2018 hasn't given us a lot of bad moments to revisit 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, so here's another one. The rest is at the link.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.

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"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

I know a lot of Catholics who really revolt at the idea of reading Luther, which is doubly a shame because he's both brilliant and, even when wrong, incredibly important for diagnosing a peculiar and widespread reaction to traditional (as taught) Catholic soteriology.

But you can't rehabilitate monsters to "probably worth reading."

Same thing seems to be true of Marx in America. Which is crazy. We've got two centuries and literally billions of people influenced by his thought. Refusing to engage his actual work doesn't really feel like an option.

http://theweek.com/articles/770718/time-normalize-karl-marx

Happy birthday to Karl Marx, who was born 200 years ago on May 5. He was the most astute and influential critic of capitalism in history — and also the most misunderstood.

It is long since time that Marx re-joined the community of ordinary intellectuals, considered as neither the terrifying harbinger of social upheaval, nor a secular pope with the eternally correct description of all human society. He was a genius, but in the end, only another human scholar with a brilliant but incomplete perspective.

For elite American economists, Marx has long been viewed as absolutely anathema, if not some kind of demon, producing an enormous taboo against seriously considering or even mentioning his ideas. Back in 2006, liberal Berkeley economist Brad DeLong jokingly sneered his book Capital would "introduce serious, permanent bugs into your wetware" (that is, your brain), and therefore reading it "should only be done by somebody with immunity to the mental virus — by a trained intellectual or social or economic historian, or by a trained neoclassical economist." In other words, the best person to crack the dread tome is someone who is already a committed right-winger.

This is absurd, if for no reason other than its lack of confidence in human reason. Any thinking person can read any book without brain damage, as there are no magic spells in real life. And as economist Branko Milanovic argues, Marx is incontestably one of the greatest and most influential intellectuals of all time, right up there with Aristotle and Augustine. If nothing else, he is worth examining for that reason alone.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

idk how one can deny the plain and obvious truth in the basic building blocks of his core philosophies

they always struck me as pretty bullet proof idk

__

fairweather

>idk how one can deny the plain and obvious truth in the basic
>building blocks of his core philosophies

That's how I did it for the longest time. But it's kind of surprising how much warmth and compassion there is in his work. We've made him this kind of godfather of dour statism, but he can't shut up about human freedom and the structures, ones that we build, preventing that.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

by shitty dudes who are like the people mentioned in the article (worshipping him, treating his words like holy text that can not be debated.)

If socialism's "moment" or whatever we're calling it does nothing more than make it so the first time someone hears about Marx isn't going to be from some dickbag holding down the wall at a college party who says things like "capitalism is the ultimate friend zone," that's still a net positive.

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12 play and 12 planets are enlighten for all the Aliens to Party and free those on the Sex Planet-maxxx

XBL: trkc21
Twitter: @tyrcasey

I was fully armed with "sure, communism works great... IN THEORY" in high school. But yeah, the pendulum swinging back the other way wasn't particularly helpful. College communists will definitely tell you ALL about it.

All that said, those guys are useful. The idea that free market capitalism is somehow part of the natural human state is profoundly ahistorical and lets whoever the opposites of wispy-bearded adolescent Marxists are (Neo-Alex P. Keatons, I guess?) get by without actually having to defend their belief system.

I'm not getting smarter as I'm getting older, but the only thing that seems to be working is that I acknowledge that any cynicism I've developed is extremely self-serving. People who believe in things while I get old and fat are important, but further, there's a such thing as believing in the right things.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

Though left unchecked, these same people can just become tankies, which is insane for a person who wasn't alive when the USSR was around to actually be.

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12 play and 12 planets are enlighten for all the Aliens to Party and free those on the Sex Planet-maxxx

XBL: trkc21
Twitter: @tyrcasey

Ordinarily, I cringe at the idea that a certain line of demonstrably bad thinking can be helpful in any meaningful way, but I always want to preserve tankies as an exception - at least in America. That Stalinist brutality was active, rather than passive, gives the rest of the (American, at least) left a chance to engage the idea of state violence much more seriously than we would have otherwise.

To repeat some of the above: I'm an extraordinarily lazy thinker when I'm comfortable. Tankies make me uncomfortable, which isn't worthless.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

My younger cousin is a tankie and he was born in the mid 90's. Though he still ID's as socialist or communist, he also likes sharing things on Facebook by the American Enterprise Institute about how the wage gap is a myth (in addition to the occasional lefty racist stuff,) so maybe he just really likes the aesthetic/state violence aspect of Soviet life?

I've got another cousin's wedding next month and he may or may not be there, but if he is and says some weirdo Stalin shit, I don't know what I'll say. He's not at all a baseball fan, so "Tankie Clipper" or "Pride of the Tankies" will likely just confuse him. I'm a normal adult.

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12 play and 12 planets are enlighten for all the Aliens to Party and free those on the Sex Planet-maxxx

XBL: trkc21
Twitter: @tyrcasey

Bias or not, having to deal (even just occasionally) with real life tankies instead of just faceless goofballs like Ph*l Gr**ves gets you the nod. They're just an intellectual boundary to me. I don't have to, like, have a beer with them. That sounds miserable.

"Tankie Clipper" is gold though.

*edited for good habits. typing out his name, even here, feels like I risk summoning him.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

I thought he was a sentient Soviet flag that got put into a Twitter algorithm Weird Science style.

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12 play and 12 planets are enlighten for all the Aliens to Party and free those on the Sex Planet-maxxx

XBL: trkc21
Twitter: @tyrcasey

He'll emerge here like Smith in the third installment of the Matrix, oscillating between fascination and disgust at his physical form - then causing havoc by unironically condemning the concept of "fun".

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

>Though left unchecked, these same people can just become
>tankies, which is insane for a person who wasn't alive when
>the USSR was around to actually be.

Yes, I'm mad. Let's move on.

Jays | Cavs | Eagles | Sabres | Tarheels

PSN: Dr_Claw_77 | XBL: Dr Claw 077 | FB: drclaw077 | T: @drclaw77 | http://thepeoplesvault.wordpress.com

He wins for that.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

is real Anarchism

When you run into Anarchists now (I have during my activist days), they are usually smelly as fuck and sit on the dirtiest surfaces available to them in public places as a general rule. Basically, being an Anarchist comes across as an annoying stage in life rather than an actual ideology.

By some strange coincidence I was reading "The People's Art History of the United States" and was on the section that explains the Haymarket Riot of Chicago and all of its aftermath involving Anarchists, while also reading a synopsis of Pynchon's "Against the Day", which deals heavily with American Anarchism. I put down the first to begin reading the second (and it seems I'll be reading it for some time)

Anarchism has been painted into the same pink corner Marxism has, but has had a direct hand in shaping American culture. Yet you never hear it referenced in pop culture, while 60's hippie-ism seems to be forever lionized.

Today's the anniversary of the Haymarket Riot, right?

The history of the late 19th and 20th century is out of my wheelhouse but SO fascinating to me, at least in part because of what you're identifying here: it's utterly at odds with our American narrative of political progress. But at the time (and this extends all the way into the Civil Rights movement) these incredibly diverse and surprisingly huge leftist groups managed to get a level of political traction that seems impossible today.

>Anarchism has been painted into the same pink corner Marxism
>has, but has had a direct hand in shaping American culture.
>Yet you never hear it referenced in pop culture, while 60's
>hippie-ism seems to be forever lionized.

Hey. Bakunin's birthday is at the end of the month, and Emma Goldman died on May 14th. We'll trot out some anarchist texts on those days and try to remind ourselves that there was a SUBSTANTIALLY broader discussion on whether the use of state power could ever be licit and whether electoral politics had any positive relationship with human freedom a hundred years ago.

The periodic reminder that our current, two-parties-with-huge-tent political discourse is a tiny, self-created world that we can leave any time we want seems kind of necessary.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

Holy smokes.

>Today's the anniversary of the Haymarket Riot, right?
>
>The history of the late 19th and 20th century is out of my
>wheelhouse but SO fascinating to me, at least in part because
>of what you're identifying here: it's utterly at odds with our
>American narrative of political progress. But at the time (and
>this extends all the way into the Civil Rights movement) these
>incredibly diverse and surprisingly huge leftist groups
>managed to get a level of political traction that seems
>impossible today.

Yes, that's exactly what blows my mind about American Anarchism. We didn't hear much about it in history class growing up. We don't hear its tenets discussed in even the most progressive curricula at small liberal arts colleges, where Marxism is at least seriously considered for academic purposes before one graduates to 'The Real World'. Learning about a public space in a huge American city acting as ground zero for repeated confrontations, real and symbolic, between class and ideology for the first time at my age, I have to think there is no way we will come across this part of American history without concerted effort.

>Hey. Bakunin's birthday is at the end of the month, and Emma
>Goldman died on May 14th. We'll trot out some anarchist texts
>on those days and try to remind ourselves that there was a
>SUBSTANTIALLY broader discussion on whether the use of state
>power could ever be licit and whether electoral politics had
>any positive relationship with human freedom a hundred years
>ago.
>
>The periodic reminder that our current,
>two-parties-with-huge-tent political discourse is a tiny,
>self-created world that we can leave any time we want seems
>kind of necessary.

The revolution will not be box-setted, brother.