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Showing posts with the label statism

The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing (Part 4)

Leftist Organicism There was a leftist version, though the inter-war emergence of  organicism was slower and less thorough on the Left. The new USSR  quickly embraced the statism that pre-war socialist and especially  communist movements had denounced. 20 By September 1918, the  independence of the soviets, the unions and the law was almost gone, the Cheka secret police was into its first murders, ‘merciless extermination’ was declared to be the fate of the kulak class enemy, concentration camps were built and the ‘Red Terror’ had been formally inaugurated. Statism was seen more as political necessity than moral principle—unlike extreme rightism. Nonetheless, some Bolshevik language had begun to resemble fascist language. Trotsky made a famous speech with a decidedly fascist title: ‘Work, Discipline and Order Will Save the Soviet Socialist Republic’. He also sometimes praised paramilitary virtues: economic problems, he declared, had to be ‘stormed’ with ‘disciplined...

‘I’ve Had Enough With Marx’

“What Foucault and many intellectuals  at the time  were struggling against  was not only socialism abroad, but also a certain kind of socialism and its legacy in France. More fundamentally,  after 1968, it is the very notion and entire conceptual structure of revolution  that Foucault would reject.” “In May 1975, Michel Foucault took LSD in the desert in southern California. He described it as the most important event of his life, one which would lead him to completely rework his History of Sexuality. His focus now would not be on power relations but on the experiments of subjectivity and the care of the self” The Last Man Takes LSD Michel Foucault Related Foucault and neoliberalism:  “Do Not Ask me Who I am”