seigneur wrote:

To associate critical theory and radical deconstructivism with Marx and Marxism is a straightforward mistake. Marx was highly structured. His idea was not just revolution, but to establish other institutions that he outlined - after first having described with good precision the contemporary institutions. On the other hand, the current brand of art and social critique/analysis relying on critical theory has nothing constructive in it. It just aims to deconstruct and demolish what is currently standing, and has no ideas beyond that.

​I listened to some interesting lectures by Stephen Hicks about the origins of postmodernism/deconstructivism etc. in France in the decades following WW2, he sketches out some of the links between these views and more conventional Marxism.  
 

seigneur wrote:

He was constructive in the sense that he was a good scholar; nobody can deny this. His economic theory about capitalism is the best one out there. The one about socialism is, yes, a utopia, but the mistake is to see in him just the utopia and forget his contribution to the analysis of capitalism. His critique was stronger in every way than his utopia, and the critique was constructive in the sense that the social democratic parties of Europe took it and in fact improved capitalism to last another century.

(The most important economic insight by Marx was to show that capitalism itself generates cyclical crises. His suggested solution was to get rid of capitalism and replace it with socialism. Social democrats modified this: Instead of revolution, let's see how to survive the crises. Whereas mainstream economists see economy, wrongly, as an equilibrium and every crisis is a shock and surprise to them.)

I agree Marx's business cycle theory was insightful, and a precursor to Keynes, but I certainly don't agree that otherwise his theory gave the best understanding of capitalism. Much of his economic theory is either not original, being just a continuation of the classical economics of Ricardo, or so wrapped up in his deeply dubious historical materialism and bastardised Hegelianism as to be useless. His pure economic theory ran into the transformation problem, which Piero Sraffa (fresh from vanquishing the neoclassicals in the Cambridge capital controversy) and Ian Steedman showed was unsolvable.

I'm not sure what you mean by linking Marx and social democracy as you do. Certainly, on the continent these parties were clearly Marxist influenced, if not originally derived. But, so far as they had anything of worth to add (As a Distributist,, I consider social democracy and socialism no better than capitalism), Marxist influence seemed to retard this, and send them off down blind alleys. In Britain the Labour party originally wasn't mostly Marxist, but drew more from the likes of Ruskin, Morris, and Tawney, and it achieved as much (if you can call it that) as the continental social democrats. And, though Marx's business cycle theory was insightful, it was Keynes and the experience of the great depression that led to the embrace of Keynesian policies, and, although Keynes came to acknowledge Marx's insight here (though not elsewhere), I don't believe he was influenced by him in developing his own central ideas.

But ever since postmodernism, the so-called Marxist scholars do not have a utopia. They only use shoddy scholarship to produce fruitless destructive criticism or hyped babble. There is no value or insight in calling them Marxists, particularly when they themselves see no connection either.

I don't disagree about the post-modernism, but that doesn't change the Marxist influence - which can be traced easily, if you care to do it. It is above all in the tendency to see society as reducible to a few broad classes in an exploitative relationship that sullies irredeemably just about everything in society, culture, and politics, except some sentimentalised tradtions or attributes of the lower classes. Whether it bourgeois and bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and patriarchy and men or whiteness and white men, on the other, the shared patterns of thought are clear.

By the way, the term New Left is not one simply applied by critics.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

I'm sorry, but as far as I can see, queer theory, women's studies, critical theory, radical feminism, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, etc., are just ideology posing as serious scholarship. That isn't to say there might not occasionally be something of worth brought up, but it is so lost in the accretions of nonsense and ideology as to be irretrievable. These are the kinds of bilge that made the Humanities and social sciences a joke, which as an early career Humanities/social science annoys me no end.

Is queer theory and other approaches to gender studies a joke in the way that Marxists and proponents of scientism insist that traditional metaphysics is a joke? I would assume that everyone here is disgusted by the sort of "everyone knows it's meaningless" refutation that you get from secularists constantly, so if you're going to write off a whole field as nonsense, I'd hope for a better reason than "it annoys me."

Honestly, even seigneur's article which refers to postmodernism as a "non-scientific worldview" is amusing in how familiar it is, and fullblown postmodernism drives me crazy.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

Without looking deeply into those figures, I would take them a huge grain of salt. The kind of chicanery that goes into those kinds of statistics is myriad. There are clear alarm bells in what you mention. Notoriously, these kinds of studies are famous for using very broad definitions of sexual assault, and for then concluding incidents as sexual assaults, even when the alleged victim didn't see them this way. So, for example, it may well be case that when the female has had alcohol, that would count, even if the male had just as much, or it was only a small amount. Any unwanted touching might be counted, even if it would used to be called sexual harassment, rather than assault (i.e., the knee or an attempted unwanted kiss). And any kind of pressure, even the slightest attempts at persuasion or nagging, would count. Interestingly, the only area where the definition is narrowed, at least of rape, is male rape, where the CDC (amongst others) are famous for counting only male-on-male rapes and those rare times where a woman somehow penetrates a male. Incidents of women forcing men to penetrate aren't counted as rapes, but sexual assault. There is some limited evidence, I recall, that this latter happens quite a lot more than you'd think (though I'm not sure what definition is being used, or whether it is as broad is the case for female sexual assault).

I don't want to look through them again, but the studies I posted did differentiate between rape and other sexual violence, so they aren't using very broad definitions for rape. These were also governmental surveys, and upfront about how they conducted the research, so I'm not sure why you think chicanery is involved. You were quite happy to refer to whichever finding offered the lowest statistics as the "real" figures, so I'm somewhat concerned by your objectivity in determining which surveys can be trusted and which ones are the result of a leftist conspiracy.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

Really the 1 in 5 claim, even over a life time, is so high it should cause questions set off alarm bells about the methodology and cause questions to be asked.

Have you spoken to many women about the issue? Obviously we can't really judge what statistics are from personal stories, but in my experience at least, stories do come up fairly often. Perhaps whether these figures actually match up to people's perceptions of reality, once the problem is actually discussed more openly, is the first question that ought to be asked.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

For what it's worth, I don't think the fact men are probably more likely to sexually harass and assault women than the other way around is because women are more respectful or virtuous. I think it is more a matter of women naturally wishing to be pursued, rather than pursue, to a degree at least, and on average being more timorous. This is just my own observation and experience, and I have nothing solid to back it up (though the made to penetrate data is interesting), but I think it's the case. As I said, by the broad definitions (although I'm not counting girlfriends who didn't meet the activitist definition of affirmative consent - if that is even meant to apply to women as well as men) used in much research, I've been sexually assaulted several times by women. To the degree there is a problem with sexual assault and harassment in our societies, I don't think it is a matter of maleness, toxic masculinity, rape culture, etc., as human nature.

I have never made any claim concerning women being more respectful and virtuous, so I'm not sure where you're getting that from. It's not a terribly common theory in critical studies either.

The suggestion that women are more likely to be assaulted because we naturally wish to be pursued is frankly part of the reason that identity politics are in full swing right now. If you're going to offer your own gender theory while writing off anything anyone else says as the sort of nonsense that's not worth taking seriously, you should expect to be called on it at some point or another. Women do not necessarily wish to be pursued, and if men persist in saying that it's simply our natural tendency, then we end up in a situation where wearing the wrong outfit or even simply smiling at a man can be taken as an invitation. Which is precisely what is meant by the term "rape culture."

I don't specifically think the problem is men either. I absolutely think it's rooted in human nature, but it seems clear that there is a problem, and if people are telling you that, you need to actually listen to them instead of writing it off as part of a conspiracy. Otherwise you're going to end up with identity politics. Or worse.

Hypatia wrote:

Is queer theory and other approaches to gender studies a joke in the way that Marxists and proponents of scientism insist that traditional metaphysics is a joke? I would assume that everyone here is disgusted by the sort of "everyone knows it's meaningless" refutation that you get from secularists constantly, so if you're going to write off a whole field as nonsense, I'd hope for a better reason than "it annoys me."

Probably the general criticism of postmodernism I have been most impressed by is that applied consistently it just leads to a generalised global scepticism; that you could equally well, and equally validly, use these approaches to argue for some kind of Islamist or old-school authoritarian far right as for the left wing views it is in fact mostly deployed to defend and promote. That it amounts to a commitment to a kind of political emotivism, maybe ultimately more nihilistic and arbitrary than either scientism or classical Marxism.

​Also, Peter Boghossian & co.'s success with their hoax articles is a bit worrying given the obviously bizarre and unethical content they put into them. That was only three individuals working in a comparatively short time span.

​

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

The definition of rape, as noted, is also often very broad in these surveys, such as including the woman having any alcohol or any pressure, like the slightest kind of persuasive, can be included, even if the woman herself doesn't consider the incident rape.

When faced with a particular study, "often" should not be an argument. The definitions in the specific study are important.

When the study makes a distinction between rape and sexual assault, and a further distinction with harassment, it just might be a good study, depending on how consistently the definitions are followed through and whether the conclusions are warranted by the data.

Mind you, I have seen conclusions unwarranted by the data in plenty of statistical studies of more legit fields, such as economics (insofar as it can be called data there), so I'd say statistical competence is a wider problem in scholarship. At any rate, one should always check these three things in any study:

- definitions
- data
- conclusions

When these three speak the same thing, you should not say it's bad scholarship even when you don't like the conclusions. When you don't like the conclusions or the field itself, it might be a true clash of ideologies (or of personal interests).

But when it's bad scholarship, we should reject the conclusions because it's bad scholarship, not (only) because there's ideological bent. It might very well be ideological bent in our own direction, but bad scholarship deserves to be called out even then.

Last edited by seigneur (10/07/2018 4:48 am)