CE&P social thread: why do the people I disagree with hate freedom so much?

[Shrooms00087]

Guess who's back! And it ain't slim shady...
^Many would say that "marxism" was never implemented, and I heard this a lot at school, but I disagree. I think Mao and Lenin were good Marxists.

Marxist imitators. Lenin was a douche, Trotsky would've been closer to the ideal. Mao was better than Stalin. But no, it's fact, Marxism was never achieved. "It failed a notion of History as a linear concept" Haha what? Here we are in a recession, the politicians are all but bought, and austerities looming, and hoarders sitting....Hmmmmmm.

 

[Bardeaux]

Lenin and co abandoned Marxism in the early 20s and I would argue that Mao never even pursued it. I don't believe vanguardism and central democracy are what Marx envisioned as a dictatorship of the proletariat.

 

[Shrooms00087]

Mao used it as a theoretical base, before his book he gave peasants and farmers Marx readings. And it's true he didn't actively pursue it, but he was better than Stalin regardless. And it wasn't, but those were structures to "secure" the revolution. Although you have to remember they had a lot of problems securing themselves, naturally they had to oppress and be militant. The Kronstadt rebellion is a good example of this. (those poor sailors fought for every side, lol)

 

[Care]

Blacks, on average, run faster than others. This is a fact. Whites and Asians, on average, have higher I.Q.s. This is a fact.

This is true at the very highest level of competition, but on the whole when you look at an individual 99+% of what they are is a result of factors outside of their racially dictated genetics.

I know white people that are extremely athletic, I also know black people that are extremely intelligent. Genetic tendencies for x race to be good at y activity are very small differences, and are only really noticeable when someone is the absolute best at what they do. Most of it comes down to good circumstances and training to be good at one type of thing from a very young age.

A person may have the genetics to be 300 pounds, 7 feet tall and run the 40 in 4 seconds. But if they spend their whole life behind a desk crunching numbers they will end up physically inferior to a person who is not genetically gifted, but trains their whole life.

 

[ebola?]

I think Mao and Lenin were good Marxists. The dictatorship of the Proletariat was the essential part of Marx's plan.

But this is simply not what Marx meant by "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat". Lenin went explicitly on record, in his writings, arguing that Marx's plan for a democratic republic involving wide participation of the proletariat at large would need be revised for the historical conditions specifically present in early 20th C. Russia. Lenin's move here illuminates both Marx's original intent but also Lenin's deviation therefrom.

And I have no idea how one could justify Mao's use of the peasantry as his revolutionary social base as true to Marx's original analysis of capitalism or Marx's (proletarian-centric) prediction of and plan for revolution.

Marx was a very shortsighted person when it came to trying to provide a solution to his analysis of the problems with the industrial age economy.

Here I actually agree with you: Marx failed both in providing a concrete picture of what communism might actually look like (instead presenting idyllic images nostalgic for the Middle Ages (The German Ideology)), and his theory of political practice was naive at best, positing that resistance would lead to increasingly greater and more organized resistance, culminating in revolutionary upheaval directed by the communist party (The Communist Manifesto). I believe, however, that the point of Marx's writing is to learn from and revise his theoretical analysis, rather than assess him as correct or mistaken, much less hold him up as a holy figure, as some contemporary Leninists do.

Marxism is outdated and proven to be a failure in the sense that it's method (as put forth in Capital) would never lead to anything other than a recapitulation of the bourgeois revolution i.e. Life, Liberty, and Happiness a la 1776 and 1789 type stuff that we saw the university students in Tianamen wanting.

Please elaborate on what this specific method put forth in Capital is. While I agree that Marx's conception of human freedom can be cast as realization of the principles of classical liberalism of the 18th C., I don't think that this is particularly damning, as a key part of Marx's criticism of capitalism rested on the failed realization of these principles in the 19th C.

It failed a notion of History as a linear concept and repeated the revolutions that took place before Marxism, except that they were rebelling against marxists party leaders this time, not a landed aristocracy.

I actually take on a heterodox interpretation of Marx in this respect, thinking of multiple possible paths of development from one mode of production to another, rather than a single, linear course of possible development. Whether this is true to what Marx intended or not doesn't matter much to me, as I find this interpretation a great deal more fruitful than the mainstream 'party line', if you will.

Intellectuals and University students may not be nobility, but they are elites in society, or at least they were.
Those fortunate enough to hold full-time faculty jobs at a university must be considered elites in society becuase they can bring in over $100,000 salaries.

1. This figure is actually typical of a tenured faculty member in a city with a high cost of living.
2. Earning a high salary does not necessarily put one in an exploitative relationship vis-a-vis other classes in society, a key hallmark of the concept of class-elitism, as I would like the concept classed; there are numerous strata laying in between elites-proper and the 'ruled masses'.

Although Pierre Bourdieu was hailed as a professor that walked out of the ivory tower and into the political arena, he didn't really make any changes. Perhaps he really into a class struggle between Academics vs. CEO's and politicians. That seems to be the struggle most academics in america focus on too without bringng results for the workers on the low ends of the economy

1. Pierre Bourdieu is a bizarre example of a 'Marxist', as he built his theory on dismissive criticism of Marx's analytical framework.
2. While Bourdieu was likely inspired by his immediate situation, I think that his theory has a lot more to offer than a mere conceptualization of the struggle between academics and other classes.

but of course, they are great demogogues about the whole thing trying to make it seem like they are in it to improve life for everyone.

Have they? I think that most academics have largely insular publishing records and hold little influence outside of the 'ivory tower'.

ebola

 

[ebola?]

The Frankfurt school is where it all originated from.

11 main goals of the Frankfurt school to subvert the Christian-West.

This is really cute: you sound like a conservative from the late sixties or seventies.

Many of the most valuable comments and posts on bluelight CEP are not coming from those who wouldn't profess themselves to be intellectuals. When it comes to politics, I like it raw you could say. Sounding real is more important to me than coming off as super-intellectual or level-headedly cool.

Who here is professing himself as an (super-)intellectual or level-headedly cool?

About accusing me of using strawmen...I don't intentionally decieve people by setting up weak phony arguments and knocking them down to try to prove a point.

Behaviorally, you appear to replicate precisely what someone doing so would do at times.

Escher's waterfall actually bait me into saying things like "fuck you asshole" with that crap too. I'm highly debaitable I guess.

What bait warrants this response?

Sometimes I'm guilty of ad homs but more often it's been just flat out insults. I don't try to say "your argument is invalid because you are a _____" -- I usually just insult people for making certain arguments.

Oh: so you're saying specifically that we should ignore your bullshit? Good to know...

LOL....hahaha....just what have you been getting intoxicated on?

That day? Alprazolam, hydrocodone, and pot (when combining the former two, minimization of dosage of both is key to maintain safety).

So let's get to know you a little better. How would you ideologically describe your views?

I would describe myself as a political agnostic with anarchist sympathies, bearing a heavy debt to both Marx and Foucault.

If you don't mind me asking how did you vote in the last few elections and who are likely to vote for in the 2012 election?

This won't say much about my views, as they lie largely outside of the scope of what voting can possibly accomplish. However, in presidential elections, it went Nader (age 18), Kerry (fffffuuuuu....), Obama. I view voting as standing necessarily as a tactical compromise; in 2004, I compromised like hell. :/

Also, why do you think the leftists of the U.S. have been ineffectual?

Honestly, I would say that I currently lack a solid theory of how leftists could come to be effectual.

ebola

 

[MyFinalRest]

I was wrong about it being in Capital. It was in the Communist Manifesto.
1.Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2.A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3.Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4.Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5.Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6.Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7.Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8.Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9.Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.
10.Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.


I think Mao and Stalin did follow through nicely on Marx and Engel's proposals.

Actually the professor's income or white-collar work are really not the main things that define them as elite now that I think about it somemore. In addition to possesing an "elite" education level, they are in a position to exploit simply by being instructors to students. It may not be obvious "class based" exploitation as you mention, but it they can exploit by requiring certain readings and the subsequent examinations and essays. Being in a position of "authority over knowledge" can be very powerful.
True many professors aren't effective in the public non-educational arena, but I must mention that Mearsheimer and Walt's essay on the Israeli Lobby was effective at reaching the politcal arena. This essay sparked numerous callers on C-span praising it and begging for an appearance on Washington Journal. It may have not affected the politicians themselves, but the people were into it, and the pro-Israeli (would using the term Zionist here really be considered "casual anti-semitism" as Vader would call me out for yesterday?) journalists counter-attacks on Mearsheimer and Walt made the charge of "anti-semitism" anytime someone criticizes Israel to finally start sounding as ridiculous as it is...I was a big fan you know....

No, I don't intentionally decieve people. If I did it was an accident.

I've heard this threat about "ignoring" me before, but I hope you don't accidently read something I posted when your are rapidly scrolling down the page to avoid my posts and then get "bored" enough to reply to it

I'll share my voting record too. 2000 Nader (you're welcome...no it didn't make a difference in the state I was in, so no I didn't help hand an election to Bush;Kerry LOL; and Nader. In other elections I voted democrat often, but now I tend to take the time to "write in" phony names or celebrities and athletes when a 3rd party is not available.

I don't consider myself to hold a particular ideology, but my environmental and organic farming concerns, and my desire to live in a charitable society puts me on the left side of the spectrum I guess - if such a spectrum really holds any meaning other than where French guys of the late 18th century used to plant their asses.
As for ideological -isms, I avoid adopting any of the dogamtic sets of beliefs. We are what we make of the world every single moment that we live in it. There are no hard and fast rules or set plans for dealing with a situation.

 

[MyFinalRest]

Oh I almost forgot, Escher wanted to know what I meant by using the term "male-lesbian."
The "isle of lesbos" deffinition can actually apply in certain cases. Some of these guys have a Greek appearance with hairy bodies. They generally aren't effeminate, but are feminists, and are often married to some really butch women. They are also marxist-feminists who fantasize about being raped in a factory full of commie butch female workers dressed in gray "mao suits" and those commie "mao hats." Does that clear things up any?

 

[MyFinalRest]

Well we haven't really seen mass interaction between races until recently, historically speaking.

Are you sure about that?

 

[L2R]

 

[Escher's Waterfall]

So I'm reading a book, and I came across this part:

"... lived in a bunker at the wrong end of a very strange realtiy tunnel, in a world dominated by the spectre of the CIA funded Jew-banker spooks who faked crashing the airliners into the Pentagon and the WTC to cover up how they'd bankrupted the nation by stealing all the gold from the Federal Reserve and used it to fund their evil scheme for vaccinated the children of dissidents with an autism-causing virus."

I thought of CE&P immediately.

 

[Shrooms00087]

And I have no idea how one could justify Mao's use of the peasantry as his revolutionary social base as true to Marx's original analysis of capitalism or Marx's (proletarian-centric) prediction of and plan for revolution.

This is a quote from David Harvey's "Enigma of Capital" pg. 136-137 speaking about the failures of Lenin and Mao across the "seven spheres of activity" (in the abstract management of capital accumulation)

Perhaps one of the biggest failures of past attempts to build socialism has been the reluctance to engage politically across all of these spheres and to let the dialectic between them open up possibilities. rather than close them down [...] (Post Lenin, Stalin) -- too often reduced the dialectic of relations between the spheres to a single-track programme in which productive forces (technologies) were placed in the vanguard for change [...] It led to stasis, stagnant administrative and institutional arrangements, turned daily life into monotony and froze the possibility to explore new social relations or mental conceptions. It paid no mind to relation to nature, with disastrous consequences. Lenin, of course, had no option but to strive to create communism on the basis of the configuration given by the preceding order (part feudal part capitalist), and from this standpoint his embrace of the Fordist factory, it's technologies and organisational forms as a necessary step in the transition to communism is understandable [...]
Mao's overwhelming dialectical sense of how contradictions worked, as well as his recognition, in principle at least, that a revolution had to be permanent or nothing at all, led him consciously to prioritise revolutionary transformation in different activity spheres in different historical phases. The 'Great Leap Forward' emphasised production and technological and organisational change. It failed in its immediate objectives and produced a massive famine, but almost certainly had a huge impact upon mental conceptions. The Cultural Revolution sought to radically reconfigure social relations and mental conceptions of the world directly. While it is contemporary received wisdom that Mao failed miserably in both of these endeavors, the suspicion lurks that in many respects the astonishing economic performance and revolutionary transformation that has characterised China since its shift towards institutional and administrative reforms from the late 1970s onwards has rested solidly on the real achievements of the Maoist period (in particular the break with many 'traditional' mental conceptions and social relations within the masses as the Party deepened its grasp over daily life). Mao completely reorganised the delivery of healthcare in the 1960s, for example sending an army of 'barefoot doctors' [...] The dramatic reductions in infant mortality and increases in life expectancy that resulted just happened to produce the labor surplus that fueled China's growth in the 1980s [...] which led to draconian limitations on reproductive activity through enforcement of a one child per family policy. That all of this opened the path towards a certain kind of capitalist development is an unintended consequence of huge significance.

Because of the Cultural Revolution, Mao had set the stage for huge productive purpose labor which even found odds with the Soviet system and most certainly the Capitalist system.

 

[Care]

Are you sure about that?

I suppose that could be untrue if you take it out of context. I was talking about people of different ethnicity living together as equals under the law, in which case it is absolutely true.

 

[L2R]

the richard bastion show

 

[MyFinalRest]

I suppose that could be untrue if you take it out of context. I was talking about people of different ethnicity living together as equals under the law, in which case it is absolutely true.

Are you sure about that too?

 

[Care]

If you want to contribute something to the discussion that would be sweet, im not holding my breath though. Until then im done being trolled by you.

 

[MyFinalRest]

I'm not trolling. You are making a bold claim. I am just questioning how you reached this conclusion.

In AD 194, A man named Septimus "Hussein" Severus became emporer of the Roman Empire. Okay, it was just Septimus Severus, but wikipedia describes his ethnicity as of Italian Roman ancestry on his mother's side and of Punic or Libyan-Punic ancestry on his father's. Other sources go quite further and really emphasize his blackness:

http://www.africaresource.com/rasta...atest-emperor-of-ancient-rome/comment-page-1/

In addition to this, Rome extended citizenship first to all that served their dues in the military and later to every free citizen in its multi-ethnic borders.

Also, since the dawn of human civilization people of different ethnicities and cultures have constantly intermarried and interbred and lived among one another. Even after tribes of foreign conquerors took over various lands they settled and intermingled with the natives and created new cultures.
Even Benito Mussolini was aware that no purebred races actually existed due to constant intermingling.

Sure there have been lots of culture clashes and conflicts among different ethnicities, but that's not the whole story.

 

[Escher's Waterfall]

I suppose that could be untrue if you take it out of context. I was talking about people of different ethnicity living together as equals under the law, in which case it is absolutely true.

I think it matters about what is considered "another ethnicity" at the time.

In AD 194, A man named Septimus "Hussein" Severus became emporer of the Roman Empire. Okay, it was just Septimus Severus, but wikipedia describes his ethnicity as of Italian Roman ancestry on his mother's side and of Punic or Libyan-Punic ancestry on his father's. Other sources go quite further and really emphasize his blackness:

http://www.africaresource.com/rasta...atest-emperor-of-ancient-rome/comment-page-1/

I'm not sure how that article decides he was of black African ancestry. The only evidence they mention was he married a Syrian whose name means black - which seems to be flimsy evidence. IndoEuropeans in other areas had no problem calling someone "black" due to hair color or other features.

 

[ebola?]

the richard bastion show

hahaha...this is pretty fun.

"If you cannot alliterate an idea, it's too complicated…"

ebola

 

[Care]

If you read what I was talking about from the beginning you would see that I was making the point that historically we haven't seen different races mixing together as equals at levels even close to what we have today.

When you take that one sentence out of context, I admit its not 100% true. But you have to look at my whole post to get the meaning of what I was saying.

The fact that you focus on this one, largely irrelevant, aspect of my post without contributing anything whatsoever to the actual discussion is irritating.