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I’ve just been looking at an interview by clinical psychologist and University of Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson dealing with postmodernism and the triumph of Marxism in Canada. In view of Peterson’s brave struggle against Political Correctness at the U of T (which my late wife attended in more tolerant times) I was ready to treat his venture into my own field (European intellectual history) with a certain indulgence, until I encountered this opinion:
Communism was not popularized in the West under the direct banner of communism. Instead, it came largely under the banner of postmodernism, and aimed to transform the values and beliefs of our societies through its Marxist idea that knowledge and truth are social constructs.
Why should we think that Communism did not enter North America under its own banner? The CPUSA had 100,000 members by the end of World War II and loads of fellow-travelers who had profound influence on American culture and education. Furthermore, for many decades Canada was home to a thriving Communist Party under the leadership of Tim Buck, whose son attended Yale with me. Marxists I’ve known or read do not believe that “knowledge and truth are social constructs.” The theory they propound is that belief systems belong to the superstructure of a society. What really determines a society’s direction is who controls productive forces; and this control brings political, economic, and, at least derivatively, cultural power.
More importantly, I’m underwhelmed by the assertions that postmodernism, which Peterson tells us entered Canada sometime in the 1970s, has transformed Canadians into Marxists. I shall readily concede that some self-described French postmodernists, like Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, voted for the French Communist or Socialist Party and expressed personal dislike for bourgeois society. What is more problematic, however, is that someone who reads postmodernist texts will be transformed into a Politically Correct leftist.
Although I’ve read such texts extensively, I’ve never felt the slightest urge to march in a Black Lives Matter demonstration. Nor can I locate anything in Derrida, Roland Barthes, or any other French postmodernist that would make me inclined to speak at a Women’s March. I’m certainly not a fan of these authors who try to deconstruct and decontextualize established meanings. They also inconsistently expect to be taken seriously as semanticists while reducing those shared understandings that create and sustain community to subjective interests. I’m also aware that Lacan, Giles Deleuze, and other postmodernists identified mental disorders with a capitalist economy. Less evident is that these attacks fueled contemporary political radicalism, which Peterson sees as penetrating Canada through postmodernist deconstructionism. The ascription of psychological disorder to capitalism was a favorite theme of the Frankfurt School, which belabored it for thirty years before Deleuze took it over in the 1960s. (Deleuze expressed a debt of gratitude to Herbert Marcuse for his fusion of erotic gratification with revolutionary politics.) Since the war against social normalcy pioneered by the Frankfurt School is flourishing in most Western countries today, why should I go to French deconstructionists in order to look for its source?
The suppression of free speech by the Canadian government and Canadian universities, a situation that Peterson has doggedly resisted, has nothing to do with Marxist beliefs. Peterson’s observation on this matter does not demonstrate such a connection:
The postmodernists built on the Marxist ideology. They started to play a sleight of hand, and instead of pitting the proletariat, the working class, against the bourgeois, they started to pit the oppressed against the oppressor. That opened up the avenue to identifying any number of groups as oppressed and oppressor and to continue the same narrative under a different name.
Postmodernists may or may not have “built on Marxist ideology” but the “sleight of hand” they carried out in order to create their own version of “the oppressed against the oppressor” generated ideas that are not Marxist in origin. No Marxist government I’m aware of has prohibited gender-specific language or criminalized negative references to gays and the transgendered. I couldn’t imagine any self-respecting Communist leader mandating transgendered toilets in public restrooms. Where exactly would I find such an idea in Das Kapital or in Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism? Communist states, moreover, have usually persecuted gays, and dealt quite harshly with drug-users and others they perceived as social deviants.
What we call “Political Correctness” is not a Marxist creation, as I argue strenuously in The Strange Death of Marxism. Rather, we are looking at a post-Marxist leftist ideology stressing universalism, equality, and the social guilt of white Christians, and more particularly heterosexual, male white Christians. Those who are labeled victimizers (and often accept this label for themselves) are charged with oppressing a steadily expanding range of designated victims, and they are expected to expiate their guilt by showing said victims special verbal and behavioral consideration. Conditioning factors that may help us understand what’s going on are the cultural Marxist-inspired war against “prejudice” and the social engineering imperative of the modern administrative state. Only by considering such variables can we explain the forces that have invaded Peterson’s country and threatened his job.
I’d caution against taking too seriously what Communist Parties out of power in Western countries say and do to attract support. The shrinking CPUSA in present-day America presents women’s issues and racial discrimination as key issues in its advertising for members. A bizarre entry for the CPUSA on Wikipedia would make it appear that American Communists spent most of the last century fighting for black civil rights while being viciously tormented by anti-Communist bigots. This, of course, is PR gibberish. The party leadership was almost always unswervingly Stalinist, as long as that Soviet mass murderer was in power; and it collapsed into total irrelevance after opposing Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to liberalize the Soviet regime. If the Communists came to power, judging by their behavior elsewhere, their present showcase “victims” would probably disappear into a re-education camp.
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I do not want to defend Peterson because he is so shallow on almost everything and wrong on many things. But I would take a second look and early communists.
Read Communist Manifest chapter on marriage as prostitution and get familiar with the first several years of Bolshevik rule in Russia and activities of Alexandra Kollontai. And as far as political correctness see what penalties in USSR were for anti-semitism and for possession of Protocols of… Zion.
The main selling point of every revolution in the past 200+ years was that it was supposed to bring more equality. Even the French revolution – which by no means was a communist one – was talking about Liberté, égalité, fraternité.
Now in retrospect, Capitalism was definitely more egalitarian than feudalism and feudalism was more egalitarian than slavery – even though I don’t recall that there ever was feudal revolution that took place in order to replace the previous system.
There is one slight historical anomaly – a “revolution” which beat the French one by about 13 years and which accomplished the amazing task of setting the clock both forward and backward at the same time – in terms of égalité, but I’ll let you figure that one on your own.
Those changes in the economic system from more backward one into more advanced, usually bring more equality. The main equality that the new systems usually bring is the economic equality – that’s the biggest one, compared to which all the others pale in comparison. It’s almost impossible to worsen the equality in other domains while improving the economic equality.
You could theoretically take away for example the political rights from the people – like ban them from voting, while at the same time doubling their income, but most people would jump on this, because money beats everything else.
If someone offered me $100 000 a year, but prevented me from voting – I’ll take that deal in a heartbeat. I don’t vote anyway, because it doesn’t bring any kind of satisfaction. The political correctness – or multiculturalism as I like to call it – has nothing to do with Marxism or leftist ideology or anything like that. It is a right wing conspiracy designed to hold back improvements in economic equality by pretending to bring some phony improvements in equality based on race, gender, sexual orientation and so on.
The article stands as a whole.
An additional critique,
Peterson’s greatest flaw as a social observer lies in accentuating once again, the superior effort of the individual as to the collective. It should be obvious that there is a constant dynamic between social contexts and the same single individual. Peterson himself is a prime example. His ideas are reactionary to a very specific timely context in the West.
To disprove above, let him open his Youtube and Patreon data trove and sort it per territory, ethnic identity, gender, age to define his core context. His context and the value of his “working his ass of”, “take resposibility god dammed”, will then show to whom he is preaching, no need to negate “identity” any longer.
Context does matter, to Marx, as to Peterson.
Can it be that Das Kapital resembles the bible and the Quran, anyone can read in it what he wants ?
Marx’s theories were little more than that ever more wealth would be concentrated in ever fewer hands, and that this could be overcome only by dictatorship of the proletariat.
This theory obviously is nonsense, this is caused by that Marx did not understand that value is never absolute, or eternal.
Bill Gates got very rich by his Windows, his monopoly is resented more and more.
Long ago railway investments seemed very sure, but then highways and trucks made railways more or less obsolete.
Factories producing combustion engines could become worthless is maybe ten years from now.
This article does a great service by debunking the myth that postmodernism, identity politics & political correctness are linked to Marxism. The author accurately places the link back to the Frankfurt school. Indeed, I would maintain that the more substantial link goes back to the general outbreak of 60’s “counter culture”. (Although many of those ideas had been brewing away for many decades prior to the 60’s)
I’m guessing Peterson targets the French Postmodernists because the Frankfurt School is too Jewish and thus too dangerous to mention. “Post Marxist” is a reasonable description of the ruling ideology but it does of course have roots in cultural Marxism as well as in the US version of Anglo-Liberalism.
From rebel Canadian Jew Henry Makow: Karl Marx was a Rothschild third cousin
Indeed.
Probably the center of the Communist International was New York City, where many Red millionaires funded the movement. To be a Commie was high fashion; it was :cool” and “intellectual” (gag me) too.
The capitalism vs communism canard is as vacuous as many other false dichotomies such as Democrat vs Republican and Left vs Right.
Now that the moneyed mafiosi have most of what they want, Communism is out of vogue, and its dupes have long ago been tossed under the bus. I can’t wait til Zionism and it’s goal of world control, and its dupes and lackeys suffer the same fates.
As far as getting the culprits right, the pic is misleading. If you want to get it right, look who funded those clowns.
Thanks for your comment, especially this…
Orwell also emphasized the nexus between big money and centralization and it’s important to understand the concept. In contrast most people have been led to believe that capitalism and Communism are antagonistic which ain’t necessarily so.
The last sentence in “Animal Farm” sums it up well. Note the date.
It’s pretty obvious that the USSA went full Commie under FDR, and there is little evidence that it’s any better now.
Contemporary PC crowd & ideology have more in common with Marcuse-inspired New Left than with Marx or Lenin. Although, I doubt this is something like reversed metaphor from Marx’s material basis-cultural & ideological superstructure paradigm: these things do not appear as conscious ideations. Various schools of thought (Frankfurt school, postmodernists,..) simply try to articulate social, economic & cultural realities of their own times.
The problem is that these mental paradigms take on lives of their own & continue to shape policies and behavior long time since they’ve become obsolete or simply shown to be wrong. So much for “superstructure” as reflection of modes of production…
Though- one could try, in a Machiavellian manner, to salvage Marx’s analogies: current idolization of supposedly victimized groups (blacks, Muslims, Jews, women, POC ..) could be interpreted as a cunning device of ruling capitalist classes which are concerned only with short-term profits & are basically anational. So, “capitalist exploiters” will (mis)use any idea to maximize their profits. They will import Mestizo workers & Indian engineers because this is cheaper & easier than to negotiate with normal, white working- and middle-class.
Marx could be right in assumption that capitalist exploitation is essentially anational & globalist; then, he could be monumentally wrong because he assumed that this exploitation would inevitably lead to progress & expansion of white Europeans and their way of life.
Because he dismissed demography, race & nationality (or tacitly implied that his model was not universal, but limited to white European- North American societies) he could not have imagined a society that would at some time technologically & culturally expand, while simultaneously hurling itself into demographic, racial & cultural suicide.
Paul Gottfried has long made these points, which are valid. What I think stands in the way of his seeing the lay out, the development, the march of progress into new forms that in many way are far less sane than were the old Marxist forms is that he does not see each part as merely a different front, or tactic, in the kulturkampf: the war against every vestige of Christendom.
Bismarck and Falk did not invent kulturkampf. They simply provided one way that worked for one newly and forcibly united nation.
Gottfried’s one weakness in discerning and analyzing just what the Hell has been going on is that he proceeds from the vantage of the urbanely cultured Austrian after the Holy Roman Empire had become something decidedly Modern and secular. That certainly seems to have been a time and place calmly stable and reasonable – it is a better choice for such a starting place than those most common in the Anglosphere: the English mid-18th century or the height of Victorianism.
That is how and why Gottfried has a long history of sneering at those who, for example, attempt to explain the importance to the West’s lemming march into suicide by stressing events, in terms of of the moral philosophies involved developing naturally, such as the Albigensian crisis and the Reformation. Gottfried assumes such matters are over, done deals, and not relevant to recent issues.
Errors that directly, even violently, contradict one another invariably ally against truth. And all revolutions, all wild-eyed and sweeping reforms, are attacks against what Christendom was supposed to be in order to prevent any chance of even attempted revival. They are united in non serviam. Cultural Marxism, therefore, is very much an allied descendant of Marxism, for they have the same telos: to utterly exterminate and replace everything to do with Christendom, which, Cultural Marxists seem to grasp more thoroughly than did even most lovers of Leon Trotsky, requires the endless beat down of the peoples who made and ran Christendom: white Gentiles, with a triple focus on males.
Neat circle drawn, could it be added that Marx saw as a ready exploit the white underclass of his era, often worse of as the negro slaves in the Amerikas.
Jordan does less well, his “conciencious”(), personal effort has nothing to do with identity politics, according to his, ethnic identities do not exist. His is all about every individual vouching for himself., His paying audience should wonder where the “alternative”, and controversial aspect is to be found. Selfhelp encased in video and live. Superficial twists of stone cold conventional rehashes.
I like Jordan Peterson and will continue to avidly follow him.
This article seems like a hit piece on Jordan Peterson. I don’t get the motivation.
Jordan Peterson is distantly like Donald Trump, Valdimir Putin, and in a very distant sense, Jesus Christ, because through intensely immersing the reader / listener in out of the media box thinking. they bring the consciousness and manifestation of a greater & better reality into physical being for humanity.
Oh yes, the reader might think about downloading Jordan Peterson’s books from Amazon onto their cell phones etc
I checked out your link, and the first thing I saw was the quote below and it’s struck me because I’m reading the autobiography (really a Churchillesque autohagiography) of “rabbi” Stephen Wise and it positively reeks of the sentiment,
One can call ’em a forgery, but they are very far from wrong.
I do wonder, to what extent is it possible to unravel the threads of madness?
What these philosophies have in common is the attack on Logos, rationalized immorality, and the nihilistic hatred for all hierarchy and distinction-the project which took off especially after rhe rejection of the Logos incarnate.
I shall have to reread Strange death at some point-it went over my head the first time.
Out of gratitude, the Chinese government just gave a 15 ft. tall statue of Karl Marx to his town of birth in Rhineland-Palatinate , Trier. – Clearly, at least the Chinese would contradict your opinion, that Marx’ theories would be “obviously nonsense”, or wouldn’t they?
I approve of the article image as a Progress of masculine facial hair, but one must not be reactionary and go Right, but instead start from the Right and progress Leftward to maximize a beautiful proletarian beard.
To see what the Zionists who control America have done and are doing to our country read THE PROTOCOLS OF ZION.
I agree with Cyrano and utu that Gottfried pushes his idea too far. The Marxist embrace of feminism, gay rights, black power, etc., seems partly sincere and partly opportunistic. Marxism has always targeted Christianity and bourgeois sexual norms, but did not give them the emphasis they receive today. As Gottfried notes, actual Marxist regimes were often indifferent or hostile to sexual causes but he fails to consider that the leaders were demonstrating pragmatism and the lack of a perverted French imagination, required if one is to enthuse over the liberation of sadomasochists.
I also agree with the commenter who sees in current multiculturalism a cynical scheme that allows the feel-good experience of righteous radicalism without the pain of living with true material equality.
The victims-versus-oppressors theme is a more efficient vehicle for Jewish anti-Christian feelings than the older workers-versus-bosses theme. Ethnic minorities can be enlisted on the progressive side by flattery and promises of set-asides for people of their ethnicity. Meanwhile, the movement can injure Christian hegemony by promoting sexual radicalism without having to worry about the sexual conservatism of the working class.
This is the second article I’ve seen by Gottfried giving the older Marxists a pass on responsibility for sexual radicalism and the related assault on free speech. I wonder if he’s a recovering commie, like so many conservatives of his generation.
One could observe that assuming that the disinterested individuals in question are seeking the concept of autonomy(fair, I think), they correctly recognize that liquid assets increase autonomy much more than participation in a presumed democracy does. In that, if we equal autonomy with freedom, we see that personal property increases freedom, democracy does not, at least not at the same level.
Your characterization seems too abstract. Besides, there is a hierarchical character to the current radicalism in that Jews are the Master Victims and get to dictate which other groups are Victims, then Women, then Gays, then Blacks, then Hispanics, Asians, and so on. In other words, in a feud between Jews and blacks, Jews win, and in a feud between gays and blacks, gays win. When Korean shopkeepers draw guns against black rioters, the blacks win. (“Winning” means that the loser has to apologize or lose face or be sued or fired or jailed.)
There is some truth in your idea that the existing doctrine opposes hierarchy in that it attacks most of the sources of hierarchy — but not all. The Holocaust is the new god, and is a jealous god.
Yes, I fully concur.
I made a comment saying something similar, just going back further.
Great.
Just great.
The death toll of those early several years of Bolshevik rule was something to behold.
As for the rest – I wouldn’t touch the subject whith a bargepole.
Yet.
Perhaps never.
We shall see.
You seem to have read a lot and I think I generally agree with you, but your sentence structure is horrendous. Try writing shorter sentences and read aloud to your wife or friend. A lot of your sentences are very hard to follow. Sorry but I speak as one bad writer to another. I’m awful but I’m working on it.
Yes, agreed, the nihilism is not complete. I think it is mostly used as a tool for transvaluation at first, i.e. destroy the existing social order, and then in a more total way once that is accomplished, to destroy the identities of all groups. It will turn on many of the groups that support it currently.
I find the egalitarian idea interesting. It views any distinction of particularity of a structure to be offensive. And so, the only structure that exists in the universe with perfect symmetry, perfect equality, is the nil.
But, yes, I agree, the nihilism will be forcefully resisted by the peoples who wield it, those who I obtusely reference as the original rejectors of the Logos incarnate, i.e. at the foot of the cross (and the many allies who have joined the crusade-which would be just about everybody).
Follow the money, indeed.
The worst German war crime was to put Uljanow on that accursed sealed train.
That made possible the massacres Bronstein, Kaganovich, Dshugashwili and their ilk committed.
That the Russians took horrible revenge on Germany for the millions of their countrymen murdered as a consequence does in no way diminish this murderous act.
Morally the sealed train is on par with the Mongols catapulting the corpes of plague victims into cities they could not conquer, but it is without peer in the sheer number of victims.
There are fools and there are insufferable fools, these people falling into the latter category.
Let’s just hope they do not murder quite as many people as the communists did. Given their nuclear arms, they do pose a serious risk.
You hit the nail on the head. All this PC BS is used by thieves to distract us from their thievery. There is nothing Marxist about it. In fact, conservative Americans in the heartland are a lot closer to Marxism (even though they are successfully taught by the MSM to abhor this word) than NY trannies or Washington promoters of the idea that there are as many genders as some psychos feel. Pretended “concern” of the elites about “minorities” is their way to keep the majority under their thumb.
I disagree– the very short sentences typical of writers like Hemingway tend to tire after a while, and are insufficient to carry any significant meaning without a degree of obscurity.
Here is a sentence out of Waverley:
and a sentence out of Apocalypse (13:1, Knox version):
It’s true that the latter is interspersed with shorter sentences which make it easier to read, such as: Listen to this, you that have ears to hear with. (13:9), which is even shorter in the Greek: εἴ τις ἔχει οὖς ἀκουσάτω.
So, speaking as yet another not-so-accomplished writer, I think that while short sentences have their place and it is a necessary one, they should not entirely displace longer sentences, which allow the meaning to flow smoothly through them without being abruptly drawn to a crashing halt.
said:
“That the Russians took horrible revenge on Germany for the millions of their countrymen murdered as a consequence does in no way diminish this murderous act.”
The Germans did not “murder” Russians, it’s called WWII.
Revenge not.
‘Operation Barbarossa Was A Preventive Attack’
https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7999
BTW, if this is what you’re trying to imply:
The ‘6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers’ are scientifically impossible frauds.
see the ‘holocaust’ scam debunked here: http://codoh.com
No name calling, level playing field debate here: http://forum.codoh.com
Did you notice that everything you said (not to mention everything we see around us) supports the idea that ever more wealth is concentrated in ever fewer hands? This part was (and still is) perfectly true. The fault is with the “dictatorship of the proletariat”: the dictatorship was successfully achieved many times, but the proletariat had nothing to do with it (and didn’t even get much out of it).
Post Modernism or Cultural Marxism are Capitalist phenomena, not Marxist. They are slavishly supported by corporations, as anyone who has ever worked for one can attest.
I’m hoping they devour their own sometime soon, and in a the most painful and humiliating ways possible.
The Chinese regime pretends to be communist, so what is your point ?
What is a “Marxist”; is it someone who follows Marx’s theories as their author understood them, an adherent of the metaphysical-“science” that Engels turned Marx’s theory into, a Vanguard Party Leninist, a Stalinist, or a follower of Trotsky’s writings..
Behind all those ideologies, and also “post-Marxist leftist ideology stressing universalism, equality, and the social guilt of white Christians, and more particularly heterosexual, male white Christians” is the same thing (dominance) that is motivating those lobsters that Jordan Peterson talks about.
As Peterson says (though it is not a discovery of his) , humans constantly monitor their social status and they are very sensitive at picking up on any fluctuations. All the socialist schools of thought have their time as cutting edge, and get overthrown as they fall from the being the highest status ideology, the one that the elite and those aspiring to become members of the elite crowd into, for a time.
Under globalisation indeed the part of national incomes going to labour is declining.
Thus, again indeed, the wealth distribution is becoming more uneven.
However, there is no sign that ever more wealth is going to be concentrated in ever fewer hands.
Do not know now when Marx published Das Kapital, somewhere in the second half of the 19th century.
There was more than enough time for his prediction to become true.
A Marxist in my opinion is someone who never read Das Kapital, or someone who did read it and convinced him- or herself that he or she understood it.
As far as I know no intelligent person read more than say 20 pages.
Political correctness is merely a new term for old fashioned intolerance.
In Europe’s Christian utopia, political correctness would have meant (had the term then been coined) burning people alive for being a Catholic in a protestant jurisdiction, or being protestant in a Catholic jurisdiction. In Russia’s Marxist-Leninist utopia, political correctness meant that anyone opposed to Leninist or Stalinist totalitarianism was to be “shot on the spot” to use a phrase that Lenin favored. In Canada’s Trudeau-esque utopia, political correctness means denying Federal Funding to organizations that do not support abortion, correcting women who use the term “mankind” instead of “peoplekind,” and terrorizing academics who fail to use whatever pronouns their students demand. In America’s Obamoid-Clintonian utopia, political correctness meant calling those opposed to illegal immigration, racial quotas, and “gay marriage”, a basket of racists, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic deplorables and booting such people from their academic posts or programming jobs at Google.
So, yes. Peterson is simply wrong about the meaning of political correctness, which today, throughout the West, is a form of intolerance that serves to prevent comment on or opposition to the genocide of the European peoples through suppressed reproduction and mass replacement immigration.
Connecting the dots is so simple that it is surprising that very few manage to do so.
Jordan Peterson is a jewish psychologist that is peddling the same kind of crap that Freud foisted off on western countries.
Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalysis, and the War on the West
“We are bringing them the plague.”—Sigmund Freud, on his way to America in 1909[1]
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/12/24/sigmund-freud-psychoanalysis-and-the-war-on-the-west/
….. Jewish psychologists played a big role in bringing about this cultural warfare. “Under Jewish influence, American psychology became Talmudic as well….it was seen as a weapon against Christian culture.”[5]…..
Both the marxist killers
Stalin’s Jews
We mustn’t forget that some of greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3342999,00.html
and the Frankfurt School of “cultural marxists” are just more members of the same corrupt, racist-supremacist, abusive sect.
Impact of politically correct Britain
https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/gerald-warner-impact-of-politically-correct-britain-1-3128346
……. Political correctness is cultural Marxism. The term was coined by Anton Semyonovich Makarenko, Lenin’s education guru and favourite wordsmith (he also invented the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat”). From the beginning, Marxists recognised there was a lot more involved in imposing totalitarian social control than nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. In Hungary in 1919, during the short-lived but murderous Communist dictatorship of Bela Kun, his deputy “commissar for culture”, Georg Lukacs, introduced a programme of “cultural terrorism” under which he imposed pornographic sex education on schoolchildren, promoting promiscuity, denouncing the family and encouraging pupils to mock their parents and religion. The question Lukacs posed was: “Who will save us from Western Civilisation?” Four years later, Lukacs was one of the founders of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, from which emerged the obscenity known today as Frankfurt School Marxism, dedicated to the destruction of civilisation. Max Horkheimer, its sometime director, followed up Lukacs’ experiment by grafting Freudianism onto Marxism. In this he was followed by Herbert Marcuse, an admirer of the Marquis de Sade, who expressed his belief in “polymorphous perversity”. This was complemented by the cultural Marxism of Gramsci and other adherents such as Adorno. Whether or not the Frankfurt Marxists had become sceptical of the command economy as an economic instrument, their main target was “the culture”……
The instinctual and nearly hysterical derision of Marx and Communism in the capitalist world continues unabated, even from those debunking “Cultural Marxism” as the absurdity that it is.
Marx described capitalism as a system of social relations; specifically the relationship between the OWNERS of industrial enterprise and those through LABOR create “surplus value.”
The primary aspect of this relationship is that those who CREATE surplus value (labor) have no say or input as to how surplus value is to be utilized. The fact that this conundrum has been resolved WITHIN the capitalist system (through various forms of employee ownership) is apparently too obvious for those with political and ideological axes to grind to see.
Well, you contradict yourself. If wealth distribution is becoming more uneven, this means that wealth is concentrated in fewer hands. The fraction of national wealth in the hands of the top 1% in the US is much higher today then 50 or 100 years ago. I believe it’s even higher than 10 years ago.
Marx actually published only the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867. The second volume was half-written by the time Marx died, it came out edited by Engels (who was a lot less smart than Marx). Engels also published the third volume based on bits and pieces of Marx’ writing.
In fact, Marx predicted a lot of things that happened much later, including globalization and the rise and ultimate dominance of financial capital. He also said that financial capital is parasitic in nature and will eventually kill the host. We are witnessing this right now.
Yet his political claims were obviously wrong and never made sense logically. “The dictatorship of proletariat” was naturally hijacked by those much smarter than the proletariat and used for their own ends, which was inevitable considering pathetic intellectual state of that “proletariat” he himself acknowledged.
If we look at history, new social structures are never created by one of the classes of the old structure, so hoping that “proletariat”, which is part of capitalist-proletarian dichotomy, will create a new social order was a silly thing. However, his idea that no social order can possibly be eternal is perfectly correct and well supported by human history. We are witnessing an increase in social role of things that do not fit the capitalist exchange (goods for money) standard. Socks and nails lose their value in the process of use (consumption), so this type of goods is perfectly suited for market economy. In contrast, literature, paintings, music, and scientific knowledge do not lose any value because of use. Current social order tries to push these things into the procrustean bed of capitalist exchange (“intellectual property”), but they stick out of the system like a sore thumb.
Despite my own dimness, it’s the first book I ever attempted to read that I didn’t finish (The second was some some unctuously nauseating self adulatory piece of trash by Churchill).I don’t remember how many pages it took for me to understand that the guy was blowing hot air if not total BS, but it couldn’t have been much more than that.
I think Murray Rothbard ( no slouch intellectually) who would agree with your assessment.
For me, this sums up Marx and is part of the reason I despise him and his baloney.
If you cannot bedazzle ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with BS. It’s pretty evident that the presumptuous, preposterous, loser ass chose the latter.
The odd thing is that capitalists supported the goof. For one thing, without the support of certain “capitalists,” no one would have ever heard of the blowhard and he’d have ended up in the ash can of history, if that.
I would have to agree that the old left is nothing like the new left. Identity politics is practically designed to cause labor to divide itself. That isn’t very Marxist at all. In fact post modernism looks a lot more like a robber barren plot to divide and rule.
Of course the modern left likes to pretend they agree with Marx by all their efforts to “end bigotry and division” with more bigotry and division. Classifying people on their inherited privileges is unifying don’t ya know?
The historic Left…all of it…including communism…failed.
China and N. Korea manage to contain the wreckage thru their peculiar Oriental Despotism, but for the West, the Left is dead, that is, the Left that argued the economistic line, that all our problems would disappear when the Exploiters were expropriated and the means of production were taken over by The People.
The lower economic and social orders in Europe continue to rebel but the old puissance is gone (Is that the word?). Now it is Globalism, not Revolution; that is good, because it contains a nationalism that we see today developing
So, with the Death of class struggle in the communist and socialist sense, what is next?
All of the post-modernism, and I followed it for years as a leftish guy all the while trying to figure out why it was such nonsense, (I finally figured it out, it was Jewish) the whole project was an attack on rationality and objectivity. Why?
Because the Marxist Left was rational, more or less, and it had failed. What now? Anything Goes as long as it is anti-White and anti White Man…the jew’s blonde beast at the door. When rationality is based on false assumptions (race equality), all hell breaks loose. Oppression is Everywhere.
Race Equality and not economics, became the next Historical Agent. Then, Sex. Then Wymyn, and now all the social misfits (which are merely evolution’s mistakes, biological mistakes) and Intelligence as Oppressive , socially constructed by White Men, and so on. Language itself is attacked, pronouns are Oppressive! Everything is Hidden, Oppression Everywhere.
What this all is is the Democratic Permanent Revolution, the revolt against Nature, and Inequality. Call it nihilism or whatever you want. It is the natural result of “all men are created Equal” which has been part of Western Civ from 1789 and before even right up to now.
If we are all equal, why am I so unhappy and poorly paid and horny?
And so on. Show me who to kill…that is the upshot.
The people who are least psychologically disturbed in this regard are the Trump peasantry. They accept inequality because they are white, working class and middle class, and have realistic views of their own personal limitations. They have never read any of the nonsense that we are talking about here since they have not been to college. In a word, they are not intellectuals and dreamers, but are more or less Christian: they have a Map that is not bad.
The Jews hate everything Christian, normal, and White. The Jews Marshall the armies of the night, not that these armies do not have a certain agency of their own, especially unhappy white ladies, and cheerlead any and all as long at they hate White Men.
Everyone on this list knows how they get away with it…except you don’t know this: most Christians, especially Protestants, got jews/OT as their totem animals…cuz every church has readings from both the OT and the NT. Even when the Jews do bad things, they will return to Christ…so they get a pass.
How many Jewish Wars will it take anyway? More importantly, how long will it take for the utopians to settle down to the reality of a natural, biological order of inequality, but at least amongst Whites, with enough love to include everyone…at least Whites…in the social, and then in the political order?
Joe Webb
The intelligent of every generation determine what makes them look good among their peers for believing it. Ideas of your dad’s time can’t get you seen as edgy (the objective), so they get reinterpreted. Sometimes they even work.
“Pretended ‘concern’ of the elites about “minorities” is their way to keep the majority under their thumb.”
Yes, that’s pretty much my understanding. Our corporate masters pretty much “captured” the 1960s’ activism with affirmative action, their gamed White women-preferred variant. The fact that White guys were slowly humiliated, and traditional patterns of thought and behavior thrown into confusion helped to control wage and salary demands and political demands. Talented White guys, such as many posting and commenting here, still refuse to believe they’ve been made redundant.
“They will import Mestizo workers & Indian engineers because this is cheaper & easier than to negotiate with normal, white working- and middle-class.”
Something just occurred to me – Greg Clark in ‘A Farewell to Alms’ discusses how English entrepreneurs took textile looms to India, but could not get Indians to work like Englishmen – they failed. Whereas Indian immigrants to England adapt to English labour/productivity norms.
IE importing Indians & other low-productivity peoples into high-productivity nations works much better for the capitalists than trying to get those low-productivity peoples to improve their own countries.
I think this explains a lot of Third World immigration. It does not explain the purely suicidal policies of eg Germany & Spain in accepting hostile north African rape gangs, but it does help explain why the US elites favour allowing Latino immigration.
Looks like Warner pretty much copy/pasted William S Lind.
Exactly! The same goes for open borders and immigrants. Who needs them: Koch bothers, libertarian Silicon Valley. Who advocates for them: the so called leftist.
The left became the useful idiots of big business capitalists, bankers and ZOG and yet people cry it is communists and Marxist fault. At least the author of this article tries tries to make some decoupling.
It is all about as not seeing our true enemies, creating diversion, creating false enemies and dividing and rule. And people keep falling for it.
A closer look at Jordan Peterson presentations may show that he also is part of the problem not a solution. One thing is that he is pushing the meme of the extraordinary Jewish IQ which serves the purpose of explaining Jewish overrepresentation and power: Do not Balme Jews for being an elite in charge, not their fault are, they just happen to be smarter than you. Smarter than you. Smarter than you. Smarter than you. Smarter than you. Smarter than you. Smarter than you. Smarter than you.
Kevin MacDonald has recently written about Jordan Petersen.
“The historic Left…all of it…including communism…failed.”
Really?
So 8 hour work days, child labor , workers compensation were all failures?
I think the problem was when the left abandoned a market based approach to restricting labor and collective bargaining and started to use the power of government. All those government protections more or less destroyed the need to have unions. In other words ,unions became a publicly run institution. I think unions would have figured out mass immigration is probably hostile to their interests. Now the left wants to import voters which utterly ruins their negotiating power in the market.
The historic left was not always government empowered central planning. It was the private interests of labor which was quite successful into they turned over the welfare of the worker to the government.
However I would not lay all the blame on the left. The right wing has also used the same tools of government to make a mess of capital. Capital is under the control of rentiers that see to it that laws favor their profits without having to improve the product.
I’d say both the old labor left and the old capital right have both failed and fallen prey to the rentiers.
The greatest trick the reintier ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.
Its the FIRE sector against everyone.
Perhaps someone can explain what happened here?
http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN3.html#B.I,%20Ch.8,%20Of%20the%20Wages%20of%20Labour
http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN3.html#B.I,%20Ch.9,%20Of%20the%20Profits%20of%20Stock
http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN5.html#B.I,%20Ch.11,%20Of%20the%20Rent%20of%20Land
“He sometimes demands rent for what is altogether incapable of human improvement. Kelp is a species of sea-weed, which, when burnt, yields an alkaline salt, useful for making glass, soap, and for several other purposes. It grows in several parts of Great Britain, particularly in Scotland, upon such rocks only as lie within the high water mark, which are twice every day covered with the sea, and of which the produce, therefore, was never augmented by human industry. The landlord, however, whose estate is bounded by a kelp shore of this kind, demands a rent for it as much as for his corn fields.”
Where is the laborer? Where is the capitalist?
They are made to appear (to PC believers) redundant, but they are not really redundant. I heard one PC adept say that of course gays in a straight society look different, just like straight people would look in a gay society. Being a biologist, I told her that gay society would exist only for one generation, and then go extinct, as gay relationships do not produce children. She shut up, obviously not prepared to look at the problem from this angle. Fact is, all humans, straight and gay, are born due to straight sex. Biologically speaking, this is the end of the debate about what is normal.
BTW, putting forward the “rights” of sexual deviants has nothing to do with Marxism in any incarnation of that secular religion. From the biological viewpoint, sexual attraction to persons of your own sex, animals, dead bodies, elderly, or young children is a mental disorder. It cannot be considered normal, but people should not be discriminated against because of it: we don’t discriminate against schizophrenics because of their disease, but we protect the society from them, when their disease makes them dangerous to others. It’s the same logic as we don’t punish the blind for their affliction, but we don’t let them drive cars or pilot planes, either.
Good thread.
Although-
I assert that the Corporate ‘robber barrons’ ARE the new revolution, the new communist endpoint. So they push identity politics to weaken nations and consolidate their power, because, we all know, when there is only ONE company left, world peace and utopia will break out, suddenly.
Video Link
And we all should know who/what owns and runs “public” institutions.
Unions were sold out by their mafia bosses and now that the vilest mafia of all pretty much owns everything, unions are no longer needed by the owners.
I think you assert correctly. They co-opted any revolution of the proles, including the American revolution.
Anon–, I take your point, but you may be overthinking my comment.
What I had in mind by “redundancy” was the idea that sixty years ago a guy could reasonably expect to get a job that offered enough income to be a man, a husband, a father, and family breadwinner. These days the possibility of marriage, fatherhood, and breadwinnership seems remote. The robustness of the traditional male role in society is what’s redundant. Our corporate masters seem okay with that to the extent they even know the social consequences of what they’re doing.
Somebody needs to tell the identitarian Left: “You won, mo’ fo’.”
Communism that works? At least up to a degree to which the chinese are satisfied with. “So!” (JB Peterson) – there must be something in Marx’ writing, otherwise the Chinese wouldn’t adore it, no?
PS
A controversy broke out in Trier over the question wether or not the Chinese Marx statue should be displayed in public.
My proposal is: To accept and display the statue of Marx in a Trierian public space – under the condition, that the Chinese government accepts a gift from the city council of Trier in return: A statue of Trierian Philosopher Nikolaus von Kues – the one who discovered the “coincidentia oppositorum” principle: THe fact that etrem positions tend to “touch” = resemble one another. Nice place for theNikolaus von Kues statue could be the Emperor’s Palace in Peking, hehe. Or Tien an Men square.
Horseshoe effect?
Well, that’s gone, too. The corporate thieves keep the wages of males without college degree essentially stagnant for decades (while loudly extolling their “concern” about “minorities”). That’s yet another example how they use that “equality” smokescreen to line their pockets.
BTW, they are “left” in name only. That’s also a smokescreen.
I’ll bet another reason Peterson prefers to target the French Postmodernists is that he’s an Albertan. They have a chip on the shoulder to rival the Marianas Trench towards all things Francophone.
Well said, utu.
Though I do seriously doubt if Silicon Valley control freaks are really ‘libertarian’.
Cheers.
Communism entered America through democracy. Why beat around the bush?
Democratic ideals, taken to their logical conclusion, are essentially the same thing as communism (universalism and total equality).
There is a lengthy discussion about Peterson on the occidentalobserver if anyone’s interested.
Whenever an old communist dies they get big obituaries in the Jew media. The obits always go on and I’m about them fighting for black civil rights, nothing about serving in FDR’s administration or whatever, just fighting the KKK on behalf of blacks.
Most are dead now thanks be to God.
“Capitalists supported the goof”
Marx was hounded by, and jailed by, various elements of the ruling classes of French, Prussian, German and British society for decades. Even if some small elements of this feudal society identified with communist ideals at superficial levels does not mean Marx or “Marxism” was supported by capitalists. Capitalism and Communism are both offshoots of feudalism. They are actually more like cousins rather than opposites.
To which it should be added that political correctness is, specifically, the intolerance instigated and enforced by the state.
Across the West the dominant form of political correctness reflects the globalist imperative, which requires the destruction of the sovereign nation states and, in particular, the most powerful sovereign nation states, which include the white, or white-dominated nations.
The exact correlation between this globalist imperative and political correctness in America was confirmed by Hillary Clinton’s description of Trump supporters as:
It’s not difficult to unpack that:
– Racist means opposed to the destruction of the European majority in America through suppressed reproduction and mass replacement immigration;
– Sexist means pursuing the traditional male sexual role of getting wenches with child, to use the Shakespearian language no longer taught in the English-speaking world;
– Homophobic means opposed to the encouragement of non-reproductive sexual gratification;
– Xenophobic means opposed to mass immigration by people of an alien race and culture;
– Islamophobic means anti-Christian.
Clinton,thus provided a comprehensive definition of the anti-white, anti-natalist, anti-Christian, state-backed globalist hatred otherwise known in the West today as political correctness.
Thus, in their accounts of political correctness, both Peterson and Gottfried are engaged in reification, offering arcane explanations of a mundane instrument of political control, thereby distracting attention from the real enemy of Western civilization and the European peoples. But then that is what American journalism is all about, endless word spinning to obscure reality, as we have seen here, on Unz.com.
While you are right (even the communist Manifesto acknowledges this to a certain degree), for most Americans this thought is anathema. They stick to the received wisdom (constantly drummed in by the MSM) that capitalism is the acme of human development, whereas communism is a scarecrow.
Both ideas are total BS. Unless we end our history with WWIII (rats and cockroaches would be grateful), there is no highest point in human development, human society will keep changing. In fact, the New Testament contains many clearly communist ideas (e.g., Matthew 19:24 “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God”), but Americans, especially those who consider themselves Christians, would never acknowledge this. Psychiatrists say that split consciousness is usually a symptom of schizophrenia, but who listens to them?
your are correct and thank you.
However, and I should have made the point more clear, the marxist left (communism) died after 100 million murders (Conquest ) . Intellectually, if I can put it that way, Marxism (class conflict, dialectical materialism, Revolution, workers’ paradise one-party rule, vanguard party Leninist) died
The vanguard party and one-party rule lives on in the Orient (despotism again) because it suits Asian collectivist-personality. The one-party rule suits the jewish temperament too…rule by rabbis. The Semites generally see it this way too…hence muslim totalitarianism. Israel’s Likudniks are one-party theocrats. The Leninist vanguard party is very jewish and not very white.
Whites are the only race to have invented elections, free speech, and so on, going back to antiquity and Germany and Scandinavia.
The non-marxist left has arguably been around for a long time starting in the Reformation with peasant revolts, etc. Bismarck, Tory socialism, Fabian socialism…etc. came up with worker protections, etc. Fascism did the same thing.
But Gottfried was writing about the marxist left. The legacy of non-revolutionary socialism today is social democracy which is way out of control, just as globalism is way out of control…another matter.
Communism was largely jewish in impulse and “intellectually” and the Asians readily adopted it as well cuz it suits their temperaments.
So Marx was pretty anti-semitic and racist, and critics have remarked that Marx’s view of Capitalism was that it was very jewish. Capitalism, non-jewish variety, was another thing say this point of view.
— Then there is the problem of Gottfried as a jew unable to talk about the jewish character of marxism/communism as well as the whole ramshackle wackiness of cultural, post-structural marxism. Also Gottfried was and is a Libertarian of sorts as I understand it. This too is a jewish obsession….just another example of some IDEA replacing reality…obsession.
Evolution and Biology is not an IDEA. It is a scientific theory which so far stands up very well to the test of time. DNA science today is going to be the icing on the cake. All confirming biological reality.
biological reality in humans contains the socio-biological: traits, inheritance, adaptations to environment over a very long term, and steep inequality in persons and in races.
Cultural marxism, Race Equality….complete insanity leading to civil war.
Joe Webb
Was this at Occidental Quarterly? Would very much appreciate a link–can’t seem to find the article just now.
Yes. Or maybe, that is. Kinda, defintely. Because – there was no political left and right, when Nikolaus von Kues wrote down this incredibly thought inspiring formula “coincidentia oppositorum” in late middle ages/early renaisance Europe. But as so often: If a thought once is in the world, it starts a life of it’s own.
I for sure use it in the the Horseshoe effect way, too (= not only in the “Horshoe effect” way).
The clear minded Trierian doctor would have laughed out loud, I guess, if he would have come across this Horseshoe effect thought from what – the 1970ies (I’ve looked it up in wikipedia).
The thing is: The history of this “coincidentia oppositorum” idea is at least a case of a double, most likely triple+ rebirth (or reoccuring), because one of the “emblems” (=”thought pictures” of Walther Benjamin), which Nikolaus had in mind reads pretty much like a thought that is central to Theodor W. Adornos essay about “The Essay as Form”.
Now: The central idea of Adorno, the core of the essay in Adorno’s mind is, to be a circle within a circle – which lacks a central point.
– Now you keep that in mind for a second because I want to add the following: Heinrich Seuse, the most eloquent of all German mystics, had used exactly the same trope to describe – God.
Ok – the last round of remarks here: Nikolaus von Kues, who knew at least of Seuse’s teacher Meister Eckhart, used almost the same thought-picture (again: Benjamin) some fifty years after Seuse, and it seems (at least to me… sigh…), that the step from these words here to the “coincidentia oppositorum” formula, which made Nikolaus von Kues (almost….) famous to this day, is very small indeed:
” In the sphere I am everywhere the centre, as she, the circumference, is nowhere found”
Nikolaus von Kues (or von Trier…) had he idea too, that the universe is infinite – and he found a way (and reasons as well…) to count the pulse, what had not been proposed/done before him.
Unions never made any progress in the US until the Wagner Act (1935) — at which point they just became arms of the government. It was federal regulation that, for example, banned child labor and first ordained a minimum wage with time-and-a-half for overtime; these reforms were not the result of collective bargaining agreements. Please remember that, even at the peak of union membership in the US back in the 1950s, only about a third of the labor force belonged to one.
Labor unions by themselves, without government intervention on their side, mean very little. All The Man has to do is just bring in scabs (or immigrants) and it’s all over for the striking workers. Alternatively, he can just off-shore his factory to China, or wherever. Unless it’s illegal, what’s your union going to do about that?
Control of the government by worker-friendly elements is therefore the most important thing. Unions are good for socializing and building a sense of camaraderie, but not much more.
Scratch that–I just found it.
But still, he was supported by other elements of the ruling classes, especially from the US. Engels supported him as well.
Well no kidding. I never even thought of implying otherwise.
I’ve repeatedly stated something similar, and often quote the last sentence in Orwell’s “Animal Farm” which makes a similar point.
Anyway, he was a goof and a blowhard and like I said, no one would never have heard of him if he hadn’t had big $ backing.
Strange how the Koch brothers vs. Soros make up the entirety of the “Left” vs. “Right” narrative with respect to donors. Sheldon Adelson is vastly more influential as a Republican donor than the Kochs, yet he gets a fraction of the coverage. Paul Singer, vulture fund manager, homosexual “marriage” promoter, and major “conservative” donor? He doesn’t exist, as far as the media is concerned.
Same thing with non-Soros donors on the left: Haim Saban (Univision owner and major Dem donor) and many others are simply not part of the narrative, despite being at least as influential as Soros.
Odd.
And was this some sort of aberration? Did Lukacs go off the reservation by combining the “classically Marxist” role of theoretician for Kun’s Red Terror with pushing the “Cultural Marxist” poz on Hungarian children? Did his fellow commies view him as some sort of heretic for engaging in this behavior? Apparently not, since he played an important role in the Communist Hungarian government after WW2 as well, and is a respected Marxist “thinker” to this day.
Pretty much. That’s how PC/ Cultural Marxism works; how it accomplishes its underlying purpose (in a teleological sense). But how does it “work” internally? How does it “make sense” to its followers when it has so many obvious internal inconsistencies, and so little explanatory power with respect to observable reality?
1. People “understand” it, not in an intellectual sense, but in a sociopolitical one. Like Havel’s greengrocer in “The Power of the Powerless.” They understand that (at least ostensible) support for an obviously-incoherent belief system is how you signal your loyalty to the progressive establishment. This message is constantly reinforced through the power of simple repetition, associative conditioning, and visual propaganda.
2. This is the best model of the crippled “moral reasoning” of prog true believers that I’ve seen so far. Seems rather weird; almost alien, but it fits the known facts.
thoughtprison-pc.blogspot.com
Is this supposed to be “Islamophobic means Christian?”
Alternatively, “racist” means “White” (or perhaps “non-self-hating White”).
Remember:
1. All Whites are “racist”
2. “Racism” must be eradicated
3. Any questions?
Of course, even the Conquest version tries blame it all on Stalin, downplaying the intrinsically-murderous nature of the regime in its earlier stages under Lenin and Trotsky.
Yep. What Kevin MacDonald would call a “Jewish intellectual movement.” The existence of many true-believing goy Marxists does not in any way falsify this very simple point. There are many true-believing Scientologists as well, and for them Scientology may have a particular purpose, but it’s still true that for L. Ron Hubbard, the purpose of Scientology was to gain wealth and power and avoid taxes.
Exactly. Purely abstract, complex systems of thought, which attempt to redefine and distort reality, characterized by worship of particular gurus, and suppression of dissent. That these purely-abstract systems tend to have effects that are destructive to goy societies, and advance the interests of Jews, is purely a cohencidence. To point out that the underlying purpose of these belief systems might perhaps be better understood by looking at their real world effects, than by attempting to engage with them entirely on their own terms, using their own concepts and terminology, would be blasphemous, of course.
Of course, there’s likely some validity to the moldbuggian characterization of progressivism as a sort of godless Calvinism run wild, too. Both can be true — they are not mutually exclusive.
This is can be a useful way of looking at things. Both Francis Parker Yockey and Moldbug would fully endorse this statement. The corollary to this is that the Stalinists, with their “socialism in one country” heresy, were the ones who wandered off the true path — the Trots/ Cultural Marxists/ Frankfurt School were the main stream. Post-war “anti-Communism” was really anti-Stalinism/ pro-globalism.
We know it’s not true, though. Because when McCarthy endeavored to point out the many Communists within the US establishment (though he misconstrued them as “Soviet agents”), he was not only crushed, but his surname became a byword; a warning for anyone who might consider naming Communists in the future. Thus clearly demonstrating that there were no Communists with the power to oppose him, of course.
Any similarity between this taboo against naming Communists when they wish to masquerade as something else, and a similar taboo against naming the members of another group when they wish to be thought of as simply “white,” is purely cohencidental, of course.
“Why should we think that Communism did not enter North America under its own banner? The CPUSA had 100,000 members by the end of World War II and loads of fellow-travelers who had profound influence on American culture and education.”
He’s just trying to reinforce the post-WW2/ early Cold War narrative shift, with its (very successful) retcon of the history of Communism in the US. It’s a way of signaling basic loyalty to The Narrative, while appearing to dispute some of its more recent aspects.
Communism in the US in the 30s and 40s was, of course, not some fringe movement, and not one with influence merely on “culture and education,” but one supported by much of the US establishment — especially the foreign policy establishment. Once the Soviet Union was the enemy, we had some very powerful people whose past history was… inconvenient, to say the least. The sudden shift to “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia” caught some by surprise, and some made the mistake of believing that the truth mattered more than The Narrative. Some even persisted in pointing out some of the more obvious inconsistencies in this sudden shift– that’s what happened to McCarthy. Since then, everyone understands now that publicly pointing out inconvenient truths makes you a “McCarthyist,” and that being a “McCarthyist” is a Very Bad Thing. QED.
It’s also important to understand the difference between Communism taken seriously as an ideology (nonsensical) and Communism as a useful tool. Compare to Salafism/ Wahhabism — does anyone at State, or CIA (or Mossad/ Likud etc.) “believe” in Wahhabism? Of course not. Do they support Wahhabist/ Salafist groups? Just as obviously, yes.
thanksJames.
And, please explain your ” Of course, even the Conquest version tries blame it all on Stalin, downplaying the intrinsically-murderous nature of the regime in its earlier stages under Lenin and Trotsky.”
It has been years since I read Conquest. Are you saying he gave the jews a pass? ( comparable to Gottfried )
—–
Another metaphysical perhaps impulse: The Grand Inquisitor of Dostoyevski and his “Miracle , Mystery, and Authority” definition of what people want. It stays with me after decades have passed.
I used to say that for the Left, the Miracle was Revolution, the Mystery was dialectical materialism, and Authority was the Leninist party.
Today, the Miracle is racial Equality, the Mystery is (White guy ) racism and how we pull it off, and Authority is Jews and of course their legions of shabbas goyem.
To add some spice to the Simplicity of the above, Globalism’s money seduces white elites while the jews are not interested in mere money. We know what they are interested in. Also, a dash of White genetic Altruism is thrown into the mix for a particularly toxic mix.
——- Do whites need this magic? Can we live with biological reality? Will biology finally save us anyway? Cunning of History department, etc.
Peterson’s clearly wrong about the history of Communism in America, and Gottfried is certainly correct to point this out:
Probably because it’s less of a direct challenge to the aspect of the narrative which holds that Cultural Marxism is a “conspiracy theory,” and that mentioning the Frankfurt School in any sort of negative context is somehow “antisemitic.” Of course, Derrida was actually (((French))), but that’s not widely known, so it’s all good.
But the Gottfried position seems to be a 2-stage “no true Scotsman” attempt to deny the obvious connection between 1. classical Marxism and Cultural Marxism, and 2. The earlier Frankfurt School version of the poz, and the current, somewhat more insane version. “Those people were never real Marxists! They were heretics, so they don’t count.” “Yeah, Adorno and Marcuse were determined to undermine and destroy goy societies, but they wouldn’t have gone this far!”
But to see the relationship of Communism to the poz, it’s important to go back to the pre-Stalin USSR. Stalinism was a more goyishe version of Communism. In the 1920s, Bolshevism was very anti-family, anti-marriage, pro-abortion, pro-sodomy, etc. And Trots have always continued to support the poz. The more culturally conservative aspects of Communism in the USSR date to the 1930s — to the Stalinist backlash against the Cultural Marxist aspects of Trotskyism. Worldwide revolution vs. “socialism in one country” is another aspect of this basic difference.
Or look at Magnus Hirschfeld, his connections to Communism, and his notorious Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin. Promoting sodomy, “transgenderism,” etc. in the 1920s and 30s.
It’s merely another version of Marxism, with the same goal — to control goy societies. That it destroys them in the process is merely incidental. The “long march through the institutions” always has to move forward. It’s inherent in the very nature of the “progress” paradigm. Baked in the cake. Of course today’s poz is more “advanced” than yesterday’s poz. Like a dictator’s personality cult — there’s an intrinsic ratchet effect. To show adequate levels of loyalty to the glorious leader, or to the progressive establishment, the signal has to be more intense in the current year than what was required last year.
The content intensifies, but the form remains the same. For example — The narrative of The Authoritarian Personality can be simplified as: behaviors that most people in a healthy society would understand as normal and pro-social are inherently “fascist,” and broken antisocial behavior is “anti-fascist.” Now? Borders, and any sort of healthy ethnic/ racial identity are “fascist” (at least for the target — Europeans and their diaspora); open borders for White countries is “anti-fascist.” Healthy sexual behavior/ the formation of normal families is fascist; paraphilias and sexual pathology are anti-fascist. It’s the same system, with the same basic target — destroying any healthy family and social institutions of the host society.
It’s not about you. The plural of anecdote is not data. And of course, the effect of reading that kind of crap varies greatly with the age of the reader, and with the setting. 18 year olds are much more vulnerable to this kind of perverse intellectual influence than older folks.
You’re welcome.
In a fairly subtle way. Mostly a matter of emphasis. He doesn’t come out and say “Trotsky and Lenin were the good guys,” but he focuses on Stalin.
There’s no question that Conquest was a bright guy, and that he wrote some useful stuff. But let’s take a look at the ideological trajectory of his life for a moment, shall we?
wikipedia:
“In 1937, after studying at the University of Grenoble, Conquest went up to Oxford, joining both the Carlton Club and, as an “open” member, the Communist Party of Great Britain.”
Typical for members of the US/ UK establishment at the time, of course.
“In 1948 Conquest joined the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), a “propaganda counter-offensive” unit created by the Labour Attlee government in order to “collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to friendly journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially and otherwise, anticommunist publications.” The IRD was also engaged in manipulating public opinion.”
Excellent sense of timing. Converted at exactly the same time that the party line changed. Stalin went from “Good Old Joe” to the evil enemy of the Cold War period in the space of a couple of years. Did Stalin’s nature change? Did Conquest (and the rest of the US/ UK establishment) suddenly discover, simultaneously, that Stalin was a “bad guy?” Rather unlikely. Narrative shift/ retcon.
Fun fact: Stalin was the only Soviet Communist leader, from Lenin to Gorbachev, with whom Armand Hammer did not have a personal relationship. Does that mean that Stalin was a “good guy?” Of course not. But it’s… interesting.
Real anti-Communists? Well, look what happened to McCarthy — and Francis Parker Yockey.
“In 1981, Conquest moved to California to take up a post as Senior Research Fellow and Scholar-Curator of the Russian and Commonwealth of Independent States Collection at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where he remained a Fellow”
The “conservative” Hoover Institution. Antony Sutton was fired by the Hoover Institute for writing “National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union.” Kerensky, the man who handed over Russia to the Bolsheviks, then waltzed off to the safety of the US, had a lifetime sinecure there. (See also Sutton’s “The Best Enemy Money Can Buy,” and “Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development”)
Conquest has some useful things to say about Communism in the USSR, but his viewpoint is still “Communism was useful as an ally… until it was useful as an enemy” one. His “conservatism” is still liberal internationalism.
Good way to put it. Time will tell.
The most important way in which PC makes sense is that it justifies hate.
Hatred is the most powerful motivating force in politics. And people especially love to hate when they’re with the mob, whether the mob is stringing up a nigger, terrorizing whitey, or heiling Hitler. And once the elite have the masses hooked on the politics of hate, the masses are never going to develop a rational political outlook based on objective reality or logic. They’re primed and ready for whatever the elite demand, whether it be gassing Jews, or genociding their own people but the destruction of their fertility and the annihilation of their religion and culture.
Prof. Gottfried should think about reviewing the new biography of Francis Parker Yockey:
https://arktos.com/product/yockey-a-fascist-odyssey/
Counter-Currents would normally have a done a review of this book, but they’re involved in something like a blood feud with the publisher.
One of your other articles on this site is about Cultural Marxism taking over Conservatism Inc.
This is a very common leftist trope.
“Those people over there are opposed to me, not because they have different perceived interests (as an individual or group), or a different ideology, or a different value system, but because they are just evil haters“. A very convenient (and self-serving) explanation.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, not even the most extreme groups, such as genocidal Jewish supremacists, actually perceive themselves to be “haters,” motivated by sheer hatred. They may see themselves as trying to “heal the world”… even as they destroy it. Or they identify as part of a different group than you do, and see themselves as acting to defend their own group interests from a perceived threat. Or as promoting an internally-coherent ideology, or a value system, that is simply different from your own, and that they see as self-evidently “good.” Some of these value systems (like the PC one) may be stranger than others, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.
It’s comforting to think of others as simply bad guys motivated solely by hatred; but as a model for politics, and for various group interactions, it lacks explanatory power.
“Labor unions by themselves, without government intervention on their side, mean very little. All The Man has to do is just bring in scabs (or immigrants) and it’s all over for the striking workers. Alternatively, he can just off-shore his factory to China, or wherever. Unless it’s illegal, what’s your union going to do about that?”
You are discounting , as people often do, that big business was using the powers of government. Labor unions were simply on the wrong end of government intervention.
All Unions had to do was remove this power. I recall the antitrust case with Microsoft and I was amazed at the sheer ignorance of the right in that case. Without government they would be left on their own to protect their patents , trade marks , and contracts. All the US citizenry would have to do is not give them this aid when moving to China.
“Control of the government by worker-friendly elements is therefore the most important thing. Unions are good for socializing and building a sense of camaraderie, but not much more.”
And then power swung too far into the hands of the Unions after that point now didn’t it? They began abusing the same power that abused them.
” This article does agreat service by debunking the myth that postmodernism, identity politics & political correctness are linked to Marxism”. :Hogwash.
Okay so now all of the “Frankfurter” are to viewed as not having been Marxists/communists, is this waht you are saying.
I was living in West-End Frankfurt 68/69, and was more than familiar with the leftist scene : Cafe’ Voltaire, Klein Bockenheimer Strasse, etc. All of the occupants, hang-arounders, “Dauerstudenten” , early “greens”, perfessers, medicos, social workers, and on and on : They were all fricking Marxists and the “general outbreak” of 60’s “counter culture” , with it’s main protagonists : Rudy Duschke, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the nut-cases who ended up in the RAF : They were ALL Goddamn Communists, and the present counter-culture handle is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to cover up their actual motivations, and to euphemize their totalitarian, violent Marxist/communistic zeal.
AJM “Mensa” qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet, and pro jazz musician.
Germany being the most neurotic, twisted, country on planet mirth :
Every town of size incorporating a =
“Karl Marx Strasse” : A monument to an insane pseudo-philosopher, a madman, who “teachings”
precipitated, catalysted the most untold suffering and bloodshed this abberated planet has ever known.
In a sane nation, who the hell would ever dream up such an utter lunacy, as naming streets after someone such as KM?
The great mystery to be solved is : Did he, KM, expect or hope that his concepts would end up producing such horrid results.
The Germans have endowed the world, in the last hundred years, with more bonkers “political wisdom” than
mankind can ever handle, add to this the lunacy of S Freud, und an”Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen”, and we then have : “Genug ist genug” : “Enough is enough” of Teutonic mind-set.
AJM “Mensa” qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet, and pro jazz artist.
So you are saying that the big-wheels who run capitalist entities cannot possibly be communist inspired or have communistic goals.
You are terribly wrong my friend.
AJM “Mensa” qualified since 1973, airborne trained US army vet, and pro Jazz musician.
Okay for the first wise-guy who says : But they were Hebrews : Marx, Freud, and co.
Yeah they were Jews, but up until that point in time, german Jews did in fact look upon themselves as : Germans, and they in fact were quite patriotic , having served in the front lines ww1.
AJM
Damn I have finally met my foil.
Hats off to you sir, you know wtf you are talking about.
AJM “Mensa” qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet, and pro jazz artist.
Dear oh dear, we ARE a fanatic aren’t we ? In your RUSH to stick the boot into your political enemies you failed to even grasp my comment. If you had bothered to read, the very next sentence after your quote is:
“The author accurately places the link [ to marxism] back to the Frankfurt school.”
After so many years, still with your head under the bed looking for reds. Sad.
at the risk of boring some of you who have heard it before….
We are living in the Times of complete failure of economic determinism intellectually, and its asordid companions of Govm’t Programs for The People.
Of curse, The People is now Colored People, etc.
The Other compleat Failure is Racial Uplift, on which we have spent (jewyorktimes data) one trillion dollars since 1964.
Because of these Twin Economic and Racial failures, the Revolution can only turn to pure hatred of its enemies….starting with white men.
So, Hate now has replaced all rational arguments. There is nothing left to Fix. Nothing Works, like school Programs that this time will work, or economic/jobs reforms.
The Coloreds are going nuts, some of our women too, and Trump raves along with the others on Race Equality Crusades, etc.
Total and Complete Failure of Liberalism and usual Conservatism. What’s next? The Hatreds will either burn themselves out, or This Is It….(not what Alan Watts meant in the Zen context.)
The country (US) overrun with darkies…38 % now, including the yellow perils. Whites are gonna go berserk…the Return of the Suppressed….racial identification, and Whites got way most of the guns, 82% of the 300 million rifles, handguns, and shotguns….y.
When Words are turned into bullets….bullets replace words.
Joe Webb
You don’t think those who call half of Trump supporters “a basket of deplorables, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, you name it…” don’t enjoy hating Trump supporters? You don’t think it motivates those people when it comes to marking a ballot paper? You don’t think it affects the behavior and speech of most European people when they are confronted by the evidence of a government policy that constitutes a program of white ethnic cleansing?
What world do you live in? Hating Trump supporters is what the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, CNN, WaPo, etc. do on a daily basis — or in the case of the broadcaster, pretty much an hourly basis. The same is true of the conversation in just about any university faculty lounge. Elsewhere and at other times it is or was the hatred of the Jew, the capitalist, the Palestinian, the Prods, the Catholics, or the blacks.
Hatred is the most fundamental driving force in modern politics. If you haven’t grasped the explanatory power of manipulated hatred you simply don’t understand the most basic fact of political life.
I think you do not go all the way down to the basic: fear of the stranger. This is rooted in biological life, especially in humans. Only children, and juveniles to some large degree. do not fear the stranger.
Boys fear the stranger much more than girls. Little girls are particularly vulnerable to predation.
Socio-biology describes the fundamental of group/racial solidarity as the correlate of fear of the stranger as well as equipping us to recognize genetic similarity. Dissimilarity keeps races apart.
The fact that Whites, (dunno about Asians, but I do see Chinese women now and then with black men…slow on the learning curve I guess),…that whites in the bottom quintile of whiteness, will marry a mulatto or a black in Brazil, gives the answer to the riddle….they are as dumb as
the mulatto and as sexually randy.
Other races are always stranger, in more or less degree, which. is why adults stay away from them for the most part. Except Whites .
So Hatred is Not the Absolute Fundamental, it is one of the corollaries of self and group/race preservation. Someone comes thru your window, or over your border without permission, you kill them or otherwise neutralize them. This is common sense and can be accomplished with or without violence or hatred, depending on your resources. Only Whites in our Time have fooled themselves into racial integration…like myself when I was a young fool. It is also our surplus altruism.
Sex can drive two races together, like Indian squaws in the Americas with Spaniards in the South, and a tiny bit in the North with anglo types. Mostly we brought our women with us in the north.
Joe Webb
I think I agree with your criticism of Gottfried, but wanted to say that he is definitely NOT a recovering commie. I’m pretty sure he’s been far right all his life.
I think the real reason Gottfried sees things the way he does is that he defines ideologies very narrowly entirely in terms of their theoretical content. Since he’s a historian of ideas, that makes sense. But the rest of us tend to define them at least partly in terms of their general intended effect. I don’t think Gottfried is wrong per se; everything factual he says in this article is true. It’s just that the heat he directs at Peterson seems misplaced because Peterson is defining ideologies more in terms of what their intended effect is.
Peterson and the most of the rest of us see the new anti-white left as a continuation of the old anti-capitalist left because we see these as different manifestations of the same destructive force. But Gottfried looks strictly at the content of the ideologies and sees two totally different things.
Anyway, as a Gottfried fan who sort of agrees with your criticism here, that’s my take.
Communism weaseled its way into Europe by way of the Jew Testament.
Let’s check if Mises is correct.
He surely is.
Note that Marx’s famous maxim is lifted nearly word for word from a couple passages in the Jew Testament.
That explains the stirring defense of the USSR by Pius XII and John Paul II and why Poland is communist to this very day, while never-christian China has rightly repudiated the doctrine of Marx.
Reading my source that upset you would serve you better than your snark. I’ll help.
The current pope is much more in alignment with what is actually written in the Jew Testament. Which so far you’ve avoided discussing.
Funny how nobody managed to see it for 2000 years, including Marx.
Yes, this is exactly why JPII’s efforts failed so completely. The correct commandment should not have been
but
Marx’s infamous maxim is lifted nearly word-for-word from the Jew Testament, which you’re ineptly trying to dodge.
Jew Testament:
• “each according to his ability” (Matt. 25:15)
• “all things were common property to them…and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need” (Acts 4:32,35)
Marx:
• “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
As far as serving two masters, you can’t serve the Gentile’s G_d (God, Gad, Gott, Godin, Gotin, Wotan, Woden) and the Jew’s Jehovah. Jehovah hates the Gentile’s G_d, as Isaiah 65:11 says.
And even Rabbi Jesus himself hate’s the Goy’s means of patriarchal political organization. (Luke 22:25)
Time to decide. Going to de-Jew?
If caring about the poor makes one a communist, then call me a communist. But, seriously, blaming Christianity for communism is like blaming Islam for gay marriage. Actually, it makes less sense, because Islam has historically had a problem with sodomy, whereas the closest historic Christians ever came to having a problem with Communism was Ball and the Lollards, and really their greatest protest was against serfdom– not something, I take it, you want to reproduce?
Not to mention that the verse is given in Matthew as:
The Jews love this book so much they are instructed to burn it when possible and to believe that its chief character is eternally immersed in a vat of boiling excrement. Fortunately nowadays most are too Westernized to accept that degree of idiocy.
Look, I’m not averse to actual debate, but claiming a “communist Jesus” is like claiming a “pacifist Jesus” or a “Talmudic Jesus” or some such idiocy. I will leave you with this excerpt from Lewis quoted by a more patient commenter than myself.
A pacifist Jesus is quite easy to claim too. Have you never read the Jew Testament? Resist not evil? Turn the other cheek? Now who’s the idiot?
Jesus’ cowardly, effeminate pacifism is why my Nordic ancestors called Jesus the Hvítakristr (Lily-Livered Christ.)
But I bet you stick with the “Jews First” (Romans 1:16) cult, because you too are cowardly and effeminate. You have to be cowardly and effeminate to worship a foreign Jewish King of Israel (John 1.49) instead of expelling the foreigner.
Since the ‘protocols’ emerged before the series of revolutions backed by western bankers, we will never know for sure if those rich jews would have been so keen about erecting a communist empire without that preamble. All we know is that things were made to look like Russia under the Tsar was the worst enemy of the jews.
(Despite the fact that Britain simultaneously was busy covertly encouraging jewhatred in Germany and France)
Since there is a high probability, continental freemasons had been writing several versions of the protocols over half a century since the mid 1800s, it isnt likely the final version from Sergei Nilus was representative of Russia but rather of networks remotely directed by Russias enemies.
There is however an abundance of evidence pointing to Britain as the major mover and shaker during the upheavals of 19th century, and also in connection with the french revolution, and several other events falsely described as genuine popular risings, we have a suspect which the bulk of the commenters are happily unaware of.
Dig deeper folks, dont be the suckers of empire. Like those bankers. They weren’t known for their learning.
Communism weakened the competitiveness of the targeted nation since the middle class was made into a class-enemy. Marx was hired for that purpose.
The Us parlamentarians were told it was good for the Us economy to prevent Russia from becoming a capitalist competitor. And this was around the corner. Stolypin said give us twenty years of peace, but he didnt get that. Similarwise with China. The angloamerican establishment agents of influence were adamount about preventing capitalism in China.
Mr. Peterson relishes his position as a “free thinker” taking down the Goliaths of cliche and the development of modernist thinking. However, he is nothing more than a cultural conservative envious of the rise of a different attitude towards class, and a figure that reveals the old shibboleths are not very useful when a culture is in conflict. He sounds like the tired intellectuals of the 1950s who couldn’t see the cultural change ignited by the Civil Rights movement or the protests over the Vietnam war. His views often ignore historical context as if ideas grow in a dark closet somewhere in academia. His attacks on PC culture reflect the stand-up comedian’s tirade over audiences that don’t appreciate their jokes, jokes that are essentially grounded in insult. In fact, since Don Rickles, comedians have taken to believe that the comedy of insult is valid and honest. They call it “freedom of speech” but its still insult. People who never had to confront the snarky jest from the majority culture could hardly understand why a black person hates the word “nigger” just like the Italian who hates the word “wop” or the Jew “kike”. I do not suggest these people be banned, but I understand those who boycott their presence of a campus. If you want to insult someone, fine, but don’t expect a general acceptance of your presence.