“Communism bad”
“Why?”
200 year old tropes so ancient they were debunked by Marx himself
Of course, you go through the motions of explaining the most basic political concepts that could be grasped by skimming the cliff notes for literally any Marxist works
“Friedrich Engels? Is he like the president of Germany or something?”
It’s like a kindergartener trying to teach you calculus.
The more Marx (or good Marxist theory more generally) that you read, the more you realise how detached from reality liberal discourse about anything even remotely connected to Marxist thought is. This is blindingly obvious in mainstream economics departments, where the average professor or TA normally manages to combine both shocking ignorance of any economic theory beyond their barrenly narrow purview, and depressing naivety when it comes to the apparent self-evidence of their arguments.
That being said, economics is only the most obvious example. Set foot inside the average history, sociology or anthropology department and the epistemic consequences of a lack of Marxist approaches becomes immediately obvious when you see the low quality of alot of the work being produced and ask why that’s the case.
History probably has the best showing, although it’s nothing like it was in the 1960’s or 70’s, and I suspect that that’s because history is an area where the necessity of a materialist analysis makes itself the most immediately obvious, and because the results in this area achieved by Marxist are obviously superior and so more easily form the basis for further productive historical analysis. For example the debates around the origins of capitalism out of late feudalism cannot avoid the Brenner Debate. You see the influence of materialist thought here even in thinkers who are not explicitly Marxist. Historians who are otherwise not rigorously materialist and politically liberal will still sometimes readily recognise the validity, or make use of, class-analysis.
Sociology is interesting because it’s mainstream’s basic methods seem deeply idealistic to me despite the fact that Marx is also one of the key figures in the development of modern sociology, and given that Marx’s political economy, as opposed to modern neoclassical economics, recognises that you cannot really engage in productive economic analysis beyond a very superficial level if you do not recognise that it’s essential to talk about the economic sociology, the economic institutions and social structures that serve differnent socio-economic functions and fit together in certain contexts to distribute the socio-economics functions amongst themselves, including the fundamentally important point of noting how different societies and different modes of production will see different social structures serve as the social relations of production. Otherwise you end up with an idealist theory of economic production.
Honestly though you also see this among self-described leftists or even ‘Marxists’ who do not understand the meaning of the term ‘value’ in Marx, i.e. that it is a technical economic concept, not a moral one (though through its social and political implications we are obviously naturally going to attach normative value to how it functions or affects us).
Another think that both liberals and soc dems do when discussing Marxism is taking quotes completely out of context and radically misunderstanding or misinterpreting what it being claimed or discussed. Which just makes all the more obvious the need for reeducation in the fundamentals of Marxism.
We’re so used to thinking of our fiscal debts to financial institutions and creditors as an extension of our social obligation to one another. It’s perverse. Liberals especially love thinking along these lines - it appeals to their love of politics as a vessel for virtuous self flagellation (austerity politics, bootstrapping, individual choice/responsibility, etc, all the shit that exemplifies how liberals are in fact right-wing), as well as their sycophantic and undiscerning adulation for institutions. You’ll probably never get any of these people to pick up Capital, let alone give you a rebuttal to something like the labor theory of value (as you mention, these people are not serious), but you might be able to make inroads by pointing them to David Graeber. The first chapter of Debt, “On the issue of moral confusion,” addresses this topic directly.
Side note, Trillbillies just had a guest author on whose work dealt with this concept, and I could not believe they didn’t mention Graeber even once.
:graeber:
I have a copy of Debt sitting on my bookshelf, I got it as a Christmas present last year, I should really get around to reading it finally
Say what you will about professional philosophy (and there’s a lot of negative stuff to say about it), but my experience has been that people with doctorates in philosophy tend to both understand Marx better and be more receptive to his points than people in most other departments. Maybe I’ve just gotten lucky, though.
I disagree. They talk about it in a way that looks different, but philosophy academics tend to functionally be very liberal and just have more sophisticated ways of defending roughly the same stupid positions
You’re correct that the big majority of philosophy academics are liberal. It’s good to bear in mind tho imo that philosophy professors are not the only people employed as philosophy educators or teachers and are far from the only people who have seriously studied philosophy, formally or informally. There are a decent number of Marxist philosophy PhD’s, not least from the combination of their experience of the labor market and the fact that they’ve had the time or priviledge to think critically about and ‘deconstruct’ certain key concepts that are essential parts of capitalist/liberal ideology.
The issue is not so much, imo, in areas of philosophy like philosophy of science, mathematics, language, logic or even epistemology and metaphysics. The more immediate issue is when it comes to areas like moral or political philosophy, or philosophy of economics. The biases in these latter cases are really evident and you are correct imo that when considering that social function they are largely serving as more sophicated mechanisms of ideological legitimation of liberalism or reformism. E.g. any western political philosophy department is going to be dominated by Rawlsians, i.e. the least politically relevant and most mind-numbingly boring political theory that was ever shat over the face of the earth. The most recent wave of Rawlsian thought is soc-dem in nature, looking at his late texts on ‘property-owning democracy’, meaning accepts to have soc-dem societies which ‘socialism’ has been reached by reform but in which there is still private property. Obviously even a slight understanding of Marxist theory dispells this idea as obviously incoherent. The reason it is still present is because it acts as a moral paliative that petit-bourgeois soc-dem intellectuals - who are intelligent enough to realise that contemporary capitalism is completely fucked up but are neither intellectually sophicated enough nor morally strong enough to correctly diagnose it or offer genuine solutions - can use to sooth their consciences.
That being said, you do often see a correlation with how deeply or seriously people are interested in philosophy and their interest in Marxism. The danger is that these people are often simply intellectual Marxists or Marxians with an abstract idea of politics. This is generally far from being entirely their fault, but it is a danger. In practice they are often interested more in abstract argument about certain ideas as opposed to the empirical and historical adequacy of Marxism as a theory of social reality.
Right! This is a criticism of philosophy in general, and I think it’s very well-founded. In particular, the incentive structure of professional philosophy tends to encourage this kind of abstract theorizing that’s disconnected from real-world social ills. Any kind of “applied” philosophy (applied ethics, applied political theory, philosophy of any particular science, &c.) is very much treated as a kind of second-class research project within the profession, and inferior to “pure” metaphysics & epistemology. My own area of specialization, foundations of climate science, is no exception here: making contact with concrete problems, or engaging with actual scientific work, is always seen as less prestigious than working on pure logic-chopping abstract theories.
I do think you’re right that you’re not incredibly likely to find “practicing” Marxists at the upper echelons of tenured R1 philosophy (though there are a few prominent exceptions that I’m aware of, and it still seems a bit more common than it is in most other disciplines). However, there’s a vast underclass of (let’s say) lumpenprofessoriat members–adjuncts, community college professors, non-tenured lecturers, and so on–that is, in my experience, extremely likely to endorse and be engaged with Marxist thought. As you say, this is almost certainly down to material conditions, at least to a great extent. I do think that a background in philosophical reasoning can help with
though.
Yeah it does seem to me that philosophy department’s and the imposition of ‘publish-or-perish’ culture there (in a place where that makes possibly the least sense), compounds the issue of people starting their careers as academics and searching from a cottage-industry to milk for the sake of publishing; which is obviously not the kind of environment where philosophy will best do it’s actual job of helping to dialectically clarify and conceptually develop the other areas of science, ethics, politics and aesthetics (in collaboration with these fields obvs). There are exceptions but they are still only exceptions which prove the rule imo.
Yeh the lumpen-intelligentsia has far more Marxists in it (as you can see on this site) than many or even most current demographics in many societies, which is interesting as they are now the large majority of actual workers in higher education and yet remain largely invisible.
I agree.
Actually I’d go further and say that everyone should get the opportunity to study philosophy in school, and that everyone who pursues study in any subject should have to, or be encourage to, take at least one or a couple philosophy and history courses on the subject they study, e.g. philosophy of physics, biology, economics, sociology… By contrast I don’t really think there should be formal education in philosophy by itself without study other subjects to keep urself grounded and to do philosophy on. Abstraction and speculation do still need a minimum of grounding in the concrete if they are going to be meaningful or applicable imo.
If by philosophy we mean the most general study of the must general, asbtract or fundamental properties of the world, including as applied to specific key topics or areas of knowledge, then even aside from philosophical questions of ontology, epistemology, aesthetics and ethics, the reason I think that having access to engaging in philosophy proper is worthwhile is that seriously studying philosophy really can help you work on your ability of critical and conceptual analysis and logical argument. This aids our own understanding of topics and makes more convincing as Marxists. Again, the different between Marxism and utopian socialism is that it is scientific. Even on this site I think you see quite a few discussions which drift into the territory of philosophy but which seem to contain alot of confusion because people are using terms with very different meanings but then talking simultaneously as if they were debating about the same topic. This obviously doesn’t mean that every convo is like this or that any really is in it’s entirety, but it does highlight how necessary it is to try make as clear as reasonably possible from the onset what we mean when we suddenly start using abstract or technical terms, in order to avoid needless confusion.
There are of course many (often-correct) negative stereotypes about philosophy students and academic philosophy, which I agree are valid. One consequence of this is that, frankly, I’m not always convinced that the students in their class on, like, Baudrillard are really working on their critical and analytical skills in the ways they would if they studied other thinkers, schools or topics.
That being said, no one needs to deeply study philosophy or it’s history to understand the essential core of Marxism, Marxist politics or to engage as an effective militant. On the other hand, I really resent when people imply that we prols are slack-jawed meat sacks without the ability to think theoretically, abstractly or philosophically ourselves and on our own terms. I’ve met many brilliant organic working class intellectuals who could have pursued careers in respectable academia - and in fact blow the liberal professors who hold those spots out of the water - but are not as interested or would never have been given a place there if they were going to try and do anything remotely hinting of Marxist-influenced work.
Hard agree. My favorite definition of the field is Wilfred Sellers’: “the aim of philosophy is to study how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” Some education–and experience in thinking about that stuff–is invaluable no matter what you’re doing; it’s the field of study that is (or at least can be) most laser-focused on critical thinking skills. I’d never advise anyone to get a PhD in it, but it absolutely should be part of general high school and college curricula, and it’s an extremely versatile and valuable undergraduate major.
Agree again. Teasing out relatively mundane positions from deliberately impenetrable texts isn’t super useful for most people, and while it might give you some transferrable skill in exegesis, there are better ways to spend your time. A good philosophical education should focus on clarity of expression, rigorous thought, and careful definition of the terms/groundwork of a problem. Those are all incredibly useful skills, and are invaluable in seeing exactly how fucked up our contemporary economic system is. A good philosophical education will also make you comfortable asking “why” questions about things that are, to most people, just transparent parts of the status quo: it teaches you to be bothered by ordinary things, which is the first step toward awakening from (so to speak) the dogmatic slumber of liberal indoctrination.
Yeah I actually had Sellars’ definition in mind when I said that :) Interestingly Sellars begain philosophically as a Marxist from time spent in Europe and then unfortunately moved away from this, but was always firmly on the left from what I understand. Not very different to Hilary Putnam if we’re talking about yankie analytic philosophers. Obviously the value of their work is abstract not very socially or politically relevant. You can see a Marxist/Hegelian influence in his later thought though, and he put forward a process-based metaphysics at points.
I agree that I would never recomment someone to get a philosophy PhD but that’s mainly because it will be a very stressful experience and not worth if jobs-wise unless they already feel they are getting selected by certain profs for future careers.
On the Baudrillard point I think it’s also because, given his rejection of a scientific approach to philosophy as Marxism would ideally like to establish and be based on, there’s necessarily also a rejection of concern for evidence and critically analyzing what the criteria or conditions for evidence, verification, confirmation, and systematic progress of the field are, and in Baudrillard I think this actually leads to an incoherent theory of signs. Obviously not important but it is for me a case study of the decline of critical though in many parts of academia, and which correlates strongly with the decline of Marxism in these places. I do also obvs agree that some of these (ahem, mainly French) thinkers are needlessly obscure. I’d add that they’re not necessarily less obscure in French.
Also ofc agree with your last comment. It’s a shame that there’s a tendency you sometimes see where people associate those things with ‘boring positivist analytics’, but is weird as a supposed rebuttal by itself, but also speaks to an ignorance of not only analytic thought by also the history of Marxist philosophy.
Also pretty funny when liberals see when we criticize them because they think we sound like chuds because they can’t comprehend that chuds are also liberals.
Yh that shit is hilarious. Especially as it speaks volumes about how theoretically fragile their liberal ideology actually is, when their echo-chamber bubble get’s burst and they are confronted with actual critiques that they can’t respond to properly and so right off as being equivalent to far-right ‘populism’. It also reveals tons about their general class background and classist elitism that for them anything that even remotely smacks of ‘appeals to the people’ can be equated as ‘populism’, which also tells you that these liberals are very much stuck in a realm of ideological discourse and virtue signalling where what matters is not the actual meaning and practical implications and real actions of communists, but the sounds of the words and whether those same sounds are made by other people they dislike and can easily demonize because they are already obviously tarnished (i.e. conservatives and fascists).