The strong leftward tilt is because part of the political ideology of the left is that society is not currently already leftist (it obviously isn’t — we live in a capitalist world) and critical theorists analyze our society under the historical and structural conditions as to why our society is the way it is. More quantifiable explanations are going to draw from anthropology, economics, sociology and political science. More qualitative explanations are necessarily more philosophical, so that means drawing from thinkers like Marx. That should be expected.

That does not mean that every person in those departments is a communist. Marx simply did a lot of early table-setting for critiquing capitalism. Later thinkers did a lot to extend and refute him, so I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that critical theorists are trying to make “Marxism work”. To my knowledge, orthodox Marxists hate a lot of critical theory. Foucault, for example, is widely read in these circles, but as much as he criticized capitalism and society, he was ultimately a neoliberal. Politics is messy and critical theory is not a monolith.

The wishful thinking part cuts both ways. Leftists members of the academy would probably criticize liberals for wishful thinking that say, the capitalist status quo with some modifications could actually save us from climate catastrophe, or that the most sensitive and important parts of being human are not lost when we live under what they consider a structurally unjust system. Or the blind optimism that the “moral arc of history bends towards justice”.

Given that Marxist-Leninism has failed (although MLs would argue otherwise), I agree with the sentiment that it would be unwise to “try it again”. But an honest and charitable engagement with Marx would show that the claims he makes are rather minimal and broad. His relevance is tied to the fact that he can be reinterpreted, and it would be wrongheaded to see it as any more dogmatic than run of the mill non-leftist, folk politics. The guy simply had a lot to say about the industrial revolution.

You're not rebutting Walter's argument successfully. Everything you've said there is extremely subjective, difficult to pin down and mostly an emotional argument to begin with. Even your starting "obvious" premise that society isn't already leftist would get howls of disagreement from many quarters of society and because nothing that comes out of the humanities is in any way precise or rigorous it would be impossible to even resolve that dispute. You wouldn't even ever get to the point of arguing about whether Marx's claims were really "minimal" (lol) or whether he has "relevance" or was not "dogmatic"!

Whereas we built an airport and the plane doesn't fit is something not something anyone can argue about. Either the planes fit or they don't. Humanities academia devolves into Marxism so fast exactly because it's not pinned down by reality in that way, which is why it should just be abolished. Why should the rest of us be forced to pay for gibberish like "cyborg techno-feminism"?

> "cyborg techno-feminism"?

Naomi Wu is an excellent engineer and a luminary for the DIY space.

You’re making a lot of criticisms, but you haven’t shown me why what I’ve said is extremely subjective, or why it’s an emotional argument.

First of all, it is obvious that society isn’t already leftist. If you’re citing “many quarters of society howling in disagreement”, you’ll have to show me to 1) the data and 2) this somehow changes the actual nature of our society. Do you actually think that we live in a leftist society? I certainly do not see a plurality of worker co-ops walking down the street, and last I checked, the vast majority of the means of production are still privately owned. I am not going to explain my argument again as to why this gives critical theory a leftist bent.

Your argument seems to be motivated by the fact you don’t like some of the conclusions drawn out by academics in the humanities because they don’t fit your priors. To me, it’s obvious you fall right Dunning-Kruger’s trap, having read and understood virtually nothing about the subjects in question if you’re citing “cyborg techno feminism” as an example of “Marxist devolution”. You’re really proving the point here that a lack of engagement with the humanities leads to a lack critical thinking.

Sure - government spending has constantly grown for decades, and in 2020/2021 we just lived through a mass collectivization of society in which private ownership of property was suspended throughout the United States and the government took over payment of salaries. Our society also pays for an ever larger and more bloated academic sector which is overwhelmingly left leaning in orientation, so are tech firms, so are most media companies. That's just a handful of examples.

So to be it's obvious that you're wrong, and the reason we disagree is because none of this is in any way precise or rigorously defined!

Dunning-Kruger is a garbage paper lol. Go read it. It's a good example of non replicable psychology research. People quote it mindlessly having never read it, without realizing they're Dunning-Krugering themselves by doing so.

Even if you believe Dunning-Kruger is fictitious, you can't use it as an appellation on those who don't.

Yes, I was pointing out the irony.

The irony doesn't work if it's based on something that one claims is logically fictitious.

> How does this critical thinking methodology fit in with the strong leftward tilt? I don't know of any successful Marxist societies (forcible or voluntary), so why do critical thinkers think they can get Marxism to work?

Frankly this way of talking about humanities as a whole does betray lack of critical thinking on itself. For start, back in real world and in real actual universities, critical thinking does not mean Marxism.

> When the facts don't fit Marxist theory, the researcher gets cancelled.

If you mean this as a statement about actual universities, this is a lie. I mean, so much that it seems more like talking point from TV designed to make people agree with actual legislature banning actual books.

> critical thinking does not mean Marxism

I didn't say it did. I said that there's something wrong with the critical thinking that goes on in the humanities department when they wind up advocating Marxism, despite Marxism having a dismal historical record of relentless failure.

I don't believe Marxism would work in practice, I believe you'd always just get a _different_ one percenter class composed of party leaders instead of business owners, but I'm not sure that it's actually been given a fair trial. To steel man their argument, communist countries always had the world's top economic and military superpowers like USA doing whatever to could to prevent communism from spreading. I'm no history surgeon, but I can't think of a time when it was tried without external interference.

To make a long complicated story short, Marxism is the study of how class contradictions resolve themselves. Using Hegelian dialectics, it poses different classes against each other and theorizes what the synthesis would become. It could be said that this (and branching philosophies like critical theory) is the ultimate end result of Western philosophy, hence the leftward tilt of the humanities.

In an ideal sense, Marxist theory should be capable of updating itself to match actual conditions. In a degenerated dogmatic sense, it can be used to force actual conditions to fit within a narrow and false theory.

There is no end to the different interpretations of Marxism and the arguments and debates between them, because there's only so many real world examples that could be tested and examined.

Compared to an engineering problem, Marxist theory ends up touching so many fields and variables on a global scale that the problem space ends up being orders of magnitude greater. There's too much to examine and make sense of, so interpretations end up being strategies on how to navigate through this problem space and how to achieve Marxist theories and goals, either orthodixcally or heterodoxically.

In the example of that anthropologist, it does not go into detail with what the Marxists disagreed with. However, I think a Marxist argument could be made for the wars over women in that their society is of a more primitive stage where stealing women was a part of their socioeconomics. Their system works out so that a population equilbirum is achieved.

In works like Engel's On the Origin of the Family..., there is a Marxist interpretation of how humans orient themselves accordingly to the Marxist theory that the base economics form the superstructure of the culture and society. In more advanced societies, they went through agricultural revolutions that vastly increased the population and reshaped how societies must function to keep order.

Another example of Marxist theory gone wrong could be the USSR, and you have Marxists either defending or condemning it for various reasons. It could then be said that the Chinese Marxists learned from the USSR to create their own branched off lineage to prevent similar collapse and to forge their own path towards the Marxist stages of socialism and communism. (And of course you have Marxists condemning China too.)

Edit: That being said, while STEM has rigorous methodologies to verify truths, the fields can also be swept up by orthodoxies and heterodoxies and different interpretations. There's always been the derisive websh*t meme for fads on Hacker News. Or there's the unsolved problems in physics with different interpretations to resolve them. The scientific process did have its roots in philosophical developments after all.

Marxist failures are always written off as being caused by not being "true" Marxism.

STEM has had many false theories (like the sun revolves around the earth). The virtue of STEM is when the facts contradict the theories, the theories get revised, even if the old guard has to die off before the corrected theory replaces it. With Marxism, however, the facts get re-written to conform to Marxism, rather than the other way around.

One of the beauties of the scientific method is it tests the predictions a theory makes. If the predictions come true, the theory is validated. If the predictions don't pan out, the theory is false.

A famous example is Einstein's Relativity theory predicted that gravity bends light. Einstein became world famous when decades later, this bending was observed.

Marxist theory also makes predictions, but none of those predictions pan out. This never discourages the critical thinkers in the humanities, which leaves me unimpressed with the critical thinking skills of it.

This is a seriously cold take that’s infamously descended from Karl Popper’s argument that Marxism is unscientific. It’s obviously the case that Marxism is unscientific under Popper’s criterion of falsifiability for science, but

1) it’s contentious in Popper’s field itself on whether this criterion is right (it is generally accepted today that he is wrong) and

2) it’s contentious on whether Popper even understands Marx’s theory of history, which is where his criticism comes from, and

3) even if we decide by fiat that the predictions made by Marxism are unscientific, that does not preclude it from being a source of knowledge, or prevent Marxism from being imported as a normative political or ethical framework.

The whole “not true Marxism” thing usually comes from the mouths of people who’ve never read Marx, let alone explicitly non-Marxist thinkers who were influenced by Marx. In other words, the kinds of people who have never given this serious thought at all, but have likely watched some YouTube videos or read a couple articles. There is really no such thing as “true Marxism”. Marxism in practice has ranged from the USSR to Zapatista, which are very different from one another, but they are both no more “truly Marxist” than the other. The only person who could decide that is probably the guy himself, who is long dead.

>This never discourages the critical thinkers in the humanities, which leaves me unimpressed with the critical thinking skills of it.

If nuance and actual engagement with primary source material (as opposed to whatever it is you’re doing) does not count as “critical thinking”, then I strongly believe we cannot have any further discussion here.

I'm not sure how you define a "Marxist society", but if this means an economic system where there's no notion of owning capital to collect economic rent from it, then MAREZ (Zapatistas) would seem to qualify.

To some extent also AANES (Rojava). Although that one is a hybrid economy where co-ops and wage labor small businesses coexist, it's roughly a 80/20 split in favor of the former, although there's no clear line there as some co-ops use wage labor as well. For the most part, this happens because the local councils actively support co-ops with loans, so organizing as one gives you an initial advantage.

There's also a "Marxist-Leninist society" where it is a transitional one to socialism and communism like the USSR and China.

Well, they claimed to have socialism and to be building communism, but Marx himself would hardly approve or consider it "socialism" if comparing notes. There's a reason why Lenin and company were seen as hacks by many Marxists of their time.

But I don't think Walter had that degree of precision in mind when he said "Marxist". It sounded more like a generic label for anti-capitalist left to me, so I went with the broad definition to match that.

Critical thinking != Critical Theory