Love Postone, wish he was discussed here more often.
Moishe Postone Thread
Anthony Fisher
Grayson Johnson
Just because Zionists cite Postone doesn't mean he's a Zionist. Richard Spencer likes Gramsci, does that mean Gramsci was a Fascist? Please, next time you want to post on this board exercise the absolute minimum amount of critical thinking it takes to make a coherent point.
Anthony Bennett
ITT: Zig Forumsaks
I have to disagree that antisemitism is simply "anti-capitalism". If that were the case, why are the biggest Jew-haters also huge apologists for capitalism? These people hate us because they envy the success of the rich Jews in the existing system; rather than desiring the end of capitalism as a whole, they merely want to take the place of the "rich Jews" and live as the big capitalists themselves. Even quite a few of the white people who call themselves anti-Zionist aren't even all that anti-imperialist or make any attempt to understand Amerikan support for Israel as an integral part of imperialism as they love the way of life that Amerikan imperialism has given them. They only see Israel and its supporters as aliens which manipulate the United Snakes into doing evil, and assume that once the aliens have been exposed the U.S. will go back to being "good" (as if the US's entire existence isn't predicated on settler-colonialism imperialism). You can't be the richest country in the world without multiple proxy states doing your bidding.
Levi Howard
Chaya are you allowed to have a goy as a bf
Liam Watson
His argument against Bakunin was literally the opposite. Bakunin argued that a workers state would merely end up“oppressing” other classes simply by seizing and using the weapon of state power. Marx argued against this fetishistic view of power by pointing out that even if this were the case the proletariat would merely become bourgeois and the other classes would become proletarians. Historical evidence also speaks in favor of this point as I already mentioned.
Notice I never even claimed that the bourgeoisie was a central feature of capitalism but only that the bourgeoisie actually is an integral part of capitalism. Commodity production and the value-form would be oppressive without a bourgeoisie, true, but these things actually are not capitalism but merely parts of it left-coms intentionally misunderstand and seek to mislead others on this point.
Nolan Stewart
Robert Kurz is better.
Bentley Ortiz
This is perhaps the weakest point in both the lexicon of contemporary Left anti-Zionism and the philo-Semitic response to Jew hatred. The United States does not control Israel— Israel is a formidable imperialist power in its own right. On the other hand it’s untrue to say that Israel controls the US; rather, both Israel and the US are best thought of as evil symbiotic twins.
Tbh given Israel’s immense influence the anti-Semitic view of a Zionist-controlled USA comes closer to the truth then the Israel-is-a-pupper-of-the-big-bad-goy meme. Both views are wrong and both are worse from a political perspective but the Chomsky-Finkelstein view about Israel is simply weak on both logical and historical grounds.
Sebastian Gonzalez
But there was no Bourgeoise in the USSR, but (and I know this is a controversial topic on this board) Capitalism did still persist, maybe we could argue that it "wasn't quite Capitalist", but there was still wage labor and production of commodities for the creation of value, i.e. the working class did not reap the full fruits of their labor, and there didn't need to be a Bourgeois class. Unless your argument is that the Nomenklatura were the new Bourgeoise, but I've always found this to be a ridiculous argument as they never actually held the position within social relations that the Bourgeoise does in a normal Capitalist society, at most they were a somewhat privileged class, but they didn't sit around endlessly accumulating wealth without restriction, and they did not privately own the means of production. Also, I'm not a Leftcom friend.
Landon Kelly
This is a strange assertion. If there is no bourgeois class, then where are those fruits of labour not reaching the working class going exactly? Unless you mean that it went to the big evil state. Even though communism is perfectly compatible with a portion of the proceeds of labour being siphoned of to improve forces of production, to provide for common necessities like defense, and so on, it explicitly says so in the Critique of the Gotha programme.
Or do you want to posit that a whole new class came into being defined by their relation to the MOP and labour, something like managers and apparatchiks or something?
Cooper Davis
But this perfectly encapsulates the contradictory logic of reactionary thought. They rail against modernity, they rail against the Bourgeoise, they rail against Capitalism, against cosmopolitanism, against Jews, ect. ect. And yet what they offer in lieu is essentially just a more authoritarian and more alienating/atomizing version of Capitalism, not an actual break from Capitalism. To them the issue isn't really Capitalism, it's all these alien entities that have ruined Capitalism form the inside. Maybe I'm wrong, but this is how I've understood Postone's argument, when he talks about ant-semitism as a sort of false consciousness that blots out class consciousness he's referring to the way that Fascism offers a false solution to the problems of Capitalism by exacerbating the problems of Capitalism.