Man, Arendt is just frustratingly completely wrong about almost everything. I pity any of her Marxist colleagues who had to interact with her strawman of Marx...

"Hannah Arendt just misses the Marx entirely here." At least what I heared.

I'm a Marxist organizer in the US and when I heard you say that she thought marx wanted to like get rid of labour it sent me into a loop because nothing could be further from the truth. In critique of the Gotha program marx talks about labour becoming life prime want, and in Jodi Dean's much more recent Comrade she talks about how through the communist party we can see this kind of non alienated labour in embryo.

On the point of homogenation (no clue if that's a word) I think this can be true but I think most people who make the point do so poorly. Marxism, like taxonomy in this sense, attempts to employ a method of lumping and splitting. In the course of Marxist history there have certainly been opportunistic errors where the real problems of special oppression weren't dealt with, but I think it's unfair to say that's endemic to Marxist theories. The CPUSA before it's co-optation had some very advanced analysis of the special oppression of Black workers. But beyond special oppression I find this argument kinda funny because to me, Marx's  contribution to humanism was his breaking apart the concept of a single fixed essence. His critique of feuerbach is largely just that he failed to recognize the real concrete distinctions in humanity. Marx pointed out its never abstract people but real concrete people with specific interest which make history

"Will we adopt Finnish philosophy?" Well, as a Finn, I must say that we do have some cool thinkers. The philosophical novels of Eino Leino and Eino Kaila could be worth checking out - even if Leino has some strong occultist tones to him. 😉

Esko Valtaoja, Syksy Räsänen are some cool astrophysicists to check out.

Arendt also has equally horrible criticism of the USSR and the idea of "Totalitarianism" (Nazi reductionism)

Hello david, I wanted to let you know that you're doing quite a wonderful thing by teaching philosophy and making it so easy to understand. I love your explanations more than all the other philosophy channels I watch. You're so young and already have such a big impact on people's lives, its quite inspiring. I do hope that I can be as scholarly as you someday. Love from Bangladesh!

Love this. Thanks

My friend and I are doing a little Arendt book club and that’s how I stumbled on you page. Loving your content so much!

Arendt just makes Marx seem more based.

Intimacy with the actual problems individuals find in their lives is generally not what the old metaphysics could cope with in it's theoretical condition of knowledge, experience, and desire.

Arendt’s “critique” of Marx is terrible as are her “critiques” of Fanon. One of my least favorite philosophers

Will you talk about Weil? or have you already?

Even Isaiah Berlin said Arendt was wrong about the urss

Think of eliminating  absolute poverty  versus relative poverty. But yea there is no desire or wants in Marx, just analysis of objective development. Its crazy to think finding what is universal among people can be equated to "totalitarian desires" for some crude equalization or reduction of differences without preservation. Meanwhile the USSR preserved so many (164 ?) national languages, etc.

Arendt's critique begins with Marx's supposition that meaning or "being" in the world is defined by a person's creation of him/herself and "his/her world" through labor - his essential human activity.  According to Marx, human labor becomes distorted and 'alienated" under capitalism whereby the person does not recognize himself in his most basic human activity - the activity that sustains and reproduces him.  Instead, it destroys and dehumanizes him.  This concept is at odds with Marx's prognostication of the classless society, a post-scarcity society which follows the dictatorship of the proletariat in which the worker is allegedly liberated from the necessity of labor.  If so, then man's most fundamental and essential means of expressing and defining himself is denied to him and the ultimate state of "post-historical classlessness" (communism) leads him to a state of perpetual consumption, not freedom or liberation.  Marx's critique of early industrial capitalism was mostly valid.  However his projection of the communist dream state is pure utopianism.  Especially and specifically in Russia, where Stalin could not compete with capitalist nations in Europe and the US, he employed the gulag system and forced collectivization, largely relying on an extremely small and primitive industrial infrastructure and even more backward peasant agrarian system, which imposed on the proletariat, the most brutal and repressive system of labor ever devised.

Hanna Arendt wrote: '...tyranny over "laborers,"...as for instance the rule over slaves in antiquity, would automatically be a rule over lonely, not only isolated, men and tend to be totalitarian'. I don't think that she endorsed or even condoned ancient Athens but your other criticisms seem fair.

In my experience with Americans, most of you miss the point on marxism. Arendt is finely tuned. She took Heidegger and inverted his ideas! What a girl.

I agree that Marx tried to portray us as an homogeneous mass. Unfortunately that is the first thing any economist has to do, to avoid the problem of the complexity of individuals. Arendt says that we should think of Labor and, for lack of better words, man’s search for meaning. Still just homogeneous groups (2 groups this time), unless the later group is to be divided amongst the 8 billion individuals concerned. If you can’t homogenize sets of people into groups, the analysis of everything we do becomes impossibly complex. In my opinion, Arendt is accusing Marx of practicing Economics. You cannot analyze without the ability to generalize ( homogenize ). I am not a Marx fan. However , Arendt is ,as David is trying to politely say, totally off target.

Man's search for satisfying neurotransmitters

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