^Ah another of ebola's crony mods arrives with a homo-erotic cult of personality style praise for his master. Ebola is certainly Chairman Mao of his forum.
Er...really? Some people like some of my posts (and thank you
), but it's not like I have a set of "cronies" who act "cult like".
Being well read and being able to mindlessly ape it back is nothing special. Guys like Bourdieu and Weber are hardly infallible if even correct in their theories.
I will admit that my arguments haven't been that original, often simply applying other authors' frameworks in a basic way. However, it's not like I take these works as holy scripture or repeat them ritualistically. The point isn't even to be concerned with their degree of correctness; rather, it is to extend and reauthor their theories in new situations.
I'm not surprised you guys jumped on the ad hominem insult train saying MFR "can't read our master's big wurdz." Oh believe me, I am all too familiar with this neo-marxist terminology and so is almost everyone else who had these marxist sociology, political science, and history professors. It's like some factory in Soviet Russia produced thousands of robots in the 70's and sent them to the US to teach university courses. There is a good chance you had one of them or their students if you went to college.
Well, then why have you been so reticent to engage the substance of your conversants' arguments?
Why this school of thought (and I use this term loosely) fails is that it can't fathom the creation of quality institutions or quality leadership.
In periods of insufficient bottom-up social upheaval, this is true of all radical opposition. Thus, because your argument applies to all sources of social change, it cannot explain flaws within the current radical left.
That's why when Chomsky shifts into his more anarchistic thought
Actually, Chomsky believes anarchism to follow directly from common-sense reasoning about society, formed prior to self-conscious theorization. Thus, his libertarian leftism is not a reaction to a lack of left-leadership
it comes out better than this recapitulation of Das Kapital we are confronted with in the Marxist school of thought. If one truly thinks so low of humans obtaining power and that the ensuing framework is doomed to being miserable, one might as well go straight to anarchy. If you constantly rail against elites and their institutions, what is the likely outcome for those who might succeed in creating Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat? You end up with dictators and party creeps who never bothered to gather an idea of what ethical and quality leadership might be.
Right, but anarchists continue to draw from other socialist frameworks (particularly those Marxist) and analyses of power in developing a theory of the history of power in the status-quo system, that anarchists oppose.
It failed with the people craving bourgeois capitalist society and hating the oppressive dictatorships that uprooted them and their traditions.
It's more that 'Marxism' failed as subjects in 'socialist' nations saw the authoritarian hypocrisy they lived under, spurring revolutionary opposition. What they wanted instead proves empirically messy and largely unknown.
So I do find it very hypocritical when these neo-marxists rail against "the bad elites" and praise the good and honest "little guys" who struggle to have somewhere to live and something to eat when these professors are themselves part of this lazy and corrupted "elite."
How are academic 'intellectuals' "elites"?
That's who the mainstream left-wing in Western politics are and we have seen how pathetically useless they have been since the Nixon days. The reason the institutional framework is doomed to corruption and a skewed idea of "efficiency" is because right now in America, it's full of "chairman ebola" type assholes and their right-wing counterparts that use their authority to make sure it remains corrupt and self serving to the "power-elites" while surrounding themselves with cronies who merely spout off this "pseudo-liberal and pseudo-addressing social need" style "demagoguery' without actually making good on their verbal commitments.
What have I committed to doing? How have I been hypocritical?
ebola
or heaven forbid that he interacted with Heuristic! what a mess that would have been.
), even potentially good leaders face institutional constraints which force debilitating concessions to power-elites, the latter playing a role in structuring such institutions. What is more, this prevailing framework of institutions comes to shape these leaders' dispositions, actions, and identities, corruptingly constructing 'good leadership' as a mere facade, opening the door to demagoguery.
