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Social sciences ranting (hexbear.net)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by StillNoLeftLeft@hexbear.net to c/chat@hexbear.net

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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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[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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@hexbear.net 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 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@hexbear.net 4 points 4 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).