Awesome video! love your content comrade. Btw, Cockshott has some videos criticizing the concept of "interpelation" by Althusser, and are quite interesting.
I'm glad you mentioned that scene from "Sherlock" at 11:22. I remember watching that scene years ago and thinking how it was very classiest of Sherlock to behave like that.
Pretty timely video for my interests! I was remarking offhandedly to a friend the other day about how frustrating I find the conversation around machine intelligence, because it so often seems to take for granted a particular concept of subject, intelligence and language. The machine seems unintelligent to us, even if it's computational processing power approaches ours, not only because of some internal lack of "originality" or "intention", but also because it is not part of the same social, intersubjective processes that humans are.
AI does not have nearly the computational level of humans. As far as from an empirical and scientific computational view contemporary LLMs (that all utilize the Transformer aechitecture) have the same level as input-output tables. I.e. no more than a gigantic excel sheet without any functions. If they had this power, they would still have to entail the specific human leraning capacity that chooses the most reasonable rules i.e. in accordance with certain axiomatic systems like logic and arithmetic and in accordance with whatever our rigid definition of human reasonability of belief systems is (which cannot be axiomatic as they must contain contradictions).
congratulations on a great project. I thought I knew my Marx, but you have enabled me to absorb new perspectives and rethink my my way of seeing the world.
Great work, comrade. There is a conservative guy called Jordan Peterson. He is like, super famous in the right wing community. His books start with bible quotes or praisal of Moses or Jesus. His power is literally his language. He uses really really abstract concept to explain a very non abstract concept. People think he's smart because of his ability to explain his thoughts very unclearly. When someone asks a very basic question about what he writes, he just says 'you got my sentence wrong' and he proceeds to move on. The gist of his philosophy is that he thinks that alot of religions of common grounds which made soceity a better place, so we must practice these common ideas that arrive from religions from alot diverse cultures. So if you go to him and ask, "But, ancient humans practiced human sacrifice. So are you telling me that we should still practice that?." "But, that's not what I meant," he will say and will give no explanation to what he has said. It's cautionary tail to not to debate with someone who can manipulate language and bombard you with abstract language.
biology is an application of chemistry which is an application of physics which is an application of math which is an application of philosophy which is an application of language which is an application of neurons in the brain which is a part of biology and thus we complete the cycle.
I think this is a little hard on de Saussure. He emphasized synchrony only because at his time diachrony was over emphasized. He was very emphatic about language being a social practice and a totality. Bloomfield (and later Chomsky) elaborated only one strain of de Sassure's thought and rather one-sidedly.
@themarxistproject There is at least one American who gets the slogan "Power to the Soviets." Who also understands that "Soviet" is a Russian word for "council."
Yeah, this is what the right are talking about when they say the left is literally changing language and definitions, you're using newspeak and are proud of it. Insanity.
We would be very grateful. However I do believe TH-cam has disabled community captions so we'd have to get in touch outside the platform to coordinate. You can find us on Twitter or Discord, or by email: themarxistproject[@]gmail.com
I'm somewhat confused. Isn't the abstraction just an explanation of what could be the cause and effect relationships occurring with in the mind to enable it to be a part of this socio-historical circumstances? After all, a chair lacks the pre-requisite causes to be able emerge language within itself. Isn't it more materialistic to presume some baseline universal biological pre-requisites that all humans have to enable them to have language? I got the impression that the video opposed universal stable(keeping one's change within certain parameters to maintain functions) attributes. Am I misunderstanding this?
I don't think Saussure or Chomsky would necessarily with some of the things said here, they would just point out that whatever definition of language is used here, is not what they were talking about.
Excellent informative video. Could you elaborate on why the marxist take on something like “starvation wage” is more correct than the free-market take “competitive wage” ?
It's not so much that the Marxist view is correct (though I obviously prefer it lol). It's more that these terms reveal different things. It would be fully correct to say that extremely low wages are competitive. One could easily lose themselves in the economic jargon of why low wages might be good for growth, attracting capital, etc. etc., but at the end of the day the term puts a blatantly positive spin on an otherwise grim reality; a reality that is conveniently obscured by framing starvation wages as economically competitive. But even the misleading term reveals something interesting. Capitalism thrives at the expense of exploited labor, and the more exploited it is (aka. the more "competitive"), the more capital thrives. This is good for capital, and thus is framed by the ideology of capital as implicitly (or explicitly) desirable.
@@themarxistproject what about the economic jargon of the material wealth of even the poorest of people in capitalistic, market-driven countries like the US/western europe and what china is approaching these days? That the market has lifted even the poorest out of poverty, thought exploiting labor to lift the most wealthy much higher than they would have without exploitative labor? The inequality has increased, but nobody is starving for instance, everyone has a smartphone and plenty of clothing excess calories etc while nominally communist countries seem to botch material prosperity at every opportunity
@@user-cp7lx7vs1y yes, capitalism has made some countries extravagantly rich, but always at the expense of others (and at the expense of its own people in many cases). This whole narrative is immersed in charged language. Some of the repeat offenders are terms like "communism" and "capitalism", which in themselves contain so many multiplicities of meaning that are meant to evoke all kinds of systems. Another big one is "growth" which always seems like a positive term but it can be used to obscure complicated problems. "Poverty" is kind of the inverse of "growth" in that it's obviously always negative (except maybe to the most zealous neoliberals). It's often used as a rhetorical tool because of how universally undesirable it is. It's well and good to say that the "market has lifted millions" out of poverty, but people who mention this often forget to note that they're moving the goalposts. Or worse yet, they set the goalposts so far apart that the statement has no real meaning: nearly half the world lives on less than $5/day, and over two thirds live on less than $10/day. Depending on how one seeks to employ the term, "global poverty" can even be weaponized against the poor of the developed world, precisely as you are implying. "You are wealthier than your counterpart in Central Africa. You are hardly poor in the global context" is an argument made to dismiss the very real poverty that exists in the "first world" (another loaded term). Something like 10% of Americans are "food insecure" (also a funny turn of phrase, isn't it?) which amounts to tens of millions of Americans skipping meals because they cannot afford them. Bear in mind that figure is much higher for minorities. Moreover, access to medical care is becoming more of a luxury. Same for adequate housing and education.
What's more is that our very psyche might be founded upon language. Without it, we'd arguably be ego-less, nondual, "enlightened", since without labels we couldn't distinguish discrete objects in the universe, not even the self.
I kinda disagree. Cavemen still prioritized their own lives than other cavemen. And cavemen didn't have a spoken language. Sure, they worked together but they had egostic instincts like we do now.
@@bobert6686 The language in that context used less in the meaning as "speech" but more generally as ability to form abstractions and symbolise them. That innate to human psyche process of "extracting" concepts from reality is primitive form of language, and it's making possible advanced logical thinking by "extracting" properties as ideas and recombining them into "predictions" of something never seen. Therefore "the language" here is likely refers to ability to divide reality into different relationships. And the more interwoven relationships you understand the more conscious you are of an object in question. Having no division, makes you perceive reality as an total unity. Or "the One", God, absolute reality, Dao, Logos, Absolute Spirit etc. which is referred in some of those groups as "enlightenment"
Isn't this a bit of a strawman of Chomsky's argument? While it's true that Chomsky views the ability of human beings to learn language to be innate and shared across all societies, it's not true that he subsequently ignores all external material and historical conditions. The least bit of familiarity with his work will show you that he is fully aware of the ways in which behaviour and consciousness - as expressed by language - are subject to specific historical conditions.
Well the issue that Lecercle raises in the book I am referencing is not that Chomsky et al. reject external elements altogether -- they certainly do not -- but rather that the object of linguistics as a science is the study of "innate language". The critique is that the study of language should always prioritize the historical and social because that's precisely where language is situated. I didn't elaborate more on the Chomskyan position because a) there are better resources for that out there and b) the focus of this video is to outline an alternative approach to the study/philosophy of language.
@@themarxistproject I'm not sure if I have completely missed the point of this video but I don't see how one could give a non-immanent or historical account of something like syntax or phonetics. These two subdisciplines are purely focused on the internal structure of language and must necessarily be abstracted before they could be thought of in social terms. In addition to this the social/historical is already is considered in other parts of linguistics like pragmatics/semantics through the influence of Grice and Wittgenstein, morphology through the study of dialects and the social conditions they arise from, and most obviously sociolinguistics where the very point is to study language in its historical/societal position. Even something like phonology is studied in within the context of definite social relations (for the same reasons as morphology). It just seem that if one is to study certain aspects of language effectively they must assume certain things for the sake of clarity. There is no grand unified theory of language, but if there were I am sure almost every respected linguist/philosopher of language would basically agree with the tenets of a Marxist theory of language. The problem is that language is not and currently cannot be studied as a whole so each subfield must have certain assumptions/abstractions to make any progress at all. I the future, when the study of language is more mature, something like a unified Marxist theory of language may be possible. However, it just seems that currently this is impossible, so people must use many different methods and assumptions (many of which may be decidedly unmarxist) to understand language effectively. sorry if non of that made sense or if I am way off base
honey wake up, Marx posted
I appreciate your work, comrade! Thanks for this:) Looking forward to the subsequent parts of this series 🙏
Awesome video! love your content comrade.
Btw, Cockshott has some videos criticizing the concept of "interpelation" by Althusser, and are quite interesting.
I'm glad you mentioned that scene from "Sherlock" at 11:22. I remember watching that scene years ago and thinking how it was very classiest of Sherlock to behave like that.
Pretty timely video for my interests! I was remarking offhandedly to a friend the other day about how frustrating I find the conversation around machine intelligence, because it so often seems to take for granted a particular concept of subject, intelligence and language. The machine seems unintelligent to us, even if it's computational processing power approaches ours, not only because of some internal lack of "originality" or "intention", but also because it is not part of the same social, intersubjective processes that humans are.
Machine derives its identity from a system
AI does not have nearly the computational level of humans. As far as from an empirical and scientific computational view contemporary LLMs (that all utilize the Transformer aechitecture) have the same level as input-output tables. I.e. no more than a gigantic excel sheet without any functions.
If they had this power, they would still have to entail the specific human leraning capacity that chooses the most reasonable rules i.e. in accordance with certain axiomatic systems like logic and arithmetic and in accordance with whatever our rigid definition of human reasonability of belief systems is (which cannot be axiomatic as they must contain contradictions).
congratulations on a great project. I thought I knew my Marx, but you have enabled me to absorb new perspectives and rethink my my way of seeing the world.
Keep it up comrades ✊🏼
You are doing great!
Never would’ve touched this subject, but it is a real eye opener
another day, another banger
another marxist project banger 🙏
Great work, comrade. There is a conservative guy called Jordan Peterson. He is like, super famous in the right wing community. His books start with bible quotes or praisal of Moses or Jesus. His power is literally his language. He uses really really abstract concept to explain a very non abstract concept. People think he's smart because of his ability to explain his thoughts very unclearly. When someone asks a very basic question about what he writes, he just says 'you got my sentence wrong' and he proceeds to move on. The gist of his philosophy is that he thinks that alot of religions of common grounds which made soceity a better place, so we must practice these common ideas that arrive from religions from alot diverse cultures. So if you go to him and ask, "But, ancient humans practiced human sacrifice. So are you telling me that we should still practice that?."
"But, that's not what I meant," he will say and will give no explanation to what he has said.
It's cautionary tail to not to debate with someone who can manipulate language and bombard you with abstract language.
9:32 So true!
This relates kind of well with the late Wittgenstein, does it?
Apart from the challenge of reading section titles that only appear for a split second 🧐, good work.
this is amazing, you really helped me understand Marxism a lot, keep up your amazing work!
Could I get the names mentioned at 7:28?
Kinda in time, but anyways:
Волошинов (Voloshinov),
Михаил Бахтин (Mikhail Bakhtin)
biology is an application of chemistry which is an application of physics which is an application of math which is an application of philosophy which is an application of language which is an application of neurons in the brain which is a part of biology and thus we complete the cycle.
But you used different meanings of biology. The first was science and the second was object of that science.
I think this is a little hard on de Saussure. He emphasized synchrony only because at his time diachrony was over emphasized. He was very emphatic about language being a social practice and a totality. Bloomfield (and later Chomsky) elaborated only one strain of de Sassure's thought and rather one-sidedly.
Great!
@themarxistproject There is at least one American who gets the slogan "Power to the Soviets." Who also understands that "Soviet" is a Russian word for "council."
Funny, I was just thinking about how Marxism might relate to a theory of language the other day. I'm excited about this series!
Yeah, this is what the right are talking about when they say the left is literally changing language and definitions, you're using newspeak and are proud of it. Insanity.
@@runbychews134
You fool, I can tell you didn't watch the video because your comment is so unhinged and unrelated to the video.
Philosophy of language can be shortened to famous German saying-
Eine andere Sprache - ein anderes Mensch.
One more language - one more person.
comrades, i am volunteering to do closed captions for you. accessibility is good
We would be very grateful. However I do believe TH-cam has disabled community captions so we'd have to get in touch outside the platform to coordinate.
You can find us on Twitter or Discord, or by email: themarxistproject[@]gmail.com
@@themarxistproject will get in touch soonish
I'm somewhat confused. Isn't the abstraction just an explanation of what could be the cause and effect relationships occurring with in the mind to enable it to be a part of this socio-historical circumstances?
After all, a chair lacks the pre-requisite causes to be able emerge language within itself.
Isn't it more materialistic to presume some baseline universal biological pre-requisites that all humans have to enable them to have language? I got the impression that the video opposed universal stable(keeping one's change within certain parameters to maintain functions) attributes. Am I misunderstanding this?
One of the worst things Stalin did was write Marxism and Problems of Linguistics. Thank you for this!
Do you know what that book was about?
Fuck yeah another Marxist project banger!
Keep up the good work 👍
I don't think Saussure or Chomsky would necessarily with some of the things said here, they would just point out that whatever definition of language is used here, is not what they were talking about.
Excellent informative video. Could you elaborate on why the marxist take on something like “starvation wage” is more correct than the free-market take “competitive wage” ?
It's not so much that the Marxist view is correct (though I obviously prefer it lol). It's more that these terms reveal different things. It would be fully correct to say that extremely low wages are competitive. One could easily lose themselves in the economic jargon of why low wages might be good for growth, attracting capital, etc. etc., but at the end of the day the term puts a blatantly positive spin on an otherwise grim reality; a reality that is conveniently obscured by framing starvation wages as economically competitive. But even the misleading term reveals something interesting. Capitalism thrives at the expense of exploited labor, and the more exploited it is (aka. the more "competitive"), the more capital thrives. This is good for capital, and thus is framed by the ideology of capital as implicitly (or explicitly) desirable.
@@themarxistproject what about the economic jargon of the material wealth of even the poorest of people in capitalistic, market-driven countries like the US/western europe and what china is approaching these days? That the market has lifted even the poorest out of poverty, thought exploiting labor to lift the most wealthy much higher than they would have without exploitative labor? The inequality has increased, but nobody is starving for instance, everyone has a smartphone and plenty of clothing excess calories etc while nominally communist countries seem to botch material prosperity at every opportunity
@@user-cp7lx7vs1y th-cam.com/video/fo2gwS4VpHc/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/-Nc_THkV9DM/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/j08ND3_PNgs/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/nXYKFVXjQcU/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/FEHYeeRCtVI/w-d-xo.html
@@user-cp7lx7vs1y yes, capitalism has made some countries extravagantly rich, but always at the expense of others (and at the expense of its own people in many cases). This whole narrative is immersed in charged language. Some of the repeat offenders are terms like "communism" and "capitalism", which in themselves contain so many multiplicities of meaning that are meant to evoke all kinds of systems. Another big one is "growth" which always seems like a positive term but it can be used to obscure complicated problems. "Poverty" is kind of the inverse of "growth" in that it's obviously always negative (except maybe to the most zealous neoliberals). It's often used as a rhetorical tool because of how universally undesirable it is. It's well and good to say that the "market has lifted millions" out of poverty, but people who mention this often forget to note that they're moving the goalposts. Or worse yet, they set the goalposts so far apart that the statement has no real meaning: nearly half the world lives on less than $5/day, and over two thirds live on less than $10/day.
Depending on how one seeks to employ the term, "global poverty" can even be weaponized against the poor of the developed world, precisely as you are implying. "You are wealthier than your counterpart in Central Africa. You are hardly poor in the global context" is an argument made to dismiss the very real poverty that exists in the "first world" (another loaded term). Something like 10% of Americans are "food insecure" (also a funny turn of phrase, isn't it?) which amounts to tens of millions of Americans skipping meals because they cannot afford them. Bear in mind that figure is much higher for minorities. Moreover, access to medical care is becoming more of a luxury. Same for adequate housing and education.
What's more is that our very psyche might be founded upon language. Without it, we'd arguably be ego-less, nondual, "enlightened", since without labels we couldn't distinguish discrete objects in the universe, not even the self.
I kinda disagree. Cavemen still prioritized their own lives than other cavemen. And cavemen didn't have a spoken language. Sure, they worked together but they had egostic instincts like we do now.
@@bobert6686 The language in that context used less in the meaning as "speech" but more generally as ability to form abstractions and symbolise them. That innate to human psyche process of "extracting" concepts from reality is primitive form of language, and it's making possible advanced logical thinking by "extracting" properties as ideas and recombining them into "predictions" of something never seen.
Therefore "the language" here is likely refers to ability to divide reality into different relationships. And the more interwoven relationships you understand the more conscious you are of an object in question.
Having no division, makes you perceive reality as an total unity. Or "the One", God, absolute reality, Dao, Logos, Absolute Spirit etc. which is referred in some of those groups as "enlightenment"
You bastard I just spent ten minutes translating wingdings, the very least you could do was to put a rickroll or something in it >:(
Hahaha I figured someone would do it! I'll admit, it was a missed opportunity
♥️
holy shit
Ewwww get your marxism out of my linguistics! Jk love the vid
you say tomAato,I say tomAhhto
Isn't this a bit of a strawman of Chomsky's argument? While it's true that Chomsky views the ability of human beings to learn language to be innate and shared across all societies, it's not true that he subsequently ignores all external material and historical conditions. The least bit of familiarity with his work will show you that he is fully aware of the ways in which behaviour and consciousness - as expressed by language - are subject to specific historical conditions.
Well the issue that Lecercle raises in the book I am referencing is not that Chomsky et al. reject external elements altogether -- they certainly do not -- but rather that the object of linguistics as a science is the study of "innate language". The critique is that the study of language should always prioritize the historical and social because that's precisely where language is situated.
I didn't elaborate more on the Chomskyan position because a) there are better resources for that out there and b) the focus of this video is to outline an alternative approach to the study/philosophy of language.
@@themarxistproject I'm not sure if I have completely missed the point of this video but I don't see how one could give a non-immanent or historical account of something like syntax or phonetics. These two subdisciplines are purely focused on the internal structure of language and must necessarily be abstracted before they could be thought of in social terms. In addition to this the social/historical is already is considered in other parts of linguistics like pragmatics/semantics through the influence of Grice and Wittgenstein, morphology through the study of dialects and the social conditions they arise from, and most obviously sociolinguistics where the very point is to study language in its historical/societal position. Even something like phonology is studied in within the context of definite social relations (for the same reasons as morphology).
It just seem that if one is to study certain aspects of language effectively they must assume certain things for the sake of clarity. There is no grand unified theory of language, but if there were I am sure almost every respected linguist/philosopher of language would basically agree with the tenets of a Marxist theory of language. The problem is that language is not and currently cannot be studied as a whole so each subfield must have certain assumptions/abstractions to make any progress at all.
I the future, when the study of language is more mature, something like a unified Marxist theory of language may be possible. However, it just seems that currently this is impossible, so people must use many different methods and assumptions (many of which may be decidedly unmarxist) to understand language effectively.
sorry if non of that made sense or if I am way off base
Lecercle posits six idiotic, patently absurd and arbitrary rules and then upends them with equally cretinous, self-negating rules.
Amazing.
You are explaining really badly. Good that im extremely smart and still get it.