Miss Kristia, of Doorknockers, blogs:
The most difficult contradiction to face is that even if Obama makes 1.5-2 things better for some people of color in America, we know that he is nothing but a flyer, better-dressed, younger face to the New World Order AKA the same ol’ American Empire that has been running shit for the past several hundred years.
When capitalized, "Sie" is the formal way to address adults of either gender in polite German. I majored in the…
If one assumes that a person is making their money, including enough money to have no incentive to "work", by…
Ob sie wirklich Deutsch spricht. Normalweise, kommt die US Soldaten nicht ins Stadt und spricht nicht so oft mit denn…
As for being a Nazi, ich spreche fliessend deutsch und wohnte in Deutschland fuer drei Jahre mit der americanishe Luftwaffe…
And of course this "incentive" only applies to poor people: Rich people who already have enough to live off of…
let’s see. 1.5-2 things better vs. 1,000,000 things worse.
The past several hundred years?
I’m used to Marxists having no comprehension of historical forces, but come on. At least comprehension of historical fact.
Robert, don’t you know? As soon as St. Petersburg was settled (or maybe Plymouth) the Amerikan Empire was in full flower and jumped up in charge. Yowza.
The “New World Order”?
okey dokey.
Yea, Robert, let us continue to call folks we disagree with Marxists!
I’m calling Jack Stephens and Miss Kristia Marxists because, as far as I am aware, they are Marxists. If they’re not, then I apologize for tarring them with that bloody brush, and you can feel free to mentally change “Marxist” to “anti-capitalist activist” or whatever the distinction-without-a-difference of the day is.
You have to admit, though, that “several hundred years” is just pure ignorance.
Well, I mean, if you count from the first attempt at founding a colony at Roanoke, say — that’s 1585. Or maybe they’re using it as shorthand.
It’s not particularly well-thought-out shorthand, if that’s the case. Still, I think it’s the body of the message that Jack would probably rather we discuss.
Obama’s a conventional politician. I have no problem with this, but I can imagine there are those who do.
(By the way — I hope this doesn’t come off as in any way hostile, but is there a particular reason my comments always go to moderation? Is it just because I don’t comment very often, or am I using some word over and over again, or have I just misread the comment policy and this happens to everyone? Just idle curiosity on my part, I admit.)
Falstaff, I have no idea why you’re always put into moderation. It’s possible that you share an IP address with someone we’ve banned at some point over the years; it’s also possible that “staff” is one of the words that automatically turns on moderation. It’s a mystery to me.
The “several hundred years” line is, I admit, pretty funny.
Like Falstaff, I think the improvements Obama would provide are marginal. I just don’t see any way forward that would bring about greater-than-marginal improvements. So marginal improvements, while not enough, are still better than no improvements at all.
Folks, I’m pretty sure the several hundred years things is pure hyperbole, don’t get caught up in little things such as this. I was actually thinking of editing that comment out because I knew it would get comments like that which detracted from the message (plus, when you comment, please read the whole blog post that I link).
Robert:
I’m a little confused of your hostility towards the political groundings of Marxist thought. I’d be hard pressed to find Marxist who have “no comprehension of historical forces.” Also, I find it slightly juvenile that you consider the term Marxist an insult; unless of course you find “Smithian,” “Republican,” “Democrat,” “Keynesian” or any other type of political and/or economic thought an insult, which, if that’s the case, you need to slightly modify your view of what is an insult and what is a basic statement of fact (i.e. “Oh my God! Sarah Palin is soooooooo Republican” is not an insult, etc.).
I used Marxist as a descriptor, not as an insult.
You’re hard-pressed to find Marxists who have no comprehension of historical forces, because you’re not competently grounded in those forces yourself. You guys are working from a worldview that was in some ways fairly insightful, but which is 100+ years out of date, and which got some of the fundamentals so deeply wrong that there was no way to get out. You’re like the Manhattanite who, prior to the election of Reagan, was hard-pressed to find anyone who disagreed with the obvious truth that conservative governance had past its time and had no hope. Sampling bias and your own unawareness combine to make you an inapt observer.
Just as one tiny example: the idea that America has been “running shit” for five hundred years. OK, you say that’s hyperbole – I see no evidence of that, but w/e. But the Marxist conception of the historical arc of economies should have the United States struggling to maintain relevance, not expanding its hegemony – we’re much more a hegemon today than we were twenty years ago, and were more of a hegemon twenty years ago than 60 years ago. Because, as it turns out, capitalism doesn’t collapse of its own contradictions – the capitalist economy has expanded something like a hundredfold since Marx predicted its doom, the universal movement isn’t towards greater power to the manual worker – it’s instead shifted to those who can manage complex symbolic arrays, and so on.
All of which is a long digression from my original point, which was this: people who think the US has been running things for 500 years are ignorant. I’m used to people with your set of views being wrong about how things work, but usually they manage to get the basic superstructure of facts right.
Falstaff-the-always-moderated thinks you’d rather discuss the meat of the post, which was that Obama poses a contradiction because instead of leading the Glorious Revolution, he’s just a tool of the capitalist machine who happens to use some progressive language. OK, my reaction: good. Glorious revolutions always turn to shit, and there’s enough bloodshed in the world without killing people for yet another iteration of the same failed and stupid ideas.
Several hundred years may be hyperbole, (several usually meaning 3 or more), but if we include the slave trade, which I think began in earnest sometime around the 1680’s, then it is not hyperbole in the least.
Oops, I mean 1710’s, not 1680’s in my post above.
Regarding the main thrust of the post – yeah, I agree. New & improved same-old same-old, but a tiny bit of improvement is soooo much better than bucket loads of crap.
Heck, I’ve been telling everyone that Sen. Obama, a creature and supporter of the Chicago Machine, is no big agent of change from the beginning. This woman is behind the curve on that – although given that I’m from Illinois and she’s not, that’s no surprise.
Participating in the slave traffic in the 18th Century does not equal “the American empire running shit for the last several hundred years”. Again, we really didn’t become a world power until the 20th Century.
The United States was not a significant world power until the Spanish-American War, and even then, we were a weakling world power. Woo, you defeated the Spanish, tough guys. Our strength relative to Europe grew modestly over the first half of the 20th century, and by WWI – WWII we were in broadly the same weight class as the other great powers. After WWII we became the strongest country, although the Soviet Union made a good run at it for 40 more years or so.
The slave trade as an exemplar of American world dominance is just silly, about like saying that I dominate the Walton family because I shop at their store. America didn’t conquer Africa and take slaves; European and American merchants traded with African countries and bought slaves there for resale in the colonies, while Arab countries did the same thing on the other side of the continent. There were some European-led raids in very weak parts of Africa, but most of the slave gathering was done by coastal African countries who would attack weak inland tribes and sell the resulting captives to passing merchants. How this translates to powerful America ruling the world, I have no idea.
Actually, no, you’re kinda conflating Lenin and Marx. Marx simply identified a system of capitalism in Britain when other parts of Europe were still in certain aristocratic stages; Marx simply identified capitalism as a system that would become much greater in the years to come and he development and accounting system for the worker to reassert her or his monetary worth within that system. His writings were more on the labor theory of value and on how human beings are simply affect by the social and economic structures around them and how these structures influence their thought (simple sociology). Marx never “predicted” capitalisms doom.
Lenin argued of imperialist adventures using standing armies as obsolete and a new kind of imperialism using capital and trade being the more logical ones for imperialist powers in Europe to take. He only argued for a fall of capitalism once first world countries reached certain stages in history, nothing more, nothing less.
Only within a first world context is that true. On a worldwide scale there are now more proletarian workers than ever before (i.e. Thailand, China, Cambodia, Philippines. etc.).
Except the Glorious Revolution in England. ;-)
But, anyways, I’d suggest actually reading Marx’s “Capital Vol. I” and a few other Marxist economic and sociological texts and companion pieces and you’ll find your explanation for Marxist thought is not really that accurate.
I was referring to empire building, not actual world dominance. The former is intent, the later is the result (short lived maybe, temporary very likely). I mention the slave trade as an example of the intent to build empire. That’s how I interpret “New World Order AKA the same ol’ American Empire that has been running shit for the past several hundred years”.
Eva, “the same ol’ American Empire that has been running shit for the past several hundred years.” means that some (rather hypothetical, BTW) entity called the “American Empire” has been running things for several hundred years. It does not mean that a bunch of people planned to run things for a few hundred years but only started to succeed a few decades ago. Especially since depending on your interpretation of “several”, several hundred years ago either nobody in the then-most powerful nations even knew that the North and South American continents even existed or they had just landed on it and were basically looking to exploit it, not set up shop on it, declare independence and then take over the world.
Let’s fact it – it was an ignorant statement.
I mention the slave trade as an example of the intent to build empire.
Nobody in industrial times setting out to build an empire is going to make slave labor the basis of that empire (the Hittites, maybe, but that was a long time ago). Slave labor is inefficient and uncompetitive with free labor. People go to slave labor for personal profit – the plantation run with slave labor makes more money for its owner than the one run with free labor, because the expense of keeping slaves is considerably less than the expense of employing paid workers. But the total output is also considerably less. (Plantation A uses slave labor and produces 1000 bales, at a profit of $100 per bale. Plantation B, same amount of land, uses free labor and produces 2000 bales, at a profit of $10 per bale. Empire-builders go with option B – they care about how much production they can create. Personal profit-seekers go for option A – they care about how much profit they can make.)
It is unnecessary to ascribe imperial motivations when greed is sufficient to explain people’s actions; it’s silly to ascribe imperial motivations when the actions taken would undermine those motivations.
And, by the way, if participating in the slave trade is what makes for empire building and world dominance and “running shit”, then the Arab countries were running things for centuries before the transatlantic slave trade got started – the African slave trade existed long before the western hemisphere had been “discovered” by Europeans, and continued long after Europeans stopped trading in slaves.
OK, RonF & Robert, uncle.