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.
That is because they, demonstratively, haven’t read any actual Marx or Engels. Or Lenin or really anyone who had a real impact on political power. For them Marxism is purely arguing about philosophical terms between the dialectic of materialism and idealism, usually argueing against a vulgar materialist Marxism that the ideological founders and nobody of any consequence outside of the academy ever actually advocated for.
This is in the same way that I have met people with PhDs who supposedly focused in Freud, who clearly have only read summaries of his works or at best skimmed quotes that supported the things that they wrote about. Instead of attempting to understand how radical and influential these thinkers are, and how far we have strayed or Flanderized their insights, these academics attempt to subsume them into the larger and more moderate theoretical fields and histories.
I’ve started to realize this about Freud after reading about his work bit more. I think it was a lecture or a presentation by Richard Wolff that got me to reconsider a lot of assumptions I had picked up.
And yup, it is like being political is a curse word and for bourgeoise academia it obviously is. I just hate that the result of it all and the way academia itself maintains the status quo with all of the “good practices” it would like to cast as unbiased and objective is that if I want to say anything at all about anything I am going to first have to spend so much time refuting the postmodernists, Western marxists, evidence-based bros etc. etc. when I would in fact just want to say: “Fuck you, Foucault.”
Reading someone like Giddens over and over again brings nothing of value whatsoever to anything concrete and yet that is what we are still reading. And Marx is considered a classical, but redundant theorist. Even though his analysis does withstand the test of time.
I have also never really understood the charges against materialism. The following quote from an article I read explains really well how clearly even consciousness is based on materialism and yet the debate is seemingly forever fair game.
I think it stems from this strange idea that you have to be saying ‘new things’ in order to be relevant in academia, when in the past you could spend generations mulling over old ideas until you eventually stumbled onto a unique thought that could be considered your own. I believe it was Camus or Sartre who said that pretty much all ‘new’ forms of thought that supposedly disprove Marxist thought are literally just rehashings of older forms of thought that were addressed by Marxists. Marx and Engels are dismissed as ‘redundant’ precisely because they have been so influential that they overshadow everything that has come after it.
For academics, I think it is far easier for them to play in the shade than actually try to grapple with, and continue to climb the tree. A consequence of the bourgeois academy.
It’s Sartre, and here’s the quote:
I tend to not agree with Sartre, but to my knowledge Camus never seriously dealt with Marxism at all, unless you for some reason want to call his attack in “The Rebel” serious.
Camus and Sartre literally had a falling out over the necessary amount of violence needed to protect the revolution, in particular as it pertained to the Soviet Union in the 50’s, with the former believing the USSR to be too violent in its actions.
I would agree that most of Camus’s writings didn’t deal all that seriously with Marxism, but his intellectual life was all about seriously dealing with the implications of Marxism and how that affected intellectual life in France.
Both of them are annoying bastards who I am not fond of, but I do agree with that particular summary, as it has been accurate to my philosophical reading as well. Most people who aren’t going off of Marx are usually unknowingly riffing on Hegel, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, or even Plato and Aristotle, unless they are directly referencing those authors. I specifically find alot of contemporary pop philosopher types tend to just be rehashing Plato. Real demise of democracy hours.
On the whole “going beyond” Marxism at its worst I’ve found it very eye-opening when I’ve read the postmodernists and realized how conservative they actually are, how most seem to be secrectly pining for some sort of return to tradition. How the supposed anxiety of the times they love to theorize on seems to just reflect their anxieties on how their reality is losing coherence (which most often translates to loss of control in systems of control that to these people work as privileges).
Exactly. And many if not all of the French theory etc. seems just preoccupied with the superstructure with no focus on the base. Which is of course handy as then you really don’t have to advocate for any meaningful change.