05.19.10

Booknotes: three studies of communism’s history

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.

Permalink Comments

05.15.10

The left and postdarwinism

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.

Permalink Comments

04.29.10

Exposing religious exploitation: doing it right

Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 12:46 pm by nemo

An Evolutionary Psychology: Classical Samkhya
Antiquity also had its leftis revolt done right against religious exploitatioin, the classic Samkhya. By comparison the Feuerbachian Marxists, what to say of their New Atheist descendants, are pikers, incompetent on the whole question.

Permalink Comments

04.24.10

The Nation and the left’s criminal embrace of Social Darwinism in disguise

Posted in Evolution, Ultra Far Left at 12:57 pm by nemo

Yesterday’s post: Could Naomi Klein and the other celebrity idiots at Nation get with it on evolution?

The failure of left groups on evolution/Darwinism is collosal, as the previous post makes clear. It’s one thing for a psychopath like Dawkins to promote social darwinism in disguise, but for the left to acquiesce is grounds for a real war on the left. The current left is a fake set of idiot Stalinists groupies incapable of thought. The stance on Darwinism, which goes back to that other ‘smart’ idiot, Engels, makes a mockery of the whole critique of ideology, as Marx himself suspected.

Permalink Comments

04.15.10

Leninist deadbeats

Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 4:02 pm by nemo

More on 5th Internationale

I don’t think that it is possible to save Lenin from the historical facts of the Bolshevik revolution. The history is pretty definite.

Leftists fail to realize that Bolshevism was not a socialist experiment, if you study carefully Lenin’s clever endrun around the second internationale perspective.
That should be the gateway to a new left. Instead we have these Leninist deadbeats ad infinitum.

Permalink Comments

04.14.10

Leftist daydreaming: a 5th Internationale

Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 11:55 am by nemo

History of the Marxist Internationals (conclusion, the call for a Fifth International)

I think that the left should consider the absurdity of their position in light of the Tea Party movement. Idiocy still trumps the Leninist Third Internationale. The 4th is a Troykyist fiction. The first, and second, the real thing.

A new internationale has to be the FIRST of something new, something post-marxist, post-lenist, and post-stalinist. The idea for a 5th Internationale from Chavez means well, but I fear the ultimate mockery springs from the way that the populist strain has been captured by Mad Avenue style brainwashing to reduce radical impulses to nullity, visible in the Tea Party movement.

The left has to disown its past to recreate a future. No use being stubborn, the longer the left waits, the more absurd the radical impulse becomes as the right makes a joke out of it.

Permalink 10 Comments

03.31.10

Robert Paul Wollf

Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 5:21 pm by nemo

Comment on The New Spirit of Capitalism

Jim Buck said,
March 31, 2010 at 11:32 am

http://www.law.upenn.edu/academics/institutes/ilp/200708papers/WolffFutureofSocialism

Robert Paul Wolff has a number of interesting books from the seventies, one on the labor theory of value.

I converted the file to a text document which you can read here: http://www.redfortyeight.com/2010/03/31/the-future-of-socialism-robert-paul-wollf/

Permalink Comments

02.26.10

Need for social democratic left

Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 4:50 pm by nemo

Inequality

James said,
February 26, 2010 at 1:43 pm ·
“It’s important to realize how rapidly our inequality has grown, and how different our societies used to be. Inequality isn’t some entrenched characteristic. It’s become much worse since the 1970s. And we can shift things back.”
The inevitable currency crisis should take care of this. When that time comes, most Americans will be equal in impoverishment.

The American system has suffered from the lack of a genuine left and the promotion of Social Democracy, long established in Europe.

Permalink Comments

02.17.10

The dead left

Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 12:48 pm by nemo

A life in politics: New Left Review at 50′

Can a left intellectual project hope to thrive in the absence of a political movement? That remains to be seen’

Beyond the fancy leftist discourse, the reality is that the left can’t critique itself and is still stuck in the legacy of Leninism.
The New Left Review can presume to speak for Marx, but that is hype from the dead left.

Permalink Comments

02.15.10

Michael Harrington’s Socialism

Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 6:27 pm by nemo

I was looking again at Socialism, by Michael Harrington, a book from the seventies that younger readers may not know. (isn’t Amazon great? you can get an old copy for two and half bucks)
Watching the charade of rightwing ideology in action, to the point of accusing Obama (!) of socialism, I am mindful of a lost world of liberal/left culture and thought that is being asphixiated by neoliberal media tactics, devastatingly successful.
I am often stunned by the sheer idiocy of the current generation, even of educated persons. The work of Fox News has been done well: idiots roll off the assembly line
I am a critic of Marx and Engels and have posted frequently on that issue, but the current prejudice against socialism, despite the left’s idiocy on the legacy of Stalinism, is a form of historical ignorance, and often the result of the mindset described in Frank’s What’s The Matter With Kansas: the working class mindset poisoned by overdose watching of Fox News into the rejection of self-interest. Basically the rightist elite understands the low class asshole hooked on Fox News: he is easily turned against himself to be a compliant idiot in the system from which he can receive no profit.

We can see this in clever way propaganda has reversed the idea of revolt in the stupidity of the Tea Party movement. etc, etc….
These phenomena were foretold fairly well by Marx/Engels.
The right wing is trying to destroy American democracy, and in the process have distorted the meaning and usage of the terms ‘socialism’ and ‘liberalism’.

Michael Harrington, although his book is out of date, has some nice pieces that endure in this text from the days before even Nixonian conservatism.

He makes the case for the democratic Marx in the wake of 1848, and as a consistent socialist clarifies the way in which Lenin along with the right wing destroyed the socialist idea.
It is not complex: any right thinking citizen-voter untouched by the Fox News poison machine would naturally embrace basic elements of socialism, or, at least, welfare economics and social democratic pseudo-socialism.
One can disagree with these statements, but the idea of socialism should at least be used in a proper usage even by critics.
Harrington would have a hard time in the current scene where unrepentant leftists of crypto-Stalinist persuation have coopted the idea of socialism as badly as those on the right. Harrington was a rare thinker, and insisted on the need for the left to resurrect socialism after and apart from the Bolshevik theft of the idea.
Anyway, his book is a minor classic of reasonable and intelligent socialist discourse.
It might help, even for critics of socialism, to insist at least on the right use of the term, instead of the current systematic mystifications of the increasingly fascist right in the the US.

Everything that Marx predicted is rapidly coming to pass in the US, and the result could be catastrophic very soon.
An archaeological study of the ideas of socialism and the left are essential, but that is very difficult because of the kind of distortions of the record, right and left, that Harrington uncovered with considerable foresight in the seventies.
quotation/selection moved to redfortyeight.com

Permalink 5 Comments

01.31.10

Lenin’s hatred of liberalism

Posted in 1848+, liberalism, Ultra Far Left at 4:20 pm by nemo

Lenin post
To be fair, the current logjam of manipulated liberalism producing idiocy is just the kind of situation that led Marx to his critique. Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink 2 Comments

More on Lenin

Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 3:40 pm by nemo

Two comments on Booknotes: Lenin bio

Jim Buck said,
January 31, 2010 at 2:55 pm ·
I’ve not read that book, but some of its reviewers describe the writer’s views as “slanted”. And, in any case, the ruthlessness–attributed to Lenin– is seen as a positive quality in some quarters.

I’ve spent some time in Berlin, over the last few years; and I’ve found ostalgie to be very real. I Watched Lenin’s statue being craned out of position, in the “People’s Palace”. and boated down the Spree (to be broken up). Despite my antipathy towards the man, the occasion was redolent of Arthurian myth: the deposed, dead, king being ferried towards the land where the sun sets—to sleep for a hundred years, perhaps, before returning.

nemo said,

January 31, 2010 at 3:20 pm ·
I hold no brief whatever on this particular book on Lenin (which I got out of the library two days ago and read rather swiftly). The question of bias here depends on who is making the charge. Anyway, by all means, find another book. How about someone who grates on the left (and on me) with known bias, e.g. Richard Pipes, who will go out of his way to present ugly facts about the Bolsheviks and Lenin.
My point is merely to note the way that Lenin’s biography tends to suppress the facts of what really happened.
The point here is to understand the horrible betrayal of the left, e.g. the Socialist Revolutionaries, who attempted to produce a reasonable outcome, all of whom were simply wiped out as the Leninists took over and invented something absent in nineteenth century leftism, the Chekist one-party dictatorship plus gulags. We have forgotten what the left was, and the way that Leninists redefine the term, and then proceeded to discredit everything.

That some admire Lenin for his ruthlessness is precisely my point, and/or irrelevant. The left was, not suprisingly, frustrated in the nineteenth century by the failure to achieve revolutionary control. The 48-ers ended up slaughtered as Louis Napoleon swept up the spoils. The Commune was a tantalizing horror that ended in another slaughter. The French Revolution itself was an arrested transformation.
Especially the Commune experience made many leftists, like Lenin, determined to never let the opportunity slip again. The reason for his ruthless determination and murderous totalitarian obsession. Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink 1 Comment

Booknotes: Lenin bio

Posted in 1848+, Booknotes, Ultra Far Left at 1:14 pm by nemo

Comment on Great Lenin’s Ghost

Jim Buck said,
January 31, 2010 at 10:11 am
Lenin may yet urn out to be the once-and-future king.

You point is quite apt, and you may be right, the point of my remark, about the enduring ‘ghost of Lenin’. My point was that the left is stuck on Lenin, and a fantasy Lenin, that doesn’t correspond to the reality.
The left is a gang of people who often don’t read books, certainly not critical books, and the result is a failure to understand either Lenin or the history connected to him. Here’s one of the first post-bolshevik bios of Lenin, using the new open archives. It is hard to consider how Lenin’s reputation can survive the facts. But it has survived, so I don’t know.

Lenin: A New Biography (Hardcover)
~ Dmitri Volkogonov

Permalink 2 Comments

Where’s The People’s History of Bolshevism?

Posted in 1848+, Booknotes, Ultra Far Left at 12:46 pm by nemo

Howard Zinn’s biggest failing

Although Zinn was a hero of the left, he did not do enough to challenge the legitimacy of capitalist America

Well, at least someone has the nerve to critique Zinn. I have always admired many aspects of his life and work, but in the final analysis his famour book/history palls as you see its built in bias. So much indignation over the USA and not a peep, nothing, zero, about the atrocities of the left that have broken all records for mass murder. I was always puzzled as to how such success could come to a book that limited. Perhaps the book is a peanut gallery fan club success phenomenon.
Whatever the case, and I am being slightly unfair since the novelty of a critique of American history deserved its first round, the left suffers from bad literature, bad analysis, dead propaganda, Leninist idiocy engrained, and much else.
Zinn’s book is substitute for real analysis of the problems of the left, and suggests the need for A People’s History of Bolshevism.

Unfortunately, Zinn’s big book is stronger on polemical passion than historical insight. For all his virtuous intentions, Zinn essentially reduced the past to a Manichean fable and made no serious attempt to address the biggest question a leftist can ask about US history: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live?

According to A People’s History, “The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history.” It uses its wealth to “turn those in the 99% against one another” and employs war, patriotism, and the military to “absorb and divert” the occasional rebellion.

US history for Zinn was thus a painful narrative about ordinary folks who kept struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society, yet somehow were always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose wiles match their greed. In Zinn’s view, the ruling elite was a transhistorical entity, a virtual monolith; neither its interests nor its ideology had changed markedly from the days when its members owned slaves and wore knee-britches to the era of the Internet and Armani.

He described the American Revolution as a clever device to defeat “potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership”. His Civil War was another elaborate confidence game. Soldiers who fought to preserve the Union got duped by “an aura of moral crusade” against slavery that “worked effectively to dim class resentments against the rich and powerful, and turn much of the anger against ‘the enemy’”. Zinn saw nothing unusual in the election of Reagan in 1980. It simply “meant that another part of the establishment”, albeit “more crass” than its immediate antecedents, was now in charge.

Zinn did give voice to many heroic, plebeian losers. He punctuated his narrative with hundreds of quotes from slaves and populists, anonymous wage-earners and such articulate radicals as Eugene V Debs, DuBois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Stokely Carmichael, and Helen Keller. Those supplied texture and eloquence absent from the author’s own predictable renderings. But to make sense of a nation’s entire history, one has to explain the weight and meaning of world-views that are not his own and that he does not favor. Zinn had no taste for such disagreeable tasks.

Yet, whether as activist or author, his sympathies were always clear, consistent, and put forth with an ardour no contemporary radical could match. “To understand,” wrote the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, “one must stand under.” In a grim era, Zinn offered many on the American left a certain consolation. They might be losing, but they could comprehend the evil of a 400-year-old order, and that knowledge would, to a certain extent, set them free. But no work of history can substitute for a social movement.

lthough Zinn was a hero of the left, he did not do enough to challenge the legitimacy of capitalist America

Permalink 1 Comment

01.30.10

Great Lenin’s ghost

Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left, you've got mail at 2:21 pm by nemo

Alfred Wallace, the true source of Darwism, and its first great repentant critic, considered the ghost question crucial to understanding evolution and humand psychology. It would seem that Marxism’s encounter with scientism was the first stage in its undoing.

The Posthistoricity of Orthodox Marxism

http://clarkmax.blogspot.com/2010/01/posthistoricity-of-orthodox-marxism.html

1. The orthodox Marxist ends the history of thought with Marx. All
truth that remains to come is to be a methodical reiteration of his
thusly eternalized word. All that is not a reiteration is rendered
false. This tendency runs riot in the unconscious behavior of all
orthodox Marxism, the provisos of dialectics notwithstanding, and is
near incurable as such.

2. If idealism, as Marx writes in his German Ideology, is essentially
a belief in ghosts, the ontotheological “spectre of communism” surely
betrays the main contours of Marx’s faith.

http://www.marxmail.org/msg72360.html

Permalink 5 Comments

12.16.09

Marxist idiocy on Darwinism

Posted in 1848+, Evolution at 2:11 pm by nemo

The left is almost incapable of extricating itself from the ideology of Darwinism as disguised classical liberalism. Karl Marx did it, before his views were covered over by Second Internationale propaganda.
The left cannot see how it feeds the right with this stupidity ad infinitum.

Darwin’s Science vs ‘Intelligent Design’
Written by John Pickard
Tuesday, 24 November 2009

This month marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. This book revolutionised thinking about the living world because for the first time it provided an explanation for the evolution of species. It was a triumph of the materialist world outlook and for that reason its publication was celebrated by Marx and Engels.

Permalink Comments

12.15.09

Black Book of Capitalism?

Posted in 1848+, Booknotes, Ultra Far Left at 3:04 pm by nemo

The Siren Call Of Tyranny

The hard-left former groupies of totalitarianism keep searching for new murderous ideologies to defend.

Despite the sudden rightwing nosedive at the end of this review at hopeless-case WSJ it raises an issue discussed here several times, from a leftist, or ultra far left viewpoint (! to disown the current left_).

First let me note the unwritten book, The Black Book Of Capitalism.

That considered, the current left, as noted in this review, is mind-frozen, and unable to move on. More soon on this.

‘Last Exit to Utopia” was first published in France nearly a decade ago. It concerns itself primarily with the failure of much of the French left to come to grips with the collapse of communism and the exposure of its innumerable crimes. The events and debates under its review date mainly to the 1990s, and its author died in 2006.

Yet the book, at last available in English in this fine translation, ought to command close attention because it was written by Jean-François Revel, who—unlike such bien-pensant idols as Jean-Paul Sartre (an admirer of Stalin) and Michel Foucault (a cheerleader of the Ayatollah Khomeini)—deserves to be ranked as the pre-eminent French political philosopher of the second half of the 20th century. What’s more, the book’s themes continue to resonate today, when murderous ideologies still compete for legitimacy and “enlightened” understanding by the Western intelligentsia.

Revel’s great subject was totalitarianism, not just its practice but also its intellectual methods, deceits and disturbing psychological attractions. In books such as “The Totalitarian Temptation” (1976) and “How Democracies Perish” (1983), he dissected the mind-set of Western intellectuals who, living in democracies, found much to admire in gulag countries like the Soviet Union and Cuba and much to detest in free ones—the U.S. most of all.

View Full Image
Last Exit to Utopia
By Jean-François Revel
Encounter, 348 pages, $23.95
Why was that? “The totalitarian phenomenon,” Revel observed years ago, “is not to be understood without making an allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or—much more mysteriously—to submit to it.”

It was a temptation that proved to be remarkably resilient. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the once fellow-traveling European left had no choice but to admit that the god to which it had long rendered faithful service had been an illusion, and incurably dysfunctional to boot. Yet that grudging concession, as Revel observed, did little to chasten the former groupies of totalitar ianism. On the contrary, it served as a springboard for a fresh assault on liberal-democratic principles.

The tipping point, in Revel’s view, was the publication in 1997 of “The Black Book of Communism,” an 800-page compendium of the serial barbarities of communist regimes from China and Ethiopia to Russia and Cambodia. This massive scholarly undertaking, meticulous in its research and incontrovertible in its findings, was instantly greeted with fury by much of the French intelligentsia, which refused to accept that its own eyes-wide-shut apologetics for the likes of Mao, Mengistu, Stalin and Pol Pot were no less a form of complicity in mass murder than Holocaust denial.

Permalink 2 Comments

12.11.09

Zinn’s classic omits Bolshevik crimes

Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 12:05 pm by nemo

Review: Dave Zirin
THE REVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED
The People Speak debuts this Sunday–the work of “people’s historian” Howard Zinn brought to life by an incredible collection of performers.

http://socialistworker.org/2009/12/11/revolution-will-be-televised

Zinn’s classic is one of my favorite books, but the problem is the one-sidedness of his history, which is filled with moral indignation over the sins of everyone except the Bolsheviks. And they were the worst, the absolute worst!
That flaw has always limited Zinn’s account. We need a People’s History of Bolshevism.

Permalink Comments

12.01.09

Darwinism a conservative ideology

Posted in 1848+, Evolution at 6:39 pm by nemo

http://history-and-evolution.com/whee/chap7_2_2.htm: Will Democracy Survive?
Toward A Postdarwinian Liberalism

The polarization of left and right on evolution is a considerable confusion. In fact, Darwinism is a conservative ideology in disguise, one that ended up fooling the left.
On this:
Leaving the right, in Sullivan’s phrase, should imply leaving the natural selection ideology of Darwinists, which is not the same as leaving the idea of evolution.
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/andrew-sullivan-steps-up/

Permalink 1 Comment

First and last whigs…

Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 6:36 pm by nemo

7.3.3 Last and First Men
The issue of conservatives has its most confusing ‘clarification’ in the ‘end of history’ shennanigans.

Permalink Comments

A Kantian foundation for marxism

Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 1:12 pm by nemo

Marx’s thought was born under a bad star, I guess, and the result is a completely wrong-headed view on life that poisoned the well of socialism.
A dose of Kant might help/
Alasdair Macintyre’s contribution to marxism
Macintyre’s pronouncements are highly misleading, as is his history of ethics. There was no ‘Enlightenment project’ to be called a failure. And the dismissal of Kant is outrageous. Kant more than anyone else was a critic of ‘divine fiats’.
His ethical system is one thing, his transcendental idealism another.
Going back to Aristotle won’t work (although the gesture is useful).
The work of Kant is as close as anyone has come to clarifying the issues of ethics/
Sadly Marx’s prejudice against Kant made him forever unacceptable to Marxist true believers, and other idiots.
A Kantian Marxism is the best shot for a real left, with or without Kantian ethics (only one part of the Kantian foundation);
Marx was a frustrated transcendental idealist who ended up not very intelligently getting swamped in Feuerbachian positivism, with useless results.

In A Brief History of Ethics, he provided a (Eurocentric, or rather, Hellenocentric) account of transforming moral habits rooted in changes of social structure, from Ancient Greece to modern Europe. Later, in After Virtue, written after he had ceased to be a marxist and had come to view the working class as possessing insufficient resources for solving the problems of modernity, he elaborated his compelling argument as to why the Enlightenment project had failed with respect to morality, and why it had to fail. Enlightenment philsophers sought to rationally ground moral claims, but did so on the basis of an unsustainable normative commitment to individualism. Thus, in Enlightenment philosophy the attempt to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’ always fails. Either one lapses into Humean subjectivism (the default position of Anglo-American philosophy), consigning morality to an unavoidable but empirically unjustifiable sentimental response to the world, or one attempts to reproduce divine fiats at another level, as per the Kantian categorial imperative. For Macintyre, the Aristotelian tradition of deriving morality from a conception of ‘human nature’ had to be the starting point for any rationally grounded morality.

Permalink 1 Comment

11.30.09

Modern, postmodern, and the left(s)

Posted in 1848+ at 5:16 pm by nemo

1848+: Theory, Ideology, and Revolution

A way to connect world history, evolution, and the politics of modernity/revolution.

Permalink Comments

Leftist traffic collisions

Posted in 1848+ at 5:04 pm by nemo

Two articles on the current confusion on the ‘left’: Michael Berube’s war on the left
The Left At War, Michael Berube
I find it hard to make anything out of this bickering.
We commented on this here a few days ago re: Chavez’ call for a Fifth International.

The verdict here is simple: we don’t have a left. Since 1989 ‘left’ has fallen into chaotification and succumbs to incoherence at the babbling level at regular intervals.

I have often suggested the need to adopt a critique of Marxism and start over from scratch. Bickering over the politics of the last two decades is hardly productive. Everyone, left or right, is frozen in place, and unable to think.

Permalink Comments

11.25.09

Hegel, Fukuyama, and the ‘end of history’

Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 4:07 pm by nemo

Last and First Men

Fukuyama’s essay/book on the ‘end of history’ is starting to fade away now, having done its right wing work all too well, and having confused the left, who should have been able to deal with this ideologue.
But Fukuyama is deceptive here, because what he had to say was more to the point than anyone on the left realized.
It raises the question of what Hegel really meant. Hegel never discoursed on the ‘end of history’. He did produce a teleological metaphysics of spirit in which the emergence of freedom was part of a spiritual design.
This language was confusing to secularists, and finally rejected, missing the point he was making, which is twisted into something else in Fukuyama.

Fukuyama makes a subtle set of changes in Hegel, first to adapt the argument to ‘historical materialists’, so to speak, by getting rid of the spiritual apparatus for a secularized reductionism, and second by injecting the question of capitalism into the question of the end of history (that pun on the teleology of history, and the endpoint of history, clever pun indeed).
The permanance of capitalism at the end of history is something Hegel never claimed. What he did claim was that, as he toasted the French Revolution every year, the gains of modern freedom were an aspect of the teleology of Universal History. This kind of thinking just couldn’t survive the onset of positivism. But history has born Hegel out, in some fashion. This was therefore a strange sort of plug for the dawn of liberal civilization, even as he acutely critiqued liberalism even as it was being born. The issue is much clearer in Kant, who produced the great philosophy of liberal freedom.

The point for the left here is, not that Leninist ruffians can or should destroy liberalism and concoct a totalitarian socialism, but that a successor to liberal capitalism ought, at the end of history, to be a liberal socialism, a society of free men, free of the constraits of capitalist domination.
The idea was something Marx and Engels could not grasp. What to say of the degenerations of leftists of the French (and American) Revolution in the nineteenth century.

It is a remarkable thought to consider that Fukuyama cleverly distorted the question in this way. It has led us to consider that capitalism is blessed with the same aura of Hegelian mystification as liberalism. But that was a clever switch.
This might help to challenge the left also: there can only be a liberal socialism. There is no other kind. To take away all the gains of human rights fought for in modern revolutions, as Marx proposed, was a calamity of bad theory. And it is all a little too conventient for those obsessed with that other ‘fetish of the commodities’: the revolution, with its mystique of grand historical dynamics, a washed out variant of Hegel’s teleology of freedom.

Permalink 1 Comment

11.22.09

What is the only revolution in world history to have succeeded?

Posted in 1848+, Critique of Evolutionary Economy, Ultra Far Left at 3:15 pm by nemo

Commonwealth, By Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, By Slavoj Zizek
In the Bolshevik cabaret
Reviewed by John Gray
I will leave John Gray, a bit of conservative ‘reactionary’, to sink Zizek.
Lost on everyone, it seems, is that the only revolution in history to have succeeded was the plain garden variety yankee doodle liberalism of the American Revolution.
This is a refutation of Gray and Zizek both.
Could the ghosts in the Marx/Lenin graveyard learn something here?
Socialism is as realizable as democratic republicanism, because the two are both liberal entities, at least until Marx came along and confused everyone.

A Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalytical theorist and film critic, Zizek has become a gadfly of the left establishment, a prolific provocateur whose principal aim seems to be to confound his tender-minded readers. His target throughout this book is not the right but the soft, democratic, meliorist left, which imagines that the egalitarian goals of communism can be realised by non-repressive, liberal means.

Zizek is savagely scornful of this view, writing sharply that “One of the mantras of the postmodern left has been that we should finally leave behind the ‘Jacobin-Leninist paradigm’ of centralised dictatorial power. But perhaps the time has now come to turn this mantra around… Now, more than ever, one should insist on the ‘eternal Idea of Communism’ – strict egalitarian justice, disciplinary terror, political voluntarism, and trust in the people.”

In other words, dictatorship is indispensable to the communist project. Mass coercion and terror are not departures from a humane vision, brought about by tyrannical leaders acting in backward conditions. Lenin and Stalin were genuine masters of revolutionary strategy, who knew that without organised terror their goals would never be achieved.

In this if in nothing else, Zizek is unquestionably right. In the real world, communist revolutions are not achieved by rhetoric; they require firing squads, secret police and gulags. This is as near as Zizek ever gets to the realities of revolution, however. He passes over the fact that systematic terror has nowhere realised the utopian goals of communism, but instead created new and worse forms of tyranny while killing millions of people.

When applied to contemporary conditions, his much-vaunted Leninism is comical. First As Tragedy, Then As Farce differs from the pap dispensed by the authors of Commonwealth chiefly in virtue of the gleeful enthusiasm with which Zizek defends the necessity of terror. But no more than Hardt and Negri can Zizek identify any social force that actually wants communism. For all his insistent tough-mindedness – “If you can get power, grab it”, he declared in an interview the other day – he is at the furthest possible remove from anything that could be described as serious politics.

The essential frivolity of this latter-day Leninism is a pointer to the true reasons for the revival of radical leftist thinking at the present time. The global financial crisis has left many people frightened and confused. Faced with the failures of capitalism, they look around for alternatives – and here capitalism itself comes to the rescue.

A feature of the hyper-capitalism of recent years is that it abolishes historical memory. The squalor and misery of communism are now as remote to most people as life under feudalism. When Zizek and others like him defend communism – “the communist hypothesis”, as they call it – they can pass over the fact that the hypothesis has been falsified again and again, in dozens of different countries, because their audience knows nothing of the past. Hence the appeal of Zizek’s works, which are being avidly consumed by young people across much of Europe and beyond.

Whether as Hardt and Negri’s embarrassing rhetoric or Zizek’s parodic Leninism, the intellectual revival of communism is best understood in terms of capitalism’s ability to produce compensatory spectacles.

The media-confected communism of the present time has as little connection with everyday life as does reality television – possibly even less. But precisely because of its unreality, the neo-Bolshevik spectacle has a definite function in contemporary society. The clowning cabaret of 21st-century communism does what entertainment has always been meant to do. It distracts those who watch it from thinking about their problems, which secretly they suspect may be insoluble.

Permalink Comments

Van der Linden’s book on Kantian ethical socialism

Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 2:37 pm by nemo

Theories of Stalinism
— Paul Le Blanc
The Marxism of Leon Trotsky
By Kunal Chattopadhyay
Kolkata: Progress Publishers, 2006, 672 pages, including index, $25 paperback.

Western Marxism and the Soviet Union
By Marcel van der Linden
Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009, 379 pages, including index,
$20 paperback.

KARL MARX AND his comrades deemed their own approach “scientific,” as compared to “utopian” intellectual efforts on behalf of socialism, because they believed that practical efforts to challenge and ultimately replace capitalism with something better must be grounded in a serious study of economic, political, social, historical realities and dynamics.

Two biographies of Trotsky are out and I have glanced at both, unsatisfied, grumbling, mad as hell with the idiot left. Trotsky is no help. Forget him.
Thus I link to a third, but also to anything by Van Linden who wrote a most fascinating book on Kantian ethical socialism.

This work details the long lost moment of the Kantian socialists of Marburg at the end of the nineteenth century. Their influence seeped in the debates of Second Internationale but went nowhere, and confused Bernstein who used a Kantian twist from the Marburg school to end up by discrediting social democracy and Kant in the eyes of most leftists.

But the point is that Marxist theory is dead, and hankering after Trotsky isn’t going to help. That pipe dream has delayed the needed reckoning with Bolshevism which is a dead loss in toto.

Something like Kantian ethical socialism is the only hope for the left, and even that has already been ruined by Marxist scholarship on the subject. But the point is that a whole vein of socialism exists that is not psychopathic Marxism. We need awfully for the old generation to drop dead and for a totally new organism to rise in its place. A complete disconnect with all the hasbeens still trying to defend Lenin or resurrect Trotsky.
Trotsky was Stalinism lite, so I fail to see the fan club interest in his case.

Permalink Comments

11.21.09

1848: the mystery moment for the left

Posted in 1848+ at 2:12 pm by nemo

Out Of Revolution
After haranguing Zizek, it should be said that a ‘new left’ could be so easily achieved, but it seems it can never happen.
The question of revolution has been misunderstood and given false theories by the left, that is Marx, and it is hard for people to overcome the mystique of the Second Internationale, or come up with any fresh ideas. But even to go back and study that period would remind the left that Lenin was another interloper who systematically wiped out the original left.

Permalink Comments

Zizek and leftist psychopathy

Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 1:32 pm by nemo

Zizek in Times
and a protest from a rightist rag:

New York Times “Celebrates” the Fall of the Berlin Wall
Posted by Marian L. Tupy
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/11/09/new-york-times-celebrates-the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall/
In a way, I always knew it would happen. I knew that, come November 9, the left-leaning NYT would publish an article focusing on the supposed crisis of capitalism rather than the end of communist dictatorship. Still, I was not prepared for Slavoj Zizek’s op-ed entitled “20 Years of Collapse.”

First, a few words about the author — a Marxist philosopher from Slovenia. Generally ignored or ridiculed in Slovenia, Zizek is considered (by some) to be the new messiah of leftist thought in the West. Why did the NYT chose to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the collapse of communism with Zizek’s call for “socialism with a human face,” rather than an op-ed by someone like Vladimir Bukovsky, a former Soviet political prisoner tormented for years by the communists, is anyone’s guess.

I dislike linking to rightwing sources, but in a way this protest against Zizek in the Times is a kind of ‘just desserts’. A slap in the face.
Zizek wants us to just surrender to Stalinism, and think nothing of it. It is a strange mentality.
It is also the fag end of the left.

Twenty years after the fall of communism we might have hoped for something new by now: accurate histories of the old left and where it went wrong, dissociation from its failures, and a disconnect of guilt/muddle by association from its crimes.
But no, we get such fare as Zizek’s Hegelian Lacanian bullshist, that, citing The Black Book Of Communism, sees nothing notable in the Communist destruction of 80 million people. A shrug. Come again?

Zizek is doing a profound disservice here, can the left do nothing more than program young idealists to be political psychopaths?
The attitude seems to be that, wait long enough, and the next round can begin.
I doubt it!
We need a new left, sans the sophistical thinking and bully tactics of Marx and Engesl that made a claim on the socialist idea that noone can seem to shake off.

Permalink Comments

11.16.09

Position paper on the Chinese Wall (work in progress)

Posted in 1848+, Critique of Evolutionary Economy, Ultra Far Left at 4:55 pm by nemo

I was just looking at: When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (Hardcover)
~ Martin Jacques
with a discussion here:
Discussion at NPR

This is a large book, and I have barely glanced at it, but I see at square one a host of fallacies mixed up with what might be prescient analysis, or not.
Apparently this is a leftist analysis that wishes to sucker punch the ‘American Empire’ and subtly revenge itself by promoting the future of China.
Let me say that as a great admirer of China I don’t wish the fate of world domination on them. It will destroy their reputation for ever, as it seems destined to destroy that of America, originally a charming wonder of world history.
So I don’t recommend being next in line after the procession of imperialistic nationalisms starting with the Spanish in the sixteenth century. The challenge is to advance modernity and freedom the way American did (or did not, as you see it). Industrialism is a secondary achievement at best.
Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink Comments

11.11.09

Revolutions per second

Posted in 1848+, Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 2:56 pm by nemo

Revolutions per second

Marx, for all his savvy insight, never got the question of revolutioin straight, and the exemplar of the French Revolution has always mesmerized and confused the left. The problem is that while ‘revolution’ and modernity seem to suggest a dynamic of revolution for historical change the reality is more complex, and, in any case, the attempt to repeat the French (bourgeois) Revolution for a post-capitalist society provokes a contradiction, and failure of the gesture.

Permalink Comments