The noble savage myth

From Rousseau to Marx, philosophers of a certain bent argued pre-modern societies possessed an inherent nobility that is destroyed by civilisation. By colonialism. By modernity.

'Students for Liberty' explains the puncturing of the noble savage myth:

In 1964, a young University of Michigan anthropologist went to live with a tribe untouched by modernity.

What he found destroyed the noble savage myth.

Then his own discipline spent the next four decades trying to destroy him for publishing it.

The field was long dominated by a myth.

Postwar anthropology, inspired by Rousseau and Marx, held that "savages" were peaceful and cooperative. Violence, hierarchy, and inequality were supposed to be diseases of civilisation, invented by property, colonisation, and markets. Abolish those, and the natural harmony of man would supposedly return.

Then a kid from rural Michigan went to check.

In 1964, Napoleon Chagnon, one of twelve children from a poor family in Port Austin, traveled to the Venezuela–Brazil border. He went to live with the Yanomamö, roughly 20,000 people scattered across the Amazon rainforest, largely untouched by the state, by markets, or by modernity. 

He would return nearly thirty times over the next three decades. His 1968 book, Yanomamö: The Fierce People, sold nearly a million copies and was translated into fifteen languages.

But this is what he actually found: Raids between villages were routine. Infanticide was common. Women were regularly abducted and traded after violent conflict. Headmen, as a rule, were killers. Chagnon mapped Yanomamö genealogies using early computer methods, learned the language, and lived inside the villages for months at a stretch. The data was not hearsay.

A particular finding broke the field. In a 1988 paper in Science, Chagnon documented that the unokais, men who had killed in raids, had on average more wives and more surviving offspring than non-violent men of the same age. In a state of nature, violence was being reproductively selected for. The Rousseauian premise ran backwards.

If violence, hierarchy, and inequality were what civilisation produces, they should be rare where civilisation is absent. Chagnon found the opposite. Where the state, the market, and modern institutions had never arrived, up to 30% of adult male deaths were violent. The men who killed were the men whose lineages survived. In the modern United States that figure is under 1%. [In today's New Zealand, the figure is 0.3%.]

The reaction was immediate. Marshall Sahlins, one of Chagnon's former graduate teachers at Michigan, turned on him. Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel circulated a warning to the American Anthropological Association (AAA) describing "an anthropological heart of darkness beyond the imagining of even a Joseph Conrad, though not, perhaps, a Joseph Mengele." Salesian missionaries in the region joined the coalition. What Chagnon had found could not be answered on its merits, so the man who found it became the target instead.

Then came the book that ended him. In 2000, journalist Patrick Tierney published Darkness in El Dorado. He accused Chagnon of triggering a measles epidemic through vaccine experimentation, arming rival factions to stage conflicts on film, cooking his data, and behaving as "a war criminal or even a genocidaire." The New Yorker ran Tierney's companion article the same month. Chagnon's career effectively ended before any serious investigation reached a verdict.

But every serious charge eventually collapsed. The vaccine complied with WHO protocols. The measles epidemic predated Chagnon's arrival. Venezuelan physicians, the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Michigan, the American Society of Human Genetics, and the U.S. Department of Health each investigated. Each reached the same verdict: no crime, no cover-up, no fraud. Jane Hill, who chaired the AAA's own inquiry, wrote privately that Tierney's book was "a piece of sleaze, that's all there is to it." [Alice Dreger, a historian of medicine and science, concluded after a year's research that Tierney's claims were false and the Association was complicit and irresponsible in helping spread these falsehoods and not protecting "scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges." The controversy is covered in the 2005 book Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It by anthropologist Robert Borofsky, and Dreger's 2015 book, Galileo's Middle Finger. Chagnon himself revisited the topic in his later book, 2013 Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes: the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists.]

The AAA task force issued its own report in 2002 anyway, condemning Chagnon for prioritising his research over the Yanomamö. Raymond Hames had already resigned from the panel mid-inquiry, and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a National Academy of Sciences member, quit the AAA in protest. Three years later, the AAA membership voted to rescind the report. In 2012, Chagnon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The following year, Sahlins resigned from the Academy over it. 

The noble savage myth itself outlived the twentieth century's political movements. Today it powers the decolonial framework that dominates the humanities and much of political discourse. The claim is unchanged: violence, hierarchy, and inequality are artefacts of property, civilisation, and colonisation, and would vanish once those were abolished. Three decades of Chagnon's evidence showed the claim was wrong. The re-tribalisers ignored the evidence.

In the absence of the institutions the utopians wanted to destroy, human beings behaved more violently than within them. The discipline that could not answer his data answered his character instead. That is what an intellectual monoculture does when evidence contradicts its premises. It goes after whoever brought the evidence.

"Sometimes both institutions and people pick up a firearm and blow both feet off. Cambridge University has done so with its gross mismanagement of the Jason Arday affair."

 

"Sometimes both institutions and people pick up a firearm and blow both feet off. 

"Cambridge University has done so with its gross mismanagement of the Jason Arday affair. ...

“The idea that historically disadvantaged groups are entitled to extra civil rights – coupled with social preferment – over and above those held/enjoyed by people considered their oppressors is inimical to the rule of law, specifically the principle that people should not be punished for crimes they did not commit. We do not inherit criminality from our ancestors. This is in turn derived from the larger principle of treat like cases alike, which was first articulated in its modern form by the Roman jurist Ulpian. ...

“Jason Arday got his job in large part because a lot of people – and especially humanities and social science academics – think it’s reasonable to punish whites (and sometimes East Asians) who have never wronged blacks by making it harder for them to get into university or gain employment. This punishment of whites/East Asians who have done no wrong is undertaken to compensate blacks who have not been wronged for wrongs committed by other white people against other black people in the past. This logic is the basis of all affirmative action schemes and preferential hiring regimes (provision for which exists – albeit in limited form – in the UK’s Equality Act 2010). It is also the logic of inherited vengeance.

“It took humans centuries to work out that the law should punish individual wrongdoers rather than members of their family, their descendants, or their extended kin group for crimes or civil wrongs. One only need read some of the world’s great literature, both ancient and modern – from Njal’s 'Saga' to 'The Godfather' – to gain imaginative entry to a world where intergenerational and kin-based revenge are norms.

“May I suggest that the world of medieval Iceland or a New York dominated by the Five Families are the sorts of places you probably only want to visit in fiction? We stopped basing punishments on vendetta – a long, slow process of legal evolution starting in early Republican Rome – for good reasons. Societies based on vendetta are places of violent horror and boiling intergenerational resentment.”

~ Helen Dale from her column 'L’affaire Arday'

"Marxism has never died. It has mutated."

"Here are four things every serious anti-communist should understand about Marxism: 

    "First, Marxism is not primarily a set of economic policies. It is a complete philosophical system built on the claim that private property and markets are the root causes of human oppression and alienation. This is why communist regimes did not simply make economic mistakes - they systematically tried to abolish the foundations of voluntary cooperation. 

    "Second, Marxism focuses heavily on social structures and class forces while leaving very little room for individual choice and moral responsibility. Individuals are treated largely as products of their class position rather than as autonomous agents capable of shaping their own lives. This deterministic outlook underpins both Marxism’s repeated predictive failures and its readiness to justify coercive social engineering. 

    "Third, the authoritarianism, terror, and centralised control seen in every communist state were not distortions of Marxism. They were logical consequences of attempting to impose a total transformation of society (and Mark understood that). Once private property and markets are rejected, coercive state power becomes necessary to enforce the new order. 

    "Fourth, Marxism has never died. It has mutated. Much of today’s identity politics, critical theory, and institutional “equity” activism draws directly from Marxist frameworks - simply replacing economic class with race, gender or other identity categories while retaining the same oppressor-versus-oppressed logic."

~ Creative Deduction

"In branding profits as excessive, people are injuring themselves."

"In branding profits as excessive and penalising the efficient entrepreneurs by discriminatory taxation, people are injuring themselves. Taxing profits is tantamount to taxing success in best serving the public. The only goal of all production activities is to employ the factors of production in such a way that they render the highest possible output. The smaller the input required for the production of an article becomes, the more of the scarce factors of production is left for the production of other articles. But the better an entrepreneur succeeds in this regard, the more is he vilified and the more is he soaked by taxation. Increasing costs per unit of output, that is, waste, is praised as a virtue. ...

"All people, entrepreneurs as well as non-entrepreneurs, look askance upon any profits earned by other people. Envy is a common weakness of men. People are loath to acknowledge the fact that they themselves could have earned profits if they had displayed the same foresight and judgment the successful businessman did. Their resentment is the more violent, the more they are subconsciously aware of this fact.

"There would not be any profits but for the eagerness of the public to acquire the merchandise offered for sale by the successful entrepreneur. But the same people who scramble for these articles vilify the businessman and call his profit ill-got."

~ Ludwig Von Mises from his 1951 paper 'Profit and Loss'

BOOK REVIEW: 'Who Was Behind the Bolshevik Revolution?' by Ron Asher [updated with reply by publisher]

I have in front of me a new book by Tross Publishing, which I have been invited to review. Having written a chapter or two for the publisher, it is my unpleasant job not just to recommend you not buy it, but that the publisher withdraw it. (Recommending withdrawal is not a matter of "free speech" -- the right to speak includes the right to take the consequences, including criticism -- simply a recommendation for good editorial hygiene.) Withdraw, because it sits poorly with his other titles, because it sits badly with genuine scholarship on any subject. ...

... and because it's not even a good read.

In 1917 in the midst of a war for survival on the First World War's eastern front, Bolshevists seized power from a provisional Russian government fighting the war, and proceeded to enact terror on the population and thereafter on the world. Far from a revolution, it was a squalid little coup, and what came of it was disaster, starvation, death, and mass-murder. 

There had been a revolution that swept away the Tsar -- swept away him and his autocratic regime -- what Ayn Rand was to call "the good revolution." But it wasn't the Bolsheviks who revolted against the Tsar's regime; they came to power instead in a squalid little backdoor coup eight months later -- orchestrated in part by the Imperial German High Command, who had sent Lenin into Russia to kill the war on their terms -- a backroom revolt that stabbed in the back the Provisional Government and squashed like a bug Russia's first stumbling chance at real freedom. 

The Bolsheviks didn't sweep away oppression; they brought it back.

And our friend Mr Asher has now written 93 pages (and 5 pages of notes) to tell us who really did it. And oddly, the important wartime context is never mentioned ...

The wartime context of the coup. (From Louis Fischer's

 The Life of Lenin (NY: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 109

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT WAS SUPPOSED TO have said that "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."

This short book claims to reveal who was really behind the Bolshevik Revolution. Really and truly. And it will do so, we are promised, "with meticulous care and references" [p. 5; all uncredited page notes will refer to Mr Asher (2026)]. Take careful note: This is not a book about the ideas that caused the event in question. It is about the people. And, spoiler alert, our author says it was the Jews wot dunnit. They were driven to it, says the author, because they were Jews. 

That's it. That really is it.

And note the argument: it wasn't that those who driven to it because they happened to be Jews. They were driven to it because they were Jews. It was "vengeance," says our author, for earlier Russian pogroms against Jews. Or just because their religion was weird. Or ... something.

A remarkable claim, not least because head Bolshevik and the revolution's driving force was one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who was not at all Jewish. (He was raised in a Russian Orthodox Christian family, baptised as an infant, and identified culturally and ethnically as Russian; historians who have examined distant links, such as the author of Lenin's Jewish Question, emphasise any link was irrelevant to his identity, ideology, or actions: he critiqued all religion, including Judaism, and saw ethnicity as secondary to class struggle). Nor was Lenin's successor known as Stalin any more Jewish (he was, famously, an ethnic Georgian christened as Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili), and nor was the head of Lenin's feared secret police, the Cheka (the brutal Feliz Dzerzhinsky, who was a Pole). 

None of the heads of the snake were Jewish.

Indeed, of the 21 members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in August 1917, there were at most just six who could be categorised that way. Such niceties however do not disturb our author. (Indeed, he adds three more, without any reference for doing so.) 

And in any case.a similar ethnic make-up can be found for many other Russian movements of the time, including the Russian Orthodox priesthood, the rival Menshevik party (whose founders were both Jewish, and which actually had double the proportion of ethnic Jews to the Bolshies), and of course the Jewish Bund (a secular Jewish socialist party active between 1897 and 1920). A similar make-up can be found because any intellectual movement attracts intellectuals -- and Jewish Russians were among the most educated of the time, and were barred by the Tsar's regime from other political involvement.

So the claim is not just remarkable for being bold, but also (as we will see) for lacking the kind of "meticulous care and references" the boldness demands. It's true that historians of the various Russian revolutions and coups d'etat have generally recognised that Jews were represented in early Bolshevik leadership, but so were many other educated ethnic minorities who all faced persecution under the Tsar. (Most of whom were excluded by being non-Russian from advancement in Russian culture or in the vast Russian bureaucracy.) And of course the vast majority of Jews were not Bolsheviks, and Jews as a community suffered enormously under Soviet rule.

This is especially important today to understand. The book comes at a time when ethnic Russian fascism and anti-Semitism has escalated dramatically following Putin's insane aspirations for empire, and Hamas's murderous October 7 attack followed by Israel's bloody response. It's said that Hamas's “Sinwar placed his money on the 2,000-year belief that Jews were inherently vengeful, greedy, and lustful for the blood of innocents and children [and] in betting on Jew-hatred, Sinwar hit the jackpot."  

The irrational hatred continues even here in New Zealand, once considered a relatively safe environment for Jewish folk, and yet the NZ Jewish Council recorded 227 antisemitic incidents in the 12 months following October 7 -- more than the 166 recorded across the entire eight-and-a-half years prior.

So things are ramping up, and you might well ask yourself about such a book's publication: "Why now?" 

And about the thesis, even if proven: "So what?"

WHILE YOU PONDER THOSE QUESTIONS, consider again what such a proof might look like -- proof that it was the Jews wot dunnit -- and about that promise of "meticulous care and references." 

Let's begin by looking at some contemporary (or near-contemporary) quotes adduced by Mr Asher to describe the Bolshevik coup and the Jews' alleged responsibility for it: some examples drawn from a diplomat's alarmed despatch, a gossip columnist's interview, a White Russian general's memoir, and a State Department intelligence file drawing on a known forgery -- all of which are treated as equivalent historical evidence ...

Marx's inner contradictions explained

Today's guest post from Students for Liberty explains that Ludwig von Mises and other Austrian economists didn't just refute Marx's economics, they exposed contradictions in Marx's thinking so devastating that the entire system collapsed. ...

Marx built his system on "historical materialism." Socialism [he claimed] would arrive with "the inexorability of a law of nature." Material forces determine everything, he said: History has a predetermined path; human agency is an illusion.
Mises saw the fatal flaw immediately: Marx's philosophy refutes itself. His actions contradict his theory. His method destroys his conclusions. ... 

1. The Activist Paradox
Marx declared that socialism must arrive through inevitable material forces. Nothing can stop it. History has already decided. So Mises asked the obvious question:

If socialism is inevitable, why did Marx spend his entire life writing manifestos, organising workers, and agitating for revolution?
If material forces determine everything, why does human action matter?

Marx lived as if ideas could change history, while writing that ideas are powerless against material forces.
His life contradicted his philosophy. 

2. The Polylogism Trap
Marx claimed all ideas are products of class interests. 
Bourgeois thinkers produce bourgeois ideology. Proletarian thinkers produce proletarian truth.
Mises called this "polylogism." Different classes have different logics.
The problem? First, Marx couldn't even define the term! And second, this principle applies to Marx himself. 

If all thought is class-determined, then Marx's theory is just bourgeois ideology. He was, after all, a wealthy intellectual, not a factory worker.

You cannot claim "all ideas are ideological" while exempting your own theory from that rule.
The system refutes itself. 

3. The Origin Problem
Marx said "material productive forces" determine everything. That tools, machines, and technology create society. Law, culture, and ideas all flow from the means of production.
But Mises identified a fatal circularity:

Tools and machines don't fall from heaven. They are themselves products of ideas.

Before you can build a steam engine, someone must think of a steam engine.
Marx tried to explain ideas through tools. But tools only exist because of prior ideas.
You cannot explain the origin of society by pointing to things that can only exist within a society built on prior ideas.
Cause and effect, inverted. 

 

4. The Blueprint That Doesn't Exist
Marx spent decades critiquing capitalism. He preached its inevitable collapse. He promised a socialist paradise.
But he refused to describe how socialism would actually work. He called detailed planning "utopian."
Ludwig Von Mises exposed the consequences: Marx advocated destroying the most productive economic system in history to replace it with a system whose institutions he never analysed.
When Mises later proved that socialist calculation was impossible, Marxists had no answer.
Because Marx never thought about how his system would actually function.
He tore down without building up. He promised without planning. He diagnosed without prescribing.

This is what they don't teach in your political philosophy class:
The entire Marxist edifice rests on self-refuting contradictions that were exposed over a century ago.
Mises didn't just win on economics. He showed that Marx's philosophy itself was intellectually bankrupt.
Historical determinism makes activism pointless. Polylogism that invalidates its own claims. Material explanation that requires immaterial origins. A revolutionary program with no coherent plan.
One economist dismantled the entire system.
And many academics still pretend it never happened.
Every libertarian learns about Mises, the economist.
Few learn about Mises, the philosopher, who exposed the contradictions at the heart of the most influential ideology of the modern age.
These aren't obscure academic quibbles. These are fundamental logical errors.
Once you understand them, you can dismantle Marxist arguments at their foundation. Not with emotion, but with cold, clear logic.

This is the intellectual ammunition they don't want you to have. 

"The issue is never the issue. The issue is always Revolution."

"In New Zealand, Māori are being offered [these] promises: co-governance, constitutional recognition, cultural primacy. These are framed as justice, but function as leverage. The goal is not reconciliation; it is ideological entrenchment.

    

    Co-governance is not about partnership; it’s about parallel sovereignty.
    Te Tiriti reinterpretation is not about history; it’s about power.
    Tikanga in law is not about tradition; it’s about jurisdictional capture.

"The race-Marxist machine does not care about whakapapa. It cares about mobilisation. Māori identity is being re-coded as political loyalty, and dissenters are cast as traitors to their own people. ...

"This is a classic Motte-and-Bailey tactic. ... Predictably, defenders of this [approach] will retreat to the motte: 'We just want equity.' But the bailey—the real ideological terrain—is far more radical: constitutional transformation, racial separatism, and symbolic supremacy. ...

" 'The issue is never the issue. The issue is always Revolution.' "

~ Colinxy from his post 'How Māori Are Being Played by the Marxist Machine'

"Interestingly, the right didn’t take the leftist ideas that were intended to build something; they took just the ideas intended to destroy."

"As so many have noted, MAGA is identity politics for white people. It turns out that identity politics is more effective when your group is in the majority.

"… Last year, a writer named James Lindsay cribbed language from “The Communist Manifesto,” changed its valences so that they were right wing and submitted it to a conservative publication called The American Reformer. The editors, unaware of the provenance, were happy to print it. When the hoax was revealed, they were still happy! The right is now eager to embrace the ideas that led to tyranny, the gulag and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Interestingly, the right didn’t take the leftist ideas that were intended to build something; they took just the ideas intended to destroy."

~ David Brooks from his column 'Hey, Lefties! Trump Has Stolen Your Game' [hat tip Alex Tabarrok ] 

"It's hard to get too much enthusiasm for the Tamaki Makaurau by-election"

"It's hard to get too much enthusiasm for the Tamaki Makaurau by-election. ... [W]hat we actually have is a spectre of Peeni Henare, Labour list MP, trying to win back 'his' seat by pandering to the far-left student activist nationalist rhetoric touted by the rather clueless Marxist nationalist Oriini Kaipara ...

"[B]oth major candidates hold a view of the country, economy and Maori that is led by a philosophy of nationalist Marxist collectivism ... They offer nothing to Maori who are entrepreneurs, who don't want to be tethered to the State or Iwi ...

"So on we go. I hope Henare wins, as it denies Te Pāti Māori one more seat and reduces the overhang in Parliament ... From the looks of it, neither are deserving."

~ Liberty Scott from his post 'The by-election without much choice'

Matua Kahurangi reckons there's one candidate who is less deserving: Te Pāti Māori's Orini Kaipara who, he reckons, "has been a walking disaster."

Her interviews over the past fortnight have been nothing short of a waka wreck. If voters in Tāmaki Makaurau decide to elect her after this performance, it would suggest they’re as dumb as a bucket of dead muttonbirds.

Yesterday was another low point. Instead of fronting the media, Kaipara let John Tamihere and Rawiri Waititi speak on her behalf. It’s no surprise after she admitted, “Peeni would be a formidable leader for the Labour Party ... I think that's more important than Tāmaki Makaurau. Who should be the leader of our nation as the first Māori Prime Minister? I want to give that back to Peeni Henare.”

That statement says it all. She is effectively campaigning for her opponent.

When Te Pāti Māori first announced Kaipara as their candidate, they claimed she would “champion” the party’s mana motuhake package, including a policy giving mana whenua the first right of refusal over culturally significant private land. When Tame asked her on Q+A how that would actually work, she fumbled. She admitted she didn’t have the details and would need to go back and consult with others. At one point she even reached for her phone, unable to respond when pressed on whether Te Pāti Māori had achieved anything tangible for Māori in the last two terms.

That’s the heart of the problem. For all its hoha attitude, Te Pāti Māori has very little to show. 

Their one big act was a hikoi against ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill, which wasn’t going to pass in the first place. 

Beyond that, their most successful project might be their merchandising arm. The Toitū Te Tiriti online store, directed by Kiri Tamihere-Waititi, sells pro-Māori propaganda gear under the promise that “all proceeds” fund the movement. It has become a branding exercise, complete with MPs regularly parading around Parliament in their own merch.

It's a bit like the bolsheviks themselves. Outside their famines, disasters and purges, the only thing at which they succeeded was producing decent propaganda posters.

Must be some decent marketing advice in Marx's old Manifesto.

"The Greens' vision a pathway to Venezuela"

"LET'S STRIP AWAY THE political gloss and assess the Green Party’s 2025 budget for what it is: a document heavy on ideology, neo-Marxist buzzwords, and te reo, but dangerously light on pragmatism, economic credibility, and operational realism. ...

"Fundamentally, their budget is about lifting government revenue by taxing New Zealanders an extra $88billion over four years. They have no plan for growing the economy. ... for additional capital, the Greens have decided to simply borrow more. ...

"Included in the Greens tax grab are following revenue channels: Inheritance Tax [i.e., Death Tax]... Private Jet Tax ... 10-year Brightline test ... Labour’s removal of interest deductibility for residential property ... Companies/Corporate Tax [hike] ... Income Tax [threshold] change ... Mining Royalties [hike] ... Wealth Tax...

"It is worth remembering that the Green Party only claims these policies will generate nearly $90 billion in new revenue over four years. This is an implausibly optimistic figure. The reality is you can’t just plug in tax rates and expect static revenue. People adapt and restructure in reaction to law changes and shifting systems. Sometimes they just straight up leave. These are not 'guaranteed billions.' They are some pretty wild assumptions disguised as policy. ...

"CLAIMING TO HAVE FOUND $88 billion in additional revenue thanks to taxing the shizzzzz out of New Zealanders, the Greens have gone to town spending big. ... their budget is more manifesto than fiscal plan. At the heart of the document is the assumption that profit should be avoided and the state should act to hamper it as much as possible. Other assumptions of note relate to their allergic reaction to anything that remotely suggests that adults should be responsible for their own wellbeing. ...

"In classic modern Marxist fashion, they are determined to try things that have already failed multiple times over in other jurisdictions. ...The biggest problem with [their] extensive list of spending [outside the morality of altruism and theft, Ed.] ... is that there’s clearly a lack of capacity in our systems to deliver any of these services. ...

"It is also a strategy that assumes infinite government competence. The Greens are highly critical of our existing systems and yet they want to expand them, give them vastly more power, and put them under further pressure. ...

"'As Venezuelans have learned over the past 20 years of socialism, “free things” come at a high price'.' ...

"Most depressing of all, in my view is the way the Greens would set out to cause lifelong structural dependency on the state. Accusations of Marxism and socialism are often overblown, but in this case they are truly warranted. This plan contains no serious expectations of any personal responsibility nor any incentives to engage in commerce and grow the economy. Guaranteed incomes, regardless of effort, encourage longterm unemployment or permanent student life. There’s no point in saving, working hard, starting a business, or taking financial risks. In fact, those who do would be penalised severely by the Greens through taxation. This is a social model built not on empowerment, but entitlement. ...

"This budget is a blueprint for turning our country into the next Venezuela. It is easy to dismiss the insanity of the Greens as the fantasies of the irrelevant, but the assumption that will not get close to the levers of power is a naive one. ... unless MMP is overhauled ..."

~ Ani O'Brien from her posts 'The Greens' vision a pathway to Venezuela' and 'Greens' moral crusade masquerading as an economic plan

WATCH: Greens's co-leaderette Chloe Swarbrick attempts defending the impossible against Jack Tame's timid prodding:

"Rather than searching in Marx's texts for a condemnation in advance of the Gulag, it is a matter of asking what in those texts could have made the Gulag possible."

Cartoon by Etta Hulme

"The [destructive aftermaths of the] Soviet Union, Maoist China, Kim's North Korea, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Castro's Cuba, Mugabe's Zimbabwe, Chavez and Maduro's Venezuela, and countless other deadly authoritarian regimes and revolutions— all carried out in Marx's name, and celebrated by Marxists at their inception — are casually dismissed and dissociated from Marx's theories ... They are not 'true socialism' or 'true Marxism,' we are told, and it falls to the next socialist regime to implement Marx 'the right way.'
    "A succinct and representative example of this tendency among modern intellectuals may be seen in political theorist Matthew McManus's account of Marx's reputation over time

'But of course the most substantial objection came from Karl Marx, whose epochal critique of political economy remains in some respects the climax of the modernist project...Marxism became the chief theoretical outlook for most of the major socialist movements and parties by the end of the 19th century, with many achieving important reforms. But its reputation was seriously tarnished by the totalitarian movements in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere, which appealed to Marx's legacy to advance tyranny while taking serious liberties with his thought. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989, many thought socialisms' days were numbered, though it has since enjoyed a resurgence in popularity as the inequalities and vulgarities of neoliberalism [sic] became increasingly scrutinised.'

"Note that McManus errs in assigning high status to Marx's intellectual following in the late nineteenth century, which, as we have seen, he did not possess at any point in his life or for many decades thereafter. Neither does McManus substantiate his efforts to differentiate the humanitarian abuses of Marx's twentieth century followers from Marx's own revolutionary theorising. 

    "One is reminded of the quip of French philosopher Michel Foucault, who stated in a rare moment of clarity: 'Rather than searching in [Marx's] texts for a condemnation in advance of the Gulag, it is a matter of asking what in those texts could have made the Gulag possible, what might even now continue to justify it, and what makes it intolerable truth still accepted today.' 'The Gulag question,' Foucault continued, 'must be posed not in terms of error (reduction of the problem to one of theory) but in terms of reality'."

~ Phil Magness, from recent writing

Venezuela reminds us: hard-core Marxists "are not ousted electorally nor peacefully."

 

Your regular reminder, this time from Venezuela overnight, that hard-core Marxists "are not ousted electorally nor peacefully." [Click the pics for links.]

Let's not ask a Marxist about the environment

"Solving our global ecological crises today requires understanding how capitalism has transformed humanity’s relationship to the land," says the Marxist Jacobin website. "Karl Marx’s thought," they say, "gives us the tools to do just that."

Does it? Did it? The record of the Soviet Union and its empire — history's largest experiment in Marxism — was dismal. Air in the city of Nikel, in the Arctic Circle (below), was so bad that occupants routinely wore respirators outside to avoid the sulphuric acid in the air. 

The Caspian Sea was transformed into a sewer. "Hundreds of factories and refineries along the Caspian Sea dump untreated waste into the sea," explains Thomas DiLorenzo, "and major cities routinely dump raw sewage. It has been estimated that one-half of all the discharged effluent is carried in the Volga River, which flows into the Caspian Sea. The concentration of oil in the Volga is so great that steamboats are equipped with signs forbidding passengers to toss cigarettes overboard." 

Meanwhile, in Russia's "steel city" Magnitogorsk (to this day now only Russia's third-most polluted city), 

any new arrival to the city [was] likely to notice an industrial tinge to the air, like the whiff of a charcoal brazier and an acrid dryness at the back of the throat. ... [T]he level of benzopyrene in the air, a carcinogen that has been linked to lung cancer, was 23 times the allowed amount. In addition, millions of cubic metres of industrial waste water is pumped into the Ural River each year, according to environmentalists, polluting it with heavy particles, nitrites and other chemicals.... [A]ccording to Anna Rozhkova, head of the environmental group EcoMagnitka, only one in 20 children born in the city is completely free of health problems and allergies. The head of Magnitogorsk’s oncological hospital said in a 2012 interview that “people around the world are susceptible [to cancer], but we unfortunately outpace all others.”

That report is from The Guardian.

Pollution in the Marxist paradise was so inevitable that citizens were literally forced to adapt. A contemporary cartoon shows citizens, having no legal recourse,  using the chemical waste to paint the houses.

And it wasn't just Russia. Victor Sebestyen's book Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire explains that

even by East German standards, Leipzig was a filthy place. Millions of tons of sulphur dioxide were spewed into. the atmosphere nearby each year. The water in the reservoirs and rivers were massively polluted. An official government report, kept strictly secret, revealed that the city's water supply contained twenty substances available only on doctor's prescription, and ten times West German levels of mercury. Journalists and scientists who investigated the high levels of cancers, respiratory ailments and skin diseases around the city — which produced more than two-thirds of East Germany's electricity — were simply arrested.

 

What's 'woke'? Let me explain.

 

You hear it all the time now. 'Woke.' "He's woke." "She's woke." "That's woke." Woke, woke. woke. You hear it all the time.

But awake to what?

James Lindsay likes tweaking 'woke' noses, and he's a fairly knowledgable chap on the subject. "There's a right name for the 'Woke' ideology," he explains, "and it's 'Critical Constructivism.' 

Critical constructivist ideology is what you "wake up" to when you go 'Woke'." He explains in a lengthy Twitter thread:

Reading this book [above], which originally codified it in 2005, is like reading a confession of Woke ideology. Let's talk about it.
    The guy whose name is on the cover of that book is credited with codifying critical constructivism, or as it would be better to call it, critical constructivist ideology (or ideologies). His name is Joe Kincheloe, he was at Magill University, and he was a critical pedagogue.
    Just to remind you, critical pedagogy is a form of brainwashing posing as education — it is the application of critical theory to educational theory and praxis, as well as the teaching and practice of critical theories in schools. ... [C]ritical pedagogy was developed ... to use educational materials as a 'mediator to political knowledge,' i.e., an excuse to brainwash.
    The point of critical pedagogy is to use education as a means not to educate, but to raise a critical consciousness in students instead. That is, its purpose is to make them 'Woke.' What does that entail, though? It means becoming a critical constructivist, as Kincheloe details.

As some people have said, it always starts with teacher mis-education. 

Note what we've already said, though. Yes, Marcuse. Yes, intersectionality. Yes, CRT and Queer Theory et cetera. Yes, yes, yes. That's Woke, BUT Woke was born and bred in education schools. I first recognised this right after [Helen Pluckrose and I] published our 2020 book 'Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody.'
    Critical pedagogy, following people like Henry Giroux and Joe Kincheloe, forged together the religious liberationist Marxism of [Paulo] Freire, literally a Liberation Theologian, with the 'European theorists,' including both Critical Marxists like Marcuse and postmodernists like Foucault.
    In other words, when Jordan Peterson identifies what we now call 'Woke' as 'postmodern neo-Marxism,' he was exactly right. ["Yes, no, and sort of," says philosopher Stephen Hicks.] It was a neo-Marxist critique that had taken a postmodern turn away from realism and reality. The right name for that is 'critical constructivism.'

CRITICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM CONTAINS (OR SYNTHESISES) two disparate parts: 'critical,' which refers to Critical Theory (that is, neo-Marxism or Critical Marxism), and 'constructivism,' which refers to the constructivist thinking at the heart of postmodernism and poststructuralism.
Critical Theory we all already generally understand at this point. The idea is pretty simple: 

• ruthless criticism of everything that exists; 

• calling everything you want to control 'oppression' until you control it; 

• finding a new proletariat in 'ghetto populations'; blah blah blah.

    More accurately, Critical Theory means believing the world and the people in it are contoured by systems of social, cultural, and economic power that are effectively inescapable and all serve to reproduce the 'existing society' (status quo) and its capitalist engine.

    Critical Theory is not concerned with the operation of the world, 'epistemic adequacy' (i.e., knowing what you're talking about), or anything else. They're interested in how systemic power shapes and contours all things and how they're experienced, to which they give a (neo)-Marxist critique.
    Constructivism is a bit less familiar for two reasons:
We've done a lot of explaining and criticising Critical Theory already, so people are catching on, and it's a downright alien intellectual landscape that is almost impossible to believe anyone actually believes. 

You're already very familiar with the language of constructivism: 'X is a social construct.' Constructivism fundamentally believes that the world is socially constructed. That's a profound claim. So are people as part of the world. That's another profound claim. So is power. I need you to stop thinking you get it and listen now because you're probably already rejecting the idea that anyone can be a constructivist who believes the world is itself socially constructed. That's because you're fundamentally a realist, but they are not realists at all.
    Constructivists believe, as Kincheloe says explicitly, that nothing exists before perception. That means that, to a constructivist, some objective shared reality doesn't exist. To them, there is no reality except the perception of reality, and the perception of reality is constructed by power.
    I need you to stop again because you probably reject getting it again. They really believe this. There is no reality except perceived reality. Reality is perceived according to one's social and political position with respect to prevailing dominant power. Do you understand?
    Constructivism rejects the idea of an objective shared reality that we can observe and draw consistent conclusions about. Conclusions are the result of perceptions and interpretations, which are colored and shaped by dominant power, mostly in getting people to accept that power.
    In place of an objective shared reality we can draw conclusions about, we all inhabit our own 'lived realities' that are shaped by power dynamics that primarily play out on the group level, hence the need for 'social justice' to make power equitable among and across groups.
    Because (critical) constructivist ideologies believe themselves the only way to truly study the effects of systemic dominant power, they have a monopoly on knowing how it works [despite the contradiction in terms], who benefits, and who suffers oppression because of it. Their interpretation is the only game in town.
    All interpretations that disagree with critical constructivism [they insist] do so for one or more bad reasons, for example:

• not knowing the value of critical constructivism, 
• being motivated to protect one's power on one or more levels, 
• prejudice and hate, or
• having bought the dominant ideology's terms, etc. 

CRITICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM IS PARTICULARLY HOSTILE to 'Western' science, favouring what it calls 'subjugated knowledges. This should all feel very familiar right now [hello Mātauranga Māori], and it's worth noting that Kincheloe is largely credited with starting the idea of 'decolonising' knowledge. 

    Kincheloe, in his own words, explains that critical constructivism is a 'weltanshuuang,' that is, a worldview, based on a 'critical hermeneutical' understanding of experienced reality. This means it intends to interpret everything through critical constructivism.
    In other words, critical constructivism is a hermetically-sealed ideological worldview (a cult worldview) that claims a monopoly on interpretation of the world by virtue of its capacity to call anything that challenges it an unjust application of self-serving dominant power.
    When you are "Woke," you are a critical constructivist, or at least suffer ideological contamination by critical constructivism, whether you know it or not. You believe important aspects of the world are socially (politically) constructed, that power is the main variable, etc.
    More importantly, you believe that perception (of unjust power) combined with (that) interpretation of reality is a more faithful description of reality than empirical fact or logical consistency, which are "reductionist" to critical constructivists.
    This wackadoodle (anti-realist) belief is a consequence of the good-ol' Hegelian/Marxist dialectic that critical constructivism imports wholesale. As Kincheloe explains, his worldview is better because it knows knowledge is both subjective and objective at the same time.
    He phrases it that all knowledge requires interpretation, and that means knowledge is constructed from the known (objective) and the knower (subjective) who knows it. It isn't "knowledge" at all until interpretation is added, and critical constructivist interpretation is best.
    Why is critical constructivist interpretation best? Here comes another standard Marxist trick: because it's the only one (self)-aware of the fact that 'positionality' with respect to power matters, so it's allegedly the only one accounting for dominant power systems at all.

WE COULD GO ON AND on about this, but you hopefully get the idea. Critical constructivism is the real name for 'Woke.' It's a cult-ideological view of the world that cannot be challenged from the outside, only concentrated from within, and it's what you 'wake up' to when Woked. [A different name for 'Critical Constructivism': Cognitive Onanism.]
    Critical constructivism is an insane, self-serving, hermetically sealed cult-ideological worldview and belief system, including a demand to put it into praxis (activism) to recreate the world for the possibility of a 'liberation' it cannot describe, by definition. A disaster.
    There is a long, detailed academic history and pedigree to 'Woke,' though, so don't let people gaslight you into believing it's some right-wing bogeyman no one can even define. It's easily comprehensible despite being almost impossible to grok like an insider.
    People who become 'Woke' (critical constructivists) are in a cult that is necessarily destructive. Why is it necessarily destructive? Because it rejects reality, and attempts instead to understand a 'reality' based in the subjective interpretations of power .....
    Furthermore, its objective is to destroy the only thing it regards as being 'real,' which are the power dynamics it identifies so it can hate them and destroy them. Those are 'socially real' because they are imposed by those with dominant power, who must be disempowered. Simple.

To conclude, Woke is a real thing. It can be explained in great detail as exactly what its critics have been saying about it for years, and those details are all available in straightforward black and white from its creators, if you can just read them and believe them.

 

"The capitalist system was termed 'capitalism' not by a friend of the system, but by Karl Marx" [updated]

"The capitalist system was termed 'capitalism' not by a friend of the system, but by an individual who considered it to be the worst of all historical systems, the greatest evil that had ever befallen mankind. That man was Karl Marx. Nevertheless, there is no reason to reject Marx’s term, because it describes clearly the source of the great social improvements brought about by capitalism. 

    "Those improvements are the result of capital accumulation; they are based on the fact that people, as a rule, do not consume everything they have produced, that they save—and invest—a part of it. 

    "There is a great deal of misunderstanding about this ... [not least that] capitalist savings benefit workers.

"An often unrealised fact about capitalism is this: savings mean benefits for all those who are anxious to produce or to earn wages. When a man has accrued a certain amount of money—let us say, one thousand dollars—and, instead of spending it, entrusts these dollars to a savings bank or an insurance company, the money goes into the hands of an entrepreneur, a businessman, enabling him to go out and embark on a project which could not have been embarked on yesterday, because the required capital was unavailable.
    "What will the businessman do now with the additional capital? The first thing he must do, the first use he will make of this additional capital, is to go out and hire workers and buy raw materials—in turn causing a further demand for workers and raw materials to develop, as well as a tendency toward higher wages and higher prices for raw materials. Long before the saver or the entrepreneur obtains any profit from all of this, the unemployed worker, the producer of raw materials, the farmer, and the wage- earner are all sharing in the benefits of the additional savings.
    "When the entrepreneur will get something out of the project depends on the future state of the market and on his ability to anticipate correctly the future state of the market. But the workers as well as the producers of raw materials get the benefits immediately....
    "The scornful depiction of capitalism by some people as a system designed to make the rich become richer and the poor become poorer is wrong from beginning to end. Marx’s thesis regarding the coming of socialism was based on the assumption that workers were getting poorer, that the masses were becoming more destitute, and that finally all the wealth of a country would be concentrated in a few hands or in the hands of one man only. And then the masses of impoverished workers would finally rebel and expropriate the riches of the wealthy proprietors....
    "If we look upon the history of the world, and especially upon the history of England since 1865, we realize that Marx was wrong in every respect. There is no western, capitalistic country in which the conditions of the masses have not improved in an unprecedented way. All these improvements of the last eighty or ninety years were made in spite of the prognostications of Karl Marx.
    "We must realise, however, that this higher standard of living depends on the supply of capital. ... A country becomes more prosperous in proportion to the rise in the invested capital per unit of its population."

~ Ludwig Von Mises, from the collection of six of his lectures titled Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow, and in Brazil under the title As Seis Lições (The Six Lessons) [hat tip Renato Moicano]

UPDATE:  Sad news just in that economic historian Robert Hessen has just died. David R. Henderson remembers him, and quotes from his contribution to the Concise Encylopaedia of Economics on Capitalism. 

"Capitalism,” a term of disparagement coined by socialists in the mid-nineteenth century, is a misnomer for “economic individualism,” which Adam Smith earlier called “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty” (Wealth of Nations).   Economic individualism’s basic premise is that the pursuit of self-interest and the right to own private property are morally defensible and legally legitimate. Its major corollary is that the state exists to protect individual rights. Subject to certain restrictions, individuals (alone or with others) are free to decide where to invest, what to produce or sell, and what prices to charge. There is no natural limit to the range of their efforts in terms of assets, sales, and profits; or the number of customers, employees, and investors; or whether they operate in local, regional, national, or international markets.

Here’s another great paragraph:

In early-nineteenth-century England the most visible face of capitalism was the textile factories that hired women and children. Critics (Richard Oastler and Robert Southey, among others) denounced the mill owners as heartless exploiters and described the working conditions—long hours, low pay, monotonous routine—as if they were unprecedented. Believing that poverty was new, not merely more visible in crowded towns and villages, critics compared contemporary times unfavourably with earlier centuries. Their claims of increasing misery, however, were based on ignorance of how squalid life actually had been earlier. Before children began earning money working in factories, they had been sent to live in parish poorhouses; apprenticed as unpaid household servants; rented out for backbreaking agricultural labor; or became beggars, vagrants, thieves, and prostitutes. The precapitalist “good old days” simply never existed (see industrial revolution and the standard of living).

And:

Despite these constraints, which worked sporadically and unpredictably, the benefits of capitalism were widely diffused. Luxuries quickly were transformed into necessities. At first, the luxuries were cheap cotton clothes, fresh meat, and white bread; then sewing machines, bicycles, sporting goods, and musical instruments; then automobiles, washing machines, clothes dryers, and refrigerators; then telephones, radios, televisions, air conditioners, and freezers; and most recently, TiVos, digital cameras, DVD players, and cell phones. ...

That these amenities had become available to most people did not cause capitalism’s critics to recant, or even to relent. Instead, they ingeniously reversed themselves. Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse proclaimed that the real evil of capitalism is prosperity, because it seduces workers away from their historic mission—the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism—by supplying them with cars and household appliances, which he called “tools of enslavement.”Some critics reject capitalism by extolling “the simple life” and labeling prosperity mindless materialism. In the 1950s, critics such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Vance Packard attacked the legitimacy of consumer demand, asserting that if goods had to be advertised in order to sell, they could not be serving any authentic human needs. They charged that consumers are brainwashed by Madison Avenue and crave whatever the giant corporations choose to produce and advertise, and complained that the “public sector” is starved while frivolous private desires are being satisfied. And having seen that capitalism reduced poverty instead of intensifying it, critics such as Gar Alperovitz and Michael Harrington proclaimed equality the highest moral value, calling for higher taxes on incomes and inheritances to massively redistribute wealth, not only nationally but also internationally.

""The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence ... "

"The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. 

    "Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. 

    "Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. 

    "Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects — his laziness, incompetence, improvidence or stupidity. 

    "Never believe in the honesty or disinterestedness of anyone who disagrees with you. 

    "This basic hatred is the heart of Marxism. This is its animating force. You can throw away the dialectical materialism, the Hegelian framework, the technical jargon, the 'scientific' analysis, and millions of pretentious words, and you still have the core: The implacable hatred and envy that are the raison d’etre for all the rest."

~ Henry Hazlitt, from his 1966 article 'Marxism in One Minute' [PDF, page 9]