
The Opium of the Intellectuals - sebastianconcpt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Opium_of_the_Intellectuals
======
lainga
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.

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vearwhershuh
Interesting history and background:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Aron](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.

~~~
zaaakk
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.

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

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

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thu2111
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...](https://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Society-Thomas-
Sowell/dp/0465025226)

------
jonmartinwest
"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

~~~
ardy42
I've not read _The Opium of the Intellectuals_ , but was it talking about
postwar French Marxism or Soviet Leninism/Stalinism?

~~~
jonmartinwest
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.

------
Der_Einzige
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.

~~~
zaaakk
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.”

------
cultus
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.

~~~
ardy42
> 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.

~~~
cultus
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.

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

~~~
cultus
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.

------
hirundo
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.

~~~
misterbishop
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.

~~~
Der_Einzige
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...

~~~
misterbishop
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.

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

------
misterbishop
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](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.

