Interesting. I pretty much agree with all of this, though not as aggressively. I mean, there is a very good reason that I chose not to pursue (despite having the recs and qualifications for) a doctorate in anthropology, because pretty much all of it felt like complete horseshit, particularly if you have lived, worked and read Marx and all of those descended from that dialectical materialist mileau.
God if you think the anthropology department is bad, you should read the scholarly dog shit that comes out of communications departments. I was told once that I wrote a exemplar paper for a class, I think it was on art criticism. I was absolutely black-out drunk and do not remember writing at least half of it, and upon re-reading it, it was some of the most pretentious bullshit I have ever written and really made me despondent that this was considered the best paper I had ever written, but I was already in my senior year and all of my scholarship stuff was tied up in this very stupid degree, so I finished it anyways.
Thank you for all these recommendations though, I will absolutely look into them when I get a chance. I am actually going back to school for a hard science degree soon, funded by my manufacturing career, but I will absolutely buy and read your recommendations.
Yeah I agree that the way I wrote that above came off perhaps aggressively. Apologies for that as that was not my intention.
It’s rather that’s it’s depressing that these areas that should be hotbeds of Marxist thought seem to be in methodological impasses. This isn’t helped by how misrepresented Marxism is, and how much contempt the dominant liberal academics have for it, to the point that they so mistrust anylike a Marxist approach that it seems they are willing to compromise the quality of their own research, or more likely are so blinkered by The days of some history departments being controlled by Marxists are long-gone.
Like I was recently trying to find Marxist political economy and anthropology of pre-Colombian Mexico and couldn’t find any (despite speaking Spanish), although that might have been due to poor searching on my part, or because there is relatively little to go on because the Spanish destroyed most of the written culture (thousands of works of philosophy, science, mathematics , religious texts and literature, and who knows what else) and because disproportionate amounts of archeological funding have mainly gone into European projects, and even when funding gets given to Westerners to go outside of the West to do archeology, the non-Western parts of the team - who often do most of the work - get stiffed in terms of recognition for the research. I still read great works of anthropology ofc, but I worry about the future of the discipline, same as with sociology. It does also seem like anthropology students are also tripping hardcore in a particular way on the fucked-up history of the discipline (i.e. it’s role in colonialism and imperialism), but it seems like this is leading as much if not more to poor theoretical approaches as to productive ones. Perhaps due to the fact that many of the people are tripping on it as liberals (hence the at-times performative act of virtuously recognizing the agency of peoples in no matter the context, which is important imo but normally poorly done by liberals).
I’ve heard some wild stuff about those departments. The other crazy thing is that the business schools, which are now often some of the largest and most well funded, with the newest facilities, teach stuff basically equivalent to astrology. Like I been shook at some of shit I’ve seen when stumbling into some of these departments. Some of the courses are basically just honest-to-God “this is how you best exploit your workers as a manager”, other shit is like “profit = revenue - loss”. Yes these people apparently go on to run society. Honestly the worst when I saw some essays that some management school people had written.
I had a somewhat similar experience to you where I was initially going to go into hard sciences, but then went into economics because of my social interests, hoping to find some radical or orthodox economists or fellow students (in terms of my understanding of how the world worked I was Marxist or Marxian by then, albeit a politically pessimistically depressed one, at the end of high school). Obviously that normally doesn’t happen because there is even less incentive to allow good Marxist political economy in the academy, perhaps because it would quickly outcompete its competitors in terms of explanatory power. On that note I went back into work in more formal sciences.
Yeah, business schools are a whole different matter. I struggle to even call them schools because the ‘better’ they are, the less the students actually understand about business.
Interesting. I pretty much agree with all of this, though not as aggressively. I mean, there is a very good reason that I chose not to pursue (despite having the recs and qualifications for) a doctorate in anthropology, because pretty much all of it felt like complete horseshit, particularly if you have lived, worked and read Marx and all of those descended from that dialectical materialist mileau.
God if you think the anthropology department is bad, you should read the scholarly dog shit that comes out of communications departments. I was told once that I wrote a exemplar paper for a class, I think it was on art criticism. I was absolutely black-out drunk and do not remember writing at least half of it, and upon re-reading it, it was some of the most pretentious bullshit I have ever written and really made me despondent that this was considered the best paper I had ever written, but I was already in my senior year and all of my scholarship stuff was tied up in this very stupid degree, so I finished it anyways.
Thank you for all these recommendations though, I will absolutely look into them when I get a chance. I am actually going back to school for a hard science degree soon, funded by my manufacturing career, but I will absolutely buy and read your recommendations.
Yeah I agree that the way I wrote that above came off perhaps aggressively. Apologies for that as that was not my intention. It’s rather that’s it’s depressing that these areas that should be hotbeds of Marxist thought seem to be in methodological impasses. This isn’t helped by how misrepresented Marxism is, and how much contempt the dominant liberal academics have for it, to the point that they so mistrust anylike a Marxist approach that it seems they are willing to compromise the quality of their own research, or more likely are so blinkered by The days of some history departments being controlled by Marxists are long-gone.
Like I was recently trying to find Marxist political economy and anthropology of pre-Colombian Mexico and couldn’t find any (despite speaking Spanish), although that might have been due to poor searching on my part, or because there is relatively little to go on because the Spanish destroyed most of the written culture (thousands of works of philosophy, science, mathematics , religious texts and literature, and who knows what else) and because disproportionate amounts of archeological funding have mainly gone into European projects, and even when funding gets given to Westerners to go outside of the West to do archeology, the non-Western parts of the team - who often do most of the work - get stiffed in terms of recognition for the research. I still read great works of anthropology ofc, but I worry about the future of the discipline, same as with sociology. It does also seem like anthropology students are also tripping hardcore in a particular way on the fucked-up history of the discipline (i.e. it’s role in colonialism and imperialism), but it seems like this is leading as much if not more to poor theoretical approaches as to productive ones. Perhaps due to the fact that many of the people are tripping on it as liberals (hence the at-times performative act of virtuously recognizing the agency of peoples in no matter the context, which is important imo but normally poorly done by liberals).
I’ve heard some wild stuff about those departments. The other crazy thing is that the business schools, which are now often some of the largest and most well funded, with the newest facilities, teach stuff basically equivalent to astrology. Like I been shook at some of shit I’ve seen when stumbling into some of these departments. Some of the courses are basically just honest-to-God “this is how you best exploit your workers as a manager”, other shit is like “profit = revenue - loss”. Yes these people apparently go on to run society. Honestly the worst when I saw some essays that some management school people had written.
I had a somewhat similar experience to you where I was initially going to go into hard sciences, but then went into economics because of my social interests, hoping to find some radical or orthodox economists or fellow students (in terms of my understanding of how the world worked I was Marxist or Marxian by then, albeit a politically pessimistically depressed one, at the end of high school). Obviously that normally doesn’t happen because there is even less incentive to allow good Marxist political economy in the academy, perhaps because it would quickly outcompete its competitors in terms of explanatory power. On that note I went back into work in more formal sciences.
Yeah, business schools are a whole different matter. I struggle to even call them schools because the ‘better’ they are, the less the students actually understand about business.