OnlySubs Episode 101: Communism and the Metaphor of the Bat is now available exclusively for New Discourses contributors on the following platforms:
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At the risk of running the poor thing into the ground, I’m coming back to the societal metaphor of the baseball bat I’ve used in two previous episodes. In this episode of my subscribers-only podcast, James Lindsay OnlySubs, I dive back in to talk about the idea of the “negative thinking” or “critical method” of Marxism in these terms. The long and short goes like this: Marxist critique is like believing the best way to keep a baseball bat balanced upright is by knocking it down over and over and over again. The closest thing they have to a point is that fascism will follow if anyone grabs onto the bat to hold it upright, but the ridiculous magical thinking is pretty obvious in this framing. Join me for another fun and creative exploration!
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3 comments
Hello! Thanks for the analogy, it’s great!
I see your interrogations as “around the field” of the bat: it’s proper use, it’s effects, etc..
I suppose that another “field of scope” would the about the “existence” of the bat; it’s a scope located a bit “above” or “before” your present interrogation.
If the bat should not “be” in the first place, it would be worth analyzing things at that level; still I am pretty sure that you did this job already or that you have room for it, so just pointing out the probability of success in focusing more on that aspect.
I wish you great success, you are an exemple for many! Thank you!
Memes:
Who Would Win?
The Cathedral vs A Giant Housewife Army
I read another of Dr. Lindsay’s posts about how Liberalism can’t or doesn’t want to grab the bat and so it just keeps balancing on the palm of the hand threatening to topple over. As for Marxism wanting to keep knocking down the bat, is that a metaphor for societal collapse and destruction of western democratic thought and sociopolitical structure and ideas borne out of The Enlightenment? Is everything we are witnessing a repudiation of that period which gave rise to liberalism?