David > Recent Status Updates

People who rate these early works so highly are glazing fr. It's good historiography and for seeing intellectual development but the writing is so bland and boring and so focused on literary cleverness to the detriment of everything else.

Marx really thought Stirner was a genuine ideological threat. I know Bauer would've been pissed he got like 30 pages and I'm still reading at 300 deep into Stirner.

You see the germs of the weaker parts of Poverty of Philosophy here, polemical satire over genuine philosophical analysis, but you also see the clear foundations of dialectical materialism and a deep critique of theory and thought for theory and thought's sake.

Thus far not sold on the "rethinking" of colonialism by the critique of James and Fanon. Scott does demonstrate that the James-Fanonian analysis of colonialism leads to a "vindicationist" view of colonialism that necessitates its overthrow through a "longing for total revolution," but I'm not sold on why we need to "rethink" that. Saying that it doesn't fit the postcolonial "problem-space" doesn't suffice.

Utterly ridiculous comparisons of Czechoslovakia to French Saint Domingue, citing Havel against Robespierre and comparing Eastern Bloc "totalitarianism" to enslavement. Absurd and ahistorical comparisons resultant from generalizing philosophical analysis rather than concrete historical reality. Genuinely flabbergasted at such an offensive and insulting passage. Only possible from a white Western leftist.

And so we reach the dreaded chapter on class consciousness...