Social media,. as opposed to blogs, increasingly rejects freedom of speech , serious discourse and is a self defined mob and echo chamber. Blogs are far better for serious discussions on politics, culture , science and religion
As someone said, the left didn't eat the rich. The rich ate the left.
I'm not sure what "Marxism" means today. The heart of it is economic determinism, viewing politics and culture as epiphenomena; and historical determinism. Who believes those any more? With it comes the theory of exploitation or surplus value, based on the false labor theory of value, discredited already before the end of the 19th century. (Economic value is a result of demand, not supply -- that is, want or need or use value).
Consumed for more than a few minutes at a time, Twitter is deeply harmful to people and other living things. Blogs are far superior. The Web went off the rails, in part, because of the rise of such highly concentrated yet vulnerable-to-abuse platforms. The older Web 1.0 was better is many ways. In general, the spread of electronic media has fatally undermined political parties, making Western societies much harder to govern.
The ideas about history being shaped by means of production, means of war, and power and economic relationships in different epochs was lifted and garbled by Marx from the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. I mean not just Hume and Smith, but Playfair, Ferguson, and Lord Kames. They were direct influences on Hegel as well, a hard-to-understand but more profound thinker.
I write as a sometime-fan of Lasch and his books, especially The Culture of Narcissism, which appeared in my last year in high school. My advanced US history teacher had been a student at Columbia in the late 1960s and was taught by both Lasch and his advisor, the famous Richard Hofstadter. We knew about populism, and some of us, at least, had some vague notion of Marxism. (Learning economics in college and the theory of monopoly and oligopoly really clarified things -- do they teach any of this any more?) We didn't know what to make of Lasch's use of psychoanalysis, which was even then in the process of being discredited from a variety of directions -- historians, modern psychiatry and psychotherapy, feminists.
Overall, Culture of Narcissism was too long and had a hard time focusing on the real point, not too different from Tom Wolfe's more pop concept of the "Me" Decade. (As one critic in the early 80s wrote about the length of the book, "limits to growth, man.") It's that the Boomers are prone to far greater degree of narcissism than previous generations, and it's greatly enhanced by the proliferation of visual media and screens (flat surfaces, essentially). This was already becoming clear in the 1960s and 70s, but is obviously blatant now that we have portable flat-screen devices. The Millennial kids of the Boomers -- the narcissism ("selfie" culture) starts young and has been so normalized that we often don't notice it.
Social media,. as opposed to blogs, increasingly rejects freedom of speech , serious discourse and is a self defined mob and echo chamber. Blogs are far better for serious discussions on politics, culture , science and religion
As someone said, the left didn't eat the rich. The rich ate the left.
I'm not sure what "Marxism" means today. The heart of it is economic determinism, viewing politics and culture as epiphenomena; and historical determinism. Who believes those any more? With it comes the theory of exploitation or surplus value, based on the false labor theory of value, discredited already before the end of the 19th century. (Economic value is a result of demand, not supply -- that is, want or need or use value).
Consumed for more than a few minutes at a time, Twitter is deeply harmful to people and other living things. Blogs are far superior. The Web went off the rails, in part, because of the rise of such highly concentrated yet vulnerable-to-abuse platforms. The older Web 1.0 was better is many ways. In general, the spread of electronic media has fatally undermined political parties, making Western societies much harder to govern.
The ideas about history being shaped by means of production, means of war, and power and economic relationships in different epochs was lifted and garbled by Marx from the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. I mean not just Hume and Smith, but Playfair, Ferguson, and Lord Kames. They were direct influences on Hegel as well, a hard-to-understand but more profound thinker.
I write as a sometime-fan of Lasch and his books, especially The Culture of Narcissism, which appeared in my last year in high school. My advanced US history teacher had been a student at Columbia in the late 1960s and was taught by both Lasch and his advisor, the famous Richard Hofstadter. We knew about populism, and some of us, at least, had some vague notion of Marxism. (Learning economics in college and the theory of monopoly and oligopoly really clarified things -- do they teach any of this any more?) We didn't know what to make of Lasch's use of psychoanalysis, which was even then in the process of being discredited from a variety of directions -- historians, modern psychiatry and psychotherapy, feminists.
Overall, Culture of Narcissism was too long and had a hard time focusing on the real point, not too different from Tom Wolfe's more pop concept of the "Me" Decade. (As one critic in the early 80s wrote about the length of the book, "limits to growth, man.") It's that the Boomers are prone to far greater degree of narcissism than previous generations, and it's greatly enhanced by the proliferation of visual media and screens (flat surfaces, essentially). This was already becoming clear in the 1960s and 70s, but is obviously blatant now that we have portable flat-screen devices. The Millennial kids of the Boomers -- the narcissism ("selfie" culture) starts young and has been so normalized that we often don't notice it.
@ghostofchristo1 is a solid follow.