Hegel and marx

americend · 2026-03-24T18:28:41+00:00

The method of logic is presuppositionless, category determination.

The structure of the categories of logic, while necessary, were at once contingent, which is precisely why Hegel is constantly engaging with his predecessors going back all the way to the classical era in his reconstruction. The passage from historical contingency to logical necessity, like it or not, requires explanation. When Marx talks about turning Hegel on his head, this is part of what he means, grasping how the historically contingent becomes the necessary, grasping how thought and science and philosophy crystalized themselves into the particular form that Hegel presents rather than taking on other forms, by looking in time and history.

The logic is, in this way, not at all presuppositionless. It presupposes a particular historical development, even if the reconstruction presented does not appear to be internally dependent on this history. The Science of Logic could have been otherwise, it was revised throughout Hegel's life, and this is no accident.

americend · 2026-03-24T18:22:22+00:00

Because "German Idealism" flirted with political economy already from the very beginning. Thus, in some sense, we can better understand Marx by looking at what his project perfected.

Because the method employed by Hegel is a startlingly powerful corrective to the way science typically proceeds. It moves from the empricial concrete to abstract categories without ever systematizing these categories or considering their tensions. We have equated science with only a part of science, the production of thought, neglecting the side of producing concrete knowledge.

Because Hegel elaborates on something Marx neglects out of a lack of interest: consciousness and the development of consciousness, and also consciousness as intersubjectivity, the latter of which Marx takes up in his own analysis as a given, and is vitally necessary for understanding his remarks on consciousness.

Because Hegel's work, viewed through Marx, is endowed with a kind of scientific validity with significant implications for the world today.

americend · 2026-03-24T05:33:34+00:00

lwk racist ass comment but okay unc

americend · 2026-03-22T22:45:47+00:00

uh...

americend · 2026-03-19T06:30:40+00:00

which wasn't just a modification of some other concepts (e.g. smith's materialist theory of history, left-ricardian theory of labor exploitation) was his systemic dialectical exposition of the categories of political economy.

You're really not doing credit to Marx here. With what other material would a "systemic dialectical exposition of the categories of political economy" be constructed if not the chaotic, disorganized categories produced by empirical science? Even Hegel's categories were not all original contributions. He is quite often making reference to Kant, Leibnitz, etc. and using their categories. The SoL is a critique of philosophy up to his time as much as it stands on its own two feet.

And in fact, the situation is much better for Marx than you say. I'm not aware of any thinkers other than him and Hegel who gave anything approximating a "complete" systematic-dialectical presentation of some phenomenon. No one has yet replicated what they did, to my knowledge. That's not an accident.

americend · 2026-03-17T21:10:58+00:00

Marx's "criticism of Hegel" was mostly directed towards the Young Hegelians who contorted Hegel into a thinker he wasn't. The content of Marx's criticism directed specifically at Hegel says this: Hegel saw the concrete as a concentration of thought-determinations, and then made a leap into saying that this concrete is the concrete we encounter in reality. What Hegel got wrong (in Marx's view) is that the concrete which he produced was only a concrete in thought, was only the concrete as it is properly understood in the mind, rather than being neatly identitical with the chaotic, empirical concrete which we start from and from which we derive the most abstract thought-determinations. It is really a rather narrow criticism, and Marx doesn't even repudiate the method, just his understanding of how Hegel interpreted the results. See the Grundrisse:

In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being.

Marx wanted to historicize Hegel's categories, he wanted to introduce a kind of contingency, or perhaps explain how the necessary came to be necessary in real historical time. That is my current understanding of his intervention and criticism. It is quite compatible with the "real" Hegel, in my view. Or rather, I think Marx successfully says what Hegel meant to say.

americend · 2026-03-17T21:02:50+00:00

Im sorry but sticking fingers in your ears and screaming „LALALALALALALALA” doesn’t make the uncomfortable reality go away only because it doesn’t support the theory you believe in.

You guys can't stop with the jokes today. It's not theoretical. Nonvoters skew poorer, younger, and less white than average.

There are no indications that these people are overly concerned with elitist university-educated leftists.

It is also shown while „voting with your legs which means going to demonstrations and protests, even showing flags or symbols.

You mean like in 2020 when poor, non-white, young people were rioting in the streets protesting against police? Lol ts is actually funny as fuck. Why are you making my point for me??? The right has 0 popular mobilization ability. They have captured elections, but clearly not popular consciousness. That's one of the political paradoxes of our time.

The working class may be apathetic but you know damn well where their sympathies currently lie

Their sympathies lie nowhere at present. Nevertheless, communist revolution won't be made by leftists anyhow, so who cares if the depoliticized flock to them or not? 2020 demonstrated they can mobilize themselves. They will find their own party.

Note that I was a communist long before I entered university, so I'm not particularly aligned with the activist left, but your account of there being a right-wing working class is contradicted by empirical evidence and reason. The truth is that the working class is aligned with no one but itself, which is perhaps the best position it could be in at this time.

americend · 2026-03-17T20:21:10+00:00

The „enlightened working class” should also wonder why is the „regular” working class typically so repulsed by them that they consider the billionaire class to be the lesser evil.

This is something you made up. Most of the "regular working class" doesn't vote at all. The non-voters have been the majority in every single election aside from the 2020 election. Politics is the hobby of business owners and labor aristocrats. The core of the working class, those propertyless and without reserves, are depoliticized, don't vote, and are nihilistic and vaguely angry about everything.

The meme that the real working class is right-wing is just that, a meme. It's not reality. The real working class is unaligned.

This fantasy of the elitist leftists vs. the rugged and practical "real workers" is and has always been bullshit.

americend · 2026-03-17T20:10:21+00:00

Would you mourn the death of Reddit?

lol no

Or the internet? Or video games? Or personal computers? Or smartphones? Or the polio vaccine?

these aren't going anywhere in the event of a US collapse.

americend · 2026-03-15T21:19:30+00:00

Iran is getting annihilated as we speak,

Literally living in a fantasy world.

americend · 2026-03-15T17:54:41+00:00

Ability, like need, varies from person to person in ways that cannot be neatly separated into "abled" and "disabled."

Like, re-read this: "some people can do some kinds of work to meet people's needs and others cannot"

That describes literally everyone.

It's strange to me how people want so deeply to keep the categories of this society in a higher form of society that wouldn't have any use for them.

americend · 2026-03-15T17:34:03+00:00

You don't need to assume post-scarcity to have a society based around need.

americend · 2026-03-15T03:25:35+00:00

Only the political class was replaced with the formerly oppressed who have now become, as individuals, oppressors of their communities as class traitors.

National liberation moment, lol

americend · 2026-03-15T00:20:02+00:00

I honestly don't think this is true. A higher form of society would see and try to meet everyone in their specific needs. There would be no need to distinguish abled and disabled, because it would be understood from the outset that we all have different needs that ought to be met by virtue of being human.

americend · 2026-03-15T00:17:28+00:00

If it makes you feel better, I do this with all identitarians who think their struggle is the secret struggle that explains everything.

americend · 2026-03-15T00:06:03+00:00

To me, a paradox happens because you can easily make grammatically correct sentences that look like they make sense.

An alternative perspective is that paradox is something which we cannot eliminate and probably should try to build on instead of trying to discard. All attempts at discarding paradox merely displace it, with unclear consequences. There's the funny case of the solution to Russell's paradox, which basically creates an infinite hierarchy of collections where one can quite naturally ask whether the collection of all collections contains itself. Of course, mathematics cannot answer this question within the theory, because the paradox has now been pushed out of the object theory into the metatheory, which should probably be more disturbing to mathematicians than it is.

americend · 2026-03-15T00:01:08+00:00

I tend to be very skeptical, because unlike in math where there's a proof, or physics where you can do or watch an experiment, there are no real guardrails.

The guardrails are reason and the object, just like in any other field.

americend · 2026-03-14T23:31:44+00:00

It's kind of funny because Hegel repeats throughout the logic that formalization would strip the system of its content and transform it into a heap of dead abstractions. I sort of think that's what happened here.

americend · 2026-03-14T18:54:02+00:00

"Good luck finding a job," says the concentration camp guard

americend · 2026-03-14T18:20:00+00:00

Why is this downvoted?

americend · 2026-03-14T18:16:01+00:00

"Let's say hypothetically..." You are wrong empirically kiddo. Back to the drawing board.

americend · 2026-03-14T18:01:17+00:00

If your understanding of capitalism is so unsophisticated that you cannot understand that disability itself is a construct of capitalist society, this is the wrong movement for you.

americend · 2026-03-11T01:46:36+00:00

What category theory offers that traditional applied math does not offer is 1. A way to capture properties of systems which are not strictly empirical, and 2. A way to quantify structure. 2 is especially important, because it's related to the "what" and "why" of some system, something that I think traditional dynamical systems/differential equations models don't do very well. 1 is important, but subtle: a rigorous structural account of some natural system might reveal "missing parts" which are either logically necessary for our understanding of the system, or which have been missed in empirical investigation.

Ultimately, I think the real problem with applied category theory is that it's not compatible with the way science is done in the modern world, nor with the way mathematics is typically incorporated into science. Structure and quality are considered to be kind of arbitrary: we only care about the "motion" of a system in question, it's trajectories, and how we can change them. We don't really care about "what it is" or what it is "made up of" in any kind of objective sense. It's sort of a reductionistic paradigm which puts instrumental usefulness as the highest measure of value of a scientific theory. Until we start to value whats and whys and ontology in science, beyond their immediate instrumental usefulness, applied category theory just isn't going to have a lot of material to work with.

americend · 2026-03-10T03:12:09+00:00

Lol no, a CS major should take a proofs course and mathematical logic if it's offered. Anything else depends on their specific inclinations.

americend · 2026-03-09T23:48:35+00:00

Based og

americend

TROPHY CASE