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To say Chomsky and Herman's media theory lacks empirical evidence and that every political theory held by (what western liberals consider as) "radicals" is the
by lyu07282 3y ago
To say Chomsky and Herman's media theory lacks empirical evidence and that every political theory held by (what western liberals consider as) "radicals" is the same, just reeks of neoliberal depolitization. Its the ultimate end-of-politics style argument to end all arguments, the little bit of actual political discourse left in western neoliberal societies is nothing but shunned and marginalized.
The same vapid ideology that always claims to be free of ideology and that underpinned the culture of the Obama white house that brought us Trump in the first place. Not to mention the absolute havoc it wrought in the, for the lack of a better word, global south.
- mjburgess 3y agoCan there be a science of politics? If so then the must therefore be a non-ideological mode of analysis. If you deny the possibility of science here, so be it. I do not.
- pphysch 3y agoYou do realize that all of the people you dismissed as radicals -- Marx et al. -- more or less claimed the same thing? That they had a scientific or objective approach to history/politics/economics?
- mjburgess 3y agoYes, but i'm not advancing a particular theory -- only, at best the criteria for such a theory. The fashion for these theories is predictive power -- but this is unscientific when applied to complex systems of this kind. The error of marx et al. was to suppose that dialectical materialism is a possibility -- this mistakes the kind of phenomenon that history is -- we have learned, after marx, that maxism isnt even a possible theory today, we need to show we have learned these lessons
- pphysch 3y agoDialectical materialism is a powerful epistemological framework. It's a far better model than any alternative I'm aware of. > we have learned, after marx, that maxism isnt even a possible theory Are you referring to Popper? Have you actually read him? It's easy to say "Popper debunked Marxism" but his line of reasoning is flimsy at best.
- mjburgess 3y agoNot popper, but chaos theory and the like. A swirling glass of coffee isnt subject to 'coffee-bean materialism' let alone the morass of history. What science teaches us, of late, is the radical limits of science. Any prognostictor of society, coming along, and 'reading its temperature' is automatically a fraud. Marx gets a pass. My view is that if marx had lived long eough, he'd be here today as a sceptical capitalist, long beyond the habit of prediction.