Intelligence is the high ground
Those of us who sincerely want a fair society and a proper redistribution of wealth and power are hoping that we can outmanoeuvre those who work openly, self deludedly or covertly to keep the capitalist status quo. But certainly the intellectual prostitutes of Marxism 2010 won't do the trick.
Will the true revolutionaries please step forward?
Indeed!
So where are the communist and socialist universities that will win this intelligence war against sentient global capitalism and not just beat on some unresponding unintelligent straw man construct they build for themselves? Where are the revolutionary strategists and thinkers to help combat the highly developed propaganda weapons of the mass media and lifestyle marketing?
The front line against global capitalism is just as much a struggle to deal with working class and "peasant" consumerist aspirations as it is about fostering awareness of the inherent contradictions of capitalism.
How can you combat capitalism if people's aspirations so readily turn to to the products of capitalism? What is the serious and intelligent response to the problem which is encapsulated by the phrase adapted from the Sara Lee slogan:
"Nobody doesn't like the products of lifestyle capitalism."
Moreover, lifestyle marketing and the appeal to self interest are the ace up the sleeve. The only true communists that remain seem to be ascetics or the impoverished. The ones who can withdraw from the world or who are on the periphery of global capitalism. Perhaps these people drink their Coke and sauce their eggs with ketchup and drive their cars and watch their films, but ironically. Or perhaps they are selective aesthetes and they only buy organic, but in small quantities. So what do they advocate to combat lifestyle marketing?
How many staunch South African communist academics have taught at universities in the USA and used their talent and minds and knowledge to explain the intricacies of the South African "coyntura" just so that someone from a think-tank or the Foreign Policy Establishment in Washington can gather up their insights like so much bitter nectar and use them against the SACP or any other organisation that threatens global capitalist interests?
My mother was offered a lucrative job at the Ford Foundation in the 1980s and she told them to get lost. How many others do not tell the Ford Foundations and the Gates foundation and the think tanks to get lost? That is, if they are given the opportunity.
They are a modern kind of informer. They inform US policy making and what they say and write is shared by the network of cognoscenti in the US establishment that charged with protecting, conserving and expanding global capitalism.
How many of them are there!
There are many of them - these intelllectuals, these so called communists - and their intelligence is indeed at the service of the vangaurd... the vanguard of capitalism.
And they are very people who were - or whose parents were - at the forefront of the struggle, and they find a ready clientele for their ideas and thoughts: the same people charged with developing strategies to counteract national democratic revolutions and communism.
Marxism 2010: an irrelevant festival of intellectual masturbation
We read the French and the British theorists and theorists from the former Yugoslavia. But they are all, or were all, parochial. They are mere academics. They are all part of an immensely trivial Kafé Klatsch cuture of careerism and one-upmanship.
They go to conferences like Marxism 2010 as comedians and performers go to another "gig".
The hodge podge of people like Tony Cliff, Foucault, Marcuse, Althusser, Zizeck, Derrida, Barthes, Hobsbawm, Tariq Ali: the lot of them that have come to stand for Marxism and Communism in Britain and France - they are all social climbing intellectual masturbators, infantile and disordered. They are a mere higher order of intellectual prostitute. They all have their houses in Versailles and Hampstead from which to pontificate from.
Who on earth in Mozambique, Angola, Cuba or Vietnam ever cared to read anything Foucault or Tariq Ali or Barthes had to say?
For Christ's sake can anyone tell me in which of the following people participating in Marxism 2010 actually advocate communism?
What does advocating Marxism mean? Nothing at all. Marxism isn't a type of society.
And if any of them advocate communism, then what do they mean by it? What makes them the revolutionary vanguard. Let them tell us what is to be done.
Skazhite nam, duraki, esli vi znietye.
Shto delats?
Sheila Rowbotham
Shlomo Sand
Tony Benn
Gary Younge
Hester Eisenstein,
Nina Power
Judith Orr
Ben Fine
Alfredo Saad-Filho
Joseph Choonara
Guglielmo Carchedi
Costas Lapavitsas
Graham Turner
John Holloway
Istvan Mészáros
Gerry Conlon
Moazzam Begg
Gareth Peirce
Alex Callinico
Ghada Karmi,
Sami Ramadani
Haifa Zangana
Panos Garganas
Mark Serwotka
Kevin Courtney
Matt Wrack
Jeremy Dear
Jeremy Corbyn
Martin Smith (LMHR)
Weyman Bennett (UAF)
Christine Buchholz
Danny Dorling
Steven Rose
Michael Rosen
Roy Bailey
David Edgar
Those of us who sincerely want a fair society and a proper redistribution of wealth and power are hoping that we can outmanoeuvre those who work openly, self deludedly or covertly to keep the capitalist status quo. But certainly the intellectual prostitutes of Marxism 2010 won't do the trick.
Yeah, sure. Pull the other one.
Will the true revolutionaries please step forward?
Indeed!
So where are the communist and socialist universities that will win this intelligence war against sentient global capitalism and not just beat on some unresponding unintelligent straw man construct they build for themselves? Where are the revolutionary strategists and thinkers to help combat the highly developed propaganda weapons of the mass media and lifestyle marketing?
The front line against global capitalism is just as much a struggle to deal with working class and "peasant" consumerist aspirations as it is about fostering awareness of the inherent contradictions of capitalism.
How can you combat capitalism if people's aspirations so readily turn to to the products of capitalism? What is the serious and intelligent response to the problem which is encapsulated by the phrase adapted from the Sara Lee slogan:
"Nobody doesn't like the products of lifestyle capitalism."
Moreover, lifestyle marketing and the appeal to self interest are the ace up the sleeve. The only true communists that remain seem to be ascetics or the impoverished. The ones who can withdraw from the world or who are on the periphery of global capitalism. Perhaps these people drink their Coke and sauce their eggs with ketchup and drive their cars and watch their films, but ironically. Or perhaps they are selective aesthetes and they only buy organic, but in small quantities. So what do they advocate to combat lifestyle marketing?
- Asceticism and refraining from consumption?
- Ethical and informed consumption?
- Irony?
How many staunch South African communist academics have taught at universities in the USA and used their talent and minds and knowledge to explain the intricacies of the South African "coyntura" just so that someone from a think-tank or the Foreign Policy Establishment in Washington can gather up their insights like so much bitter nectar and use them against the SACP or any other organisation that threatens global capitalist interests?
My mother was offered a lucrative job at the Ford Foundation in the 1980s and she told them to get lost. How many others do not tell the Ford Foundations and the Gates foundation and the think tanks to get lost? That is, if they are given the opportunity.
They are a modern kind of informer. They inform US policy making and what they say and write is shared by the network of cognoscenti in the US establishment that charged with protecting, conserving and expanding global capitalism.
How many of them are there!
There are many of them - these intelllectuals, these so called communists - and their intelligence is indeed at the service of the vangaurd... the vanguard of capitalism.
And they are very people who were - or whose parents were - at the forefront of the struggle, and they find a ready clientele for their ideas and thoughts: the same people charged with developing strategies to counteract national democratic revolutions and communism.
Marxism 2010: an irrelevant festival of intellectual masturbation
We read the French and the British theorists and theorists from the former Yugoslavia. But they are all, or were all, parochial. They are mere academics. They are all part of an immensely trivial Kafé Klatsch cuture of careerism and one-upmanship.
They go to conferences like Marxism 2010 as comedians and performers go to another "gig".
The hodge podge of people like Tony Cliff, Foucault, Marcuse, Althusser, Zizeck, Derrida, Barthes, Hobsbawm, Tariq Ali: the lot of them that have come to stand for Marxism and Communism in Britain and France - they are all social climbing intellectual masturbators, infantile and disordered. They are a mere higher order of intellectual prostitute. They all have their houses in Versailles and Hampstead from which to pontificate from.
Who on earth in Mozambique, Angola, Cuba or Vietnam ever cared to read anything Foucault or Tariq Ali or Barthes had to say?
For Christ's sake can anyone tell me in which of the following people participating in Marxism 2010 actually advocate communism?
What does advocating Marxism mean? Nothing at all. Marxism isn't a type of society.
And if any of them advocate communism, then what do they mean by it? What makes them the revolutionary vanguard. Let them tell us what is to be done.
Skazhite nam, duraki, esli vi znietye.
Shto delats?
Sheila Rowbotham
Shlomo Sand
Tony Benn
Gary Younge
Hester Eisenstein,
Nina Power
Judith Orr
Ben Fine
Alfredo Saad-Filho
Joseph Choonara
Guglielmo Carchedi
Costas Lapavitsas
Graham Turner
John Holloway
Istvan Mészáros
Gerry Conlon
Moazzam Begg
Gareth Peirce
Alex Callinico
Ghada Karmi,
Sami Ramadani
Haifa Zangana
Panos Garganas
Mark Serwotka
Kevin Courtney
Matt Wrack
Jeremy Dear
Jeremy Corbyn
Martin Smith (LMHR)
Weyman Bennett (UAF)
Christine Buchholz
Danny Dorling
Steven Rose
Michael Rosen
Roy Bailey
David Edgar
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