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From the NYT opinion pages:
Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!
By Jason Barker
Mr. Barker is an associate professor of philosophy.
April 30, 2018
… Racial and sexual oppression have been added to the dynamic of class exploitation. Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic targeting of the “eternal truths” of our age. Such movements recognize, as did Marx, that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress.
Uh, the more our age becomes obsessed with punishing the White Male Ruling Class, such as George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson, for its toxic whitemaleness, the less concern it has for class struggle and the richer white male billionaires seem to get. Funny how that works …
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Levels of non-self-awareness that shouldn’t even be possible
Funny how the MSM never mentions “Class Struggle” when Billionaire Bloomberg come after your AR and handgun, huh?
Notice how Mao’s “Political Power Grows Out the Barrel of a Gun” has been totally subsumed by “Save Ze Children!”
Yeah, it’s funny how today’s “progressives” are on the side of the FBI and CIA now.
Hard to pin down, but my impression is that Bill Clinton was the guy that kicked this off, historically. The third way stuff and the abandonment of traditional labor unions, white working class, etc. by the Democratic party seemed to start during his presidency. Identity politics then filled that vacuum. It would be ironic if Hillary’s failed run marked the beginning of the end of that particular con.
A lot of the left was disillusioned with the traditional working class by the 70s and early 80s. They didn't really want revolution, and seemed satisfied with a state that provided for their needs with the minimum of institutional change.
Developing an intelligent version of the mixed economy which could compete with the privitize/sell off everything that the state owned policies of the right would have required a lot of self questioning. Going with the ideological flow, acquiescing to the forces of the freemarket, but opening new fronts in Gender/Race/Sexual Identity was a lot easier.Replies: @J.Ross, @Thirdeye
Why don’t they go after these toxic old white guys?
” that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress. ”
The “alt right” is revolutionary?
In one of Sergio Leone’s lesser known movies, a classic scene about revolutions. My guess is that Jason Barker is one of those people who read the books.
And uuuhh: "That's that" - echoed as if spoken by the (at times) enraged Jordan B. Peterson. - He was a young radical leftist, when this film premiered, and, you know, leftists in France and Germany (and Canada?) loved "Spaghetti-Westerns, as they once were called - "so" (JBP) - "that's that!" - or is it?!Replies: @Anonym
Yes, I’m sure Marx would have loved to see today’s left agitate for the same immigration policies as the Koch Brothers and Michael Bloomberg.
The "alt right" is revolutionary?Replies: @Daniil Adamov, @Buzz Mohawk, @Seth Largo
They’re the latest wave of wannabe revolutionaries.
If the "alt right" can do 180 degrees, it is good no?
Communists of today have learned from their mistakes in the Soviet Union. Instead of seizing the means of production, they have seized the means of production of critical thought — by seizing the media and academia.
To conquer the heart, you must first conquer the mind.
Judging from the number of brain dead SJWs, BLMers, Antifa, “Resist” and CNN watching zombies, I’d say they’re succeeding mightily.
+I;S;E;P;M
It reads as such:
the positive intellectual transformation of society (+I) stands firmly behind the social trasnformation of society (+S). All social problems are economic (+E) and all economic problems are political (+P) and military aims presuppose politial objectives (+M)
Also works for the negative:
-i;s;e;p;m
the negative intellectual transformation of society -i) stands firmly behind the negative social trasnformation of society (-s). All social problems are economic (-e) and all economic problems are political (-p) and military aims presuppose politial objectives (-m)
Hence once the cult-mars got a hold of the educational system and media, they were able, over time to do -i. Once a critical mass of the -i mindset was met, there was a rapid transformation of society. Started slowly with the whole "get an inch, wait for objections to stop being raised, go again" to leaps and bounds (Trans this and that, censorship physical violence against 'wrong talk/ wrong action")
This all pushed upwards to the economics (see Starbucks and other virtue signaling corporations) and politics.
None of this turns around until a critical mass of +I is attained and followed through.Replies: @Thirdeye
The "alt right" is revolutionary?Replies: @Daniil Adamov, @Buzz Mohawk, @Seth Largo
Yes.
https://theconservativetreehouse.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/comey-clapper-and-brennan-2.jpgReplies: @Barnard
It amazes me that Clapper can lie to Congress multiple times and not only avoid jail time but face no repecussions whatsoever.
Karl Marx was always popular with Richard Harris and those who would be King … of the Popes.
>I’m going to bring you into the basement, for freedom! I’m tying you to the bedposts — to help you self-actualize! I’m fumbling with my trousers now, to demonstrate how much I believe in you!
In the future, when Marx is less famous, it will be possible to use an uninformed first read of his ideas as an intelligence test. The smart kids will be able to figure out that this is a straightforward bait-and-switch: that the logical outcome of all these proposals is the opposite of what was promised.
freedom of the press;
freedom of assembly, including the holding of mass meetings;
freedom of street processions and demonstrationsSort of like Contemporary USA where freedom of speech (university campuses) and freedom of assembly (Charlottesville) are protected.Replies: @TheJester
Here’s a story Ron Unz will insist didn’t happen, involving the arrest of 16 violent gang members, in San Jose. Hispanics and one really ugly Arab guy.
http://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/16-arrested-in-connection-with-violent-robberies-carjackings-burglaries-in-san-jose/1151974854
One of the generational differences I have noticed between boomers and those coming behind is that the former tends to couch things in economic terms or class while the latter are more likely to see things through the lens of race or sexual identity. The Right / Republicans were slower to adopt identity politics but it is clearly coming. This is one reason the neo and religious conservatives are having so much trouble with Trump. The message that all we have to do is integrate colored people into the economy and they will automatically become Republicans is passe. Everybody but the stupids and old people have already be disabused of the notion. Blacks certainly don’t believe it. Same for white liberals. They have to explain the bad behavior of their more vibrant coalition members in Marxist / Socialist / Progressive terms to avoid the ugly truth that many of them simply hate and are resentful of white people.
They haven’t been “added”, they’ve replaced class warfare. This is a neat sleight of hand whereby billionaires can be presented as people’s champions by mandating tranny bathroom privileges at their companies. Not much of a Marxist this Barker fellow.
The parades were pretty great.
“They’re the latest wave of wannabe revolutionaries.”
If the “alt right” can do 180 degrees, it is good no?
I’d say the abandonment of the white working class began in the late 1960s. That’s when the Dems, in order to help blacks as much as possible, threw white workers under the bus, so to speak, and didn’t listen when they complained about increases in crime in their neighborhoods. By 1980, it was clear from all the talk about Reagan Democrats that the white working class could no longer be counted on to automatically vote for Democrats. And while the Dems blame this on right-wing propaganda, a more realistic analysis suggests that these whites knew their own interests better than any of the “experts” did. They could see perfectly well that the Dems were hurting them a lot more than they were helping them.
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UyKUT-thBqM/WAG1zfIWFfI/AAAAAAAABZw/5HDTJwxJiS8vIaN1ETuOpujURTqTkDr-wCLcB/s1600/hardhatrally.jpg
Subsequently, school bussing drove working class whites out of the cities, solidifying black urban political machines.
Then, the Left tiptoed away from actual environmental stewardship in favor of incorporeal "climate change." Did you know that in 2013, the NYT shut down its environmental desk? Plastic islands in the ocean? The California condor released back into the wild? What? Huh?
I've noticed Ramz Paul is now using the Ghost Dance meme to describe the terminal phase of American conservatism, which I've been saying since 2014.
It's amazing how right I am about everything.
The Marxism that really won the future.
A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of a man with bras calling himself a ‘woman’.
The ultimate vision of Marx. A man calling himself a ‘woman’ and beating real women in women’s sports.
Given the educational and economic success of Jewish-Americans, who vote overwhelmingly democrat, you’d think the GOP would realize such integration is no guarantee of party support.
” Racial and sexual oppression have been added to the dynamic of class exploitation.”
This isn’t new. The upper middle class kids of the New Left paid lip service to the class struggle and ending the war in Vietnam. The white revolutionaries of that time, the antifa of the 60s, were deeply obsessed with race. If you do any reading on the Weathermen you will discover that the plight of the negro was always prominent.
This is fitting. I’m currently reading The Gulag Archipelago. And my teenage son likes to listen to the Soviet National Anthem, ironically of course, when he is pulling his deadlift workset of 5; over our small gym’s loudspeaker. This total strong-ass brother got a kick out of that last week. Especially since my son is a tall skinny white kid that can almost pull twice his body weight and is still not old enough to have a driver’s license nor has he hit Tanner Stage 4.
The Left is now and always has been plutocratic.
Yet in 2016, the white working class provided Hillary with 1/3rd of her vote. The fact so many continue to vote democrat today when there is no doubt how they are seen by that party is depressing. They are literally assisting the people who wish to eliminate them.
The white working class has been abandoned by both parties. Both parties are pursing policies to beat down the unionized private sector and the white working class.
These neo-bolsheviks are dead serious.
Their personalities are deformed as if from a brain injury. It doesn’t matter how many commie regimes crash and burn.
THEIR EVIL DREAM IS ETERNAL.
The bottom line is that marxists don’t believe in discourse or argument or debate. They believe in total control and murdering dissenters e.g. Sean Penn is continually frustrated by the concept of dialog with the opposition: The opposition should simply be killed! What’s the holdup?
Remember. They’re dead serious.
Bill Clinton was a symptom of this in the United States, there have been similar leaders in other western countries, Tony Blair in the UK, Trudeau (the elder) in Canada, perhaps Macron in France.
A lot of the left was disillusioned with the traditional working class by the 70s and early 80s. They didn’t really want revolution, and seemed satisfied with a state that provided for their needs with the minimum of institutional change.
Developing an intelligent version of the mixed economy which could compete with the privitize/sell off everything that the state owned policies of the right would have required a lot of self questioning. Going with the ideological flow, acquiescing to the forces of the freemarket, but opening new fronts in Gender/Race/Sexual Identity was a lot easier.
I’d pay big money to see what Marx would think of this article, considering the unabashedly pro-plutocratic, pro-ruling class politics-sycophantic beyond parody-of the modern MSM. He himself was a former journalist who was quite skilled with sneering sarcasm and satire, and what is easier pickings for satire than the NYT playing the populist in 2018?
Karl Marx’s scathing opinion of the upper-middle class liberals of his day came across loud and clear in his 18th Brumaire. It was enlightening to discover that in Paris in the early 1950s, the bien-pensants proved to be no less feckless, self-absorbed, and-given someone who had the power to do, like Louis-Napoleon-easy to push aside than our current ones. Some things never change…. with that said, he would support mass immigration, but not for reasons that the likes of Ezra Klein would appreciate. Marx pointed out that mass immigration would heavily exacerbate the destabilization of capitalist society and hasten its demise.
He’d probably see today’s elite fetishism of mass immigration as a political gift beyond his wildest dreams, and openly question why he couldn’t have been lucky enough to have elites this stupid back when he was around. Short-term greed overriding long-term interests and petty individual whims driving policy rather than sober calculation is a classic staple for ruling classes that fall in history.
Rope, Capitalist … Capitalist, … wait, you introduced us to Rope, didn’t you?”
When the Stupid Party is in charge of Congress you can lie to them with wild abandon and no consequences. Try it when the Evil Party is in charge and watch what happens to you. One party consists of people who think of themselves as being in office. The other of people who think of themselves as being in power.
This, “the left” actually comes from a particular generation of wealthy OxBridge students who realized they could get away with more if working class people saw them as their champions. Marx is invoked to give them credibility, not necessarily ideas.
A lot of the left was disillusioned with the traditional working class by the 70s and early 80s. They didn't really want revolution, and seemed satisfied with a state that provided for their needs with the minimum of institutional change.
Developing an intelligent version of the mixed economy which could compete with the privitize/sell off everything that the state owned policies of the right would have required a lot of self questioning. Going with the ideological flow, acquiescing to the forces of the freemarket, but opening new fronts in Gender/Race/Sexual Identity was a lot easier.Replies: @J.Ross, @Thirdeye
Didn’t Cohn-Bendit characterize his sixties student radicalism as against the orthodoxy of the unions and the established-left?
They’re probably aware that the Republican Party establishment hates them every bit as much as the Democrats do. Why on earth would working class people love the Republican Party?
Second, in the democrat party it is not just the establishment that hates the white working class. Pretty much everyone from the establishment all the way down to the individual voter of the coalition of the fringes hates whites and more specifically the white working class.
This is not so in the GOP. Of either party in this current day and age, it is the only the GOP that can help whites in general. There is still work that needs to be done such as getting rid the cucks that have played the role of controlled opposition. But at least this is possible. I don't see any possibility of making any headway in the new democrat party.Replies: @dfordoom
In one of Sergio Leone's lesser known movies, a classic scene about revolutions. My guess is that Jason Barker is one of those people who read the books.Replies: @Dieter Kief, @Anonymous
Great dialogue!
And uuuhh: “That’s that” – echoed as if spoken by the (at times) enraged Jordan B. Peterson. – He was a young radical leftist, when this film premiered, and, you know, leftists in France and Germany (and Canada?) loved “Spaghetti-Westerns, as they once were called – “so” (JBP) – “that’s that!” – or is it?!
Yes, it is. I was going to mention in my previous comment that Steiger's Mexican accent is a lot like Pacino's Tony Montana's Cuban accent a decade before Scarface.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Reg Cæsar
A revolution happens, when something is rolled (volvere= roll, latin) back (latin: re) – – (many a revolutionary kinda misses out on this one).
Marx was brilliant for noticing that the forms of production have a determining effect on everything else such as culture and politics.
Like all grand theorists are incentivised to do, he then stretched this a long way past its limits. Of course, some Marxists will argue that he walked it back, but then that rather defeats Marxism.
A fall-out observation from Marx’s fundamental point was that the growing urban proletariat would be the political force of the future. The way Western economies were developing meant that this class would dominate numerically and would also be generally aggrieved.
He thus rested the burden of the future on their shoulders.
Fast forward and one thing stopped Marx’s prediction coming true. It turned out that he had over-egged the economic determinism – just as rich people often don’t mind paying more tax out of solidarity with their proletariat, the proletariat often don’t mind letting their rich people keep their stuff out of solidarity. This point is important. It has allowed peaceful and relatively open societies to have both huge taxes/welfare states and huge economic inequality. Some at the same time, some in different cultures.
Scrap that sense of mutuality that has been largely based on culture and possibly also ethnicity and shared genes(!) and the only time you’ll sample the open society will be in old movies.
Now the modern-day ‘progressive’ may skip Marx’s fundamental observation and simply notice that immigrants or people of colour, not proletariat, are the fasted growing group and will come to predominate but this is an infantile observation. There is no immigrant land nor people of colour ethnicity. The shared experience and shared grievance mostly consists of imagining that social faux pas have been committed against them. It seems only to have power because it is superficially true that, given current trends, people not native to Western countries will become the majority and that this observation allows those who feel part of that movement to feel spiteful power in this fact when combined with a personally ennervating sense of victimhood. This is a funhouse mirror version of Marxism.
To be fair, this third-worldism as it used to be known, made a lot more sense during the years of white imperialism. I suppose it is testament to how slow people are at changing their worldviews that it isn’t seen as anything other than absurd today.
What annoys me most is that if the type of mutuality that sort of exists between the same culture rich and the same culture poor can exist cross cultures then it defeats this farcical Marxism of colour and immigration by rendering its prediction wrong while if it cannot exist then it means that this project is a road to hell.
The fundamental and internal contradiction of this ‘progressivism’ is that it both holds that people of colour have separate interests and that they’re no different. Or as Steve puts it, that POCs are equal but also superior.
This is how we know that we are dealing with people who are essentially simple. In that they’ve spotted a route to power but they intend to use that power only to satisfy themselves. Or maybe they’re just all idiots.
Always ask the rich progressive: “why would the diverse poor let you keep your wealth?” Then laugh at his complex economic arguments as if the diverse poor would either understand or believe him.
Also always ask the poor progressive: “why would the diverse rich pay taxes to support you?” His brain will melt.
Remember also that some poor consider themselves rich and practically all of the rich consider themselves poor some of the time.
Marx was a noticer, par excellence. His reach was simply extraordinary, for a guy living in a newly industrialized, but still globalizing world.
Exactly. Especially as Marxists would consider sexual oppression simply as an expression of economic oppression. Marxism even considered all human cultures an expression of economic oppression. So no serious Marxist would pay much attention to a #Metoo-movement, as they would immediately determine that its proponents were the upper class and the ills it tries to expose would simply vanish after the revolution.
And uuuhh: "That's that" - echoed as if spoken by the (at times) enraged Jordan B. Peterson. - He was a young radical leftist, when this film premiered, and, you know, leftists in France and Germany (and Canada?) loved "Spaghetti-Westerns, as they once were called - "so" (JBP) - "that's that!" - or is it?!Replies: @Anonym
Great dialogue!
Yes, it is. I was going to mention in my previous comment that Steiger’s Mexican accent is a lot like Pacino’s Tony Montana’s Cuban accent a decade before Scarface.
They learned from Antonio Gramsci. The ‘left’ you see today is the result of cultural hegemony.
Well, he is a democrat/liberal. They usually go unpunished and play under their own set of privileged rules
In the future, when Marx is less famous, it will be possible to use an uninformed first read of his ideas as an intelligence test. The smart kids will be able to figure out that this is a straightforward bait-and-switch: that the logical outcome of all these proposals is the opposite of what was promised.Replies: @Stephen Paul Foster
“The smart kids will be able to figure out that this is a straightforward bait-and-switch: that the logical outcome of all these proposals is the opposite of what was promised.”
Yes, indeed. Below one of the best examples of how Marxism produces the opposites to its promises from the USSR Constitution of 1936, courtesy of that great progressive humanist, J.S. Stalin.
ARTICLE 125. In conformity with the interests of the working people, and in order to strengthen the socialist system, the citizens of the U.S.S.R. are guaranteed by law:
freedom of speech;
freedom of the press;
freedom of assembly, including the holding of mass meetings;
freedom of street processions and demonstrations
Sort of like Contemporary USA where freedom of speech (university campuses) and freedom of assembly (Charlottesville) are protected.
Bingo. The left doesn’t want to produce anything. And that’s why they don’t challenge outsourcing. They don’t want to have to get their hands dirty, literally or metaphorically. Screaming for tranny bathroom access is easy. Having to juggle the complexities of an economy is, well, adult stuff.
I’ve been saying this since January 2012. The under-remarked Hard Hat Riot in New York was emblematic of this split.
Subsequently, school bussing drove working class whites out of the cities, solidifying black urban political machines.
Then, the Left tiptoed away from actual environmental stewardship in favor of incorporeal “climate change.” Did you know that in 2013, the NYT shut down its environmental desk? Plastic islands in the ocean? The California condor released back into the wild? What? Huh?
I’ve noticed Ramz Paul is now using the Ghost Dance meme to describe the terminal phase of American conservatism, which I’ve been saying since 2014.
It’s amazing how right I am about everything.
I don’t think old Karl would be glad to hear this. Bourgeois concerns being put at the level of the mover of History?
It’s funny. Old day lefties were 100% sure everything came down to class struggle (and they were wrong, it doesn’t); current ones profess the same faith, but they don’t even know what class means anymore – they conflate it with all sorts of sillier things.
Not any different than the Bolsheviks being on the side of the NKVD and the KGB…
As the old joke goes, the Soviet Constitution guaranteed freedom of speech, but not freedom after the speech.
All explained in The Sequential Equation:
+I;S;E;P;M
It reads as such:
the positive intellectual transformation of society (+I) stands firmly behind the social trasnformation of society (+S). All social problems are economic (+E) and all economic problems are political (+P) and military aims presuppose politial objectives (+M)
Also works for the negative:
-i;s;e;p;m
the negative intellectual transformation of society -i) stands firmly behind the negative social trasnformation of society (-s). All social problems are economic (-e) and all economic problems are political (-p) and military aims presuppose politial objectives (-m)
Hence once the cult-mars got a hold of the educational system and media, they were able, over time to do -i. Once a critical mass of the -i mindset was met, there was a rapid transformation of society. Started slowly with the whole “get an inch, wait for objections to stop being raised, go again” to leaps and bounds (Trans this and that, censorship physical violence against ‘wrong talk/ wrong action”)
This all pushed upwards to the economics (see Starbucks and other virtue signaling corporations) and politics.
None of this turns around until a critical mass of +I is attained and followed through.
The "alt right" is revolutionary?Replies: @Daniil Adamov, @Buzz Mohawk, @Seth Largo
There will always be a ruling class. Every ruling class will have ideas. Ergo, Marxism calls for eternal revolution.
Having detailed dossiers on all of their mistresses, call-girls, and rent-boys helps.
Yes, it is. I was going to mention in my previous comment that Steiger's Mexican accent is a lot like Pacino's Tony Montana's Cuban accent a decade before Scarface.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Reg Cæsar
Rod Steiger may not have been one of the greatest actors. But he was one of the greatest over-actors.
He was really good in Dr. Zhivago too.
So you've seen him in The Big Knife? His hamminess rivaled that of Lee J. Cobb in Golden Boy. Interestingly, both films were based on plays by the odious Clifford Odets.
First, if the white working class is aware that the GOP party establishment hates them, then how on earth can they not be aware that the democrats hate them? And if both parties hate them, they’d be better off not even voting, or voting 3rd party.
Second, in the democrat party it is not just the establishment that hates the white working class. Pretty much everyone from the establishment all the way down to the individual voter of the coalition of the fringes hates whites and more specifically the white working class.
This is not so in the GOP. Of either party in this current day and age, it is the only the GOP that can help whites in general. There is still work that needs to be done such as getting rid the cucks that have played the role of controlled opposition. But at least this is possible. I don’t see any possibility of making any headway in the new democrat party.
A philosopher!!! I thought only a sociologist could dish out such drivel. Unless, of course, he is a French philosopher.
.
Funny how the guy who started communism is talked about in such tones, given the fact that communists murdered over a hundred million civilians in the 20th century.
Nazis only murdered like 12m people, and anyone connected to them, in even the most tangential way, is radioactive.
It’s almost as if the oligarch class are communist sympathizers, and maybe have some gulag plans tucked away, in the backs of their heads.
It's not "almost as if" , rather is it precisely that : They, the monetary PTB, are most certainly "communist sympathizers", as crazy and paradoxical as it sounds, and they are counting the minutes till the revolution is completed, and they , stupidly and naively assume that they will be in charge.
This is an insane planet, and the workings of the human mind defy all logic and rationality.
Authenticjazzman "Mensa" qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet, and pro jazz artist.
I’m still waiting for someone to chew more scenery than the guy who played Ben Sisko on Deep Space Nine. Definitely a high-water mark. Guy cracks me up constantly.
Indicated anti-social-media response for such outburts is simply to quote back St. Karl’s own writings on: Chinese, Hindus, Negros… some Judaism zingers in there, too.
In one of Sergio Leone's lesser known movies, a classic scene about revolutions. My guess is that Jason Barker is one of those people who read the books.Replies: @Dieter Kief, @Anonymous
Basically the Eric Hoffer analysis of same from “The True Believer”
Of course, it’s the standard hypocrisy that the author lives in South Korea rather than North Korea. On the other hand, he probably lives in Asia because he hates white folks, so anything that can get people like that out of the West is a good thing. That was the one good thing about Obama’s mom.
1968 Democratic National Convention is when the replacement of Marxism by Cultural Marxism really got going on the US left. Clinton’s contribution was to make the D party friendly to Capital (or, rather, to complete in a more-or-less official way, that transformation). Capital is definitely hostile to Marxism but is enthusiastically friendly to Cultural Marxism.
Notice how Mao's "Political Power Grows Out the Barrel of a Gun" has been totally subsumed by "Save Ze Children!"Replies: @Eagle Eye
OT but broadly related and IMPORTANT – the Hearst-style pro-war propaganda is going into overdrive. A “limited” war in Syria can (and is intended to) lead to world-wide conflagration involving Russia and U.S.
See also on this site: https://www.unz.com/article/the-league-of-assad-loving-conspiracy-theorists
Waiting for the OPCW: How to Read the Next Report on Alleged Chemical Weapons Atrocities
Peter Hitchens
There is a growing danger of an actual war between Israel and Iran, between Saudi Arabia and Iran and, as a result, between the ‘West’ and Iran. Such a war could spread quite easily to the European continent thanks to Russia’s close relations with Iran and with Iran’s ally, Syria. …
In the coming period of grave danger in the Near East, much may depend on the attitudes of media and politicians towards evidence of atrocities. This is because in the post-1945, post UN Charter world, nations cannot simply start wars. They need a reason and/or pretext. A noble humanitarian pretext is the best way of ensuring public and UN support for wars of choice which would otherwise break international law.
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2018/04/waiting-for-the-opcw-how-to-read-the-next-report-on-alleged-chemical-weapons-atrocities.html
I guess he felt he needed to compete with Patrick Stewart’s Shakespearean background. Two close contenders would be Meryl Streep in any film, particularly ones in which she plays a foreigner, or Kenneth Branagh acting in any film he also directs.
Two hundred years and still chasing dancing shadows.
Raymond Aron’s definition of Marxism remains matchless: “The opiate of the intellectuals.”
But it’s a Pyrrhic victory: the expected utopia gets subsumed by the diversity(tm) clashes.
Nazis only murdered like 12m people, and anyone connected to them, in even the most tangential way, is radioactive.
It's almost as if the oligarch class are communist sympathizers, and maybe have some gulag plans tucked away, in the backs of their heads.Replies: @Tyrion 2, @Authenticjazzman
Marx didn’t do anything wrong. Nor did he live to see his followers do anything wrong. Nietzsche is in a sort of similar place as regards the Nazis and he is far from radioactive. Most uni professors love him.
Who’s Next came out in 1971, the same year as Duck, You Sucker. People needed to hear that message then and now.
This is disturbing, they will just keep repeated debunked lies in an exposed method until they get the result they want, or somebody stops them. As I have pointed out they will now start to attack critics by conflating skeptics of Syrian chemical attack claims with Holocaust deniers, as happened to Hitchens himself. The people who have taken apart these claims (and the claims of a Russian chemical attack coincidentally located near to the British chemical weapons lab) include Ivy League professors. Hopefully there is some kind of moment of exposure, like when Kerry attempted the same schtick as Colin Powell and ordinary people instantly made the connection.
Second, in the democrat party it is not just the establishment that hates the white working class. Pretty much everyone from the establishment all the way down to the individual voter of the coalition of the fringes hates whites and more specifically the white working class.
This is not so in the GOP. Of either party in this current day and age, it is the only the GOP that can help whites in general. There is still work that needs to be done such as getting rid the cucks that have played the role of controlled opposition. But at least this is possible. I don't see any possibility of making any headway in the new democrat party.Replies: @dfordoom
True. But to admit to yourself that both parties are out to get you means admitting that the whole political system is a fraud and that democracy is a fraud. That’s not easy to do, especially for Americans who have had more than a century of non-stop propaganda about how great America is and how great democracy is.
You don’t think so?
One thing Marx was absolutely right about is, first time tragedy, second time farce. It certainly fits here.
Because Marx didn’t do anything, period.
Neither did Charles Manson.
Yes, it is. I was going to mention in my previous comment that Steiger's Mexican accent is a lot like Pacino's Tony Montana's Cuban accent a decade before Scarface.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Reg Cæsar
There’s more than a little tinge of Cuban to Ella Fitzgerald’s Portuguese on her AC Jobim tribute album, too. A couple of weeks on the streets of Rio could have fixed that, as otherwise her pronunciation was quite good.
The late Harold Wilson, who served two terms as prime minister of Britain, said of Das Kapital that he didn’t read beyond the footnotes on page 1, and I think most people have had the same experience. I have read the Communist Manifesto, it is a stirring polemic, but based on false assumptions.
The greatest defect of Marxism is that it has nothing to say about the inner life. Marx and his followers assumed that under a Marxist regime, the State would wither away because there would be peace and prosperity for everyone. I don’t think that Russia under Lenin and Stalin, China under Mao, and Cambodia under Pol Pot were aberrations, I believe that they were a predictable outcome of Marxism as a political system.
One of the strange features of modern times is the alliance between Islam and the radical Left of the Western world. Equally bizarre is the attitude of feminists towards Islam: in Islamic societies females are oppressed, they have no rights, and may have their genitals mutilated, and yet feminists in the West are more concerned with detecting Islamophobia that in criticising Islam’s misogyny.
However, I believe that Marxists, Islamists and feminists have a common goal: the destruction of Western society, and the imposition of a regime with the characteristics that Orwell described with uncanny prescience in Nineteen Eighty Four.
Authenticjazzman "Mensa" qualified since 1973, airborne trained us Army vet, and pro jazz artisit.
“Rod Steiger may not have been one of the greatest actors. But he was one of the greatest over-actors.”
So you’ve seen him in The Big Knife? His hamminess rivaled that of Lee J. Cobb in Golden Boy. Interestingly, both films were based on plays by the odious Clifford Odets.
I would not be surprised to learn that identity politics is secretly backed by the ultra rich as a vaccine against Marxism. The 20th C showed that Marxist regimes are a real danger if you’re wealthy.
The necessary (but not sufficient) precondition for a Marxist revolution is a united working class, which identity politics has completely destroyed. Blacks and other minorities in western countries are encouraged to blame white people for all their problems past and present. Not rich people.
Billionaires don’t get caught by political correctness scandals. And if the struggle ever does get violent, there are lots more poor and middle class white targets than rich.
freedom of the press;
freedom of assembly, including the holding of mass meetings;
freedom of street processions and demonstrationsSort of like Contemporary USA where freedom of speech (university campuses) and freedom of assembly (Charlottesville) are protected.Replies: @TheJester
As I recall the theory, a constitution to the Soviets was an idealized projection into the future that they admitted was not extant in contemporary society. It was a distant and final goal to seek, not a process to be implemented.
The political message was identical to that offered by the Nazis: “Stick with us and this idealized utopia is your future. In the meantime, bear with us: ‘You have to crack eggs to make an omelet…’”
Communists (as well as contemporary Cultural Marxists, feminists, and intersectional ethnicists/racists cults who have adopted their cultural and social perspectives) are typically at peace with themselves as they seek perfection in the distant future (Platonic Forms) while irrationally and violently reacting to the political and social imperfection in the present. Indeed, recourse to the fanciful and farcical safety of the Hegelian dialectic allows them to try to functionally entertain logical contradictions at the same time (and otherwise violate the Law of Non-Contradiction) without the cognitive dissonance suffered by the rest of humanity. The approach is simple: One has to at times do nasty things (violent social deconstruction) to create the conditions to make the Platonic Forms “real” in the real world … regardless of the consequences. If you don’t succeed, it is because your social deconstructions were not violent enough. People failed you and, therefore, they will have to suffer the consequences.
I will not call this cognitive and political approach to life childish. Rather, it is the idealized irrationality that parents typically have to deal with when they find their children have turned into rebellious, self-absorbed, and self-destructive teenagers.
I leave it an open question regarding the future of Western Civilization when its youth appear to have devolved into a state of permanent adolescence.
Friend, Marx considered manual labour beneath him and he was disdainful of peasants and labourers because he deemed them not sufficiently intellectual to understand his (ostensibly) weighty ideas. His family lived in abject poverty because of his refusal to work (they got by on money from his wife’s family and Marx’s own mooching off of people like Engels).
Divide and conquer.
As the rich steal the whole loaf, let the proles fight amongst themselves for the crumbs. The real Karl Marx may not have come up with the cure (which in my humble opinion lies more in patriotism and morality and respect for societal stability), but he was not all that wrong about diagnosing the disease.
So American blacks aren’t doing so well? Don’t blame rich white billionaires for shipping their jobs to low-wage countries, or directly replacing them with desperate third-world immigrants, or for spending trillions on pointless overseas wars of choice that serve only to enrich politically connected defense contractors, or trillions of dollars of Wall Street bailouts that have starved main street of capital… No, don’t talk about any of that. It’s all the fault of: micro aggressions! And two black guys hanging around a Starbucks got harassed one day. Yeah, it’s all that.
Pay no attention to the Elephant in the room. Because that would be racist.
Nazis only murdered like 12m people, and anyone connected to them, in even the most tangential way, is radioactive.
It's almost as if the oligarch class are communist sympathizers, and maybe have some gulag plans tucked away, in the backs of their heads.Replies: @Tyrion 2, @Authenticjazzman
” It’s almost as if the oligarch class are communist sympathizers”.
It’s not “almost as if” , rather is it precisely that : They, the monetary PTB, are most certainly “communist sympathizers”, as crazy and paradoxical as it sounds, and they are counting the minutes till the revolution is completed, and they , stupidly and naively assume that they will be in charge.
This is an insane planet, and the workings of the human mind defy all logic and rationality.
Authenticjazzman “Mensa” qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet, and pro jazz artist.
The greatest defect of Marxism is that it has nothing to say about the inner life. Marx and his followers assumed that under a Marxist regime, the State would wither away because there would be peace and prosperity for everyone. I don't think that Russia under Lenin and Stalin, China under Mao, and Cambodia under Pol Pot were aberrations, I believe that they were a predictable outcome of Marxism as a political system.
One of the strange features of modern times is the alliance between Islam and the radical Left of the Western world. Equally bizarre is the attitude of feminists towards Islam: in Islamic societies females are oppressed, they have no rights, and may have their genitals mutilated, and yet feminists in the West are more concerned with detecting Islamophobia that in criticising Islam's misogyny.
However, I believe that Marxists, Islamists and feminists have a common goal: the destruction of Western society, and the imposition of a regime with the characteristics that Orwell described with uncanny prescience in Nineteen Eighty Four.Replies: @Authenticjazzman, @J.Ross, @Thirdeye
Brilliant observations, to which I can add nothing.
Authenticjazzman “Mensa” qualified since 1973, airborne trained us Army vet, and pro jazz artisit.
+I;S;E;P;M
It reads as such:
the positive intellectual transformation of society (+I) stands firmly behind the social trasnformation of society (+S). All social problems are economic (+E) and all economic problems are political (+P) and military aims presuppose politial objectives (+M)
Also works for the negative:
-i;s;e;p;m
the negative intellectual transformation of society -i) stands firmly behind the negative social trasnformation of society (-s). All social problems are economic (-e) and all economic problems are political (-p) and military aims presuppose politial objectives (-m)
Hence once the cult-mars got a hold of the educational system and media, they were able, over time to do -i. Once a critical mass of the -i mindset was met, there was a rapid transformation of society. Started slowly with the whole "get an inch, wait for objections to stop being raised, go again" to leaps and bounds (Trans this and that, censorship physical violence against 'wrong talk/ wrong action")
This all pushed upwards to the economics (see Starbucks and other virtue signaling corporations) and politics.
None of this turns around until a critical mass of +I is attained and followed through.Replies: @Thirdeye
That scheme stands in direct opposition to dialectical materialism.
The greatest defect of Marxism is that it has nothing to say about the inner life. Marx and his followers assumed that under a Marxist regime, the State would wither away because there would be peace and prosperity for everyone. I don't think that Russia under Lenin and Stalin, China under Mao, and Cambodia under Pol Pot were aberrations, I believe that they were a predictable outcome of Marxism as a political system.
One of the strange features of modern times is the alliance between Islam and the radical Left of the Western world. Equally bizarre is the attitude of feminists towards Islam: in Islamic societies females are oppressed, they have no rights, and may have their genitals mutilated, and yet feminists in the West are more concerned with detecting Islamophobia that in criticising Islam's misogyny.
However, I believe that Marxists, Islamists and feminists have a common goal: the destruction of Western society, and the imposition of a regime with the characteristics that Orwell described with uncanny prescience in Nineteen Eighty Four.Replies: @Authenticjazzman, @J.Ross, @Thirdeye
David Horowitz just said on Dennis Prager’s show that the line which sums up the thinking of the Left is in Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire:
The greatest defect of Marxism is that it has nothing to say about the inner life. Marx and his followers assumed that under a Marxist regime, the State would wither away because there would be peace and prosperity for everyone. I don't think that Russia under Lenin and Stalin, China under Mao, and Cambodia under Pol Pot were aberrations, I believe that they were a predictable outcome of Marxism as a political system.
One of the strange features of modern times is the alliance between Islam and the radical Left of the Western world. Equally bizarre is the attitude of feminists towards Islam: in Islamic societies females are oppressed, they have no rights, and may have their genitals mutilated, and yet feminists in the West are more concerned with detecting Islamophobia that in criticising Islam's misogyny.
However, I believe that Marxists, Islamists and feminists have a common goal: the destruction of Western society, and the imposition of a regime with the characteristics that Orwell described with uncanny prescience in Nineteen Eighty Four.Replies: @Authenticjazzman, @J.Ross, @Thirdeye
They were. There are plenty of counterexamples, including the post-Stalin Soviet Union and post-Mao China. Stalin and Mao formed ideologies that reflected the extremities of war that accompanied their rise to power, extended into peacetime conditions. Mao operated within the ideology of China’s Q’ing rulers and subsequent warlords that peasant lives were expendable.
A lot of the left was disillusioned with the traditional working class by the 70s and early 80s. They didn't really want revolution, and seemed satisfied with a state that provided for their needs with the minimum of institutional change.
Developing an intelligent version of the mixed economy which could compete with the privitize/sell off everything that the state owned policies of the right would have required a lot of self questioning. Going with the ideological flow, acquiescing to the forces of the freemarket, but opening new fronts in Gender/Race/Sexual Identity was a lot easier.Replies: @J.Ross, @Thirdeye
The idea that the working class was too prosaic to be a transformative social force, and would be replaced by intellectuals and national minorities in that capacity, was advanced by the Frankfurt School (Marcuse et al.) in the 1950s. As it turned out, intellectuals were hardly transformative in any beneficial sense; they turned out to be mainly interested in securing a bureaucratic niche for themselves. The Democratic Party, under the flag of justice for the disenfranchised, turned into the vehicle of the new bureaucratic elites who immediately turned against the working class and are now fully aligned with imperial power.
A rough explanation may be in Emmanuel Goldsteins "The theory of oligarchical collectivism'. The middle having been unsuccessful in overthrowing the top with the help of the low are recruiting a new low to make their accession possible.
There was plenty of brutality in the post-Stalin Soyuz. Stalin killed so many people that they realized it was affecting the functionality of the country, especially since it was a highly anti-meritocratic process; among other vectors a major source of blood was jealous co-workers backstabbing their superior competitors, or anyone who wanted a nice apartment brought onto market. Insofar as the “extremities of war” had any effect on Stalin it was to slow him down and rehabilitate condemned generals.
The brutality under Stalin and Mao, affected most those who were actually those closest to Stalin and Mao. Your odds of surviving might have been better for many commoners than those in the revolutionary elite. The revolutionaries who actually worked with Lenin in Tsarist Russia had a very short life expectancy in the 30s. Post Stalin/Mao, people were/are sent to camps and executed but at a couple of magnitudes lower numbers.Replies: @J.Ross
The necessary (but not sufficient) precondition for a Marxist revolution is a united working class, which identity politics has completely destroyed. Blacks and other minorities in western countries are encouraged to blame white people for all their problems past and present. Not rich people.
Billionaires don't get caught by political correctness scandals. And if the struggle ever does get violent, there are lots more poor and middle class white targets than rich.Replies: @dfordoom
Of course it is. Cultural marxism is a right-wing ideology.
T
OK, you may be right, perhaps the roots of this go further back than I have read.
A rough explanation may be in Emmanuel Goldsteins “The theory of oligarchical collectivism’. The middle having been unsuccessful in overthrowing the top with the help of the low are recruiting a new low to make their accession possible.
There was plenty of brutality in the post-Stalin Soyuz. Stalin killed so many people that they realized it was affecting the functionality of the country, especially since it was a highly anti-meritocratic process; among other vectors a major source of blood was jealous co-workers backstabbing their superior competitors, or anyone who wanted a nice apartment brought onto market. Insofar as the “extremities of war” had any effect on Stalin it was to slow him down and rehabilitate condemned generals.
The brutality under Stalin and Mao, affected most those who were actually those closest to Stalin and Mao. Your odds of surviving might have been better for many commoners than those in the revolutionary elite. The revolutionaries who actually worked with Lenin in Tsarist Russia had a very short life expectancy in the 30s. Post Stalin/Mao, people were/are sent to camps and executed but at a couple of magnitudes lower numbers.
The brutality under Stalin and Mao, affected most those who were actually those closest to Stalin and Mao. Your odds of surviving might have been better for many commoners than those in the revolutionary elite. The revolutionaries who actually worked with Lenin in Tsarist Russia had a very short life expectancy in the 30s. Post Stalin/Mao, people were/are sent to camps and executed but at a couple of magnitudes lower numbers.Replies: @J.Ross
So millions of Ukrainians were closest to Stalin, and millions of potless farmers were closest to Mao?
It was not good to be a Ukrainian farmer in the 1930s, I am not saying that Stalin was a kind ruler.
But I don't think your chances were much better if you were an Army officer or an old Bolshevik in the 30s. You got shot instead of starving to death. The terror was quite democratic. This made rulers after Stalin a bit less extreme.
The present Chinese Communist party must uphold the legacy of someone who massacred them. An interesting contradiction.
That he executed millions of others was a different matter.
The few old Bolsheviks that survived his reign were all next on the chopping block.
Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich are the only ones I know of and Molotov and Mikoyan knew he was planning their demise .
So millions of Ukrainians were closest to Stalin,
It was not good to be a Ukrainian farmer in the 1930s, I am not saying that Stalin was a kind ruler.
But I don’t think your chances were much better if you were an Army officer or an old Bolshevik in the 30s. You got shot instead of starving to death. The terror was quite democratic. This made rulers after Stalin a bit less extreme.
The present Chinese Communist party must uphold the legacy of someone who massacred them. An interesting contradiction.
I work in academic publishing. I read a lot of the pomo literature. Class has not been entirely replaced. There is still a holy trinity of grievance categories: race, sex (they say gender, but they mean sex), and class. Class is certainly a poor relation, but it included. It is not usually framed in Marxist terms of the proletariat, but in terms of the poor, who somehow turn out to be women and people of color.
Well, if not eternal revolution, at least permanent revolution.
Stalin executed nearly everyone of the Old Bolsheviks because their ability and sometimes popularity were a threat to his power.
That he executed millions of others was a different matter.
The few old Bolsheviks that survived his reign were all next on the chopping block.
Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich are the only ones I know of and Molotov and Mikoyan knew he was planning their demise .