germanjoey posted:
how have you gotten by for so many years without tab-space

it's too much work

blinkandwheeze posted:
has anyone here read "Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain" by Butch Lee? it looks interesting as fuck, i need to hunt down a copy

its very MSH-y

its on library.nu btw

babyfinland posted:
im reim glad lyg is reading chinese stuff

he always has

Lykourgos posted:
I've always read chinese stuff; in terms of reading ancient texts, I started with chinese and then took up greek later. For the last couple of years I've thought the greek texts to be superior in a lot of ways, but the chinese texts have their own strengths and are sometimes better.

For economics, there's really a dearth of quality ancient works, that's why I'm revisiting qingzhong. The greeks have a good one from xenophon, and the one by aristotle can make you smile, but overall dedicated economic discussions are few and far between.

Totalitarianism is the best example of something that the greeks didn't talk about in too much detail, but the chinese literally built a whole philosophical school on the notion.

cool. respeck.

Impper posted:
medicine and engineering are the only disciplines that exist. liberal arts serve as cash cows to bilk all the useless buffoons that are out there

yeah peeps like me

getfiscal posted:
i'm sort of a beginner on such things so i probably won't describe it well and will step into various errors.

basically marxist humanism focuses on humanity as being realized (the liberation of their species-being) in the process of history and sees alienation as the key to marxism. althusser suggests that this relies on an early marx who has not rejected hegel's dialectic yet. althusser argues that marx's dialectic is qualitatively different from hegel's, that it isn't just an adopted hegelianism. marx had to "break" with hegel in order to understand history in a scientific way. and so mostly after this "break" he doesn't really talk much about alienation (except again in private journals).

hegelian marxists like lukacs had said, for example, that the proletariat was the subject-object of history. that means that human history was essentially groping towards its own liberation in the form of a proletariat that could see itself as liberator of all and therefore see society as it actually is rather than mediated through class relations. but this objectivity was questioned by althusser, who ended up saying something radically different: marxism was the first theory that didn't see itself as objective and representing all of humanity. so it is theoretically anti-humanist.

for example, bourgeois philosophy almost always implies universalism about itself, it always say that it has come to conclusions about what is natural and timeless about itself. so it might come up with things like "humans are rational self-seekers that self-organize in markets naturally" as axioms that can't really be argued against effectively. marxist humanists played a similar game by implying that classless society was the natural state of humanity and that history was essentially restoring a natural balance but with advanced technology. althusser says, on the other hand, that marxism doesn't make claims about timeless features of humanity, and it doesn't appeal to see society as it really is in absence of distorting features, it rather is a partisan theory of theoretical practice that draws on the class position of the proletariat as the first theory in history that admits it is biased and contingent. in other words, marxism is a theory in service to the proletariat, rather than pretending to be a theory of humanity (as in bourgeois philosophy).

Good.