Status Updates From The Strange Death of Marxis...

the working class lost its distinctive features in a largely postindustrial society and because of the relentless inroads of managerial democracy. The staffing of such government by a postliberal elite has accelerated the movement toward a new political culture. In this culture, administrators with the media and judiciary, have gone from providing social services into supportingpostbourgeois lifestyles and attitudes

Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, Italian Socialist senator and longtime political theorist Norberto Bobbio defends the continued use of left-right distinctions after the fall of the Soviet empire. According to Bobbio, such traditional nomenclature continues to have value, inasmuch as there are still rival partisans who stand behind the two opposing principles of equality and inequality.

An often amorphous guilt over past acts of intolerance and over material inequalities, an association of Third World cultures and religions with the “suffering just,” a reduction of quintessential Christianity to equality and universality, and an expectation of living in some multicultural end-time all fuel the Catholic campaign for inclusiveness.

*** Tolerance, understood as glorifying the foreign and the antiWestern, is different from courtesy to strangers. It is an expression of ancestral self-rejection, like the zeal of those Romans who upon joining the early church turned against their pagan heritage entirely.

In the struggle against “fascist” Islamicists who engage in terror and express anti-Jewish sentiments, the anti-Stalinist internationalist Trotsky is someone whom Schwartz believes that his side should venerate. No wonder an English critic of American imperialism, John Laughland, mocks this “Marxism without Stalin” haunting the American establishment Right

A more homogenized humanity moving across open borders would be equally acceptable to both American neoconservatives and most European leftist intellectuals, however much they may disagree about the United States’ present Middle Eastern politics

The promise of the present age for the European Left is more or less the vision articulated by Fukuyama. “Liberal democracy,” as the breakdown of national borders and national consciousness, governments responsive to the people, international commerce, and human rights, Fukuyama proclaims, is the wave of the future, after the last antidemocratic ideology of the 20th c had made and lost its bid for world domination.

Left also reveals traces of a “Gnostic” myth, it may be necessary to ascertain its origin in an ancient Near Eastern civilization.Voegelin and the German-Jewish scholar Jakob Taubes have both focused critical attention on the relation between ancient Christian heresies and modern political cultures

by 1947 the United States was far less interested in prosecuting suspected Nazis and in applying Frankfurt School prescriptions to German family life than it was in fighting Communism at home and abroad.

revision is now a code word on the Post-Marxist left for being politically incorrect, which means expressing “fascist” ideas. It does not refer exclusively to those who challenge the established account of the Holocaust, but it has been extended to those who are transmitting a historical narrative that might weaken our resistance to “fascist” threats.

For many Europeans the United States has become a hegemonic power socioeconomically, culturally, and politically. It is the unavoidable reference point by which they grasp their place in the world and by which the PostMarxist Left is charting its future.

“Cultural Trotskyism” may be a suitable description of this Left, which is actuated by a vision of perpetual cultural change and bureaucratically contrived social engineering. Neither a workingclass consciousness nor socialist economic planning is considered necessary to advance this leftist agenda.

The Americanized version of Critical Theory provided resources that served well in a therapeutic war against bigotry. In this struggle, Critical Theory enjoyed the aid of federal and state agencies and the blessings of the media and entertainment industries, which protested (sometimes after the fact) what they considered to be long-lived prejudices.

Fromm believed that both capitalism and the degeneration of Jewish belief into a Christian heresy were problems whose effects could still be seen. Both had laid the foundation for a sadomasochistic culture and for the predictable rise of fascism.

From medieval Jewish mysticism in the philosopher Walter Benjamin to Horkheimer’s appropriation of Schopenhauer and his philosophy of the will, to Fromm’s and Marcuse’s incorporation of depth psychology and Adorno’s musings about the Hegelian dialectic and atonal musicology, the Frankfurt School has incorporated a salmagundi of ideas framed in notoriously murky prose.

**** What remains, once this transposition takes place, is hatred of bourgeois society, which is made synonymous with “fascism.”And equally Marxist, according to Caspart, is the desire to replace European nation-states with a revolutionary internationalist society and with an expanding political control over citizens in order to “reeducate” them

Although PC Neomarxism does seem to be thriving, it has become a spongy, increasingly abstract concept whose proponents more than fifty years after the deaths of Hitler and Mussolini have nothing to talk about except ‘antifascism.’

anti-anti-Communism, which in Adorno’s case meant a general indifference to Communist assaults on personal and social liberties, became a characteristic of many Frankfurt School intellectuals.What changed from the master to his best-known disciple, Habermas, according to Adorno’s biographer Rolf Wiggershaus, were the moral grounds invoked for turning a blind eye to Communist tyranny.

Adorno was shocked by a suggestion from one of his coworkers, Seymour Martin Lipset, that the psychic grid they had applied to right-wingers might work for left-wing extremists equally well. Such ideas drove home for Adorno the anti-Communist hysteria that he thought raged on the democratic Left

Adorno, Marcuse, and other members of the Frankfurt School were explicit about the link between “antifascism,” which was the banner they sported, and sympathy for Communist governments. Like Sartre and his collaborators at Les Temps Modernes, the Critical Theorists considered anti-Communist attitudes proof positive of fascist residues in those who expressed them