DJP
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I’m not sure if the above was a response to my comment about “sharing” the critisticuffs text.
To be clear I meant worth sharing here on this forum with the people here.
If anyone fancies printing some out to hand out at the next far right pogrom or invasion of Gregg’s – well I guess you could, but that doesn’t mean you should!
Perhaps worth sharing this for some straight thinking about immigration and capitalism.
Something else that is interesting here is that some of the initial spread of misinformation was probably nothing to do with any ideology, but automatically generated by bot accounts with the aim of generating clicks and so advertising revenue.
“I think it’s more anti-Muslim than white supremacist.”
I think that’s true for the general mood. But there are elements expressing a more generalised racism, including real neo-nazi elements.
It would also be a catastrophic mistake to think that these disturbances are a reflection of the general mood in the UK. As articles like this one point out:
“[…]the Ipsos survey showed people are generally more positive about the impact of immigration than not, although that gap has tightened since 2022 too.
As for longer term attitudes, the respected European Social Survey found that in 2022, external most people in the UK thought immigration had been good for the economy and the country’s cultural life. A clear majority said it had made Britain a better place to live.
Separate research by the World Values Survey, external found the UK the least likely country to agree that immigration causes crime or unemployment. Just 5% of Brits said they’d be unhappy to have an immigrant for a neighbour, one of the lowest proportions found anywhere.”
Why not call a spade a spade? Why not call it far-right and white supremacist terrorism? This is what it is, with some opportunist elements being dragged along.
Of course, the scapegoating of migrants and minority groups is nothing new but what is (relatively) new is how such discourse was made mainstream by the previous governments, and the nebulous way in which these events are being organised. Due to the invention of social media, these aren’t being centrally driven by a specific organisation or individual but are coming out of networks of people connected by an adherence to a vague set of ideas. This book is a couple of years old now but is a very good explanation of the current situation:
https://www.dogsection.org/product/post-internet-far-right
Marx to Vogt, 1870: “Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. […]
This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_04_09.htm
“I think we can dispense with the criticism of a theory being ‘unscientific’ thus barring it from any serious consideration.”
Regardless of if you want to call something ‘scientific’ or not, I still think it makes sense to subject our cherished views to some kind of logical and empirical standards.
It seems a grave mistake to go in the opposite direction – to bend our standards so that they fit with a cherished view.
We are all prone to mislead ourselves. It is out of a kind of reflexive skepticism that was aware of this fact that modern science arose.
(PS after ten or more years of this forum, I don’t know why some people think anything useful is going to come out of endless feeding the pigeons)
How would Freud’s theory of the unconscious give you a causal explanation of the Holocaust?
Surely what needs to be explained is why it happened when it did, and why its victims were who they were. I don’t think any a-historical explanation is going to get you very far in that.
The video is someone complaining about when fictional works (Netflix series etc) based on historical events do not follow the currently accepted historical narrative. But why should they? They are works of fiction, not reflections on the current state of historical research.
Someone should tell that guy that fictional recreations of historical events or persons aren’t actual history. But then I guess he’d have to miss out on the YouTube revenue.
“Perhaps this could/should be the theme of a thread of its own?”
Perhaps we’ve already been over this, when LBird used to visit?
Wez, this all seems a bit half-baked.
You do know that Popper’s ideas about falsification have largely been found inadequate and rejected by philosophers of science?
Marx definitely saw his work as a ‘science’, look at the prefaces to Capital Volume One for example. But The German word is wider than the English. The German ‘Wissenschaft’ (which is often translated as ‘science’) directly translates as ‘knowledgeship’ – his critique of political economy is definitely an exercise in that, it’s a body of systematically organised knowledge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wissenschaft
Even if we do want to hold on to Popper, there are definitely plenty of things in Capital which can be subject to empirical verification.
You also claim that BD has said that “Freud’s work can be discounted because of his historical and cultural context”, where was such a claim made?
I think round these parts the general consensus is that most of Freud is pseudo-scientific and doesn’t stand up to rational criticism. You haven’t been doing a good job of convincing us otherwise.
EDIT: Just for interest I’m adding a link to this talk from the archives. I thought it was good when I listened to it.
“It’s what is being done to them by the producers of junior dictionaries and other internet-obsessed and newspeak-obsessed pundits.”
The function of a dictionary is descriptive not prescriptive. They are just tracking which words are commonly used and how they are being used.
Lack of access to green spaces is not a new problem and not one that the makers of a children’s dictionary are in a position to solve.
It’s too easy to get swept up by moral panics…
I also see someone produced a child’s dictionary that is full of nature words, for those that want to use that version..
If you’re worried about this, the problem mentioned was really more about access to open space than the words changing in a dictionary, why not set up a nature group for kids instead of moaning about it on your computer.
I would go so far as to say that cooperativeness and mutuality are more or less hard wired into us, a bit like a biological version of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid. I would say there is a “Human Nature argumen”t, but that it supports the socialist viewpoint, rather than the anti socialist viewpoint.
I like this quote, written by Malatesta, which is taken from his obituary of Kropotkin:
At bottom Kropotkin conceived nature as a kind of Providence, thanks to which there had to be harmony in all things, including human societies.
And this has led many anarchists to repeat that “Anarchy is Natural Order”, a phrase with an exquisite kropotkinian flavor.
If it is true that the law of Nature is Harmony, I suggest one would be entitled to ask why Nature has waited for anarchists to be born, and goes on waiting for them to triumph, in order to destroy the terrible and destructive conflicts from which mankind has already suffered.
Would one not be closer to the truth in saying that anarchy is the struggle, in human society, against the disharmonies of Nature?
In short, I don’t think arguments along the nature of “humans are naturally co-opertative / unco-operative” have much use.
Something else I have been toying with is with the Boehm’s idea of an ‘ambivalent’ conception of human nature. In short: Human beings have a tendency to both seek to dominate and to submit. But submission causes feelings of resentment, and these can lead to co-ordinated efforts to enforce more egalitarian forms of co-operation.
You get a similar idea in Machiavelli’s writings on Livy’s history of the Roman republic. When the powerless revolt it is not so much because they want to take power but because they resent being ruled.
What influence, if any, this kind of thinking had on Freud I don’t know.
