Wait, are you trying to tell me that African slavery, or even the brutal enslavement of the peoples of the Congo by the Belgians and the Germans and the French did not exist, and that all those looted artworks I saw in Europe are a fiction?

That said, there is a Canadian school of thought that true Marxism (not Leninism or Stalinism) is merely the continued projection of all seven of the books of the Wealth of Nations by the Father of Capitalism, Adam Smith, in their true form.

Perhaps this literary character is merely a projection of this utopian Canadian view (and there are many such), or a wishful thinking that, but for the flaws of implementation, that a true understanding of Capitalism can be a true understanding of Marxism, minus the looting of souls, treasure, and ideas from the motherland Africa from whence all civilization sprang?

Peterson would mop the floor with Chuck. Just like Shapiro did. Leave Mudede there stuttering like the privileged Marxist midget he is.

“Africa from whence all civilization sprang?”

Yes, civilization started in Africa first. It also appears to have stopped there first.

The project of Marxism is extremely brutal, as attested by its outrageous cost in "human capital":

65 million deaths in the People's Republic of China
20 million deaths in the Soviet Union
2 million deaths in Cambodia
2 million deaths in North Korea
1.7 million deaths in Ethiopia
1.5 million deaths in Afghanistan
1 million deaths in the Eastern Bloc
1 million deaths in Vietnam
150,000 deaths in Latin America
10,000 deaths resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power

A project complicit in countless crimes against humanity including, but not limited to, in the Soviet Union alone:

The execution of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners
The murder of hundreds of thousands of rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 to 1922
The Russian famine of 1921, which caused the death of 5 million people
The Decossackization, a policy of systematic repression against the Don Cossacks between 1917 and 1933
The murder of tens of thousands in concentration camps in the period between 1918 and 1930
The Great Purge which killed almost 690,000 people
The deportation of 2 million so-called "kulaks" from 1930 to 1932
The death of 4 million Ukrainians (Holodomor) and 2 million others during the famine of 1932 and 1933
The deportations of Poles, Ukrainians, Moldovans and people from the Baltic states from 1939 to 1941 and from 1944 to 1945
The deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941
The deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1943
Operation Lentil and deportation of the Ingush in 1944

Pure evil.

@4 I gotta ask - do you keep a fact sheet like that around as a text document all ready to deploy at a moments notice? Or did you copy/paste that from some other board someplace? Like a "yell at communists resource" website out there. Because no freaking way did you just do that off the top of your head.

I tried searching a few of your phrases to see if I could turn up that list someplace else but no luck. So I thought I'd ask.

Not a single one of these clowns (@1-4) has addressed a single point in Charles' post.

Way to leave them spluttering, Charles!

Wait, aha!

https://theredand.black/forums/topic/524-arguments-i-have-noticed-against-communism-as-a-communist/

On the subject at hand, I've been seeing people mis-characterize Post Modern thought in this exact way for over 20 years. And it seems like it comes from the same place: an inability to distinguish between descriptive and prescriptive reasoning. So its another form of confusion around Is/Ought.

You can even extend this to the way people want to blame poor ol' Karl Marx, who was only trying to figure out Capitalism, for the crimes of some 20th century monsters. But Marx was only describing.

The US killed 2.5 million in Vietnam. Go America!

Adam Smith must be responsible for the extermination of the Native Americans! He wrote a book!

@5

It's copy paste.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism

Aside from the pompous name-dropping and padding in your latest parlor pink screed , WTF does Jordan Peterson being Canadian have to do with anything?

I miss the days when Charles’ posts where worth getting upset about...

@12
Not true!
Chuck has a HUGE following in the beastiality crowd...

@9
Yes. Kennedy and his policies killed a lot of people. Thank God Nixon got us out of that quagmire.

Nameless writer for obscure online magazine vs. respected Professor of Philosophy... Hmm..

Charles, can you write without parentheses? Try.

Isn't the Wizard greater if he's just a duffer behind the curtain with a bunch of effects?

Jordan Peterson is cited over 10,000 times in academic journals. He's been interviewed all over the world. He does sold out shows. He's done debates for large audiences. He taught at Harvard. He's wrote "Maps of meaning" quite a dense book. He interviews some of the world's leading scholars. And you want me to take your insults seriously? All you're doing is making yourself look pretty and foolish. I'm not surprised though.

Identity politics is not the reason we could have an open gay Apple-CEO. It's the reason one could be denied that role based off of what they have done to advance the company. Your fingers work hard to attack genuine people. And the folks who read your "work" love ignorance. Therefore, you make enough money for kale and an overpriced apartment because of free market. Jeez guys this isn't rocket surgery. Doesn't take a brain scientist.

I'm actually incredibly impressed that he managed to obtain a PhD and teaching position at Harvard without having read any books. You're making him out to be a true genius, Charles!

Also we should probably believe Charles because of his credentials (he made a short film once).

Oh.. OH! The wisdom from on high! Thank you Charlie.. You Pop Tart!

Get the Cheetos and Mountain Dew out! Lobster Man's neckbeard squad have arrived!

C'mon Charles. You wrote this for the page views these troglodytes will bring and you know it.

Anyway, don't you shitbags have some mass shootings to go plan?

Always a treat when Charles criticizes someone who actually produces something, because all of his critiques are basically things he himself does constantly.

I mean, this little line in the beginning:

"with little or no real intellectual force (but with the passion of a bulldog focused on the hopping and acrobatic happenings of a squirrel beyond its reach)."

Mudede may as well be writing an autobiography here.

"Read a book"? The problem is, you can find books that support just about any idea you want. Authors are subjected to cognitive biases also. I suspect Mr Peterson would have a field day with this article. That said my understanding of the topics are not strong enough that I can form an educated opinion of who's right or wrong here. I would love to see the two debate the topic for sure. What I do know of Jordan Peterson is This, he puts a lot of thought and research into his philosophies and positions. If he has not done his homework and dudiligiance he would and has said so. To assume he has not researched and went to great details in understanding these specific topics he spends so much time on is foolish. This author attacking Mr Peterson from that perspective leads me to believe this article is simply cherrypicking. I am a fan of Mr Peterson so maybe I am somewhat bias as well. Couple that with my understanding of the topics not being sufficient to have an educated opinion. I just think this author sells Mr Peterson short and I promise you he would find a real intellectual challenge if he were to have a discussion on this topic with Jordan Peterson.

You come off extremely arrogant and condescending here, and I don't think you're as concerned with understanding Peterson's perspective as with characterizing him as some moron. You don't really engage with his views on the manifestation of Cultural Marxism, and appear to take issue only with his terminology. He calls it "Cultural Marxism" because it is Marxist only by analogy, insofar as it considers the world as a power struggle between classes based on identity rather than wealth. This is mostly intellectually masturbatory fluff designed to annoy people.

Literally 30 seconds into the video he starts talking about one of the concepts you accuse him off never having heard of... Did you actually watch the video? Or did you think you could cover sloppy research with vociferous bomphiologia? (I'm taking a cue from this article and hoping big, silly words make my post more true)

Watch out Charles; when you criticize a guru, there is guaranteed backlash from those under the spell. Kachiiiiing!

During the Great Depression, social interaction was plagued by dreadful bores convinced that Marxist/Leninist Dialectical Materialism had all the answers and boy weren't they on a hair-trigger to share the wisdom. Jaded 1930's newspapermen coined the phrase in response: "you can't class-angle a blowjob," (meaning "every aspect of human existence isn't encompassed by your bright shiny philosophy.")

Frankly, I'm feeling the same way about Professor Peterson's lobster-boys.

Charles this piece lacks a cogent analysis or a concise summary. I like the range of your criticism and your plentiful array of halfway finished disassembles of this Jordan character but you provide no endpoint for your readers and you expect them to muck around all day in the quicksand while you make a grand show of disrobing not an emperor but just another internet philosopher trying to get traction with the political economy nerds.
Please for the love of John Stuart Mill, please work in a basic declarative sentence every few paragraphs.

"Peterson's bête noire: identity politics"

Naw, he talks a lot about it because it's now a favorite rightwing line of attack and especially, it allows him to paint the entire left with the broad brush of intolerance. The core of his discourse is still primary anti-leftwing (anti-egaltiarian) tripe (like claiming that the whole of the Marxist legacy is worse than nazism). He basically sounds like a rightwing crank.

@36 "sounds like a rightwing crank"

In this specific case, halfway between Libertarian and self-help grifter, which is consistent but doesn't reflect very highly on the content.

Is this a joke?
You are claiming postmodernism morphed into structuralism "which is anti-marxism"?
I believe all of these words are less than fully understood by you.
One must only look at leftist born and/or supported policies in government, compare them to Marxist Doctrine, then come to a conclusion that doesn't make you look like a moron...
Leftists in the US are literally fighting for universal income, state control of private interests, and have started the "war on wealth", which seems pretty suicidal considering their form of government admittedly relies on wealthy people to remain viable.
Now you say "I was referring to cultural Marxism", well it would be very easy for you to look at the social tendencies of the left when it comes to separating groups based on perceived victimhood and see the Marxism for yourself. Examples such as sex, race, and income are being used to separate "good from bad", one to war the other. Workers versus the bourgeoisie
Yes I could lead you carefully through social/cultural examples that quite possibly outnumber the political/fiscal examples but I do not believe for one second you would make the journey willingly.
Just as there is no point in getting me started on the fact that slavery was not a capitalist experiment, it's a well know fact that it was a practice started in Africa by tribal/nomadic cultures and later implemented by governments of every denomination. Did you think it was coincidence that the last country to abolish slavery was Mauritania in Africa in 1981?

Your big argument point was three French intellectuals who were postmodernist did not consider themselves Marxist. Well ok, I'll give you that one as a favor and say that would make sense considering that was at the birth of postmodernism when perhaps it did separate itself from Marxism and we are talking about "postmodernism" beginning with Derrida in the 70's who was a Marxist until the body count had gotten so high that you couldn't really call yourself a Marxist even in left leaning intellectual circles.
That is why you will hear (if you ever listen) Dr. Peterson compare postmodernism today to neo-marxism, Neo meaning new or a newer version of.
Jacques Derrida even published "Spectors of Marx" which was a look at the future of Marxism in the US in 1993.
Derrida was absolutely the gold standard of postmodernist influence in the US, introduced by universities in the 70's.
That is the brand of postmodernism we are dealing with here.
One last thing, you have really outdone yourself in trying to discredit Jordan Peterson in your article. Well we mostly know about Peterson's higher learning degrees and accomplishments and I was curious how they compare to your own?

@38 "Leftists in the US [..] have started the "war on wealth"

such level of rank stupidity betrays the verbiage of your drivel, poseur.

The utility of the term "Cultural Marxism" is it allows Peterson and his acolytes to pretend that any left-of-center position on any Culture War issue is in fact a secret dog whistle about "the Left's" fervent desire to establish a totalitarian state.

Here's a fun game: in any comment section where Peterson acolytes are present, count how many comments it takes before somebody brings up Stalin. Doesn't matter what the topic of discussion is.

I don't think Peterson is stupid or unread. I think he's a very hard-working charlatan who knows exactly what he's doing.

I read this article last night and my first thought was "I'm so glad I didn't give up popcorn for Lent..."
I am not disappointed.

It's just more projection. By his definition, the true "Cultural Marxists" are those on the right.

So would like to see Jordan Peterson get a taste of some real Cultural Marxism, and spend five years starving in a Gulag for his hate speech.
.

@16:

Yeah, and it only took him four years, 2,500 U.S. casualties, and nobody knows how many tens of thousands of innocent civilians killed during "Operation Menu" and other secret, unauthorized bombings in Laos and Cambodia while he was in office - USA! USA!

4,

South Korea under Syngman Rhee was capitalist. He carried out ten of thousands of killings of suspected communists. Park Chung-hee transformed the country into a military dictatorship. The country didn't have a democratic election until the 1980's. But it was capitalist.

Sukarno massacred an estimated 3 million Indonesians during an anti-Communist purge from 1965-1966. Augusto Pinochet's regime was probably the purest form of capitalism ever tried in human history; it resulted in 3,200 public executions and 3500 "disappearances". The regime was a military junta that forbade democratic elections.

Zaire under Mobutu Sese-Soko and its successor state the DRC under Kabila and Son have been a non-stop capitalist horrorshow since it assassinated the only democratically elected (and pro-Soviet Communist) leader in it's history. Since that time, each leader has come to power by murdering his successor. The policy of one-man rule featured images of the great leader in every classroom and every home, just to remind the Zaireans and later Congolese show as watching everything they ever did. It's fair to call this country a kleptocracy; Mobuto stole $15 billion of his countrymen's wealth to lavish on his own family while his citizens starved en masse.

From 1976 to 1983, the military dictatorship of Argentina murdered 30,000 people in an anti-communist purge called 'The Dirty War'. El Salvador's President Martinez murdered 30,000 peasants suspected of Communist sympathies. Another 75,000 were killed in the same country 40 years later in another purge for the same reason. Guatemala murdered an estimated 200,000 in an anti-Leftist purge as well.

Prior to Mao's revolution, the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-Shek murdered 10,000 suspected Communists over a period of just 20 days. During the Revolution, Kai-Shek ordered the murder of an estimated 1,131,000 suspected of Communist loyalties. After fleeing to Taiwan, he rounded up an estimated 140,000 Taiwanese suspected of Communist leanings and had them all shot.

The United States murdered an estimated 310,000 Vietnamese civilians suspected of pro-Communist loyalty. In Spain, the Francoist fascists murdered 400,00 Spaniards who were loyal to the Socialist Second Spanish Republic.

But do go on about how its only the Reds who kill people.

Oh yeah, I'd like to point out that the only political party in South Africa during the apartheid regime that allowed both Black and White members was the South African Communist Party.

Unlike Elon Musk, I never lived in SA and therefore did not flee the country to avoid military service. However, had I been there at the time in which he did, I could only have the moral conscience to sleep at night had I been a member of the CPSA, which actively resisted apartheid at a time when everyone else on Earth was perfectly willing to let Blacks die in De Beers owned diamond mines while capitalists in the US stocked up on kugerands.

I also want o point out that the very first military unit comprised of American soldiers where white men served under a Black general was the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, an explicitly Communist fighting force that resisted Franco. The General's name, if you';re interested, was Oliver Law.

And do you know who defended the Scottsboro Boys? Before whites finally got the courage up to join MLK on the Edmund Pettis Bridge, the only white Americans who tried to stop the horror of lynching was the CPUSA. Nobody else had the balls to tell the Klan to fuck off, but we fought them like we were fighting the devil himself. Your nice business oriented Dixiecrats did nothing in the face of lynching, but the Communists of the Deep South- and yes, there have always been Communists in the Deep South- put their own asses on the line to do what was right.

I don't know if John Brown had ever read Marx. They were contemporaries, so maybe he did. However, he surely would have found common cause if he'd had.

45

"So would like to see Jordan Peterson get a taste of some
real Cultural Marxism, and spend five years starving in a
Gulag for his hate speech.'

That'd surely give him Something to whine about, eh?

[speaking of the irony, Scottie]

Oh, the Oppression.

Sorry to pop your bubble but Marx was also a creature of Capitalism. Son of a Rabbi, he never worked a day in his life and eventually moved to London to be closer to his financial benefactors. Lenin, Trotsky and all the other Bolshevik bandits got filthy rich on the plunder of Russian Aristocracy which they secured in Swiss banks while they starved the Russian peasants. Communism is in fact an expression of Talmudic Judaism but you will never hear Mudede or Petersen mention this.

This article is an innefectual attempt to differentiate the modern left wing doctrine from classical Marxism. What is learned is that the main differences are the terms used to label the ideology by its own purporters, and that this author uses personal insults to attempt a political statement.

52

Whoa -- way to Throw Down the Gauntlet, Csernyik.
Whatchya Say, Chas?

Looks like an Article there, to me . . . .

" ... the terms used to label the ideology by its own purporters... "

I know. I Loved it when Teabaggers first came to town.
With exactly two teabags, dangling delectably / enticingly /
distractingly from the fronts of their tri-cornered tin foiled hats.

Speaking of insults.

Hey Charles, thanks for sharing the Jordan Peterson video. It helped me finally understand him and his appeal. I agree Peterson doesn't really understand critical theory. Marx, Nietzsche and Freud deconstructed economics, religion and psychology to emancipate people from oppressive narratives imposed on us by others as well as ourselves. Peterson does not recognize this.
I believe Peterson's worldview was profoundly shaped by his traumatic experience of existential dread at the threat of nuclear annihilation, as detailed in his introduction to "Maps of Meaning."
I think this reified in him a binary worldview of capitalism vs. communism, which conditions his understanding of Marxism to this day.
Still, he has a point. As you well know we are living in the time of late capitalism and the death of empire. Peterson's countercultural sociological critique is simply critiquing post-modern inspired social engineering as a solution to cultural problems in the same way an environmentalist would critique geo-engineering as a solution to climate change. But because we are culturally stuck in a patriarchal/modernist worldview we tend to think of a revolution within the system rather than the transformation of it.
Because Peterson doesn't propose a forward thinking solution he comes across as--and is judged as--a backwards thinking troglodyte resisting progress. But he is simply beating his tin drum at the degradation of civilization that accompanies the death of empire.
The world doesn't need another revolution, it needs transformative healing. I look forward to a New Age when people will be fully individuated and spiritually enlightened. Only then will we be truly emancipated and rise as like a phoenix from the ashes of the past 2000 years.

Wow. This article is not at all a bad introduction to the controversy surrounding JBP. Any one new to this circus that does a bit of digging after reading this very mundane Mudede article is likely to be very curious about the motivations for the bizzare assertions herein.

The philosophical incompatibly between postmodernism and Marxism is a subject JBP has addressed at length. They certainly are very strange bedfellows.

I don't think there is a better way to introduce the unfamiliar to JBP's critique than to present an example of exactly what he is critiquing.

"Peterson says that there is a massive clusterfuck of ideological horeshit that has pervaded much of our cultural landscape? That ideologically-posessed lying, even about easily verifiable facts, has become normalized!? Nonsense!! I shall present a large puddle of recycled ideologically-posessed claims that will be easily shown to be false by anyone with an internet machine!!"

"Adorno, and Horkheimer and the other lovely fellows of the Frankfurt School, clearly do not exist, as anyone can easily falsify! They certainly did not intend to undermine decadent Western Civilization! They certainly did not claim that classical Marxism had failed, and ought to be replaced with a their new, improved (neo?) sort of Marxist-ish critique!"

"Jaques Derrida definitely did not exist, and definitely did not consider his ideas to be "in a certain spirit of Marxism"."

"Furthermore, Gramsci, also did not exist. Or doesn't count somehow. And Rudi Dutschke, likewise, definitely did not further develop Gramsci"s ideas into "The Long March Through the Institutions". ---And if he had!, it definitely was not! an homage to Mao's great famine forward! And, even if it was!, it was not about gradually, carefully, undermining Decadent Western Civilization while pretending to be moderate reformers, with the ultimate goal of complete destruction of American culture. Which they definitely did not hate and wish to destroy."

"As long as no one has one of those dirty capitalist internet-machines, there is no way for anyone to check any of this. And, anyone who doesn't believe me that the FS is not real, is a dirty, dirty, Nazi-pants Nazi-face nazi-Nazi."

"They are probably also "multi-racial-white-supremicists". Because that term existing is not an indication of this very silly ideological possession."

Alden.

"The aim is not to change history, but merely to understand it."

...did I get that right? Or was it the other way around?

You well know that Marxism is Proscriptive. As is Derrida. As is Foucault. As is The Frankfurt School.

Tell me again how Post-modernist ideology and Neo-Marxism have not formed a bizzare alliance as a social movement "against the dominant paradigm" and all that...

Wandering Stars,. Are you claiming that CPUSA was influential in American politics? I heard that only mean people said that Communists were real.

Were CPUSA's Active Measures campaigns also real?

....I heard that only crazy natzi-pants people believed in communists.

Did CPUSA stop being influential as soon as Stalin started being "non-real"?

Most people here seem to think that you are not real.

Historically, Marxism is rooted in theological Satanism, which is rooted in Luciferianism, which is rooted in ancient Gnosticism. Why would anyone willfully support Marxism, if they knew this? They would not. Unfortunately, most people do not know history, so they ignorantly support evil. Gnosticism, Luciferianism, and theological Satanism engage in the inversion of social moral standards, which means that deceit, lies, and manipulation are par for the course. This is why the Satanic Black Mass is an exact inversion of the traditional Catholic Mass. Know your history, people! God bless all of you.

Frank, how would that burst anyone's bubble? Whoever claimed Marx was not a product of capitalism? Honestly I don't know what it is that people think they are talking about when they say stuff like that. Marx wrote three volumes of analysis of capitalism. How in the world could he do that if he were a product of, say, feudalism? Like Adam Smith before him (who he read and references), he did work- as an economist and political theorist. What he didn't do was wage labor, and I don't think there is anyone who claimed he did? Also what does the writer of analyses of capitalism have to do with Russian aristocrats and dictators getting rich several decades later in another country? And finally, not that it matters, but Marx's father was a lawyer, not a rabbi. His grandfather was a rabbi.

I suggest that those of you chasing white rabbits and talking about spiritual traditions might want to crack open a volume of Capital and demystify your impressions. It's literally just an analysis of capitalist production. If you are going to talk about analyses of capitalism, you have to deal with Adams, Marx and Keynes. There is nothing mystical about any of them.

@60 EmmaLiz -- Marx was financed by... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg2Spn4KJ_0

Although Adam Weishaupt only dabbled in the Kabbalah and Egyptian magick, he was surrounded by Kabbalahists and he also received financing from Baron Meyer Rothschild, who was a devoted Kabbalahist. Kabbalah is one major arm of Luciferianism. Followers of Weishaupt later financed Marx. The goals of communism are almost exactly the same as those of Luciferianism. This is no coincidence.

One thing that always baffles me about this conversation is, how can the Frankfurt school or Marxism be trying to undermine Western Civ- by any definition. They are literally a product of Western civ and major contributors to those traditions. The Frankfurt school philosophers and economists didn't even agree with one another, much less with any wider global agenda. And Marx was an influence on them (as he is on any Western study of political or economic theory) but they were critical. Anyone who thinks these people agreed enough to have a cohesive agenda have not read any of them. That's whats so troubling about all these conspiracy theories- you are taking people who have loads of disagreements and differences and assuming they are all on the same side against- what? - some static ideal of Western Civ?

Step away from the ivory tower folks and look at this shit in the real world. Modernism/Postmodernism has a tendency to deconstruct everything and question any core truths. Loads of people have built academic careers arguing over stuff that 99% of people don't give a flying shit about because if you can deconstruct everything and assign all sorts of narratives and meanings to everything, then you can endless spin in circles. I guess it's fun for a certain kind of circle jerk. But it's not Marxist. Marxism is materialist. It's not concerned with those things. It's also one of the most influential analyses of capitalist production and organization of society in the Western tradition, so every single school of political and economic thought that comes afterwards will have to respond to Marx and will show some Marxist influence. It's just silly to pretend that all these people are Marxist or that they have the same understanding or agenda just because they all came after Marx and don't dismiss him out right. The majority of these people don't even agree with one another- and that persists until this very day. Even Peterson's hobby horse about gender identity- he seems to have this idea that the left is all on board with this deconstruction of gender and language politics. Does he honestly not know that there is this huge clash between trans rights activists and radical feminists, to the point that some trans people were literally marching in the streets with baseball bats saying they wanted to punch radical feminists? These people are both on the left and both influenced by Marxism to a certain extent. Does he not know that there are disputes about what it means to be anticapitalist- that anarchists and socialists have always clashed with one another to the point sometimes of violence. I believe he does know all of this and he just pretends that there is some globalist bloc among these people because it gives you, his fans who don't read any of the writers he talks about, an enemy to blame for everything. Makes you feel in the know. It's these neomarxists undermining Western civ that's destroying everything. As if Western civ can be divided up into two sides.

Marxism is simple at its core. All it says is that capitalism requires the existence of profit which means you must sell a thing for more than it cost to make it. Now let's analyze where that profit comes from and how society is organized around the requirement for growth and what could happen as a result of that. Anyone who really can't see the existence of class politics as sitting on top all these other ivory tower disputes is deluding themselves.

Peterson is a hack. Here's what he's done. The first thing is to mimic a sort of "find the patterns and extrapolate meaning" theory of popular culture. This is very easy to do, and it's been done better by people like Jung and Joseph Campbell. I can make a dragon any number of things- it's been a symbol for capitalism, a symbol for paganism, a symbol for avarice, a symbol for chaos, a symbol for matriarchy- you can make it whatever you want. Etc for all his maps of meaning when you strip away the academic language and really look at what he's doing. But if you are going to market this sort of shit and make it interesting to anyone other than your own fellow academics, you have to have a hook for a wider audience.

Enter part two. Peterson is a self-help guru. Every generation has self-help theories that helps alienated and isolated people create some sort of meaning and structure in their lives. If the pieces fit together too nicely, then it's probably bullshit. Peterson affirms the grievances and life experiences of a certain kind of young man and then gives him someone to blame for it.

Combine the two together and add a little transgression (like Shapiro, he says the things he's supposedly not allowed to say) and moral outrage without having to do any of the heavy lifting of actually reading hard books (not surprising that both of their fans get their info from youtube videos rather than actually reading the stuff they say is so nuts) and ta-da. You have a career.

I think it was deliberate because it's boring to be a sub-par academic writing shit no one else will read, and he does not have the rigor to actually produce something that honestly engages with the stuff he criticises. He's a charlatan, and you are his rubes.

Richard, have you read any Marx? He does not write about Communism. He writes about Capitalism. The only time he talks about Communism at all is in the very short pamphlet (the Manifesto) he wrote with Engels.

Capital (all the thousands of pages of it) is an analysis of capitalist production. There is nothing at all mystical about it. I have no doubt that certain Western religious traditions which shaped Western Civilization have some trickling influence on how we think and how we shape our societies, and no doubt if you want to find those symbols in any school of Western thought you can find them (it's like a fish analysing water) but you are creating elaborate conspiracy theories here. This is exactly what I'm talking about. I think people have no fucking idea what Marx wrote- they have it built up in their minds to be something far different from what it is. It's literally pages and pages of discussion of how commodities are produced, how profit is accumulated, etc.

Also, yes, plenty of people who call themselves communists have slaughtered people and been dictators. Likewise with people who call themselves capitalist- they also slaughter people and create dictatorships. If we kill ten million people in one state to service the rubber trade or a million in another to secure an oil market, this is as much the fault of capitalism as killing millions in a population transfer is the fault of communism. Lift your heads out of your asses- the issue is that organizing for power is bloody regardless of how you do it and it always has been. What kind of structure was not, ever in human history? If we are going to move forward and attempt to create a better world, then we have to consider what else can be done, and that requires an analysis of the current moment and the things we've tried before and the mistakes we've made. Currently we live in capitalism, it is bloody, it is destroying the planet, it is precarious and unstable, and the best analyses we have of this situation is Adams, Marx and Keynes. All Peterson contributes is to say that we should just shut up and not criticise and some vague ideal of static Western civ (which is contradictory)- the rest of it is just resentment politics and scapegoating grievances that affirm your sense of yourself in the first place. Step away and ask, what next? If he's been your stepping stone, then good. Stop worshiping him and engage with the harder questions: what do we do from here? He's offering you the hollow thrill of arguing, of transgression, of grievance, with no movement forward. And he's conditioning you to not see any of the nuance in the thought he is introducing you to so that you will dismiss it before having any understanding of it.

It's exhausting because it's hard to discuss something with someone when their notions are wrong in the first place. Like, if I were to say to you "Theresa May, the queen of Mexico, wants to round up all the tigers that roam the Himalayas outside of Mexico City and shoot them into space on Elon Musk's flying saucer fleet- how do you feel about that?" you'd have trouble answering because first you'd have to correct so much misinformation. Then each step of the way, you'd get bogged down because when you start explaining how Theresa May is a PM and not a queen, I'd have a million ready counter arguments and we'd never even get to the part about Mexico much less all the rest of it. That's what these people do- they brainwash you and bog you down in petty distractions that in the moment feel real but which offer you nothing over all. Step back, and ask yourself who benefits? What do these people offer any of us? What contributions are they making to the world? And what do you really know about the people you are blaming for stuff? How much of it have you honestly read or engaged with? How aware of the fact that they constantly criticise each other as well?

Richard, I glanced at that stuff, and now I think you are trolling? Either that or you actually believe this. In either case, I do wish you lived nearby and we could go have a drink so you could expound upon your worldview which seems remarkable (though ludicrous).

I mean this shit... If I'm parsing it, you are saying that a Kabbalahist funded a guy who had his own followers who later financed Marx, and that the goals of communism (worker ownership of the means of production) are the same as those of Luciferianism (which are what exactly?).

If you were a rich intellectual at that time, you likely dabbled in Egyptology or knew someone who did. It was popular in the way that speculations around AI are right now. No doubt if you were Jewish and rich and an intellectual at the time, you were connected in some way to people who were into Kabbalah.

Have you read Foucault's Pendulum? If you wrote all this in earnest, I highly recommend that you grab that novel and take it to a beach or a lake (somewhere away from screens) and sit and read.

Who is EmmaLiz (@63 & @65)? Hire her! Those were far and away the most cogent comments on this generally benighted and silly comment thread.

67

She's our resident genius who pops in from time to time and shows us how good Humanity can truly be.

I wish we had ten millon more very similiar...

@66 EmmaLiz -- I would be happy to. Post an email address of some kind and we'll go from there. Most of world history has evolved around power brokers who are Gnostic, which later evolved into Luciferianism (today's theological Satanism). Please research the history of the Black Venetian Nobility and the first world central bank, the Fondo, in Venice (the Genoa family also had a competing central bank in Italy at the time). These are the families (today's European royalty) who later financed the Rothschild central banking dynasty. The roots of communism lie within Luciferianism, as communism was created as a means to implement the goals of Luciferianism. The traditional pre-Vatican II (prior to 1959) Catholic Church knew this, as there are 15 or more encyclicals that are specific to this, from the last 200 years alone. The main goals of communism, Luciferianism, and United Nations Agenda 2030 (recently rebranded as the Green New Deal) are the same -- abolition of the family unit, abolition of private property, abolition of inherited wealth, creation of a one world government (we already have this, which is the unelected Bank for International Settlements), the reduction of population volume (via GMOs, vaccines, fluoridation, plastics, etc -- all impacting estrogen), and the end of organized religion. No, i am not an idiot, as you suggest. I am merely interested in world history. My historical book collection is quite extensive. To understand Marx, you have to first understand who came before him. His ideas were largely borrowed from the Luciferians which include the Illuminists who crafted the French and Russian revolutions, the Freemasons and Carbonari, and also, in part, Adam Weishaupt's Illuminati group from Bavaria. The financing for all of this came from the same central banking families that are still in control, today. They own and control the Bank for International Settlements, which is the most powerful corporation on the planet that no one has ever heard of, it seems. The BIS coordinates the activities of at least 58 of the most prominent privately owned corporate central banks so that they act in unison, like a world government. The collective power of these banks is absurd when compared to that of any single government. While you were blaming capitalism for the world's problems, you were ignoring the world's power brokers who have been dominating the world's history books for the last 1,500 years or more. They created the US central bank in 1913 which technically means the US has been fascist (corporations merging with govt) -- not capitalist -- since that date. No one around here has seen capitalism for many decades... check the congressional findings of the 1912 Pujo Commission on this, to confirm. It's very well documented.

given the author's lack of understanding of the actual subject matter as opposed to the academic topics upon which the subject matter is based, I find his conclusions unfortunately incomplete and totally insufficient given that it lack any pertinence to the cultural debate that is ongoing. Case in point, Peterson is describing the practical behavior of Marxism, both historically and in the modern day. By conveniently ignoring the practical reality, most likely due to his own lack of experience given he seems, I assume, isolated in his own academic bubble, the author is debating along an axis that Peterson is not even attempting to engage on.

It is at this point I would question the academic ability of the author given his inability to properly assess the situation rather than wanting to project his version of reality onto a situation he seems to know nothing about.

for god sake, people dont have time to do as much reading as is required to get a graduate degree, that's why they listen to a self-help guru. Can you please re-write your essay in the form of aphorisms or self-help truisms? As for postmodernism, sure Peterson is not on intellectual footing, but he is right about the intellectual left that dominates universities having no conception of the (theoretical) notion of individualism in democratic societies. Society is seen as an interplay of various groups, that's basically Peterson's point about "postmodernism".