absorb and neutralise

IdleRich

IdleRich
One hurdle's that in order to argue something's been neutralised, you'd have to assume it had power in the first place. That something could have been done.
Is that the only type of power? I was thinking of say a song that has the power to move you but loses it once you see it advertising pile cream.
 

version

Well-known member
Is that the only type of power? I was thinking of say a song that has the power to move you but loses it once you see it advertising pile cream.
I suppose the thread's generally based around political power, but that's an interesting point and one I hadn't thought of.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
The thing I'm currently wrestling with is whether a company like Amazon selling Marx means Marx has been neutralised or whether it's a flaw in the system that it can't help but manufacture and sell products which may damage it.
I don't think Marx in book form is really any kind of threat to Amazon, but it is an interesting thought experiment to imagine a product that could theoretically damage Amazon but which would have extremely profitable sales... and really I think Amazon is a stand in for capitalism here, in which case imagine a product that was extremely profitable but could potentially bring about the downfall of capitalism itself... then I think that that flaw in the system you ask about is there, cos unlike Amazom there is no central control that could stop it from being sold.

So I guess I do think that IF someone could somehow create a profitable capitalism destroyer then Capitalism itself would inevitably build and sell that thing and bring about its own destruction. There would be no way for it to prevent itself. So IF that thing could exist then yeah... whether it could though...
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I suppose the thread's generally based around political power, but that's an interesting point and one I hadn't thought of.
You might be being generous there. Reading back through the replies before mine I feel that I might have misunderstood the question.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I know. I just don't think people reading Marx are any threat to Amazon so it can safely sell as many as it likes.
Yeah, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the influence of Marx seems largely limited to academic professionalism and the milieu thereof, i.e. theoryheads such as myself.

Are there books protagonizing the CCP widely sold via Amazon to US citizens? That would strike me as information more likely to raise flags for US policymakers or whatever the pertinent federal agency is, maybe between department of commerce and department of homeland security?
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Or books prescribing Muslim [extremist] fundamentalist ideology or tactics. Or white supremacist doctrines, etc.

There would appear to be obvious and presumably precedented grounds for decirculating stuff like this. For CCP stuff, there may be less clear-cut grounds for decirculation, as the CCP is framed more as a great power competitor with apparent human rights violations, rather than an outright threat to US national security.

Whereas the communist manifesto seems more like a nostalgic and benign historical document.

edit: bracketed text
 
Last edited:

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Even though congresspeople and IC officials qua witnesses are constantly prioritizing CCP as the top national security threat, it seems more prospective than actual. CCP is a national security threat insofar as it threatens to bring China ahead of US as world hegemon, which I have my doubts about, but it's a different kind of national security threat than jihadists and domestic violent extremists.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
The foothold of Marxism in the US seems to be among upper-middle class liberal intellectuals, again like myself, who would seem far too attached to the system they claim to abhor to constitute a national security threat.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Bigotry and terrorism would seem to be the things that western liberal democratic culture would resist subsuming, beyond a superficial aesthetic along the lines of Red Scare's islamic state-styled t-shirt.

But maybe that is a critical point. Maybe the stuff being subsumed and neutralized is the aesthetic of revolution, rather than the substance. Extract and market the sexiness out of the revolution, leave out the austerity and suffering.

Hunger Games may be a good example here, but I'm not really familiar with the story.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
The foothold of Marxism in the US seems to be among upper-middle class liberal intellectuals, again like myself, who would seem far too attached to the system they claim to abhor to constitute a national security threat.
Although I just recently learned the ideological distinction between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, that the former believed in a professional revolutionary class (vanguard/cadre, Leninism) while the latter believed the revolution should be more natural and the collective should be left to somehow speak for itself.

Before learning this I was under the impression that the schism in 1903 was due to some semantic argument about what constitutes the duties of a party member.

So having an upper-middle class stratum of revolutionary theorists would seem to be in keeping with the Bolshevik approach, which I suppose makes sense seeing as they ended up being more powerful than the Mensheviks, and by extension a greater determinant of the legacy of Marxism, to my knowledge.

Maybe if it went the other way, Marxism would be a less theoretical and bourgeois project, i.e. more of a threat to the status quo of wealth inequity and the private ownership of means of production.
 

version

Well-known member
I dunno about books promoting the CCP or terrorism, but they sell a lot of books critical of America and capitalism. You can buy stuff like Evola and Mein Kampf on there too, also Mao's writings and probably lots of other stuff too.
 
Top