Augustine Togonu-Bickersteth
It's been a long time !
I wrote to you after missing you here for so long, about some coincidence I associated with you, one of the many letters that I didn’t get around to posting. I'll have to burrow / rummage through a pile of files to find and post it
Just imagine, in answering a question about his roots, Joseph Brodsky once informed an enquirer that he was not a tree ! You know how it is with some of our ancient lineages, family coat of arms etc etc , so and so, the son / daughter of so and so , the lineal ancestry going back a few thousand miles down the line, the blood running in the veins, thousands of years old , much older than Methuselah, during which time some of the trees, got uprooted, transited, migrated, emigrated, scattered - you've heard Pharaoh Sanders & Co chanting , “Our Roots Began In Africa “ - at least Moses was supposedly born in Egypt , and even back then although it was this that begat that some people still did not have “ surnames” (a modern invention), so they took or as in the case of modern Iran (bichareh - which in Farsi/ Persian means “helpless) were forced to take places names, in our case ( Hammelburg, Germany) - and so, we have e.g. Rabbi Hammelburg, and not surprisingly we have one Isaiah Berlin who obviously did not come from Hamelin and then there’s of course the famous Johnny English
Dear Mr cornelian Hamelberg.. interesting you mentioned the piper.We are in the month of the pied piper of Hamelin Germany..It makes your name interesting. Hamelberg from Hamelin?
Here is the web:According to historical documentation and the original Pied Piper of Hamelin legend, the piper led the children out of the town of Hamelin on June 26, 1284. [1]Historical & Mythological Details:
- The Date: The date is etched into a surviving inscription on the historic Pied Piper's House in Hamelin, Germany, which specifies the event happened on "the day of [Saints] John and Paul on 26 June". [1]
On Wed, 10 Jun 2026, 08:42 Cornelius Hamelberg, <cornelius...@gmail.com> wrote:
Gabriel Rockhill: Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism
A short Facebook review by Nathan Hamelberg
https://www.facebook.com/nathan.hamelberg
( Automated Google translation)
Nathan's post
Nathan Hamelberg
·
Last year, the book "Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism" was released with the philosopher Gabriel Rockhill, where he traces the weakness of the European and US-American left to Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, Bertrand Russell, Jacques Derrida and the Frankfurt School. Squeezed it yesterday, and just read a rave review of it in Aftonbladet
The book is an ambitious project, which Rockhill succeeds badly. To be nominally Marxist in his office, Rockhill barely stays at the base, but makes it appear that historical decline in which labor organization conditions have changed fundamentally by anti-union legislation, outsourcing to semi-periphery, just-in-time production and more is due to college students being duped by having read postmodern and critical theory. Idealism, as it is usually called in a Marxist context.
Me thinking about when Jordan b. Peterson talked about “postmodern neo-Marxist identity politics” and launched the conspiracy theory of “cultural Marxism” in a marginalized form. That everything from feminism to anti-racism and LGBT activism comes from communists who have tried to repackage themselves to disintegrate. Short recap: for Peterson, postmodern theory was just wolves in sheep's clothing, Marxists who, because of communism being discredited, camouflaged themselves to continue working.
It's just that it's objective nonsense. In his lecture on “campus indoctrination,” Peterson has a party talking about Derrida and Foucault, and that “the postmodern neo-Marxists” had a view in which no one is an individual, just their gender, race, class, etc. (It is complete nonsense, and Peterson obviously does not indicate any ancestor where such a view is articulated, but the conspiracy must be true for Peterson's medicine to be healing).
Foucault released his first major work The History of Madness in 1961, Derrida's breakthrough work De la grammatologie came in 1967. Peterson claims that postmodernism came for the appropriate reasons because some Marxists found themselves crowded. It was just the opposite: at this time, the PCF (French Communist Party) had a multi-million membership. CGT, the union they ruled even more. Around 1968, there were millions of French people organized to the left of both the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. If anything, it was appropriate _to_ pose as a purely learned Marxist, not to dress in new feathers and criticize Marxism. The very least you can say about postmodernism is that it relates critically to modernist theories with unified subjects, linear view of time, and so on.
The main thing Derrida is tackling is to develop deconstruction as a method, while Foucault criticizes historical method and analyzes power relationships in ways that go beyond the traditional Marxism class as a primate. None of it was an opportune occupation in the Left, no secure career path in the academe, etc. For Peterson, however, is exactly the point of postmodernism. It is just that Marxism was in no way discredited at the time postmodernism emerged, there were mass Marxist parties in Italy and France and similar things emerged in Greece after the collapse of the junta in 1974. Swedish Social Democracy's party congresses and programmes in the 1970s were among the most Marxist coloured since 1920 and in the UK there were a number of Marxist tendencies and newspapers within Labour and in both LO and TUC, Marxism was fundamental.
Rockhill seeks out the same conspiratorial view of not only postmodernism but also the Frankfurt School (typical Jewish cosmopolitan intellectual to screw everything up for the honest left, you can almost hear him moaning). Everything that has been a leftist conspiracy for Peterson is a right-wing conspiracy for Rockhill; it's the CIA behind the leftist intellectuals, if they weren't on the way, real socialism would have prevailed.
It is so genome idealistic. Nothing about the production. In the global south, the left is not as bewitched by Herbert Marcuse and Albert Camus means Rockhill. Whoever is looking for how trade union clubs on Volvo trucks collaborated with trade union clubs in Sao Paolo are looking in vain. Whoever hoped to read about the wild strikes, mass radicalization that was going on _just_ when the left according to Rockhill studied on semiotics and structuralism will be disappointed.
The working class is not in the book, it's just a search for a scapegoat that can explain weakening. Bretton-Wood's collapse is not included, nor is the inflation and economic crisis of the 1970s, not the huge solidarity movement with COSATU and ANC's fight among trade unions in the global north.
Rockhill's skepticism against left-wing intellectuals within academia in no way explains how Bertrand Russell marginally influenced that communist Arthur Scargill could lead the National Union of Mineworkers in confrontation with Thatcher and the British state in a year 1984-85, and how miners from Yugoslavia, Sweden, Bolivia and more sent support to them. Despite the fact that the global south is maintained as incorruptible, the analysis of labor organization in the Tiger economies, union revolts in South Korea is terribly thin. And even less points to a continuity between them and for example Cobas (Confederazione dei Comitati di Base) organization in Italy in the late 1980s and onward.
The book can probably be appreciated if you are looking for scapegoats, even though it investigates - and thus explains - so little.
· See original
· Rate this translation
Har du alltså orkat dig igenom den?
Reply
See translation
Alexander Ekelund ja, den är inte sååå tung även om den upprepar sig. Men drygt 400 sidor hade kunnat kokats ner till hälften
Reply
See translation
Alexander Ekelund men betänk att jag pga detta avstått från att läsa klart såväl ”Morgoth’s Ring” som Ashley Khans bok om A Love Supreme
Reply
See translation
Så vems fel är det att dagens "vänster" är värdelös och vänsterliberal?
Ge mig namn. Helst adress.
Reply
See translation
Uppskattade detta ur recensionen i Jacobin:
"Had the Frankfurt scholars fled to the ‘really existing socialism’ of the Soviet Union and not the United States, they would have ceased to really exist in Soviet camps."
Reply
Känns lite symptomatiskt för vår samtid, va? Åtminstone för en på sociala medier vanlig typ av argumentation.
Reply
See translation
Tack för den
Reply
See translation
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/fde5a056-0720-4bc4-bcb1-11dd3ff9737dn%40googlegroups.com.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/fe98b858-7301-4bfd-baf6-bc21ca567789n%40googlegroups.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment