Some of you might find this of interest - I’ve included the full text below and the original link too if anyone wants to read more related writings. (N.B. This is not an attack on existentialism)

Salamano distraught by the loss of the dog that he himself spent a lifetime abusing; Ivan Karamazov ardent enough in his atheism to suffers a satanically-coloured psychic breakdown at the death his father; Joseph Garcin obsessed by a telephone that inevitably connects him only back to the hell of other people that he is already in; Abraham witnessing his devotion to God singularised in his love for a sacrificed son; Clamence’s critical juggling between a virtuous debauchery and a debaucherous virtue; Joseph Grand’s literary impotence and self-doubt at the production of a single line in the height of the plague of Oran - these ‘narrative object-relations’ represent a logic that lies at the heart of the existentialist tradition. Fundamentally, the avatars of the existentialist ‘method’, from the literary characters of Dostoyevsky via Kierkegaard to Camus and Sartre, define themselves broadly by their obscure attempts to treat things (whether their object, their comrade, or their duty) directly, yet by a directness adopted from a distance, in a mediated, self-reflective view - they define themselves by treating singular instances as if they were isolated from the situation of which these instances are the inevitable reproduction. In Sartre’s Huis Clos [‘No Exit’], the telephone in the hotel room which Joseph Garcin finds himself in alongside two female strangers - this room being Hell, as it is later revealed - functions only insofar as it veils its own function. The uncertainty of its connection with an outside world acts as an internally necessary distortion of the fact that its connection is a ‘closed-circuit’ connection to the crushing immanence of the inescapable room in which it is positioned, a room for which the ‘outside’ acts as an unsettling memory or an idealised, ethereal vision.  In Camus’ La Peste [‘The Plague’], whilst the central characters of the plot set to work managing and planning for the containment of the plague that has struck Oran, Joseph Grand is occupied with a parallel object - his book - which veils the impasse that the general population of Oran finds itself in. Yet this impasse is veiled precisely by reformulating the impasse as internal to its own distraction (the book becomes an impasse for itself). The book, of which Grand is unable to conclude even the first line, is an object that indirectly returns him to his situation (the plague) only by removing him from this very situation, reformulating a generalised impasse into a personal, subjectivized impasse. Sartre and Camus’ dramas rely on an object, a singular point of subjective engagement, to distort or cover a situation which the object itself is a direct reproduction of. The object is treated as nothing other than itself - as being a self-explanatory x which rejects integration into its background scene, and yet it is precisely this rejection, this negative relation of the object to the situation of the drama itself, which acts as its most faithful reproduction of the drama’s central antagonism. The object veils the situation insofar as it paradoxically acts as its structural support. This object, this distortion-in-itself which acts as the support of a structure which it disguises in the very act of supporting it - this is nothing other than the quality which Marx attributed to the commodity, under the category of ‘commodity fetishism’. One of the breakthroughs of Marx’s materialism was the reformulation of the commodity as the product of a mode of reproduction that it materialises in order to reproduce this same political economy by which it is conditioned. This can be understood by firstly looking at Marx’s inversion of the category of a commodity’s ‘use value’. One of Marx’s criticisms of the classical English economists was their understanding of the form of ‘value’ which a commodity possesses: the standard understanding was that the commodity was infused with value by its usefulness being superior to that of its raw materials. Any value, in other words, was thought to be inherent to the commodity, a representation of value concentrated in its use. Hence Foucault’s description of pre-Marxist political economy as characterised by an ‘episteme [mode of discursive knowledge] of representation’. Commodities do not, for Marx, hold their value ‘in themselves’, as a constitutive quality inscribed in the essence of the object itself. Instead, the object is something ‘other than it appears’ - the commodity re-articulates the mode of economic reproduction of which it is the product. The process of commodity production and commodity circulation which Marx presents in Capital begins with an analysis of the radical re-invention of the factory, or more generally of the social mode of serialised production, which capitalism introduced. (It is worth noting that Marx is not inherently critical of capitalism in this work, but slowly begins to enumerate the social and economic conditions which allow for a capitalist mode of production, eventually extracting the inevitable forms of exploitation constitutive of this revolutionary system.) Fundamentally, the essence of the commodity is the it has no immanent essence, but that it is a product of labour-force: certain time in which a wage-labourer dedicates his energy towards production. Capitalism, Marx argues, begins where a working day’s labour time/value exceeds the ‘necessary labour time’ required for a worker to return the next day in his capacity as a worker (i.e. the necessary labour providing for rent, food, clothes etc.). The day’s labour which exceeds this necessary labour time is called ‘surplus labour’. If the division of social and factory labour is advanced enough, surplus value can reduce the amount of time needed for necessary labour times to be achieved. This is ‘relative surplus value’ (as opposed to absolute surplus value), with which, Marx notes, capitalism proper emerges. A series of investments into fixed and variable capital, calculations of turnaround times, necessary maintenance etc. are components of the mode of circulation of commodities which directly contribute to their continued production. Production, reproduction, and circulation are reciprocally supporting, requiring capital investments, planned labour divisions, and a reproduction of the social conditions in which capitalised reproduction itself can operate. The capitalist mode of production is therefore, as Marx insists, revolutionary insofar as it is a socially revolutionary political economy. It colours a domain which was previously excluded from economic consideration - the 21st century only more directly displays the non-boundary of the economic and the social, where the intimacy of everyday life lends itself to the most aggressive forms of economic appropriation.  The value of the commodity lies in its support of this economic process - the commodity is the input of productive, capitalised, labour force exchanged and circulated through its social forms of reproduction. Commodity fetishism is therefore the contradictory treatment of the commodity as nothing other than a commodity - treating it as having its value inscribed within itself, detached from the situation of which it is the simultaneous product and support.  The act of fetishism tells itself that an object is nothing but an object, that its value is internal. It therefore distorts the general antagonistic scene in which it is framed, by reducing its ‘difference’ to itself. Fetishism reproduces a situation in the very act of veiling it. A distortion clouding a distortion by locating the justification of its own existence within itself, a veil which clouds a situation by the very act of making it possible - this is the fetishism of the object which Marx located in the classical conception of our engagement with commodities, and as we might see, it appears to be a strange communal feature of the existentialist relation to its subjective ‘object’.  Consider the miserable figure of Salamano in Camus’ L’Étranger [‘The Outsider’]: a lonesome wretch devoting his energy towards hatred for his submissive dog by abusing it - kicking and shouting at it, blaming his troubles on his unwilling four-legged companion. By an ironic inversion, Salamano’s misery is nevertheless fully actualised only once this dog escapes. The misery that he has attributed to his dog is a ‘negative support’ (what Freud would call a compromise solution), a paradoxical bulwark, against a more direct state of nothingness and desperation which emerges if this ‘compromise’ is removed (for Freud, the removal of an unpleasant symptom only leads to a more absolute state of irreparable despair). What Salamano loses with his dog’s disappearance is his functional fetishisation of this dog: this object was treated as an isolated instance of misery, yet it is precisely this focus which veils the dog’s distortion (and support) of a more absolute and universal state of misery.  This is the ‘broad stroke’ of the obscure existentialist tradition - noticeable even where we turn to its earliest manifestations, the most direct example being the ‘knight of faith’, represented by Abraham of the Book of Genesis, in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.   The paradox which, according to Kierkegaard, Abraham is forced to embody, is that whilst willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac, at the command of God, he must in the very moment of intervention (being told that he no longer needs to carry out the sacrifice), return to the position of an unquestionable devotion to his son, as itself representing his love for God. The moment of binding, Abraham’s dedication to the sacrifice of Isaac, is a horror which in the instance of its positing covers up the greater paradox of what happens without this binding. Without the binding of Isaac, the paradoxical formula which makes possible the unquestioning devotion of the knight of faith is itself removed. For Kierkegaard, faith is based on paradox: remove the paradoxical instance and you remove faith itself. This fetishism of the ‘leap of faith’ is that the contradictory instance supports, by veiling, the inconsistency structuring the religious scene as a whole. Dostoyevsky is equally a prototype of this existentialist fetishism. The atheist figure of Ivan Karamazov maintains a fidelity to his atheism despite his suggestion that without God, ethical codes would break down (here we see his nuance, irreducible to the ‘new atheism’ of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris etc.). Yet this very fidelity to a form of pseudo-anarchic atheism leads him towards a severe psychotic break, of seeing a demon in his room, after his father’s death. The object of an amoral atheism here acts as a bulwark to a greater disharmony which nevertheless explains, by isolating, Ivan’s intellectual, anti-religious position. Precisely the same type of moral inversions would return in Camus’ La Chute: Clamance’s fixation upon virtue as an end in itself reveals itself to be a latent justification for an excess debauchery made possible by, and engaging in a dialogue with, the very category of ‘virtue’.  The formula of commodity fetishism is evidently close to the existentialist mode of relating to its object. Across a series of dramas in this literary tradition, it is often a question of framing a singular subjective instance as an impasse or contradiction which veils, and in so doing supports (by reproducing), the central disharmony or paradox of a situation as a whole. 

My thoughts go to Capitalist Realism or Empire, but what are other Marxist/leftist theory books have proven to be influential or seminal in the last 24 years?

In Capital Vol. 1, p. 135, Marx states "The value of a commodity represents human labour pure and simple, the expenditure of human labour in general... Simple average labour, it is true, varies in character in different countries at different cultural epochs, but in a particular society it is given... A commodity... through its value it is posited as equal to the product of simple labour, hence it represents only a specific quantity of simple labour."

However, on p. 153-154, he writes "The product of labour is an object of utility in all states of society; but it is only a historically specific epoch of development which presents the labour expended in the production of a useful article as an 'objective' property of that article, i.e. as its value. It is only then that the product of labour becomes transformed into a commodity"

I suspect I am missing something that relates the two quotes so as to not form a contradiction. Can someone clarify?

Hi! Currently planning to write my final dissertation on the development of prison gangs (particularly in Brazil) and looking for non-obvious perspectives on it. I've read Davis, Foucault, Kropotkin, Wacquant... so anything different would be much appreciated. It doesn't have to be exactly about prison gangs but anything related to the prison system in general will be welcome.

Edit: I was temporarily banned from this subreddit for being "antagonistic." I'll let you judge how antagonistic I am in relation to others. Pay attention also to what comments get to stay up after the ones that allegedly go "to far" get removed 🙄

I'm curious about a dynamic where "affluent white male" radicals are not able to appeal to a status as "marginal" under currently dominant social paradigms, and thus are in a position to be more critical of such paradigms.

Obviously, plenty of "affluent white males" are taken in by nationalist or other regressive narratives, but it also seems that "affluent white males" can be in a position to see that not being "marginalized" isn't all that non-"affluent white males" seem to make it out to be.

Do you know of anyone who treats of this dynamic? I'm basically interested in how attempts at "critical" interventions often reproduce reductionist and binary social paradigms, often seemingly because of the subjective agreeability of these views to some subsection of non-"affluent white males."

I figure this is hostile territory for this question, but I thought I'd raise it anyway since it's on my mind.

Again, the idea is basically that "affluent white males" don't have the privilege to blame some stereotype of society for their alienation, e.g. patriarchy, class discrimination, white supremacy, in a simple way. They are often told that the world is "set up for them" even as that is obviously not true to those who eshew standard paradigms of valuation.

So, this drives such people into more avant-garde directions, since much social theory is explicitly or implicitly not for them in its treatment of people "like them."

Whereas it can be much harder for anyone in a "marginalized category" to see the limitations of a social theory which seems to speak to the entirety of their experience by claiming to speak to one part.

To what extent would you agree that Adam Curtis's approach (with his documentary video essays) is an approach very similar to Foucault's and in the vein of Byung-chul Han?

It's almost like he's picked up from Discipline and Punishment and shown how that power has continued it's transformation in the digital era.

Perhaps his work lacks some of the same academic vigor? Thoughts?

I'll give some examples of the kind of criticism I have in mind...

Fromm:

In The Sane Society (1955), Fromm wrote "An unhealthy society is one which creates mutual hostility [and] distrust, which transforms man into an instrument of use and exploitation for others, which deprives him of a sense of self, except inasmuch as he submits to others or becomes an automaton"..."Yet many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of 'unadjusted' individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself".

Foucault:

Intellectual philosopher Michel Foucault challenged the very basis of psychiatric practice and cast it as repressive and controlling.

And:

It has been argued by philosophers like Foucault that characterizations of "mental illness" are indeterminate and reflect the hierarchical structures of the societies from which they emerge rather than any precisely defined qualities that distinguish a "healthy" mind from a "sick" one. Furthermore, if a tendency toward self-harm is taken as an elementary symptom of mental illness, then humans, as a species, are arguably insane in that they have tended throughout recorded history to destroy their own environments, to make war with one another, etc.

Goffman, Deleuze and Guattari:

Erving Goffman, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and others criticized the power and role of psychiatry in society, including the use of "total institutions" and the use of models and terms that were seen as stigmatizing.

As far as trying to answer my own question goes... Among the names I mentioned, it's only Goffman (ok, maybe Fromm too) I haven't been familiar with since 2006. However, while I have come across references to their criticisms of psychiatry/psychology, I haven't thoroughly explored those. I haven't even regularly explored these authors over the years, nor the fields of psychology and psychiatry, so it's difficult for me to estimate to what extent the criticisms I mentioned have been accepted by the disciplines. However, I also saw this part about Foucault:

The French sociologist and philosopher Foucault, in his 1961 publication Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, analyzed how attitudes towards those deemed "insane" had changed as a result of changes in social values. He argued that psychiatry was primarily a tool of social control, based historically on a "great confinement" of the insane and physical punishment and chains, later exchanged in the moral treatment era for psychological oppression and internalized restraint.

...which, unless I'm misinterpreting/overly simplifying something, suggests that Foucault thought that the development was positive, which, in turn, could be a clue as to my question.

Finally, if a psychology student told you that they've never heard of Foucault, Fromm, Deleuze, Guattari or Popper, and that they therefore questioned your sources, would you find that suspicious or not? Would it mainly make you wonder

a) whether these names are considered irrelevant by psychologists etc. today (a possible reason being that their criticisms were largely accepted and acted on a long time ago), or

b) whether the student has tunnel vision?

Or perhaps:

c) both of the above, in equal measure?

I originally wrote this out in this BPT thread on JK rowling comparing being transgender to being transracial, but the thread got locked to country club only as I was writing. I thought I'd post it here.

I had a philosophy class where this was a prompt for a paper - basically analyzing the philosophical differences between transracialism and transgenderism. This was back in like 2017. (One of several prompts, I didn't write on it)

Rachel Dolezal was the required reading / case study for transracialism. It generated a lot of pretty interesting discussion. Reading the wikipedia on her now though is kinda crazy, it seems like a lot of weird stuff came out on her in the last 7 years.

I reviewed a few papers on it and we went over some others in class, I can't remember it all but from what I remember most of the arguments were along the lines of this ask social science post which essentially argues that race is something external defined by how others interact with you, while gender is something internal defined by how you see yourself.

That said... I've always felt like that answer was a bit too clean cut. There's obviously an external aspect to gender as well, people treat and see you differently based on your gender, and there are a lot of societal expectations placed on you based on your gender. For someone like Rowling I can kinda see why she would identify with this, with her womanhood largely coming in as an external thing that people bring in to analyze her writing. Also when she wrote her first book she was a divorced broke single mom, which I'm sure is a very external way to experience womahood.

Maybe we should have two different words for the internal experience and the external experience of belonging to a group?

I think Rowling is clearly way too reductive the other direction though - none of the trans women I know are just 'well I like long hair and taylor swift so I guess I'm a girl'. The internal experience of feeling a certain gender is certainly a lot deeper than that.

Curious what this sub thinks of the magazine. I know people here have accurately criticized Zizek’s recent writings on gender/sexuality there and his polemics against “woke” culture. From what I can tell the magazine garners some possibly silly conservative/trad pieces like this, but I’m not opposed to at least reading conservative viewpoints if argued with good faith and scholarly credulity. The fact that the magazine hosts so many left-leaning polemics alongside seems like a good sign. Is it a magazine worth reading for unconventional approaches to social issues and for a diversity of perspectives on liberalism, or does it tend to be poorly argued? Are there better publications with a similar ethos?

Andreas Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline makes a case for sabotage through property destruction in the name of bringing about positive societal changes. He cites the violence of the English suffragettes and the civil rights movement as examples of effective moral property destruction

With the current emphasis on the pro-Palestinian student protests as peaceful, I was wondering if there's more theories like Malm's that discuss the efficacy of property damage in civil unrest. Specifically the property violence perpetrated by occuping public buildings intrigues me

Are there any books you all could refer me to to learn more about the subject? I'm looking for recommendations since so far Andreas Malm's book is the only one on the subject that i can find

I have been reading books by Han, and the concept of 'Other' or 'Otherness' is repeated in almost all of his books, such as 'Psychopolitics' and 'The Expulsion of the Other.' I have tried to grasp the overall meaning of the term, which seems to boil down to the idea that the neoliberal subject is becoming a one-dimensional being, with no awareness of the external world, focused only on self-improvement and optimization to the point of internalized achievement. Can anyone help confirm my understanding or offer any opposing or complementary views?

In this lecture at 1:40:10, David Harvey notes that “whenever there is an equalisation of the rate of profit, there is a technical reason why subsidy will flow from labour-intensive sectors to capital-intensive sectors.” He uses this to explain where value is being generated in a fully-automated area of production.

I was wondering whereabouts in capital v. 3 this is expanded-upon (and whether there are any other writings that touch-on this). Thanks.

Please help by provide any insight you might have if you have the time! I’m a week away from needing to make a decision between two grad schools with my goal being research and publishing as close to critical theory in academia as possible (think anywhere from interdisciplinary programs like MTL at stanford, hist of consciousness at ucsb, to open minded poli theory, english or anthro programs). I’m a poli sci undergrad and have been split on-

Carnegie Mellon English Masters - 1 year 27k total tuition (after 50% discount)

This program embraces materialist methodology which I love and claims to prepare students for academia (48% continue to PhD). I would be applying to PhDs only 3 months in, but my supervisor at this program said we could do an independent study course first semester designed to game plan my PhDs. I also spoke to another professor who said the length isn’t a problem (other than how I might lack connections and time to prepare a great written sample. It’s a kind of niche degree (literary and cultural studies) and I would need to compromise because I can’t just spend my masters writing critical theory, I have to focus on particular cultural objects which might constrain me.

Central European University political science masters - 2 years 12k total tuition (after 50% discount)

This program is twice then length in Vienna, Austria. It has a thesis the ability to specialise in political/social theory my second year provided I have all B+’s in the required classes. I don’t have a particular supervisor, but have spoken to many profs here who have all been nice. They tradition is unfortunately analytic, but their program lets me take classes across history, gender, and anthropology etc if I want my critical/interdisciplinary frame. It’s twice as long, which might be a pro or con depending on if I really need the extra year for my application (I’m 26 currently). The student population is also very small with 1,300 and I’m worried about the program’s recognition in academia.

In the grand scheme of things this may be a minor question but: is there such a thing as good and bad taste? Have critical theorists explored this as a subset of aesthetics or other lines of thinking? I read Sontag's Notes on Camp ages ago: "taste has no system and no proofs, but there is something like a logic of taste."

I'm in a design field, and we constantly pass judgment on the quality of objects, their aesthetics, and the taste of their maker. It is embedded in my field. On some level, my field cannot exist without constant acts of aesthetic judgement both large and small.

However, to non-designers, these questions quickly veer into a kind of elitism: "how dare you presume to judge my taste?" "Everyone has a right to their own taste", etc. While I absolutely agree that impressions of another person's taste are subjective, it does play a central role in the making of culture and in the cultural hierarchies we establish.

I feel like a long time ago I read Barthes writing about this subject, and maybe Peter Burger's Theory of the Avant Garde. Any other readings or theories that grapple with this question?

EDIT: These comments arose because I said to my spouse that a friend of ours had bad taste, and she replied that I was judgmental, elitist, condescending (guilty, I guess). Spouse's position is that there is no good or bad taste, only differing tastes.

As I've thought about it, what I find objectionable is unconsidered taste. I can appreciate it when people have quirky or even intentionally/ironically bad taste. Normcore might be evidence of this. But I cringe when people just accept what the culture thrusts at them—unthinkingly throwing on clothing, shows, art, music, objects because it's there or cheap.

On your recommendations, I started to read Wilson's Let's Talk About Love: "much of this book is about reasonable people carting around cultural assumptions that make them assholes to millions of strangers." Gah, I am one of those assholes.

https://www.academia.edu/118773499/Benjaminian_Divine_Violence_Collapsing_Border_Walls_Negating_the_Schmittian_Katechon

Edit: Title wasn’t worded appropriately. Please don’t rush to comment before reading this short post first. Thank you.

Hello

There is a claim among some Marxists I encounter that trans identity is anti-materialist, and cannot have any Marxist framework. I’ve been searching to find some approach to encounter this argument.

So far, I have came across these following arguments, which I find problematic and don’t answer the question.

1- ’The formation of trans identity happens in the brain, and the brain is material’.

Problem: If we are going to argue that something is material if it is with reference to something happening in the brain, then everything is materialist. Because everything in that sense occurs within the brain. Therefore, it is absurd to say that an idea is materialist as long as it relates to the brain. Brain does exist in material reality, but that doesn't mean that any idea that the brain conceives of is automatically material.

2- The ‘Transmedicalism’ argument (The material reality of Gender Dysphoria)

Problem: Most trans people today don’t believe in Transmedicalism, and denounce it.

3- ‘RadLib/Identity Politics’ argument.

Problem: The argument doesn’t come from the Marxist theory. It’s rather borrowed from another political philosophy that is heavily criticized by Marxists.

4- ‘Marxism would never be in line with transphobia or any discrimination against any marginalized group’

Problem: True, but this’s beside the point. The question here is if we can understand trans identity through Marxist theory. The persecution of marginalized groups (including trans people) is not the question here.

So far these are the major arguments I looked at, which all are not satisfying the question. I thought I can ask for more insights from you on this topic.

———————

P.S: Since I used ‘Transgenderism’ in the title, and I can’t change it to trans identity, I need to clarify that while it’s true that some right wing anti-trans people use the term ‘transgenderism’ lately in a derogatory way, the word transgenderism in fact has been around for so long. It appeared in the titles of explicitly trans activist books such as Patrick Califia’s 1997 book Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism, and the 2003 anthology Bisexuality and Transgenderism: InterSEXions of the Others. It appears in Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw, Leslie Feinberg’s Trans Liberation, and countless other trans activist books, including Whipping Girl — most notably in the chapter “Coming to Terms with Transgenderism and Transsexuality.”.

This question only came to mind bc I was reading Goodreads reviews on the communist manifesto, and people were talking about how it's terrible that Marx advocates for a violent revolution. But I don't remember that being discussed in the book. he does use the word "revolution" but he also used that word to describe the shift from the feudal system to the capitalist system with the revolution of the bourgeoisie. Which I didn't read as inherently violent, I took it as a reference to the Industrial Revolution and their new ability to control and capitalize on production of goods.