Overthrow

"...it was demonstrated that one can live quite well here even without money. Would that be a perspective for critics of money if it became common practice?" I can't take the question very seriously. "...live quite well" by spending all day rummaging through dumpsters – here, no less, illegally, thus at the cost of punishment – frequenting food banks, asking friends and acquaintances for shelter, looking for discarded clothing at the Red Cross, etc. So, the "good life" is supposed to be spent entirely organizing the most basic necessities of life – food, drink, clothing, housing – without money. Don't you still have something planned for your life when food, clothing, and housing are somehow secured? Don't you have interests and desires whose fulfillment falls by the wayside when life without money inevitably fills your entire day. To voluntarily choose to live without money – the worst kind of poverty that the local economy has in store for wa...

  So, there is a misunderstanding here. I am looking at what it means when states guarantee their subjects freedom, rights, and equality in reality. Our claim is that in this society indeed particular forms of freedom and equality are realised, which cannot be brushed aside. This is different than most leftists who insist that these "ideals" simply are not truly realized, and only Socialism would be the real deal, would finally realize the ideals of the bourgeois French revolution. Instead, I'm arguing that these (freedom, equality, democracy, rights) are the forms in which (economic) exploitation and (political) domination happen today. The critique of domination and exploitation must therefore take on and criticize this freedom and equality, not ignore them and posit an ideal outside of them. So, a word of caution on inversion of arguments: if we criticize freedom, equality, humanity, democracy -- it's a bad habit in democracy to immediately assume one must simply w...

  A reader writes: ".... in a recent lecture in.... you framed the fears of fellow citizens for their jobs amid increasing demand from foreigners for work as nationalist. Your 'arguments' were not at all convincing to me. I personally have nothing against foreigners; I just fear for my job. Therefore, I am not a nationalist. I would never vote for the AfD or any other right-wing extremist party. That's why I think it's good when you and others speak out against the AfD. However, I am writing to you so that you reconsider your 'arguments' and refrain from calling harmless fellow citizens nationalists in the future..." Before anything, I'd like to set a few things straight: First, I didn't – directly – oppose the AfD in the aforementioned lecture. More on that in a moment. And second, I didn't call anyone a nationalist. Rather, I tried to criticize the slogan that foreigners are taking "our" jobs, and to point out its flaws and its ...

By Dr. M. Dunn (A) Nationalism  (1) As workers, entrepreneurs, renters, homeowners, retirees, students, teachers, taxpayers, politicians, etc. people differ socially and pursue different and in many cases conflicting interests. The social relation between a worker and capitalist employer in America is characterized by the same class conflict as in Britain, Germany or elsewhere. The social relation between a tenant and the homeowner is the same independent whether they live in America, Britain or Japan. Nationalists declare all these material interests and social conflicts, circumstances of life, their opinions and beliefs to be less significant when they emphasize their affection for their home country, take pride in being an American, German etc.. By doing so, they postulate a commonality of and between all compatriots independent of all personal conflicts and social antagonisms which characterize their daily life.  (2) The fact that nationalists identify themselves with thei...

Marx and Engels are often seen as being interchangeable and in absolute agreement about all topics. It is assumed there were no differences between them because they closely collaborated and indeed had plenty of agreements. Nonetheless, there were differences.  When it comes to the discussions you find about Freedom and Equality, it is usually said without much deliberation that M and E saw socialism as the true fulfillment of the ideals of the French revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy. This became something repeated throughout the history of the communist movement, shared by stalinists, trotskyists, Bernstein, Kautsky, even today in marxist-humanists, the Frankfurt school, and so on. Socialism naturally is a product of modernity, the enlightenment, liberalism.  The bourgeois revolutions overthrew the old class hierarchies between "freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman" and so on, but: "The modern bourg...

 Part 1 They both are anti-modernists who dream of uncovering a lost primordial way of being that is the true authentic spiritual essence or lost tradition of a "people/Volk" that will understand itself as the embodiment of "assertion" or free imposition of will on the world, as having a relationship to history. In other words, a racism of the spirit where people come to understand themselves as distinct racial collectives who have a historical destiny to become the true masters of the world by reuniting with an old esoteric philosophical worldview. They both undertake a deconstruction of the western metaphysical-liberal-materialist-rationalist tradition i.e. world jewry, bolshevism, enlightenment, democracy, modern technological industrial society-- all shoved into one vague blob: "modernity/the modern world, nihilism, the darkening, the reign of the Everyman,  the age Kali yuga or decay". Although Evola will often proclaim the return to the tradition of ...

 If you look at history (which itself, as a concept, is a modern invention), it would seem that all of the monumental inventions that played such an important part in profoundly shaping the world anew were never widely recognized in their true significance within their time, especially not in a general sense that it entered into thematic reflection on the part of the general population. Did the people of the Bronze age grasp the importance of the first sword forged in fire? Or even before that-- the mastery of fire itself? Was there a collective self-consciousness or general understanding that understood its place in time and the changes taking place? Doubtful. Because this was precisely the understanding developed in the concept of a universal world history, and it did not come into existence until the 17th century, and didn't reach its culmination until the 19th. And even then, this understanding was only a subject of reflection for the few philosophers and theorists who thought ...

 If one takes a course on 19th century philosophy or reads a majority of commentaries on the topic, one will come across the assertion that it was Nietzsche who first, in the modern era, pronounced the death of God and saw clearly the problematics this creates for European man and his conception of himself, for morality and meaning, for man's understanding of his place in the universe. This assertion that it was Nietzsche who first grappled with this concept rests either on an ignorance of the history of philosophy or its intentional distortion. Either way, the claim that Nietzsche was really the first to think this problem through is factually not true. It is true Nietzsche made this remark, and that he thought about its implications, but it is not true that he was the first. The latter is an oversimplification and distortion, and it serves to bolster the flattering picture of Nietzsche as a profoundly original thinker who picked himself up by his own bootstraps. As to whether thi...