/lit/ - Literature

Pessimistic communism is a pretty defensible position. I can think that Marxist socioeconomic critique is correct without hoping that the self-abolition of the proletariat will ever actually happen. I think that important movements could happen in the third world, but I'm too cowed by the expert ability of western governments to appropriate and kill radical ideas.

In any case, only a complete retard would deny the great strides in labour rights and political freedoms made as a direct result of the socialist movement. Early USSR was the most progressive state in history, and the unionizing efforts it caused benefitted the material interests of any wage worker in the west. The New Deal was a compromise to hold off communists giving the US burgeoisie a much worse deal. Also, I'm from ex-Yugoslavia and the anti-communist propaganda slides off of me like water, I'd trust my family's experiences far more than some neoliberal puppet today. The proles had an objectively better condition and a better culture.

>>10702084
He doesn't eviscerate anyone lol, he's just spouting shit without responding to any arguments. This is even more disappointing given Chomsky always whines about "muh evidence" and people who blindly criticise him, but it's exactly what he does here. He obviously doesn't care about the continental tradition and has to tout his anglo empiricist cred, nothing new from that camp.
I've never seen an influential continental thinker make sweeping generalizations about Anglo philosophy being shit, but the reverse happens all the time. That says enough about their intellectual integrity in my view.

Žižek's response here was very good:
>https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1365-some-bewildered-clarifications-a-response-to-noam-chomsky-by-slavoj-zizek
>But I think that that the differences in our political positions are so minimal that they cannot really account for the thoroughly dismissive tone of Chomsky’s attack on me. Our conflict is really about something else—it is simply a new chapter in the endless gigantomachy between so-called continental philosophy and the Anglo-Saxon empiricist tradition. There is nothing specific in Chomsky’s critique—the same accusations of irrationality, of empty posturing, of playing with fancy words, were heard hundreds of times against Hegel, against Heidegger, against Derrida, etc. What stands out is only the blind brutality of his dismissal—here is how he replies when, back in his December 2012 interview with Veterans Unplugged , he was asked about the ideas of Lacan, Derrida, and me: [interview quote]
> And he goes on and on in the same vein, repeating how he doesn’t see anything to what I’m saying, how he cannot discern in my texts any traces of rational examination of facts, how my work displays empty posturing not to be taken seriously, etc. A weird statement, measured by his professed standards of respect for empirical facts and rational argumentation: there are no citations (which, in this case, can be excused, since we are dealing with a radio interview), but also not even the vaguest mentions of any of my ideas. Did he decode any of my "fancy words" and indicate how what one gets is "something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old"? There are no political references in his first attack (and in this domain, as far as I can see, I much more often than not agree with him). I did a couple of short political books on 9/11 ( Welcome to the Desert of the Real ), on the war in Iraq ( Iraq: the Borrowed Kettle), on the 2008 financial meltdown ( First as Tragedy, then as Farce), which appear to me written in a quite accessible way and dealing with quite a lot of facts—do they also contain nothing but empty posturing? In short, is Chomsky in his thorough dismissal of my work not doing exactly what he is accusing me of: clinging to the empty posture of total rejection with no further ado?

I love living in a world where analysis based on economic class interests is thrown away in favor of theories about hidden racial agendas embedded in entire civilizations based on their ancestry. This is a real political argument that the current youth is engaged in.

I'd genuinely like to get into analytic philosophy but its whole approach seems fucking retarded to me. Anyone familiar with the history of philosophy should be aware of the historical and social situatedness that influence philosophical inquiry, yet analytics seem to live in the illusion that philosophical positions can be neutrally examined and judged by the standards of formal logic. Similarly, they redefine the field of philosophy to suit their own interests, leading to the bizzare proclamations that Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger and other "continental" giants aren't actually doing philosophy since they're not commited to analysing concepts in a way reconcilable with anglo thought. This leads to even more radical specialization of academia, since if your interests lie in wide-ranging intellectual developments you can't be an analytic philosopher. Of course, interpretations of Aristotle have been accepted as valid analytic philosophy even though his thought is hardly compatible with their approach, while any thinker that stinks of Hegelianism is just writing poetry or something.

So, the main point of analytic philosophy appears to be rigorous defining of various positions that arise on a
philosophical question - usually revolving around language, with anything going beyond those limits dismissed as nonsense.

>think I transcended the desire to social validation
>stutter and look like a retard every time I talk to someone

>tfw you study philosophy in uni but figure out you were only really interested in the history of philosophy

Is there anything worthwhile in the analytic tradition that doesn't ignore Hegel, Marx, Althusser, Heidegger and basically every notable continental thinker that triggers Anglos?