#Poly-Marxism

[world-v-you-blog]

The Tapestry of History, 2 – Meta-History Tipping Point

Here is Part 2 of "The Tapestry of History". Explore the influence of Meta-History - Big Picture History - on our present socio-political situation.

Academia divides history into a myriad of categories, fields, and specialties. It is certainly more convenient to study it that way, and, viewed in this narrower focus, it seems to lend itself more easily to interpretation. One event or character or movement can be more easily fitted into an interpretive lens than an era. For example, Karl Marx reduced history to a few simple tenets which can be…

[girlboysupreme]

you know what really pisses me off, is when low-wage labor is called "low-skill" labor. Because not only is that super untrue, it is another tool that bourgeoises use to alienate workers from their value. Saying "low-skill" labor implies that because it's low skill, the people doing that work are undeserving of more money or benefits. workers are entitled to all the value their labor creates!!!!

(And in many cases, low wage labor is incredibly difficult work!! Imagine a stock broker working in an Amazon distribution warehouse, they wouldn't last a fucking day. )

[asshole-rebel-psycho]

Dr. Zhivago was a movie about the first poly couple caused by marxism.

[jingerpi]

talking about girl politics (marxism) with my girl friends (I'm poly)

[qqueenofhades]

Hi!! Sleep deprived anon here

So the thing about my history professor is that while he teaches us about what happened, he’s going very little into WHY it happened or what happened as an effect. And yeah, I get that it’s an overview and one small unit in the whole of a year-long course, but it would be nice if we went a little more in depth with everything.

My main issue, though, is that he refuses to actually take a political stance on anything, by which I mean, he’ll only talk about exactly what communism is from a poli sci perspective and won’t actually talk about why communism doesn’t work out, because saying that communism doesn’t work out would be the same thing as saying that communism is bad/problematic/harmful/etc etc etc and that would be letting us know his political views and potentially influencing us.

He says he doesn’t want to influence us in our politics and wants us to be able to make a decision about what we believe ourselves, but somehow expects us to do that with what is, in my opinion, an incomplete education.

Which ties into my point last night about learning more about the late stages of the Soviet Union from the lighthouse au than I have from… two months on this unit so far, I believe? because the political state at the time is a BIG plot factor and something you discuss a lot, and you’ve laid out what it was like and what was going on so much more clearly and in so much more depth than my history professor ever could have, while still (to the extent that’s possible by two characters biased very different directions at the start) maintaining a fairly neutral and scholarly voice on the topic, if that makes sense.

(He’s also the “before we had tiktok we had drunk Boris Yeltsin” guy, so…)

Okay, first: thank you, again. This is very heartening for me to hear. One of my not-so-secret fanfic agendas is to teach at least a little history along the way (i.e. with DVLA, AITWW, Lighthouse AU, etc.), or make it relatively painless to learn since it comes with a heaping helping of pining gay idiots. So yes.

Second, I agree that that is a.... weird, to say the least, way for your actual professor to teach it. It sounds like he subscribes to the school of thought wherein you should just deliver the information in an objective vacuum and never make any attempt to contextualize, explain, critique, or otherwise teach you what to do with it, and that is... odd. I don't know if you go to school in one of the red states wherein history education has become excessively politicized -- if so, it might explain some of his caution, but still! That's not useful!

This is because you can't study the USSR, especially the late-stage USSR, without studying its collapse. That's like, one of the seminal major world events/end of the Cold War/end of the initial entire post-WWII paradigm. It has major implications for post-Soviet and modern Russian history (which is obviously, to say the least, important to understand right now), and for post-Cold War American and Western history. You don't need to start every class session with a lecture on why Communism Is Bad, but you do need to do more than recite the information and nothing else. Like, a reasonably good encyclopedia article could do that, and any scholarly monograph would likewise engage in more thoughtful and detailed critique!

Basically, "I can't teach in any detail why communism didn't work because that would mean I think communism is bad" is, to put it mildly, intensely baffling to me as an intellectual/pedagogical stance, and is certainly not going to produce students who are conversant with the actual practice of history, the practice of critical thinking, or indeed, the ultimate failures of the USSR as a geopolitical entity. Like... how do you NOT contextualize a system in any meaningful empirical way, such as how the idea of Marxism-Leninism was embedded into the particular historical setting of post-Bolshevik Russia and eventually the USSR??? Are you only reduced to talking about "communism" in some abstract way that has nothing to do with the actual particulars of the situation??? Why?? WHY???

Anyway: yes, my rant aside, the lighthouse AU obviously does go into detail on all that, and try to place it in both a personal human and a general historical context. I'm deeply flattered, again, that a fic I wrote and posted on AO3 for free and for fun is teaching more than your actual university course, but also. @ your professor: Turn on your location, I just wanna talk.

[soft-lily]

I hate to do this to you tumblr, but this is unfortunately another instance of not having all the information.

CW/TW for suicide and transphobia

In a very thorough article on the whole thing, JN Hoad (featured in the book 'Transgender Marxism'), lays out a more somber tale. Wojtowicz never saw Elizabeth Eden as a woman (thought of her as a confused gay man).

His motivation for robbing the bank too was based on the connection to the Mafia.

The full article can be found here:

We stan!!!!

chaotic good

[buildingrelationshipsinanarchy]

A New Intimacy Model

So what spurred this project is a culmination of a few things. Namely, frustration with the imprecise and incomprehensible words, Platonic, Romantic, and Sexual. The English language hasn’t been great at adapting the words for personal relationships as our times and values change.

I fell into Anarchism only very recently, stumbling into the language of ‘relationship anarchy’ through the internet in discussion with forms of polyamory years ago when I started this blog. Over the last year, I’ve been getting into radical politics and finding how my un-politicized opinions were validated, and then stretched the more I learned and studied up. While I’m still learning more about Radical politics, Anarchism, Marxism, Queer and Feminist theory specifically, the more I wanted to link some of my perspectives on intimate relationships with these political and theoretical texts.

“The Personal is Political.” - Carol Hanisch, Feminist Author.

@mythr1der​ wrote a post detailing a bit of the frustration I also share in regards to how the Dichotomy between Platonic and Sexual (which almost all definitions of Romance boil back into), leave much to be desired when discussing attraction, desire, intimacy and relationships in general. I believe that this very simple dichotomy reflects, oddly enough, capitalism and the history of the role of state power in culture. I rant a little bit about it as a response to @mythr1der​‘s post here. 

It’s long, and incomplete, but I proposed an idea of just building entirely new words, so we can build an entirely new map for talking about love, desire, attraction, and relationships that actually discuss what its like to be next to someone you like to be next to! 

What is intimacy? It’s closeness right? To be near some ‘intimate’ part of another person, or them near something meaningful about why you’re you. I wanted to start this series by talking about what it means to be close to someone. If you remember my birthday without Facebook, that might make me feel a bit special. But if you remember how badly I was abused by an old friend, its because I trusted you enough to share some of the sadness that I’m not as loud about.

Intimacy isn’t always trauma, sometimes its tears of joy hearing that your cousin is out of prison, or the laughter of your friends. Being close to each other in a hyper-digitized age is a bit tricky, but phone calls, facetime, snapchat are only some of the tools we use to keep each other updating on what we’re feeling. Whether its about our love life, sex life, work life, or home life, just sharing that information can be real special, and bonding.

When we say that we have friends or that we are [Queer] Platonic Partners, does that mean we’ve decided how often we’re gonna talk or what we’re gonna talk about? What if we just send each other memes or rant about politics? Am I supposed to devalue those interactions because they aren’t the person I’m crying on the phone with?

Intimacy can be as deep as childhood scars and as simple as surprising me with my favorite snack. It all just means you know who I am, what I like, and what I care about. I want to intentionally forge those connections. And this why I set these definitions first. 

Other Words:

A Daekkon (n.) would be person/partner whom you’ve developed intentionally this kind of relationship with. 

If you desired this kind of relationship with a certain person, you’d be feeling Daekeen (adj.) for/about that person.

People who are desiring or actively doing these activities together are Daekkoning (v.). 

This would be understood as Daekkonic (adj.) behavior; as in, “My roomate isn’t super talkative with me, but is deakkonic (adj.) with Sandra from the Mosque.” 

“Tom is going through it, he’s felt deakkonically (adv.) deprived since the move.”

________________________________________________________________

In our sex-negative, ironically repressed culture, we seem to think that if you’re touching your bodies together at all, it means *something*.  I want to remove that idea. I want to reclaim physical affection. I want to be touch and be touched by others. I don’t want my afab friends who have experienced some sort of sexual violence in their lives, to ever feel weary about the fact that I’m physically affectionate. It’s been my #1 Love Language for the last 10 years. 

Fighting r*pe culture is a full-time fight, but I think adding a word, and therefore an idea[l], can be useful in reclaiming safety, and boundaries regarding bodily autonomy, for all of us. Clear communication and respected boundaries and asking consent for everything are the bedrock we need to continually practice. And as trust builds, I believe this could be very useful theoretically tool for improving the quality of our relationships and help create clearer discussion about our individual boundaries, needs, and desires. I feel like this leads me to a relevant question. What activities are inherently platonic, romantic or sexual? Is holding hands inherently romantic when almost all of us have done it with a friend? What about those of us who are religious or spiritual and have held hands with members of church, mosque or synagogue; do you think we’re out here non-stop blushing at the Pastor? Or when we held hands with family members? Doesn’t sound like it holds up, huh? 

What about snuggling a roommate? Holding a teammate while celebrating a victory? The kiss my bestfriend gave me on our shared birthday dinner? Are we left to through our Aro and Ace friends’ out of the discussion, just because our culture has bad takes on sex and romance as the only forms possible of significant physical touch? Physical touch is such an important way to communicate love and affection, as well as care, concern, and comfort. They don’t get to cast their shadow on this space anymore!

Other Words:

If you had this desire for someone, or wanted to approach cultivating these forms of affection in a relationship, you could say you’re feeling Phaddish (adj.) for that person.

.Participating or initiating acts of a non-sexual physical intimacy Phadronic (adj.) quality are said to be phade-ing/phading (v.).

A Phadrone (n.) could be the name of a person/partner you share this kind of relationship with. 

Phadroning (v.) would the act of cultivating this kind of intimacy with another person. 

Phadronically (adv.) could describe a certain level of intimacy implicit in a physical touch between to particular people.

________________________________________________________________

Now lets talk about Sex. That’s the thing the everyone’s mind always gravitates to when discuss words like, intimacy, attraction, desire. It’s the thing we want to stay away from when you use the Platonic or Friendly. But, lets be real. Haven’t many of us had sex with people didn’t even consider friends? Or people who became our “Strictly Platonic” friends after we may have had sex, once or several times, with them?

People who gravitate toward polyamory or non-monogamy tend have had a “hoe-phase.” The boundary between friend and lover, or partner and fuckbuddy have been blurred in a good chunk of people’s lives. Non-monogamous or not, I think it’s useful to talk directly about our sexual experiences, desires, fantasies, and how different it can be with different people, or in different stages of our lives. But what makes an experience sexual? Maybe that sounds redundant or obvious; I mean, it’s got the word SEX in it, maybe that’s got something to do with it? But maybe not... 

Lets ask an odd question. Is sex inherently sexual? Who wouldn’t assume the answer is automatically yes? Well, my first thought is to talk to those in the Adult Entertainment industry or friends of ours who are sex-workers, in whatever capacity. Is every client sexy or shoot erotic? Those of us who have sex, have we never been doing it and been bored through most of at least one experience? 

If sex is inherently sexual, why do we have so many Sexual Health Educators, Marriage Counselors, Pornstars, Yoga Teachers, Personal trainers and Writers telling us how to have sexy sex? Dating Coaches and Websites, telling us how we are getting something that’s supposed to sound so easy wrong.

I’ve come to the opinion that sex isn’t about body parts, genitalia, certain body motions, or even clothing [or lack thereof]. I believe that sex, or eroticism, is all about the context and the people involved. There’s nothing inherently sexy about fruit, or food in general, but if woman eats a banana in public, there are at least several men in area thinking of something than her healthy food choices. 

This is why talking about sex directly is good. And understanding it as an energy that you imbue to any activity or circumstance, could help have better sex; and and on the flip-side, show us how we may need to more aware of how we may take up space with our body language. I do also feel, that in part, some of our Ace friends (those who aren’t sex repulsed), may be able to find some resonance with this model; sex doesn’t have to feel passionate or any particular way at all (other than good?), because sex isn’t about sexiness, but about human connection and pleasure.

Other Words:

Serotic (adj.) activities include any activity that is engaged due to, or is infused with, sexual desire and/or erotic intention. It also describes the type of desire you’re feeling for another person. 

A Serato (n.) is any person you engage in serotic activities or feelings with. 

An activity that was originally un-serotic (adj.), but became sexually or erotically charged, we could described as having become Serotically (adv.) charged. 

When you are cultivating or charging an act with serotic energy, you are Seroticizing (v.) that activity

________________________________________________________________

Lately, especially since diving into Radical Politics, I find less and less desire in defining Who I Am as a part of a relationship unit. It’s an overlay from monogamy, The Couple being the only social unit that is recognized, as it’s necessary to the Nuclear Family; a super important thing for Capitalism to sustain itself. The relationships I cultivate with others, with whatever forms of intimacy or interactions therein, cant be understood by that model. I am more than my interactions with a handful of people; I am a human person, and my engagement with the world isn’t actually reducible to whether or not I’m having sex with someone or not. 

We’ve talked about multiple forms of intimacy, and some of the desires or interests associated with them. Have you noticed that in the desire, or need, to discuss relationships on a basis of, ‘sex: yes or no?’, that we haven’t talked about the webs that form because we are all reliant on each other to survive? Not everyone in your community or workplace or online spaces, you’ll get to know or talk to. Do they, as people, matter less because they aren’t in your contacts list or your DM’s?  

This is a space where not a lot of us to tend think or engage as much. An easy word to discuss this space is community. But is a community the people or the place you spend your time, whether online or off? Is the community the place you live and your neighbors? Is it the people who may share some of your identifiers or face similar forms of oppression, despite living in a different city, state, country?

We are multi-dimensional beings, and with the use of technology, there are so many ways to form relationships, and share resources. I think the ‘community’ is any space you find yourself in, which means that mutual aid is something you are always able to engage in. Whether it’s feeding the homeless guys who hang out by the intersection, or dropping a few bucks in a trans kid’s venmo, mutual aid is so much easier.

But what if that feels so inconsequential? It’s not! But it does, from time to time, feel like the problems of the world are so big, and that you and so many you know are suffering in ways you wish you could help. Well, community organizing is always happening somewhere, online and off. It becomes important to join up with others in order feel like we can actually make a positive impact on the lives of others. We don’t have to wait on a government who’s interest isn’t ours, don’t have to wait for some politician to fail on a promise to Make Things Better.

We have each other, and we are all we really have. At the end of the day, all of our concepts are man-made. COVID-19 showed us how drastically things could be different if the people in power made decisions that actually benefited us. A lot of us understand the need to do something. Capitalism says that competition is what drove human kind into evolution, the fight for survival in a meaningless, terrifying world. Anarchism, as I’m learning, throws the whole idea in the trash where it belongs.

Peter Kropotkin, whose been called both the Godfather and Santa Claus of Anarchism, penned in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), “under any circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life.”

We are better off together. Capitalism and the property relationships in our compulsively monogamous society try to tell us other wise. We don’t have to follow that model.

Other Words:

To Mudshop (v.) is to build a mudship with a particular person, organinzation, or community; Mud-shopping (v.). 

A Mudshipper (n.) is an individual in a mudship of any scale. 

I’ve said a lot. I hope this reads as accessible to as many people as it can be. I built this because I want to tell the people in my life why I love them as dearly as I do. And that I’d love to build relationships with as many awesome, lovely people as I can.

If you try to use the words Romantic and Platonic while you look at this post, and find it almost impossible, I’ve done my job.

I hope those words die along with oppressive ideas they uphold.

[skz-edm]

me getting a 90% on my first ever university essay about right-wing conspiracy theories and legal amendments to tackle violence from right-wing populist groups, including incels and proud boys? good shit.

[berniesrevolution]

NonCompete | Class Reductionism keeps the working class divided, NOT intersectionalism!

[somstory]

from “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” Karl Marx

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it---when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc.,---in short, when it is used by us...In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, into the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world...The abolition of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human.

[grandhotelabyss]

It’s really not, though. Sebald and Cusk are boring! Autofiction is boring! Knausgaard? Boring! I read 20 pages of an Annie Ernaux book and do you know what? It was boring! Thin anhedonic slices of life rendered in stilted translationese? No thanks! Why not make up a crazy and symbolic story and dramatize it in incendiary language, the way non-boring writers like Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison do? And when did this dour Germanism become a model for Anglophone writers, we heirs of Shakespeare and Dickens, of Melville and Faulkner? 

The objection is not to autobiographical inspiration, or to the everyday as subject matter. The objection is to the tepid self-hatred that regards representation—the inventive recreation of the world in words—as naive, with a pointed implication of political regress. Realists “belong to the 20th century”—as if anything as important as aesthetics or ethics could be decided by a glance at the calendar. The realists, when you read them, are never as naive as reputed—Stendhal and George Eliot, practically postmodernists back in the 19th century, both liked to invent pastiche epigraphs to the chapters of their novels—nor did the first wave of modernists think they were. Joyce revered Defoe, Ibsen, Tolstoy. Woolf called Tolstoy “the greatest of all novelists,” she proclaimed Middlemarch “the only English novel written for grown-up people,” and she finally pronounced, “Our quarrel is not with the classics.” 

Ironically, I suspect this whole faulty way of thinking got carried out of the misguided Euro-radical tradition into English by one of my own teachers, Colin MacCabe. His cohort of British academic renegades, the self-styled “Class of ’68,” translating the French who translated the Germans, pressed the Brechtian aesthetics of Barthes and Althusser onto radical academe, with the most notorious effect felt in film studies via Laura Mulvey’s Platonic censure of cinematic pleasure. 

According to this theory, an artwork that does not immediately and self-punitively announce itself as an artwork à la Brecht’s alienation effect is politically suspect, because it attempts with its “reality effect” (per Barthes) to fool the people with the bourgeois illusion of unmediated representation. The people, however, still need guidance, just not from artists, whose only real job in this regime is artfully to abolish themselves. Artists place themselves under the mandate of political commissars, who alone may legitimately govern the polis because they alone possess the correct theory to do so. 

Marxism, as we’ve seen here already, is not what it appears to be. Rather than leaping into the revolutionary future, it is a throwback to Plato’s Republic. It empowers the ancient and immemorial clerisy, now guised as tribunes of the oppressed, to seize back power from the middle classes who made modernity, very much including its independent writers, themselves no longer dependent on church and state. None of which is to say that literature automatically benefits from the market—this can put debilitating pressures of its own on the arts—only that the alternatives are, if anything, worse. The market may ignore or seduce you, but church and state can kill you.

Brigid Brophy, in an amusingly severe LRB review of MacCabe’s pioneering poststructuralist monograph on Joyce, cannily intuited something of this caste-atavism inhering in the “Class of ’68” project: 

Indeed, for a critic who purports to think in political terms and who cites the ‘traditional Marxist definition of a practice’ when he discusses the activity of writing, he is weak on economic relationships. He doesn’t mention the respect in which Joyce was truly a counter-revolutionary: he reversed the tendency, which had been increasing from the 17th century on, for writers to depend not on private patronage but on the public. It is at least worth considering the effect on a writer’s writing of the source of his income. Perhaps some 20th-century writers have striven to express themselves comprehensibly enough for a mass public, and others to write incomprehensibly enough to satisfy the avant-garde expectations of a patron. After all, it might really just not have done, in the eyes of Joyce’s financial supports (a Rockefeller daughter and Harriet Weaver), had Joyce’s imagination eventually come up with an indubitable masterpiece but a masterpiece on the lines of, say, Treasure Island.

But why go to Brophy? By the beginning of the 21st century, MacCabe himself publicly conceded that

what came with this position was the full panoply of Leninism, and in particular the notion of the party as the union of theory and practice, which would transform and liberate the world. It is no part of my purpose today to analyze Leninism; suffice it to say that it is now my opinion that it was the most disastrous and evil of the fruits of German idealist philosophy and that its contribution to history—from its slaughter of the most advanced and progressive capitalist class in Europe, to the formation of fascist parties in both imitation and opposition to Bolshevism, to its perversion of Third World liberation struggles according to the tenets of Stalinism—was overwhelmingly negative.

And Sebald, we should remember, himself belonged to “the class of ’68,” began as a Marxist academic, and likely understood his own work in exactly these terms. Which is why such work is, as I exclaimed at the outset, boring. They aren’t stories, they aren’t poems, they aren’t songs, they aren’t dreams. They’re sermons.  

[inqilabi]

I am thinking of doing a masters and I would love to learn more about the kind of stuff you blog about, what kind of field do u think that would be categorized under? Government/poli sci/ international relations? Any input it appreciated!!

Yes it would be political science (but from a Marxist perspective). May be you can look into the education history of Bikrum Gill. He did his MA then PhD and now writes and teaches on these topics. (https://www.uvic.ca/research/centres/globalstudies/people/alumni/gillbikrum.php). If you do this route, you just have to make sure that you do not "sell out". A lot of academic Marxists sell out, meaning that they end up distorting marxism. Marxism is technically developed in the struggle on the ground with the people, not in academia. That is the function of academia in the global north to kinda strip Marxism of its revolutionary potential and make it just some political theory to be studied rather than applied.

There's also a Marxism degree in Wuhan. And based on how things are going, if I was younger and looking to do a degree, I would definitely go to China.

[jingerpi]

info:

Hi, I'm a queer woman in my 20s. I post about Marxism, (trans) feminism, and occasional media analysis or art. I'm white and from the imperial core, so do with that what you will. I'm also poly, plural, and disabled. that being said I'm not the biggest on labels and seek to understand things through materialist analysis rather than individualist identity.

Death to all settler colonialism.

tags:

#self post - a post which I have written with some degree of care or substance. can be a reblog too if I add a lot to it, these are posts I don't want to lose.

#talking - posts that are mostly text or where I'm OP, but aren't quite the level of detail or care of a "self post"

#art - self explanatory

#us politics - tag for us centric politics. i don't typically tag things critical of us politics as this, but rather things from within the country which are totalizing or "assume the viewer is usamerican" type posts.

#media stuff - tag for discussion of movies/anime/tv shows/games, sort of fandom adjacent discourse (tagged since I usually talk politics)

#pmmm - Madoka posts

#signalis - Signalis posts

#discourse - discourse topics that people may be tired of or involve responding to bad/incorrect "takes"

#discourse I guess? - technically discoursey but less weird

#marxism / #feminism / #trans feminism - mostly self explanatory. posts about those topics have the tags (usually)

content warnings are done with "#[topic] warning" and sometimes I will add a "#cw [thing]" when it is a common issue/tag e.g. "#cw sa"

"I'm quite sure that people will look upon my attitude and sentiments and look for hypocrisy and hatred in my words

My revolution is born out of love for my people, not hatred for others"

-Immortal technique, poverty of philosophy

[st-just]

Trump stood against the upper class. He might define them as: people who live in nice apartments in Manhattan or SF or DC and laugh under their breath if anybody comes from Akron or Tampa. Who eat Thai food and Ethiopian food and anything fusion, think they would gain 200 lbs if they ever stepped in a McDonalds, and won't even speak the name Chick-Fil-A. Who usually go to Ivy League colleges, though Amherst or Berkeley is acceptable if absolutely necessary. Who conspicuously love Broadway (especially Hamilton), LGBT, education, "expertise", mass transit, and foreign anything. They conspicuously hate NASCAR, wrestling, football, "fast food", SUVs, FOX, guns, the South, evangelicals, and reality TV. Who would never get married before age 25 and have cutesy pins about how cats are better than children. Who get jobs in journalism, academia, government, consulting, or anything else with no time-card where you never have to use your hands. Who all have exactly the same political and aesthetic opinions on everything, and think the noblest and most important task imaginable is to gatekeep information in ways that force everyone else to share those opinions too.

(full disclosure: I fit like 2/3 of these descriptors)

Aren't I just describing well-off people? No. Teachers, social workers, grad students, and starving artists may be poor, but can still be upper-class. Pilots, plumbers, and lumber barons are well-off, but not upper-class. Donald Trump is a billionaire, but still recognizably not upper class.  The upper class is a cultural phenomenon.

Scott, buddy, pal, I know you have some fatal allergy to any sort of political theory within three degree of separation of Marxism, and also touching any poli sci or sociology textbooks would cause you to burst into flame, but c’mon man. What the hell is the ‘upper’ in ‘upper class’ actually supposed to mean?

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: Do the intellectual elites basically set the direction of how society thinks? Over the centuries, the general public has followed philosophical trends in the academic world so how do these beliefs and academic theories filter down into the mainstream? Is there anything we can do to stop it?

It may seem like in our current turbulent times that the elites do the thinking for the masses. And if one stands back to look at the flash points of intellectual history that indeed feels true. But equally one can stand back and ask critically if this is really so? 

Who are you actually talking about? Who are these intellectual elites? I dislike these generalisations because they are unhelpful. How does one define elite? Is it intellect? Is it cachet of social position? I think our so-called university elites - professors etc - are in their own existential crisis because of how commodified a university education is becoming. They are beholden to students as consumers. It’s a worrying trend.

Of course it didn’t use to be like that because then our intellectual elites had both recognised intellectual prowess and a social cachet. In other words they had power. I think the modern day academic is many ways a powerless and even pitiful figure at the mercy of university managers and money men.

Nor do I think one thinker dominates over others as they might have done in the past.

A case van be made that ideas today are democratised. Power resides wherever their is a vacuum. It doesn’t reside in the class room but on social media.

In our more recent times intellectual trends like post-modernism and now social critical theory have been seeping into the mainstream. Even Donald Trump has brought up critical race theory to the wider watching populace as a beating stick over the left.

But many ordinary people would be hard pressed to name the actual thinkers (outside of just lumping people together as an amorphous mass e.g. cultural marxists or far right conservatives). It’s more true to say that all ideas now fight in the market place of ideas as a product for people to consume blindly.

But why one idea takes off and another doesn’t is something I don’t have answer for. Or where is the point where ideas from top down meet reality from bottom up and create some kind of intellectual and social momentum? I don’t have time to get into that here.

Another thing is that like an MP4 download the compression size of the complexity gets eroded the more it is downloaded and passed around. In other words people start arguing over labels and top line arguments than actually grapple with the deeper and more complex ideas contained.

This isn’t to say there are no problems with such theories - e.g. critical race theory - because there are. For the record, I am hostile to such philosophies as a Tory as I am towards many lefty isms plaguing the modern university campus that find their way into the public square.

Rather than attack the messenger (ie people) one should critically examine the arguments from every side. This is true for any theory and wherever it comes from. We engage ideas not people.

I don’t want to sound like a broken record so let me play devil’s advocate and suggest an alternative if only to muse upon on it.

I was having a stimulating series of conversations with a professor of intellectual history and other academic historians and political scientists from prestigious French institutions at a friend’s dinner party not so long ago. Like any French dinner good conversation is expected along with good food and wine. Arguments are meant to be robust and even heated but never personal. Arguments are won as much by charm and wit as it is by intellect. It’s all very convival and civilised.

Anyway, we touched on many things from the sorry state French politics, Brexit, Trump, and Covid of course. The usual stuff I imagine. But because of who was around the table the discussion enjoyably explored much wider issues.

For me it’s always interesting to hear the premise from where people build their arguments. For the left secularist the Enlightenment becomes the cornerstone from which the lens of history is viewed and interpreted. For the conservative it’s anything before the 1789 Revolution. Both actually looked at change and the ideas therein as from top down. The ground up (or the view from below) was given short thrift.

I suggested an alternative premise more from a playful motivation than absolute empirical evidence - if only to liven things up a little as the conversation was becoming stale and even predictable.

Perhaps the direction of influence could also be seen the other way round? That is to say that philosophical theories formalise and develop ideas that are already in circulation in society and culture.

Did you get that? Let me explain.

Remember Hegel's beautiful and profound observation that 'the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. In the words what Hegel was saying was that philosophical theory comes afterwards, reflectively, when a development of ideas or institutions is complete and (he would add) in decline.

Plato's 'Republic', at least its political portion, was as the late Michael Oakeshott once put it, 'animated by the errors of Athenian democracy'. Any citizen could participate in politics and help determine policies and legislation without any knowledge of the relevant matters. Plato saw democracy as the politics of ignorance. If every other human inquiry or activity recognised expert knowledge - in his famous example, you wouldn't let just anyone, regardless of their lack of specialist skills, navigate a ship - why not politics, too ? Why should politics be special in not requiring knowledge of the proper ends and means of political action as a condition of participation. Think of this what you will, but the 'Republic' was rooted in its contemporary context and was a response to it.

Aristotle's 'Politics' is a theorisation of the Greek polis, which was already passing out of independent existence under the impact of Alexander the Great's conquests. Athens was a city-state, and a democracy (albeit a limited one). Even though Aristotle was not born in Athens his views were accepted until he was shunned after the death of Alexander.

Aquinas' 'Summa' was a response to the recovery of Aristotle's writings and to the ongoing beliefs and practice of the Catholic Church - as well, of course, to movements which he opposed in theology.

Hobbes' 'Leviathan' is clearly a recipe for avoiding the kind of political and social chaos caused by the French Wars of Religion and the English Civil Wars. They were in his rear-view mirror when he wrote his tome.

Hume's 'atomistic' view of the nature of experience as composed of distinct impressions and ideas drew on the model of Newtonian 'corpuscular' physics.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason asks how knowledge is possible, with the glories of Newtonian physics in the background. His emphasis on the place of reason in ethics is fully in the spirit of the Enlightenment's celebration of reason.

John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty' was a counter-blast to the pressure toward conformity which he thought he saw in the England of his day.

Logical Positivism was a response to the huge, brilliant developments in science - relativity and quantum theory - and took the form of scientism, the view that scientific knowledge is the only form of deep and accurate knowledge (of all real knowledge).

Marxism was a response to the embryonic birth of the modern capitalist system after the industrial revolution in Britain. Both Hegel and Marx formulated their theories by what they observed was happening with the birthing pains of modern industrial capital society. Cultural Marxism is a different beast entirely.

I could go on.

I am not suggesting, of course, that there was anything crude or mechanical in the way these philosophies emerged from their contexts. They all added independent thought of great subtlety. But their problems and the terms of their solutions were set by their times, at least as they understood them. It’s plausible but may not be completely true. But that’s part of the enjoyment of musing upon whimsical thoughts without the conceit of being certain.

Anyway something to think about.

Thanks for your question.

[sarahelizabethstudies]

hello! i’m currently a freshman and i have this course on introduction to political science. we’re reading heywood’s book and i realized that it really isn’t my forte :( can you recommend some readings so i can understand political science even more? thanks!

(TL;DR, there are reading tips for reading bad textbooks at the end of this ask.)

Hey! So I’m not sure which Heywood you are reading but Heywood’s books tend to be very comprehensive. Lots of info thrown at you; thorough, but absolutely mind-numbing, even for me. If you think it’s not your forte, it might honestly be Heywood, and not you.

That said an intro to poli sci will probably focus a lot on ideologies. I am a sucker for political philosophy, so I want to tell you to pick up some Rousseau, Smith, and de Tocqueville, but the way they talk about liberalism, conservatism, socialism, (and Marxism) is quite different than what we’re look for here. Right now, with an intro class, you really should focus more on being able to assess a situation and ‘assign’ it an ideology (or a few ideologies). You will knock papers/in-class essays/any short answer questions out of the park if you can constantly (and correctly) refer to the core ideologies).

So, what to read? It’s rough. I think comparative politics book are easier to read, mostly because they delve into historic examples more instead of talking super abstractly. There’s one by Kesselman that’s good (He’s a much better writer that Haywood. Honestly Haywood is awful and if your prof is making you read it cover to cover I pity you, he’s much better for spot reading/introductory research when you’re writing). But I would do some browsing, and just make sure there are hefty sections on the core ideologies (most will have 3-4 Non-Marxist and Marxist. Usually the non Marxists are liberalism, conservatism, socialism, but this are broad categories that can be split up in many ways, author depending).

I hope this helps, I know you weren't looking for reading tips but bad textbooks are hard to read, and sometimes you just have to read them, so:

Here are some tips for reading something like that (very dry material):

 Skim! skim skim skim. Not every word must be read. I promise. Do the reading before lecture to put you in a good place to understand what’s happening in class, go to lecture, and THEN read (but this is kinda skimming too because you should be like “oh yeah! talked about this in class!”). If you daydreamed in class though, fully read.

Reading a bit before allows you to ask questions during class! Which is so so helpful! 

Also helps in office hours, you can say “you assigned this part of the book but didn’t talk about it in class, so wtf, do I need to know this?”

If you’re struggling with a certain topic/chapter, STOP READING. I know it sounds crazy but sometimes reading the same sentence over and over again is going to get you nowhere. Google it. Figure out the phrase or the concept at a very surface level and then go back to the book.

Write out questions as you have them. Ask them in class/office hours. Getting answers to your specific questions is awesome and helps so much. Don’t just say “I don’t get this”, come with specific, precise questions that will get you answer that will help you.  See also learning to be wrong.

I'm sure you know this one but read the end summary first so it doesn’t feel like you are being thrown to the wolves.

This is my best tip so it’s going in all bold.

SUMMARIZE. it helps so so much. I do a very informal summary. literally sometimes if I'm confused I'll just ask my prof after class “Hey, this is what I think this means. Am I correct?” Put it in your own words. It is really really helpful to stop reading and say (out loud helps too!) “This whole page/paragraph/section is just saying that this is this and this, and this happens.”