Harbal wrote: ↑Tue Jul 26, 2022 4:09 pm
IC knows perfectly well what Marxism is, but I'm sure that the average American has no idea what it is, other than it is a word that means something very scary. The thought of Marxism getting a foothold in the USA is beyond ridiculous, but luckily for the Right Wing, most Americans aren't smart enough to know that.
You are certainly right that the term 'Communist' (and thus Marxist) has been employed for a long time as a scare-term in American politics. So if you take, for example, the university class that opposed the war in Vietnam and examine the original motives for opposition, you will find that a Marxian perspective, or Marxist activism, was not the motive for opposing it. In the early days it was largely American Personalism. Mark Twain opposed the Philippine invasion and occupation for
similar reasons. That is, conquest and occupation cannot be squared with American Constitutional idealism. Some of the organizations that developed an oppositional stance to the war were originally *Ban the Bomb* activists. And as I say their ideological roots (for example Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day) were in Catholic Personalism not in Marxist-Lenninist political activism.
However, and I say this as a result of my own reading (I share aspects of IC's perspective and I also admire James Lindsay -- with some necessary caveats), attention must be paid to the activism of
neo-Marxists in order to understand what IC, in somewhat fanatic terms, is trying to clarify. So as an example Peter Maurin and Dorothy day would have been and were described as 'Communists' by the factions that had a need to oppose their generally humanist projects. And this points to the use of 'smear tactics' and the use of rhetorical terms to influence in just the way you describe: terms that connote something 'really scary'. Sometimes, but not always, involving misinformation and the use of false accusation.
The problem that I would draw attention to is that there is so much noise, so much improper and inaccurate use of intense rhetoric, that it is almost impossible to sort things out.
Harbal wrote: That's all just right wing propaganda, as you very well know. Marxism isn't a threat to Western democracy, the real threat is what you have just obligingly provided an example of: scaremongering misinformation. It is everywhere, and it frightens me a hell of a lot more than the prospect of Marxism.
But here you are zeroing-in on the problem. Underneath all 'propaganda positions' are dedicated and resolute actors who have specific but often hidden interests. And they use narratives, as in a war, in order to attack, discredit and in the best case defeat their enemies. But would it really be accurate to focus only on right-wing propaganda? (which I regard as completely real and existent) and not to recognize the other side of a power-dynamic? (on an opposing political and economic pole).
While it may be true that classical Marxism and Marxist-Lenninism might not be a real threat, there seems very definitely to be a threat from ideological movements that are derivative. And it is in my opinion only fair and only realistic and a coherent intellectual assertion to recognize in CRT just that modification of Marxist activism. What I wonder is why is it that this is relatively easy for me to distinguish, and therefore to make statements like this, but that you will only be or might only be able to see even what I am saying here as delivering a *propaganda-position*?
It is a curious problem then -- but what is it? Fundamental and insuperable suspicion and/or paranoia? Simply radically different existential and perceptual positions?
the real threat is what you have just obligingly provided an example of: scaremongering misinformation.
Except, if I may say, what IC is on about has to be looked at carefully. One, as a discourse that he wields as a 'fanatic' and for his own purposes, but Two as a series of interpretations about the influence of some powerful ideological and cultural (neo-Marxist) influencers (Freire, Marcuse, etc.) whose positions can be examined cooly and dispassionately.
The object then becomes sorting these two poles out. And IC is thus
exemplary of a sort of social and intellectual hysteria and emotionalism that is evident in the American political body. But this hysteria (an indefinite term I admit) is evident on all sides, in greater or lesser degrees.
