Serious question. I’m vaguely familiar with him as a political commentator on the left, but the more I see of the guy, the more I think he’s just a liberal.
He’s got some good takes and some wacky ones. He also talks in a way that would suggest he’s very radical, like he calls people brother and sister, and he’s got a very powerful speaking voice. He’s got a good sense of oration and he’s not afraid to throw around words like imperialism, structural racism, stuff like that. I think if you wanna look into West’s ideology, I think he’s caught up in too much religious symbols and metaphysical stuff to ever reach what we’d call coherent leftism. He’s a 1990s style leftist, when the smell of Marxism had drifted away, when any radicalism had been defeated, when everyone was a kind of utopian.
But you’re right. He’s another ivy league professor. They’re always going to betray you, because they’re at their core just some academics who write papers. It’s the same with how people will occasionally get whiplash from something Zizek says.
So far the only ivy league professors who have never betrayed me have been Michael Parenti, Richard Wolff, Paul Buhle, and Jodi Dean. They’re very cool and know what they’re talking about. There’s also Vijay Prashad who is possibly one of the best Marxist academics right now, at least among English speaking academia. China probably has some kickass scholars I’ve never heard of. I have a gut feeling there are some good academics who write in Spanish too.
The way to tell if an intellectual is going to knife you is simple. What do they do outside of the university? Do they organise at grass roots level? Are they cadre in a political org? Or do they just posture at every election and protest to sell books?
There are some exceptions like how Chomsky had bad takes while being legitimately involved in material work, but Chomsky is at least consistent in his bad takes, he doesn’t betray his own stated values at a moments notice. (He’s always walked an inconsistent line of electorialism vs anarchism, for instance)
He’s just another left-liberal who thinks THE solution is taxing the wealthy and having stronger unions, as if those are even viable options under a bourgeois democracy.
I stopped even paying attention to him when he first ran under The People’s Party, a group of/closely-tied to LaRouchites. I assume the grift is to just get money from whatever Bernie supporters haven’t moved further left since 2020? I dunno, anyone still falling for this song and dance should read “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder by
What anticommunism does to your brain.
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A professor I had once did that with Oliver Wendell Holmes, but he was being cheeky about it and his implied purpose for doing so was to challenge us as he made an obvious appeal to authority.
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I think in terms of need that’s broadly correct (I might add Goethe and Hugo, and of course the Russian greats but certainly that’s it for English). If you’re reading Shakespeare there’s no reason not to be reading Shikibu or Achebe or a thousand other authors modern and ancient. And Dickens and Austen are way down the priority list.
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So everyone here is voting de la Cruz, right?
Im voting for
It’s her turn
Classic “Non-Marxist Socialist” lol
The hell is a non-marxist socialist
Its like saying “meat based tofu”
Arguably the most common kind of socialism in the ‘west’ historically. To go off of what @emizeko said, they were usually utopian socialists, particularly religious and nudist sects in the U.S., there is a whole sect of German utopians that set up around Missouri I think, but there were lots of these groups up south of Seattle, and even (famously) anarchist nudist socialists on the peninsula in Seattle.
They were non-Marxist in that they didn’t subscribe to any variety of Marxist economic or geo-political thinking, and they usually are big on libertarian principles coming first.
Nudist, you say? Maybe we could learn something from these people.
Volcel Police!
Nudity is not inherently sexual. Unlearn puritan mindset.
