Oddbean new post about login | logout @636cb8f3 You might be interested in my own immediate reaction to #TheDawnOfEverything: https://climatejustice.social/@GeofCox/109916064374143676 Incidentally, I'm neither a 'marxist' nor an 'anarchist' - just a working-class left-leaning man that takes what insights I can from all the great traditions of left thought - and I think you'll find most left-leaning people find this ongoing squabble in the left family a bit silly - leading, in this instance to a 'review' that spends more time trying to charicature a 'marxist' straw man than on the book it's supposed to be reviewing. Not to mention, in the process, getting dangerously close to an anti-intellectualism we'd normally associate with the extreme right.
@64af5594 @636cb8f3 Agreed. I've learned almost nothing about this book from this review. Even if one agrees with the caricature of Marxists there's nothing constructive here. What's good and interesting about it? (Other than the fact that it allegedly annoys Marxists, but perhaps only the Marxists who exist solely in the author's imagination.) There's hardly more than a single sentence that deals with what the book is even about.
@64af5594 @636cb8f3 that is too ambiguous. The range of views within so called "leftism" are incredibly broad, with both ends being vehemently opposed to each other. Libertarian vs authoritarian. Individualist vs communist (but these two should really get along fine). Right wing views are either malicious or just under educated.
@c8b85fde @636cb8f3 Of course there are a range of views - otherwise we wouldn't be able to 'take what insights we can from all the great traditions of left thought'. I don't see anything negative - or ambiguous - in this. But don't mistake the various different blueprints for better societies that appear from time to time for substantive differences. Such blueprints come and go, and will never be realised everywhere forever anyway - history doesn't end - and as Camus argues in 'The Rebel' such teleological illusions carry inside them the terrible danger of believing 'the end justifies the means'. The underlying unity of left thinking lies elsewhere: in working for the oppressed, opposing exploitation and injustice, and, deepest of all, in the belief that humanity is capable of organising itself on the basis of evidence and reason - it is this that really defines the left, and distinguishes it from the political right and centre.
@64af5594 @636cb8f3 so in that case what you have proposed as your own ideology is simply impossible. Judging from what little information I have you are at the very least, left-libertarian
@c8b85fde @636cb8f3 The only label I'm sort-of comfortable with is 'socialist', because it alludes to the fundamentally social nature of humanity, and to the fact that everything that makes life good is socially produced - even self-awareness. But I tend not to label people (while not denying that 'isms', etc, can be useful in grouping related ideas, etc); nor (I hope) do I have 'an ideology' - the whole point of left-wing thinking, surely, is just that: trying to see through ideology, to look reality square in the face.