Why is Marxism so attractive to the academic class?
Why is a bourgeois institution so intent on patronizing the working class?
>>7950014
brownie points
>>7950014
>hy is Marxism so attractive to the academic class
once maybe
>>7950033
>implying most career academics in the western humanities aren't openly marxist
>>7950059
they may be leftist but that's hardly the same as marxists
>>7950014
Marxism is attractive to the powerless.
"M... maybe if we lead a revolution, people will listen to us..."
>>7950070
>career academics
>powerless
M8, most of the actual powerless folks are too busy working. It's the upper class kids who go to ivy leagues and UCs who have never had a job that are most often marxists.
>>7950066
The modern left has its philosophical foundation in marx.
>>7950111
This is retarded mate.
The people with power went to Ivy league universities for econ or business, left, and forgot about it except for their frat brothers. The people left in academic institutions churning out two papers per year are hardly powerful people. Sure, they are not working class, and most of them are not struggling to live (though the continued devaluation of academia is working to fix this), but they are not the people in power either.
>>7950014
Because it offers an interesting shift in perspective which is very relevant to the social science and has titillated it with the thought of something of human understanding. If material conditions produce ideas instead of the other way around, then cultures may be understandable through empirically observable evidence. Marxism has not managed to do this, but that some strain of materialist philosophy may eventually realize this is promising enough.
Politically, just like their reactionary counterparts, modern leftists seek to understand the poverty of modern life: Why is it that we can be so prosperous, but so dissatisfied? Why is our society becoming plagued with mental illness? What is driving the social impoverishment of society? Again, these answers are sought out by studying the material conditions of our society.
The problem is, as it has been without the perspective shift of Marxist thought, that even if you can draw a parallel, the mysterious nature of thoughts and ideas means that no causal link is easy to establish. Marxism remains an interesting way to analyze the world, but it has yet to prove any predictive power.
Oh, wait, sorry. What I meant to say was: cucks, libtards, babbies, ressentiment, lazy, navel-gazing, thieves, slave morality, etc.
>>7950179
>they are not the people in power
There is no single group in power. Obviously they don't run shit like the CFR but career academics do have a lot of power over culture. Most kids and young adults spend more time with teachers than with their parents.
>>7950437
There literally is. If you control investment you control the economic future of the country and the world. The richest 1% of the global population control over 60% of all business equity.
>>7950111
Hey friend. Seems like you're making generalizations about groups of prople you haven't spent much time around. Maybe trying fixing this problem before posting again and you'll get a much warmer reception :)
>>7950483
what do you think power even means in this context
>>7950496
Ability to compel others to perform tasks you want them to perform, which is literally what money is.
because academia had been infiltrated by... "them"
i've said too much
>>7950179
>not realising Marxism has become the orthodox among scholars for decades
why are you so angry brother
>>7950497
>Ability to compel others to perform tasks you want them to perform, which is literally what money is.
half right, so you're not completely dumb
>>7950014
Messiah complex, they need to instill in themselves a sense of self-worth and purpose.
>>7950483
>The richest 1%
This is very infantile thinking. The "1%" are not a cohesive group by any means.
>>7950483
>The richest 1% of the global population
Dude, anyone who makes over 32k a year is in the richest 1% of the world. Welcome to the capitalist class my friend, you're on our side now.
>>7950497
>Ability to compel others to perform tasks you want them to perform
Sounds like my professors.
>>7950483
>the 1%
pavlovian technique at work, I now can't look at that without feeling nauseous
>>7950483
It's much worse than that.
62 individuals control more wealth than half the world's population - that's 3.5 billion people.
>>7950531
Wealth is much more important than income here
>>7950520
Sure, but neither is "everyone in Shanghai" and yet we still talk about the population of Shanghai. (That group is much less cohesive, really.) Generalizations are necessary to talk about sociology at all, and this is a useful one.
>>7950537
It's unfortunate that it's become a slogan rather than a considered thought but statistically it's almost exactly the point for majority of global wealth.
>>7950555
>Generalizations are necessary to talk about sociology
this is because sociology and the concept of an existing class of objects in reality occupy the same space, fantasy
>>7950555
>Wealth is much more important than income here
Doesn't change the fact that even if you're struggling in a first world nation, you're still wealthier than 99% of the world.
When are you going to start sending you paychecks to Pajeet to help the global proletariat, you bourgeois scum?
>>7950567
You do not seem to understand the difference between wealth and income. If you make 32k/year you are not in the top 1% of wealth unless you inherited a lot.
>>7950559
How do you feel about economics? I only ask because the people who have this opinion tend to think the micro-foundations of econ are a real, hard science, but sociology is hokum.
>>7950555
Even if you're talking about the top 1% of america, that income level is only 300k.
Even the billionaires have lots of disputes and disagreements. Many political financiers echo your ideology too. Think about that.
>>7950575
>If you make 32k/year you are not in the top 1% of wealth unless you inherited a lot.
Wrong again. What i was saying is that the 1% is much larger than you think, including in terms of net worth.
Anybody with a net worth of about 800k USD is in the top 1%, which is a shitload of homeowners in the first world.
>>7950575
>I don't.
>>7950483
this is bate lads and gents
>>7950014
>apparent messiah complex
>collectivist
>uses poor/stupid people to gain money and influence in society, because poor/stupid people are easy to take advantage of and bend to your will
>uses pseudointellectual faggotry to explain the world and brainwash its followers
>"all is for the best, believe in what you're told"
>don't question us
>tries to regulate everything (especially sex) by using moralfaggotry
>shaming and isolation of the unbelievers
Marxism, rather ironically, is merely the religion of the inept and stupid members of the bourgeoisie.
>>7950014
Because academics in America have very little power. Certainly climate change deniers are evidence of that. And Marxism is attractive to anyone who believes that they will receive more power after distribution.
>>7950497
Wrong. Power is negative. It's the ability to free yourself from doing work (without having to put in extra work in order to do so). Owning capital is literally power.
>>7950643
Academics shape the entire Liberal worldview, which is half the country. Seriously, Harvard via NYT is the modern gospel, and the Conservatives eventually fall into line as well, it just takes them a couple decades.
>>7950692
>It's the ability to free yourself from doing work
What in the fuck abomination of Marxist definition is this? Power is the ability to effect changes or keep things the same, and a more subtle definition would point out that these abilities have to be consistent through time, ie power has to beget itself to be true power. North Korea can drop a nuke but then they can never do anything again.
Work is way too narrow a view of what power is
>>7950014
Because regardless of class, the contradictions and injustice of capitalism are visible to everyone.
>>7950744
Yeah but the working classes don't harbor strange fantasies of revolution or future utopia whose tangible associations since they have existed have been of bloodshed, dictatorship and genocide.
90% of lib shits "purpose" is to help the unfortunate or 'overthrow the system'
Aka they need a big boogeyman they can constantly prattle on about.
That being said I think some are genuine. Zizek for example makes good points sometimes.
But most are just subversive Jews desu
>>7950751
The working class is also systematically denied access to education that bourgeois and petty bourgeois are afforded.
Ask the average blue collar American worker what the principles of socialism are, and more often than not it's associated with state control of industry and the establishment of a welfare state.
>>7950762
Nailed it
>>7950753
>subversive jews
You placed this here so you wouldn't have substantiate your point with fact or argument.
>>7950732
FORCE is the ability to compel others to perform tasks you want them to perform (forcing things on them), work is that task which involves the transformation of a thing, and power is active as well as negative. You can't just make up nonsense definitions for things you child. This is why we need Marxism.
>>7950753
I feel compelled to present to you the view that the Ashkenazis' associations with leftism, finance, media, science, etc. are not an Ashkenazi phenomenon, but a Western one. After the ghettos disbanded in the 19th century the Ashkenazi started to integrate into the Western European society and they unerringly chose the winning side, ie. Leftism. Their massive overrepresentation in various fields is due to the uncomfortable fact that their average IQ is a standard deviation above the West European norm, and since IQ distributes normally in a population, this gives them a huge amount of people of genius level ability, people like Einstein, von Neumann, Mendelssohn. The Ashkenazi culture before integration into Western Europe and its diaspora had absolutely nothing in common with modern Leftism except perhaps argumentative nature. Leftism is fundamentally Western and has been around since the Enlightenment, since the Glorious Revolution, etc. It actually seems to corrode the cultures it comes into contact with, witness the ''century of democracy'. And the Ashkenazi are set for extinction themselves as they have significantly changed their marriage patterns to be more allowing of marrying non-Jews, though there is an enclave in Israel that is still traditional in this respect and the culture is still present.
I understand that you're angry at Leftism, and this a natural response to the insanity of the 20th century and some of the other bouts of insanity it has caused, but Jews are just really not to blame here. It is also like shaking your fist at a thunderstorm, you are not going to win against a 400 year old historical pattern.
>>7950776
If we parse your comment we come up with a worldview that a)cannot see anything in reality other than human interaction, b)reduces transformation to human effort, and c)espouses the notion that we are no longer allowed to make definitions because Father Marx has laid them before us and it is a sin verily to praise other gods.
None of these assumptions are true, your worldview is not true, history will tell you over and over, as it has every time your revolution occurs, that your worldview is incoherent and that you are only going to cause pain.
The real answer as to why there are so many Marxian (not so much Marxist anymore) and leftist "cultural critique" milieu people in academia is that the political moralism and progressivism of the Enlightenment are still perceived to be the duties (a cynic would say hobbies) of the intellectual / leisure class, AND, simultaneously, the current zeitgeist is the "school of suspicion" (the Marxist, Nietzschean, Freudian hyper-suspicion and anxiety that even our everyday lives are determined by ideology, especially the ideology of the "powerful," ipso facto the tyrannical).
The leisure classes in a Christian era had their own mixture of guys sincerely concerned with Christian injunctions to self-effacing charity, who actually agonised over how they can give their fortunes to the poor and shit, and of cynical douchebags who just paid lip service to it all, and a million self-satisfied faggots in between who barely did anything but still thought they were super good people "moral" because they gave their table scraps to beggars or whatever.
Likewise the current system has guys from unfathomably rich backgrounds who genuinely want to be good people, and the ethico-political intellectual framework they encounter is the Enlightenment progressivism + the school of suspicion, because that's what we've got currently. So they freak out and start analysing how the proles are totally overdetermined by ideology and basically mind-controlled by a soulless post-capitalist order (all true, btw - even the hardcore right wing, like literally Nazis and ex-Nazis, had the same critiques of techno-capitalism). And then there are lots of trust fund babies who fart around with "boooo capitalism lol" and think they're FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT ON THE VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION!!!
Marxian critique is just fucking useful. If you want to be a good person, and you take politics seriously, you basically immediately become immersed in a century and a half of critiques of capitalism as an entire Weltanschauung and civilisation. The only reason more people don't tend toward the (again, functionally identical) critiques of dudes like Gehlen instead of toward Adorno & Horkheimer more often is because Gehlen is verboten. That's it. Even if you could be an unabashed Nazi in academia these days, people would still be doing fundamentally Marxian critiques of capitalism, or more specifically ideology, they'd just have slightly different final chapters to their books. Elitism is out of vogue.
It's very rare for someone to 1) intelligent, 2) concerned with ethical politics, 3) conservative, because of this. Real conservatism (Gehlen etc.) isn't allowed, and neoconservatism is just an insane rich people cult. People with vague elitist tendencies just become stuffy leftists.
>>7950781
Posts like these make you realize WWIII will happen in your lifetimes, and rightists will succeed in overthrowing the system and replacing it with the same thing (but with less people and bombed out cities!)
What liberation that orgy of violence will bring! A great new hegemony too! To hell with this leftist system, it spills blood only slowly and without fanfare!
>>7950807
>the current zeitgeist is the "school of suspicion" (the Marxist, Nietzschean, Freudian hyper-suspicion and anxiety that even our everyday lives are determined by ideology, especially the ideology of the "powerful," ipso facto the tyrannical).
I'm looking forward to the day this meme dies. Every Democratic debate in the US is back-and-forth about an ever-elusive 'them' controlling things from behind the scenes, usually synecdochized as 'Wall Street'
In a sense it's almost like a mutation of the age-old antisemitic tropes holding jews as cabalistic bankers manipulating world affairs.
>>7950813
I take it you think I am a Rightist from that post? Let me be clear: Hitler, Mussolini, the Confederates, the French nobility, etc. are all unspeakably evil and I don't respect anything about them. I don't see the point in comparing atrocities but they are arguably worse than the atrocities committed by the Democratic or Communist states, though US slavery and the Soviet genocide give them a close contender.
Will there be a new Caesar though? Maybe. I don't welcome it, but it might happen. Modernity might have ruptured the normal patterns though.
>>7950817
I think it's just mankind's existential crisis at the end of our adolescence. Meta-meta-meta-self-awareness to the point of terrifying ego death was a necessary phase. Something better is coming, some kind of post-postmodern self-direction rather than paralysed self-awareness. It's just probably in three centuries, after six more world wars.
>>7950807
What are your main influences, in terms of historical/political thought?
>>7950792
The problem with Hegel isn't that his worldview can't see non-human interactions or that it's wrong in any way it's that it relies on words like essential which makes it hard to follow. Deleuze uses the word differential instead but I'm not sure why or how this changes things.
I talked to a communist the other day and his path to communism was really milquetoast.
>>7950827
Modernity "might have" ruptured the normal patterns? The industrial revolution is second only to agriculture in terms of society-shaking developments. Blaming the ills of industrialization on philosophers is stupid. It's like blaming the crime on the courtroom proceedings.
>>7950832
I like any critiques of capitalism/post-capitalism/neoliberalism, closed systems of thought (Gellner), Gesellschaft vs. Gemeinschaft, and mass society (Gasset, Baudrillard), posthistoire (Kojeve), from left or right (Habermas, Foucault, Frankfurt, Heidegger, Gehlen, Schmitt, doesn't matter), but I also hate post-structuralist relativism and defeatism. I like stuff on disenchantment (Weber, Frankfurt) too, and perennialist, meritocratic elitism, like Strauss and the traditionalists, but I fucking hate traditionalists, because they're implicitly just as relativist as the post-structuralists. I guess overall still a Hegelfag or neo-Hegelian.
>>7950115
They have a philosophical ancestry in Marx.
>>7950872
I was not at all blaming it on philosophers, I apologize if that was what I expressed. It was an aside, a different form of history that I was bringing in as a mediating factor to what we could normally expect to happen.
>>7950882
I saved your entire post here in my documents because I found your comment very interesting, the original one you made.
I would recommend Oswald Spengler. If that name brings to you Reactionary philosophy then please reconsider the impulse. He is quite outside normal political views. His decline of the west, in German something rather more like the Sunset of the evening-lands, is a beautiful vision of history and culture, which has been instructive to minds as disparate as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Northrop Frye, and Henry Kissinger.
I think you would like him, the book does take some perserverance and he is really not right about everything but it is worth it for the purpose of understanding.
The literature you list is not so far from what he wrote, just in a different language.
>>7950111
>upper class kids who go to ivy leagues and UCs who have never had a job that are most often marxists.
Nah, all the rich kids I know from college are low-key intent on keeping their money. The "progressive" values they often espouse are just posturing.
The kids who were marxists were typically middle-class or lower, with a lot of those middle-class kids being the children of academics.
>>7950970
This, the closest they come to actually going Marxist is flirting with leftist protests. At the end of the day they become tepid liberals whose biggest political concerns are what words are acceptable to hear around you office's water cooler.
Christ almighty, /lit/ is full of pretentious kids. I swear, it was bad in 2013 but coming back to this board, it's like the average age dropped by like 3 years.
>>7950925
Shit, I'm flattered. But I'm just a caffeinated amateur faggot, so YMMV.
I actually love Spengler, and he inspired me to get into a TON of the academic stuff I'm doing now. I also love Fryefor his weird mystic stuff.
I've always been reactionary and elitist, I just can't bring myself to be relativist. I feel like Spengler drops the ball on that shit like so many others. Schmitt, too.
the goal of the liberals and libertarians is the make hedonism as moral and legal as possible. They thrive on the transition private->public that they consolidated, so that they can appear as worthy and dignified in one realm, in order to feel more debased in the other realm. This transition is the best means to counter boredom.
This disdain for the explicit love of hedonism in liberal societies appeared already centuries ago, when the liberalism started to become trendy.
Most people are hedonists, especially through the body, and they love to think of themselves as less materialistic hedonist than they are [while still being total hedonist), typically in turning to prayers, meditations 15 minutes a day, or in the societies designed by the liberals and libertarians, in turning towards the common good, through the normative reason since the modern rationalists where every schmuck should strive to embody the free thinker....
The fantasy of the free thinker is either the one that elucidates the role of the society on the people, like the academics in literary fields, or the one who masters the nature, like the academics int he scientific fields... Both fields serve and a financed explicitly to ease the life of the people, with some myths about ''explaining the world'', because the liberals and libertarians cling to their fantasy that if people's materialistic desire are fed, then they would at last behave according to their Human rights.
This faith in some structure to make people better (aka make people think like they think) is the most defining fantasy of the europeans. The more they fail to exhumate this structure, the more they turn to asian doctrines and try to find the structure in those philosophies. They whine that they discover that these doctrines lack the structure that they fantasize and they hardly admit that they look at them only by pure exoticism, which would feed their hedonism.
>>7951132
The problem of the liberals and libertarians is that they created the middle class in a society which is after positivism and structuralism and now they strive to save their humans rights in both the scientific and the humanity fields. They try to incorporate the religions into their dream of a secular society. The religious ares here to expose how good the liberals and libertarians are good at tolerating what they will always think as retards, but of course, those retards are not meant to take power. The the liberals and libertarians have taken power from the religious and will not give it back.
The middle class is here only to work in order to dwell better in leisure: to embrace the liberal mores, but still with the duty& need to work each day.
The problems of the liberals and libertarians and their mores is about the merit and explicit authority. they fail to expose what a merit is, beyond paying your taxes otherwise you go to prison (if you are poor), which inherently contradicts the goal of the Human rights: the goal is to make everybody impotent through their actions, so that people become active only through speech and cling to the fantasy of the free thinker.
The marxist society is not meant to exist, it is meant for people to fantasize about a society where everybody is potent in act, not in thought, whereas the safety remains assured. This is why women love this doctrine.
The marxist society is the dream where masters and slaves reunite, thanks to the master, and the slave forgives the master for being so authoritative and punitive, in the liberal society, where and when the master tries to elevate the slave.
The goal of the liberals and libertarians is to instal the dichotomy of liberal-libertarian as the only one possible, ejecting the extremes and thinking that the liberals and libertarians are indeed different: they are not; they use and fight for the exact same principles.
>>7950014
Because the Jews made it up and use it to control the world with a carrot which is right now manifested by some egalitarian sexless orgy of society.
because it's really easy
Raymond Aron - The Opium of the Intellectuals
>>7950115
The modern left has its philosophical foundation in Luther.
>Why is Marxism so attractive to the academic class?
because it picks up chicks, that's literally it
>>7950762
>average blue collar American worker
they don't exist anymore
>>7950014
>Why is a bourgeois institution so intent on patronizing the working class?
it ain't gonna suck itself
>>7950014
Because intellectuals are middle class faggots who want to lead the proletarian revolution with their "intellect". They are just striving for a Leninist aristocracy. Re-read 1984 and realize that the main character is one of those "intellectuals".
>>7951864
Easily one of the worst readings of 1984 I have ever had the displeasure to see.
how do I become a leftist again
I want to go back
>>7950014
Most academics are not bourgeois in the sense Marx used the term since they're waged employees. The bourgeois/proletarian distinction is just a purely analytical distinction in terms of relations to ownership of means of production, i.e. if your living income comes out of wages or profit (directly or indirectly e.g. living off dividends). Professors do not actually own universities and can be let go. The question should be why would the owners of universities allow critical investigations on themselves and their class which goes against their vested interests and the answer is like anything else under capitalism: because it's profitable obviously.
The bourgeois/proletarian distinction in the classical Marxist sense has always been worthless. Do you really think office workers and ditch diggers have anything in common? Just read Marx to see how much he hated the lower class and openly mocked the "lumpenproletariat". Marx always saw the revolution being a creation of the upper crust of the "working class" e.g. "the middle class". The "middle class" (teachers, cops, office workers, etc...) today are just functionaries of the state apparatus concerned about maintaining MUH PROPERTY VALUE and if anything are much more enemies of progressive change than the "bourgeoisie". All true revolutionary movements need to be anti-"middle class" and anti-Marxist.
https://libcom.org/library/karl-marx-anti-bourgeois-or-neo-bourgeois-max-nomad
>>7951910
Try actually reading, rather than getting your opinions from /pol/
>>7951944
any suggestions
>>7950567
All he has mentioned is the simple fact that money/power is concentrated in a small group of people. Why would you assume he is a marxist?
>>7951864
Read Michea, you fucking faggot.
>>7950828
This is the most pretentious post in this thread, and you didn't even say zietgiest.
>>7952158
Because we are living in such a far right society that any attempts to speak the truth is met with accusations of being a communist.
>>7951747
in Jesus even to be hoonessst famm
>>7950584
Your "wrong again" comment makes me feel like you still don't understand the difference between income and wealth, or possibly between stocks and flows in general.
Most people right at the $800K-$1 million point (34 million people - which is why I chose a large city for a comparison point) receive mostly labor income, I agree. The division between capitalists and laborers is not quite so clean and perfect as an Orthodox Marxist might put it. But move up to the top 0.1% and you have overwhelmingly capital income - more so the higher you go up.
>>7952158
>>7952297
It's interesting - I consider myself much more of a Keynesian or post-Keynesian economically but I have found that almost the only people I can have non-aggravating political conversations with are Marxists. Most other people won't even acknowledge the existence of concentration of wealth, or will brush it off as sloganeered or cooked statistics.
>>7952351
>Your "wrong again" comment makes me feel like you still don't understand the difference between income and wealth
Dude i gave you examples of the threshold for being in the top 1% of both income and wealth.
Now you're moving the goalposts to muh 0.01%.
Yeah, super rich people are super rich. What a profound discovery.
Muh 1% is absolutely a sloganeered statistic.
>>7950111
>rich kids living off of grandpappy's money want to abolish capitalism
>>7953485
1% - 50% of the wealth is absolutely correct, whether or not you find it overly handy, it's just true. 50% of the wealth isn't quite the same as 50% of the investment decisions, which I would say is really the important measure here in terms of economic power.
1% and 0.1% aren't contradictory arguments - they're complimentary. The point is that wealth approaches an exponential distribution near the top echelons: the more narrow a band you choose, the more social cohesion the group will have. It's hard for me to figure how someone could stay informed, hear about stuff like the Panama Papers, and still not think the highest tiers of wealth have interests that are pretty contradictory to the rest of us, but go with God if that's your choice.
>>7951004
maybe you just got 3 years older and feel things are younger in relatively?
https://mises.org/library/intellectuals-and-socialism-0
>>7953625
>austrian """"""""""economics"""""""""""
Not Marxism. Not ever since the Cold War.
Also, you should stop taking America as a reference for cultural phenomena.
>>7950059
I think they were when it was trendy, I'd guess now you find more sympathy with 2nd wave feminism than marxism.
'career academics' are mostly hacks (analytic philosophy dominates academia for instance) that want to feel smart and zeitgeisty, they believe nothing authentically. thats why freaks like nick land have to flee to asia.
>>7950499
>i've said too much
you've said nothing
It’s literally just that Marxism and postmodernism is popular with academics because they are systems of ideas that are really easy to be obscurantist but are not conceptually difficult. So academics who had struggled in Calc for Business Majors 1 need something to make themselves sound smart and sophisticated
>>7953741
yeah if only baudrillard knew about derivatives, definitely would have seen how dumb pomo is
>>7953752
nah he just wouldn't have to make up circumlocuting nonsense to validate himself
>>7953755
This.
Continental 'philosophy' is an elaborate long con on a par with Scientology.
how did I know Badiou would be someplace on /lit/ rn :)
reminder that this is a trash board full of stemlords, self conscious teens, and /pol/ run-off
>>7953781
reminder that classical logic and classical set theory is trash
>>7953595
>the Panama Papers
Well meme'd my friend.
If you were "informed" you'd know there are dozens of political financiers trying to fuck eachother in the ass from all over the world.
>>7950014
because they've never done an hour of real physical labor
and don't understand what real work entails
>>7954287
>Panama Papers explained
>in 6 points
>like you're 5
what hath Buzzfeed wrought
>>7954252
classical set theory? like naive set theory or zfc?
>>7951010
Could you go into more detail about your personal beliefs? How reactionary are you? y u no socialism? Thoughts on Ebola?
>>7954435
ZFC
>>7954290
this
and Marxism is equivalent to "Free Shit". Who don't like free shit?
>>7954846
Damn, this is a stale meme.
>>7954867
His next line is: "As stale as bread that you get from waiting on line"
>>7953683
do you not know the difference between economics and sociology?
>>7950531
the glorious truth is that trainee cops even in shit economy US states make 32 starting
the only government jobs worth looking into are in enforcement
There's a lot of studies showing why humanities and social science academics are heavily left biased, one reason is due to hiring bias (there was a study in 2012) and because people who choose non practical careers, tend to be left wing and end up staying in universities.
>>7950807
>Comparing Gehlen with Adorno
You could not have shown more how philosophically illiterate you are, also if you thought Dialectic of the Enlightenment was just part of a "culture of critique" narrative it also shows how either you didn't read that book or didn't understand it. The book is more of an answer to the Enlightenment, not technology.
Marxism has been completely impotent in the last 20 years.
People like Badiou are dinosaurs of theory, and philosophers like Zizek don't pretend to have an answer, though in a worse twist of fate Zizek has moved in the comfortable space that globalization and inter-national co-operation will magically fix capitalism.
Things like left Accelerationism and Anarchism are far more attractive to young people, because it calls for a total transformation of society that embraces a post-capitalist future with real answers. Instead your average Marxist today is like Zizek who is comfortable holed up in the academy , and declares himself a "pessimist" while he glorifies the liberal state that gives him money. No revolution will come about from such thinking, only "parodies" of a revolution, like OWS and the Indignados in Europe.
>>7950014
There are very few original thinkers. Academics aren't thinkers, they are people who apply original thinkers' toolsets to things that interest them.
Marx (and Freud etc.) gave them a very easy to understand toolset that claimed to be able to tackle the biggest and the smallest of problems. It seems like the sale of the century, and so many academics bought into it, whether or not it actually has any correspondence to reality is not relevant to the academic.
>>7955440
When something has flaws it is enticing to smash it and start again. Marx provides both a framework of that and further affirmation of slave morality.
>>7950014
Because it is the natural conclusion to come to, once you start looking at the world.
Only if you already have a certain set of values, however.
>>7955579
only correct answer 2bhfam
>>7953741
>postmodernism is popular
the more frogs on your computer the less neurons in your brain
>>7955579
indeed, indeed. i value sucking cock too much and i want mine sucked later way too much, as well, to openly become a mraxist. looking at the world all i can see is Leo Strauss, muh Realism and the Melian Dialogue, or, alternatively, the blonde Protestant Übermenschen of Weber and Huntington and the bible of King James. When I get drunk and sentimental I also tend to sputter marxism though always it is wrapped in the muh liberty cloth of the reformed ex-Trotskyists of the McCarthyist era to whom it isn't histomat but the "modernization theory of rogoff". And it is not the revolution that we export but democracy. heil fukuyama.
>>7956007
*fewer
>>7951930
You haven't read Marx
>>7950014
Even assuming that academics are necessarily bourgeois, class essentialism is in fact retrograde. It is not only possible for bourgeois persons to be a class traitors, it is probably essential. It must also be noted that capitalism only works because the capitalist class is so easily able to make workers into class traitors.
>>7950059
It's the opposite, they're mostly (and, naturally, naively) anti-marxist.
Marxism as a critical ideology is attractive because it is the only ideology capable of situating texts and cultural artifacts in their historico-material context without reducing them to "expressive" or "symptomatic" residua of the economic infrastructure. New Historicism is bunk, feminism falsely subsumes class struggle, and psychoanalysis is irredeemably bourgeois. Read Jameson.
>>7955288
>people who chose not to devote their lives to capital's accumulation end up being left-wing
this is truly shocking, i needed a "study" to tell me this. thank you wise anon.
>>7951991
Maybe Marx?
Marxists?
Anything to make you realise the status quo isn't left wing.
>>7955434
I don't think Zizek believe's internationalism and Globalisation witll "fix" capitalism but it's so unsustainable that as the global social order begins to burst at the seems, there will be a reassertion of counter hegemonic forces à la Schmittian Large Spaces and Multipolarity
>>7951991
You might want to read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations beforehand, because it's quite easy to think of Marx as a build up on classical liberalism (mainly his theory of alienation from labour 2bh)
As far as Marxists readings, here's a list I recommend (no name means by Marx):
Utopia by Thomas More
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels
Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State by Engels
What Is Property? by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
The Communist Manifesto
Estranged Labour
Value, Price, and Profit
Wage, Labour, and Capital
The Principles of Communism
The Civil War In France
These on Feuerbach
The German Ideology
Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism by Lenin
Das Kapital, if you want to get deep into it (not for beginners)
All of these are available at http://marxists.org and if you want some Anarchist texts go to http://theanarchistlibrary.org where I recommend anything by Kropotkin, Bakunin, or Rudolf Rocker. (Ancom, Ancollectivist, Ansyndicalist respectively)
>>7950179
> predictive power
proof positive you understand nothing about marxism
>>7955434
OWS was mostly an anarchist movement, or at least much more of anarchist movement than a Marxist one
