Batshevik ☭🔻

We all know the “three sources & component parts” of Marxism, but I’d argue that there is a fourth. That being the natural sciences, which Marx and Engels always made a concerted effort to engage with. You can argue all day about their success, but if reality isn’t dualistic, neither are dialectics

That I’m one of the first really revolutionary-minded marxists to actually latch onto enactive cognition, which cites Hegel and various marxists on the regular, is a huge condemnation of our theoretical and philosophical groundings. Why spend another year rehashing old western marxist beefs?

judging by some of the papers on realism that I’m seeing in enactive circles, it would probably do them a lot of good to read “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” and replace the occasional word or phrase with something appropriately sensorimotor-ish.

My thing with anti-humanist Marxism is that it claims to be the “science” Marxism is supposed to be in opposition to humanism, and yet in light 21st century science on the topic of cognition, its claim to scientific accuracy is unsustainable. Enactive cognition ensures that.

That I’ve seen someone who I consider generally pretty intelligent call Ilyenkov a “humanist” as an insult more or less confirms my suspicion. There are unexamined epistemological presuppositions here. Talk about needing a symptomatic reading.

My thing with anti-humanist Marxism is that it claims to be the “science” Marxism is supposed to be in opposition to humanism, and yet in light 21st century science on the topic of cognition, its claim to scientific accuracy is unsustainable. Enactive cognition ensures that.

It becomes clear, when performing that thought experiment, that Marx’s critique of political economy would be self-contradictory without an enactive and deeply historical view of humans and their capacity for labor. The very view anti-humanism calls unscientific and humanist.

My thing with anti-humanist Marxism is that it claims to be the “science” Marxism is supposed to be in opposition to humanism, and yet in light 21st century science on the topic of cognition, its claim to scientific accuracy is unsustainable. Enactive cognition ensures that.

Marx was, himself, a proto-enactivist, which lines him up with modern science, and yet it is precisely his ideas which align with enactive cognition which anti-humanists call “humanist” or “idealist.” That’s the whole reasoning for the “epistemological break” thesis.

Thought: The difference between western marxists and eastern marxists is that the former had representational views of cognition (the subject/structure dualism they insisted exists is inherently representationalist) whereas the latter had proto-4E views of cognition.

Further thought: Marx was the first true enactive thinker of western philosophy (pre-marxist eastern philosophy already has a long tradition of proto-enactivism). This makes computational or representational cognition revisionism. It betrays Marx’s methodology

Thought: The difference between western marxists and eastern marxists is that the former had representational views of cognition (the subject/structure dualism they insisted exists is inherently representationalist) whereas the latter had proto-4E views of cognition.

the ontological commitments of enactive cognition are mutually antagonistic with the core presuppositions of neoclassical economics, particularly homo economicus. When you try to immanently examine homo economicus via enactivism, you just produce Marx’s Labor Theory of Value via enacted labor

boy i sure do never post here huh