To the Straussians, rationality does not provide an adequate basis for a stable social order. To the contrary, the Age of Enlightenment has ushered in the crisis of modernity, in which nihilism – the moral vacuum left behind by the death of God – inevitably leads to decadence, decline and, ultimately, genocide.
That logical leap from Jefferson to Hitler might seem like the intellectual equivalent of Evel Knieval’s outlandish attempt to jump the Snake River canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle. But it’s essential to the Straussian world view – just as it provides the crucial angst that gives neo-conservatism such sharp political edges.
Back to Main
April 28, 2005
Billmon: The Grand Delusion
Comments
Colman – don’t be an ass.
I wasn’t being an ass. I was summarising what you said. Poetry is great, but not a reliable guide to action as a rule.
The “regulated market” is not regulated.
Faith in the markets is a big P.T. Barnum target we paint on the whole world to forget what we meant when aimed to be “citizens.” Iraqis are now on the pointy end of that delusion-stick.
Now who’s being an ass? I didn’t say I had faith in the markets nor that I believed that they were currently regulated. I said to use the markets for the stuff they’re good at, not have faith in them.
The experiment is not working. Why do you profess satisfaction?
I don’t. I suggested we should try that experiment: it no more exists in most of the world than communism does.
“Though, what is lacking obviously in razor’s posts, and substantially in citizen k’s posts, is the acknowledgment of the subterfuge of capitalist progress, of this progress as a ruse to keep all the happy people happy.”
I communicated after all! I am in fact for the ruses that keep all the happy people happy if that is what the happy people want and the alternative is coercion by marxians who can’t make a sale otherwise.
Stand Marx on his head for goodness sake. The implicit assumption that some have the truth because Marxian memes (direct descendants of the antagonistic competitor to the Anglo American line, the post Kantian German comprehensive philosophy line, that also includes Straussians, and many neo cons) have colonized their brains to the exclusion of contradicting information from one and a half centuries of updates, is just another confirmation of what needs no more confirming. In some of us those marxian memes lost the competition for brain space.
In the year 2005, continuing to insist that others must subscribe to an untestable philosophy and psudeo science that explains away all the results, or, be ruled ignorant and unenlightened! Marx would be ashamed.
The pertinent question is who represents the subset and who the superset of mortal knowledge. The marxians have been crushed in the Go game, and are conclusively revealed a distinct subset.
Marxism only matters at the moment because it makes the hard source questions immeasurably harder to pursue at a time source questions are critical to counter psudo conservative nonsense. Once someone tries to raise those source questions in good faith, the marxist meme zombies attack. They will not take human reality for an answer, and may still have the power to block critical progress by tainting all they touch with the repuganant history of marxism in action. And, if they were what they claim to be, this would not be the case, because a marxian “science” would not require this fanatic allegiance to its own jargon and history, but could easily adapt because science doesn’t depend on or need any particlar jargon and history.
Posted by: razor | May 5 2005 18:14 utc | 302
And, for me at least, the limited form of blog fora provokes tendetiousness, which I accuse myself.
I don’t know how you could have reached that conclusion.
colman
I mean, the comments, mine also, are unreliably truncated and sometimes too aphoristic.
It’s a difficult, fragile discourse, but valuable nevertheless.
Posted by: slothrop | May 5 2005 18:24 utc | 304
razor
are you trying to read ayn rand through john rawls while listening to aerosmith
or are you some great common law advocate defending the poor & oppressed at a moments notice
or are you a defender of the tradition as old as ancient greece of hiding your elitism behind a subterfuge of ‘openness’ to human interaction, whicha paranthetically – i do not witness at all in yor posts
the law is the law is the law
a criminal class is a criminal class is a criminal class
gladly, the interests of empire are safe in your hands – & the old family from odessa will be glad that you have transfromed pogrom into programme
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 5 2005 18:24 utc | 305
science and poetry
each of these is only healthy and nourishing when it respects the reality it works on.
citizen k:
My basic critique of Marxianism, is that like Straussianism and Opus Dei Catholicism it defines a totalizing ideology interpreted by an elite who must not be questioned.
Yes, if you are reading theorists who speak this way, then by all means object. But Marx’s scientific works and notes do not advocate this. I am familiar with trickster “Marxists” who have spoken this way, but I am also familar with trickster “democrats” (like Strauss). We have to be wise as well as clever.
The very good reason to study Marxist social science is that it respects the reality of the world. Unlike Strauss, Marx recommends that we try to discipline our inquiries with terms of art that constantly remind social scientists that if we throw sand into the wind (into the reality of how society works now) it keeps blowing and we end up blinded. That is one reason to use a Marxist vocabulary, because it points to social reality better than can old aristocratic theories of individual virtue. Strauss foxily misreads an entire corpus of texts to obscure the reality of social causes. But Strauss’s emperor is completely stark naked. The proper response when someone points out that the emperor is naked is not to say, “Yes, but how will you clothe him?”
The mess of (not) accounting America’s billions of tax dollars spent in Iraq on flattening Falloojah and painting a few hundred schools is a revolting performance art burlesque of what happens more subtly in Anglo-American free markets. It is a demented warning of what we will all get if we continue to say “sure!” to so called free markets in everything. The house searches, check points, and faux trials are our raving mad society desperately trying to warn us how well we can expect things to go of we rely on “trying to balance property rights and fairness.”
The free market is a naked lie. How much does it cost to maintain a “free market”? An actually free society would know the answer; it would plan for it.
The challenge slothrop has posed is a sensible one for an actually liberated people: a society that claims to be free should plan to produce that freedom and track how well it’s doing, not just hope for it. No?
Posted by: citizen | May 5 2005 19:04 utc | 307
The proper response when someone points out that the emperor is naked is not to say, “Yes, but how will you clothe him?”
What is the proper response? To spout fountains of jargon that can only be understood by the properly initiated elite?
The current problem have nothing whatsoever to do with free markets. The current problem is a philosophy, a world view, that denies half of human nature. We are driven both by a concern for ourselves and a concern for our comrades and fairness.
The prevailing Anglo-Saxon world-view denies the second part of that. It denies the golden rule, grasping at whatever justifications it can: Strauss, social darwinism, welfare theorems, whatever.
It does not matter if that world-view expresses itself through feudalism, central planning or free markets. It will yield disaster.
Economics should be realm for engineering, not ideologies. Markets are neither moral or immoral. It’s how we use markets that has moral content. We should use markets when appropriate, socialisation when appropriate. Now I’ve started channeling Adam Smith.
Admittedly, I have pushed “production” to include other goods than th emore concrete ones I expect slothrop meant when he wrote that.
razor:
science doesn’t depend on or need any particlar jargon and history.
Ummmmm, do you know any physicists?
Equally, what would you say if I told you that Marxian social science is a historical science? That data is history in all fields of science, including social science?
The pertinent question is who represents the subset and who the superset of mortal knowledge. The marxians have been crushed in the Go game, and are conclusively revealed a distinct subset.
Am I free to take from this that you will transfer your allegiance to whomever wins?
Colman:
Now who’s being an ass?
Sure, I’ll ‘fess. It’s all bump and grind. Peace (and disagreement).
Posted by: citizen | May 5 2005 19:25 utc | 309
What is the proper response? To spout fountains of jargon that can only be understood by the properly initiated elite?
When working in a disciplined and demanding environment, yes, precise terminology that communicates specific things to the initiated is key. Among others, football players, engineers, musicians, draftsmen, martial artists, and Marxists share this need to think and communicate expertly.
And yet we can also speak more loosely. I think in the post to which you reply I was making all my words generally available for this audience. But you’re right, I did not answer the question about what would be an appropriate Marxist response. The answer:
laugh.
hard.
Posted by: citizen | May 5 2005 19:34 utc | 310
There are two kinds of people: those that split everything in two categories and those that don’t…
I’d be interested to know what our resident marxists think of what has happened in Russia in the past 15 years. To me, it is pure capitalism as understood by marxists (which they all were to some extent). It looks disturbingly similar to Randism or whatever it’s called (objectivism?)
I’m lost in all the ism’s you’re all discussing – but nothing good has ever come of any “-ism”
Posted by: Jérôme | May 5 2005 19:55 utc | 311
I see a rift in this thread that can’t be bridged, one has to acknowledged if the thread is to lead anywhere. Any honest scholar is at once a “man of the street,” who walks and talks with other people on the street, and a technical climber, who, on a technical climb, is doing something different from walking and talking on the street. There’s plenty of pathos and comedy in this state of affairs, and it all has to be processed by each and every honest scholar for himself or herself. Some do it well, and some don’t do it very well at all. Benjamin certainly tried to do it well, but he also believed that technical climbers had an overriding, and prior, obligation to his fellow climbers: “ An author who teaches writers nothing, teaches no one “. This sentence comes at the conclusion of The Author as Producer , a Marxist essay if ever there was one. The italics are his own, it’s the only italicized sentence in the essay.
Posted by: alabama | May 5 2005 20:10 utc | 312
“one that has to be acknowledged”. I don’t proof-read very well.
Posted by: alabama | May 5 2005 20:11 utc | 313
“Am I free to take from this that you will transfer your allegiance to whomever wins?”
You are kidding, right? Or do you believe in an omniescient mortal? I suggest, instead of Marx, version 1,231.05, a basic summary of population biology, the predator prey race, and immunology. This would ward off the superstition that there is A person out there with THE answer, by injecting the reality of statistics and populations and enviromental change into the mix, and so avoid rhetorical questions that are far wide of the mark. I do not belong to the church of comprehensive philosophy. I belong to the church of DNA.
As to scientific language, any physicist worth his salt can drop the jargon and still stick to the concepts. Call pi cake – who cares? The Airbus Whale flies or it does not. A trait of scientific language is that it is tested against indifferent data. A scientest who engaged in tricks like false consciousness to explain away, for example, continental drift, might even lose tenure. Marxism is a closed system for those who choose to make it so and those who insist on its hegemony, do. Get on the right side of history by dropping the labels.
Posted by: razor | May 5 2005 20:13 utc | 314
“fellow technical climbers”. Maybe I don’t proof-read at all.
Posted by: alabama | May 5 2005 20:15 utc | 315
coercion by marxians who can’t make a sale otherwise kinda like Wal*Mart or Halliburton, eh? coercive marketing didn’t start with marxism nor does it end there.
razor has raised an important point (at last) however, among the usual persiflage: They will not take human reality for an answer, and may still have the power to block critical progress by tainting all they touch with the repuganant history of marxism in action. the issue of Taint is one I’ve been wanting to discuss for some time, as it is the central argument of the Red-baiters. the colossal failures of the Soviet system, and the authoritarian brutality of its enforcement mechanisms, are pointed to as irrevocably “tainting” the discourse under whose banner they were committed.
if this argument of Taint is supportable then it leaves us moderns in a quandary. for there is no actually-existing ideology or religion — including neoliberalism and capitalism — which is not tainted with the death and suffering of large numbers of our kind. if we are to regard Soviet central planning as tarred forever with the brush of forced relocations, the Gulags, Lysenkoism and the other sins of the USSR — then how are we not to regard mercantile capitalism as stained forever with the blood of indigenous millions who died and were enslaved to stoke Europe’s early “free” markets with specie and raw materials? how shall we ignore the intimate connection between the slave trade and the commodities markets and the fortunes of Lloyd’s of London? is there a family or corporate fortune on this planet that is not tainted with ancestral or contemporary crime? not rooted in land theft, war crimes, child labour, fraud, embezzlement, and all the rest?
shall we conveniently forget the tortures and murders committed by “friendly” dictators who enabled corporate profiteering, and remember only the crimes of those committed to centralised economic planning and state-owned enterprise? that is selective memory indeed.
and the struggle over Taint goes further and deeper.
is the Torah and all of Judaism tainted by the ideology of Zionism and the occupation of Palestine? is Christianity per se tainted by the Magdalene Institutions, the extirpation of indigenous cultures, languages and religions worldwide, by the burning of heretics and witches, by the paedophilia scandals, by the antics of the Robertsons and the Swaggarts? at what point can we separate ideology, dogma or theory from its real-world instantiation?
this argument smouldered on the papal election thread, as we argued over the balance sheet for the Catholic Church: has it done more harm than good, in toto? and if it has done more harm, is this because its dogma or belief system is inherently productive of harm, or because it was “mis-implemented” by corrupt human beings? does it belong on that proverbial “trash heap of history” where we are so eager to fling ideas we don’t care for?
Strauss managed to make himself believe that rightwing totalitarianism was not tainted per se by the Nazi atrocities, even as he fled for his life. he still thought that in theory, centralised one-party authoritarianism (elite rule) was a nifty idea. well, at least he stuck to his principles 🙂 but it is hard for me to read Nazi political theory, or Straussian admiration for authoritarian rule, without the sense that these are ideologies inherently productive of harm: they explicitly propose an agenda of repression enforced by secrecy and violence.
but so does a business enterprise, if it can get away with it 🙂 secrecy (concealing information from customers and public, falsifying test results and financial reports, suppressing innovation), repression (breaking strikes by the use of armed thugs, spying on employees at leisure, invasive drug testing, keystroke monitoring), and violence (usually against indigenes in areas designated for resource-stripping or poor people in areas designated for waste and toxics dumping) are commonplace in corporate practise — and are in fact required by the business model that acknowledges no goal other than maximising shareholder return. the ideology of growth and monetary profit inherently implies these things. does this then taint the ideology of “free markets” which proposes a lack of any check and balance mechanism on corporate power? many would say so.
others would say that the theory of markets is simply being “mis-implemented” by corrupt human beings, much as the theory of communism was mis-implemented by corrupt human beings. or in other words, a lot of things sound good in theory, but given that they will be implemented by human beings who are corruptible, does even a good theory guarantee good results? the NT has some pretty good theory in it — tolerance, mutual charity, compassion, and all the rest — and yet the people who are waving it about the most loudly at present display few of its virtues.
in sum I think the argument of Taint as applied to an entire direction of thought, belief, or scholarship is a fairly weak one, since it can be applied in almost any direction with equal force. control freaks and thieves have operated under every flag from the cross of st G to the stars and stripes to the hammer and sickle.
I’m about to agree with Colman (quick, someone, call the National Enquirer!) but will do so separately and later. lunch break over.
I do not belong to the church of comprehensive philosophy. I belong to the church of DNA.
razor 4:13
dear dear dear
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 5 2005 20:42 utc | 318
nothing good has ever come of any “-ism”
how about activism and optimism? 🙂
Posted by: b real | May 5 2005 20:52 utc | 319
Look, I’ll work intellectually with anyone who believes that social relations are at bottom, real, whatever vocabulary they use. It is not the specific set of terms that lets me trust someone, it is whether or not they agree to regard the way they treat me and other human beings as something more than an amusing story, a fascinating case. Durkheim provides an influential account of social relations, but he thinks the social object only exist as a social collective. I am effaced and straitjacketed as an individual – so why trust this? With Weber the social exists as regulative ideas, and my body is erased from the picture (so I get a whiff of asceticism and murder). Marx, refreshingly, explains my relations to others as just that, relations among self and other entities.
Durkheim: “the social is an empirical, collective object.”
Weber: “the social an ideal object thought by individuals.”
Marx: “The social is a real object, and it exists as relations.”
The definition subscribed to by Marxists seems almost too obvious. Could this really be Marxism? What about all the jargon? Well, Marxism is an attempt not to explain away the distractions, but to explain all kinds of relating in order to fully describe the world. In short, Marxists don’t do closed systems (such as rational choice models) because closed systems are not how social relations really work. So, yes, Marxist social science can’t really predict what will happen, but that does not distinguish it from any other social science.
Why all the hostility to Marxism then? Because Marxism actually does accomplish a move from “is” to “ought.” Do you think this impossible? I don’t, but rather see it as a philosophical and social scandal. Every scientist knows that when an experiment reveals that a theory is wrong, it means that one “ought” to abandon efforts to act as if the false were true. Because our politicians resist this very reasonable move from “is” to “ought,” we are creating hell on earth. And the fact that our schools teach that one cannot move from “is” to “ought” should count for all of us as evidence that schools are training slaves and not free people. Because Marxism won’t shut up about how important it is to move from “is to “ought”, I give Marxists a lot of credit. For identical reasons, philosophical serpents of all kinds pour all sorts of irrelevant dirt on the name of Marxism. So let us agree, at least here on this thread, that to call something “Marxist” is not in any way to discredit it.
Strauss is our example for this thread –
Strauss: “The social is an illusion, a myth deployed by the great man, who is himself an illusion if bested.”
Don’t get me wrong, I think Marx makes mistakes and I am working on understanding those mistakes (reading Roy Bhaskar), but I am altogether respectful of a body of writing so thoroughly disciplined by its author to prepare grounds on which we could all, not only relate as equals, but also work together on new depths of complex ethical and social action.
Posted by: citizen | May 5 2005 22:46 utc | 320
EDIT: Because we and our politicians resist this very reasonable move from “is” to “ought,” we are creating hell on earth.
Posted by: citizen | May 5 2005 23:10 utc | 322
Call me unimaginative, citizen, but I find it inconceivable that Strauss could be compared to Marx in any way. To Weber, perhaps, or Durkheim–but then I don’t see the point of comparing these two founders of sociology with a classical scholar who bases his occasional put-downs of sociology on his understanding of the Hebrew Bible. When Strauss takes an occasional shot at sociology, which he really doesn’t bother to study. Unlike Strauss, Marx and Nietzsche are major minds,working on the level of Kant and Hegel. They’ve read everything, and have carefully studied, and understood, the “everythings” they’ve read. The work they do is incalculably rigorous, comprehensive and inventive, and they are unrelenting in the pursuit of this work. They go further, faster, harder and stronger than anyone, on any subject whatsoever. It’s a matter of magnitudes–of intellectual reserves–and I like to believe that all honest writers understand this. Strauss himself understands it. Yes, he denounces Machiavelli for “blasphemy”–one of the strangest moves I’ve ever seen anywhere–but this is a dogmatic value judgment of the sort that many of us tend to make when we’re in over our heads, and Strauss, in his readings of Machiavelli, is definitely in over his head (something that could never be said of Marx and Nietzsche: their respective comments on Machiavelli, few and far between though they may be, show a thorough and lucid understanding of Machiavelli’s project). What, then, does Strauss do well? Well, for one thing, he’s done valuable work on Maimonides, Al Farabi, and the whole Medieval Andalusian reading of Aristotle. He writes with great confidence and patience when dealing with these figures–no doubt because they give at least the appearance of a pre-scholastic (non-Christian?) reading of the Greeks. Because Strauss really doesn’t like Christianity! This is a limitation that has to be recognized and respected if we’re to have any success in reading him at all (and I accept the fact that some folks don’t want to, and perhaps wouldn’t know how to, read his more technical contributions). As for his American political context, we all know very well that Strauss was appalled, and even somewhat terrified, by the McCarthyism that burned through our universities during his years in America. I’m no intellectual historian, but I hope I’m not wrong to think that this context calls for some linkage to Strauss’s career in Germany and France during the thirties. I believe that if we can accept the guy for his own magnitude, successes and limitations, we get a much clearer picture of how truly mediocre, tendentious and anti-intellectual his supposed acolytes really are, and this, in my opinion, is a discrimination that truly counts. But then I’ve never felt a need to demonize intellectuals in my take on the political scene, because I think the Masters of the Universe never read. They certainly don’t think. People who used to think, and then gravitate toward the scene of economic and political power relations, quickly lose the capacity to study ideas and concepts, and rarely, if ever, retrieve that capacity. They end up cutting deals and fabricating lies. This is not an unusual fate in our world, but it’s completely removed from the career of Leo Strauss–who, I repeat, never rises to the level of Marx or Nietzsche (but then who does? maybe Freud?)
Posted by: alabama | May 5 2005 23:50 utc | 323
alabama
i think this talk of limitations is important. the scale of magnitudes. whatever i think of hegel – i am as overawed today by what he thank & how he thought it as i was when i was 20
& on that level of magnitude i also place benjamin. when i first read his work & it was the essay you have cited in fact & another essay – on mechanical reproduction – i undersestimated the work simply based on the melancholy that seemed to pin it down – a melancholy that is at the roots of althusses work & that too of poulantzas. i didn’t sense the steel. now some decades down the road i understand that steel & am in awe not only of the scope but of the depth which goes far further than commentary. i am in awe of his humantiy – which he never lost – which was not so with adorno or horkheimer or the rest of the frankfurt gang. the fact too that he transcended a german jewish sensibility which was uncommon but the conflict this caused him is clear in most of his correspondances. there is grandeur even in his most simple statements – thee is grandeur sometimes because they are such simple statements
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 6 2005 0:37 utc | 324
Why all the hostility to Marxism then? – so I am failing in my resolve shut-up, but I am too weak to let this pass. Why? How about the in-actuality operation of Marxist parties? How about the NKVD and the Lubyanka, the Ukranian famine, the Hitler-Stalin pact, the betrayal of Spain, the hungry ghosts of the great leap forward, the Cultural Revolution, Kim Il Sung, the slaughter of Budapest, the Doctors plot, the cults of personality, the “oops civil rights don’t matter during the period of the popular front”, the people’s secret police, the hacks like Maurice Thorez and thousands of other nasty little bureaucrats itching for an opportunity to send people to the jails. You want to know why the scent of Marxism makes people instinctively revolt against the haunting spectre of the responsible comrade – my God. It’s like that Belgian who asked me why people in Zaire were so hostile. History leaves scars. I forget who said it, but some European savant once said the Jews are anxious because a millenium of Christian Love has take a serious toll on them. You are welcome to explicate that the teachings of Jesus don’t include burning at the stake or that the teaching of Marx don’t have anything to do with Comrades Beria and Vyshinsky or Madame Mao, but reality disagrees. 150 years of the practice of scientific socialism has not invalidated Marx’s brilliant analysis of economics, but it has validated Bakunin’s argument that Marx was creating an ideology of despotism.
But according to Mr. Marx, the people not only should not abolish the State, but, on the contrary, they must strengthen and enlarge it. and turn it over to the full disposition of their benefactors, guardians, and teachers — the leaders of the Communist party, meaning Mr. Marx and his friends — who will then liberate them in their own way. They will concentrate all administrative power in their own strong hands, because the ignorant people are in need of a strong guardianship; and they will create a central state bank, which will also control all the commerce, industry, agriculture, and even science. The mass of the people will be divided into two armies, the agricultural and the industrial, under the direct command of the state engineers, who will constitute the new privileged political-scientific class.
That is Bakunin in 1872 or so. One does not need to subscribe to the theories of Strauss or Madame Thatcher or even the rather disjointed theories of Bakunin to acknowledge the acuity of this critique – 50 years before the brilliant scholar Derzhinsky set up the machinery of the charnel house.
Posted by: citizen k | May 6 2005 0:46 utc | 325
alabama-
since this thread has been so educational for us lurker types, would you be so kind as to offer a synopsis of Strauss’s reading of Maimonides and Al Farabi? I was under the impression that they are central to his teachings.
Posted by: dk | May 6 2005 0:54 utc | 326
“You are welcome to explicate that the teachings of Jesus don’t include burning at the stake or that the teaching of Marx don’t have anything to do with Comrades Beria and Vyshinsky or Madame Mao, but reality disagrees”
citizen k 08:46
any real study of marx or marxism will explain all and any of these questions. the nature of state formations is an area of expertise for which marx is duly known. you again conflate events that do not have anything to do with one another than they took place in the bloodiest century of all which – even the failed stae formations of russia & china did not possess & monopoly on bloodshed or on cruelty. capitalism had already built up quite a bloody reputation & it was extended in the last fifty years with terrifying rapidity on all continents
the blood that has run through this century can be separated into two terros if you will – red terror which has always been less than premediated & chaotic & the brown terror of fascism, of the colonialists & of the us empire – which has been deliberate, intentional & through in south east asia, africa, latin america etc etc
your primal anticommunism blinds you to accurate analysis. there are vast differences between count derzhinsky & yagoda & beria – there is enormous difference between the NEP & the great leap forwards, there is a qualitative difference between letting a thousand blossoms bloom & the cultural revolution, there is a sizeable difference between maurice thorez & jacques duclos or auguste lecoeur, there is a difference between the war in spain & the popular front – there are spectacular differences between madame mao & lin piao & chen po ta
etc etc etc
any fool can go through some mandatory right wing encyclopedia & root out the sins of the left – they have never hidden them – but it takes a clown to try to build a monument from all those differences
but for citizen k & perhaps for razor too we are all little lenin’s writing in ou room in zurich ‘left wing communism an infantile disorder’ – incapable of understanding that we have lived in the bloodiest century for which no ideas have come out unstained
& personally i a tired of having to defend marxist ideas not only from inept attacks but from such a misreading of history & a utilisation of history that underlines a prejudice that is closed & far from open
i spoke on marxism on this thread because it bore a very direct relation to strauss’s thought – especially set against his german contemporaries & especially his german jewish contemporaries
but i refuse to use the red flag to attack the red flag – you have offered nothing except a sneering self regard aganst a body of ideas that on whole have given this world strength heart & insight
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 6 2005 1:15 utc | 327
rg:
Bad news. You, and everything you have been, is but product of a bag of DNA. Saint Marx, also. Time to work the old mind body con! Spirit!
The good news is that apparently some are tired of hearing of the goodness of Saint Marx and what He bestowed on a grateful and suffering mankind, and others are tired of explainign how great Saint Marx is. Accord! That is progress!
And the taint problem, aside from people equating twenty million dead in one extravaganza alone, (Don’t look at us. The heretics did it!)to shopping at walmart, is that you are scaring away the customers.
Decent people, who I happen to like as decent human beings, will make the reasonable judgment that someone who lacks the sense to reject marxist non sense and its rotten history is not someone they will support, and will not waste their time listening to anyone with these taints. It is like going to the critically acclaimed best restraunt in the world, seeing bodies carried out, and deciding not to eat there, no matter how sophisticated the arguments and excuses.
And please stop misrepresenting what drives this nantucket sleigh ride on marx. Some are defending what hasn’t been attacked, and insisting on the hegemony, even on this thread, of a particular vocabulary and set of mid 1800 philosophical concepts from Middle Europe. It reminds me of the right wing Christian claim that their religion is under attack when the problem is they just don’t like competition and need an enemy to misdirect attention away from their own mortal failings.
I claim source questions are critical, and plead for people to address source questions without marxist jargon and others say hell no, and misrepresent. It’s a real problem.
Posted by: razor | May 6 2005 1:59 utc | 328
Razor/citizen k
I don’t think anyone is defending Marx the man, only ideas–some of which came from Marx, others from Gramsci, Trotsky, Serge, Orwell and many others–they are the ideas of democracy and a critical historicity; an understanding of the dynamics of capitalism and the revelations possible through analysing through dialectics. All of the ideas from these sources (ideas, not people) make it clear that the history of USSR, China, or any of the other so-called communist countries, had nothing to do with communism or socialism. This was central to Orwell’s whole body of work. These societies were labelled socialist or communist by the ‘communists’ themselves and by the ‘democrats’ in the west, for the obvious reasons–to ideologically legitimate themselves in the case of the communists in the case of the former–and to discredit the idea that ordinary people can organise their own societies on a democratic basis in the case of the latter. The ideas of socialism or communism are very, very dangerous in our capitalist societies, and have been since the 18th century, so all means are deployed to continually discredit them as projects through the ‘example’ of Stalin or Mao. When we start to look at these as examples of ‘actually existing socialism’ then the argument has become ideologically deformed form the start—and therefore pointless.
Posted by: theodor | May 6 2005 2:30 utc | 329
Citizen Giap: On the general issue, no doubt you are correct, for I have been told many times that if only I understood St. Paul, or St. Marx, or St. Hayek or St. Pinochet or even the pious St. Bush or any of the other great saints of our glorious history, small things like an occasional massacre or mass starvation or an over-enthusiastic secret policeman with his trusty pair of pliers would not bother me so much. On the specific, the difference between a pig like Madame Mao and a swine like Lin Biao I leave to greater scholars than myself – I suggest you read some Simon Leys and then some of the many great Chinese witnesses to the efforts of both Saints. The difference between Yagoda and Derzhinsky, I know quite well. It is the difference between the devil and the devil’s favorite 20th century accomplice – the intellectual who invokes him. When we total the blood of the 20th century, so much comes from the intellectuals – people of our class, the class who writes on this very forum, educated, technically adept, self-regarding, and so prone to the sin of worshiping abstractions with the sacrifice of artefacts. People like Wolfowitz, the Straussian, are just stupid and untalented versions of Derzhinsky. But if you found yourself in Abu Ghraib or in Lubyanka, those differences might not seem so great to you.
Posted by: citizen k | May 6 2005 2:49 utc | 330
How important it is to ask all the questions but not to expect any answers! Because if you ask the questions, you eventually will live the questions, and they will answer themselves.
Posted by: Rilke | May 6 2005 2:53 utc | 331
Theodor
“ideologically deformed” is what you get on this mortal plain. Marx was a man who wrote many things, some of which are vital. No one here has denied it. Ideas that can handle the deformity of this mortal world are not for mortals.
The crux is this insistence that the record is irrelevant to the idea (which would be news to the disowned heretics) and the truth still resides in the “idea”. No. It doesn’t.
Which is it: dealing with the current mortal predicament because that is what actually matters, or sticking to an unfalsiable idea that deforms?
Posted by: razor | May 6 2005 3:05 utc | 332
razor,
Take your first point. But your ‘this insistence that the record is irrelevant to the idea’ is my point. The ‘record’ is the record attributed by those in power in the media, business and politics. My argument is that there is no record of ‘actually existing socialism’. It has always been strangled at its birth, or drowned in the blood of its adherents (first of all), then drown in the blood of anyone else who gets in the way of what ‘Marx really meant’.
Posted by: theodor | May 6 2005 3:24 utc | 333
Alabama: Surely Strauss is a pigmy compared to Marx and I too would be interested in what Strauss made of Maimonides – who was himself an absurdly comprehensive thinker. But Marx is not a pure element – he is an alloy of many elements. This is a point Razor is making as well. And one of the elements that exists in Marx, noted by some of his contemporaries in the International, is a type of German-professor Eureka-ism that was so mocked by Nietzsche. “By careful study, I have unlocked the key to the true world wisdom and can now explain everything, but only to the worthy” seems to me to be common to both Strauss and Marx. But I am no philosopher, just a bystander with a reflexive dislike for certain forms of authority.
Posted by: citizen k | May 6 2005 3:50 utc | 334
was there a point in this thread, apart from razor’s strawman, where anyone here has prescribed marx as the only filter w/ which to work from, or am i not privy to some pseudo-straussian subcontext extrapolation here? this notion of either/or seems disingenuous and at cross-purposes to the topic at large. the elite will always seek out theories to justify & defend their governance, no matter how crude intellectually, because it’s really a game of power relationships. before guttenburg, churchs held power by possessing monoply over the word, literacy & interpretation. i see strauss’s ideas as being little different from this age old attempt at controlling interpretation, therefore retaining power over the masses. it is just another attempt to counter the revolutionary distribution of the written word, which empowered the masses. okay, the elite say, you might have access to more information, but you can’t possible comprehend the important bits which make it clear that we have power over you, but trust us, it’s in there. and you’re still ignorant & we don’t have to talk to you. isn’t that what elitism is all about anyway? that’s the role that strauss essentially serves for the neocons, apart from having played mentor to many of them in academia. anyhow, secrecy seems to be more important nowadays, at least for this administration, as they would appear to have fallen back on the idea of control over the word by not allowing anyone w/o need-to-know access to any interpretation of data. in addition, they’re worried about covering up evidence of corruption.
it still boils down to elitism and power. all tangents aside, and there have been many, that’s the context here, as i understand it.
Posted by: b real | May 6 2005 4:15 utc | 335
theodor
Yes, the idea should be kept alive that the world could be different and better. The kingdom of heaven, here, in our presence. Or, “Faults without efforts to amend them! Faults indeed, faults indeed.”
But, marxism is not the vehicle to keep this idea alive.
For one thing, marxism provides vocabulary and concepts to explain all one doesn’t like as a consequence of power residing elsewhere, and in the name of people, denies the authenticity of people. Somehow Leszek Kolakowski comes to mind. This encourages appalling laziness. People who don’t know a damned thing about power talk as its intimate master. Norman Mailer has addressed the problem with regard to novelists today not knowing anything about how things actually work. They aren’t in the room.
A related problem. marxists may have a beef with human nature, similar to Creationists, whose real beef is with the Creator, not scientists. It is not all capitalism and Power. Some of it is people being assholes, or just jerks to each other even innocently, in old old ways. If this is the case, marxism is the opiate for those who don’t want to accept their mortal circumstances, and taking the opiate makes this mortal world worse, not better, by misdiagnosis and mistreatment and wasting of opportunities.
Posted by: razor | May 6 2005 4:46 utc | 336
b real, you pose an impossible obstacle to thought of any kind, and it’s this: all thinking is interpreting–responding to the thoughts we receive. We can pursue a line of thought, or we can drop it, but if we pursue it at any length, with all its windings, internal complexities, contradictions and so on, it becomes a difficult thing. True, we can boil it down to a few aphorisms after some long and hard concentration, but then it becomes a still more difficult thing–a string of condensed enigmas. But let’s suppose we do this–what then? Well, according to you, we’ve simply performed an exercise in power politics, morphing ourselves into an “elite”–if only an elite of one. And all elites, by your reckoning, are absolutely evil. This is the most uncomplicated anti-intellectual statement I’ve read in my entire life, anywhere, ever. It does more: it fairly boils over with hatred and envy, and means to intimidate any and all who read it–nothing more, and nothing less. Which is why a writer like Leo Strauss, who knows what it’s like to be intimidated by anti-intellectuals, might happen upon a phrase like “Persecution and the Art of Writing”.
Posted by: alabama | May 6 2005 4:58 utc | 337
“It is only with the heart that one can see clearly; what is essential is invisible to the naked eye.”
Posted by: Le Petit Prince | May 6 2005 6:23 utc | 338
@alabama
I remember asking, back at the Whiskey Bar, if you considered yourself an intellectual – a person who deals primarily in ideas. Your response was, as I recall, “God, no. Why do you ask?”
Posted by: Pat | May 6 2005 6:39 utc | 339
Razor:
I have responded to your complaints with the most basic and jargon free account of a key marxist difference, and you ignore the issue. When confronted with an actual idea that demands you think coherently and in front of people where we can see what you have to offer, have responded with mere accusations and made no effort to relate them to the ideas you pretend to critique. You have not offered anything.
Citizen k:
Citizen Giap: On the general issue, no doubt you are correct, for I have been told many times that if only I understood St. Paul, or St. Marx, or St. Hayek or St. Pinochet or even the pious St. Bush or any of the other great saints of our glorious history, small things like an occasional massacre or mass starvation or an over-enthusiastic secret policeman with his trusty pair of pliers would not bother me so much.
And now you are simply insulting. We have not asked you to ignore anything, but to pay attention to specific things. I am also a humanist – will you point out to me all the bad things that humans have done? What rotten word-magic you weave.
We are attempting to discuss the real strengths offered by Marxist thought to understand society in such a way that people can work toward a world that values each individual – and we are doing so because the world may actually be losing ground in defending individuals from being treated like fertilizer. Despite the real contributions we try to make to figuring out where our strengths are – you haven’t the basic decency to critique how Marxist thought seems to you so destined to lead to travesties. I think if you honestly attempted to care about tragedies you cite as anything more than useful rhetorical firebombs, you would try to explain (which is different from merely accusing) how Marxian thought causes them. Remember, Socrates was Athens’ gadfly, not its fruit fly.
You were offered Marxism in a highly technical format, and you screamed “too much jargon.” Now you have been offered it in simple language, and you dance around the issue screaming, “It burns! It burns! Aaaah, Marxism kills!” If we are wrong in our arguments, please don’t keep attacking our magic name, show us.
Posted by: citizen | May 6 2005 7:34 utc | 340
In case I was unclear, it is not the insulting in simply insulting that offends me here. It’s the simple. There should be some nourishment to go with the insult.
Posted by: citizen | May 6 2005 7:39 utc | 341
Alabama, it occurs to me that reading Strauss is not necessary useful for me or, I suspect, Billmon. I don’t actually care what he said. What I want to know is what the current crop of disciples think he said and how that affects their teaching. I don’t necessarily care what Jesus said. I need to know what the current crops of loonies calling themselves Christians think he said.
I understand the wish for intellectual rigour and precision, but while this is perhaps a gathering of intellectuals, this is not an academic seminar.
And I think your reading of b real’s post is a little strange. I thought that he/she/it (help, I can’t remember the correct gender pronoun) was attempting to return to the original topic, the use of Strauss’s ideas by the current crop of philosopher-kings in the US.
Well, according to you, we’ve simply performed an exercise in power politics, morphing ourselves into an “elite”–if only an elite of one. And all elites, by your reckoning, are absolutely evil. This is the most uncomplicated anti-intellectual statement I’ve read in my entire life, anywhere, ever.
Alabama, I was confused for a bit about how you got this read out of b real, and then it struck me. I think b real is talking about elites as people who seek the power of being at the top. But what you described as a process of making oneself an elite, is actually the process of making oneself accomplished. As this seeks skill and not necessarily power, it is a distinct endeavor. I don’t see any anti-intellectualism in the post.
Posted by: citizen | May 6 2005 7:48 utc | 343
Mind you, in the current climate I can understand being a bit sensitive about anti-intellectualism. This just isn’t the place to expect to find it.
Thank you all for this great discussion.
As this page is becoming quite long, I set up a new thread.
Please continue here.
50 years from now- when your children are foraging for wild things to eat- and burning their grandparent’s old furniture for warmth- will you still find the time to masturbate?
Posted by: iron | May 6 2005 19:24 utc | 346