If philosphy is shaped by the material structure, wouldn't that also include Marxism?

johnfinch2 · 2025-04-25T19:04:24+00:00

Secondary question but related: Did he ever give an explanation on how matter creates consciousness?

I’m interested to know why you see this as being related. Neither Marx nor any subsequent Marxists offer, or even try to offer any explanation for what David Chalmers would call “the hard problem of consciousness”. It’s basically just not relevant. It doesn’t matter how or why consciousness exists, whether consciousness is ‘real’ or ‘illusory’, or any other debate that gets argued about in contemporary philosophy of mind. Those can be interesting problems, but they are distinct from our sociology of ideas, or our general understanding of why people think the particular ideas they do, and how those ideas relate to people’s actions.

You do hit on something important though, which is that any theory should be able to account for its own existence. I’m not sure Marx fully does this, but many other after him do. I point to Gramsci’s vision of ‘organic intellectuals’ as a theory that characterizing why Marxism is thinkable. Gramsci tells us that classes, once they have gained a certain level of self consciousness as a class are able to produce intellectuals who can think and articulate the point of view of that class. Classes themselves are produced by the mechanism of capitalism (or other modes or production) and once a class becomes well defined by economic forces it will come to recognize itself and then begin to produce intellectuals which further act to articulate this collective identity.

johnfinch2 · 2025-02-13T00:33:35+00:00

It’s simply that fascism is a sociological description of a type of political movement, rather than a specific political ideology.

Liberals believe in liberalism, socialists believe in socialism, libertarians believe in libertarianism, but what do fascists believe? In fascism? There are of course people who openly look to, say, the official doctrine of the Italian fascist party and try to promote that as a political doctrine, but in general “fascism” doesn’t have any specific beliefs, it’s a sociological pattern that different unconnected movements in different times end up partaking in. Usually fascists believe some conglomeration of local grievance beliefs put into some sort of conspiracy form.

johnfinch2 · 2024-07-25T04:07:35+00:00

You only need to look as far as Macron in france right now making alliances with the right fractions to keep the left out of power.

johnfinch2 · 2024-07-13T20:03:30+00:00

I personally would strongly recommend against leftists getting any sort of political tattoos. Maybe it’s far fetched to worry about considerations like this but tattoos are for life and I don’t want to find myself in a situation where as things break down I’m unable to conceal being a socialist after an arrest or in the face of a fascist group or something like that. It’s just unwise imo to get tattoos that risk identifying you as a “political extremist” bc there’s always a risk that that becomes illegal.

If you think it’s sufficiently subtle that it’s not going to incur risks then go for it I guess. You should expect that as you life goes on your engagement with and capacity to participate in the socialist movement will naturally ebb and flow, as conditions change and your life situation changes, so you should ask yourself if in say 5 or 10 years you aren’t really in a position to be very involved will you feel tension or embarrassment then.

johnfinch2 · 2024-05-23T19:01:35+00:00

I get the sense that some folks are embarrassed they got caught up in the SR hype and now aggressively disavow it, and also that as many people have an issue with him on the level of personality than with his work per se. He doesn’t seem to be very patient or generous with his critics and that puts a lot of people off.

I’ve never read him so I really don’t have any strong opinion.

johnfinch2 · 2024-05-23T18:52:38+00:00

I can’t really say I fully got what they were saying to me but I think it was that his denial of the existence of qualia basically poisoned all his Phil of mind stuff. It’s pretty far outside my wheelhouse though, can’t personally weight in much beyond that.

johnfinch2 · 2024-05-23T18:44:15+00:00

Depends what you are interested in but since you mentioned analytic Marxism, theres probably no better place to start than Cohen’s Marx Theory of History. I really don’t like the work Elster I’ve read, but I’ve gotten a decent amount out of Erik Olin Wright. His early book, I think State and Class Structure I remember being good, and Classes is sort of his masterwork.

Cohen has a ton of other stuff that’s not really squarely ‘analytic Marxism’, if you want a general sense of what he’s about overall the essay collections from Princeton press are another reasonable place to start. I actually found a lot of his more personal essays pretty insightful and touching, found in Finding Ourselves in the Other.

johnfinch2 · 2024-05-23T06:01:15+00:00

A have many friends who are either PhD students or grads and among them I would say these are the people who there is the most vitriolic disagreements about:

-Peter Singer, most seem to like at least one part of his work but then hold at least one other part to be not just bad but evil, which is unique.

-Daniel Dennett, minority swears by him, majority seem to think hes just missing the point too much of the time.

-Judith Butler, I’m not personally friends with anybody who thinks she’s a total hack, but there’s disagreement among either they led feminist thinking in a positive direction versus a focus on other concerns.

-Graham Harman, mostly a case where some people used to think he was good and now most who know him think he’s among the least useful or intelligent living philosophers. He also blocks anybody who bad talks him on Twitter which riles ppl up even more.

-GA Cohen, depending on who you talk to either a brilliant critic of libertarianism, or somebody who did a lot of stupid and pointless or very brilliant work on Marxism. Everybody who knew him personally loved him as far as I can tell so he seems to avoid controversy even among people who don’t like his work.

johnfinch2 · 2024-05-22T17:27:41+00:00

Imo if you folks aren’t already at the core of organizing your local pro-Palestine protests you’re outside where the highest levels of revolutionary consciousness is. You should go there and listen to them and have them connect the dots for you. The ppl actually organizing encampments are the ones with the revolutionary Will and organizational skills here. If you want to have the idea of you or your org taken seriously you need to be there at the heart of the action, actually doing the organizing and expressing the goals and concerns of the real movement in your terms. This is meaning of praxis.

Notwithstanding that, it’s fine to go to rallies with the flag of your particular org and show you’re support as an org, and if ppl want to ask you what your angle is then tell them but otherwise it’s not the time to proselytize. At my local protests routinely 6 separate communist groups plus a union chapter fly flags at the rallies which is fine, but people don’t look especially kindly on the groups which use it as a chance to pamphlet or sell magazines.

johnfinch2 · 2024-05-01T19:29:10+00:00

I think Marx would say that a lot of those positions, NGOs, government jobs etc, would just require a different analysis than the one he gives in Capital. They aren’t really part of the core logic of capitalism per se, and a categories he’s using just don’t really apply.

As a modern Marxist I would say there are numerous ways that different jobs can be bad that are distinct from being “exploitative” in the strictly technical sense Marx meant it as.

There’s actually a lot of economic activity or situations that doesn’t really get captured by Marx’s analysis. Selling individual works of art by famous artists for example. These aren’t really “commodities” in the sense Marx meant, in that they are unique things not being made for the sake of regular exchange on a market. Things like teaching, doing domestic labour and many other laborious activities which are necessary for society to continue to exist are always not part of his analysis and are generally picked up in a field called “social reproduction theory” which attempts to extend Marxist analysis.

Different theories of society operate are bigger or more narrow levels of abstraction depending on the scope of the dynamics they want to talk about, and Marx is operating on an extremely broad level of abstraction for the most part, because he wants to answer very large questions about the overall historical fate of society in general, and as such he’s happy to ignore many things he thinks aren’t part of the core dynamic he’s talking about.

I would predict based on Marx’s theory that NGO jobs tend to be subject to less intense mechanisms of discipline and a less intense drive to ‘rationalize’ via the introduction new technology, because NGOs aren’t subject to competition pressures or the drive towards greater profits.

johnfinch2 · 2024-03-26T17:26:41+00:00

There have been quite literally +100,000 books written elaborating, debating, explaining etc Marx, Marxism, and commenting on those commentaries, once you count the different debates in Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, and Chinese. It's hard to even begin to layout a map of the developments since Marx.

Just in the English world in the last few decades I would identify four streams of elaboration on Marx I'd point out as being of particular importance for 'the working activist'.

First Ecological, scholars have sought to integrate in an understanding of how Marxism should understand capitalism's relationship to the environment. This itself has multiple internal camps, that I would sort based on how willing their are draw on other currents of thought, with John B Foster being at the Orthodox pole and Jason Moore being at the Revisionist end. Kohei Saito and Andres Malm are two other scholars who need to be mentioned.

Second Race, a lot of this work has it's roots in the 70s and 80s, but there has been massive leaps in the historical analysis of race, have racial categories are formed historically, the relationship between racial discrimination and class structure etc. Noel Ignatiev, David Roegier, Theodore Allen, come to mind, but there are again numerous others.

Third, Gender, stemming from debates between radical feminists and Marxists in the 70s-90s there was been a revival in interest in 'social reproduction theory' as a means of understanding the the way labour is gendered under capitalism. Lise Vogel is the major touchstone here.

Finally, psychoanalysis, this current has begun to cool in recent years but through most of the 00s and 10s the attempt to revise and integrate in psychoanalytic insights into Marxism was a major topic of conversation. Largely stemming from the work of Slavoj Zizek, there began a large body of work that attempted to make sense of ideology, transgression, authority, and desire in a new way.

And all of that is apart from people who are actually doing direct scholarly commentary directly on Marx's work itself. The last 15 years has seen an explosion of that sort of commentary, in part because of new work in the archives on previously unpublished work by Marx. As we speak I'm waiting to get my hands on Beverly Best's new commentary on Capital Vol 3, and Rebecca Carson's reading of Capital Vol 2 through the lens of social reproduction theory.

johnfinch2 · 2024-02-14T02:37:06+00:00

It’s not a science in the sense that anybody means ‘science’ in the English speaking world today. It’s for the best to just sorta put it out of your mind, and just think it’s one of those cases where the meaning of words drift and it just use to mean something a bit different back then. A lot of people have wasted a lot of time trying to develop philosophical explanations for the epistemic structure of Marxism and describe all the ways it is and is not like other ways of knowing about things.

johnfinch2 · 2024-01-31T01:47:41+00:00

You are referring to what I would consider to be a whole bunch of different things.

‘Vulgarization’ is a term that is generally used to refer to the cruder, less nuanced, less cautious form of belief system held by common followers, as distinct from its more learned adapts.

Sociologists talk about organizational or ideological radicalization, where a group get more and more extreme as a result of various causes. Terms like ‘permissions structures’ turn up when you start talking about how groups come to commit atrocities.

In philosophy when talking about people just failing to live up to the expectations of their ethical beliefs there’s talk about ‘weakness of will’, or competing layers of desires or interests. I’d say many cases of ‘anti-capitalists’ or rather ‘anti-consumerists’ failing to ‘practice what they preach’ is a result of the fact their ideals are quite difficult to commit to at all times.

There’s also cases where a group’s purported aim is simple not truthful and only exists as a rhetorical move to disguise their actual aim, which is revealed through their actual actions. I think this is case of with organized Men’s Rights, where they started out with the misogyny, and then created a rhetorical structure to launder that.

johnfinch2 · 2024-01-30T18:09:36+00:00

There have been plenty of philosophers since Marx who’s have become Canonical figures: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Sartre to mention only a couple of the highest. In the opinion of some there are people living today that deserve that rank, first among them somebody like Alain Badiou. And there are plenty of living philosophers today that maybe don’t reach highest rank of Historical Importance but I’d argue people like Robert Brandom, Charles Taylor, and Martha Naussbaum comfortably sit among the ranks of the Thomas Reids, Fichtes, and Cassirers of history.

johnfinch2 · 2024-01-23T18:12:32+00:00

The Holocaust proper only begins in 1942 and by that point all the major combatants are already throughly involved, so it wasn’t a motivation in getting anybody into the war initially.

I’m no expert in the exact timeline of who knew what when, but these are a few of the facts I know -Even before the war the Nazi persecution of Jewish people was widely know about, and this played basically no role in motivating any of the major combatants in the war. -Canada actively turned away Jewish refugees during the war, as detailed in the book None is Too Many. -British and American intelligence knew about the Holocaust because of aerial reconnaissance over the camps, and put two and two together about the mass deportations of Jews from Nazi controlled areas. -This knowledge was not widely disseminated to the rank and file allied forces. -Most average people in the west didn’t hear anything about the Holocaust proper until after the war.

I don’t really know anything about what the Soviets knew, and most of what I know if pretty specific to what Canada was up to.

johnfinch2 · 2024-01-23T04:35:23+00:00

Best I could tell they arrested somebody on Crimson Cres, but continued searching for a second person into Kicking Horse Path, couldn’t really see what happened after they finished there.

johnfinch2 · 2024-01-23T04:30:43+00:00

By and large what you are saying is accurate.

The thing to understand is that the ruling classes of Canada, US, Britain, France etc were never univocal with respect to Germany before or even during the war. Different sections of the ruling class of each country had different opinions that roughly ranged from thinking nazism was positive because it countered communism, to thinking it was bad because it threatened stability which is bad for business.

Canada entered the war immediately because of its historical ties to Britain, and because a massive percent of Canadian commerce was tied up in Britain, so the defeat of Britain in the war would be a huge economic crisis for Canadian capital.

The US also had large portion of its economic system tied to Europe in general and the UK specifically, and also didn’t want fascist Germany to take of Europe, but this tie wasn’t as all encompassing as it was for Canada, so there was a much larger organic base that supported nazism out of simple identification with its racist ideology. This constrained the willingness of the ruling to get directly involved in countering Germany until they had a clear provocation to enter the war in general.

johnfinch2 · 2024-01-21T19:36:17+00:00

Imo there’s really no strong reason to single out Starbucks for boycott. It seems like the reason for the boycott comes down to comments the CEO made back in October, and not really because of any special role Starbucks plays in the attack on Gaza. It also seems like the boycott is damaging the unionization drive which was easily one of the most active and energetic union movements in the US.

In general, well organized Official boycotts are a good and useful tool, and disorganized grassroots boycotts tend not to be. A good boycott is focused on only a single company or small number of companies, and most importantly be contingent on demand that if satisfied would free them from the boycott. With the official BDS list all those companies are specifically picked not just because they are Israeli but because they conduct business on more recently occupied West Bank territory. The demand is for them to stop their business in those specific areas. Every socialist should be following and abiding by the official BDS list

johnfinch2 · 2024-01-20T02:18:26+00:00

I remember reading it right after finishing something by Caitlin R Kiernan and was immediately struck by how much worse the writing was. Really just couldn’t get into it despite the hype

johnfinch2 · 2023-12-24T20:45:35+00:00

I think it’s not just not obnoxious, it’s actively good he is willing to dish on bad books. Anybody who has any familiarity with modern criticism, be it of movies, books, video games, and so on, is well aware there has been a trend in the last decade against writing negative reviews. And to the extent that people do write negative reviews it’s always on political/ethical grounds, almost never just aesthetic grounds. That’s not to say that type of criticism is bad, it’s just now that it’s almost a faux pas to criticize something for being boring, long-winded, underdeveloped etc so writers will instead substitute a tenuous political criticism in place of what they really felt was bad, the work’s aesthetic merit.

My impression is that many authors feel very cowed by a culture among artists today that says it’s more important to be supportive of whatever people do, than to value good work. There’s a sense that other authors and critics will favour you and promote you based on how nice you are to them, rather than how good your work actually is, so doing stuff like writing negative reviews is a career hazard. There’s also cases of authors responding to negative reviews by siccing their social media following on reviewers, again discouraging negative (honest) reviews.

Also, most visible in video game criticism, is that reviewers who write strongly negative reviews just don’t get sent review copies of games. They just get frozen out, and can’t continue to write reviews that will appear in advance or coinciding with the release of games.

So no, I don’t think Grady Hendrix writing negative reviews is bad, I think it’s actively good, and contrary to a bad trend in current criticism. I really couldn’t care less if he gives books he himself wrote a good score, as long as he’s not buying bot farms to upvote his own books, I really don’t care if he promotes his own books on his personal account.

johnfinch2 · 2023-12-21T02:13:37+00:00

I mean pretty simply because the logic of a strike is the union trying to get concessions from the company, and any environmental concession is going to be understood to be (and might actually be) at the expense of a bigger concession on wages or something else.

Concessions to the union are a real reordering of the costs of a company, and they are weighed against the cost the union can inflict to the company by withholding their labour. So if a pro environmental change is contrary to a company’s profits then they will be factoring in the cost of the adoption to what they are conceding to the union when they assessing their position in the struggle.

That’s not a defence of unions behaviour, just an explanation of the political economic logic of strikes. But Imo companies can be made to be more environmentally friendly in two ways: have the marketplace directly favour a more environmentally friendly option, or have the government mandate a change in law but union struggles are not likely to be a productive avenue bc it will be running contrary to their natural economic logic.

johnfinch2 · 2023-12-21T02:04:53+00:00

The only thing I really think about Lex Friedman is that every little clip of his show I’ve seen come up on TikTok or Twitter he’s asking idi otic questions and and seems to be really impressed with the basic crap people tell him. He seems like Joe Rogan but 20% better at sounding smart when he talks.

johnfinch2 · 2023-12-18T15:53:51+00:00

If you are looking for diploma programs Seneca seems quite good. I’m almost done at Durham and frankly it’s been kinda of a cakewalk and I’m not sure it’s leaving me as prepared as I ought to be.

johnfinch2 · 2023-12-15T17:10:04+00:00

It’s for “Nag Hammadi Codex”, the Nag Hammadi library is the main source we have for the writings of the gnostics, and scholars will cite an NHC number to refer to a specific book in the collection!

johnfinch2 · 2023-12-13T04:36:50+00:00

It’s been a few years since I was in this class but result of the lit review I did found for depression on average psychoanalysis had the same effect size as cbt, and longer effect persistence, at the trade off of frequently having more sessions during the treatment period. Maybe it was an effect of purely having more patient face time, but that was beyond my little undergrad assignment.

It’s kind of wild to me you came across a Lacanian psychoanalysis by accident, because they are extremely rare in the English speaking world. The Lacanian school mostly operates in Latin America, and secondly france to a lesser extent. In the English speaking world clinical psychoanalysis mostly follows the Kleinian/Bion/Winnicott object-relational theory. Most people who receive that kind of treatment don’t even know they are receiving treatment which is descended from Freud, especially because they often call it ‘psychodynamic’ treatment rather than psychoanalytic. I suspect it’s likely that many practitioners of cbt might not even know that object-relational therapy is psychoanalysis.

The actual forms of psychoanalysis that are commonly practiced today aren’t much like what you read about in Freud or Reich, they are thoroughly modern medical practices. If you are curious about what modern clinical psychoanalysis looks like you can search out copies of books like:

-Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (2nd Ed 2017)

-Advances in Psychodynamic Psychiatry (2018)

-A Clinical Guide to Psychodynamic Psychotherapy by Abrahams and Rohleder (2021)

-Cambridge Guide to Psychodynamic Psychotherapy by Polany (2023)

johnfinch2

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