Marxism-Islamism

 

Overheard on the interwebs: "Islam is a political ideology masquerading as a religion. Communism is a religion masquerading as a political ideology." Not entirely accurate, in my estimation.

Both are religions. :P

Let history judge

 

Previously posted on August 11, 2023. Just a little reminder! 

Marxism is a religion. Something as strange as a "materialist" religion, but nevertheless. Or, to put it another way: if Marxism had declared a belief in God, or existed 1000 years ago, everyone would readily have recognized it as some kind of Kabbala in radicalized Shia Muslim garb. It´s almost ridiculous.

So world history has a deeper meaning, culminating in the establishment of communism. Which is the end goal not only of human history, but of the cosmic process itself. Where does this come from? Let me guess: the megalomaniacal brain of a...Hegel? 

But how could Marx and Engels divine the deeper meaning of history? They couldn´t, of course. They were just speculating. Lenin turned Marx-Engels into virtual prophets, with himself as Imam, exegeting their esoteric message...and adding to it. He even founded his very own Assassin order, and spread the dawa worldwide. And just as any Muslim dynasty betrays the revolution that brought them to power, so did the Communists. Heretical splinter groups abound!

Hegel´s ideas about gradual salvation through struggle presumably comes from Oetinger. And the whole scheme is probably just Lurianic Kabbala or some form of Hermetism, secularized and properly immanentized. Marx believed he placed Hegel "on his feet", but he really just founded a materialized Gnosticism. In all fairness, though, Marx and Engels were still too German, rationalist, enlightened and "scientific" to go all the way to secular religion. 

The transformation of Marxism to some kind of millennial cult comes during the 20th century. It´s probably not a co-incidence that this happens in Russia and China. While Social Democracy becomes a reformist form of postmillenarianism and even later pseudo-socialist churchianity, Communism becomes a kind of bizarre Ghulat imitation in its Russian form and a substitute Taoist sect in its Chinese ditto. 

If a future historian would analyze these movements *without looking at their formal ideology*, he would immidiately see the similarities between Maoism and apocalyptic Taoism (or the pseudo-Christian Taiping rebellion). He would then marvel at how the Russian "Bolsheviks" recapitulated the Abbasid revolution in the Muslim world. Of course, the actual geopolitics of the Soviet and Chinese Communist regimes would be no mystery. I suppose the same historian would also scratch his head over the restoration of the Korean imperial dynasty in the form of the Kim family...

This is not the end point of history. It´s not even the beginning of the end. It´s just the same old story, recycled again, and again. Marxism has been recycled by history and found to be just another Sino-Russo-Semitic religious movement. We´ve been here before. What is perhaps more surprising is that so many people in the Western world believed in the crap. But then, it´s amazing that so many people believed in it 1000 years ago, too! 

I have spoken.

Påfågelstronen

 

Både kronprinsens och Mujahedins flagga. Tydligen. 

Varför refererar SVT Nyheter till Reza Pahlavi som "kronprinsen" inom citationstecken? Alltså den *så kallade* kronprinsen. Varför detta väldigt tydliga avståndstagande? Varför inte helt enkelt kalla honom "Shahens son" eller något sådant? 

I fredags visade TV-nyheterna bilder från en demonstration någonstans i Sverige mot den iranska regimen. Inget om vem som arrangerade den. Men det var Folkets Mujahedin. Porträtten på deras ledare Massoud och Maryam Rajavi var fullt synliga. Så varför sade inte nyheterna att protesten var arrangerad av "motståndsrörelsen" (inom citationstecken) Folkets Mujahedin? Eller varför inte "den ytterst kontroversiella väpnade och terrorstämplade ex-marxistiska shia-sekten Folkets Mujahedin som tidigare haft nära band till Saddam Husseins regim i Irak"? Vilket ju verkar vara en alldeles korrekt beskrivning. 

Bryr jag mig? Nja, lite kanske. Jag undrar vem som sitter på SVT Nyheter och har åsikter om olika falanger inom den iranska oppositionen... 

Merry Christmas, world

 

Here is that darn photo of Bannon and Chomsky again, probably taken by Epstein. In hindsight, it´s obvious that Western-style more-or-less-democratic capitalism simply couldn´t be overthrown by a revolution. Any revolution. The system was simply too good to derail and integrate all opposition and render it harmless. See the photo above! Chomsky (the "anarchist" who ended up voting for the Democrats like everyone else) was obviously controlled opposition, but the fact that Bannon shows up in the Epstein files may tell you something about *that* end of the political spectrum...  

The system could only have been smashed from the outside - but even that might have been impossible, Communism perhaps being too integrated itself into certain "geopolitical structures" (and strictures). I mean, how many of the revolutionary regimes in the Third World were really dependent on Western capital for their survival? And what about the Soviet Union itself? Beside, how would such a "smashing" even have looked like, anyway? A nuclear first strike á la Posadas?

There is of course another way in which the Western democratic-capitalism might end: by gradually rottening from the inside. Indeed, that seems to be what is happening as we speak. A process which will end in the simultaneous disappearence of the two main contending classes (whoever *they* are - the managerial class and the lose cannon capitalistas)?

Marxism ended as a utopia. In its un-ironic form, it was just the millennarian cult of modernity. And the paedophiles are always with you.    

 

I fucking love science

 

 - Technology? Nah, me hovering
is the result of natural selection!

Overheard on the interwebs: the dominant secular ideas of a period are just the dominant religious ideas of the preceding period with their serial numbers filed off. 

Now, apply this to Big Bang cosmology. The similarity to creation ex nihilo is pretty obvious. Even more disturbingly, apply it to the Western Idea of Progress. Yes, that would be postmillennialism. Or even premillennialism in some versions! Cough, cough, Marxism, cough, cough. And what about evolution? Isn´t that just secularized German Romanticism?

Which doesn´t necessarily mean that these worldviews are wrong. Maybe science genuinely proves certain armchair speculations right. Or kind of right, since science (at last nominally) insist that everything is matter (in mystical motion, perhaps?). But that just raises the next question: How many of these ideas have *really* been scientifically proven in the first place? I would say that Darwin´s theory of evolution is pretty solid (as far as it goes). Indeed, Neo-Darwinism seems to be the furthest removed from any "Western" religion due to its rejection of teleology. 

The other stuff? Not so much. In fact, I´m convinced that the Big Bang cosmology will be seen as a secular version of Biblical creation in 100 years, in much the same way as "everyone knows" today that Marx just took over some mystifications of a Hegel. And in secret, everyone also knows that the idea of Progress really comes from the Protestants, the Jews or the Rosicrucians. Whatever.

But I´m not going anywhere in particular with this. So I stop here.  

Röd magi

 

Har ju intresserat mig för detta en längre tid. Och visst är det lite särpräglat att den marxistiska materialismen är teleologisk. Vilket ju implicerar en världssjäl. Och storhetsvansinnet hos en...Hegel.

Från Motpol:

Bolsjevismens ockulta rötter

Evigheter bland stjärnorna

Från denna blogg:

The real Bolsheviks?

The Other Russia

Russians who stare at goats

Cosmists, kooks and Anti-Christs

Esoterisk marxism

 

Kan ju inte undgå att länka till denna. Ja, det är den högerradikala/högerextrema "tankesmedjan" Motpol som recenserar "I Want To Believe", alltså den där boken om Juan Posadas och hans bisarra rörelse. Tonvikten ligger såklart vid UFO-aspekten...

Posadismer

Definitioner

 

Materien är rörelse i oändlighet! ;-) 

The revolution won´t be televised

 

LOL! About 20 years ago, there was an obscure website somewhere called "Cyber Leninists". Its goal was to organize the working class through the Internet for a socialist revolution. Unless it was a troll. Either way, it didn´t work out very well.

Now, there´s a new player in cyber town: the Workers League/Socialist Equality Party/World Socialist Web Site. If you read carefully, they seem to be suggesting that socialist AI can replace the vanguard party as the chief Organizer, Leader and Educator?! (Or whatever was Lenin´s exact formula.) 

It cannot. This is just another little ploy from this small sect, just as their website itself. The working class cannot be organized for revolution through the Internet. But you knew that already. Still, I suppose it might be funny to see what kind of "advise" the Northite AI will give to the atomized petit bourgeois nerds, trolls and kooks who will be drawn to this project.  

World Socialist Web Site to launch Socialism AI

We have a situation

Beware of the Spectacle!

John Michael Greer continues his discussion on Situationism. Not sure where he´s going with this, but I suppose we´ll see!

Here´s an excerpt: 

>>>In the first post on this sequence, I talked about the social function of Marxism in modern bureaucratic societies, which have already passed through the changes that Marxism brings about in practice (though not, of course, in theory). Since it’s hardly necessary to impose a metastatic bureaucratic system fusing politics and economics on a society that already has one, Marxists in bureaucratic societies—beta-Marxists, as I termed them in that post—have the function of providing dissatisfied youth with harmless ways to act out their fantasies of rebellion, before they sell out in the usual way and get the jobs in the corporate or bureaucratic worlds to which their class status entitles them.

>>>Beta-Marxists therefore tend to pursue an intriguing double agenda. On the one hand, they quite often craft extremely insightful critiques of the societies in which they function. On the other, they are exquisitely careful not to embrace any means of action that might actually pose the least threat to the status quo. Marxist rhetoric makes this last task easy. Read through Situationist books such as Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life, for example, and you’ll find no shortage of stirring evocations of that imminent moment when the masses will rise up and take destiny into their hands, or what have you.

>>>Of course that moment is never going to happen, and that’s exactly the point. The masses aren’t interested in taking destiny into their hands.  Nor, to be a little more precise, are they interested in handing over their destinies to a cadre of downwardly mobile bourgeois intellectuals who want to play at being revolutionaries. When the masses take to the streets, it’s because they want an end to specific burdens or the provision of specific benefits, which can be provided quite handily by any modern bureaucratic system that isn’t hopelessly sunk in incompetence. I’m sure that beta-Marxists are quite well aware of this, but daydreaming about the supposedly inevitable proletarian revolution allows them to evade the whole question of how to turn their fine ideas into something other than a head-trip to entertain denizens of the political fringes. 

Situationism: Where domination ends 

Lesser evilism

 

 

Things are heating up in the New York City mayoral race. 

Trump has publicly called on Republican voters *not* to support Curtis Sliwa, the "populist vigilante" candidate of the Republican Party (he´s apparently the founder-leader of the Guardian Angels). Instead, POTUS is backing liberal Democrat Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent. If all of Sliwa´s voters switch to Cuomo at the last moment, the latter will narrowly defeat the "socialist" candidate Zohran Mamdani (the official Democrat nominee). 

Which is the real point of the exercise. That, and presumably to stop any further legal proceedings against the Donald in the Big Apple. Meanwhile, Mamdani quotes Marx in a tweet. A troll? Suggesting he thinks he´s going to win...

We have a situation

 

"The opposition to the Spectacle is part of the Spectacle itself". What if the radical left-wing revolutionaries in an advanced capitalist society aren´t just politically impotent or controlled opposition, but *an inevitable and even necessary part of the System´s own self-reproduction*? So is their subjective revolutionary consciousness. 

This raises the following disturbing question: Is the same true of the Alt Right and the "brown tide" populists? Or are *they* capable of actually destroying the Spectacle? 

But if so, will they really emancipate the Nation, the White Race, or whatever they think they are doing...or simply create another Spectacle?

Pondering. 

Leggo my ego

 

John Michael Greer´s latest essay. Could be useful! The ego-tripped "non-ego-person" (or is it persona) is definitely a thing. I encountered them a few years ago in corners of the internet dedicated to - you guessed it - Advaita Vedanta. Or rather Neo-Advaita (not to be confused with Neo-Vedanta). 

JMG only mentions them in passing and then goes on to discuss the esoteric-occult meanings of ego, personality and individuality. The curious tie-in to Situationism comes from the fact that Greer is currently writing a series of blog posts on this particular quasi-Marxist movement.

An excellent theme for meditation.  

The No-Ego Ego Trip: An Interlude

The Manifesto on the Mount?

 

Is Thomas Sheridan´s flirt with conservative Christianity over? 

The Situationist situation

 

It seems me and JMG have something in common. We both hanged around the far left political subculture in our sadly misspent youths. In JMG´s case, the place was Seattle, where he encountered the RCP and FSP. I actually encountered the RCP in another US city, but not the FSP, although I certainly devoured the latter group´s magazines and pamphlets. As for Situationism, the anarchists around 1985-90 still talked about them. If you knew were to look, you could even buy Swedish translations of some of their pamphlets. I agree that they were typical French rebel intellectuals: some interesting takes here and there, but of course completely unpractical from a political POV. Their Swedish co-thinkers (which I think were called The Golden Fleet) were apparently unpractical for another reason - they were constantly high on drugs! 

But I´m digressing...

The essay linked below is apparantly the first in an entire series. I already have one (important?) disagreement: Marx and Engels were hardly "beta-Marxists" (JMG´s neologism for New Left-derived middle class reformists with a pseudo-radical veneer). They really did support the creation of an independent workers´ movement. However, Marx and Engels were pragmatic enough to support the workers´ movement even under conditions when a revolution was highly unlikely. This led to a tension in the Marxist movement between those who believed in a future revolution (which on the standard interpretation included Marx and Engels themselves - although some have argued that "the late Engels" became a reformist) and those who really wanted reformist politics. 

But the latter group (who went on to appropriate the Social Democratic label) didn´t want a "managerial aristocracy" of the current type, but (at least initially) a different kind of managerial elite based on the organizations of the labor movement. "Beta-Marxism" emerges when the labor movement is no longer a serious contender for political power in capitalist society and the managerial elites turns towards (or even creates) middle class "identities" and their protest politics, immigrant groups co-opted by the system, and so on. This does lead to relevant policy changes. 

JMG´s description of "alpha-Marxism" (Leninists and Stalinists) and "beta-Marxism" (the New Left, often absorbed by the Democratic Party in the US) are spot on otherwise. I mean, I could name names! It will be interesting to see where he finally lands in his analysis of the Situationist situation...  

Situationism: A Voice from the Fringes

Marxism, altruism and autism

 

Is Marxism just a form of autism? I´m not a Marxist, but not even I would go this far. Not sure what to even make of this essay, written by one "Lennox" and promoted on X by Richard Hanania (an elitist libertarian and on-off troll). 

Note how the author first admits that he used to project his own autism onto everyone else...and then ends up *doing exactly the same thing* not realizing it this time!

In the unlikely event you haven´t got anything else to do at 2am in the morning, Swedish local time...  

Of Marx and Moloch

And here is the almost equally absurd follow-up essay. The "socialism" promoted in this piece is less radical than even Scandinavian Social Democracy?! 

Pragmatic socialism

The cunning of unreason

 

Taking the red pill...

Marxists often call capitalism "irrational". But this wasn´t really the position of Marx and Engels. Or, to be more precise, they believed that capitalism was part of a deeper rationality working itself out in history. This (surprise) comes from Hegel: the "cunning of reason". 

This deeper, teleological rationality pushes the bourgeoisie to destroy pre-capitalist modes of production, create the modern industrial proletariat and hence create the objective preconditions for both a working class revolution and socialism. 

Look around you, comrades. Has any of this come to pass? What do you see? Yes, the capitalist system is crumbling...due to the climate crisis, the energy crisis, environmental destruction, lower IQ levels and the demographic shift of *de*population. And the bourgeoisie (whatever that even means today) is trying to solve the problem with policies which are clearly irrational and suicidal. 

None of this should come as a surprise. After all, Hegel´s cunning of reason is simply another term for...divine providence. Which doesn´t exist. Marxism has finally been exposed as a secular religion, a kind of weird Christian heresy. And while keeping the notion of God´s providence, it did away with another key Christian doctrine: that of original sin. 

I´m not a Christian, but "original sin" is certainly compatible with what we can actually observe: that every civilization declines and collapses, due to deep-seated irrational impulses. It´s the cunning of *unreason*.    

Why Marxists are atheists

Just for fun, a short and surprisingly "moderate" (relatively speaking) defense of atheism, written by a very small Trotskyist group somewhere in the United States. No Big Bang denialism and similar stuff. Almost a disappointment!  

Why Marxists Are Atheists

Informal matriarchy

 

Both hits and misses in this one...

A few notes on matriarchy

The Woke Right

 

This is frankly ridiculous. Just another day on the Internet...

A Communist Manifesto for Christian Nationalists: Testing the Woke Right