Reading for an exam and the author just states:
the structuralist thinking of Marx and Durkheim, for example, operates within a largely positivistic framework.
Seriously, the more of these mainstream academia books I read the more I feel like none of these people have actually spent any real time reading Marx or trying to understand marxist theory.
On positivism and Marxism from my other self-appointed readings
No point to this post really, I just feel increasingly disillusioned about my ability to ever write a Marxist dissertation in Western academia, one that would actually pass. There aren’t even anyone to teach me or guide me in it in my field, the most Marxist guy I’ve found is firmly a Frankfurt school type.
Another one from today that was a real banger was an article by a Finnish professor on whether Marx is still useful for theories of social work.
In his article he smuggly asserts that the reason why radical Marxist social work never got traction here is because “Finnish Marxist theory was more sophisticated compared to for example the radical tradition in the USA” and how the tradition in the US and Britain was too old-fashioned and political.
Why is that though? Why is that!
He goes on to state how the tradition here definitely did not find inspiration in the Soviet Union but instead looked up to Swedish, Danish and German traditions with “extremely sophisticated Marx-exegetics”
It also mourns the “murder of Trotsky” by Stalin and just states, with no citations whatsoever, the following: “The Marx studies of Stalin and his contemporaries did not produce historically sustainable results.”
This thing also has a chapter on how utterly odd and foreign it must sound to a Finnish reader that anyone would have for realsies been persecuted for their Marxist views like very much happened during mccharthyism in the US, because in smol bean nazi country such a thing would never happen. He actually spends time justifying how this isn’t just conspiracy thinking.
Handily bringing receipts on how totally the struggle here has been swept under the rug and forgotten. And how texts like this still work to keep it forgotten.
fascist gangs were literally kidnapping social fucking democrats and driving them over to the border with Soviet Russia in the 30s, and that’s because all the actual communists were either dead, in prison or already exiled to Russia, god i hate this fucking country
Right!? And the way they managed to spin these “muilutukset” in school was wild. It was presented like it was some tongue in cheek horseplay between political rivals and not taking people from their beds in the middle of the night to be driven into the woods to be tortured and shot in the back. Which is what happened too, the “thrown across the border” is still the more mainstream mild stuff.
It’s the same story with everything we “know” about the last 150 or so years here. From Karelia to the civil war, from Mannerheim to Donald Duck, from finlandization to nato it’s all very much bourgeoisie reality.
Did he forget about Finland’s White Terror?
Honestly this is never presented as such here. Not in education, nowhere. In the mainstream none of the civil war stuff is discussed much and if it is, it’s always vague.
If you come across this information, you have to find it yourself.