Tag: historical materialism

Dancing While the Dollar Depreciates

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Feels appropriate to drop some remixes to go along with the Reagan era remix—Stephen Miran’s nomination to the Federal Reserve Board is just the latest track in a long playlist of dollar devaluation, austerity for the rest of us, and profits for the usual suspects. Still waiting on a proper critique from economists like Michael Roberts or Michael Hudson, but from what I’ve gathered so far, the “Miran Doctrine” is collapse choreography: pain for the working class, leverage for capital.

Marx saw this coming: the ruling class conjures up the ghosts of past ideologies to mask present-day extraction.

So here’s this DJ set of Madonna remixes—because I need an escape, and maybe you do too.

YouTube

Vladimir Lenin: On the Question of Dialectics

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)1 Comment

On the Question of Dialectics

Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes). Rectilinearity and one-sidedness, woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness—voilà the epistemological roots of idealism. And clerical obscurantism (= philosophical idealism), of course, has epistemological roots, it is not groundless; it is a sterile flower undoubtedly, but a sterile flower that grows on the living tree of living, fertile, genuine, powerful, omnipotent, objective, absolute human knowledge.

Friedrich Engels ‐ On Authority

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)
Red Ant

Works of Frederick Engels 1872: On Authority

A number of Socialists have latterly launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned. This summary mode of procedure is being abused to such an extent that it has become necessary to look into the matter somewhat more closely.

…

Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.

Trotsky: The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

LEAVING out of account the weak echoes of pre-Revolutionary ideologic systems, the only theory which has opposed Marxism in Soviet Russia these years is the Formalist theory of Art. The paradox consists in the fact that Russian Formalism connected itself closely with Russian Futurism, and that while the latter was capitulating politically before Communism, Formalism opposed Marxism with all its might theoretically.

Literature and Revolution: The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism