The materialist explanation for the following

[Texan]

Hello, I was on another forum where someone was arguing that materialism fails to explain "a lot of things" from history. Although I disagree, I did not have a materialist answer to the following

1) Alexander the Great (he argued that materialism can't explain why he wanted to foster learning, etc)

2) Why Atilla the Hun did not attack Rome

3) Why the Arabs conquered half of the known world in the 7th-8th centuries (this I thought was a terrible example, though)


What do you say, Revleft?

[xxxxxx666666]

Well materialism isn't always what drives wars and so forth, ideology also has an impact (and I could be wrong), let's see:

1. He believed if the conquer the known world there would be peace in the land, and so he tried to do so. Supposedly he slept with a copy of Homer's Iliad under his pillow. Alexander may also be an egotists as he founded a number of cities and named a number of them after himself, so self gratification and ideology.....?

2.Pope Leo I in 452 met with Atilla and somehow convinced him not to attack Rome. (how he did it, well as far as I know we still don't know for sure but maybe the Pope threatened God will bring fire and brimstone upon the Huns and the Huns believed it and left Rome alone) And again ideology.

3. Well, Muhammad founded Islam and they do believed that Allah was on their side, again ideology.

[Ember Catching]

Historical materialism is not vulgar and does not deny human agency. It posits that the march of history renders unto humanity a necessarily limited set of potential means, from which humans select to shape reality with — or, more eloquently, that:


"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."

— Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852

There are cases where humans have acted illogically, unpredictably, and even at odds with what is in their material interests, but never outside and against history.

[Thirsty Crow]

Hello, I was on another forum where someone was arguing that materialism fails to explain "a lot of things" from history. Although I disagree, I did not have a materialist answer to the following

1) Alexander the Great (he argued that materialism can't explain why he wanted to foster learning, etc)

2) Why Atilla the Hun did not attack Rome

3) Why the Arabs conquered half of the known world in the 7th-8th centuries (this I thought was a terrible example, though)


What do you say, Revleft?

All of the above mentioned need to be explained in reference to prevailing social conditions at the time. For instance, what possible reason could Alex have to want to foster learning? No verbal adherence to materialism will be able to explain that if there was no research into available documents which could position this in relation to the social context of the time.

So, to take Alex again, it might be useful to unearth the motives for said belief. In other words, the question "why" can be first approached by reformulation it in the sense of "what are your intentions". From there on it can become clear what social significance this might possess; the history can be also traced, and finally the question is transformed into asking about the effects of this practice.

I can't explain the above examples because my information and grasp on it is lacking.

[PhoenixAsh]

* Attila did not get to attack Rome because
1) Military overstretch.
2) Italy did not yield enough supplies and the cost of getting them from abroad as well as the logistical difficulties involved outweighed the possible economic and military gain from conquering Rome.
3) The economic gain potential in reconquering Constantinopel.


* The Ottoman expansion was necessity because the states main income was through expansion and increasing fiscal income and was more geared to agriculture than production and trade.

[Texan]

I forgot to add another point last night.

What of the Chinese destroying their ships in the 15th century and return home? They were on their way being THE trading superpower.

I remember reading that they didn't have enough shipyards to hold many of their ships, but as to why they returned home I don't know.

[#FF0000]

Hello, I was on another forum where someone was arguing that materialism fails to explain "a lot of things" from history. Although I disagree, I did not have a materialist answer to the following

1) Alexander the Great (he argued that materialism can't explain why he wanted to foster learning, etc)

2) Why Atilla the Hun did not attack Rome

3) Why the Arabs conquered half of the known world in the 7th-8th centuries (this I thought was a terrible example, though)


What do you say, Revleft?

I have to say I'm kind of at a loss here because this is one of the the dumbest things I ever heard in my life. What exactly does this person mean when he says "materialism can't explain" this or that?

[Texan]

I too was left a little perplexed. Considering he said "materialism can't explain xyz" verbatim, I am assuming he meant that there aren't blatant material/economic motives for xyz

[Thirsty Crow]

I have to say I'm kind of at a loss here because this is one of the the dumbest things I ever heard in my life. What exactly does this person mean when he says "materialism can't explain" this or that?
It's also worthwhile to mention with some confidence that the person ascribes to this "materialism" something which is not within its domain. I'm getting at the fact that the question why Alex fostered learning isn't answered by some "materialism" that is at the same time tasked with answering how muons act, but rather by close historical inquiry.

[Rugged Collectivist]

* The Ottoman expansion was necessity because the states main income was through expansion and increasing fiscal income and was more geared to agriculture than production and trade.


3) Why the Arabs conquered half of the known world in the 7th-8th centuries
,

[Alan OldStudent]

I too was left a little perplexed. Considering he said "materialism can't explain xyz" verbatim, I am assuming he meant that there aren't blatant material/economic motives for xyz

I think you're getting to the key point here. Perhaps you need to ask the person on the other forum what s/he means by "materialism." Does this person think that a materialist explanation requires a direct financial gain for Alexander, Attila, the Muslim armies, and the Chinese?

The materialist view of history is not so directly linear, as the Marx quote Comrade Ember Catching cited (http://www.revleft.com/vb/materialist-explanation-following-t186714/index.html?p=2715625#post2715625) illustrates.

Ask your opponent where s/he acquired the notion that materialism means getting a dollar is the sole reason historical figures act. Ask for sources for that assumption. You might want to read this Wikipedia article on economic determinism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_determinism) to see various views on this topic. You'll get a bit of the range of debate, even among socialists, on this topic.



Regards,

Alan OldStudent
The unexamined life is not worth living—Socrates
Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto—Violeta Parra

[RedMaterialist]

Hello, I was on another forum where someone was arguing that materialism fails to explain "a lot of things" from history. Although I disagree, I did not have a materialist answer to the following

1) Alexander the Great (he argued that materialism can't explain why he wanted to foster learning, etc)

2) Why Atilla the Hun did not attack Rome

3) Why the Arabs conquered half of the known world in the 7th-8th centuries (this I thought was a terrible example, though)


What do you say, Revleft?

Do you have a link to Alexander the Great and his fostering of learning? What is meant by "fostering learning?"

[Hit The North]

When Marxists talk about the material conditions determining ideas, they are merely restating the truism that human beings are products of their society; that their cultural, intellectual, normative horizons are engendered by (a) the place their society occupies in human history and (b) (to a weaker extent) the place the individual occupies in their society. So, for instance, if Albert Einstein had been born 100 years earlier, he could not have come to formulate the scientific theories he did. If Alexander the Great had been born lowly in his society, instead of a prince - had not been educated by Aristotle and inherited the throne from his daddy - then he would probably not have been an individual who valued education and certainly wouldn't have been in a position to implement it. These are the "material" facts of the case. Your friend is free to believe in fate, or the Gods or in some trans-historical genius to explain it, if he wishes, but then you can just laugh at his silly superstitions.

Of course, the above is a simplification and ignores many factors - but all of those factors will be the product of human relations and human action (in Alexander's past and the present). As LinksRadikal argues, there is no substitute for close historical analysis.

[Manic Impressive]

Historical materialism is not vulgar, is not deterministic, and does not deny human agency. It posits that the march of history renders unto humanity a necessarily limited set of potential means, from which humans select to shape reality with — or, more eloquently, that:

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."

— Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852There are cases where humans have acted illogically, unpredictably, and even at odds with what is in their material interests, but never outside and against history.
This (in bold) is in contradiction of the quote you have just used and the rest of what you have just said.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

The fact that "they do not make it as they please" and that they are compelled by already existing circumstances is practically the definition of determinism.

[argeiphontes]

The fact that "they do not make it as they please" and that they are compelled by already existing circumstances is practically the definition of determinism.

It's possible to act with free will within a limited horizon of possibility, though. In a world that has to be taken as given. I think that's what that quote means.

[Manic Impressive]

It's possible to act with free will within a limited horizon of possibility, though. In a world that has to be taken as given. I think that's what that quote means.
I think that's a reasonable reading of the quote and isn't necessarily a negation of determinism. It's not one that I personally agree with, or I should just say that it's much more complicated than that. It's a subject I'm interested in discussing but I've got a killer headache right now so not feeling up to it. Hope we can do it another time. But yeah cognitive decision making is subject to ideology, which is predetermined.

The main point of my post though is to contest that Marx was a determinist and historical materialism is a determinist philosophy. I think the confusion comes with the understanding of what determinism is. For instance I remember speaking to a guy once who thought that everything in the universe was written in a book (literally, written in a book that exists in space) and that everything would happen according to what is written. He called that determinism...:rolleyes: Point being that the concept of determinism has become very obscured from what it means in Marxist terms. There's also a lot of vulgar determinism among Marxists.

[Ember Catching]

This (in bold) is in contradiction of the quote you have just used and the rest of what you have just said.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

The fact that "they do not make it as they please" and that they are compelled by already existing circumstances is practically the definition of determinism.
I was referring to hard determinism specifically, though I wasn't explicit about it, since I assumed this would be implied given what the OP heard, and also given the rest of my post. Historical materialism is of course deterministic, so I'll remove the word from my post.

[argeiphontes]

Historical materialism is of course deterministic

How is historical materialism deterministic? Is all materialism deterministic? I used to think I knew what these words meant but then I hung around on this site. ;)

[Five Year Plan]

Hello, I was on another forum where someone was arguing that materialism fails to explain "a lot of things" from history. Although I disagree, I did not have a materialist answer to the following

1) Alexander the Great (he argued that materialism can't explain why he wanted to foster learning, etc)

2) Why Atilla the Hun did not attack Rome

3) Why the Arabs conquered half of the known world in the 7th-8th centuries (this I thought was a terrible example, though)


What do you say, Revleft?

Are you suggesting that military conquest doesn't have a materialist explanation? Did these people just pray their way to power?

[PhoenixAsh]

Are you suggesting that military conquest doesn't have a materialist explanation? Did these people just pray their way to power?

I think he (actually...his debate partner) is rather suggesting that certain strategic decisions do not seem logical or seem to defy what would be the most beneficial and therefore couldn't have a materialist explanation.

Which is indeed nonsensical because materialism assigns no value to the object/subject...in other words...a seemingly wrong or illogical decision is (can be) very well still materialist in origin.

[Five Year Plan]

I think he (actually...his debate partner) is rather suggesting that certain strategic decisions do not seem logical or seem to defy what would be the most beneficial and therefore couldn't have a materialist explanation.

Which is indeed nonsensical because materialism assigns no value to the object/subject...in other words...a seemingly wrong or illogical decision is (can be) very well still materialist in origin.

Then he and his debate partner seem to be mistaking historical materialism for the thesis that every action a person undertakes is primarily aimed at immediately, as individual deeds, maximizing wealth. This has more in common with neo-classical "rational choice" theorists than it does to anything remotely resembling Marxism.

[Dave B]

Engels to J. Bloch In Königsberg London, September 21, 1890



According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.

The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.

There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.


We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one. The Prussian state also arose and developed from historical, ultimately economic, causes. But it could scarcely be maintained without pedantry that among the many small states of North Germany,

Brandenburg was specifically determined by economic necessity to become the great power embodying the economic, linguistic and, after the Reformation, also the religious difference between North and South, and not by other elements as well (above all by its entanglement with Poland, owing to the possession of Prussia, and hence with international political relations — which were indeed also decisive in the formation of the Austrian dynastic power).

Without making oneself ridiculous it would be a difficult thing to explain in terms of economics the existence of every small state in Germany, past and present, or the origin of the High German consonant permutations, which widened the geographic partition wall formed by the mountains from the Sudetic range to the Taunus to form a regular fissure across all Germany.


In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting force, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition.

For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals — each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) — do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it.


I would furthermore ask you to study this theory from its original sources and not at second-hand; it is really much easier. Marx hardly wrote anything in which it did not play a part. But especially The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (http://www.revleft.com/vb/../../1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm) is a most excellent example of its application. There are also many allusion to it in Capital (http://www.revleft.com/vb/../../1867-c1/index.htm). Then may I also direct you to my writings: Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (http://www.revleft.com/vb/../../1877/anti-duhring/index.htm) and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (http://www.revleft.com/vb/../../1886/ludwig-feuerbach/index.htm), in which I have given the most detailed account of historical material which, as far as I know, exists. [The German Ideology (http://www.revleft.com/vb/../../1845/german-ideology/index.htm) was not published in Marx or Engels lifetime]


Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-á-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction.

But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error was permissible. Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles, and even those not always correctly.

And I cannot exempt many of the more recent "Marxists" from this reproach, for the most amazing rubbish has been produced in this quarter, too....
[....]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm


As to the first two we don’t have enough reliable information to make an informed judgement I think.

But as to these "barbarians" I think they weren’t actually that interested in conquering the Roman empire to take it over in an imperialist kind of way as their own economic base was different to the Romans.

Many of them thought the Roman way of life was barbaric; not to say they were not into a bit of plunder and booty etc.


The Muslim conquests brought about the collapse of the Sassanid Empire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasanian_Empire) and a great territorial loss for the Byzantine Empire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire). The reasons for the Muslim success are hard to reconstruct in hindsight, primarily because only fragmentary sources from the period have survived. Most historians agree that the Sassanid Persian and Byzantine Roman empires were militarily and economically exhausted from decades of fighting one another (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine%E2%80%93Sassanid_Wars). The rapid fall of Visigothic Spain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visigothic_Spain) remains less easily explicable.
Some Jews (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew) and Christians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian) in the Sassanid Empire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassanid_Empire) and Jews and Monophysites (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophysitism) in Syria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria_(Roman_province)) were dissatisfied and initially sometimes even welcomed the Muslim forces, largely because of religious conflict in both empires.[3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquests#cite_note-3) In the case of Byzantine Egypt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Egypt), Palestine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine) and Syria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria), these lands had only a few years before being reacquired from the Persians, and had not been ruled by the Byzantines for over 25 years.
Fred McGraw Donner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_McGraw_Donner), however, suggests that formation of a state in the Arabian peninsula and ideological (i.e. religious) coherence and mobilization was a primary reason why the Muslim armies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashidun_army) in the space of a hundred years were able to establish the largest pre-modern empire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires) until that time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquests


The Islamic religion itself then was also perhaps quite tolerant and intrinsically or coherently suited to transnational merchantile trading and simple commodity production.

It may have been a case that they were welcomed in as less of a bunch of bastards than the previous lot.

.