The “left wing activist organizations” link in the top comment links to a Newsweek article about left wing violence.

Get a grip.

In the USA, lots of radical unions and labor movements will recruit salters. Portland, OR even has a prominent salter job fair put on by several unions and reformers

I’ll def put Rubin on my list, and check out that lecture. To be clear, my engagement with Mouffe/Laclau is specifically due to an observed ignorance of Gramscian definitions of hegemony and passive revolution, which the Mouffe and Laclau exploits in order to actually divide Gramsci from Marx (impossible if you actually like study Gramsci.) This leads to Leninist formations to actually respond to the pomo framing by reverting to like 1903 Menshevist understanding of power, which Lenin was explicitly critical of.

I’m also captivated by how often moderate academics fall for this “guys what if there’s a trialectic” bit from L&M. But in that respect, an alternate but cohesive and coherent formulation of Marxist dialectics that expands my own pedagogical critical dialectics is very appealing, especially as I am starting to recognize some practical weaknesses.

I’ve definitely enjoyed the thoughtful discussion and engagement. Most of the time i get this deep into the topic, I end up losing people.

abstractions can become reified.

Honestly I was kinda riffing with this stuff. Being able to get into the weeds with you was an opportunity to work through some points I’ve been thinking a lot about. If I were to point to examples of real abstractions, which are definitely mediated through practical activity, though I def need to think more about what that means, would prob deal with some points Marx made in Capital v1 about abstracting labor to alienate it from workers. The watch maker example, of a highly skilled craftsman, who could make one watch like per week. The watch was highly sought after and expensive until a capitalist figures out how to use a tool to make one piece of the watch, and then has an unskilled craftsman just make that one piece all day. Put the craftsperson in a factory with a bunch of other workers who make the same part over and over, and then assemble them at the end. Take a specialized task of a worker, and have a machine do it, now you can produce more springs or whatever at a cheaper cost, because you no longer need a worker who can make springs, you just need someone to load a strip of metal into the machine and pull a lever.

Its like the way that the labor is abstracted, takes away the human element. As the work is made abstract and given over to the machine, the human becomes part of the machine. And what Marx takes great care to prove, is that the more this labor becomes abstract, the more it is used to exploit more vulnerable people. What took a trained craftsman can now be accomplished by a child, or elderly.

Another example is actually software. The user interacts with an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction, and so on, in order to like perform some task on a computer. The user never has to think about ones and zeroes, or circuits, or even computer code. But all those things are abstractions. they are the product of human labor, but once they’re existing, they reduce human labor, or limit it in some ways.

This is where I need to spend a bit more time with your description that abstractions are mediated by human activity. I’m gonna need to chew on that a bit. Its an important clarification, and I appreciate you identifying it for me.

generalize the concept of abstraction into a bi-directional process that includes both human sense-perception and human activity?

Okay you caught me. My application of Marxism is heavily humanist. Probably my biggest other influence is Paulo Friere. I have some criticisms of him, like I think he naively leans toward an academic new-left orientation in some ways, not explicitly, but I can’t help but read what he’s writing about the cultural revolution and compare it to the various academic milquetoast “maoists” I’ve encountered. But I also deeply appreciate and heavily apply the method of revolutionary critical pedagogy, so I think that’s what you’re picking up here. I think Lenin and Trotsky had a good practical grasp of this method, which they synthesized out of Hegel, sometimes via Plekhanovist determinism, sometimes more particular and human-centered. Fanon’s analysis I believe is very close to this as well. But it isn’t strictly Marx, and studying Gramsci for example, he doesn’t do this. He sticks to history, he sticks to class. I think Marxism opens the door to this kind of critical method, I think it is consistent with Marxism, but as I engage in organizing and political work I recognize that not everybody is on the same page as me here. Many of my more politically minded comrades don’t seem to want to bother with pedagogy, but also, I still see them making errors like defining consciousness as an individual trait at the expense of a structural critique. In my view, the structural is deeply connected to the subject, in this dialectical contrast. When I mentioned that Capital was more than just a book of economics, that was very much the impression I got after reading it but couldn’t put my finger on it. Friere, Fanon, and (obsessing over) Theses on Feuerbach/The German Ideology – and maybe a little Pannekoek too – was where I found my orientation toward Marx’s method after Capital. I’m also very impressed with Friere’s ability to concretize even concepts which might be nearly Metaphysical.

Good discussion! Appreciate the rec in real abstraction, I’ll look this over.

I’m having to read the Laclau/Mouffe book in the near future, which will me my next hate-read. I haven’t gotten into the Frankfurt school stuff yet, thankfully, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen, just that i haven’t recognized problems caused by it in my local conditions

What kind of speaking are you doing? Are you speaking to your own experiences? Or are you peddling in abstractions that contradict the lived experiences of people who have direct experience of the subject?

If you aren’t sure of something, ask questions, state the limitations of your knowledge, create situations where you can learn more. Have one on one conversations with people who may be more knowledgeable. Engage in the work.

I think HB has a rule about disengaging once someone asks

Part 2, start with the other comment:

IMO, it is more practical to think of consciousness not individual, but structural. Hell, the “individual” as it is commonly umderstood is a historical social construction.

In this sense, “Abstraction is the reflection of the material world into thought. This thought doesn’t become objective until it is then reflected back into the material world in the form of human activity,” is correct in one direction. But the entire point of the original post, while I don’t agree with op’s identification of language as the source of abstraction, op is right to point out that a major barrier to mass consciousness is an objective problem of abstraction. The abstractions, the ideas of society, are part of the structural consciousness of society, a function of the hegemony of one class over all others. The abstractions are “more real” to us than our own experiences! Its hard to consider abstraction that exists objectively as a “reflection into thought.” Abstraction in this sense can function as part of objective conditions of alienation.

An epistemic application of Marxism is extremely common. It defines the classes for us, it defines labor and revolution for us, it describes history to us; and we consume it like we consume any commodity, one epistemic brand among many. But a practical application of Marxism brings people together in the conditions of struggle and people’s lives, and identifies the material relationships that define our experiences. It allows us to perform materialist critique in the face of severe alienation and hegemony, and come away with the “truth and the power” of the people who create society with our labor. We discover for ourselves the nature and character of our alienation, and we take action to change it. Another hot take, but Marx wasn’t only trying to convey a set of economic theories in Capital, which is what Engels wanted, but he was demonstrating a method that allows us to practically critique any social phenomenon and develop it toward the emancipation of workers from our material conditions. We can look at Marx as an economist, we can admire his conclusions, his incredible insight. And in Capital, Marx relies heavily on Abstraction when beginning each subject in his criticism. But the “Marxism” as I identify it, is the way he holds the abstraction against the wheel of scientific evidence, based in the real conditions centered around the exploited, and identifies how each real set of circumstances embodied in abstraction is really composed of dialectically connected parts, which function as a real phenomena in a way that is distinct from the abstraction. So yes, I think you are half correct that abstraction is the thought that occupies our reflections of our experiences. But practically, if we keep testing our abstractions in real conditions, we eventually realize that any abstraction is flawed, incomplete. All that remains is a scientific method of determining truth, transforming truth into human activity, which accumulates into revolutionary change. Abstraction gives way to action. This is why Marxism is, to me, not an epistemology, because if we are doing epistemology then we are only making mental abstractions. But if we are engaged in the materialist method, then the source of truth is people’s lives and a relation between the inner life of the subject and existence within their objective conditions. We use abstractions to connect them but the source of them is the described lived experiences of the workers, not something that comes from Marx and goes into the worker. Marx shows us what is possible with his method of critique, but it is up to us to define truth.

Thanks for your comments, I see where you’re coming from in your points, so let me clarify these call outs.

The 2nd thesis which you cited should not be interpreted to mean that there is no difference at all between thought (ie, abstraction) and material reality.

Yeah I’ve been called out on this before, I need to figure out how to state a some things better. To clarify, thought is objective human activity. I particularly like the choice of the word “contemplation.” If I have an experience, I contemplate it, it initiates change within myself. I experience my own thoughts, which I may also contemplate. I do believe that thinking is material, because it drives actual material changes in the individual. But if it is referred to statically, like some ghost that lives only in the mind, which IMO it often is, that abstraction is idealistic.

That is an epistemological claim!

I see where you are getting at. But here is the problem I have with it. This places Marx’s materialism next to every other theory of knowledge, like a buffet. This is fine when we are surveying, learning and critiquing. But Marxism isn’t a philosophy, it contains philosophical concepts but in a particular way. It harnesses them into a revolutionary practical method. I think the problem with defining it as an epistemology, which I admit parts of it technically are, is that if it is one epistemology among many, then we aren’t involved in negation. If we consider Marxism an epistemology, we aren’t doing Marxism, we are philosophising, interpreting. We have removed the thing from its practical function, put it in a museum. This is fine and interesting, who doesn’t love a museum? But if we are engaged in class war, in libratory, revolutionary struggle, then placing these philosophies next to each other is not fulfilling the actual purpose.

Marxism negates idealism, and the way it does this is really fascinating, to me. You mentioned that Feuerbach’s philosophy was “strictly materialist” but this is not true. It was the closest anyone had come to practical materialism up to that point, which is why it moved Marx and Engels as much as it did, but it still contained idealist elements. Marx identified these idealist elements, like the essentialism of human nature and abstraction of human thought. Feuerbach had taken Hegelian dialectic idealism and negated many of the idealist elements, and created a theory of social transformation where the functions of the christian church were secularized and harnessed by society to get all of the social benefits of religion, without the baggage and negative consequences of the three estates.

But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice (my emphasis.)

This last line is really important, and underrated. By the time society has developed to the point where philosophers are able to criticize parts of it, the object of critique has already completely negated, and replaced the subject.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his natural superiors, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Obviously to us, the holy family was based around the nuclear family, but when its hegemony was developing it wasn’t clear what was happening. Violence and repression destroyed the old, and ideology recontextualized the new order Only once a totality is established, and the new relations negated and replaced the basis for it, could society begin to criticize it. By that time it is impossible to negate the negation without a social transformation that eliminates the material (productive) basis for the domination of the church. By the time of Feuerbach, the development of capitalism had been underway for 200+ years. The basis for the philosophers to criticize the church in this way was a material productive change to society, not the independent development of philosophical thought.

In the time of Marx and Feuerbach, there was a material, productive change in the works (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Sec 1):

Reason became the sole measure of everything. It was the time when, as Hegel says, the world stood upon its head first in the sense that the human head, and the principles arrived at by its thought, claimed to be the basis of all human action and association; but by and by, also, in the wider sense that the reality which was in contradiction to these principles had, in fact, to be turned upside down. Every form of society and government then existing, every old traditional notion, was flung into the lumber-room as irrational; the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by prejudices; everything in the past deserved only pity and contempt. Now, for the first time, appeared the light of day, the kingdom of reason; henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man.

We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realization in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law, that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the 18th century could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.

Capitalism and industrialization had already demolished the basis of Christ and King. A new ruling class was ascendent, needing only to topple the old power, which had disassembled piece by piece, holding by holding, the basis of material power of the church, first through the enclosure and then through the enlightenment. In Feuerbach’s case, he was standing at the end of an epoch, trying to jury rig the declining social power of the church into a secular framing that had no real basis. Feuerbach’s materialism still contained an idealism that did not reflect reality, it abstracted the human subject in a way that obscured people’s actual conditions. It was an idealist philosophy with a materialist character.

On the other hand, the productive bourgeois had also developed their own materialism which was legitimately revolutionary. Science, manufacturing, abstraction of human labor into dead labor, (an example of abstraction that is not pure thought) was the material basis of a new society. But since it was based in class society, it contains an idealist character, namely that some parts of nature are necessarily dominant over other parts.

So now we have two sides of a dialectic. Feuerbach’s subject – idealist philosophy with a materialist character; and the bourgeois object – material revolution with an idealist character. Both contain the same fundamental idealism: the abstraction of real thinking, feeling, living, laboring people. Feuerbach’s philosophy imagines people that don’t exist objectively in any time or place, a subject without object. Bourgeois revolution considers people only mechanically, abstracting their time and labor into the value of commodities, an object without a subject.

Here are the conditions for Marx to turn Hegel on his head. The materialist character of Feuerbach’s philosophy is what negates the idealist character of bourgeois revolution.

This forms the basis of Marxism, both positively and negatively. In the positive it is a practical, scientific transformation of society that centers real people and our experiences. In the negative, it is a movement of the masses (not a privileged minority), it is scientific and materialist (not idealist), that is based in people’s action, need, and inner life, (not abstract rationalized “humans”).

You are right, I also do not view the object and subject as “fused” since that indicates a static inseparable thing. For me, dialectics is like a motor, with a subject on one end and an object on the other. In the case of Marxism, which resolves the contradictions of idealist philosophy and bourgeois production, the object and subject are connected by human practice and experience, like the belt that drives both sides. Practice transfers power from the subject to the object, and experience transfers power from the object to the subject.

With regard to consciousness, I tend to think of it not as a separate thing but as its own dialectic. Again, I do not like to think of consciousness like a thing that happens inside the mind of an individual. I mean, obviously there is a subjective side, but as a matter of emphasis I think that generally, consciousness is only thought of in this way. Consciousness also has an objective, structural side that does not get much consideration, although Lenin almost exclusively refers to it in this way.

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Yeah I think that’s what I was getting at lol try not to cringe to death

It could be considered third campism. “We don’t support the USA or Iran, we support this other group that you’d have to be a total chud to not support.” Davis has a platform, the og letter in the Guardian was signed on by a bunch of activists, academics, etc.,

To be clear, I don’t advocate for campism either. This statement is in line with Davis’s larger prison abolition mission. She’s at the same time an expert on the subject and IMO worthy of some criticism. She’s doing more than just posting.

Critical support is not an individual inclination, it is something that an org or party does within a coalition or united front. Since Davis is signing this letter along with several others who are all using a mass media platform to influence others, then it goes beyond some abstract individual support, its more than waving a sign at an empty government building on the weekend. Its coordinated, organized, and deploying real resources to achieve some goal.

But practically, without knowing more about Davis’s work in this area, it appears to be a “thoughts and prayers” type gesture to political prisoners. It doesn’t oppose imperialism, it doesn’t aid anti imperialism, it doesn’t even oppose the repressive elements in any real way. Maybe word will get to those prisoners and their families and supporters, that a group of prominent academics and activists are really hoping for justice. Maybe that accomplishes something, or maybe, im sure, this is part of some larger effort that will have more impact.

But third campism is a trap. It demobilizes movements and abstracts away from the contradictions that need to be organized around. Like campism is at least clustered around a side, often deeply contradictory, messy, but based in power and human need. Third campism is making ourselves feel good, avoiding contradictions, keeping our hands clean. I’m not saying that is what is happening, but it bears some hallmarks

Everybody wants to teach Marxism, nobody wants to learn pedagogy.

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

Marx did not treat thought abstractly, and was against doing so. He defined thoight as a practical process. The foundation is a thinking, sensing, experiencing subject, who experiences their environment, contemplates the experience, and then acts based on the contemplation, changing their environment, which they experience… etc.

Overcoming Hegel involved a fusion of the object and subject, not separating them and treating the object outside of the subject. That’s what bourgeois rationalism accomplishes. Division of the object from the subject, of the mind from the body, of the individual from the social is exactly the problem. Hot take, but there is no Marxist epistemology, and Marx was definitely not a pure empiricist. Experience is not inherently revolutionary. Marx treated empirical knowledge as true and objective, in the way that your thoughts and experiences are an objective condition to me, in that they affect my environment, in a world which i experience that contains you and your activity. Pannekoek makes an excellent point in Lenin as Philosopher that all science is composed of empirical knowledge. But what makes science concrete is that it is a testable, consistent process. The practice of science is the essence of scientific ideas.

There’s no way to believe that Marx handled thoughts abstractly, and understand his criticism of Feuerbach. Feuerbach nearly overcame Hegel’s idealism, but still treated the human subject abstractly. Feuerbach was like Ricardo in that he wanted to center humans in his analysis, but the humans they centered did not exist. Marx uses abstractions in his analysis, but always reinforces it with the experiences of people who were directly witnessing, recording and describing their experiences. This process reveals the special, local character of conditions, which are absolutely necessary to understand in order to change them. Marxist abstraction is only useful where it allows us to engage directly with the people in the society we share, with the goal to initiate and develop revolutionary change. These changes are simultaneously objective and subjective in that change is a process of people changing our world while we change ourselves.

This is why Marxist epistemology does not exist outside of critique and revolution. There is no proof outside practice, there is no knowledge without getting our hands dirty. Epistemology is interpreting the world, Marxism is interpretation, criticism, and practicing revolution.

Worth noting that Gramsci, a trained linguist, analysed of the spread of the Florentine dialect during the Risorgimento, demonstrating how language spreads according to the struggle of Piedmont-Savoy to dominate and unify Italy, not a product of organic adoption of language based on its inherent descriptive qualities. Mass adoption of new languages is a performance of power, so adoption will be dependent on seizing power, not the other way around.

There’s def some truth here, and some value to analysing language to understand hegemony and power. Gramsci in particular is good with this analysis. As a linguist, his deep understanding of the functions and origins of language, overlaid with the history of the spread of the Florentine dialect during the Risorgimento, forms one of the pillars of his formulation of hegemony.

However, I am of the opinion, as an emphasis if not a rule, that if we are doing epistemology, we are not doing praxis. I’m not convinced that the dynamics you describe are inherent to language itself. I think they are cultural, political, moral framings rather than a limitation of this or that specific language. We don’t have to learn German to understand Marx. The limitations imposed on language and thought are a much larger project that exist in education, mass media, cultural production.

The problem with consciousness isnt a problem of language, but that the culture, morals, and politics, the superstructure, conceives of things too abstractly: “The highest point reached by contemplative materialism, that is, materialism which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is the contemplation of single individuals and of civil society.” We can imagine the individual, and we can imagine society, but we can’t see how individuals create society or how individualism is a social relation/construction.

The problem with abstraction, is a lack of concreteness. Lenin wrote in 1903, “Truth is always concrete.” You are absolutely correct to say that the problem with consciousness is a problem of abstraction. People conceive of “things” as idealized Platonic forms that are static and immutable. The conception of things literally resists formulating a theory of change, “that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.”

In practice, this looks like making generalizations and then treating those generalizations as truth. Practical Marxism means going into the social conditions of workers and the oppressed, organizing people to discuss, articulate, and critique their own experiences, organizing more deeply on the basis of those newly understood conditions, and proving the power of shared experiences and active solidarity. The contradictions are right there, people know them because it is our lives. But because we lack a way of thinking about our experiences without using abstract categories, comparing ourselves to an ideal, or within the context of social hierarchies, all social contradictions are projected on the individual – itself a historical social relation.

I’d recommend reviewing Theses on Feuerbach and the German Ideology, deep diving into Gramsci (I can get you a reading list on exactly this topic so you can speed run), revisiting Lenin not for his particular conclusions but the way he develops his case for political action, he was a master at political concreteness. I’m also a particular fan of Paulo Friere’s pedagogy, which IMO is the most direct method to developing this kind of concreteness in criticism, and the best explanation of how and why to be concrete.

Good post, my only criticism is the emphasis on language, which becomes an idealized abstraction. By uncritically placing the burden on the linguistics, as a category removed from the people who speak it and use it to convey meaning, you are reproducing the same errors you are trying identify.

Mosin-Nagants are heavy, kick hard, and their triggers are rough, squeaky, and loose.

Its really common to replace the stock with a lightweight stock, replace the trigger mechanism with something that pulls smoothly, install a scope mount and scope since the gun was invented before long range scopes were common/standard for rifles, and add a compensator to the barrel to mitigate the strong kickback from shooting it.

I’m on fire!

I think that it means autistic. I was in Venice last year. My wife is an intervention specialist who works with autistic students, particularly non-speaking students, and we were talking to some Venetians about it. They weren’t like acutely aware of autism like in the USA, they said that support and services were growing there, but that it was still pretty grassroots. So the context/meaning of the word could be different than other places, while still having the same basic meaning.

Feed me more Death

This works on multiple levels, since you have to replace half of the parts of the Nagant, otherwise it is miserable