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@tiggtiggs

18 күн бұрын

Intelligencia doesn't belong in academia, it doesn't educate it indoctrinates.

I am not a leftists, I am not positioned in any direction and am certainly opposed to "isms" of all kind. This conversation has however, been edifying and immensely helpful to my understanding of these characters. It makes so much more sense now. Thank you. I will be eagerly awaiting this man's book.

Dr Rockhill is very courageous to take on the whole academic establishment.

Arendt needs to be called out more often. Basically a bog standard rightwinger that people try to excuse and justify in every way imaginable

@ChucklesMcGurk

18 күн бұрын

being against Hitler and Stalin does not make you a bog standard right winger. She was absolutely right about the nature of mankind, that ordinary people are capable of terrible evil simply because of the inability to empathize. Marxism doesn't make you special, you are no different.

@kvaka009

13 күн бұрын

Could you elaborate? What makes her rightwing in your view?

So excited for this! Your channel is great and Rockhill is at the top of my list right now.

It's just amazing how you really need to interact, learn, study and engage intellectually with like minded progressives to understand the complex political, economical and philosophical reality of modern capitalism and its empire.

Gabriel Rockhill is a breath of fresh air, listening to such a knowledgeable and inspiring person gives many of us on the left hope for the future with optimism that status quo is no longer an option.

@beautifulrose8619

18 күн бұрын

I agree. He is very intelligent and his vocabulary is so high level. I love to listen to him speak. I wish I could express myself like that.

Great stuff thanks

Gabriel Rockhill and Yanis Varoufakis and Gabor Mate' must talk together on your show!

@odinallfarther6038

8 күн бұрын

I'd like to hear his take on yanis and his tech feudalism as if it's a new thing requiring redefinition and new un required terminology ,the mills were tech feudalism of the day .

@lunaridge4510

3 күн бұрын

Yanis Varoufakis is not a Marxist economist and is quickly moving to become a bourgeois clown puppet himself. Just listen to what he says about Russia.

@lunaridge4510

3 күн бұрын

@@odinallfarther6038 Scholasticism of the 21 century, that's what his theory is. It contains neither in-depth Material nor class analysis. How important is it to give precise terminology to the horror and mess that we are living through? It is a civilizational shift. It is quite possibly the beginning of the end of Patriarchy as well.

1:06:50 - "Zizek is a reactionary"

@SamirHusainy

17 күн бұрын

Zizek is the court jester of imperialism.

@mattiafabbri8944

17 күн бұрын

I love Zizek, but his pro liberal considerations are pure reactionary rubbish. I agree.

@m.rebman7221

7 күн бұрын

Zizek is irrelevant intellectually, but is wonderful as comic relief in the way he mangles French, German, English and probably his native Slovenian. His books have flashes of brilliance in the same way automatic handwriting by spiritualists sometimes produces accidental non-gibberish. His recent attempt at a comeback at age 75 could be interesting as he has been very generous with his time lately. However, I predict his effort to turn the reading of philosophy into the reading of Finnegan’s Wake or something worse like Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury will be a passing fad and disappear into the dustbin of history…

@mattiafabbri8944

6 күн бұрын

@@m.rebman7221 have you ever read his books?

A thousand thanks for this fascinating discussion. Totally necessary and highly appreciated!!! Brilliant individuals serving humanity!!❤

So rich and engaging... It truly prompts my despair ~ and my question of " What gives one hope for a humane life with eyes open?" Is it to live with the Question, daily?

Well thank you, another site I found that is not for the genocide in Gaza.

Really interesting stuff from Dr Rockhill

I’ve been waiting for your take on this! I hope there’s a question on the issue of afropessimism and anti solidarity, and the challenges around blackface imperialism

@beautifulrose8619

18 күн бұрын

What is afro pessimism? I found your question very intriguing. Yiou aer intelligent. I would like to learn what you mean by blackface imperialism. If you would like to share with me.

@stepmaster9988

16 күн бұрын

@@beautifulrose8619 Afropessimism is a movement called which believes African Americans are still treated as slaves by everyone everywhere. I’m not an expert on this but on Rockhill Critical Theory Workshop channel he addresses it. Might be in this vid as I can recall exactly which one kzread.info/dash/bejne/mHxmtsh-c9aro9o.htmlsi=CMOmsPifnMWdWfNl Many African Americans said there were reasons they couldn’t support Palestinians because they were anti-black like everyone else There was an angry furore when pro Palestinian activists used the watermelon logo in protests, in lieu of the Palestinian flag was banned, because African Americans said watermelon is an anti-black symbol to make fun of them. There were a few more incidents like this where African Americans underscored anti-black statements by Palestinians (in the end these statements were mistranslations or relied on contexts African Americans are not familiar with and therefore too offence as evidence why they can’t support the liberation of other people who’re not African Americans

Thank you for your interview. How I wish a transcript of this interview is available for reading. A lot of your audience may want a text to review after reading. Only something you kight consider.

Post 2WW saw a move of western Marxism into universities, isolated from struggle and developing elaborate obfuscating elitist language which owed more to other bourgeois theorists then Marx. This had an impact on the global south struggles too. With intellectuals in India more focused on what mode of production it was, or the Bielefelt School forcing ahistorical generalisation onto an ostensibly Marxist framework in Latin America.

@carc.sync0

14 күн бұрын

What is the Bielefeld School you mention? Do you mean the systems sociology of N. Luhmann? As a Latin American myself, I am curious

@communistmole

14 күн бұрын

@@carc.sync0 I think he is talking about historians like Hans-Ulrich Wehler or Jürgen Kocka, whose historiography is influenced by marxism.

@casteretpollux

7 күн бұрын

Hi @aminamangera . This has been a conscious CIA project with promotion of anti Marxist so-called Neo Marxism and divide and rule identity politics.

@lunaridge4510

3 күн бұрын

Great overview, thank you! Noam Chomsky would agree :))) Obfuscating and elitist indeed, he said it makes his eyes glaze reading their crap.

Man, I have to listen to this one more time in order to grasp atleast 60-70%. It is both very interesting and also complex to follow along all those vocabulary and phrases- "intellectual imperialism, theory industry" etc etc

@odinallfarther6038

8 күн бұрын

May I suggest listen to it once more this time pausing to take notes . Then read your notes . You will absorbs and see/gain so much more .

Gracias por la entrevista!

Very enlightening interview. Thanks

Thank you Jyotishman and Rockhill for this. Much love and solidarity from Türkiye.

It has been said before. I see Rockhill and I watch

Manufacturing consent by manufacturing dissent.

It started to come out with Ronald Reagan as president of USA.

Excellent interview, congratulations.

Extraordinary interview. Kudos from Spain.

Cultural apparatus! Exactly. Very accurate.

The Brain is the Battlefield. 😮

World Economic Forum is a very dangerous organization

@themistersmith

18 күн бұрын

It does not have as much power is people imagine.

@casteretpollux

7 күн бұрын

It's one among several capitalist conspiracy organisations

Jyotishman - Love & solidarity from WhatsOn

The worst thing is to have nothing any imperialist power would want, as is the case for Haiti, Somalia, and Yemen.

@casteretpollux

7 күн бұрын

For a hegemon, everywhere is what they want

Great discussion ❤

Enjoying your channel, comrade!

Hobsbawm wasn't Trotskyist.

@wallybrooker1189

14 күн бұрын

Totally. Neither was E.P. Thompson.

Excellent!! ❤

remarkable 🙏

58:57 "...performing radicality through their consumer choices..." ^ That's the most succint, accurate description of the behavior of American liberals I've seen. Bravo!

best thing on the internet!!

Really interesting. What would your guest think of David Harvey and his ideas. Have you interviewed David? I couldn't see anything on your channel. I follow David's interpretation of Marx. I'm wondering what your guest thinks of his interpretation.

I loved your pushback on some of the assumptions in Rockhill's analysis. I couldn't help feel how his was more of a quibble "within" Western Marxism and disregarded the different kinds of critiques and mutations of radicalism that exist in the non-West, thanks to some of the thinkers he calls as compromised.

It would be nice if not every piece of history or sociology writing starts with a quote from Foucault

This guy's basic credibility is critically undermined when he keeps doubling down on mischaracterizing historians like Hobsbawm, Thompson and Hill as "Trotskyist" when they were in the orbit of the famously not-Trotskyist CPGB as members of the Historians Group. Even his passing reference to Marxist Humanism as "Trotskyist" is bizarre. That tendency was (also famously) a _break_ not only from Trotskyism, but from the Leninist tradition more broadly.

@ebflegg

18 күн бұрын

Yes, I guess so immersed in French theory that he got British thinkers very wrong in that respect! Surprising. Erich Fromm was no doubt the most important Marxist humanist of the Frankfurt school and the most widely read, yet in discussions on the school he tends to be largely or totally ignored. This despite the fact that he siccessfully challenged Marcuse on the latter's misinterpretation of both Marx and Freud!

@ZecZli

18 күн бұрын

Yes. That missalignment of Hobsbawm was the first thing I also spotted as factualy incorrect, simply being a trained historian, not a political philosopher. And here in former Yugoslavia, for example, Hobsbawm was never translated during our specific socialist system, until 1990 - for being regarded as an unrepented Stalinist 😊, all the way since the events in Hungariy in 1956.

Was Aleksandr Dugin also hand in glove with the CIA?

Wow, Dr. Rockhill is really astute in his observation on how the American empire function; by pretending very hard that it is not an empire. It's all virtue signalling and huge amount of projection, accusing the others first of their own crimes. I took a college course on US foreign relation history as an elective and the professor posed a question asking if the US is an empire. He spent the whole lecture on how the US cannot be defined as an empire. Looking back, I can see that his arguments are mostly semantics and purity tests, and really do not go into the core of what empires actually are and do. American intelligentsia themselves know that the US is a country of contradictions and I find a lot of them are deliberately blind to American style neocolonialism, financial colonialism, and cultural colonialism and a large part of historical contexts that put America functionally, a defacto empire. Like what Debord expounded in his Society of Spectacle, America is an empire of spectacle.

All this detailed, scholarly, well-documented analysis of the 60-70s French intellectuals such as Derrida, Foucault, et alia, and the post-everything academics who followed being the frontline troubadours of the anti-Marxist anti-Labour bourgeois movement is clearly very important. But why not take a listen to succinct (less than one paragraph) analysis of this historical situation offered by Noam Chomsky? Offered probably at the time when Prof. Rockhill was still enamored by them. Noam said (not quoting him verbatim): "The French Columnist Party was the very last one in Europe to stick with Stalin, so when the Hruschёv's '56 revelations were no longer possible to deny, the French intellectuals turned around and started TALKING NONSENSE, thus entirely abandoning the working class." And another brilliant analysis: "When I read them, my eyes glaze."

The worst offender by far is Francoix Lyotardian post modernist frameworks, which assert that ANY narrative is legitimated as long as it's fighting subjectively ascribed systems/narratives of oppression as determined by the particpant observer. Neo modernist framed activists still believe in the rigor of defending their positions, of logic and debate as a necessary mechanism of change and praxis, they believe in academic and legal rigor in asserting and defending their positions, and they believe in using existing structural systems when prudent no matter how flawed. In short the modernist activists don't believe in throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Francoix Lyotardian post modernists, might assert the bathtub shouldn't exist nor the plumbing to fill it with water. The interjection of Francoix Lyotardian post modernism into the efforts to increase awareness around the structural components of systemic racism (and class) has been disastrous for those efforts, creating endless power games and more and more sectarianism. Nothing changes materially as we gouge each others our eyes out in ever increasing ways. The coopting of intersectionality concept by post modernists from its neo marxist origins and intent -- to help black women win civil rights cases -- now means an endless array of converging indentitarian variables, both self ascribed and self evident, manifesting in an endless potential of ever atomized subjective narratives of oppressed and oppressor self determined by particpant observers. Meanwhile materially little changes for the historically marginalized as pomo "warriors" -- mostly white women grad students and Millennial and Gen Z pop cultural "activists" -- define oppression in increasing irrelevant and granular ways to no end. The effect is a gutting of necessary praxis towards meaningful change based on more modernist concepts of truth. Ask the average pomo warrior who Kimberlie Crenshaw is or who she was trying to assist with the concept of intersectionality and they have no clue. It only applies to "their" subjectively determined suffering and oppressed reality. Which is racist, classist and sexist beyond comprehension. Under Lyotardian pomo frameworks no narrative is more legitimated than the other -- especially science. Indeed science is viewed as simply another system or narrative of oppression to be subverted by any and all means necesary -- usually by reifying "science" in higher education settings creating a form of legitimated pseudoscience pretending to be science. Now science is not beyond critique but one only needs German anti-positivism to understand the reality of science being embedded deeply in structural systems of oppression. But if ANY narrative is legitimated as long as its fighting subjectively ascribed systems or narratives of oppression as determined by a particpant observer, then ANY narrative is legitimated as long as it's fighting subjectively ascribed systems or narratives of oppression. In this world view the flat earther has equal legitimation as an astrophysicist. A shamen from Papua NewGuinea the same legitimation in healing as a neurosurgeon from Cornell. A pedophile becomes a minor attracted person. Indeed ANY subjectively ascribed narrative is legitimated. Actual white supremacy. Actual anti-semitism. Anti vaccine narratives. Islamist extremism. White nationalism. Neoconservatism. ANY narrative is legitimated potentially. The result is the potential for sectarianism and violence so granular in nature nobody will escape because if ANY narrative is legitimated as long as its fighting subjectively ascribed systems of oppression determined soley by a participant observer, then everyone becomes totalitarian in their own world view fighting everyone else potentially in a brutal spiral of interpersonal destruction that will ahnihilate society as we know it. Meanwhile materially and structurally nothing changes in an increasingly sectarian world driven largely by frameworks seemingly tailor made to prevent the advancements of material conditions in any meaningful way.

@Jorenanthony

17 күн бұрын

Very articulate. Thank you.

@casteretpollux

7 күн бұрын

Interesting but Neo Marxism itself is OSS CIA promoted anti Marxist subjective idealism. All of it.

I watched "American dream" by Madonna, the reaction videos. It's interesting that nobody can see what it's about... Check it out. BTW it's not the original version the OV ends with Bush lighting up a cigar wit a granade and throwing it into the viewers, screen .

3:10 - Professional Managerial Class

Can't wait for this conversation!

Great point bringing the CAA NRC protests in colleges across India. Also noteworthy protests against Labour code, Farmer's movements, in plain terms 2019 August (Abrogation of 370 for Kashmir, India’s annexation of Kashmir) onwards back to back massacres, 370, CAA, Labour Code, Farm Bills, NEP, NIA... Parliamentary majority literally gave them the power to do anything they please with India's resources. But may be US has more oppressive technologies, India has way way more sway in terms of organised fascist militia, where open Massacres are happening on camera, in the capital of the country, as Trump visits, we are looking at it real time, as some sort of 'hunger games' dystopia being played out. It was unthinkable at the time. The fascist rulers of two countries have different strengths but none of the situations, of India’s back to back killings and incarceration of protesters from or US's literally turning encampments into warzone is less threatening from one another.

@IndiaGlobalLeft

18 күн бұрын

Correct.

I like to know what GF thinks about Habermas?

Removing the r kills me. Whyyyyyyyyy? :'O (Great interview otherwise :) )

I feel a sense of disappointment that many of these highly engaging discussions have such low viewing figures. I suppose it supports the argument that many are misinformed about the workings of the world. A racialised, imperialised manifacturing consent superstructure we acquiesce to.

I would characterise this as a knowledge warm

Where Foucault was interested in problems Rockhill seems to be driven by the project of deploying communism. Now Foucault's studies led him to conclude that all forms of political power - socialism included - are very dangerous. It is apparently this criticism of political power, a critique which does not offer a carve out for socialism, which has enraged Rockhill and motivated his efforts to demonize Foucault. Where the student of the history of ideas preserves the suppleness of mind to remain susceptible to new thought, for the polemicist its a question of shutting down debate, of 'exposing' the heretic in this case by smearing him as a 'CIA cutout' - whatever a 'cutout' is or means. Now ironically we can see already in this Foucault's grave misgivings about political power beginning to emerge. That is, someone like Rockhill, driven to arrogate and exercise political power over others, seems to be quite intolerant of criticisms directed against his own particular brand of political power, immediately provoking the resort to polemics. One could say that where Foucault's studies led him to propose the Power:Knowledge pair, in the case of political authority one always finds the Power:Polemics paring.

Interesting. Derrida, Foucault et al. as agents of the US Imperium. Who knew?

@alexissycamore8707

9 күн бұрын

Derrida was against Algerian independence

This guy is a hoot. “Imperialist core” he thinks he’s in a Star Wars episode

@janosmarothy5409

13 күн бұрын

core and periphery are basic concepts of geography used in world systems theory, dumbass en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-systems_theory

You obviously know French, please discuss Emanuel Todd.

This will be interesting!

Yes.

Hurrdutrfrrrrr

I appreciate all of what this genius has to say but just how can it be translated to the common man?

@ingehanson

18 күн бұрын

That's the problem. The common man still watches mainly TV news or Twitter and Instagram news where everything comes in brainwashing soundbites. Some seeds against Zionist Israel were sown in the Sixties but we had not internet adn other than some small groups here or there it was not mainstreamed adn the empire won. it is being mainstreamed now and the empire fights back with all its might and the Marxist Left (Biden and Co.) and the Fascist Right (Trump & Christian nationalism) have joined hands. They speak from the same neoliberal war mongering playbook. What I see so far the masses are still with the empire for different reasons, depending if they are Reg. Democrats or Republicans.

@hansfrankfurter2903

18 күн бұрын

Good point about the over intellectualization of socialist thought. Perhaps you can help in that translation?

@vivalaleta

18 күн бұрын

@@hansfrankfurter2903 I do what I can.

@thenderson8135

18 күн бұрын

You can also start to learn this language because it is your responsibility to learn the theoretical conditions of your own politics, don’t you think? It does not take too long to gain enough competence to read a lot of literature, all the resources are available of the internet.

@vivalaleta

18 күн бұрын

@@thenderson8135 It isn't I who have difficulty comprehending what is said but much of it seems immaterial. The kind of stuff scholars squabble about. Anyway I certainly don't require you to give me a personal lecture when my question wasn't about me in the first place.

Great video, great guests, great questions.

We are connecting

To be quite honest, my views on things have started to develop in the sense that the US is necessary to play a balance of power role in an increasingly multipolar world. If all capitalist countries have imperialist ambitions given time and resources, then so too is it necessary that the United States struggle to maintain its progresses in civil rights and liberties that capitalism gave, while transitioning its economy to account for the self-destructive strategic mistakes that it has made in the past to a more socialistic one, lest it slip into a feudal society as it crumbles. Tell me what folks think.

@DinoCism

16 күн бұрын

I think that sounds insane. The US doesn't maintain any balance of power, it pushes relentlessly and recklessly towards a total imbalance of power in its favor. You state the assumption that all "capitalist countries have imperialist ambitions" without evidence (making the assumption that "capitalist countries" are the only kind). The US is not "transitioning its economy to a more socialistic one" nor is any progress in "civil rights and liberties" "given" by capitalism. Every sentence in this paragraph is a total inversion of reality in a way that is so wrong it's impressive.

@ukcryptolondonbased2953

12 күн бұрын

What DinoCism said.

@JohnSmith-nz1vj

10 күн бұрын

@@DinoCism If one takes any effort to examine what I said in good faith, it is the conditions under capitalism and the development of revolutionary liberal theory emerging out of feudalism, that laid the ground work for civil rights and liberties. The socialist movement came out of the initial liberal one, namely the dissatisfaction with liberal revolutions not living up its values (highly stratified class society + elites still maintaining power to oppress people). We now have a situation where capitalism has progressed so far, that the technology and infrastructure exists so that we can have socialistic reforms to fully realize a better, more prosperous society. I am not saying struggle and militancy aren't required. But in the field of international relations, balance of power is extremely important. States like the PRC, Russia, and even a possible "socialist" America, will have differing interests, even if we may see heightened global cooperation, peace, and the possibility of change in the future. It is also my opinion, that a "socialist" America will inevitably have conservative elements. I am not making any assumptions. If one reads critically thinkers like Blanqui, you can clearly read the dissatisfaction of how things ended up for the liberal revolutions. The PRC is not socialist in the sense that if we take its own state positions, they intend to achieve it decades from now, despite having a wealthy oligarchical strata, just like Russia, and just like the US. Russia and the PRC right now, although they are not "imperialist" if we take Lenin's definition as the authority on this, we can see through out their history, chauvanistic impulses and opportunistic power plays in their foreign relations. This in my opinion, will only increase as America's strategic blunders continue. Obviously, this doesn't come close to America's unipolar moment I would say, but your skepticism about America's foreign policy not maintaining a balance of power is merely a question of who is making the calls at the moment. Even now at this current moment, state officials can adopt a more measured approach.

I like Rockhill but criticising actually existing socialism doesn't mean you're anti-marxist. There are serious flaws that need addressing and just fawning over MLs isn't going to help things. And no it's objectively incorrect to label western-Marxism as reactionary or revisionist. Have you actually read Trotsky? The guy, like most Leninists basically treated him like the second coming of Christ. The main reason why ML's are cult adjacent is because they believe the word of Lenin to be true without any actual dialectical materialist analysis. And finally if all the "actually existing socialisms" are so different, which they are, then by definition it means that some of them are doing it wrong. Also not criticising them is literally liberal as fuck like when you don't respond to something stupid a person of colour said out of second hand guilt. You guys are doing the ML version of identity politics. Finally, did you ever stop to think that the material conditions of supposedly flawed and inferior western Marxists make it the only way to wage class struggle. That's basically the same argument MLs use for doing literally anything they want.

@Golubp-br2ou

15 күн бұрын

"Criticising actually existing socialism doesn't mean anti-marxist" - agree, but when it comes only to criticizing "real socialism", it means anti-Marxism and anti-communism with American money....

@anopinionatedlaymanappears9052

15 күн бұрын

@@Golubp-br2ou Yeah because western Marxists are only criticising AES 🙄

@anopinionatedlaymanappears9052

9 күн бұрын

@@Golubp-br2ou Also it's well known that the CCP doesn't even read Marx yet there is no criticism of Chinese Marxists. Somehow only western Marxists have "misinterpreted" Marx, which is the most obvious projection I've ever heard

The stories about the Frankfurt School are well known (even Müller's book on Marcuse was published almost fifteen years ago). Horkheimer went so far as to suppress his pre-war writings because they were too left-wing for him. Horkeimer is barely read these days, and Adorno was never an author suitable for the masses anyway. The best-known German-speaking philosopher at the moment is probably Habermas, who, strangely enough, is never mentioned here, even though he made a significant contribution to the domestication of left-wing thinking. Hannah Arendt was not a leftist, and as far as Raymond Aron is concerned, hardly anyone is likely to have mistaken him for one. And to accuse Lacan's psychoanalysis of not being anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist is pretty pointless. Rockhill's benchmark seems to be the attitude towards real socialism and Lenin, but as we know, Lenin was supported by Imperial Germany ...

@ebflegg

18 күн бұрын

The omission I find most notable listening to critics of the Frankfurt school from the left and the right is Erich Fromm. His debate with Marcuse in which he exposed how M misinterpreted both Marx and Freud is never quoted! Yet in his day Fromm was probably more widely read than any of them. He also was the first to publish an English translation of Marx' Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. The Frankfurt School strayed far from its origins, but it was never monolithic. Its original project was one that could not be more vital than it is today: to understand why workers might be drawn to fascism rather than communism

@communistmole

17 күн бұрын

@@ebflegg Marcuse was influenced by Heidegger (as were Foucault, Derrida and Badiou, with whom Rockhill studied), and his knowledge of psychoanalysis in the 1930s was certainly more limited than Fromm's, who, as you rightly point out, is usually ignored when it comes to the Frankfurt School. This is probably due to the fact that Fromm is not considered an academically reputable theorist because of his popularity. His closeness to Heidegger was one of the reasons why Adorno was reserved towards Marcuse from the very beginning, and Adorno was also very skeptical of the revolutionary potential of the student movement - which put him in a very precarious situation. I don't know whether Rockhill has read more of Adorno than his teachers, but his critique seems to skirt around the fundamental problem you raise - "why workers might be drawn to fascism rather than communism" - probably because this historical experience of Horkheimer et al. makes it more difficult today to reconnect with Lenin - the 68 movement also drew extensively on Lenin, and the accusation of not being leninist enough was a standard verdict in theoretical debates. This reliance on Lenin was already ahistorical at that time, but every new generation seems to have to repeat the mistakes of the old. In addition, Adorno's critique of Heidegger, which is central to his late work, is probably much more interesting than Derrida's or Badiou's statements on the old Nazi. Apart from that, it's always a bit bizarre when university professors criticize other university professors for not being left enough ...

@ebflegg

17 күн бұрын

@@communistmole The idea that a thinker should be scorned because he was capable of writing for a popular audience is as ridiculous as dismissing Marx and Engels because they wrote the Communist Manifesto. Fromm was a polymath who more than any other thinker I know of was capable of integrating the ideas of Marx and Freud, and most accounts of his life and work focus on a limited aspect of his knowledge and contribution because they can't grasp the depth and breadth of it. He's ignored or disregarded by intellectual snobs because of his humanism, let's face it. I doubt many of them actually read Marx's Concept of Man, for instance, and still fewer understood it. Fromm's critique of how capitalism is destructive of mental health, and his exposition of Marx's concepts of alienation and reification, are not 'superficial' intellectually.... it's just pathetic how many academic Marxist intellectuals will proclaim the importance of understanding both Marx and Freud, and yet be ignorant of the insights of perhaps the most important scholar and practitioner who managed to integrate these two modes of thought.

@communistmole

16 күн бұрын

@@ebflegg There are probably other reasons why Fromm was less interesting for the 1968 movement than Reich or Marcuse. His social-psychological part in the study on authority and family was certainly the most advanced attempt to integrate Marxism and Psychoanalysis at the time, and the empirical study on workers and employees in the Weimar Republic was probably one of the reasons why the Institute was not too surprised by the victory of National Socialism. Fomm later said in an interview that Horkheimer had feared negative consequences for the Institute, because in his eyes the study was too marxist; Horkheimer's Institute policy was therefore very cautious even before the war.

@ebflegg

15 күн бұрын

@@communistmole Well he was very popular in the sixties? I think his book The Art of Loving which was written for a mass audience sold multi-millions. He believed that the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts contained essential insights of Marx, whereas crazy people like Althusser were dead set on rejecting them. Academics were not interested in talking about being loving and they did not grasp Fromm's conceot of biophilia, which I think is an important one. In addition, most Marxists get completely stuck in trying to write about 'human nature'. This was Fromm's main interest and imo greatest contribution. He believed that capitalism did not allow us to express our full capacities and that that was one of the strongest arguments for opposing it. As you suggest he had a profound understanding of the authoritarian and fascist character. I could not believe it when I consulted Norman Geras' book on Marxism and human nature, for instance, and found no mention of Fromm. It's a huge omission in my view and I think Fromm was a highly original thinker who was in many ways ahead of his time and even this time. He's dismissed as soft or a Pollyanna by arrogant academics who probably never read Anatomy of Human Destructiveness let alone understood it.

You lost me at "not supporting Ukraine." That's a case of theory tripping up practice. The west and us empire is complicit in what is happening in Ukraine, sure. Nevertheless, Putin must be defeated and Ukraine defended so as to prevent a genocide on an even larger scale from taking place there.

For a leftist to be criticized by Stalinists and Trots is the highest compliment.

@DinoCism

16 күн бұрын

For a "leftist" to be promoted by the Ford or Rockefeller Foundation is the highest insult, almost as if they're not a leftist in any meaningful sense of the word.

great work, many thanks!

Great WORK TNX

Hobsbawm wasn't a Trotskyist.