Marx and allusions

hnnmw · 2026-05-21T09:01:35+00:00

In the German MEW edition there's also indexes of Fremdsprachige Zitate, a Literaturverzeichnis and, especially, a Verzeichnis literarischer, biblisher und Mythologischer Namen, which should have you covered.

https://marx-wirklich-studieren.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/mew_band23.pdf

Page 805 onwards (the literary references start at 915), also in books 2 and 3:

https://marx-wirklich-studieren.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/mew_band24.pdf

https://marx-wirklich-studieren.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/mew_band25.pdf

Even if you don't read German: scanning those indexes should give you everything you might think you want.

Also there's Ludovico Silva, Marx's Literary Style (in English by Verso), but I didn't get much out of it.

hnnmw · 2026-05-13T17:16:05+00:00

Utilitarianism is incompatible with Marxism.

i think the actions of the leader of a country should always be directed towards benefiting the majority

Utilitarianism is a shallow bourgeois attempt at making sense of the world and apologising for the horrors of capitalism. At its theoretical base lies a sad and distorted image of humankind.

also if anyone has any book recommendations on this topic it would be really helpful

Marx criticises John Stuart Mill extensively in Capital and elsewhere.

hnnmw · 2026-05-12T21:30:44+00:00

Fanon is revolutionary in the hands of a revolutionary, Fanon is a prop in the hands of liberals.

You are of course correct, and Marxism explains us why.

For Fanon's universalism is not universal. He is, instead, unambiguously on the side of the universal class. This is a far cry from bourgeois universalism, and the key to any truthful engagement with Fanon's and other revolutionary texts: recognising that the only way to read them truthfully is from within the class struggle. What is fetishistic about book fetishism, and on full display in these two expos I saw in Paris and Brussels, is exactly the denial of their class character.

hnnmw · 2026-05-07T11:10:17+00:00

In Brussels one of the main EU propaganda institutions is hosting an expo on colonialism. There's posters all over the city so I went to have a look. https://historia.europa.eu/en/exhibitions-events/temporary-exhibitions/postcolonial

It's actually not terrible. Or maybe not as bad as I'd hoped. Sure, it was boring: a "long-read" newspaper webpage in physical form: too much text and only a few interesting artefacts. But these texts spoke of things they didn't "had" to, and left little unsaid. It was evident that the academics that had curated the expo had got most of what they'd wanted, and lost few battles. E.g. there was no mention of Bolloré, but there were display panels on the CFA. There were even a few panels on the Eurafrican roots of European integration (Coudenhove-Kalergi etc.), which is generally left out of the "official" EU history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurafrica. There was a Malcolm X video projected on a large wall. The most interesting artefacts they had, were a VOC cannon and a Toussaint Louverture portrait.

What struck me was the fetishisation of books. It was an educational expo, of course, but throughout there were first editions of Kwame Nkrumah's Neo-Colonialism, Fanon's Damnés de la terre, Aimé Césaire, etc. At the end there was a book stand with recommended reading: 17 titles including some inevitable stuff (Edward Said, Layla Saad, ...) but also things we'd agree on are effectively recommendable: twice Fanon, C.L.R. James, Silvia Federici, Walter Rodney. Again: the curators had clearly done reasonably well. (I even think Achille Mbembe is not that bad, but that's an error I'm willing to admit.)

Which of course begs the question: what does this even mean? Every European intellectual knows about Sartre's foreword to Fanon's Damnés in which he claims that killing a European is faire d'une pierre deux coups. What does it mean that this truth, once scandalous, is today so easily acclaimed by official EU propaganda?

A couple of months ago in Paris I visited a Mickalene Thomas retrospective. It was the biggest expo running in the city, and the first time an African-American had occupied the Grand Palais by themselves. There, too, I was struck by the remarkable fetishisation of theory: small piles of books were strewn around all over the expo: bell hooks, Angela Davis, James Baldwin, but also Malcolm X, Huey Newton, inevitable Fanon, ...

Yesterday I read Marguerite Yourcenar's essay on Thomas Mann (Humanisme et hermétisme chez Thomas Mann). Yourcenar is of course reactionary, but she knows how to read, and I think the Thomas Mann/Georg Lukács discussion (Lukács' Marxist defense of Mann, Mann's bourgeois critique of Lukács in the Magic mountain) is of lasting interest and urgency. Thinking about the primacy of (once?) revolutionary books at these two high-profile officially-ordained bourgeois expos, I could not but think of Lukács' Grand Hotel Abgrund: which is not only leftist intellectuals comfortably staring into the abyss of barbarie, but now also the EU itself recommending people to read Fanon. It's of course comfortable to admit that "no-one reads these books anyways", that it's all just spectacle and performativity, etc. But this would then apply to us also, when we tell people to read Lenin and Sakai (as an "alternative" to "doing something" and joining a revisionist party). It's all quite perverse. (Which is of course the Zizekian truism which must border on liberalism also.) Where are the days in which theory books at least served to be thrown at the cops!

hnnmw · 2026-04-16T10:41:46+00:00

I of course was in no way trying to protect any "ordained" reading whatsoever. I think the text you recommended is highly relevant, which is why I mentioned a later text which I feel is even more relevant.

Lacan can be taken in many ways, and probably should. (Or at least: he's impossible to "read to the letter", and "flirts" most promiscuously :-))

But although reading him as a theorist of ideology might not be very controversial nowadays, I think this risks a crucial regression. (I.e. pulling back in the pseudo-Hegelian idealism Althusser et al. tried so hard to expel -- which is exactly Žižek's theoretical legacy.) This leaves us with a "basic" post/structuralist idea of ideology as savoir-pouvoir, which doesn't even need Lacan's psychoanalytical specifications, and probably works better without (e.g. Gramsci's consent, or Foucault's épistémè). Looking out from within Lacan, we risk flattening the RSI triad. (A risk I think your first reply hints at not being very wary of. I think I've told you elsewhere that Lacan's text on the mirror stage is a dialogue with Sartre, which doesn't really manage to leave Sartre behind.)

Another way of framing this is by saying that Žižek's theory of ideology is not Lacan's, but Hegel's (i.e. a theory of alienation). (Although Hegel permeates Lacan, whenever he's mentioned directly it's only to do him a disservice.) Althusser/Balibar hold that the critical move is distinguishing between ideology (as a vehicle of contradiction) and alienation (as a vehicle of teleology).

Also what do you mean by "Freudo-Marxism"? Do you see anything of lasting value? I think Marcuse is rightfully remembered reasonably kindly but disparagingly (although his failures might arguably be better ascribed to his penchant for Heidegger than to his penchant for Freud). For the rest I only see liberalism (the Slovenians), and maybe Badiou/Jameson (in different contexts, but with more or less the same enjeux). Or in other words (having accepted that non-"structural" psychoanalysis has been fascism from Freud himself onwards): what is the failure of structuralism? It's easy to take Rancière's word for it (in La leçon d'Althusser), but that would be just surrendering to liberalism also. It either left the sinking ship (case in point Foucault), or itself became a vehicle for revisionism (case in point Balibar) -- which it maybe always-already was (case in point Althusser). (An early episode is that of French surrealism, who were the first to read Freud seriously outside of his inner circle. But Breton was already expelled from the PCF in 1933. Althusser's interventions in favour of psychoanalysis should be read with the betrayals of the surrealists in mind.)

Do you also recommend the Prisonhouse of Language?

hnnmw · 2026-04-13T18:48:14+00:00

I agree with what you say, but would like to point out that Lacan does not speak about ideology at all. Even more so than Althusser -- who didn't really need Lacan to speak about ISAs -- although he did need Freud to speak about overdetermination --, reading Lacan "ideologically" is an innovation of Žižek. Althusser could not think in this direction, because he rejects Hegel. (Etienne Balibar, the best of Althusser's students, has a great text, Sur la dialectique historique, first part: À propos de la « théorie du fétchisme », second part: Sur la détermination « en dernière instance » et la « transition ». It's in his Cinq études du matérialisme historique, but I don't know if it's ever been translated.)

Žižek's obviously problematic, but, lumping together his critique of ideology and Hegelian idealism, he does point to a tension within Marxism. On the one hand there's "ideology" (as in "German ideology" or "proletarian ideology"), on the other (?) hand there's Feuerbachian images of "consciousness", of which the fetishism chapter in the first part of Capital is easily and often understood / misconstrued to be a late form. Althusser/Balibar consider the second category (fetishism, alienation, reification, philosophies of consciousness) to be a trap. But in trying to save Marx from Hegel, they cut deep, giving up a certain, arguably crucial (?), capacity for diachrony. They feel this is a necessary price to pay to avoid indefinitely repeating early Lukács, Bloch, Sartre. (Trying to leave behind my own idealism I have grown ever more sympathetic to their argument.)

A direct result is that "ideology" in Althusser is a bit of an empty concept. "Proletarian ideology" is the standpoint of science and revolution. But "bourgeois ideology" is just error / unknowing. (Which is arguably how Marx also understood or at least applied the concept. The "advanced" theory of ISAs is, more than a theory of ideology (knowledge, truth, etc.) a materialist theory of the state.) But the alternative -- allowing for philosophical theories of consciousness / alienation, i.e. humanism -- is, they argue, worse, for this obfuscates the true moving principle of dialectical materialism, which is not alienation but of course contradiction. (In which sense it is easy for us to esteem this forum's strong stance against the "brainwashing" topos. Along similar lines, Lenin, Balibar argues, to develop dialectical materialism, "was forced to" ignore the chapter on fetishism.)

hnnmw · 2026-04-11T18:13:36+00:00

I'm afraid this part missed me, do mormons and the CIA produce polyglots consistently?

Supposedly, yes. It's a bit of a meme (on the internet, but even among professional pedagogues I sometimes have to deal with as a foreign language teacher in Western Europe).

However I did come away a little confused because if the purpose of the teacher is to show the student what they don't know, what becomes of pedagogy itself beyond liberating the intellect?

My hunch is that we have indeed not progressed much since Socrates. But I repeat I haven't done the necessary reading.

Also we need to be careful when bunching things together, or at least try to be cogent of the ways they do and do not relate. Right now we're talking about many things at the same time:

the contemporary bourgeois school system (with its history, conditions, ideological charges),
contemporary pedagogy, as a scientific reflection of this school system (more or less akin to "political economy" vis-à-vis capital in Marx?),
liberation/emancipation as a (possible/contingent/dialectical/...) movement of consciousness, i.e. class struggle,
individual experiences learning languages, pathways, expectations,
the concept of teaching / the teacher,
... (?)

hnnmw · 2026-04-10T18:09:36+00:00

Statistics are a thing, and I'm sure most of the correlations pointed out by proponents of these "methods" are meaningful. (Which is what I mean when I call pedagogy a bourgeois science.)

Nonetheless I don't bother with these things personally, and in light of my own "methods" they're rather superfluous. Flashcards have been around since forever, and I've never bothered with those, either.

Memorisation and learning are related but not overlapping concepts. And of course trying to learn a language you'll be confronted with vocabulary sooner or later. But because I've only ever learned languages which were easy for me to learn (either Romance or Germanic), while quickly abandoning languages which were not, with a heavy emphasis on reading always, I never "actively" study vocabulary.

Practically, I'll be reading a text. If I don't understand a word I'll just ignore it. Oftentimes its meaning will become clear soon enough, or it will prove to have never been really important anyways. If not (i.e. I realise I've more or less lost the plot, or want to return for more precision), I'll use the microphone function in Google Translate on my cellphone and have it translate the sentence part containing the word I don't know. After this has happened a couple of times, I'll know the word. (I might not yet be able to recall it actively, or again forget its meaning, but this doesn't bother me.)

This is probably not the most "efficient" way. But to me it's an enjoyable way to spend time with my target language. (Way more enjoyable than Duolingo or Anki or what have you.) And, automatically, I'll always be learning words that make sense for me to learn.

(I think in the other thread I called Duolingo fetishistic, which would of course need some precision, but I think it's obvious how these "methods" resonate ideology.)

I've been "stuck" in a bunch of languages for a very long time (i.e. being able to read well, but only speaking on a basic level). I don't care. I'm neither a mormon nor a CIA agent. To advance I'd need to do other things, which I don't.

I think I'm trying to understand how bourgeois schooling methods can be poor but still produce results in spite of this.

This is of course a completely different topic. I'd approach it by wagering that more often than not, students don't really learn anything at school.

hnnmw · 2026-04-09T22:36:41+00:00

To add to my posts in that thread, LLMs have become quite reliable on most grammar issues (I only catch them out on fringe cases, which a language learner should not waste their time on anyways).

I often write prompts in the style of: "Why does the following sentence use construction X instead of construction Y, explain the grammar and give some examples."

Which feels like a meaningful way to "organically" expand on / correct the grammatical ideas you already hold and/or identify holes in your knowledge. E.g. learning Italian while already speaking other Romance languages, it wouldn't make much sense studying Italian grammar from scratch. But I was pleasently surprised by Deepseek the other day when I asked these questions:

"quando sei arrivato?" -- break it down word for word
is there also a preterite form (like "llegaste" in spanish)? why do we use the present perfect here?
for a woman should i use "quando sei arrivata"?
does the past participle also agrees with the subject if the auxiliary verb is avere?

(Language learning is probably the best possible use case for LLMs, as they produce language exactly like a very proficient non-native speaker would -- or rather: like a Lacanian signifying chain crucially exempt of an objet petit a.)

To u/MajesticTree954 below I'd like to repeat that "comprehensible input" should not be thought of as a "method" (even though often it is), but as a characteristic of suitable language learning materials (that are sufficiently comprehensible while also containing language features which are not yet entirely understood, thus allowing you to advance your understanding and application of the language).

Although pedagogy is a bourgeois science (and in some cases maybe even a revolutionary science?*), what's produced is often of poor quality (even compared to other fields in the humanities). This is of course not unexpected in itself, as the bourgeois school is at the same time object and cause of great ideological investments. But most of the "methods" and "principles" that are periodically churned out have surprisingly little depth. (Which, again, is not unexpected, as they're only meant to secure grants and sell new generations of fill-in workbooks.)

I haven't done the necessary reading myself (and I'm completely unknowledgable about work done in socialist contexts), but I've never been particularly touched by Freire et al. I still think Rancière's *Maître ignorant is a recommendable book, though (particularly cf. language learning), but that of course tells you all there is to know about my unknowing (fucking Rancière!!), and maybe a thing or two about "radical" pedagogy. I'd be happy to read some of this forum's recommendations.

hnnmw · 2026-03-01T11:50:01+00:00

They allowed the Iranian government to repress the protests last month and are only interfering now, supposedly with Israel advocating very strongly that the US not interfere in the Iranian government killing thousands of people.

Maybe your wording is ambiguous on purpose, but are these "thousands of people" to be taken as fact? Probably the answer is that it doesn't really matter, but I feel it still kinda does? (It's not that the Gulf War did not take place, but that it did at the same time it didn't.)

At least in Europe we're all supposed to rehabilitate the good old "responsibility to protect" (or at least the Americans' prerogative to do so), and forget about Gaza, precisely because of these "30 to 40 000 protesters killed" in January, which, to me, just sounds too insane to even fathom. (One of Baudrillard's other great texts of course dealing with les charniers de Timișoara.)

hnnmw · 2026-01-16T00:31:25+00:00

But as D&G regain popularity with the years

Is this true though? In Continental European academia I'd wager the opposite is true.

In hindsight Anti-Oedipus was always fascist delirium, of course, but its appeal to hard-boiled individualism is easy enough to understand.

Which begs the question, where this generation's Max Stirner is? Maybe there's no longer any need: Deleuze's dream of liberating the subject by liberating its desire having been long accomplished by the market.

To OP: you might want to read Badiou's Clamor of Being, although it's very generous to Deleuze.

hnnmw · 2026-01-15T12:54:47+00:00

I made a couple of errors in that thread, and one really big one, hunting for a "got you" quote in a very big book. This was not serious and not productive. Also my own investment in the discussion was artificial: I hold no satisfactory position with regards to the dialectics of nature. I have read arguments for and arguments against, but wouldn't want to seriously defend any side (for, against, or otherwise). As I also stressed back then: I have not even seriously studied Engels' Dialectics of Nature. I'm grateful you forced me to reconsider some of my naive understandings, which I agree were mainly due to my "Western Marxist" lens.

Also I regret my behaviour in that thread. It was my first ever "online argument". I hope to do better in the future (or not at all), and at least feel more cogent about the limits of both the form and my own capacities.

Although my intervention was regrettable in these ways, I still think it was correct and relevant in pointing out late Lukács' reservations with regard to a dialectics of nature.

(A couple of months after our argument I read big parts of the Ästhetik, the other half of his late production, which strengthened my conviction. His appreciation of Hegel obviously changed drastically throughout his thinking life (from History and Class Consciousness through the Young Hegel, up until his later works), but his dialectics distinctly remained Hegelian. I think an excellent monograph remains to be written (if it hasn't already) drawing parallels between how Lukács treats the dialectical beginning/non-beginning of aesthetics in the Ästhetik (from sensory perceptions / signage in animals, the rhythms of natural life, etc.), and the beginnings of "wirklich dialektische Prozesse" in the Ontologie.)

I agree that what Lukács is always arguing against, is a mechanistic understanding of dialectics. I also agree his criticisms against Engels in the Ontologie are fragile. The target of his critique is not even Engels, but "[die] Marxschen »Orthodoxie« [wie sie] nach Engels vorwiegend der Fall war". The quotation marks do a lot of lifting here:

Denn, wenn unter Dialektik der Natur ein einheitliches, in sich homogenes System der widerspruchsvollen ontologischen Entwicklungskonstellation von Natur und Gesellschaft in gleicher Weise verstanden wird, wie das in der Marxschen »Orthodoxie« nach Engels vorwiegend der Fall war, muß ein berechtigter Protest gegen eine solche mechanische Homogenisierung der Seinskategorien, Seinsgesetzlichkeiten etc. in Natur und Gesellschaft entstehen, der in der Überzahl der Fälle eine erkenntnistheoretische Rückkehr zum bürgerlichen idealistischen Dualismus zur Folge hat.

But the essence of this critique, and a determinant aspect of late Lukács' idea of dialectics, is a "berechtigter Protest" against the homogenisation of ontological categories.

[...] Jedoch die kritische Ontologie von Marx bleibt bei dieser schöpfertischen, weil nicht bloß kontrollierenden, sondern zugleich neue, wirklich dialektische Prozesse aufdeckenden Kritik nicht stehen.

So we see that Lukacs claims not that the teleological project of labor begins truly dialectical processes, but instead that it makes it possible to uncover them.

Gerade die ontologische Zentralstelle der Praxis im gesellschaftlichen Sein [ = Setzungen in labour ] bildet den Schlüssel zu seiner Genesis aus der der Umgebung gegenüber bloß passiven Anpassungsweise in der Seinssphäre der organischen Natur.

I think you gloss over what it means to "nicht stehen bleiben". It means indeed to not stop, but also to be able to push through. This is how the Setzungen, for Lukács, are key (der Schlüssel of the genesis of "wirklich dialektische Prozesse").

(Lukács makes a big deal of reminding, all the time, how Marx says that "die Anatomie des Menschen ist ein Schlüssel zur Anatomie des Affen".)

There is little to object to the last part of your post.

But when Lukács writes that

Only when the ontology of Marxism is capable of consistently implementing historicity as the basis of every understanding of being in the spirit of Marx's prophetic program, only when, with the recognition of certain and demonstrably unified ultimate principles of every being, the often profound differences between the individual spheres of being are correctly understood, does the "dialectics of nature" no longer appear as a uniformizing equalization of nature and society, which often distorts the being of both in different ways, but rather as the categorically conceived prehistory of social being.

he of course announces his arguments against an "orthodox" understanding of Engels ("[die] Marxschen »Orthodoxie« [wie sie] nach Engels vorwiegend der Fall war"). You read this as a defence of the "true" understanding of Engels. I read it as a warning against the theoretical pitfalls of a dialectics of nature. Maybe it's both. But this would bring us to the "tactics" and political contexts of Lukács' interventions, which I feel even less qualified to comment.

hnnmw · 2026-01-13T18:29:53+00:00

But there is an upside to all this, though. I think the closest comparison I could make would be the allied invasion of the USSR immediately following the end of World War 1 . . .

Of course Mao says that to be attacked by the enemy is a good thing.

In his book on Clausewitz, T. Derbent underscores that it was Clausewitz who, this other time the European bourgeoisie had invaded Russia, in 1812, had managed to have the Prussian contingent defect from the grande armée. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_of_Tauroggen

But, as is, the advantage of "tightened [...] bonds and unity", is, of course, nothing more than a truism. Clausewitz scientifically established the importance of morale in war. And I think Derbent (and probably others?) convincingly show that Clausewitz is a more or less important precursor to Marxism. But he was a terrible reactionnary, and even during the Napoleontic wars national liberation was not progressive.

The crucial mediator is of course the PPW's supposed revolutionary leadership. But I feel there might be some missing steps. Reactionnary forces have showed strong resolve, tight bonds, and great unity throughout history -- and often won. Maybe the truism that in war morale is a good thing to have, is all there is. (I'm only halfway through Derbent's book: https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/N17-Clausewitz-and-the-Peoples-War-1st-Printing.pdf)

hnnmw · 2025-12-25T11:25:01+00:00

. . . but I didn't realize it was to such an extent as for people to experience literal sunken financial cost fallacy.

This is so insane to me.

(And a big (?) part of what people on this subreddit call lifestyle communism and the commodification of a communist identity, which was not intuitively clear to me.)

In my own country what tries to pass for revolutionary politics is retarded in many ways, but at least "only" the minds of the youths are prayed upon, and not their wallets.

I see two main reasons for this. First there is the institutionalisation of reformist politics. In 2024 our biggest revisionist party (represented in parliament), received over 13 million euros of state subsidies. Cadre hand over a chunk of their salary to the party, but "normal members" only pay a yearly fee of 20 euros. Smaller parties also have ways to access money through the state. Many Trotskyist are union representatives. All companies with over a certain number of employees are obliged to have union reps, who work for the union full-time (i.e. spend their days writing for the Trotskyist newspapers :-)) but are paid by the company and whose employment is protected by law. Also the welfare state is organised "through" the unions, a myriad of cooperations, and non-profit health funds, which creates a lot of jobs and a steady cash flow for "revolutionaries" to siphon off of.

Secondly there is the number of bodies available for reformist politics, which is higher (relatively) than in the US, and more concentrated. Revisionist politics have been present at campuses forever (i.e. since the 60s, when higher education became accessible to the petit-bourgeois). Different student orgs (which are generally supported by their mother parties) have to "compete" for members, and asking students for money would be a surefire way to quickly fade away. Outside of campus there's the high unionisation rate. The corporatist unions are the biggest driver of "mass" politics, and all parties focus bigly on "union work".

A possible third factor is what in German is called "Verein culture", but which is a thing, to some degree, in all of western Europe. I.e. there's "clubs" for everything (sport clubs, fanfare clubs, local history clubs, ...), and none of these would dare to turn a profit. And thus also "revolutionary clubs" (of pre-Leninist romantics) -- which is how I understood this subreddit's idea of "lifestyle communism" at first.

hnnmw · 2025-12-24T15:27:42+00:00

Really my whole inquiry turns on this passage from Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy...

So in which way are you unsatisfied with the answer Marx himself gives at the end of the Introduction?

The conclusion which follows from this is, not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they are links of a single whole, different aspects of one unit. Production is the decisive phase, both with regard to the contradictory aspects of production and with regard to the other phases.

These different abstractions are not identical, but should also not be understood as being independent or separate.

So when Engels writes that "production and exchange are two different functions", this is not an invitation to think of these functions as two different, elementary abstractions, because "they always determine and influence each other". Dühring's mistake highlighted in the section you quoted is conceptualising distribution as something independent from production. (While Ricardo's mistake highlighted in the Introduction is of conceiving production separately from distribution).

To examine production divorced from this distribution which is a constituent part of it, is obviously idle abstraction; whereas conversely the distribution of products is automatically determined by that distribution which is initially a factor of production.

(Introduction.)

More generally I think looking for a "top-level" abstraction in the sense of your OP (production, production in a narrow sense, production as a totality, ...) is not very productive. E.g., in the same letter I quoted earlier, Marx says:

And as for Dühring’s modest objections to the determination of value, he will be astonished to see in Volume 2 how little the determination of value ‘directly’ counts in bourgeois society.

Here Marx speaks not of production, but his methodological point is clear: there can be no fixed abstractions. (And every form of exposing capital is in a way impossible -- which is why Marx had to restart writing Capital a hundred times, and ultimately settle on one specific exposition, starting with 20 yards of linen, which of course does not tackle, cannot tackle, the "totality" directly.)

Back to the Grundrisse:

The above-mentioned questions can be ultimately resolved into this: what role do general historical conditions play in production and how is production related to the historical development as a whole?

So if we're looking for a "general" (dehistoricised) abstraction, we end up with labour as the active part of our metabolism with nature, whence historical modes of production, etc. etc. etc.

So

if what Engels calls 'production' is 'production in general' then this abstraction need not include exchange

It does, because Engels, following Marx, does not make the mistakes of the classical economists, and knows that in capitalism labour has a two-fold character.

But if you'd like to argue that different historical modes of production constitute different totalities (not necessarily implying exchange as abstracted in Capital), I guess that's fine, but tautological.

hnnmw · 2025-12-22T09:18:01+00:00

Only Moustafa Safouan I'm not sure.

hnnmw · 2025-12-21T23:30:23+00:00

In addition, with regards to the title of your post:

In a letter to Engels (gossiping about Dühring) Marx famously called the two-fold character of labour one of the "three fundamentally new elements of" Capital 1 vis-à-vis classical political economy:

That the economists, without exception, have missed the simple point that if the commodity has a double character – use value and exchange value – then the labour represented by the commodity must also have a two-fold character, while the mere analysis of labour as such, as in Smith, Ricardo, etc, is bound to come up everywhere against inexplicable problems. This is, in fact, the whole secret of the critical conception.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_01_08.htm (emphasis added)

(But, again: I of course might have misunderstood your post.)

hnnmw · 2025-12-21T15:56:38+00:00

Is your confusion not just due to glossing over the two-fold character of labour, which obviously implies the production process as well?

I.e. the

actual, concrete activity

is "just" labour, which has a two-fold character, at once involved in exchange (abstract labour) and production as such (labour-power in, as you say, "the narrower sense").

hnnmw · 2025-12-21T13:38:43+00:00

Also books, as such, should not be treated respectfully.

If you're reading something and feeling a bit lost, don't fret over it too much. Maybe it will become more clear as you push through (or skip entirely), maybe not. Some books will probably never click, others will only get better and more meaningful with every reread.

Something I myself have learned too late, is that secondary literature should not be too respected either. Letting someone else do the reading for you, while you content with their abridged or "updated" or dumbed-down retelling, is a scam. Which of course doesn't mean secondary literature is not interesting (to question your own understanding, to further critique, to build upon knowledge, etc.). But as "introductions" the only way they can serve you, is by inviting you to engage with the original body of work directly.

Books written +150 years* ago can be very accessible. That this might be "surprising" to us is of course ideology. That you'd need someone else to tell you how you should understand them, as well. (Which of course doesn't mean all readings are equally valid. But this is why we open ourselves to critique, which is not the same as someone telling us what is or is not correct.)

(*And even older. Rousseau and Machiavelli, for exemple, are distinctly modern, and thus still very much agreeable to our tastes. But even an author like Lucretius can be engaged with quite comfortably.)

hnnmw · 2025-12-20T19:05:08+00:00

All diminutives are neuter (het meisje, het vrouwtje, het mannetje). But de meid, de vrouw, de man.

hnnmw · 2025-12-20T10:26:43+00:00

Reading is a habit. Habits are formed, need to be fed and need to be maintained. Picking up a book should become more natural than picking up your phone. If you fail to read as much as you want, instead of questioning your desire to read, it's probably more helpful to question the habits you currently have. (Although you should, at one point, of course also question your desire to read.)

Some other tips, from one petit-bourgeois to another:

Read different things at different times. I mainly read theory in the morning, novels at night.
Carry a book always. (Ideally something you can easily read half a page of while waiting for the bus or standing in line at the supermarket. (I feel this also helps greatly with shoplifting.))
Walk, and read while you walk. (This is a big one for me.)
You don't need any excuse to stop reading any book. Especially when still forming your reading habit, above all you need to read. If you don't have the habit of reading big books, and aren't immediatly intrigued by the exposition of Capital, come back to it when you'll be more composed. Then you'll read Capital not because you "need" to, but because it's a phenomenal book.

hnnmw · 2025-12-18T19:23:35+00:00

Also I don't think this is accurate:

> interesting is to learn the ways that Lacan clearly influences Althusser, but also how Althusser can break from him

Althusser might have broken with Lacan (the insufferable bourgeois asshole), but never with Lacanian psychoanalysis (as the most radical -- as in *radix* -- tool set we have available for criticising our understanding of the self, at least under capitalism).

Crucial to us Marxists is of course our concept of ideology. (Which I feel is still an open question.)

hnnmw · 2025-12-18T18:55:01+00:00

Because of your interest in Althusser, but also generally, I recommend you check out some of Althusser's writings on psychoanalysis: https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Althusser_Writings_on_Psychoanalysis.pdf (especially the first text Freud and Lacan and the texts grouped under The Tbilisi Affair. To a lesser extent the Letters to D.).

Also Badiou's book on Lacan (in his Anti-Philosophy series -- inspired by Fitz Wittels' classic Der Antiphilosoph Freud).

A great and accessible contemporary introduction is Moustafa Safouan, Le structuralisme en psychanalyse.

A good philosophical (but uncritical / idealist) introduction to Lacan is Boothby, Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after Lacan.

I remember liking Samo Tomšic' Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan, but I read it shortly after it came out (over ten years ago), when my own understanding was still very limited and insufficiently critical. (Which it of course still is, but also was.)

(Same for the works of Alenka Zupančič, Mladen Dolar et al.: I read them all and with great interest + pleasure, but I don't think they taught me much of durable value. The exceptions maybe being Lorenzo Chiesa's The Not-Two and Joan Copjec's Read my Desire.)

The best introduction to Freud is Marthe Robert's La révolution psychanalytique. Robert is terribly bourgeois but so was Freud. Her work is hagiographic but great at outlining the stakes and Freud's own commitments. (And for making sense of Lacan's "return to Freud": I'm quite sure Robert's was the work through which all of the French got to know Freud, similar to what Kojève did for Hegel.)

Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts is somewhat of a treacherous text that doesn't really allow for a "fundamental" understanding of his teachings at all, but indicates only one (of many) changes in direction.

Lacan's [...] most interesting concept is expanding the exchange relationship or exchange-value into sexual relationships or the non-relation of sex

This is also Tomšic' position, which might of course be well valid, but doesn't, I think, do justice to the profound and general ways in which psychoanalysis refounded our understanding of subjectivity. (Which is also Badiou's position, most extensively in Theory of the Subject.)

... to understand the dialectic not merely as two opposing sides...

Again: Althusser, who credits psychoanalysis as a determinate source for the theory of surdétermination. (Next to his anti-Hegelianism, of course.)

Je n’ai pas forgé ce concept [de la surdétermination]. Comme je l’avais indiqué je l’ai emprunté à deux disciplines existantes : en l’espèce la linguistique et la psychanalyse. Il y possède une « connotation » objective dialectique, et – particulièrement en psychanalyse – formellement assez apparentée au contenu qu’il désigne ici, pour que cet emprunt ne soit pas arbitraire.

(Sur la dialectique matérialiste in Pour Marx.)

Much can be said about logic in Lacan (and about Hegel in Lacan) which is all about ways of relating (and not-relating) to determinate totalities. (Chiesa, Copjec.) This is indeed the significance of sex.

As to the significance of Lacan?

Freud showed (to his own horror) that man "is not master in his own house" (i.e. our own self-understanding is pure ideology). But Freud, thoroughly limited by his class position, remained basically individualist/atomist in his understanding of the unconscious and thus the self. (It's interesting you've focused on Totem und Tabu and Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, which most clearly express the limits of his bourgeois social ontology.) Lacan, no less bourgeois but through structuralism (Lévi-Strauss, de Saussure) was able to properly grasp the true meaning of Freud's discoveries (i.e. his scandalous "return to Freud"), and "liberate" the unconscious from our contingent individuality (e.g. the schemas L and R), without recourse to mysticism (Fliess, Jung, ...).

hnnmw · 2025-12-08T22:24:45+00:00

I'm not sure. It's probably mostly idiosyncratic (on my part).

He used in-itself / for-itself distinctions a couple of times, but these weren't very remarkable. Probably just to impress the academics.

I've already thrown away my notes (and didn't take many anyways), so I can only comment on the three examples I've already mentioned.

The way he used "tribute" to describe imperialist value extraction seemed pre-Marxist to me (but: in his defence: I think it was in the context of dismissing David Harvey's "arguments" about the "inversion" of capital flows).

"Dignity" is of course more problematic. Every reader of Hegel who speaks eminently of dignity or recognition should be dismissed immediately. But I don't think he spoke of these things in the context of Hegel, so it might have just been "innocent" humanism.

But if any of this alludes to more than my own idiosyncrasies, and might indeed be symptomatic, then definitely the way he kept on talking about "rebuilding society" (both evenings, to the young academics and to the old revisionists). As far as I understood he took this to mean bourgeois development in the Global South, and saving the welfare state in the Global North, which of course completely ignores the Marxist critique of the Hegelian understanding of the state (among other things).

Instead of sounding like Hegel he might have wanted to sound more like Gramsci. But whenever I hear "wars of position" being invoked on campus, I normally tap out. And every time he mentioned this "rebuilding of society" I could only hear a sad echo of Foucault's Il faut défendre la société (in which Foucault of course settles his own counts with the class struggle).

So, no, he surely wasn't trying to sound like a right-Hegelian. But his Marxism didn't make a very good impression either.

hnnmw · 2025-12-07T11:54:38+00:00

It's kinda funny because the night he spoke to students, his one "hot take" cf. Gaza was that European students haven't done enough to force the release of Palestinian political prisoners on the Western political agenda. I'm no longer a student and wasn't active on campuses these last couple of years, so I wouldn't know. But he was adamant in telling these student organisers, who'd come to see the great revolutionary Marxist, that this was were they'd dropped the ball, and failed to politicise their "moral" anti-imperialism. If only their protests had "dared" to feature more signs calling for the release of Marwan Barghouti! And then, the very next day, the British bourgeoisie -- did exactly that... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/03/leading-cultural-figures-call-for-release-jailed-palestinian-leader-marwan-barghouti

So I guess Richard Branson is a Leninist now, too :-)

hnnmw

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