Judith Butler trading card
(For a related blog see https://clarespark.com/2012/09/07/charisma-and-symbolic-politics/: my response to the rhetoric and tactics of the Democratic National Convention, 2012.)
There was a time when there was a radical left in this country, with many warring internal factions from the late 19th century onward. But social democrats (moderate conservatives in their own view) selectively co-opted the real left, saving that pro-labor distinction for themselves as the sole moral defenders of the working class, nailing McCarthyism (and the “paranoid” Right) for misguided assaults upon liberals. But whether old Communist or New Dealer, this messy, confusing, and overlapping set of movements rejected “reality” in favor of the “real” existence of
1. “False consciousness” (the Red argument that the working class had been bought off through consumerism, hence had relinquished demands for structural reform). For Marxist-Leninists , we don’t have socialism in America because capitalists transmitted their greed to the workers through institutions managed by “the Jews” or other wily “Hebraic” puritans. In a previous century, Southern apologists for slavery (e.g. George Fitzhugh) helped ploughed this field, comparing Northern “wage slavery” with the more benign paternalism they ascribed to Southern slaveholders. Or, false consciousness may signify excessive deference to “experts” and lack of faith in their own ability to manage their lives. In this instance, [Jew-controlled] mass culture is blamed, while those who laud the heroism and solidarity of workers in current television, may be writing against this type of “false consciousness,” one identified by George Orwell. (Orwell described it as “the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors”.)
or
2. “Identity politics” (the Social Democrat/progressive policy) that class ties were pre-empted by ethnic or racial ties. All my blogs on German Romanticism and the progressives are about this issue. (See https://clarespark.com/2011/03/28/index-to-multiculturalism-blogs/.)
For social democrats masked as “the Left”, we would and should have [ethical] “socialism” in America (or its simulacrum) under certain conditions: The rich should pay their “fair share” and reparations should be made to those victimized by “white male supremacy” through such programs as affirmative action and a “people’s history”: the unveiling of America’s previously unbounded assault upon Nature (including the Third World), non-whites, women, and the labor movement. The State answers the question “what is truth?” and gathers unto its bureaucracies (assisted by social psychologists) all claims to objectivity as to the “real” American history.
Yes, there are Marxist-Leninists with full professorships at numerous universities, as there are university and popular presses that publish them. But such a sprinkling of dissent serves one purpose: the fiction that free speech, no holds barred, is protected in America. Whereas some on the Old Left praised the industrial bourgeoisie as a progressive class, the New Left, along with the rest of the counter-culture, “uncovers” the “real” American past as an unadulterated outrage, with the assistance of Communist/Pop Front allies.
So who sees “things as they are”? There remain two groups vying for your eyeballs: Those hard leftists not beset by false consciousness and who see themselves as future bosses in a reconstructed communist/socialist polity (led of course by the politically conscious working class), or
the critical theorists and postmodernists, who nail science and empiricism as a “swindle,” with the Enlightenment as protofascist, reserving a “multiplicity” of truth telling for their socially-constructed selves. Many (on their left) have criticized this stance as self-contradictory, as a house built upon sand. Not to worry; Orwell’s Doublethink is alive and well amongst those academics who win all the prizes these days.
Judith Butler, Flexner Professor
[Illustrated: anti-Zionist and feminist Judith Butler, winner of the Adorno Prize this year. For my own take on Orwell criticism see https://clarespark.com/2012/10/15/orwell-power-and-the-totalitarian-state/, where I sharply depart from socialist interpreters of Orwell’s legacy.]
The Clare Spark Blog 
Because Marx’s “scientific” prediction — that the workers would revolt in the most advanced capitalist countries — was falsified by history, Orwell’s Inner Party (Djilas’ New Class, Voslenskii’s Nomenlatura, etc.) accuses workers of “false consciousness” to suggest that Fabian intellectuals know the interests of the working class better than the proles themselves. Because workers rejected the leadership of this “vanguard,” it has latched onto racial, sexual, etc. minorities, mute animals, or the earth itself as their constituencies.
Comment by Mark LaRochelle — June 12, 2014 @ 7:41 pm |
Yes, but the social democrats were the originators of this victimology. The communists went along with them as part of the Popular Front against Republicans/laissez-faire capitalism. The New Left also played a role, as back-to-nature-lovers and primitivists.
Comment by clarelspark — June 12, 2014 @ 7:44 pm |
I do hope to find my old articles on the psychology of alienation, reification as a prime engine driving de-humanization, Marx’ own abnormal psych. primer contained in the ignored “1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” and my own small contribution of “intrapsychic imperialism,” where the subjective inner fantasy world becomes commoditized and spatialized. [Katz, G.M.; (c)1979].
Fun for the whole family! Doc
Comment by gk68 — June 12, 2014 @ 1:12 pm |
Reblogged this on Winning the War against Islamic Fascism and commented:
Dr. Spark says it all!>>>>again!
Comment by gk68 — June 12, 2014 @ 2:00 am |
*Note: ‘ railing against the industrializing bourgeoisie that had once raised the status of all women….’ “all” but the hundreds of millions of mutilated, disfigured, dismembered girls/women of the Islamist world. Cultural difference, I suppose.
Comment by gk68 — June 12, 2014 @ 1:58 am |
[…] railing against the industrializing bourgeoisie that had once raised the status of all women. (See https://clarespark.com/2012/10/14/reality-and-the-left/, partly about Judith Butler, their […]
Pingback by Gendered wage inequality: an overview | YDS: The Clare Spark Blog — April 10, 2014 @ 8:24 pm |
[…] Multiculturalism, the dominant ideology in progressive reformism, its purported “inclusiveness” operates on the same racialist assumptions as the more overtly völkisch Hitler approach. If you read the multiculturalists, you will see that “there is no truth,” nor any possibility for communication between races or ethnicities, for all knowledge is “local.” Even hip postmodernists hold to this wacky “historicist” viewpoint and warn us about “the pastness of the past,” the terra incognita where none dares venture. (See https://clarespark.com/2012/10/14/reality-and-the-left/.) […]
Pingback by The “demographic change” explanation is racist « YDS: The Clare Spark Blog — November 8, 2012 @ 6:17 pm |
[…] For a related blog see https://clarespark.com/2012/10/14/reality-and-the-left/. […]
Pingback by Melville, Orwell, Doublethink « YDS: The Clare Spark Blog — October 28, 2012 @ 3:48 pm |
I am no fan of marxist-leninists, but what is the evidence that they are anti-semitic??
Comment by btraven — October 15, 2012 @ 6:56 pm |
Even if you dismiss anti-Zionism as not being associated with antisemitism, there is the influence of J. A. Hobson’s theory of the International Jew that was such a powerful influence on Lenin. In general, the Leninists identify “finance capital” as the primary enemy of the people, and “the money power” has ever been the target of populists of every stripe. But for a glossary of antisemitism in all its sources and variants, I recommend this attempt of mine to organize the sources of Jew-hatred: https://clarespark.com/2010/11/14/the-abcs-of-antisemitism/.
Comment by clarespark — October 15, 2012 @ 7:05 pm |
@btraven: In 1856, Marx wrote a book called The Jewish Question, which Richard Wurmbrand discussed in his book Marx and Satan. From my entry on excerpts from Chapter 3 of Wurmbrand’s work are his citations from Marx. This is the quote from The Jewish Question:
‘We know that behind every tyrant stands a Jew, as a Jesuit stands behind every Pope. As the army of the Jesuits kills every free thought, so the desire of the oppressed would have chances of success, the usefulness of wars incited by capitalists would cease, if it were not for the Jews who steal the treasures of mankind. It is no wonder that 1856 years ago Jesus chased the usurers from the Jerusalem temple …’
Yet, Marx (raised as a Lutheran), also wrote in favour of Jews in other works. In The Capital, Volume I, under the heading ‘The Capitalist Character of Manufacture’ he wrote, ‘In the front of the chosen people it was written that they are the property of Jehovah.’
That said, Marx didn’t have much time for anyone outside of his immediate circle, it seems. He railed against fellow Europeans, the Chinese and blacks. Wurmbrand observed, citing Marx:
‘”Germans, Chinese, and Jews have to be compared with peddlers and small merchants.” He called the Russians “cabbage-eaters.” The Slavic peoples were “ethnic trash.” He expressed his hatred of many nations, but never his love.
‘Marx wrote in his new year’s roundup of 1848 about “the Slavic riffraff,” which included Russians, Czechs, and Croats. These “retrograde” races had nothing left for them by fate except “the immediate task of perishing in the revolutionary world storm.”
‘Marx identified black people with “idiots” and constantly used the offensive term “n—–” in private correspondence …’
More here: http://churchmousec.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/richard-wurmbrands-marx-and-satan-chapter-3/ and
http://churchmousec.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/richard-wurmbrands-marx-and-satan-a-recap/
Marx was not the ideological cover page ‘man of the year’ or centrefold many of us, myself included, thought he was.
Comment by churchmouse — October 15, 2012 @ 10:42 pm
Could it be that they killed so many?
Comment by hrwolfe — March 3, 2016 @ 3:05 am |