And quite frankly I have not time for Baudrillardian language or ‘theory’, given that not only his the theory of signs his thought is based literally incoherent, but his book on Marx displays page after page, paragraph after paragraph, sentence after sentence of misunderstanding of Marxism.
You can pick up a book by Guattari and fine basic logical fallacies on every other page. It’s a disagrace honestly that these bodies of post-structural thought that display such ignorance of Marxism and science (like I’m sorry but if you pick of Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Irigay, Latour or even Foucault, they actually have very little to say of deep theoretical and historical importance on the nature of science) are commonly suggested as the ‘must-read’ philosophical texts of our time to young leftists, when they could be reading far more grounded, analytical (including Marxist) works of philosophy, history, economics, sociology, anthropology etc.
As for Foucault, well we can see the useless theoretical and practical impasse his thought leads to in Negri and Hardt’s work, where vague, unclear theoretical fusions between the concept of ‘proletariat’ and that of ‘biopower’ lead to concepts of practice that were only really of influence during the 2000s, during the nadir of modern leftism, when the western left’s practice became deeply influenced by these anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist theorists promoting new, nonsensical theories of spontaneous revolt by no longer opposing the processes of capitalism, but by inserting ourselves within them in a way that does not imply creating new alternative, ‘bureacratic’ institutions like that of the party. It also isn’t a coincidence that these come out of the Operaismo tradition of modern Italian ‘Marxism’, which came out of a pre-neoliberal alienation from classical and leninist marxism and burrowed a huge amount of ideas of spontaneity and voluntarism from Italian anarchism, and has consistently failed not only to from lasting movements labor, rejects party structures, but whose intellectual work is also far weaker than other traditions of Marxism. Ofc, they are not actually giving more theoretical understanding to the topic, in fact they are literally changing the meaning of the term ‘proletariat’, and so talking about something else, saying that the new definition is more useful. I won’t go into it but their work is actually contradictory and so incoherent. I’m bringing this up because this is the kind of failure to understand how to responsible scientific theoretical thought and concept use is supposed to be applied, especially in revolutionary ways, that has alienated so many intelligent young people from Marxism as a tradition. If you go into most, say, history, sociology or anthropology departments today, you will hear people talk in pseudo-emancipated language about how women had ‘agency’ (rarely carefully defined) in marriage contracts in medieval Hungary or in the media industry of modern Saudi Arabia, along with alot of other fetishistic bullshit that could only be concocted by overeducated bourgeois, but if you say you are a Marxist, you will almost certainly be treated with disdain, contempt and smirks. Why do bourgeois liberals embrace Foucault et al., but viciously reject any attempt to be explicitly Marxist? You can normally only get into a history department these days if you are very lucky and find a Marxist professor who is already there and willing to be your supervisor.
But, at the end of the day, there is little explanatory utility or validity to the concept of biopower, and it’s main effect on thought has been to allow a cottage industry within academia to develop around it, so that petit-bourgeois people can intellectual masturbate for 3-4 years and then get a job at a corporate law firm. In practice, to turn people away from, and defang, the only body of thought that has actually posed a real threat to capitalism in the modern world: Communism/Marxism.
If you want to read actual Marxists explain in more detail why the post-structural turns were intellectual embarassment, both Lefevre (in his writings on structuralism) and Perry Anderson (in Traces of Wester Marxism) do good jobs. Poststructural thought was, literally, positively perceived by the CIA as an intellectual development in Europe, specifically France, which would undermine the legitimacy of Marxism, and indeed, that is precisely how many of these thinkers understood what they were doing.
But I also think (as someone who has read and studied this stuff) that it’s really irresponsible for self-proclaiming Marxists to suggest to people that they should go waste years of their lives reading these people, given that that this literally how much time you will need if you really want to study and digest what they read, and given that the level of genuine, grounded enlightenment about your world or about politics will be limited if any. In fact the result is normally negative, in that it reduces many peoples intellectual relationship to the world to one in which there is only discourse and abstract systems of signs (in Baudrillard and several others, including to a lesser extent in Lacan or Althusser, although these are strictly speaking structuralists). As Anderson points out, this explains why in practice this amounts to idealism. The reason these thinkers are popular amongst modern self-described leftists is because the latter are deeply susceptible to idealism, ultraleftism and anarchism in the current era of capitalism, although it is clear that over the last few years that there has been something of an alienation from this especially amongst young adult leftists and increased interest in Marxism and Communism, given the impasses the people in those lines of thought tend to fall into (e.g. out cult in our squat paid for by the bougie parents of two of our fellow activists has exploded for the 20th time because everyone was fucking each other, smoking weed and we don’t have any relation to real workers or working places or labor movements). I think it’s very sad that this is what people think of when they think of 20th century French intellectual life, when there was the school of Historical Epistemology (Bachlard, Cavaillès, Canguillem, Desanti, etc.) as well as the Annales school of historians (especially Bloch and Duby), along with Marxist thinkers like Badiou and Lefevre.
And quite frankly I have not time for Baudrillardian language or ‘theory’, given that not only his the theory of signs his thought is based literally incoherent, but his book on Marx displays page after page, paragraph after paragraph, sentence after sentence of misunderstanding of Marxism.
You can pick up a book by Guattari and fine basic logical fallacies on every other page. It’s a disagrace honestly that these bodies of post-structural thought that display such ignorance of Marxism and science (like I’m sorry but if you pick of Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Irigay, Latour or even Foucault, they actually have very little to say of deep theoretical and historical importance on the nature of science) are commonly suggested as the ‘must-read’ philosophical texts of our time to young leftists, when they could be reading far more grounded, analytical (including Marxist) works of philosophy, history, economics, sociology, anthropology etc.
As for Foucault, well we can see the useless theoretical and practical impasse his thought leads to in Negri and Hardt’s work, where vague, unclear theoretical fusions between the concept of ‘proletariat’ and that of ‘biopower’ lead to concepts of practice that were only really of influence during the 2000s, during the nadir of modern leftism, when the western left’s practice became deeply influenced by these anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist theorists promoting new, nonsensical theories of spontaneous revolt by no longer opposing the processes of capitalism, but by inserting ourselves within them in a way that does not imply creating new alternative, ‘bureacratic’ institutions like that of the party. It also isn’t a coincidence that these come out of the Operaismo tradition of modern Italian ‘Marxism’, which came out of a pre-neoliberal alienation from classical and leninist marxism and burrowed a huge amount of ideas of spontaneity and voluntarism from Italian anarchism, and has consistently failed not only to from lasting movements labor, rejects party structures, but whose intellectual work is also far weaker than other traditions of Marxism. Ofc, they are not actually giving more theoretical understanding to the topic, in fact they are literally changing the meaning of the term ‘proletariat’, and so talking about something else, saying that the new definition is more useful. I won’t go into it but their work is actually contradictory and so incoherent. I’m bringing this up because this is the kind of failure to understand how to responsible scientific theoretical thought and concept use is supposed to be applied, especially in revolutionary ways, that has alienated so many intelligent young people from Marxism as a tradition. If you go into most, say, history, sociology or anthropology departments today, you will hear people talk in pseudo-emancipated language about how women had ‘agency’ (rarely carefully defined) in marriage contracts in medieval Hungary or in the media industry of modern Saudi Arabia, along with alot of other fetishistic bullshit that could only be concocted by overeducated bourgeois, but if you say you are a Marxist, you will almost certainly be treated with disdain, contempt and smirks. Why do bourgeois liberals embrace Foucault et al., but viciously reject any attempt to be explicitly Marxist? You can normally only get into a history department these days if you are very lucky and find a Marxist professor who is already there and willing to be your supervisor.
But, at the end of the day, there is little explanatory utility or validity to the concept of biopower, and it’s main effect on thought has been to allow a cottage industry within academia to develop around it, so that petit-bourgeois people can intellectual masturbate for 3-4 years and then get a job at a corporate law firm. In practice, to turn people away from, and defang, the only body of thought that has actually posed a real threat to capitalism in the modern world: Communism/Marxism.
If you want to read actual Marxists explain in more detail why the post-structural turns were intellectual embarassment, both Lefevre (in his writings on structuralism) and Perry Anderson (in Traces of Wester Marxism) do good jobs. Poststructural thought was, literally, positively perceived by the CIA as an intellectual development in Europe, specifically France, which would undermine the legitimacy of Marxism, and indeed, that is precisely how many of these thinkers understood what they were doing.
But I also think (as someone who has read and studied this stuff) that it’s really irresponsible for self-proclaiming Marxists to suggest to people that they should go waste years of their lives reading these people, given that that this literally how much time you will need if you really want to study and digest what they read, and given that the level of genuine, grounded enlightenment about your world or about politics will be limited if any. In fact the result is normally negative, in that it reduces many peoples intellectual relationship to the world to one in which there is only discourse and abstract systems of signs (in Baudrillard and several others, including to a lesser extent in Lacan or Althusser, although these are strictly speaking structuralists). As Anderson points out, this explains why in practice this amounts to idealism. The reason these thinkers are popular amongst modern self-described leftists is because the latter are deeply susceptible to idealism, ultraleftism and anarchism in the current era of capitalism, although it is clear that over the last few years that there has been something of an alienation from this especially amongst young adult leftists and increased interest in Marxism and Communism, given the impasses the people in those lines of thought tend to fall into (e.g. out cult in our squat paid for by the bougie parents of two of our fellow activists has exploded for the 20th time because everyone was fucking each other, smoking weed and we don’t have any relation to real workers or working places or labor movements). I think it’s very sad that this is what people think of when they think of 20th century French intellectual life, when there was the school of Historical Epistemology (Bachlard, Cavaillès, Canguillem, Desanti, etc.) as well as the Annales school of historians (especially Bloch and Duby), along with Marxist thinkers like Badiou and Lefevre.