Part 1 here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6231827
I left it off just when it was getting into the juicy bone of patsocism, softly suggesting that recognizing a settler class in present-day USA is a deviation of Marxism and part of the 'purity fetish' that Carlos talks so much about.
As way of apology, please accept this picture of a series of webinars Carlos of MWM is holding soon with tickets starting at 80$:
Anyway, let's get into the rest of chapter 2 and, hopefully, chapter 3 as well which is all about China.
This is what Carlos says of the 'settler' class, which he refutes exists:
And this is what footnote 82 is (again a whole subchapter is relegated to a footnote, please have an editor look at your books before you publish them):
To make his point, Carlos reduces decolonial Marxism to Sakai -- not Fanon, Rodney, or even Césaire or Nick Estes. You are also supposed to just believe him when he says, in a footnote, that Sakai was connected to the State Dept. Certainly Sakai enjoys some popularity in online marxist circles and certainly he is not above criticism. But, his popularity is precisely online; or at least Carlos has not made any attempt to connect Sakai to present real life movements (or any movement really; his entire argument is "some people like him"). Someone said on the last thread this read like a reddit post, and it is. And it's fine. But don't make it into a book that you sell for money!
And once again I have to ask why they imagine Sakai speaks to Brazilians which begs even more questions as to why they chose to have a Portuguese edition of this book published. It makes no sense.
The rest of this section is devoted to criticizing Marcuse's position on the issue, again focusing on a single theorist at a time, and as I'm not familiar about Marcuse's thought, I can't really comment on it. This is the same shortcoming of the book as I mentioned in the previous post, that the author expects you to already be familiar with the people he talks about. Lenin used to quote the subjects of his critiques at length, faithfully conveying their theories. Carlos of MWM just says "trust me bro".
The weirdness of this book is that certainly he talks about Adorno, Marcuse, Sakai, Žižek and I'm sure plenty of other theorists he finds problems with, but... he places all of them under the umbrella term of 'western marxist', hence why I said in the previous post that he needs to define his terms properly before getting into the subject matter. I don't know a single person that is a proponent of both Adorno and Marcuse at the same time. Maybe Carlos knows some, but they seem a very rare group. In the particular, he decries entire movements based on one theorist of that movement!
There is a kinda funny part further down from the last screenshot:
It is no coincidence that you will only find ‘Marxists’ who are more critical of socialism than capitalism within the academy and media. The hegemonic order creates, finances, and proliferates controlled counter-hegemonic institutions, movements, and forces that channel popular discontent into areas which fail to substantially challenge the existing order. The ‘Marxist’ authors hailed in Western academies are but the agents through which this process of controlled counter-hegemony concretizes.
When Carlos himself is part of the academia he criticizes, but doesn't address this (he is a PhD candidate, and maybe has earned it by now).
He is certainly correct to criticize Zizek here, but again... who is this for? Who seriously listens to Zizek and bases their view of the world on him? Basically my problem with this book at this point is that it's a screed; it's not a guide to action or theory. It informs no practice; it's an exercise in intellectual masturbation, showing off how much he knows and how much he's read.
I can certainly see this book being recommended to people to 'deprogram' them from their defeatist eurocom positions, but... I don't think it will really help them. There is matter in this book, but it's so superficial that it doesn't really help. It talks about everything and thus nothing.
The above screenshot continues on this page:
Taking an entire aside to talk about the 2014 Maidan coup. This is fine, I've talked about the coup as well. But you're preaching to the choir. The people that are going to pick up this book already think Zizek is a clown, you don't have to convince them. At least that's what I think.
This is the part where he fanboys over Parenti and Losurdo, but doesn't tell you to read them directly, but instead rely on his interpretation. It's not completely wrong as a method, it's just... strange. Like he's trying to make an argument of authority. The section, which we have just entered, is titled Lessons from Parenti and Losurdo: Left-Anticommunism and the Fetish for Defeat.
There is an interesting argument to be made about CIA involvement in COINTEL operations. It's been going on for decades. And it's important to be aware of it. But this is not the topic of this book -- remember, the book is The crisis of western marxism. The CIA is important as a plot device insofar as it allows the author to dismiss the arguments of his opponents with a handwave. "Oh, you think we shouldn't support the USSR? Well guess who else thought this. The CIA! That's right: checkmate, commie". It's not serious, despite all the name-dropping and the lengthy list of citations.
There is an argument post-modernists and left-communists (Adorno etc) make today, that even if the Frankfurt school was funded by the CIA, it doesn't diminish their arguments. And this is not a wrong argument to make. If you aim to write a book pulling on your academic background, then engage with the arguments, not with their connections. In the last thread, we looked at a screenshot that stated:
As Horkheimer stated in 1967, “in America, when it is necessary to conduct a war… it is not so much a question of the defense of the homeland, but it is essentially a matter of the defense of the constitution, the defense of the rights of man.”[61: Wolfgang raushaar, ed., Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung: Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946-1995, Vol. I: Chronik (Hamburg: Rogner & Bernhard GmbH & Co. Verlags KG, 1998), 252-3. Quoted from Rockhill, “The CIA and the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism.”]
But some people looked into it, and found that Horkheimer likely never said this. On Adorno, I counted each instance -- he names him 11 times throughout the book (all at the beginning of chapter 2) and gives only 4 examples of his connections and things he said. He never once delved into Adorno's theories, i.e. not criticizing him on the basis of unsound theory (theory that cannot be put into practice or theory that leads to wrong practice), but on grounds of his CIA connections.
Sorry for the detour. Going back to our chapter -- the first subsection of chapter 2, this made me laugh:
Dialectics is when nuance. And he of course quotes Parenti again, which just makes me want to read him directly instead of relying on this book.
Carlos himself is not doing a nuanced (i.e. dialectical) reading of western marxism's purity fetish here. He links it to CIA involvement, professing that this is enough to make the reader nod their head in complete understanding, and no more words need to be said. He doesn't look at the contradictions of what he calls western marxists and why they would arrive to the conclusion of purity testing materially. He doesn't even engage with the idea that the purity fetish he talks so much about is wrong in the first place: he holds that to be self-evident.
He then quotes Losurdo at length after he's quoted Parenti ad nauseam and thus ends Lessons from Parenti and Losurdo: Left-Anticommunism and the Fetish for Defeat
I can't seem to be able to upload more pictures and I think this post was much more lengthy, so we'll look at the last two sections of chapter 2 next time, and hopefully be able to get into chapter 3 which talks about China because I really, really want to see what he says there. Also excited for the part where he praises the american revolution lol