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MARXISM_IS_THE_OPIATE

                                             November 3, 2016


                                                   POLAR_SARTRE

Jean Paul Sartre, "In Search of a Method", p.27:

  "Marxist voluntarism, which likes to speak of analysis, has
  reduced this operation to a simple ceremony.  There is no
  longer any question of studying facts within the general
  perspective of Marxism so as to enrich our understanding
  and clarify action.  Analysis consists solely in getting
  rid of detail, in forcing the signification of certain
  events, in denaturing facts or even in inventing a nature
  for them in order to discover it later underneath them, as
  their substance, as unchangeable, fetishized 'synthetic
  notions.'  The open concepts of Marxism have closed in.
  They are no longer *keys*, interpretive schemata; they are
  posited for themselves as an already totalized knowledge.
  To use Kantian terms-- Marxism makes out of these
  particularized, fetishized types, constitutive concepts of
  experience.  The real content of these typical concepts is
  always *past Knowledge*; but today's Marxist makes of it an
  eternal knowledge.  His sole concern, at the moment of
  analysis, will be to 'place' these entities.  The more he
  is convinced that they represent truth a priori, the less
  fussy he will be about proof."


Sartre is essentially complaining
about Marxism degenerating into a      A Marxist "explanation" doesn't
religion, which many have noticed.     involve studying what's going on--
                                       they already *know* and are just
                                       filling in the blanks on the form.

   Sartre's own terminology here,
   at least in translation, looks
   like a forerunner of post-modern
   duckspeak:

      signification
      totalized

   I wonder what the actual source was.  Lacan?
   Some fashion among French-English translators?

         It would be really funny if the
         verbal tics of the pomo-90s
         "intellectuals" were rooted in         (Why would you say
         bad translations from the French.      "legitimate" rather
                                                than "legitimize"?).




There are many details in the surrounding text
of this quote that I don't quite follow.

    Sartre take on Marxism
    circa 1956 is that it's
    "a voluntarist idealism"?
                                         Would it be better if
Huh?  Really?  So?                       it were a totalitarian
                                         realism?


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