Have hit the point where I can't remember how I know anything any more, but I think this is a mainstream view. Marxism-Leninism is Marxism adapted to the (unforeseen) scenario of applying Marxism in a country which lacked capitalist institutions, for example.
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"False consciousness" is required to explain the lack of proletarian solidarity in situations where Marx assumed it would occur. A good proportion of 20th century sociology is an attempt to explain why people didn't do what Marx expected them to do. I'm simplifying, but not much.
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Marx is still right to say that material conditions matter, that the process by which a society produces its most important goods matters, and you can still get a long way by extending that (carefully!) into, say, online social relations (Debord nailed this, imo).
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But too many people want to answer everything by reference to Marx, and so "Marxism" became this thing ever in need of one more bug-fix to account for the latest crisis caused by its mis-application.
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Replying to @rob_knight @Meaningness
ok this is perfect it exactly matches on to my model of how these things go: girardian innovator makes innovation (PARADIGM!), it accounts for a lot but not everything, further synthesisers push it forward, true believers just hold on to it forever
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there is a parallel with science here. adding epicycles.
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Replying to @nosilverv @Meaningness
You can even end up with a Ship of Theseus effect where very little of the original is left, but the powerful brand-name remains. Before he died, Marx wrote to two prominent Marxists saying, in effect, that "if this is Marxism then I am not a Marxist".
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At this point I'm really not sure how well this parallels Rationalism. The only thing I'm certain of is that complete systems always turn out to be incomplete, and if you have identified strongly with the system then you will feel that incompleteness as somewhat terrifying.
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This is generally a bad place to reason from, so No True Rationalist should want to be in that position. But stepping back also means accepting the limits of rationalism, which is hard to do when it is part of your identity (annoyingly this is like practical rationality 101).
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The scary thing for Rationalism as a community is that people will turn up with their private forks of Rationalism with a few patches applied (One Weird Trick therapy methods, for the most part) and claim that this restores completeness.
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Glad you are pointing out this pattern; I’ve seen several damaging instances.
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