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.

  • StillNoLeftLeft [none/use name, she/her]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
    11·
    2 months ago

    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.

    At a meta-theoretical level we can say that the world upon which humans labour is not a passive object. As Engels says, ‘(the world) does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution’ (Engels. Anti-duhring 1975; 360.

    Different layers of the world are a particular and relatively autonomous manifestation and development of a universal material substance. The world is in a state of motion. Consciousness exists as a qualitative manifestation of this motion and, as a form of matter, consciousness assists labour in thinking about the appropriation of this motion to meet human needs. Yet `to think’ is to think about ‘something’. Thus although matter exists independently of consciousness, consciousness cannot exist independently of matter (Sayers 1983: 18). ’

    Thought’ itself is a particular, distinct manifestation of matter. So much so, in fact, that `history itself is a real part of natural history-of nature developing into man’ (Marx 1970: 143). Consciousness and human agency arise from natural-historical circumstances in the form of a being for self-creation (Marx and Engels 1968: 39-40; see also Hoffman 1986: 117: Woolison 19820.

    Consciousness, as a material substance, is thereby a reflection of reality. As Marx announces: `For Hegel, the process of thinking is the creator of the real world… .With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man and translated into forms of thought’ (Marx 1988: 102).

    • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      12·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        6·
        2 months ago

        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.

        It’s Sartre, and here’s the quote:

        If philosophy is to be simultaneously a totalisation of knowledge, a method, a regulative Idea, an offensive weapon, and a community of language, if this “vision of the world” is also an instrument which ferments rotten societies, if this particular conception of a man or of a group of men becomes the culture and sometimes the nature of a whole class-then it is very clear that the periods of philosophical creation are rare. Between the seventeenth century and the twentieth, I see three such periods, which I would designate by the names of the men who dominated them: there is the “moment” of Descartes and Locke, that of Kant and Hegel, finally that of Marx. These three philosophies become, each in its turn, the humus of every particular thought and the horizon of all culture; there is no going beyond them so long as man has not gone beyond the historical moment which they express. I have often remarked on the fact that an “anti-Marxist” argument is only the apparent rejuvenation of a pre-Marxist idea. A so-called “going beyond” Marxism will be at worst only a return to pre-Marxism; at best, only the rediscovery of a thought already contained in the philosophy which one believes he has gone beyond.

        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.

        • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          4·
          2 months ago

          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.

        • StillNoLeftLeft [none/use name, she/her]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
          4·
          2 months ago

          there is no going beyond them so long as man has not gone beyond the historical moment which they express. I have often remarked on the fact that an “anti-Marxist” argument is only the apparent rejuvenation of a pre-Marxist idea. A so-called “going beyond” Marxism will be at worst only a return to pre-Marxism; at best, only the rediscovery of a thought already contained in the philosophy which one believes he has gone beyond.

          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).

      • StillNoLeftLeft [none/use name, she/her]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
        5·
        2 months ago

        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.