Thread by @_CLancellotti

This is a very nice essay, which could be qualified in various ways from a "Del Nocean" perspective:

quillette.com/2020/08/16/the… via @Quillette

1) What is acting today is actually "half-Marxism" because it has mostly shed Marx's philosophy of history, thus becoming "irrational." The "revolution" does not fulfill the plan of history but just a will to power, and is entirely "intra-bourgeois" like 1968 in Europe.

2) Conversely, liberalism has shed its 19th century Kantian or Protestant aspects, and has embraced the "other half" of Marxism: materialism, sociologism, relativism etc What DN calls "objectivized" Marxism without the revolutionary impulse.

3) So, the dance is largely between the two halves of Marxism after they "decomposed": the technocratic, relativistic, economistic half, and the revolutionary, activist, irrationalist half (which according to DN should be properly called "Fascism").

4) Of course there are other actors: older and more humane forms of liberalism, forms of political Christianity, genuinely democratic socialism, idealistic leftism, nationalism, etc. But by and large they seem to be supporting actors compared to the two main protagonists.

5) But what is crucial is that the two main positions agree on the same "philosophical anthropology," what Max Scheler called the "homo faber." This is why ultimately the irrationalist revolutionary side aids and expands the great economic and bureaucratic powers.

6) and why large corporations etc view it as a useful tool that does not threaten them in the least.

As DN wrote back in 1967, the real opposition is between two ideas of man, not the technocratic and revolutionary sides of "Occidentalism."