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one thing chomsky and marxists get right: there are no more skilled ideologists for the ruling class, whose job it is to manufacture consent for the racist, classist status quo that perpetuates violence every second of its existence, than liberal academics
and they dominate the academy: political science, sociology, criminology, law, economics, history. go to departmental sites of elite universities for these subjects and look at their profiles: they're overwhelmingly warrenite "capitalist to my bones" liberals or just republicans
you have to formulate "intellectual means of self-defense" against these purveyors of bourgeois ideology, and as chomsky notes you aren't going to get that in the university. you get it through participating in social movements, on the streets, in unions
this is where you learn how to wield concepts like tools and weapons for our emancipatory cause and avoid reifying and mystifying them and have them be used against us by bourgeois ideologists. and how to be flexible when needed, but also an immovable object when that's required
this was prompted by seeing some liberal hack elite political scientist wield terms like "agency" and "lived experience" to defend the status quo and smear the protest movement. this kind of slipperiness and charlatanry is perfected by liberal academics. again, it's their job
this is why I've cautioned against reifying and mystifying these terms and concepts; always remember they can be inverted, distorted, turned around on us. for example when a liberal uses "agency" to frame us as racist/sexist, you lean on their hypocrisy and ignoring of structure
and when they do the same with "lived experience" for the same purpose, selectively identifying a view that aligns with the status quo an then universalizing that as *the only experience*, you don't just fall for it, as I detailed in this thread: https://twitter.com/zei_squirrel/status/1249726774747041794
it's the same for all concepts, you have to be able to employ them creatively, and, again, use them as tools, as weapons, and not get confused and mystified by them, or turn them into objects or essential categories. there's no guide for how to do this, no map to point you to it
and exactly because this isn't a clear science but a disposition you have to work on and cultivate, and the social world is incredibly complex and we're fallible creatures looking at it from a specific position within it, everyone inevitably ends up making mistakes
but if you're guided by a concern for emancipation from exploitation in all its forms, you have a moral compass that minimizes these mistakes, which are also minimized by cultivating the "intellectual means of self-defense" noted earlier, and not reifying and mystifying concepts
lol it's difficult to verbalize this exactly because it's ultimately ineffable. marxists use terms like "praxis" and "dialectical thinking" to indicate it, but that's also inherently vague. you can see what it is through examples of others, who exhibited it in their own behavior
I often mention who I think are the greatest dialectical thinkers, who exhibit it in their practice, people like marx, lenin, chomsky, sartre (notice how it's not a property of any particular ideological tendency within the anti-capitalist left!). see also https://twitter.com/zei_squirrel/status/1281496375964966914
some more examples of what I consider to be "dialectical" thinking here https://twitter.com/zei_squirrel/status/1284578413978750978
