Jacobin

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Intersectionality could be about the relationship between intersections though, which could be useful in identifying relativistic notions of oppression.........but it doesn't it is nearly always exclusively about race and gender.

I understand that, but at this point intersectionality just becomes a second order metaphor or another way of talking about diversity. Ironically it loses its specificity, the specificity of its own texts and activism, and just becomes another yes-word for inclusivity. It could (and often does) mean that for sure but it would be better if it means what the people who invented and popularised the term wanted it to mean when they coined it. Making it mean something Marxist when it doesnt is a bit too "hello fellow kids" or worse insincere. Marxism as the original identity politics makes me cringe, its very "jesus was the original rock star" - eh I'll take my lumps and take criticism of my political opinions in the best faith I'm able.

Id rather recognise a terms utility and the thought behind it than would try to change it, or prune it until it becomes useful to me. Its not like the leftist stuff I read doesn't have dozens of different ways of talkng about plurality and multiplicity. I don't have to squish on anyone elses playdoh because I've got loads. also yuck ew theyve got pubes and anarchism all over theirs i dont want to touch that

[Satchmo Distel]

I think it's better to fight to make intersectionality mean what it was meant to mean rather than just throwing it out. The term was coined because numerous black men and women felt that political Marxism in the late 80s/early 90s was no longer responding to their needs in the way it had done in the Black Panther era (as you correctly point out). My interpretation of intersectionality tries to align it to the concept of "racial capitalism", i.e. recognize that capitalism and racism have always been hand in glove and that you can't understand one without the other. You could also expand that to "racial-gendered-capitalism" to, as per Engels, acknowledge that gender relations are capitalist relations (such as the woman's unpaid labour in the home and the assumption that you can pay women less because they are doing "female jobs", such as cleaning or working in a launderette).

Class is "lived through" race and gender, which in turn are lived through class. It's like a set of feedback loops. Marxism can encompass that but not, in my view, by saying that class is more fundamental (which ignores that class has to be lived through a set of practices, which in our society are always gendered and racialized).

[Video Game Fan 2000]

I think it's better to fight to make intersectionality mean what it was meant to mean rather than just throwing it out. The term was coined because numerous black men and women felt that political Marxism in the late 80s/early 90s was no longer responding to their needs in the way it had done in the Black Panther era (as you correctly point out). My interpretation of intersectionality tries to align it to the concept of "racial capitalism", i.e. recognize that capitalism and racism have always been hand in glove and that you can't understand one without the other. You could also expand that to "racial-gendered-capitalism" to, as per Engels, acknowledge that gender relations are capitalist relations (such as the woman's unpaid labour in the home and the assumption that you can pay women less because they are doing "female jobs", such as cleaning or working in a launderette).

Class is "lived through" race and gender, which in turn are lived through class. It's like a set of feedback loops. Marxism can encompass that but not, in my view, by saying that class is more fundamental (which ignores that class has to be lived through a set of practices, which in our society are always gendered and racialized).

I don't think critiques of racial capitalism necessarily have anything to do with intersectionality, in either their inception or their arguments but I might be wrong. They are compatable but they are not aligned or inseperable by definition - there is a liberal form of intersectionality but no liberal critique of racial capitalism. It was also not initially really about opposing Marxist orthodoxy at all, really - its more based on sociological analysis of power relations than economic structure or historic process. The academic or scholarly world had already moved beyond strict Marxism at that point, not that it was even really concerned with it in the US where intersectionality began, the USSR had yet to fall so there wasn't a norm of Marxism to fight against like there was in France. Intersectionality was initially about legality and relates to legal scholarship like the dreaded critical race theory. It has recently conjoined to theories of racial capitalism, which to me seem more like extensions of anti-colonialist thought that doesn't go through the highly theoretical world of postcolonialism. I think that is a different topic, but a pretty interesting one. Like you say, its more about making it mean something that it might or what it is intended to rather than what it meant in its conception and initial texts. But my reply is then why use it? You have to argue for the utility and relevance of a certain set of concepts rather than change the semantics behind a certain set of terminology just because right now that terminology signifies some things everyone can superficially agree on. I'm more interested in the disagreements, because that's where the interesting thinking is going on and where the best work was done.

And I'm not at all interested in throwing it or any of its tributaries out, I'm interesting in accepting its critiques of my positions (not just Marxist the ones) as best I can without capitulating to things I think are false or illogical for the sake of not offending people or signalling that I'm one of the good ones - intersectionality is, like identity politics of Audrey Lorde and the Combahee collective, incompatable with universalist or rational versions of Marxism and socialism such as those I subscribe to. I appreciate those positions but I have to recognise that, as a european leftist who is more interested in European scholarship and its traditions, I am myself a representative of what they're critiquing. When Audrey Lorde writes there is no class that isn't mediated by gender, no gender not mediated by race, no race not mediated by sexuality and so on - I just don't agree, I think this fails as both a reading of past leftist work and as a political logic. And I am very critical of the sociology, historiography and anthropology that incorporates this kind of thinking into its methods. In my view, it is a flawed basis for both critique and practice. But by the same token I recognise the enormous utility of this kind of argument and how much it informs people I otherwise agree with. But we should be sincere and good faith in disagreement as possible rather than pretend deep down we all believe the same things, or just dodge the criticism by pretending it somehow does not apply to me or what I think or write.

My issue is that I can't pretend I agree with things I don't just because I want to signal that I'm on the right team, or even worse to use things to mean what I think they should mean if they don't work with my own preoccupations or reasoning - it seems disrespectful of things that already get battered on that front. I think no one is as disrepectful as liberals who just use this words to signify goodness or diversity without engaging with what was intended. No one is doing it here, but elsewhere I am disgusted by how scholarship related to things like intersectionality and gender is habitually 'de-intellectualised' - making it about intuition and practice, ignoring the philosophical and scholarly argument behind it, as if it sprang directly from life without needing scholarship, argument or research. Like it came naturally to the oppressed just from the virtue of their oppression, so we just listen and believe without engaging with it as we would canonical works. It seems like a perversion of the radical feminist dictum that women "know with their lives" rather than through theory or abstraction. As if these political movements leap directly from a certain social position without any conceptual mediation.

On this point in particular:

Class is "lived through" race and gender, which in turn are lived through class. It's like a set of feedback loops.

I also don't accept class as a category of "lived experience" because it is a matter of struggle or structure, and not a particular structure itself but descriptive of the way that social structures can be or are structured. It is a matter of, to use the internet joke word, dialectics. It is crucial to understand that class does not pre-exist class struggle in the way that something like disability, age or bodily sexuation pre-exist their cultural contexts and linguistic expressions. Or drive and desire if you want to get into psychoanalysis and all that. Class is unique in this regard, making it more like language or other highly- or meta- structured social practices in that it is more a condition for experience than the content of experience. I think there is a misunderstanding of the concept of 'class consciousness' that is widespread these days, that has its origins in the assimilation of feminist 'consciousness' groups into Marxism without taking their practice seriously or critically enough. In philosophical terms, class is better explained by erfahrung than erlebnis. That is, something in the category of understanding rather than interpretation. Class, unlike sexuality or gender, is not associated with a plurality of expressions and interpretations but a hierarchy around capital and production even if that hierarchy is now dispersed rather than centralised. Morever class, unlike art and poetry for example, does not retain experiential content in any profound or significant way. I do not think anyone feels close to the sublime because of an expression of class structure in the way a work of art might express love and gender in a sublime way, because experiential content is (despite being bound by grammars of experience) in part defined by its autonomy from such structures and the authorities that they pre-suppose. Race, gender, and other things marked by identity are in part articulations of a certain kind of independence or autonomy that can't be totalised or structured into a social system like class. They are related to things like love and art and politics because they are indomitable in a literal sense, even if all experience of them is also, in a measure, the experience of oppression. Class, as it denotes a kind of "structuring of structure" through materially embedded relations, is cut off from or exterior to this kind of intensely subjective or practical experience - it provides limitations and valuations more than any profound content, redirecting expression or drive into production rather than giving it expressive form. There could never be class pride in the sense of gay pride or black pride, in the same way that folk music could never become a class-based analogue to jazz. Attempts at purely class-based forms of expression like socialist realism or various kinds of socially didactic or experiential writing never work out as intended.

I'm also not a foundationalist, so I don't agree with readings of Marx that read class as "fundamental" or more basic than other forms of social experience. I'm not even sure those fundamentalist forms of Marxism ever existed outside of some Stalin apologism or reactionary ranting. A lot of criticism seems to think that they existed and were influential, I can't it see unless we're really uncharitable to people like Lukacs and Althusser and ignore their actual writings. In all forms of Marxism worth giving a damn about, it is the struggle that is fundamental not the class positions that result from it. If anything class is useful precisely (prechishely) because despite its structural ubiquity it is far less important than other things when we think of life on an individual level. Its less important than race and gender to peoples whose views on aesthetic and artistic works I value as much as any political work. This is what I would call a generic approach which I accept is weak because it is philosophical rather than practical. But I'm more interested in weak approaches than strong ones, which is where I rejoin things that I otherwise disagree with, and where differential or identitarian thinking starts to become suggestive to me again. But I do have the issue with the idea that social difference or lived experience themselves provide foundations - from where, and how? It may well be so, but this has to be argued and although there are arguments that treat this proposition seriously as political idea, they tend to be things like Radical Feminism or other forms of identity activism that have flaws that are now obvious to almost anyone. Replacing one set of epistemological givens and foundations with another is not at all helpful. Its also not a very good continuation of feminist or anti-racist critiques of Marxism to just swap out singular "capital" for plural "oppressions" without engaging with the logic behind them. Neither Marxism nor its critics are well served by that.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

oh god I should be asleep. Sorry to whoever read that

[Bernice]

I thought it was interesting. I do struggle with this though, having an actual opinion on these... philosophies? abstractions? paradigms? theoretical approaches? See, I don't even know the proper word. All I know is I can read Marx and think yeah, right, fucking A; and then I can read, say, Audrey Lorde and think ooh, yeah, interesting that. And I can see the contradictions and the incompatibilities but then ask me to make some sort of actual critical judgment and fuck, I don't know. Seems preposterous to even ask it of me, with me adrift in my work to be done, my pints, my wanks, my cheap biryanis.

[pcsjwgm]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-17/liz-cheney-wyoming-election-harriet-hageman-republican-trump/101341334
Goodbye Liz Cheney. She'll be remembered for always bravely opposing Trump.

[Kankurette]

I thought it was interesting. I do struggle with this though, having an actual opinion on these... philosophies? abstractions? paradigms? theoretical approaches? See, I don't even know the proper word. All I know is I can read Marx and think yeah, right, fucking A; and then I can read, say, Audrey Lorde and think ooh, yeah, interesting that. And I can see the contradictions and the incompatibilities but then ask me to make some sort of actual critical judgment and fuck, I don't know. Seems preposterous to even ask it of me, with me adrift in my work to be done, my pints, my wanks, my cheap biryanis.

Me too. After a while it just goes over my head. Having what appears to be flu mixed with tonsillitis and lack of sleep does not help. When I get sick my intelligence level is roughly on a par with Ross Barkley's.

[TrenterPercenter]

I also don't accept class as a category of "lived experience" because it is a matter of struggle or structure, and not a particular structure itself but descriptive of the way that social structures can be or are structured.

All experience is "lived", class is no different.  You are mixing two things up here and facing them off against each other, both are true.
a) class as a descriptive of hierarchy
b) the experience on individual within that hierarchy on the individual (leading to groups of individuals sharing experiences)

It is that shared experience and the understanding of why that experience is occurring that creates "class consciousness".

Class is unique in this regard, making it more like language or other highly- or meta- structured social practices in that it is more a condition for experience than the content of experience.

Yes, this is basically what I've just written. Class is a condition for experience, and all experience is lived.

In philosophical terms, class is better explained by erfahrung than erlebnis. That is, something in the category of understanding rather than interpretation. Class, unlike sexuality or gender, is not associated with a plurality of expressions and interpretations but a hierarchy around capital and production even if that hierarchy is now dispersed rather than centralised.

Completely - I tend to try and simplify this and make this more accessible by saying class is something that is done to you - you are classified into your "class", you become a class of human.  People get hung up on the "working" part but it really doesn't matter fundamentally class hierarchies can be built on lots of things (i.e. the Indian caste system is based on karma and dharma).  Marxian class is about the working class because they are the majority that have most to gain from changing (revolution) of the current system.

Morever class, unlike art and poetry for example, does not retain experiential content in any profound or significant way. I do not think anyone feels close to the sublime because of an expression of class structure in the way a work of art might express love and gender in a sublime way, because experiential content is (despite being bound by grammars of experience) in part defined by its autonomy from such structures and the authorities that they pre-suppose.

I don't really agree with this, there are lots of examples of working class "experiential content", this does not need to be "sublime", folk and blues singers do not sing about the sublime (yet the feeling listen to them can be), bread and roses is a song about conditions, and working class and idealisation of work are massive influences on society.  It's a bit like a vicar saying rock music isn't as uplifting as choral music.

There could never be class pride in the sense of gay pride or black pride, in the same way that folk music could never become a class-based analogue to jazz. Attempts at purely class-based forms of expression like socialist realism or various kinds of socially didactic or experiential writing never work out as intended.

class pride is different from gay/black pride so of course it is not in the same sense.  Why does folk music need to be an analogue to jazz? that is just bizarre, and what does that even mean? Socialist realism is a movement specific to Sovietism so I'm not sure you can glean much from this about all "class".  I think what you are getting at is "class-based" art struggles to have the same impact of other things - As mentioned I don't really agree but you aren't really investigating this particularly well.  Spartacus is a story that has lasted for 3 thousand years.

I think you are missing the fact class is so ubiquitous, yet confronting it head on can be difficult, so it remains hidden amongst other things, and there are good reasons for this i.e. historical oppression and influence of powerful hierarchies with an interest of degrading class consciousness.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

All experience is "lived", class is no different.  You are mixing two things up here and facing them off against each other, both are true.
a) class as a descriptive of hierarchy
b) the experience on individual within that hierarchy on the individual (leading to groups of individuals sharing experiences)

It is that shared experience and the understanding of why that experience is occurring that creates "class consciousness".

Yes, this is basically what I've just written. Class is a condition for experience, and all experience is lived.

I can't agree. All experience is not lived or else we wouldn't need so many competing theoretical frameworks for what is unconscious or implicit in experience - from the subconscious in psychology to the Freudian unconscious, femininist accounts of interiorisation, hermeneutic totality or pragmatic accounts of social norms. I could go on, but what is important here is that we wouldn't need Marxist accounts of mediation and sedimentation. There would be no distinction between use and exchange value, no congealing, no need for an account of the alienation of labour and of ideology.

Even though what is lived is what is most important, we cannot get away from the fact that there is always something unlived in experience. Whether its Freudian unconscious, structuralism, modern sociology and neurology, Kantian transcendentals or Hegel talking about the "fibres" in the brain there are many competing ways to talk and argue about it.

Which is why it is difficult to talk about theory in English that was originally in French or German, because English has one word for all these categories wherea in German writers can talk about the distinction between experience as erfahrung and as erlebnis in English we're stuck making jargon for these ideas. Or more basically its harder to make plain Marx's critique of idealism, and how crucial it is for his political ideas. It doesn't do justice to a theory that (unlike other forms of philosophy) is trying to be as practical and useful as possible.

I agree to the extent that all experience ultimately ends up as what is lived. To use a Marxist term that is kind of vogue right now, it is better to modify what you are saying slightly and say all although there is always something unlived in experience, all experience is lived in the last instance. What is descriptive at the level of structure or hierarchy is lived in the experience of poverty or struggle. But class is not lived as class, it is lived as struggle or suffering, the relation or structure is an abstract we have no direct access to but through what mediates it or gives it material form. Just like I can never directly experience the object "five pounds" but I can experience holding five pound coins or a fiver in my hand. The notion of "five pounds" still corresponds a real thing and still a matter of experience, but only in the last instance where I buy something and pay for it with money. The Marxian focus on the primacy of practice and method (what 'praxis' is supposed to mean) means eventually that anything described is a matter of direct experience, but it is a matter of mediation and conceptual frameworks rather than an empirical or positivist account of what is immediately apparent in experience. Experience begins and ends in life as it is lived, this is obvious.

I don't really agree with this, there are lots of examples of working class "experiential content", this does not need to be "sublime", folk and blues singers do not sing about the sublime (yet the feeling listen to them can be), bread and roses is a song about conditions, and working class and idealisation of work are massive influences on society.  It's a bit like a vicar saying rock music isn't as uplifting as choral music.

"experiential content" means something very specific, I shouldn't have used it without defining it. Experiential content is another example of a kind of experience that isn't "lived" since it describes experiences which are unconscious yet historically or practically become sedimented or embedded in the form of things - in this usage, its Adorno's term from his critique of identity and his readings of Hegel and Kant. I know the term has a sociological meaning that is slightly different, I don't know if psychologists use it all.

Essentially, to me means that just because something can address or be about a certain experience it doesn't immediately follow that it will have explicit content describing or communicating that experience, but rather that the form or concept of something will be what retains a trace of the experience which grouded it or that it mediates. Jazz sediments, consciously and unconsciously, aspects of the experience of blackness without needing to have content in the sense of lyrics, gestures or pictograms that explicitly address those things. Experiential content is formal and unconscious. Or to put it another way, in aesthetics, experiential content describes the unconscious or unlived aspect as the point where the distinction between form and content becomes moot through the experience of the non-identical. My comparison between jazz and folk was not that folk needs to be like jazz - I like jazz and folk equally - it is just that is jazz is politically exceptional or culturally unique in that way it does not need to explicitly narrate or describe the experiences which it sediments.  When a form does this, it is always unique and singular. And because jazz is a totally unique aesthetic sedimentation of experiential content, it both is and is not autonomous from the experiences that it reflects or embodies. Whereas political folk music needs to explicitly narrate or have content in the form of lyrics to address the experiences and life behind it, maintaining a distinction between form and content. The distinction I'm trying to make is that folk music is therefore bound to the social practice of interpretation and re-interpretation of tradition, whereas jazz can be traditional, academic, avant-garde, free, conservative, etc. because of the autonomy it has. It often involves interpretation, but not always. It can be both the most and least social music in the world depending on the composer or performers. Yet for folk, experiential content is never directly from life as it is lived but mediated through tradition, even if that mediation is itself transformed through interpretation. OK, this is now another digression to aesthetics, I'll stop. Didn't Stewart Lee do this bit better than me?

So I argue that class itself, as a structure or relation, does not retain experiential content in the same way that specific cultural forms do, since it is a form of social relation rather than the material things that embody that relation. For example, studies for over a century have shown that childrens playground rhymes and games almost always have "experimential content" related to poverty - but the "class relation" that gave rise to those specific forms and activities does not retain that content itself, it requires mediation by social practice. The relation needs the form to retain it, and the form therefore needs materiality of objects and practice to sediment it. Even if children could have direct experiential access (erlebnis) to class, they are too young to experience an understanding of it (erfahrung) but they are not to young to know that some kids skip lunch and some don't, some eat brandname cereal and some don't. Which are the experiences that mediate class for them. So in a sense, class relations are sedimented in the social content of playground games and rhymes, and this sedimentation is experiential, the social structure of the playground mediates class structures without reflecting them directly. But is important to understand that, if this sort of framing is correct, the experiences it describes do not retain in themselves a direct experience of class but as experiential content related to experiences of poverty, want, social difference, inclusion and exclusion and so on. What happens in this kind of situation is neither a direct erlebnis of class nor a false consciousness that conceals it, but a mediation and the embodiment of experiential content in social practices. At no point is class relation or structuring itself substantialised, it always mediated through other things and specific practices.

This is why mediation is such an important concept for Marxism. As a structural category, class is always mediated. By definition, there is no direct access to it on the level of personal experience in the way that we have direct access to poverty or struggle. This is why the misunderstanding of class consciousness has been catastrophic and it is probably a source for the idea that that class is reductive, normative or generalising. If class was not mediated, if we had direct access to it in the same way we had direct and unmediated access to our sense of gender or to how healthy we feel, it would no longer be described by the concept of class. Class would no longer be a category of action and struggle, it would be another demographic or sociological category that a person either belongs or doesn't belong to based on the price of their house and what their parents did for a living. If class ever becomes a category of either direct lived experience or pre-existing demographic, it loses all purpose and utility. It ceases to address the struggle of the people who, as you say, "have the most to gain" from revolution or radical change.

But again, all of these things are ultimately lived or this wouldn't be either a dialectical or materialist theory, it would be antiscientific, but the important part is to have a theoretical model for what is unconscious or collective. It would be better to say that all experience starts or ends in what is lived, but it all contains unconscious, formal or conceptual aspects that theoretical models help us deal with. Its not good enough just to describe, a theory about class should give grounds for change. 

I think you are missing the fact class is so ubiquitous, yet confronting it head on can be difficult, so it remains hidden amongst other things, and there are good reasons for this i.e. historical oppression and influence of powerful hierarchies with an interest of degrading class consciousness.

"Hidden" here is difficult because I don't do like using hermeneutic language of concealing and revealing, which is influential in a lot of academic Marxism and post-Marxist thought (such as Sartre, Marcuse and Foucault all being enormously influenced by Heidegger) and the vulgarity of some academic historicism which leans on Marxist thought as an authority while stripping out its dialectical component.

Rather than "hidden" or concealed, I want to stick to the point of unconsciousness and mediation. Which is really a way of agreeing with the broadstroke of your reply - which is, in the last instance, class is lived. But "hidden" does imply unconscious or formalised, not simply forgotten or overlooked. Or "congealed".

[TrenterPercenter]

But class is not lived as class, it is lived as struggle or suffering, the relation or structure is an abstract we have no direct access to but through what mediates it or gives it material form.

I think we can put the idea of unconscious experience is troublesome but lets agree that all experience is ultimately ends up in what is lived (it's not that unconscious experience isn't relevant but whether it counts as experience really).  Class is obviously not simply ultimately lived as struggle and suffering, class is inhabited and experienced other ways, obviously being upper "class" you are not experience class from a struggling or suffering perspective.  I understand why but I'm not sure what is gained by reducing the experience of class down to these two things, Marxist class struggle is largely an attempt to understand the relationship between class and capital, not define what class is (hmmm this sloppy from me - but I'm busy with other stuff at the moment) or rather investigate fully the psychological basis/impact for class (he does a bit alienation etc..), he's a sociologist and political economist not a psychologist (and at risk of repeating myself you don't understand human behaviour properly without psychology).  Marx very much writes capital as an argument, that is relational to itself, and based on relational arguments, that is where the "science" part comes in.  Class can be experienced outside of struggle and suffering though, people are "proud" to be working class for example and see value, self worth and righteousness through working class endeavours there are lots of things going on here that Marxism doesn't cover.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

The way I've used "experience" is obviously problematic since its the philosophical use of the word which is incredibly outdated and doesn't apply to the commonsense idea of what it is to "experience" something. "Unconscious experience" is practically an oxymoron as is "that which is unlived in experience" but I badly need constructions like those since the word "experience" itself is so limiting. Language isn't great with negation and negatives but its all we've got.

These are not terms I would use if I was trying to organise labour action. Not because I think people wouldn't understand but because I'd sound like an idiot getting off on sophistry fumes.

I understand why but I'm not sure what is gained by reducing the experience of class down to these two things, Marxist class struggle is largely an attempt to understand the relationship between class and capital, not define what class is

Yes, this is the most important. Which is why what I'm trying to describe is not a "reduction" of class to anything, but an emptying out of class of any kind of cultural or social specificity. That is, making it something that is historically contingent and therefore something that does not have specific definitions that are universally applicable - like, if you're working class you eat crisps and wear a cap but if you're middle class you drink prosecco and read the Guardian. Class can't be definied in the way that you could define and discuss what it is to be feminine, to be Irish, to be disabled or to be adolescent. The distinction between generic and specific has to be maintained, and the kind of things I'm argued against are things that attempt to collapse that distinction or deny that generic/universal thinking ever has utility or facts on it side. I think we agree?

Hence why class is sometimes opposed to identity, not in the sense that it is "against" understanding experience on the basis of identity, but because class can potentially include "any identity whatsoever" (sorry I'm trying to take something from French here and I can't think of an especially clear way to say it) rather than centre itself on one particular position or specific definition and exclude others - which, I think, is the idealist position, to have identity as an exclusive rather than inclusive operator.

I think it would be best if there were two terms to describe what you called the two different "true things" about Marx's account - the experiential, social side and the structural, framework side. Having them both in the same term is excellent if you're making a dialectical argument that isn't descriptive so much as transformative, but if you're trying to be purely descriptive or just talk about life as you find it then the distinction it conceals might be an impediment. Which I suppose is why words like "caste" and "strata" are having their moment in the sun, to provide alternatives. Personally I would use other terms to talk about the "social processes" we discussed in the other thread, for example because even though my thinking is based on class-based arguments the terminology isn't always easiest to use to make myself clear.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

The missing word from argument about "the last instance" is obviously "immanent" but the post was long enough, French enough, already.

All experience is immanent to life and its practices. Easy if I say that way, but where's the fun in that.

[jamiefairlie]

All these words trying to capture something that is essentially simple. Do you believe in the value of collective effort? Most people do to some extent, very few want a private road network. Then the question is to what extent? That's the real point, more collectivism or more individualism? More left or more right. Everything else gets in the way of that primary argument.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

All these words trying to capture something that is essentially simple. Do you believe in the value of collective effort? Most people do to some extent, very few want a private road network. Then the question is to what extent? That's the real point, more collectivism or more individualism? More left or more right. Everything else gets in the way of that primary argument.

As nutso as it might sound, this is exactly the point or value of analyzing things in this way. We want philosophy and theory to allow political action and collective effort to be autonomous and express itself as clearly as possible. The same with art, the same with science, and the same with matters of love and gender. Provide conceptual tools if they're needed and shut up if they aren't.  This is why Marxism tended to leave the physical sciences alone during the years when poststructuralism and postmodernism were all quantum-this and Godel-that, and why as Trenter pointed out Marx himself was not a psychologist.

We're (Marxists of the rational sort) trying to get out of the damn way and let things happen. But at the same time there is value in the "intra-philosophical" consequences of looking at action and effort. Its a question of saying - right, instead of telling people how things should be done and how life should be lived, asking what can we learn from this, what creative or expressive things can we do? Is a better framework possible?

Outside of discipline and method it might look like a bunch of jargon and sophistry but, to be honest, it should do. It is there if you're interested but out of the damn way if you not. Which is why its different from, say, the sort of identitarian and thinktanky academic work criticised in this thread which is all about telling people how to act, how to talk and such, entwining theory and effort together as if they are one and the same - but keeping theory and philosophy in the captains position, directing the action and telling group efforts what they should be. Be intersectional or be bullshit. You must use our language. Its a very instructive approach, which explains its institutional popularity. Wheras Marx recognised the distinction between what changes life and what describes it, between the ideal and the practice, which why many prefer to begin with him and not Kant or Aristotle.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

i like that word "essential" though, people should be less afraid of it

[Dex Sawash]

Jaco bin jackson

[Dex Sawash]

Woopsy! He's dead

[Satchmo Distel]

A theory of experience also has to account for 'false consciousness', like working-class people voting for Thatcher because they believe they are not as 'low class' as the scutters who live down the road. Race and gender can also be false, as in whiteness being something that was made up in the 1600s as a new category that had not previously existed; or the idea that gendered work roles are 'natural'. You can call it 'ideology' but I think it's more deeply embedded into the taken-for-granted assumptions people make about their social position: a lifetime of self-deception about one's class, race and gender roles.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

A theory of experience also has to account for 'false consciousness', like working-class people voting for Thatcher because they believe they are not as 'low class' as the scutters who live down the road. Race and gender can also be false, as in whiteness being something that was made up in the 1600s as a new category that had not previously existed; or the idea that gendered work roles are 'natural'.

False consciousness, ideology and alienation are vital and they've all fallen heavily out of favour in the academic world. And into total obsolescence elsewhere. A lot of intersectionality, as well as a lot of queer theory, race studies and feminist theories reject these ideas because these theories often fall under the umbrella "critiques of representation" which has both continental and liberal forms. I have been told and I have read numerous times that the major flaw with Marx's theory of class is that it requires something like false consciousness and alienation in order to function: as Deleuze and Guattari famously wrote "there is no ideology and there never was". You brought up Engels earlier, and I think this a reason why people who take this position often prefer his clarity to Marx's conceptual abstraction - it doesn't really require the same notion of false consciousness, which is deeply embedded in the wider critique of philosophical idealism, in order to function as a descriptive framework for social behaviours and a more commonsensical notion of consciousness.

My own position is that I don't like any theory that suggests that the most potent or important personal experiences, the inalienable and indivisible, can be "false" in the sense that the experience of feeling recognised by Donald Trump or thinking that a Ferrari would make you more virile are false. A notion of self-experience, as an alternative to the "identity" and "difference" spoken about in the human sciences and the "recognition" spoken about in philosophy, complicates the matter immensely. There is an absolutely irreducible distinction at play here and its a place where both Marxists and their critics bulldoze right on through without taking stock. The idea that all gender is just different degrees of social fiction and falsity in particular sets off all my alarms bells. Or that race is "constructed" not only at the level of social order, but at the level of intimate personal or interpersonal experience. A theory of experience has to deal with false consciousness but I think it should also account for what is inalienable or autonomous in experience. I recognise this is a minority or even contrarian way of deal with theories of experience so I won't press the point. Just to say that I'm concerned with subjective autonomy, its truths and processes, first and foremost. That is where I encounter the limits of Marxism, and hold my nose and go back to pragmatism and idealism.

[Buelligan]

It all seems pretty simple to me.  The working class are and have always been oppressed.  When we divide the working class, we destroy solidarity.  Without solidarity we cannot succeed.

Every subdivision beyond working class is a fault line the oppressors use to fracture solidarity.  Leave Remain being a giant recent example in the UK.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Aye, and the language we use to divide people from their neighbours is the same language that divides an individual from their experiences or their ordinariness, hic et nunc. We start saying that someone is not just a person, but a person and a soul. Not just a group of people, but a group of people and a national identity. The blank slate body and the power relations that scrawl on it. But its bunk, solidarity and subjectivity are indivisible. Politically, solidarity is subjectivity. Indivisibility is its truth, not just a minor feature.

Historically leftists and communists have used the language of local or specific groups, the language people already use in the lives. The fact that mass movements have a thousand different names expresses a common feeling for equality, a basic unity, not incommensurate cultural differences. Liberals, on the other hand, insist that they already have the right language, they already have the right words, and you have to use it otherwise you're showing yourself to be bad. No surprise this focus on right words returns in moments whenever the red scare comes back, from the sixties to Occupy to BLM. 

A focus on language as constructive or institutive rather than performative or practical betrays the monarchist and theological inheritance of liberalism, not its enlightenment legacy or its humanism. The ultimately authoritarian thinking of behind putting property rights over autonomy and happiness, which focusing on race cannot scrub out. Or mask the philosophical presumptions behind that kind of thinking. Its a sleight of hand, categorical and historicist thinking and another return of idealism, trading real experience for just words.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

I fear we'll never be rid of God so long as we still believe in grammar as some syphilitic dead German said

you should get down to the campus Fred they have grammars of experience now and they think mountains and lakes narrate things, it'll blow your head clean off you vitalist fuck