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The non-democratic state: Platonism, Fascism, Theocracy, Monarchy etc.
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#14487558
Remedial classes are an excellent development. They give graduate students the opportunity to earn money and feel superior. This heals their battered egos and helps them buy large mushroom tomato and sausage pizzas covered with real Ementhal cheese.
#14487566
The Clockwork Rat wrote:I bet it'll be something Japanese. The right in the West is either suppressed or utterly lacking in creativity.

Good point.

I wonder if I should ask Rei? I thought of that already, but I was afraid of unleashing a holocaust of J-POP.
#14487580
Out of curiosity, what type of program are you involved with? I remember when I entered the faculty of Liberal Arts (huge mistake, I should have gone into the trades), everyone had to take Liberal Arts 101 (regardless of your major). It was a broad range of theories and philosophies going back to Greece, up to present day. Despite the fact that the Liberal teachers mostly just gave fascism and communism a short presentation, they were presented along with short readings. Regardless of you political leanings, it was actually helpful in developing a basic understanding of political theory.

Anyway, Red Barn, good luck with your attempts to develop this new course. I will not be attending as I reject anyone wanting to propagate fascist thought to the masses.

I will support you, only if you start a far-left wing course to propagate the mass of brainwashed neoliberal consumers. Make it a Masters Degree, just like they have in China.

(I'm only bugging you!).
#14487613
The Immortal Goon wrote:The latter is nice for the above mentioned students that don't get that there's a difference between Marxism and Fascism since it simply states that, "Fascism is the complete opposite of Marxism." It blows minds.

A bigger issue is that times evolve and the terms no longer fit the times. The Estates General may have had a right and left wing, but the French Aristocracy and commons already had scientifically minded people. So there were major political differences, but already both right and left were tending toward materialism and rationality. What makes today's left interesting is that much of what was the political left--dedicated to the rising welfare of the working classes through material improvement--has abandoned materialism but continued to embrace solidarity.

The Immortal Goon wrote:In Ireland (of course) there was something of a mixed victory in kicking Britain out. While nominally a republic, there was a big fascist movement in Ireland. Most famously the Blue Shirts, but in this case the Ailtirí na hAiséirghe. Which, in its own way, was not a completely illogical movement in Ireland (even if we don't like it).

De Valera himself confided to an American journalist in July 1940 that ‘the people were pro-German...

My mother's father, who had some Irish ancestry but was born and raised in the UK had a British Labour outlook on things, while my grandmother from County Cork had distinctly Irish views. My grandmother used to snicker about the German couple who lived next door to them in California, as they'd go on and on about the wonders of Germany. My grandmother would quip, "Well why don't you go back there?" At the dinner table, she'd find it amusing to say, "I guess they had trouble with Hitler." My grandfather would always say her name in a deep rising scolding tone.

Calling the Irish facist is to misunderstand their anti-imperial sentiment. Britain's view of the Irish was that they were unproductive and that Ireland was best suited to agriculture and animal husbandry. They did build significant shipyards at Belfast, but much of the industry was in England or Scotland while the rest of the empire pretty much provided raw materials or food to the UK. So they naturally resented the United Kingdom. The United States ironically has done the opposite: kept people from attacking the US by ensuring that the US runs deficits rather than surpluses--keeping the ruling classes of dependencies loyal to the US. What makes the war on terror interesting is that we fight non-state actors where the state actors are basically dependencies and the non-state actors are the ones in rebellion.

I think the more interesting questions are of geographical scope. Locality, ethnicity, and regionalism in juxtaposition to states, federations, and empires.

Neoliberal takes on a meaning with respect to the EU, US and China. However, America's political left and right are both internationalist, with the right significantly more materialist in its outlook. The left's non-material aspects aren't a reversion to traditional religion, but a move toward a sort of internationalist humanism, Gaia, etc. complete with industrialism as an original sin and global warming as the great lament, with environmentalism and politically correct diets as some sort of salvation.

What does it mean to call Barack Obama a leftist in a traditional sense? He doesn't give a damn about the working classes of the United States. He's much more loyal to billionaires and Central American immigrants who will serve to drive down the wages of native born working class Americans. What point is there in calling Mitt Romney a right winger? He passed RomneyCare.

In America, both major parties are internationalist and proponents of big government and big industry.

What point is there in calling the Chinese communists? They're totalitarian, and they are still materialist. Yet, they have become more nationalist, and they operate a lot like the mercantile empires of the 18th-19th Century.

Red Barn wrote:Yes, this is huge. Huge.

Yes, but you still end up missing the big change. America went from a federation (Revolution to pre-Civil War), to a nationalist country (post-Civil War to 1950s) to an internationalist country. Why the Left (bad), Right (good) element came to be is that the left in America abandoned patriotism, so the right just became jingoistic. FoxNews has held sway since just after 9/11, because they were the only news network in the United States that wrapped themselves in the American flag after 9/11. CNN, CBS and others adopted a sort of ambivalent stance to things as simple as wearing an American flag pin on their lapels--the same people who would wear yellow or pink or some other color wristband for any sort of cause they championed. The left was all about solidarity, provided it wasn't wrapped in anything pro-American. Is that anti-American or anti-nationalism, or post-nationlism? What would you call it?

Eauz wrote:Back when I attended university, I had a poli-sci course on international relations in the Americas. To my surprise, the last month of classes was spent looking at the teacher's vacation photos. Oh, yes, I really wanted to know that he laid on the beach in Cuba. All that money wasted to attend this required course.. And guess what? There was no final exam for the course, only to write a broad understanding essay.

I quit college in my early 20s for a similar reason. I went back in my mid-30s for the purpose of getting the piece of paper; although, I made myself get straight A's and graduate summa cum laude. I'm not really sure it was worth it. However, my experience was US History from 1750-1860. My professor would whip out his acoustic guitar and start singing Woodie Guthrie tunes, talk about the 1960s, Kennedy, etc. The class loved him. I thought it was pathetic and a total waste of my time (and money).

Eauz wrote:Fair enough. It's just that when I attended undergraduate uni programs, I was pretty much required to do any background work if I required additional understanding beyond the book and classroom. I found Google a life saver when it came to writing essays. Unfortunately, essays became mundane, as they were the same format each time and I found that with the use of a template essay and Google (for quotes), I could rattle off numerous essays and get the mark of A- to B as a grade. I just can't understand why in a world that is so connected to the internet, why these students can't pull up a general definition of the ideology.

One of the classes I went into thinking it would be completely pathetic was about study--getting primary sources, secondary sources, tertiary sources, etc. How to cite your sources and support your work. After I quit college in my 20s, one of the few things I had purchased that really opened my eyes was a CD set of all US Supreme Court decisions from 1789 to the 1990s. It opened my eyes to a lot of US History that still isn't taught. Anyway, one of my take aways from that class is that I could go to primary sources and usually argue a position entirely antithetical to mainstream propaganda. For example, I was able to point out to Drlee that Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, also served in the Blackhawk War and put down the Sioux Rebellion--effectively participating in enslaving the Sioux in the Midwest as he was ending slavery in the South. America hates facts like that.

The thing is that technology makes people lazier, and it has manifested itself in a sort of tribal mentality. What TIG laments in Left (bad), Right (good) is exactly the opposite when the shoe is on the other foot. Trayvon Martin was a real story only because it reinforces a tribal mentality. That's also true of the Franklin, MO case. None of these stories are watershed events in the way that Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus was a seminal event. Yet, real stories, like the de facto dissolution of Western Iraq and Eastern Syria gets relatively short shrift in the media.

When I say that US media is pure propaganda and that the US today is like the Soviet Union from the 1950s-1980s, I'm not simply saying that we're communist totalitarians, but that our state propaganda engine is in full tilt. There's actually nothing interesting about many of the stories that make headlines.

Red Barn wrote:So, lets say the Art History prof. assigns the Greenberg essay on Modernism in which he talks about the role of art under Socialism. The average undergrad will mentally recast this into mass media pablum, and assume that Greenberg is advocating some fuzzy version of Keynesianism. That's absolutely as far as they can go without a huge amount of prompting and explanation.

(Which, BTW, is another reason why Eauz's "Just Google It" idea doesn't work. Phrases like "means of production" and "surplus value" have no meaning for them, so the Wiki definition of "Socialism" simply goes in one eye and out the other, only to be immediately replaced by the usual crap about high taxes in Denmark.)

I just watched "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," for example. One of my big take aways from it is that 19th Century Indian reservations were every bit the same sort of "civilizing" help that the modern welfare state is today. Have a look at it if you get Amazon Prime or HBO. What's the difference between a welfare recipient today and a 19th Century native American on a reservation getting rations until they reach "self sufficiency"? It's the same set of lies applied to a different era.

The Immortal Goon wrote:Red Barn:

Have you tried looking at Vice's stuff for the Golden Dawn in Greece? It's poppy, but it has some good content...

I don't think it should be hard to find right wing or fascist stuff at all. You just have to be prepared for the reality that every bit of it gets trashed by the political left as well as by neoliberals. The US Tea Party, UKIP in the UK, the National Front in France, Golden Dawn in Greece, etc. International capitalism (neoliberalism) and international socialism (commies, lefties, etc.) are often two sides of the same coin. They all talk about "global" something: global warming, global governance, global transaction taxes. The US neoconservatives are out of the Trotskyist wing of communism. They are anything but conservative, but they are as interested in internationalism as the communists are.

Eauz wrote: I know everything about getting that D- and a comment about rewriting, because it happened to me as well. I took a class and wrote an essay in my first year and got the mark back telling me I didn't understand the course content and I would need to rewrite the essay. Did I go crying to the head of the department? No, that would have been a disaster. Did I go get help available at the university (tutors, essay preps, etc.)? Yes, because that's responsibility on the student's side. Did I end up getting a B- as the final mark on the essay? Yes.

I found that getting a good grade was nothing more than understanding the political bias of the professor, which you can usually figure out by asking for help at his or her office and spying on their bookshelves. That's what left me totally disillusioned in my 20s. By my 30s, getting straight A's was a matter of pride and a matter of applying myself as rigorously as possible, but I couldn't care less what they thought of me.

Red Barn wrote:I admire this attitude, of course, but it's becoming less and less common. Students now see themselves primarily as consumers, while administrators see them primarily as walking dollar signs the university can ill afford to lose.

Sad but true.

Very true. In between dropping out of college and going back, I worked in eProcurement at a start-up focused on higher ed. So my job was talking to purchasing managers at universities, and I learned first hand how they operated as corporations. They are very much corporations. Harvard is a brand. Big name schools have a student body that is at least one of already pretty well accomplished before they get there and very rich. The value of a Harvard, Standford, University of Chicago, or UPenn degree isn't the education, but the alumni association.

Red Barn wrote:Momentarily gratifying as it might be to hand that whiny little pissant his steaming pile of F, it really doesn't do anyone any good to leave one more cretin wandering around thinking Glenn Beck is a scholar and Obama is a Communist.

Deconstructing Glenn Beck then shouldn't be the primary goal, because he's insignificant anyway. A more interesting question is, "If Barack Obama supports labor unions, why does he also support amnesty for illegal aliens when labor participation is at its lowest point in 35 years?" If you tie in the labor unions and their IWW roots with the wage depression of open borders, there's a real and interesting question there. Your job isn't to teach them what to think, but how to think. Does Obama really champion the cause of labor union workers seeking better wages? If so, why does he tolerate illegal immigration? If labor unions want higher wages, why do they support Barack Obama? Why would they support the US government with its major parties today at all? Part of that is a spoils system, because government employees are the biggest unionized workforce in the country. So the difference between Scott Walker and Barack Obama is a lot more interesting than the difference between George W. Bush and Barack Obama. However, to note that, you have to be prepared to present a view of George W. Bush that isn't a cowboy warhawk. If George W. Bush is a conservative, why did he pass the largest expansion of the welfare state with Medicare Part D? Republicans oppose it when it is proposed by Al Gore and the suffering of his imaginary friend that eats dog food, but George W. Bush--the compassionate conservative--could get that enacted.

See, the trick in American politics is to make you think that Bush is a conservative (he's not) and to think that Obama is a communist (he's not). They're both shitheads in a number of respects, but they serve the same master: international capitalism. Bush can allow the TSA and a whole new bureau of useless unionized government employees, while Obama drives down the wages of the working class, because these guys are two sides of the same coin. Glenn Beck stirs the emotions of dumb people on the right just as MSNBC folks do for dumb people on the left.

Red Barn wrote:You can't make it personal. The goal really is to get them to know this stuff, even if you occasionally feel like throttling them - or yourself - in the process.

You cannot endorse a side though, and that's a huge problem with the university environment. In the United States, they very often side with America's Democratic party, oppose its Republican party, and ignore most everyone else in the political sphere unless it involves group identity politics.

Red Barn wrote:I wonder if I should ask Rei? I thought of that already, but I was afraid of unleashing a holocaust of J-POP.

What about a state like Singapore? They cane people, hang heroin traffickers, etc. They are plenty nationalist and authoritarian.
#14487728
Eauz wrote:Out of curiosity, what type of program are you involved with?

I'm in an interdisciplinary, theory-based Art department - it's fairly innovative, actually - but the Political Ideas class is meant to serve a more general Arts and Humanities audience. It won't have prerequisites, so it might include anybody.

Eauz wrote:I will support you, only if you start a far-left wing course to propagate the mass of brainwashed neoliberal consumers.

My critical position is Marxian (Frankfurt School with a few teeth, if you can picture that) and the bulk of my classes are in the visual arts, so yeah: we talk about consumer capitalism a lot. You can't really say anything about visual culture otherwise.



Blackjack wrote:You cannot endorse a side though, and that's a huge problem with the university environment. In the United States, they very often side with America's Democratic party, oppose its Republican party, and ignore most everyone else in the political sphere unless it involves group identity politics.

Actually, I don't plan to talk about US party politics much at all, except to point out that this is a battle primarily of rhetoric and symbology, pretending to be a genuine schism within Liberalism.

This might interest you, though: students never have any objection to my Marxian approach, nor to my own ideological views, but they do require reassurance that I'm strictly "nonpartisan" in terms of US electoral politics. Isn't that something? Even in classes where the focus is on very broad philosophical/theoretical/aesthetic issues, these kids need to be told that "Marxian theory" posits no endorsement of either Democrats or Republicans!

But this is what happens when Political Philosophy is no longer recognized as a coherent academic subject area, and "Political Science" takes its place. The "educated" are now no more sophisticated about the universe of political ideas than are high school drop outs. It's a tragedy, really, and a complete subversion of what the university ought to stand for.
#14487734
Red Barn wrote:This might interest you, though: students never have any objection to my Marxian approach, nor to my own ideological views, but they do require reassurance that I'm strictly "nonpartisan" in terms of US electoral politics. Isn't that something?

This isn't surprising at all. The United States spent a lot of time as an almost 1 party state from the 1930s to the 1980s. I'm working on a technology paper and reviewing some software architecture, and I wanted to draw upon an old (from computer theory) but well worn quote from David Wheeler: "All computing problems can be solved by adding a layer of indirection, except of course the problem of too many layers of indirection." The problem with the regulatory state is that it progresses to a state of sclerosis, because the regulations become too complex. Abstraction is the opposite tendency: to over simplify. Cubism is a classic example in art. The US under Reagan was really just simplifying by repealing, deregulating and cutting taxes. It actually isn't as right wing as you might think.

Red Barn wrote:But this is what happens when Political Philosophy is no longer recognized as a coherent academic subject area, and "Political Science" takes its place. The "educated" are now no more sophisticated about the universe of political ideas than are high school drop outs. It's a tragedy, really, and a complete subversion of what the university ought to stand for.

Sure, but there are really simple political philosophies that challenge liberalism--ones that liberalism is constantly at war with: racism and sexism are the big ones and sexual orientation is big with them too. Move out of Western political thought and talk about the castes of India, for example, and you might be able to open some eyes. In the US though, it's highly political. Allan Bloom more or less called it in "The Closing of the American Mind." It's been closed for awhile now.

Does your class touch on that in the modern context of art, or popular culture?

I mean in many respects art and music seem pretty dead. The recent thread on Nicki Minaj's new tune "Only", if it can be called that, is appallingly bad musically.

Nicki Minaj - Only (Lyric) ft. Drake, Lil Wayne, Chris Brown

It's principal "controversy" if it can be called that is an animated and black homage to the Nazi aesthetic without using a swastika or mentioning anything from Nazi ideology. If anything, the banality and sexual hedonism of the video is counter even to the fairly rudimentary Nazi aesthetic. The video was apparently not her work, but that of an ethnically Jewish producer. The song is essentially a black exclusivist sentiment, "real niggas only." So it begs the question if the producer deliberately introduced a Nazi theme into it as a critique of the artist, and the artist wasn't keen enough to realize that it was criticism of the sentiments of the song.

What's the scope of the class though? Do you ask for their thoughts on Jacques Louis David's "The Oath of the Horatii" and they are simply incapable of understanding monarchy versus a Republic; loyalty to the King versus loyalty to the state or loyalty to the family? I mean if you compare him to someone born post revolution like Eugene Delcroix, you get very different artistic expression; one that is decidedly more emotional and romantic, and much less studied as to technique. Yet, this trend seemed to continue. I think you could look at impressionism in that vein, but where it goes beyond--with perhaps an exception for surrealism--is toward less detail, to more abstract.

Whereas, if you study progress in the arts from primitive societies forward--the Venus of Willendorf--to the height of Greek art--the Riace Bronzes. Even classical Greek art deviates to contraposto and anatomically impossible ideals by the time the Riace Bronzes were made.

The Frankfurt school seems to adopt that minimalist abstract ideal of form following function, and as limited as possible in terms of form.

There was a brief revival of Art Nouveau and Art Deco in the late 1980s and early 1990s when computer illustration programs like Adobe Illustrator became popular, as they were much more effective at vector art than bit map applications of their time. Art Deco was an industrial aesthetic that more or less reflected the ideals of industrial society. However, the Bauhaus movement seemed ultimately to subvert art to a utilitarian role.
#14487746
That Nicki Minaj thing deserves an entire class unto itself. What a semiotic goldmine!

Thanks so much for that.

Blackjack wrote:The Frankfurt school seems to adopt that minimalist abstract ideal of form following function, and as limited as possible in terms of form.

Actually, the term "Frankfurt School" refers to a Marxian tradition of social criticism - the original instance of "Critical Theory" as an organized discipline. In my own classes, it's regularly presented as oppositional to the current academic default font, which is basically prettified Poststructuralism.

I'm very happy to say that the kiddos are generally quite receptive to this, since most of them were dead bored with the Poststructuralist worldview years before they ever even heard the word for it. (In this they're way ahead of many of their teachers - that is, my peers - and that's quite exciting for me.)

Blackjack wrote:What's the scope of the class though?

My main goal, really, is just to familiarize students with the kinds of broad political ideas that have informed art - both "high" and "popular" - through the Modernist and Postmodernist periods. This is where incoming students are really lacking.

Deciding on the most compelling and interesting examples of how these ideas play out in aesthetic and cultural terms is the tricky part - hence my questions here.
#15124552
I keep coming back to this thread and it arks up my antiAmerican prejudice thinking how dumb they are politically. But then I don’t sense much difference in Australia other than a somewhat strong but weakening labour tradition.
#15124559
Wellsy wrote:I keep coming back to this thread and it arks up my antiAmerican prejudice thinking how dumb they are politically. But then I don’t sense much difference in Australia other than a somewhat strong but weakening labour tradition.


To be fair, the labour tradition was never particularly strong, all things considered. Have you read Lenin's take on the situation? I must say, I was never much of a fan of Lenin, but I find it very accurate. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... jun/13.htm
#15124566
Local Localist wrote:To be fair, the labour tradition was never particularly strong, all things considered. Have you read Lenin's take on the situation? I must say, I was never much of a fan of Lenin, but I find it very accurate. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... jun/13.htm

I find his assessment agreeable in that the labour party does seem mostly centrist and the union leaders the most moderate sort.
I think social democracy characterizes much of Australias left, often based on appeals to a shared whiteness that the nation was founded on. Seems social democracy often conforms homogenity.

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