{"id":373670,"date":"2018-08-16T20:57:10","date_gmt":"2018-08-16T19:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/an-updated-and-improved-marxism\/"},"modified":"2018-08-16T20:57:10","modified_gmt":"2018-08-16T19:57:10","slug":"an-updated-and-improved-marxism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/an-updated-and-improved-marxism\/","title":{"rendered":"An Updated and Improved Marxism"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>It is the rare intellectual who can withstand the pressures of groupthink. This is a fundamental truth, or a truism, borne out not only by daily experiences in an academic or other \u201cintellectual\u201d context (e.g., the newsroom or editorial board of any establishment media outlet) but also by critical scholarship from the likes of Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky. Left-wing intellectuals tend to be vigilantly aware of irrational groupthink among mainstream, establishment types, or even among other leftist sects with which they don\u2019t identify; but, like all intellectual cliques\u2014indeed, like nearly all individual intellectuals\u2014they\u2019re reluctant to turn their critical gaze on themselves. They imbibe certain ideas and ideologies in their formative years and perhaps refine them as they mature, but on the whole their commitment to the ideology is apt to become rigid and uncritical.<\/p>\n<p>This complacency has always most disturbed me with regard to Marxists, whose system of thought, if correctly formulated, is precisely <a href=\"http:\/\/digitalcommons.fiu.edu\/classracecorporatepower\/vol6\/iss2\/3\/\">the most critical<\/a>, the most <em>self<\/em>-critical, the most democratic and revolutionary ideology ever devised. I expect intellectual laziness from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wrightswriting.com\/tensions\">most<\/a> \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.wrightswriting.com\/postmodernism\">postmodernists<\/a>,\u201d from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wrightswriting.com\/goodwin\">liberals<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wrightswriting.com\/westad\">centrists<\/a>, from all witting or unwitting servants of power. I\u2019m disappointed, though, when I see it in Marxists and semi-Marxists. There\u2019s a pronounced dogmatism in most Marxist circles. Personally, I\u2019ve tried to stimulate some critical rethinking of Marxism in various&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/2018\/08\/an-updated-and-improved-marxism\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is the rare intellectual who can withstand the pressures of groupthink. This is a fundamental truth, or a truism, borne out not only by daily experiences in an academic or other \u201cintellectual\u201d context (e.g., the newsroom or editorial board of any establishment media outlet) but also by critical scholarship from the likes of Ed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2525,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-373670","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2525"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373670\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}