“Communism bad”
“Why?”
200 year old tropes so ancient they were debunked by Marx himself
Of course, you go through the motions of explaining the most basic political concepts that could be grasped by skimming the cliff notes for literally any Marxist works
“Friedrich Engels? Is he like the president of Germany or something?”
It’s like a kindergartener trying to teach you calculus.
Say what you will about professional philosophy (and there’s a lot of negative stuff to say about it), but my experience has been that people with doctorates in philosophy tend to both understand Marx better and be more receptive to his points than people in most other departments. Maybe I’ve just gotten lucky, though.
I agree.
Actually I’d go further and say that everyone should get the opportunity to study philosophy in school, and that everyone who pursues study in any subject should have to, or be encourage to take at least one or a couple philosophy and history courses on the subject they study, e.g. philosophy of physics, biology, economics, sociology… By contrast I don’t really think there should be formal education in philosophy by itself without study other subjects to keep urself grounded and to do philosophy on. Abstraction and speculation do still need a minimum of grounding in the concrete if they are going to be meaningful or applicable imo.
If by philosophy we mean the most general study of the must general, asbtract or fundamental properties of the world, including as applied to specific key topics or areas of knowledge, then even aside from philosophical questions of ontology, epistemology, aesthetics and ethics, the reason I think that having access to engaging in philosophy proper is worthwhile is that seriously studying philosophy really can help you work on your ability of critical and conceptual analysis and logical argument. This aids our own understanding of topics and makes more convincing as Marxists. Again, the different between Marxism and utopian socialism is that it is scientific. Even on this site I think you see quite a few discussions which drift into the territory of philosophy but which seem to contain alot of confusion because people are using terms with very different meanings but then talking simultaneously as if they were debating about the same topic. This obviously doesn’t mean that every convo is like this or that any really is in it’s entirety, but it does highlight how necessary it is to try make as clear as reasonable possible from the onset what we mean when we suddenly start using abstract or technical terms, in order to avoid needless confusion.
There are of course many often-correct negative stereotypes about philosophy students and academic philosophy, which I agree are valid. One consequence of this is that, frankly, I’m not always convinced that the students in there class on, like, Baudrillard are really working on their critical and analytical skills in the ways they would if they studied other thinkers, schools or topics.
That being said, no one needs to deeply study philosophy or it’s history to understand the essential core of Marxism, Marxist politics or to engage as an effective militant. On the other hand, I really resent when people imply that we prols are slack-jawed meat sacks without the ability to think theoretically, abstractly or philosophically ourselves and on our own terms. I’ve met many brilliant organic working class intellectuals who could have pursued careers in respectable academia - and in fact blow the liberal professors who hold those spots out of the water - but are not as interested or would never have been given a place there if they were going to try and do anything remotely hinting of Marxist-influenced work.
I disagree. They talk about it in a way that looks different, but philosophy academics tend to functionally be very liberal and just have more sophisticated ways of defending roughly the same stupid positions
You’re correct that the big majority of philosophy academics are liberal. It’s good to bear in mind tho imo that philosophy professors are not the only people employed as philosophy educators or teachers and are far from the only people who have seriously studied philosophy, formally or informally. There are a decent number of Marxist philosophy PhD’s, not least from the combination of their experience of the labor market and the fact that they’ve had the time or priviledge to think critically about and ‘deconstruct’ certain key concepts that are essential parts of capitalist/liberal ideology.
The issue is not so much, imo, in areas of philosophy like philosophy of science, mathematics, language, logic or even epistemology and metaphysics. The more immediate issue is when it comes to areas like moral or political philosophy, or philosophy of economics. The biases in these latter cases are really evident and you are correct imo that when considering that social function they are largely serving as more sophicated mechanisms of ideological legitimation of liberalism or reformism. E.g. any western political philosophy department is going to be dominated by Rawlsians, i.e. the least politically relevant and most mind-numbingly boring political theory that was ever shat over the face of the earth. The most recent wave of Rawlsian thought is soc-dem in nature, looking at his late texts on ‘property-owning democracy’, meaning accepts to have soc-dem societies which ‘socialism’ has been reached by reform but in which there is still private property. Obviously even a slight understanding of Marxist theory dispells this idea as obviously incoherent. The reason it is still present is because it acts as a moral paliative that petit-bourgeois soc-dem intellectuals - who are intelligent enough to realise that contemporary capitalism is completely fucked up but are neither intellectually sophicated enough nor morally strong enough to correctly diagnose it or offer genuine solutions - can use to sooth their consciences.
That being said, you do often see a correlation with how deeply or seriously people are interested in philosophy and their interest in Marxism. The danger is that these people are often simply intellectual Marxists or Marxians with an abstract idea of politics. This is generally far from being entirely their fault, but it is a danger. In practice they are often interested more in abstract argument about certain ideas as opposed to the empirical and historical adequacy of Marxism as a theory of social reality.