Your insistence that language can only be prescriptive and never descriptive is honestly offensive in its anti-intellectualism and dismissal of the importance of truth and accuracy. We can’t solve problems which we can’t accurately assess, and we can’t stop the actual ecofascists without acknowledging that they are the ones who hold power in most of the world. Their narrative is unfortunately the future that is most likely to come to pass because they are in the position to ensure that it does, not because those of us who would like to see them stopped recognize the difficulty of doing so.
Your main argument seems to be that we shouldn’t ever try to make value-neutral, factually-based assessments of probabilities, and instead we should only propagandize. This is literally the exact mistake China made in the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Doing so lost them a generation of scientists who either fled or were killed for insisting that truth and accuracy were more important than narrative. It is ultimately no different than Trump banning certain news organizations from White House press events because he doesn’t feel like they portray him positively often enough. This is magical thinking, end it doesn’t end well regardless of where you stand on the political spectra.
Speaking of which, you throw around the term “liberal” like a 20 year old that decided to skip Das Kapital and go straight to the writings of cold-war tankie academics that can’t see the forest for the trees. In the most classical sense, I am a liberal simply because I am anti-authoritarian, pro-democracy, and pro-science. But at the same time, I am a Marxist who believes that the means of production should belong to the workers (not the state), and an Anarchist who dislikes the coercive nature of social hierarchy. All of those positions are born out of the understanding that truth is more important than narrative, and honest analysis is fundamental to solving problems. Persuasion, if deceptive, is always a hindrance, and the need to change facts to better prop up an ideology is the very foundation of fascism. In chastising us for not focusing on your preferred narratives, you embody that which you claim to oppose.
I am a Marxist who believes that the means of production should belong to the workers (not the state), and an Anarchist who dislikes the coercive nature of social hierarchy.
There is no such thing as anarcho-Marxism. You do not know what neither of these terms mean if unironically believe you are both.
The only plausible way one could justify anarchism in a Marxist framework is if they submitted a thesis demonstrating a flaw in Marx’s analysis of capitalism’s development and showed that the trends he identified will not actually occur, but rather, capitalism trends towards the foundations of a new mode of production conducive to anarchism instead.
But if you point this out, most anarchists’ heads explode, and they have no idea what you’re even talking about. I remember asking one other self-identified anarcho-Marxist for this analysis, and he looked at me and said, with complete sincerity, “what does the development of capitalism have to do with socialism?” Indeed, I recall another telling me that the development of capitalism has nothing to do with socialism, because the systems are “different,” so of course we’re just going to change it all so it doesn’t matter.
Do you actually understand what I’m talking about at all?
I understand what you are saying very well. I did not however, describe myself as an anarcho-Marxist, nor would I. I pretty clearly stated that there are aspects of liberalism, Marxism, and anarchism that I agree with. I don’t adopt any of those as my political identity, however, because each of those ideologies has problematic ideas, theorists, adherents, and histories.
A lot of socialism’s problematic histories stem precisely from revolutionaries in agrarian monarchies ignoring the fact that it is supposed to be a post-industrial, post-capitalist economic system. The lack of existing industry in those countries led to authoritarianism in an attempt to compete economically with capitalist nations, and in most cases that predictably led to fascism with a veneer of socialist/communist marketing.
Anarchism is an ideal - I don’t want to say it is unachievable, but humanity is currently far from ready for the level of vigilance it would take to maintain such a system, and I have no good ideas for how to get there from here. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can do within our current societies to push things in that direction culturally and economically, but I don’t think that overcoming the entrenched state powers directly is likely anytime soon. And since it has become clear in the last decade that much of the world doesn’t remember or never properly learned the political lessons of the 20th century, I think that the best we can hope for in the short term is a more peaceful world in which wealth inequality is shrinking rather than growing and human/civil rights are expanding.
I’m happy to witness you learning about poststructuralism for the first time. Strange that such a serious Marxist has never come across it, what with how practical and intellectual you are. Go have fun learning about it; seriously, go look up what it is and why it exists.
Yeah, no. I am familiar with poststructuralism, and even read some Foucault a couple of decades back. I’m also well aware of its historical ties to relativity and (to a lesser extent) quantum physics, and that, similarly to how those discoveries ruptured ideas of objective reality in physics, poststructuralism did so for objective meaning and the primacy of authorship in literature, history, and other humanities.
Poststructuralism is very useful for understanding how fascism takes hold and the power of propaganda. It allows us to better understand how Western colonialists shaped ideas of race to enforce their own supremacy. What it does not do is demand that we all choose to obfuscate and intentionally distort perspectives to obtain our goals. I would actually argue that, on the contrary, one of the important lessons of poststructuralism is that we should focus on the factual if we want to address the world’s problems in a non-zero-sum manner - it is often our attempts to codify subjective meaning into false narratives of supposed truth that are the source of strife and anomie when a society (or humanity at large) is capable of materially supporting itself.
All of which is to say, in a thoroughly roundabout and unnecessarily academic way, that’s its fucking annoying when you put words in people’s mouths and make assumptions about their beliefs based on things they didn’t even say. Please learn to take simple statements at face value, and don’t assume that everything is said for the purpose of trying to shape people’s understanding of the world. A prediction is not the same as an endorsement, and an acknowledgement of factual events is not a value judgement as to whether that reality is desireable or not.
Your insistence that language can only be prescriptive and never descriptive is honestly offensive in its anti-intellectualism and dismissal of the importance of truth and accuracy. We can’t solve problems which we can’t accurately assess, and we can’t stop the actual ecofascists without acknowledging that they are the ones who hold power in most of the world. Their narrative is unfortunately the future that is most likely to come to pass because they are in the position to ensure that it does, not because those of us who would like to see them stopped recognize the difficulty of doing so.
Your main argument seems to be that we shouldn’t ever try to make value-neutral, factually-based assessments of probabilities, and instead we should only propagandize. This is literally the exact mistake China made in the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Doing so lost them a generation of scientists who either fled or were killed for insisting that truth and accuracy were more important than narrative. It is ultimately no different than Trump banning certain news organizations from White House press events because he doesn’t feel like they portray him positively often enough. This is magical thinking, end it doesn’t end well regardless of where you stand on the political spectra.
Speaking of which, you throw around the term “liberal” like a 20 year old that decided to skip Das Kapital and go straight to the writings of cold-war tankie academics that can’t see the forest for the trees. In the most classical sense, I am a liberal simply because I am anti-authoritarian, pro-democracy, and pro-science. But at the same time, I am a Marxist who believes that the means of production should belong to the workers (not the state), and an Anarchist who dislikes the coercive nature of social hierarchy. All of those positions are born out of the understanding that truth is more important than narrative, and honest analysis is fundamental to solving problems. Persuasion, if deceptive, is always a hindrance, and the need to change facts to better prop up an ideology is the very foundation of fascism. In chastising us for not focusing on your preferred narratives, you embody that which you claim to oppose.
There is no such thing as anarcho-Marxism. You do not know what neither of these terms mean if unironically believe you are both.
The only plausible way one could justify anarchism in a Marxist framework is if they submitted a thesis demonstrating a flaw in Marx’s analysis of capitalism’s development and showed that the trends he identified will not actually occur, but rather, capitalism trends towards the foundations of a new mode of production conducive to anarchism instead.
But if you point this out, most anarchists’ heads explode, and they have no idea what you’re even talking about. I remember asking one other self-identified anarcho-Marxist for this analysis, and he looked at me and said, with complete sincerity, “what does the development of capitalism have to do with socialism?” Indeed, I recall another telling me that the development of capitalism has nothing to do with socialism, because the systems are “different,” so of course we’re just going to change it all so it doesn’t matter.
Do you actually understand what I’m talking about at all?
I understand what you are saying very well. I did not however, describe myself as an anarcho-Marxist, nor would I. I pretty clearly stated that there are aspects of liberalism, Marxism, and anarchism that I agree with. I don’t adopt any of those as my political identity, however, because each of those ideologies has problematic ideas, theorists, adherents, and histories.
A lot of socialism’s problematic histories stem precisely from revolutionaries in agrarian monarchies ignoring the fact that it is supposed to be a post-industrial, post-capitalist economic system. The lack of existing industry in those countries led to authoritarianism in an attempt to compete economically with capitalist nations, and in most cases that predictably led to fascism with a veneer of socialist/communist marketing.
Anarchism is an ideal - I don’t want to say it is unachievable, but humanity is currently far from ready for the level of vigilance it would take to maintain such a system, and I have no good ideas for how to get there from here. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can do within our current societies to push things in that direction culturally and economically, but I don’t think that overcoming the entrenched state powers directly is likely anytime soon. And since it has become clear in the last decade that much of the world doesn’t remember or never properly learned the political lessons of the 20th century, I think that the best we can hope for in the short term is a more peaceful world in which wealth inequality is shrinking rather than growing and human/civil rights are expanding.
I’m happy to witness you learning about poststructuralism for the first time. Strange that such a serious Marxist has never come across it, what with how practical and intellectual you are. Go have fun learning about it; seriously, go look up what it is and why it exists.
Yeah, no. I am familiar with poststructuralism, and even read some Foucault a couple of decades back. I’m also well aware of its historical ties to relativity and (to a lesser extent) quantum physics, and that, similarly to how those discoveries ruptured ideas of objective reality in physics, poststructuralism did so for objective meaning and the primacy of authorship in literature, history, and other humanities.
Poststructuralism is very useful for understanding how fascism takes hold and the power of propaganda. It allows us to better understand how Western colonialists shaped ideas of race to enforce their own supremacy. What it does not do is demand that we all choose to obfuscate and intentionally distort perspectives to obtain our goals. I would actually argue that, on the contrary, one of the important lessons of poststructuralism is that we should focus on the factual if we want to address the world’s problems in a non-zero-sum manner - it is often our attempts to codify subjective meaning into false narratives of supposed truth that are the source of strife and anomie when a society (or humanity at large) is capable of materially supporting itself.
All of which is to say, in a thoroughly roundabout and unnecessarily academic way, that’s its fucking annoying when you put words in people’s mouths and make assumptions about their beliefs based on things they didn’t even say. Please learn to take simple statements at face value, and don’t assume that everything is said for the purpose of trying to shape people’s understanding of the world. A prediction is not the same as an endorsement, and an acknowledgement of factual events is not a value judgement as to whether that reality is desireable or not.