Living with Neo-Marxism

A fantasy only academics could like 

Michael D. Shaw Jul 31 @ Mike's Point of View

 

As with many “Neo-” theories, Neo-Marxism was introduced to bolster the already-failing notion of classical Marxism. (cf. Neo-Darwinism). First promoted by a group of sociologists out of the University of Frankfurt in the 1920s, these members of what was to be called the “Frankfurt School,” endeavored to develop a theory of society that was based on Marxism and Hegelian philosophy, but which also incorporated the insights of psychoanalysis, sociology, existential philosophy, and other disciplines.

This method of analysis became known as "critical theory”—a term that is simultaneously opaque and grandiose.

Many influential articles were published in the Frankfurt School’s journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal for Social Research). Prominent contributors included:

** Theodor W. Adorno—Theorized civilization’s tendency to self-destruction; fled Nazi Germany in 1934 (ironically to capitalist Britain and even more capitalist United States); returning to Frankfurt in 1949 to pick up where he had left off.

** Walter Benjamin—Possessed great intellect, trying to reconcile Marxism, Kabbalah, free love, and the Arts scene; alienated some colleagues, and lived in exile, in fear of the Nazis; committing suicide when he realized he would be turned over to the Gestapo.

** Erich Fromm—Yet another German Jew who had to flee the Nazis; a disciple of Sigmund Freud before turning against him; Zionist for a while but functional atheist, calling himself a “nontheistic mystic”; held that modern man has become alienated and estranged from himself within consumer-oriented industrial society.

** Julian Gumperz—Born in the US, before returning to Germany with his parents; hard-core Commie who renounced it all after World War II to become a stockbroker; wrote Pattern for World Revolution (1947) under a pseudonym, this work analyzes the structure and strategies of the Communist International and its role in promoting world revolution.

** Herbert Marcuse—Followed the Frankfurt School members first to Geneva, and then to Columbia University; hired by the OSS (precursor to the CIA) in 1941; his Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955) attacked capitalism, and was described by some as “eroticizing Marx”; not surprisingly became popular with students in the 1960s for his Marxist and sexual liberation views.

Cutting to the chase, whether Marxism or Neo-Marxism, all focus is on the dialectic between the Oppressor and the Victim. However, this always requires a determination of which party IS truly the Oppressor and the Victim. In the US, ever since Affirmative Action (growing out of the Civil Rights Act of 1964), this distinction has become fatally flawed.

Under what rubric is a White job applicant denied a position in favor of a Black the “Oppressor”? What is the formula whereby society is healed by perpetuating discrimination in a modified context? Is a woman seeking an abortion a worthy Victim?

Indeed, the entire dialectic has deteriorated into pure travesty. How else to describe the new production of Jesus Christ Superstar, featuring Black Lesbian Cynthia Ervio as Jesus, and gay Adam Lambert as Judas. Surely, this arrangement will give new meaning to Mary Magdalene’s song “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.”

And, how can we forget the ridiculous incident (July 27th) in which WNBA player Kahleah Copper’s hair extension was inadvertently pulled off, and the game was actually stopped, followed by the ejection of a fan who apparently laughed at the absurdity of it all. Never mind that by all rights the league should not even exist since it has NEVER turned a profit since its inception in 1997. Who is the Victim here?

Make it make sense.

Thanks for reading Mike's Point Of View! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Recommend Mike's Point Of View to your readers

Politics, theology, pop culture, health, and the environment

We have lost our minds!

By Rich Kozlovich

Editor's Note:  This is a follow up on yesterday's commentary,  Cycles of Insanity. RK

Leftism is a plague on humanity.  Whether it's an issue such as abortion or economics, dystopia is the ultimate consequence of leftism.  

The historical accuracy of that statement is there for the world, and it's politicians to see and act on, but the activists in government, the media and academia are constantly working to overcome reality, and the public buys into it.  Doesn't anyone read history books any longer? Answer? No! 

Not only that, we're not taught history any longer, because actual history has been replaced by leftist propaganda such as Howard Zinn's, A People's History of the United States, filled with lies of commission and lies of omission.  And done deliberately, which is known, and yet they're still pushing it on our children, at all levels of education. 

• You may wish to view my

Education in America was heavily influenced by an outspoken socialist, John Dewey, going back to the 1890's.   His goal, along with so-called progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, was to make sure the apple fell as far away from the tree as possible.  The state was to become the ultimate moral arbiter for what communists called the "new man".  Not the churches!  Not the parents!  The State! 

Reading, writing and arithmetic were merely side benefits to that ultimate goal.  Now that they've pretty much reached their goals of moral supremacy, they've largely failed at reading, writing and arithmetic. Since that was never their true goal in the first place, they've kicked actual education to the curb. 

And so,  here we are, left with an education system that's not only failing to educate our children, it's filling them with insane social paradigms that will doom the nation, just like Venezuela, Greece, and many other socialist failures.  

 The academic leftists fled fascism in Europe, and then worked to impose what they fled here. Through the Marxist take over scheme referred to as a "long march through the institutions", to infest all of America's institutions in order to make socialism acceptable to Americans, with the end goal of imposing it.

• The Communist Takeover Of America - 45 Declared Goals 

We have infanticide promoted by a corrupt judiciary that "discovered" a "right" in the Constitution that doesn't exist in the Constitution.  They've created something called the Penumbra of the Constitution, where "rights" not specifically cited are "implied" by the Constitution.  The Supreme Court created a new "right", calling the right murder your unborn child the Right to Privacy.

 "In January 1973, the Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision ruling that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides a "right to privacy" that protects a pregnant woman's right to choose whether or not to have an abortion." 

 

All promoted by corrupt, self-serving, amoral political and activist misfits with the goal of destroying the foundational values of the nation.   We have illegal deep state abuse by America's bureaucracy against America's citizens,  and the latest outrage where the FBI raiding former Mayor Guillani about the Ukraine investigation, but the people who've been exposed for their corruption in this affair, fake President Joe Biden and his corrupt son Hunter are given a pass. 

•  Giuliani claims materials seized by FBI are 'exculpatory' evidence

We have deep state and political corruption to the point of treason and no one is being charged with it.  A political party that gone so far to the left they've committed themselves to the destruction of the American identity, the American culture and the destruction of the Constitution.  A party that's irrational, misanthropic and morally defective, and the , , industry and the unions praising them while condemning those who actually believe in the American way of life, calling them racists, xenophobes, greedy, and well, take you pick, when you're looking for a denigrating term, any one will do.

Everything is now racist, including milk and federal, state and local governments that are owned by the .

As I watch the insanity appearing in the news daily even a newsie like me gets sickened by it. I keep wondering, just how insane can the world get?  Apparently there are no limits to insanity, cognitive dissonance, corruption and greed.  The left uses our own values against us to destroy us, and entirely too many aren't disgusted by it all.   

Islam has delivered more human disaster than any other force in the world's history.  But the left in all its glory runs a close second.  It has always been a force for human misery, suffering and dystopia since its inception. The combination of the two represents human disaster on a scale that has to cause fear and dread in those who actually read and understand world history.  A history that's incontestable.

We're hearing a lot from and her "", which is neither new, nor is it a deal.  Ocasio-Cortez is a nitwit, but at least she's an honest nitwit, unlike most in the Democrat Party, she actually lets us see just what a nitwit she is, thus, we can see just how insane her schemes and policies are.  She's actually telling everyone what she believes, and I give her kudos for that, but history has shown what she believes in is a human nightmare.  And that history is also incontestable. 

I keep being amazed at some of the positions these "leaders" and "opinion makers" take.  But when you dance with the Devil you won't choose the dance, you won't pick the music and you may not be able to leave the dance floor.  Their views border on insanity.  Unfortunately, everyone has to suffer for their insanity

Paradigms and Demographics was never a big blog.  The biggest month I had 40,000 hits.  Typically, P&D gets between 20 and 30 thousand hits a month these days.  In the beginning I was only interested in shaping ideas and concepts I thought important for the pest control industry and those who are involved with us. 

Going back many years I published a weekly newsletter and I had a blog before this one; and they both had the same caveat; green only!   As time went by I realized that it was impossible to do “green only” because I could see that green was nothing more than the spear point for imposing socialist policy worldwide predicated of fraudulent environmental disasters.  Therefore, I decided that Paradigms and Demographics would stop being an anti-green blog and become a pro-humanity blog, which by definition makes Paradigms and Demographics anti-green and anti-left. 

I’ve try to work in different formats over the years, but I never really liked the way anything was coming together.  I kind of like what I am doing now and I think I have settled on this format.  For one thing, I think it's more focused, and better organized.

I don't know how my friend Alan Caruba, who passed in 2015, put out such accurate in depth commentaries each day, and on such varied subjects.   While I was working I didn’t have time to do a commentary each day, and quite frankly, I can’t seem to do one each day now that I’m retired....much to my embarrassment. 

I don’t know about others, but there are times I can crank out a complicated article in a couple of hours.  There are other times when it takes me two days, and then I keep changing it.  I never quite figured out why that is, other than the fact that the subject has so many layers that I have the tendency to go off in different directions attempting to tie it all together. 

At one point I stopped doing anything for a couple of weeks.  Even a news junkie like me can get to the point that I just can’t stand anymore.  Alan Caruba was concerned and sent me an article to publish just to get me back in the arena.

Admittedly some of my articles are a bit long, but that doesn't bother me as much as making sure I have continuity in the article.  At times I have had to work in what are called "coherence through connectives" because of the depth of the subject…and usually the continuity isn’t obvious until the end of the article.   If not done correctly - you look like a loon.   

I find that pushes me into different realms of thought and ideas.  And I get ideas.....lots of ideas!  I can get an idea a minute.  All of them time consuming, some are brilliant…..some….well....not so much!

But one thing has become clear as day to me.  Mass insanity really is cyclical, with peaks and valleys. From the 60's until now we've seen the cyclical waves of insane behavior and decision making, but even at the bottom of the waves, the insanity was above the sane base line of foundational values that created the greatest nation the world has ever seen.   Consequently, the resulting the downward spiral from that foundation is making the continued existence of America more critical than ever before.

We're facing economic disaster at every turn, and the left demands more spending, more taxation, more central government control over everyone's life, irrespective of the fact that kind of government has been a dismal failure forever and everywhere, and the media is complicit.

We really have lost our minds, and perhaps an  , which I've gone back of forth on as to whether it's a good thing or not, may have to be the answer. 

 

The Long March Through the Corporations: Book Review

March 25, 2021 Mike Gonzalez @ Law and Liberty

 

That all cultural institutions in America have been taken over by the Left is beyond question. The media, the academy, Hollywood—all are now in its clutches. Conservatives still cling to talk radio, just as tightly as they do to their guns and bibles, as President Obama so dismissively put it, but that is about the only redoubt of the “sense-making” institutions they still have.

This was no accident. Those who have studied the genesis of this annexation know that it was a deliberate “long march through the institutions.” That campaign was conceived in the late 1960s by the violent German activist Rudi Dutschke, a disciple of the non-violent but much more dangerous Frankfurt School academic Herbert Marcuse, who approved of Dutschke’s plan.

Today, this strategy manifests in the demand that institutions be “woke.” The term, borrowed from African-American slang for being awake, has come to mean not just any type of liberalism, but one denoted by an obsequious obsession with social issues, denunciations of “whiteness,” the insistence that the freest and most prosperous society today is hopelessly racist and in need of deep change, and the intolerant resolve to censor any deviation from any of these concepts through cancel culture. Other American institutions are teetering on the verge of a woke takeover.

The Churches—as in the institutionalized Abrahamic faiths—have long been bastions of conservatism by their very nature, but they are now in danger of seeing their commitment to true justice and the care for the poor and the stranger hijacked in the name of Social Justice, a concept that undermines religion. Social Justice abandons forgiveness and concentrates on punishment—especially, but not only, through forced redistribution of resources according to membership in categories of the supposedly oppressed and marginalized. Forgetting past sins, which the Bible repeatedly tells us is what God routinely does, is verboten.........To Read More....

 

The Whirlwind Is Already Here

Judge Kavanaugh was understating the problem.

Scott S. Powell October 5, 2018

In Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s defense before the Senate Judiciary Committee to refute the unsubstantiated allegations by Christine Blasey Ford regarding an alleged sexual assault 36 years ago, he charged the Democratic senators on the committee with sowing “the wind for decades to come…[and]…the whole country will reap the whirlwind.”

The whirlwind is already here.............For about the last two and a half generations there has been a subtle but growing assault on most of the values that were previously the bedrock of American society. Many older Americans hardly recognize the country of their childhood. While technological progress has proceeded at a rapid pace providing convenience, efficiency, and higher standards of material living, the foundational institutions of American society—the family, educational institutions, manners and civility, respect for law and order, and merit-based outcomes have been in concurrent decline..............Antonio Gramsci was a leading 20^th century Marxist theoretician who argued that communists’ route to taking power in developed, industrialized societies such as the United States would be best achieved through a “long march through the institutions.”

This would be a gradual process of radicalization of the cultural institutions — “the superstructure” ........... Cultural Marxism was also advanced by intellectuals from the “Frankfurt School,”............the long march through the institutions” meant, in the words of Herbert Marcuse, “working against the established institutions while working in them.”........To Read More....

The Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxism

By Paul Gottfried January 12, 2018

Franklin Einspruch, A commentator in The Federalist, describes me as a “circumspect conservative” scholar who has written responsibly about Cultural Marxism. I’m also deemed to be a conservative who agrees with other conservative critics of the Frankfurt School on the harmful effects of this group’s radical ideas. But I must part ways with Mr. Einspruch when he tells us:

 “It’s plain fact that political correctness and multiculturalism derive from notions hailing from the Frankfurt School, which in turn took most of its cues from Karl Marx.”

 Although I can discern a connection between feminist attacks on inherited gender roles and Frankfurt School views on sexual liberation, I’d have to question whether the present war against Christian, bourgeois institutions can be traced back in any meaningful way to traditional Marxism.

Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer (my teacher), Herbert Marcuse and other members of the Frankfurt School in interwar Germany worked to fuse Marx’s theory of class struggle and the contradictions of capitalism with a Freudian-based vision of erotic pleasure.

In this remarkable fusion, it is hard, at least for me, to recognize Marx’s socioeconomic critique. Marx was concerned about man’s alienation from his own work as a result of productive forces over which he had no control.

The father of “scientific socialism” never focused on abetting sexual revolt or fighting the emotional repression created by sharp gender distinctions or the failure to give proper social recognition to homosexuals. Orthodox Marxists and Marxist Leninists from the 1920s on vigorously denounced the Frankfurt School and its exponents as social decadents posing as Marxist revolutionaries. Communist regimes would later engage in similar attacks on representatives and sympathizers of the Frankfurt school, such as the Hungarian radical literary figure Georg Lukacs...........To Read More......