What are some topics in sociology, economics, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, or history you think leftists should explore more often, and why?
What would make a good topic of exploration if, say, you were writing a graduate thesis from a leftist perspective in the humanities or social sciences?
marine biology
...
The role of myth would be a good one.
Pick what interests you
Applying dialectical and historical materialism as a basis for your exploration of the topic will assist you far more than you might suspect
You may need to elide and obscure these high power research tools from your supervisor if you want the piece of paper and they're unsympathetic to actual real Marxist theory however
It's all connected, you tard.
entymology
this is what i did at uni
Funny that you post Althusser who actually threw out the concept of Marxist totality.
People on the left should finally read fucking post modernists like baudrillard an Foucault for their analysis of the postmodern society and its power dynamics since, and it hurts me that I even have to say it, a revolution like 1918 will never ever happen in a first world country again which these retarded ☭TANKIE☭ larp about 24/7
I mean at least read society of the spectacle since it pretty much did that, not much in detail but from a marxistic perspective
Architecture and aesthetics
I think Marxists need to analyse in a deeper context the dialectical shifts prior to the development of capitalism: slave society into feudalism, proto-communism into slave society ect. You never see Marxist analysis of ancient history.
David Graeber and John Zerzan are the first people to pop into mind. Might want to do some more research.
Tbf they're both anprims, I mean more you'll find loads of essays on say proto-capitalism in Russia in the pre mongol period but not class relations in the Achaemenid Empire.
t. no one
we study revolutions of the past because we are scientific socialists. if we did not study the past, but instead fell into pomo bullshit, we'd end up in the exact position of the mainstream """left""" today, virtue signalling and failing to accomplish literally anything.
if you actually read Left-Wing Communism, you'd know Lenin talks specifically about this point: revolutions do not happen in the same way and trying to apply the lessons of the Bolsheviks move-for-move is incorrect and doomed to failure (look at the Hungarian Soviet). but what Lenin does talk about is the lessons that can and will apply in every revolutionary situation.
if we did not study the past, but instead fell into pomo bullshit, we'd end up in the exact position of the mainstream """left""" today, virtue signalling and failing to accomplish literally anything
Thanks for being a prime example for ☭TANKIE☭s with the exact same understanding of postmodernism as a JP fanboy
One could almost think I was samefagging to illustrate my own argument
Sup sorelfag
As an ex-Muslim I'd like to see Marxists write about the rise of Islam and the Khilafah/Caliphate based on all the new evidence we have today, i.e. that the Qur'an is probably a lot older, and "Islam" was most likely a combination of local traditions which became a state religion after the Empire came into existence.
Book recommendations pls.
I haven't heard of any theories like that? I mean Muhammad was a bloke that united the Arab tribes and launched a conquest. Is the theory that he merely united various beliefs and did that? I mean that would still make him like Abraham tier as opposed to Jesus tier (in terms of theological origins).
The theories I've heard are that "Muhammad" was a legendary figure who was based on a real guy, probably a Samaritan from Babylon. The Lakhmids (who practiced a form of non-trinitarian Xtianity) overthrew the Persians and then later teamed up with the Ghassanids to defeat the Byzantines and go into Egypt and whatnot. Mecca as we know it today didn't even exist until the 800s and the Qur'an is most likely describing events which occurred in Palestine and Mesopotamia.
Would you be the same ex-muslim leninist fem-user I recall from about a year ago? Or am I crazy and mixing up my comrades? Never the less, I'm always curious as to people's opinion on the confrontation of communism and religion. Are you of the opinion that it needs to be systematically dismantled, de-fanged and reintergrated into a socialist society, or simply left free so the religious can do as they may providing they don't contradict a communist society's laws and constitution?
Finger painting
I feel like the dogmatic view of dialectical materialism in terms of revolution that was stratified by Stalin needs an overhaul. Marx was wrong about revolution occurring in advanced capitalist countries, and the Third Worldist explanation that this because they are "bought off" by imperialism is, while partly true, certainly not satisfactory. I feel like Marxists need to stop to shy away from Weberian sociology and try to find out what exactly creates a revolutionary situation, and what creates a situation in which fascism is likely to win. This ideological, superstructural aspect of social movements is either ignored or underestimated by modern Marxists. Because clearly, a collapse of capitalism into turmoil and torrents of blood, such as WWII, was not sufficient for a global socialist consciousness.
I know Debord and Baudrillard have tried to address this but their explanations are lacklusters as well.
This. Most Marxists know shit about pre-capitalist societies. Whenever you see Marxists try to talk about the Middle Ages or Antiquity you get takes that are nothing short of a disaster. I mean it is not really relevant for revolutionary thought, but it is interesting to me.
That's me, yes.
I would also add Marxists (western Marxists in particular) know jack shit about non-western cultures and our psychology. They universalize modern western norms and values on everyone and only bring up cultural differences in a superficial manner ("the Ottoman Empire wasn't a REAL empire because it wasn't western and empires are ONLY a western thing!"). That needs to stop ASAP.
People actually say this?
I'd break your jaw if I knew who you were, kid. You don't know anything. Slice open your wrist and put it into very hot water and bleed out, cunt.
Is this a meme?
Two memes one modern; one ancient.
Apparently there was an school of historians in the soviet union founded by V.V. Struve that looked at ancient Mesopotamia but that isn't in english as far as I know. There is also Reinhard Bernbeck
For Greece there is De Croix (already mentioned) & Jean-Pierre Vernant who's more of an structuralist bent.
I think part of the problem is that studying ancient history is extremely specialized & often requires learning dead languages that an handful of other poeple know. Nobody has the time for that except for the intelligentsia stratum. I would love to be an expert in ancient Mesopotamia but I would have to learn Akkadian & Sumerian for that to happen. Sadly Marxists are an extreme minority in the classical antiquity scholarship.
Everyone who considers themselves in favor of revolution needs to be studying the emerging science of complex adaptive systems. It's essentially a formalization of the work Engels started with 'Dialectics of Nature', and the fact that neither Marxists nor complexity scientists seem to realize this infuriates me. I firmly believe that systems thinking is the key ingredient that will help Marxism graduate into a full-fledged science, as concrete as evolutionary biology or ecology. It will certainly help us understand what has gone wrong in the past, and what the necessary conditions for future success will be.
As an example: necsi.edu
Researchers from the New England Complex Systems Institute were able to "identify a specific food price threshold above which protests become likely". This is an extremely basic example from a field in its absolute infancy. I invite you to imagine what could be achieved if Marxists were well-versed in this field, and turned these analytical methods to the question of revolution.
If you want to learn more, Complexity Labs has an introductory video series, and their website has quite a few free study materials:
hooktube.com
complexitylabs.io
Other research outfits include the Santa Fe Institute, and the Institute for the Study of Complex Systems.
If you read Hegel you'd know he's the first one to come up with this "system of systems" approach and with a rigorous method as well.
why are you still here when you've been btfo'd several times?
That I got bored of you people does not mean any btfo of me ever happened. I've kept doing my usual things just fine.
ok whatever you say anal water
Unironically economics.
Psychoanalysis.
Oh goddamn it, now my super smart post bringing attention to an underappreciated emerging scientific discipline has been undermined by anal water's loud, content-free slurping on Hegel's dick. Of all the (You)s I could have gotten, why did it have to be (You)rs, Anal Water?
he's actually correct tho, what you see as a connection between Engel's and systems theory is also a connection between systems theory and Hegel's analysis of history because Engels drew from this source in his research
See if you can dig up the lecture notes Hegel's students kept from his lectures and you'll see it, they should be in the public domain
have you brought up your observations with some of the sharper students, tutors and lecturers in private where they can be more candid?
Of course he's correct, but he's trivially correct. There was literally no need to bring Hegel into the discussion, since I already very clearly noted that an early form of systems thinking existed in the Marxist tradition (which obviously descends from Hegel). I'm talking about making historical materialism a concrete, quantitative science on the level of evolutionary biology when Anal Water comes in with 'hurf durf ackshually HEGEL is the ultimate source of everything you just said'.
Anal's post pissed me off because it's exactly the kind of shit I intended to rail against with my original post. Complexity theorists are working hard to develop quantitative methods to understand emergence, phase change, system dynamics, etc. Marxists should be at the forefront of that field, but we're not because pseuds like Anal Water think an idealist philosophical framework qualifies as a 'rigorous method'.
And no, I haven't gotten anywhere bringing up the relationship between complexity and dialectics with complexity scientists, because we fundamentally don't have all that much to offer them at the moment. They've already taken all the useful bits of the dialectic and integrated it into their body of theory. Years of being shuffled off to the soft sciences wing, and the attendant corrosion by psueds like Anal Water, has left the scientific side of Marxism in woeful disrepair. The hard sciences have left us behind.
That's the other reason for my post - it's meant to be an appeal to bring people with a Marxist research agenda into the field. That's why I posted some of the prominent research institutes in the field. There are a lot of university-aged posters here, and a few STEM students among them. Studying complexity science and applying it to revolutionary goals is a rare opportunity to simultaneously advance revolutionary theory and build a lucrative career (consultants well-versed in systems thinking make beaucoup bucks).
There are a few things Engel's and even Hegel grant them
*prestige from a 19th century historical scientific grounding you would be surprised at how important this is to get your curriculum into first year subjects
*tools to beat up the competing subjects in the field of social science and claim more academic turf
*a dialectical and historical materialist lens on the development of their own field
I suspect the founders of your discipline were far more familiar with Marx, Engels, Hegel and diamat than is commonly assumed BTW
PS. Could you translate systems theory into diamat terms for the benefit of us here if you have the time?
You people never learn. Dialectical Science > science already if you comprehend it, to make it what you want is actually to demean Science and make it yet another positivist bungling enterprise. Don't take my word, take Marx's and Hegel's. All of you people attempting to make dialectic an empirical science have no idea what dialectic is, if you did you wouldn't be trying something so stupid.
Keep science and leave Science, stop pushing dialectical bullshit.
Almost forgot
hahahahaha. Leftoid, read the logic of quantity, like it's right there in the book. Your obsession with numbers is a delusion absolutizing quantity. You want to do real quantitative science? Develop a qualitative math of quantity as opposed to the formalist garbage unintelligible systems that exist. Get the bourg mathematics out of your head.
Why?
I'm advocating something more here subsuming systems theory into diamat
necsi.edu
So how to expand out from
Being steady unreflective life
Negated to non-being as the strange loop we call consciousness becomes aware of itself as a lack of all determinate thoughts
Negating this negation by becoming and reaching out and grasping things
How do we get from this beginning of the dialectic to what systems theory has grasped in a concrete manner, great Hegelian master?
Why are you anti-postmodernist types always so retarded? almost always burgers. it actually hurts my brain.
Boy do I have something for you, go to your favourite search engine, type in the following terms together in the input field; postmodernism, Heidegger, ecology, fascism
Come back and tell us what you've learnt
Cold & Dark Stars? Dat u?
I'm not, but thank you so much for pointing him out to me. He's a bit wordy for my taste, but he seems to be saying the shit that I'm trying to get across here. It makes sense that we've got similar viewpoints, it looks like we were both physicists concerned with nonlinear phenomena. Very glad to come across this guy to wash the taste of anal water out of my mouth.
t. Jordan Peterson
Read Hegel.
Warning idealist, DON'T READ THIS BOOK, IT IS FATAL TO IDEALISM:
marxists.org
That's actually the subject of my master's thesis
You start out by not being completely wrong about what Being is, duh.
It's not you, it's not me, it's not physics, it's not consciousness, it's not mind. It's just Being, the absolute immediate as immediate. If you comprehended just that much you would comprehend how that is already immanent system. Think, user, *think*. That's all the logic is about, being capable of thinking the most basic thought possible.
Also, Cold and Dark Stars is alright. Better than most Leftists, but lol at your joy of finding a fellow blind man to walk off a cliff with. You've never really questioned "science," you've surely never dared to imagine that you could even question physics, and further it is certain you have never had the thought that math itself can be questioned. You're the poor 'intelligence' that Ilyenkov worked against his whole life, that he argued should be stamped out early in "Our schools must teach how to think."
But hey, it just werks amirite? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Nevermind that you actually know no rational basis, you people don't care about the truth.
inb4 I didn't explain it: it's literally right there on page 1 of chapter 1 of the Logic, if you can't figure it out you're just not cut out for this.
Tell you what, how about a detente? I think you're ignoring the next great paradigm shift in our understanding of the world, you think I'm educated stupid for trying to concretely understand (and hopefully predict and manipulate) nonlinear phenomena.
How about we just…separate? Like, you keep doing your dumb bullshit, I try to do my dumb bullshit, neither of us talk to or about each other, and both of us (but mainly me) end up happier? The alternative is that I angrypost harder, you smugpost even harder in response, and everyone ends up unhappy. Life's too short for that, you know? It's really no skin off my nose if some posters end up…reading lots of Hegel? And it shouldn't be too much skin off your nose if a couple of Zig Forums chucklefucks do a graduate project with the Santa Fe Institute on my recommendation.
You need to stop being so arrogant. No wonder everyone on this board hates you.
You're literally half a century late. Systems thinking is not new, it's been around for a long time, more in some disciplines than others. What you're spouting isn't the next great revelation, systematic reality already pushes the recognition that the world is a system of systems. This recognition isn't because of some discovery by anyone, it is a myriad of discoveries immanent to experience itself in all scientific endeavors.
My only argument with you is that 1) you think this new, it isn't even for metasystematic thinking; 2) you want to bring dialectics into it, why the fuck would you? This comes from a supreme ignorance of the systematic thinking you're praising and the dialectical thinking you believe you comprehend yet clearly don't. That which is systematic *is* already dialectical, there is no revelation to be made about it. No one NEEDS to call it dialectic or recognize it as such, it's pointless. It's just silly posturing, you don't help anything along. Good science is always already dialectical science just as good philosophy is always already that, to come in and want to push a terminological religion of yours so that everyone worships your hero is retarded. No, Marx nor Hegel have no insights into whatever you're working on—THINKING does. No, dialectical thinking has no productive relation to any endeavor you're trying to achieve, if you think genuinely you've always already thought dialectically.
My point is what I've said for years: quit fetishizing what you don't comprehend, quit being empty echo chambers of ideology and jargon because none of it is useful or good. Nobody wants that shit.
Holy shit I've missed you. It has felt all too cold and stagnant since you've left. though I assume you just popped in to shit on the scientism and bad philosophy
If you want to keep up with me I'm not hiding. I've started to upload more to my philosophy channel lately. Just check my twitter @aw_hegel. I won't link it since people would say I'm spamming or something.
Mr. Anal Water. I'm interested in watching your videos and reading more about Hegel, but your microphone quality is a crime against humanity tbh. And stop recording outside.
I'll upgrade if you're willing to pay for that microphone and a room that's quiet. Be thankful I'm not annoying you for likes and patreonbux
Just become a twitch thot. It's not hard.
Or are you trying to go for that Varg Vikernes approach by filming in the middle of no where?
Oh and read Spinoza you cuck.
Do you comprehend how monumental that is? Shit's like 75 pages, but that's 75 pages of the density of a pure Hegelian logic outline. The effort I have to put into getting through the Ethics is going to be at least a year for any decent comprehension, and no I'm not going to read secondary lit.
I told myself I wouldn't do what I do with Hegel with anyone else, but fuck I can't not. I hate Schelling and yet I'm doing it for one of his essays and I'm genuinely having fun with the relatively tame mind fuck this is compared to Hegel once you realize the guy is making analogical shifts left and right under the hood of what he's saying because he literally wanted the surface text to be nonsense if you couldn't figure out the argument flowing underneath.
You have done nothing but mock principled leftists.
Then again I have never met a sincere Hegelian who wasn't a crypto-reactionary or neocon.
Name one. Theory kids don't count. Youtubers don't count. Student union kids don't count. Party kids don't count.
There are no respectable Leftists in the 1st world, they're a dead breed and you're a parody of them.
Yessss
Never mind Anal Water, Hegel himself has been BTFO'd a number of times.
Defending Hegel today is almost like trying to claim China is still socialist, or that Israel isn't "really" apartheid.
Oh yeah, let's hear about this - tell me all about how Hegel has been intellectually and theoretically trounced, because it certainly hasn't much of an impact on literally the most important philosopher in modern history
Yes
...
lol
Paganism
more like niggerism
