“American Thought”: from theoretical barbarism to intellectual decadence

adidasmarxism.wordpress.com/2017/08/25/american-thought-from-theoretical-barbarism-to-intellectual-decadence/

Don't know what to drop as a short key quote here so I'll just drop the first paragraph which is sure to grab your attention:
Have you noticed how, for example, being rude towards fat people has suddenly become a question of left-wing politics instead of proper upbringing and being a decent human being? Have you noticed suddenly embracing your own mental illnesses, instead of treating them in a proper way, and encouraging others to act the same, has become an act of political “emancipation” and “empowerment” of the individual? Have you noticed how toxic Western political correctness has become the mandatory language of the left-wing politics with its aim being the enforcement of a certain way of discussion without examining the content? Have you noticed how being working class has suddenly become just one of the identities, how suddenly you can become working class just by association, instead of needing to work for a wage or being dependent on somebody that does, and how the working class has lost its role as the “wheel of social change” to become “oppressed peoplex”? Have you noticed how the problem of racism is suddenly “challenged” by enforcing particular ethnic identities?

Was also reposted on Charnel House here with a small introduction by Ross Wolfe which kind of adds something: thecharnelhouse.org/2017/08/28/american-thought-from-theoretical-barbarism-to-intellectual-decadence/ (the best thing about him is that he almost always goes into the comments to confront butthurt).

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Decree
reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/6xrrjz/intellectual_imperialism_on_the_export_of/
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Whenever someone uses the word "America" as an adjective for something that's not a direct institution within the USA I always feel they're missing a massive opportunity to use the word "Burger" instead.

I love that word so much; it simultaneously slurs America, references the concept of the bourgeois class the preservation of which is the cause of the phenomenas being described, and brings to mind the fast food industry and its innate connection with both capitalism and the Spectacle

Would be good but probably doesn't fly in publishing.

Aw, Doug toned down his mocking impersonation voice.

You people really need to stop posting random blogs as your sources of information and opinions.

It reinforces the "leftists are illiterate" stereotype.

Turning up the baka pretty early this morning aren't we?

...

Conservatives are barely functional mentally.

I can confirm this. My day's happiness depreciates by a massive magnitude when I am called a burger.

...

Burger.

No, because this has not happened. No one cares if you make fun of fat people for any reason.
No, because this is not happening. On the contrary, you're not somebody these days unless you got a therapist or social worker and some kind of pill regimen.
"Muh pc" is conservative bullshit.
Workerism is really old.
What the fuck does this even mean?

I read that article a while ago. It's a good article but there's not much to say about it, as it's one in a million that try to explain why "working class" disappeared from the lexicon of left-wing politics, or why it replaced by "working class" as either an identity or a quantifiable level of material comfort replaced working class as a position in a relation of production, and then placed nicely next to all the other oppressed groups.

Obviously I agree with all of it but it seemed a bit redundant.

that whole budweiser tank might just be enough to get one person drunk

Marxist common sense is "workerism" now. How far we sink just to keep telling ourselves that radical transformation of society can be achieved with our 'movements' that never go beyond the boundaries of the university.

It means that Queen Latifah wearing african hats and clothings and posing with a raised fist next to a Pan-African flag is a dumb approach to politics

It's virtually impossible to go to a big name left wing space and not be confronted constantly with "anti-shaming" shit. I experienced this first hand a year ago when I went to the local IWW chapter. Yes, an industrial union organization spends time on this shit, and does more on that then on anything pertaining to industry or even the working class.

Point being that this solves nothing at all precisely because it just puts you in the right little commodified box.

Instead of outright solving the antagonism of racism we get an elevation of those suffering from racism to a sacred position, and a politics of shaming racism as if it's just an attitude problem while "empowering" the victims by tokenizing and glorifying a few in their ethnic group culturally.

The funny part is that this article (rightly) shits on the kneejerk moralistic anti-Americanism and anti-imperialism that you see around here more often as of late, and yet people in this thread are still doing that.
Every time that I give self-identified "anti-imperialists" a chance to redeem themselves, they come back looking like this to me. They're just as braindead as idpollers and not that different mentally. Braindead banhappy dipshits.

Seeing as you don't read at all (re: early USSR still kept power with the soviets), it would certainly be an improvement.

Buthurt barbarian from Balkans. He's not wrong though.
Seriously, don't get hung up on the denunciation of America in the blog. It actually digs into the underlying material reality that has allowed this cultural poison to spread.
Too bad it doesn't propose much of a solution, or even a weapon to combat it.

Leftists do seem to care, but the social justice types also frame it as "being a decent human being". Aside from that, certain kinds of reactionary attitudes about what a person is supposed to be can lead them to criticize a person for being fat, and then it inevitably leads to philosophical debate (even if it is often carried out in pedestrian sloganeering or whatever) about what it means for being fat to be "bad". Those ideas then becoming associated with a body of politics predates our time or SJWs. The surrealists, many of whom were self-identified Marxists, were actively attacking institutional beliefs around tangential subjects as apart of their entire political project to tear down bourgeoisie society and replace it with something else. They were often confused mystic weirdos, but the point is these ideas were in socialist circles during the peak of revolutionary Marxism in Europe.

But I also agree that people don't embrace mental illness. At most they "embrace" stuff like autism and being transgender, but consider being bipolar, schizo, borderline or any other number of mental illnesses as a serious burden that is exacerbated and not treated properly by capitalist society.

Other stuff I mostly agree with from the OP, but I think the whole ideological conformity along certain social justice issues is a complicated problem. In certain ways it is a runaway meme that seems hijacked by opportunists and ignorant people. People who are excited to be activists, who have a certain desire to be leaders. It seems as though they accrue some power from others who want to participate in "activism" who don't know any better, and that power makes them capable of frightening people into further conformity, or driving away people who don't feel like they align with the group.

It seems to me like it is relatively small groups who become the organizing force and face for the wider, disinterested public. So when events occur that draw the normal, non-activist public out to demos and swell them to the huge sizes we might see, the demos are organized by the smaller activist crowd. The ones that have already been conditioned by these prior circumstances, and they then influence the rhetoric and form of organization of the demos since they frequently have the microphones, they have t-shirts and props, whatever.

I don't think they're indomitable though. You just need to form rival groups that have a different message that won't be taken over and start your own demos. But the whole thing has been getting diluted to new forms now. Socialism is a little more popular as a message, but the socialists are still allied with a lot of the social justice groups. So as their popularity grows they continue to share the stage with them to some extent, and you're seeing a bit of a check on the supremacy of social justice. A part of it is how it was completely subsumed into a blatant, grotesque mockery in the popular culture. The farce of establishment cretins giving clumsy lip service to social justice while trying to attack and ignore socialism has created some backlash.

t. every single person on this board

And, you know, I've been seeing this claim that Lenin and the Bolsheviks "crushed the soviets" and destroyed soviet democracy, despite having the overwhelming support of the soviets and factory committees and generally being their biggest advocates.

So, here's a list of Bolshevik-led soviet decrees from the October revolution all the way to 1924. Please explain to me which specific decrees took power away from the soviet system.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Decree

I wasn't referring to Trotsky (and I've read some Trotsky). I was referring to a thread yesterday where you made a fool of yourself.

They took away power by declaring illegitimate all soviets which elected non-Bolshevik majorities (and Bolshevik ones were de facto subordinate to the centralized Sovnarkom and later Politburo), which happened to be most (SRs were overwhelmingly popular).
Lenin prevented them from convening to plan the economy, instead introducing 1 man management and strict centralized control, even before the war started (this is why the SRs and anarchists turned against them - see: Fanny Kaplan and Lev Chyorniy).
Stop making a fool of yourself and repeating the same lies.

Because the Bolsheviks were quite literally the only organized party that didn't want to co-govern with the bourgeoisie.
Incorrect, the soviets were actually fairly independent from the party and factory committees were the dominant form of economic organization.
Oh, you mean the same SRs who joined literal fascists during the civil war? I'm sure they were the better choice for the proletariat.
Lenin envisioned factory committees as the future of the soviet government. Any party control over them was purely a result of the harsh reality of the civil war rather than an ideological opposition to their power.
Stop pretending that Lenin was the Antichrist when him and the Bolsheviks are the ones who led the workers to victory in the first place.

The Charnel House wrote a great piece about how SJWs are essentially being cultural imperialists by forcing their definitions of race, nationality etc. on the rest of the world. I found interesting what (little) /r/latestagecapitalism had to say about it: reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/6xrrjz/intellectual_imperialism_on_the_export_of/

bumping

this is a very good article. americans on this board need to get over their superiority complex and read it thoroughly. it might provide them with some insights how the rest of the world sees them. hint: a strong military financed by big corporations doesn't magically make you a cultured nation.

ah yes, much better that we should site paper books.

*goes to >>>/pdfs/ to download 'Von den Jüden und iren Lügen and The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion'' *

did you even read the article?

step forward would be to get rid of talking about identities and belonging and focus on discriminate attack on all concentrations of private and state power

Damn that's a well written article

when an idiot wins, revolution invariably fails.

I didn't know the SRs did this. Are they the most contemptible faction in leftist history?

'Political correctness' is just empathy and basic human decency. Marginalised people are sick and tired of not having their humanity recognised. why is it that hard to understand? the anti-pc left are just chauvinists, most often white straight and male, playing into fascist and right wing discourse. There are some things, some kinds of suffering that you will NEVER be able to understand. Believe me, I used to be an anti PC white dude once, but I have learned and grown as a person since I started engaging with activism and marginalised people such as PoC and queers. They have taught me a lot.