#neo marxism

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Paul Mulshine

Published: Dec 28, 2015

Around this time of year, various journalists run sanitized versions of the creation myth of Kwanzaa. They report that it has roots in African culture and overlook the fact that founder Maulana Karenga has a past that discredits both him and his made-up holiday.

So, it was interesting to see this article in which the writer notes that Kwanzaa is even less popular than Festivus, that holiday made up for the Seinfeld show.

Click here for the in-depth article I did for Heterodoxy Magazine on Kwanzaa back then.

Below is my 2002 column on the subject:

--

ONE OF MY READERS called me the other day to inform me that the public schools in New Jersey aren't allowed to celebrate Christmas but are celebrating Kwanzaa.

This is intriguing. Christmas celebrates the legacy of Christ who, by all accounts, was a nonviolent man who believed that people of all types could learn to live in peace. Kwanzaa celebrates the legacy of an extremely violent man from California who has dedicated his life to spreading dissension among the races.

More on that later. First let's deal with the question of why schools can propagate a belief in Kwanzaa but not Christmas or Chanukah. For an answer, I called Ed Martone of the American Civil Liberties Union.

''Kwanzaa isn't a religious holiday," said Martone. "It's a cultural holiday. It doesn't have the same restrictions as Chanukah or Christmas."

I'll grant that there is a certain logic to the view. After all, once the government gets involved in religion, the potential conflicts among Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims and atheists are so complex that perhaps we are better off avoiding them altogether.

But by that same logic, the public schools should not be pushing certain cultural practices. And the schools especially shouldn't be endorsing cultural practices created by a character with the beliefs and the background of Ron Karenga.

It is not easy to get a hold of the facts about the background of the creator of Kwanzaa. In fact, it is nearly impossible. The history of the founder of Kwanzaa has disappeared into an Orwellian time warp.

If you look up the name "Ron Karenga" on any of the many newspaper data bases that are available these days, you will read a glowing account of a deep-thinking philosopher who comes across as a sort of jolly Father Christmas for African-Americans.

You won't find any reference to murder or torture. Yet murder was a specialty of US, the paramilitary organization that Karenga ran in Los Angeles in the late 1960s.

As for torture, Karenga took that more personally. The accounts of his personal role in a particularly sadistic episode of brutality have been largely lost to history.

The episode seems to exist only on a few microfilmed pages of the Los Angeles Times. It took two days of research and phone calls to track them down.

Here is an excerpt from an article headlined "Woman describes two days of torture" on the May 1971 trial of Karenga for torturing two dissident members of his group:

''Deborah Jones, who once was given the Swahili title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis' mouth and placed against Miss Davis' face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said."

Karenga was convicted and served more than three years in a state prison.

This was not an isolated incident. In 1967, Karenga was accused of having his thugs beat up a student who asked him an impertinent question at a college forum.

In 1969, US got involved in a struggle with the Black Panthers for control of the black studies program at UCLA. All involved carried guns on campus. The US guys were quicker on the draw; they killed two Panthers in a shootout at the student center.

It would be nice to say that after Karenga got out of jail in 1975 he repented, saw the error of his ways and invented Kwanzaa as a means of atoning for his past.

Nice, but untrue. Karenga has never atoned for his thuggery, probably because no one ever asked him to. And his sole concession to repentance was his 1975 conversion to Marxism. For him, this was considered to be a sign that he had moderated his views.

Karenga invented Kwanzaa at the height of his gang days, in 1966. And he made it up not to bring peace among the races but to divide them. That's why he placed this alleged "harvest festival" in competition with Christmas, which he derided because of its ties to the hated capitalist system.

It may be true that Kwanzaa has evolved into a ceremony that has importance to a great number of well-intentioned people, people who have no knowledge of its creator's questionable history.

But Karenga himself continues to champion the holiday as an example of what he terms "cultural nationalism." This is the view that black people are a separate "nation" within a hostile country. During a visit to Newark in 1987, Karenga defined America as "an insane, socially decaying society." "We need a value system and a support system . . . because the world is organized against your Africanism," he told Newark residents.

Karenga remains a leading spokesman for the multicultural movement, a movement based on the idea that Americans should emphasize their differences rather than their similarities.

The idea of Kwanzaa fits firmly within multiculturalism. And however you feel about multiculturalism, you must admit that it is a political movement and therefore one that should not be supported with tax dollars.

As for Karenga himself, he should be given all the respect due a convicted torturer.

Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I believe that once a man inserts a hot soldering iron into a woman's mouth, he should be excluded from public discourse for eternity. I may be wrong, however. Certainly, the people in California don't seem to share this view.

Karenga is now a professor at California State University in Long Beach.

That's California for you. By that standard, there's a university presidency waiting somewhere for Charles Manson when he finally gets out.

COMMENTS:

Note that I'm not arguing here that people shouldn't celebrate Kwanzaa. It's a free country and people can celebrate what they want.

I'm arguing that the media should not cover these celebrations without including the key facts about its founder. That's just basic journalism.

==

Why the Vice President of the United States feels compelled to pretend that her family has a long tradition of celebrating a fake holiday that apes African tropes and Judaism, concocted by a brutal felon and sociopath, and which was invented when she was two years old is a question worth seriously contemplating.

#Ron Karenga #Kwanzaa #Happy Kwanzaa #fake holidays #holiday of torture #Kamala Harris #seven principles #cultural nationalism #black nationalism #black separatists #neo marxism #religion is a mental illness

[raglanphd]

#sigmund freud #freud #psychoanalysis #psychology #philosophy memes #philosophy #psychology memes #neo marxism #critical theory #erich fromm #herbert marcuse #wilhelm reich #freudo marxism

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

#us politics #2022 #twitter #tweet #republicans #conservatives #republicans be like #conservatives be like #the serfs #memes #gop #woke #communism #socialism #critical race theory #marxism #gender critical #trans ideology #post modern neo-marxist #cancel culture #1984 #ministry of truth #free speech

[unitedfrontvarietyhour]

That first time you read Lenin is a doozy...

#united front #communism #anticapitalism #socialism #meme #capitalism #marxism #lenin #vladimir lenin #the matrix #neo #keanu reeves

[thechampagnesocialist]

vague posting for an upcoming scenario 2: electric boogaloo :)

#call of cthulhu #im continuing to amuse myself #if you want an update ive moved on from post marxism to neo marxism and yeah its for a game set on a plane #cant wait to show my source at the end of this

[mibuchis]

sociology mock tomorrow 😭😭

#hoping the big essay is on neo marxism or feminism #they’re the most memorable to me #and i’m hoping like crazy that it’s not on weber 😭

[orthopoogle]

It's because teens/twenties are apt to have a "cause" as they are still forming their identity (not labels... but actual who IS John Smith actually type identity) and it's very easy to use keyboard activism as a time filler and slap baseline labels on everything in place of real introspection. This is a problem for all ages, humans don't tend to like doing things the hard way, but it's VERY present in young adults and social media fuels it imo.

Yeah, but it’s arguably a lot worse now than it was with younger generations in the past.

#nothing about modern gender ideology and neo-marxism is ‘’normal’’

[ninjoots]

Hey does anybody know if post-modern-neo-Marxism had a different account they post art on? I loved their centricide content but they haven’t posted in 3 months since the epilepsy incident. I’d love to support their other content if it’s out there but I’ve sent 2 asks about it with no reply yet. Any advice?

#centricide #jreg #jrumblr #tmi jreg #jreg tmi #jreg centricide #help please #post-modern-neo-Marxism #i loved their art so so much and I miss them a lot

[world-v-you-blog]

War for the Promised Land, 2 – Myths Debunked, 1

(Image credit – Theodor Herzl and the First Zionist Congress delegates, Zurich, 1897 – Wikipedia) The shocking surprise terror attack of October 7, 2023 by Gaza-based Hamas on Israel left more than 1300 Israelis and foreign visitors to Israel, mostly unarmed civilians, dead, and resulted in the violent hostage-taking of about 200 more. This gruesome and brutal onslaught has brought into the open…

View On WordPress

#Hamas #Israel #Middle East Conflict #Neo-Marxism #Palestine #Turkish Empire #Zionism

[ghelgheli]

Recognizing this central ambivalence in regard to so-called Western values—whereby they are cast out as “postmodern authoritarianism” only to be embraced as the “true spirit” of societies to come—is essential to understanding the strategic significance of the anti-gender misappropriation of postcolonial language. This ambivalence sheds light on the fact that the superficial takeover frames the “gender ideology” colonizer not simply as the “West as such but [rather as] the West whose healthy (Christian) core had already been destroyed by neo-Marxism and feminism in the 1960s” (Korolczuk and Graff 2018: 812). Very often, the anti-gender misappropriation takes on a decidedly Islamophobic hue; for all their catering to anticolonial sentiments, anti-gender thinkers often claim that “gender ideology,” with its historical roots in anti-European “neo-Marxism and feminism,” goes hand in hand with the threat of (Muslim) immigration. A blatant example of this can be found in former Cardinal Sarah’s proclamation against the two unexpected threats of our times:

On the one hand, the idolatry of Western freedom; on the other, Islamic fundamentalism: atheistic secularism versus religious fanaticism. To use a slogan, we find ourselves between “gender ideology and ISIS.” . . . From these two radicalizations arise the two major threats to the family: its subjectivist disintegration in the secularized West [and] the pseudo-family of ideologized Islam which legitimizes polygamy [and] female subservience. (Sarah 2015)

Sarah aggressively draws up a dual picture of the true enemy—the biopolitical survival of the family is threatened on the one hand by excessive secularization and sexual freedom, and on the other by “ideologized Islam’s pseudo-family,” which marks the degraded and uncivilized counterpart to Christianity’s proper tradition. This discursive construction of “terrorist look-alikes” as possessing an excessive, uncultivated, and dangerous sexuality yet again plays into the same fundamental racialized mapping of progress that colonial gender undergirded (Puar 2007). This rhetoric is mirrored by Norwegian right-wing politician Per-Willy Amundsen (2021) when he writes that:

I will never celebrate pride. First of all, there are only two sexes: man and woman, not three—that is in contradiction with all biological science. Even worse, they are allowed access to our kids to influence them with their radical ideology. This has to be stopped. If FRI [the national LGBT organization] really cared about gay rights, they would get involved in what is happening in Muslim countries, rather than construct fake problems here in Norway. But it is probably easier to speak about “diversity” as long as it doesn’t cost anything. (Amundsen 2021; translation by author) Here Amundsen draws on the well-known trope of trans* and queer people “preying on our kids” while at the same time reinforcing the homonationalist notion that Europe, and in particular Norway, is a safe h(e)aven for queer people—perhaps a bit too much so. In his response to Amundsen, Thee-Yezen Al-Obaide, the leader of SALAM, the organization for queer Muslims in Norway, aptly diagnoses Amundsen’s rhetoric as “transphobia wrapped in Islamophobia” (as quoted in Berg 2021). Amundsen mirrors a central tenet of TERF rhetoric by claiming to be the voice of science, biology, and reason in order to distinguish his own resistance to “gender ideology” from the repressive, regressive one of Muslims. In this way, his argumentation, which basically claims that trans* people don’t exist and certainly shouldn’t be recognized legally, attempts to come off as benign, while Muslim opposition to “gender ideology” is painted as destructive and anti-modern. This double gesture, which allows Amundsen to have his cake and eat it too, is a central trope in different European iterations of anti-gender rhetoric. In France, for example, such discourse claims that, “while ‘gender ideology’ goes too far on the one hand, the patriarchal control of Islam threatens to pull us back into an excessive past. Here of course, ‘Frenchness’ is always already neither Muslim, nor queer (and certainly not both)” (Hemmings 2020: 30). Therefore the French anti-gender movement sees itself as the defender of true Western civilization, both from Western “gender ideology” and from uncivilized “primitives” who are nevertheless themselves victims of “gender ideology.” A similar dynamic plays out in Britain: “Reading Muslims as dangerous heteroactivists and Christians as benign points to how racialization and religion create specific forms of heteroactivism. . . . Even where ‘Muslim parents’ are supported by Christian heteroactivists, they remain other to the nation, and not central to its defence” (Nash and Browne 2020: 145). In the British example, it is clear that white anti-gender actors represent themselves as moderate, reasonable, and caring—often claiming that their resistance to the “politicization” of the classroom has nothing to do with transphobia and homophobia.

Is “Gender Ideology” Western Colonialism? Jenny Andrine Madsen Evang

#reading #evang

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Eddie Waldrep, PhD, MSCP

Published: May 15, 2023

This is a guest post by Edward E. Waldrep, Ph.D, M.S.C.P. Dr. Waldrep is a Veteran of the War in Iraq, Purple Heart recipient, and is currently a clinical psychologist for the Department of Veteran Affairs specializing in PTSD. Views expressed here are those of the author and are not the views of the Department of Veteran Affairs.

Our country, and indeed the world, has gone through a lot in the past couple of years. The COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, a racial reckoning, rioting, and a tumultuous transition of presidential power that has marred our democratic institutions to name a few. With so much going on, the radical political changes within the American Psychological Association (APA) may have easily escaped the attention of many.

For example, the APA has been gradually changing the way race is approached. Officially, in 2017 it updated standards on multiculturalism to include embracing “intersectionality,” a conceptualization of the myriad ways in which one is oppressed via group identity. In 2019, a Task Force on Race and Ethnicity Guidelines in Psychology noted drawing upon Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a guide and in 2020 the definition of racism promoted by the APA was officially changed. The redefinition changed it from internal prejudicial beliefs and interpersonal discrimination to a “system of structuring opportunity.” What led to this change and why does it matter so much?

Social Justice versus Critical Social Justice

These changes came as a result of the changing focus of APA, and academia in general, from traditional social justice movements to Critical Social Justice (CSJ). Traditional social justice sought to end institutional oppression, discrimination based on immutable characteristics, focus on universal humanity of every individual, and for equality of opportunity for each to pursue their own self-directed goals. These are indicative of aspirational goals found in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech. There are contemporary organizations promoting the same pro-human ideals such as the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) and many others. On the other hand, there is CSJ that has skyrocketed in the public sphere in recent years and is much more pernicious.

The boom of CSJ is not a mere phenomenon. It is the result of decades of planning referred to as “the long march through the institutions,” a neo-Marxist approach to establish the conditions for revolution. This built upon the work of Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci who developed the concept of “cultural hegemony.” Cultural hegemony was posited as an explanation for why the grand Marxist revolution and utopia had failed to manifest itself. Basically, if people were able to have a comfortable life in a free market society, then they lack the motivation to burn down western society to make way for the grand utopia.

Critical Critical Theory Theory

The hegemony is thought of as an invisible, largely undetectable, ubiquitous force that nobody intentionally directs but by which all are influenced. This is where the “fish in water” analogy stems from the that is commonly used to explain “white privilege.” In their book, Black Eye for America, Swain and Schorr (2021) note that the strategy to bring about communism is to dismantle or undermine western society by attacking five societal components that maintain the hegemonic “oppression”: educational establishments, media, the legal system, religion, and the family. Douglas Murray also noted this attack in his recent book, The War on the West.

CRT is just one iteration of the application of Critical Theory(1) to different aspects of society (e.g., race, gender, sexuality, queer, colonialism, etc.) and often is presented as diversity, equity, and inclusion. CRT and intersectionality have been encouraged to be adopted in cultural competencytraining and stem from the same origin. Intersectionality, applied socially, is designed to get people to think of how they are constantly oppressed, in any variety of ways, in any given situation, to promote social divisiveness. The concept of intersectionality was popularized by Marxist lawyer and key developer of CRT, Kimberle Crenshaw. In her 1991 article for the Stanford Law Review, she argues that universal humanity ought to be rejected and focusing on race should be retained and be used for political power.

This is the exact opposite of Dr. King’s approach.  She makes the distinction between “I am black” vs. “I am a person who happens to be black”. She is critical of the latter and states, “’I am a person who happens to be black,’ on the other hand achieves self-identification by straining for a certain universality (in effect, “I am first a person”) and for concomitant dismissal of the imposed category (“Black”) as contingent, circumstantial, nondeterminant” (pg. 1297). Hence, the CRT focus on “centering race” to achieve ideological and political goals associated with imposing Marxist ideology to “dismantle” western norms and practices centering individual human rights and liberties.

The Modern Echoes of the Ugly History of Collectivist Ideologies

This ideology has a horrendous track record for humanity. Simply relabeling the ideology does not change that fact. American Psychologist, the “flagship publication” of the APA, went so far as to dedicate an entire special issue promoting this ideology in 2021. The edition editors criticize the field of psychology for “failing” to focus on structural power dynamics and for not creating “lasting social change” (Eaton, Grzanka, Schlehofer, & Silka, 2021). These are references to postmodern philosophy, Marxist structural determinism and social engineering. The authors go on to state “articles in this special issue build the case for a public psychology that is more disruptive and challenging than simply aiming dominant, canonical, and mainstream psychological research and practice outward” (pg. 1211).

Flynn and colleagues, 2021, discuss civil disobedience and criticize nonviolence as the only acceptable form stating, “we encourage psychologists to think critically about the effects of privileging certain acts of civil disobedience over others on the basis of decontextualized tactics alone, such as the assertion that property destruction invariably denotes a protest tactic outside the bounds of civil disobedience” (pg. 1220). They go on to describe strategies to twist and manipulate APA Ethics to justify any means they appear to see fit to dismantle “systems of oppression”. For example, regarding Principle C: Integrity, they state, “we also read it as authorizing clandestine methods of civil disobedience to contest injustice (e.g., deception, evasion) when methods maximize benefits and minimize harm” (pg. 1224). This stretches the intent of the use of deception from research methods, a researcher pretending to be a student for example, to justifying outright dishonesty.

And of course, the special issue would not be complete without an article criticizing “good” psychology. Note, the use of “Critical” in this context is related to neo-Marxist “Critical Theory” and not critical thinking. Grzanka and Cole, 2021, make an argument for what they describe as “bad psychology”. They argue that “good psychology” (maintaining rigorous methodological, scientific, and objective standards) is a problem because it gets in the way of the radical political agenda of transforming society the way that they think is best.  They state, “we contend that what is commonly thought of as ‘good’ psychology often gets in the way of transformative, socially engaged psychology. The radical, democratic ideals inspired by the social movements of the 20th century have found a voice in the loose network of practices that go by the term critical psychology and includes liberation psychology, African American psychology, feminist psychology, LGBTQ psychology, and intersectionality” (pg. 1335).

The authors do, conveniently, leave out the fact that the ideology underlying the radical social movements of the 20th century are attributed with mass murder on an unimaginable scale. Throughout the special edition, the argument is made, consistently, that this ideology, advocacy, and radical social transformation should be incorporated through all aspects of psychology: research, training, and delivery of clinical services.

How could the American people continue to trust the organization if this ideology is being actively promoted? What would psychotherapy look like within this ideological framework? I would argue that society would not and should not continue to trust APA if this continues. This is not sound, competent, professional, empirically informed psychology. This is Psychological Lysenkoism.

Critical Theory Ideas are Bad Psychology

APA has allowed, even endorsed, the miscommunication of psychological science that has the potential to negatively affect the mental health of individuals and society overall. Concepts such as implicit bias and microaggressions have questionable validity yet are so prominently displayed that they have the effect of gaslighting society. The net effect is to have people wondering if every interpersonal interaction is racist or bigoted and second guessing each encounter for intent and impact. These are reflective of the precepts and goals of CRT itself. The implicit idea is that almost everything is or can be racist is a central tenet of the ideology. From there, the goal is to then create the critical consciousness necessary to give rise to social unrest and revolution. The first paragraph of the intro to CRT, written for high school students, sets itself aside from traditional civil rights, and “questions” equality theory, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law. Delgado and Stefancic (2017) state, “Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law” (pg. 3).

An additional tenet is that the voices and “lived experiences” of marginalized groups ought to be accepted unquestioned. However, the hypocrisy of the framework is laid bare when the “voices of color” dissent from the prevailing narrative. Prominent examples are those of John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Wilfred Reilly, Roland Fryer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Darryl Davis, Jason Hill, Coleman Hughes, Eric Smith, Ian Rowe, Thomas Sowell, and the list goes on and on. The same dissociation occurs with members of various marginalized communities when anyone of that community doesn’t toe to line with the ideological framework. The individual does not matter, only the prevailing ideological narrative and political agenda. Anything, or anybody, that interferes with that agenda is inherently loathsome. The most common response to any individual expressing skepticism or dissent is to label the individual (any applicable variation of -ist or -phobic) and should not even be allowed to have a voice!

APA Should Adopt a Pro-Human (All Humans) Orientation

In psychological practice, we should focus on the individual with inherent dignity, value, and careful consideration of how factors influence the individual. APA ought to return to a pro-human orientation. The “critical” movement denies the individual and views them as simply a representative of a superimposed group identity or combination of identities. This is antithetical to our field. The adoption of radical political ideology has even led to the resignation of at least one leadership role in protest. When we focus on our universal humanity, we can celebrate our differences. If not rejected as morally abhorrent as it is, then the American people would rightly lose trust in the organization and damage trust in our profession.

--

(1) “Critical Theories” (Critical Race Theory, most varieties of postmodernism, fat studies, etc.) have taken that name because they endorse deep skepticism of liberal democratic norms and practices that pervade … liberal democratic societies. I (this is Lee writing here) sometimes have a bit of fun with this by referring to critiques of Critical Theories as Critical Critical Theory Theories — i.e., turning the lens of critique that includes revelations of implicit, empirically flawed or moral dubious claims & assumptions back on Critical Theories themselves, as Ed Waldrep has done here with respect to APA.

#Eddie Waldrep #critical theory #critical race theory #cultural marxism #neo marxism #queer theory #postcolonial theory #lived experience #intersectionality #woke #wokeism #cult of woke #wokeness as religion #wokeness #psychology #human psychology #institutional capture #religion is a mental illness

[socialjusticeinamerica]

Ted Cruz, at the behest of Nazi oligarchs of course, is a leading purveyor of the attacks on Harvard and institutions of higher learning. Even though he is an alumni of Harvard he calls it a bastion of “cultural Marxism.” He likely couldn’t even explain that and street level MAGAts have no idea what he is talking about but they’ll regurgitate it. Ted and friends could never tolerate a black woman running Harvard. It must have been like sandpaper rubbing their reptilian skin.

The central pillar of Republikkkan culture wars is a rejection of authority and basic social structure. Respect for education, science, medicine, common decency, and anything progressive or compassionate is being ground into dust by 24/7/365 Republikkkan propaganda spewing across news media, social media, print media, and through relentless conservative talk radio.

Republican propaganda and the political think tanks behind it have been doing this in a coordinated manner since the 1960’s. They have nearly unlimited dark money from neo-Nazi fascist oligarchs like Koch, Walton, Crow, DeVos, Murdoch, Muskrat, etc.

The Democrats have literally nothing in place to counter this and still relies on crossing their fingers and hoping that individual charismatic candidates will buy us time before we are lost to corporate fascism. Somebody on the left needs to step up and create a coordinated nationwide resistance network to resist the fascist onslaught from the right before all is lost.

If you think both parties are the same you are too dumb to be allowed access to my content.

#claudine gay #Harvard #Republican racism #Republican sexism #republican bigotry #Republican Islamophobia #Republican culture war propaganda

[edwad]

it’s not that you think marx should be read primarily as an economist. it’s that your project of contextualizing marx in terms of the economic thought that both predates and follows him is valuable, but it runs up against hard limits in terms of both explanatory power and ability to generate practice that you can only solve by situating marx in the context of the actual political movements that both produced and drew from him and the concrete actions that resulted (cont.)

you wont find the key to a systemic analysis of capitalism purely in the realm of ideas, whether they be economic, philosophical, or political, you need to connect your analysis to some sort of concrete political reality for it to have any teeth. sure, no movement has succeeded at ‘achieving communism’ but they have made undeniable gains in the anti-colonial struggle and general social welfare (cont.) the latter thing, despite what you say frustratingly often, is not simply reducible to social democracy, and it shows how little understanding you have of the actual material history (as opposed to ideological), that you think western social democracy is comparable to the social welfare achievements of socialist countries, and that’s without even taking to account that the former is directly predicated on imperialism and neo-colonial exploitation of the global south

im finally getting around to this 3-message wall of text which i should realistically ignore because its not really productive and its clear by the end that youre just typing your frustrations at me, but it gives me a chance to say a bit more about a particular angle of what im doing with marx.

you say:

"your project of contextualizing marx in terms of the economic thought that both predates and follows him [...] runs up against hard limits in terms of both explanatory power and ability to generate practice that you can only solve by situating marx in the context of the actual political movements that both produced and drew from him and the concrete actions that resulted"

what limits? and what explanatory power is lost here? you dont say, although your immediate pivot toward the need to "generate practice" implies that youre suggesting some sort of practice-oriented information. frankly, i dont really understand why this enters here. if marx is totally wrong (which is further than i would go!) and nothing can be salvaged from him whatsoever, you would be upset because this critique of him wouldnt generate immediate practice? on what grounds could that desire for practice even be justified? marxist ones? some new, un-marxist one which can only come out of this (assumed to be, for sake of argument) successful critique of marx which still, for some reason, is immediately interested in the development of practice (sounding an awful lot like marxism btw)? or is your problem simply that it fails to account for actual marxisms after marx? if its the last option, then thats a non-criticism if part of my point is that i am trying to say something new about marx. the fact that he might've been received otherwise would only work as a refutation of my criticism if it weren't a necessary part of the criticism itself (ie, id be wrong for agreeing with myself).

whichever one of these it is, it misses the point. however it works as a segue to what i imagine you really want to talk about, which is concrete struggles. your initial way of getting there is to try and make me reckon with a proper contextualization of marx in his political environment as well as those he influenced. the latter, as ive just said, isn't necessarily damning (because it is part of my point), but the former is definitely worth lingering on.

so you say in your second message

"you wont find the key to a systemic analysis of capitalism purely in the realm of ideas, whether they be economic, philosophical, or political, you need to connect your analysis to some sort of concrete political reality for it to have any teeth"

you seem to think i fail to do this. ironically, i see my chief criticism of marx to be that *he* fails to do this. he tries to identify the development of political economy out of patterns of class struggle, but he constantly gets the facts wrong on both counts. yet even if we could take him at his word and assume he got all of these things right (which is definitely necessary for coming to terms with the nature of marx's project as he saw it), then i would argue that he actually saw his political environment as being shaped, in large part, by the reception of political economy in the workers' movement. this is already clear from the radical/popular economic literature which, in his eyes, arose and declined alongside (and, to some extent, within) the ricardian school, which is why he deals with it at length in theories of surplus value (in a deliberately historical mode, for the record). the socialist appropriation of economic categories to explain the ills of capitalism is something which animates much of his work beginning in the 40s. for example, in the poverty of philosophy, he announces at the outset that he aims to "protest" the "double error" of seeing proudhon as a "good German philosopher" or "one of the ablest French economists" on the basis of marx's being both german and an economist. this goes to show the economic terrain of marx's approach to his socialist rivals and how significant the economic angle was to him and to the movement around him more broadly. the critique of his rivals (especially proudhon) as economic thinkers appears again in capital, as william clare roberts has demonstrated in his work.

but also, at a different level, he very deliberately intervenes in engels' anti-dühring by contributing a single chapter which is *specifically* designed to take dühring to task for his critical history of political economy, in large part (as reading the text makes obvious) because marx alleges that dühring gets the history wrong. this was because, among other things, dühring's work was having a large influence on the german socialist movement and several of marx and engels' peers. this wasn't some apolitical intervention, it had meaningful stakes for marx's practical work. clearly, the critique of political economy and the ability to properly account for the history of economic thought was politically significant for both marx and the socialist movement around him. if i am being accused of over-estimating this angle, then that would only serve as another criticism of marx himself.

however, you continue (or, really, you pivot entirely, but you continue talking)

"sure, no movement has succeeded at ‘achieving communism’ but they have made undeniable gains in the anti-colonial struggle and general social welfare[.] the latter thing, despite what you say frustratingly often, is not simply reducible to social democracy, and it shows how little understanding you have of the actual material history (as opposed to ideological), that you think western social democracy is comparable to the social welfare achievements of socialist countries, and that’s without even taking to account that the former is directly predicated on imperialism and neo-colonial exploitation of the global south

this has absolutely nothing to do with what im dealing with here, and its bizarre of you to include it in the first place, not least because you seem to think that by me criticizing communists around me for not having a political horizon capable of overcoming social democracy, that i am overly critical of socialist experiments in the 20th century for feeding themselves. if anything, i think the point of political theory should be to achieve the greatest possible "good" (whatever that might be taken to mean) for the greatest majority of people. despite their obvious flaws, i count the 20th century socialist experiments as among the greatest examples of social organization ever achieved and if communism were proven to be impossible tomorrow, i would be a dogmatic social democrat (ive actually said this for years).

im not the cartoonish ultra leftist that some of you think i am, as if i care more about establishing some magical bar for communism than i do about the people who are supposed to reach it and live in it. i dont say any of those things "frustratingly often", and youre unable to correctly attribute my own views to me, which i think is pretty telling. if anything, the things i try to talk about here dont stem from an allergy to anything less than whatever perfect ideal i might hold in my head, its out of a frustration with communists who dont even recognize that they might as well be social democrats. thats not necessarily an insult (ive worked with a lot of good social democrats in my life and will continue to do it as long as it produces worthwhile results), its just supposed to clarify the stakes and what i see as the limits to their analysis of the system (which ought to matter to them, even if i dont get much out of it!).

my focus on the history of economic thought as it relates to marx's critique of political economy, is admittedly pretty far removed from some of this stuff, but i dont take that distance between the two as a problem of my ability to reckon with the global south or the success-rate of communist movements around the world, i take it as an issue which only results from the overexertion of your stretched criticism to try and get me to talk about something else. next time you want my opinion on something other than what im posting about, you can just ask!

[koroktree]

Antisemitism Education

What does dogwhistle mean?

A dog whistle is the use of coded or suggestive language in political messaging to garner support from a particular group without provoking opposition. The concept is named after dog whistles, which are audible to dogs but not humans

Antisemitism or “anti-semitism”?

The word, “anti-semitism” was coined on the premise of pseudo-scientific race theory, alleging that “Semites” are a race of people, in order to give the hatred of Jews a scientific, rationalistic veneer.

Numerical dogwhistles

1-11

One representing the letter “A” and eleven representing the letter “K”, this is a numerical dog whistle made to refer to the Aryan Knights (AK) which is an Idaho based white supremacist group.

109

May be written as 109/110. This refers to the idea of Jews being exiled from 109 countries. The “110” is typically a direct threat, stating that there is about to be 110 countries.

12

One representing the letter A and two representing the letter B, these two letters represent the Aryan Brotherhood (AB).

100%

While there are many variations, 100% generally refers to “100% white”, feeding into the “pure white race” belief.

14 (14 words)

Fourteen words refers to a white supremacist slogan coined by the deceased leader of the group “The Order”, David Lane

1488

A numerical dog whistle that joins the “14 words” used by white supremacists in conjunction with “88” which refers to the eighth letter in the alphabet, “H”. “88” - “HH”, meaning Heil Hitler. 1483 may also appear which would instead mean Heil Christ.

6 million/6 gorillion

6 million refers to the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Antisemites will use terms like “gorillion” and other variations to avoid detection as well as to denote exaggeration in reference to their belief that Jews exaggerate the Holocaust.

6MWE

An acronym standing for “Six Million Wasn’t Enough”, signifying that 6 million Jews being murdered in the Holocaust wasn’t enough.

Dogwhistles and Conspiracy Theories

AKIA

Standing for “A Klansman I Am” this allows members to greet each other covertly.

Anglo-Saxon

A term what once was, and still is, used by white supremacists.

In the 1920s, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America lobbied in favor of segregation and argued for the exclusion of those with even a drop “of any blood other than Caucasian.”

Arbeit Macht Frei

Translating to, “Work will set you free” in English, this phrase was put on the gates of Aushwitz as well as other Nazi concentration camps.

Ashki-nazi

The intentional mispronunciation of Ashkenazi (Correct: Ash-ki-nah-zee. Incorrect: Ash-ki-Natzi) to accuse Ashkenazi Jews of being Nazis.

Ballpoint pen

A form of Holocaust denial in which Neo-Nazi’s claim that Anne Frank’s diary is a falsified or entirely fake document because “ballpoint pens didn’t exist at that time”.

Blood libel

Perpetuated accusation that Jews have murdered non-Jews

(such as Christian children) in order to use their blood in rituals

Cabal

Jews have long been accused of being part of a secret group that controls the economic and political world order. The term cabal originates from the word kabbalah, the Jewish mystical interpretation of the Hebrew Bible.

Cultural marxism

Sometimes also appearing as Cultural Bolshevism, this antisemitic theory believes Jews are trying to overthrow “Western culture” and destroy “White America”.

Delousing

A method of denying the Holocaust by suggesting that the gas chambers used to murder people were actually merely “delousing” facilities.

Dual Loyalty

Alleging that Jewish people are more loyal or only loyal to Israel rather than their own country.

Khazars or Khazar Theory

An antisemitic conspiracy theory that the Ashkenazi Jewish people today come from ancient Khazars and are “not real Jews”.

Khazar Milkers

A term used for sexual harassment towards Jewish women. Alternatively “milkies”.

Lizard people

The conspiracy theory that reptilian humanoids are trying to take over the government and can be government officials or large corporate figureheads.

Oven Dodger

A term for a Jew who antisemites believe should have been murdered in the Holocaust.

Pepe The Frog

While not originating in Nazism or White supremacy, the meme was co-opted by the alt-right along Reddit, 4-Chan, and 8chan.

Protocol of the Elders of Zion

An antisemitic text that spreads the paranoid theory that Jews are planning to dominate the globe.

Swimming Pool

An antisemitic conspiracy that the Holocaust didn’t happen because of the existence of a “swimming pool” at Aushwitz and was instead a “resort”. In actuality, it was an aquifer turned into a swimming pool for SS soldiers and their families.

The Jewish Question/Problem

The problem is the existence of Jews. The “question” being how to deal with the “problem” of Jews. This results in Nazism, for example, with the Final Solution. The full phrase is, “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question”.

WPWW

White Pride/Power World Wide.

You Will Not Replace Us

A phrase popularized in 2017 after the Charlottesville Nazi Riot. Sometimes appearing as Jews will not replace us or YWNRU, this antisemitic theory believes Jews are trying to “over-run the white race”.

ZOG

Meaning “Zionist Occupied Government”, white supremacists curated this phrase to signal a “Jewish controlled government”, most commonly the United States.

(((echo)))

an antisemitic symbol used to highlight the names of Jewish individuals or organizations owned by Jews

#witchblr #jewish #witch #jewitch #jewitches #antisemitism #education #witch community #witchcraft

[officialyourdailyinspiration]

by Dean Dwyer | In Australia, we have a city called Melbourne, located in the state of Victoria. Melbourne is the capital city of Victoria but is also becoming known as the heartland of radical leftists, intellectual activism and neo-Marxism. It wasn’t always like this. The discovery of gold…

[majorbaby]

what's your fav movie ever and why?

the matrix.

i really love when production, nigh independent of writing and acting, conveys messaging.

the matrix is a movie about pushing the limits of your understanding of the physical world beyond what your assumptions may be, and production of the movie was a combined feat of almost every discipline and craft used to produce film.

if you didn't understand what was happening, you at least remember the flashy visual effects: bullet time conveys how Neo experiences the flow of time and reality differently than other people in the, matrix, and later on as his adversaries become conscious of the truth of their realities, they begin to exploit the ability to. so you're left with this unforgettable visual the crux of the plot: Neo is conscious of the constructed reality of the matrix, and he's therefore able to bend it to his will.

it also just has a lot of what i love: marxism, cyberpunk, hot guys in leather, a bitchin soundtrack and that 90s je ne sais quoi.

#replies