Khrushchev's mentioning "Fall of Berlin" in Secret Speech..

In Khrushchev's denting Secret Speech and overall swift, unexpected criticism of Stalin partly consisted of pointing to scenes from the propaganda film "Fall of Berlin" in an attempt to criticize Stalin's personality cult.

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Let us recall the film, The Fall of Berlin. Here only Stalin acts. He issues orders in a hall in which there are many empty chairs. Only one man approaches him to report something to him - it is Poskrebyshev... And where is the military command? Where is the politburo? Where is the government? What are they doing, and with what are they engaged? There is nothing about them in the film. Stalin acts for everybody, he does not reckon with anyone. He asks no one for advice. Everything is shown to the people in this false light. Why? To surround Stalin with glory - contrary to the facts and contrary to historical truth."

What I have to say is, perhaps Dear Nikita had a little too much vodka upon viewing the film? Stalin was in fact known to hold late night banquets with his cohorts, where he encouraged them to get drunk, and then they'd watch a movie.

I say this because I find what Khrushchev had to say as being grossly false. Sure this film did not depict the Poliburo, or the entire government at work, and it did feature ONE scene with one man taking a military order from Stalin.

However, upon my viewing, it also featured 3 key scenes in which Stalin was standing in his office, amongst a handful of people, including military commanders, and even Molotov, all discussing what actions to take and military strategies against the Nazi's.

All other scenes of Stalin portrayed him in his element, such as tending to his tomato garden, and then being the statemen that he was, visiting Churchill and Roosevelt, amongst crowds of other officials, being British, American, and Soviet.

This film did not leave me with the feeling or suspicion that it had tried to forge the idea that Stalin himself single handedly won the war. It just depicted him as calm, and confident, even in times of peril (which at first he was not, upon nazi invasion, but of course it doesn't depict that.) Contributing ideas to the war, while his commanders also shared their ideas. In fact I do even remember a scene where he asks the commander's of their thoughts on what to do.

Portions of this film also had scenes completely dedicated the the triumph of the Soviet Union, such as saving prisoner's from concentration camps, and Soviet airforce prevailing in the skies, and then the entire finale featured a great scene with the red army charging into Berlin and the famous raising of the Soviet flag.

Nothing can be argued for the final scene of Stalin visiting Berlin, which was completely fictional.

I fully agree. Khrushchev's speech was a pack of lies, half truths, and self-serving generalizations. Even his supposed fatalism when being informed of his deposition, "Well, I made it so I can simply retire without worrying about being purged", etc., is a piece of prime egoistic bullshit, assuming that these were even his real thoughts.

It's just completely maddening that he succeeded in smashing Stalin's legacy and his contributions in a speech to advance his own agenda, saving his own ass, and then eventually allowing him to end up on top. It's unbelievable that this was allowed to happen.

I agree Stalin wasn't perfect, and an immense amount of his methods of leadership were NOT needed after the war, solely for the sake of breathing space for the Soviet people and stabilization of Soviet life in general.

USSR needed normalization after the war, not de-stalinization.

Virtually everything he said in using this film as a part of his anti Stalinist criticism is EASILY challengeable, and questionable.
All anyone needs to do is watch the damn movie, and you'll see the lies that were given in his speech.

1-Stalin not asking for advice, thoughts
2-Stalin in a room alone, giving orders to only one person, acting as Lone commander and winning the war
3-Single handedly winning the war

All completely false because the film features the exact opposite of those three above accusations.

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"Well, I made it so I can simply retire without worrying about being purged", etc., is a piece of prime egoistic bullshit, assuming that these were even his real thoughts.

Yeah what a lump of bullshit. His arrogance is disgusting, stretching from the secret speech, to his idiotic diplomacy, (Shoe banging), his rude and embarassing personality and self portrayal as a statesmen, then to him apparently crediting himself for there being a bloodless coup against him by Brezhnev. What an accomplishment, he allowed himself to be stuffed under a rug. He was VOTED out by the party because he was a complete embarassment, that's why he lost his position. What an accomplishment.

I've read a bit about this, although I am by no means an expert. Also, I have no love of Stalin. I think Kruschev had every right to rant, even if what he said wasn't totally accurate. However...

You have to realize when Kruschev went off, this was really unprecedented. There was no chance at all to say what one felt - even in private - about Stalin while he was alive. On the off chance that you were heard, you'd be executed. Even dead, Stalin was dangerous. He had (and still does have) many supporters. Kruschev had iron balls to say what he did, because he didn't know how the politburo would act.

Kruschev was also Stalin's gopher. Stalin would send him to do some menial task, which Kruschev would immediately run to do out of fear of Stalin. Sometimes Stalin would laugh at Kruschev for it, other times Stalin would send him back to put back whatever he fetched. So yeah, no wonder Kruschev hated Stalin.

Vodka? There are rumors Kruschev was drunk. He may well have been.

That the politburo applauded Kruschev says something about both Stalin and Kruschev...

Again, here's Leninists thinking that one man can make a difference.

The USSR developed the way it did because of laws of social development (histomat), not because Khrushchev/Brezhnev/Gorbachev was a -comment removed-.

And I pretty much agree with the previous assessment, btw:

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Kruschev had iron balls to say what he did, because he didn't know how the politburo would act. ... That the politburo applauded Kruschev says something about both Stalin and Kruschev...

Duh.

Mabool wrote:

The USSR developed the way it did because of laws of social development (histomat), not because Khrushchev/Brezhnev/Gorbachev was a -comment removed-.

Not entirely. The immense centralization of power (political, economic, socio-cultural) in the hands of the General Secretary meant that in the case of Soviet socialism at least, leadership counted, and counted immensely. To argue that Gorbachev was a product of the laws of histomat means that these laws foresaw the rise of a class of traitors to socialism that would inevitably destroy it. In reality, the project to destroy socialism was actively carried out by but a few hundred key ideologists, economists, and politicians.

Mabool wrote:

The USSR developed the way it did because of laws of social development (histomat), not because Khrushchev/Brezhnev/Gorbachev was a -comment removed-.

There is a theory that the 7 Premiers of the USSR vacillated between Leninist and Stalinist, and actually that this is why Gorbechov didn't come to power directly after Andropov - Gorbechov and Andropov, according to this theory were both Stalinists. Therefore, Chernenko was installed between the two with the expectation that he wouldn't last very long in the Kremlin.

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Again, here's Leninists thinking that one man can make a difference.

Why not? Imagine that Marx died of tuberculosis when he was 10...would there be Marxism today had that happened? Hardly IMO...

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The USSR developed the way it did because of laws of social development (histomat)

What exact laws are you talking about?

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Why not? Imagine that Marx died of tuberculosis when he was 10...would there be Marxism today had that happened? Hardly IMO...

That isn't an exact analogy, Marx discovered forces that were already in Capitalism that were not readily explained. If he had died, somebody else would have discovered it.

Yeah that ^

@loz: You're totally forgetting the atmosphere that Marx arose from. As well as that Engels was a great communist in and of himself. While the primary actors in events may be important to those specific events, the forces that created these actors in the first place persists until the principal contradiction is solved.

edit: Oops, I totally derailed this thread. Sorry. Split, maybe?

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The immense centralization of power (political, economic, socio-cultural) in the hands of the General Secretary meant that in the case of Soviet socialism at least, leadership counted, and counted immensely.

So that means that the popular masses of any society are just the pawns of their leaders? I strongly disagree with that. The political superstructure of any society is merely an outgrowth of its economic base; in that regard, Soviet society did not differ from any other society: A bureaucratic, hierarchic, authoritarian economy obviously had to have a correspondingly bureaucratic, hierarchic, and authoritarian government. The economic base of any society, in turn, is constantly (re)produced by all the people, because everybody is an economic subject. This is why all qualitative socio-economic changes happen by revolution, not by governmental decrees. As long as people exchange commodities (especially labor power) among each other, you have capitalism. When they stop doing that and decide to come together and plan their economy rationally, you get socialism. On the other hand, nationalization for example (as an impulse that comes just from the superstructure) has nothing to do with it at all, as Marx and Engels constantly told everybody who would listen - compare their rants against "bourgeois socialism", which would be called "social democracy" or "democratic socialism" nowadays. Since this is a dialectic and not a mere mechanical causality, the superstructure can also influence the base to a certain degree - i.e., if Hitler hadn't been such a psycho, there would still be Jews in my country - but the influence of the economic base always predominates: fascism would have come anyway.

In the case of Soviet society, "bourgeois socialism" would actually still be a good description. The Russian revolution completed the tasks of the bourgeois revolution because there was no bourgeoisie who could have done this in Russia, but then it remained stuck there. Stalin's socialist industrialization was nothing but the primitive accumulation of capital in the specific Russian/Soviet context - a process that had taken place in Western Europe centuries ago. Now of course the CPSU consisted of communists who really meant well, so they tried to get as close to socialism as possible - but since they were still a ruling elite this was bound to fail. Of course their specific version of capitalism was very different from the Western variety because it had a superstructure composed of communists, but at the end of the day, it was still a society based on wage labor, capital and commodity circulation, because no government in the world will ever be able to change its economic base.

In fact, the reverse happened: As the new capitalist relations of production matured in the USSR, the superstructure followed suit. As soon as labor power had been fully converted into a commodity, and capital (called "enterprise funds") had established itself as the primary moving force of the Soviet economy, the class of managers tried to gain political control. As Cajo Brendel writes:

Cajo Brendel: Theses on the Chinese Revolution wrote:

What the new class wanted was a more or less 'new' Bolshevik Party adapted to the current situation, a Party that would recognise the new class's powerful position. The requirements of the new class led to an interesting struggle between the old Party bureaucracy and the representatives of the factory management that had come into being, and that formed the basis of the new class. The struggle lasted many years. Both factions balancing one another, the outcome was for a long time undecided. At one time the old Party held the strongest positions, at other times the managerial faction did.

All this started in darkness, before Stalin's death. It became visible in the post-Stalin era. It reached its culminating point in the days of Khruschev, who won power because he was the right man at that particular time. [...] When his adversaries boxed his ears with quotations from the dead Lenin. Kruschev pointed out that people were living in another time: what was valid then had lost its value. With those words he accurately divulged what was going on behind the scenes.

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To argue that Gorbachev was a product of the laws of histomat means that these laws foresaw the rise of a class of traitors to socialism that would inevitably destroy it.

Gorbachev was the culmination of the process I just wrote about.

The laws of historical materialism foresee that there is a dialectical relationship between base and superstructure, in which the development of the productive forces causes political changes. The steam engine brought us liberty and equality. Likewise, capital in the USSR brought them prostitution, heroin and a position as the world's leading center of organized crime. This was indeed inevitable. (edit: Upon reading this again, I just noticed that it sounds terribly chauvinist, almost bordering on racism. Sorry for that. Of course "liberty and equality" don't mean that the West is any better off than Russia - I just used the terms as examples for the the way the specific Western variants of bourgeois ideology express themselves - or that our capitalism is any better than theirs, or that Russians are naturally predisposed to prostitution and illegal arms trade. It was just their historical development that got them there - whenever a state-owned economy is privatized, stuff like this is bound to happen - lol, again, economy determining society - the GDR wasn't really any better, just on a much smaller level of scale. So, sorry if what I said caused offense to anyone, that was really not my intention.)

As long as you have capital, capital will fight for power. Capital is a beast that can't be tamed, even though the Soviet communists tried to do that for several decades. It can only be exterminated. Wage labor and money are no basis for a socialist society.

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In reality, the project to destroy socialism was actively carried out by but a few hundred key ideologists, economists, and politicians.

And why could they do that? Socialism is supposed to be the dictatorship of the proletariat. What an awesome proletariat, that lets a few hundred key ideologists take away its power! That's like the definition of idealism. But ideas have never changed anything. Material development changes everything.

It makes far more sense to assume it never had this power - and indeed it didn't because it was subordinated to capital. Millions of liters of red paint couldn't hide the fact that in the USSR, you either busted your ass at work, for a wage, to produce something you're alienated from through commodity fetishism, or you were in trouble. In a socialist economy, people produce the stuff they need for themselves, under their own control. This is the purpose of a planned economy. The purpose of a planned economy is not to make money. As long as the purpose of an economy is to make money, it's obviously inevitable that the money-makers will fight their way to the top. It's called capitalism, and it doesn't like to be controlled by a state that favors the needs of the people over the needs of profit, as the Soviet state did. So it got rid of that state, because the base determines the superstructure.

It makes far more sense to see the period of Soviet socialism merely as a period of transition between feudalism and full capitalism, because that's what it was when you just look at it objectively, historically. It was not socialism as in "the socioeconomic formation that is supposed to develop after capitalism", because that's just not what it was, from a retrospective point of view. Russia has been in its stage of developed state monopoly capitalism since the mid-90s. Western Europe and the US have been there since the 70s. Soviet socialism was just their specific way of getting there, due to a radically different point of departure - no revolutionary bourgeoisie under the Tsar. So Lenin began a bourgeois development which the Soviet/Russian mafia ended up completing.

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There is a theory that the 7 Premiers of the USSR vacillated between Leninist and Stalinist, and actually that this is why Gorbechov didn't come to power directly after Andropov - Gorbechov and Andropov, according to this theory were both Stalinists. Therefore, Chernenko was installed between the two with the expectation that he wouldn't last very long in the Kremlin.

That sounds more like a retarded conspiracy theory than anything else. Stalinism is Leninism.

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Why not? Imagine that Marx died of tuberculosis when he was 10...would there be Marxism today had that happened? Hardly IMO...

No and yes. The laws of social development would have been discovered anyway, and capitalism would have been explained as well. It wouldn't be called Marxism of course, and probably these things would have been discovered by several different people. And most importantly, Marx's absence from history wouldn't change anything about the historical necessity of proletarian revolution.

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What exact laws are you talking about?

See above.

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You're totally forgetting the atmosphere that Marx arose from. As well as that Engels was a great communist in and of himself. While the primary actors in events may be important to those specific events, the forces that created these actors in the first place persists until the principal contradiction is solved.

Yeah that.

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Again, here's Leninists thinking that one man can make a difference.

Well, I certainly wasn't saying that at all in my post. I was simply pointing out that Khruschev's assessment of this one film, the Fall of Berlin, was completely untrue, after having watched the film myself upon making this post.

Mabool wrote:

So that means that the popular masses of any society are just the pawns of their leaders? I strongly disagree with that. The political superstructure of any society is merely an outgrowth of its economic base; in that regard, Soviet society did not differ from any other society: A bureaucratic, hierarchic, authoritarian economy obviously had to have a correspondingly bureaucratic, hierarchic, and authoritarian government. The economic base of any society, in turn, is constantly (re)produced by all the people, because everybody is an economic subject. This is why all qualitative socio-economic changes happen by revolution, not by governmental decrees. As long as people exchange commodities (especially labor power) among each other, you have capitalism. When they stop doing that and decide to come together and plan their economy rationally, you get socialism.

Different groups of people have different capabilities to influence societal discourse. Peoples' motivations and what they are willing to come together for are fluid and changing, can be and are manipulated from above. In a capitalist society, capital holds media, academic, and broad cultural influence. In Soviet socialism, it was the Party and state bureaucracy. The way your analysis makes it sound, all it takes is for society to wise up, and then it will be able to build socialism (or on the contrary, to get tired of fake, ‘bourgeois socialism’). There is no account of the ability of the powers that be to manipulate social attitudes, to split society, to turn a lie into a commonly accepted truth. The broad masses of society will never be able to build anything if there is not a revolutionary leadership to organize and guide them, which includes participation in a media war, and there will always be resistance.

In the Soviet historical case, when Yakovlev became the Central Committee's Secretary of Propaganda in late 1985, he quickly moved to appoint liberal socialists and outright counterrevolutionaries in the media, academia, and the artistic community. Conservative chief editors of journals and newspapers, heads of creative unions, university deans and others were all replaced in a period of about 2-3 years, Gorbachev personally intervening when Yakovlev ran into opposition. From 1987 on, the cultural and academic work produced by these newly liberated forces resulted in the turning upside down of all guiding historical myths, accepted political realities, and conceptions about social morality and justice. The hierarchical power structures of the Soviet system, together with the old pre-reform 'totalitarian' apparatus, were aimed at disarming conservative socialist opponents. This resulted in a radicalization of the mass intelligentsia, which comprised between 20-50 million people. This group played the instrumental role in nationalist and democratic protests, marches and other agitation, most crucially in the August 1991 events in Moscow.

I think hierarchization and an inability on the part of conservatives to adequately respond to an information and culture war growing in complexity can explain why such a small group of ideologists could assume power like that in a dictatorship of the proletariat. However, your point about ‘inevitability’ has a grain of truth to it in that these factually anti-Soviet ideologists had grown up within the Soviet system itself, living, thinking, conspiring and working at the expense of the state, reading Western anti-communist literature in the special reading rooms reserved for academics, and traveling abroad to get a sense of life under capitalism. This of course was all a natural development of the social and cultural thaw that resulted after Stalin’s death. In principal I of course accept both the thaw and the right of Soviet social scientists, historians and others to develop controversial new theories and approaches. The issue is that in the Soviet case, there was no one to stop them once these people got the ear of the highest echelon of power. After all, in the West too there are many Marxists, socialists and outright communists in academic institutions, but they are all constrained by the editorial boards, by discreet censorship organs, and by the power of capital. In the Soviet Union, the safety mechanism required for allowing alternative thinking while simultaneously keeping a conservative line was simply absent.

Mabool wrote:

In the case of Soviet society, "bourgeois socialism" would actually still be a good description. The Russian revolution completed the tasks of the bourgeois revolution because there was no bourgeoisie who could have done this in Russia, but then it remained stuck there. Stalin's socialist industrialization was nothing but the primitive accumulation of capital in the specific Russian/Soviet context - a process that had taken place in Western Europe centuries ago. Now of course the CPSU consisted of communists who really meant well, so they tried to get as close to socialism as possible - but since they were still a ruling elite this was bound to fail. Of course their specific version of capitalism was very different from the Western variety because it had a superstructure composed of communists, but at the end of the day, it was still a society based on wage labor, capital and commodity circulation, because no government in the world will ever be able to change its economic base.

I cannot agree with this, because I believe in the transformative power of life under a different social system (even if it was, as you say 'bourgeois socialism', which I also cannot agree with). The people growing up and living under socialism had their values transformed, their perceptions of life, their worries, their hopes, etc. I have noticed this just by observing the difference in views and actions between younger and older people in the post-Soviet space. Through the guidance of a benevolent moral and social authority, the intellectual enlightenment and social transformation of the base of society whose importance you discuss will be possible. It is much easier to do this in an inorganically socialist state than to attempt it in a capitalist society yet to undergo revolution, where your voice and mine are weak in a sea of media, cultural, and academic institutions aimed at preserving the status quo.

Mabool wrote:

As the new capitalist relations of production matured in the USSR, the superstructure followed suit. As soon as labor power had been fully converted into a commodity, and capital (called "enterprise funds") had established itself as the primary moving force of the Soviet economy, the class of managers tried to gain political control.

I don't believe this to be the case. I don't accept that the factory managers came to constitute a new class in society, and a reading of their activities, capabilities, and personal opportunities would confirm their status as managers, not owners. I would recommend to you Kontorovich and Ellman's 'The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: An Insider's History'. There you would discover that managers of Soviet enterprises reacted to rather than initiated the changes that saw control of factories shift from public to private. For the vast majority, the main goal was to preserve the inter-enterprise and destination links which the Gorbachev Central Committee decided to tear apart so violently in 1988. This to me is the main convincing reproach to the idea that a management class schemed to rid itself of socialism.

Mabool wrote:

Millions of liters of red paint couldn't hide the fact that in the USSR, you either busted your ass at work, for a wage, to produce something you're alienated from through commodity fetishism, or you were in trouble. In a socialist economy, people produce the stuff they need for themselves, under their own control. This is the purpose of a planned economy. The purpose of a planned economy is not to make money. As long as the purpose of an economy is to make money, it's obviously inevitable that the money-makers will fight their way to the top. It's called capitalism, and it doesn't like to be controlled by a state that favors the needs of the people over the needs of profit, as the Soviet state did. So it got rid of that state, because the base determines the superstructure.

Conscious decisions by the reformist leadership of the state, not inevitable processes, led to the rise of a primitive accumulative class in the USSR. The 1987 Law on State Enterprises, the 1988 Law on Cooperatives, the 1988 elimination of almost the entirety of planning bureaus -these were projects undertaken and completed at the top. There was no way for the black marketeers and petty criminals to have influenced this course, though they were the main groups to take advantage of it when it happened.

Mabool wrote:

It makes far more sense to see the period of Soviet socialism merely as a period of transition between feudalism and full capitalism, because that's what it was when you just look at it objectively, historically. It was not socialism as in "the socioeconomic formation that is supposed to develop after capitalism", because that's just not what it was, from a retrospective point of view. Russia has been in its stage of developed state monopoly capitalism since the mid-90s. Western Europe and the US have been there since the 70s. Soviet socialism was just their specific way of getting there, due to a radically different point of departure - no revolutionary bourgeoisie under the Tsar. So Lenin began a bourgeois development which the Soviet/Russian mafia ended up completing.

For all my respect of Marx, I find his ‘rails of history’ argument overly rigid. Also, the Russian variant of monopoly capitalism is simply incomparable to the US and Western Europe, since it was based on wealth that had been created under an entirely different economic system, and effectively stolen from the population that oversaw its construction over 70 years. Finally, what is your reasoning behind classifying the US and Western Europe as ‘state monopoly capitalism’, and why since the 1970s?

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Mabool wrote:

[...]But ideas have never changed anything.[...]

Vice versa: Ideas change everything. Behind every discovery, every new theory, every invention, every proof of a mathematical hypothesis there is an idea.
Without ideas - all the fancy stuff about laws of social development etc. - to a point where the individual allegedly doesn't play any role whatsoever- is irrelevant IMHO.
To put it bluntly: Without ideas we all would still be living in caves and fear thunder and lightning because the 'gods' are angry with us. No offense intended!

Mabool wrote:

[...]Material development changes everything.[...]

Material development needs (among other things) ideas. And -I admit that gladly:
Ideas need material development to a certain degree.

"An idea that takes grip of the masses becomes a material force"

Man In Grey wrote:

It just depicted him as calm, and confident, even in times of peril (which at first he was not, upon nazi invasion.

Actually this is another fabrication, based on Khruschev's memoirs, where he said that Beria had told him (Khruschev was in the Ukraine at the time), that upon hearing the news of the Nazi invasion Stalin had panicked. This was not true. Stalin indeed retired briefly to his summer residence, but only after a week of uninterrupted work in the Kremlin trying deal with the situation. The visitors' logs of his Kremlin office show that he didn't leave it for that entire week and accepted all sorts of military, party and civilian government officials around the clock never remaining alone there for more than three hours in a row.

Gods are as much ideas as science and math. Also no it wasn't the ideas that provided momentum, they are the product of that momentum. Ideas are only meaningful inasmuch as they solve something. That is ideas that lead nowhere are meaningless until they do. Case in point: the numerous occasions of humans learning to manipulate electricity all led to nothing (save the last "discovery" of course). Material precedes ideas in all things, or rather ideas flow from material.

MAbool wrote:

So that means that the popular masses of any society are just the pawns of their leaders? I strongly disagree with that. The political superstructure of any society is merely an outgrowth of its economic base; in that regard, Soviet society did not differ from any other society: A bureaucratic, hierarchic, authoritarian economy obviously had to have a correspondingly bureaucratic, hierarchic, and authoritarian government. The economic base of any society, in turn, is constantly (re)produced by all the people, because everybody is an economic subject.

I think is lenin in war&socialism cleverly states (correct me if I;m wrong) that " the reflection of the society on the party is full opportunism". If you think about it you'll see he is correct.
At the first stages of socialist construction is the party that mobilizes the masses to conduct and advance the revolution, and it does this by processing the social conditions with histomat, and of course with great and iron discipline and organization, towards a specific goal. So we can say that the party as the subject and not the object of history is not fully in the mercy of the conditions.. This doesn't mean, of course, that can promote any social advance or reform at will, without first taking into account the historical conditions of the time, but it must reassure that by making this "calculation" must promote the interest of socialism and revolution. It's not a passive receiver of history, but rather the actor, the one who creates history ...or rather directing it (since the one that really creates it is the masses).
So we can say that the party is in some degree "autonomous" from society's movement, standing above it, in order to create these conditions required. (and this is why the dictatorship of the party is needed, at a given time)

So this "mechanistic" and "deterministic" view of history is not fully applicable in the party, not at least in the same sense that is applicable in the society (actually that "mechanistic" and "deterministic" views (at this degree) are not applicable anywhere, i think)
The necessity of the diactatorship of the party, in the beggining, has exactly this meaning. That the party will have the power to promote and favour those parts of the society beneficial to revolution while suppress the rest.

So first we must be able to see where the society starts to reflect within the party, eventually transforming it into an historical object, in its turn, and whether bad decisions, and deviation from the goal and the line, are made (and for what reason), in order to avoide them next time..

Pink Spider wrote:

OFF TOPIC
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quote=Mabool [...]But ideas have never changed anything.[...]
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Vice versa: Ideas change everything. Behind every discovery, every new theory, every invention, every proof of a mathematical hypothesis there is an idea.
Without ideas - all the fancy stuff about laws of social development etc. - to a point where the individual allegedly doesn't play any role whatsoever- is irrelevant IMHO.
To put it bluntly: Without ideas we all would still be living in caves and fear thunder and lightning because the 'gods' are angry with us. No offense intended!

quote=Mabool[...]Material development changes everything.[...]
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Material development needs (among other things) ideas. And -I admit that gladly:
Ideas need material development to a certain degree.

Zulu wrote:

"An idea that takes grip of the masses becomes a material force"

Mostly on c. Pink Spider, I will agree with mabool, because are the material coditions the begining of this dialectical transinfluence and of social evolution. This means that ideas do influence the material conditions, but they do it in their turn.. Human brain has the capability of imagining hypothetical conditions. In this perspective ie the bourgois notion of liberty, of self independance, may always have existed in the minds of the people (and actually did have existed, in some vague form), but in order to be the basis of a social structure and take specific form, should first meet some objective requirements that came into objective existance in the late 18 century. So yes, ideas do exist and do shape reality, but in order to do so certain material conditions must be met. Is a dialectical relationship but with the material conditions and explicit reality as the begining.

Excellent marxic extract from Zulu, my favourite one

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Without ideas we all would still be living in caves and fear thunder and lightning because the 'gods' are angry with us.

No, that would be without material development. Fire was not an idea, it was a discovery. So were tools. So was the wheel. So was the microprocessor.

Dagoth Ur wrote:

Also no it wasn't the ideas that provided momentum, they are the product of that momentum. Ideas are only meaningful inasmuch as they solve something. That is ideas that lead nowhere are meaningless until they do. Case in point: the numerous occasions of humans learning to manipulate electricity all led to nothing (save the last "discovery" of course). Material precedes ideas in all things, or rather ideas flow from material.

You're getting really quite good at dialectics. I'm impressed, that was an awesome explanation.

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In this perspective ie the bourgois notion of liberty, of self independance, may always have existed in the minds of the people (and actually did have existed, in some vague form), but in order to be the basis of a social structure and take specific form, should first meet some objective requirements that came into objective existance in the late 18 century. So yes, ideas do exist and do shape reality, but in order to do so certain material conditions must be met. Is a dialectical relationship but with the material conditions and explicit reality as the begining.

That, too.