Academia is truly the last refuge of the Marxist. Only in the hallowed cloisters and ivory towers of the state-funded university system do these anaemic advocates of a failed, murderous ideology subsist, ever ready to tell us what their parasitical, hypocritical, fine wine-quaffing, servant girl-impregnating hero wrote, and then, what he must have meant by it, the literal text being so strewn with inconsistencies, absurdities and busted fallacies, that interpretation is required if the charade is to proceed.
Read one Marxist, and you’ve read them all. The same turgid prose, the same paucity of reference. You can’t perfume a pig, so the saying goes. Marxists recognise this. Their tendency to impenetrable verbiage constitutes an attempt, not merely to perfume the pig, but to drape it in fine silks and satins, dim the lights and put on some mood music. The intellectually myopic may be beguiled, but no one else is fooled. It takes more than a few clever phrases to wipe out the bloodstains of the 20th Century.
What was I thinking of? What got me started? Oh yes. An article by Ed Rooksby, one of those vile Marxist academics we thought we’d seen the back of, once Eric Hobsbawm finally did us all a favour and croaked (MGHMOHS). Rooksby attempts to liquidate two birds with one stone; attack UKIP and attack libertarians, accusing us of being ‘authoritarian’, ‘racist’, ‘fascist’ even.
Personally, I don’t take lectures on authoritarianism from a man who sprays out quotes from Marx and Lenin like a hippo spraying out shit. Because when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were murdering one third of the population of Cambodia, he wasn’t quoting Locke, was he? He wasn’t quoting Rothbard, or Mises or even Hayek. No, he was quoting your heroes, Mr Rooksby, and he was realising your heroes’ dreams of the ideal society. With Marxism, the charnel house is not incidental, it’s imperative.
Maybe this is irrelevant. Maybe it’s ad hominem. Maybe I should deal with the points Rooksby makes. You know, I was going to do that. But what would be the point? There is no shared language with a Marxist, so the salient lines of his article would need first to be translated, and once that is done, there’s nothing of substance left to deal with.
I will instead note one key difference between Marxists like Rooksby and libertarians. In a libertarian society, if people want to read books and spout quotes from murderous scum like Marx and Lenin, they can do so. They can work in universities and enjoy the good things in life provided by private enterprise, so long as other people are willing to pay voluntarily for their worthless services. But in the society imagined by Rooksby and comrades, the same liberty cannot be allowed to the libertarian, or anyone else who does not demonstrate total subjection to the dictators.
Libertarian Home 
If only academia was the last stronghold of the Marxists. Sadly the media, government (both national, local – and international) and even private business is full of people influenced by Marxist ideas.
But the open words are rarely used – the whole thing has been repackaged (as “Critical Theory” and so on), yet the basic doctrines are the same (the fundementally opposed interests of rich and poor – the need for a fundementally transformed society with an end to the large scale, and REAL [not just formal], private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange….) as is the basic objective – the destruction of what is left of civil society, and its replacement by some form of collectivism.
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‘If only academia was the last stronghold of the Marxists. Sadly the media, government (both national, local – and international) and even private business is full of people influenced by Marxist ideas.’
This must be the best piece of psuedo-intellectualism I’ve ever seen on the internet.
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Paul,
as ever, it’s virtually impossible to know what the fuck these people are talking about. It explains the appeal of Marxism amongst impressionable under-graduates. They mistake meaningless arse-gravy for profundity.
Ollie,
is that ‘psuedo-intellectualism’ in the sense that Kautsky defined it, or were you thinking more along the lines of the Gramschian meta-dialectic?
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So Ollie, let’s try and convert that ad hominem into a reasonable debate:
Media – BBC, Guardian, Independent, Observer, Channel 4 all brands in the UK associated with the left and obviously left wing. Rupert Murdoch is better, but continuously pulls a Gail Wynand and panders to the left.
Private companies – Starbucks cover their walls with propaganda about the firms “values” i.e. progressive values which put the interests of unknown Africans ahead of the interests of the company and even the customer. Sainsbury’s Supermarket – stock nothing but “Fairtrade” in some parts of the store, and always jump on the media bandwagon whenever a campaign group says “supermarkets should”. They are desperate to be the supermarket that did, and crow loudly about it when they implement every new idea. These are private companies participating in the work of political campaigns with overt political agendas. You might think they are just being cynical, but they would not get away with it if large numbers of staff (e.g. in marketing and HR) did not agree.
I’ll leave academia to Paul, except to note the National Union of Students which are allowed to dominate the social scene of every university campus in the UK.
I appreciate these examples are largely from the UK, but let’s hear from you about what is different in the US or how you believe libertarians to be mistaken?
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Ah Simon, God loves a trier! Me and Paul will be over in the corner, with our Brownings within easy reach.
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The biggest problem with that article is the shameless flipping between positive and negative freedom, as if there was no difference.
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There’s no way to respond to it without first translating it into understandable English, which it doesn’t deserve. Words like ‘liberty’ mean something completely different to a Marxist (basically, starving in a forced labour camp, with a well-fed party man pointing a rifle at your head, while singing hymns to the glorious leader is roughly what a Marxist means by the word).
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Hahaha have you ever read a Marxist paper or theorist, or are you just taking that straight from 1950s McCarthyite propaganda?
So supposedly the ‘libertarian’ can dissent, unlike the Marxist – you don’t seem to be very interested in dissenting and being uncritical from the (US) state’s official views!
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“have you ever read a Marxist paper or theorist”
Why don’t you click on the links in the post? You can gorge yourself on the shit from Rooksby. Do you really think my opinion is based on never having read a Marxist? How about Sartre’s ‘Critique of Dialectic Reason’? I’ve read that. It’s very long, and it’s bollocks. Is that Marxist enough for you, or has Sartre been purged? After all, ‘Les Mains Sales’ is a bit risqué, it might not have gone down well with the comrades.
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… I’ve even read Gramschi in the original Italian – which probably means I outrank you!
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Agreed.
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What is the point of debating with someone who deines that the Frankfurt School ideas (now called “critical theory” and so on) have a massive influence in the education system and, via the education system, in the media and so on?
As for Senator Joesph McCarthy (a man I did not mention and was really interested in agents-of-influence in government not the influence of ideas in the culture – note to morons SENATOR McCarthy was not on the HOUSE UnAmerican Activties Committee which was interested in such matters) – actually I totally disagree with Joe McCarthy.
I totally disagree with him – on Federal Housing Subsidies (and many other issues of politics).
As for the pro Stalin and pro Mao people he pointed to in the United States government. Are people really still debating that?
Surely M. Stanton Evan’s “Blacklisted by History” settles the matter. The government people (I repeat, contrary to the myths, McCarthy was not really interested in Hollywood and so on – that was the House Committee) that McCarthy pointed to were guilty, They supported powers that murdered tens of millions of human beings – and were working to bring such policies to the United States.
The information has actually been in the public domain for years (although decades too late to save McCarthy) with “Venona” and so we know these people were guilty. So what is our “dissent” person really saying?
That it is O.K. to be an employee of the United States government whilst really working for the cause of Stalin and Mao – the two largest scale mass murderers in human history. That does not seem very libertarian to me.
These people (the people that the “evil” McCarthy accused) were working to murder tens of millions of Americans and to enslave the rest (that is not nice – I do not care that they mostly came from “good” families and went to elite schools and universities). They were no different from the so called “New” Left of the 1960s – the Weathermen and so on. Accept the Weathermen did not just sit around talking about their dreams of destoring “capitalist” American (and passing on papers to the NKVD-MGB-KGB) the Weathermen actually got their own hands dirty – by planting bombs and shooting people (the last proven murder by the Weathermen occured in 1981 – the murder of a security guard during on of their robberies).
As for the “official views of the United States government” – I am not interested in those, especially now the university Frankfurt School types (or Frankfurt School influenced types) have the top jobs.
“You are just anti intellectual”.
Well I certainly hope so – for as Jack Cashill shows in “Hoodwinked” abd Paul Johnson shows in “Intellectuals” (although Cicero got there a couple of thousand years before either of them) the main fads of the “intellectual” world are total nonsense (and that is being polite).
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It should be remembered that the Marxists have murdered around 150 million human beings over the last century – see “The Black Book of Communism” (written by French socialists – not a hard drinking Irish Catholic from Wisconsin). So people who side with the Communists against a Cong hunter like McCarthy are really no better than people who side with the Nazis.
After all McCarthy was a Nazi hunter long before he became a Cong hunter (which is why the pro Nazi areas of Wisconsin, and there were some, always voted against him) and for the same reason – their working against the United States for a alien power (in this case Nazi Germany).
People who scream “witch hunt” or “vampire hunt” would have a point – if witches and vampires actually were real (which, sadly, Communists and Nazis are).
For example, if vampires were real I rather doubt that a long term vampire hunter would really look like an attractive Californian girl such as “Buffy Summers”.
More likely someone with long, and bitter, experience of real life vampire hunting – might well look like a middle aged man with a short temper and a drinking problem.
It is difficult for many people to grasp just how cynical the Marxists are.
For example the main anti-communists-are-crazy book (cited again and again in “intellectual” circles) is Theodor Adorno’s “The Authoritarian Personality”.
Surprise, surprise – it turns out that “conservatives” (i.e. people who oppose socialism and “social justice”) have “authoritarina personalities” aiming at dictatorship.
It is not the social justice supporters who are aiming at dictatorship – oh dea me no. Theodor Adorno has “scientifically proved” that there is no Communist threat – it is just a mental illness of “conservatives” for which they need therapy (perhaps in special camps …..).
But who actually was Theodor Adorno?
“He was a great Columbia Univeriity intellectual – you McCarthyite running-dog……”
Errrr.
Would he be the same Theordor Adorno who was a Franfurt School “Cultural Marxist” (P.C.) person? Please tell me it was a different Theodor Adorno.
So no connection to Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm or Herbert Marcuse (or, in a related school of Marxism, to Gramsci in Italy before WWII)?
And let us not forget Adorno’s chief henchperson……..
Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter – with his “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”.
What Hofstadter (like the faithful servant of Adorno and co that he was) was really saying was………
“People who believe that people like ME exist are paranoid – people like ME do not really exist”.
That is such a wonderful argument that only an “intellectual” could believe it.
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Having established that Marxists actually exist – although they may choose to call themselves “liberals” or “Progressives” in the United States (as they are cowardly as well as genocidal)…..
I do understand that I have left myself open to the objection that Marxism might still be correct.
That they might really be create a wonderful new society.
Very well my dear “dissent” person (odd that left always call themselves rebels – when they are actually teacher’s pets who believe everything their teachers and university academics tell them) – let us deal with that.
If you can refute Ludwig Von Mises “Socialism” and “Human Action” I wil listen to your ideas.
You can explain how your wonderful new society will work.
But please do not come back if you are going to pretend that you are not a Marxist – i.e. that you believe that “capitalists” have, as a “class”, different long term economic interests from other people.
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Paul… I have no problem earning ad revenue on the basis of Marxists coming to read the ideas of Libertarians. In fact I find it most agreeable.
Meanwhile, it’s interesting that libertarians can cite specific issues of economic calculation which opponents are invited to refute, but the whole altruistic basis of every other point of view seems to rely on “god” or “nature” thinking it’s a good idea, or, as you have explained various equally incredible ideas.
(Edit: although, many libertarians also agree with what God says. In fact the subset which is both selfish and godless is a very small subset. I was speaking for myself above)
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Yeah, what’s this, Paul? Let him come back and engage with us in building this dialectic of ours.
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Agreed – I am happy for the person to come back and try and refute “Socialism” and “Human Action” by Ludwig Von Mises.
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Don’t hold your breath! They’ve had more than half a century and still nothing but the sound of crickets.
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