Thomas.... What I am hearing in your post is: your early memory of trauma.. with regard to how you were overtly disregarded in your beliefs by those " hippie facsists" who treated you with disrespect and disregard. It still seems to be resonating ...in your psyche/memory.... No one, and in this case, not John, is saying that being an intellectual is bad. John even admits that his mentor, and he himself, IS an intellectual. The "dialectical mistake" you are making it seems to me is: you are conflating: "intellectual" with " elitism.'" This is a mistake. We all need intellectuals. You, John, and all.... What John is saying is: We don't need the "elitism".... And, don't you agree with this?
Karin, I agree we don't need elitism. We should fight against it. But we should also fight against anti-Marxist demagoguery. And your relative here is full of that.
Neither Marx and Engels, nor many (but not all) of their followers, were elitist. Rosa Luxemburg, for a most obvious example. We are democratic.
There have been people--like Lenin, and when he won him over, Trotsky--who made STRATEGIC contributions to the art of Marxist revolution. But in the end, they were won over, I believe, to a BLANQUIST, not A MARXIST, conception of how to organize a socialist society. While enjoying a democratic centralist scheme of organization for their own Party, they acted in such a way as to SHUT DOWN the possibility for the kind of multiparty, pluralist, democratic socialist society that Marx and Engels, as early as 1847, envisioned, when they were in the Communist League.
What your relative (husband? father?) is doing is knocking all of these characters calling themselves Marxist into a big cocked hat where, to mix my metaphors, it's so dark that all cows are black. And he's doing this on the ridiculous pretext that Marx and Engels found PRESENT working class consciousness lacking in revolutionary socialist consciousness.
Yes, but Marx and Engels argued that goaded by the economic crises of capitalism, and guided hopefully by those intellectuals who don't flatter the workers (like your relative does), but instead, criticize, debate, work with them, to achieve socialist consciousness. To GUIDE them.
This does not mean creating a pedagogical dictatorship, after the insurrection is over. By the time of the insurrection, the working class must have achieved socialist consciousness--the consciousness of why we should have socialism, why we need a socialist revolution to create it--and why that socialist society should be fundamentally democratic. And how to run that society, democratically. A MAJORITY, as Marx, Engels, Luxemburg and others argued strenuously--must come to this understanding, BEFORE, not decades after the insurrection, as your relative so spuriously, insultingly, bigotedly, pig-headedly, and maliciously charges.
I'm tired of these shrill anti-Marxist accusations, this bigotry, these stupid insults. That's why I'm here and that's WHY I'm challenging your relative's BULL SHIT!
And yet Karl Marx himself insisted that only in a higher phase of communism (which comes after socialism) could people make society be based on the egalitarian principle of From each according to need, etc. as he states in his Critique of the Gotha Program with these words:
"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
What the HELL has that got to do with Marx and Engels' view, expressed by their then artisan comrade Karl Schapper (who a few years later went Blanquist, like the rest of the artisans in the Communist League, thus breaking up the League), that their goal was to create a democratic, multi party, pluralistic socialist society?!
You're grasping at straws, to prop up your anti-Marxist bigotry.
Why don't you just shut up for about a year, on this question, and actually LOOK at the Marxist texts, carefully reviewing them. Again, I think I mentioned to you two works which solidly put Marx and Engels in the democratic, not the elitist-Blanquist camp: Richard N. Hunt, THE POLITICAL IDEAS OF MARX AND ENGELS; and Hal Draper, KARL MARX'S THEORY OF REVOLUTION.
Also, John, thanks for the rich appendix you provide; the passage from anthropologist Graeber was interesting about the viability for the city to become the natural locus for democratic change in society; Bookchin of course advocates for a libertarian municipalism, which evokes the middle age adage that "City Air makes one free..." in which a serf, if he /she could reside in a 'free city' for a year uninterrupted could liberate from serfdom.
I like this passage..."almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly ‘scale up’ to anything like a city, a region, or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence."
Thank you John for this criticism of elitism and the tendency by elites from both sides of the intellectual aisle to denigrate the commoner and elevate, well, the intellectual. When this happens, it has the effect of 'otherizing' those we need in a mass movement to liberate from plutocracy.
I read Stratham's we can change the world I find his argument compelling. And I accept your notion that a significant majority of ordinary people are already in a state of readiness for revolution, but that they feel alone in this 'readiness.' So, the task of the egalitarian revolution is to speak frankly and openly about the shared experience of plutocratic domination and the problems it has wrought on society, socially to people, and ecologically to the natural systems.
I don't experience your criticism of the elites that 'otherize' the working classes and the rural folk as demagoguery. I think Thomas 'doth protest too much...' on this point. Nor do I think you are being anti-intellectual, nor that you are dismissing the notion of the value of an intellectual vanguard. You just want revolutionaries to perceive the inherent wisdom and instinct for freedom among ordinary workers be they from rural areas or from the cities, and I would add, that even the 'petite bourgeoise' need to be enlisted in an egalitarian liberation program.
The bottom line in an egalitarian movement is that a critical mass of all the people need to accept that the plutocracy has ruined society out of their hubristic sense of entitlement, and that a movement for real and not fake democracy, is what we need in our society, all around the world.
I know you, Thomas and I share a sense of the emergency society is in. We all agree revolutionary change is necessary. But I have no confidence in a 'left intellectual elite' making all the difference, but I do have confidence in a possibility for people to find common cause in advancing a free society. We need intellectuals to write about and explain this possibility, be they classical marxists, deep christian freedom fighters, or good government anarchists such as myself.
I, in contrast to Marxists, judge people by the values they have and the aims they pursue, not by their membership in this or that class based on relation to the means of production. Yes, it is true that there is a strong correlation between the values and aims people have and their relation to the means of production, but this correlation doesn't tell you whether a particular individual, be they a peasant or blue collar worker or peti-bourgeois or intellectual, has pro- or anti-egalitarian values and aims. One has to hear what they say and see what they do and judge them accordingly.
Thanks John. A comprehensive summary of the manner in which the working man has been treated as inferior and unworthy by the arrogant elites throughout history.
John, this is demagogic. And dangerous. It reminds me of the anti-intellectual treatment I received from the hippie fascist pit bulls for the upper middle class twits, who ran the NYC Medical Freedom Party right into the ground--just like your Boston housing group. For one of these hippie fascist in particular, using your brain is a sin. For both of them, to criticize the authoritarianism of the upper middle class leaders, was to "disrupt our unity" and to "insult everybody".
It's dangerous in general to the egalitarianism we both promote, to overgeneralize about "intellectuals" per se. That is demagogic. There is a need for intellectuals--particularly Marxist intellectuals--to help guide ordinary working people AWAY from the misleadership of the upper middle class twits, AWAY from the hero worship and authoritarianism promoted, as Erich Fromm wrote in ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM, by the insecurities of the capitalist system itself--and TOWARD democratic socialist self-empowerment.
Your "take" on Marx is undialectical and completely one-sided. I've already disputed this with regard to the proletariat. You don't comprehend that Marx is talking about a DIALECTICAL PROCESS of the working class coming into socialist consciousness, as a result of a) economic and existential crises created by the capitalist system b) democratic leadership by... intellectuals!
Counterpoised to your quotes by Marx about the peasantry, are the statements he made in both CLASS STRUGGLES IN FRANCE and THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, about the potential for a "revolutionary peasantry" to emerge.
Thomas, You seem not to have noticed that my post was against the elitism of the intellectuals on both the left and the right, and NOT against intellectuals in general. In fact you seem not to have noticed that I cite favorably the intellectual Dave Stratman and the intellectual, James C. Scott, author of the book "Hidden Transcripts." I myself am an intellectual. So, what it seems you are really opposed to is my denunciation of elitism.
I think you have trodden on his Marxist toes here John. He is blinded by the dense fog of elitist BS promulgated by Marx one of the worst examples intellectual arrogance.
No, John, I am not an elitist. You are being anti-intellectual, and anti-Marxist. These objections still stand:
1) You used the definite article, "the": "the intellectuals of both the left and right". Where you might have said "some" or even "most of" That's an overgeneralization.
2) Once again, you unfairly attacked Karl Marx's writings, confusing one moment in the dialectic he promotes in proletarian (and peasant) consciousness, as his last word on the possibility for proletarian and peasant consciousness. That was once again unfair and undialectical
Didn't they teach you anything in public health school about the dialectical nature of reality? It's too bad you obviously didn't study Heraclitus ("you never step into the same river twice").
Thomas, there you go again with your words, "possibility for proletarian and peasant consciousness." The word "possibility" means that they may in the FUTURE have good values and aims despite the supposed fact that they do not CURRENTLY have good values and aims. This is precisely the elitist and false view of ordinary people that my post criticizes, and it is apparently your view too.
So I'm an elitist because I don't think the working class or the peasantry are all great and wonderful now?!
That would make every teacher who thinks she knows more than her students, an "elitist".
It's ridiculous. You're being demagogic, not dialectical. I'm not going to argue this with you. It's obvious you have ego/emotional issues around this.
This is a game you're playing with yourself, and fooling others, into thinking you're the great and noble intellectual who's saving ordinary people from the elitism of those dirty marxist commies who want to dominate them. "You're wonderful, and nobody has the right to criticize you. I love you just the way you are" It's a load of patronizing self-indulgent
bullshit. With this kind of an attitude, the working class will never come to power
And you attract to yourself fellow anti-Marxist bigots like JAS, who take as an absolute truth, just like you do, that we Marxists are elitist and want to dominate, because we don't believe in flattering the workers as you do, rather than understand where they are actually at intellectually, and helping them understand their proper aims and values. You're not contributing to any egalitarian revolution with this demagogic, bigoted nonsense.
John Spritzler's romantic view of "ordinary people" is, to say the least, not scientific. He wants nothing to do with a scientific, realistic attitude toward "ordinary people" and their various tendencies--some of which are positive, some of which are negative. The scientific socialist aims to UNDERSTAND these tendencies, and guide the positive ones toward liberation. This takes a lot of work.
Nope, Spritzler says. They're all positive.
This is a comfortable illusion. And Spritzler will defend it to the death, because it is so comfortable. Come off it, ye scientific intellectuals. You're just elitist. You just want to build this vanguard party of the intellectuals and advanced workers, to become a murderous bureaucratic elite your selves. You don't have to build a vanguard party. All we all have to do, is go down to the parking lot of the local supermarket, and preach egalitarianism to the benighted masses. Then they will all spontaneously rise up and claim their egalitarian legacy.
No matter how much he rails against the rich, his real enemy are those scientific intellectuals who would dispute his comfortable illusion, He will do anything to delegitimize them, including lying and misrepresenting their position as "elitist"
You're either a romantic like him. Or you're an elitist. There's no in between, in his comfortable fantasy world.
But there's also no working with him. On anything. Unless you agree with him.
And yet, it is I, not the Marxists, who write extensively to refute the ruling class's divide-and-rule lies. For example my article at https://www.pdrboston.org/21st-century-divide-and-rule refuting many of these lies. I write such articles because I am not naive about the harmfulness of ruling class lies. Having a true understanding of the positive values and aims of most ordinary people is not the same as being naive about the harmfulness of ruling class lies, Thomas.
The ruling class uses censorship to create divisive frameworks in which both of the choices offered are bad. What do the Marxists and the Left in general do? They tell people to take one of the bad choices and they say how awful the opposite choice is. This is exactly what the ruling class loves.
This is just about as incoherent as your last comment, about to each according to their needs, was irrelevant.
What is this mysterious "bad choice" that we Marxists, do you suppose, are offering ordinary people?
Where and when have we ever counseled ordinary people to accept ruling class lies? What lies are you talking about?
As for divisiveness, that's pretty rich, coming from you. You might present as a mere intellectual disagreement, the difference of opinion between those who romanticize ordinary people, vs. those who adopt a scientific (= Marxist) attitude. All the while, IN COMRADELY fashion, accepting the fact that we have the REAL ELITISTS in common, as our common enemy--the eugenicist billionaires and their lackeys among the upper middle class pseudo-intellectuals (Whom Marxist van der Pijl has described as the "cosmopolitan cadre" of the ruling class.
But no. That's not your approach--this comradely approach--at all. In true, woke, identity politics fashion, you foment hatred against your potential Marxist comrades. Instead of accepting the fact that we have differences of opinion, you stigmatize and scapegoat us as elitist, ourselves. And thus you conflate us with the authoritarian, upper middle class cadre.
This is EXTREMELY divisive. What you are doing is promoting an anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, demagogic mentality, DIVIDING the working class from the scientific socialist intellectuals who want to guide them to socialist consciousness as the means of dealing with growing economic and even these days medical crises that they face.
Yes, so far. But because you are such a anti-Marxist bigot, you refuse to consider the mitigating circumstances: enormous pressure by the imperialists upon the fledgling Soviet Russian state, synergizing with the Blanquist proclivities of its most important leader, V.I. Lenin--who idolized a Russian Populist Blanquist named Petr Tkachev.
How wonderful is the track record of folksy cornpipe smoking romantics like yourself, going down to the local supermarket parking lot and preaching to your idolized ordinary people that, "Eureka! Each and every one of you ALSO wants egalitarianism"?
Just for the record, John, this is from Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire. In this passage, Marx talks about BOTH the revolutionary and the conservative peasant. And the revolutionary peasant does NOT become revolutionary because of anything that socialist intellectuals say to them or do. it's because of the crisis posed in their lives by Louis Napoleon's bourgeois rule. Put that in your demagogic, anti-Marxist, bigoted pipe and smoke it. You can always find such passages about the proletariat as well by Marx. You just have to look for them. But being a bigot like yourself, you don't. you cherry pick the negative analyses of the way the proletariat is now, and confuse this with Marx's basic view. You IGNORE the possibility he raises of their enlightenment. Because you're setting him up as a bogeyman. You're not really reading him generously, because that would interfere with the image you want to present to the world of being that unique egalitarian intellectual, the only one who has an open heart for the value of working people
BULL SHIT!
But let us not misunderstand. The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the
conservative peasant; not the peasant who strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather one who wants to consolidate his holding; not the countryfolk who in alliance with the towns want to overthrow the old order through their own energies, but on the
contrary those who, in solid seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their
small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the Empire. It represents not the enlightenment
but the superstition of the peasant; not his judgment but his prejudice; not his future but his past;
not his modern Cevennes but his modern Vendée.5 The three years‘ stern rule of the
parliamentary republic freed a part of the French peasants from the Napoleonic illusion and
revolutionized them, even though superficially; but the bourgeoisie violently repulsed them as
often as they set themselves in motion. Under the parliamentary republic the modern and the
traditional consciousness of the French peasant contended for mastery.
Another trick you play, John Spritzler--a demagogic trick--is to move the goal posts. First there's nothing that Marx wrote that was ever kind about the working class, or the peasantry. Then, when I find something--and there any number of passages where he actually says stuff that is kind, that reveals the proletariat has the potential to become socialist in their consciousness--you don't admit that you were wrong. Oh, no. You just say that Marx even saying that they have potential, proves he's an elitist. Because there's a moment in the dialectical process of intellectual advancement, when they DON'T have great "values and aims".
It's a little, shameful, demagogic racket you're playing. It stinks. It's counterproductive. It's destructive. It's basically McCarthyist.
According to J. Spritzler, if Marx , or anyone had said that the 19th century practice of child labor in factories, mines, and other unwholesome atmospheres had resulted in stunting a child's intelligence as well as harming his or her physical development, with few exceptions, such as Charles Dickens, he would be accused of elitism and thinking that children " suck"!
Judith, exactly! This is identity politics logic, applied to "ordinary people". If you hint in the slightest that there's actually wrong with them--not INTRINSIC to them (Marx NEVER said that)--but because of their CONDITIONS--you're anti-worker. You're insulting THEM.
Another example of this was Tom Angotti's "review" (i.e. politically correct hatchet job) on the late great Mike Davis' PLANET OF SLUMS. For even using the word "slum", Angotti damns him. How dare you say that the CONDITIONS under which the ordinary people live, are terrible?! 0Engels, Angotti said, would never have used that word! But as a matter of fact--he did! He used the word, which is a Gaelic word--not any German translation, but the actual word--in his first great book, THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ENGLAND. Slum means a place of desolation.
But I guess for Angotti and Spritzler, you can never say that the consciousness of the working class has been degraded by their conditions--even though you practically say in the same breath--as do Marx and Engels--that this very degradation will drive the proletariat to achieve socialist consciousness, overthrow the capitalist system, and build a socialist society.
No. Like Athena out of the head of Zeus, or like Nietzsche's ubermensch, the ordinary people of this world are ALREADY PERFECT! And anybody who says anything different (than such flattering demagogic nonsense) is an elitist!
The fact is that Thomas, and most Marxists likewise, focus on how ordinary people are wrong, not right in their values and aims. Thus Thomas repeatedly cites the book, "The Dangerous Class" whenever I emphasize that ordinary people are the solution, not the problem, and ought to have the real power today. This is why the only way that Thomas says anything positive about ordinary people is by saying that they have the POTENTIAL to develop 'socialist consciousness'--i.e., maybe in the future but today, no; they are the 'DANGEROUS CLASS.' It is impossible to build a truly mass and egalitarian revolutionary movement on the basis of the Marxist negative view of ordinary people. All one can do with this view is establish anti-democratic regimes, which is what Marxists have done.
Spritzler, You are either a conscious liar or a careless one. Your rendition of what I've been saying is just about as ignorant as your reading of Marx's views.
Let me correct some really insulting grotesque errors you are stating here, about my views. It seems to come from your stubborn, thick headed bigotry.
I only referred to Barrow's book, THE DANGEROUS CLASS, once, and then perhaps commented further. You make it sound as if I've been citing this work for the last year. I did not "repeatedly" cite the book "whenever" you "emphasized" that ordinary people are the solution, not the problem.
I never said that ordinary people are the problem, in the first place.
I never said that ordinary people in general are the dangerous class. Neither did Judith, who by the way, is also a Marxist. Neither of us believe that ordinary people are the problem, John. We only argue that their present consciousness poses a problem.
You YOURSELF argue this, in a way. You have "repeatedly" argued that there is something WRONG with the present consciousness of ordinary people: the fact that while they are all supposedly egalitarian, they don't know that EACH OTHER are egalitarian.
NOBODY should pay attention to the anti-Marxist RAVINGS of this man until he at least admits he has been either sloppy, bigoted, or consciously lying.
No one who has any integrity can work with such a deceitful and/or sloppy demagogue. Nobody can ever create a democratic society alongside such a silly, insulting, bigoted fool
No one can have a decent debate with such a person.
Thomas.... What I am hearing in your post is: your early memory of trauma.. with regard to how you were overtly disregarded in your beliefs by those " hippie facsists" who treated you with disrespect and disregard. It still seems to be resonating ...in your psyche/memory.... No one, and in this case, not John, is saying that being an intellectual is bad. John even admits that his mentor, and he himself, IS an intellectual. The "dialectical mistake" you are making it seems to me is: you are conflating: "intellectual" with " elitism.'" This is a mistake. We all need intellectuals. You, John, and all.... What John is saying is: We don't need the "elitism".... And, don't you agree with this?
Exactly!
Karin, I agree we don't need elitism. We should fight against it. But we should also fight against anti-Marxist demagoguery. And your relative here is full of that.
Neither Marx and Engels, nor many (but not all) of their followers, were elitist. Rosa Luxemburg, for a most obvious example. We are democratic.
There have been people--like Lenin, and when he won him over, Trotsky--who made STRATEGIC contributions to the art of Marxist revolution. But in the end, they were won over, I believe, to a BLANQUIST, not A MARXIST, conception of how to organize a socialist society. While enjoying a democratic centralist scheme of organization for their own Party, they acted in such a way as to SHUT DOWN the possibility for the kind of multiparty, pluralist, democratic socialist society that Marx and Engels, as early as 1847, envisioned, when they were in the Communist League.
What your relative (husband? father?) is doing is knocking all of these characters calling themselves Marxist into a big cocked hat where, to mix my metaphors, it's so dark that all cows are black. And he's doing this on the ridiculous pretext that Marx and Engels found PRESENT working class consciousness lacking in revolutionary socialist consciousness.
Yes, but Marx and Engels argued that goaded by the economic crises of capitalism, and guided hopefully by those intellectuals who don't flatter the workers (like your relative does), but instead, criticize, debate, work with them, to achieve socialist consciousness. To GUIDE them.
This does not mean creating a pedagogical dictatorship, after the insurrection is over. By the time of the insurrection, the working class must have achieved socialist consciousness--the consciousness of why we should have socialism, why we need a socialist revolution to create it--and why that socialist society should be fundamentally democratic. And how to run that society, democratically. A MAJORITY, as Marx, Engels, Luxemburg and others argued strenuously--must come to this understanding, BEFORE, not decades after the insurrection, as your relative so spuriously, insultingly, bigotedly, pig-headedly, and maliciously charges.
I'm tired of these shrill anti-Marxist accusations, this bigotry, these stupid insults. That's why I'm here and that's WHY I'm challenging your relative's BULL SHIT!
And yet Karl Marx himself insisted that only in a higher phase of communism (which comes after socialism) could people make society be based on the egalitarian principle of From each according to need, etc. as he states in his Critique of the Gotha Program with these words:
"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
What the HELL has that got to do with Marx and Engels' view, expressed by their then artisan comrade Karl Schapper (who a few years later went Blanquist, like the rest of the artisans in the Communist League, thus breaking up the League), that their goal was to create a democratic, multi party, pluralistic socialist society?!
You're grasping at straws, to prop up your anti-Marxist bigotry.
Why don't you just shut up for about a year, on this question, and actually LOOK at the Marxist texts, carefully reviewing them. Again, I think I mentioned to you two works which solidly put Marx and Engels in the democratic, not the elitist-Blanquist camp: Richard N. Hunt, THE POLITICAL IDEAS OF MARX AND ENGELS; and Hal Draper, KARL MARX'S THEORY OF REVOLUTION.
Richard N. Hunt
Also, John, thanks for the rich appendix you provide; the passage from anthropologist Graeber was interesting about the viability for the city to become the natural locus for democratic change in society; Bookchin of course advocates for a libertarian municipalism, which evokes the middle age adage that "City Air makes one free..." in which a serf, if he /she could reside in a 'free city' for a year uninterrupted could liberate from serfdom.
I like this passage..."almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly ‘scale up’ to anything like a city, a region, or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence."
Thank you John for this criticism of elitism and the tendency by elites from both sides of the intellectual aisle to denigrate the commoner and elevate, well, the intellectual. When this happens, it has the effect of 'otherizing' those we need in a mass movement to liberate from plutocracy.
I read Stratham's we can change the world I find his argument compelling. And I accept your notion that a significant majority of ordinary people are already in a state of readiness for revolution, but that they feel alone in this 'readiness.' So, the task of the egalitarian revolution is to speak frankly and openly about the shared experience of plutocratic domination and the problems it has wrought on society, socially to people, and ecologically to the natural systems.
I don't experience your criticism of the elites that 'otherize' the working classes and the rural folk as demagoguery. I think Thomas 'doth protest too much...' on this point. Nor do I think you are being anti-intellectual, nor that you are dismissing the notion of the value of an intellectual vanguard. You just want revolutionaries to perceive the inherent wisdom and instinct for freedom among ordinary workers be they from rural areas or from the cities, and I would add, that even the 'petite bourgeoise' need to be enlisted in an egalitarian liberation program.
The bottom line in an egalitarian movement is that a critical mass of all the people need to accept that the plutocracy has ruined society out of their hubristic sense of entitlement, and that a movement for real and not fake democracy, is what we need in our society, all around the world.
I know you, Thomas and I share a sense of the emergency society is in. We all agree revolutionary change is necessary. But I have no confidence in a 'left intellectual elite' making all the difference, but I do have confidence in a possibility for people to find common cause in advancing a free society. We need intellectuals to write about and explain this possibility, be they classical marxists, deep christian freedom fighters, or good government anarchists such as myself.
I agree.
I, in contrast to Marxists, judge people by the values they have and the aims they pursue, not by their membership in this or that class based on relation to the means of production. Yes, it is true that there is a strong correlation between the values and aims people have and their relation to the means of production, but this correlation doesn't tell you whether a particular individual, be they a peasant or blue collar worker or peti-bourgeois or intellectual, has pro- or anti-egalitarian values and aims. One has to hear what they say and see what they do and judge them accordingly.
Thanks John. A comprehensive summary of the manner in which the working man has been treated as inferior and unworthy by the arrogant elites throughout history.
John, this is demagogic. And dangerous. It reminds me of the anti-intellectual treatment I received from the hippie fascist pit bulls for the upper middle class twits, who ran the NYC Medical Freedom Party right into the ground--just like your Boston housing group. For one of these hippie fascist in particular, using your brain is a sin. For both of them, to criticize the authoritarianism of the upper middle class leaders, was to "disrupt our unity" and to "insult everybody".
It's dangerous in general to the egalitarianism we both promote, to overgeneralize about "intellectuals" per se. That is demagogic. There is a need for intellectuals--particularly Marxist intellectuals--to help guide ordinary working people AWAY from the misleadership of the upper middle class twits, AWAY from the hero worship and authoritarianism promoted, as Erich Fromm wrote in ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM, by the insecurities of the capitalist system itself--and TOWARD democratic socialist self-empowerment.
Your "take" on Marx is undialectical and completely one-sided. I've already disputed this with regard to the proletariat. You don't comprehend that Marx is talking about a DIALECTICAL PROCESS of the working class coming into socialist consciousness, as a result of a) economic and existential crises created by the capitalist system b) democratic leadership by... intellectuals!
Counterpoised to your quotes by Marx about the peasantry, are the statements he made in both CLASS STRUGGLES IN FRANCE and THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, about the potential for a "revolutionary peasantry" to emerge.
Thomas, You seem not to have noticed that my post was against the elitism of the intellectuals on both the left and the right, and NOT against intellectuals in general. In fact you seem not to have noticed that I cite favorably the intellectual Dave Stratman and the intellectual, James C. Scott, author of the book "Hidden Transcripts." I myself am an intellectual. So, what it seems you are really opposed to is my denunciation of elitism.
I think you have trodden on his Marxist toes here John. He is blinded by the dense fog of elitist BS promulgated by Marx one of the worst examples intellectual arrogance.
I think you're a right wing asshole.
Thanks for proving my point.
Brilliant comeback! You just proved mine. You're a bigoted idiot.
No, John, I am not an elitist. You are being anti-intellectual, and anti-Marxist. These objections still stand:
1) You used the definite article, "the": "the intellectuals of both the left and right". Where you might have said "some" or even "most of" That's an overgeneralization.
2) Once again, you unfairly attacked Karl Marx's writings, confusing one moment in the dialectic he promotes in proletarian (and peasant) consciousness, as his last word on the possibility for proletarian and peasant consciousness. That was once again unfair and undialectical
Didn't they teach you anything in public health school about the dialectical nature of reality? It's too bad you obviously didn't study Heraclitus ("you never step into the same river twice").
Thomas, there you go again with your words, "possibility for proletarian and peasant consciousness." The word "possibility" means that they may in the FUTURE have good values and aims despite the supposed fact that they do not CURRENTLY have good values and aims. This is precisely the elitist and false view of ordinary people that my post criticizes, and it is apparently your view too.
So I'm an elitist because I don't think the working class or the peasantry are all great and wonderful now?!
That would make every teacher who thinks she knows more than her students, an "elitist".
It's ridiculous. You're being demagogic, not dialectical. I'm not going to argue this with you. It's obvious you have ego/emotional issues around this.
This is a game you're playing with yourself, and fooling others, into thinking you're the great and noble intellectual who's saving ordinary people from the elitism of those dirty marxist commies who want to dominate them. "You're wonderful, and nobody has the right to criticize you. I love you just the way you are" It's a load of patronizing self-indulgent
bullshit. With this kind of an attitude, the working class will never come to power
And you attract to yourself fellow anti-Marxist bigots like JAS, who take as an absolute truth, just like you do, that we Marxists are elitist and want to dominate, because we don't believe in flattering the workers as you do, rather than understand where they are actually at intellectually, and helping them understand their proper aims and values. You're not contributing to any egalitarian revolution with this demagogic, bigoted nonsense.
John Spritzler's romantic view of "ordinary people" is, to say the least, not scientific. He wants nothing to do with a scientific, realistic attitude toward "ordinary people" and their various tendencies--some of which are positive, some of which are negative. The scientific socialist aims to UNDERSTAND these tendencies, and guide the positive ones toward liberation. This takes a lot of work.
Nope, Spritzler says. They're all positive.
This is a comfortable illusion. And Spritzler will defend it to the death, because it is so comfortable. Come off it, ye scientific intellectuals. You're just elitist. You just want to build this vanguard party of the intellectuals and advanced workers, to become a murderous bureaucratic elite your selves. You don't have to build a vanguard party. All we all have to do, is go down to the parking lot of the local supermarket, and preach egalitarianism to the benighted masses. Then they will all spontaneously rise up and claim their egalitarian legacy.
No matter how much he rails against the rich, his real enemy are those scientific intellectuals who would dispute his comfortable illusion, He will do anything to delegitimize them, including lying and misrepresenting their position as "elitist"
You're either a romantic like him. Or you're an elitist. There's no in between, in his comfortable fantasy world.
But there's also no working with him. On anything. Unless you agree with him.
And yet, it is I, not the Marxists, who write extensively to refute the ruling class's divide-and-rule lies. For example my article at https://www.pdrboston.org/21st-century-divide-and-rule refuting many of these lies. I write such articles because I am not naive about the harmfulness of ruling class lies. Having a true understanding of the positive values and aims of most ordinary people is not the same as being naive about the harmfulness of ruling class lies, Thomas.
The ruling class uses censorship to create divisive frameworks in which both of the choices offered are bad. What do the Marxists and the Left in general do? They tell people to take one of the bad choices and they say how awful the opposite choice is. This is exactly what the ruling class loves.
This is just about as incoherent as your last comment, about to each according to their needs, was irrelevant.
What is this mysterious "bad choice" that we Marxists, do you suppose, are offering ordinary people?
Where and when have we ever counseled ordinary people to accept ruling class lies? What lies are you talking about?
As for divisiveness, that's pretty rich, coming from you. You might present as a mere intellectual disagreement, the difference of opinion between those who romanticize ordinary people, vs. those who adopt a scientific (= Marxist) attitude. All the while, IN COMRADELY fashion, accepting the fact that we have the REAL ELITISTS in common, as our common enemy--the eugenicist billionaires and their lackeys among the upper middle class pseudo-intellectuals (Whom Marxist van der Pijl has described as the "cosmopolitan cadre" of the ruling class.
But no. That's not your approach--this comradely approach--at all. In true, woke, identity politics fashion, you foment hatred against your potential Marxist comrades. Instead of accepting the fact that we have differences of opinion, you stigmatize and scapegoat us as elitist, ourselves. And thus you conflate us with the authoritarian, upper middle class cadre.
This is EXTREMELY divisive. What you are doing is promoting an anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, demagogic mentality, DIVIDING the working class from the scientific socialist intellectuals who want to guide them to socialist consciousness as the means of dealing with growing economic and even these days medical crises that they face.
And we all know how wonderful a track record Marxist vanguard parties have in creating genuine egalitarian democracy, right?
Yes, so far. But because you are such a anti-Marxist bigot, you refuse to consider the mitigating circumstances: enormous pressure by the imperialists upon the fledgling Soviet Russian state, synergizing with the Blanquist proclivities of its most important leader, V.I. Lenin--who idolized a Russian Populist Blanquist named Petr Tkachev.
How wonderful is the track record of folksy cornpipe smoking romantics like yourself, going down to the local supermarket parking lot and preaching to your idolized ordinary people that, "Eureka! Each and every one of you ALSO wants egalitarianism"?
You do a grievous injustice to Karl Marx. Is your misunderstanding of him willful or innocent?
I quote Karl Marx. What’s wrong with that?
Read the quotations at https://www.pdrboston.org/communism-no-socialism-no
Just for the record, John, this is from Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire. In this passage, Marx talks about BOTH the revolutionary and the conservative peasant. And the revolutionary peasant does NOT become revolutionary because of anything that socialist intellectuals say to them or do. it's because of the crisis posed in their lives by Louis Napoleon's bourgeois rule. Put that in your demagogic, anti-Marxist, bigoted pipe and smoke it. You can always find such passages about the proletariat as well by Marx. You just have to look for them. But being a bigot like yourself, you don't. you cherry pick the negative analyses of the way the proletariat is now, and confuse this with Marx's basic view. You IGNORE the possibility he raises of their enlightenment. Because you're setting him up as a bogeyman. You're not really reading him generously, because that would interfere with the image you want to present to the world of being that unique egalitarian intellectual, the only one who has an open heart for the value of working people
BULL SHIT!
But let us not misunderstand. The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the
conservative peasant; not the peasant who strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather one who wants to consolidate his holding; not the countryfolk who in alliance with the towns want to overthrow the old order through their own energies, but on the
contrary those who, in solid seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their
small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the Empire. It represents not the enlightenment
but the superstition of the peasant; not his judgment but his prejudice; not his future but his past;
not his modern Cevennes but his modern Vendée.5 The three years‘ stern rule of the
parliamentary republic freed a part of the French peasants from the Napoleonic illusion and
revolutionized them, even though superficially; but the bourgeoisie violently repulsed them as
often as they set themselves in motion. Under the parliamentary republic the modern and the
traditional consciousness of the French peasant contended for mastery.
Another trick you play, John Spritzler--a demagogic trick--is to move the goal posts. First there's nothing that Marx wrote that was ever kind about the working class, or the peasantry. Then, when I find something--and there any number of passages where he actually says stuff that is kind, that reveals the proletariat has the potential to become socialist in their consciousness--you don't admit that you were wrong. Oh, no. You just say that Marx even saying that they have potential, proves he's an elitist. Because there's a moment in the dialectical process of intellectual advancement, when they DON'T have great "values and aims".
It's a little, shameful, demagogic racket you're playing. It stinks. It's counterproductive. It's destructive. It's basically McCarthyist.
According to J. Spritzler, if Marx , or anyone had said that the 19th century practice of child labor in factories, mines, and other unwholesome atmospheres had resulted in stunting a child's intelligence as well as harming his or her physical development, with few exceptions, such as Charles Dickens, he would be accused of elitism and thinking that children " suck"!
Judith, exactly! This is identity politics logic, applied to "ordinary people". If you hint in the slightest that there's actually wrong with them--not INTRINSIC to them (Marx NEVER said that)--but because of their CONDITIONS--you're anti-worker. You're insulting THEM.
Another example of this was Tom Angotti's "review" (i.e. politically correct hatchet job) on the late great Mike Davis' PLANET OF SLUMS. For even using the word "slum", Angotti damns him. How dare you say that the CONDITIONS under which the ordinary people live, are terrible?! 0Engels, Angotti said, would never have used that word! But as a matter of fact--he did! He used the word, which is a Gaelic word--not any German translation, but the actual word--in his first great book, THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ENGLAND. Slum means a place of desolation.
But I guess for Angotti and Spritzler, you can never say that the consciousness of the working class has been degraded by their conditions--even though you practically say in the same breath--as do Marx and Engels--that this very degradation will drive the proletariat to achieve socialist consciousness, overthrow the capitalist system, and build a socialist society.
No. Like Athena out of the head of Zeus, or like Nietzsche's ubermensch, the ordinary people of this world are ALREADY PERFECT! And anybody who says anything different (than such flattering demagogic nonsense) is an elitist!
The fact is that Thomas, and most Marxists likewise, focus on how ordinary people are wrong, not right in their values and aims. Thus Thomas repeatedly cites the book, "The Dangerous Class" whenever I emphasize that ordinary people are the solution, not the problem, and ought to have the real power today. This is why the only way that Thomas says anything positive about ordinary people is by saying that they have the POTENTIAL to develop 'socialist consciousness'--i.e., maybe in the future but today, no; they are the 'DANGEROUS CLASS.' It is impossible to build a truly mass and egalitarian revolutionary movement on the basis of the Marxist negative view of ordinary people. All one can do with this view is establish anti-democratic regimes, which is what Marxists have done.
Spritzler, You are either a conscious liar or a careless one. Your rendition of what I've been saying is just about as ignorant as your reading of Marx's views.
Let me correct some really insulting grotesque errors you are stating here, about my views. It seems to come from your stubborn, thick headed bigotry.
I only referred to Barrow's book, THE DANGEROUS CLASS, once, and then perhaps commented further. You make it sound as if I've been citing this work for the last year. I did not "repeatedly" cite the book "whenever" you "emphasized" that ordinary people are the solution, not the problem.
I never said that ordinary people are the problem, in the first place.
I never said that ordinary people in general are the dangerous class. Neither did Judith, who by the way, is also a Marxist. Neither of us believe that ordinary people are the problem, John. We only argue that their present consciousness poses a problem.
You YOURSELF argue this, in a way. You have "repeatedly" argued that there is something WRONG with the present consciousness of ordinary people: the fact that while they are all supposedly egalitarian, they don't know that EACH OTHER are egalitarian.
NOBODY should pay attention to the anti-Marxist RAVINGS of this man until he at least admits he has been either sloppy, bigoted, or consciously lying.
No one who has any integrity can work with such a deceitful and/or sloppy demagogue. Nobody can ever create a democratic society alongside such a silly, insulting, bigoted fool
No one can have a decent debate with such a person.