French Socialism and Antisemitism

Lol, you just did you dumb bitch.

Religions aren't just a collection of institutions and scriptures, they're first and foremost a multi-faceted social phenomenon. It's not something you can summarize monolithically like you do.
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I was referring to their role as merchants in early mercantilism which was, by a Marxist definition, somewhat parasitic. I never defended it, merely explained that it was an inevitability of the system that existed and was emerging. Also, your statement of "cultures emphasize hard-work, moral integrity, and moral obligation to thy neighbor" assumes that such culture usurps the systems and material conditions of a society, which is simply untrue when societies with such assumed "cultures" were okay with only certain groups of people or peasantry working for an upper class or aristocracy, were ready to abandon morals in material scarcity or during war, and backstabbed their neighbors over petty family disputs when they could stand to benefit. Your arguments put non-material over material and puts blame on entire groups for what is the material struggle of history. It's "X european were involved in the development of feudalism, therefore they are responsible for feudalism" tier.

He isn't saying all proles are inherently narrow minded and dumb, he's saying that the conditions of some societies have made it easier for lies and thought of conspiracy to spread and for proles to remain ignorant to the reality of their situation. When the people are pushed to the point of desperation, workers especially, many are willing to take the quick answers provided to account for their condition as to temporarily "alleviate" their suffering. Your framing puts it as if we think their status as proles mean their ideas are dumb or that everyone who is a prole can't have a bad idea. If such was the case, then both of our statuses as prole (assuming here) would mean that neither of us could be "wrong".

You're telling me there isn't a hint of derogation in the use of the term "abysmal ignorance"? Nor is there a hint of derogation in, essentially, referring to some trains of thought as peasant-status? You certainly give yourself plenty of room to escape through what ought to be a coin-sized hole, meanwhile (assuming it's you) give me nothing.


I don't assume that. If you want me to make a claim on culture and its effects on the systems we inhabit: it molds them, to a degree, and it defines the upper and lower bounds for moral conduct within those systems. You're falsely attributing a certain belief to me and there is much, much more grey area in the relationships between culture, morality, and social systems than you're allowing for. Taking that insight in-mind, the moral behavior of the European individual at the median of societal hierarchy was leaps and bounds higher than that of the Jew at the median of his own social hierarchy.

Zygmunt Bauman (socialist sociologist) talks about this a bit in his book "Modernity and the Holocaust". I don't remember all the details, but basically the thesis is that European society came to identify Jews with modernity. The socialist movement, in his view, was part of the larger movement against modernity, or at least its excesses. Therefore in the earlier stages of the leftist/anti-modernist movement you see a mingling of anti-semitic and more tolerant socialist thought; mildly for someone like Marx, and to the extreme for those like Proudhon. He argues that these two tendencies came to a more or less permanent schism only around World War I. You have one group, many of them ex-leftists like Mussolini, move their primary focus to romantic nationalism and anti-semitism, and another that sticks with leftism and at least outwardly expunges anti-semitic tendencies.

On a related note, I know that Sorel for example started out as a reactionary monarchist and carried some foundational assumptions from that into his later ideas. He embraced socialism because he saw it as a myth that could motivate social rejuvenation against "social decay". It's not hard to see how fascists ended up drawing inspiration from him.

I'm actually not the user who posted that, but I felt I needed to respond anyway. If its Lenin were talking about, then if there is derogation to be had its not for the people being proles or peasants or the peasants being inherently dumb but for the ruling classes who Lenin always felt purposely keep the populace in the dark. This isn't a coin sized hole, in the context of his other works it clearly means what I described it to be earlier. You made the claim earlier that we thought they were narrow minded proles, to which that user is correct, we never thought such. All posts before that user never made the claim even.

your posts stink of historical illiteracy. abstract marxist framework can't make up for that fact

or maybe i'm misquoting, whoever is asserting jews created capitalism

I'm arguing that certain Jews being involved in extremely early capitalism doesn't mean capitalism was "created" by Jews as capitalism is an inevitable historical stage that would happen regardless of who in particular was involved, just like feudalism wasn't "created" by x European.