this man was a Trotskyist then became a european idpol ultra-conservative.
Discuss.
Peter Hitchens
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Change "european" for "american" and you have neocons. Typical Trot tbqh.
That's nothing, check David Horowitz.
oh yeah, i forgot about this guy.
He basically sounds like he had one bad encounter with leftists and thought "wtf i hate socialism now"
I once listened to him talking about Putin's Russia and he describes hearing that the Soviet Union had fallen and, "as a Trotskyist", being full of joy.
That's a very shitty Trotskyist, because Trotsky even in exile continued to completely defend the existence of the Soviet Union and its right to protect itself against enemies and potential enemies. He even supported the Soviet invasion of Finland and said the Soviet Union should declare war first against Germany, which doesn't strike me as someone who'd be happy if it fell.
But that's an insight into what Trotskyism is to a lot of people of this generation: it's a way they found, in the 60s and 70s, to abstain from major politics conflicts, to cry "both sides are equally bad" and find a figure, party or movement that is utterly powerless but morally sound to attach their bandwagon to, because if that entity is powerless they'll have nothing to answer for. They criticize without giving the right to be criticized back. You can claim to be a radical without ever having to build or support something, you just cross your arms and play morally/intellectually superior.
The better Hitchens brother.
Writes a lot of hogwash about marxism now but is broadly right about the undesirable trend of society and the synthesis of social liberalism with economic liberalism, where even the "conservatives" conserve nothing socially.
I vaguely enjoyed The Cameron Delusion although with hindsight reading it was probably a bad idea because it erased all my opinions on social issues. (It's not that I became more authoritarian or conservative, but that I realized I don't really care either way. If teaching people psalms in school can form an electoral coalition that gets the railways nationalised, why the fuck not?)
Better than Christopher "US can bomb the middle east because Islam sucks" Hitchens at least
He was not a trotskyist
The kinds of intellectuals who were involved with the Trotskyists and Democratic Socialist tendencies tended to be Boug or Boug adjacent elitists who had little to no ideological convictions whatsoever, Peter likely didn't change his political outlook to staunch reaction so much as he actually committed to that sort of politics as he got older.
Baby boomers of his sort were comfortable band-wagoners who dropped leftism as soon as it wasn't cool to them anymore. That's why the "You're just a lefty cus you're a college kid" meme comes from.
yes he was
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i've never seen zizek so mad
He's the kind of person who has an instinctual feeling of where society is going.
He can tell we're going in a wrong direction, but because of his contingent personal circumstances, he assigned reactionary explanations to everything. If only he was born in another decade, he might have fallen in with Adorno and Debord and assigned a proper Marxist explanation to the shitshow that is our society.
US neocons aren't pushing US nationalism though, they are fervently globalist and pro-immigration.
Žižeks problem is he takes every statement, no matter what dumbfuck made it, at face value and tries to discuss it. He's autistic.
That's why they are called neo-cons.
Look at this. This is the final form of Trotskyism.
He pretty much rode Christopher's coat tails during the college years and played radical, but I don't think he ever was. He dropped Trotskyism as soon as he left college, so it's pretty transparent that he adopted radical politics in order to impress his peers and big brother…
Is neoconservatism inherent in trotskyist ideology or in the social relations that produce followers of trotskyist ideology?
The latter. Some guys made valid points in this thread
He grew up.
We should adopt forcible abortion tbh
Ah yes, I forgot about all the slaughterhouses for meat production shown on TV.
Kekworthilly just reminded me of when I was reading a k-punk thing about factory farmed vs organic chickens (from a middle class liberal perspective as TV show, basically muh ethical consumption under capitalism.) where they apparently had to construct their own replica to show the conditions those chickens grow up in because nobody would allow them to take a film crew into their factory farm.
k-punk.org
Because it's never just psalms.
Seize the means of reproduction comrade
Modern liberals shill the slaughterhouse documentaries constantly. The point he was making was that they will push fun, and LGBT obscenity into the public square all day, but abortion just a "medical procedure" that all womyn have a right to. That's why they get so triggered by the Anti-abortion protestors.
I genuinely enjoy his blog, the better Hitchens by far.
He may be spooked beyond repair by christian moralism but he correctly identifies capital's tendency to atomise society and destroy community. His trotskyism, as is common, was all too much posturing against the USSR and no substantial desire for socialism but he nonetheless is rather prescient in regards to neoliberalism and I think deep down he is still a marxist of sorts and might even be slowly turning back towards it these days (if only he lets go of the cultural marxism angle)
Thats because 🍀🍀🍀international🍀🍀🍀 socialism is a meme. The impulse to spread "western values" ,"secularism", and "enlightenment ideals" beats their veiled altruism for the common man. Usually consisting of bouregouis academics themselves they are contrarians by nature and adopt socialism to show just how kind and caring they are but deep down they have disdain for the proletariat and an even deeper disdain for the common population of the third world. They view these people as stupid animals who need to be "enlightened" which is why they eventually find themselves attached to their natural ally, neocons.
On the flip side of that same kind, there are the self-proclaimed leftists who are utterly misanthropic and take pleasure in seeing other people suffer, if only to bring them down to their level, figuratively speaking.
I don't know where you're from but they don't do it here. It's mostly uncomfortable for them.
My impression of him is that he was a no-theory idiot that only became a Trot because he saw it as the anti-Stalinist left.
Thats the problem with most leftists nowadays. They have never had a deep relationship with someone who is working class or have experienced any of their hardships yet they claim to represent them. Breaking down militant leftist opposition and limiting them to universities actually ended up having the effect of alienating workers from socialism because the people who are said to represent are clearly charlatans.
Mein gott.
Nigga just because he wants teens to hold up doors for older people again doesn't mean he's "uber-conversative"
He's not even a free market Reaganbot, and he always saw Trump for what he really was.
If you're looking for people to get butthurt about this guy should probably be a lot lower on your priority list.
A part of the sad trend of post-ww2 British Trotskyism. It still lingers today
But he is one of the better Conservatives.
Classic Trot move
The American New Left was also formed by ex-Trots.
Hmmm…
And the the railways fall into disrepair and bureaucratic iinefficiencies make them awful to ride.
This is always the result of nationalizing industries.
Take the wasteful inefficiencies in the U.S. Military.
If the annual budget was not so unimaginably large it would barely function. Nationalizing industries turns them into parasitic holes where value is destroyed and waste is their most common attribute. Fuck nationalizing anything.
South america has played a ping pong game of privatizing and nationalizing its industries. They have nothing to show for it except people throwing jars of shit at each other in the streets and lining up at empty supermarkets.
You literally know nothing of the histories of privatization, and specifically its history in Britain.
Railways are franchised now, which means there's no coordination for a national rail infrastructure, and it's causing terrible problems for modernisation and innovation.
Read these:
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
For all it's flaws British Rail never fucked up that badly. Now that RailTrack is back in public ownership, British trains receive more subsidy than they ever did under British rail. They're still nationalised in a sense - it's just that the governments which own them are foreign. (And they don't really own the trains, they lease them, it's a complicated mess.)
And also afterwards: bbc.co.uk
Now, that last story is an example of inefficiency at British Rail - sure, if you have no heart - but it exemplifies something a lot of nationalised industries (and Britain in general, before the neoliberal market-stalinists took over everything) had. A sense of public service and humanity to them. That has been completely lost now, replaced by "Not my job mate" and reading from a pre-approved script. Even the memetic union militants were never as bad as the managing executive on floor 3.
Also read: theguardian.com
Adding the private sector doesn't magically make things more efficient, it just adds further layers of insanity. In a case like railways in particular, even the US had to accept nationalisation of passenger stock.
The idea you can simply break companies up into "private sector good, public sector bad" is plain silly. Especially with infrastructure like the railways where it basically doesn't matter. (Or indeed, the record of the public sector outstrips that of the private sector in delivering something good.)