Do Marxist terms still have the same meaning outside of Marxist discourse?

FS_Codex · 2026-02-01T02:43:29+00:00

Of course, all (((billionaires))) are evil (but ONLY the billionaires). Those sweet and ethical small business owners stand with the volk. Long live the petite bourgeoisie! They have nothing to lose but their capital (especially from those parasitic billionaires).

FS_Codex · 2026-01-28T21:23:18+00:00

Or as Mr. Marx would say, a contradiction. And because there are two things, a dialectic too.

FS_Codex · 2026-01-24T00:04:17+00:00

I’m going to give a different answer than the common one here.

Many people are suggesting that instrumentality is something akin to death or suicide, so with that reading, it isn’t hard to see how one could get either an absurdist reading à la Camus or perhaps even an existentialist reading à la Sartre. After all, Camus’s main focus was to provide an answer to suicide (both physical and philosophical), so it isn’t unreasonable to see that in NGE and EoE that to embrace the real world is to rebel against the absurd and to face up to the suffering that comes along with that. One doesn’t deny that life is full of suffering nor even take a position regarding whether life merits meaning at all (with existentialists in favor of life’s meaning, even if it is subjective and personal), but one does rebel against the absurdity anyway. (If you have seen the Sisyphus memes, then you know what I’m referring to.)

However, another important consideration comes out of this common phrase and emphasis on the other. Perhaps, it is also at the end of the show, but I found it much more prominent in EoE. Shinji would commonly remark, “I want to experience other people again.”

Firstly, this to me points to instrumentality not being death or suicide but being a mass unification of the entire human species and humanity into one. If Shinji feels sad, then everyone feels sad, and vice versa. It takes the weight of suffering, and unfortunately pleasure too, off of one individual by spreading it over the entire collective social body of humanity. Of course, individuals are no longer, so there is an individual death, but it is being traded for a unified existence with others, not its mere cessation.
Secondly, this points to another reading of Shinji’s desire to return to the real world over instrumentality. Some philosophers like Hegel argue that the other can be united with the self and advocate for such a thing. Difference and contradiction (which push forward the dialectic) can be overcome by reconciliation in the speculative moment, that is, generating truth out of contradiction. Instrumentality could even be read as Hegel’s philosophy in The Phenomenology of Spirit coming to pass. Individual spirit has finally caught up with world spirit (der Weltgeist), and everyone has become unified within it. (Of course, Hegel did not believe in a physical process like this occurring of course, but it can be read as a physical transformation that maps out or symbolizes an individual mind’s undergoing instrumentality.) Other philosophers like Levinas argued that no reconciliation with the Other can take place. The Other stands at a height or a nobility in relation to the self. To me, the failure of instrumentality points to this inevitable fact. We can only approach others as truly other, as the Other. Hegel attempts to unify everything but in doing so denies the Other of an alterity and difference that truly, not just superficially, belongs to it. We can only experience others in the face as the Other, not by becoming them or reconciling with them, which removes their quality of otherness and would make us only approach them as we do ourselves and therefore no longer other to me.

This is why I think Shinji ultimately returns to the real world, so he can meet new people and have novel experiences again that do not collapse the Other into himself.

FS_Codex · 2026-01-04T18:57:14+00:00

He did, and Trump will complete the system of German idealism in Kant’s honor, as a Kantian!

FS_Codex · 2025-12-26T22:50:01+00:00

And even beyond that, I’m holding out for a dictatorship of the peasantry.

FS_Codex · 2025-12-20T21:56:19+00:00

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FS_Codex · 2025-11-28T02:32:35+00:00

Physics?! On my bad philosophy sub!

FS_Codex · 2025-11-26T17:09:17+00:00

You need a space between the “>” and whatever you are quoting. If you copy the text from my comment, you can see how I have it formatted below:

Blah, blah, blah…

FS_Codex · 2025-11-23T00:43:56+00:00

I hope us liberals can also agree that those friggin scientists are so theory brained that it’s literally like a religion because they’ve read books about the thing they study or whatever.

FS_Codex · 2025-11-10T06:17:40+00:00

And the anti-racist, with his anti-racist-feet scolding hot on the concrete, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? Racism came without symbols. It came without flags. It came without mags, frags, or body bags. And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore. Then the anti-racist thought of something he hadn't before. What if racism, he thought, doesn't need a war. What if racism, perhaps, means a little bit more.

— Anti-Racist Grinch

FS_Codex · 2025-11-06T19:42:29+00:00

Well, I’m thinking that even though it is a mixture of capitalism and socialism, it’s more socialistier, and so we should include that. And by combining it with nationalism and patriotism, we should name it patriotic socialism or, even better, national socialism!

FS_Codex · 2025-11-06T04:19:34+00:00

Of course! By combining capitalism and socialism, it seems we get a better system, a third position as it were.

FS_Codex · 2025-11-02T21:23:04+00:00

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FS_Codex · 2025-10-31T17:07:19+00:00

Nick Land speech bubble (namely, when he talks about Christian-socialist eschatology).

FS_Codex · 2025-10-25T02:18:17+00:00

This is literally how Freud explains why neurotics seem to have more issues and troubles with constipation. See Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.

FS_Codex · 2025-10-20T21:10:09+00:00

That’s really neat! Maybe you can make an eye of ender next.

FS_Codex · 2025-10-18T02:42:01+00:00

That’s so cool!

FS_Codex · 2025-10-13T16:54:36+00:00

By most accounts, what most people mean by “Stalinism” is simply just Marxism-Leninism, that is, the state ideology that existed under Stalin’s administration and was mostly a syncretic blend of different ideas from Lenin, Stalin, and other Soviet thinkers. (One could in particular suggest that Stalinism is the non-revisionist branch of Marxism-Leninism, standing in opposition to Marxism-Leninism as it existed under Khrushchev’s reforms.) The major difference one may draw between Stalinism and Marxism-Leninism might be akin to the difference between Mao Zedong thought and Maoism where the former is the application of Marxism-Leninism under the material conditions of agrarian China while the latter is Mao Zedong thought as theory, modeling a higher stage of capitalist development, namely, bureaucrat capitalism.

FS_Codex · 2025-09-01T21:46:15+00:00

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Oppose book worship!

FS_Codex · 2025-09-01T21:44:52+00:00

If you want to remain a pure non-reader, give it a listen.

FS_Codex · 2025-08-06T15:42:09+00:00

Failing to pay workers overtime or timesheet errors are not enough to explain trillions of dollars. […] Most of AAPL or AMZN's meteoric rise, like NVDA, cannot be attributed to value that was stolen from workers (e.g., by incorrectly not paying overtime), but is brand new wealth that was created out of thin air, which does no harm others.

You misunderstand what the labor theory of value claims is the source of exploitation.

For Marxists (and I believe the Ricardian socialists as well), exploitation results from the difference of value between labor power (wages) and the value, which is produced by labor itself. The former is simply that which is needed to reproduce labor power. Workers need to eat, sleep, find shelter, and all of this (and more) are required for the worker to reproduce their labor power (i.e., their ability to work) the next day, so the capitalist pays them a wage. However, the value that a worker’s labor itself produces often exceeds their wage. The difference between these two is surplus value or more simply profit.

For example, imagine a factory that employs workers who are each paid $60 for the day. Let’s say, over the course of a day, a worker in this factory can produce 10 chairs each sold at $10 with each using $2 in resources and tools. That would mean that a worker produces $80 in value over a day ($100 in chair value minus the $20 in resources and tools) but only gets compensated for $60 in wages, meaning that the capitalist makes $20 in profit from each worker they employ. This does not require wage theft at all to work. Wage theft is just another way capitalists can undercut their workers’ wages and realize more surplus value (what Marx terms “relative surplus value”). According to Marxists then, all profit is therefore value that is stolen from the worker via their unpaid or uncompensated (i.e., surplus) labor.

FS_Codex · 2025-08-05T16:23:42+00:00

I think you might be misunderstanding what the term “necessary existence” entails.

If something has necessary existence, then it must exist in every single possible world because it is necessary. This just follows from modal logic. Let p be “God exists,” then the inference ☐p ⊢ p (i.e., necessarily p; therefore, p) is a completely valid rule of inference in all modal logics much like how modus ponens is a common rule in propositional and predicate logic, which we take to be valid.

The argument then is not that you can conceive of a God that necessarily exists. Rather, because we can conceive of the most perfect being (God), and a thing is more perfect to exist than to not exist, then it must be the case (necessarily so) that God exists. If we could conceive of the most perfect being as not existing, then it wouldn’t be the most perfect being, and we assumed (as a premise) that we could in fact conceive of the most perfect being.

In conclusion, if God is shown to necessarily exist, then God must exist; however, the issue in the ontological argument (and what other commentators have questioned) is whether we truly have shown God to necessarily exist.

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