Marxist revolutionary theory - let's learn more

[sologdin]

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

i like the concordance to nihilism better, definitely.  

for marcuse, am thinking of the repressive desublimation argument from one dimensional man as paired with the general thesis of eros and civilization.  we bridge the gap with dante's definition of lust as subjugating reason to appetite, which has a corollary in freud, insofar as how pleasure must subordinate to the real. capitalist rationality requires the subjugation of individual desire even while encouraging it.  marcuse's great insight is that the real is not always the same, that different historical necessities produce different reals to which one must accommodate.  for marcuse, the revolution unleashes what capitalism had repressed; desire is liberated when the real is eroticized--and accommodation thereto is fundamentally different when the scarcity that requires desublimated discipline is abolished.  sex is accordingly way hotter in socialism.

 

Nota bonum. Latin for a free note. 

unless it's an RSB thread, and we're discussing the No-Bakker.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

9 hours ago, mcbigski said:

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?

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.

@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.

I think you definitely will find people who take the neo-Marxist label because for so long, Marxism was about class issues, whereas neo-Marxism casts a much wider net. It's not a derogatory term at all (unlike "cultural Marxism). I know Marxists who would technically be neo-Marxists, but they don't accept that label. 

ETA: I will say that neo-Marxism was kind of an attempt to modernize Marxism for the 20th century. And this, I think, is what a lot of people don't understand about the term. It isn't "Marx" anymore. He greatly influenced what this term means, but it has undergone significant changes. When people say if you want to understand Marxism, go read the Communist Manifesto, I always want to add, "Yeah, that's a good start." But that in no way gives you a clear line of thinking in this debate in the 21st century. Don't take me wrong--Marxism does not exist without Marx. But it is bigger than Marx, and it has changed so much. I got into an argument in the US politics thread that centered on this inability to think about Marxism (or democratic socialism/social democrat) as though it had evolved over the last two centuries.

[DMC]

2 hours ago, sologdin said:

for marcuse, the revolution unleashes what capitalism had repressed; desire is liberated when the real is eroticized--and accommodation thereto is fundamentally different when the scarcity that requires desublimated discipline is abolished.  sex is accordingly way hotter in socialism.

I've read most of Marcuse, and I don't recall him ever describing being liberated should be equated with eroticism.  Still seems like a stretch.  But whatever.  Lust is a hard one to equate to an ideology, so sounds fine to me.  As long as you still understand - I AM THE SENATE, and IT'S TREASON, THEN!

[Alarich II]

16 hours 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. 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. 

 

The question is: what is selfishness? Its a concept that (other than for example self-preservation) has largely negative cultural attributes and is seen as a deviation from "ideal" human behaviour. Most modern evolutionary anthropologists will argue, that humans have actually evolved to become less "selfish" and what some would call a "hyper-cooperative" ape-species. I have started reading Michael Tomasellos book Becoming Human: A theory of ontogeny and it is quite a fascinating read (albeit not easy for me as a layman, he basically condenses his 20 years of research as the head of the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig into his theory). His basic argument is that what makes us human is what he calls the capability for "collective intentionality" (there is a lot more to it, of course this is a very simplistic description of his findings).

So what makes us human (distinctive from other great apes) is not selfishness, but rather to identify, "selfish" behaviour as deviation from common cultural norms and ostracize it, based again on shared cultural norms.