Fundamentalist Marxism

Obviously, whenever you read a text which is thousands, or hundreds of years old -- or maybe even decades old when it comes to economics, or even years or months -- even if you rate the text very highly, you will also discard a lot. Because people -- some people, at least -- learn as time goes by.

Then there are fundamentalists: people who regard certain texts as perfect. Most well-known are religious fundamentalists, who are generally unbearable even to the other people in the same religion.

But Marxists are also accused of fundamentalism. I don't know whether it's true of most Marxists, but, Jesus, Lord from above -- so to speak -- it's true of a lot of them. There are a lot of dull-witted Marxists who spend what seems to be their entire lives denouncing anyone who claims to see any contradictions between what Marx wrote, and reality. 

And I don't think that Marx himself can be excused from blame for this. He uses terms like "inevitable" and "immutable" a lot.

It seems that people noticed this similarity to religious fundamentalism in Marx pretty early. In 1847 -- a year before the Communist Manifesto -- Marx published a "Communist Catechism," a satire of the questions and answers which children memorize in order to become members of the Catholic Church, but for Communists instead of Catholics. Ha-ha-ha, not as funny as you thought, Karl!

There's a lot of worthwhile stuff in what Marx wrote. There's a lot of worthwhile stuff in the Bible. There's also a certain amount of nonsense in both the Bible and in Marx. That in itself is unremarkable. Nobody's perfect. Compare the Bible and Marx to other writing done around the same times, and they're really not all that bad.

What is bad, and very unusual, in the case of the Bible and in the case of Marx, are the huge numbers of sheer idiots who cling fiercely, blindly, stupidly, to the worst parts.

Buy books by Karl Marx at Amazon: https://amzn.to/4fXCaip

Dream Log: Western Movie

I dreamed I was an actor in a Western movie. Two families were feuding, one headed by Brian Dennehy, the other by Johnny Depp. I was playing Johnny's loyal cousin and number-two in our family's chain of command. 

The two families' houses were very close: sometimes within a quarter mile or so, at other times literally parts of the same building. The fight scenes were often room-by-room gun battles.

For the most part, everything in the movie, countryside, sets, decor, costumes, was classic Hollywood Western, inspired by a notion of the late 19th century. However, my revolvers, instead of the historically-accurate long-barreled single-action variety, requiring that the hammer be cocked before every shot, were double-action snubnosed .38's of the kind seen used by plainclothed cops in mid-20th-century movies and TV. The hammer on a double-action revolver can be cocked between shots, resulting in a trigger which shoots with a lighter pull required -- single-action -- or the shooter can pull harder on the trigger with cocking it first, and the gun will still fire -- double-action. I was packing two of those snubnosed .38's, each about half as long as an authentic single-action revolver of the Old West. 

Partway through the script, Dennehy's character devolved into a plain coward, and the action consisted mostly of us chasing him through his, house, firing enormous amounts of bullets at him -- and always missing, or else the movie would have been over too soon. 

At one point we had him cornered inside a glassed-walled segment of a room in his house. Several of us stood outside the glass-walled compartment, about a dozen feet square, and pumped dozens of bullets at the glass. The glass not only didn't shatter -- it was barely scratched. I felt this to be a particularly unrealistic bit of movie-making, and began to lose faith that this might turn out to be a good movie.

Suddenly all of the actors, those in Dennehy's family and in Depp's, stopped acting, and instead they just sat around and turned into Marxist jerks who were unkindly, and wholly inaccurately, criticizing me. They all agreed that I was the sort of person who would go to Milan during peak tourist season, fetishizing the ultra-expensive cars of the super-rich, and their boats on Lake Como.

Their criticism could barely have been less accurate: I don't like crowds, I like crowds of tourists even less, I don't envy ultra-cars, in fact I find them rather ridiculous, I lost my fascination for them decades ago, and the next time I really enjoy being on a boat will the first time.

But before I could begin to defend myself from this inaccurate Marxist criticism, I woke up.

Buy movies starring Johnny Depp on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4gVEM1K

Critical Race Theory

News & Guts reports:

"While dozens of Republican lawmakers around the country speak out against critical race theory, there have been questions about whether these politicians actually know what they are fighting against."

Imagine how much time and energy might have been spared if more people had taken a similar approach with Jordan Peterson and postmodernism and Marxism!

Perhaps some people learned from the case of Peterson, and are better prepared this time around.

Who knows. It would be nice to think that there are people out there somewhere who are actually learning things, and therefore behaving in a more sensible and effective manner than they used to. 

Do Peterson and Republican wingnuts and similar idiots actually have a new positive effect, by acquainting people with things so as postmodernism and Marxism and critical race theory, things with which they were previously unfamiliar?

I should probably end this post pretty soon, I seem to be in danger of getting carried away by silly amounts of optimism. I like optimism generally but I believe that it can be overdone. 

Although I must mention before ending, for the benefit of those who haven't already read it in this blog, that it actually took Jordan Peterson for me to finally learn what postmodernism is and that I am a postmodernist, even though I'm about a year older than Jordan Peterson.

It takes what it takes, whatever it is.

Jordan Peterson Accidentally Helped Me Realize I'm a Post-Modernist

Can it really be less than 24 hours since I began to read Derrida? Yes. It be.

About a week and a half ago, I first started to notice the existence of Jordan Peterson, in the remarks of otherwise seemingly sedate and reasonable people expressing extreme distaste for him. I soon heard Peterson, on YouTube, describing what he asserted was postmodernism. I was hazy about what exactly postmodernism was, but not so hazy that I couldn't see that what Peterson was saying had to be inaccurate.

More precisely: Peterson is warning us all about neo-Marxist postmodernists. He claims neo-Marxist postmodernists want to destroy Western civilization. That they say people belong in groups determined by their ethnicity and gender, and that all these groups are condemned to war against each other forever.

So I did what I could have done decades ago: I turned to actual Marxists and postmodernists for their definitions of Marxism and postmodernism, and learned that, outside of the imaginations of people like Peterson and his fans, neo-Marxist postmodernists don't exist: a defining characteristic of postmodernism is a skepticism toward all meta-narratives, and Marxism IS one of those very meta-narratives.

Now: Marxists and postmodernists will agree about SOME things. Such as that Jordan Peterson is constantly making stuff up and selling it at high prices as invaluable truth. But any reasonable person of any political or philosophical tendency will see that, if he or she takes a little time and effort to examine the matter.

A huge bell went off in my head, because, for decades, I had been skeptical toward all meta-narratives. I'm always insisting that things are more complicated than that. You know that episode of "The Simpsons" where Lisa is reading some Buddhist literature, and has a sudden epiphany and yells, "I'M A BUDDHIST!" Same thing happened to me, except I didn't yell, and I realized I'm a postmodernist, not a Buddhist.

Yesterday, I began reading the 40th anniversary revised edition of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's English translation of Derrida's On Grammatology, with an introduction by Judith Butler and a new Afterword by Spivak, and, people: these are my peeps.

And we don't want to destroy Western civilization or war against all other groups. Derrida is a total Western-civilization-phile from Homer to Heidegger.

My advice, besides checking out Derrida and Spivak and Butler, is to not believe anything Peterson says. About anything. At all. Ever. When Peterson disses a dead writer like Derrida or a living one like Butler, READ THAT WRITER.

Man, wouldn't it be a huge irony if Jordan Peterson, of all people, unintentionally caused people to read more good books?

It was with some reluctance that I sought out an English translation of a book by Derrida, rather than the French original, but undergraduate French classes were a long, long time ago. In the case of Of Grammatology, I was fortunate -- we all are fortunate -- because Spivak, the translator of Of Grammatology, is a tremendous writer in her own right. I have no idea, yet, what the quality of other English translations of Derrida or other French postmodernists might be.

Jordan Peterson is Not an Intellectual, He Just Plays One on YouTube

PZ Meyers sez we should call Jordan Peterson what he is: an anti-intellectual. I'm down with that. (And it's nice to be able to agree with PZ Meyers about something for a change.)

This takedown of Peterson by Nathan J Robinson in Current Affairs is wonderful. I take exception with Robinson referring to Peterson as an intellectual. But Robinson makes it clear that he uses the term very loosely:

"In a reasonable world, Peterson would be seen as the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train. But we do not live in a reasonable world."

And I also take issue with Robinson's... okay, I was about to say that I take issue with Robinson's characterization of Peterson as "the intellectual we deserve," and giving some of the responsibility for Peterson's success to the sorry state of the Left -- but then I remembered the Occupy movement and their position that "it's okay not to have goals" and how that has always struck me as a particularly poor attitude for a (supposedly) political movement to take.

But in this post, I'm about accentuating the upside. I see intellectuals (real ones) being energized by Peterson. If anyone ever could energize and unite Marxists, postmodernists, intersectional feminists, philosophers in general, English teachers, evolutionary biologists, comparative mythologists and other (real) intellectuals who normally don't necessarily all get along so well with each other, then surely it's Mr Go Clean Up Your Room There Bucko. If any one person ever could inspire us to go grab the public by its mental lapels and explain to them just who really does and does not deserve to be called an intellectual, it's Peterson, with his constant and thorough misrepresentation of who we are and what we do and say and want.

Oh and by the way, let me take the opportunity to address the reason I've seen most often proposed by writers on the Right for the Left's hostility to Peterson: the amount of money that he makes. That's absurd. George Clooney has made over a billion dollars so far, many times as much as Peterson, and we're not pissed off at him. Because Clooney isn't constantly talking out of his ass.

I'd also like to address the excuses so often being made for him by critics on the Left: he's not so bad, they say. Yes, very many of his fans are alt-right and antisemitic and brimming with toxic sexism and otherwise atavistic, but he's not far-right. How much longer will the non-Right keep giving Peterson this thoroughly undeserved concession? Wake up and smell the barbed wire: he's far-right. That's why all of those fans of his are far-right (and very often deny that they are, perhaps oftener than not). I know of only one admiring description of Peterson from the Left -- except, to be precise, it's from an author, a fellow mythologist, who sez "I'm a Leftist and I like Peterson." I'm not sure whether anyone else sez that that guy is a Leftist.

Jordan Peterson, Marxism and Postmodernism

Jordan Peterson is a horse's ass, a pseudo-intellectual, someone that stupid people can follow and believe that they're engaging in intellectual discourse.

One of Peterson's favorite topics are the neo-Marxist postmodernists who have taken over our campuses and are busy enslaving the minds of our youth. Peterson goes into very great detail about the history, motives and goals of this movement of neo-Marxist postmodernists, as if he were a great authority on the subject of neo-Marxist postmodernism.

Here's an example of how far Peterson is from being a real intellectual, or a real authority on anything at all: there is no such thing as a Marxist postmodernist, neo-Marxist or not, and there is no such thing as a postmodernist Marxist. One of the most central and basic features of postmodernism is a skepticism toward all-encompassing theories of society. Marxism IS such an all-encompassing theory: namely, the theory that all human history has been the history of economic class struggle. Marxism insists that it all boils down to that. Postmodernism, in response to Marxism and to any other theory which insists that person A responds in manner X because of condition 1, for example, Freudianism and its insistence that all human behavior can be reduced, ultimately, to the sexual impulse, says that people are free and can respond differently, that they are not bound by economic or sexual forces or by any other universal conditions. Postmodernism is always insisting that things are a little more complicated.

As for historical context, postmodernism arose in the form of philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida in opposition to a Marxist domination of certain parts of French academia in the 1960's. At the time, the Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was about as popular as Peterson is in the US right now. Fortunately for France, Sartre was very far from being a horse's ass.

But why take my word for any of this? Some Marxist works written in opposition to postmodernism include Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism: The Cultural logic of Late Capitalism, David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity, Perry Anderson's The Origins of Postmodernity, and Alex Callinicos' Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critque

As to Peterson's assertion that we can learn from the social hierarchies of lobsters, if you're not already laughing out loud, you can ask an evolutionary biologist about that one. Probably just about any evolutionary biologist would do.

I Can't Find A Pope Francis Effect In The Book Market Yet

Rush called Francis a Marxist. Francis makes statements about the rich and the poor which certainly sound more Leftist than Rightist. Now he's said, "I know many Marxists who are good people." In angry opposition to Francis, or so he thinks, a rightwing freemarket laissez-faire rah-rah-siss-boom-bah capitalist has written: "Capitalism and many variants called Capitalism has raised the standard of living for more people around the world than any system every created by man. Capitalism has produced more wealth and increased production greater than any other system in the world." I replied to him: "That's very close to a direct quote from the first pages of the Communist Manifesto. Which you might want to read sometime. It's only 20, 30 pages or so. Maybe some people somewhere dispute what you say about capitalism's effect on the world's wealth and productivity. Marxists certainly don't."

So that's when I wondered whether perhaps many Americans had indeed read the Communist manifesto because of Francis. What with the economy and all, and now in top of that what with Francis infuriating rightwingers on such a regular basis in such a delightful way. Marx has been read very little in the US in proportion to how much he is dissed. People don't know what they're talking about when they diss him, they're just repeating the staggeringly-successful US capitalist talking points on Marx and Communism. So I thought, maybe now, after years of spectacular worldwide abuse of financial deregulation and now with Francis, and what with the economy and all -- maybe now, finally, Americans would start reading Marx. The Communist Manifesto at least. Capital and Critique of Political Economy, that could come a little later, and then pretty soon Jimmy Kimmel and Conan O'Brian could discuss Maoism versus New Left with their movie-star guests and everybody would get it and the Earth would be saved and we could all just really get on with it. Thanks to a Pope, sure, why not, who, if not History, doesn't love irony?

But no, I was getting a little ahead of myself. I couldn't find an edition of the Communist Manifesto higher than around #20,000 on Amazon's book bestseller list. Then I thought: maybe AD-AMAZON The Portable Karl Marx,but ouch: it's at #147,305.

Even Francis himself is not burning up the track: a book by him published in November is at #1348, and AD AMAZON Evangelii Gaudium,which caused such a fooferah in the headlines? It's at #661. Holy moly, pardon my French, Holy Father. Wouldn't something by John Paul II have been at #1 by now? And in Amazon's top 20 for books there are items by Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck. It's all horribly disappointing and surprising for me, except for the success of O'Reilly and Beck, which is merely horribly disappointing for me.

Then I thought: Maybe Kindle is here and it's passed me by because I'm old, and that's where the real bestsellers are, and Francis is way up high in the Kindle bestseller list, but no. Marx, also no.