Posts by Megan Wilson2

I don't think so—mostly because Karl Marx defined essence in a way that’s fundamentally different from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. You're right that he never actually denied that essence exists; his whole core premise rests on viewing humans as the architects of their own history and the creators of their own means of production, which implies certain universal human attributes. But unlike Hegel, he didn't see this essence as some immutable thing without which a person couldn't exist as a human being—rather, he saw it as empirically being the general attributes of human existence. It's basically his thesis regarding Ludwig Feuerbach, right?

We're talking about an essence that isn't fixed or eternal—which makes it totally different from what you'd find in Hegel or in Platonic thought (which are pretty much the same thing, if you ask me). Marx actually predicted that all these attributes would eventually dissolve once a classless society emerges; there wouldn't be "history" for humans to create anymore, and labor wouldn't mean what it does today because work and leisure would just sort of merge into one thing, etc.

If empirical facts turned out to show the opposite, I doubt Marx would have ever stopped believing that essence exists, but he definitely would have said, "Well, look at that—turns out that wasn't our true essence!" and then he'd just pivot and keep philosophizing through a brand new lens. At the end of the day, philosophy is always going to be this restless search for essence, whether you happen to be an essentialist or a nominalist.

Karl Marx wasn't an essentialist—not by a long shot. His whole pivot from idealism to materialism basically flips the script on the Hegelian logical relationship between being and becoming. To me, essentialism assumes that "being" is the bedrock of existence, which is really just a textbook idealist postulate. Marx, on the other hand, argued that existence has to come before being—meaning history itself had to exist before we could even come up with the concept of historicity. That makes him a totally different kind of historicist than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. It’s simple: if the actual empirical evidence doesn't match our preconceived notions of what historicity looks like, then we don't actually understand the essence of history at all. This tendency to ignore empirical data? That's a leftover from Hegel, not Marx. The core distinction here is really just the gap between idealism and materialism—or, if you want to get technical, the divide between nominalism and essentialism.

I honestly feel like we're suffering from a massive surplus of Popperian errors here.

Theodor Adorno kicked off his "three studies on Hegel" with this little nudge to all the philosophers working in his era—basically saying we’re doing it all wrong. Instead of obsessing over stuff like, "What's left of his ideas?" or "Which parts of his books are still useful today?", he thought we should be asking what these giants would actually say about our current world if they were sitting right here with us. It's about using their eyes to see the present, you know? Like looking through a vintage lens at a modern cityscape.

So, let's try applying that kind of thinking to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. We already have a pretty good idea of what thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Erich Fromm thought about the Soviet Union, and we can look at how folks like Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Slavoj Žižek view things nowadays—but let's pivot. What would the original duo, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, actually make of that specific Bolshevik version of socialism? I mean, sure, they loved a good "critique of everything existing," but I'm talking about the real-world application. How would they react to it specifically?

Free speech is basically an oxymoron.

I tend to look at language itself as this tool for dominance—sort of like how any structured system works to suppress ideas that might shake up the symbolic order. In that sense, speech is inherently unfree, because every single thing we say carries this extra layer of meaning—this ideological baggage—that exists just to narcissistically reaffirm the authority of the great second.

Take this, for instance: nobody is actually going to arrest me legally for saying that during the World War II Axis occupation, there was a mass slaughter of Mexicans. But if I actually go out and say it? Some local American patriot is going to jump down my throat and label me some kind of anti-American radical, simply because within our national discourse, highlighting those specific victims gets lumped in with foreign nationalist agendas.

So, speech ends up acting as its own inhibitor. We can only really pretend "freedom of speech" exists if we cling to this flawed theory that language is just a permissive way to communicate—which, honestly, it just isn't.