>>22312>I found this book Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson and his thesis runs as following. Marxism and European socialism, instead of being an ideology of the proletariat, was a petty bourgeois ideology born out of a ressentiment for the bourgeoisie and the belief that the proletariat could be better managed.This has a kernel of truth (that popular theorists of socialism were not from poor backgrounds - though that really makes sense considering that's what you'd expect of a learned person at a time when universal literacy wasn't a thing) but it makes no sense on closer inspection. How does theorizing the democratic self-management of the proletariat help the petite-bourgeoisie manage the proletariat? How is a political position that openly advocates the expropriation of all productive property a position of the petite-bourgeoisie, and which was specifically against small ownership as the solution to the social questions of their times, an ideology representative of the interests of the petite-bourgeoisie? It's not.
>Leftists falsely understood capitalism as a rationalizing force which would create a homogenous proletariat, while in truth capitalism exacerbates racial differences to manage pops more efficiently. Leftists mistake nationalism and racism as essentially reactionary, while in truth it has always played a huge and sometimes preponderant part in history. Is the first claim even true? The way that racial antagonisms were stoked to undermine class unity has been acknowledged forever by socialists in the labor movement. The second claim is basically just the standard idpol claim, which has two sides: one, it's talking about "history" and not only the history of capitalist society, and so it's engaging in ahistorical analysis that doesn't address why national antagonisms existed in the past and compare that to why and how national antagonisms are reproduced in the present - they are very different. E.g. it's a huge difference to enslave an external population because a large part of production in your society depends on slave labor (which is high turnover and demands constant raids on external communities) and create national hostility and war this way, and the national antagonisms between colonizer and colonized nations in a global capitalist system which relies primarily on waged labor and secondarily on slave/coerced labor. But it also is mistaken if it thinks that identity struggles are able to hold their ground without challenging capitalist rule, since patriarchy, racism/nationalism, etc. are not just vestigial, irrational forms of oppression but actually complement capitalist production, reproduction, and social control, and so the active reproduction of these oppressions is sought by at least portions of the ruling class. Also the national movements within capitalism have won de jure in many cases but de facto oppression was never ended, and inequality, brutality, and poverty remain. National oppression is only relieved for the bourgeoisie.
>Second Kolakowski's book Main Currents of Marxism makes two important claims. Terms like "materialism" and "dialectics" are not well defined leading to ambiguity and confusion
Is this true at all? Materialism is pretty much just the view that the observable world precedes consciousness, and has objective reality outside of our subjective perception of it. Maybe this idea is so ubiquitous today that it just seems silly to incorporate it as the philosophical basis of political theory, and Kolakowski wants it to be more complicated than it is? For dialectics, yes there are many definitions available but for M&E they are coming from the hegelian tradition, so it's in the sense that Hegel uses it, and also Engels lays out the main 'laws' of dialectics in Anti-Duhring so there shouldn't be confusion there, even tho yes it's inherently confusing how an idealist theory is turned into a materialist one but the name is maintained.
>This is why Lenin and the Russian Marxists misinterpreted Marx's materialism as an ontology of matterThis makes no sense, because matter was just the current way physical science saw the world. Later on we got the "everything is energy". The fact that 100 years ago materialists were using the scientific language of their day doesn't equate to that language being the defining characteristic of the philosophy, which is a broader view about the independent objectivity of reality from human subjectivity.
>Second leftist materialism is determinstic and offers a telological history in which outcomes are predeterminedThis is kind of funny because determinism says "things happen based on their configuration, forces, movement, etc. and there is no room for randomness or miracles in this", which puts time going forward, whereas a telological view posits the ends as inevitable. These only line up when we look at the past, but looking at the future these are opposite stances. Also this argument is an argument against materialism as a whole, because it implicitly claims that we can't understand the world enough to make predictions of the future. Why can the world not be known through study? This line of thought is the domain of idealists and 'skeptics'. Making predictions about the future is not 'denying free will'. Men make their own history, but not as they please. We aren't imbued with divine agency that allows us to miraculously navigate outside the confines of causality, and in that sense we are pre-determined beings, but at the same time we act with a sense of agency except when specifically denied free initiative usually by other humans. What a trashy idealist 'argument' based on existential anxiety.
>I want bring out Carl Schmitt here for all the leftcoms and anarchists. If you have a radically open society you can easily get invaded by an influx of new people. /pol/ stormfaggot colonization of online spaces proves that anarchic environments are highly vulnerable to this type of invasion or the emergence of extremism within.
Online "spaces" involve no actual space, so they can't be good allegories for physical space imo. In real societies, human people need to work, eat, and live. Where do they live? Who owns the land? What economy is there? A sudden influx of people means refugee camps with deep poverty, not simply a demographic shift in the given society. It creates a two-tiered society unless special efforts are made towards integration and rapid construction and expansion of the economy to fit these people and accommodate their needs. Also online "communities" are not real communities, they are sites of recreation and communication, but don't structure the daily lives or all round social existence of their participants. Real communities exert an influence back on their members via social meaning-making, so the inclusion of people with foreign beliefs would not necessarily simply change or corrupt the community. The community would also change them. This may result in a mixing, or in assimilation of the small amount of new members from outside, or of the minoritization of the previously predominant culture in the case of a large influx that outnumbers the old group and massively grows the society, but in that case we can see how minority cultures keep their ways alive and so again there's no reason to fear disintegration because of new people. The whole idea is based on fake "communities" that can't exert much influence on their members, in digital "spaces" that actually require no space, and to which economy is totally foreign.