Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Marx

  • Ernst Bloch on Law and the State

    Substack latest. We humans are hopeful. Ernst Bloch was on to something. But man on his own is without reasonable hope. We are reduced to praying. The above thought occurred to me during the penumbral twilight period betwixt sleeping and waking.

  • Robert Paul Wolff (1933-2025)

    When John Silber died in September of 2012, Robert Wolff expressed his contempt for the conservative Boston University president in an ironically entitled notice, De Mortuis. Wolff's title alludes to the Latin saying de mortuis nil nisi bonum.  Literally translated: "About the dead, nothing except the good," which is to say, "Speak no evil of…

  • Kimball on Kolakowski on Marxism as a Bogus Form of Religion

    I have argued time and again that Marxism is not a religion. But many have a burning need so to misunderstand it. What the great Kolakowski says below reinforces me in the correctness of my opinion.  As for Fredric Jameson, whom Roger Kimball discusses in his Guilt of the Intellectuals, I haven't read him and…

  • R. P. Wolff on Anarchism and Marxism

    Top o' the Stack. Are they logically consistent?

  • The Lapse of Laïcité: Cause and Effect

    Substack leader. In this entry I unpack what I consider to be a brilliant insight of Finkielkraut. Alain Finkielkraut: Laicity is the solution that modern Europe found in order to escape its religious civil wars. But contemporary Europe doesn’t take religion seriously enough to know how to stick to this solution. She has exiled faith…

  • Marxism and Pelagianism

    If Pelagianism is the false belief that man can save himself without help ab extra, then Marxism is a latter-day secularized form of Pelagianism. Among the central  pillars of Marxist and indeed all leftist delusion is the conceit that human beings are fundamentally good. The blood-drenched attempts at the remaking of humanity in the image…

  • Marx and Work

    Physical work is good for the soul if you are working for yourself and have time for other things. So I have long felt a certain sympathy for a famous passage from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (ed. C. J. Arthur, New York: International Publishers, 1970, p. 53):   . . .…

  • Against Marx

    "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." (Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, #11) No, the point is to understand it, and to understand it so well that one understands that it cannot be changed in any but metaphysically inessential and unimportant ways.

  • Marx at 200: Classical versus Cultural Marxism

    Here

  • What is Cultural Marxism?

    Despite the febrile complaints of some leftists, 'cultural Marxism' is a useful term that picks out a genuine cultural phenomenon. It is no myth. Nor is it an anti-Semitic or a racist 'dog whistle.'  It is alleged by leftists  to be an anti-Semitic conservative slur because the members of the Frankfurt School were mainly Jews,…

  • How Much Socialism is There in Cultural Marxism?

    It is a mistake to confuse 'classical' Marxism with cultural Marxism. The former is characterized by the labor theory of economic value; the call for the abolition of private property; collective ownership of the means of production, i.e., socialism in the strict sense of the term; historical materialism (HISTOMAT) and dialectical materialism (DIAMAT); belief in…

  • The Essence of Cultural Marxism: No Truth, Only Power

    Rod Dreher: There it is, reader. There is the “cultural Marxism” that you hear so much about, and that so many on the left deny. It is in the Marxist principle that there is no such thing as truth; there is only power. Lenin understood this well. This is the meaning of his famous dictum, “Who, whom?” …

  • Jordan Peterson on Why Marxism is So Attractive

    A six-minute video. Peterson makes a very important point starting around 4:10 on the transmutation of Marxism. It is taking a new strategic tack, which no one really envisioned, namely, taking over mid-level bureaucracies everywhere, school boards being one sort of mid-level bureaucracy. If you voted for Hillary, you aided and abetted this destructive tendency. If…

  • Mike Valle at Big Sticks

    Mike Valle and I got together the other day at the premier cigar lounge in the East Valley, Big Sticks, to discuss Grundlagen des Marxismus-Leninismus, chapter 1, Der Philosophische Materialismus.  Mike has read the entire stomping 800+ page tome.  It is an outstanding manual of Soviet scholasticism.   Originally written in Russian and published in…

  • Michael Walzer on Religion

    At least one lefty gets religion. Actually, the preceding sentence is ambiguous.  The thought is that at least one leftist understands that religion has far deeper roots in human nature than a typical leftist analysis can expose, let alone eradicate.  The following quotation borrowed from the weblog of  Keith Burgess-Jackson: The left has always had…