Marxist revolutionary theory - let's learn more

[sologdin]

no doubt. (i offered it with a bit of a smirk.) that said, the form of twitter and other internet dumb is a perfect fit for bourgeois ideology.

 

and in keeping with the thread's overall point, here's a decent article on conservatives trying to respond to marx.

[DMC]

1 minute ago, sologdin said:

that said, the form of twitter and other internet dumb is a perfect fit for bourgeois ideology.

Sure I'll definitely agree with that.  But in a way, that's progress?  Instead of billionaire industrialists delivering us our information and influencing our attitudes - which they still do even on the "liberal" stations of MSNBC and CNN - at least it's a bit more democratic.

And yeah, conservatives trying to grapple with the cognitive dissonance of Marx's arguments is at once hilarious, frustrating, and revealing.  Witnessed it up close many many times, even in the classroom.  This graph from the Jacobin article sums it up well:

Quote

Two of the most glaring examples: the conservative penchant for praising capitalism while bemoaning the decline of tradition; and the tendency to invoke an unchanging “human nature” to lambast critics of capitalism while insisting that individuals should be understood in relation to the traditions and communities around them.

 

[sologdin]

that's progress? 

agreed. in part it's a matter of all that is solid melts into air--we shouldn't be too conservative in mocking internet media, which have a democratizing tendency.  that quantitative change, permitted by the form, eventually should itself transform the content qualitatively; i think we've already seen that sort of improvement to items such as wikipedia and goodreads over their lifespans.

[maarsen]

54 minutes ago, sologdin said:

that's progress? 

agreed. in part it's a matter of all that is solid melts into air--we shouldn't be too conservative in mocking internet media, which have a democratizing tendency.  that quantitative change, permitted by the form, eventually should itself transform the content qualitatively; i think we've already seen that sort of improvement to items such as wikipedia and goodreads over their lifespans.

Hmmm. I have often wondered if Gresham's Law applies to information as well as to money. 

[Altherion]

On 8/22/2020 at 10:46 AM, DMC said:

The important corollary is what you mentioned - what gets taught in universities.  Marx may be taught in a political philosophy/theory course (albeit not necessarily), but other than that most poly sci courses aren't going to mention him beyond the obvious impact he had on certain regimes throughout the 20th century.  Whereas in sociology, he's right up there as one of the founding fathers and is essential.

This is location specific, no? Marxism is not fashionable in American political science courses, but I'm fairly confident that in, say, China, all political scientists must know both the original and its difference from their current system.

[DMC]

6 minutes ago, Altherion said:

This is location specific, no? 

Of course.  I have exactly zero experience or firsthand knowledge in what gets taught in poly sci courses outside of the US.

[Durckad]

2 hours ago, DMC said:

Of course.  I have exactly zero experience or firsthand knowledge in what gets taught in poly sci courses outside of the US.

I thought you University types were part of some secret, global Marxist cabal? What, were you out indoctrinating children the day they sent out the memo?

[DMC]

5 minutes ago, Durckad said:

I thought you University types were part of some secret, global Marxist cabal? What, were you out indoctrinating children the day they sent out the memo?

I believe I was in a Deep State revision of Balzac at the time.

[DanteGabriel]

Just now, DMC said:

I believe I was in a Deep State revision of Balzac at the time.

Nice try. Almost got that euphemism past...

[sologdin]

if Gresham's Law applies to information as well as to money

definitely. expertise takes work--even understanding expertise takes work, whereas dunning-kruger is the default condition. we can see glib, facile narratives take hold readily as complicated, nuanced positions are forced out. qualitative distinctions, such as the racialist's black/white, are simple, but quantitative spectra are not. i like the democratizing tendency of wikipedia, say--but the really useful information is not all available freely on the internet yet.  for now, it is a risky time of greatly increased access. 

 

fairly confident that in, say, China, all political scientists must know both the original and its difference from their current system.

maybe. those in my ambit report that there's less interest in marxism in china than we might think.  consider further a recent article in NLR, which has this handy chart. (s. zhan. 'the land question in 21st century china.' new left review 122 (mar/apr 2020) at 125.) it's a great article--but NB that all of the solutions are market-oriented. this is not even a moderate georgism, as we see in fairhope, alabama, or a cautious land trust type solution, such as how maine manages forests or louisiana holds the basin; the options are almost entirely supportive of dispossessing the peasants to sell to large private holders. this can be consistent with marxism--a cautious development of the productive forces, perhaps--though the classical theory wants private civil society to develop the productive forces until it is unable to do so any longer, at which point the state takes over. the leninist revision perhaps is more aggressive, as is the maoist.  but marxism big tent need not be.  

 

University types were part of some secret, global Marxist cabal?

there's a paralegal who works in my office, a true trump cultist, and this sort of conspiracism is a basic article of the faith for him.  i tried to explain that when i taught at university, i could pour subtle crypto-marxist slickness all over students' individualistic entitlement through subversive cross-examination, or i could assault frontally their fortresses of bourgeois indifference with the arsenal of leftwing theory--FFS, i taught walter benjamin and terry eagleton and edward said and dubois and heaven forfend chomsky and wtf why foucault to undergraduates.

none of it made an appreciable difference, as far as i could tell.  maybe one or two students was interested in the ideas, and perhaps seeds were planted for later development (that's what happened to me--university was transformative from apathetic liberal to committed radical).  but on the whole, a couple years in college is light on the scale in comparison to 18 years of indoctrination from althusser's ideological state apparatuses of family, media, church, and so on.  our paralegal did not understand this, and regarded college education as pathological intrusion into the proper mental state that one apparently inherits from birth and must never change, rather than counter-indoctrination against all of the cumulative bullshit that kids are forced to believe.

[mcbigski]

On 8/21/2020 at 1:13 AM, Altherion said:

If you were to swap Marxist for Marxist-Leninist, you would be very slightly more correct -- but not by much. The part that's correct (and, incidentally, the part that was also the kernel of truth in the original post) is that neither the Marxists nor the Leninists ever managed to come up with a system that would lead to a society that is unquestionably better than any that came before. However, everything else is still wrong: Lenin never advocated damaging society to make revolution more likely and he definitely had a detailed plan for what to do after the revolution (so that 1-2(?)-3 list is wrong in the context of Marxism-Leninism). The plan had a lot of things that were ultimately very useful (e.g. universal literacy), but unfortunately, it did not create the kind of society that the revolutionaries wanted.

The protesters (and especially the rioters) of contemporary America may profess a belief in some flavor of Marxism, but they're either confused as to what Marxism actually means (I suspect this is true for the vast majority so professing) or they're assisting causes which either have little to do with Marxism or are outright antithetical to it.

You all do have a fair amount of inside baseball type terminology on the left.  Sometimes seems like whack-a-mole to figure out which descriptor applies!

Or cynically, the protesters are being intentionally misled.  There's a sort of lower brain appeal to abolition of property.  Did any of us share all of our toys as kids?  That's sort of the summary of the Cliff's Notes version of Marxism and jealousy is powerful lever.

Would be useful for discussion to have a better fleshedout framework - those are the Marxists, those are the Communists, those are the Socialists, those are the neo-Marxists, those are the Gramscians, those are undifferentiated leftists, those dicks just like to watch things burn, etc.     But then truth is just another way of expressing power within at least some of those philosophies too, no?

On 8/21/2020 at 11:58 AM, Jo498 said:

I think one post/neo-marxist aspect McBigski might be thinking of because it has shown up in some of the vulgarized contemporary "marxisms" and especially in the even more vulgarized "internet rightists" characterization of "cultural marxism" is the cultural subversion idea. This has its roots in Gramsci and some others writing in the 1920s/30 and expecially Marcuse in the 1960s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse

They realized already back then that the original Marxian conflict/dynamic would not work by itself (despite the general contradictions and inhumanity of capitalism persisting). So like the capitalists had pacified the workers with a few crumbs such as giving them a bit of healthcare and tolerating instead of shooting union leaders, the ones striving for change towards a better society or a revolution had to slowly infect central institutions (education and arts above all) achieve cultural hegemony and thus disrupt the bourgeois capitalist society from within and eventually replace their values with marxist values. (Bluntly: Leftist should become professors and teach communist claptrap and free love to corrupt the youth. ) This has almost nothing to do (directly) with economics, so it is a few steps from original marxism but it is the realization that "soft power" might achieve something. (Nothing of the above means rioting as a tool to disrupt society, it's much more subtle and largely without violence.)

According to the right these so-called "cultural marxists" have remarkably succeded and in the last ~50 years taken over most of education, media, arts and basically have all the soft power in most Western democracies, regardless of who is president. According to the left, most Western democracies are still racist capitalist patriarchies,i.e. dominated mostly by the old hegemony, not the cultural marxist one, so there is still much to do/destroy/improve.

(I am only exaggerating a little, one can easily find sources for such positions.)

Not quite sure you're exaggerating on the takeover, the kids today have brains full of mush, by and large.  From here, most of the educational establishment and media encourage divisiveness, rather than appealing to our common humanity.  That would be one  very long string of unintended consequences for me to think it to be accidental. 

Gramsci came up my radar a lot more over the last year or so in reference to Mayor Pete, who's father was, if the story is correct, a professor who had his specialty there.  I would certainly have lumped Gramsci in as a Marxist in the context of my original post.

On 8/21/2020 at 6:24 PM, Simon Steele said:

I disagree with your last part. You don't have to aim for communism to be a Marxist. Several Marxist scholars later, Marxism (or neo-Marxism if you will) is an excellent tool for not only diagnosing the ills of a hyper-capitalist state (which in turn could help us to fix this nightmare), but it also provides context and understanding for things that seem incomprehensible: ie why people continually support parties/politicians on policies that are clearly against their interests. I've studied a lot of Marxism--I call myself a Marxist and Marxist educator--but I am not aiming for communism or a fully socialist state. 

@sologdin  Thank you.  I wanted to take your apology as sincere, but checking out the length of your reply I was initially worried I was just going get what I asked for, good and hard, and get buried in jargon.  Not the case.

@Simon Steele <The formatting is giving me fits, tried to slip this between your quote and the bit towards solo>  Do people actually title themselves Neo Marxists?  I was under the impression that was mostly a catch all descriptor from the right.

[Rippounet]

13 minutes ago, mcbigski said:

the kids today have brains full of mush, by and large. 

13 minutes ago, mcbigski said:

There's a sort of lower brain appeal to abolition of property.  Did any of us share all of our toys as kids?  That's sort of the summary of the Cliff's Notes version of Marxism and jealousy is powerful lever.

It's "envy," not "jealousy" and "abolition of private property," thus allowing a distinction with personal property.

As for the idea that humans are inherently selfish, it has been largely debunked by psychologists, cognitive scientists, anthropologists... etc. Even Adam Smith didn't believe that, though the right loves that one paragraph about butcher, brewer, and baker...

Cliff's Notes doesn't seem to have an analysis of this, but SparkNotes does:

Quote

Marx says that Communists have been "reproached" for desiring to abolish the "right" of acquiring private property through the fruits of one's labor. However, he points out, laborers do not acquire any property through their labor. Rather, the "property" or capital they produce serves to exploit them. This property, controlled by the bourgeoisie, represents a social--not a personal--power. Changing it into common property does not abolish property as a right, but merely changes its social character, by eliminating its class character. In a Communist society, then, labor will exist for the sake of the laborer, not for the sake of producing bourgeois-controlled property. This goal of communism challenges bourgeois freedom, and this is why the bourgeois condemn the Communist philosophy. Marx writes, "You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population." Despite what the bourgeois claim, Communism doesn't keep people from appropriating the products of labor. Rather, it keeps them from subjugating others in the process of this appropriation.

To be fair, there is a lot of jargon in Marxism. Otoh, the Manifesto was written in 1848, not long before Dickens wrote David Copperfield.

The point here being that the idea of "property" for the masses is anachronistic considering the time of writing.
Funnily enough, I would argue it's really the other way around: we (here on this forum) enjoy a wealth of "property" today largely because Marxism and socialism existed in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Anyway, I wanted to say I think it's logical that the American right is so intent on burrying Marx (see: the RNC) and thought that this thread was a better fit to express that than the US politics one.
As levels of inequality are slowly getting closer to what they were in the 19th century, Marxism might become a threat again. Of course, ironically, I rather doubt the threat will be actual Marxism (the jargon indeed being quite a problem), but rather a reformulation/strand of Marxism adapted to our times, taking into account global warming and consumerism.
But the right loves pre-emptive strikes, and it is important to maintain the brainwashing of the people who would benefit from Marxism most if they understood it and started developing some kind of class consciousness. Best to make sure all those American conservatives keep hating something they don't really know.

On some level though, American conservatism does get something right about Marxism: it is fundamentally godless, in the sense that it runs counter to some core tenets of American protestantism. In the final analysis, Marxism rejects "election" and determinism, pushing for economic justice and solidarity instead. As long as Americans would rather have faith in God than build a utopia, Marx's ghost will remain tje ultimate bogeyman.

 

[Knight Of Winter]

18 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

As for the idea that humans are inherently selfish, it has been largely debunked by psychologists, cognitive scientists, anthropologists... etc. Even Adam Smith didn't believe that, though the right loves that one paragraph about butcher, brewer, and baker...

 

People behave selfishly now. They behaved selfishly 100 or 1000 or 3000 years ago, in every civilization in every corner of the world. With such a widespread phenomenon, can there be any other explanation than inherency? 

Yes, I know, altrusim and cooperation are also widespread, and also inherent to humans. Which is all the more reason to avoid simplistic generalization such as "humans are selfish" or "humans aren't selfish".

It's a curious trait, I think - for the main two economical systems still don't quite know how to approach it. Capitalism pragmatically acknowledges it, but then oftentimes makes the mistake of liking it a little bit too much. Communists, on the other hand - often fall into a trap of outright denying it, and aiming for a society where there won't be any selfishness around. 

[sologdin]

i don't think the pop psych explanation (rooted in emotional envy) is very useful, considering that it is not prerequisite to actually be lacking anything in particular to hold marxist beliefs; those of us who act in representative capacity might be quite content. maybe we could do a pop psych concordance for all of the seven deadly sins:

Quote

envy - socialism

wrath - fascism

pride - feudalism

sloth - adorno's communism

gluttony - late capitalism

avarice - early capitalism

lust - marcuse's communism

we would need to cross-reference these with aquinas in the summa theologica--would be a fun project.

lot of jargon in Marxism

dunno.  everyone has their own specialized lexicon. it's not too difficult to learn new things?

 

With such a widespread phenomenon, can there be any other explanation than inherency? 

is it even a cultural universal? and if so, is that in itself sufficient for a finding of its being inherent? NB this 'biological' argument has relied solely on historical evidence. that normally means the argument fails.

Communists, on the other hand - often fall into a trap of outright denying it, and aiming for a society where there won't be any selfishness around. 

doubtful. there's plenty of left cogitation about this sort of historical occurrence--though thinking in terms of 'selfishness' is to adopt a rightwing conceptual apparatus, which is of course the path of error.

[All Cats Are Bad]

Bunch of communists steal your lunch money or something OP?

[.H.]

6 minutes ago, sologdin said:

dunno.  everyone has their own specialized lexicon. it's not too difficult to learn new things?

Of course not, but at the same time, "wir sehen hiermit wieder die Sprache als das Dasein des Geistes."

[Larry of the Lawn]

15 minutes ago, sologdin said:

 

dunno.  everyone has their own specialized lexicon. it's not too difficult to learn new things?

 

.

What does "NB" stand for?

[DMC]

1 hour ago, sologdin said:

lust - marcuse's communism

Was totally with ya til this one.  Need more justification.  Also, sloth more seamlessly can be attributed to nihilism.

[Rippounet]

1 hour ago, Knight Of Winter said:

People behave selfishly now. They behaved selfishly 100 or 1000 or 3000 years ago, in every civilization in every corner of the world.

The first sentence is partly correct while the second one is partly wrong, at least by a definition of selfishness that is relevant to this discussion.

To say that humans aren't selfish doesn't mean they are altruisitic. Cooperation can easily have elements of both. I guess I could I have made my thoughts clearer, as I really don't like to simplify this stuff.

It's too late in the day here to write about human nature. Suffice to say that humans aren't just selfish or altruistic, but behave differently in different circumstances, and that the society they live in will encourage one trait over the other in specific ones.

Here are Marx's words btw:

Quote

[...] the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.

 

1 hour ago, Knight Of Winter said:

It's a curious trait, I think - for the main two economical systems still don't quite know how to approach it. Capitalism pragmatically acknowledges it, but then oftentimes makes the mistake of liking it a little bit too much. Communists, on the other hand - often fall into a trap of outright denying it, and aiming for a society where there won't be any selfishness around.

Capitalism certainly doesn't "acknowledge" anything. No one ever sat down, thought hard about what kind of socio-economic structure would best fit human nature, and came up with capitalism. Capitalism came about because European societies were already hierarchical. In other words, when capitalism emerged as an economic structure, it was mostly reflecting the existing social order. It was a branch, a continuity, and an accelerant. By itself it doesn't mean anything ; our relationship to it does.

That's... kinda what Marx taught us actually, the link between social hierarchy and economics (not that he was the first to see it, but he was one of the most influential people to describe it). And the fact that as a rule people do not get to choose the socio-economic structure of the society they live in. His work aimed to change that, but he died before getting there. Nonetheless, I like to see Marxism as the rejection of resignation or fatalism.

There are many reasons to reject any "naturalistic" arguments - that all too often reveal more about the person speaking than about humanity. Instead of attempting to list them, I'll just say that the one friend I had who would always bring this argument up in our political discussions was in fact a selfish asshole most of the time, and at some point I realized that his argumentation was really a way to defend his own behavior by generalising it rather than to discuss politics. In real life some of us are more selfish than others, at least at times, though I tend to think that no one can be completely selfish or completely altruistic all the time.
Anyway it doesn't really matter that much. Capitalism is only "selfish" in the sense that it comes from and fuels the greed of the few at the expense of the many ; it doesn't say anything about the nature or the many, or even of the few. Nor is communism that "altruistic" either.

 

[maarsen]

4 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

What does "NB" stand for?

Nota bonum. Latin for a free note.