The woman in charge of BLM in Toronto purchased a multi million $ house in the richest area of Toronto with donations made to BLM, just goes to show what her ideology was. Having worked in Toronto for 30 years I saw very little racism directed towards any specific groups. I have travelled quite a lot to other countries and my experience has shown me that we are amongst the least racist places.
Yes. Those ones are not traditional Marxists. Marxists despise postmodernism; they actually believe there is something called objective reality, even if they don't practice it.
This dear James is a 'troublemaker' theory of history that denies that they had much to make trouble about. It is a favorite refrain of dictators or anyone who is an embedded beneficiary of a noxious status quo
I think you need to nuance this a lot to make it look less like an apologia for reactionaries.who are in denial that there are serious issues with the way they do business & the regime they are apologists for
This is not to say that the revolutionaries aren't just like the people & forces they oppose.....or worse....much worse.
However it is important to recognize that revolutionaries lose traction when the condition of the oppressed is better than the picture their slogans paint. The class struggle 'lost it's way' in the increasingly improving working class conditions within Western societies, starting from the 1840s on, as industrial conditions improved & reform movements started to kick goals.
The rise of the Woke is much more complex than it looks & is a result of a profound regime crisis. The Woke are not revolutionaries at all. They are regime, in the same way that the church once was. It's highly successful campaign to seize power over the system of social reproduction & administration has all the features of a neo clerical coup.
We haven't seen anything like this since The Reformation.
We haven't yet provided a theory of history. And, we haven't said that defining woke or wokeism is the goal of this series.
"Revolutionaries" opposing poor working conditions is one thing, but where a hard line must be drawn is when leftist agitators are opposing liberal principals and seeking to tear down the social order. No one would ever vote for their revolution, so it always involves agitating against and undermining the social order through subversive, not democratic, means. Hence a reactionary movement is needed to keep leftist agitators in check.
We are looking primarily at patterns that can be illustrated through illiberal changes in public policy and education. Media reportage, "calls for changes," and then those changes subsequentially expressed in public policy. Those things are material. They require no theorizing outside of what the sequence of events constructed from the material evidence tells us. What we are showing, among other things, is that at virtually every turn where public policy veered toward illiberal ideology, a Marxist of some form (neo-Marxist) was behind it. My view is that this cancer of illiberal subverters needs an organized reactionary rightwing movement to counter it. And probably always will.
My dear James, over the last 50-70 years, democratic life has been steadily hollowed out and replaced by the most successful and privatized totalitarianism ever attempted, precisely because until very recently, it lacked a public institutional and state based face that would give us the traditional warnings of autocratic governance. Joseph Goebbels was not the only student of the public relations and marketing revolution that was kicked off by guys like Edward Bernays after the First World War.
Bernays' successors today would make Goebbels look like an amateur and if he came back from the dead today, he would have to go back to propaganda school to get even a sniff at a job in any marketing or public relations firm.
'The Matrix' is a late modern fable of what actually exists right now. And its power is now so great, the revealment of its profound illiberality no longer matters. It no longer needs to project the face of reasonableness, because it has captured consciousness itself. Consciousness is the main commodity of Indulgence Capitalism. The Goods and Services it produces are merely facilitators to that end. Reified postmodernist thought is simply the academic extension of publikrelationsmarketingthink, where fantasy-based subjectivity trumps objective critical reason.; i.e., where blind faith cuts out evidence based reason.
Bernays was the first to realize that a staged smoking stunt by well-dressed and elegant women in a fashionable New York parade would shift attitudes and beliefs in relation to female smoking in ways that would never be accomplished by a thousand evidence-based arguments and debates. He understood that 'perception management' was a profound game changer that would ultimately change not merely what they thought, but how they thought and thus gain unrestricted access and capacity to reconstruct the human mind.
There is nothing 'revolutionary' going on here in traditional sense. The revolutionary organism is Indulgence Capitalism that started to roll itself out in the 1960s and the Wokes are its Red Guards who are there because as the system starts to implode under the weight of it deregulatory and privatizing of the now trashed commons, indirect control is no longer enough.
Christopher Eastman-Nagle: As you are a self-described Marxist intellectual, who should be surprised that you are, true to form, ever the Marxist obscurantist? Woke is an ideological engine driving evolved identity Marxism (don't bother playing coy and pretending you don't know what that entails) into Western institutional and governmental policy everywhere, the so called long march through the institutions (as you ought to well know, a modified Gramscian model of subversion - as the radical theorists themselves explain, I've got books and articles attesting that to be so). In a few words, this is the great illiberal subversion. It would be convenient for you, a rather conflicted revolutionary, if we -on your say so- were to take woke as "not revolutionaries," to skip the entire history of how the cultural revolution has happened, and just get to blaming the "regime" and "regime weakness" with you, our resident Marxist theorist. Yes, it's the establishment's fault that it was perverted by radical activists ideologues with an burning hatred for the free west - let's just forget about blaming the bloody revolutionaries for any of that situation, right? 0_0 It would be great for you, because that's always what Marxists come to isn't it (while obfuscating the disastrous results of their own radical conceits and social meddling)? It's the establishment's fault that it got screwed up by us, take our bloody word for it!
Yeah, no thanks.
Robin Collins: You realize "reactionary" in this sense implies someone who undertakes to repudiate the machinations of revolutionary (and illiberal) Marxists? What is so indecent about that prospect, would it be that it comes from the right and you are a dogmatic leftist, or that it runs counter to your aspirations as a one time 1970s/1980s Marxist-Leninist?
Ok, but cultural Marxism and/or Neo-Marxism is the point where identity politics entered. Race is foregrounded, and class is relegated to the background. The neo-Marxists (including black Marxists) consider the Marxism that you are referring to as vulgar, and outmoded.
I see here in this essay a conflation of Marxist strategies with black nationalism and identity politics that on the most part contradicts the politics of many/most Marxists of that era. They did not accept the postmodernist model. This is a long discussion, but as someone who was in the m-l camp in the 70s and early 80s, I can be quite categorical that while we may have had some incoherent ideas, identitarian politics were not included. In fact, quite the opposite. I remember we were the ONLY ones rejecting the term "visible minority" because it was racist. There is also a lot of difference in the politics in the US vs Canada and in the 1930s vs 1960s vs now.
Our series will eventually explore in more detail those differences of politics between time and place. Although the history of the black radical tradition was covered in more detail in Mr. M’s - https://wokewatchcanada.substack.com/p/a-moral-chimera
The little bits of this piece that allude to the connection between black Marxism and black nationalism (what we call the black radical tradition), rely on what was established in Mr. M’s piece.
Another Marxist who would like to chime in and to say 'Oh, that's not my Marxism - that Marxism is deplorable!' Well, no your Marxism is bloody well deplorable AND, additionally, black Marxism is bloody well deplorable along with it. For people who don't understand that such a tradition of intellectual ineptitude exists, I always provide the book title that says it all - yes, check out black studies professor Cedric Robinson's textbook "Black Marxism: the Making of the Black Radical Tradition." That's their deplorable Marxism, and by the way your deplorable Marxism is just as asinine and illiberal. And no, we aren't confused between the two, we clearly mark the difference and yet you all need a swift kick in the rear. Happy now?
The woman in charge of BLM in Toronto purchased a multi million $ house in the richest area of Toronto with donations made to BLM, just goes to show what her ideology was. Having worked in Toronto for 30 years I saw very little racism directed towards any specific groups. I have travelled quite a lot to other countries and my experience has shown me that we are amongst the least racist places.
Yes. Those ones are not traditional Marxists. Marxists despise postmodernism; they actually believe there is something called objective reality, even if they don't practice it.
This dear James is a 'troublemaker' theory of history that denies that they had much to make trouble about. It is a favorite refrain of dictators or anyone who is an embedded beneficiary of a noxious status quo
I think you need to nuance this a lot to make it look less like an apologia for reactionaries.who are in denial that there are serious issues with the way they do business & the regime they are apologists for
This is not to say that the revolutionaries aren't just like the people & forces they oppose.....or worse....much worse.
However it is important to recognize that revolutionaries lose traction when the condition of the oppressed is better than the picture their slogans paint. The class struggle 'lost it's way' in the increasingly improving working class conditions within Western societies, starting from the 1840s on, as industrial conditions improved & reform movements started to kick goals.
The rise of the Woke is much more complex than it looks & is a result of a profound regime crisis. The Woke are not revolutionaries at all. They are regime, in the same way that the church once was. It's highly successful campaign to seize power over the system of social reproduction & administration has all the features of a neo clerical coup.
We haven't seen anything like this since The Reformation.
https://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/2205477-Luthers-Last-Laugh-Indulgermania
We haven't yet provided a theory of history. And, we haven't said that defining woke or wokeism is the goal of this series.
"Revolutionaries" opposing poor working conditions is one thing, but where a hard line must be drawn is when leftist agitators are opposing liberal principals and seeking to tear down the social order. No one would ever vote for their revolution, so it always involves agitating against and undermining the social order through subversive, not democratic, means. Hence a reactionary movement is needed to keep leftist agitators in check.
We are looking primarily at patterns that can be illustrated through illiberal changes in public policy and education. Media reportage, "calls for changes," and then those changes subsequentially expressed in public policy. Those things are material. They require no theorizing outside of what the sequence of events constructed from the material evidence tells us. What we are showing, among other things, is that at virtually every turn where public policy veered toward illiberal ideology, a Marxist of some form (neo-Marxist) was behind it. My view is that this cancer of illiberal subverters needs an organized reactionary rightwing movement to counter it. And probably always will.
My dear James, over the last 50-70 years, democratic life has been steadily hollowed out and replaced by the most successful and privatized totalitarianism ever attempted, precisely because until very recently, it lacked a public institutional and state based face that would give us the traditional warnings of autocratic governance. Joseph Goebbels was not the only student of the public relations and marketing revolution that was kicked off by guys like Edward Bernays after the First World War.
Bernays' successors today would make Goebbels look like an amateur and if he came back from the dead today, he would have to go back to propaganda school to get even a sniff at a job in any marketing or public relations firm.
'The Matrix' is a late modern fable of what actually exists right now. And its power is now so great, the revealment of its profound illiberality no longer matters. It no longer needs to project the face of reasonableness, because it has captured consciousness itself. Consciousness is the main commodity of Indulgence Capitalism. The Goods and Services it produces are merely facilitators to that end. Reified postmodernist thought is simply the academic extension of publikrelationsmarketingthink, where fantasy-based subjectivity trumps objective critical reason.; i.e., where blind faith cuts out evidence based reason.
Bernays was the first to realize that a staged smoking stunt by well-dressed and elegant women in a fashionable New York parade would shift attitudes and beliefs in relation to female smoking in ways that would never be accomplished by a thousand evidence-based arguments and debates. He understood that 'perception management' was a profound game changer that would ultimately change not merely what they thought, but how they thought and thus gain unrestricted access and capacity to reconstruct the human mind.
There is nothing 'revolutionary' going on here in traditional sense. The revolutionary organism is Indulgence Capitalism that started to roll itself out in the 1960s and the Wokes are its Red Guards who are there because as the system starts to implode under the weight of it deregulatory and privatizing of the now trashed commons, indirect control is no longer enough.
Marxism may very be a bad idea but a "reactionary right wing counter movement" is of no positive use to anyone decent.
Christopher Eastman-Nagle: As you are a self-described Marxist intellectual, who should be surprised that you are, true to form, ever the Marxist obscurantist? Woke is an ideological engine driving evolved identity Marxism (don't bother playing coy and pretending you don't know what that entails) into Western institutional and governmental policy everywhere, the so called long march through the institutions (as you ought to well know, a modified Gramscian model of subversion - as the radical theorists themselves explain, I've got books and articles attesting that to be so). In a few words, this is the great illiberal subversion. It would be convenient for you, a rather conflicted revolutionary, if we -on your say so- were to take woke as "not revolutionaries," to skip the entire history of how the cultural revolution has happened, and just get to blaming the "regime" and "regime weakness" with you, our resident Marxist theorist. Yes, it's the establishment's fault that it was perverted by radical activists ideologues with an burning hatred for the free west - let's just forget about blaming the bloody revolutionaries for any of that situation, right? 0_0 It would be great for you, because that's always what Marxists come to isn't it (while obfuscating the disastrous results of their own radical conceits and social meddling)? It's the establishment's fault that it got screwed up by us, take our bloody word for it!
Yeah, no thanks.
Robin Collins: You realize "reactionary" in this sense implies someone who undertakes to repudiate the machinations of revolutionary (and illiberal) Marxists? What is so indecent about that prospect, would it be that it comes from the right and you are a dogmatic leftist, or that it runs counter to your aspirations as a one time 1970s/1980s Marxist-Leninist?
Marxists to my recollection don't accept any such thing as "black Marxism". It's a way at looking as historical change and is colour-free...
Ok, but cultural Marxism and/or Neo-Marxism is the point where identity politics entered. Race is foregrounded, and class is relegated to the background. The neo-Marxists (including black Marxists) consider the Marxism that you are referring to as vulgar, and outmoded.
Oh yes, it's just a "way of looking," it's not a political program or anything - that wouldn't be fair to Marxism now would it.
I see here in this essay a conflation of Marxist strategies with black nationalism and identity politics that on the most part contradicts the politics of many/most Marxists of that era. They did not accept the postmodernist model. This is a long discussion, but as someone who was in the m-l camp in the 70s and early 80s, I can be quite categorical that while we may have had some incoherent ideas, identitarian politics were not included. In fact, quite the opposite. I remember we were the ONLY ones rejecting the term "visible minority" because it was racist. There is also a lot of difference in the politics in the US vs Canada and in the 1930s vs 1960s vs now.
Our series will eventually explore in more detail those differences of politics between time and place. Although the history of the black radical tradition was covered in more detail in Mr. M’s - https://wokewatchcanada.substack.com/p/a-moral-chimera
The little bits of this piece that allude to the connection between black Marxism and black nationalism (what we call the black radical tradition), rely on what was established in Mr. M’s piece.
Another Marxist who would like to chime in and to say 'Oh, that's not my Marxism - that Marxism is deplorable!' Well, no your Marxism is bloody well deplorable AND, additionally, black Marxism is bloody well deplorable along with it. For people who don't understand that such a tradition of intellectual ineptitude exists, I always provide the book title that says it all - yes, check out black studies professor Cedric Robinson's textbook "Black Marxism: the Making of the Black Radical Tradition." That's their deplorable Marxism, and by the way your deplorable Marxism is just as asinine and illiberal. And no, we aren't confused between the two, we clearly mark the difference and yet you all need a swift kick in the rear. Happy now?
I'm not a Marxist, maybe never was. So no need for the usual ad hominem. Try and be civil, academic, fact based.