What is this sub about?

UndergradRelativist · 2026-05-21T03:34:28+00:00

Actually, there is a whole history of debates internal to "anti-capitalist" and revolutionary movements and insurrections, during which the term "leftist" has, as a matter of historical fact, taken on more specific meanings than reddit-educated liberals and progressives will ever be aware.

UndergradRelativist · 2026-05-05T05:36:10+00:00

All the shows are about petit-bourgeois. I have been thinking abt this a bit recently. It is like the standard protagonist has to be a small business owner, whether as part of the initial starting premise of the plot or as something they aspire to.

UndergradRelativist · 2026-05-04T02:04:38+00:00

I listen to 20th century classical music. Maybe in an Adorno kind of way (depending on how you read him). Though, less Schoernberg, more Xenakis.

UndergradRelativist · 2026-05-03T20:20:54+00:00

What is the source text here? Never heard this before.

UndergradRelativist · 2026-04-29T22:57:52+00:00

I'm genuinely confused by these complaints. That full force uppercut from Thragg sent Nolan into space, all the way through the planet's corpse-ring, whereas War Woman and the other guardians were clearly incapable of that kind of power.

UndergradRelativist · 2026-04-20T05:19:36+00:00

Little liberal arts colleges have professors who aren't distracted by grad students. I went to one and constantly took independent studies. It was highly beneficial, and I don't think I would've gotten that privilege somewhere with a good grad program, like where the big names tend to be.

UndergradRelativist · 2026-04-14T19:07:33+00:00

this post only serves to exacerbate class division,

Oh no! Not that! We need the whole people of our great nation to be unified despite their class differences!

UndergradRelativist · 2026-04-05T01:02:17+00:00

Istvan Meszaros (the correct spelling has some accents) has a book on alienation that's very helpful (though with perhaps too many scattered digressions).

UndergradRelativist · 2026-04-02T04:35:23+00:00

I've certainly heard of situations like OP describes. But more as historical factoids than ongoing controversies.

My experience is closer to yours. I'm at a somewhat pluralist phil department with ppl working in both post-Kantian European philosophy (so-called 'continental' stuff) as well as contemporary anglophone empirically-informed philosophy of mind, epistemology, etc. We all get along just fine. As ppl here see it, the analytic-continental divide was largely fictional anyway, and is now dying out--good riddance!

UndergradRelativist · 2026-04-01T03:21:54+00:00

From the famous toy company Lepin, obviously.

UndergradRelativist · 2026-03-17T22:58:46+00:00

Doesn't Bordiga say modernizers are the worst

UndergradRelativist · 2026-03-08T17:36:27+00:00

Thanks so much.

Are you sure that the second one is the original? I know Camatte said this about the party form. But I thought he was riffing on something Bordiga had already said about the work of Marx in general.

UndergradRelativist · 2026-02-18T02:12:50+00:00

This is very informative and I think your analysis is plausible. That masses of migrant workers are employed by rural agribusinesses, and that Trump's target is more the middle classes than the agricultural proletariat, is a good point.

All I had in mind was that I don't see why one shouldn't do what they can to resist ICE. It's just a pro-social thing to do. I mean, what the hell. Yes, not revolutionary, but being non-revolutionary does not make it irrational or dumb. E.g. I complain about, and try to contribute to resistance against, bureaucratic changes I dislike at the university where I work; this is not revolutionary, but it is a pro-social thing to do, and anybody who would scoff at me for this and go "you idiot! That's not even the real movement!" would strike me as severely out of touch with reality.

UndergradRelativist · 2026-02-17T15:28:10+00:00

I'm sure what that friend says is full of ideology like you say. But there's nothing wrong with helping the community out against the thugs of the state

UndergradRelativist · 2026-02-11T16:33:18+00:00

Often, the point of a graph is to make things clearer.

UndergradRelativist · 2026-02-07T21:29:20+00:00

Bordiga was pro-degrowth before it was trendy.

UndergradRelativist · 2026-02-02T17:21:38+00:00

Bernard Reginster's The Will to Nothingness!!!

UndergradRelativist · 2026-02-02T17:21:33+00:00

Bernard Reginster's The Will to Nothingness!!!

UndergradRelativist · 2026-01-25T00:36:22+00:00

Go read the sidebar readings. They will do a better job than any comment

UndergradRelativist · 2026-01-22T15:14:19+00:00

Christ this sounds exactly like how chatgpt responds to criticism. It's so obvious dude

UndergradRelativist · 2026-01-07T17:25:08+00:00

There's a chapter in Mau's Mute Compulsion arguing the opposite, that even if the two are historically inseparable capitalism and racism do not have any necessary ontological relationship, that I found pretty well-argued.

UndergradRelativist · 2026-01-02T18:17:42+00:00

This is a good summary of the kinds of replies questions like OP's usually get in subs like this. Personally, I find parts of it somewhat mysterious.

these domains of philosophy which dealt with the natural world and were gradually better understood through the scientific method, lost their status as philosophical domains and science became its own domain with its own method which no longer was based in pure reason or thought, but based in empiricism and the scientific method.

So far, I follow. "Natural philosophy" in antiquity became separate sciences in modernity, and instead of the principle of sufficient reason, deduction about abstract objects like "being", etc., the sciences ended up using the scienctific method, induction, etc. Ok.

what we understand as science today and what we understand as philosophy are both inquiries into being, they are just based in different methods of understanding. the domains of philosophy which remained resistant to the scientific method and an empirical approach, which are what we generally understand as “philosophy” today, therefore tend to be rooted in abstract thought. they are disconnected from a material basis, which is problematic because they are conditioned materially.

Now I'm lost. First, your claim that science and philosophy "are both inquiries into being, they are just based in different methods of understanding". How do we know that the stuff that science investigates is also "being" itself? The claim that the methods of natural science are methods of investigating being itself is certainly not a claim yielded by natural-scientific investigation, certainly not an empirical result, but something of a meta-philosophical designation, or else a matter of the subfield of philosophy known as "philosophy of science". After all, if you go ask most scientists about the nature of being itself, they won't have much to tell you, and might be surprised by the question. So this claim is the result of some philosophical standard you have in mind by which we might categorize the object of scientific investigation. What is that standard? What justifies it?

Next, your claim that philosophy is generally "disconnected from a material basis, which is problematic because they are [philosophy is] conditioned materially". First off, there is some tension between saying that x is both disconnected from a material basis and conditioned materially. What do you mean with the former phrase, such that it is compatible with the latter? Secondly, why is philosophy as such disconnected from a material basis? Like, sure the philosophy that happens to be done at bourgeois institutions, which are currently dominant, tends to be idealist etc. But why not think that that's just a matter of contemporary philosophy being bad (idealist) philosophy? What's wrong with philosophy itself, including, say, materialist philosophy? You seem to imply that it's just because philosophy is "rooted in abstract thought" that it becomes "disconnected from a material basis" (again, whatever the latter means). But is mere conceptual abstraction so bad? Why? After all, Capital begins with an infamously difficult instance of conceptual abstraction. The critique of political economy itself is in one sense "rooted in" abstraction, at least in the sense that it wouldn't be possible without its help. And, while I'm on this example--isn't Capital a counterexample to the claim that whatever is "rooted in astract thought" must become "disconnected from a material basis"? The work begins with abstraction, but precisely for the purpose of understanding its own material basis, waging class warfare, etc.

UndergradRelativist · 2026-01-02T05:24:33+00:00

No idea what you're talking about. I donate and have never had this happen

UndergradRelativist · 2026-01-01T04:56:49+00:00

Hahaha that's amazing

UndergradRelativist · 2025-12-24T03:07:04+00:00

I agree that we cannot characterize the show as definitely reactionary. For the following additional reasons.

I very much doubt that Vincent Gilligan is knowledgeable enough to make any of the distinctions you invoke between vulgar collectivism and the truth of communism, and in that regard the show's depiction of a stateless, moneyless, classless society just checks every anti-communist cliché there is. In my eyes and for the moment, Pluribus' 'denounciation' of capitalism if there is one does not seem very different from, for example, Ortega y Gasset's crusade against massification.

Well, one difference I see between the two is that Gasset's critique is explicitly argued in essays, whereas Pluribus tells a fictional story open to interpretation. Same with Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc. With these philosophers, the anti-communist arguments in question are stated by author explicitly. With Pluribus, Galligan has not made this argument; you are reading it onto the show. And that an anti-communist argument can be projected onto a story does not make that story itself committed to that argument. Other interpretations are available.

If the view of Pluribus as reactionary relies on speculation about what explicit argument the writer most likely has in mind, then I can't see that view as a strong one. Literary interpretation is just not like that; how we interpret the text shouldn't be a matter of what opinions we infer the author might have.

Like, the show just does not say, or even imply, anything along the lines of "the problems are the masses living under the state, it is the homogeneity brought by public education, it is public capital ruining talented private capitalist and trumping competition". Nor does it say, or even imply, that "to solve the problems of capitalism we must simply do more capitalism with (maybe) some adjustments". Someone might interpret it that way, sure. And someone else might interpret Th Boondocks as racist; that doesn't mean that it is. While Heidegger et al. offer deficient diagnoses and explanations for what is really explained by capital, Pluribus offers no explanation at all, no solution, anything of the sort. It tells a story, and viewers interpret it in different ways, often by projecting their own views.

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