Communism/Marxism

a certain form of the Right remains unable to reflect on the very essence of capitalism, on the logic of the unlimited, on commodity fetishism, on the theory of value, on the concept of the market, on the nature of money, etc. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Alain de Benoist (@Daily_Benoist) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Sloterdijk, Pete wrote:

“Occasionally the names of the three major writers Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, each of whom—in his own way—carried the twilights of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, are mentioned in the same breath, and observers have sought to detect in them a common denominator that has been called their dysangelical mission. They are regarded, especially by representatives of Christian humanism, as bearers of the three obtrusively negative messages about the basic forces of human reality with which the citizens of modernity have had to contend ever since: the dominance of the conditions of production over idealistic fictions; the dominance of the vital functions—also known as the will to power—over symbolic systems; the dominance of the unconscious or instinctive nature over human self-awareness.
With three voices the dysangelists seemed to be proclaiming one and the same doom: you are prisoners of structures and systems. The truth will make you unfree. In this view, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the dark messengers, are the bearers of truths that do not lift up and unite, but dissolve and weigh down.
Of course, if one takes a closer look it becomes apparent that the three authors exerted entirely different effects than those of eschatological heralds of human entanglement or decentering. On the contrary, all three, each in his own way, found forms of succession that one would have to call apostolic, were that expression not already so clearly colonized by the Christian paradigm. Marx, like Nietzsche and Freud, became the originator of texts and tendencies upon which the law of the dominance of interpreters asserted itself with the utmost power. They all sought and found agile readers who in their writings detected the slogans for careers, indeed, the pretexts for coups, the establishment of societies, and radical revolutions in thinking and ways of living. In addition, their works attest the modern teaching role of non-professors—they reveal the extent to which the university has become alienated since the nineteenth century from the crucial creative minds. As for the interpreters of the modern masters, it is true of them as well that empires, churches, and their schools are the important employers—and where it becomes possible, as in empowered Marxism, to fuse these three entities into a single centralized power that creates meaning, functionaries who interpret the classics enjoy the unbridled privilege of an aristocracy melded with the clergy.

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The good reader of the future will become attentive in Marx’s texts to the concepts and metaphors under which the longest dreams of classical metaphysics donned a contemporary disguise—especially the all-pervading phantasm of the powerful self-generation of the historical subject and the crypto-theological motif of the recovery of the original fullness of self by the ‘producers’ in a world freed from money. These basic elements of Marx’s philosophical fiction of a ‘proletarian reason’ become visible as soon as one immerses oneself in his work with the kind of mixture of curiosity and equanimity that became possible only with the waning of the religious war over exegesis. One can echo Günter Schulte—to whom we owe the most penetrating recent work on the Messianic critic of political economy—in asking, ‘Do you know Marx?’; and one can second the author’s conviction that a real knowledge of Marx cannot exist as long as his new readers do not participate in the adventure of a ‘critique of proletarian reason.’ Thus, a renewed knowledge of Marx does not have the purpose of defiantly disseminating once again a compromised classic of social criticism in a time removed from critique. Rather, reconstructing the Marxian inspirations means entering into the ghostly history of concepts which—as a force that has become a state, a spirit that has become technique, and as all-intertwining money—are sucking at the life of individuals more than ever before. Without a doubt, Marx’s future theoretical fame will be linked to his achievements as the conjurer of dead labor. The core of his critique of political economy is necromancy: as the hero who descends to the realm of the dead to contend with the shadows of values, Marx remains uncannily relevant also for the present. The undead—which walks among humans as the value of money and which, as a laughing communicator, strips the living of time and souls—rules today almost without any pretexts over the advanced societies. Work, communication, art, and love belong here entirely to the endgame of money. These form the substance of contemporary media and experiential time. And because money requires time for its utilization, so-called great history is also continuing in some eerie way; it is a game that is always played for extra time. Yet such history is no longer the conversation of the living with the dead about the goodness of the world, but the ever more thorough pervasion of the living by the economized specter.
[Philosophical Temperaments – From Plato to Foucault]

Sloterdijk, Pete wrote:

Against this, it must be asserted that labor is an elementary relation of life, which a theory of the real has to take into account. Wherever it shows itself unwilling to do so, and wants to transcend these foundations, an unmasking is called for. This unmasking is to be understood as grounding. The typical unmasking gesture in Marx's critique is therefore inversion: turning consciousness around from its head onto its feet. Feet means here knowledge of one's place in the production process and in the class structure. That consciousness must be considered unmasked that does not want to know about its ‘social being,’ its function in the whole, and therefore persists in its mystification, its idealistic split. In this sense, Marxist critique deals successively with the mystifications of religion, aesthetics, justice, welfare, morality, philosophy, and science.
Besides the critique of mystified consciousneses, Marx's theory harbors a second far-reaching variant of ideology critique, which has shaped the critical style of Marxism, its polemical sharpness: the theory of the character mask. As a theory of masks, it distinguishes a priori between persons as individuals and as bearers of class functions. In doing so it remains a little unclear which side is respectively the mask of the other—the individual the mask of the function, or the function the mask of individuality. The majority of critics have for good reasons, chosen the anti-humanist version, the conception that individuality is the mask of the function. Thus, there may well exist humane capitalists-as the history of bourgeois philanthropy proves—against whom Marxist critics have vehemently polemicized. They are humane merely as individual masks of social inhumanity. According to their social being, they regain, in spite of this, personifications of the profit interest, character masks of capital. Indeed, in some respects they are, for the agitators, worse than the worst exploiters because they nourish the laborer's patriarchal mystification. ‘Bourgeois’ role theory provides the mirror image of this theory by conceiving social functions (‘roles’) as masks with which individuality covers itself in order, at best, to even ‘play’ with them.
[Critique of Cynical Reason]

How J-wish people played a central role in the creation of political correctness. 1/2

"As part of that program, Lukács introduced a radical sex education program into the Hungarian Schools.

Political correctness as we know it... was already beginning to take form" [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— @nti Hero 🧐 (@BucksBreaking) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Sloterdijk, Pete wrote:

Marx, however, stepped over dead bodies at least twice in a way that raises doubts as to his claim to teach and his realism. In Max Stirner and Bakunin I see the most intimate opponents of Marx because they were the theorists whom he could not simply surpass but whom, in order to exclude them, he had to practically annihilate with his critique. For both represented clear logical and objective alternatives to Marx's solutions, Stirner with his question whether and how one can break through ‘private’ alienation, and Bakunin with his question whether and how a way can be found to a future ‘alienation-free society.’ Marx criticized both outright with a practically eviscerative hatred. The famous posthumous German Ideology, in large part directed against Stirner, contains the most intensive, detailed dispute Marx and Engels ever carried out with a thinker; and the annihilation of Bakunin was for Marx a preoccupation that stretched over many years. In Marx's hatred for both, in his scorn and his infinite contempt, an energy was at work that in no way can be explained by temperament and a feeling of competitiveness. Both showed him the systematic limits of his own approach — experiences that he could neither integrate nor simply disregard. Here, elementary and undeniable considerations came into play for which there was no place in Marx's plan and for which no place was to be made. Indeed, moreover, in Stirner, as in other representatives of critical critique and of the ‘Holy Family,’ Marx recognized something that was also present in himself, but whose right to exist he had to deny in order to become this Marx. With his right side, with his ‘realistic,’ statesmanlike, realist-political, and grand-theoretical side he suppressed the left, rebellious, vital, merely ‘criticistic side, which, in the others, confronted him as a ‘position as such.’ In his critical annihilation of Stirner and Bakunin, he stepped over his own corpse, so to speak, over the concrete, existential, and in the last instance, ‘feminine’ part of his intelligence. With this part he had revolted, critically and realistically-concretely, against Hegel; now he comes forward as master thinker against this side in its one-sidedness.
Stirner, like Marx, belongs to the ‘young Germany’ generation that, in the cli-mate of Hegelian philosophy, with its subversive training in reflection, had developed an extraordinary sense for everything that ‘takes place in the head’ (Feuer-°ach, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, Moses Hess, Karl Griin, Heinrich Heine, among others).
Hegel's logic had conquered a space that is neither only being nor only consciousness but contains ‘something of both’; this is expressed in the figure of thought ‘mediated immediacy.’ The magic word of the new logic is ‘mediation’ (Vermittlung). We may translate it as ‘medium.’ Between being and consciousness is something in the middle that is both and in which the illusory antithesis of spirit and matter disappears; Marx transposed this vision to his theory of capital.
Let us say it concretely: In people's heads, historically formed programs of thinking and perception are at work that "mediate" everything that moves from the outside to the inside, and vice versa. The human cognitive apparatus is, in a way, an inner relay, a switching station, a transformer in which perceptual schemata, forms of judgment, and logical structures are programmed. Concrete consciousness is never immediate but is mediated by the ‘inner structure.’
Reflection can assume basically three attitudes to this transmitted inner structure: It can try to escape the inner structure by "deprogramming itself; it can move within the inner structure as alertly as possible; and it can surrender itself as reflection by accepting the thesis that the structure is everything.
We now have to treat these three attitudes. Stirner's idea is simply to throw all alien programming out of one's head. After this total self-purification of the head, a naked, so to speak empty, reflected egoism should remain. If society really has trained "kinks" into my head, then my emancipation, thought through quickly, must presumably consist in my dismantling this alien programming. What is one's own in ego consciousness tries thus to rid itself with a snap of the fingers of what is alien. Stirner aims for a liberation from alienation in one's own interior. What is alien makes itself at home in me; I thus win "myself back by expelling what is alien. For several hundred pages one can read how Marx and Engels got worked up about this basically simple thought. They criticized this neoegotistical position in a devastating way —not morally but epistemologically: as a new self-delusion. They showed that the Stirner egos, those "individuals" who have based their position on nothing and view themselves as their only property, leap into a new naivete that betrays itself not least of all in its petit-bourgeois, boasting standpoint of ‘I am the be-all and end-all.’ The theoretical anarchism of the nineteenth century reached its first culmination in Stirner. Stirner effected an ‘existentialist’ reduction to pure ego, but in doing this he very naively presupposed the ego as something that simply ‘exists.’ Once I have thrown out of ‘me’ what is alien (society), Stirner believes, then a beautiful ego of my own remains that revels in the ‘possession’ of itself. In radiant naivete, Stirner speaks of the ‘property’ that individuals have in themselves. But one can only possess what exists in reality. Here, valid reflective experience and confused naiveté stand next to each other, separated by a hairbreadth. Existentialist reflection on one's ‘own’ consciousness is as realistic as the transition to the idea of self-property is false. Self-reflection leaves nothing objective that one could possess.
Marx and Engels dismantle this construction down to its atomic components. On wings of contempt, they prepare for themselves a feast of satirical reflection that, as alertly as possible, moves within the inner structure of consciousness. In the destruction of the Stirnerian illusion, however, they destroy more than the opponent; they destroy themselves in him. The way they do it, line for line, with intensive logic, meticulous philology, and a cruel pleasure in destruction—that is more than critique; it is the exorcism of a danger, the elimination of "another possibility." In fact, Marxism could never shake off the anarchist and existentialist shadow that fell on Stirner. Only with Sartre and Marcuse did this shadow again gain a more intensive life in Marxist-inspired thinking.
Marx does not belong to that sort of naive-genius that, like Schelling, ‘develops its thought in public.’ The German Ideology remained a private text. It was not published until 1932. Since then, Marx philologists have passed it around like a holy text. In the student movement, it was taken into battle as an antisubjectivistic weapon-by the ‘strict’ Marxists against the spontaneists5 and the academic flower children. In fact, however, there was a good reason for Marx and Engels's discretion regarding their most intensive work in ideology critique. The German Ideology lets the cat out of the bag. One can learn from it that, on the question of subjectivity, Marx and Stirner went off in symmetrically false directions. Both know that human consciousness, as one initially finds it, is "alienated" and must be ‘appropriated’ through patient reflection. Both think in the dialectic of the authentic and the alien; however, both fail to find the middle ground and plunge into exclusive alternative positions. Stirner chose the right, Marx the left path. Stirner believes he can overcome the expropriation of oneself (Enteignung) through an individualist act of purification. In his ‘adulthood,’ individuals learn how to expel their inner alien programming so that they have it and do not have it at the same time and thus "keep" it as its free masters and possessors. By surrendering thoughts and things as their own, they are no longer under their power. In Stirner's thinking, realistic self-reflection and ideological ego-cult flow without clear boundaries into one another. What can be a productive experience of inner distancing from conditioning has become in Stirnerism dogmatically ossified to a new ‘short-circuited thinking.’
Marx's investigation of class consciousnesses is at its starting point equally realistic. Class consciousnesses, worldviews, and ideologies can indeed be understood as ‘programming’; they are mediations, formed and forming schemata of consciousness, results in a world-historical process of the self-formation of all intellect. This way of seeing opens a path to a fruitful analysis of patterns in consciousness that can become free of the curse of naive idealism. With their ‘in the last instance’ dogmatic materialism, however, Marx and Engels deviate from this approach again. They dissolve subjectivity in the historical process. This comes it in the harshness and contempt with which Marx treats his ‘existential’ opponents. In this brutality, the other, master form of reflection begins to stir. Where Stirner brought his rebellious, protesting ego out into the public arena, Marxism produced revolutionaries who, with the feeling of supreme slyness and an artful sense for reality, use themselves as means in the historical process. In the clinch with Stirner's false individual, the idea of the false Nobody arises in Marx's theory- those revolutionaries who themselves will become only grim instruments of the fetish: revolution. That is the break Althusser has discerned in the Marxian oeuvre after The German Ideology. Early on, at the latest since the polemic against Stirner, there begins a tendency in Marx's thinking to chain oneself, almost like Jesuits of the revolution, to the process of historical development, in the belief of being able not only to recognize the development but also to direct it. Marx's theory sets its hope on domination by conceiving of the subject of the theory as a function of development. Through self-reification it believes it can achieve a mastery of history. By making itself into an instrument of a purported future, it believes it can make the future into its own tool.
This schizoid logic of master's cynicism has no historical parallel. Only an extremely highly developed consciousness can deceive itself in such a way. The only thinker whose self-reflection reached similar heights of artful self-denial was Friedrich Nietzsche, whose historical influence is well known.
The philosophically significant pinnacle of this artful self-reification was reached by those courageous old Communists who, in the Moscow Show Trials, in the face of certain death, falsely confessed to having conspired against ‘the revolution,’ a confession that was not merely extorted but possessed an aspect of freedom insofar as the accused, with their confessions, wanted to save the revolution from greater damage than had already been done to it by accusation and execution. The subtlety of this doubling of murder by the judiciary with suicide cannot be grasped with conventional conceptions of ‘tragedy.’ They are murders in which it is clear only in the biological sense who is in fact killing whom. They are murders and suicides within a schizophrenic structure, where the ego that kills can no longer be clearly distinguished from the ego that is killed. Only one thing is certain: In the end the corpses of intelligent human beings are lying on the ground, strangled, shot, beaten. The case of Althusser is probably, among other things, a supplement to the psychopathology of Marxism. It takes place on an intelligence level of murderous violence on which the revolution devours its cleverest children, not to mention the millions who lost their lives without knowing exactly what they had to do with this revolution, except perhaps that what was killing them could not be quite the truth.
The young Marx expressed the logical root of these inversions in 1843 in a fully alert sentence that was written before that time of callousness, although it already betrayed a cynical tendency: ‘... communism has seen other socialist doctrines rise up against it not by accident but because it itself is only a particular, one-sided realization of the socialist principle.’ (Letters from the Deutsch-Franzosischen Jahrbuchern, Marx to Ruge, September 1843). The word ‘onesided’ shows the elevated irony of Marxism at play. Those who say "one-sided" know that there are, and must be, at least two sides. Those who then decide for one side deceive themselves and others. Only a knowledge that is consumed by an enormous will to power can want to present conscious one-sidedness as the truth. In doing so, it profoundly denies its own pathos for genuine cognition. Thus, communism is that knowledge of power that tells it all before it has taken over the reins. This, and only this, constitutes, on a philosophical level, its affinity to fascism.
[Critique of Cynical Reason]

Intriguing [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

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Quote :

This pattern of a technologically backward Soviet Union relying on infusions of Western know-how ran all the way through to the final demise of the USSR in 1991. My own uncle, a high-ranking executive for the British chemical company ICI, spent several years in Russia in the 1960s and 1970s overseeing the construction of a massive chemical processing plant with technology that the Russians were incapable of providing for themselves.

This is not russia.

This is Germany (Frankfurt) today.

What do you think russians are celebrating? [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— A n n a (@tweet4anna) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Today in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], there was a pro-Russian rally taking place.

It’s sickening to see this monstrosity while [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] continues its barbaric and genocidal war against [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]:

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— Alex Kokcharov (@AlexKokcharov) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Eric Hoffer wrote:

There is apparently no surer way of turning a thing into its opposite than by exaggerating it. Professor Joseph Klausner said of Jesus that "by overfilling Judaism, he caused his disciples to make of it a "non-Judaism"; thus it is by "overfilling" Capitalism that the Communists make of it non-capitalism. Ever since Capitalism came into its own, we have caught glimpses of the Capitalist' dream of omnipotence. It is a dream of total noninterference, of a "company state" rather than a company within a state. Some Capitalists tried to realize this dream in distant colonies where they were unrestrained by mores and traditions of their homeland. But only a Communist regime succeeds in making the wildest Capitalist dream come true right in the home country. A monolithic company--The Communist Party--takes possession of a whole country. It not only owns every acre of land, every building, factory, etc, but has absolute dominion over the bodies and souls of every man, woman and child. The aim of this super-Capitalist company is to turn the captive population into skilled mechanics and so shape their souls that they would toil from sunup to sundown, thankful to be alive and blessing their exploiters. It is only natural that such a "company state" should aspire to turn itself into a holding company for the whole planet.
Even when a Communist regime is wholly free of Stalinist viciousness, it can still be seen as an attempt to overfill Capitalism. In a Capitalist system the productive process is hampered by the trivial motivation of the owner, the recalcitrance of the worker, and the capriciousness of the consumer. It needs a prodigious expenditure of energy and substance to counteract the vitiating effect of these factors. Communism, with one sweep, rids Capitalism of the anarchic owner, worker, and consumer. It makes of production an uncompromising deity which brooks no interference from any quarter.
Finally, Communism is repeating a pattern followed by other heresies when it strives to separate Capitalism from the Capitalists. The Christian heresy detached Judaism from the Jews, and the Protestant heresy separated Catholicism from the Catholic hierarchy. And remembering the battle cry of the Kronstadt uprising it is permissible to predict that the slogan of an eventual Communist heresy will be: "Communism without Communists", the perfected state.