Arendt vs. Marx
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ม.ค. 2023
- In this episode, I describe Hannah Arendt's (poor) criticisms of Marx.
If you want to support me, you can do that with these links:
Patreon: / theoryandphilosophy
paypal.me/theoryphilosophy
Twitter: @DavidGuignion
IG: @theory_and_philosophy
Podbean: theoretician.podbean.com/
![[4K] BABYMONSTER(베이비몬스터) “FOREVER” Band LIVE Concert “영원히” 베몬만을 사랑하게 되…💗 [it’s KPOP LIVE 잇츠라이브]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/TQfC0xdpiw4/mqdefault.jpg)
Arendt’s “critique” of Marx is terrible as are her “critiques” of Fanon. One of my least favorite philosophers
Man, Arendt is just frustratingly completely wrong about almost everything. I pity any of her Marxist colleagues who had to interact with her strawman of Marx...
💯
Arendt also has equally horrible criticism of the USSR and the idea of "Totalitarianism" (Nazi reductionism)
"Hannah Arendt just misses the Marx entirely here." At least what I heared.
Is Marxism truth?
I'm a Marxist organizer in the US and when I heard you say that she thought marx wanted to like get rid of labour it sent me into a loop because nothing could be further from the truth. In critique of the Gotha program marx talks about labour becoming life prime want, and in Jodi Dean's much more recent Comrade she talks about how through the communist party we can see this kind of non alienated labour in embryo.
On the point of homogenation (no clue if that's a word) I think this can be true but I think most people who make the point do so poorly. Marxism, like taxonomy in this sense, attempts to employ a method of lumping and splitting. In the course of Marxist history there have certainly been opportunistic errors where the real problems of special oppression weren't dealt with, but I think it's unfair to say that's endemic to Marxist theories. The CPUSA before it's co-optation had some very advanced analysis of the special oppression of Black workers. But beyond special oppression I find this argument kinda funny because to me, Marx's contribution to humanism was his breaking apart the concept of a single fixed essence. His critique of feuerbach is largely just that he failed to recognize the real concrete distinctions in humanity. Marx pointed out its never abstract people but real concrete people with specific interest which make history
Speaking of the CPUSA, think about the 2036 initiative.
Arendt just makes Marx seem more based.
Hello david, I wanted to let you know that you're doing quite a wonderful thing by teaching philosophy and making it so easy to understand. I love your explanations more than all the other philosophy channels I watch. You're so young and already have such a big impact on people's lives, its quite inspiring. I do hope that I can be as scholarly as you someday. Love from Bangladesh!
"Will we adopt Finnish philosophy?" Well, as a Finn, I must say that we do have some cool thinkers. The philosophical novels of Eino Leino and Eino Kaila could be worth checking out - even if Leino has some strong occultist tones to him. 😉
Esko Valtaoja, Syksy Räsänen are some cool astrophysicists to check out.
Great video king 👑
Love this. Thanks
Will you talk about Weil? or have you already?
Even Isaiah Berlin said Arendt was wrong about the urss
Humans are political animals according to Aristotle. They are the Zoon Politikon. You must remember that Arendt is a phenomenologist. She is about human experience. Experience is the highest order for her.
Where does Marx state that Indians needed British colonialism to advance? As far as I know, he supported the Indian rebellion against the British.
Please cite a source so I can look into this further. Thanks!
Intimacy with the actual problems individuals find in their lives is generally not what the old metaphysics could cope with in it's theoretical condition of knowledge, experience, and desire.
Nice job, Dave. Though, I think Arendt is keenly aware that Greek society was predicated upon slavery! She talks about it at length in The Human Condition and elsewhere. Thinkers like Seyla Benhabib have done a good job refuting the notion that Arendt had "polis envy." Her engagement with the Greeks is not so simple. As for the segregation issue, Arendt promoted the idea that we have the right to voluntarily choose who we spend our private time and private spaces with, BUT this absolutely does not extend into the political realm where plurality is crucial to the dignity and status of political life. Not saying she was right, but again I think her stance is not so simple.
And, she did not like two-party systems! She hated all party systems and representative democracy in general. Her preference was for a participatory council system where everyone could engage directly in political practice.
Depends which book you read, my guuuuuy. Origins of totalitarianism: two-party system naturally dissuades tyranny. Human condition: self-representation in arena for the free exchange of ideas and debate.
Here's the evidence: (OoT):
"Behind the external difference between the Anglo-Saxon two-party and the Continental multiparty system lies a fundamental distinction between the party's function within the body politic, which has great consequences for the party's attitude to power, and the citizen's position in his state. In the two-party system one party always represents the government and actually rules the country, so that, temporarily, the party in power becomes identical with the state. The state, as a permanent guarantee of the country's unity, is represented only in the permanence of the office of the King ( for the permanent Undersecretaryship of the Foreign Office is only a matter of continuity). As the two parties are planned and organized for alternate rule, all branches of the administration are planned and organized for alternation. Since the rule of each party is limited in time, the opposition party exerts a control whose efficiency is strengthened by the certainty that it is the ruler of tomorrow. In fact, it is the opposition rather than the symbolic position of the King that guarantees the integrity of the whole against one-party dictatorship. The obvious advantages of this system are that there is no essential difference between government and state, that power as well as the state remain within the grasp of the citizens organized in the party, which represents the power and the state either of today or of tomorrow, and that consequently there is no occasion for indulgence in lofty speculations about Power and State as though they were something
beyond human reach, metaphysical entities independent of the will and action of the citizens" (252).
@@TheoryPhilosophy Fair enough, I'll have to go back to that section in OoT for more context, but to me this quote reads as a somewhat pragmatic description of how the two-party system functions rather than a whole hearted endorsement.. as is the case with her endorsement of the council system in On Revolution.
Certainly refutes my overemphasis. She clearly did not "hate" it!
@@TheoryPhilosophy A, lets say, "5-party system" wouldn't mean that power is not alternated but that it wouldn't relate by default with a 1:1:1:1 ratio of party-government-state-power. One may argue that the whole point of what you quote is to demonstrate this "clear" and "human" relation, and not even on how this "two-party system" work in order to prevent "one-party dictatorship".
As you pointed, some serious, if not fundamental, aspects like i.e. exclusions seem to be outside the encapsulation of this "clear" abstraction.
Unfortunately the last minutes were a bit painful. By starting to bash Arendt from the perspective that "she doesn't understand alienation" you ended up showing your own ignorance / misreading of her work quite elegantly. Arendt should be read from the perspectives of post-structuralism / feminism as opposed to analytical or Frankfurt School. I have some quotations and points below. It might be interesting to see another episode where you have fixed these mistakes.
---
Here is what Arendt thinks about Alienation and why alienation of labor is not the REAL issue for her. Her point often is that women have done "work for free" and in democracies some works needs to be done for free, because we can not be reduced as capitalistic agents:
"The second sense of ‘being earthbound’ is referenced to scientific praxis and, more specifically, to what Arendt identifies as ‘earth alienation’. In contrast to (but not in conflict with) Marxist accounts of the alienation of labour, Arendt identifies how the disclosure of the Earth through the multiplicity of scientific praxis created new conditions of political alienation. No longer is politics anchored by common sense experience and the plurality of ways individuals encounter reality, for the experiential disclosure of the social and natural world is always already mediated by technoscience. These two senses of being earthbound led Arendt (1963a: 527) to renounce not only anthropocentrism but, more radically, ‘all anthropomorphic elements and principles, as they arise either from the world given to the five human senses or from categories inherent in the human mind’. This form of non-anthropocentrism poses acute difficulties for the political, because the plural perspectives through which the reality of the social world is understood must all travel in single file: through forms of science and technology that disclose the world through instruments and techniques that bring universal processes into earthly affairs."
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263775820953855
PS: You also have misunderstood Arendts three forms of "work": labor includes our jobs, because they are necessary for survival; work is what we build for ourselves with our surplus; political is the actions we do for future generations. Or at least that is one popular framing of her work in contemporary philosphy.
I disagree about contextualizing Arendt as a post-structuralist and feminist, but this seems to me far more representative of Arendt's work than that provided by the author of the video. Maybe I missed something, I didn't find any argument in the video against Arendt on her own terms.
Think of eliminating _absolute poverty_ versus relative poverty. But yea there is no desire or wants in Marx, just analysis of objective development. Its crazy to think finding what is universal among people can be equated to "totalitarian desires" for some crude equalization or reduction of differences without preservation. Meanwhile the USSR preserved so many (164 ?) national languages, etc.
David Guignion is one of the best philosophers(?) explaining leftist ideas in video form, especially when he has become better at it over time.
This small lecture evoked the following thoughts:
a) Guignion and I come from different political alignments. My realistic assesment is that I understand much better the philosophy and politics of Guignion than the other way around, and on the other hand Guignion of course understands leftist philosophy better than me. This is often the case in general between leftists and the people on the right (Professor Jonathan Haidt).
Often this has some tragic consequences from the point of view of discussion in general. Too many ready made and ingrained conceptual, framework related steps and sometimes (quantum/boolean) jumps might separate us. This may not only prevent mutual understanding, like we would talk different languages, but also creates conflicts 'out of nothing', because it is inbuilt in the differences between concepts and frameworks, and their cognitive-emotional and moral-judgemental consequences. If I just describe how market economy works, in real life, not how it is described in leftist ideology and philosophy, and I don't condemn it, this in itself might be such a moral transgression for some leftists, that it calls for stern moral judgement.
b) If leftist philosophers is compared, who has been the most enlightening to me? Michel Foucault. Although he was to some extent poor historian, and his biases obscured and misdirected some issues for him, he generated plenty of excellent insights in most issues (e.g. 'Punitive Society', 'Penal Theories and Institutions', 'The Birth of the Clinic', 'Psychiatric Power', 'Security, Territory and Population', 'Society Must Be Defended', 'Biopolitics', etc.).
Hanna Arendt wrote: '...tyranny over "laborers,"...as for instance the rule over slaves in antiquity, would automatically be a rule over lonely, not only isolated, men and tend to be totalitarian'. I don't think that she endorsed or even condoned ancient Athens but your other criticisms seem fair.
I agree that Marx tried to portray us as an homogeneous mass. Unfortunately that is the first thing any economist has to do, to avoid the problem of the complexity of individuals. Arendt says that we should think of Labor and, for lack of better words, man’s search for meaning. Still just homogeneous groups (2 groups this time), unless the later group is to be divided amongst the 8 billion individuals concerned. If you can’t homogenize sets of people into groups, the analysis of everything we do becomes impossibly complex. In my opinion, Arendt is accusing Marx of practicing Economics. You cannot analyze without the ability to generalize ( homogenize ). I am not a Marx fan. However , Arendt is ,as David is trying to politely say, totally off target.
Marx was not an economist, Marx was a philosopher who attacked economists with an ad hominem approach calling them vulgar economists, and then proposed a funny theory where labor is the ultimate source of value while value is entirely subject and comes with individual desirability which economist carl menger knew, Marx had no idea about individual psychology and human nature, that later became the reason of existential dread in soviet. if Marx knew Darwinian principles like Nietzsche he won't have tried social engineering to alter human nature with flawed theories backed by the philosophy of resentment.
@@amorfati4096 @Amorfati have you read capital? Because it's pretty clear he was working within the frame work of classical political economy like Smith and Ricardo. While he does call many of them vulgar his arguments never stop at that point but go into finer details about their theoretical errors. For malthus he very clearly articulates a critique of his theories about population growth. He spends a great deal of time addressing another economist Say on a number of points. In capital marx also makes some interesting insights using darwinian thought because he was a huge darwinist, going so far as sending darwin a copy of capital. If you wanna disagree with his theories feel free but I helps if you do the readings first
@@LoganMillett That’s why i used word Darwinian Principle, I have Read Marx, And Theories of Value from Labour Smith to Sraffa, and Subjective value from Carl menger to Mises. From Original Text to Textbooks, and I have also Read Behavioural Genetics, Evolutionary Psychology and Neurobiology, not only Verbal Hodgepodge of Philosophy. Smith Ricardo and Marx were Clearly Stuck to their Timely Worldview of Muscle Labour and leg work ( just Like Physiocrats of 16th century were confined to “All Value comes from Farming Land” and At the same time you had Carl menger from same era 1840, who wrote like Professional Economists not Conspiratorial and vengeful ranting like Marx. The point I’m trying to make here is; go and ask any Layperson any where around the world that where the value of everything comes from? If you tell them Labour people will Lough. And then Hegelian Dialectic equally laughable.
@@amorfati4096 I mean your response just seems like someone trying to distract from their lack of concrete dealing with the texts by listing off a series of other texts.
I actually have experience talking with working people about the concepts in Marxism and most of them agree that without labour(and nature which you conveniently leave out) there could not be value of any sort.
@@amorfati4096 you also seem to have some misconception that for marx labour was only manual which completely ignores his whole discussion of intellectual labour. There is a point of debate about intensity of labour time and value but it's silly to pretend he only saw manual labour as important or even value creating
Derivative of
The division between the private and the public is not any more odd than the division between the sacred and the profane. sacred acts happen in profane spaces, but they sanctify them, they are special acts, holidays, and holy days that happen in profane times. having private and public separate doesn't mean they don't "spill over" it more a problem of which spills on to which.
Man's search for satisfying neurotransmitters
Thanks for the episode! This provided me with deeper insight of Arendt's thinking "at work." A lot of the problems around her also typically consider her relation with Heidegger and how she, although jewish, did not refute him in her life. What you bring up here in relation to her fractured understanding of ancient Greece and ignorance of slavery kind of spurs on the idea of how she seemed to not be equally attentive to all forms of social injustices (to put it mildly). Thanks again!
Arendt critiqued Heidegger a lot.
I like some of Hannah Arendt’s work but her political theory is hopelessly reactionary.
In my experience with Americans, most of you miss the point on marxism. Arendt is finely tuned. She took Heidegger and inverted his ideas! What a girl.
Why are you caveating everything like you’re talking to some Stalinist committee?
Marx was correct about capitalism in the 19th century. His solutions, however, failed.
Well, whether it failed or not depends entirely upon what criteria you make for "failure", because the socialist/communist movement had tremendous influence on the world, leading to such things as 8 hours workday, universal healthcare (unless you're American), universal pension/welfare systems, the spreading wide of labor unions, universal higher education (tuiton-free with stipends for students in several European countries), decolonization which completely changed the global order and created numerous new countries, the adoption of development programs for formerly colonized countries, the socialization of scientific institutions leading to things such as space programs or the grand European science projects.
The list of things which the socialist/communist movements either made directly happen or which it inspired/influenced to happen, is long, and the number of ways in which they've completely changed life for people, particularly in Europe, but also in the United States, cannot be understated. Many of the improvements of society done in Europe and the US were direct counters to internal socialist/communist pressure, or the rivalry with the Soviet Union or the communism of India, Indochina, China, and Japan, not all of which had communist regimes but were certainly influenced by regional communism.
You need to understand Husserl and Jaspers
You've missed the point on this. You can't just read HC and think you're an Arendt scholar. Start with her PhD thesis on the concept of love in Augustine and work your way out from there.