One of the big questions facing all of us trapped inside today’s increasingly totalitarian global system is ‘How did we get here?’ How was it ever possible that human beings, once as free as every other wild creature on the planet, were able to be captured by a small minority of their own kind and reduced to a degraded and disempowered condition of complete dependency on their jailors?
Deploying doublethink or cognitive dissonance is how totalitarians whether fascist or communist maintain control. Suppressed populations are constantly forced to engage in mental gymnastics in order to accept the ideological contradictions and hypocrisies pontificated by gangster ruling elites.
An example of this is the doublethink relentlessly displayed on MSNBC "Morning Joe" where today commentators express empathy over a special news report about how Latino migrant children are being exploited working in slaughterhouse plants, however, the same bunch of spook journalists don't emote one bit of sympathy for the mass slaughter occurring in Gaza where more than 8,000 children have been obliterated by bombs.
Marxism does seem to be wed to a conception of material progress. This essay is really good at zeroing in on a significant way Marxists end up defending bad things. That seems to be an aspect of their dialectical thinking (is that specifically what Orwell was thinking when he invented the idea of doublethink??).
I recommend this clarification of Bakunin by the anarchist, post-situ and excellent writer Miguel Amorós.
He touches on this issue of Marx and Engels wanting the developed industrialism as a prerequisite for communism, which was one of the main causes of dispute between marxists and anarchists at the time.
It says:
"Bakunin thought that there could be a revolution in countries where the proletariat was not highly developed and capitalism was weak; in such a revolution the principal role of protagonist would fall to the peasantry, the natural class, alongside of whom the artisanal proletariat and the déclassé urban youth were mere auxiliary forces."
Marx himself didn't give a damn for the revolts happening at the time (only afterwards when it was all gone), he dismissed 1848 and the Paris Commune in 1871 according to this Zerzan exposé, also a good read:
Marx[ism] shortcomings are many, he was merely a reformist, although radical, still a reformist. Obviously he helped shed some light of what was and is happening in the world, but he was very limited.
And of course, as I'm sharing articles against marxism, I can't forget this one by Darren Allen
Dec 19, 2023·edited Dec 19, 2023Liked by Paul Cudenec
If I lack creativity, lack imagination, lack humanity, can you still call me a human? Only a broken one. A trap made by living in only half of our selves, the brain only half inhabited, saturated with fear and numbers. A world where delight goes to die, and the limitless possibilites of humanity coopted into alms for a death machine. I had enough Marxism attending public school, I see it now for what it is. Thanks for the assistance.
"When this power-hungry minority indulges in usury to sustain and amplify its power, this manifests in physical terms as “development” or industrial “progress”.
Reading yesterday about the history of enclosure, these terms were used to describe the draining of the fens that had long provided income to commoners. It is unfortunately the case that the amalgamation of power and adjunctive capital often supersedes common effort. It is more sorrowful still if the masses allow it. Civil disobedience is the only resistance that has ever worked. If we prefer ease to effort, those with the power of usury will ever declare "progress," promising comfort and taking power instead.
Emma Goldman's “colourless and mechanistic” is awfully spot-on.
"Indeed, you could say that Marxism is one of those limits, a gatekeeping ideology..." — indeed ... surely as important a part of the fake left/right paradigm as any.
Dec 20, 2023·edited Dec 20, 2023Liked by Paul Cudenec
[One of the big questions facing all of us trapped inside today’s increasingly totalitarian global system is ‘How did we get here?’]
This is absolutely what I have been wanting to answer and it very much my own motivation for understanding human choice and what motivates us....hence my peace propositions.
And this kind of statement...
[But, over time, there was “a gradual weakening and break up of tribal society and its eventual replacement by feudalism”]
...seems to be what we really don't understand. 'Over time' ... 'a gradual weakening'. So what happened in this time, and why was the tribal society weakened?
I am not an extensive history reader...does anyone know the answers to these questions? Is it even possible to answer it and even if we could, do we live in a context now that makes it unlikely that it would help. Is it more purposeful to look at how humanity and life works now? This is what I have tried to do in my propositions for peace.
Essential to my Life Schema is the idea that we (all of life, not just humans) are motivated to maximise our own potential through maintaining universal needs. I conceive of universal needs as optimum need states: Change, Choice, Communication, Conflict, Connection, Consciousness, Energy, Form, Motion and Space. While these are all interconnected, as life itself is, I think that Optimum Change is perhaps most relevant to the discussion on development. The concept of Optimum implies quality and quantity and in the Optimum Change need state, both relate to the idea of 'ready, willing and able'. Readiness is the state of being prepared for specific change having acquired the knowledge and skills relevant to move into a different state of being. Willingness reflects the degree of resistance or acceptance to specific change. Ability refers to the resources available to increase the likelihood that specific change will be possible.
I believe deflecting the push for development with the perspective of Optimum Change provides a means for switching the perspective to one focused on life, and opens up the potential for a shift in consciousness that sees Optimum Change as moving us in a different direction...away from 'progress' (characterised by unending expansion and eventual destruction), toward life, cycles of change and synchronisation of needs for all life.
My aunt has campaigned for decades to bring awareness to the dangers of vaccines. My grandfather said to her once that no one will listen unless you have an alternative. He was a practical man, and this made sense to me. Without understanding that people are making uninformed choices, from fear, and with the perception that there is no other option, what else would you expect people to do? In terms of the Life Schema, these people are not ready. They are definitely able, because all the information exists for them to find. So if they are not engaging their ability to find other options, then they must also be unwilling. So for me...this is where greatest change can be generated in terms of vaccine awareness....readiness (information sharing) and willingness (creating a dint in their consciousness with information sharing sparks a will to know more and find options).
If this works in this example....my hope is it is a way to move for change more broadly.
Paul, everything you share has that potential to make the dint in consciousness. Thank you for all the work that it must be to put these writing pieces together🙏🏻 (and for keeping it open for comment)
"What inner voice is Morton oebying" the one from the current Secular Ruling Families.
After the SRF & Billionaires ultra successful OPERATION COVIDIUS the REALITY is simple:
~99% of the herds of Modern Moron Slaves/Irresponsible, Ignorant, Idiot (MMS/3i's) around the Planet will NEVER do anything against their Owners. We have today the same mindset that the African slaves had in North America. Majority never wanted to be Free. Only a very small minority started to CULL whites for Freedom (the only way to go by the way since we're what we are!).
So NEVER expect that the MMS/3i's, especially the ones slaving around in Cities (>15.000 animals), will do a thing to jeopardize their current and confortable slavery. Meekness and Cowardice are our main traits, embedded and nourished since kindergarten and extremely hard to CHANGE.
Just look at the sheer number of morons that took the m[iracle]RNA toxic spew COVIDIUS jabs just because of being once again authorized to fly from A to B and to go to a restaurant.
I've learned a lot from both anarchist and socialist sources. When I come across criticism of either side against the other in what has become a suspiciously hard and fast divide, I often wonder if any of these sources have ever been even read by those who seem all too eager to mistake stereotype for study and ad hominem for argument, inherited and passed on as tradition that's hardly distinguishable from the demonization of anything anti-capitalist.
Bismarck remarked upon schism among those (self-)identified as anarchists and marxists in 1872: "Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite." Ever since, black versus red flags and fights appear to blend in with all the divide-and-rule shenanigans of psyop and color revolution.
Much of really existing anarchism and socialism in imperial centers appears to amount to little more than fashion statements of radical chic lifestyle. Black dress, red bling, whatever it takes to construct a counter-culture from focus groups for social engineering. Much of this appears to compensate for absence of any materialist basis for working class consciousness among select socio-economic demographics tied to ruling class institutions of higher learning and earning, just more of the same old identity politics of postmodern abandonment of grand narratives of social revolution to multicultural comfort zones.
Maybe there's some correlation in all this to how authoritarianism is in ample supply on either side of this avant garde divide. Language of leaderless movement often amounts to de facto dominance by a few, while democratic centralism serves as softer cover for top-down bureaucracy. Set apart in sectarian siloes, what's left of the left has been hijacked by the nonprofit industrial complex at the grassroots, infiltrated by agents provocateur of the police state, to form the woke front of the new abnormal beyond the sins of Ingsoc.
Back to Bismarck and the break between marxists and anarchists, split between Marx and Bakunin as leaders of the factions. Self-proclaimed anarchist and not-so-now closeted fascist Noam Chomsky was fond of quoting Bakunin's 'prediction' of a red bureaucracy eventuating in the totalitarian dungeon of the Soviet state, or whatever flavor of leftist anti-communism he dished out during the cold war.
But historical accounts can indicate that Bakunin represented a spontaneous insurrectionism and propaganda of the deed just as dictatorial over masses needing to be led where they would not go without elite machinations. And that Marx, fresh on the heels of what he had learned from the conciliarism of the Paris Commune, insisted instead the emancipation of working classes to be accomplished by themselves, as he put it.
It's also worth recalling in this respect how Marx said he was no marxist himself when it came to reducing the necessarily evolving science or methodologies of social critique to any dogmatic form, and his own magnum opus of Capital, never near completed, attests to the flexible development of his own thinking and searching. Marx was a student of evolution and anthropology well aware of 'primitive' communism's egalitarian relevance to modern class oppression, and his materialism was as every bit spiritual as any revolt against industrial alienation.*
Any purism is to be avoided if we are to live as free beings, changing our habits in order to meet the changing conditions of our lives. Following Emma Goldman's quip, and contrary to Alexander Berkman's doctrinaire anarchism, why be part of any revolution where we can't dance?
Living traditions recreate how best we live as residents upon earth with respect and reverence for 'all our relations' (Lakota Sioux). Looking for a way out of this "filthy, rotten system" (Dorothy Day) may seem short of solutions for anyone, but that hardly disqualifies the exposure of problems from which the solutions may be found. Perhaps the real challenge is to live our way, together, into a new world within the shell of the old, as the Wobblies said, with the compassion and cooperation that frees us to recreate those relations.
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language." (Marx)
“The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another… We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community." (Landauer)
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.... Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. ...Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” (Rilke)
*Here's a video with words from Alan Watts consistent with marxist critique of industrial capitalism, its cash nexus and commodity fetishism, etc., and the need for liberation from its universal alienation:
As you live your life, you have to take care and make an effort to survive. If you just let things go, you eventually end up in tatters. The same goes for government. While there is no government that can ever secure your freedom and liberty, many ideas of governance are wickedly less desirable than others. It is the arrogant, the lazy and the control freaks who constantly live in fear that want to destroy all that is not them. The process they use is government.
I hope people don't reject Morton's book (which I own and have read) because of that one sentence. It's a great book and you are not going to get that point of view (like the viewpoint of the non-ruling class) reading a standard history. He was talking about material progress, as in the the iron age was a material and productive improvement to the bronze age. (E.g farmers could grow more food with less work w/ iron tools thus providing time to other things besides labor.) Paul's criticism of the notion of "progress" (which I do not think, nor Marx thought was a universal good)* comes from his anti-industrialism which to be fair seems to be a work in progress and not without its own contradictions.
*See chapter 26 of Capital V-1 on "Primitive Accumulation" - a devastating description of the capitalist Enclosure Movement that did tremendous harm to English peasantry.
Yes, the usage of a single sentence from the whole book is utterly disingenuous, pretty much as this whole essay is - criticizing a strawman rather than actually engaging with Marxism. The usual right-wing ignorant crap.
Deploying doublethink or cognitive dissonance is how totalitarians whether fascist or communist maintain control. Suppressed populations are constantly forced to engage in mental gymnastics in order to accept the ideological contradictions and hypocrisies pontificated by gangster ruling elites.
An example of this is the doublethink relentlessly displayed on MSNBC "Morning Joe" where today commentators express empathy over a special news report about how Latino migrant children are being exploited working in slaughterhouse plants, however, the same bunch of spook journalists don't emote one bit of sympathy for the mass slaughter occurring in Gaza where more than 8,000 children have been obliterated by bombs.
Or wailing over Putin Puppets while ignoring the massive influence of Israel.
Marxism does seem to be wed to a conception of material progress. This essay is really good at zeroing in on a significant way Marxists end up defending bad things. That seems to be an aspect of their dialectical thinking (is that specifically what Orwell was thinking when he invented the idea of doublethink??).
https://libcom.org/article/bakunin-miguel-amoros
I recommend this clarification of Bakunin by the anarchist, post-situ and excellent writer Miguel Amorós.
He touches on this issue of Marx and Engels wanting the developed industrialism as a prerequisite for communism, which was one of the main causes of dispute between marxists and anarchists at the time.
It says:
"Bakunin thought that there could be a revolution in countries where the proletariat was not highly developed and capitalism was weak; in such a revolution the principal role of protagonist would fall to the peasantry, the natural class, alongside of whom the artisanal proletariat and the déclassé urban youth were mere auxiliary forces."
Marx himself didn't give a damn for the revolts happening at the time (only afterwards when it was all gone), he dismissed 1848 and the Paris Commune in 1871 according to this Zerzan exposé, also a good read:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-zerzan-the-practical-marx
Marx[ism] shortcomings are many, he was merely a reformist, although radical, still a reformist. Obviously he helped shed some light of what was and is happening in the world, but he was very limited.
And of course, as I'm sharing articles against marxism, I can't forget this one by Darren Allen
https://expressiveegg.substack.com/p/goodbye-marx
If I lack creativity, lack imagination, lack humanity, can you still call me a human? Only a broken one. A trap made by living in only half of our selves, the brain only half inhabited, saturated with fear and numbers. A world where delight goes to die, and the limitless possibilites of humanity coopted into alms for a death machine. I had enough Marxism attending public school, I see it now for what it is. Thanks for the assistance.
"When this power-hungry minority indulges in usury to sustain and amplify its power, this manifests in physical terms as “development” or industrial “progress”.
Reading yesterday about the history of enclosure, these terms were used to describe the draining of the fens that had long provided income to commoners. It is unfortunately the case that the amalgamation of power and adjunctive capital often supersedes common effort. It is more sorrowful still if the masses allow it. Civil disobedience is the only resistance that has ever worked. If we prefer ease to effort, those with the power of usury will ever declare "progress," promising comfort and taking power instead.
Good one!
Emma Goldman's “colourless and mechanistic” is awfully spot-on.
"Indeed, you could say that Marxism is one of those limits, a gatekeeping ideology..." — indeed ... surely as important a part of the fake left/right paradigm as any.
[One of the big questions facing all of us trapped inside today’s increasingly totalitarian global system is ‘How did we get here?’]
This is absolutely what I have been wanting to answer and it very much my own motivation for understanding human choice and what motivates us....hence my peace propositions.
And this kind of statement...
[But, over time, there was “a gradual weakening and break up of tribal society and its eventual replacement by feudalism”]
...seems to be what we really don't understand. 'Over time' ... 'a gradual weakening'. So what happened in this time, and why was the tribal society weakened?
I am not an extensive history reader...does anyone know the answers to these questions? Is it even possible to answer it and even if we could, do we live in a context now that makes it unlikely that it would help. Is it more purposeful to look at how humanity and life works now? This is what I have tried to do in my propositions for peace.
Essential to my Life Schema is the idea that we (all of life, not just humans) are motivated to maximise our own potential through maintaining universal needs. I conceive of universal needs as optimum need states: Change, Choice, Communication, Conflict, Connection, Consciousness, Energy, Form, Motion and Space. While these are all interconnected, as life itself is, I think that Optimum Change is perhaps most relevant to the discussion on development. The concept of Optimum implies quality and quantity and in the Optimum Change need state, both relate to the idea of 'ready, willing and able'. Readiness is the state of being prepared for specific change having acquired the knowledge and skills relevant to move into a different state of being. Willingness reflects the degree of resistance or acceptance to specific change. Ability refers to the resources available to increase the likelihood that specific change will be possible.
I believe deflecting the push for development with the perspective of Optimum Change provides a means for switching the perspective to one focused on life, and opens up the potential for a shift in consciousness that sees Optimum Change as moving us in a different direction...away from 'progress' (characterised by unending expansion and eventual destruction), toward life, cycles of change and synchronisation of needs for all life.
My aunt has campaigned for decades to bring awareness to the dangers of vaccines. My grandfather said to her once that no one will listen unless you have an alternative. He was a practical man, and this made sense to me. Without understanding that people are making uninformed choices, from fear, and with the perception that there is no other option, what else would you expect people to do? In terms of the Life Schema, these people are not ready. They are definitely able, because all the information exists for them to find. So if they are not engaging their ability to find other options, then they must also be unwilling. So for me...this is where greatest change can be generated in terms of vaccine awareness....readiness (information sharing) and willingness (creating a dint in their consciousness with information sharing sparks a will to know more and find options).
If this works in this example....my hope is it is a way to move for change more broadly.
Paul, everything you share has that potential to make the dint in consciousness. Thank you for all the work that it must be to put these writing pieces together🙏🏻 (and for keeping it open for comment)
"What inner voice is Morton oebying" the one from the current Secular Ruling Families.
After the SRF & Billionaires ultra successful OPERATION COVIDIUS the REALITY is simple:
~99% of the herds of Modern Moron Slaves/Irresponsible, Ignorant, Idiot (MMS/3i's) around the Planet will NEVER do anything against their Owners. We have today the same mindset that the African slaves had in North America. Majority never wanted to be Free. Only a very small minority started to CULL whites for Freedom (the only way to go by the way since we're what we are!).
So NEVER expect that the MMS/3i's, especially the ones slaving around in Cities (>15.000 animals), will do a thing to jeopardize their current and confortable slavery. Meekness and Cowardice are our main traits, embedded and nourished since kindergarten and extremely hard to CHANGE.
Just look at the sheer number of morons that took the m[iracle]RNA toxic spew COVIDIUS jabs just because of being once again authorized to fly from A to B and to go to a restaurant.
So don't expect much from this ~99%.
To be an Anarchist one must be Responsible.
https://postimg.cc/f3RDN9sg
I've learned a lot from both anarchist and socialist sources. When I come across criticism of either side against the other in what has become a suspiciously hard and fast divide, I often wonder if any of these sources have ever been even read by those who seem all too eager to mistake stereotype for study and ad hominem for argument, inherited and passed on as tradition that's hardly distinguishable from the demonization of anything anti-capitalist.
Bismarck remarked upon schism among those (self-)identified as anarchists and marxists in 1872: "Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite." Ever since, black versus red flags and fights appear to blend in with all the divide-and-rule shenanigans of psyop and color revolution.
Much of really existing anarchism and socialism in imperial centers appears to amount to little more than fashion statements of radical chic lifestyle. Black dress, red bling, whatever it takes to construct a counter-culture from focus groups for social engineering. Much of this appears to compensate for absence of any materialist basis for working class consciousness among select socio-economic demographics tied to ruling class institutions of higher learning and earning, just more of the same old identity politics of postmodern abandonment of grand narratives of social revolution to multicultural comfort zones.
Maybe there's some correlation in all this to how authoritarianism is in ample supply on either side of this avant garde divide. Language of leaderless movement often amounts to de facto dominance by a few, while democratic centralism serves as softer cover for top-down bureaucracy. Set apart in sectarian siloes, what's left of the left has been hijacked by the nonprofit industrial complex at the grassroots, infiltrated by agents provocateur of the police state, to form the woke front of the new abnormal beyond the sins of Ingsoc.
Back to Bismarck and the break between marxists and anarchists, split between Marx and Bakunin as leaders of the factions. Self-proclaimed anarchist and not-so-now closeted fascist Noam Chomsky was fond of quoting Bakunin's 'prediction' of a red bureaucracy eventuating in the totalitarian dungeon of the Soviet state, or whatever flavor of leftist anti-communism he dished out during the cold war.
But historical accounts can indicate that Bakunin represented a spontaneous insurrectionism and propaganda of the deed just as dictatorial over masses needing to be led where they would not go without elite machinations. And that Marx, fresh on the heels of what he had learned from the conciliarism of the Paris Commune, insisted instead the emancipation of working classes to be accomplished by themselves, as he put it.
It's also worth recalling in this respect how Marx said he was no marxist himself when it came to reducing the necessarily evolving science or methodologies of social critique to any dogmatic form, and his own magnum opus of Capital, never near completed, attests to the flexible development of his own thinking and searching. Marx was a student of evolution and anthropology well aware of 'primitive' communism's egalitarian relevance to modern class oppression, and his materialism was as every bit spiritual as any revolt against industrial alienation.*
Any purism is to be avoided if we are to live as free beings, changing our habits in order to meet the changing conditions of our lives. Following Emma Goldman's quip, and contrary to Alexander Berkman's doctrinaire anarchism, why be part of any revolution where we can't dance?
Living traditions recreate how best we live as residents upon earth with respect and reverence for 'all our relations' (Lakota Sioux). Looking for a way out of this "filthy, rotten system" (Dorothy Day) may seem short of solutions for anyone, but that hardly disqualifies the exposure of problems from which the solutions may be found. Perhaps the real challenge is to live our way, together, into a new world within the shell of the old, as the Wobblies said, with the compassion and cooperation that frees us to recreate those relations.
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language." (Marx)
“The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another… We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community." (Landauer)
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.... Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. ...Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” (Rilke)
*Here's a video with words from Alan Watts consistent with marxist critique of industrial capitalism, its cash nexus and commodity fetishism, etc., and the need for liberation from its universal alienation:
AWAKENING/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9miTS53auUk&pp=ygUnYWxhbiB3YXR0cyBhd2FrZW5pbmcgKHlvdSBhcmUgdGhlIHdvcmxk
"I am not a Marxist."
-Karl Marx
As you live your life, you have to take care and make an effort to survive. If you just let things go, you eventually end up in tatters. The same goes for government. While there is no government that can ever secure your freedom and liberty, many ideas of governance are wickedly less desirable than others. It is the arrogant, the lazy and the control freaks who constantly live in fear that want to destroy all that is not them. The process they use is government.
I hope people don't reject Morton's book (which I own and have read) because of that one sentence. It's a great book and you are not going to get that point of view (like the viewpoint of the non-ruling class) reading a standard history. He was talking about material progress, as in the the iron age was a material and productive improvement to the bronze age. (E.g farmers could grow more food with less work w/ iron tools thus providing time to other things besides labor.) Paul's criticism of the notion of "progress" (which I do not think, nor Marx thought was a universal good)* comes from his anti-industrialism which to be fair seems to be a work in progress and not without its own contradictions.
*See chapter 26 of Capital V-1 on "Primitive Accumulation" - a devastating description of the capitalist Enclosure Movement that did tremendous harm to English peasantry.
Yes, the usage of a single sentence from the whole book is utterly disingenuous, pretty much as this whole essay is - criticizing a strawman rather than actually engaging with Marxism. The usual right-wing ignorant crap.
Thank you. Are you familiar with this guy and with what he proposes? https://www.pdrboston.org/egalitarianism-is-anti-marxism
No, but I'll have a look. Thanks.
A brief but spirited canter through the history of Marxism in Britain. Marxists of the world, unite - and then just get in the sea.