Category: marxism

marxmail@groups.io | Moderators Note: What should be done with the Marxism List?

I am no fan of Marxmail, having been banned for the entirety of his duration from the era of the narrow cult Marxist Proyect. I can hardly fathom the venoumous hatred of Proyect for me and even slight deviations from the canon. It was in part the critique of Darwinism and historical materialism that evoked such murderous anathema.
Having spent a year writing The Last Revolution I had expected at least a link to the (free) text, and some discussion, but in reality the result was total ‘cancellation, refusal of any discussion whatsoever, total refusal to interact, blanket refusal communicate by email and, well, I had expected that having watched Proyect over the years, a very narrow, that is, Marxist, vision. One is better off statying away from such a list which has its hidden form of conformity enforced.
Marxmail is useful enough, and as a blogger at redfortyeight.com I often go to its site in search of links. But as discussed in The Last Revolution Marxism has gone past its due by direct relevance date, keeping in mind however that I can’t generalize to the large number of disparate users, writers and posters in what is after all a collation list.
But I fear Marxism is too dated now for any direct action and Marxists as a whole are stuck in mindset that has passed away, along with Bolshevism. The fate of socialism, which needs a new realization, is under check by Marxists who think they own the subject. And infiltration by covert agencies remains a suspicious factor when a site goes dead.
The presumption by Marxists they represent the direct path to socialism/communism has crippled the left as critics over and over and over have tried to revive the subject, then simply abandon it and start over because the Marxist cult issues its unspoken banishment of any critique of Marxism as it has come down from its archaic nineteenth-century form.
Indeed, is this waste of breath? Perhaps, but I have noticed that a lot of subscribers to Marxmail take a peek at redfortyeight.com in a sort of tiptoe in the night. But Marxists make a fatal mistake of cancel culture with any new or creative effort here.
My issue here is that at a time when social crisis accelerates there is no left left to take up the task of postcapitalist transition. The Marxist effort, and that includes the many websites around, is hopelessly stalled and a victim of its own jargon which is seeded with the confusions of Marx’s theories. Marx was almost obscurantist in his theory obsession and has confused generation after generation of students vainly attempting to analyze capitalism with the mishmash of Marx and Engels pastiche.

So what of Marxmail. Not up to me but I think the whole game is too far gone for revival. Why not give at least a look at the neo-communist formulation in The Last Revolution. I would welcome criticism, but cultists in the Marxmail vein dare not communicate with critics nor even critique a critique. Total Orwellian cancellation is the only option.

Marx and Engles were terrific activists but they were both terrible at theory and seeded a dogmatic near-religion that no one understands and which is doomed to be carried by enthusiastic amateurs directly to the hands of Stalinists.
Whatever the case, it is easy to create a more viable brand of socialism/communism, and the whole question can be resolved by looking at Marx/Engels historically as a saga, and then moving beyond them to a new framework on history, economics, revolution(reform), and the construction of a democratic socialism in practice. The public won’t stand for the old fashioned left Marxism that ended up with Lenin. (What to say of Stalin).
Get a free copy of The Last Revolution: Postcapitalists Futures at redfortyeight.com, if you dare. As for Marxmail I suspect its time has passed, but it could revive itself to a new future if a break with the past can be achieved.

Source: marxmail@groups.io | Moderators Note: What should be done with the Marxism List?

Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek

The confusions of Zizek are sad to watch but given the sterile confusions of the left he tokens the end of the Bolshevik era and the need for a new left that is able to debrief Marxism without giving up the path to postcapitalist socialism.

One of the most prominent intellectuals in the contemporary world was named to the list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” in Foreign Policy magazine in 2012. He shares this distinction with the likes of Dick Cheney, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Mossad director Meir Dagan. The theorist’s best idea—according to this well-known publication that is a virtual arm of the U.S. State Department—is that “the big revolution the left is waiting for will never come.”

Source: Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek – CounterPunch.org

Marxists befuddled history and made a cult of Marx

The two historians in question are both of interest but more generally Marxists have boxed themselves into a corner from which there is no escape, and no path to the future. The passage below is the standard tactic to cite the devastating critiques of Marxism, as if to cite them shows, well, we know all that but,… This tactic creates great confusion and has essentially stalled the left with Marxist dogmatism. The critiques offered are more or less final and Marxist true believers can’t really evade that. One grows impatient with the cultic rigidity here. A better tactic is to see that the time has come, long since in fact, to start over with a new formulation that can acknowledge the critiques. Marxists are dreary in their obstinate refusal to see that the critiques as below are an enjoinder to move on. The question of history eluded Marx, and the standard critique below shows why. Marxism is a lost cause theoretically. I have shown in The Last Revolution how easy it is to move on. Marx ended up crippling socialism. Time to start over, time is short.

Update: The passage below states the problems with Marxism very well, but to cite them in an apologetic is very destructive and in general the Marxist is hopelessly confused by such argumentation. Citing the British Marxist historians is all very well, and I have read manyof their books, but they never challenged openly the Marxist problematic and the average leftist is never going to read them anyway. Read this again: armed with this set of critiques a Marxist can free up thought to something new and stop the century and half of Marx religious blah blah. We will move below the quote and to continue.

In the discipline of history in particular, the Marxist approach is now frequently criticized as economically deterministic, failing to account for human agency, and reducing complex historical developments to the unchangeable processes of economic systems. In the crudest interpretations of Marx’s writings, all ideology, law, politics, culture, and civil society is reducible to the makeup of the economic base; the study of historical development becomes an unchangeable science, accessible with only a Marxian understanding of economic exploitation.

Marxism was born in an especially confusing moment and Marx seems to have wasted energy on the Hegel milieu and in the process confused himself and others. The issue of idealism and dialectic are hopelessly confused in Marxism. A simpler approach would be helpful leaving that debate to historical review while practical work moves in a new vein.

Marx in fact attempted to make historical materialism and economic analysis fundamental but that made Marxism simplistic and unable to deal with the broader history of culture/ On top of that Marx adopted the Darwinian view as a buttress to his scientism, and the result was still more confusion.

In our time the issue of JFK assassination research and the 9/11 false flag operation are beyond the ken of the left in general and Marxists in particular. After all the sermons on ideology Marxists have been fooled three times and end up a kind of laughing stock.

I have tried to restate the issue of ‘socialism’ and/or what I call neo-communism in The Last Revolution: in one hundred pages one has a critique of Marxism, a new approach to history, a critique of Darwinian ideology, a clear acknowledgment, if not resolution, of the JFK and 9/11 issues, a practical program for a new socialism, and a complete break with Marxist boilerplate religion, using Marx as an historical reference point. The_Last_Revolution_Postcapitalist_Futures_ED2_version_11_9_22

Source: Marxists Changed How We Understand History

Marxists Changed How We Understand History

The two historians in question are both of interest but more generally Marxists have boxed themselves into a corner from which there is no escape, and no path to the future. The passage below is the standard tactic to cite the devastating critiques of Marxism, as if to cite them shows, well, we know all that but,… This tactic creates great confusion and has essentially stalled the left with Marxist dogmatism. The critiques offered are more or less final and Marxist true believers can’t really evade that. One grows impatient with the cultic rigidity here. A better tactic is to see that the time has come, long since in fact, to start over with a new formulation that can acknowledge the critiques. Marxists are dreary in their obstinate refusal to see that the critiques as below are an enjoinder to move on. The question of history eluded Marx, and the standard critique below shows why. Marxism is a lost cause theoretically. I have shown in The Last Revolution how easy it is to move on. Marx ended up crippling socialism. Time to start over, time is short.

In the discipline of history in particular, the Marxist approach is now frequently criticized as economically deterministic, failing to account for human agency, and reducing complex historical developments to the unchangeable processes of economic systems. In the crudest interpretations of Marx’s writings, all ideology, law, politics, culture, and civil society is reducible to the makeup of the economic base; the study of historical development becomes an unchangeable science, accessible with only a Marxian understanding of economic exploitation.

Source: Marxists Changed How We Understand History

 The harm done by taking ‘Marxism’ as science

We have been critical of the idea that Marxism is science for over a year plus here and The Last Revolution goes over this in a lot of detail. Having sent many links to Jacobin on this I have to assume this article is a shot over the bows for me. In any case, the idea that Marxism is science along with Engels’ useless Dialectics of Nature is not really defensible anymore, and I am puzzled anyone on the left would still try. Marx’s interest in science is commendable but what science are we talking about, in the early to late nineteenth century in the context of reductionist science, causal physics, and the botched job of Darwinism which Marx annexed to his doctrine of materialism, compounding the confusion. In that context, Marx tried something daring by trying to turn history into a study of economic categories but that was simply off the mark from the start. World history is an immensely complex field far beyond mere economic categories and Marx’s ‘stages of production’ theory applied to history in a sequence of epochs is a pile of nonsense.
Marx created a difficult situation for his faithful by locking them into nineteenth-century science notions, and with a system that even scientists of his time saw as dubious. And science has moved on. With the coming of Quantum Mechanics, and then Quantum Field Theory/String Theory we are all out in left field wondering just what science is telling us, if anything.
The science of Marx simply doesn’t wash anymore. Not at all. In retrospect, calling something like Marxism science is dangerous because it makes critics into counterrevolutionaries who must be lliquidated because they are not scientific…Madness. And it happened with Stalin.

Trying to produce a science of history has always failed because history is not like physics and shows the transformation of facts and values in a dynamic totally beyond current science. Better to use descriptive approach and deal with simple chronologies. Marx’s theory subjects the left to endless debates and rejection by critics who have long known the flaws here. And the whole mess is compounded by Engels and his total confusion over the dialectic. Taking The Dialectics of Nature as a path to science is hopeless confusion and gives even sympathetic leftists a difficult dilemma.
Socialism doesn’t require a science of history and can be constructed far better without a pretense of theory and science. This blog has endless material on this…
cf. The_Last_Revolution_Postcapitalist Futures_ ED2_8_23_22

From Marx and Engels to the present day, socialists have been deeply engaged with the world of science. With the provision of lifesaving vaccines held hostage by corporate profiteering, the story of this relationship is more important than ever.

Source: How Marxists Brought Science to Politics and Politics to Science

Dead end of the dead beat Marxists

This is an interesting resource for texts on Marxism but the last thing we need now is more Marx jargon ad infinitum (I am tempted to examine a few). The Marxists have an immense literature, ALL of it based on a set of false assumptions and theories of Marx. What a waste. What a waste! It is just the academic gravy train: Phd writes book, Academic press publishes book, Libraries buy ten thousand copies,some profit, capitalist cycle complete, next! Hardly a single criticism is present in such a corpus which after a flood of verbiage cannot explain anything about how to construct a postcapitalitst system that is not a proto-Stalinist nightmare. A book like The Last Revolution, outside the Marxist/academic book mill, is cancelled on the spot in the Orwellian system of Marx conformity. I hope someone reads it because Marxists won’t. In fact this is endemic: dozens of critics have tried to debrief Marxism, all in vain.
Instead we get the oulala cadre making the confusion worse with hyper sophistication: cf. György Lukács, the Western Marxists….etc.. I was once very impressed by Luckacs, but he was still in the ‘still alive’ Second International period. Such elite marxism was hardly of any help to the semi-intelligent Bolsheviks whose legacy is a Russian cripple, Chinese and North Korean montrosities. The public wouldn’t dare go near Marxism again after that. Face reality. The left cannot inflict such a disaster again.

In a way that Marxist structure is however a knockover, it has no active movement or effect anymore, and is so subtly regimented despite the appearance of free speech, that a new left can bypass it completely as the cult remains oblivious of everything including critics: it is no doubt controlled also in ways we don’t see by the covert agencies. Leftist groups have a half life: maybe ten, twenty years, and they are controlled dummy orgs???? Maybe one or two. The Red Fortyeight Group therefore has twenty years and counting.
It can also as a template or reminder of the failure of single term systems.
A nexus around The Last Revolution can start from scratch, and in under a hundred pages produces the net equivalent, in my view better, of the dead weight of the Marxist canon. It has its own limits, no doubt, but shows how easy it is to walk away from the morass of biblical texts.

_________________
[marxmail] Free downlaods from Pluto press
From: Jeffrey Masko
To: marxmail@groups.io
Date: Thu, Jul 28, 2022 10:39 am
Here’s what they are offering…Most importantly IMO there is Rereading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism by Fuchs, Christian (2019), a book and an author I’ve posted about here before. Much of the poverty in discussions of media on the list are due to ignorance of the field and stubbornness that nothing can be gleaned from Marxists working in communication disciplines, so here is a book and scholar beyond professional reproach – you can obviously disagree with his argument, but the work is sound. And as someone with limited financial resources, I am looking forward to reading Mark Lause’s book on the “first American left” for free.

Open Access Books Continue reading “Dead end of the dead beat Marxists” →

The CIA & the Frankfurt school’s anti-communism | MR Online

Frankfurt School critical theory has been—along with French theory—one of the hottest commodities of the global theory industry. Together, they serve as the common source for so many of the trend-setting forms of theoretical critique that currently dominate the academic market in the capitalist world, from postcolonial and decolonial theory to queer theory, Afro-pessimism and beyond.

Source: The CIA & the Frankfurt school’s anti-communism | MR Online