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I think we’re allowed to violate the rules still. Things I’ve enjoyed reading today or yesterday include
https://off-guardian.org/2020/12/17/year-zero/
. There’s nothing anywhere I read that I agree with. This piece by CJ Hopkins comes the closest, but I could literally write a small book attacking it if I had time. I recommend it though. The comments section has the usual detritus but some treasures as well if you pick through it.
www.voltairenet.org/article211845.html Civil war becomes inevitable in the USA by Thierry Meyssan
www.voltairenet.org/article211579.html U.S. Presidential Election: Open your eyes!
These last two read as if they were two parts of a term paper by a drug-abusing teenager at a high school for gifted space aliens. Instead it turns out that it was written by an erudite and highly intelligent Frenchman. These 2 pieces are interesting and provocative, replete with pronounced overgeneralizations, rather at odds with reality, and worth reading.
Also, check out comments at https:// off-guardian.org/2020/12/16/beethoven-in-the-age-of-endarkenment/ (can remove space) by moneycircus on Gates and eugenicists. I think he has described himself as former CNBC reporter, self describes (I think) as right wing but could have fooled me. (The article on Beethoven itself is not necessarily bad either, but I wouldn’t have re ommended it.
Later monecircus recommends something else you might like:
OK I’ll Bite Karl…what is it you disagree with in the Hopkins Article ?
TIA
PS…the video is funny in a macabre sort of way
I’ll second that, Karl – what exactly is it you disagree with in the Hopkins article?
I’d have a hard time writing succinctly. (Also, as you note I have a hard time writing w/o typos – but that’s another matter!)
I think I could summarize as
1) Overgeneralization and 2) too much pessimism. I also think he implies too much skepticism about the concept of Great Reset although he does not come out directly and say that he disagrees with what people like Corbett say about it.
As you have noted, I write messily. I can write much better if I go over things repeatedly. I will not do so now. I will do almost stream of consciousness.
One of the great things Marx and Engels did was attack **reification** (from the Latin word for *thing*). You think of a concept, a thing, and then you think of the thing as if it were an active agent that acts on humans, rather than vice versa. You can think of it as, vaguely, their as attacking fixed ideas as fetishes, as idols. For example, in Vol 3 of Capital Marx writes (as I recall from decades ago) of Monsieur Le Capital and Madame La Terre (meaning real estate) walking around like zombie-spooks haunting the world, doing things to humans who are powerless to control them, when ideally people should be getting together in a democratic and rational fashion and deciding what works best for them. They write elsewhere of people being enchained by their ideologies, by their habits – things that they create that then rule them.
Marx and Engels themselves certainly had a hard time fighting off being imprisoned by their own concepts. Most people who call themselves “Marxists” are hopeless in this regard.
I think that the concept of Global Capitalists is reasonable as a start. But it is just a useful concept. Global capitalists are, after all, people. They are not homogeneous. Hopkins acts as if they magically communicate all at once, like a school of fish or flock of birds, turning almost instantaneously. There are details on how they do it. The details count. Yes, class, but class is not homogeneous. There would be rifts and other weaknesses ….
To be pedantic, Hopkins (who knows better – he would actually agree with me – I can tell that he has read what I have read and is of generally the same school of thought) is even more extreme in writing about GloboCap. Marx and Engels similarly would write about Capital doing this and that when in fact they also knew better. Capital is not a person. It was shorthand that I suspect they picked up from Hegel (don’t know – never made it through much Hegel).
It is people who are doing what Hopkins describes not an abstract entity. There are however undoubtedly inhomogeneities among the extremely rich. I have had some contact with some of them. Probably some of you have. Some of them are probably freaking out. Some of them may well be listening seriously to the Voltaires, Diderots, Marxes. Engels was a factory owner (though I don’t think a super-rich one) and Bakunin a prince after all. I will leave that thought undeveloped for now.
I will also touch (like perhaps one or two people who comment) on Hoplins’s implicit pessimism. Extreme left antileninist Marxists – (Hopkins clearly is from this school of thought) – like to cite a passage from Hegel about the French Revolution that I suppose Marx and Engels cited somewhere. Hegel noted that things were going along as usual for decades. The Bourbons were doing their thing. The heavy taxes, the wars, the starvation of the peasantry, the brutal treatment of the peasantry, and so forth and so on. It seemed as if an eternal rule of nature. Then BANG. It was over. In the passage from Hegel (which I am not going to look up) Hegel writes something to the effect of a **silent, INVISIBLE revolution** going on in spirit or mind. It cannot be seen yet it is thorough – as it shows when it suddenly manifests itself.
One may reasonably wonder whether and to what extent there is a silent revolution waiting to become manifest.
If you read the famous opening passage of Marx’s 18th Brumaire (which I think BTW Horace Greeley serialized in The NY Tribune) you will see how he says how in all revolutions people are oppressed by not knowing how to do things anew. They look to the old for their poetry rather than creating. If hypothetically people decide to throw away their masks and along with them their devotion to current forms of devotion to huge statist and corporate bureaucracies, they will struggle with ridiculous old leftist and rightist ideologies, but they will have to make up their own stuff. Enough. I blabber. But part of the point is that there may be quite a few people who are fed up. They are inhomogeneous in ideology and background in some respects, but they are homogeneous in feeling helpless yet being potentially ready. A lot of them. Maybe.