B encourages the development of A." But if C caused A, the intelligent and well-read historian could have created another explanation for why C caused A.

Why does the timeframe of the divergence change anything? All it shows is that the industrial revolution was compounded by hundreds of years of economic development and events. Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, etc. could only do what they did with the thousands of years of mathematical and technological development (often not from Europe). The 15th-16th centuries had a lot more going on than the discoveries by these people. For example, you're ignoring major events like the Protestant Reformation.

The timeframe of divergence matters because it places the roots of Europe's great divergence before Europe's economic divergence and not in the same regions where Europe's economic divergence began. Prior mathematical and scientific development was obviously necessary for the discoveries of early modern Europe, but it doesn't explain the massive and sudden increase in rate of change let alone attribute it to material conditions. The Protestant Reformation didn't cause this either because, again, this trend started before the reformation and in areas which remained Catholic, like Italy and Brabant. I would actually say the Protestant Reformation was more of an effect of these changes rather than a cause, but the Protestant Reformation is surprisingly Great-mannish in nature. There were definitely historical factors, but one of the strongest predictors of Protestant shift was contact with Luther or his students.

Not really related to what we're talking about, albeit.

But I would like to talk a bit about innovation centers before modernity. What productive factors made the Greeks so innovative? What made these pirates living in the mountain crags of a small peninsula produce more intellectual output than China, and even India, in the period from 1000 BC to 1 AD? And what evidence is there that this is what made the Greeks so innovative other than the fact that these things coincided?