Fantastic profile picture btw

A lot of modern economists remind me, outside of their priestly function, of the court astrologers of Imperial China who would be like “My Lord, the stars tell me that you must reorganize the dispensation of the salt monopoly to my wife’s cousin’s son’s control, lest we should, in 2000 years hence, be ruled by Winnie the Pooh’”.

Alright, now I’m mad.

I’m not talking about just about particular thinkers. I don’t care how Baudrillard would perhaps maybe understand this. What importance does that have politically? Why is that interpretation more theoretically enlightening? Why could any actual claims made there, valid or not, not be expressed in Marxism, or simply more clear language, so that we can better examine and test them?

I am talking about postmodern culture in general. I am referring to a cultural ‘logic’, and more specifically to one that has become more and more in common in intellectual culture - both in bourgeois academia and outside. You see it above in certain departments, such as sociology and anthropology which, not coincidentally, are also filled, in proportional terms, with very high amounts of poor scholarship and outright nonsense which people will often still obtain degrees. Especially in anthropology, there are waves of deeply essentializing, fetishistic, and frankly racist works of no logical coherence or empirical validity fusing ‘ocean epistemologies’ of indigeneous people from one location with their deleuzian mysticism and that applying to another indigeneous peoples on the other side of the planet who also happen to live by the sea. I could go on endlessly with these times of examples, but frankly the main point is simply that if these fields were. Also, suffice to say that this level of investment of public economic resources into such bullshit would not have been allowed in the Soviet Union. The post-structural intellectual turn and the postmodern cultural transformations that it accompanied, and of which it is a part, has changed the intellehctual characters of the modern social sciences and humanities. It is not a coincidence that these became dominant in the Neoliberal era and that they drove out Marxism from these domains. There is basic lack of sytematicity, logical validity and empirical support throughout many of these works. Some of these thinkers, such as Deleuze, I think are more philosophically impressive, albeit deeply problematic. But even with the latter case, as with Christ, the problem is the Christians. As I’m talking about a culture, and in particular and intellectual culture, you cannot separate it from the participants in the culture, and it is striking that it seems to have become, at least amongst American or anglo ‘leftists’ (but really what Marx referred to sarcastically as ‘true leftists’ and what Lenin referred to ‘ultraleftists’) more common to refer to and read these thinkers than Marxist thinkers. I don’t care how Baudrillard would perhaps maybe understand this. What importance does that have politically? Why is that interpretation more theoretically enlightening? Why could any actual claims made there, valid or not, not be expressed in Marxism, or simply more clear language, so that we can better examine and test them?

Tbh the baudrillardian point your comment cites is an example of the kind of obfuscation that I’m talking about. ‘Whole modernist reduction of identity’ - what does this mean? What, in concrete, material terms, is a reduction of identity? Are you making a physicalist statement? Is this a metaphysical statement? Is this a statement about ideology, about thought, i.e. that we in the modern world reduce our concepts of identity to one of what one consumes? Baudrillard’s entire theory, to the extent is has coherence, demands an explicit rejection of Marx. In particular, is does so based on the hilariously wrong and reductionist idea that, as you put it, Marx carries out a ‘modern reduction of identity as production’. Also, you are saying that the correct judgement would be ‘“criticism of astrology is a from of misogyny” is a wholely modernist reduction of identity to consumption’, except that it is not clear why you are not yourself reducing this judgement to a fairly arbitrary interpretation. We can explain it far more simply, easily and clearly by just saying that saying that you think that the belief, that saying that that which is clearly nonsense is wrong, is also misogynist because it is, on average, is more commonly believed by women (I don’t know if this true, but anecdotally is seems to be the case and appears to be the reason for the judgement), is simply nonsensical because what women at any point in time happen to believe on average doesn’t really determine any nature of womenhood (why should it? Why do we need that in the first place? Why is this relevant?). And, in any case, because it is a criticism of a specific belief, not women as women. Otherwise we start doing another classic irrational postmodern move of saying that practically it is misogynist for the former reason. In other words it destroys the distinction between the meaning of what we can say or think and reduces them to a kind of sociological relativism. It makes thought passive and destroys the ability for analysis. I am not saying that this form of irrational thought has not existed plenty in the past. I’m saying that it has become even more common as a sociological product of neoliberal postmodern culture.

And quite frankly I have not time for Baudrillardian language or ‘theory’, given that not only his the theory of signs his thought is based literally incoherent, but his book on Marx displays page after page, paragraph after paragraph, sentence after sentence of misunderstanding of Marxism.

You can pick up a book by Guattari and fine basic logical fallacies on every other page. It’s a disagrace honestly that these bodies of post-structural thought that display such ignorance of Marxism and science (like I’m sorry but if you pick of Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Irigay, Latour or even Foucault, they actually have very little to say of deep theoretical and historical importance on the nature of science) are commonly suggested as the ‘must-read’ philosophical texts of our time to young leftists, when they could be reading far more grounded, analytical (including Marxist) works of philosophy, history, economics, sociology, anthropology etc.

As for Foucault, well we can see the useless theoretical and practical impasse his thought leads to in Negri and Hardt’s work, where vague, unclear theoretical fusions between the concept of ‘proletariat’ and that of ‘biopower’ lead to concepts of practice that were only really of influence during the 2000s, during the nadir of modern leftism, when the western left’s practice became deeply influenced by these anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist theorists promoting new, nonsensical theories of spontaneous revolt by no longer opposing the processes of capitalism, but by inserting ourselves within them in a way that does not imply creating new alternative, ‘bureacratic’ institutions like that of the party. It also isn’t a coincidence that these come out of the Operaismo tradition of modern Italian ‘Marxism’, which came out of a pre-neoliberal alienation from classical and leninist marxism and burrowed a huge amount of ideas of spontaneity and voluntarism from Italian anarchism, and has consistently failed not only to from lasting movements labor, rejects party structures, but whose intellectual work is also far weaker than other traditions of Marxism. Ofc, they are not actually giving more theoretical understanding to the topic, in fact they are literally changing the meaning of the term ‘proletariat’, and so talking about something else, saying that the new definition is more useful. I won’t go into it but their work is actually contradictory and so incoherent. I’m bringing this up because this is the kind of failure to understand how to responsible scientific theoretical thought and concept use is supposed to be applied, especially in revolutionary ways, that has alienated so many intelligent young people from Marxism as a tradition. If you go into most, say, history, sociology or anthropology departments today, you will hear people talk in pseudo-emancipated language about how women had ‘agency’ (rarely carefully defined) in marriage contracts in medieval Hungary or in the media industry of modern Saudi Arabia, along with alot of other fetishistic bullshit that could only be concocted by overeducated bourgeois, but if you say you are a Marxist, you will almost certainly be treated with disdain, contempt and smirks. Why do bourgeois liberals embrace Foucault et al., but viciously reject any attempt to be explicitly Marxist? You can normally only get into a history department these days if you are very lucky and find a Marxist professor who is already there and willing to be your supervisor.

But, at the end of the day, there is little explanatory utility or validity to the concept of biopower, and it’s main effect on thought has been to allow a cottage industry within academia to develop around it, so that petit-bourgeois people can intellectual masturbate for 3-4 years and then get a job at a corporate law firm. In practice, to turn people away from, and defang, the only body of thought that has actually posed a real threat to capitalism in the modern world: Communism/Marxism.

If you want to read actual Marxists explain in more detail why the post-structural turns were intellectual embarassment, both Lefevre (in his writings on structuralism) and Perry Anderson (in Traces of Wester Marxism) do good jobs. Poststructural thought was, literally, positively perceived by the CIA as an intellectual development in Europe, specifically France, which would undermine the legitimacy of Marxism, and indeed, that is precisely how many of these thinkers understood what they were doing.

But I also think (as someone who has read and studied this stuff) that it’s really irresponsible for self-proclaiming Marxists to suggest to people that they should go waste years of their lives reading these people, given that that this literally how much time you will need if you really want to study and digest what they read, and given that the level of genuine, grounded enlightenment about your world or about politics will be limited if any. In fact the result is normally negative, in that it reduces many peoples intellectual relationship to the world to one in which there is only discourse and abstract systems of signs (in Baudrillard and several others, including to a lesser extent in Lacan or Althusser, although these are strictly speaking structuralists). As Anderson points out, this explains why in practice this amounts to idealism. The reason these thinkers are popular amongst modern self-described leftists is because the latter are deeply susceptible to idealism, ultraleftism and anarchism in the current era of capitalism, although it is clear that over the last few years that there has been something of an alienation from this especially amongst young adult leftists and increased interest in Marxism and Communism, given the impasses the people in those lines of thought tend to fall into (e.g. out cult in our squat paid for by the bougie parents of two of our fellow activists has exploded for the 20th time because everyone was fucking each other, smoking weed and we don’t have any relation to real workers or working places or labor movements). I think it’s very sad that this is what people think of when they think of 20th century French intellectual life, when there was the school of Historical Epistemology (Bachlard, Cavaillès, Canguillem, Desanti, etc.) as well as the Annales school of historians (especially Bloch and Duby), along with Marxist thinkers like Badiou and Lefevre.

Also, the ‘postmodern’ or ‘poststructural’ critique does not seem to understand, again, that science is real. It is impossible to study the scientific method without understanding that certain key types of reasoning are involved in it. The only way you prove that something is not scientific is by Of course that leaves the question of what science is constituted of, by these thinkers do not offer much of anything practical in this line of questioning, otherwise there wouldn’t be the crises of methodology and reproducibilty which we see in the departments where this kind of thought predominates or is very influential.

For instace, there is nothing in Latour which gives any real understanding of how science produces genuine knowledge. When you speak to people who are influenced by Latour - in particular many sociologists, unfortunately also under the influence of Bourdieu - they have frequently expressed to me that they think that neoclassical economics is ‘just as scientific’ as, say, physics or mathematics or biology. They say this because they have often a purely ‘external’ as opposed to ‘internal’ view of sciences, meaningly that they look simply at the, at times very superficial and in any case partial, sociological activities such as conferences, networking, team, lab and research group organization, discourses, apparent types etc. They do not take an internal view of the subject where they ask: “what are the internal logical relations of the key principles, axioms, propositions of this science? What are the relations with experience, with the data of experience? To what extent are the theoretical concepts we inherit culturally imbedded deeply in even the most apparently immediate perceptions we have of objects?” I am not interested in any epistemology or theory of science if it cannot contribute to the question of how it is that science as a process or social institution is able to produce a particular kind of very powerful knowledge. If it cannot explain the mechanics that allow us to answer that normative question, then it is useless imo. It’s a luxury that falls in a yelling alarm the moment you have to do actual theory or explain things in a way that matters. Sociology and much anthropology in particular, when I read papers of theses in these topics, have often basically abandoned any pretence of presenting models of reality in order to explain a particular type of phenomenon, which is what every science does. I have read literally nonsensical word salads which have gotten people in ‘top universities’ on the western model, when that quality of work would almost certainly never be accepted in several other disciplines.

Capitalists do need engineers to actually know how they objects of study work in order for them to be of value. In the social sciences this is not necessary. In fact, the opposite is to a very high degree necessary, because obfuscuation and mystification is part of what capitalists are paying for when they fund, say, economics departments. In the other social science departments the situation is of course somewhat different, but, especially in Western anthropology and sociology, there is a crisis of methodology which has intensified since the post-structural turn. There is of course still good anthropology and sociology that gets done, but it is a relatively small proportion imo and is in general and exception which proves the rule I’m highlighting.