For the older posters here, you know the drill. No struggle sessions, keep it nice.

For the newer folks, hi! I'm Corgi! I made these threads from time to time to see if everyone is doing OK. Got something cool you wanna talk about? Need an ear for venting? This is your space! Just be nice, this isn't the thread for arguments.

I made a down payment for next year's wedding recently, and I've been having a BLAST with the Retroid 3+. I've been going to the bar with the pup the last few days and just sitting with a pint and playing MVC2, Twisted Metal Black, Smash, and Mario. Met another Hexbear IRL recently, that was nice!

Hope everyone is doing well! Remember, you are loved stalin-heart

  • JuneFall [none/use name]
    ·
    1 year ago

    You kind of have to talk about Weber in pol theory classes, it is foundational even though not the first person having thought about a lot of stuff. It also is good to be able to critique the conceptions as many pol sci people hear Weber, hear Carl Schmitt (right wing Max Weber for conservative authoritarians and Nazis basically) and a few others and then just repeat those points and look down on anyone having a wider set of political knowledge.

    • duderium [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      I view Weber as basically Marx but with bourgeois escape valves. "Marx failed to consider culture which is this vague thing that just sort of floats around in the air and gets involved in human affairs whenever the bourgeoisie (the people currently paying my salary) starts to look bad." Weber allows liberal academics to do something like historical materialism (even though it's nothing of the sort) and avoid relying too much on great man theory / divine intervention without risking their careers. Also, Weber's idea that Protestantism created capitalism has the entire base-superstructure backwards and is not dialectical.

      I don't actually know that much about Weber so anyone who knows more should feel free to dunk on me. My history professor in college relied on him pretty heavily and stabbed me in the back and nuked my graduate thesis (after we had worked together really well for four years!) because I dared to express support for Students for Justice in Palestine, even though back then I was a lib. So I associate Weber with that guy. Always looking at interesting details, never considering the broader dialectical picture, and rarely mentioning Marx or Marxists except to say that they are wrong.

      • JuneFall [none/use name]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Your critiques are good places to start critiquing Weber from I feel. They are very accessible and especially the protestant -> capitalism thing shows the idealism that Marx and half the Hegelians fought so hard against.

        I also see a couple things that Weber did well (especially review stuff which became important for later for myself), but Marx did quite a bit work on culture in his works, not only in the German Ideology in which he describes some conceptions of how the mechanism between modes of productions and class as well as super structure is, but also in later works. I always wondered why people would skip over that when Capital contains so many great critiques of capitalist culture that are used to this day in anthropology frameworks in some way or the other.