Great comment. That final paragraph headed me off asking what to say about Marxism being founded on faulty premises in a reductio ad absurdum kind of way.
Could you give us some examples of the following, please, particularly of the first kind?
of things that exist squarely within the domains of hard science [but] are not falsifiable themselves and plenty of things that are a part of science happened outside of the scientific method.
Not sure what to think about Benz. He seems to go against the grain but almost everything he says or writes or summaries of his arguments can be read as coded support for US imperialism. It’s unclear who his messages are for. While they might lend support to anti-imperialists, there is enough in there for just a different kind of imperialist.
The US and its CIA-controlled “soft power” arm utilized the encrypted social media app Telegram to foment riots and protest movements against foreign governments it deems undesirable …
And:
… “26 US-government-funded NGOs” condemned Russia for attempting to ban Telegram in 2018 [because] “the US State Department was …” utilizing its encryption and local popularity “to foment protests and riots within Russia – just as they did in Belarus, Iran, Hong Kong, and attempted to do in China,” …
Is this an exposé on the US/CIA? Maybe. What critic doesn’t already suspect such behaviour? The claim can be read as an attempt to persuade users and potential users that TG is so secure even the CIA uses it.
Combine this with the following:
The US has championed free speech globally for decades …. Durov’s end-to-end encrypted social media app Telegram has been instrumental in this effort …
Is this a double-bluff attempt to get anti-imperialists to reject TG because it has been used to undermine their governments? The claims appear to say something but the intent is unclear.
Finally:
The app’s encryption is a powerful means of evading state control over media and allowing “US-funded political groups or dissidents to garner tens of thousands of supporters with relative impunity,” …
Another not-so-subtle hint that TG is secure enough to use for all of your anti-imperialist organising.
The alternative is that RT is picking this story up in this way to settle US nerves. Maybe Russia already has access to encrypted TG messages/metadata and has used it to root out US spies/saboteurs.
It’s a strange one but I don’t think Benz can be read as just stating ‘facts’. The other irony is that he is a free speech activist. Does he agree with the US pushing free speech, despite the CIA angle? Or does he think speech should be censored where it is used to undermine other/any government(s)?
“dialectics? Not a clue.”
Chomsky
Thanks
where does it sit next to other text?
Thanks for this, I’ll read through it later.
In the meantime, I’ve had a quick look at the author. What I will say is that successful career academics like Brodie are good for one thing in particular: they tend to represent the orthodox state of affairs even if they create their own brand around the edges. This means you can read a few of their articles, maybe a book (skimming the waffle sections) for a snapshot of the mainstream, ‘critical’ but uncontentious thought.
When you write for an academic audience that has been trained to think in a certain way, you’re at disadvantage as a Marxist. You know they’ll reject you if you push the Marxism too fast or too hard before you have demonstrated your intellectual credentials.
Opening an essay with close, analytical, and critical engagement with writers like Brodie let’s you show your reader (examiner) that you know what you’re supposed to know. This can also help to lure the reader in to accept your challenges, left with the question, ‘okay, so now what?’
And that’s when you can hit them with the Marxism, with or without directly referencing (well known) Marxists (including Marx). For example, you can present evidence of what’s been said elsewhere in this thread about the uselessness of lower, middle, upper class by asking what’s similar about an senior engineer at Tesla (‘upper class’) and the owner, Musk. This lets you question the orthodoxy in a way that leads back to Marxism without letting the reader know until it’s too late for them to reject your argument on it’s face for being Marxist.
This approach doesn’t always work and it’s not a fixed blueprint (a lot also depends on the learning outcomes and the marking criteria, etc) but maybe it’ll help you power through when you’re given other anti-Marxist readings.
Tagging @SpaceDogs@lemmygrad.ml as you might be interested in this thread if you haven’t seen it.
This is exactly why I stopped using YT.
Even painters were able to paint over people in their paintings to make it look like they weren’t really there.
That quote also telescopes hundreds of years of development through a bourgeois lens, no less. One only need read the three paragraphs in the Manifesto before M&E say that capitalism has simplified classes to see the echo of a subtler conception of class than is presented in Brodie’s work. That is, even Brodie’s limited actual engagement seems to take ideas/quotes out of context and uses them as gotchas.
I wouldn’t say the quote necessarily attributes to Marx the belief that ‘democracy was achieved by bourgeois revolution’. There’s a way of reading that claim as Brodie’s garbled understanding of bourgeois revolution followed by a claim about Marx’s class analysis. But here we see an alternative problem beneath the text.
If we read Brodie instead as saying that Marx only called the ‘new class—the commercial and industrial capitalists … the bourgeoisie’, the question is, does Brodie agree? Is Brodie sceptical that a bourgeois class exists at all? Is the bourgeoisie only the bourgeoisie according to Marx?
It wouldn’t be the first time a bourgeois writer has rejected the notion of a bourgeois revolution (the underlying topic, here). But that rejection usually starts by claiming that humans have always lived under or driven (teleologically) towards capitalism; i.e. there is no ‘new’ class of bourgeois because the bourgeois always existed (just don’t look too closely at feudal lords, etc). It doesn’t usually reject the existence of a bourgeoisie, although that term is usually replaced with the friendlier-because-more-obscure ‘capitalists’.
That’s a problem with the writing, rather than your interpretation. It’s making me squint, too, and it’s hard to know who is supposed to be saying what without any real engagement with what Marx (or specific Marxists) have said.
Fair enough if Brodie has unknowingly read a summary of a summary of e.g. GA Cohen but that needs to be made clear. The problem is that academics can write shit like this but they must uphold the pretense that it’s rigorous. So they can’t start admitting what or who they have actually read or to what extent.
I need help putting words to my issues with it.
I read the first screenshot and was going to ask: how do you deal with nonsense like this? Looking forward to hear other people’s answers.
I just can’t get my head around where to start with rubbish like this. How do you even broach the subject when the subject is: ‘you published an academic article criticising Marxism on the basis of whatever you thought it was in a dream because you clearly haven’t read any Marx except maybe you misunderstood the Manifesto on the bus to college as a hungover undergrad because the editors and reviewers were equally illeducated; luckily for you, you are repeating the same thing that everyone else who hasn’t read Marx also believes so you are likely in for a lucrative career’.
Jfc. Unfortunately, I’m not surprised. But I am horrified yet again by the depravity.
This is a test
The test works
That’s the one. And that’s a good video. Scary. I wonder if they’ve had any follow ups since.
Hope you got home okay. Public transport is so mismanaged it’s criminal.
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Similar thing happened in Australia. That was a while ago. Now you know what the checks and balances of liberal constitutions really mean.
At this point I’m not sure the west could plan things centrally and succeed. They would have to go through several cycles of trial and error. China has been building it’s capacity for decades. And it benefits from its democratic centralism/SWCC/Marxism. Then again companies like Amazon can manage it…
Will we be getting more chronicles of spacedogs? I must’ve missed your most recent post while I was busy. How did the Marx paper go in the end? / What were the comments/feedback like?
What does HS*C have to do with this?
Ooohh, you mean Yale. It’s hard to keep track of all the drug money.
Forcing yourself to do classical liberalism to own the commies.