DJP
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“Someone on X….”
Be mindful of how much time and energy you give to these platforms. They are not neutral means of communication but capitalist enterprises that exist for the purpose of generating advertising revenue. And they do that by mining their users data, and manipulating them to spend as much time on the platform as possible.
By chance, this came up in my podcast stream:
It mentions Pannekoek’s “Marxism and Psychology” which examines the relationship between Marxism and Freudianism. https://aaap.be/Pages/Pannekoek-en-1938-Marxism-And-Psychology.html
Also, my supervisor for the last 4 years was a respected Adorno scholar. I still don’t know that much about Adorno but this review details the relation between Adorno and the Holocaust. Adorno refers to it as providing a new categorical imperative – we should arrange our actions so that the holocaust doesn’t happen again. No mention of the “death instinct”
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/adorno-s-practical-philosophy-living-less-wrongly/
“Here’s the opposite extreme”
And the happy middle is the local self-organisation of those who would have been affected by the intrusions. I think in the contemporary age of social-media networking this was the predominant factor that got people out into the streets. Leaderless street demonstrations are a common thing now, but are not sufficient to bring about socialism of course.
Yes, that article does read like someone bragging about how big and strong they and their mates are.
But visible displays of solidarity, such as those that happened on Wednesday, are an important factor in demonstrating that the racist far-right are not the “silent majority” and that the wider community will come out in defence of themselves and minorities.
After all, we shouldn’t imagine that a rising socialist movement wouldn’t face organised intimidation from reactionaries. Working-class community solidarity is something that should be lauded.
“I think the reason there was such a large turnout of anti fascist demonstrators last night was due to trade union organisation.”
The Trade Unions certainly did play an organisational role, and liaised with the police, but I think the majority of people that turned up to these things did so independently of them. Organic social media sharing seems to be the predominate factor these days.
I’m not sure if the above was a response to my comment about “sharing” the critisticuffs text.
To be clear I meant worth sharing here on this forum with the people here.
If anyone fancies printing some out to hand out at the next far right pogrom or invasion of Gregg’s – well I guess you could, but that doesn’t mean you should!
Perhaps worth sharing this for some straight thinking about immigration and capitalism.
Something else that is interesting here is that some of the initial spread of misinformation was probably nothing to do with any ideology, but automatically generated by bot accounts with the aim of generating clicks and so advertising revenue.
“I think it’s more anti-Muslim than white supremacist.”
I think that’s true for the general mood. But there are elements expressing a more generalised racism, including real neo-nazi elements.
It would also be a catastrophic mistake to think that these disturbances are a reflection of the general mood in the UK. As articles like this one point out:
“[…]the Ipsos survey showed people are generally more positive about the impact of immigration than not, although that gap has tightened since 2022 too.
As for longer term attitudes, the respected European Social Survey found that in 2022, external most people in the UK thought immigration had been good for the economy and the country’s cultural life. A clear majority said it had made Britain a better place to live.
Separate research by the World Values Survey, external found the UK the least likely country to agree that immigration causes crime or unemployment. Just 5% of Brits said they’d be unhappy to have an immigrant for a neighbour, one of the lowest proportions found anywhere.”
Why not call a spade a spade? Why not call it far-right and white supremacist terrorism? This is what it is, with some opportunist elements being dragged along.
Of course, the scapegoating of migrants and minority groups is nothing new but what is (relatively) new is how such discourse was made mainstream by the previous governments, and the nebulous way in which these events are being organised. Due to the invention of social media, these aren’t being centrally driven by a specific organisation or individual but are coming out of networks of people connected by an adherence to a vague set of ideas. This book is a couple of years old now but is a very good explanation of the current situation:
https://www.dogsection.org/product/post-internet-far-right
Marx to Vogt, 1870: “Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. […]
This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_04_09.htm
“I think we can dispense with the criticism of a theory being ‘unscientific’ thus barring it from any serious consideration.”
Regardless of if you want to call something ‘scientific’ or not, I still think it makes sense to subject our cherished views to some kind of logical and empirical standards.
It seems a grave mistake to go in the opposite direction – to bend our standards so that they fit with a cherished view.
We are all prone to mislead ourselves. It is out of a kind of reflexive skepticism that was aware of this fact that modern science arose.
(PS after ten or more years of this forum, I don’t know why some people think anything useful is going to come out of endless feeding the pigeons)
How would Freud’s theory of the unconscious give you a causal explanation of the Holocaust?
Surely what needs to be explained is why it happened when it did, and why its victims were who they were. I don’t think any a-historical explanation is going to get you very far in that.
The video is someone complaining about when fictional works (Netflix series etc) based on historical events do not follow the currently accepted historical narrative. But why should they? They are works of fiction, not reflections on the current state of historical research.
