this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
19 points (100.0% liked)

ProleWiki

1069 readers
1 users here now

ProleWiki

A community related to the ProleWiki project.

Post in this community to request articles, provide suggestions and discuss ways to develop our project

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

What do I mean by this? Well, this is how The German Ideology used to look on ProleWiki:

https://en.prolewiki.org/index.php?title=Library%3AThe_German_ideology&oldid=85037

And this is what it looks like now: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_German_ideology

In the 'before', the book was imported entirely on a single page. This is how all books on prolewiki are.

In the after, the book is on a single page, but you can also use the integrated table of contents to navigate directly inside a chapter subpage. E.g.: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_German_ideology/The_essence_of_the_materialist_conception_of_history_Social_being_and_social_consciousness

This gives readers choice as to how they want to read books.

We have to run a script on every library page individually so it'll take some time and new books will probably lag behind before they're split, but this is a net positive overall

Also reminder to press '0' on your keyboard (desktop only) when using prolewiki to enable reading mode, and check the gear icon in the sidebar for customization/accessibility options.

top 11 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] ComandanteCapybara@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Oh wow, having a whole chapter subpage directly in a single page is amazing!! I look forward to having that option with other books then :)

Thank you for the change! Def a net positive

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It will take a while to format the books because we do them one at a time, but if there's one you're reading right now you can send me the link and I can run the script on it!

[–] ComandanteCapybara@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Oh that's a very kind offer, thank you!!

I do have Materialism and Empirio-criticism next on my reading list if you don't mind :)

I think that should work since the whole book is already uploaded and available on the website

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah for sure, it takes five seconds with the script :)

[–] ComandanteCapybara@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 9 months ago

Extremely fast, it already converted the whole book! Much appreciated, thank you

fidel-salute

[–] pcalau12i@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Be unbiased and read Bogdanov's The Philosophy of Living Experience as well. :)

[–] ComandanteCapybara@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Interesting! I have never heard of that one but I saw that Lenin has a few different chapters already in this book about Bogdanov and his work. So it might indeed be worth checking out to see how their views different at some point :)

[–] pcalau12i@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

This is prob a hot take given this is lemmygrad but in my opinion Lenin is rather unfair to Bogdanov in that book. Lenin sees what we directly observe prior to applying any sort of cognitive interpretation to it or even being aware of it, i.e. the raw sensuous experience itself, as a mental thing created by the mind, what he calls a "reflection of reality" as opposed to reality itself. Bogdanov denies that there exists a reality beyond experience / beyond what we observe, and so Lenin interprets this to mean he is saying that all that exists is mental stuff and accuses him repeatedly of being an idealist.

But Bogdanov's main thesis is not that we are trapped in some sort of mental "reflection of reality" and reality and that non-mental reality doesn't exist, but that he is not convinced by the argument that we can't perceive material reality directly. Philosophers often use arguments from dreams or illusions to try and "prove" that what we perceive cannot be directly equivalent to material reality as it actually exists but is sort of a purely mental creation. Bogdanov goes through these arguments and shows how, in his opinion, they don't actually work and can be rather easily refuted.

Bogdanov also is clear that he rejects the thing-in-itself, which Lenin interprets this unfairly as more proof he is an idealist, but Bogdanov is just taking the stance that the material world is not actually divisible up into discrete "things" that can be considered in complete isolation from one another. Everything is interconnected from his view, and it is humans who divide up the world into discrete objects as a way to make sense of it. What is "real" for him is just what we perceive, what we are actually looking at when we label something as a particular thing, like a "dog" or a "cat," and not the label itself.

Bogdanov's view is rather comparable to the later Wittgenstein's views, and there is a modern philosophical school called contextual realism created by the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist that is also rather similar. A lot of idealist philosophers will attack Kant's notion of the "noumena" because if it lies beyond experience then by definition it is not observable and so we can never actually be certain that it is even there or what its properties are, but they will leave the "phenomena" in tact, and thus believe everything is mental. If you read Benoist's book Toward a Contextual Realism, there is a whole category criticizing the notion of phenomenality, criticizing common arguments given, such as those from illusions, as actually demonstrating what we perceive cannot be considered reality as it directly exists.

Bogdanov was not some anti-Marxist idealist, he was a materialist and a Marxist he just didn't agree with metaphysical realism but was a direct realist. Idealism is when you deny Kant's "noumena" but uphold his "phenomena." That wasn't Bogdanov's position, he wasn't an idealist. He rejected the whole phenomena-noumena distinction entirely, seeing them both as wrong, and took a direct realist stance. This is not in conflict with the materialism because the material sciences are driven by what we observe, by empirical evidence, and so if you believe what we observe is equivalent to reality, then the material sciences are a direct description of material reality.

[–] darkernations@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Do you lot have a monero address where one can donate?

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

We have a few donation methods here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Donate, I think we closed down our monero address because it was a hassle to manage though.

[–] darkernations@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Thank you for your good hard work!

zoidberg salute 2