GenZhouArchive

u/aimixin - originally from r/GenZhou
While having knowledge of future technology can help you industrialize faster, you still have to go through the process of industrializing. It is incredibly idealist to think of people who had knowledge of advanced economies were teleported back to the feudal era that they could just bring advanced socialism into existence in one stroke.

The society would be backwards by thousands of years. Nobody would even know what they were talking about. Even if they could beam the knowledge directly into people's heads, while they might develop faster, it would still take a long time, because they still have to develop. It could still take centuries to move from the feudal system to a socialist system even with full knowledge of it.

I mean, the entire point of Marxism is to try to create a theory of development so we can predict future developments in order to help us develop faster. But Marx makes it clear you still have to develop towards it, and says explicitly a ruling communist party cannot simply abolish private property by decree but only in proportion to its development, so it should rapidly develop the economy as fast as possible to facilitate this transition.

The claim that material conditions don't matter is absolutely idealist no matter how you spin it. You still have to go through the steps of material development even if you know what is next.

The analogy also is rather useless to us because we don't live on a planet 300 years from now where this technology has been invented. You and the other person are talking explicitly about implementing a fully planned economy now independent of the material conditions and independent of even having knowledge of what this would look like since no economy has ever developed productive forces high enough that all the means of production have been socialized.

We don't have a future person from 2321. We are still figuring out stuff here and now, all we have is predictions from Marxian economics which helps us to know what direction we have to go and a general idea of what the process would look like. But we have to continue focusing on development as rapidly as possible to ever actually get there. The claim you can just implement full planning by fiat is idealist. There is no way to spin this otherwise. It absolutely is idealist in every way, shape, and form. It is literally the entire conception of "idealism" that Marxism was attacking in The German Ideology.