The phrase “bringing forth a world” is not incorrect per se but it is misleading if interpreted literally, as anyone is wont to do. The world exists, if not “independently” from us per se, then certainly in our absence.

Of course, I’m mostly saying this as a suspicion, I haven’t sketched any of it out yet, but I can see in my mind’s eye the direction it would likely go. Lot of other marxist and anti-colonial writers on nationhood that I’d look to in trying to sketch this out too.

I’m not saying one should return to humanist marxism as defined, I have my critiques there too (it never escapes the subject/structure divide enactivism and Marx both escape either), but it certainly seems more practically close to modern science than anti-humanism.

That I’ve seen someone who I consider generally pretty intelligent call Ilyenkov a “humanist” as an insult more or less confirms my suspicion. There are unexamined epistemological presuppositions here. Talk about needing a symptomatic reading.

Anti-humanism sought to purge Marxism of everything which did not fit with the representational epistemology which dominated science at the time. In so doing, it epistemologically froze itself, digging its own grave (and setting the stage for poststructuralist idealism)

It becomes clear, when performing that thought experiment, that Marx’s critique of political economy would be self-contradictory without an enactive and deeply historical view of humans and their capacity for labor. The very view anti-humanism calls unscientific and humanist.

The “epistemological break” is not a break of epistemology, but of scale. When you read labor through enaction, you get something remarkably close to a labor theory of value, just with the word “enacted cognition” instead of “labor.”

Marx was, himself, a proto-enactivist, which lines him up with modern science, and yet it is precisely his ideas which align with enactive cognition which anti-humanists call “humanist” or “idealist.” That’s the whole reasoning for the “epistemological break” thesis.

This isn’t to dismiss western marxist philosophy altogether by any means, just that it, as a rule of thumb, has a very clear limitation in terms of presupposed cognitive models

Further thought: Marx was the first true enactive thinker of western philosophy (pre-marxist eastern philosophy already has a long tradition of proto-enactivism). This makes computational or representational cognition revisionism. It betrays Marx’s methodology

Vygotsky and Ilyenkov have both been cited by name by enactivists. Tran-Duc-Thao has an extremely enactive phenomenology. Mao was all about practice being the source of knowledge. Kim Il-sung’s political philosophy was undeniably 4E too, despite Juche’s anthropocentrism.

If one follows the ontological commitments of enactive cognition to the factory floor and to the market, Marx’s economics emerge, fully-formed

i have gotten at least 70% more maoist since the last time i was here. i have also gotten at least 50% less stupid

read Blackshirts and Reds