3 Comments
Mar 4Liked by Roger Boyd

Anti-communism.... a euphenism for anti-labor....

Goal.... destroy the trade unions.... gut worker benefits/wages....

With the accession of the PRC to the WTO, the Corporate elites found a new tool to gut worker incomes further...

In consequence, enrollments in STEM curricula atrophied, to the point that US graduate schools depend almost exclusively on foreign students of exceptional ability to operate.

Into this breach stepped the FBI, hell bent upon prosecuting and hobbling foreign scholars in the US...

In the old days they could do this with impunity, now not so.... Why?? because the PRC and Iran and Russia now need those folks and compensate them hansomely...

An outlier in this trend is Pakistan... the newly appointed Sharif government announced to the world that it seeks to "improve relations with the USA" how it' major benefactor China, and it's major energy supplier(s) Iran/Russia will treat this remains to be seen...

INDY

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Mar 4Liked by Roger Boyd

It is very easy to underestimate the long term effects of the McCarthy agitation and the subsequent decades of anti-communism. Anti-commuism, like a virus, infected every corner of Imperialist society and nowhere more than at its centres.

As an intellectual movement it took a long time to mature. One might argue that only now, thirty years after the demise of the USSR, is the movement peaking.

It took a long time to eradicate all the `communist`influence from the academic world, for example, which is crucial to the development of social ideology. In History, for example, the influence of communists and socialists was almost hegemonic though beginning to wane by the end of the C20th.

What we see today is the replacement of marxism as a critique of society with a series of alternatives, distinguished by the fact that none of them is based on class analysis and that all involve the enigration of revolutionary theory.

In terms of ideas in the imperial metropoles things are just going to get worse- the last marxists are dying out and what is replacing them, apart from the incomprehensible gobbledegook of renegade theorists is a crude liberalism that has the sole virtue of bringing Dickens`works back into vogue.

This might matter were it not that, having dumbed down its brain, the Empire is stumbling towards irrelevance intellectually as well as otherwise

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