Saturday, October 27, 2018

Paul Gottfried has read Antifa's wunderkind Mark Bray and finds that there's no there there, just slogans

Proving once again that PhD's aren't what they used to be. Maybe it's time to draft them. 


Despite its obvious incompatibility with the dominant political culture, the alt-right seems to have rallied philosophically deeper thinkers than the slogan-chanting adolescents who swarm around [Mark] Bray. ...

Bray’s Left has nothing in common with the Left that existed in interwar Europe. His field and passion are gender studies and “fighting racism.” These were hardly the major interests of anarchists and Marxists in the 1930s. Back then the Left was serious about a socio-economic revolution and showed no noticeable interest in identity politics or LGBT self-expression. It may even be a bit of a stretch to relate antifa activism to the protests in the 1960s that I personally witnessed. The demonstrators at that time opposed a prolonged war in Vietnam into which they might be personally dragged; others protested segregation, which really existed in some parts of the country. What similarly deep cause is driving Bray and his allies? I can’t seem to find one other than seizing power or simply letting off steam.