Talk:Economic materialism

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[edit] Sucky article

I agree that this article is currently sucky. Hippie bias in the article. Needs to be connected more with the other Materialism article. That "personal relationships" should be put above wealth/objects is an assertion Wikipedia is not entitled to make. But since when do anti-Materialists bother with any restriction on what they can say and pretend to be neutral. Colour me successfully offended. If this kind of thing isn't brought into check across the whole encyclopedia, someone else, not me, will create a right-wing fork of the whole damn thing. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 62.252.224.17 (talk • contribs) .

[edit] Archive gibberish added by troll

This diff url [1] shows that the following gibberish was added by the anonymous user 64.78.86.108. In case this gibberish does make sense, then you can add it back but rewrite in a comprehensible format.

Here is the gibberish:

Just as well, using transformative grammar to explain materialism in the language of cultural anthropology and political science, a sharp distinction between the philosophical definition and the 'scientific' defintion occurs. In the language paradigms of Cultural Materialism and political science, materialism corresponds with states of consciousness which arise from interaction with a society's physical environment. Cultural Materialists analyse cultures using what is known as the Universal Set.

The Universal set has three basic units, infrastructure, structure and superstructure. Every society has these three elements. The infrastructure of a community is the physical landscape. The structure is the economic systems used to manage the resources. Structure can be divided into at least two different types of economies, domestic economy and political economy. The former relates how family and kinship groups interact with their environments to meet their basic needs while the latter deals with trade and relations between family and kinship groups. As societies become more complex, the political economy becomes more complex. The global marketplace has made many societies' political economies interact. In the third and final paradigm is the superstructure. The superstructure consists of abstract ideals and philosophies imbodied in law, religion, culture, and art. Many theories exist as how these abstract ideas arise from a society's infrastructure. See Marvin Harris, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Marx, Max Weber or Bryan Haden.

After rereading this material 5 times, the words seem to make a kind of sense. However, given the anonymous edit, I am still suspicious of this content

WpZurp 00:53, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Have just been reading the "philosophical" materialism page. If I understand the above gibberish, it is talking about a "philosophy", maybe Dialectical materialism or Historical materialism. But I've wasted enough time justifying myself already.

WpZurp 00:58, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Translating from Jargon to English as an intellectual exercise:

Materialism may be equally well explained using the language of cultural anthropology and political science. When it is, a distinction is visible between the philosophical definition and the 'scientific' defintion. Materialism is an attitute towards the world we live in, which can be divided into three basic elements.

Those elements are: the environment; the economy, which can be futher partitioned into the domestic sphere and the wider economy; and the world of abstract ideals and philosophies such as in law, religion, culture, and art. See Karl Marx, Max Weber, two guys hardly anyone has heard of and one guy no-one has so much as written a page on.

And it stops there. Disappointing. I was hoping to learn something about what can be gained by looking at Materialism from those three POV. Oh well.

I still think the best definition of materialism is

Whoever dies with the most toys wins.

Regards, Ben Aveling 20:20, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup? Delete?

Does this page add value? Should it be tagged for cleanup? Or for AfD? Regards, Ben Aveling 01:13, 13 January 2006 (UTC)