Your comment’s style was suboptimal, technological determinism is different from economic determinism
I cannot see how it is different then a mix of historical materialism and economic determinism. Please elaborate.
and the neo-reactionary position is neither
Near as I can tell, the point is that Yvain and others (Ishaan specifically) are arguing that the reactionary position is wrong by asserting some form of historical materialism/economic determinism.
i.e. reactionaries cannot reverse the trend of history because the structures of governments are largely an adaptation to the technological world we live in. The reactionaries want to divorce the government/culture from technological progress and assert they can move independently.
The argument against them seems to be that government/culture may well be a response to the technological climate, and as such as technology changes so will the culture and government.
I cannot see how it is different then a mix of historical materialism and economic determinism. Please elaborate.
Economic determinism refers specifically to the economic structure. The basic outlines of the US’s economic structure have not changed since at least the 1930′s, and arguably even earlier. The development of TV, the internet, or for that matter the printing press, are all changes in technology, not changes in a society’s economic structure. Marx, for example, was not a technological determinist; Yvain et. al. are not economic determinists. Changing an economic structure is significantly easier than destroying all technology and preventing new developments.
Other stuff
In that case, I switch this critique to ‘sub-optimal style’- i.e. it was difficult for me to tell who Multiheaded was addressing and how his point was relevant.
Economic determinism refers specifically to the economic structure.
You missed roughly half of my sentence, and half of Multiheaded’s. The other half was historical materialism- below is a quote from the wikipedia article
[Historical materialism] is a theory of socioeconomic development according to which changes in material conditions (technology and productive capacity) are the primary influence on how society and the economy are organised.
Nah, I was deliberately ignoring the other half. The fact that one part of Multiheaded’s comment was correct (though, AFAICT, irrelevant to the above discussion) doesn’t mean that the other part (regarding economic determinism) is too.
I cannot see how it is different then a mix of historical materialism and economic determinism. Please elaborate.
Near as I can tell, the point is that Yvain and others (Ishaan specifically) are arguing that the reactionary position is wrong by asserting some form of historical materialism/economic determinism.
i.e. reactionaries cannot reverse the trend of history because the structures of governments are largely an adaptation to the technological world we live in. The reactionaries want to divorce the government/culture from technological progress and assert they can move independently.
The argument against them seems to be that government/culture may well be a response to the technological climate, and as such as technology changes so will the culture and government.
Economic determinism refers specifically to the economic structure. The basic outlines of the US’s economic structure have not changed since at least the 1930′s, and arguably even earlier. The development of TV, the internet, or for that matter the printing press, are all changes in technology, not changes in a society’s economic structure. Marx, for example, was not a technological determinist; Yvain et. al. are not economic determinists. Changing an economic structure is significantly easier than destroying all technology and preventing new developments.
In that case, I switch this critique to ‘sub-optimal style’- i.e. it was difficult for me to tell who Multiheaded was addressing and how his point was relevant.
You missed roughly half of my sentence, and half of Multiheaded’s. The other half was historical materialism- below is a quote from the wikipedia article
Nah, I was deliberately ignoring the other half. The fact that one part of Multiheaded’s comment was correct (though, AFAICT, irrelevant to the above discussion) doesn’t mean that the other part (regarding economic determinism) is too.