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.
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My horticulture degree taught me how to do The Grapes of Wrath. It’s one of the most dialectical sciences out there, you can make a big socioecological impact, and it’s so radicalising that it made me a Double Communist. Not only was there absolutely no radical content, but they let a cattle industry contractor with a vineyard background teach the only agroecology class that might contain something radical. Not only was there nothing philosophical, but they used Malthusian bullshit to explain why industrial agriculture is actually cool+good. My job is doing eco-Marxism but there wasn’t even an environmentalist angle to the degree, let alone any mention that radical environmentalism exists.
I hate STEM as an academic culture. It produces redditors. It only teaches you how to be a redditor with some technical niche. If I had started my degree at 18 without some existing societal critique it would have lobotomised me.
I hate STEM as an academic culture. It produces redditors.
I hate how correct you are because the rest of my working life will probably be spent surrounded by exactly this culture/mentality
I just feel increasingly disillusioned about my ability to ever write a Marxist dissertation in Western academia, one that would actually pass.
Write one anyway, fuck 'em
This is the plan.
Hell yeah, respect
Yeah I am absolutely going to die on this hill.
The Marx quote I always think about is the one about philosophers intreperting the world in various ways and how the point is to change it.
The best you will find in western academia is trotskyists who, in their talking points and views on AES, are indiscernable from feds.
B-b-but they use the word “Bonapartism” instead of "authoritarianism*!!
Conservatives are pretty dumb but there are not fully blind
There’s a reason anti intellectualism is a big thing in the usa ,and I am not gonna say becoming big because I feel that it already has
western academia has a lot of bs ,people can be and are very stupid but when it goes to the degree of “don’t believe you lying eyes” its when you reach the point of no return
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.
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.
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.
Trying to do science in Free Country but getting accused of Doublespeak
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Real.
Honestly I feel like most of my time studying and reading Marxist stuff these past 5-6 years has been about eventually realising 99% of the modern western literature and “schools” and thinkers are useless and wrong. And that NOBODY FUCKING READS MARX AND ENGELS.
Like please give me back the time I wasted reading Debord. PLEASE.
And those few that claim they did only talk about alienation and yet typically don’t really seem to understand what Marx meant by it.
I particularly hate how they try to paint many, clearly not at all Marxist, writers like Bourdieu or the critical realist guy Bashkar as somehow Marxist.
It probably means nothing, but when I was applying for grad school, there was a requirement to submit a previous work, and basically the only piece of writing I had at the time that I didn’t feel revolted by was a nearly-exhaustive critique Popper’s lecture Science: Conjectures and Refutations as pertains to Marxism. I think there were a few points that I forgot to address, but really the only difficulties I had were finding ways of deconstructing his sophistic, ironically anti-science rhetoric and also following his knot of self-reference to other works so that I could actually work with a complete argument that didn’t use “well, I proved this point in a book I wrote” as axioms. Looking back on it now, I don’t think it was a great essay, but it was fine.
Anyway, I gave this essay to very anticommunist academics and they thought I did a good job, so I was accepted. I agree with you that the vast majority of academics don’t have any substantial familiarity with Marxism, sometimes really none at all, and yet many still feel that they can speak authoritatively on it and don’t hesitate to do so. I nonetheless believe, and this was my purpose in writing this comment, that for most of these people you can present good arguments to them and they will accept them as being good arguments. You aren’t going to change their mind on almost anything, but they will simultaneously not just thwart you for being a communist (depending on the person). I guess that’s what happens when someone really believes in liberal pluralism.
I also encountered people who understood that liberalism stands against democracy and therefore explicitly adopted the position of opposing democracy. They ultimately were so tied up in spewing fatuous nonsense that I just couldn’t deal with them because I lacked whatever elements of personal character would be required to deal with someone who almost never speaks in good faith.
Anyway, I think it’s unlikely that you’ll find some kind of model Marxist mentor, but I believe that especially for writing a PhD, you should be more oriented toward educating yourself with constructive feedback given from your advisors on a conversational basis rather than seeking an ideal mentor. It sucks that they don’t have the knowledge we would hope for to direct you to pertinent information you didn’t already know about Marxism, but just having people who can follow and critique arguments on a deductive basis and have knowledge about adjacent topics (you can’t defend Marxism without attacking liberal paradigms, which they usually will be familiar with and strenuously defend) should be enough.
I agree with this as well, though I have approached the same topics purely from an undergraduate level, before my career transition into STEM.
Good advice, thank you.
At least he is a Frankfurt school guy and not a french theory guy
Lol yep, but to balance it out the entire rest of them are French theory guys.
Around two thirds of social science academics are basically hucksters.
