From Philosophical Research
Main entry[edit]
- post-Marxism
Related[edit]
- class essentialism -> why is this a concept. you know when people come up with stuff like this that they have no idea what Marx is even about. [1]
- symbolic politics -> 'britannica two' says it is something like the art of uniting a movement around specific concepts that might be expressed as slogans or images. [2] I don't know if that's the right definition in this context. if it is the right definition, I can sort of see how it practically applies here: the Existentialists take all the various identity movements and hand them a shared content to create a single Social-Philosophical System, then they all advance medicare because they're united around it and it's shared content. that would actually make sense. the dumb thing is how post-Marxists make their ideas unnecessarily hard to understand to where I have no idea what they're even saying.
Edelman's critique sounds accurate though as far as Liberal-republicanism goes. that if you just hand a bunch of people a slogan they won't necessarily be doing much work that way or participating at the high-stakes levels that would go on in Congress or that would happen in a central Marxist party, on one level they're kind of just a fanclub.
so... is this really just a glorified form of anarchist Idealism? I see some commonalities between this and how charcoal anarchists will try to make a movement solely out of preserving 'unkillable' disembodied ideas.
- power beyond the factory floor / to theorise power beyond the factory floor (theorize; post-Marxism) -> I feel like the biggest problem with all of this is that it focuses on the concept of "power", as if "ruling" and "government" are truly some fundamental core of a society. it's a very Liberal-republican or Kantian concept that is not at all the way Marxists conceptualize what societies are. despite what phrases like "dictatorship of the proletariat" may make you think.
Marxists aren't obsessed with having "power". they're obsessed with building a functioning society that coheres together as one. that's why Marxists talk about joining up every business or close into one big mono-structure. when you think that has anything to do with "power", you get the false picture of Marxism as some kind of conspiracy to bring down power and control to enslave poor unsuspecting businesses into a nationality. it's almost the opposite of that. the point is to slowly encourage people to solve their own problems at local levels and for the government to order them around less. but Liberal-republicanism has this idea that like, you need a central government constantly ordering people around for the rest of time. this notion of an eternal "blue Big Brother" gets baked into anybody who grows up in Liberal-republicanism. and I think in some ways it conditions people to believe in hegemony politics because they come to believe that "democracy" actually involves exerting power over people to get your way and not just like, unregulated dysfunction and claiming people voted for it. in some kind of irony, they're almost right for the wrong reasons, because capitalism works that way although democracy is kind of an illusion. and this will then produce modern Gramscianism, where people just kind of carry out a bunch of musical chairs attacks and hope that filling up slots in capitalism and putting out a bunch of "culture" actually gives them power. it's not entirely wrong but it's off in subtle ways. it ends up assuming that Liberal capitalism really is democratic, but only the most elite people actually have democracy, which means people-governing-power possessed by clusters of individuals, and you really can fix society but also that you'll have sufficient power if you get a tiny cluster of lesbians or Black women to have power while there are also a huge forest of White bigots who also have power and can easily drown them all out. the ratio isn't good. the reason Marxists focus on "class" is that theoretically it creates a good ratio of over half the population who will stand strong against less than half the population. so really, what you need to do is something like find the large-scale structural elements of the population and pick out the biggest ones with the tiniest groups of people owning them. it never had to be factory workers, but it always has to be a majority of people, or a sturdy enough network that can extend over the whole of some given population to create one unified structure putting together the entire thing. it doesn't have to be all the workers of Russia if you understand the structure of the 14 populations and how to put them together into a nation-state against a shared oppressor that deprived of its populational structures becomes tiny.
so... United States Gramscianism seemingly re-spawned out of anarchism by accident when it was trying to put together identity politics movements around Ideas and mistakenly believed there was such a thing as "power", only to find out that capital was still one of the largest factors unifying the population and fractured islands of capital were where power was.
Ideology codes[edit]
