You know the parable of the three blind men and the elephant?
There are several variations, but I will provide a quick, simple recap for the unfamiliar: the first touches the trunk and thinks the elephant is like a snake. The second touches the leg and thinks the elephant is like a tree. The third touches the ear and thinks the elephant is like a palm frond. ^((Nobody knows how the elephant feels about all this.))
I propose a variant of my own: suppose that a person with perfectly good vision refuses to believe in elephants for ideological reasons. One day, he sees an elephant . . . and concludes that he is looking at a hippopotamus trapped on top of four palm trees with a snake dangling off of its head.
This analogy captures how I feel about certain liberal/libertarian/right-wing people (in this case, Siskind) who simply refuse to understand class conflict. Whenever they engage with left-wing ideas (especially class conflict) or evidence in support of said ideas, they laboriously misinterpret them to avoid challenging their extant worldviews.
In this case, Siskind read 200 pages about class conflict being the explanatory factor behind neoliberal politics–and by extension, most of the politics of the late 20th century–then proceeded to write about class conflict as if it were a fringe concept that David Harvey made up on the spot. Then, when a vocal contingent of his own readers/commenters call him out on his possibly-worst-ever book review, he gets super defensive. It’s . . . messy.
Siskind’s whole “conflict theory” machinery is part of an elaborate effort to deny not just class conflict but conflict in general. It very often leads to weird blind spots; I wrote about it here.
It’s a very weird mode of thought. I mean, it’s one thing to dislike conflict, it’s another thing to try to write about political and economic matters as if conflict didn’t exist.
Ah, yes, for example, consider the famous quote “War is the continuation of politics by other means” by famous radical communist squints at notes Carl von Clausewitz
he can’t even do it when he literally agrees with the book
E: My god this comment is brutal:
You touch upon something I frequently see at my university. The most conservative professor I’ve ever had taught a class on the philosophy of the American Revolution. For the final paper, we had to select one of several prompts, and the one I chose was a comparative analysis of notions of property in early-modern English philosophy (à la James Harrington) and ideas of property in Marxism. The professor was an extremely sharp guy, and in my discussions with him in preparation for the paper, I got the impression that he had read plenty of Marx and understood the finer intellectual nuances of Marxist thought
So I remember being surprised when he made a random comment about “socialist” Democrats. There was some gnarly cognitive dissonance going on between his sophisticated understanding of Marx (and Marx-adjacent left-wing thinkers) and his modern political views
I’m trying to point out Scott’s mistakes in the comments section, if I do it enough times he will hopefully correct his mistakes. He is a mistake theorist, after all.
I loved SSC in the early 2010s, the hazy times right before everyone was forced to reckon with politics on a broader cultural scale. Then when I saw him dealing more and more with politics, it was like seeing behind the curtain. And I no longer trusted anything he was saying or had said previously.
This is exactly right. I was baffled by how abstracted Scott’s “review” was from what Harvey’s book is actually about. It was much more a polemic about Scott’s feelings on neoliberalism than any substantive engagement with Harvey’s argument. Ig it’s my fault for being surprised by that
Link to the review: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-a-brief-history-of-neoliberalism
I nominate every commenter patiently trying to explain to SSC’s regular readers that historical materialism is a method of analyzing history for the Order of Lenin.
(Sure, it’s also an ideology, but so is marginal utility; good luck explaining that to a bunch of LW exiles)
I saw that. Scott Wunderkind will need thicker skin if he continues to invite online workshopping of his book reviews. I see he even threatened to ban a commenter if future criticisms continue to be phrased un-generously. To which, of course, the fawning follower replied contritely. 🙄
(Ir)rationalism is a cope for conceited right wing individuals. The whole thing is basically their own take on the self help book The Secret.
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Who else is on the verge of unsubscribing from this sub? Not because we disagree with the choice of content, but because we can’t make it one paragraph through without shouting “GO FUCK YOUR MOTHER! OR FATHER! DEPENDS ON YOUR SEX AND SEXUALITY, I’M NOT BIGOTED!” at our screens.