Base and Superstructure

Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology

Category: Philosophy (Page 4 of 7)

These are posts on philosophy from the blog Base and Superstructure. My background is in academia, with a specific focus on feminism, philosophical issues in the social sciences, and social and political philosophy. I have also done work on historical figures such as J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. These posts incorporate some or all of these issues. The influences may be more or less explicit, depending on the topic. Philosophy can be intimidating, and so these posts present issues in a way that’s open to many people. There is also discussion of specific philosophical issues, and specific issues from a philosophical perspective, such as feminist accounts of pornography, Marxist and socialist accounts of the state and political economy, and the search for the best explanations for social and material phenomena.

the dawn of everything

The Dawn of Everything

February 21, 2022 /

This rather weighty tome from David Graeber and David Wengrow – The Dawn of Everything – got lots of attention upon its late 2021 release. I’ll call them the Davids. Some of the attention arrived due to the untimely death of David Graeber. He brought us a number of modern anarchist-leaning leftist classics. Topics range from ‘bullshit jobs’ to rules and debt.

But this book also arrived in a timely way. Insofar as the public hears grand historical narratives, they come from sources like Jared Diamond or Steven Pinker. Diamond and Pinker present a certain ‘standard narrative’ of history. For them, history proceeds in stages: from simplicity to complexity, from agriculture to industry, from ‘primitive stateless society’ to empire, and so on.

The Davids question all this in The Dawn of Everything. And they do some other things. Let’s see how it works out for them.

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V.I. Lenin what is to be done

On V.I. Lenin – ‘What Is to Be Done?’

January 10, 2022 /

Readers hardly need an intro to V.I. Lenin. To this day, he’s still a hero to the Marxist-Leninist left. Why? He defeated Russian capitalism, founded the Soviet Union, and guided revolutionary movements around the globe. And to most anarchists, he’s still a villain. Why? He broke Russian anarchism and turned communism into an authoritarian ideology.

I’m not going to wade too heavily into that debate. I’ll take a more modest aim here. Recently I started reading the Essential Works of Lenin. From that collection, I’ll say a few things about Lenin’s short book ‘What Is to Be Done?‘

While much of the material looks at the specific situation in Russia, I think we can learn a few things from it. Even things we can apply in the 2020s. Lenin can teach us a number of things about both good activism and what to avoid.

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Philosophy, Bloomington, and J.L. Austin

September 23, 2021 /

philosophy bloomington sycamore

So, before I lived in Iowa City, I lived in Bloomington, Indiana. I wandered that way from rural southern Indiana, and it became a very important six years of my life (from age 18 to 24). It’s where I, in some sense, grew up, decided on philosophy as a major and life focus, and first learned how to be an adult. It’s where I did all sorts of new things.

In college, when I took philosophy as a major, I also got very interested in the work of ordinary language philosophy, especially that of J.L. Austin. I recently had the chance to return to some of these topics.

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anarchism and marxism

Anarchism and Marxism, Again

May 20, 2021 /

Over the course of the last few months, my partner and I did a little reading group. We read Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution. It’s a joint biography of Karl and Jenny Marx by journalist Mary Gabriel. Marx was, of course, not too into anarchism. We’ll return to that.

For now, there’s much of interest in Love and Capital. The Marx family was an interesting family, and Gabriel shows the collective, whole family nature of the Marx political project. However, one topic that kept returning to me as I read is the relation between anarchism and Marxism.

That’s not a central topic for Gabriel, but she finds it important to several key moments in Karl Marx’s life. And like many commenters who focus on Marx, she comes down almost entirely on the side of Marxism in any dispute with anarchists. But several events in the book highlighted the conflict again for me. Battles between Marx and Mikhail Bakunin around the First International, in particular.

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Political Argument and Wealth: Fallacy or Not?

April 29, 2021 /

political argument wealth

People often talk about money or class standing in a political argument. But I’m not referring in this post to liberal elitism. Nor am I talking about the even more brazen, ‘I have more money than you, therefore I’m better’ kind of thing.

Rather, I want to focus on more subtle ideas. And ones found primarily on the political left. Leftists will appeal to money or class status when discrediting certain kinds of views or people.

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