President Obama Re-Elected - Page 251

On August 07 2012 11:13 sam!zdat wrote:
I understand where you are coming from, but I feel that you are operating under some very common misconceptions and ideological pitfalls. I'll try to explain what I mean.



By "we" I mean both the US and humanity in general. Nationalism is the most egregious of ideologies. I'm not particularly invested in being an "American," and the nation-state as a geopolitical entity is obsolescent anyway. The ultimate goal is global sovereignty - the world is a big integrated system, and we're fooling ourselves (or trying to justify our own exploitative hegemony) in thinking otherwise. We can't solve any of the real problems without a global political order. To be sure, this is just the endgame - we are still a ways off from this.



Well, I wouldn't call that a "serious debate." What I have in mind involves more spilling of ink than of blood. But sure, the sentiment which you are evoking here is what we call "the death of the modernist project" in western culture post-1945. It is the feeling that, as Margaret Thatcher put it, "there is no alternative." (this is, of course, not a particularly ringing endorsement of the system in itself).

But I think the idea that "last time somebody had a different idea, things went badly, so nobody should ever have a different idea ever again" is an incredibly poisonous one. I think we can learn our lessons from such fiascos and move forward - anyway, we'll have to, because American style liberal democracy is turning into a police state, and is going to collapse of its own accord (or remain stable as precisely the sort of thing you are accusing me, baselessly, of wanting to create). We need to start thinking about what we will build after that. Of course, serious scholarship of the 20th century is the starting place for this, not something to be ignored. (I would recommend reading Adorno and Horkheimer's _Dialectic of Enlightenment_ if you are interested in the topic).



I'm not sure what you take me to mean here. This is precisely my point about democracy (with the caveat that it is more about a failed educational system and ideology than "intellectual capacity").

I would like to see a system with some democratic elements, but which was much less democratic than what we have now. I don't think democracy makes any sense without direct human relationships (i.e. I think it's absurd to vote for someone you don't personally know, and obviously the scale of american democracy doesn't support that - this is why we have cartoons instead of candidates.)



So a point of terminology: Marxism is not a political or economic system (what you are thinking of is Marxism-Leninism). I am not an anarchist, marxist-leninist, nor a libertarian (and I too would choose what we have over these - thank god they're not the only possibilities!). I am however a Marxist, which is a theoretical orientation but not a political or economic theory. Marx doesn't really set out what he thinks should be done in the future (besides those in the _manifesto_, the importance of which for Marx's overall body of work is blown greatly out of proportion). What Marx primarily does is offer a critique of bourgeois political economy, a philosophy of history, and a critical methodology.

It's important to note that anybody who would want to take what Marx said should be done in the manifesto and apply it directly to the post-industrial 21st century world would be entirely missing the point of Marx's thought in the first place. You can't take the (totally half-assed) programme in the manifesto, which was written in an early industrial context, and apply it to a post-industrial world. This goes against the most fundamental tenets of Marxist theory. (edit: it's also interesting to note that the bolshevik program goes against fundamental tenets of Marxist as well, so I'm not a Marxist-Leninist BECAUSE I'm a Marxist, not in spite of it)