Attempt to normalize Marxism and Sartre's bromance fails

Retired Wayne State professor of the history of ideas Ronald Aronson, an expert philosophical commenter on Jean-Paul Sartre, including on his friendship with Albert Camus, attempts to rehabilitate both Marxism and Sartre's attempt to rehabilitate it in a new Boston  Review essay.

And fails.

In a nutshell, here's why.


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First, Sartre did find a weak point — rather, the weakest point — of Marxism 101, with all of its permutations through Lenin, Stalin, Mao and even revisers like the Frankfurt School.

It’s Hegelian dialectic.

Congrats to Sartre for seeing the main issue that makes Marxism even more a pseudoscience than most theories of economics, since Hegelian dialectic and its thesis-synthesis-antithesis is purely a philosophical idea, and totally unscientific.

BUT! Marxism is not Marxism without Hegelian dialectic. Pull that out, and you're engaging with non-Marxist Socialist theorizing of some sort.

Second, while comparing and contrasting Sartre to Camus, and intertwining them, and saying that Sartre tried to find a third way, Aronson ignores how late Sartre was to the table on criticizing both Stalin in particular and Soviet Communism in general.

Third, Marx ignored, or never thought through, larger economic consumptive problems of capitalism — resource exploitation problems that aren’t part of Marxism.

Peak Oil — temporarily offset by fracking — is one.

Climate change is a much bigger one, as this Boston Review essay notes in passing.

As far as Aronson's book on Sartre and Camus? Without staking absolutist positions on either side, Camus was in general right to reject the use of violence in social movements. And, per some critical reviews of his book (at that second link in the first paragraph), Aronson reportedly butters his bread clearly for Sartre, and for postmodernism that follows to some degree from him. You lost me there.

So Sharon Hill is no longer a skeptic

Sharon Hill of I Doubt It has finally seen the light and is leaving movement skepticism or Skeptics™. She mostly gets the reasons right, though in calling out scientism she doesn't get into larger anti-philosophy attitudes among many Skeptics™ folks who aren't necessarily scientism types. That's you, Barb Drescher. Still haven't forgotten you and your UCSB ev psych-leaning friend.

Too bad Hill herself likely isn't apologizing for fostering the cult of Brian Dunning. Nor does she take note of the likes of me or former top notch Skeptics™paralleler Massimo Pigliucci calling out all the things she has, and more, more than the five years ago that she says was the bottom of the movement.

Beyond her personal role in the sullying of the movement skepticism brand, she's apparently not aware of Jeff Wagg and Naomi Baker's even bigger black eye.

Nor does she look beyond tribalism at other issues involved — money and power. When one makes more than $100,000 a year for running a fairly small nonprofit, oh, like some California libertarian-neoliberal guy and the James Randi Educational Foundation, but not to name names, one has a vested interest in promoting both the brand and the tribalism used to keep it propped up.

Her own part in rebranding I guess includes dumping the old I Doubt It blog for her new website.

That said, there's other funniness in her "I'm not a Skeptic" schtick. She says that movement skepticism isn't hip enough on technology. Really? So, skepticsm is about marketing as much as anything, then? Does she now have a YouTube channel? A "brand"?

It's also funny to see her lack of skepticism toward attention whore Bill Nye and the allegedly "hands on" Neil DeGrasse Tyson, of whom the first allegations against him were already floating around at this time.