/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

History shows that Western Marxists, including Sartre, could not refute the core ideology of Marxism because the Soviet Union appeared to prove it correct. Instead, they focused their attacks on the mistakes of individual leaders. This distinction caused the split between Western and Eastern Marxism. To understand the origins of this humanism, you must look back to Lukács in the 1920s.

heidegger destroyed sartre in his letter on humanism, those are my thoughts on existentialism

>>2658171
wasn't this dude like a nazi

>>2658171
What did he say ?

>>2658170
>could not refute the core ideology of Marxism because the Soviet Union appeared to prove it correct
What are you talking about here ? That economics determine everything ?

>>2658176
…

>>2658176
>>2658183
And…?

>>2658170
Existentialist anti-humanism is a thing. And the USSR was a theocratic eschatological authoritarian project proven "wrong" in 1991.
>>2658159
>midwit philosophy that reduces everything to human agency.
As opposed to what? Some divine Other? Fatalistic eschatology?

One of the central flaws of "Marxism-Leninism" (and "Soviet Communism" by extension) is the denial of agency or choice. Including the assumption that Workers will naturally turn into revolutionary communists upon familiarizing themselves with the gospel of ML, instead of recognizing they might reject it regardless.

Proles are naturally drawn to communism. It's simply an innate interest they supposedly have, except when they don't at which point supposed materialists fall back on notions of "false consciousness".
But why is it false consciousness to not care about this revolutionary eschatology (especially if they already share a different faith), or desire to be "rich" instead? What drives this class consciousness? Why is the desire of the patriarchal racist misogynist worker to have an obedient subservient wife and only live in a community surrounded by "his" people (regardless if they're 'bourgeois') "false", but not that of the revolutionary communist who believes in the Revolution (as eschaton) and is willing to kill his fellow "reactionary" workers for the sake of this?

Both are choices. Choice here is not meant in the deterministic vs indeterministic sense, but in that we 'own' our choices. They may be socially informed and the product of upbringing and culture generally. And we may be aware of this or not to various extends. But you can't abdicate moral authority over your own actions by pretending someone - be it The People, God, Nature, Revolution - is forcing you to. Whether it is a pogrom or a revolution. Unless you're a theist (like MLs).

There's many other issues with ML and Marxism generally. (Among them not understanding the difference between ethics, teleology and science) But this is one of the most glaring.

sartre was a communist who supported the soviet union

>>2658229
>can't abdicate moral authority over your own actions by pretending someone - be it The People, God, Nature, Revolution - is forcing you to. Whether it is a pogrom or a revolution. Unless you're a theist (like MLs).
thank you for proving once again anti ML people are just complete dumbfucks

>>2658250
Amazing arguments.
Anyway consider this: Is it possible to be a communist without knowing anything about Marx or Lenin and having never read their books?
And two, is it possible to have read and understood Marx, Lenin and other "Marxists" as a prole and reject ML and communism regardless?

>>2658159
Sarte was a pedophile rapist along with his "partner" Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre supported legalization of pedophilia in France and signed a petition for the abolition of the age of consent.

>>2658254
thats not the retarded part of your post, calling them theist and the USSR "theocratic" is the retarded part

>>2658264
Calling it the People or the Proletariat whilst denying (individual) workers have any choice in the matter doesn't make it less theistic, and calling it the (world) Revolution instead of judgement day doesn't make it any less eschatological.
ML and "Soviet communism" has been structured like a religion from the beginning. It has its clergy and gospel, it's deity and apocalypse, its saints and heresies, its sins and martyrs.

Note how people will drone on about scientific marxism, the primacy of the class struggle and conflict as driver of history, but when it comes to 1991 it's the supposed product of evil outsiders (or corrupted insiders) and proves nothing.

>>2658285
I used to think the same thing then I realized that line of thought is just formalistic autism

>>2658229
OK he's cooking

>>2658299
The motivations behind it don't make it less religious either. ML aims to fill the void left by the moral and theoretical bankruptcy of pre-existing organized religion (chiefly Christianity in the "western" world), whilst realizing its promise of paradise - on Earth. (Communism as the transcendant eschaton that will end all conflict and suffering)
The fanaticism (and disillusionment when predictions fail), the diatribes against the latest heresies and obsession with adherence to scripture, the veneration of martyrdom, the insistence that Communism will come about if only people "believe" and spread the gospel. It's all very religious.

There's never going to be a revolution that will absolve us of having to make choices or will rule out the possibility of disagreement. We aren't going to be able to transcend our own moral culpability and responsibility for our actions. And we're not going to be able to rule out the formation of new classes and class relations because these precede both the commodity form and capital.

>>2658229
Avenge Communism. We cannot achieve it so we will destroy the very world that denies it!

>>2658331
Not if we make a giant super cult! The whole world is filled with cults, anti-religious included why not fight for a better cult

>>2658331
the formal (structural) similarities dont justify calling the USSR theocratic and ML "theist", you are abusing language
>moral culpability and responsibility for our actions
no thanks im not a christian

>>2658391
As explained it goes beyond shallow structural similarities. Denying Communism as something that must be pursued as a choice regardless of whether one is a prole or familiar with Marxism, or pretending one is acting on behalf of the "Proletariat" is theistic and fatalistic. Communism is about what Communists want, not workers.
>Christian
Accepting moral responsibility is the opposite of theism ("God demands it"). Appeals to (human) nature, tradition, the people, are all forms of theism and abdication of moral authority.

Sartre was a literal cμck and his entire "philosophy" (I use the word loosely here) rests on reaffirming the existence of free will; a poorly defined, illogical, irrational, proovably false concept tainted with religious mysticism. Existentialism isn't a real philosophical movement, it is just a loosely correlated set of 20th century franco-germanic writings that groups together widely incoherent and incompatible thoughts, then they forcibly tried to ascertain their lineage as coming from Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky because they couldn't admit they were just writing knock-off footnotes on Nietzsche's work on genealogy.

>>2658439
>rests on reaffirming the existence of free will
Pseud hours. It has very little to do with indeterminism.

>>2658455
I wasted literal hours of my life being forced to read the retarded bullshit that Sartre wrote. "Free will" is literally the core concept he builds his entire "philosophy" upon. It is there, in his books. You know those things that you open and they have pages and words inside of them? Maybe you have heard of them at some point, try reading one of them sometime.

>>2658470
The will is irrational. But it or freedom do not require indeterminism. Which would preclude our ability to be responsible for our choices at all.
We're condemned to be free, and to decide. Regardless of what informs those decisions. And then accept responsibility for the outcomes.

The theist by invoking some Other as having decided for them, denies both responsibility for choice and the outcome. (I.e. the religious fanatic who commits the latest atrocity in the name of their God)
I know this nuance appears esoteric to some. But it makes the difference between whether there can be ethics or freedom at all, or not. (And yes both ML and Marxism generally also make ethical claims and invoke freedom)

>>2658159
sartre was an artist and a philosopher, who gives a fuck about his "thoughts" on marx or communism lmao

>>2658507
His own books include a well articulated explanation of why free will doesn't exist; he calls it 'facticity'. The universe is a causal system, a human is a part of the causal chain, and each prior determines the next state of being. One doesn't chose the circumstances of their birth. Free will is a meaningless, nebulous concept; an artifact of folk psychology that abstracts away the underlying physical causality of action and "choice".

The mechanism that Sartre uses to try and deny the nonexistance of free will is cartesian dualism. And it is painfully, painfully stupid and infuriating reading him try to rationalize that.

The only reason modern people believe free will is a meaningful concept is because it does so much work within our religious mythology. "Free will" is exactly the nebulous concept that was invented to rationalize the idea that the abrahamic god is somehow both omnipotent and omniscient and yet not responsible for the actions of the beings he was fully responsible for creating. Sartre's "existentialism" is a ghost of the very abrahamic religious beliefs he supposedly rejects.

>>2658541
>The mechanism that Sartre uses to try and deny the nonexistance of free will is cartesian dualism. And it is painfully, painfully stupid and infuriating reading him try to rationalize that.
My good friend, can you elaborate on this? I don't want to read his books.

>>2658541
How do you (assuming you're the same anon) go from recognizing why Existentialism (as set out by Sartre) invalidates and rejects 'Free Will'' (as indeterminism) - which I agree with, whilst still asserting it is a ghost of Abrahamic religion?
The way I see it Existentialism is the product of rejecting theism and various religious narratives. And while I remember Sartre identifying with humanism, I feel if you extend many of the Existentialist ideas both by him and others, it also leads to a rejection of humanism, or at least invoking humanity itself as yet another "god". Which is about the only reason I can think of why some might see Sartre's existentialism as a ghost of abrahamic religion.

>>2658436
>Accepting moral responsibility is the opposite of theism
you can keep trying to theorywash your liberalism and christianity with phenomenology all you want, materialists will see through it

>>2658625
Don't see how that quote is relevant. Do you even understand what I'm on about, and why theism and assuming moral authority are opposites? And why it is relevant in regards to ML?
Not exactly dispelling stereotypes about being scholastic scripture obsessed clergy too btw

>>2658586
He explains it somewhere in the later half of Being and Nothingness. It's difficult for me to find the exact quote or section, so I'm gonna try and explain from memory (it's probably going to be a lot less articulate and well-explained, I admit).

Sartre defines facticity as the entire set of things that make you who you are and that you never had any say over. Your name, your nationality, your sex, your race, your parents, your genetics, your place of residence, the socioeconomic strata that you start life from, etc… The immense set of prior conditions that we start life from and that we have zero control over. Literally everything that makes you, well… you.

Basically, you already start out life with everything that's necessary to explain every action you're ever going to take during your life. It's all mechanistic, determined. There's nowhere for you to inject a magical property called "free will" to explain why you acted a certain way rather than another; if we were able to break everything down to it's true causal layer we would be talking about brain chemistry and how the particular way you developed while you were still inside your mother's uterus defines the types of behavior you have today.

It's very similar to the types of arguments someone like Robert Sapolsky or Sam Harris would make, but frankly Sartre made the argument even more eloquently and clearly than them.

You could basically sum it with that quote from Schopenhauer: "Man can do as he will, but he can't will as he will."

>>2658618
You misunderstand. Sartre FIRST presents an extremely convincing, rational, and irrefutable argument for why free will DOESN'T exist and THEN he constructs a cartesian counter-argument to try and affirm that it actually DOES exist based purely on a purely subjective, phenomenology-based assertion that could be basically summarized as "but I actually feel like I'm free".

>>2658229
>the denial of agency or choice
It doesn't. This is anti-marxism dogma that has spread around for a while now but that's not substantiated by any of Marx's writings.
What Marx did believe in was that one's consciousness was derived from his environment. However, this is because there needs to be a starting "consciousness" before being able to be self-aware of this self-consciousness. Similarly, if you want to learn another language, you must first be able to speak yours. This doesn't mean that the person can't be free or have autonomy, it simply means that this person will at some point construct his consciousness from what he has around him, aka, his environment/nature.

>False consciousness
False consciousness refers to proles thinking that capitalism is "natural", or conceiving of their state as something that was decided upon by god. It's "false" because it's quite literally constructed from "false" facts. Thinking that your boss has an innate right granted by God to make you obey is constructed from "false" facts, hence leading to a "false consciousness".

>why is racism/patriarchy etc false ?
Mhmm I sure wonder… Could it be that we have an abundance of literatture that has determined that these are pseudo-scientific theories based on erroneous theories ?
You're also mistaking something as being a desire (i.e. I want this), with something being justified (i.e. My wife should be submissive because it's in her nature). The notion of false consciousness refers to the second one.

>le revolutionary communist
It can be. If you think that by doing mass killing you will succeed in making a utopia, you are in effect developing a false consciousness (false information leading to false desires).

>we 'own' our choices
It's midwit time…
Yes, we own them, to the extent that we perform these consciously. This is already a strong rebutal to Sartre by Merleau-Ponty, because freedom is inherently situated and not complete.
Nonetheless, marxism doesn't deny this. Individuals shape their environment. This is exactly what I referred to in my OP. It's pure strawman bs. Read Marx before commenting next time.

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past"

>But this is one of the most glaring
>erm my strawman perfectly contradicts your own argument so I must be right !!!


To answer your original question, as opposed to well constructed phenomenology and theory of history and conflicts. I'm surprised Sartre was taken this seriously.

>>2658254
>Is it possible to be a communist without knowing anything about Marx or Lenin and having never read their books?
You can be communist without knowing about Marx. You can't be a marxist without knowing about Marx's theories.

>is it possible to have read and understood Marx, Lenin and other "Marxists" as a prole and reject ML and communism regardless
Yes. Marxism is a method to analyze past and present societies. It is not a deterministic science that believes that communism MUST happen. You can adhere to the marxist method and reject communism.

>>2658331
>believing in something to improve the world is religious
Lmfao topkek holy cope. Let me guess, you're going to argue that Marx inherently says that the end justifies the means ?

>[class] precedes both the commodity form and capital.
You can't have specialized "class" without surplus

>>2658436
>Denying Communism as something that must be pursued as a choice
Retarded and fake strawman. Just read the book, or ask ChatGPT even. Marx never says that there is a divine mission to establish communism.



overall, 4/10 bait

>>2658159
>>2658159
I did give it a casual read look like peak garbage made up to confuse people in the 1800s. Schizo garbage. Also he looks like a deformed mutant monster.

>>2658507
>>2658541
>>2658671
For the record, on a material level, the universe is non-deterministic. We cannot say with absolute certainty how fundamental particles behave, only the upper and lower bounds of what they might do. Any philosophy that asserts determinism is fundamentally wrong.

>>2658675
I think you misunderstand my point about false consciousness. Yes maybe both the revolutionary fanatic and the patriarchal racist are (pretend) acting on false information, but why is one more false than the other? The main shared element here is that both are are acting in bad faith, if one is invoking god and nature, and the other is invoking the People, the Proletariat or the Revolution. Whether "science" or "the facts" claim to support one or the other is irrelevant. Neither in this case are "owning" their stances. Both are abdicating responsibility to some Other.

I'm not disagreeing with the idea that ones "consciousness" is derived from their environment, upbringing and so on. I'm disagreeing with the idea there is something as an innate class interest at all. There there is something like an "innate" "true" proletarian consciousness which innately aligns with communism.
Communism as a movement has had the offspring of capitalists and aristocrats join its ranks. It's also had to face workers who fought it on the side of the reaction.
So who is the subject of Communism? It's not proles; it's other Communists. Communists will communism, not workers. But putting it like this dispels the notion of class struggle defining history and culminating in the overcoming of capitalism by a revolutionary proletarian vanguard. This is not a position that can be reconciled with 'orthodox' Marxism-Leninism.

>Merleau-Ponty
I will have to check him out, I'm not familiar with his arguments. The quote you posted by Marx isn't necessarily in disagreement with what Sartre wrote either.
Note that original post was in regards to ML and the Soviet experiment, not Marx and Marxism in itself.

And ML goes beyond aiming to "improve the world a little". Otherwise it's adherents wouldn't spend so much time shitting on "socdems" now would they?
On the subject of class preceding the commodity form, capital and (yes) surplus I recommend reading The Dawn of Everything.

>read the book
Which?

>>2658706
I don't think we can state with certainty the universe and (certain parts of) particle physics are nondeterministic either. But as far as ethical claims go, asserting responsibility does require a degree of deterministic causal relations between actions and outcomes.

>>2658706
>For the record, on a material level, the universe is non-deterministic. We cannot say with absolute certainty how fundamental particles behave, only the upper and lower bounds of what they might do. Any philosophy that asserts determinism is fundamentally wrong.
You're probably referring to the heisenberg uncertainty principle. You're probably confused due to the different meanings of determinism in a philosophical and physical sense, but It doesn't actually imply what you believe it implies here. Quantum mechanics are still fully causal in nature and deterministic in the philosophical sense (everything necessarily evolves probabilitically and in accordance to the schrodinger equation); it doesn't create any magical room for 'free will'. There are several didactic videos that you can find online from people like Sean Carroll and Sabine Hossenfelder explaining how quantum mechanics doesn't rescue the concept of free will.

>>2658747
>why is one more false than the other?
Depends on the extent of which their consciousness is predicated upon. If one is built on more fake facts than the other than you have your answer.

> I'm disagreeing with the idea there is something as an innate class interest at all.
Class interest is merely the extension of personal interest. Marxists will say that this is reductive, which it is, but that's what it ultimatly is.

>there is something like an "innate" "true" proletarian consciousness which innately aligns with communism
No there's not. Communism is better for the proles because they aren't alienated. This doesn't mean that they don't prefer inaction rather than risk a revolution, or that they must believe that communism is better, but simply that communism is in the interests of proles going by the typical suffering that they go by.
Now, you can indeed say that a worker will prefer instability, relative poverty, immiseration, joblessness, and alienation. After all, these are personal preferences ultimatly… But realistically, the average worker doesn't. Furthermore I'd even argue that it is precisely because there's been many advances in social security that the proletariat has not revolted and has prefered political stability rather than revolution.
So, it's not that the proletariat must tend towards communism, which absolves any act done by communists, but rather that the proletariat has an interest in abolishing the class division, just like the bourgeoisie has an interest in maintaining capitalism.

>it's other Communists
Indeed. The people who shape history are the people who shape it.

>this dispels the notion of class struggle defining history and culminating in the overcoming of capitalism by a revolutionary proletarian vanguard.
History has indeed been that of class struggle. Capitalism, when it has been overturned, has also been the result of a vanguard party (most of the time). These statements are empirically correct.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong but I sense that you percieve marxism as : "history must progress and the means justify the end because history will vindicate the acts". If this is the case, Marx doesn't say that.
The vanguard party isn't vindicated by history for doing anything. It is their responsability if they commit x or y act, or if they fail the revolution. The idea of a vanguard party only serves to educate and make aware the proletariat of their condition, and to organize the revolution to succeed in abolishing capitalism. This isn't justified by an external force such as God or History, it is only a specific group acting for a group's interest. There is no ontologic difference between counter-revolutionaries and revolutionaries in the end.

>I'm not familiar with his arguments
He argued that freedom was situated, and not absolute. In other words, that that freedom is always situated within a world that both enables and constrains it, and that our actions are shaped by our social existence.

>Note that original post was in regards to ML and the Soviet experiment, not Marx and Marxism in itself
You overestimate the difference between both, unless you're specifically talking about Stalinism.

>Which?
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, for Marx's view of history
The German Ideology, on Feuerbach has some insights but I don't if it'll be worth reading just for that.

>>2658754
I didn't mean to suggest that indeterminism implied free will, because it doesn't, just that history is not on an exact, set, predetermined path where the same factors will always lead to the same outcome.

>>2658159
Sartre was a stalinist though

>>2658229
Mods permaban this person.

Stalinism is voluntarist. Sartre is a voluntarist too.

>>2659190
Big mad because you can't disprove his thesis so just hope and prayers jannies do it for you and punish him for thinking different to you
Which isn't hard because you don't think. Is that because of your environment entirely and material conditions or do you choose to be a stupid cunt? Hmmmmm. This one requires the especially Sartre pipe tobacco.