/lit/ - Literature

>>20932941
There are a lot of good concepts in it. A few you might find useful:

(1) Economic substructure determines political superstructure. Political superstructure reinforces economic substructure. The ownership of the means of production influence the relations of production. The U.S. is a great example because it has a high level social productivity and advanced productive forces but not necessarily great relations of production. And great relations of production in theory don't always benefit people if you have poor social productivity.

(2) Political superstructure will protect its economic substructure. See financial policy, laws, debates, use of violence and oppression, propaganda. Any means necessary to ensure the ownership of means of production or relations of production remain unchanged or only partly changed.

(3) Capitalism will structurally create its contradictions (long story so I won't go into the details). Internally, contradictions are the fight for the means of production, the distribution of goods and services, etc. Externally, these contradictions can be "transferred" elsewhere such as through war, petrodollar recycling, welfare regimes in developed countries, high-value manufacturing vs. mid-low manufacturing, "I'm gonna build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" or "Russia is to blame for the inflation" and so on, or trying to set people against each other to divide people from the same class in order to weak social class struggle.

(4) Without transference and redirection of contradictions, capitalism will eventually implode. But only when capitalism is overthrown completely and replaced by socialism will there be a "qualitative" change in society which will be "upgraded" to a new level. This will occur over a long period of time and taking the shape of a zig-zag or spiral-shaped pattern.

(5) Theory and practice are dialectically united. You can modify the theory through obtaining feedback from practice and then use the modified theory to guide the practice and then so on and so forth. Marxism's elements are not separate, still, absolute, metaphysical (of course this part may not be true) but dialectical, developing, transforming. You can't understand anything without understanding its relations to other things. Marxism is (or at least intends to become) the dialectical unity of natural science and philosophy. Marxism is interested in changing the world for a better collective gain. If a theory can't change the world, its five million pages of writing are as useless as toilet paper no mater how logical and self consistent it may sound.