We want to post this article one more time because it addresses what REAL left social progressives have been shouting since REAGAN/CLINTON 1990s------the continuous wars being waged by global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS Knights of Malta Tribe of Judah killed civil societies globally by injecting those global banking 5% freemason/Greek civil unrest civil war players PRETENDING MARXIST rebels were populist when they worked for team ROYALIST military----this post addresses that FAKE ALT RIGHT ALT LEFT pretense of MARXISM being LEFT in Middle-East. All of that civil unrest and war was manufactured by global banking 1% and those ARABIC global banking 1% against the 99% of citizens in ARABIA.
THAT IS THE SAME MECHANISM BEING BUILT TODAY INSIDE US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES BY THESE SAME FAKE MARXIST 'POPULIST REBELS'.
Below we see how STALINIST POLAND meets LATIN AMERICAN MARXISM-------trades were organized by region rather than craft. This is why freemasonry in third world nations keep society in continuous civil unrest civil wars with brutal dictators taking all wealth and power.
INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD -----WORK FOR FAR-RIGHT WING WORLD BANK GLOBAL 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS KILLING 99% OF SOVEREIGN CITIZENS.
'Solidarity (Polish trade union)
- Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_(Polish_trade...
Solidarity was organized as an industrial union, or more specifically according to the One Big Union principle, along the lines of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (workers in every trade were organized by region, rather than by craft)'.
We like how this article explains how what is REAL left social progressive stances are corrupted by far-right wing global banking MARXISM.
Chaosistan, Hybrid Wars, Iran, Iraq, Middle East, Syria, Turkey
“Neo-Marxism” And “The New Middle East”
Written by Andrew KORYBKO on 24/01/2017
One of the most curious quirks of recent history is that self-proclaimed followers of the Cold War-era ideology of Marxism are on the upswing two and a half decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and interestingly enough, they’re making on-the-ground progress in the Mideast of all places. This may come as a surprise to casual observers who have been convinced by the Mainstream Media that the region is only awash with religious radicalism, which while certainly true, doesn’t fully encapsulate the whole picture of all the extremism that’s active there nowadays. One of the more unexpected outcomes of the 2011 theater-wide Color Revolutions popularly known as the “Arab Spring” has been that armed “Neo-Marxist” Kurdish militias eventually ended up going on the offensive against the Syrian, Turkish, and Iranian governments, each for their own purportedly separate ‘reasons’ but in reality as part of a US-backed coordinated plan for geopolitically reengineering the Mideast.
Syria And Turkey
Before going any further, the first thing that should be addressed is the “Neo-Marxism” label included in the article’s title. The author drew primarily upon the stated positions and manifesto of the Syrian PYD, which is leading the regional charge for undeclared Kurdish separatism, in making the decision to emphasize the ideology that’s driving the region’s anti-government Kurdish militias. The PYD is a political and ethnic extremist organization which attempts to channel Marxist thought in order to impose “democratic confederalism” in Syria, which essentially seeks to dissolve the state through its devolution into a complex quilt of identity-based cantons. The PYD is closely linked to the Turkish PKK, and both organizations claim to be inspired by the late American Marxist Murray Bookchin, who wrote extensively about what he called “decentralization”.
In practice, however, this is pretty much indistinguishable from the political end game that fundamentalist Marxists (“Secular Wahhabis”) aspire for, which is the elimination of the state and its replacement with community councils and other non-traditional governing structures. Whether or not this position truly represents conventional Marxism and more general Leftist thought is up to those communities themselves and their various polemicists to decide, but the labelling of the PYD and PKK as “Neo-Marxist” is due to their political positions in advocating what the public generally conflates (whether rightly or wrongly) with this ideology. Moreover, since they’re active in the 21st century and after the Soviet dissolution at the end of the Cold War, the prefix “Neo-“ is applied to differentiate these organizations and their ideological strands from the ‘classical’ Marxism that was associated (whether rightly or wrongly) with that period.
The point here isn’t to convince anyone that the PYD and PKK are ‘Marxist’, but rather to highlight that this is how they self-identity and to emphasize the ideological motivations behind their militant activity.
Iraq And Iran
Expanding past Syria and Turkey, one can see the influence of “Neo-Marxist” Kurdish militant groups in Iraq and Iran, too. The allied “Patriotic Union of Kurdistan” (PUK) and Gorran opposition parties in northern Iraq’s Kurdish Regional Government, both of which are leftist, are on friendly terms with the PKK. Barzani’s ruling “Kurdish Democratic Party” (KPD) is opposed to the PKK and Marxism, which is why it enjoys such considerable Turkish support even though it regularly threatens to pursue ‘independence’. Interestingly, Iran is aligned with PUK and Gorran in spite of their links to the PKK, which might be partially attributable to Tehran looking favorably upon these groups’ hesitancy to see an ‘independent’ “Iraqi Kurdistan” in the near future and could thus also signal that Iran is engaged in a soft proxy war with Turkey for influence (and pipelines) in the Kurdish Regional Government.
All of the Iraqi Kurdish groups and their affiliated militias are in support of “federalism” or separatism to varying degrees and can generally be described as friendly to the US (the KPD obviously much more in both cases than PUK and Gorran), but aren’t necessarily “Neo-Marxist” in the context that the article is defining it as. Therefore, they’ll largely be excluded from the rest of the analysis going forward, but were importantly mentioned in the first place order to show their loose connections to the troublesome Kurdish organizations in Syria and Turkey.
Amidst this complicated intra-Iraqi Kurd drama, however, the pro-‘Israeli’ and ‘socialist’ “Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran” (KDPI) terrorist group has recently found shelter in northern Iraq and begun to periodically launch cross-border attacks against the Iranian border forces. This organization is part of the “Congress of Nationalities for a Federal Iran” (CNFI), an umbrella group of various ethno-religious minorities fighting against Tehran in favor of the same broad sort of ‘political solution’ as the PYD and PKK, “federalism”. This end goal thus connects the KDPI to its Syrian and Turkish counterparts, and can even be said to give it something in common with all of their Iraqi brethren as well, despite some of the latter being reluctant to associate with them, whether openly or in general, due to Iran’s understandable sensitivities.
“Federalist” Failings And The MEK
In and of itself, there’s nothing inherently negative about federalism, nor does this political system have any origins in Marxist thought, but the “democratic confederalism” of the PYD and PKK and the “Identity Federalism” of the CNFI incorporate radical ideas inspired by this ideology and popularly described as “Cultural Marxism” (whether rightly or wrongly), which ultimately would be disastrous for the national unity of the diverse states threatened by these initiatives if they were ever implemented.
Separate from the Syrian-Turkish-Iranian nexus of Kurdish “Neo-Marxist” militant groups but fighting for similar ideological goals in Iran is the “People’s Mujahedeen of Iran” (MEK), a hard-core Marxist terrorist organization which was delisted a few years ago by the US State Department and is now recognized by Washington as a ‘legitimate opposition party’ (despite having killed Americans in the past).
This group and the aforementioned Syrian, Turkish, and Iranian ones don’t just share a common denominator in “Neo-Marxism”, but are also marked by the strong degree of support that they enjoy from the US, although it must be said that they don’t all coordinate with one another because the Kurds supposedly have a strong hate for the MEK after the latter allegedly fought against them under Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
The US And The PKK
Even though the US formally includes the PKK on its list of terrorist organizations, Turkey has accused it on many occasions of indirectly supporting this group through the provisioning of material and weapons assistance to the PYD, implying that Washington is using the Syrian Kurds as intermediaries for rendering support to their Turkish counterparts. This isn’t unrealistic to assert since the US is nowadays opposed to President Erdogan, and relations between Ankara and Washington have been very chilly ever since last summer’s failed pro-American coup attempt. While it might shock some people to even consider and will likely be met with intense skepticism in the usual alternative media corners, the US does in fact have a serious problem with nominal NATO-member Turkey due to Ankara’s involvement in the Russian-Iranian-Turkish Tripartite of Great Powers aimed at bringing a gradual end to the War on Syria, which explains why it would betray its “ally” by unleashing the unconventional weapon of Kurdish separatism against it via PYD-laundered weapons to the PKK.
The Wahhabi-“Neo-Marxist” Geopolitical Convergence
The Hybrid War drama surrounding the Kurds occupies considerably less media attention than Daesh, but it’s no less dangerous to the stability of the Mideast. In fact, while Daesh has been on a years-long killing spree trying to construct an “Islamic State” in the Mideast, the militant Kurdish organizations mentioned in this article have taken to doing something similar and to a much lesser degree in advance of their shared objective of creating a transnational “Kurdistan” political entity. This goal has lately manifested itself through the intended formation of a stateless (con)federation of Kurdish communities between Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, as per the “post-state” and “Neo-Marxist” ideology of relevant groups in the first three aforementioned states.
As for the Iraqi Kurds, although they’re not “Neo-Marxists”, they are in support of either “federalization” or outright separatism, and would naturally develop their own independent relations with their other Kurdish political counterparts if they succeed in their map-changing schemes. Even though linguistic and historical differences would likely prevent the creation of a unified Kurdish ‘superstate’, the tangible effect of the aforementioned could quickly lead both to the dissolution of the multiethnic states that this demographic is a part of and the de-facto rise of a “second geopolitical ‘Israel’” in part of this space, or in other words, a unipolar-supported polity carved out of the stolen territory of other countries. This eventuality would naturally destroy the incipient Tripartite of Great Powers and also symbolize the successful completion of ‘Israel’s’ 1982 Yinon Plan of manufactured state fragmentation all along its Muslim periphery, basically ensuring that Tel Aviv becomes the undisputed power in the Mideast.
The planned geopolitical redivision of the Mideast is nothing new for American strategists either, which is why Washington is so strongly in support of these organizations. Former US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice first spoke about the dawn of a “New Middle East” in July 2006 during ‘Israel’s’ embarrassingly failed War on Hezbollah and Lebanon, and just a month prior, retired lieutenant colonel Ralph Peters published his “Blood Borders” blueprint about “how a better Middle East would look”. The New York Times followed up with a scandalous map in September 2013 showing “How 5 Countries Could Become 14”, and Stratfor founder George Friedman just released his own map highlighting how 17 separate power centers have emerged across what are nominally 5 sovereign countries. While the process of transnational state dissolution was catalyzed by the theater-wide “Arab Spring” Color Revolution events and subsequent spread of Daesh, these two American-provoked events in turn created the conditions for the militant revival of “Neo-Marxist” regime change groups such as the MEK and geopolitical revisionist ones such as the PYD.
This means that Washington now has two powerful tools at its disposal for crafting the 21st-century Yinon Plan of the “New Middle East”; Wahhabis and “Neo-Marxists”, both of which are bitterly opposed to one another but nevertheless serve as complementary instruments of American foreign policy (whether as “useful idiots” or outright proxies). It’s been long documented by alternative media outlets how the US has wielded the weapon of Wahhabism for over the past three decades, but comparatively less has been said about how it misleads the world through its use of the Fake Left. In theory, Leftists are supposed to be in support of multipolar objectives and against the Western unipolar power structure, but that’s not necessarily the case when it comes to many well-known “Leftist” movements in North America, Europe, and now the Mideast.
The Atlantic-Arabian Virus
The Democratic Party and much of the scattering of other supposedly leftist-oriented organizations in the US have been co-opted by the very same establishment which they claim to oppose. The same can be said for just about any socialist organization in the EU. As for the Mideast, the most popular Kurdish parties have been compromised, and the CNFI and MEK are undoubtedly Western Hybrid War proxies. All of these aforementioned groups, and especially the ones linked to George Soros and his worldwide “protest” (riot/Color Revolution) movements, represent the Fake Left, which shout leftist economic slogans but have lost the leftist moral principle of geopolitical resistance to Western neo-imperialism. In a sad twist of fate and due to their own reprehensible choices, these very same groups have become the post-modern vanguard for the exact same world order which their Cold War spiritual predecessors fought so valiantly to avoid.
It’s not to say that every self-proclaimed Leftist organization in these three parts of the world is “fake” (after all, the Baath Party and Syrian Socialist National Party still embody the respectable principles associated with Cold War Leftism), but just that there are plenty of reasonable grounds to immediately be suspicious of supposedly left-wing groups operating in these regions nowadays. The entire US is being destabilized by the Clintonian Counter-Revolution and its Fake Left supporters, just like the EU is being thrown into chaos by the ‘Secular Wahhabis’ who have ‘opened the gates from within’ by aiding and abetting the US’ plan to unleash ‘Weapons of Mass Migration’ against the continent. Similarly, the Mideast is now facing the threat of regime change and geopolitical revisionism not from the failing forces of Daesh and other Wahhabi terrorist groups, but by the hand of reinvigorated “Neo-Marxist” ones such as the PYD, PKK, KDPI, CNFI, and MEK. All of these groups purport to represent the “Left” but are in reality part of the worldwide Fake Left in the service of American interests, whether wittingly or inadvertently.
NO, NOT AMERICAN INTERESTS---THAT GLOBAL BANKING 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS KNIGHTS OF MALTA TRIBE OF JUDAH
The “Leftist Civil War”
The only way to fight back against this is for the Real Left and its sincere, genuine activists in North America, the EU, and Mideast to come out in vocal and unceasing opposition against these Fake Leftist tools of Western neo-imperialism in order to win back the respect of their ideology and free it from American hijacking. The US has taken over the mainstream “leftist” narrative and is turning it into a mouthpiece of neo-imperialist propaganda, relying on collaborators such Varoufakis, Sanders, and an army of ‘alternative media’ bloggers to ‘legitimize’ their ‘coup’. When faced with even the slightest opposition from their Real Leftist ‘comrades’ (to say nothing of average non-Leftist folks), they resort to maliciously trolling them as “racists”, “fascists”, and/or “white supremacists” in a desperate knee-jerk reaction designed to discredit them in the eyes of what they assume to be the ‘politically correct’ public. The whole point in doing this is to protect their narrative monopoly so that dissenting voices don’t have a chance at swaying public opinion against the policies of the Fake Leftist Establishment.
Pertaining to the examined topic of utilizing “Neo-Marxist” proxy armies to geopolitically reorganize the “New Middle East”, this typically takes the form of condemning Iran’s sovereign choice to become an Islamic Republic (the narrative promoted by MEK, KDPI, and CNFI) and guilting the global public into accepting an “independent” or “federalized” Kurdish state or states as a ‘reward’ for fighting Daesh. In both interconnected cases across the combined Syrian-Turkish-Iraqi-Iranian Hybrid War battlespace, misleading and oftentimes outright false or situationally irrelevant arguments about “social rights”, “economic equality”, and “democracy” are trotted out in order to trick unaware and/or immature well-intentioned Leftists into supporting these Fake Leftist geopolitical projects. Over time, under enough pressure, and through gradually subtle degrees of ideological divergence from fundamental principles, Real Leftists can successfully be indoctrinated into Fake Leftists if they don’t have the political will to resist the Establishment, which regrettably appears to be the trend in North America and the EU.
It’s also in these two regions where Fake Leftist support for Kurdish separatism and a “Green Revolution 2.0” are most pronounced, which are dangerously combining to form a very serious threat to the multipolar states of Syria and Iran. Even if Real Leftists find themselves in support of Kurdish separatism in Turkey and/or Iraq, and/or regime change in either of them – justifying their position on the belief that these states are of questionable loyalty to the emerging Multipolar World Order – they need to realize that such geopolitical viruses, by their very nature and obvious consequences, won’t be ‘contained’ to these two countries alone but would inevitably spread to Syria and Iran as well. Therefore, even if they find themselves sympathizing with some of the positions presently being promoted by their Fake Leftist peers, they must remain steadfast in opposing them out of geopolitical consistency in standing against the Western-led international system.
This could ultimately lead to a “Leftist Civil War” (ideologically speaking, not necessarily in physical terms) in order to liberate this ideology from its present status as one of the US’ premier bullhorns of neo-imperialism, provided, of course, that it’s not already too late to do so.
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As was said yesterday the goal of MOVING FORWARD these few decades was to first silence REAL left social progressives making up 99% of DEMOCRATIC PARTY ----with that LABOR AND JUSTICE platform forcing them into these FAR-RIGHT WING MARXIST structures. Well, over 80% of DEMOCRATIC voters have refused to vote for FAR-RIGHT WING GLOBAL BANKING 1% CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS -----because we KNOW MOVING FORWARD is killing freedom, liberty, justice, pursuit of happiness and installing far-right global corporate campus MARXISM. After 2016 Presidential election rigged and fraudulent having nothing with GET OUT THE VOTE-----why didn't white Democratic voters vote for Hillary---why didn't women not vote for Hillary----well, we do not fight to enslave and kill our futures----
REAL LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE 99% OF CITIZENS IN NORTH AMERICA AND EUROPE REALLY DO NEED TO KEEP FIGHTING THE FAKE LEFTIST 'MARXISTS'.
'Therefore, even if they find themselves sympathizing with some of the positions presently being promoted by their Fake Leftist peers, they must remain steadfast in opposing them out of geopolitical consistency in standing against the Western-led international system'.
What is being called WESTERN-LED-----our US-LED ----is neither---ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE for only the global 1% is led by global 1% of OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS-----not American. These OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS are flipping the Earth's economic axis killing WESTERN NATIONS-----so this is not WESTERN -LED. The INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM is indeed behind this----has no loyalty to what is WESTERN or what is AMERICAN.
'Neo-Marxism is a pretty loose term, and tends to encompass most of the trends of Marxist philosophy arising from the New Left'.
BUT CLINTON NEO-LIBERALISM WASN'T EVEN THE 'OLD LEFT'.
'Today, Dependency Theory has evolved into World Systems Theory'
Please ignore all that mumbo jumbo called 'academic' description and simply see NEO-MARXISM is global corporate campus SOCIALISM is global corporate SUSTAINABILITY is WORLD BANK/IMF/UNITED NATIONS DEEP, DEEP, REALLY DEEP STATE far-right authoritarian militaristic, extreme wealth extreme poverty LIBERTARIAN MARXISM. We will note that a former Coast Guard veteran is behind this FAKE NEWS of NEO-MARXISM. Shake that global banking 5% freemason/Greek player stance ---we are STOPPING MOVING FORWARD.
What are the key ideas of Neo-Marxist thought?
Robert Palermo, Former academic, USCG veteran, and lifelong political junkie
Updated Jan 17 2013
Neo-Marxism is a pretty loose term, and tends to encompass most of the trends of Marxist philosophy arising from the New Left. There is certainly no unified ideology of Neo-Marxism in the way that there is in orthodox Marxism, and many of the former's currents are in fact not in agreement with one another. Broadly, Neo-Marxism seeks to answer questions traditional or orthodox Marxism cannot, especially in light of technological advances and economic and political developments that Marx and Engels did not address or foresee.
The most influential and important current in Neo-Marxist thought is the Frankfurt School, which founded the Institute for Social Research in 1923. The Frankfurt School is critical of both capitalism and Soviet state communism, and sought to rectify the inadequacies of traditional Marxist theory. To do so, they draw from other schools of thought, such as antipositivist sociology, Weberian sociology, psychoanalysis, and existentialism. Beyond the ISR, the original Frankfurt School thinkers were only loosely affiliated as a group, but they shared a common philosophical approach, and a belief that a different path of socio-economic development from Soviet communism was needed.
The current of Neo-Marxist thought that is probably the most important and influential historically and today is Dependency Theory, which originated with the work of Hans Singer and Raúl Prebisch. In Dependency Theory, economic processes are largely defined as external and based on a core-periphery model of a world economy, rather than the internal approach of orthodox Marxism that sees economic exploitation occurring on a nation-state scale. Much of the work in the Dependency Theory school was done on Latin America and the decolonizing world by scholars such as Andre Gunder Frank and Samir Amin. Today, Dependency Theory has evolved into World Systems Theory, whose originator and leading scholar is Immanuel Wallerstein. World Systems Theory expands on many of the basic ideas of Dependency Theory, but is an even more macro approach to economic and social change, arguing that nation-states should not be the basic unit of socio-economic analysis at all, but rather that international economic systems themselves are the key.
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Modern Marxism is NEO-MARXISM is indeed FAR-RIGHT WING LIBERTARIAN. Remember, these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA were a small step away from LIBERTARIANISM which is simply accumulating wealth anyway you can always with the global 1% rich being made extremely rich---LIBERTARIANISM is simply global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS 1000BC sack and loot laissez faire. This is why we always see the ROMAN SALUTE with these far-right corporate fascist MARXISTS pretending to be LEFT. We like this image with the rainbow colors designating ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE for only the global 1%.
INDUSTRIAL COMMUNISM/SOCIALISM HAS BEEN AND ALWAYS WILL BE FAR-RIGHT WING GLOBAL BANKING 1% EXTREME WEALTH EXTREME POVERTY.
'Others label it existential Marxism. Still others designate it Cultural Marxism or the New Left. I term this vision “Libertarian Marxism.”'
This is why in US southern states like TEXAS ---labor union organizing is growing where it was never allowed to grow. It is not AMERICAN left social progressive capitalism---it is global corporate campus SLAVE LABOR.
Global hedge fund Johns Hopkins corporation, global banking 1% BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT, GREATER BALTIMORE COMMITTEE great big far-right wing HITLER/STALIN/MAO corporate fascists.
How Modern Marxism Is Libertarian
P. Andrew SandlinPosted on August 29, 2017
Today Communism as a political system, if not dead, is on life support. It survives only in North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam -- and the campuses of elite American universities. That last sphere is the one that concerns me, and it should concern you, and it does concern you, whether you want it to or not. It’s not a Communism identical to Leninism and Stalinism, but a development of it, and it’s more pernicious and successful than anything Lenin or Marx or Pol Pot could have imagined.
This evolved Marxism is the leading social vision of our time. Some call it neo-Marxism, a refinement and development of the vastly influential 19th century German philosopher Karl Marx.[1] Others label it existential Marxism. Still others designate it Cultural Marxism or the New Left. I term this vision “Libertarian Marxism.”[2] (I’ll explain why in a moment.) Call it what you want,[3] it’s the reigning vision of the vast majority of cultural leaders in the West.[4]
The Libertarian Marxists differ widely among themselves on many issues, but they’re generally united in embracing their all-controlling vision. There’s likely no intellectual movement in history that has endured so many revisions as Marxism. Sometimes it seems there are as many Marxisms are there are Marxists. At several key points this newer vision deviates from traditional Marxism,[5] but this vision is sufficiently common and coherent that it’s correct to see it as an extension of Marxism, and its leaders certainly see it that way. It’s a way of thinking, living and being in the world.[6] It was invented and championed by a number of thinkers. Leading ones included Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and Georg Lukács. Their objective was to transform Western civilization from its Christian foundations to an elite-led, secular egalitarian utopia. They have been wildly successful.
Libertarian Marxism Defined
Here is a provisional definition of Libertarian Marxism by Sidney Hook, one of its advocates. It is
… a philosophy of human liberation. It seeks to overcome human alienation, to emancipate man from repressive social institutions, especially economic institutions that frustrate his true nature, and to bring him into harmony with himself, his fellow men, and the world around him so that he can overcome his estrangements and express his true essence through creative freedom.[7]
This permutation of Marxism is by no means identical to Marx’s original vision, or to Leninist-Stalinist Marxism. This newer version of Marxism is much more germane to our Western world than old-time Marxism. The founders of Libertarian Marxism knew that violent political revolution would fail in Western democracies, so they rethought how the basic instincts of Marxism could be introduced into and capture those democracies. Marxism was all about seeing and making society the sum total of its material conditions: everything was reduced to economics. Libertarian Marxism is all about liberating humanity from the social institutions and conditions (like the family and church and business and traditional views and habits and authorities) that prevent the individual from realizing his true self, his true desires and aspirations, from being anything he wants to be — full autonomy. Original Marxism and Libertarian Marxism overlap, but they’re not identical. Libertarian Marxism is the Marxism of our culture, of our time.
Libertarian Marxism Distilled
Modern Marxism is Libertarian. An extended metaphor might help. Imagine thousands of tiny seeds, full of flourishing, fruitful potential, but they can never fulfill that potential because they’re submerged beneath hard, frozen, nearly impenetrable soil. Imagine further a sympathetic farmer who comes with a massive plow and cracks the soil and waters and fertilizes it so that the seeds can finally sprout upward.
The good seed, the bad soil, and the great plow
The seeds in this metaphor are humans as we enter the world. Recall the famous first line of The Social Contract by the 18th century French romantic thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Humanity is good at heart; we have massive, unrealized moral potential. But we’re chained. Returning to the original metaphor, we’re stifled by the hard, frozen soil, which won’t allow us to unleash our moral potential. That soil is our society, especially leading institutions like the family and church and business. We’re born into a family that requires us to curb our desires and sacrifice for other family members. Our family doesn’t provide the environment for realizing many of our desires and dreams. Perhaps our family is not well educated. It might not be wealthy. In any case, our families establish oppressive moral guidelines: you must obey your parents. You must attend school. You may not eat whatever you want, whenever you want. All life choices are not open to you.
And then there’s the church.
It teaches that there’s a Triune, sovereign God to whom you’re responsible. He lays down his truth the Bible. The church establishes the boundaries of belief, or orthodoxy. You and I don’t get to decide. The church says premarital and extramarital sex and homosexuality are sinful. Ditto with covetousness and self-centeredness. If you have an unwanted pregnancy, you may not have an abortion. If you sin, you must confess your sin and repent and amend your ways. You must rely on Jesus Christ alone to save you. You don’t have free spiritual reign in your life.
Add to this your employer. You have to be at work on time. You work for your employer’s goals, and especially the customer’s. If your business exists to provide cheeseburgers or Chevy Impalas or legal counsel, you’re required to serve if you’re going to get paid. Your employer might hamper your dreams and ambitions. You feel stifled.
These social authorities — the family, church, business, as well as others — keep us frustrated and in check. Recall Sidney Hook’s definition. The Libertarian Marxists “emancipate man from repressive social institutions ….” This cold, hard topsoil prevents us from breaking through upward to realize our true selves. We should be free like an artist to paint beautiful pastels of our life onto the world we create. What we need is a plow to break up this hard soil and get it out of the way. In our metaphor, that plow is the state.
The oppression-liberation nexus
This is where Rousseau stepped in: he basically appealed, “Give me a state strong enough to wipe out the authority of these stultifying social institutions, and I’ll give you individual liberty — except, liberty from the state itself. I’ll give you your soil-wrecking plow.” This, in fact, essentially happened during the French Revolution. The church was gutted, the medieval guilds were destroyed, and the family was diluted. What became all-powerful was the state.
Why were so many individuals willing to make this trade?
That’s simple enough. These other institutions, like the family and the church, demanded morality. The state doesn’t demand morality; it only demands subservience. Individuals were willing to give up political liberty in order to gain moral (=immoral) liberty. Or, more accurately, they were willing to enslave themselves to the state as long as they could emancipate themselves from moral standards. This has been the course of Leftism in the West. The state is the enforcer of the “oppression-liberation nexus.”[8] Your freedom to practice homosexuality is protected; your freedom to start a degree-granting Christian college is not protected. Your freedom to abort an unborn baby is protected; your freedom to pass on all your wealth to your heirs is not protected. Your freedom to produce and disseminate pornography is protected; your freedom as a pastor to endorse a Christian political candidate is not protected. Virtually any sort of sexual “preference” is permitted, just as long as you acquiesce to the state’s power.
This is Libertarian Marxism:
it uses the state to get rid of all that is impeding sinful man from venting his basest instincts. Hierarchies keep those instincts in check. They have to go. The traditional authorities must be enslaved, literally or culturally: men, especially white men; fathers; clergy; business owners. They and their hierarchical authority put a crimp on us, particularly a crimp on our sexual desires. So, the authority of family and church and business must be diluted and undermined to provide individuals with maximum autonomy. This is the goal of Libertarian Marxism.
They undermine family authority by using the giant plow of the state to enforce abortion rights, allow quick and easy no-fault divorce, legalize same-sex “marriage.” They break the authority of the church by forbidding it to exclude from the clergy or membership people who violate the church’s beliefs, or even by imposing punishing zoning regulations. They dilute business authority by enacting excessive environmental regulations and imposing burdensome requirements for employees. In Libertarian Marxism, the state longs to assault all competitors to its own ubiquitous authority.
When we hear libertarianism, we think of freedom from the state. When we hear Libertarian Marxism, we should think of freedom from everything but the state. The state exists to hamper all other authorities that keep us from realizing our true dreams and desires. This is the leading social vision of our time.
And it also explains why pure libertarianism paves the way for statism: if you oppose the state but champion liberation from the non-coercively, God-ordained regulating institutions like the family and church, you’ll eventually need the state to coercively guarantee your freedom to live any way you want as long as you don’t hurt somebody else. This is how libertarian support for no-fault divorce, same-sex-marriage, pornography, hard drug legalization, and Ayn Rand’s “Objectivism” will come full circle to statism. Individual autonomy and state autonomy grow from the same liberty-crushing depraved root.
The Adversarial Intelligentsia
The Libertarian Marxists were led by thinkers. The Christian counterrevolution also needs a strong core of thinkers to combat the false, pervasive ideas of contemporary culture. Ideas have consequences, but only people communicate ideas. We Christian culturalists need what has been called an adversarial intelligentsia.[9] We need godly, courageous adversaries with nimble minds to refute the massive ideas eroding our culture. Ideas are important to everybody reading these lines, but some of you are gifted and called to be the adversarial intelligentsia, or to support them by your prayer and finances.
But everybody, from homeschool Mom to pastor, college student to professor, dishwasher to CEO, has a critical role to play.
We must labor by the Spirit’s power and the inspired Word of God to “demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and . . . take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). Humanly speaking, the future rests with us.
Professing and practicing Biblical Faith, in all of its glorious and gracious hierarchies, is the revolutionary alternative to Libertarian Marxism.
And in the end, it — and it alone — will win.
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There is a reason the saying after HITLER corporate fascism ----FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE TRADE UNIONISTS---FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE ACADEMICS.
CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA being pre-WEIMAR global corporate fascists did indeed come for the LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE TRADE UNIONISTS. They did indeed come for the REAL left social progressive ACADEMICS----you know, those folks REALLY working for 99% WE THE PEOPLE public interest ---civil rights, civil liberties for workers, small businesses, communities.
When we see LIBERTARIAN MARXISTS are led by 'thinkers'---we KNOW the only talent these global banking 5% freemason/Greek players have is ---LYING, CHEATING, AND STEALING----they have no ability to create civil societies---they have no ability to do ANYTHING----they are pledged to do whatever global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS tell them.
'The Libertarian Marxists were led by thinkers'.
........OH, REALLY????
CULTURAL MARXISM is simply what we have been discussing these few decades of global banking 1% billionaire ZOROS----and his OPEN BORDERS ------teamed with global banking 1% KNIGHTS OF MALTA and these continuous wars. The ZOROS crowd working for WORLD BANK/IMF have these few decades built the TEAM FAKE LEFT MARXISTS having promoted as 'social benefit' all this MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE ------creating population tensions by making one group 5% freemason/Greek players then another group.
ZOROS and other global banking 1% have been funding the CULTURAL side of ONE WORLD for only the OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS----this is CLINTON/OBAMA here in US. When we discuss global banking 1% FREEMASON STARS----those musicians, actors, writers allowed to become rich creating FADS----that is cultural MARXISM. While our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE may be having fun dancing and singing to our walkmen and social media thinking it is DEMOCRATIZING---we are being MARCHED to DARK AGES DEEP, DEEP, REALLY DEEP repression.
When we say DAP is no longer about 99% black empowerment as it was in 1960s-70s civil rights movement----that is because of far-right wing cultural MARXISM replacing REAL left social progressive capitalism. When we say #RESIST with the fist in ROMAN SALUTE is killing our 99% of US workers and rights from 1960s-70s-----that is because of far-right wing cultural MARXISM replacing our REAL left social progressive labor rights movement.....same for women's rights movement---veteran's rights movement....disabled and senior rights movements.
Cultural Marxism is marching into all areas of our lives
KARL DU FRESNE
Last updated 05:00, June 28 2018
OPINION: A significant anniversary passed recently with surprisingly little fanfare.
News stories marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx focused on the fawning tribute paid to him by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping.
There was a large dollop of irony here, since the modern Chinese communist party is highly selective in its application of Marxism. It has combined Marxist-style political totalitarianism – brutal suppression of dissent and absolute obeisance to the party – with a largely unfettered capitalist-style economy.
As an economic model, Marxism stands totally discredited. The few remaining outposts of communist ideology, such as North Korea and Cuba, are economic basket-cases, as well as notoriously repressive.
And of course Marxism's record has been irrevocably blighted by two of the most monstrous figures in history, Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao – proud Marxists who carried out mass exterminations without blinking an eye.
In view of all this, it's grimly ironic that a form of Marxism not only survives, but is rampant across the democratic Western World.
Some call it cultural Marxism, others neo-Marxism. However you choose to label it, it has perversely triumphed where Marx's economic theories have deservedly been consigned to the dustbin of history.
Neo-Marxism draws partly on Marxist analysis but is equally influenced by a bunch of twisted 20th century French philosophers. It grows out of the assumption that Western civilisation, and all that goes with it, is fundamentally rotten and therefore must be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.
In the cockeyed illogic of the neo-Marxists, we should feel guilt and shame at having inherited a civilisation that has lifted untold millions of people out of poverty and introduced them to democratic government.
You can see Marx's influence in neo-Marxism's hostility to capitalism, its contempt for supposed bourgeois values – the family, for instance – and its emphasis on class and division.
But neo-Marxism takes classical Marxist analysis a whole lot further, examining every issue through the lenses not only of class but also of race, gender, sexual identity and any other potential point of difference that can be leveraged into a grievance.
It marches arm-in-arm with identity politics, seeing society not as a cohesive whole, sharing common interests and aspirations, but as a seething mass of oppressed minorities struggling for liberation – hence the ever-increasing number of aggrieved groups clamouring for special recognition. The result is polarisation and fragmentation.
Neo-Marxism also sets out to create a sense of continuing economic and social crisis, using this as justification for ever more intrusive state intervention and control. And it seeks to undermine our most basic understanding of human nature and society. How we see and interpret the world is dismissed by neo-Marxists as a social and political construct, a product of our conditioning.
Nothing is fixed, not even the sex we are born with, and nothing has any objective value.
Every belief and every value, no matter how soundly based in human experience and observation, is up for question.
Paradoxically, while the neo-Marxists attack some belief systems as oppressive – Christianity for example – they make excuses for others, such as Islam, although it's infinitely more controlling. But don't go looking for ideological consistency in neo-Marxism; you'd be wasting your time.
It all sounds laughable, but it's taught in deadly earnest in our universities. Marxism may have been a wretched failure as an economic model, but the German radical Rudi Dutschke realised decades ago that its aims could be pursued by other means.
Inspired by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, Dutschke came up with the idea of the "long march through the institutions". Drawing an analogy with the famous march by Mao's Red Army through China in the 1930s, Dutschke envisaged subverting society by infiltrating the institutions of higher learning.
He couldn't have imagined how successful his stratagem would be. It works by targeting the impressionable young, many of whom have a natural idealistic desire to do the right thing, and few of whom have any knowledge of the crimes against humanity perpetrated in the past in pursuit of a Marxist utopia.
And how do the neo-Marxists respond when anyone resists their nihilistic theories?
Typically, opposition is howled down as hate speech or met with sneering and ridicule.
There's no room in the neo-Marxist world for dissent or freedom of expression.
The tragedy is that neo-Marxism is triumphing because the institutions of liberal, democratic government are too weak, too naïve, too complacent or too uncertain of the worth of their own values to put up a fight.
Neo-Marxism has now extended its influence far beyond universities, reaching deep into government, schools, the media, the arts and even the churches. The result is a society that is losing confidence in itself, which is precisely the neo-Marxists' aim – because a society that has lost confidence in itself is easier to intimidate and control.
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No matter how much NOAM CHOMSKY is sold as LEFT LIBERTARIAN------he has always been that FAKE ALT RIGHT ALT LEFT 5% global banking player. Here is what is being called LIBERTARIAN MARXISM---and it is indeed FAR-RIGHT WING. This is think tank AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE. Know what? No US right wing conservative think tanks ----they were corrupted and captured by far-right wing global banking 1% BUSH neo-conservatives these few decades. So, our US 99% of REAL right wing conservatives not already under the bus are soon to be thrown under the bus in MOVING FORWARD MARXISM OF THE RIGHT. We see all those global hedge fund corporate STANFORD/YALE/JOHNS HOPKINS global banking 5% players with those MARXIST books-----
SORRY 99% OF US, EUROPEAN, AFRICAN RIGHT WING PLAYERS---MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE IS CONSERVING ALL WEALTH AND POWER TO GLOBAL 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS---NO BEOWULF'S NEED APPLY.
Our US 99% of right wing conservatives have fought hard to keep Bush neo-cons at bay just as our US 99% of left wing fought to keep Clinton neo-liberals at bay. We need our US right wing 99% to STOP PRETENDING THEY CAN BE WINNERS because all of MOVING FORWARD IS RIGHT WING. Far-right wing LIBERTARIANISM has no sovereign REPUBLIC for people wanting to be REPUBLICANS.
Sadly, many of our US 99% right wing citizens will embrace global corporate HITLER/STALIN/MAO fascism liking all that BRUTALITY ----but remember, those 99% of citizens supporting FASCISM are always those hundreds of millions KILLED.
Marxism of the Right
By Robert Locke • March 14, 2005
Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government. Libertarianism offers its believers a clear conscience to do things society presently restrains, like make more money, have more sex, or take more drugs. It promises a consistent formula for ethics, a rigorous framework for policy analysis, a foundation in American history, and the application of capitalist efficiencies to the whole of society. But while it contains substantial grains of truth, as a whole it is a seductive mistake.
There are many varieties of libertarianism, from natural-law libertarianism (the least crazy) to anarcho-capitalism (the most), and some varieties avoid some of the criticisms below. But many are still subject to most of them, and some of the more successful varieties—I recently heard a respected pundit insist that classical liberalism is libertarianism—enter a gray area where it is not really clear that they are libertarians at all. But because 95 percent of the libertarianism one encounters at cocktail parties, on editorial pages, and on Capitol Hill is a kind of commonplace “street” libertarianism, I decline to allow libertarians the sophistical trick of using a vulgar libertarianism to agitate for what they want by defending a refined version of their doctrine when challenged philosophically. We’ve seen Marxists pull that before.
This is no surprise, as libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon’s wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments.
Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. Nourishing foods are good for us by nature, not because we choose to eat them. Taken to its logical conclusion, the reduction of the good to the freely chosen means there are no inherently good or bad choices at all, but that a man who chose to spend his life playing tiddlywinks has lived as worthy a life as a Washington or a Churchill.
Furthermore, the reduction of all goods to individual choices presupposes that all goods are individual. But some, like national security, clean air, or a healthy culture, are inherently collective. It may be possible to privatize some, but only some, and the efforts can be comically inefficient. Do you really want to trace every pollutant in the air back to the factory that emitted it and sue?
Libertarians rightly concede that one’s freedom must end at the point at which it starts to impinge upon another person’s, but they radically underestimate how easily this happens. So even if the libertarian principle of “an it harm none, do as thou wilt,” is true, it does not license the behavior libertarians claim. Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it.
Libertarians in real life rarely live up to their own theory but tend to indulge in the pleasant parts while declining to live up to the difficult portions. They flout the drug laws but continue to collect government benefits they consider illegitimate. This is not just an accidental failing of libertarianism’s believers but an intrinsic temptation of the doctrine that sets it up to fail whenever tried, just like Marxism.
Libertarians need to be asked some hard questions. What if a free society needed to draft its citizens in order to remain free? What if it needed to limit oil imports to protect the economic freedom of its citizens from unfriendly foreigners? What if it needed to force its citizens to become sufficiently educated to sustain a free society? What if it needed to deprive landowners of the freedom to refuse to sell their property as a precondition for giving everyone freedom of movement on highways? What if it needed to deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap foreign labor in order to keep out poor foreigners who would vote for socialistic wealth redistribution?
In each of these cases, less freedom today is the price of more tomorrow. Total freedom today would just be a way of running down accumulated social capital and storing up problems for the future. So even if libertarianism is true in some ultimate sense, this does not prove that the libertarian policy choice is the right one today on any particular question.
Furthermore, if limiting freedom today may prolong it tomorrow, then limiting freedom tomorrow may prolong it the day after and so on, so the right amount of freedom may in fact be limited freedom in perpetuity. But if limited freedom is the right choice, then libertarianism, which makes freedom an absolute, is simply wrong. If all we want is limited freedom, then mere liberalism will do, or even better, a Burkean conservatism that reveres traditional liberties. There is no need to embrace outright libertarianism just because we want a healthy portion of freedom, and the alternative to libertarianism is not the USSR, it is America’s traditional liberties.
Libertarianism’s abstract and absolutist view of freedom leads to bizarre conclusions. Like slavery, libertarianism would have to allow one to sell oneself into it. (It has been possible at certain times in history to do just that by assuming debts one could not repay.) And libertarianism degenerates into outright idiocy when confronted with the problem of children, whom it treats like adults, supporting the abolition of compulsory education and all child-specific laws, like those against child labor and child sex. It likewise cannot handle the insane and the senile.
Libertarians argue that radical permissiveness, like legalizing drugs, would not shred a libertarian society because drug users who caused trouble would be disciplined by the threat of losing their jobs or homes if current laws that make it difficult to fire or evict people were abolished. They claim a “natural order” of reasonable behavior would emerge. But there is no actual empirical proof that this would happen. Furthermore, this means libertarianism is an all-or-nothing proposition: if society continues to protect people from the consequences of their actions in any way, libertarianism regarding specific freedoms is illegitimate. And since society does so protect people, libertarianism is an illegitimate moral position until the Great Libertarian Revolution has occurred.
And is society really wrong to protect people against the negative consequences of some of their free choices? While it is obviously fair to let people enjoy the benefits of their wise choices and suffer the costs of their stupid ones, decent societies set limits on both these outcomes. People are allowed to become millionaires, but they are taxed. They are allowed to go broke, but they are not then forced to starve. They are deprived of the most extreme benefits of freedom in order to spare us the most extreme costs. The libertopian alternative would be perhaps a more glittering society, but also a crueler one.
Empirically, most people don’t actually want absolute freedom, which is why democracies don’t elect libertarian governments. Irony of ironies, people don’t choose absolute freedom. But this refutes libertarianism by its own premise, as libertarianism defines the good as the freely chosen, yet people do not choose it. Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians.
The political corollary of this is that since no electorate will support libertarianism, a libertarian government could never be achieved democratically but would have to be imposed by some kind of authoritarian state, which rather puts the lie to libertarians’ claim that under any other philosophy, busybodies who claim to know what’s best for other people impose their values on the rest of us. Libertarianism itself is based on the conviction that it is the one true political philosophy and all others are false. It entails imposing a certain kind of society, with all its attendant pluses and minuses, which the inhabitants thereof will not be free to opt out of except by leaving.
And if libertarians ever do acquire power, we may expect a farrago of bizarre policies. Many support abolition of government-issued money in favor of that minted by private banks. But this has already been tried, in various epochs, and doesn’t lead to any wonderful paradise of freedom but only to an explosion of fraud and currency debasement followed by the concentration of financial power in those few banks that survive the inevitable shaking-out. Many other libertarian schemes similarly founder on the empirical record.
A major reason for this is that libertarianism has a naïve view of economics that seems to have stopped paying attention to the actual history of capitalism around 1880. There is not the space here to refute simplistic laissez faire, but note for now that the second-richest nation in the world, Japan, has one of the most regulated economies, while nations in which government has essentially lost control over economic life, like Russia, are hardly economic paradises. Legitimate criticism of over-regulation does not entail going to the opposite extreme.
Libertarian naïveté extends to politics. They often confuse the absence of government impingement upon freedom with freedom as such. But without a sufficiently strong state, individual freedom falls prey to other more powerful individuals. A weak state and a freedom-respecting state are not the same thing, as shown by many a chaotic Third-World tyranny.
Libertarians are also naïve about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday. They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more.
This contempt for self-restraint is emblematic of a deeper problem: libertarianism has a lot to say about freedom but little about learning to handle it. Freedom without judgment is dangerous at best, useless at worst. Yet libertarianism is philosophically incapable of evolving a theory of how to use freedom well because of its root dogma that all free choices are equal, which it cannot abandon except at the cost of admitting that there are other goods than freedom. Conservatives should know better.
Robert Locke writes from New York City.
March 14, 2005 Issue
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We like this discussion because nothing LEFT has been happening in LATIN AMERICA in modern history. Our Latin American nations have been captured by FAKE MARXIST revolutions one after the other. CHAVEZ was not left socialist---he was a global banking 1% FAKE MARXIST ----collectivizing the wealth of Venezuela just to place it in the hands of global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS.
CHAVEZ LEAVES WE SEE SACKING AND LOOTING FOLLOWED BY A GLOBAL BANKING NEO-LIBERAL GOVERNMENT.
There was never any common ownership of government structures folks----far-right MARXISM simply collectivizes all wealth to a powerful dictator.
Is Venezuela a socialist or communist country?
'The answer to this would unequivocally be no. The dynamic of capital accumulation still drives economic activity, most enterprises are privately-owned and profit seeking, the the wage-labor relationship is still in place - and even more fundamentally - Veneuzela operates in a global capitalist market system'.
What is MOVING FORWARD in LATIN AMERICA? ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES FILLED WITH GLOBAL FACTORIES AND LOOTING NATURAL RESOURCES AND MINERALS.
Oh, that's why CITGO gas stations filled US economy-----pols pretending they were supporting a 'LEFT CHAVEZ'.
Is Venezuela a socialist or communist country?
Sean Ahluwalia, BA Economics, MBA Information Technology
Updated Jul 1, 2017
· Upvoted by Kirill Nenartovich, MS from Soviet University where communism was mandatory
No; Venezuela is not a socialist state in the sense of having its government officially and constitutionally bound to socialist construction (this is what a “socialist state” means in the the Marxist-Leninist / Communist sense). At most, a socialist party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, held a majority in the National Assembly from 2000 to 2015 and two of the country’s presidents have belonged to this party.
Now let’s turn to the question you probably intended to ask: does Venezuela have a socialist economy?
The answer to this would unequivocally be no. The dynamic of capital accumulation still drives economic activity, most enterprises are privately-owned and profit seeking, the the wage-labor relationship is still in place - and even more fundamentally - Veneuzela operates in a global capitalist market system.
The government does intervene with the process of capital accumulation and with market processes and does create a negative and uncertain atmosphere for business in the name of fighting corruption and serving the needs of “the people”. But it hasn’t erected a new system to replace capitalism - nor could it accomplish such a monumental task on its own. At most Venezuela is a mixed economy with anti-business government policies that distort markets and retard growth.
The most socialist aspect of Venezuela was during Chavez’s presidency when the profits of Venezuela’s Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (a state-owned oil company that was under state ownership prior to Chavez taking power) was used to finance social programs.
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If here in US our 99% of WE THE PEOPLE come to understand how our US history has been REVISED especially these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA---then we can understand that in far-right authoritarian nations like Russia/Poland/Germany that REVISIONIST history is exploding. While Germany has worked hard to make clear a HITLER fascism was bad---we are reading more and more CORRUPTED history of what that fascism was----trying hard to again sell HITLER as LEFT SOCIALIST.
We see below the same in RUSSIA where PERESTROIKA sending all USSR collective wealth to those global banking 1% OLIGARCHS is finished is ready to reinstate FAR-RIGHT WING AUTHORITARIAN STALINISM.
Of course we read all these NEW HISTORIES of STALIN years as too TROTSKY AND LENIN. It makes sure they pretend what population groups were WINNERS during STALIN and target certain population groups as LOSERS.
Russia as China was totally engaged in civil unrest, civil wars, brutality that killed 99% of Russian and Chinese citizens---there were no WINNERS ---indeed Stalin working for global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS protected Russia's global 1%----THAT WAS IT.
RUSSIA AS GERMANY AS CHINA AS AMERICA GLOBAL BANKING 1% WORKING AS HARD AS THEY CAN TO ELIMINATE 5% FREEMASON/GREEK CIVIL UNREST CIVIL WAR PLAYERS WITH DEEP, DEEP, REALLY DEEP STATE.
Opinion
Stalin, Russia’s New Hero
By Alec Luhn
“He was a great man, unique in history,” Zhenya Viktorov, an 11th grader, told me on a recent visit. His classmate Amina Kurayev was more circumspect: “It wasn’t as terrible as they say.”
And what about the millions of Soviets who were shot or sent to the gulags? “No one was repressed for no reason,” Zhenya said. When I asked him how many political opponents Stalin killed, he told me “thousands,” and argued that the purges weren’t as “big or inhumane as the media likes to say.”
At least 15 million people were killed in prisons and labor camps under Stalin and his predecessor Vladimir Lenin, according to Alexander Yakovlev, who led a commission on rehabilitating victims of political repression under President Boris N. Yeltsin. Estimates vary, but Stalin’s victims alone certainly number in the millions.
And yet views like Zhenya’s are becoming more common in Russia. Polls show a gradual improvement in perceptions of Stalin, who led the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. A survey released on March 1 by the Levada Center, a research organization based in Moscow, found that 40 percent of Russians thought the Stalin era brought “more good than bad,” up from 27 percent in 2012. In an annual Levada survey published in January 2015, a majority of Russians (52 percent) said Stalin “probably” or “definitely” played a positive role in the country.
This quiet rehabilitation began after Vladimir V. Putin came to power in 1999. Stalin’s legacy has become a tacit justification as the Putin government has strengthened its own grip on power. Under Stalin, “order” and national prestige trumped human rights or civil liberties.
“By raising the figure of Stalin, the Putin regime is trying to raise the idea that collective interests are more important than individual lives, and that means the regime has less responsibility to society,” Lev Gudkov, who conducts the Levada Center’s Stalin polls, told me.
Here in Penza, the Communist Party opened a Stalin Center in December. It’s just a few rooms of old photographs and newspapers and a lecture hall with a giant portrait of Stalin, but it makes a statement. A golden bust of Stalin stands in front of the building.
Sites like these are becoming more and more common. In 2015, the Communist Party, which has 92 of 450 seats in Parliament and often toes the Kremlin line, raised a banner with pictures of Lenin and Stalin as the backdrop for the party plenary session. At Victory Day celebrations last May 9, his image adorned a fence next to a Moscow police station. Moscow’s best-known bookstore was recently promoting a book called “How Stalin Defeated Corruption.”
School textbooks and state television programs, even if they briefly mention his human rights abuses, celebrate Stalin as a great leader. Mr. Putin has backed a planned monument to the victims of Soviet political repressions in Moscow, but that’s likely pure politics. He wants to play to the masses who are growing enamored of Stalin without alienating those Russians, such as the Moscow intelligentsia, who abhor him. The president has also carefully praised Stalin: “We can criticize the commanders and Stalin all we like, but can anyone say with certainty that a different approach would have enabled us to win?” he once said about World War II.
But Stalin receives more than just cagey rhetorical support. On Feb. 22, the Russian Military History Society — which Mr. Putin founded in 2012, is headed by the minister of culture and receives millions of dollars in state funding each year — paid for a bust of Stalin to be installed at a war museum in the city of Pskov, near the Estonian border. The minister of culture recently supported an exhibition of Socialist Realist paintings by Aleksandr Gerasimov, one of Stalin’s court painters, featuring portraits of the “generalissimo.”
Why is Stalin now gaining popularity?
For one, people remember less and less about his purges and prison camps — which in Russia began to be thoroughly investigated and openly discussed only in the 1980s. As the sharp edges of Stalin’s image have gone out of focus, he has become what Ilya Budraitskis, a leftist thinker and activist, described to me as an “empty shell that can be filled with different meanings.”
I saw this firsthand in Penza. The Communists at the Stalin Center longed for his command economy, arguing that the hyperinflation and collapses of the 1990s were far worse than Soviet-era shortages; a right-wing, neo-pagan taxi driver told me that his favorite historical figures are Stalin and Hitler because they were able to “keep order.”
In today’s Russia, corrupt officials steal from the budget, police officers demand bribes and judges are believed to be bought and sold. Longing for the “order” of the past is palpable. The problem is that the fans of order never picture themselves as the ones being repressed, said Sergei Oleynik, head of the Penza branch of the liberal Yabloko Party. “When they talk about the Stalin era, they imagine the holster at the side, but not the barrel to the back of their neck,” he told me.
The Kremlin also plays on Russian nostalgia for superpower status, stressing the glories of the Soviet past — first and foremost, victory in World War II — over the persecutions and famines. When Russia is besieged by enemies, including a government in Ukraine that the state news media has described as a “fascist junta,” the image of Stalin the defender against Nazis wins out over that of Stalin the paranoid tyrant. Can Mr. Putin’s strong hand similarly defend the motherland?
The Putin government is able to capitalize on Stalin’s legacy because Russia has not fully reconciled with the dark side of this heritage. The Moscow city administration opened a gulag museum last year, but most labor camps and mass graves around the country have not been commemorated. Russia’s only preserved gulag camp and museum, Perm 36, was recently taken over by the government, which changed the site’s focus to its contribution to the victory in World War II. Memorial, a nongovernmental organization that works to document Soviet abuses, has called for a ban on Stalin monuments. It’s a worthwhile proposal, but an unlikely one: The Justice Ministry has deemed several branches of Memorial “foreign agents.”
Russia won’t be able to reform its increasingly authoritarian and corrupt government — which rejects “Western” values like human rights and democracy while buying into its capitalist economic model — as long as it refuses to acknowledge the excesses of the most tyrannical government in its past. Victor Erofeyev, a novelist whose father was a translator for Stalin, has said that “when Stalin dies in the soul of the last Russian, then you can say our country has a future.” Unfortunately, Mr. Putin is happy to keep him alive.
THAT IS THE SAME MECHANISM BEING BUILT TODAY INSIDE US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES BY THESE SAME FAKE MARXIST 'POPULIST REBELS'.
Below we see how STALINIST POLAND meets LATIN AMERICAN MARXISM-------trades were organized by region rather than craft. This is why freemasonry in third world nations keep society in continuous civil unrest civil wars with brutal dictators taking all wealth and power.
INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD -----WORK FOR FAR-RIGHT WING WORLD BANK GLOBAL 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS KILLING 99% OF SOVEREIGN CITIZENS.
'Solidarity (Polish trade union)
- Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_(Polish_trade...
Solidarity was organized as an industrial union, or more specifically according to the One Big Union principle, along the lines of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (workers in every trade were organized by region, rather than by craft)'.
We like how this article explains how what is REAL left social progressive stances are corrupted by far-right wing global banking MARXISM.
Chaosistan, Hybrid Wars, Iran, Iraq, Middle East, Syria, Turkey
“Neo-Marxism” And “The New Middle East”
Written by Andrew KORYBKO on 24/01/2017
One of the most curious quirks of recent history is that self-proclaimed followers of the Cold War-era ideology of Marxism are on the upswing two and a half decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and interestingly enough, they’re making on-the-ground progress in the Mideast of all places. This may come as a surprise to casual observers who have been convinced by the Mainstream Media that the region is only awash with religious radicalism, which while certainly true, doesn’t fully encapsulate the whole picture of all the extremism that’s active there nowadays. One of the more unexpected outcomes of the 2011 theater-wide Color Revolutions popularly known as the “Arab Spring” has been that armed “Neo-Marxist” Kurdish militias eventually ended up going on the offensive against the Syrian, Turkish, and Iranian governments, each for their own purportedly separate ‘reasons’ but in reality as part of a US-backed coordinated plan for geopolitically reengineering the Mideast.
Syria And Turkey
Before going any further, the first thing that should be addressed is the “Neo-Marxism” label included in the article’s title. The author drew primarily upon the stated positions and manifesto of the Syrian PYD, which is leading the regional charge for undeclared Kurdish separatism, in making the decision to emphasize the ideology that’s driving the region’s anti-government Kurdish militias. The PYD is a political and ethnic extremist organization which attempts to channel Marxist thought in order to impose “democratic confederalism” in Syria, which essentially seeks to dissolve the state through its devolution into a complex quilt of identity-based cantons. The PYD is closely linked to the Turkish PKK, and both organizations claim to be inspired by the late American Marxist Murray Bookchin, who wrote extensively about what he called “decentralization”.
In practice, however, this is pretty much indistinguishable from the political end game that fundamentalist Marxists (“Secular Wahhabis”) aspire for, which is the elimination of the state and its replacement with community councils and other non-traditional governing structures. Whether or not this position truly represents conventional Marxism and more general Leftist thought is up to those communities themselves and their various polemicists to decide, but the labelling of the PYD and PKK as “Neo-Marxist” is due to their political positions in advocating what the public generally conflates (whether rightly or wrongly) with this ideology. Moreover, since they’re active in the 21st century and after the Soviet dissolution at the end of the Cold War, the prefix “Neo-“ is applied to differentiate these organizations and their ideological strands from the ‘classical’ Marxism that was associated (whether rightly or wrongly) with that period.
The point here isn’t to convince anyone that the PYD and PKK are ‘Marxist’, but rather to highlight that this is how they self-identity and to emphasize the ideological motivations behind their militant activity.
Iraq And Iran
Expanding past Syria and Turkey, one can see the influence of “Neo-Marxist” Kurdish militant groups in Iraq and Iran, too. The allied “Patriotic Union of Kurdistan” (PUK) and Gorran opposition parties in northern Iraq’s Kurdish Regional Government, both of which are leftist, are on friendly terms with the PKK. Barzani’s ruling “Kurdish Democratic Party” (KPD) is opposed to the PKK and Marxism, which is why it enjoys such considerable Turkish support even though it regularly threatens to pursue ‘independence’. Interestingly, Iran is aligned with PUK and Gorran in spite of their links to the PKK, which might be partially attributable to Tehran looking favorably upon these groups’ hesitancy to see an ‘independent’ “Iraqi Kurdistan” in the near future and could thus also signal that Iran is engaged in a soft proxy war with Turkey for influence (and pipelines) in the Kurdish Regional Government.
All of the Iraqi Kurdish groups and their affiliated militias are in support of “federalism” or separatism to varying degrees and can generally be described as friendly to the US (the KPD obviously much more in both cases than PUK and Gorran), but aren’t necessarily “Neo-Marxist” in the context that the article is defining it as. Therefore, they’ll largely be excluded from the rest of the analysis going forward, but were importantly mentioned in the first place order to show their loose connections to the troublesome Kurdish organizations in Syria and Turkey.
Amidst this complicated intra-Iraqi Kurd drama, however, the pro-‘Israeli’ and ‘socialist’ “Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran” (KDPI) terrorist group has recently found shelter in northern Iraq and begun to periodically launch cross-border attacks against the Iranian border forces. This organization is part of the “Congress of Nationalities for a Federal Iran” (CNFI), an umbrella group of various ethno-religious minorities fighting against Tehran in favor of the same broad sort of ‘political solution’ as the PYD and PKK, “federalism”. This end goal thus connects the KDPI to its Syrian and Turkish counterparts, and can even be said to give it something in common with all of their Iraqi brethren as well, despite some of the latter being reluctant to associate with them, whether openly or in general, due to Iran’s understandable sensitivities.
“Federalist” Failings And The MEK
In and of itself, there’s nothing inherently negative about federalism, nor does this political system have any origins in Marxist thought, but the “democratic confederalism” of the PYD and PKK and the “Identity Federalism” of the CNFI incorporate radical ideas inspired by this ideology and popularly described as “Cultural Marxism” (whether rightly or wrongly), which ultimately would be disastrous for the national unity of the diverse states threatened by these initiatives if they were ever implemented.
Separate from the Syrian-Turkish-Iranian nexus of Kurdish “Neo-Marxist” militant groups but fighting for similar ideological goals in Iran is the “People’s Mujahedeen of Iran” (MEK), a hard-core Marxist terrorist organization which was delisted a few years ago by the US State Department and is now recognized by Washington as a ‘legitimate opposition party’ (despite having killed Americans in the past).
This group and the aforementioned Syrian, Turkish, and Iranian ones don’t just share a common denominator in “Neo-Marxism”, but are also marked by the strong degree of support that they enjoy from the US, although it must be said that they don’t all coordinate with one another because the Kurds supposedly have a strong hate for the MEK after the latter allegedly fought against them under Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
The US And The PKK
Even though the US formally includes the PKK on its list of terrorist organizations, Turkey has accused it on many occasions of indirectly supporting this group through the provisioning of material and weapons assistance to the PYD, implying that Washington is using the Syrian Kurds as intermediaries for rendering support to their Turkish counterparts. This isn’t unrealistic to assert since the US is nowadays opposed to President Erdogan, and relations between Ankara and Washington have been very chilly ever since last summer’s failed pro-American coup attempt. While it might shock some people to even consider and will likely be met with intense skepticism in the usual alternative media corners, the US does in fact have a serious problem with nominal NATO-member Turkey due to Ankara’s involvement in the Russian-Iranian-Turkish Tripartite of Great Powers aimed at bringing a gradual end to the War on Syria, which explains why it would betray its “ally” by unleashing the unconventional weapon of Kurdish separatism against it via PYD-laundered weapons to the PKK.
The Wahhabi-“Neo-Marxist” Geopolitical Convergence
The Hybrid War drama surrounding the Kurds occupies considerably less media attention than Daesh, but it’s no less dangerous to the stability of the Mideast. In fact, while Daesh has been on a years-long killing spree trying to construct an “Islamic State” in the Mideast, the militant Kurdish organizations mentioned in this article have taken to doing something similar and to a much lesser degree in advance of their shared objective of creating a transnational “Kurdistan” political entity. This goal has lately manifested itself through the intended formation of a stateless (con)federation of Kurdish communities between Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, as per the “post-state” and “Neo-Marxist” ideology of relevant groups in the first three aforementioned states.
As for the Iraqi Kurds, although they’re not “Neo-Marxists”, they are in support of either “federalization” or outright separatism, and would naturally develop their own independent relations with their other Kurdish political counterparts if they succeed in their map-changing schemes. Even though linguistic and historical differences would likely prevent the creation of a unified Kurdish ‘superstate’, the tangible effect of the aforementioned could quickly lead both to the dissolution of the multiethnic states that this demographic is a part of and the de-facto rise of a “second geopolitical ‘Israel’” in part of this space, or in other words, a unipolar-supported polity carved out of the stolen territory of other countries. This eventuality would naturally destroy the incipient Tripartite of Great Powers and also symbolize the successful completion of ‘Israel’s’ 1982 Yinon Plan of manufactured state fragmentation all along its Muslim periphery, basically ensuring that Tel Aviv becomes the undisputed power in the Mideast.
The planned geopolitical redivision of the Mideast is nothing new for American strategists either, which is why Washington is so strongly in support of these organizations. Former US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice first spoke about the dawn of a “New Middle East” in July 2006 during ‘Israel’s’ embarrassingly failed War on Hezbollah and Lebanon, and just a month prior, retired lieutenant colonel Ralph Peters published his “Blood Borders” blueprint about “how a better Middle East would look”. The New York Times followed up with a scandalous map in September 2013 showing “How 5 Countries Could Become 14”, and Stratfor founder George Friedman just released his own map highlighting how 17 separate power centers have emerged across what are nominally 5 sovereign countries. While the process of transnational state dissolution was catalyzed by the theater-wide “Arab Spring” Color Revolution events and subsequent spread of Daesh, these two American-provoked events in turn created the conditions for the militant revival of “Neo-Marxist” regime change groups such as the MEK and geopolitical revisionist ones such as the PYD.
This means that Washington now has two powerful tools at its disposal for crafting the 21st-century Yinon Plan of the “New Middle East”; Wahhabis and “Neo-Marxists”, both of which are bitterly opposed to one another but nevertheless serve as complementary instruments of American foreign policy (whether as “useful idiots” or outright proxies). It’s been long documented by alternative media outlets how the US has wielded the weapon of Wahhabism for over the past three decades, but comparatively less has been said about how it misleads the world through its use of the Fake Left. In theory, Leftists are supposed to be in support of multipolar objectives and against the Western unipolar power structure, but that’s not necessarily the case when it comes to many well-known “Leftist” movements in North America, Europe, and now the Mideast.
The Atlantic-Arabian Virus
The Democratic Party and much of the scattering of other supposedly leftist-oriented organizations in the US have been co-opted by the very same establishment which they claim to oppose. The same can be said for just about any socialist organization in the EU. As for the Mideast, the most popular Kurdish parties have been compromised, and the CNFI and MEK are undoubtedly Western Hybrid War proxies. All of these aforementioned groups, and especially the ones linked to George Soros and his worldwide “protest” (riot/Color Revolution) movements, represent the Fake Left, which shout leftist economic slogans but have lost the leftist moral principle of geopolitical resistance to Western neo-imperialism. In a sad twist of fate and due to their own reprehensible choices, these very same groups have become the post-modern vanguard for the exact same world order which their Cold War spiritual predecessors fought so valiantly to avoid.
It’s not to say that every self-proclaimed Leftist organization in these three parts of the world is “fake” (after all, the Baath Party and Syrian Socialist National Party still embody the respectable principles associated with Cold War Leftism), but just that there are plenty of reasonable grounds to immediately be suspicious of supposedly left-wing groups operating in these regions nowadays. The entire US is being destabilized by the Clintonian Counter-Revolution and its Fake Left supporters, just like the EU is being thrown into chaos by the ‘Secular Wahhabis’ who have ‘opened the gates from within’ by aiding and abetting the US’ plan to unleash ‘Weapons of Mass Migration’ against the continent. Similarly, the Mideast is now facing the threat of regime change and geopolitical revisionism not from the failing forces of Daesh and other Wahhabi terrorist groups, but by the hand of reinvigorated “Neo-Marxist” ones such as the PYD, PKK, KDPI, CNFI, and MEK. All of these groups purport to represent the “Left” but are in reality part of the worldwide Fake Left in the service of American interests, whether wittingly or inadvertently.
NO, NOT AMERICAN INTERESTS---THAT GLOBAL BANKING 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS KNIGHTS OF MALTA TRIBE OF JUDAH
The “Leftist Civil War”
The only way to fight back against this is for the Real Left and its sincere, genuine activists in North America, the EU, and Mideast to come out in vocal and unceasing opposition against these Fake Leftist tools of Western neo-imperialism in order to win back the respect of their ideology and free it from American hijacking. The US has taken over the mainstream “leftist” narrative and is turning it into a mouthpiece of neo-imperialist propaganda, relying on collaborators such Varoufakis, Sanders, and an army of ‘alternative media’ bloggers to ‘legitimize’ their ‘coup’. When faced with even the slightest opposition from their Real Leftist ‘comrades’ (to say nothing of average non-Leftist folks), they resort to maliciously trolling them as “racists”, “fascists”, and/or “white supremacists” in a desperate knee-jerk reaction designed to discredit them in the eyes of what they assume to be the ‘politically correct’ public. The whole point in doing this is to protect their narrative monopoly so that dissenting voices don’t have a chance at swaying public opinion against the policies of the Fake Leftist Establishment.
Pertaining to the examined topic of utilizing “Neo-Marxist” proxy armies to geopolitically reorganize the “New Middle East”, this typically takes the form of condemning Iran’s sovereign choice to become an Islamic Republic (the narrative promoted by MEK, KDPI, and CNFI) and guilting the global public into accepting an “independent” or “federalized” Kurdish state or states as a ‘reward’ for fighting Daesh. In both interconnected cases across the combined Syrian-Turkish-Iraqi-Iranian Hybrid War battlespace, misleading and oftentimes outright false or situationally irrelevant arguments about “social rights”, “economic equality”, and “democracy” are trotted out in order to trick unaware and/or immature well-intentioned Leftists into supporting these Fake Leftist geopolitical projects. Over time, under enough pressure, and through gradually subtle degrees of ideological divergence from fundamental principles, Real Leftists can successfully be indoctrinated into Fake Leftists if they don’t have the political will to resist the Establishment, which regrettably appears to be the trend in North America and the EU.
It’s also in these two regions where Fake Leftist support for Kurdish separatism and a “Green Revolution 2.0” are most pronounced, which are dangerously combining to form a very serious threat to the multipolar states of Syria and Iran. Even if Real Leftists find themselves in support of Kurdish separatism in Turkey and/or Iraq, and/or regime change in either of them – justifying their position on the belief that these states are of questionable loyalty to the emerging Multipolar World Order – they need to realize that such geopolitical viruses, by their very nature and obvious consequences, won’t be ‘contained’ to these two countries alone but would inevitably spread to Syria and Iran as well. Therefore, even if they find themselves sympathizing with some of the positions presently being promoted by their Fake Leftist peers, they must remain steadfast in opposing them out of geopolitical consistency in standing against the Western-led international system.
This could ultimately lead to a “Leftist Civil War” (ideologically speaking, not necessarily in physical terms) in order to liberate this ideology from its present status as one of the US’ premier bullhorns of neo-imperialism, provided, of course, that it’s not already too late to do so.
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As was said yesterday the goal of MOVING FORWARD these few decades was to first silence REAL left social progressives making up 99% of DEMOCRATIC PARTY ----with that LABOR AND JUSTICE platform forcing them into these FAR-RIGHT WING MARXIST structures. Well, over 80% of DEMOCRATIC voters have refused to vote for FAR-RIGHT WING GLOBAL BANKING 1% CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS -----because we KNOW MOVING FORWARD is killing freedom, liberty, justice, pursuit of happiness and installing far-right global corporate campus MARXISM. After 2016 Presidential election rigged and fraudulent having nothing with GET OUT THE VOTE-----why didn't white Democratic voters vote for Hillary---why didn't women not vote for Hillary----well, we do not fight to enslave and kill our futures----
REAL LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE 99% OF CITIZENS IN NORTH AMERICA AND EUROPE REALLY DO NEED TO KEEP FIGHTING THE FAKE LEFTIST 'MARXISTS'.
'Therefore, even if they find themselves sympathizing with some of the positions presently being promoted by their Fake Leftist peers, they must remain steadfast in opposing them out of geopolitical consistency in standing against the Western-led international system'.
What is being called WESTERN-LED-----our US-LED ----is neither---ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE for only the global 1% is led by global 1% of OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS-----not American. These OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS are flipping the Earth's economic axis killing WESTERN NATIONS-----so this is not WESTERN -LED. The INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM is indeed behind this----has no loyalty to what is WESTERN or what is AMERICAN.
'Neo-Marxism is a pretty loose term, and tends to encompass most of the trends of Marxist philosophy arising from the New Left'.
BUT CLINTON NEO-LIBERALISM WASN'T EVEN THE 'OLD LEFT'.
'Today, Dependency Theory has evolved into World Systems Theory'
Please ignore all that mumbo jumbo called 'academic' description and simply see NEO-MARXISM is global corporate campus SOCIALISM is global corporate SUSTAINABILITY is WORLD BANK/IMF/UNITED NATIONS DEEP, DEEP, REALLY DEEP STATE far-right authoritarian militaristic, extreme wealth extreme poverty LIBERTARIAN MARXISM. We will note that a former Coast Guard veteran is behind this FAKE NEWS of NEO-MARXISM. Shake that global banking 5% freemason/Greek player stance ---we are STOPPING MOVING FORWARD.
What are the key ideas of Neo-Marxist thought?
Robert Palermo, Former academic, USCG veteran, and lifelong political junkie
Updated Jan 17 2013
Neo-Marxism is a pretty loose term, and tends to encompass most of the trends of Marxist philosophy arising from the New Left. There is certainly no unified ideology of Neo-Marxism in the way that there is in orthodox Marxism, and many of the former's currents are in fact not in agreement with one another. Broadly, Neo-Marxism seeks to answer questions traditional or orthodox Marxism cannot, especially in light of technological advances and economic and political developments that Marx and Engels did not address or foresee.
The most influential and important current in Neo-Marxist thought is the Frankfurt School, which founded the Institute for Social Research in 1923. The Frankfurt School is critical of both capitalism and Soviet state communism, and sought to rectify the inadequacies of traditional Marxist theory. To do so, they draw from other schools of thought, such as antipositivist sociology, Weberian sociology, psychoanalysis, and existentialism. Beyond the ISR, the original Frankfurt School thinkers were only loosely affiliated as a group, but they shared a common philosophical approach, and a belief that a different path of socio-economic development from Soviet communism was needed.
The current of Neo-Marxist thought that is probably the most important and influential historically and today is Dependency Theory, which originated with the work of Hans Singer and Raúl Prebisch. In Dependency Theory, economic processes are largely defined as external and based on a core-periphery model of a world economy, rather than the internal approach of orthodox Marxism that sees economic exploitation occurring on a nation-state scale. Much of the work in the Dependency Theory school was done on Latin America and the decolonizing world by scholars such as Andre Gunder Frank and Samir Amin. Today, Dependency Theory has evolved into World Systems Theory, whose originator and leading scholar is Immanuel Wallerstein. World Systems Theory expands on many of the basic ideas of Dependency Theory, but is an even more macro approach to economic and social change, arguing that nation-states should not be the basic unit of socio-economic analysis at all, but rather that international economic systems themselves are the key.
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Modern Marxism is NEO-MARXISM is indeed FAR-RIGHT WING LIBERTARIAN. Remember, these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA were a small step away from LIBERTARIANISM which is simply accumulating wealth anyway you can always with the global 1% rich being made extremely rich---LIBERTARIANISM is simply global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS 1000BC sack and loot laissez faire. This is why we always see the ROMAN SALUTE with these far-right corporate fascist MARXISTS pretending to be LEFT. We like this image with the rainbow colors designating ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE for only the global 1%.
INDUSTRIAL COMMUNISM/SOCIALISM HAS BEEN AND ALWAYS WILL BE FAR-RIGHT WING GLOBAL BANKING 1% EXTREME WEALTH EXTREME POVERTY.
'Others label it existential Marxism. Still others designate it Cultural Marxism or the New Left. I term this vision “Libertarian Marxism.”'
This is why in US southern states like TEXAS ---labor union organizing is growing where it was never allowed to grow. It is not AMERICAN left social progressive capitalism---it is global corporate campus SLAVE LABOR.
Global hedge fund Johns Hopkins corporation, global banking 1% BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT, GREATER BALTIMORE COMMITTEE great big far-right wing HITLER/STALIN/MAO corporate fascists.
How Modern Marxism Is Libertarian
P. Andrew SandlinPosted on August 29, 2017
Today Communism as a political system, if not dead, is on life support. It survives only in North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam -- and the campuses of elite American universities. That last sphere is the one that concerns me, and it should concern you, and it does concern you, whether you want it to or not. It’s not a Communism identical to Leninism and Stalinism, but a development of it, and it’s more pernicious and successful than anything Lenin or Marx or Pol Pot could have imagined.
This evolved Marxism is the leading social vision of our time. Some call it neo-Marxism, a refinement and development of the vastly influential 19th century German philosopher Karl Marx.[1] Others label it existential Marxism. Still others designate it Cultural Marxism or the New Left. I term this vision “Libertarian Marxism.”[2] (I’ll explain why in a moment.) Call it what you want,[3] it’s the reigning vision of the vast majority of cultural leaders in the West.[4]
The Libertarian Marxists differ widely among themselves on many issues, but they’re generally united in embracing their all-controlling vision. There’s likely no intellectual movement in history that has endured so many revisions as Marxism. Sometimes it seems there are as many Marxisms are there are Marxists. At several key points this newer vision deviates from traditional Marxism,[5] but this vision is sufficiently common and coherent that it’s correct to see it as an extension of Marxism, and its leaders certainly see it that way. It’s a way of thinking, living and being in the world.[6] It was invented and championed by a number of thinkers. Leading ones included Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and Georg Lukács. Their objective was to transform Western civilization from its Christian foundations to an elite-led, secular egalitarian utopia. They have been wildly successful.
Libertarian Marxism Defined
Here is a provisional definition of Libertarian Marxism by Sidney Hook, one of its advocates. It is
… a philosophy of human liberation. It seeks to overcome human alienation, to emancipate man from repressive social institutions, especially economic institutions that frustrate his true nature, and to bring him into harmony with himself, his fellow men, and the world around him so that he can overcome his estrangements and express his true essence through creative freedom.[7]
This permutation of Marxism is by no means identical to Marx’s original vision, or to Leninist-Stalinist Marxism. This newer version of Marxism is much more germane to our Western world than old-time Marxism. The founders of Libertarian Marxism knew that violent political revolution would fail in Western democracies, so they rethought how the basic instincts of Marxism could be introduced into and capture those democracies. Marxism was all about seeing and making society the sum total of its material conditions: everything was reduced to economics. Libertarian Marxism is all about liberating humanity from the social institutions and conditions (like the family and church and business and traditional views and habits and authorities) that prevent the individual from realizing his true self, his true desires and aspirations, from being anything he wants to be — full autonomy. Original Marxism and Libertarian Marxism overlap, but they’re not identical. Libertarian Marxism is the Marxism of our culture, of our time.
Libertarian Marxism Distilled
Modern Marxism is Libertarian. An extended metaphor might help. Imagine thousands of tiny seeds, full of flourishing, fruitful potential, but they can never fulfill that potential because they’re submerged beneath hard, frozen, nearly impenetrable soil. Imagine further a sympathetic farmer who comes with a massive plow and cracks the soil and waters and fertilizes it so that the seeds can finally sprout upward.
The good seed, the bad soil, and the great plow
The seeds in this metaphor are humans as we enter the world. Recall the famous first line of The Social Contract by the 18th century French romantic thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Humanity is good at heart; we have massive, unrealized moral potential. But we’re chained. Returning to the original metaphor, we’re stifled by the hard, frozen soil, which won’t allow us to unleash our moral potential. That soil is our society, especially leading institutions like the family and church and business. We’re born into a family that requires us to curb our desires and sacrifice for other family members. Our family doesn’t provide the environment for realizing many of our desires and dreams. Perhaps our family is not well educated. It might not be wealthy. In any case, our families establish oppressive moral guidelines: you must obey your parents. You must attend school. You may not eat whatever you want, whenever you want. All life choices are not open to you.
And then there’s the church.
It teaches that there’s a Triune, sovereign God to whom you’re responsible. He lays down his truth the Bible. The church establishes the boundaries of belief, or orthodoxy. You and I don’t get to decide. The church says premarital and extramarital sex and homosexuality are sinful. Ditto with covetousness and self-centeredness. If you have an unwanted pregnancy, you may not have an abortion. If you sin, you must confess your sin and repent and amend your ways. You must rely on Jesus Christ alone to save you. You don’t have free spiritual reign in your life.
Add to this your employer. You have to be at work on time. You work for your employer’s goals, and especially the customer’s. If your business exists to provide cheeseburgers or Chevy Impalas or legal counsel, you’re required to serve if you’re going to get paid. Your employer might hamper your dreams and ambitions. You feel stifled.
These social authorities — the family, church, business, as well as others — keep us frustrated and in check. Recall Sidney Hook’s definition. The Libertarian Marxists “emancipate man from repressive social institutions ….” This cold, hard topsoil prevents us from breaking through upward to realize our true selves. We should be free like an artist to paint beautiful pastels of our life onto the world we create. What we need is a plow to break up this hard soil and get it out of the way. In our metaphor, that plow is the state.
The oppression-liberation nexus
This is where Rousseau stepped in: he basically appealed, “Give me a state strong enough to wipe out the authority of these stultifying social institutions, and I’ll give you individual liberty — except, liberty from the state itself. I’ll give you your soil-wrecking plow.” This, in fact, essentially happened during the French Revolution. The church was gutted, the medieval guilds were destroyed, and the family was diluted. What became all-powerful was the state.
Why were so many individuals willing to make this trade?
That’s simple enough. These other institutions, like the family and the church, demanded morality. The state doesn’t demand morality; it only demands subservience. Individuals were willing to give up political liberty in order to gain moral (=immoral) liberty. Or, more accurately, they were willing to enslave themselves to the state as long as they could emancipate themselves from moral standards. This has been the course of Leftism in the West. The state is the enforcer of the “oppression-liberation nexus.”[8] Your freedom to practice homosexuality is protected; your freedom to start a degree-granting Christian college is not protected. Your freedom to abort an unborn baby is protected; your freedom to pass on all your wealth to your heirs is not protected. Your freedom to produce and disseminate pornography is protected; your freedom as a pastor to endorse a Christian political candidate is not protected. Virtually any sort of sexual “preference” is permitted, just as long as you acquiesce to the state’s power.
This is Libertarian Marxism:
it uses the state to get rid of all that is impeding sinful man from venting his basest instincts. Hierarchies keep those instincts in check. They have to go. The traditional authorities must be enslaved, literally or culturally: men, especially white men; fathers; clergy; business owners. They and their hierarchical authority put a crimp on us, particularly a crimp on our sexual desires. So, the authority of family and church and business must be diluted and undermined to provide individuals with maximum autonomy. This is the goal of Libertarian Marxism.
They undermine family authority by using the giant plow of the state to enforce abortion rights, allow quick and easy no-fault divorce, legalize same-sex “marriage.” They break the authority of the church by forbidding it to exclude from the clergy or membership people who violate the church’s beliefs, or even by imposing punishing zoning regulations. They dilute business authority by enacting excessive environmental regulations and imposing burdensome requirements for employees. In Libertarian Marxism, the state longs to assault all competitors to its own ubiquitous authority.
When we hear libertarianism, we think of freedom from the state. When we hear Libertarian Marxism, we should think of freedom from everything but the state. The state exists to hamper all other authorities that keep us from realizing our true dreams and desires. This is the leading social vision of our time.
And it also explains why pure libertarianism paves the way for statism: if you oppose the state but champion liberation from the non-coercively, God-ordained regulating institutions like the family and church, you’ll eventually need the state to coercively guarantee your freedom to live any way you want as long as you don’t hurt somebody else. This is how libertarian support for no-fault divorce, same-sex-marriage, pornography, hard drug legalization, and Ayn Rand’s “Objectivism” will come full circle to statism. Individual autonomy and state autonomy grow from the same liberty-crushing depraved root.
The Adversarial Intelligentsia
The Libertarian Marxists were led by thinkers. The Christian counterrevolution also needs a strong core of thinkers to combat the false, pervasive ideas of contemporary culture. Ideas have consequences, but only people communicate ideas. We Christian culturalists need what has been called an adversarial intelligentsia.[9] We need godly, courageous adversaries with nimble minds to refute the massive ideas eroding our culture. Ideas are important to everybody reading these lines, but some of you are gifted and called to be the adversarial intelligentsia, or to support them by your prayer and finances.
But everybody, from homeschool Mom to pastor, college student to professor, dishwasher to CEO, has a critical role to play.
We must labor by the Spirit’s power and the inspired Word of God to “demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and . . . take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). Humanly speaking, the future rests with us.
Professing and practicing Biblical Faith, in all of its glorious and gracious hierarchies, is the revolutionary alternative to Libertarian Marxism.
And in the end, it — and it alone — will win.
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There is a reason the saying after HITLER corporate fascism ----FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE TRADE UNIONISTS---FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE ACADEMICS.
CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA being pre-WEIMAR global corporate fascists did indeed come for the LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE TRADE UNIONISTS. They did indeed come for the REAL left social progressive ACADEMICS----you know, those folks REALLY working for 99% WE THE PEOPLE public interest ---civil rights, civil liberties for workers, small businesses, communities.
When we see LIBERTARIAN MARXISTS are led by 'thinkers'---we KNOW the only talent these global banking 5% freemason/Greek players have is ---LYING, CHEATING, AND STEALING----they have no ability to create civil societies---they have no ability to do ANYTHING----they are pledged to do whatever global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS tell them.
'The Libertarian Marxists were led by thinkers'.
........OH, REALLY????
CULTURAL MARXISM is simply what we have been discussing these few decades of global banking 1% billionaire ZOROS----and his OPEN BORDERS ------teamed with global banking 1% KNIGHTS OF MALTA and these continuous wars. The ZOROS crowd working for WORLD BANK/IMF have these few decades built the TEAM FAKE LEFT MARXISTS having promoted as 'social benefit' all this MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE ------creating population tensions by making one group 5% freemason/Greek players then another group.
ZOROS and other global banking 1% have been funding the CULTURAL side of ONE WORLD for only the OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS----this is CLINTON/OBAMA here in US. When we discuss global banking 1% FREEMASON STARS----those musicians, actors, writers allowed to become rich creating FADS----that is cultural MARXISM. While our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE may be having fun dancing and singing to our walkmen and social media thinking it is DEMOCRATIZING---we are being MARCHED to DARK AGES DEEP, DEEP, REALLY DEEP repression.
When we say DAP is no longer about 99% black empowerment as it was in 1960s-70s civil rights movement----that is because of far-right wing cultural MARXISM replacing REAL left social progressive capitalism. When we say #RESIST with the fist in ROMAN SALUTE is killing our 99% of US workers and rights from 1960s-70s-----that is because of far-right wing cultural MARXISM replacing our REAL left social progressive labor rights movement.....same for women's rights movement---veteran's rights movement....disabled and senior rights movements.
Cultural Marxism is marching into all areas of our lives
KARL DU FRESNE
Last updated 05:00, June 28 2018
OPINION: A significant anniversary passed recently with surprisingly little fanfare.
News stories marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx focused on the fawning tribute paid to him by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping.
There was a large dollop of irony here, since the modern Chinese communist party is highly selective in its application of Marxism. It has combined Marxist-style political totalitarianism – brutal suppression of dissent and absolute obeisance to the party – with a largely unfettered capitalist-style economy.
As an economic model, Marxism stands totally discredited. The few remaining outposts of communist ideology, such as North Korea and Cuba, are economic basket-cases, as well as notoriously repressive.
And of course Marxism's record has been irrevocably blighted by two of the most monstrous figures in history, Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao – proud Marxists who carried out mass exterminations without blinking an eye.
In view of all this, it's grimly ironic that a form of Marxism not only survives, but is rampant across the democratic Western World.
Some call it cultural Marxism, others neo-Marxism. However you choose to label it, it has perversely triumphed where Marx's economic theories have deservedly been consigned to the dustbin of history.
Neo-Marxism draws partly on Marxist analysis but is equally influenced by a bunch of twisted 20th century French philosophers. It grows out of the assumption that Western civilisation, and all that goes with it, is fundamentally rotten and therefore must be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.
In the cockeyed illogic of the neo-Marxists, we should feel guilt and shame at having inherited a civilisation that has lifted untold millions of people out of poverty and introduced them to democratic government.
You can see Marx's influence in neo-Marxism's hostility to capitalism, its contempt for supposed bourgeois values – the family, for instance – and its emphasis on class and division.
But neo-Marxism takes classical Marxist analysis a whole lot further, examining every issue through the lenses not only of class but also of race, gender, sexual identity and any other potential point of difference that can be leveraged into a grievance.
It marches arm-in-arm with identity politics, seeing society not as a cohesive whole, sharing common interests and aspirations, but as a seething mass of oppressed minorities struggling for liberation – hence the ever-increasing number of aggrieved groups clamouring for special recognition. The result is polarisation and fragmentation.
Neo-Marxism also sets out to create a sense of continuing economic and social crisis, using this as justification for ever more intrusive state intervention and control. And it seeks to undermine our most basic understanding of human nature and society. How we see and interpret the world is dismissed by neo-Marxists as a social and political construct, a product of our conditioning.
Nothing is fixed, not even the sex we are born with, and nothing has any objective value.
Every belief and every value, no matter how soundly based in human experience and observation, is up for question.
Paradoxically, while the neo-Marxists attack some belief systems as oppressive – Christianity for example – they make excuses for others, such as Islam, although it's infinitely more controlling. But don't go looking for ideological consistency in neo-Marxism; you'd be wasting your time.
It all sounds laughable, but it's taught in deadly earnest in our universities. Marxism may have been a wretched failure as an economic model, but the German radical Rudi Dutschke realised decades ago that its aims could be pursued by other means.
Inspired by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, Dutschke came up with the idea of the "long march through the institutions". Drawing an analogy with the famous march by Mao's Red Army through China in the 1930s, Dutschke envisaged subverting society by infiltrating the institutions of higher learning.
He couldn't have imagined how successful his stratagem would be. It works by targeting the impressionable young, many of whom have a natural idealistic desire to do the right thing, and few of whom have any knowledge of the crimes against humanity perpetrated in the past in pursuit of a Marxist utopia.
And how do the neo-Marxists respond when anyone resists their nihilistic theories?
Typically, opposition is howled down as hate speech or met with sneering and ridicule.
There's no room in the neo-Marxist world for dissent or freedom of expression.
The tragedy is that neo-Marxism is triumphing because the institutions of liberal, democratic government are too weak, too naïve, too complacent or too uncertain of the worth of their own values to put up a fight.
Neo-Marxism has now extended its influence far beyond universities, reaching deep into government, schools, the media, the arts and even the churches. The result is a society that is losing confidence in itself, which is precisely the neo-Marxists' aim – because a society that has lost confidence in itself is easier to intimidate and control.
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No matter how much NOAM CHOMSKY is sold as LEFT LIBERTARIAN------he has always been that FAKE ALT RIGHT ALT LEFT 5% global banking player. Here is what is being called LIBERTARIAN MARXISM---and it is indeed FAR-RIGHT WING. This is think tank AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE. Know what? No US right wing conservative think tanks ----they were corrupted and captured by far-right wing global banking 1% BUSH neo-conservatives these few decades. So, our US 99% of REAL right wing conservatives not already under the bus are soon to be thrown under the bus in MOVING FORWARD MARXISM OF THE RIGHT. We see all those global hedge fund corporate STANFORD/YALE/JOHNS HOPKINS global banking 5% players with those MARXIST books-----
SORRY 99% OF US, EUROPEAN, AFRICAN RIGHT WING PLAYERS---MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE IS CONSERVING ALL WEALTH AND POWER TO GLOBAL 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS---NO BEOWULF'S NEED APPLY.
Our US 99% of right wing conservatives have fought hard to keep Bush neo-cons at bay just as our US 99% of left wing fought to keep Clinton neo-liberals at bay. We need our US right wing 99% to STOP PRETENDING THEY CAN BE WINNERS because all of MOVING FORWARD IS RIGHT WING. Far-right wing LIBERTARIANISM has no sovereign REPUBLIC for people wanting to be REPUBLICANS.
Sadly, many of our US 99% right wing citizens will embrace global corporate HITLER/STALIN/MAO fascism liking all that BRUTALITY ----but remember, those 99% of citizens supporting FASCISM are always those hundreds of millions KILLED.
Marxism of the Right
By Robert Locke • March 14, 2005
Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government. Libertarianism offers its believers a clear conscience to do things society presently restrains, like make more money, have more sex, or take more drugs. It promises a consistent formula for ethics, a rigorous framework for policy analysis, a foundation in American history, and the application of capitalist efficiencies to the whole of society. But while it contains substantial grains of truth, as a whole it is a seductive mistake.
There are many varieties of libertarianism, from natural-law libertarianism (the least crazy) to anarcho-capitalism (the most), and some varieties avoid some of the criticisms below. But many are still subject to most of them, and some of the more successful varieties—I recently heard a respected pundit insist that classical liberalism is libertarianism—enter a gray area where it is not really clear that they are libertarians at all. But because 95 percent of the libertarianism one encounters at cocktail parties, on editorial pages, and on Capitol Hill is a kind of commonplace “street” libertarianism, I decline to allow libertarians the sophistical trick of using a vulgar libertarianism to agitate for what they want by defending a refined version of their doctrine when challenged philosophically. We’ve seen Marxists pull that before.
This is no surprise, as libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon’s wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments.
Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. Nourishing foods are good for us by nature, not because we choose to eat them. Taken to its logical conclusion, the reduction of the good to the freely chosen means there are no inherently good or bad choices at all, but that a man who chose to spend his life playing tiddlywinks has lived as worthy a life as a Washington or a Churchill.
Furthermore, the reduction of all goods to individual choices presupposes that all goods are individual. But some, like national security, clean air, or a healthy culture, are inherently collective. It may be possible to privatize some, but only some, and the efforts can be comically inefficient. Do you really want to trace every pollutant in the air back to the factory that emitted it and sue?
Libertarians rightly concede that one’s freedom must end at the point at which it starts to impinge upon another person’s, but they radically underestimate how easily this happens. So even if the libertarian principle of “an it harm none, do as thou wilt,” is true, it does not license the behavior libertarians claim. Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it.
Libertarians in real life rarely live up to their own theory but tend to indulge in the pleasant parts while declining to live up to the difficult portions. They flout the drug laws but continue to collect government benefits they consider illegitimate. This is not just an accidental failing of libertarianism’s believers but an intrinsic temptation of the doctrine that sets it up to fail whenever tried, just like Marxism.
Libertarians need to be asked some hard questions. What if a free society needed to draft its citizens in order to remain free? What if it needed to limit oil imports to protect the economic freedom of its citizens from unfriendly foreigners? What if it needed to force its citizens to become sufficiently educated to sustain a free society? What if it needed to deprive landowners of the freedom to refuse to sell their property as a precondition for giving everyone freedom of movement on highways? What if it needed to deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap foreign labor in order to keep out poor foreigners who would vote for socialistic wealth redistribution?
In each of these cases, less freedom today is the price of more tomorrow. Total freedom today would just be a way of running down accumulated social capital and storing up problems for the future. So even if libertarianism is true in some ultimate sense, this does not prove that the libertarian policy choice is the right one today on any particular question.
Furthermore, if limiting freedom today may prolong it tomorrow, then limiting freedom tomorrow may prolong it the day after and so on, so the right amount of freedom may in fact be limited freedom in perpetuity. But if limited freedom is the right choice, then libertarianism, which makes freedom an absolute, is simply wrong. If all we want is limited freedom, then mere liberalism will do, or even better, a Burkean conservatism that reveres traditional liberties. There is no need to embrace outright libertarianism just because we want a healthy portion of freedom, and the alternative to libertarianism is not the USSR, it is America’s traditional liberties.
Libertarianism’s abstract and absolutist view of freedom leads to bizarre conclusions. Like slavery, libertarianism would have to allow one to sell oneself into it. (It has been possible at certain times in history to do just that by assuming debts one could not repay.) And libertarianism degenerates into outright idiocy when confronted with the problem of children, whom it treats like adults, supporting the abolition of compulsory education and all child-specific laws, like those against child labor and child sex. It likewise cannot handle the insane and the senile.
Libertarians argue that radical permissiveness, like legalizing drugs, would not shred a libertarian society because drug users who caused trouble would be disciplined by the threat of losing their jobs or homes if current laws that make it difficult to fire or evict people were abolished. They claim a “natural order” of reasonable behavior would emerge. But there is no actual empirical proof that this would happen. Furthermore, this means libertarianism is an all-or-nothing proposition: if society continues to protect people from the consequences of their actions in any way, libertarianism regarding specific freedoms is illegitimate. And since society does so protect people, libertarianism is an illegitimate moral position until the Great Libertarian Revolution has occurred.
And is society really wrong to protect people against the negative consequences of some of their free choices? While it is obviously fair to let people enjoy the benefits of their wise choices and suffer the costs of their stupid ones, decent societies set limits on both these outcomes. People are allowed to become millionaires, but they are taxed. They are allowed to go broke, but they are not then forced to starve. They are deprived of the most extreme benefits of freedom in order to spare us the most extreme costs. The libertopian alternative would be perhaps a more glittering society, but also a crueler one.
Empirically, most people don’t actually want absolute freedom, which is why democracies don’t elect libertarian governments. Irony of ironies, people don’t choose absolute freedom. But this refutes libertarianism by its own premise, as libertarianism defines the good as the freely chosen, yet people do not choose it. Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians.
The political corollary of this is that since no electorate will support libertarianism, a libertarian government could never be achieved democratically but would have to be imposed by some kind of authoritarian state, which rather puts the lie to libertarians’ claim that under any other philosophy, busybodies who claim to know what’s best for other people impose their values on the rest of us. Libertarianism itself is based on the conviction that it is the one true political philosophy and all others are false. It entails imposing a certain kind of society, with all its attendant pluses and minuses, which the inhabitants thereof will not be free to opt out of except by leaving.
And if libertarians ever do acquire power, we may expect a farrago of bizarre policies. Many support abolition of government-issued money in favor of that minted by private banks. But this has already been tried, in various epochs, and doesn’t lead to any wonderful paradise of freedom but only to an explosion of fraud and currency debasement followed by the concentration of financial power in those few banks that survive the inevitable shaking-out. Many other libertarian schemes similarly founder on the empirical record.
A major reason for this is that libertarianism has a naïve view of economics that seems to have stopped paying attention to the actual history of capitalism around 1880. There is not the space here to refute simplistic laissez faire, but note for now that the second-richest nation in the world, Japan, has one of the most regulated economies, while nations in which government has essentially lost control over economic life, like Russia, are hardly economic paradises. Legitimate criticism of over-regulation does not entail going to the opposite extreme.
Libertarian naïveté extends to politics. They often confuse the absence of government impingement upon freedom with freedom as such. But without a sufficiently strong state, individual freedom falls prey to other more powerful individuals. A weak state and a freedom-respecting state are not the same thing, as shown by many a chaotic Third-World tyranny.
Libertarians are also naïve about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday. They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more.
This contempt for self-restraint is emblematic of a deeper problem: libertarianism has a lot to say about freedom but little about learning to handle it. Freedom without judgment is dangerous at best, useless at worst. Yet libertarianism is philosophically incapable of evolving a theory of how to use freedom well because of its root dogma that all free choices are equal, which it cannot abandon except at the cost of admitting that there are other goods than freedom. Conservatives should know better.
Robert Locke writes from New York City.
March 14, 2005 Issue
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We like this discussion because nothing LEFT has been happening in LATIN AMERICA in modern history. Our Latin American nations have been captured by FAKE MARXIST revolutions one after the other. CHAVEZ was not left socialist---he was a global banking 1% FAKE MARXIST ----collectivizing the wealth of Venezuela just to place it in the hands of global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS.
CHAVEZ LEAVES WE SEE SACKING AND LOOTING FOLLOWED BY A GLOBAL BANKING NEO-LIBERAL GOVERNMENT.
There was never any common ownership of government structures folks----far-right MARXISM simply collectivizes all wealth to a powerful dictator.
Is Venezuela a socialist or communist country?
'The answer to this would unequivocally be no. The dynamic of capital accumulation still drives economic activity, most enterprises are privately-owned and profit seeking, the the wage-labor relationship is still in place - and even more fundamentally - Veneuzela operates in a global capitalist market system'.
What is MOVING FORWARD in LATIN AMERICA? ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES FILLED WITH GLOBAL FACTORIES AND LOOTING NATURAL RESOURCES AND MINERALS.
Oh, that's why CITGO gas stations filled US economy-----pols pretending they were supporting a 'LEFT CHAVEZ'.
Is Venezuela a socialist or communist country?
Sean Ahluwalia, BA Economics, MBA Information Technology
Updated Jul 1, 2017
· Upvoted by Kirill Nenartovich, MS from Soviet University where communism was mandatory
No; Venezuela is not a socialist state in the sense of having its government officially and constitutionally bound to socialist construction (this is what a “socialist state” means in the the Marxist-Leninist / Communist sense). At most, a socialist party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, held a majority in the National Assembly from 2000 to 2015 and two of the country’s presidents have belonged to this party.
Now let’s turn to the question you probably intended to ask: does Venezuela have a socialist economy?
The answer to this would unequivocally be no. The dynamic of capital accumulation still drives economic activity, most enterprises are privately-owned and profit seeking, the the wage-labor relationship is still in place - and even more fundamentally - Veneuzela operates in a global capitalist market system.
The government does intervene with the process of capital accumulation and with market processes and does create a negative and uncertain atmosphere for business in the name of fighting corruption and serving the needs of “the people”. But it hasn’t erected a new system to replace capitalism - nor could it accomplish such a monumental task on its own. At most Venezuela is a mixed economy with anti-business government policies that distort markets and retard growth.
The most socialist aspect of Venezuela was during Chavez’s presidency when the profits of Venezuela’s Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (a state-owned oil company that was under state ownership prior to Chavez taking power) was used to finance social programs.
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If here in US our 99% of WE THE PEOPLE come to understand how our US history has been REVISED especially these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA---then we can understand that in far-right authoritarian nations like Russia/Poland/Germany that REVISIONIST history is exploding. While Germany has worked hard to make clear a HITLER fascism was bad---we are reading more and more CORRUPTED history of what that fascism was----trying hard to again sell HITLER as LEFT SOCIALIST.
We see below the same in RUSSIA where PERESTROIKA sending all USSR collective wealth to those global banking 1% OLIGARCHS is finished is ready to reinstate FAR-RIGHT WING AUTHORITARIAN STALINISM.
Of course we read all these NEW HISTORIES of STALIN years as too TROTSKY AND LENIN. It makes sure they pretend what population groups were WINNERS during STALIN and target certain population groups as LOSERS.
Russia as China was totally engaged in civil unrest, civil wars, brutality that killed 99% of Russian and Chinese citizens---there were no WINNERS ---indeed Stalin working for global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS protected Russia's global 1%----THAT WAS IT.
RUSSIA AS GERMANY AS CHINA AS AMERICA GLOBAL BANKING 1% WORKING AS HARD AS THEY CAN TO ELIMINATE 5% FREEMASON/GREEK CIVIL UNREST CIVIL WAR PLAYERS WITH DEEP, DEEP, REALLY DEEP STATE.
Opinion
Stalin, Russia’s New Hero
By Alec Luhn
- March 11, 2016
“He was a great man, unique in history,” Zhenya Viktorov, an 11th grader, told me on a recent visit. His classmate Amina Kurayev was more circumspect: “It wasn’t as terrible as they say.”
And what about the millions of Soviets who were shot or sent to the gulags? “No one was repressed for no reason,” Zhenya said. When I asked him how many political opponents Stalin killed, he told me “thousands,” and argued that the purges weren’t as “big or inhumane as the media likes to say.”
At least 15 million people were killed in prisons and labor camps under Stalin and his predecessor Vladimir Lenin, according to Alexander Yakovlev, who led a commission on rehabilitating victims of political repression under President Boris N. Yeltsin. Estimates vary, but Stalin’s victims alone certainly number in the millions.
And yet views like Zhenya’s are becoming more common in Russia. Polls show a gradual improvement in perceptions of Stalin, who led the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. A survey released on March 1 by the Levada Center, a research organization based in Moscow, found that 40 percent of Russians thought the Stalin era brought “more good than bad,” up from 27 percent in 2012. In an annual Levada survey published in January 2015, a majority of Russians (52 percent) said Stalin “probably” or “definitely” played a positive role in the country.
This quiet rehabilitation began after Vladimir V. Putin came to power in 1999. Stalin’s legacy has become a tacit justification as the Putin government has strengthened its own grip on power. Under Stalin, “order” and national prestige trumped human rights or civil liberties.
“By raising the figure of Stalin, the Putin regime is trying to raise the idea that collective interests are more important than individual lives, and that means the regime has less responsibility to society,” Lev Gudkov, who conducts the Levada Center’s Stalin polls, told me.
Here in Penza, the Communist Party opened a Stalin Center in December. It’s just a few rooms of old photographs and newspapers and a lecture hall with a giant portrait of Stalin, but it makes a statement. A golden bust of Stalin stands in front of the building.
Sites like these are becoming more and more common. In 2015, the Communist Party, which has 92 of 450 seats in Parliament and often toes the Kremlin line, raised a banner with pictures of Lenin and Stalin as the backdrop for the party plenary session. At Victory Day celebrations last May 9, his image adorned a fence next to a Moscow police station. Moscow’s best-known bookstore was recently promoting a book called “How Stalin Defeated Corruption.”
School textbooks and state television programs, even if they briefly mention his human rights abuses, celebrate Stalin as a great leader. Mr. Putin has backed a planned monument to the victims of Soviet political repressions in Moscow, but that’s likely pure politics. He wants to play to the masses who are growing enamored of Stalin without alienating those Russians, such as the Moscow intelligentsia, who abhor him. The president has also carefully praised Stalin: “We can criticize the commanders and Stalin all we like, but can anyone say with certainty that a different approach would have enabled us to win?” he once said about World War II.
But Stalin receives more than just cagey rhetorical support. On Feb. 22, the Russian Military History Society — which Mr. Putin founded in 2012, is headed by the minister of culture and receives millions of dollars in state funding each year — paid for a bust of Stalin to be installed at a war museum in the city of Pskov, near the Estonian border. The minister of culture recently supported an exhibition of Socialist Realist paintings by Aleksandr Gerasimov, one of Stalin’s court painters, featuring portraits of the “generalissimo.”
Why is Stalin now gaining popularity?
For one, people remember less and less about his purges and prison camps — which in Russia began to be thoroughly investigated and openly discussed only in the 1980s. As the sharp edges of Stalin’s image have gone out of focus, he has become what Ilya Budraitskis, a leftist thinker and activist, described to me as an “empty shell that can be filled with different meanings.”
I saw this firsthand in Penza. The Communists at the Stalin Center longed for his command economy, arguing that the hyperinflation and collapses of the 1990s were far worse than Soviet-era shortages; a right-wing, neo-pagan taxi driver told me that his favorite historical figures are Stalin and Hitler because they were able to “keep order.”
In today’s Russia, corrupt officials steal from the budget, police officers demand bribes and judges are believed to be bought and sold. Longing for the “order” of the past is palpable. The problem is that the fans of order never picture themselves as the ones being repressed, said Sergei Oleynik, head of the Penza branch of the liberal Yabloko Party. “When they talk about the Stalin era, they imagine the holster at the side, but not the barrel to the back of their neck,” he told me.
The Kremlin also plays on Russian nostalgia for superpower status, stressing the glories of the Soviet past — first and foremost, victory in World War II — over the persecutions and famines. When Russia is besieged by enemies, including a government in Ukraine that the state news media has described as a “fascist junta,” the image of Stalin the defender against Nazis wins out over that of Stalin the paranoid tyrant. Can Mr. Putin’s strong hand similarly defend the motherland?
The Putin government is able to capitalize on Stalin’s legacy because Russia has not fully reconciled with the dark side of this heritage. The Moscow city administration opened a gulag museum last year, but most labor camps and mass graves around the country have not been commemorated. Russia’s only preserved gulag camp and museum, Perm 36, was recently taken over by the government, which changed the site’s focus to its contribution to the victory in World War II. Memorial, a nongovernmental organization that works to document Soviet abuses, has called for a ban on Stalin monuments. It’s a worthwhile proposal, but an unlikely one: The Justice Ministry has deemed several branches of Memorial “foreign agents.”
Russia won’t be able to reform its increasingly authoritarian and corrupt government — which rejects “Western” values like human rights and democracy while buying into its capitalist economic model — as long as it refuses to acknowledge the excesses of the most tyrannical government in its past. Victor Erofeyev, a novelist whose father was a translator for Stalin, has said that “when Stalin dies in the soul of the last Russian, then you can say our country has a future.” Unfortunately, Mr. Putin is happy to keep him alive.
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