02.24.11
Posted in Booknotes, Ultra Far Left at 2:05 pm by nemo
http://www.redfortyeight.com/2011/02/24/booknotes-how-to-change-the-world/
This review is worth reading (as is the book, no doubt). But I think we should be glad that the hold of Marxism has loosened, since the failure of Marx’s approach (more the failure of the Leninists) needs to open up the way to a new version of the basic theme, that goes back to the French Revolution, and whose relevance is even greater today than it was several decades ago. Marx monopolized the whole subject, and then his formulation failed, leaving a void.
Not a single idea in his formulation was original: so we have the way forward, and we can actually start learning from Marx as we move away from him.
We are in a state of crisis, and a formulation of the issues of socialism/social democracy, then the more distant communism, are crying out for some attention. But noone can get past the dead hand of Marx’s theories, Engels’ theories, and Lenin’s quiet appropriation of that legacy for his Blanqui-ism.
Marxists are masters of confusion. If you mention Blanqui, they foam at the mouth. That Lenin was a Blanqui-ist is never uttered in public. So it goes at all points.
Why not just drop all of it? Marxism is suffering from metal fatigue.
The deck has been reshuffled here: we propose A New American Revolution of the bourgeois type, but recast as bourgeois-socialist and democratic. The point is that socialism is a form of liberalism, and the issues should have been addressed within the context of rights based politics. The old left has made an enemy of social democracy, but some of its achievements (and they are real, almost the only achievements of the far left) need to be built into a new form of social democracy . The left needs to put Marx in a museum, and, starting with an emergency version of democratic socialism (with a few ideas from social democracy) that still accepts the market, but one based in framework of rights, commence the hard work of asking if a movement can lead to this, or whether the American system is too corrupt for orderly change. I think that it is beside the point to call this unrealistic. The phenomenon of global warming is making capitalism unrealistic, and we need to start preparing a failsafe version of socialism revolutioin to be ready when the thugs decide they have to create a brand of socialist non-socialism for the rich eco-survivors.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/terry-eagleton/indomitable
Indomitable
Terry Eagleton
How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011 by Eric Hobsbawm
Little, Brown, 470 pp, £25.00, January 2011, ISBN 978 1 4087 0287 1
In 1976, a good many people in the West thought that Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, most of them no longer felt that way. What had happened in the meanwhile? Were these people now buried under a pile of toddlers? Had Marxism been unmasked as bogus by some world-shaking new research? Had someone stumbled on a lost manuscript by Marx confessing that it was all a joke?
We are speaking, note, about 1986, a few years before the Soviet bloc crumbled. As Eric Hobsbawm points out in this collection of essays, that wasn’t what caused so many erstwhile believers to bin their Guevara posters. Marxism was already in dire straits some years before the Berlin Wall came down. One reason given was that the traditional agent of Marxist revolution, the working class, had been wiped out by changes to the capitalist system – or at least was no longer in a majority. It is true that the industrial proletariat had dwindled, but Marx himself did not think that the working class was confined to this group. In Capital, he ranks commercial workers on the same level as industrial ones. He was also well aware that by far the largest group of wage labourers in his own day was not the industrial working class but domestic servants, most of whom were women. Marx and his disciples didn’t imagine that the working class could go it alone, without forging alliances with other oppressed groups. And though the industrial proletariat would have a leading role, Marx does not seem to have thought that it had to constitute the social majority in order to play it.
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02.22.11
Posted in The Virtual Revolution, Ultra Far Left at 12:28 pm by nemo
The question of a new phase of The American Revolution is going critical, a point that was obvious from the presidency of Bush II. The issues of economics, and the Wall Street gangster elite hides the deeper disease:
What is still unclear to the public is the covert action behind 9/11 and the outrageous smear campaign against the Islamic world on the basis of that conspiracy of false-flag state terrorism.
The books of David Ray Griffin are a good place to start: The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 [Paperback]
David Ray Griffin
And this issue reenergizes the obvious JKF questions.
The failure of the current left to address this issue is outrageous, and strong evidence of its failures. If you are that fooled, you are fired.
I cite this issue for the obvious warning that a government taken over by the Intelligence Agencies who have gotten away with it for over fifty years is grounds for the severest challenge to governmental legitimacy. You can’t have a democracy under such conditions: it is a de facto fascist coup.
The standard economic issues of the left are obviously also coming to a head, and the climactic era of globalization sets an alarm clock set in 1848 and is the prime moment for reopening the questions raised in the Communist Manifesto. But as indicated here the theme of the current left’s fixation on Marxism needs a challenge. Marxists have never had a sinlge success, and the reason is their flawed theories. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn from Marxism, but the subject needs to be recast completely.
But the question of revolution is better seen in the context of the American brand with its indications of the liberal foundations needed for a socialist or social democratic recasting.
Can this happen with the kind of spontaneous outbreak we are seeing now?
Whateve the case, the idea of The Virtual Revolution is essential to begin to think about a society in failure, and a fake democracy being used to front for the Wall Street gangster elite.
My point: you no longer have the option as an American proud of democratic traditions to preen your feathers confronted with the fascist take over of the American system. At the other extreme the corrupted legacy of the Bolshevik and Marxist left is coopting any serious effort to create a serious left.
We can still learn from the old left, and need to learn how to transcend its contradictions, to see the basic point made: the basic liberal revolution was deficient in its rights protections of the full class structure of the system, viz. the proletariat, and the rogue market ideologies used to corrupt the basis of democratic freedom. The Marxist left was unable to deal with its own critique, and the reasons are obvious: the method to deal with the issues is another brand of liberal democractic revolution with a socialist or social democratic framework. The total abolition of the market, i.e. communism, is another, far more complex, issue.
We need also to study the history of Bolshevism to see how these potential solutions were destroyed by a new form of class society and state capitalism, the Bolshevik system.
This history is fading away and the real option of a liberal/socialist revolution in the American context and in the American tradition of revolution comes into view.
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02.20.11
Posted in 1848+, The Virtual Revolution, Ultra Far Left at 2:06 pm by nemo
We have reposted the material on ‘revolutionary confusions’, and it is fitting to continue this discussion.
But we have a problem, clearly evident in many discussion forums, which is that declaring for revolution is putatively illegal, and makes the utterer of the dread words open to everything from arrest to rendition and life imprisonment for terrorism, off to Guantanamo or worse for the bloke.
Actually I can’t think of anything more illegal than the current dot.gov as it lives off the lies and crimes of 9/11.
It would seem, thus, to be factual that hidden branches of the American governmental system illegally and crimininally ‘false flagged’ the 9/11 massacre to create a war on terror. Such behavior,and the overwhelming evidence is sitting out in the open, ready for review, is so grotesque that the issues of The
Virtual Revolution become immediate.
An immediate question is whether Obama is aware of what is going on here, or is himself a dupe.
But, that apart, the point is apt, declaring ‘revolution’ plays into the hands of the criminal government, and we can evade troubles if we create two categories, The Revolution, and The Virtual Revolution. Discussions of virtual revolution, prevented from immediate realization by a countdown that can be canceled dailly, are entirely legal, and allow the discussion of the potential takeover by democratic revolution of an established government (e.g the current American gangster regime) out in the open. Like the space shuttles, the countdowns will be frequently cancelled an put on hold/reset. So the FBI/CIA can drool on their shoes in peace.
As noted already, the American experience virtually endorses the possibility of a new American Revolution, and the question then is to consider the virtualities here very carefully.
Food for thought: a host of Obama fans who devotedly campaigned and then voted for him are now stranded in limbo, and, most sadly, de facto disenfranchisees without political hope because they can’t vote for him again. For many such, it is a question of conscience: after eight years of Bush they were desperate and then wildly hopeful that Obama would e.g. close Guantanamo. That that was a cynical deception from the start has left many dumbfounded and they cannot easily buy into the triangulation game: it is tantamount to voting for something fascist.
What is surprising is the sheer Machiavellian cunning of Obama here, not doubt due to the coaching behind the scenes form the Clinton/Emmanuel types.
The blackmail here is the bet that those who are paranoid of a worse Republican victory in a future election
Whatever the case, this is a prototype of the point of no return, as feared, where no further possibilities are open to the political citizen, who then must consider the potential of virtual revolution in a rapidly deteriorating political chaos.
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02.19.11
Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 2:46 pm by nemo
Towers of Deception
It might seem uncalled for to summon the idea of revolution at his juncture, but the situation is actually far worse than people imagine, and here the left has proved totally useless, and suspiciously compliant.
The counterrevolution of the right in the last generation has been accompanied by a concealed coup d’etat of the intelligence orgs who have seized power in a fashion so clever noone realizes what has happened. Not only that, the public is perfectly brainwashed and will denounce the truth here as ‘conspiracy theory’. It is a pathetic defeat for a democratic public. So to counter this fascist revolution a new revolution is needed to recast American government as the republic it was: the seizure of power by the CIA-style hidden factions that come into existence with the Cold War began with the assassination of JFK and jumped to a new level of outright fascism after 9/11. A new political culture must abolish these intelligence agencies. There is no other possibility.
Unless the left can come to an understanding here, their efforts along the lines of Marxist ideology are ludicrous in their pathos, and sheer stupidity.
The point here is that we don’t live in a democracy any more, making the idea of revolution as topical as it is now in the streets of Cairo.
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Posted in 1848+ at 1:49 pm by nemo
Yesterday the blog got a stunning 31000 page views (the average is just under ten thousand), most probably because of the post on ‘Revolutionary confusions’.
People are worried, and starting to panic as they see the handwriting on the wall for USA civilization, so-called.
This situation tells me that people are being radicalized, but every time they move in that direction they slam into a stone wall called the ‘history of Bolshevism’.
Yesterday’s post pointed to the obvious way out from that: study the revolutions of the early modern, then the American, and of course the French. But the French Revolution never really succeeded and left a useless legacy of the Terror.
The Amerian case, despite its being a colonial revolt and thus slightly simpler, shows that revolutions, and not slow piece meal change, are world-historical innovations that produced freedom against the backdrop of antiquity, and that they can succeed and produce liberty. I say that because the garbage created by conservatives re: the French Revolution and leftists re; the Russsian revolution, have confused the issue.
The American case is telling, and it is ironically a template because of its flaws: the real humdinger being the look the other way tactic on slavery at the foundation: that is a reminder the job was not finished. Please note that the Civil War was another phase in that revolution, and that these precedents, and much else, demonstrate that that revolution is still not complete. A completion based on a form of liberal-democratic and socialist republicanism is crying out in the times we live in when the Wall Street gangster elite won’t stop their counterrevolution.
It is good to reflect on the success of the American revolution, but also, as its endless imitators fall in the trap (witness the middle east now) of neoliberal domination in the name of democracy, to feel responsible for the immense confusion created by Americans as they spread a fake across the planet, coopting the good name of democracy. That’s a bit alarmist, perhaps, but as we watch all the gains of labor being destroyed, and worse to come, and as we see a democratic presidnet triangulated out of real existence, the question must arise, is the revolutionary path inevitable. It is important to ask the question sooner rather than later, because the erosion of rights and the ability to resist proceeds apace, will soon create as situation that can’t be remedied.
Much more to say here, but Americans owe the world a real democracy, resulting from a real revolution. I cite the American case because, as noted, it bypasses the false legacy of Marxism (which still has a lot of lessons to teach us) and its fetish of anti-liberal revolutions. Actually, as cited, Michael Harrington outlined the issues very well a generation ago. I cite this author because insanity has overtaken many leftists, witness the case of Zizek. Whatever the case with his thinking, the center of gravity of American culture just won’t respond. We have something much better, and very classic.
The current elite is suffering insanity, and to contemplate two hundred years of the great American experiement reduced to nothing should be a wake up for those who indulge in the slogans of American exceptionalism.
So the problem is simple: Americans have corrupted the democratic idea, and need to do the job right.
Repost for ‘Revolutionary confusions’, plus links to lead up posts:
http://darwiniana.com/2011/02/18/revolutionary-confusions/
——————–
Out of revolution
The legacy of the French Revolution has forever confused the left (and in fact Marx and Engels sensed this after 1848, changing their tactics). The reason is that the differentiation of socialism from democratic action ended up creating a jackknife effect.
The question is simple: the only successful revolution of the period was the American. So that’s the prototype. But as Marx, and others, pointed out (to restate the howlingly obvious) this revolution was actually riddled with issues of class interest resulting in an ambiguous outcome: in fact the emergence in parallel of the capitalist economy confused everyone. So, as the Socialists/Marxists said, the revolution needs to be re-tuned to ‘real democracy’ which implies it would seem an element of socialist=democratic insight, that is, participation of all classes and a settlement that takes into account the confusing synchronous appearance of capitalism. Sounds simple, but the chaotification of the issues and the myth that some new kind of revolution should dispense with liberal rights and then with democracy created a monster of confusion and wasted effort.
Please note that the founders of the American system warned the future their work might not last very long, and in essence embedded revolution in their declarations. I am sorry, but I have to say it: the right to revolution is built into the Constitution.
If you say it isn’t then the original revolution/constitution is not valid either.
We need, not a sophistical Leninist conflagration, but a new American revolution that can free Americans from the gangster elite of capitalists that have destroyed democracy. That situation can’t be corrected by a leftist gangster elite of Leninists. That requires the revolutionary creation of a democratic/socialist republic, with a liberal set of rights, including rights against finance capital, etc, and a possible projection into the future of a communist final stage. But the latter has confused the issure. It is a big thing! Perhaps utopian. Note that the old left correctly (once) distinguished socialism (=liberal democracy) from the more complex ‘final stage’ (maybe) of communism. The progression to democratic revolution implying an element of socialist rights against capital is a sensible passage way to an unknown future, and represents at all stages a realizable and practical possibility that is not the dreaded ‘utopian’ so-called fallacy: the original American revolution proves it.
As the Wall Street gangster elite destroys all the exit points, and begins to destroy a whole society, it is important to consider if standard politics is finished. The founders we should note pretty clearly warned of this kind of situation, and even recommended a new revolution at frequent intervals.
Some leadup posts:
http://darwiniana.com/2011/02/18/some-suggestions-for-a-new-left/
http://darwiniana.com/2011/02/18/repostupdate-zizek-and-harrington/
http://darwiniana.com/2011/02/18/repost-puzzle-of-whacko-republicans/
http://darwiniana.com/2011/02/18/repost-the-hidden-forty-trillion/
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02.17.11
Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 1:55 pm by nemo
1848: End of Eonic Sequence?
WHEE, starting with this section, has a fair amount of material on Marx and the post-liberal left, and some judicious critiques next to some over-generous explications.
The old left of the Marx/Engels years never truly got its act together, but after the revolutions of 1848 Marx/Engels did change their tactics to produce a vigorous success in the politics of the socialist/labor movements of the whole modern era. The current left cannot grasp that period because it is fixated on Lenin and the anomalous Russian Revolution which massacred the idealistic left socialists. So what are we talking about. The ultimate responsibility lies with Marx whose obsessive power domination neuroses drove him to create an ideology that the left can’t see through or repair/correct. Why not just leave it behind. What is needed is more of what worked, and that was created from the right: the Social Democratic starting point that might lead ultimately to real socialism, thence communism.
Part of the problem is the way that Marx rejected basic liberalism in the name of countering market ideology. That was the strategy that led to the Lenins. What is needed is a democratic/liberal/socialist mix that is viable and backed up the power of labor in revolt. The fetish of Marx the Genius is delaying the needed objective critique of the outcome of 1848 as a whole, whose legacy is now unraveling in the onslaught of the globalization pirates able to bypass the ealier successes based on nationalist politics (social democracies).
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Posted in Ultra Far Left at 1:43 pm by nemo
The Parallax View
I have been critical of Zizek, but to give his works the benefit of the doubt, I have been trying to read some of them, but the task is apparently beyond me. The Lacanian take on Hegel sounds cute until you see, as in the first page of this book, that Zizek plans to rehabilitate dialectical materialism by doing a soft-porn curveball on torture and the basic Stalinist program.
Can we get a break here? This is a godsend to the right, especially the American Tparty nutcases who can actually look sane when confronting a Zizek.
Zizek’s basic strategy is wrong: dialectical materialism needs to be set aside as the left reinvents itself beyond Marx and his unnecessary theories. The situation could be rendered much simpler if the phantom ghost of the old left would drop the past, and start over.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A Lacanian-Hegelian philosopher and pop culture critic who divides his time between America and Slovenia, Zizek is one of the few living writers to combine theoretical rigor with compulsive readability, and his new volume provides perhaps the clearest elaboration of his theoretical framework thus far. Expatiating on such subjects as Heidegger, neuroscience, the war on terror and The Matrix, he seeks to rehabilitate dialectical materialism by replacing the popular “yin-yang” interpretation (the struggle between opposites that ultimately form a whole) with a theory of the “gap which separates the One from itself.” One example is a tribe whose two subgroups draw mutually exclusive plans of their village: their deadlock “implies a hidden reference to a constant… an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole.” Discussing Abu Ghraib and pedophilia in the Catholic Church, Zizek explores how an ideological edifice is sustained by underground transgressions: “Law can be sustained only by a sovereign power which reserves for itself the right… to suspend the rule of law(s) on behalf of the Law itself.” Based on his interpretation of Lacanian psychoanalysis, he envisions a society in which public law would no longer sustain itself through its own obscene breach. This challenging book takes us on a roller-coaster ride whose every loop is a Möbius strip. (Apr.)
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Posted in 1848+, General, Ultra Far Left at 1:21 pm by nemo
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/02/17-2
Published on Thursday, February 17, 2011 by The Nation
“What’s Disgusting? Union Busting!” Chant Wisconsin Crowds That Swell to 30,000; Key GOP Legislators Waver
by John Nichols
“I have never been prouder of our movement than I am at this moment,” shouted Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Phil Neuenfeldt, as he surveyed the crowds of union members and their supporters that surged around the state Capitol and into the streets of Madison Wednesday, literally closing the downtown as tens of thousands of Wisconsinites protested their Republican governor’s attempt to strip public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights.
The American rightwing is a puzzle: it is either exceptionally stupid, or else determined to simply wreck a whole civilization for reasons unknown to reason.
We discussed here several times Europe’s Promise, a history of the way the European conservatives invented Social Democracy as a response to the left. That response might well be debated, but the fact remains that in, say, the German case, the result is a resolution of the crisis of capitalism and class struggle in a form that the American whacko right simply cannot grasp.
What earthly sense can be made from a political system that will declare war on taxes, especially taxes for the rich, and then destroy the educational system. It is hard to grasp the nature of the stupidity at work.
Actually, speaking of taxes, a one time tax on the hidden forty trillion owned by the richest Americans would fund the whole social matrix for several generations.
So it may be too late for rightist social democracy. Socialist appropriation makes a lot of sense.
In any case, the system produces more than enough wealth to fund a rolls royce social democracy, so why this egregious and self-destructive display of greed? It serves no purpose, right or left.
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01.14.11
Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 1:32 pm by nemo
Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way Is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age
Now that the Republican gangsters are coming to Congress, it is time to fight back with some defense of socialism as an idea. The constant diatribing against socialism, e.g. with respect to Obama (??), is rightwing nonsense, and freemarket brainwashing in action.
We need to remind the whacko conservatives, who are truly whacko and almost incomprehensible, that conservatism in much of Europe, e.g. Germany took the form of Social Democracy, which isn’t actually socialism, but certainly what the Tea Party nutcases would so call.
Let me say at the onset that I am often a critic of the left here, but the fact remains that the classic tradition of socialism, which predates Marxism, is part of the liberal revolution of modernity.
In any case, the whacko ideology peddled by the Repubs is alarming because it indicates their center of gravity is an exploited stupido class manipulated by ideological elites in the background.
The point of Hill’s book and speaking in general is that to trash socialism isn’t even a rational rightwing strategy. As the tradition of Social Democracy shows it is intelligent conservatism to create a hybrid socialism/market economy. They outdid the real socialists, and made the Bolsheviks look ridiculous and monstrous.
So there isn’t the slightest reason to be on the defensive here: it is time for ‘in you face’ counterattack on these issues.
I would be happen to hear leftist critiques of Social Democracy, but there is plenty of room for a dialectic here.
The point is that the American gangster elite is exceptional confused, and vicious, and have just perpetrated an immense set of crimes, on top of those from the Bush mafia, et al, and they don’t deserve the consideration they are given.
This discourse can start with critiques of classic Bolshevism, no problem. But that wasn’t even socialism/communism, as Lenin cleverly knew, creating his own concoction as he went along.
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01.09.11
Posted in Ultra Far Left at 1:56 pm by nemo
Nation article, Alternet:
Nation Magazine Holds Annual Bash, Gives $100,000 Puffin Awards to Outstanding U.S. Progressive Activists
At a gathering that features most of the East Coast progressive elite, attendees have a blast and take care of some serious political business.
I wasn’t invited, and don’t feel anything except contempt for this gang of the ass hole left who should be fired on the spot for their performance in the last half decade, or longer.
Such articles are a reminder you are alone at the present time, because there is no left at all. This is no small matter. Just finding a group of people with whom to discuss the current scene is all but impossible unless you conform to pattern.
This constellation of celebrities is a completely useless group of firing squad fodder that is probably being paid off by the secret intelligence orgs, et al. It would be good to know which ones are, for we can be sure the CIA et al have wasted no time in the past generation improving their tactics of infiltration and cooptation. It is hard for me to believe that this left has not been crippled from within. So who in this cess pool of Nation mag celebrities are the hidden agents? Is there anything real there, and at Nation? Who is paying off Nation Mag? Unfair? I will bet a considerable sum there is easy money somewhere in this fake.
The left needs to start over completely, what I have called The Ultra Far Left, leaving behind the has beens now reaching senility.
By the way, Marx is a suspicious character here: was he another paid agent? Tarpley has said so in his book on Obama. Will look up the reference.
There was something queerly odd about Marx. He should have finished Capital in the Fifties, with Engels producing his own version. Instead he delayed and delayded and delayed to Engels’ total frutration, the whole thing went rancid and bombed, although the labor movement beyond revolutioin prospered after the 48′s. This situation is not the one portrayed by Leninists.
There is something neurotically wrong-headed in Marx’s domineering ripoff and restructuring of the thriving, wholeome, but bedlamite confusion of early Socialists. Marx’s tactics of domination spoiled that freshness and turned the left in to a gang of Lenininst psychopaths. I can understand the need to unify the chaos of the early Socialists, but the result was such a flawed ideology of historical materialism that one has to wonder, was it worth it?
We need to get past this will-to-power neurosis in Marx and Marxists to rewrite the left. It is not that hard, and if none of the left orgs current can do it it is in part due I am sure to easy CIA money and other dollar cons at work.
The current left is a ridiculous farce, good only for celebrity jerkoffs a la Nation.
Meanwhile, could it have been true that Marx got cornered and turned by the early British secret service? I find it hard to believe, but the produce created by Marx needs to be left behind, like the early socialists, and used as inspiration, without dogma.
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Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 2:52 pm by nemo
http://darwiniana.com/2010/11/26/booknotes-born-on-the-wrong-continent/
Our idea for a Green Tea Party might be a useful foil for recasting the liberal/left: people on the left can’t seem to realize that, short of a cataclysm, as with the First World War, the chance for some revolutionary change doesn’t exist in reality. The examples of the revolutions of the early modern are thus misleading, and Marx understood, yet misunderstood this.
Whatever the case, the stale cliches of the left are a disservice to a moment of crisis, as an entirely new framework is needed.
More next week.
File:Horace Vernet-Barricade rue Soufflot.jpg
1848, February: this was the last real aftershock of the French Revolution, and remains a moment to be understood.
We live in a new era, when the intelligence agencies (in America) have alread coopted revolutionary change by taking it over: they successfully staged a coup d’etat with the assissination of JFK, and kept the coup invisible, behind a series of fronts, Obama not the last, no doubt.
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11.25.10
Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 12:40 pm by nemo
http://darwiniana.com/2010/11/24/im-founding-the-new-green-tea-party-repost/
The idea of the Green Tea Party is reminder of the orphan status of most us in this current political situation. To lose Obama is the last straw, so some new perspective: so maybe the idea is useful as a gedanken experiment.
When I say ‘orphan’, I mean it. The conservatives are whacko, the liberals are being Obama-fried, and the left left is brain dead with Stalinist hangovers.
Perhaps by tommorrow we can pursue the idea further as a useful abstraction.
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11.24.10
Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 2:01 pm by nemo
I knock off early today, but will post tommorrow at length (maybe) since many arrive here on their days off.
I am working on the Green Tea Party membership card (fill out your own), and party line.
Think Ultra Far Left (left of Karl Marx) and you won’t be far off. It’s even more visionary than ‘end times Zarathustrianities’ of all brands.
Actually in a less serious vein it is important to know where the government is located. If it is Langley, Virginia, and not Washington, that’s important information.
That’s all folks (til tommorrow)
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11.23.10
Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 2:25 pm by nemo
More on this tommorrow. But the inspiring example of the Tea Partiers is marred by a few confusions, viz. it is rightwing when it should be left wing, etc…
But the Green Tea Party will share part of the platform of the passe Tea Party.
Thus, if we are going to dump tea in Boston Harbor it should be against the American Empire, rather than the British. And the initiative against Big Government is Right ON, but: the Whitehouse and congress/senate are small potatoes, hardly big government. We need to expose the real ‘big government’, viz. the hidden fascist core that controls American politics via the CIA, and other secret orgs, using black ops, such as those few known, from the JKF assassination (CIA?) to the 9/11 inside job, etc…
Many issues here us to phase out the Tea Party muddle by moving the party to the left.
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11.21.10
Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 3:38 pm by nemo
The age of Feuerbach…
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11.14.10
Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 1:53 pm by nemo
The Monthley review is so crotchety that some Huffpost ‘naked ladies’ on the front page might help.
Actually the left has the all time classic here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/sunday-roundup_152_b_783170.html
Arianna Huffington: Sunday RoundupThe marriage of Newsweek and The Daily Beast (“NewsBeast”?) is a great example of journalism’s hybrid future. I’m looking forward to watching Tina balance and blend what she describes as the “more reflective narrative rhythm” of magazines with “the fast, furious, instant take of the Web.”
I read this and jumped backwards, in shock. Last time I will read Newsweek, except as anthropological research.
Request (PLEASE): could someone photoshop Arianna’s head onto Liberty Leading here, and send me the result?
We are upgrading this blog to the ultra far left (see redfortyeight.com).
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10.11.10
Posted in Ultra Far Left at 11:31 am by nemo
How Democracy Dies…
This is an important article (but Aristophanes was an ambiguous culture conservative who hated much of the Greek Enlightenment), but, while I agree with Hedges on the dangers of fundamentalist theocracy the fall of the democratic phenomenon has a multidimensional aspect.
One could just as well blame President Truman for being such a soft/passive tool of powerful interests, like those he set in motion with the new CIA, a point he came to suspect quite directly. These are corrupted liberals, not religious fanatics.
The power of the hidden forces of crypto-fascism and their link with the growing power of the CIA spectrum world, invisible to the naked eye, have been more and more brazen ever since they got away with the JFK assassination. A lot of people realized that the successful coverup tokened unlimited opportunities for fascist manipulation, which has been going on ever since.
So liberals dupes who don’t get it are also a problem.
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09.15.10
Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 12:43 pm by nemo
We already cited this link today: Naomi Klein: Building a Real Left
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2290?akid=185.96588.gN7uC8&t=16
I didn’t feel like turning on my audio to listen to the tape so I am not sure what she is saying. I will get around to it soon.
Naomi Klein preaching a new left. Tut tut. Why not just send a check to the Tea Partiers.
I actually agree, at the blurb level, especially this week, a bad week indeed, in which I realized (two years late, or minus one year early since I suspected the worst in 2007) that Obama has been triangulated by the likes of Rahm Immanuel, and is not really a president at all, but a sort of Clinton parody being operated behind the scenes by forces that elude me.
Obama is being asphyxiated by Axelrod, Immanuel, Geithner and Summers, a sad almost frightening svengali spectacle for a figure once hoped to be an FDR moment in action. One such svengali is too many, but four!!
Whatever happened to Obama?? I missed something here, and what of Krugman, Kuttner, Warren, and Reich????
I obviously don’t get it, and haven’t a clue as to what lies behind Obama’s seductive rhetoric. I am a simple sort, and watch PBS, and when I read that Rahm Immanuel, as Obama’s chief of staff, thinks liberals retards and counts on their votes as suckers, I am genuinely shocked, and not a little puzzled. That is something new, not present in the politics of liberalism, and it is tantamount to taking away someone’s vote. It is possible to fudge a bit on the complex of views, inevitable, but to openly mock and trash the loyalty of lifelong liberals behind the sweet talk of Obama crosses the line, and is unforgivable. This Rahm gangster will end up making voting at all dishonorable.
So I am glad to hear from Klein’s timely call. She is right, we are losing the electoral option, something I find incredible.
Why won’t Obama just throw the bums out and do it right?
It is also thus vital for the (Jewish) left to try and clear its good name with something intelligent as here. As Jewish culture accelerates into a right wing decline, the whispers from the old Jewish left are important, but probably irrelevant.
But that is a resource that is played out at this point. Too many dead beat intellectuals stuck forever in the Marxism cult are in the way of a new left. I think that Marxism is paradoxical. It is one of the few resources that we have but it is so flawed it is counterproductive, and in any case noone can seem to extricate themselves from Leninism/Stalinism.
It is thus not surprising a gesture of revolt arises on the right in a form so brain dead as to be grotesquely comical, the Tea Party movement. The left fails to see how its inability to critique itself has fed the right.
But the point is significant: we need a truly new left. Where will that come from?
We certainly need a new left, but that’s unlikely in this generation. I have explained why a dozen times here, and given a lot of suggestions.
Since we have raised the tasteless question of Jewish culture, consider the important point that Marx was NOT Jewish. He was an assimilated ex-christian, a crucial distinction.
Why not ask Jewish leftists to assimilate, super assimilate, and leave Jewish culture behind. The same demand goes without saying for Christians and Moslems. We could create a whole new culture of left familes with assimilated Jews/Xtians/Moslems/everyone else welcome. The leftovers of Axial Age Judaism are still alive on the Jewish left, and confusing its cultic devotees, who are confused by their position. It is stinking shit at this point, and, as Marx well understood, you have to decamp and not look back.
Please recall, as noted, that Marx understood this problem perfectly, and that he was not Jewish, but an ex-Christian. Jewish leftists unaware of their position are simply feeding the right. He is charged with being a self-hating Jew. Who wouldn’t be self-hating after a lifetime of Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan. The more self-hating the better, as Marx sensed.
We need a whole new population of leftists, like the Rajneeshees who gave up their old identities, and changed their names.
Ditto here, for Christians, and Moslems.
In general a new left must be really new, and analyze the faults of the Bolshevik fiasco. But twenty years have passed since the fall of Communism, and that hasn’t happened.
The left needs a complete makeover, on theory, philosophy, and religion.
The left needs to get some religion even as it needs to put some teeth into its critique of religion. Feuerback on Hegel wasn’t enough. The problem with leftist atheism as a substitute for religion is that leftists end up sitting ducks confronted with all the dark forces of religion, unaware in principle of what is going on. The realm of the occult is very real, part of the human legacy, and will eat the left alive if they persist in stupidity of the Feuerback game.
That was a disaster. So the left needs to religion to get past religion.
This problem was solved ten times over in India, where atheist ‘materialist’ religion has a strong history, and a no-nonsense attitude to materialist oversimplifiers.
There is a lot to say here, and I will listen to Klein’s video and comment, and then construct a new left of my own.
I am sorry to be hard on Jews, but I am much harder on Christians and Moslems. I have always been a philosemitic student of Judaism. But as we examine the case of Israel, all the warnings of antisemites are confirmed. Jews can’t even handle a nation state. So why should we listen to them on politics. Marx, as noted, understood this.
In another generation, jewish will be so decayed as to be a cesspool, as Christian and Moslem culture are now.
I would certainly like some kind of political home for myself. Since Rham Immanuel just kicked me out of Obama land, I will have to consider my options.
I have no place anywhere, right, center, left, an orphan of politics, so I will use my rubric of the Ultra Far Left, left of Marx, and, yes, left of Naomi Klein.
So the moral is clear, Jews have to become ex-Christians, effective immediately. You figure it out.
“We have to build that independent left. It has to be so strong and so radical and so militant and so powerful that it becomes irresistible.” Who better to say such a thing than Naomi Klein, Nation columnist, author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, and longtime rabblerouser Naomi makes a special visit to the GRITtv studio to talk about the recent G20 meetings in her hometown of Toronto, about Obama’s recent return to a kind of populism, the looming midterm elections in the U.S., her reporting on the BP disaster in the Gulf, and what we can do to channel the growing rage in this country and in the world into a true progressive movement.
\Here’s the Rahm Immanuel link from this week:
Why Rahm Emanuel’s Political Calculations Were 100% Wrong
Rahm’s attitude was that you could ignore progressive demands because, where could they go? Well, it turns out that the answer to that question is: home.
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08.15.10
Posted in 1848+ at 12:38 pm by nemo
Just reviewed, or checkmarked would be a better term,Thke Secret Team Fletcher Prouty’s take on the machinations of the CIA.
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07.30.10
Posted in 1848+, 9/11, Ultra Far Left at 2:42 pm by nemo
As per previous post: the question of revolution won’t go away, and if even one tenth of the 9/11 truth initiative materials are valid we have grounds for a demand for a new government, one that will abolish the CIA as a first step.
Yeah, yeah, I know, that’s seditious, but you don’t have a government at this point. Yeah, yeah, Obama’s the prez. But you don’t have a dot.gov, really, don’t be absurd and pretend all day long.
Red Alert: when an intelligence agency completely fools you, and they done so for almost fifty years, you have essentially lost your freedom. So you must move to deal with that reality.
Although this book is not as disciplined as those of David Ray Griffin on 9/11, it does shock the varnish off the commentariat and its dismissal of 9/11 theories as ‘conspiracy theories’: 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition [Paperback]
Webster Griffin Tarpley
I cannot make similar endorsements of this author’s other books (e.g. on Obama), except maybe the one of Bush 41.
If this book is not your type, set it aside and consider Griffin’s more restrained and rational analysis. But Tarpley cuts through the bullshit quite nicely, despite some wild pitches. Simple, read all the books in this spectrum.
But get Griffin’s books if there is any doubt here, and consider the desperate situation we find outselves in, if it is true that concealed factions/CIA essentially control the government. All through the liberal attack on Bush 43 over the years, the deeper crisis was not even mentioned.
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07.18.10
Posted in 1848+, Evolution, Ultra Far Left at 12:24 pm by nemo
“Darwinian Liberalism” at “Cato Unbound”
Most conservatives are too cunning to explicitly link Darwinism with conservative politics. Arnhart is the exception and is fascinating for the naive idiocy of his public discussions of ideology in action.
Beware of getting sucked into such arguments: the way out is to see that Darwin’s theory of natural selection is a pseudo-science. If the theory is false then it is useless as a prop for conservative thinking.
Myers, who will debate this group, plies the idea of Darwinian liberalism in another sense, not the ‘classical liberalism’ now seen as conservative.
But Myers is as confused as the rest, why? Because Darwin’s theory is false.
This is a false debate with the false authority of academic profs who are all completely brainwashed by Darwinism.
The real way to consider politics and evolution is via the eonic effect:
http://eonic-effect.net/politics_of_evolution.htm
Note that this set of essays is all that academia can come up with. There are hundreds of specialists in the field of politics and its philosophies, but because a gang of Darwin assholes and loudmouths control the academic spigot, they control the definition of liberalism, it seems.
You won’t hear from those people, not all of whom have been brainwashed, but all of whom have been silenced.
Liberalism springs from sources such as Kant, where the idea of freedom in a challenge to Newton finds its point of application via transcendental idealism.
Darwinians trying to take over these classic entities, which should be the job of undebased academia, darwinize it with junk scientism and are on all sides third rate thinkers as a result of their Darwinism.
So much for academia. At the rate this is going, intelligent people will find no place in the university world where the Dawkins cult has produced a monopoly of idiots, with loners like Arnhart at the (lunatic/academic) fringe getting a peep in occasionally.
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07.13.10
Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left, you've got mail at 10:40 am by nemo
mxmail
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/9472/
The Political Activism of Karl Marx
By Bob Patenaude
Mention the name Karl Marx and most people will conjure an imagine a
gray long-haired, bearded man hunched over piles of books and papers in
the London Library. This is, of course, an accurate image of much of
what occupied Karl Marx’s life, not only the writing of his masterwork
“Capital” but a body of work which was to become the basis for a global
movement for socialism. Yet Marx was more than just a specter haunting
the reading rooms of the London library. He was also actively engaged in
many of the earliest struggles of the communist movement in which he
played such a vital role.
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07.11.10
Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 1:08 pm by nemo
Comment series on Zizek’s Act
One reason for my anger here is that I have learned how easy it is for intelligent people to ‘slum down’ with a bit of Hegel and Marxist theory to confuse less able beginners. Zizek is a past master at that game, and what’s worse it sells better than decent studies of Marx, what to say of the uphill battle of those who wish to recreate a new left.
There’s a kind of rule here: you can’t regurgitate Stalinism. If that requires dropping Marx too, then that’s that. So why not. We can always cite Marx in the history of socialism, just as Marx/Engels did in the 1840′s with the French Socialists, et al.
The trick, if you are so hooked on Hegel, is to sublate the previous work into a higher system. But simple repetition of the legacy that was created by Lenin simply won’t work. So there Zizek is simply exploiting a vacuum and cashing in on a market niche. We need something new. And it seems noone on the left has the wit to do that.
That’s why we speak of the somewhat ironic ‘ultra far left’ here. The old left is a conservative gesture and mentality, conserving a failed past.
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07.10.10
Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 4:57 pm by nemo
‘The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West’
Welcome to the Slavoj Zizek Show
The truth comes out: Zizek is a standup comedian orchestrating a crypto-reactionary leftwing farce.
We have commented here a number of times on this fellow:
Zizek
This is not the left! Zizek’s indifference to Stalinism is not the least of his confusions. To obstinately associate the left with this brand of the Bolshevist left in decline is a disservice to a new generation that needs to make some hard decisions about contemporary culture without all the leftist vultures of the past coming to roost on their sudden insights into capitalist domination.
It is worse than a disservice, it is the best service to the right possible.
It is worth considering that if Marx and Engels had had to defend a legacy like Stalinism the left would have died in the nineteenth century, as it bids fair to do with clowns like Zizek. You have to wonder what these late has-beens are thinking at this point.
The left has to have a revolution against itself now, to recover the impetus of honest cultural innovation, and something better than historical materialism, rehashes of putrid hegelianism, and Lacan for neurotics.
It is probably impossible since it is all too easy for pastiche peddlers like Zizek to steal the show. The rightwing must be laughing.
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06.19.10
Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 12:44 pm by nemo
On Your Marx: Neoliberalism on the rocks
We have lamented many times here the failure of Marxists to be ready for their moment. And the renewed interest in Marx can’t go anywhere because the brilliant original critique of capitalist economy is not really backed up by a viable theory any more. The same old tired junk from the labor theory of value to the sacred canons of historical materialism, always a bad theory of history, enter consciousness to block advance and leave everyone chained to bygone episodes. To say nothing of the legacy of Leninism. Read the rest of this entry »
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06.03.10
Posted in Ultra Far Left at 6:25 pm by nemo
Chris Hedges’ Columns: This Country Needs a Few Good Communists
This article disappeared to the back pages fairly quickly (took me ten minutes to find it). Clearly in the age of Tea Party idiots, commies don’t sell. Hedges is to be commended for a kamikazi article, which I found interesting.
It is not clear what Hedges is up to here: there are plenty of leftist blogs, websites, orgs, etc, so his wish would seem to have been resolved. Or else he is ironic: none of the above are the ‘good communists’ he wishes for.
The situation is suffering from the decayed tradition of the left, which has created a void, and an obstacle course toward renewal of the subject.
Let’s face it, Marx was overrated as a thinker (though not as a tactician, and as a critic of economic ideology) and produced a body of theory that doesn’t have traction any more. However, it is a cleverly created illusion of theory, and freezes many in place thinking they are initiates to rocket science.
So we need a whole new analysis of the question of capitalism in the context of liberalism. Simply praying for a few good communists is like praying for rain.
We don’t even have much of working class anymore, it having been outsourced to China, I guess. And the Chinese must have at least a few good communists. No? Not even one?
More on this some other time.
We have commented here many times on the failures of the left, on the way to a perspective that is ‘ultra far left’, in fact, we have already dealt with the liquidation of Hitchens (http://darwiniana.com/2009/04/18/dialectics-of-the-red-terror-liquidating-hitchens/).
Liquidating Hitchens won’t really solve the problem.
The whole subject needs to start from scratch, but this it cannot do, because the whole game has become a kind of dead mass living in the past, and unable to disassociate itself even from Stalinism.
A renewed left is absolutely needed at this point, but none such seems possible.
The left needs a Kantian critique of Hegel, and better version of Feuerbach, a postdarwinian perspective, something better than a hyped ‘historical materialsim’, a motion beyond scientism, and much else…
Every time anyone tries to do anything here the same group of deadbeats chants all the Second Internationale ideologies, mixed the Leninist mantras that ditched real communism for a new brand of Blanquist revolutionary adventurism. After the working class voted the WWI war credits, the left died, as Lenin sensed, cleverly creating a kind of leftist elitism that said the hell with the proletariat even as it claimed to be its agent.
Anyone care to start over and do the job right?
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05.28.10
Posted in 1848+ at 1:43 pm by nemo
Comment: Promoting Ideology thru Culture
Stephen said,
May 27, 2010 at 12:02 pm ·
Political ideology represents a polarity, in my view. The extremes of the polarity are given by the extremes of collectivism and libertarianism, in general. Collectivists embrace community and group harmony. Libertarians embrace freedom and self-reliance. Collectivists complain about the greed that may come with free-enterprise, and they may seek regulations to control the private sector. Libertarians complain about the heavy regulation that may stifle freedom and businesses, and they may seek a limited governance.
Read the rest of this entry »
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05.19.10
Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 5:02 pm by nemo
Communism, Rising and Falling
Michael Kimmage – May 4, 2010
The Red Flag: A History of Communism
By David Priestland
Grove Press, 2009
The Rise and Fall of Communism
By Archie Brown,
Harper Collins, 2009
Zhivago’s Children: The Last Intelligentsia
By Vladislav Zubok,
Harvard University Press, 2009
A RUSSIAN JOKE begins with the following question: “What is communism?” To which the joke gives a simple answer: “Communism is the longest path from capitalism to capitalism.” This joke, in its exploitation of the ironies implicit in communism’s long decline, could only have been told after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
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05.15.10
Posted in Evolution, Social Darwinism, Ultra Far Left at 2:29 pm by nemo
Notes Toward a Darwinian Left
This article is sad to read, because it is proof the left no longer has any discrimination or any ability to stand beyond scientism, or Darwinism with a critique of bad theories, or reductionist science.
Peter Singer’s book on this, which I reviewed at Amazon when it came out, is a puzzle. What is Singer’s fetishic attachment to Darwinism, after so much free play with theories of ethics?
His thesis is wrongheaded, and he is hardly a leftist at all in any case. He did great harm, because he is often convincing to idiots, when they should instead show some discrimination.
The start of the essay, which is a complete compendium of all the talk.origins baloney on which everyone is now raised, like parrots:
To what extent is the Darwinian vision of human nature compatible with progressive philosophies of social change, or more generally, with contemporary “left-of-center” ideals of social equality and justice? Is it possible to acknowledge our animal qualities while simultaneously advocating the ideals of a progressive and secular humanism?
The Darwinian view of human nature is one of the most incomplete bits and pieces of pseudo-science in the whole history of science. It admits only what is compatible with its theory of natural selection and completely misses everything else. In that sense it is completely alienated from man’s true human nature, replacing it with a propaganda scheme for capitalist economics, the hidden scandal of Darwinism that leftists in their idiocy cannot seem to fathom.
I recomment the view of historical evolution as seen in the eonic effect,history and evolution ‘.com’, so that the ideals of justice and equality, which are foreign to the hidden class theory of Darwin, have an instrinsic historical dynamic behind their action.
It is remarkable that Marx has been criticized as a closet design argument thinker because of the latent teleology in his historical materialism, an ism that fails because it is really a form of universal history.
It is time for a new left that leaves these Darwin leftists behind to sing the praises of Singerian psychopathy.
The class theory of Darwin is apparently beyond the grasp of the current left, trained to stop thinking, and to embrace forever the false positivism that emerged in the generation of Feuerbach and Marx.
Time to move on. Starting with a postdarwinian left.
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