Socialdem. 21st Century

That has always been the outstanding fault of the far Marxist left, and, I am afraid, it is even quite prevalent on the Postmodernist left and more mainstream left. It has also been taken to some ludicrous extremes.But it is ridiculous. In many ways, it is the mirror image of Rothbardian or Misesian libertarians who blame virtually everything on “socialism.”One could write a lot about this issue, but let me take just two examples: (1) global warming and (2) imperialism.Global Warming How...

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) passed away in 2011, and he remains one of those iconoclast leftists, who, generally speaking, is either hated or loved. Worse still, it is widely believed that he went over to the right and deserted the left, and there are plenty of left-wing people who loath him for that.Quite simply, he was a complex intellectual and thinker. There was a good, a bad, and an ugly Hitch. He was capable of holding defensible and right opinions on some issues, and shamefully...

It is usually very hard to get excited about the left-wing politicians anywhere in the West these days, but the rise of the US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is quite refreshing.It is predictable that all the usual right-wing halfwits are screaming the accusation of “socialism” against Sanders – as if this means Marxism or Communism or a total command economy. It’s nonsense, of course.Bernie is just a good old fashioned European social democrat in American form, as we can see in this...

The cry that “Marx was not responsible for the crimes of Soviet communism” is Marxist apologetics at its worst: an attempt to completely exonerate Marx from the horrors of 20th century communism.It is also curious that many Marxists claim that Soviet communism was some “betrayal” of Marx and Engel’s vision of communism, but then at the same time go on to engage in the most disgraceful apologetics for Soviet communism.However, that is not my purpose here. The question is: to what extent was...

An interesting interview here with Yanis Varoufakis.[embedded content]Now although I do admire Varoufakis, especially for his excellent attack on Postmodernism described here, I see some very troubling points here about Marxism.Varoufakis says that Marxism is libertarian in some sense, and it is true that Marxism’s ultimate aim was a stateless, utopian paradise. But (as far as I can see) that is not the sense in which Varoufakis calls himself a “libertarian.” For Varoufakis goes on to say...

Imagine a man with whom you were having a conversation who got up and said this: “There is no such thing as spoken human communication or spoken human language.” The very act of asserting that statement while others listen and understand its content utterly refutes what is being asserted: empirically, it is blatantly self-refuting.Now consider the core belief of Postmodernism: Proposition (1): there is no such thing as objective truth. This is self-refuting nonsense as well.If one...

One of the core beliefs of Postmodernism is this: Proposition (1): there is no such thing as objective truth; all “truths” are culturally relative. If one believes that there are no objective truths, then it follows that nothing you can say is objectively true, not even the statement that “there are no objective truths.” What sort of statement, then, is Proposition (1) if it is not objectively true? Is it rhetorical hot air? Is it akin to fictitious statements in poetry or novels? If not,...

What is wrong with the Left today? In my view, a big problem is the ideology called Postmodernism.Chomsky in the video below gives us some fascinating insights into the origins of French Poststructuralism – and also into its modern offshoot Postmodernism.Remember he is talking about the origin of French Poststructuralism in the early 1970s.[embedded content]Chomsky understood the origins of Poststructuralism very well: many of the big French Poststructuralists – like Roland Barthes...

And I mean the anti-capitalist mentality of the Austrian libertarian cult and certainly in its Rothbardian form, because – make no mistake – these people are anti-capitalist in their core ideological beliefs, no matter how much we have to hear of their blustering nonsense.Let us take the crucial points which make Austrian libertarianism anti-capitalist: (1) Opposition to fractional reserve banking Rothbardians and many other Austrian libertarians oppose even private capitalist fractional...

The talk below by Steve Keen is the first lecture in his introductory subject “Becoming an Economist” at Kingston University (in the UK), though personally I wish he had not shown that stupid rap video about Keynes and Hayek, which shows very little except that the tiresome libertarians who made it do not understand Keynes’ thought.[embedded content]