"Submitting traditionalism to any kind of rational scrutiny reveals it for what it is: an appeal to fantasy, the wrapping of oneself in the blanket of vaguely defined yet comforting categories. It presents a fundamentally hierarchical vision of the world, compensating followers for a lack of material improvement with a sense that they are superior to degenerate liberals and dangerous foreigners.
The right-wing populism of figures like Steve Bannon, for instance, excludes huge swaths of workers, despite his claims of championing a working-class politics. Compare that to democratic socialism, which offers all workers not just better material conditions, but empowerment — extending basic economic and political rights that neoliberalism has allowed to wither away."
jacobinmag.com/2021/01/benjamin-teitelbaum-war-for-eternity-steve-bannon/
The right-wing populism of figures like Steve Bannon, for instance, excludes huge swaths of workers, despite his claims of championing a working-class politics. Compare that to democratic socialism, which offers all workers not just better material conditions, but empowerment — extending basic economic and political rights that neoliberalism has allowed to wither away."
jacobinmag.com/2021/01/benjamin-teitelbaum-war-for-eternity-steve-bannon/
Jacobinmag
Far-Right Intellectuals Are Offering Workers a Rotten Deal
Far-right intellectuals like Steve Bannon claim to speak for a working class put upon by out-of-touch liberal elites. But their anti-modernist, hierarchical vision of the world doesn’t offer workers what they really need: more money in their pockets, and…
"[...] The right can riot, but its violence is always personal, always victimizing and scapegoating, always symbolic even when it spills fatally into the material. This is its understanding of order. This is why the gallows looms so large in its imaginary, why so many of those interviewed speak of stringing up politicians, making them pay for their crimes, watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants. But here tyranny grows capacious, for it designates any figure who threatens their inalienable right to harm. They wanted to hang Senators but they would have gladly killed a Black person, a Jew, an immigrant, and they settled for a cop. One single article by an embedded reporter on January 6 captures, without meaning to do so or seeming to notice, seven different references to communists. This is what you get when you imagine yourself a rightful heir, dispossessed by social justice warriors, by the RCP puppeteering the rise of China, by northern carpetbaggers and urban elites. You get people who want to cleanse the Capitol’s marble with blood, who fight cops in order to be cops.
The burning of a police station by partisans, by comparison, targets a basic structure of domination. It wants the unmaking of everyday life, not its purification and repetition with a slightly changed cast. In this regard the Capitolists could not have been more eloquent. Having breached the building and reached the Senate chambers, the boldest and most ludicrous among them, dressed as a reiver, could think of nothing better to do than install himself at the desk of the Senate president."
libcom.org/library/dilemma-political-economy-time-monsters-research-destroy
The burning of a police station by partisans, by comparison, targets a basic structure of domination. It wants the unmaking of everyday life, not its purification and repetition with a slightly changed cast. In this regard the Capitolists could not have been more eloquent. Having breached the building and reached the Senate chambers, the boldest and most ludicrous among them, dressed as a reiver, could think of nothing better to do than install himself at the desk of the Senate president."
libcom.org/library/dilemma-political-economy-time-monsters-research-destroy
libcom.org
The Dilemma: Political economy for the time of monsters - Research & Destroy
Research and Destroy on purifying violence, crisis, and our present. This article was first published by Ill Will Editions.
It’s impossible to agree to disagree with someone when there is no mutually agreed upon reality. It’s impossible to agree to disagree with a person who refuses to accept the equal right to life of a person who looks different or worships another god. It’s impossible to build a democracy with those who have given themselves over—mind, body, and soul—to authoritarianism.
https://www.guernicamag.com/why-we-cant-agree-to-disagree/
https://www.guernicamag.com/why-we-cant-agree-to-disagree/
Guernica
Lost for Words
It’s impossible to agree to disagree with someone when there is no mutually agreed upon reality.