Imagine this story…

"These bureaucrats only think of their political résumés as they destroy capitalism," she says. "They want students to focus on studying Christianity, not to practice it or fight for its cause. When we do that, it causes too many problems for them."

Christian youths are being targeted and blacklisted by local authorities at other schools, too. Earlier this month, plainclothes police assaulted and hauled away Christian students at X University, in the eastern US, after their school refused to recognize their on-campus Christian student society. Two weeks ago, a graduate of Y University was attacked and dragged into a car on campus by several people in black jackets.

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"I think this shows the dominant political party can no longer justify itself," says historian Z. "While the party talks about serving the people, The US has actually been practicing socialism."

Historian Z says young Americans being arrested for practicing Christianity — the official belief system of the Republican Party — poses the latest conundrum for the country's leadership, whom he blames for feigning interest in Christianity in order to maintain a guiding principle.

"Since the current leader came to power, many colleges have established Christian study centers, and that leads to a conflict for the ruling party," says historian Z. "You're brainwashing the youth with Christian theory, but by doing so, you're giving them a tool to fight against the government."

It's also a tool young people can use to defend themselves when authorities arrest them, says historian Z. "It's like a child using his ancestor's tombstone to protect himself from an abusive parent."

Now examine the actual existing story from NPR about China (PRC).

"These bureaucrats only think of their political résumés as they destroy socialism," she says. "They want students to focus on studying Marxism, not to practice it or fight for its cause. When we do that, it causes too many problems for them."

Marxist youths are being targeted and blacklisted by local authorities at other schools, too. Earlier this month, plainclothes police assaulted and hauled away Marxist students at Nanjing University, in eastern China, after their school refused to recognize their on-campus Marxist student society. Two weeks ago, a graduate of Peking University, in Beijing, was attacked and dragged into a car on campus by several people in black jackets.

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"I think this shows China's Communist Party can no longer justify itself," says Beijing-based historian Zhang Lifan. "While the party talks about serving the people, China's actually been practicing capitalism."

Zhang says young Chinese being arrested for practicing Marxism — the official ideology of the Communist Party — poses the latest conundrum for the country's leadership, whom he blames for feigning interest in Marxism in order to maintain a guiding principle.

"Since the current leader came to power, many colleges have established Marxist study centers, and that leads to a conflict for the ruling party," says Zhang. "You're brainwashing the youth with Marxist theory, but by doing so, you're giving them a tool to fight against the government."

It's also a tool young people can use to defend themselves when authorities arrest them, says Zhang. "It's like a child using his ancestor's tombstone to protect himself from an abusive parent."

www.npr.org/...

The premise of the above language substitution exercise is that cultures and ideologies have ambivalent equivalences, especially when one puts theory into practice, or moral philosophy into religion. While there are structural similarities, the devil remains in the historical and cultural details.

There are obvious differences between the PRC and the US at the level of university extracurricular groups, but they also reveal something about their similarities.

The desire to exercise social control perhaps remains the same, even if the means are not identical: one person’s social credit score in the PRC is another’s financial credit rating in the US. (Surprisingly enough in both countries such indexing can determine a person’s employability.)

Marxism, while not equivalent to a religion, is an ideological practice, a philosophy worthy of academic study and perhaps even having university extracurricular clubs. In the US they manage to exist (2013), even if they’re few and far between, compared to student religious groups.

Activists in the US have claimed at various times that religious study groups at public universities were being repressed. see (Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, 561 U.S. 661 (2010),)

The seven mountain mandate has its roots in dominion theology, which started in the early 1970s with a goal of “taking dominion” of the earth, twisting Genesis 1:28 to include a mandate for Christians to control civil affairs and all other aspects of society. The New Apostolic Reformation, with its self-appointed prophets and apostles, has also influenced the seven mountain movement, lending dreams and visions and other extra-biblical revelations to the mandate. www.gotquestions.org/...

As fantastically delusional as some US evangelical RWNJs might be, in developed countries lacking official state religions, no such oppression of its majority religions exist, even as contradictions in guaranteeing protections of religious equality are problematic.

Theory without praxis, that synthesis of action and critical practice, makes little sense regardless of ideological tradition. The agora is the marketplace of ideas.

Acting “like a Christian” can be identical to “acting like a Marxist” in a liberal democratic society. The problems arise when such actions become pathological; when intolerance is agoraphobic.

Even as persecution is a mythologizing doctrine and a recruiting tool for some religions, when it is hegemonic, it can never be a victim.

The situation gets worse when race/gender/class meanings become confabulated, as if white incels were being oppressed by those who can’t afford the same digital gaming systems.

Eschatology the historical study of religious end times, is the delimiting condition for all ideologies. Some of us prefer “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner,” rather than anticipate the rapture scooping up the elect and leaving the rest of us with their vacated Buicks.

Marxism as a viable, evolving theory needs to be constantly re-articulated much like Marx had no theory of monopoly capitalism. Political-economic dominion, regardless of its ideological position. should remain open to dialectical critique and ruthless criticism.

More insidious is the false consciousness promoted by the aspirational dominionism currently operating in some places like the US Federal government. No, it’s not the “deep state”, but it certainly is some strange projection of totalitarianism that now often erupts in Individual-1’s tweets like bad acne as he desperately appeals to his base.

The cat-calls of “commies” by RW extremist groups like Proud Boys are only the superficial examples of misunderstanding what authoritarianism has become in the post-Soviet political landscape.

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“The class struggle doesn’t necessarily mean barricades in the streets and summary execution of plutocrats. ” youareaghost.blogspot.com/...

We are approaching the centenary of the Red Scare in the US and a still significant proportion of the population is ignorant of a historical language so easily manipulated by an orange buffoon.

Another generalization mistake occurs when people stumble into DK and call the antifa anti-fascists, “communists”, or more generally see socialism and communism as synonymous. More idiotic are those who might consider that all Marxists are atheists just as Marx himself didn’t consider himself a Marxist.

Just as Darwin was not the first “evolutionist,” Marx was not by any means the first socialist. And as with Darwin and the word “evolution,” “socialism” meant something fairly different before Marx came along. Socialism was basically a moral system, sometimes rooted in Christian values, utopian in character and justified based on what was “fair” or “just.” Marx and Engels spent much of their active years differentiating their theories from prior theories of “utopian” socialism built on moral persuasion — Engels going as far as to publish a book-length pamphlet on it.

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If we want to engage in political competition and analysis of what Marx would have called “political economy,” there isn’t an alternative to Marxism that has anything near its explanatory power or guidance. That said, I understand the caution many socialists or social democrats may have to subscribing to “Marxism”: Marx’s focus on class “struggle,” the “overthrow” of the capitalist class, and the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” all of which may strike modern American ears as prescriptions for violence and authoritarianism.

It’s important to understand what Marx meant by these things.

The class struggle doesn’t necessarily mean barricades in the streets and summary execution of plutocrats. That these things can result from struggle is a historical fact; but the “struggle” Marx is talking about is the social and political competition between classes, which is always present: whether in the form of wage demands, petitions, law changes, strikes, noncompliance, all the way up to armed revolt. In the Manifesto, Marx describes how sometimes, the capitalists will cave in to demands made via demonstrations and strikes; other times, they will resist until concessions are forcibly extracted. Only the relative strength of the sides determines the nature of the struggle. The whole point of Marx’s method is to understand that the struggle is inherent to the capitalist system; it is objective. How socialists choose strategically to win the struggle depends on many factors, including the avenues available to them to win changes to the system — this is subjective. Whether we like it or not, the way commodities are produced under capitalism will always require struggle between the classes; workers want more, capitalists want them to have less and less.

As for “overthrow,” Marx looks at how previous systems of production were ended and changed into new forms: from hunter-gatherer to militarized, to slave chiefdoms and kingdoms, to feudalism, and then to capitalism. It is true that these transitions were generally marked by periods of violent competition; but (just like with Darwinism) historical study has showed that the violent outbursts were not the chief or only means of change. In fact, decades, sometimes centuries, of smaller changes accumulated over time to put stress on existing systems and bring about major changes. This is especially true of capitalism, which arose in Europe not all at once after the French beheaded enough nobles, but took place over an extended period beginning as far back as the fourteenth century. The growth of state-like kingdoms, “free” trading cities, incremental changes in technology, improvements in communications and logistics, and changes in legal systems eroded the basis of feudalism; the French Revolution was one part of a much longer and broader process of change.

Perhaps most misunderstood is the idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which comes from the Manifesto and a work called Critique of the Gotha Program, but is often interpreted according to the later theories of Vladimir Lenin. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not mean revolutionary terror against class enemies and the death of freedom. It means something very simple: look around you. Do you see how in “free market” democracies, political power is monopolized (or nearly monopolized) by the ownership class? The “dictatorship” of the proletariat just flips this. For Marxists, the dictatorship of the proletariat simply means a period where political power is held in common for the sole benefit of the working class. Getting to this point requires the working class to realize it is in fact a single class, and acting in its own interests. That this be accompanied by violent revolution isn’t necessary.

youareaghost.blogspot.com/...

Even more confounding are those RWNJs who think all liberals are identical or monolithic in their ideological dispositions, as though Lutherans were identical to Baptists and Anglicans. Those who would posit a “classical” liberalism should also understand that in the scope of history, there should be neoclassical and (post)modern liberalisms, rendering its “originality” all but academic, see Weekly Standard closing,

More distressing is that the woeful tactic of “making the libs cry” always serves the ruling class. However, it does explain the WH stunt called a “shutdown” that is the manufactured budget crisis currently used as a criminal shake-down of the national legislature by shutting down federal government operations.

And yet at the level of critical discourse, so much instability is invested in policing language use, as if one could guarantee meanings in an age where Individual-1 claims that Democrats killed the two children who recently perished in federal custody.

Who benefits from this type of discourse:

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Which ancestral tombstone will better protect children from federal custody.

Darn that heterodoxy, will I have to return my black jacket after arresting people for practicing Marxism without a license?

What is to be done with the crying need for ruthless criticism. There remain historical texts still worthy of study. Bernard D’Mello has some ideas on that, and we see elements of it in the work of PIketty.

Surely a contemporary version of Capital, a critical analysis of capital and capitalism on a global scale, whether of Volume I, II, or III, will be quite different from the original. Given the space constraint, one can only list what this will entail:

• Class analysis at the world level;
• the value of labor power and its vastly different prices at the centre, the periphery, and the semi-periphery;
• value theory as a theory of super-exploitation and unequal exchange;
• value theory as a theory of surplus-value distribution in oligopolistic market structures;
• poor peasants and other petty-commodity producers exploited by capital;
• unpaid domestic work that reproduces the commodity labor-power; the global reserve army of labor;
• proletarianization as the degradation of the majority to a condition of utter powerlessness;
• natural resource grabbing and monopolistic rents; the unsustainable appropriation of use values from “nature” and the unsustainable dumping of the resulting “waste” of production and consumption on to “nature”;
• ecological imperialism; instability, crises, and the problem of effective demand;
• financialization, the financial superstructure, and its relation with and impact on the “real” economy;
• monopoly-finance capital; an accumulation theory that takes account of both, adding to the stock of existing capital goods and to the stock of financial assets, and the interaction of these two aspects;
• the state as capital’s political command structure; the sales effort; civilian government;
• militarism and imperialism;
• the main contradictions and the principal contradiction;
• and socialist social revolution.

mronline.org/...

Just in case you need some methodological references:

J.L. Austin's work ultimately suggests that all speech and all utterance is the doing of something with words and signs, challenging a metaphysics of language that would posit denotative, propositional assertion as the essence of language and meaning.

en.wikipedia.org/...

Ordinary language philosophy is a philosophical methodology that sees traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by distorting or forgetting what words actually mean in everyday use. "Such 'philosophical' uses of language, on this view, create the very philosophical problems they are employed to solve."^[1] Ordinary language philosophy is a branch of linguistic philosophy closely related to logical positivism.^[1]

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The controversy really begins when ordinary language philosophers apply the same leveling tendency to questions such as What is Truth? or What is Consciousness? Philosophers in this school would insist that we cannot assume that (for example) 'Truth' 'is' a 'thing' (in the same sense that tables and chairs are 'things'), which the word 'truth' represents. Instead, we must look at the differing ways in which the words 'truth' and 'conscious' actually function in ordinary language. We may well discover, after investigation, that there is no single entity to which the word 'truth' corresponds, something Wittgenstein attempts to get across via his concept of a 'family resemblance' (cf. Philosophical Investigations). Therefore, ordinary language philosophers tend to be anti-essentialist.

Anti-essentialism and the linguistic philosophy associated with it are often important to contemporary accounts of feminism, Marxism, and other social philosophies that are critical of the injustice of the status quo. The essentialist 'Truth' as 'thing' is argued to be closely related to projects of domination, where the denial of alternate truths is understood to be a denial of alternate forms of living. Similar arguments sometimes involve ordinary language philosophy with other anti-essentialist movements like post-structuralism. However, strictly speaking, this is not a position derived from Wittgenstein, as it still involves 'misuse' (ungrammatical use) of the term "truth" in reference to "alternate truths".

en.wikipedia.org/...