What the fuck does it mean to be 'philosophically left-wing'?
reddit.com
I ask because as time passes, I am able to relate to others who consider themselves 'leftist' less and less. It seems that nowadays being a 'leftist' comes with a lot of philosophical baggage and to be a Real Comrade(tm) you have to hold all kinds of views.
go back there
it means they're a cunt
Grow up.
It means they had an intro class to Foucault and Butler at uni and are now LARPing as a radical
you not any better ultrababy
"leftist" and even socialist to a lesser degree means left-liberal these days. I personally stopped calling myself leftist and just go by communist or marxist, so I don't have to be associated with them.
Criticism of teleology, criticism of free-willism, recognition of social structures & determinism.
At best. "Philosophy" online could mean anything from an inconsistent worldview through vague stoner meanderings to the first paragraphs of Wikipedia articles.
This.
Care to enlighten us, plebs, oh mighty Philosopher?
It means they agree with shallow leftist platitudes but don’t understand why or read any works on economics
Most of this thread is full of strawmen "hurr ur a stoner who read half an intro on wikipedia xD" trying to project onto others things they confusely feel applying to themselves, making sure to pre-emptively disqualify them as red liberals or whatever. This is not really specific to this thread but also applies to the majority of leftypol trying frantically to determine who is a legit leftist and who isn't (idpol, liberals, larpers, whatever, you guys have so many labels to throw around it's not even funny to list them) to feel good about themselves.
Philosophy generally as a critical stance of "commonly held views", as a pluridisciplinary approach can constitute a solid theoretical foundation for leftist politics. I'm saying can because obviously there are right-wing philosophers and people who think of themselves as well-versed in philosophy and hold centrist views or are politically confused.
Just because you aren't familiar with esoteric marxian economics, finance or the history of modes of productions doesn't mean you are disqualified. I'm getting more and more fed up of reading dunning-kruger-ridden posters who pathologically need to tell how everyone but them suck.
Being philosophically left-wing, for me, is rejecting individualist ethics, individualist morals, it implies supporting some kind of rationalist historical project (criticism of religion and tradition, trying to remove capital/the market as the only decision-taking social force and replace it by democratic institutions [not bourgeois elections] in order to uphold certain values that are specific to the left).
Spinoza's determinism is the closest thing you can find to a philosophically left-wing project and it's hardly surprising he influenced Marx that much (through hegel).
Are you new? If anything, the core posters don't give a shit about the term "leftist" (an already lost cause), leaving it behind and calling themselves communist/Marxist.
It all boils down to one's understanding of class struggle: the structuring ontological field of the current regime (Marxist) vs. one of the many causes (leftist).
I don't give a shit about leftist politics, mate. Your conception of philosophy as a critique of doxa is outdated, and "pluridisciplinarity" is just an ideological term every academic tries to live up to.
Esoteric for you.
It means you are not a Marxist. That's all.
I'll stick to dialectical materialism.
If there's an anti-Spinozan philosopher par excellence, it's Hegel, mate. I know that he says something along the line that "modern phil. starts with Spino" but that's just wiki-tier again. There were and are attempts to bring together Spinoza and Marx, and while these are very intelligent attempts – much better than the other 'Marxist' tradition, the analytic philosophers, with whom they share the reservations about the dialectical method, if not the ultimate aim of abolishing it altogether –, they ultimately prove to be failures.
I'm sorry but you're out of your depth.
I'm sorry, but you'll have to demonstrate that.
Every single string of text you've typed is a demonstration clear as day. When it takes you 10 seconds to type out a half-skilled statement, it will take me 5 minutes to debunk it, it's clear going into this is a mathematically losing game for me.
I wouldn't mind debunking you on voice chat because I could actually do it fast enough for it not to feel like a huge chore. I'm not paid to do this and typing it will take me forever. But every single point you're making is extremely weak/parroting others while you obviously have no clue what you're talking about.
I'm not the one who (from the beginning) framed this as a dick measuring contest:
this post reeks of "me>u," just like the current one I'm answering to. If you attempt (and still continue to take) the debate as such at least try to measure up to your enormous phallus, or face the obvious conclusions people will draw.
You have a really great understanding of what you're discussing, especially in regards to Hegel and Spinoza. However, I fear you're going down the route many who study philosophy do, in that you become so aversive to newcomers that you stifle discussion. That includes me. But there's no reason to get so uppity and discredit everyone else's understanding of political philosophy, when you could just as easily educate them instead.
In regards to the OP, I think everyone else hit the nail on the head. Unfortunately, everyone in Uni throws the word philosophy around more than a whore in an orgy lol. What he probably meant to say was that he is an economic centrist/US liberal who's studied basic marxism but wants to know every day differences a properly run socialist society has with a capitalist, globalist society like ours.
I seriously hope that's sarcasm. He literally copy-pasted zizek's opinion on Spinoza.
I wonder if a meth addicted Anglo who lives in China is behind this post?
They are probably stupid. Socialist/leftwing thought is almost entirely composed of the Marxist and scientific kind. The economics are arguably the most important part of the whole damn thing. Marx himself said that the entirety of a Communist's aims can be said to be the abolishing of private property.
That guy is probably just some confused liberal. He feels bad about inequality but doesn't agree with Marx. That's giving him a lot of credit though…
God forbid you have to actually hold certain views to fit into a certain category of viewpoints. Fucking descriptions man, I hate them. Descriptions allow thinking and thinking is psychological baggage.
This poster almost certainly means they believe in egalitarianism, democracy, and solidarity as core values, but if you're confused about what they mean why not ask them yourself there? Why are you asking me what someone from reddit thinks?
Spooky US-politician lingo.
Wanting people to come under the umbrella of some kind of universal ideal (justice, equality, humanity) is not Marxist.
Marxists wish to abolish all forms of domination, including the democratic ones.
Depends on the usage. "Solidarity between women and LGBT" is not Marxist. "International solidarity among the working class" is Marxist.
FYI this is the same pseud that posted
Fucking lol.
But also
What is wrong with American teenagers?
For you, Stirnerite kiddie
Who said that it was? Marx was a moral realist though.
If you don't care about actual democracy, then you don't care about the people. If you're talking about the ballot box that people call democracy, we aren't talking about the same thing.
Again, you're shifting the goalpost. Who said anything about Marxism besides you? Is Bakunin left? Is Kropotkin?
You're also misrepresenting Marxism because you aren't a Marxist yourself.
Aka. the optimal, perverse subject of capital.
source?
Care to give a summary?
Kind of busy, but here's the section on moral realism. There's also the conclusion which you should read, even if you can't get to the whole thing.
iv. Marx’s seemingly relativist statements in this area are not, in fact, what many have taken them to be. They are statements not of moral relativism but rather, as we may call this, of moral realism. That standards of right are, for him, sociologically grounded or determined means that the norms people believe in and live by will be powerfully influenced by the nature of their society, their class position in it, and so on.
It means, more particularly, that what standards of right can actually be implemented effectively and secured — this is constrained by the economic structure and resources of the given society. It does not mean that the standards to be used in evaluating or assessing a society must necessarily also be constrained by the same economic configuration; that the only valid criteria of assessment are those actually prevalent, those harmonious with the mode of production. Marx’s assertion that right cannot be ‘higher than the economic structure’ is a case in point. Its context makes clear — that it is a realist, not a relativist, one. He first speaks of the contribution principle as an advance over capitalism, then explains why it is defective none the less, and says that the defects are inevitable, however, during the first phase of communism. Then he makes the statement in question and says, immediately afterwards, that the different conditions of a higher phase of communism will permit the implementation of the needs principle. Implanted in this context, Marx’s statement is plausibly one concerning the real prerequisites of achieving progressively higher er more advanced standards of right. It is obviously not a statement that there can be no higher or lower in this matter on account of each such standard being relative to its appropriate economic structure.
v. There is nothing at all either reformist or contrary to the cast of Marx’s thought, it is argued in addition, about a preoccupation with distribution as such. He does object to any over-restricted focus upon the social division of income, but that is because he sees the latter as more or less a consequence of the relations of production, and it is both politically misguided and theoretically senseless to condemn the necessary effects of a cause which is itself left uncriticized. On any broader view of distribution, however, Marx is clearly concerned with it: with the distribution of free time, of opportunities for fulfilling activity, of unpleasant or rebarbative work; with the distribution of welfare more generally, of social and economic benefits and burdens. And he is concerned, in particular and above all, with the distribution of productive resources, on which according to him this wider distribution depends. That is clear even in the passage of ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ from which his putative anti-distributive orientation is usually derived. For, insisting that the distribution of means of consumption cannot be viewed as independent of the mode of production, Marx speaks of the mode of production as itself a kind of — more basic — distribution: ‘the distribution of the conditions of production’. His belittling of the ‘fuss’ about distribution, therefore, is aimed at distribution too narrowly construed and not in general. His own attention to the production relations is precisely a preoccupation with distribution, with for him the most fundamental one of all, namely that of the means of production; and as such this preoccupation is revolutionary par excellence.
cont.
vi. Equally, there is nothing inherently reformist or idealist, from Marx’s point of view, in criticism of capitalism by appeal to ethical norms or ideals, like justice. True, if such is the sole and self-sufficient, or even the principal, burden of a critical discussion of capitalism, then he does find it so wanting, but while clearly inadequate for him as an impulse to, or instrumentality of, revolutionary change, moral criticism and argument are in no way incompatible with the sort of materialist analysis — of the real historical tendencies towards revolution — that he sees as indispensable. In conjunction with that analysis, and with the actual movement and the struggles of the workers against capitalism, and with the social and economic transformations which these struggles and other developments bring about, a normative critique is perfectly in place and the denial of this just a form of what is called economism. Moral censure and justification are certainly the accompaniment of, and arguably they are a relatively independent contribution to, processes constituting the human agency of revolutionary change, the formation of a desire and a consciousness for socialism.
vii. So, whatever else may be the force of categorizing principles of justice and right as juridical ones, the categorization is unacceptably narrow if it is meant to bind them indissolubly to the existence of law, in a strict and positivist sense. They are, of course, as Marx knew well, standardly embodied in legal codes, backed up by the apparatus of enforcement that is a part of the state. However, such principles can be too, in the first instance, simply ethical ones concerning what is and what is not a morally defensible distribution of goods and bads; and it is possible to conceive their realization without the paraphernalia of state coercion. If these points do not make a juridical conception, then Marx had, or he also had, a non-juridical conception of justice.
COINTELPRO
what was it?
I'm saying can because obviously there are right-wing philosophers and people who think of themselves as well-versed in philosophy and hold centrist views or are politically confused.
pseud shit basically
8ch.net
Some iceberg meme lmao
Is there any Deleuze-Guatarian schizoanalysis left in him after being infected with boomerism anyway?
You get better dialectics from Fash-Wave aesthetisising LARPers than him. He's just a grumpy, racist lolberg who makes references to himself once in a while.
