Bourgeois academics love a confused and disjointed salad of words, it’s even worse than some court decisions I have to read that drag to get to the point, and judges complain if I base my client’s request with more than 3 paragraphs.
The French Theory authors (foucault, et al) who were CIA sponsored, actually had a format that was intentionally convoluted, using specific words to sound important, that they could plug ideas into. This was a key reason they could write a book in three months, they were actually being pushed by Wisner’s wurlitzer to pump out volumes in order to clog up the young French radicals. (Like they had a simple idea that was unimportant but after running it through their format it would take up 130 pages and become part of “reading required to engage in discussion about anything” so only professional academics could participate in discussions with any certainty)
However, sometimes you need to write something complex to get complex ideas across.
Also, in my experience, judges are pretty generally idiots who are far more biased than most laypeople realize.
I genuinely don’t understand what the author is trying to say
Self critique is fundamental to improving and self-contempt forecloses any genuine, objective self-critique. This is true for communists and it is true on a personal level.
i.e. communists need to stop with being overly self-critical of the movement and of themselves personally to make forward progress.
Roderic’s comment at the top is an extension of this where he is saying that teaching the average person to get rid of the self-contemptuous-proletarian mindset will prove (like in Cuba for example) that there is no fundamental difference in capacity between classes, despite the mythology the bourgeoisie tries to impose.
Thanks, that makes much more sense.
I did understand the point made by Roderic (yeah, we’re on a first-name basis) because it was simple in both concept and writing
Ooh word salad 🥗 Yummy 😋
Huh
SpaceCowboy’s response to Grain Eater is good. In my own words:
Average people are taught by capitalism to be self-contemptuous, to think they are stupid rubes who should shut up and listen to authority figures of capital who surely must know so much better than us. In reality, average people are massively selling their own mental faculties short, and most people with a brief education of reading comprehension would be able to easily outsmart the bourgeois academics. These bourgeois academics use purposefully, needlessly complicated, smug, smart sounding language to make the masses feel subconsciously insecure about their own expertise on the world. Self-contempt, self-mockery, other synonyms like self-depreciation, etc. are unhealthy on both a personal and political level.
Self-criticism, however similar it may seem on the surface, is not at all the same thing, however, and is necessary for both personal and political growth. A good communist should not undersell the infinite abilities we all have to improve, should not overestimate the intelligence or knowledge of bourgeois “experts” who are total hacks, and who should be willing to healthily self-evaluate and constructively criticize themselves and improve.
