Article discreditng the thesis that Mao "killed millions of people" in The Great Leap

[FireIceTalon]

and never will exist."

This is 'absolute determinism', which the following article does a superb job of discrediting.

I will simply leave you with this final nail in the coffin for the credibility of bourgeois ideology, hit decisively with the Marxist hammer:

http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/...lyneux.htm

Before dealing directly with these issues it is worth noting that bourgeois thought has never been able to resolve the problem of determinism. Rather it has swung back and forth between voluntarist idealism, which ignores social conditions and places all the emphasis on 'great' individuals and ideas, and mechanical materialism which stresses the unchangeable nature of people and society. Both these positions reflect aspects of bourgeois society viewed from the top down. On the one hand the bourgeoisie standing at the head of society, freed from productive labour and living off the exploitation of others, is able to flatter itself that its ideas and deeds rule the world. On the other hand looking down on the masses it sees them there as mere objects, passively driven this way and that by the requirements of capital accumulation. Bourgeois ideology thus attacks Marxism both for being too deterministic and for not being deterministic enough.

From Max Weber onwards bourgeois sociology and its related disciplines have condemned Marxism for its 'crude' economic determinism, its underestimation of the autonomy of ideology, politics and culture and its insistence on the central importance of class. Bourgeois historians have repeatedly tried to undermine any notion of an overall pattern of development in world history, concentrating their fire particularly on the schema outlined by Marx in The Communist Manifesto, and attacking the idea that the English and French Revolutions had any determinate class character or any historical necessity.

At the same time the socio-biologists have condemned Marxism and every form of left wing and socialist thought for its 'utopian' failure to grasp that inequality, hierarchy, class and competition (along with war, racism and sexism) are encoded in our genes and thus ineradicable.

and

Bourgeois ideology, as we noted in the opening section of this article, oscillates between idealist voluntarism, which rejects the determining role of material conditions and social relations, and mechanical materialism which sees human beings as passive objects and denies the role of conscious human practice. Both these modes of thought are generalisations arising from contradictory aspects of the social being of the bourgeoisie and the social nature of capitalism. Idealist voluntarism reflects the position of the bourgeoisie as a ruling class, living off the labours of others, which imagines that its ideas and its will are the demiurge of history. Mechanical materialism reflects the subordination of the bourgeoisie itself to the economic laws of capitalism and its view of the working masses as mere factors of production.

Marxism rejects both these positions by taking as its starting point the social being of the working class. The working class encounters directly and inescapably the determining effects of both physical nature, the weight of the stone, the resistance of the metal, the cold of the winter, the heat of the sun, and of economic and social relations, the pressure of poverty, the necessity to sell its labour power, the impact of unemployment, the invisible but real obstacles to social mobility. Yet, at the same time, the working class is continuously and directly involved in the conscious effort to transform both nature and social relations. Potentially it has the collective power to overturn the entire social system and establish a new society in which it will simultaneously produce and consciously direct production. It is on this foundation that Marxism transcends idealism and mechanical materialism in dialectical materialism which finds its highest expression in conscious revolutionary practice. Conscious revolutionary practice is activity which makes use of the fullest possible understanding of all the natural and social forces constraining and shaping human behaviour in order to tip the balance in favour of the working class and rescue humanity from the abyss.

The entire article is on point, but the quoted paragraphs especially stood out to me since they highlight the inconsistencies, unscientific, and general problematic irrationalism of bourgeois thought. The actual refutation of 'absolute determinism' however, is not present in the quoted text because of the length and complexity which the author goes into, but is discussed near the top of the article following the first two quoted paragraphs I provided, beginning under the heading "Determinism: absolute and relative". You may want to read that section in understanding why overly zealous, predictive statements like "pure communism will never happen" are not only logically absurd and childish, but in general, meaningless in the face of ever changing material conditions.

The problems of bourgeois idealism, especially in the context explained above, are numerous and obvious since they completely ignore or downplay the social forces that shape our existence. Less obvious, but equally flawed, is the mechanical materialism employed by bourgeois social scientists and psychologists.

'Mechanical materialism' has never been able to prove its hypothesis on any legitimate and thoroughly scientific level that inequality, hierarchy, racism, competition, and other philosophical nonsense used by ideologues of the given social order, are innate and unchanging to the human species (rather than being ideas that have to be and in fact are socially learned). There isn't a SINGLE credible scientific source to support this hypothesis, it is entirely heresy - at best. At worst, propagandistic mumbo jumbo. Marxism, by contrast, has numerous credible and scientific sources that can reasonably support its historical conclusions in various spheres; be it history, economics, sociology, psychology, political science, or historical/cultural anthropology. This is because it is governed by relative determinism, which is broader and more flexible and thus allows it more explanatory power than bourgeois explanations of society that are premised upon either absolute determinism or absolute/strong indeterminism; the former is inflexible, narrow, and too rigid while the latter suffers from being overly broad and based on loose abstractions.

Granted, Marxism cannot directly disprove the notion of an innate biological nature of humans that determines their thought processes and behavior, but it doesn't need to. The party making the claim of a positive, in this case the supposedly indisputable but lofty claim of an intrinsic and unchanging nature of humans, ALWAYS has the burden of proof. ALWAYS. Just as atheists do not have the burden of disproving the existence of god, but theists DO have the burden of proving his/her existence.

So long as the material conditions of capitalism continue to generally reflect the social, historical, and economic analysis of it as seen using the method of Historical Materialism, Marxism will remain not only relevant, but it will be the more accurate, cohesive, and fundamental understanding of human society than any form of bourgeois thought can ever muster.