The entire premise of this is flawed. What Marx would or would not support is meaningless, he was not a prophet and Marxism is not a religion. If we based ourselves entirely on "What Would Marx Do?" we would all shower once per month, challenge people who annoy us to duels, and drink excessively.
If we based ourselves entirely on "What Would Marx Do?" we would all shower once per month, challenge people who annoy us to duels, and drink excessively.
I mean
In our communist society, we will have one pair of pants for everyone and the only thing you will be able to do with it is pawn it.
They only thing you will be able to do with the communal pants is shit in it
we would all shower once per month, challenge people who annoy us to duels, and drink excessively.
You don't?
challenge people who annoy us to duels
Oh how I wish. I'd be dropping a cracker a day by now.
So what you're saying is that if I stop showering I'll be just like Karl?
founding-fatheritis. this obsession with what a historical figure would've said about a current thing. if marx were alive, he wouldnt support hamas, he'd be 206 years old and begging us to kill him.
Actually I think you'll find that if Marx were alive today that he would be my friend and constantly say how cool and right I am.
Discovering the concept of the American Civil Religion feels like becoming aware of the Matrix. It explains so many takes that seem like off-the-wall gibbering otherwise.
Marx, in his own lifetime, supported indigenous militant movements against colonialists including supporting their right to target “civilian” colonists, such as the Indian Sepoy uprising.
If [Marx] had stuck to his ideological guns, he might very well have framed it as an assault by religious fanatics on the collective settlements of the working class.
After all, what is Hamas but a group of religious extremists, and Marx had no use for religion – it was, as he famously said, the "opiate" of the masses. On the other hand, the kibbutzim of Be'eri, Nahal Oz, Re'im, Kfar Azza, Nirim, Zikim and Holot bore the brunt of the attack. Although they are not the products of the violent revolution Marx looked forward to, in many respects they are in microcosm the kind of society he envisioned.
A recent essay by Alan Johnson in the online journal Fathom describes how the left made the transformation from class to racial warfare. Part of this, he says, is due to Islamist and postmodern/identitarian ideas, but a major element is what he calls "post-Trotsky Trotskyism." At various times these substitutes were Stalinism itself, a vast array of anti-Western governments ranging from Maoist China to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Third World liberation movements. They were all deemed "progressive" no matter what they preached or practiced in what Johnson calls an "increasingly bizarre substitutionism when it came to the identification of and support for 'objectively revolutionary' agencies." Johnson doesn't mention this, but class warfare, which was supposed to cut across racial differences, was pushed to the side. Race, ethnicity and even gender became the be-all and end-all of progressive politics.
High school essay ass writing, the opiate quote does not even make sense here, it's not like Marx thought opium was bad because it made you fight against your oppression
The author has internalized the war on drugs, and thinks “opium” is a synonym for “addictive bad thing.” I bet they didn’t even consider the possibility that it meant a sedative/painkiller with no real value judgement attached.
Yeah I mean this is not an uncommon misconception but All the more reason for this ostensible person of letters to do even a little bit of fucking reading and analysis. The opiate of the masses quote actually explains exactly why Marx WOULD have supported Hamas. This writer would get that if they weren’t intellectually lazy and deeply unserious
Islamist and postmodern/identitarian ideas
Hitler particles detected. We have gone so deep into the antisemitism we have "Islamic-Trotskyism" instead of Judeo-Bolshevism.
They really can't help themselves, can they?
right wing in France have been saying "Islamo-Gauchisme" for a while now lol
Misunderstanding the “opiate of the masses” quote isn’t surprising but goddamn I feel like that is such entry level shit to even be reaching for. Marx probably had a lot of other actually vitriolic things to say about religion and it’s practitioners if this author was not a lazy and uninteresting POS!
Marx supported the Sepoy Uprising in 1857. In this revolution, Indians of various communities and religions attempted to restore the feudal institution of the Mughal emperor. During this event, Indian revolutionaries were accused of various atrocities by the British and were brutally put down violence orders of magnitude greater.
What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it.
Most of the "Do you support HAMAS?!?!" dipshits believe Hamas is all Palestinians, and that Hamas is a racist caricature of "Islamic Terrorism". Like, you ask a random People of NATO on the street what they think Hamas is, they're going to give you a reply taken straight from racist Charlie Hebdo (may they rest in piss) comics.
I didn't know Charlie Hebdo and this attack were known globally. But worse than their cliché racist comics were all the people saying "Je suis Charlie" (I am Charlie) and having that as a profile picture on Facebookkk
i remember getting told in school how sad and tragic it was and then people doing the facebook avi thing lol it was a wild time
Without getting too deep in to it, CH has pushed race hatred for decades while hiding behind a uniquely French bullshitting about Liberté, égalité, fraternité and "just asking questions"/"it's just a prank bro!"
A few fewer French imperialist propagandists does not bring me tears.
The argument that they also mocked Christians and other religions actually highlights why their claims to be satire are bullshit; Christians in France are not subject to the same systematic racism and violence as Muslims, Algerians, and other minorities. They gleefully engage in and spread systematic violence against vulnerable minorities while hiding behind shallow "We attack everybody"
.I suppose I should specify; I don't care who attacked them. I'd be just as pleased if a gas explosion did them in or they were hit by a meteorite. I'm not particularly fussed about what brings down my enemies as long as they're dead. I don't think they "deserved it".
Yeah sorry, this was a stupid hill for me to try and die on, I did some more reading about all the stuff they had put out and I think Ram was more right about how they’ve been covered and reported in English language media than I realized
You don't need to apologize. Your statement was reasonable based on what you knew. When you were presented with a different perspective you did some investigation and came to a different understanding. That is admirable.
I mean yeah, but that's not really relevant to anything he was saying. Let's not do vaguely 'do you condemn Hamas' stuff to comrades. Maybe that's not what you intended, but that's how it reads.
It isn't what I intended, but I appreciate your benefit of the doubt.
Resistance to genocide and apartheid isn't comparable with shooting up a newspaper office. Charlie Hebdo put out cartoons mocking Jesus, the Pope, and Mohammed. I'm not defending their depiction of Mohammed but I don't think "rest in piss" to the people killed over cartoons is warranted. People should be able to mock religions without getting killed over it.
Not saying that this necessarily justifies anything, but a lot of the content put out by Charlie Hebdo was just straight up racist and could not possibly be interpreted in any other way. The idea that all they did was mock religion got heavily pushed by the media after the attack, but it simply isn't true.
They published racist comics, and I won't defend that. The thing is they weren't killed cause it was racist, they were killed because they published a depiction of Mohammed. I mean look at their depiction of Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit. If the characters depicted were brown, it would be racist too.
CW: Cartoon depiction of sex
Double CW
Show
They published racist comics, and I won't defend that.
Oh, I definitely wouldn't think you would! I just think it's worth pointing out as there are still a lot of people who aren't aware of it.
Yeah I just wanted to be abundantly clear that what I'm saying is not in anyway a defense of their racist comics, but more a condemnation of celebrating religious violence.
"rest in piss"
Unless I missed an edit, I don't see anything like that being said or implied, that's all, so it read to me as introducing the Hebdo shootings as an oddly undermining non-sequitar.
I didn't assume that that was your intention, and I'm glad it wasn't. Maybe my 'between the lines' detector is a bit oversensative today. And I didn't mean to turn this into a tangent about the shootings (quite the opposite in fact), but oops I guess.
You're completely right. I just totally blanked on it. Apologies for that. I think I'm more exhausted than I realise.
If it were a non-settler nation it happened to, I might be inclined to agree with you; but because it's the fuckin French, a million more on their soil I say. I make no excuses and I expect none to be made for the end result of crackers fucking around.
I'm like 70 percent sure the guys that shot up CH were funded by the CIA.
I go on a rant here, it gets weird
Martin Luther King's body now lacks its organs, they've been scooped out, replaced with hay and potpourri. The bones drilled at the joints so wires can be tied through, allowing articulation now his dessicated tendons are of no use. His skin is patched with leather in the places it has split, weathering and formaldehyde makes it hard to see the seams. String is looped around his limbs and head at various places, snaking up above the stage.
Jerkily he struts about the stage, dancing and parading about as he sings aloud his condemnation.
There was a crowd here once, raucous to hear how the rebels of today are of a different breed; evil, violent, uncivil, and unjust in their cause. But now it has thinned, scant collections of men in suits who stop by to cheer on their lunch break.
The marionette man looks upon his empty square, paper tumbling in the wind. He picks up his shovel, and with a sigh lopes away. There is much work to be done before his next show.
Marx for fascists is simultaneously a duplicitous Jew and an anti-Semite.
Even if you think Hamas are that islamist terrorist caricature, “We will make no excuses for the terror” was pretty straightforward.
i wonder if Marx wrote anything about the Zionist movement of his time
The modern Zionist movement was in its infancy in the last years of Marx's life. However, one of its ideological founders, Moses Hess, was one of his contemporarys, and after having a falling out, was criticized alongside many of the other Young Hegelians in Marx's hatepost The German Ideology.
