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As a social democratic fangirl, I would advise against spending more time with Marxists.
Nonetheless I feel like the question that is asked is wrong. Is altruism inherently (or empirically) "good". We could bash on the notion of "good" but let's assume it means what it means. No, altruism is not empirically good, but in practical terms it doesn't need to be.
Some philosopher/economist, i don't remember who, criticized redistributive doctrines by arguing from an utilitarian perspective that people know what they want better than anybody else could, and so the total happiness is higher if everybody just does what they feel makes them happy. I don't find the argument convincing because in real terms certain people simply don't have the means to make themselves happy, and furthermore altruism makes the person who does it happy. Now I consider myself a selfish person, I don't really donate to charities, at least not a meaningful part of what I earn, and yet I live in Canada where I'm happy to pay taxes to help others while living affluently myself.
I am not at all concerned by the fact that altruism is not empirically good, since most of what constitutes reality doesn't deal in absolutes. I consider that altruism is good enough of the time to be preferable over selfishness. What's wrong with the notion of "good enough"? Maybe it's not philosophical enough, you can't write a thesis on it.
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The best thing about the internet is people with opinions about marx who have never read the first page of capital
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I used to be at McGill where the general perspective is more conservative and free market orientated, but right now I'm a super left-wing university and I have to say that having read Das Kapital weirdly doesn't necessarily give the insight needed to come up with useful modern ideas in the land of micro credit. I had a class where we debated pragmatism for hours and 3 of us were arguing against 15-20 of them, who all said that pragmatism is useless and what is really needed is a shift in the ideologies of people upon which a better world could be built. Politicians often describe themselves as pragmatics, they intend to build this or that, they intend to commit themselves to getting shit done. These little Marxists, Master's students and graduates, mocked the practice: the politicians should aim higher, go for the full out paradigm shift. There are others, don't get me wrong, but you can read Capital and still be an asshole, just like you can read Road to Serfdom and just pick up the most basic of ideas and assume them to be true.
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Oh we agree. Its because those marxists arent marxy enough
I know exacrly the type you mean. They havent read capital either
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On July 13 2015 09:33 bookwyrm wrote:
Oh we agree. Its because those marxists arent marxy enough
I know exacrly the type you mean. They havent read capital either
Shame that doesn't prevent them from tossing around the terms superstructure, bourgeoisie, surplus value and praxis like they own them.
Still I know for a fact that many of those people I've discussed it with have read it and many still have these very Utopian ideas. And it's a shame because I think there's a lot to be gained in there, but people just use it to have shitty arguments for their shitty ideological debates.
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Send them to me and ill school em
I mean look if we cant use marxian vocabulary all of you have to stop talking aby capitalism because thats his word
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Interpretation of actions as altruistic depends very much on the size of your "in-group" or the scope of your thinking. Depending on how much two persons scopes are differing in size the same action can be seen as either altruistic, egoistic or downright evil.
Most peoples scope extents to currently living humans.
Someone whos scope includes all future generations of humans might come to the conclusion that vaccination is bad because it weakens the human gene pool and makes future generation more dependent on it. He might also see epidemics as an important natural regulator of population size. Someone whos scope only includes currently living humans will interpret the decision as egoistic though because it endangers his in-group.
Someone whos scope is not anthropocentric and not chronocentric might even work towards the collapse of human civilization because human civilization is incredibly damaging to a vast number of other species. Needless to say such a person would be seen as downright evil and a psychopath by almost all other humans because the two scopes are differing so much.
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On July 13 2015 09:46 bookwyrm wrote:
Send them to me and ill school em
I mean look if we cant use marxian vocabulary all of you have to stop talking aby capitalism because thats his word
I wasn't saying not to use it, you absolutely have to, but they do it so clumsily a lot of the time x_x
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Well the short versions to some questions that deserve very long replies...
@nunez- What you're really asking is my own mental capacity, which I can't really prove over the interwebs. I can't say I'm really practiced at discussing the authors themselves but only their fruits and Marx is a great producer of ideologues. The most interesting parts of Marx are appropriated from Hegel, anyway. I can't say I'm in love with him either.
@Glowsphere- Again, this could be a large book, but I'd say that Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism have radically different outlooks. For instance, Christianity would say that ethics sometimes transcend or even go against your social order. That would not fly in Confucianism, for one, where social harmony seems to be the goal.
@zf- This complaint is that they wish some Marxists were more zealous, not that they have somehow failed to inculcate the attitude of the viewpoint. This is a complex comparison and the problem is partly a classification and semantic problem. Being a Marxist is (usually) only an intellectual position, whereas you could be a Christian in a number of senses- socially, intellectually, spiritually. Unless you're a politician, maybe, being a Marxist doesn't require much other than saying you're a Marxist. Christianity purports to expect more. There are generally more people that walk around under the label "Christian" that don't really fit the same definition. It's also funny because Marxists are some of the prime abusers of the "they really aren't a Marxist" card.
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On July 13 2015 09:56 Djzapz wrote:Show nested quote +On July 13 2015 09:46 bookwyrm wrote:
Send them to me and ill school em
I mean look if we cant use marxian vocabulary all of you have to stop talking aby capitalism because thats his word I wasn't saying not to use it, you absolutely have to, but they do it so clumsily a lot of the time x_x
Yeah I mean grad school is a truthiness factory
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On July 13 2015 10:01 bookwyrm wrote:Show nested quote +On July 13 2015 09:56 Djzapz wrote:On July 13 2015 09:46 bookwyrm wrote:
Send them to me and ill school em
I mean look if we cant use marxian vocabulary all of you have to stop talking aby capitalism because thats his word I wasn't saying not to use it, you absolutely have to, but they do it so clumsily a lot of the time x_x Yeah I mean grad school is a truthiness factory
At least it served me well, I think. Some of my colleagues are fucking brilliant, but me, not so much... so I got to learn how to get good shit done anyway.
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On July 13 2015 09:31 Djzapz wrote:
Politicians often describe themselves as pragmatics, they intend to build this or that, they intend to commit themselves to getting shit done. These little Marxists, Master's students and graduates, mocked the practice: the politicians should aim higher, go for the full out paradigm shift. There are others, don't get me wrong, but you can read Capital and still be an asshole, just like you can read Road to Serfdom and just pick up the most basic of ideas and assume them to be true.
Isn't it the habit of Moderns to present their ideological positions as purely pragmatic?
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@jerubaal
i'm asking for some concrete examples. i would be happy to read it you know, it's a field of interest, and you might shed some light on the material.
i have struggled with capital myself (and reading my way around to it again), but i never found it vacuous,
quite the opposite... dense, concrete, and terribly thorough.
i thought the interesting thing about marx was on what he used what he appropriated from hegel,
but i haven't read hegel. marx didn't talk a lot about ideology, afaik, on top of that it's a word that's hard to parse.
in what sense are you using the word? false consciousness? class-struggle thunderdome (in this sense i agree with the 'producer' part, at least personally)? interpellation station?
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On July 13 2015 10:17 Jerubaal wrote:Show nested quote +On July 13 2015 09:31 Djzapz wrote:
Politicians often describe themselves as pragmatics, they intend to build this or that, they intend to commit themselves to getting shit done. These little Marxists, Master's students and graduates, mocked the practice: the politicians should aim higher, go for the full out paradigm shift. There are others, don't get me wrong, but you can read Capital and still be an asshole, just like you can read Road to Serfdom and just pick up the most basic of ideas and assume them to be true. Isn't it the habit of Moderns to present their ideological positions as purely pragmatic?
Might be, but my concern was more about the outright rejection of pragmatism. They argued for instance that you can't fix the hunger problem with pragmatic measures, the way to fix world hunger is to essentially change politics such that people can produce enough food for themselves.
Pragmatism in these issues is seen as shortsightedness. They mocked the fact that we were sending food to people. "Duh, what happens when there's no more food!". We send more, I say, and we take concrete action to try to make them independent, but in the mean time we send food because they won't survive off of some westerner's golden ideals. Sending food is stupid, politicians who consider themselves pragmatic (rather than philosophers?) are stupid. Perhaps of all the debates I've had, this one was the most surprising to me. To this day I can't wrap my head around it.
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well, the first step to fix hunger is critique. you have to understand why there is hunger. in order to understand this you have to understand things like the history of capitalist agriculture and the international grain trade. these are extremely complex topics. I should know, I've spent much of the last two years researching them. As it turns out, marx is rather helpful here, though if you think his work has magical solutions to everything you are an idiot. Reading him can, however, teach you how to engage in the activity of critique...
from your post however it seems that your interlocutors did try to point out some things about the way that international aid, the grain trade etc work, but you couldn't hear them because all you can hear is the fact that they are arguing against sending food to people. I think really you should have listened to them more carefully
There is something extremely violent about creating a population that is dependent on your grain exports (which you finance by extending credit to their governments thus making them debt colonies) under the guise of altruistic humanitarianism. Actually your marxist interlocutors here are the pragmatists and you are the idealist
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On July 13 2015 10:20 nunez wrote:
@jerubaal
i'm asking for some concrete examples. i would be happy to read it you know, it's a field of interest, and you might shed some light on the material.
i have struggled with capital myself (and reading my way around to it again), but i never found it vacuous,
quite the opposite... dense, concrete, and terribly thorough.
i thought the interesting thing about marx was on what he used what he appropriated from hegel,
but i haven't read hegel. marx didn't talk a lot about ideology, afaik, on top of that it's a word that's hard to parse.
in what sense are you using the word? false consciousness? class-struggle thunderdome (in this sense i agree with the 'producer' part, at least personally)? interpellation station?
Maybe a good start would be, if I can hijack the thread even more, would be to ask why you like Marx and what you think is essential in Marxism that can't be found elsewhere?
I'm not using a terribly technical meaning for ideology. To rip off someone else's definition, it's a worldview with an action plan. It's not meant to be pejorative. The problem, as we well know, with ideology is that it's susceptible to becoming a self-containing bubble of thought that makes conversation fruitless. It's not about arguing rationally, it's about changing a worldview. That's why people who have made radical shifts in philosophy speak of it as a change in perspective. You could say that this is human nature, but I think it's plausible that the more intellectualized a worldview becomes, the more susceptible it is to this. Some worldviews may be more susceptible than others. I don't know if I've said anything not obvious, but I've also answered (or explained why I didn't answer) your first question as well.
As for altruism, I'm surprised no one has made the point yet that altruism is often argued from a self-interest perspective. There's the practical self-interest - if everyone is altruistic everyone will be happier- and then there's the idea that being altruistic makes you feel more self-actualized.
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@bookwyrm- Everything is practical. Some things are just theoretically practical.
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On July 13 2015 11:00 bookwyrm wrote:
well, the first step to fix hunger is critique. you have to understand why there is hunger. in order to understand this you have to understand things like the history of capitalist agriculture and the international grain trade. these are extremely complex topics. I should know, I've spent much of the last two years researching them. As it turns out, marx is rather helpful here, though if you think his work has magical solutions to everything you are an idiot. Reading him can, however, teach you how to engage in the activity of critique...
from your post however it seems that your interlocutors did try to point out some things about the way that international aid, the grain trade etc work, but you couldn't hear them because all you can hear is the fact that they are arguing against sending food to people. I think really you should have listened to them more carefully
There is something extremely violent about creating a population that is dependent on your grain exports (which you finance by extending credit to their governments thus making them debt colonies) under the guise of altruistic humanitarianism. Actually your marxist interlocutors here are the pragmatists and you are the idealist
I think you're reaching and you're making wild assumptions that you really shouldn't make. Not only are you mirespresenting what I say, you're misrepresenting what they say.
My interlocutors were not arguing against international aid, they were arguing against pragmatism as a whole. The example of world hunger was merely an example, where it was pointed out that sending food is not how you solve world hunger. This is obvious.
You say my interlocutors are the pragmatists, they would be deeply insulted if you were to tell them that. But thankfully it's horseshit. I don't think sending food is the way to go, but to deny the immediate importance of keeping millions of refugees fed is outright lunacy. And yet this is what the denial of pragmatism entails if we were to follow in these people's footsteps. We agree, sending food is not the way to go, but a pragmatic UN bureaucrat will look at number of mouths and number of loaves of bread and they'll see it doesn't add up. To do nothing amounts to death sentences. The problem is deeply complex and while you can hope to reach a comprehensive understanding of the world you can't escape the fact that food is the only immediate solution to immediate hunger.
And so while I do agree that sending food and endebting poor nations is horrible, I'm also someone who's not willfully blind to the reality we live in. Pragmatism is necessary. People are starving NOW, you send food. People are starving in the long run, I don't know what you do but surely certain people do. There were talks about actually building a well with the locals, then building a pump with them, figuring out how to repair the pump. This allowed the women in certain villages to saves HOURS every day, allowed them to do stuff instead of fetching water at a lake miles away. It's not perfect, but what the fuck do you suggest that we do? Stop sending grain and figure out an alternative? Try to summon the political capital for doing any of that in a way which is preferable to what's being done now and you'll be a hero. A God, perhaps. But you'll also have killed all those people because they needed food and you were changing the world.
And that perhaps is why I have a job and those poli sci graduates don't. I deal with real problems and find real solutions, as a lowly man who's fully aware of the political and social constraints that prevent me from changing the world. Perhaps working in urban planning and public health is not as glamorous as fixing world hunger solely by gathering an understanding of the problem in a classroom. I'll give you that.
TLDR: Reality should be considered when making political decisions. The quality of the lives of people depends on the proper analysis and understanding of situations. Theoretical and ideological factors are not irrelevant, but until we become superhumans, we're forced to act upon reality. To act like the only way to tackle world hunger is to drop capitalism is not entirely unfair, but the outright rejection of pragmatism in real politics is insane. It's what we've got, really.
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I think bookwyrm is just being contrary.
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On July 13 2015 11:38 Jerubaal wrote:
I think bookwyrm is just being contrary.
I don't know. He uses the term "violence" much like many of my marxist colleagues which makes me think that maybe, not unlike them, his main way to protest against certain injustices is to propose an alternate universe where this problem is solved. So he's not really contrarian, he's just operating on a completely different level, well above ours.
Anyway going to hit the sack, cheers.
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EPT
