/lit/ - Literature

>>14829920
Toynbee learned from him, and took it further. Another historian neglected by modern academia.

what exactly is the 'marxist/modernist' conception of history that Spengler is supppsed to refute, if you wouldn't mind articulating it for me. Just in a sentence or two if you can.

>>14830166
marx is a fag
modernism is cancer
secularism is a meme

fuck all onions

>>14830174
I asked for the critique of these things not a list of them being called bad in various ways.

>>14830166
There is no end of history as Marx implicitly believed. Whig historiography is a lie.

>>14829920
>creates the groundwork for the most influential philosophical school of thought of the 20th and 21st centuries
???

>>14830223
Marxist historical materialism doesn't describe an end point to history, it is primarily a critique of abstract progressive history (the move towards ever more 'advanced' civilization or 'degenerated/primitive/noncapitalist' civlizational models) this is best understood vis a vis Benjamins theses on the philosophy of history. Historiography is critiqued in Marx and Benjamin precisely because it fails to account for material. Marxist historical materialism is a critique of idealist models of history, not a proposition that history ends when we make communism or whatever (which in Capital marx mentions either one or zero times in total)

One of the things you notice reading marx is that Capital and most of his work is a /critique/ not a series of suggestions. He does make suggestions of course, but these are of course more limited than the critique of political economy.

>>14829920
who?

>>14830223
Marx 'implicitly believing' an end to history is just wrong. Marx was proposing an alternate way of understanding history, historical materialism within a critique of capital. You can see this if you read Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of History. Marx does not think if we do away with capital history will end, precisely the opposite actually. Man can only enter into historical time and act outside of commodity WHEN the critique is actuated. What tankies, Lenin, and other self proclaimed historical 'communists' don't understand is that Marx had formed a mechanism of critique and /not/ an ideologically pure 'communist system' with which capitalism could be replaced by. Historiography is precisely one of his targets. Correct me if I am wrong because I'm no expert but Spengler asserting a cycle in place of the victorian imaginary lf progress doesn't change the unserious assumption of progress in some abstract way attended by a stage of abstract decadence and degeneration. That seems to me simply a modified version of victorian darwinism, still relying on progressive/regressive values placed on social bodies.

>>14830223
Oh god i thought 4chan ate my post so I retyped it (slightly differently) and sent it again. I should not be phone posting this late at night.

>>14829920

>>14829920
too bad he was a jewish socialist

>>14830166
Spengler questioned the nature of the 'proletariat' and basically said that it was a completely literary concept that had never existed, and that there was no solidarity between the working class.
He also state that Marx's idea of capitalism did not distinguish between different types of 'bourgeois' finance, e.g. between the 'entrepreneur' who benefits the nation and the 'speculative' capitalist who profits from short term investments in the stock market and ultimately adds nothing, and benefits the most from the system.
Spengler said that Marx basically based his whole conception of history and class relations on the society of Britain, and that ultimately his attempt to apply this to societies with completely different class systems (such as Germany, Russia) would never succeed.

>>14830367
>He also state that Marx's idea of capitalism did not distinguish between different types of 'bourgeois' finance, e.g. between the 'entrepreneur' who benefits the nation and the 'speculative' capitalist who profits from short term investments in the stock market and ultimately adds nothing, and benefits the most from the system.
Based. Fuck rent seekers.

>>14830174
cringe

>>14830367
Well some parts of that seem a bit off.
To point a) the 'proletariat' as it exists in marx isn't some class that has solidarity and access to a mystical inherent understanding of the process of capital (like Lenin and other later soviet marxists would assert). In fact the opposite is true: they do not know what is actually occurring at any given time, nor do they know that they indeed form a class. The proletariat as they exist in reality are simply laborers without capital

Which comes to point b) capitalists who have capital and who socially organize labor. They also take part in an incomprehension of what they are actually doing which is a process of marshalling abstract labor to socially organize time within an exchange relationship to abstractly (and in an idealist way) produce the non material category of value. This is then culturally reinforced through processes of reducing concrete labor to abstract socially useful time, commodity fetish and so on.

What Spengler may be picking up om, and what seems to me the real salient point, is the issue of money. You see for marx one of the essential components of the abstract labor system was the invention of a general /commodity/ to use to equivocate exchange values for labor. This is money. As you know now however, since marx's time our money has been divorced from commodity (gold) and is now merely a paper symbol. This might be where spengler detects an issue: well this productive class is different from this class that functions only as leeches in a credit system; which is true! In fact, a real issue in marxism is that very system of credit which functions using now abstract and WORTHLESS money insofar as the exchange value of commodities are concerned, are we still in capitalism as marx described it? What fresh hell is this? In essence the critique of the bourgeois now has to enter a new stage: yeah rhe labor relations under capital are bad insofar as we are divorced from the concrete and material, alienation, reification, and all attendant absurdities of commodity, but what now of the marxist analysis of the credit system? (Which he does do in capital but I don't understand so well) that's a real new issue.

>>14830430
Oh yea and I should note that I kinda put it inelegantly here. 'Value' is created as a 'spectral objectivity', its slippery but in a word or two its a category formed in the social relations of exchange which then vanishes in the concrete use value of the thing (e.g. the apple you buy only constitutes exchange value when considered in an exchange relationship, its objectivity is becomes use value when removed from this). NOTE that this is not a substance, value is purely the social relationship of exchange, aristotelian category vis a vis the interpretation might be a good way to understand it idk.

>>14830166
Progression. There's organic evolution and its direction isn't in our memes.

>>14829920
His thought processes become brilliantly esoteric at times. The overly rationalist western academia of today cannot enjoy that under any circumstances

>>14829920
>philosophical school of thought
Which was?

Spengler was an NPC. Wrong about nearly everything, except minor symptoms that everyone could see.

>>14830938
Physiognomy doesn't lie.

>>14830938

>>14830226
I guess he means postmodernism

>>14830988
kek

>>14830223
>>14830367
so basically Spengler refuted Marx's specific historical predictions (which everybody did btw), but not the method of historical materialism, the ACTUAL marxist history

>>14830394
>imagine thinking speculators are not an essential part of modern capitalism just because personally each one of them is not "Productive"
so this is the power of right-wing sociology

>>14831423
You mean class war? An idea that began with Rousseau and was retroactively applied to history?

>>14830988
lmaoooo

Mysticism

>>14831501
>class war
that was Marx's own erroneous take. Historical Materialism has evolved past him

>>14830290
>>14830367
Spengler didnt believe in progress or regress as they would imply he believed there was some way for man to alter the course of civilization. There is no moral judgement of one era of a civilization being better than another, they simply are what the are. He likened them to seasons, an endless and unchangeable cycle. Marx on the other hand posits a sequential series of modes of production overturning each other one after another until finally communism is reached. It's a clear perversion of whigism in line with all modernist ideologies.

>>14829920
>takes racial discussion away from “muh low brow line” into actual cultural/spiritual discussion and dissection
So you’re saying he ruined it

This nigga is literally the flat earther of philosophy.

>>14832078
In review it's funny to see how he views the rulers of Thebes as initiating this process...

>>14830988
Holy based

>>14831501
yep, anything else is evil

>>14831520
>not yet developed
Maybe the basilica? From a Duginist perspective (which is more relevant), maybe "Russian" should just be replaced by "Eurasian" at this pint.

>>14832117
What do you mean

>>14832162
>Eurasian
where to set the boundary?

>>14832162
Nah. In comparative terms Russia is now at the stage in early Europe before even Romanesque architecture appeared, so it's hard to say. Kokoshnik architecture is distinctively Russian so it might be something like that.

>>14832184
Approximately the former USSR, give and take some of the Western portions. Maybe add Iranic peoples, Mongols and Turkics if talking about a greater Eurasia.

>>14830367
this doesn't seem to be a potent criitique of Marxism.
> that there was no solidarity between the working class
yes because transcending vulgar bourgeois ideology and developing class conscious proletariat is one of the necessary condition of the proletarian revolution. since the dreams of revolution never came into being, Spengler's critique is worthless. in order to support his thesis he'd have to demonstrate that there is no potential of solidarizing the working class not that workers are not yet in solidarity.
>He also state that Marx's idea of capitalism did not distinguish between different types of 'bourgeois' finance, e.g. between the 'entrepreneur' who benefits the nation and the 'speculative' capitalist who profits from short term investments in the stock market and ultimately adds nothing, and benefits the most from the system.
that's actually the biggest success of Marx since in treating bourgeois finance as a whole he was able to abstract from the particular form surplus value assumes (rent on land, interest or profit). to add to this speculative capital is simply a necessary outgrow of enterpreneurial capital - the latter lowers the global rate of profit forcing capitalists to seek more risky investments such as speculating on stock and bond prices.

>>14832177
He sees the Theban sages as initiating this decline from Culture toward mere Civilization during the MIDDLE KINGDOM 2150 - 1800 BC. A late date for the Tower of Babel (2400 BC) would probably fit in with a centralized bureaucracy some centuries years later.

Spengler also associates Thebes with playwrights like Sophocles in Athens, which continues his earlier thread in the IONIC PERIOD 650 - 300 BC ...and the LATE CHOU PERIOD.

>>14832200
What working class? The West is no longer industrial, we live in a world that Marx did not foresee with dynamics at play that Marx did not write about. His world doesnt exist anymore.

>>14830226
>>14830934
>>14830997
Yeah postmodernism.

>>14832200
>since the dreams of revolution never came into being
It did and they collapsed lol

>>14832250
The world Spengler foresaw as a consequence of socialism exists instead. The mythical status that was given to the Western worker in the 19th century has resulted in anything involving hard work (primarily industry) being exported to Asia, and the living standards and wages of workers has soared. The Western service economy and luxury wage is propped up by Asian industry, resulting in Western economies becoming reliant on Asia. The worker that socialism idealized doesn't exist anymore. The problem now is what happens when Asia reaches the same standard of luxury that the West currently has?

>>14830413
There is no cringe

>>14832078

>>14832466
why did Trojans choose to dress so gaily?

>>14831567
Spengler refutes the inane idea of materialistic reductionism. It is why the split with Hegel was done right by Stirner and wrong with Marx. You would know this if you read the book dumb fuck.

>>14831579
Marx articulates a critique moreso than a historical system of progression. The 'movement' that seems asserted here inevitably towards a communism (which is an idea never fully theoretically developed or explored by marx, instead remaining shorthand for his entire theorization) actually never occurs. The only movement or change in social reproduction that marx definitively accounts for in detail is pre-capitalist to capitalist, and even then marx is much more concerned with the material function of capital in the present than anything else. The inevitable scientific marxism is a convenient occlusion of the critical moves marx makes, supported easily by the blundering soviet theorists attempting to resolve the critique of political economy without its necessary attendant critique of the state form as a whole.

As for a lack of moral judgement on historical eras in spengler, from my cursory reading (and drawing on Adornos reclamation of decline of the west) Spenglers gesture towards these things as having 'declines', as having 'peaks' and life spans, and thus decays and deaths, reeks to me of western moral horror at the concept of decay. What can be more terrible in the eyes of a comitted idealist, for which the platonic realm of the immutable, unchangable, eternal, undesiring forms is still a serious proposition? What can be more of a Valerian diagnosis of 'death of the western mind' than to assert that these things live, and die, and decay. Perhaps if we want to recover Spengler from his own nonsense we can disjoint him from the literary fiction he enacts, which in his writing (from what I have read) is a masking of panic at the impossibility the task of conservatism is in his own conservative framing of cycles through an appeal to nature.

Then again I only know about marx, so I won't pretend to have more for Spengler than 'maybes' and 'perhapses' beyond the fact that I truly believe he didn't understand marx.

>Landa describes Spengler's "Prussian Socialism" as "working a whole lot, for the absolute minimum, but – and this is a vital aspect – being happy about it."
>He lived as a cloistered scholar, supported by his modest inheritance. Spengler survived on very limited means and was marked by loneliness.

if this guy were alive right today he would be an unironic Jordan Peterson fanboy and frogpost about being a NEET

>>14832466
In the Period of Civilization, you'll notice we entered the first phase about 1800 with the full formation of Democracy and Capitalism. The 2nd phase occurred arguably about the year 2000, the Formation of Caesarism has established the Victory of force-politics over money, or in our terms, the Victory of Managers over the old Capitalist class.

>>14832545
This is the mark of the pseud and the dishonest: praise work while doing none of it in real life.

>>14832466

>>14832565
>Chinese space time
Here's an example of it in Dramatic terms

>>14832565
>Western space time
in the Dramatic terms of conflict-based stories

>>14832625
>>14832632
Is this a typical story structure?

>>14832651
In anime it would be... I would contrast Isekai with Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

>>14832660
the point being the de-emphasis on Theme and Plotting in Asian drama in favour of more internal developments. It's difficult to articulate however.

>>14830223
Marx didn't believe in the end of history but in the end of prehistory, which would be the point at which the human species for the first time takes over control of its life.