Ideologies are borne from the material; you do away with the mechanistic approach by understanding that it is a subset of material interacting with other material. To frame the ideology to float separate from the material is to give into metaphysics; a cartesian dualism. The rational is real and the real is rational. I found In Defense of Materialism: The Development of the Monist View of History by Plekhanov useful here. I'm happy to be corrected but the above screenshot just sounds like Great Man Theory with Marxist jargon.
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2026
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happy to be corrected but the above just sounds like Great Man Theory with Marxist jargon.
What this posits is like the opposite of that, it's that more and more everybody in charge can't separate the PR spectactle from the actual thing
What this posits is like the opposite of that [Great Man Theory], it’s that more and more everybody in charge can’t separate the PR spectactle from the actual thing
"As the empire declines the ruling class acts on ideology instead of real material politics" is in the OP's screenshot?
That can be taken to mean that the ghouls ignore reality and assume their conception of the world (which is borne out of their ideologies) to be true instead.
That can be taken to mean that the ghouls ignore reality and assume their conception of the world (which is borne out of their ideologies) to be true instead.
Their actions are rational in attempt to maintain their class rule?
Hard to understand it without the context and I don't want to do the captcha right now on the archive link. But in general here, I think we usually categorize ideology as part of superstructure and a thing like military resources as part of base, as a way of helping to understand it. Both are real, substantial factors in what occurs. But importantly, ideology alone cannot withstand a declining material base; to put it one way, belief won't stop an ocean wave from sweeping you up in it. However, if you're in charge of a material base that still has quite a bit of oomph behind it and you not only believe sincerely that you have far more resources than you actually have, but also believe you need to actively use it to subjugate others, you may squander what you do have. You may attack Iran, thinking you can break the people there, and get your imperial bases broken instead.
Trump is definitely not secretly a long-term strategic thinker, but some people in his orbit may be. However, there's nothing particularly clever about what they did with Iran. There's no positive spin for the empire on getting debased by Iran or handling navy logistics so poorly that people wanted to jump overboard. Arrogance big, military limited.