The Opium of the Intellectuals | Hacker News Reader

The Opium of the Intellectuals

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The mentioned "endemic anti-Americanism" of postwar France was very widespread. It was found among the SFIO and diverse left, of course, for evident reasons. But it was also a component of Gaullism, I think as a chafing at having to play on the team of new postwar Anglo-American order, which replaced the Anglo-French upon the latter's defeat in 1940. France had been shuffled down to maybe 4th or 5th place on the world stage, after the Four Policemen (US, UK, USSR, China). In any event that was a contributor to France's withdrawal from NATO's military command, which happened under de Gaulle.

In technological terms they had a fiercely independent attitude, coupled with strong state control (dirigisme), which led to a fascinating sort of parallel path of technological development. Instead of the military (ARPA) or private initiative (Bell), a lot of innovation came directly from conscious French governmental efforts. France had one of the highest rates of industrial espionage against the US during the Cold War - to the benefit of companies like Bull - but it was overlooked so as to keep them "inside the tent". They also invested heavily into domestic initiatives like Sophia Antipole and Minitel, which operated even into the 2010s.

Interesting history and background:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Aron

It appears that traditional marxism has been largely coopted by identity politics, as an intentional strategy by the corporate powers that be. This is why you see companies that are absolutely brutal towards labor virtue signal about trendy left-wing social issues.

Despite being deeply conservative, I see a lot of truth in Marx's analysis of the problems with modern financial capitalism. Paraphrasing Chesterton: right about what is wrong, wrong about what is right.

You’d be interested to hear, then, that most of Marx’s work is about analyzing capitalism and very little of it involves prescriptions for future societies. In fact, Marx wasn’t interested in drafting any exact plan for a post-revolutionary society. He was far more concerned with describing the internal contradictions of capitalism that would lead us to such a point.

> Marx wasn’t interested in drafting any exact plan for a post-revolutionary society.

And look what we got. Maybe that was the mistake.

Fellow conservative here. Teddy Roosevelt had a balanced take on capitalism vs the rights of workers in one of his famous speeches. It "failed" at the time, but a lot of the principles ended up catching on: http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/speeches/t...

(Love the Chesterton quote BTW)

If you're interested in a more modern and less French-centric take on this topic, Thomas Sowell's "Intellectuals and Society" is not bad:

https://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Society-Thomas-Sowell/d...

"Alexander Dolgun's story: An American in the Gulag" is another great book showing how brutal life can be.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Dolgun

"The Soviet Story" is a 2008 documentary film about Soviet Communism and Soviet-German collaboration before 1941. It highlights the Great Purge as well as the Great Famine, Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Katyn massacre, Gestapo–NKVD collaboration, Soviet mass deportations and medical experiments in the GULAG.

  https://youtu.be/iTJQXKUR6mM
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soviet_Story

I've not read The Opium of the Intellectuals, but was it talking about postwar French Marxism or Soviet Leninism/Stalinism?

Aron explodes the three "myths" of radical thought: the Left, the Revolution, and the Proletariat. Each of these ideas, Aron shows, are ideological, mystifying rather than illuminating. He also provides a fascinating sociology of intellectual life and a powerful critique of historical determinism in the classically restrained prose for which he is justly famous.

And yet people get so pissed off when I call out french post-modernism and critical theory as being uniquely Marxist. At least some on the right see the connection properly (though it's not like they get it right beyond that in most cases, e.g. Peterson)

But to be fair, it's not like those intellectuals are advocating for the authoritarian parts of Marxism. They're advocating for the egalitarian parts as well as his methodology. Marx was a good philosopher, and is certainly a fascinating thinker. Sartre absolutely believes that Marxism and Existentialism are the same thing (read his work search for a method if you don't believe me).

Maybe academics need to make it very clear that just because they dislike capitalism as its practiced doesn't mean that they should immediately run to what appears to be its opposite uncritically. Most left-wing academics just take dialectical materialism and the primacy of the dialectic method of achieving truth as being a given (though Plato/Socrates is responsible for the latter error not Marx). They don't even see how authoritarian that the dialectical method can be. It's why I realized that Paulo Freire was the opposite of liberatory despite trying to write a book "liberating education" (he reveals himself to be obsessed with Dialectics in Pedagogy of the Oppressed).

Yet, for all of the criticism I have of the Marxist method and praxis, I think that equating it to a religion is also incorrect. No one peddling critical theory seriously is going to tell you to believe in its dogma religiously. Though, they may give you worse grades on your papers if you do a bad job of calling out its authoritarian tendencies so maybe there is some truth to the analogy...

And since HN is getting on me for posting too fast (it's necessary to combat the rampant Philosophical disinfo going on), I'll respond here to the commentator whose slandering Kant as being some how similar to Marx and Hegel

Kant is the opposite of a Frankfurt school author and you are sorely mistaken for equating him with the likes of Hegel or Marx.

It sickens me to see how poorly Philosophy is understood even by HN readers. You'll find really quickly that Kant is actually one of the most enlightened scholars of all time (and certainly not even close to a Frankfurt school author) if you read even 5 pages of him! My god! Kant would most likely be horrified by any Marxist or Marx-decending authors works.

Your pseudo-intellectualism is painfully obvious here. French postmodernism (Foucault, Derrida) is very different from critical theory of the Frankfurt school. It’s a token sign of someone who hasn’t read any of them to lump them together.

The influence of Kantian ethics on Marx and Adorno’s philosophy is very strong. Kant was a genius but in many ways his morality was stuck in the worldview of 18th century bourgeois. These modern authors chose to update his work instead of simply repeating it as dogma. Ironic that you describe Marxism as a religion, then. No, Kant is not the “opposite” of a Frankfurt school philosopher, and you’d be hard pressed to find any reputable scholar who would agree with that. A better “opposite” might be someone more contemporary, like Austrian economists, Karl Popper, or logical positivists.

Also, why not reply to my post directly instead of I subtweeting me? You should probably read more before you accuse others of “philosophical disinfo.”

A more updated version would be that neoliberalism is the opiate of intellectuals. Much (but certainly not all) of Marxism has held up rather well in retrospect (especially teh critique of capitalism), especially in the conditions we face in 2020.

You'll always have people who support one set of ideas over another as long as there's enough ambiguity/uncertainty in critical factors to sway one way or another. Actually it seems to be even deeper than that (e.g. "flat earthers").

In this case, evidence that requires time to collect and events to play out are a realm of uncertainty and ambiguity are frequently played on when comparing capitalism to historic other systems we know "didn't work."

At the same time, you'll have many who understand that those levels of uncertainty and ambiguity can be gamed to their favor and will support which ever options of the uncertain benefit them the most, regardless of what they may believe to be true.

For some reason were so confident and or arrogant that we "have it right" while others have it wrong. Meanwhile, we look at macroscopic trends that are toxic and continue preaching dogma.

When we talk about the scale of economic systems and societies, there's a lot of uncertainty of how any axiomatic rules result in macroscopic/emergent behaviors that we see. It's so complex it's often incredibly difficult to look at macroscopic behaviors we dont want as a society and walk them back to first principles or lower order principles that causes the issue to fix them. For some reason though, it feels like as society we don't try to fix them or those who play on uncertainty and fear to their advantage seem to always win everyone over.

Capitalism is extremely good at a lot of optimization problems and squeezing out efficient solutions. The issue is that it has to be well constrained to optimize for what we want and not optimize for things we don't value as society. General health and well being seems to be one of those factors we're not optimizing well for.

> A more updated version would be that neoliberalism is the opiate of intellectuals.

The real opiate of the intellectuals is any system that gives you the belief that you've got things mostly figured out. Neo-liberalism definitely qualifies for some, but so does Marxism.

However, given the current state of things, there's probably more value to be had now from reading Marx than some venerable free market tract. Just don't let it go to your head.

This is the thesis of Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies." He argues, correctly I think, that you can find intellectual strands going back to Heraclitus and Plato which revolve around the idea of some "central force" or "law of history" that enables a thinker to predict the future. He says that the alternative and preferable society is a skeptical one that views history as a series of experiments and tries to infer what amount to rules of thumb rather than grand "world historical" theories or forces.

Oh sure, there's very serious problems with orthodox Marxism. It gets somewhat of a pass because all historical communist regimes have started far before capitalism had run its course (which even now it hasn't necessarily). However, the dictatorship of the proletariat is just something I cannot buy ever working out without the revolutionary vanguard just turning into the new masters.

This is a critique that left-anarchists have always had of Marxisms. However, Marxism also has a point that a complete economic overturning is impossible without force, necessitating a vanguard anyway. So, I don't think anyone can remotely say what comes after our economic system.

This is what I always wondered. Where does the claim to political legitimacy come from if force is required?

There's no such thing as political legitimacy, at least in terms of the philosophical concept existing in reality. Legitimacy in practice just means that there are not enough people opposed to a regime to take it down. It's just really a restatement of whether people have confidence that it won't collapse.

I think The Grand Scheme is the opiate of the intellectuals, and some regimes are friendlier to such schemes than others. If you have a set of top down rules that require your will to be imposed on others, a flatter hierarchy is a bug. A decentralized system like free market capitalism allows many tyrants to flourish, but petty ones in comparison. You want a central authoritarian who can materialize your wishes. Whether that authority is right or left wing is subsidiary. Marxism has just been a convenient vehicle for such schemes, as it has had considerable momentum, and its authoritarianism is somewhat cloaked.

The best antidote for this opiate is probably humility: the awareness that maybe, given the details on the ground, you don't have a one-size-fits-all solution that's better than what people chose for themselves. But many intellectuals seem to have unusual resistance to this medicine.

It's obvious you don't know anything about Marx because you are contrasting "top down rules" (allegedly communism) to a "decentralized" capitalism.

Even a cursory reading of Marx would dispel both mistakes.

In Marx's own time, he was one of the main people who split the workers movement between his own ideas (his form of Communism) and the anarchist ideas of Bakunin or of Proudhon. People saw the authoritarian prospects of his work in his own time. They all want the same thing - a world without hierarchy. Though it's a great irony that one method relies on hierarchies to try to achieve a "stateless, classless society"

Maybe that term "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" was a mistake. Stalin and Mao were proletarians, after all...

Even by this ill-informed left-com critique, Marx and Bukunin both share a vision of a stateless, classless society based on free association and a practical end to resource scarcity. Not "top down rules" as the original poster simplistically described.

As for "dictatorship", it's easy to find out for yourself that this state of society is massively more democratic than the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie we live under in capitalist democracies.

In Soviet Russia, the dictatorship of the proletariat (i.e. the period immediately after the October revolution, not the Stalinist bureaucracy) was obviously necessary to win the civil war against foreign-backed counter revolutionaries. If the Red army lost the civil war, Russia would have been ruled by the fascist Black Hundreds.

It’s sad how it’s acceptable amongst Marxist fans that a no true Scotsman is a valid response.

If all it takes is “a cursory reading”, then you should certainly be able to provide a short summary and enlighten the capitalist slaves.

"no true scottsman" is irrelevant at the level of the philosophy of Marx/Engels. Communism is a stateless, classless society where mass productive capacity allows for the maxim "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" can prevail. Such a society has never existed, and the so-called communist governments of the USSR and CCP bear no resemblance to it. If you want to criticize Marx, you have to actually criticize his ideas, not some paper-thin kindergarten response that misunderstands both Marxism and Capitalism.

It should be obvious that Capitalism is not a "decentralized" system. It is consolidated in the firm through monopoly, it is consolidated in the state via coercive bodies like the military and the police, and it is consolidated in finance which to a large extent plans the international economy. The Ron Paul idea of competitive free markets has never been real, and capitalists themselves would be the first to destroy it.

>It is consolidated in the firm through monopoly

Monopolies are not a stable state without an interventionist government to keep out new market entrants.

> is consolidated in finance which to a large extent plans the international economy

This is a senseless statement because “finance” itself is a market of people willing to invest in various instruments. The exchange rate between two floating currencies (i.e. the international economy) is dictated by the supply and demand of those currencies on the open forex market. This is pretty far from “consolidated”.

> I think The Grand Scheme is the opiate of the intellectuals, and some regimes are friendlier to such schemes than others. If you have a set of top down rules that require your will to be imposed on others, a flatter hierarchy is a bug. A decentralized system like free market capitalism...

IMHO, free market capitalism pretty clearly counts as a "Grand Scheme." It's basically a program of totally imposing the market idea on society, to usurp and replace as much of society's other ideas and institutions as possible. IIRC, the market also requires an initial program of coercion to get started, to force workers to participate in the market to avoid starvation and other deprivations.

Sorry but why was this posted here? This is Hacker news not the national review.

It's awesome to see criticisms of Marxism on the one hand attack its rigid dogmatism, and on the other hand attack its vague, mystical dialectics.

I've been a marxist for 10 years and it's extremely rare to see a criticism of Marx that accurately describes the ideas of scientific socialism. Probably the best is Dr Shapiro from Yale: https://youtu.be/s6MOA_Y3MKE

Even he professes to have discoved "fatal" flaws in Marx which I don't think are actually fatal, and maybe don't even agree with. But overall he at least gives an honest, and critical account. He practically stands alone in this regard.

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