What theory have you read?

SpicyMarshmellow · 2025-08-15T15:42:32+00:00

I think it's good to be well-read, but I also think there are pitfalls which aren't commonly acknowledged.

I think people, especially on the left, have a tendency to trap their own minds within the frameworks set forth for them by these historical figures. In so many political discussions, you can tell that at some point they lost the ability to think independently without their thoughts being filtered through the linguistic conventions of writers considered "theory" and that it shackles their political imaginations and perceptual objectivity.

More commonly and worse than that, people lean way too hard on appeal to authority, to the point of dogmatism. Forgetting that these writers considered "theory" are/were also human beings, and developing a habit of dismissing anyone who contradicts them out of hand because how dare someone think they're smarter than this highly esteemed author from 200 years ago?!

I have a hunch that for example class consciousness would be achieved 100x more effectively if Marx's writings vanished from existence, but every vanished book were replaced with a brain that simply thought for itself.

None of this is to say that people *shouldn't* read theory. I just think there should be some self-awareness about it, and I disagree with assertions that it's any sort of requirement for forming good opinions.

EditorOk1044 · 2025-08-14T20:52:10+00:00

In Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire argues that the only way to empower oppressed groups is to help them develop their critical consciousness, helping them see the dynamics of the societal structures which uphold their oppression and enabling them to build their own pathway out of it. He elucidates how the pathways to solutions to oppressive dynamics (the "limit-acts" which break us out of "limit situations") are often obscured by the reality frameworks oppressed peoples are conditioned into:

It is not the limit-situations in and of themselves which create a climate of hopelessness, but rather how they are perceived by women and men at a given historical moment: whether they appear as fetters or as insurmountable barriers. As critical perception is embodied in action, a climate of hope and confidence develops which leads men to attempt to overcome the limit-situations. This objective can be achieved only through action upon the concrete, historical reality in which limit-situations historically are found.

It is only through developing a critical perspective on your life -- an understanding of why your life is the way it is, what you truly want for it, and what is in the way of you getting there -- that you can begin to liberate yourself. And that is a project far more difficult than it sounds, because it involves working through literal decades of social conditioning that effect and limit what actions you see as possible and what you are able to perceive of the social forces acting on you. Criticality is a skill that must be intentionally honed.

zeropoundpom · 2025-08-15T07:45:02+00:00

I work in the social sciences, but with a more hard science background. I have been gradually learning about critical theory from intro textbooks etc and have generally been horrified by the flawed premises behind it. To my mind it has one useful insight, which is that nobody can be truly objective. Our own personal backgrounds, experiences, individual differences etc shape the way we view the world, approach problems, how we interpret data etc. This is true and an important point to make. However, the scientific ("positivist" in their terms) approach says "ok we are trying to learn about objective reality, so we need to control for our own biases as much as possible, so that we can be more confident in our results". The critical theory approach does the opposite. It says "if we all have biases we should just abandon any attempt to learn about objective reality and acknowledge that everyone's approach to the world is just as valid as anyone else's". This is where cultural relativism and a whole host of critical theory's other mistakes stem from. Frankly this premise, to me, is so flawed that engaging with critical theory more generally seems pointless.

MonkeyCartridge · 2025-08-15T06:54:50+00:00

The first thing I'll probably point out is that I don't put a ton of weight on written philosophy.

Basically, the value to me is more or less in presenting conjecture about a possible way things may be linked together.

That's generally been my issue with social sciences, especially activist authors in social sciences. People will say stuff like "this is the way the world works because that's what Nietzsche". OK, where is the paper he wrote? What methodology did he use to prove that point? Were other potential explanations presented? Does his explanation fit the data better than, or at the exclusion of, these alternative explanations?

Coming from a science background, the weight placed on specific people is jarring. Hawking wasn't an authority in physics because he could come up with ideas. The methodology proved the ideas. The only authority he had stemmed only from how strongly his ideas were testable, repeatable, and provable.

When Freud says something like "everything is penis envy", that is at best a very loose hypothesis, but is really just opinion and conjecture.

So I do not disqualify people's ideas based on whether or not they have "read the literature" if that literature ends up being a lot of opinion.

Sorry if I sound attack-y. That's not what I mean for it to be. I think your question adds to the conversation, and is an important reminder to explore the field of ideas in case they fit things better. Lest this turn into another "-pill" sub.

My point just that social sciences tend to reference figures of authority as evidence for their "truthiness".

Like, I understand calculus and mechanics, but haven't read a lick of Newton or Leibniz. Because the ideas have authority, not the person. F=ma is true because of how tested and scrutinized it is, not "because Newton said it" and "Newton is an authority".

So like, I wouldn't expect a feminist to have read "The Myth of Male Power" in order for their criticisms to be valid or invalid. I just wanted to put that out there.

Anyway, I'll move more of an actual "response" over in another comment so this wall of text can sit here ignored.

Saerain · 2025-08-15T05:21:09+00:00

I think that movements woven with CT are Lysenkoisms and that its memes are overwhelmingly the source of the Woke Left problem. Kind of a syncretism of Critical Theory and Social Purity.

Adorno had I think the most accurate view of fascism, and Deleuze is my boy for larger scope reasons, but neither have much to say about men's rights. Human rights are as far as I'm concerned a liberal issue not handled well by this extremely illiberal CT crowd.

I understand "left" is commonly identified as a thoroughly anti-liberal direction, but I'm here because of the sidebar description which doesn't put on such airs.

drjamesincandenza · 2025-08-15T19:39:59+00:00

It's important to point out that Critical Theory and being a left-winger are totally and entirely independent of each other. See this article: https://uncommondiscourses.substack.com/p/critical-theory-is-destroying-the?

There is a Marxist and Post-Marxist left (the Critical Theory Left, of which Freire is obviously a representative), as well as a non-Marxist left (often most represented by social democrats and democratic socialists.) The primary difference is that one is ideological (CT) and the other is primarily pragmatic. One of the ways you can usually tell the difference is that the Marxists/Post-Marxist left spends a lot of time telling anyone who disagrees with them that they are nothing but "tankies" or some other form of ideologically captured capitalist apologist.

My own version of leftist liberalism (Democratic Socialism) is based on an empiricist epistemology that stands in stark contrast to the Marxist left's social construction of reality perspective. This is where the ideas diverge most starkly, because Marxists tend to believe that if you disagree with them, you are both wrong and evil. If you think their version of Communism or Socialism (or Anarchism, etc.) wouldn't work out, it's because you haven't had your consciousness sufficiently raised, and you are just shilling for the capitalists. There is almost never an issue that resolves itself by saying, "Well, I wonder what the statistics say about the best way to address this issue." It's a predictable outcome of making epistemology part of political ideology--instead of facts and evidence.

So I tend to argue all issues (including men's rights) in terms of the fairness and utility for everyone, not ideological conformity or analysis. Very few people agree with far-left critical theory. It's a bit like when people discuss trans issues and some percentage of people say, "But gender and sex are *different*!" as if that wasn't the conclusion of a long line of ideologically-informed reasoning, but the absolute truth. It is, instead, a type of begging the question, because empiricists don't generally believe in things they can't see and which don't have predictive value. Likewise, theory-driven leftists assume that ideology and epistemology are one and the same, and the only reason you can disagree is if you are evil or stupid.

captainhornheart · 2025-08-15T10:47:37+00:00

I've always considered myself left wing and liberal (which are two different positions), but I find myself increasingly suspicious of all ideologies and their tendency to characterise everything as a system.

It was feminism that caused this change in me. When you learn about feminism, you quickly see what a hotchpotch of psychological projection, conspiracy theories, invalid metaphors and outright lies it all is. It's laughably threadbare as an intellectual movement, and yet hundreds of millions of people around the world accept its precepts and it's a dominant ideology in academia, politics and business in the world's most developed countries. Seeing this made me realise that people will believe any old shit as long as it serves their (psychological, social, financial) purposes. There's little clear space between feminism and religion.

I started to become more and more suspicious of ALL ideologies. After all, they exist to serve purposes rather than describe reality. They aren't falsifiable and don't change when contradicted by observations. The central premises are articles of faith and cannot be questioned without the questioner being accused of heresy.

Despite my 25 years as a social democrat, I'm less and less convinced that there is a class system. Yes, the rich have more power than the rest of us, they exploit us and bend politics to their will, but why do these observations need to form a system? If all the other system-based explanations for social phenomena are wrong, why would this one be right? And class is a vague and increasingly unhelpful concept anyway. We really just mean wealth nowadays.

Marx's analysis of 19th-century European society was insightful and groundbreaking, but we live in a different society now with different problems, and all of the -isms and movements that have been based on his dialectic, especially those based on the idea of zero-sum class struggle, are similarly primitive and obsolete.

Men aren't a social class and neither are women, though feminists think of women as such. This is one of the fatal flaws of their belief system.

Any men's rights or actual gender equality movement should steer as far away as possible from ideology and the baggage of Marxism-inflected areas like sociology, psychoanalysis, gender studies, feminism, post-colonialism or whatever else. It needs to be based on rationality, facts, honesty and open-mindedness. This probably means it will lack the power of simple, internally consistent, thought-terminating global explanations, and we will sometimes have to admit that we don't have all the answers, but better that than adopting the straitjackets of ideology and humanities-based dogma, which are actually barriers to bringing about fair, sustainable, widely accepted and meaningful change. Improving the lot of men will mean, among other things, using reason and observation to kill off feminism and related belief systems.

EditorOk1044 · 2025-08-14T20:51:31+00:00

As a side note, I've noticed a strong resistance towards embracing or reading feminist theory here. But I think without a firm understanding of women's issues you cannot create an egalitarian movement that will liberate both men and women. bell hooks elucidated in her feminist study of men, The Will To Change, that feminism as a movement made a consistent choice to ignore the issues facing men or consider that any movement to end patriarchy must necessarily include them in the fight:

When contemporary feminism was at its most intense, many women insisted that they were weary of giving energy to men, that they wanted to place women at the center of all feminist discussions. Feminist thinkers, like myself, who wanted to include men in the discussion were usually labeled male-identified and dismissed. We were “sleeping with the enemy.” We were the feminists who could not be trusted because we cared about the fate of men.

[...]

Acknowledging that there needed to be more feminist focus on men did not lead to the production of a body of writing by women about men. [...] the radical feminist labeling of all men as oppressors and all women as victims was a way to deflect attention away from the reality of men and our ignorance about them. To simply label them as oppressors and dismiss them meant we never had to give voice to the gaps in our understanding or to talk about maleness in complex ways. We did not have to talk about the ways our fear of men distorted our perspectives and blocked our understanding. Hating men was just another way to not take men and masculinity seriously.

I see much the same pattern playing out here. It is not enough to be aligned with "left-wing values" as outlined in the sub's mission statement to avoid falling into reactionary patterns that create inegalitarian social movements. It wasn't enough for feminism. You, and we, must do better than developing a myopia that only allows us vision of one side of the equation.

diagnosissplendid · 2025-08-16T03:45:45+00:00

Honestly, I've read more about feminism. My leftwing politics are a little old school and chiefly focused on economics and equality: I can make a decent argument for economic democracy, but the personal has yet to become political, at least in my reading. Mostly I go off experience: the way the law gives men a pay cut for paternity leave (I'm in the UK) while women get full pay and time off, the double standards around relationships, the tilt towards women in education, etc. The extent of my reading on specific issues is policy papers rather than bonafide theory.

I'd love to know if there is any specific theory, preferably written by men, that covers issues around men. My reading at the moment is about relationships and what constitutes abuse: this is, I suspect, not a bad thing to be investigating.

Are there any good theoretical or polemical works about men's place in society today?

Few_Sink_7386 · 2025-10-02T18:30:09+00:00

I used to be a major Marxist and read Das Kapital at a very young age. However, after 7 years of being a Marxist I found some problems with it. For example it is based on dialectical materialism which is not an assumption I can subscribe to anymore due to the understanding of consciousness and understanding the world more from a classical lens. Second, the Marxist understanding of history is very faulty as the idea that proletariats caused revolutions was false. French revolution was caused by the bourgeoisie, the merchant class and their allied arisrocrats against monarch and his allied arisrocrats and even peasants. Same with USSR, Lenin was no peasant or poor proletariat. People would still consider me a leftist though due to me being against anything that resembles fascism or anti humanitarianism which includes ideologies like feminism.

Title	What theory have you read?
Author	EditorOk1044
Upvotes	18
Comments	55
Date	August 14, 2025 8:50 PM UTC (11 months ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/1mqcu5f/what_theory_have_you_read/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/what-theory-have-you-read.1559637 https://theredarchive.com/post/1559637

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