While I agree with some of the quoted writing, I find it interesting that the writer holds up Wikipedia as a great example of consensus based work. I understand that the only requirement for contribution to Wikipedia is registering a certain number of hours before posting. I don’t define that as proving knowledge or expertise. Perhaps I am wrong but I much rather pick and choose the writers I want to read and direct my dollars to my choices.
agree. wikipedia is no ideal of communal and consensus based work, dominated as it is by shadowy pr firms who control its powerful editors. still there is at its core a kind of ideal...so i get where he's coming from.
I agree it’s an ideal - I still chuckle at how easy it was for them to track back edits made from IP addresses at the Trump White House, so there is SOME oversight.
"Hell, most of my friends and colleges from the media have gone done this path, as have I.
And its not all bad of course--especially on an individual basis."
Yes indeed, we all need to pay our bills.
Furthermore we should never underestimate the power if capitalism to turn all of us, no matter what our politics, into calculating capitalist centers--in fact, as Branko Milanovic has argued we do not need the capitalist mode of production in factories if we all have become capitalists centers ourselves."
Maybe modern capitalism and modern leftism go hand in hand--I guess we could ask the Chinese.
Assistant Professor of Political Science and History
...
After teaching in New York City and Los Angeles for five years, Joshua Sperber began working at Averett in 2018. He received his PhD in political science at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he focused on American Politics and International Relations. Prior to his work at the Grad Center, he received an MA in Modern European Studies, focusing on 20th century European history, at Columbia University. Originally from Los Angeles, Sperber began his academic career at Los Angeles Valley College and then transferred as a history major to San Francisco State University. After attending and working at large schools, Sperber is excited to be at a small but lively and stimulating campus.
Does Sperber actually cite any data on the large number and types of FAILED collective movements and organizations (leftist or other political or other cultural/countercultural) over the last 50-75 years???
Does he attempt to understand why they failed, and if so, what the patterns are?
Some obvious political examples:
Nader and the Green Party
Ross Perot and the Reform Party coalition (and probably other spinoffs)
More obscure, but even better example:
Joe McCormick's Trans-Partisan movement (which was abandoned and mutated into the idiotic, leftist-postmodernist "Coffee Party" social media clique)
McCormick held a number of seminars at retreat centers and similar places, including one pow-wow between Al Gore and Grover Norquist about the fossil fuel industry's suppressive regulation of solar power by residential property owners in Oklahoma.
What McCormick found was that it is not that hard to get people to intellectually re-align with trans-partisan political ideas, but it was very hard, usually impossible, to get them to hold to those ideas after returning from the seminars. The conditions of daily life, including economic realities, work against trans-partisan community building.
One of the major forces blocking trans-partisan community building is ideological tribalism.
So Sperber is completely full of shit because he is perpetuating the very ideological tribalism that works against trans-partisan community building.
"Concerned with maintaining and ideally expanding their position in the hypercompetitive and hyper-ephemeral attention economy’s space, left-stars personalize themselves to their followers through a formulaic set of techniques: periodically disclosing intimate and frequently nostalgic personal histories or suspenseful and surprising real-time accounts; self-appropriated personal histories and ‘mood’s such as ennui, excitement, and melancholy; and personal developments including career accomplishments (and less frequently setbacks notwithstanding those now overcome, which are examples of the left-star’s teleological success), breakdowns, epiphanies, hardships such as the loss of pets, break-ups, and politically correct crushes."
I don't mind occasional personal experience takes, given that Yasha has provided some that actually bear relevance to current national narratives, but yeah - I can think of two specific Substackers who take this to an extreme and in one case led me to unsubscribe and in the other feeling like that's just around the corner as well.
Dunno how long Sperber has been researching the topic, but Rheingold already explained it a long time ago (1990s?), using Habermas' idea that "systems colonize lifeworld":
The consumer society, the most powerful vehicle for generating short-term wealth ever invented, ensures economic growth by first promoting the idea that the way to be is to buy. The engines of wealth depend on a fresh stream of tabloids sold at convenience markets and television programs to tell us what we have to buy next in order to justify our existence. What used to be a channel for authentic communication has become a channel for the updating of commercial desire.
Money plus politics plus network television equals an effective system. It works. When the same packaging skills that were honed on automobile tail fins and fast foods are applied to political ideas, the highest bidder can influence public policy to great effect. What dies in the process is the rational discourse at the base of civil society.
These paragraphs in your link made me think of it.
"The simulation (and therefore destruction) of authentic discourse, first in the United States, and then spreading to the rest of the world, is what Guy Debord would call the first quantum leap into the "society of the spectacle" and what Jean Baudrillard would recognize as a milestone in the world's slide into hyper-reality. Mass media's colonization of civil society turned into a quasi-political campaign promoting technology itself when the image-making technology of television came along. ("Progress is our most important product," said General Electric spokesman Ronald Reagan, in the early years of television.) And in the twentieth century, as the telephone, radio, and television became vehicles for public discourse, the nature of political discussion has mutated into something quite different from anything the framers of the Constitution could have foreseen.
A politician is now a commodity, citizens are consumers, and issues are decided via sound-bites and staged events. The television camera is the only spectator that counts at a political demonstration or convention. According to Habermas and others, the way the new media have been commoditized through this evolutionary process from hand-printed broadside to telegraph to penny press to mass media has led to the radical deterioration of the public sphere. The consumer society has become the accepted model both for individual behavior and political decision making. Discourse degenerated into publicity, and publicity used the increasing power of electronic media to alter perceptions and shape beliefs.
The consumer society, the most powerful vehicle for generating short-term wealth ever invented, ensures economic growth by first promoting the idea that the way to be is to buy. The engines of wealth depend on a fresh stream of tabloids sold at convenience markets and television programs to tell us what we have to buy next in order to justify our existence. What used to be a channel for authentic communication has become a channel for the updating of commercial desire."
Yes, that describes a classic example of technological disruption of culture and the information ecosystem (elaborating on Bernays' and Chomsky's even earlier work).
I have a vague recollection of references to Boorstin, never read his work.
Again, the next step in the analysis is to Kegan stage-5 "collective intelligences" and post-capitalism, which the "left" (as we know it) in incapable of:
"This scares me. Up until the 1980s, a university humanities department did teach you how to think—and it was the standard education for the ruling class. Since then, it has taught you not to think. What happens as people trained in postmodern anti-thought move increasingly into positions of power? Without an appreciation for administrative and technical rationality—much less the ability to deploy them personally—how can they lead governments, corporations, universities, churches, or NGOs?"
I'd like some examples of this in terms of curricula from university humanities departments. What exactly is this author referencing there?
Helen Pluckrose develops the definition of "Social Justice" as it is used in the academic literature in this tradition, explains its connections to identity politics and the political correctness movement, and then shows the relevance of the original postmodernists to this Theory in some detail. She does this to elegantly describe the progression of these ideas from Theory to activism to the streets by describing how these ideas originated, evolved, and were built upon by successive generations of Theorists leading up to those who have become famous names even outside of the scholarly world today: for examples, Peggy McIntosh, Barbara Applebaum, and Robin DiAngelo. She wraps up by explaining how this newest generation of Theorists simplified the highly abstract ideas of their predecessors and made it far clearer and easier to understand so that it could, as we now see all around us, eventually go mainstream.
I tend to read about foreign policy and geopolitics and I can't help but note that Pluckrose mentions multiple times the "atrocities of the communist regime..." but never talks about the atrocities committed by right wingers most often with American (and the other former colonial powers') backing and support.
Thanks for the Pluckrose link. I'll watch the video. That said, Newdiscourse uses the term (that I know you approve of and use yourself) "cultural Marxism" when there really isn't such a thing other than a myth embraced (mostly) by the so-called alt-right and IIRC having long been espoused by far right personalities such as Mark Levin.
The Characterless Opportunism of the Managerial Class
by Amber A’Lee Frost
excerpt:
Squishy and permeable as it may be, PMC is still a useful term for the class of professional managers, regardless of all the disingenuous and pedantic protest. Ehrenreich, of course, was not the first to recognize or define the managers among the middle class. There was David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, C. Wright Mills’s White Collar: The American Middle Class, and the debates between Erik Olin Wright and Nicos Poulantzas, to name a few. But Ehrenreich set out not simply to define and locate the professional managerial class, but specifically to interrogate its own self-awareness. As she writes in the introduction to Fear of Falling, “This book is about what could be called the class consciousness of the professional middle class, and how this consciousness has developed over the past three decades.”
This class consciousness, however, has been notoriously avoided by the professional middle classes themselves. In his 1976 “Notes and Commentary on the Irresistibility of the Petty Bourgeoisie,” German author (and who is better equipped to articulate the formal barriers of professionalization than a real-life veteran of the Hitler Youth?) Hans Magnus Enzensberger argued that the managerial class could be defined precisely by its inability to attain consciousness of itself as a class.
Enzensberger included “managers, ‘specialists,’ technocrats, technical intelligentsia” in the ranks of those who were neither capitalists nor workers. Like Ehrenreich, Enzensberger considered himself a member of this class and attempted to hold a mirror up to it: “So we belong to a class that neither controls nor owns what matters, the famous means of production, and it does not produce what also matters, the famous surplus value (or perhaps produces it only indirectly and incidentally . . . ).” But ultimately he concluded that:
For just as [this] class can be defined only in negative terms, so its self-understanding is also negative. The petty bourgeois wants to be anything other than a petty bourgeois. He tries to gain his identity not by allegiance to his class, but by separating himself off from it and denying it. But what links him with his own kind is just what he contests: the petty bourgeois is always someone else. This strange self-hatred acts as a cloak of invisibility. With its help the class as a whole has made itself almost invisible. Solidarity and collective are out of the question for it; it will never attain the self-consciousness of a distinct class.
Proving Enzensberger’s point, the very existence of a professional managerial class is often most controversial among the sort of left-wing intellectuals who might fit the description. Take for example David Sessions’s recent Jacobin article, “The Right’s Phony Class War,” in which he rejects the “mythical managerial class” as a right-wing boogeyman conspiracy theory, referring to it as “a pseudo-sociology that pits an ambiguous ‘managerial’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ ruling class against the rest of the country—and lets the people who actually hold political and economic power off the hook.” (It’s worth noting here that theorists of the PMC do not consider it a “ruling class” by definition, but rather a category with a relationship to capital that is distinguishable from both capitalist and worker.)
By contrast, Ehrenreich made no bones about exposing the ideology of her own frenetic class. And like Enzensberger, Ehrenreich understood the importance of such a class’s apparent instability in the midst of the ongoing class war. Enzensberger believed that the center could not hold, that some of the middle class would join the “goats” of capitalism, while most would eventually be proletarianized with the “sheep,” and “reap the fruits of socialism.” Such an outcome had not come to pass when Enzensberger was writing, leaving him to contemplate the inscrutable resilience of the professional middle class.
His conclusion was that the middle classes—by virtue (or sin, if you prefer) of their position as a “multiply articulated assemblage”—retained an “adaptability” or “characterless opportunism.” His description of this ethos was damning: “Never to take a final stand and to seize every possibility: those are the only lessons that the class has learned from its variegated history.” This “adaptability” had occasionally led the PMC to progressive politics, as has occurred recently, but, he observed, this is not a fixed feature so much as a strategy that lends credibility to its secure role as the architects of cultural hegemony.
Or, rather, seemingly secure role. It turns out that all Enzensberger had to do was wait a bit longer.
"Remember the key concern is legitimacy. Habermas agrees with Parsons about which institutions are essential to the A & G functions. A is what Habermas calls the “official economy”, and G is the “administrative state”. Both require legitimacy or else society falls into crisis. If people believe either that the economy affords them no opportunity to compete and succeed, or that the state works against their interest, crisis results. Habermas believes we have such a crisis, and it is deepening."
What is your opinion, pierce, on why (and I'm assuming we both agree with Habermas in this regard) there is a crisis of legitimacy?
The crisis of contemporary modernity (what remains unfinished about modernity as a project) is that the systems media (A & G) have become de-coupled from the lifeworld and its media (I & L). The “societal community” of I & L are increasingly colonized, in the sense that
[->] members of the community have less sphere for communicative action.
[->] Their relationships are increasingly mediated, locally, by money and power.
McDonalds is one example; the contemporary university is another. In the university, department meetings could, ideally, be a place where communicative action takes place and influence and value-commitments are regenerated. We could, in those meetings, attempt to reach common understandings. In one meeting we were discussing a proposed change to the curriculum. I was trying to ask a colleague why s/he wanted this change; my “communicative action” involved asking what s/he was trying to teach, how that teaching was going, and so forth. The colleague’s response was: “If you don’t like the change, vote against it.” In other words, s/he didn’t want to talk, explain, or reach a common understanding. Instead we would each gather votes and whoever had the most votes would win. Systems media (power, votes) had pushed out lifeworld media (appeals to common value commitments as a basis of influencing colleagues to believe one option or the other best represented who we want to be, as a departmental community). It’s important to understand that this colleague acted in a milieu that the university as a system creates: money and power dominate, and local [understandings] don’t count for much. The colleague was part of this colonization process, but s/he was only reflecting a larger process.
Habermas observes this same colonization process throughout society.
...
Habermas’s other central example, evident in any newspaper, is the transformation of the “citizen” into a “client” of the state. A citizen is one who, in John F. Kennedy’s famous words, asks not what his/her country can do for him/her, but what s/he can do for the country. Citizenship depends as much on responsibilities as on rights. But in Canada and other capitalist democracies, politicians refer to people less as citizens than as taxpayers. The taxpayer is a client of the state: s/he pays for services on a quasi-contractual basis. When the citizen becomes a taxpayer, responsibility drops out of the equation. The state becomes a more or less efficient service provider, not a source of shared identity.
Yes, I read it in its entirety before posing that question. I wanted your personal opinion in your own words which is why I didn't continue the excerpt to include the part that you just provided.
In any case, this is a good summation as well, for anyone interested in Habermas' theory.
Kailash Awati is pointing to a common conclusion that Habermas fans and people in similar (post-postmodern, holistic) discursive communities usually share:
1. post-capitalist economics need to evolve to break the "colonization" of the corporate-state
2. cultural evolution toward something roughly like Robert Kegan's "stage 5" form of awareness
note: all sorts of theoretical work has been done on "stage 5" awareness, but attempts at implementation are limited in severe ways by the current corporate-state system.
A heterodox taxonomy of the corporate-state system:
Kailash Awati is a data and insights manager at a government organisation in New South Wales. Prior to this he led a marketing insights team at a not for profit and worked in various data leadership roles at a pharmaceutical multinational. He has over two decades of experience in helping diverse organisations build data expertise using the principles of emergent design. In addition, he has held academic appointments at a university where he still teaches courses on machine learning and decision-making under uncertainty.
Earlier, in what seems to him like another life, he did research in fluid dynamics and other areas of physics and applied mathematics.
The articles on Eight to Late reflect his current professional interests which include data, decision making and collaborative approaches to problem solving in large organisations.
Kailash is the co-author of the Heretic’s Guides series of books. The first one, Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices, deals with collaborative approaches to managing complex problems. It won an Axiom Business Book Award in 2012 and was nominated for the Foreword Book of the Year Award in 2013. His second book, The Heretic’s Guide to Management, is about managing ambiguity in organisations. It was a finalist in the General Business category at the National Indie Excellence Awards for 2017.
The views ventured on Eight to Late are based on his opinions, and do not in any way represent the positions of his employers, past or present.
... it is important to highlight that the AGIL system does not "guarantee" any historical system survival; they rather specify the minimum conditions for whether societies or action systems in principle can survive. Whether a concrete action system survive or not is a sheer historical question.
[] Adaptation, or the capacity of society to interact with the environment. This includes, among other things, gathering resources and producing commodities to social redistribution.
[] Goal Attainment, or the capability to set goals for the future and make decisions accordingly. Political resolutions and societal objectives are part of this necessity.
Integration, or the harmonization of the entire society is a demand that the values and norms of society are solid and sufficiently convergent. This requires, for example, the religious system to be fairly consistent, and even in a more basic level, a common language.
[] Latency, or latent pattern maintenance, challenges society to maintain the integrative elements of the integration requirement above. This means institutions like family and school, which mediate belief systems and values between an older generation and its successor.[2]
These four functions aim to be intuitive. For example a tribal system of hunter-gatherers needs to gather food from the external world by hunting animals and gathering other goods. They need to have a set of goals and a system to make decisions about such things as when to migrate to better hunting grounds. The tribe also needs to have a common belief system that enforces actions and decisions as the community sees fit. Finally there needs to be some kind of educational system to pass on hunting and gathering skills and the common belief system. If these prerequisites are met, the tribe can sustain its existence.
While I agree with some of the quoted writing, I find it interesting that the writer holds up Wikipedia as a great example of consensus based work. I understand that the only requirement for contribution to Wikipedia is registering a certain number of hours before posting. I don’t define that as proving knowledge or expertise. Perhaps I am wrong but I much rather pick and choose the writers I want to read and direct my dollars to my choices.
agree. wikipedia is no ideal of communal and consensus based work, dominated as it is by shadowy pr firms who control its powerful editors. still there is at its core a kind of ideal...so i get where he's coming from.
I agree it’s an ideal - I still chuckle at how easy it was for them to track back edits made from IP addresses at the Trump White House, so there is SOME oversight.
"Hell, most of my friends and colleges from the media have gone done this path, as have I.
And its not all bad of course--especially on an individual basis."
Yes indeed, we all need to pay our bills.
Furthermore we should never underestimate the power if capitalism to turn all of us, no matter what our politics, into calculating capitalist centers--in fact, as Branko Milanovic has argued we do not need the capitalist mode of production in factories if we all have become capitalists centers ourselves."
Maybe modern capitalism and modern leftism go hand in hand--I guess we could ask the Chinese.
Small typo, 2nd paragraph:
"It [sic] gotta say, the essay is kinda brutal and funny, too — it cuts a bit too close to my own minor influencer bone. But right is right…"
Examples of meta-rationalist / trans-rationalist critiques of postmodern cultural conditions, including social fragmentation and atomization:
https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/john-vervaeke-1/
-----
https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
https://www.averett.edu/academics/majors-and-programs/undergraduate/historypolitical-science/historypolitical-science-faculty/
excerpt:
Dr. Joshua Sperber
Assistant Professor of Political Science and History
...
After teaching in New York City and Los Angeles for five years, Joshua Sperber began working at Averett in 2018. He received his PhD in political science at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he focused on American Politics and International Relations. Prior to his work at the Grad Center, he received an MA in Modern European Studies, focusing on 20th century European history, at Columbia University. Originally from Los Angeles, Sperber began his academic career at Los Angeles Valley College and then transferred as a history major to San Francisco State University. After attending and working at large schools, Sperber is excited to be at a small but lively and stimulating campus.
Does Sperber actually cite any data on the large number and types of FAILED collective movements and organizations (leftist or other political or other cultural/countercultural) over the last 50-75 years???
Does he attempt to understand why they failed, and if so, what the patterns are?
Some obvious political examples:
Nader and the Green Party
Ross Perot and the Reform Party coalition (and probably other spinoffs)
More obscure, but even better example:
Joe McCormick's Trans-Partisan movement (which was abandoned and mutated into the idiotic, leftist-postmodernist "Coffee Party" social media clique)
McCormick held a number of seminars at retreat centers and similar places, including one pow-wow between Al Gore and Grover Norquist about the fossil fuel industry's suppressive regulation of solar power by residential property owners in Oklahoma.
What McCormick found was that it is not that hard to get people to intellectually re-align with trans-partisan political ideas, but it was very hard, usually impossible, to get them to hold to those ideas after returning from the seminars. The conditions of daily life, including economic realities, work against trans-partisan community building.
One of the major forces blocking trans-partisan community building is ideological tribalism.
So Sperber is completely full of shit because he is perpetuating the very ideological tribalism that works against trans-partisan community building.
ASSHOLE
Ouch...
"Concerned with maintaining and ideally expanding their position in the hypercompetitive and hyper-ephemeral attention economy’s space, left-stars personalize themselves to their followers through a formulaic set of techniques: periodically disclosing intimate and frequently nostalgic personal histories or suspenseful and surprising real-time accounts; self-appropriated personal histories and ‘mood’s such as ennui, excitement, and melancholy; and personal developments including career accomplishments (and less frequently setbacks notwithstanding those now overcome, which are examples of the left-star’s teleological success), breakdowns, epiphanies, hardships such as the loss of pets, break-ups, and politically correct crushes."
I don't mind occasional personal experience takes, given that Yasha has provided some that actually bear relevance to current national narratives, but yeah - I can think of two specific Substackers who take this to an extreme and in one case led me to unsubscribe and in the other feeling like that's just around the corner as well.
Yasha is a loser.
Sperber is a loser.
Greenwald is a winner.
Taibbi is a winner.
See the pattern?
Tasha and Sperber are smear artists and leftist assholes.
LOL. OK, pierce.
vapid drivel
re: feebleness of leftist ideology/rhetoric
Dunno how long Sperber has been researching the topic, but Rheingold already explained it a long time ago (1990s?), using Habermas' idea that "systems colonize lifeworld":
Disinformocracy
https://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/10.html
excerpt:
The consumer society, the most powerful vehicle for generating short-term wealth ever invented, ensures economic growth by first promoting the idea that the way to be is to buy. The engines of wealth depend on a fresh stream of tabloids sold at convenience markets and television programs to tell us what we have to buy next in order to justify our existence. What used to be a channel for authentic communication has become a channel for the updating of commercial desire.
Money plus politics plus network television equals an effective system. It works. When the same packaging skills that were honed on automobile tail fins and fast foods are applied to political ideas, the highest bidder can influence public policy to great effect. What dies in the process is the rational discourse at the base of civil society.
...
----------------------------------------------------
Habermas' idea that "systems colonize lifeworld", explained (also see Parsons' AGIL structure)
https://web.archive.org/web/20100311193723/https://people.ucalgary.ca/~frank/habermas.html
Thanks for the Rheingold link, BTW. Very prescient he was.
Have you read this? https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Image-A-Guide-to-Pseudo-Events-in-America
These paragraphs in your link made me think of it.
"The simulation (and therefore destruction) of authentic discourse, first in the United States, and then spreading to the rest of the world, is what Guy Debord would call the first quantum leap into the "society of the spectacle" and what Jean Baudrillard would recognize as a milestone in the world's slide into hyper-reality. Mass media's colonization of civil society turned into a quasi-political campaign promoting technology itself when the image-making technology of television came along. ("Progress is our most important product," said General Electric spokesman Ronald Reagan, in the early years of television.) And in the twentieth century, as the telephone, radio, and television became vehicles for public discourse, the nature of political discussion has mutated into something quite different from anything the framers of the Constitution could have foreseen.
A politician is now a commodity, citizens are consumers, and issues are decided via sound-bites and staged events. The television camera is the only spectator that counts at a political demonstration or convention. According to Habermas and others, the way the new media have been commoditized through this evolutionary process from hand-printed broadside to telegraph to penny press to mass media has led to the radical deterioration of the public sphere. The consumer society has become the accepted model both for individual behavior and political decision making. Discourse degenerated into publicity, and publicity used the increasing power of electronic media to alter perceptions and shape beliefs.
The consumer society, the most powerful vehicle for generating short-term wealth ever invented, ensures economic growth by first promoting the idea that the way to be is to buy. The engines of wealth depend on a fresh stream of tabloids sold at convenience markets and television programs to tell us what we have to buy next in order to justify our existence. What used to be a channel for authentic communication has become a channel for the updating of commercial desire."
Yes, that describes a classic example of technological disruption of culture and the information ecosystem (elaborating on Bernays' and Chomsky's even earlier work).
I have a vague recollection of references to Boorstin, never read his work.
Again, the next step in the analysis is to Kegan stage-5 "collective intelligences" and post-capitalism, which the "left" (as we know it) in incapable of:
https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
"This scares me. Up until the 1980s, a university humanities department did teach you how to think—and it was the standard education for the ruling class. Since then, it has taught you not to think. What happens as people trained in postmodern anti-thought move increasingly into positions of power? Without an appreciation for administrative and technical rationality—much less the ability to deploy them personally—how can they lead governments, corporations, universities, churches, or NGOs?"
I'd like some examples of this in terms of curricula from university humanities departments. What exactly is this author referencing there?
CRT and similar, presumably. See James Lindsay's extensive work for examples:
newdiscourses.com
-----
video summarizing of that kind of analysis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoi9omtAiNQ
[description]
Helen Pluckrose develops the definition of "Social Justice" as it is used in the academic literature in this tradition, explains its connections to identity politics and the political correctness movement, and then shows the relevance of the original postmodernists to this Theory in some detail. She does this to elegantly describe the progression of these ideas from Theory to activism to the streets by describing how these ideas originated, evolved, and were built upon by successive generations of Theorists leading up to those who have become famous names even outside of the scholarly world today: for examples, Peggy McIntosh, Barbara Applebaum, and Robin DiAngelo. She wraps up by explaining how this newest generation of Theorists simplified the highly abstract ideas of their predecessors and made it far clearer and easier to understand so that it could, as we now see all around us, eventually go mainstream.
Off-topic, but since we're the only ones around here for the moment, what are your thoughts on the Julian Assange affair and today's verdict?
I tend to read about foreign policy and geopolitics and I can't help but note that Pluckrose mentions multiple times the "atrocities of the communist regime..." but never talks about the atrocities committed by right wingers most often with American (and the other former colonial powers') backing and support.
Thanks for the Pluckrose link. I'll watch the video. That said, Newdiscourse uses the term (that I know you approve of and use yourself) "cultural Marxism" when there really isn't such a thing other than a myth embraced (mostly) by the so-called alt-right and IIRC having long been espoused by far right personalities such as Mark Levin.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341788960_Conspiracy_and_meme_in_the_alt-right_Notes_on_the_Myth_of_Cultural_Marxism
Also see:
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-characterless-opportunism-of-the-managerial-class/
Winter 2019
The Characterless Opportunism of the Managerial Class
by Amber A’Lee Frost
excerpt:
Squishy and permeable as it may be, PMC is still a useful term for the class of professional managers, regardless of all the disingenuous and pedantic protest. Ehrenreich, of course, was not the first to recognize or define the managers among the middle class. There was David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, C. Wright Mills’s White Collar: The American Middle Class, and the debates between Erik Olin Wright and Nicos Poulantzas, to name a few. But Ehrenreich set out not simply to define and locate the professional managerial class, but specifically to interrogate its own self-awareness. As she writes in the introduction to Fear of Falling, “This book is about what could be called the class consciousness of the professional middle class, and how this consciousness has developed over the past three decades.”
This class consciousness, however, has been notoriously avoided by the professional middle classes themselves. In his 1976 “Notes and Commentary on the Irresistibility of the Petty Bourgeoisie,” German author (and who is better equipped to articulate the formal barriers of professionalization than a real-life veteran of the Hitler Youth?) Hans Magnus Enzensberger argued that the managerial class could be defined precisely by its inability to attain consciousness of itself as a class.
Enzensberger included “managers, ‘specialists,’ technocrats, technical intelligentsia” in the ranks of those who were neither capitalists nor workers. Like Ehrenreich, Enzensberger considered himself a member of this class and attempted to hold a mirror up to it: “So we belong to a class that neither controls nor owns what matters, the famous means of production, and it does not produce what also matters, the famous surplus value (or perhaps produces it only indirectly and incidentally . . . ).” But ultimately he concluded that:
For just as [this] class can be defined only in negative terms, so its self-understanding is also negative. The petty bourgeois wants to be anything other than a petty bourgeois. He tries to gain his identity not by allegiance to his class, but by separating himself off from it and denying it. But what links him with his own kind is just what he contests: the petty bourgeois is always someone else. This strange self-hatred acts as a cloak of invisibility. With its help the class as a whole has made itself almost invisible. Solidarity and collective are out of the question for it; it will never attain the self-consciousness of a distinct class.
Proving Enzensberger’s point, the very existence of a professional managerial class is often most controversial among the sort of left-wing intellectuals who might fit the description. Take for example David Sessions’s recent Jacobin article, “The Right’s Phony Class War,” in which he rejects the “mythical managerial class” as a right-wing boogeyman conspiracy theory, referring to it as “a pseudo-sociology that pits an ambiguous ‘managerial’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ ruling class against the rest of the country—and lets the people who actually hold political and economic power off the hook.” (It’s worth noting here that theorists of the PMC do not consider it a “ruling class” by definition, but rather a category with a relationship to capital that is distinguishable from both capitalist and worker.)
By contrast, Ehrenreich made no bones about exposing the ideology of her own frenetic class. And like Enzensberger, Ehrenreich understood the importance of such a class’s apparent instability in the midst of the ongoing class war. Enzensberger believed that the center could not hold, that some of the middle class would join the “goats” of capitalism, while most would eventually be proletarianized with the “sheep,” and “reap the fruits of socialism.” Such an outcome had not come to pass when Enzensberger was writing, leaving him to contemplate the inscrutable resilience of the professional middle class.
His conclusion was that the middle classes—by virtue (or sin, if you prefer) of their position as a “multiply articulated assemblage”—retained an “adaptability” or “characterless opportunism.” His description of this ethos was damning: “Never to take a final stand and to seize every possibility: those are the only lessons that the class has learned from its variegated history.” This “adaptability” had occasionally led the PMC to progressive politics, as has occurred recently, but, he observed, this is not a fixed feature so much as a strategy that lends credibility to its secure role as the architects of cultural hegemony.
Or, rather, seemingly secure role. It turns out that all Enzensberger had to do was wait a bit longer.
...
"Remember the key concern is legitimacy. Habermas agrees with Parsons about which institutions are essential to the A & G functions. A is what Habermas calls the “official economy”, and G is the “administrative state”. Both require legitimacy or else society falls into crisis. If people believe either that the economy affords them no opportunity to compete and succeed, or that the state works against their interest, crisis results. Habermas believes we have such a crisis, and it is deepening."
What is your opinion, pierce, on why (and I'm assuming we both agree with Habermas in this regard) there is a crisis of legitimacy?
Read. The. Article.
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excerpt:
The crisis of contemporary modernity (what remains unfinished about modernity as a project) is that the systems media (A & G) have become de-coupled from the lifeworld and its media (I & L). The “societal community” of I & L are increasingly colonized, in the sense that
[->] members of the community have less sphere for communicative action.
[->] Their relationships are increasingly mediated, locally, by money and power.
McDonalds is one example; the contemporary university is another. In the university, department meetings could, ideally, be a place where communicative action takes place and influence and value-commitments are regenerated. We could, in those meetings, attempt to reach common understandings. In one meeting we were discussing a proposed change to the curriculum. I was trying to ask a colleague why s/he wanted this change; my “communicative action” involved asking what s/he was trying to teach, how that teaching was going, and so forth. The colleague’s response was: “If you don’t like the change, vote against it.” In other words, s/he didn’t want to talk, explain, or reach a common understanding. Instead we would each gather votes and whoever had the most votes would win. Systems media (power, votes) had pushed out lifeworld media (appeals to common value commitments as a basis of influencing colleagues to believe one option or the other best represented who we want to be, as a departmental community). It’s important to understand that this colleague acted in a milieu that the university as a system creates: money and power dominate, and local [understandings] don’t count for much. The colleague was part of this colonization process, but s/he was only reflecting a larger process.
Habermas observes this same colonization process throughout society.
...
Habermas’s other central example, evident in any newspaper, is the transformation of the “citizen” into a “client” of the state. A citizen is one who, in John F. Kennedy’s famous words, asks not what his/her country can do for him/her, but what s/he can do for the country. Citizenship depends as much on responsibilities as on rights. But in Canada and other capitalist democracies, politicians refer to people less as citizens than as taxpayers. The taxpayer is a client of the state: s/he pays for services on a quasi-contractual basis. When the citizen becomes a taxpayer, responsibility drops out of the equation. The state becomes a more or less efficient service provider, not a source of shared identity.
...
Note to the clueless:
SPERBER IS AN ACADEMIC AND THUS PART OF THE PROBLEM, ESPECIALLY IN THAT HIS ANALYSIS (APPARENTLY) AVOIDS CORRUPTION IN HIGHER EDUCATION
Yes, I read it in its entirety before posing that question. I wanted your personal opinion in your own words which is why I didn't continue the excerpt to include the part that you just provided.
In any case, this is a good summation as well, for anyone interested in Habermas' theory.
https://eight2late.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/the-system-and-the-lifeworld-a-note-on-the-gap-between-work-and-life/
You are being a disingenuous asshole, as usual.
Kailash Awati is pointing to a common conclusion that Habermas fans and people in similar (post-postmodern, holistic) discursive communities usually share:
1. post-capitalist economics need to evolve to break the "colonization" of the corporate-state
2. cultural evolution toward something roughly like Robert Kegan's "stage 5" form of awareness
note: all sorts of theoretical work has been done on "stage 5" awareness, but attempts at implementation are limited in severe ways by the current corporate-state system.
A heterodox taxonomy of the corporate-state system:
https://attackthesystem.com/2021/12/06/curtis-yarvin-mencius-moldbug-on-tucker-carlson-today-09-08-21/
BTW, I read the attackthesystem article and found it enlightening.
Is Kailash Awati not also an academic?
again, you are being a disingenuous asshole, playing stupid word games.
https://eight2late.wordpress.com/about/
excerpt:
Kailash Awati is a data and insights manager at a government organisation in New South Wales. Prior to this he led a marketing insights team at a not for profit and worked in various data leadership roles at a pharmaceutical multinational. He has over two decades of experience in helping diverse organisations build data expertise using the principles of emergent design. In addition, he has held academic appointments at a university where he still teaches courses on machine learning and decision-making under uncertainty.
Earlier, in what seems to him like another life, he did research in fluid dynamics and other areas of physics and applied mathematics.
The articles on Eight to Late reflect his current professional interests which include data, decision making and collaborative approaches to problem solving in large organisations.
Kailash is the co-author of the Heretic’s Guides series of books. The first one, Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices, deals with collaborative approaches to managing complex problems. It won an Axiom Business Book Award in 2012 and was nominated for the Foreword Book of the Year Award in 2013. His second book, The Heretic’s Guide to Management, is about managing ambiguity in organisations. It was a finalist in the General Business category at the National Indie Excellence Awards for 2017.
The views ventured on Eight to Late are based on his opinions, and do not in any way represent the positions of his employers, past or present.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGIL_paradigm
excerpt:
... it is important to highlight that the AGIL system does not "guarantee" any historical system survival; they rather specify the minimum conditions for whether societies or action systems in principle can survive. Whether a concrete action system survive or not is a sheer historical question.
[] Adaptation, or the capacity of society to interact with the environment. This includes, among other things, gathering resources and producing commodities to social redistribution.
[] Goal Attainment, or the capability to set goals for the future and make decisions accordingly. Political resolutions and societal objectives are part of this necessity.
Integration, or the harmonization of the entire society is a demand that the values and norms of society are solid and sufficiently convergent. This requires, for example, the religious system to be fairly consistent, and even in a more basic level, a common language.
[] Latency, or latent pattern maintenance, challenges society to maintain the integrative elements of the integration requirement above. This means institutions like family and school, which mediate belief systems and values between an older generation and its successor.[2]
These four functions aim to be intuitive. For example a tribal system of hunter-gatherers needs to gather food from the external world by hunting animals and gathering other goods. They need to have a set of goals and a system to make decisions about such things as when to migrate to better hunting grounds. The tribe also needs to have a common belief system that enforces actions and decisions as the community sees fit. Finally there needs to be some kind of educational system to pass on hunting and gathering skills and the common belief system. If these prerequisites are met, the tribe can sustain its existence.
Sperber is just doing the usual rhetorical bullshit that all incompetent leftists do:
gaslighting, deflecting, projecting, guilt-by-association, smears, idiotic condescension, ideological tribalism (see below for the full list).
Stop wasting your time with crap. Grow the fuck up.
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Cultural Marxist, PC left, CRT/SJW/BLM rhetoric*, explained:
000. use absurd SMEARS
00. project
0. gaslight
...
1. Deflect from what was actually said/done
2. Distort or lie about facts and evidence (such as straw manning)
3. Cherry pick evidence to fit the (victim/diversity) narrative / shift goal posts
4. Engage in emotive, feel good bs (special pleading) rather than use rational, objective thought
5. Use guilt by association ("you are a K-K-K/n-a-z-i") to smear people that dare to criticize PC/SJW leftist ideology.
[->] Use groupthink and scapegoating to marginalize critics of the PC left.
6. Demonize the personalities of opponents/critics.
7. Destroy the reputation, character and career of critics of the PC left
8. Use psychological violence, which could include doxxing, and threats of actual violence, against critics of the PC left.
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*Note: the above can be generalized to fit any ideology.
I've lost count of how many times you've copy-pasta'd that same spiel and on how many different Substack authors' comment sections.
The great irony that you clearly don't grasp, of course, is that you're describing exactly what you're doing.
PSYCHOTIC ASSHOLE TROLL
BTW, pierce, appreciate the link to the analysis of Habermas.