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

Recognizing the dialectic

 

Here´s a radical idea: Marxism didn´t lead to Stalinism. It didn´t even lead to Leninism. Nor did it directly lead to “the administrative state” or the “professional-managerial class”. But the code word there is “directly”.

Marx and Engels did support the workers´ movement, the Paris Commune and the notion of cheap government. They also supported reform struggles and bourgeois revolutions, arguing that this would pave the way for capitalism…and hence lay down the foundations for socialism. And when the “revolutionary wave” was over, they decided to wait out the next one from within the Second International. Note also that Marx and Engels had geopolitics strikingly similar to those of Germany (which just happened to be their native land).

Thus, Marxism “objectively” led to Social Democracy. German Social Democracy, to be exact. But Social Democracy was in its turn taken over by middle class strata, which used the apparatus of the labor movement to further their own interests. In *this* way, Marxism led to the dominance of “the professional-managerial class”. So the objective fate of Marxism was to be transmogrified into reformist Social Democracy. An alternative fate (more in keeping with the original revolutionary impulse) can be seen in Rosa Luxemburg and the early Trotsky (before Bronstein became a Bolshevik). In other words, the historical fate of Marxism is to become either reformist Social Democracy or non-Bolshevik/anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialism with a family resemblance to anarcho-syndicalism. But the latter ideology is utopian. It simply can´t be implemented. So the heirs of Rosa and early Trotsky either become a ginger group on reformist Social Democracy, or a ginger group on Stalinism. Or both?

But what about Communism? Lenin was accused by the Mensheviks of being a Jacobin and a Blanquist. To an orthodox Marxist, these are insults. The Jacobins and the Blanquist are “bourgeois radicals”, they are “the far left of the bourgeois revolution”, a kind of middle class radicals who completely lost their material anchor point, freely floating around in classless social space. And the Mensheviks were right. Lenin really was a kind of Jacobin. So was Mao. Yes, they took up Marxism and may even have identified with it on some un-ironic level. But their real historical role was different. Marx *opposed* Blanqui and the Blanquists. Indeed, the formula “dictatorship of the proletariat” was originally a polemical retort to Blanqui, who had called for an educational dictatorship *over* the proletariat by the (Blanquist) revolutionary minority.

Lenin and Mao simply reproduced the usual cycles of Russian and Chinese history. Russian history oscillates between autocracy and a “time of troubles”. The Russian revolution and its immediate aftermath were the time of troubles. Later, Stalin restored autocracy. In China, history alternates between Empire and millenarian cults rebelling against Empire…only to become the new Empire. The Communist Party of China encapsulates this to a tee. Of course, in the modern world, all societies will converge on the rule of the Professional Managerial Class. Thus, the Confucian mandarins are replaced by Communist bureaucrats. The Marxian idea of a centralized planned economy (which Marx and Engels wanted to introduce only gradually and under a workers´ government) becomes a bureaucratic behemoth, a kind of weird mix of the Scandinavian welfare state (or was it the Prussian ditto) and Asiatic despotism.

In an ironic way, the fate of really existing Marxism proves the materialist conception of history. Marxism recognizes the dialectic. The dialectic also recognizes Marxism…but not under circumstances of Marxism´s own choosing.  

Frihet att svälta

 

Glada EU-byråkrater uppmanar
arbetarklassen att äta pizza istället

EU är uppenbarligen inte "marxister", verkar det som...

EU förbjuder Ungern att sänka matpriser  

"Alla vet att hon är marxist"

 

Har inte orkat kolla på debatten mellan Trump och Harris, men den roligaste repliken verkar ha varit när Trump sade "alla vet att hon är marxist". Eh?

Antagligen p.g.a. ett utspel från Harris om prisstopp. Richard Nixons osalige ande harklar sig besvärat...

Listen, Ashtar: A letter to my younger self

 

HA HA HA. An old Amazon book review? Previously posted here in 2019, it seems.  

Murray Bookchin is the man

Peak internet

 

Just some crazy shit I discovered on YouTube, posted here with complete abandon! 

Everything that exists, deserves to perish

 

Amazing that the "Karl Marx is a Satanist" meme is still going strong. Here endorsed by none other than Jordan Peterson!  

Was Karl Marx a SATANIST?

 

A somewhat confusing presentation on the (non-existence) of Marxism´s occult roots. My provisional takes on the problematique can be read by clicking on the linx belows...

But sure, the Gothic angle on "Das Kapital" was kind of funny. 

Guilt by association

The missing link

Dreams of a spirit-seer

It´s Gnosticism all the way down

 

From John Michael Greer´s blog. Somebody called Corax writes on the debate thread:

<<<<<<<

Around the (v)blogosphere I’m seeing more and more of the misapplication of the term “Gnosticism” toward secular ideologies like woke leftism, something is a rather conspiratorial manner. I know this has been brought up and addressed here on these blogs on several occasions, but I think I might know what’s driving this bad idea.

To me, the obvious first question to ask is why this hysterical fingerprinting is now coming from secular/atheistic people? As opposed to the usual assortment of fundamentalist Christians who typically peddle these kind of paranoid ideas.

My theory is that this mostly has to do with a new type of cognitive dissonance that’s now swimming around the intellectual end of the Religion of Progress. Many of its adherents can’t seem to deal with the notion that Progress isn’t exactly what it cracked up to be. There’s been a growing number of atheist liberal thinkers who have come out against wokeism. I call them “yesterday’s liberals.” I think some of them call themselves “the Intellectual Dark Web” (this label kind of reminds me of the semantic accuracy of ‘Holy Roman Empire’). They seem to want to wind the clock back to the 90s, back when Progress still had an optimistic and open-minded collective ethos; back when very few adherents to Progress thought anything other than the Star Trek Future We All Deserve was right around the corner. Rather, the emergence and mainstreaming of wokeness has clearly shown that Progress can actually lead down some rather scary and fanatical paths. Instead of Star Trek, anyone who is moderately-perceptive can now see that Progress has morphed into a totalitarian establishment ideology, and on the social and economic end of things, Progress has resulted in the enshaleification of everything.

But no, that can’t be the REAL Progress! Wokeness must be due to some weird aberration from deep antiquity that has somehow bubbled up to the surface once again. First it was the atheist intellectual James Lindsay (of the postmodernist academia prank fame) claiming Woke Leftism is actually a modern rehash ancient “Gnosticism,” despite these two things having very little in common besides both beliefs rejecting of material reality in some form, though of course in very different ways. He (and a few copycats) have doubled down on this absurdity and have extended the “connection” to Marx, Hegel, Hermeticism, and of course Occultism. I’m pretty sure next up, Plato will be pegged as the grand conspirator behind all of this (I’ve already seen this conspiracy theory floating around the more fringe corners of social media).

What this all says to me is that Progress has fallen such a state of deep doo doo, that the “circular firing squad” phenomenon is now warming its engines. Anything remotely weird or too complicated/nuanced for the Western rationalist-materialist mind to understand is now suspect, and thus now be part of the grand conspiracy to undermine and destroy Material Progress. This seems to be mirroring the same exact type of paranoia that consumed much of evangelical Protestant Christianity decades ago. Really, it’s what happens when any dogmatic ideology is in its death throes. Star Trek ain’t happening, therefore every non-believer must be attacked and demonized!

What do you make of all of this? I’d say it’s best to just ignore people peddling this idiocy. But I’m afraid these ideas are going to spread to more people should there be a successful cultural backlash against Wokeness and anything perceived to be adjacent to it. I’m particularly worried about the label “Occultism” becoming terrible optics in the eyes of the masses; not that it’s particularly great right now. I’m worried about a day where I have to hide my beliefs and practices. Perhaps I’m just being paranoid.

<<<<<<<

Wicked liberty

 

A "classical" Marxist critique of the book "The Dawn of Everything", attacking its pluralist and "idealist" perspective on human pre-history. The second link goes to my own review of the book.

How can we be free? A Marxist critique of "The Dawn of Everything"

The Dawn of Everything

Communist Cell Starter Pack?!

 

Credit: Wellred Books 

Can be yours for only 15 pounds!

From the Manifesto of the "International Marxist Tendency´s" latest little recruitment campaign at the fringes of the official Communist movement (emphasis added): 

>>>In its day, capitalism succeeded in developing industry, agriculture, science, and technique to a level undreamed of in the past. In so doing, it was unconsciously laying the material foundations for a future classless society. But now this has reached its limits, and everything is turning into its opposite. 

>>>The capitalist system long ago exhausted its historic potential. Unable to carry society further, it has now reached the point of no return. The present crisis is not a normal cyclical crisis of capitalism. It is an existential crisis, expressed not only in the stagnation of the productive forces, but also in a general crisis of culture, morality, politics and religion.

>>>The yawning abyss that separates rich and poor – between obscene wealth in the hands of a few parasites, and poverty, destitution and despair for the great majority of the human race – has never been greater. These are revolting symptoms of the sickness of a society that is rotten ripe for overthrow. Its eventual downfall is inevitable and cannot be avoided.  The world is heading towards an uncertain future characterised by a never-ending cycle of wars, economic collapse and increasing misery. 

>>>All the attempts of the bourgeoisie to restore the economic equilibrium only serve to destroy the social and political equilibrium. The bourgeoisie finds itself trapped in a crisis for which it has no solution. That is the key to understanding the present situation.

The above is true, after a fashion. 

>>>Lenin explained long ago, however, that there is no such thing as a final crisis of capitalism. Unless it is overthrown, the capitalist system will always recover from even the deepest crisis, albeit at a terrible cost for humanity.

This, emphatically, is *not* true. Not unless you have a very wide definition of "capitalism". So nah, Messrs Trotskyistes, you won´t get a second shot at it. And think of it, you´ll probably never get a first shot at it, either!

BREAKING NOW: TED GRANT TURNING IN HIS GRAVE!!!

 

Wtf. Has the IMT decided to give up on entryism and become, gulp, another small sect at the outskirts of the organized labor movement? Ted Grant must be turning in his tomb! 

The Communist, Towards the Revolutionary Communist Party

The Fresno dragons: a socialist plot?

 

In 1891, Californian newspapers reported "dragon" sightings in the area around Fresno. The monstrous creatures were supposedly pterodactyls. Or perhaps not, since many newspaper editors blamed moonshine or outright hoaxing. There were true believers and skeptics already back in 1891.

The most original claim is that the 1891 tall tale was a garbled version of a real incident involving a socialist-Marxist-utopian commune in the Sierra Nevada, the Kaweah Colony. After being forced off their land by the US army, the evil socialists supposedly imported two large and extremely dangerous Australian birds known as "boas", which were expected to physically attack the horses and mules of the soldiers! 

Nobody knows what on earth a "boa" might be (perhaps a garbled reference to moa?), but there is a flightless bird that roughly fits the description: the cassowary. Except, of course, that the story of how the Kaweah colonists imported them as a bio-weapon is probably just another tall tale. Still, I suppose Juan Posadas might have been interested in this fakelore...

The Fresno Dragons

 

Conspiracy theory iceberg

 

This is a somewhat eclectic conspiracy theory "iceberg", or actually alternative knowledge "iceberg". I have grouped various controversial speculations in three groups: Most likely, In the middle and Least likely. 

I have *not* arranged the individual items in each category from most to least likely, since I´m too tired right now. But sure, doing that could be interesting. Obviously, this is based on my subjective speculations and conjectures. Feel free to disagree! Also, the "iceberg" is obviously not exhaustive.  

Most likely 

Bigfoot

The Honshu wolf is still extant

The thylacine is still extant 

The Ivory Billed Woodpecker is...guess what

Ball lightning

Earth lights

Portugal discovering the New World

Portugal discovering Australia 

Phoenicians in Scandinavia 

9/11 was an inside job 

JFK wasn´t shot by Oswald

Hitler had part Jewish descent

Pearl Harbor was provoked by FDR (and I fucking like it) 

Pygmies and Giants

Near Death Experiences (NDEs)

Ghosts

Near-global flood

Jesus Mythicism

Buddha Mythicism

Teleology in evolution

Rupert Sheldrake

Parapsychology  

Peak oil/Limits to growth

Fascism

Gnosticism 

Ukraine blew up Nordstream

The Dems were behind the BLM-Antifa riots

Lenin got German gold

Nemesis 

Big Bang denialism

Theosophy 

Joe Biden cognitive decline

Hunter Biden´s laptop

Wuhan lab leak

The Event 

Brahman real and Thou Art That, Shvetaketu

Everything is suffering 

Known civilizations older/more advanced than we think

Migrant crisis planned by certain elite groups

Both Karl XII and Gustav III were victims of vast conspiracies 

Woke is a CIA psy-op

Woke is a Chinese psy-op

Election fraud is as American as apple pie

Midwits are a thing

People who want to abolish age of consent laws are usually paedophiles

Russia is winning the war in Ukraine

Fermi´s paradox has been solved, but people don´t want to hear the solution

Operation Stay Behind went rogue and killed Olof Palme

Actual Masonic conspiracies

George Soros is a bad boy

Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro´s love child

Richard B Spencer is a fed

Richard B Spencer actually is a Neo-Nazi carrying out deep entryism in the Democratic Party

Belief in UFOs is fostered by US intelligence agencies as a cover for military test flights  

In the middle

Lost Civilization (Atlantis)

Lemuria

ETH

Fairies 

Cryptozoology in general

Old Earth Creationism

Intelligent Design (as understood in the US)

Marxism 

Anarcho-syndicalism

Christianity and main-line religions

Panspermia

Channeling

Most COVID-related alternative theories

Netanyahu had foreknowledge of 10/7

"Centuries of Darkness" 

Afro-centrism 

Climate change real, but not caused by humans

Climate change real, but Ice Age rather than warming

Juan Posadas

The Moon eats people 

Magick

I AM Movement 

Chemtrails

Astrology

Eugene McCarthy (the maverick scientist)

Trotskyist/Neo-Con connection

The Knights Templar are not what they seem to be

The hydrogen economy

Least likely

QAnon

Ancient Aliens (Däniken)

Reptoids (Icke)

Biblical literalism

Puranic literalism

Flat Earth

Hollow Earth

Apocalypticism

Charles Hapgood

Velikovsky

Trump collusion (2015-21) 

Young Earth Creationism

Fusion power

Cold fusion

Libertarianism

Cornucopia 

Mandela Effect

"Starseeds" and such

Lilac unicorns from Lakuma channeled by Diana Cooper

Aquatic Ape Theory

Mothman

UFO contactee cases

The Da Vinci Code

"Professor" Dave is a nice guy

AI will turn the Terminator franchise into reality

Name it and claim it

Taylor Swift is an op 

The Singularity

Stargates

The Green transition  

Nibiru and the Annunaki 

Breakaway civilization

The Mud Flood and Great Tartary

Phantom time (most versions)

Kensington Rune Stone

Anthroposophy

Hare Krishna

Scientology

Babylonian Brotherhood or Illuminati behind everything

A race of land-lubbing intelligent cetaceans once created a highly advanced civilization in Siberia

The Moon is a UFO 

The Moon landing was a hoax

The Face on Mars

Fox News alien autopsy video

Bob Lazar

Antarctica was Atlantis

Time travel

Jews are evil aliens controlled from the planet Pluto

Ashtar Command (the blogger) is more than one guy

Materialism

The recession is over 

Land to the tiller