Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the supreme being for man. It ends, therefore, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being." -- Marx, quoted in Bertell Ollman, Alienation , p. 48 The above, of course, is pretty much the exact position Satan is depicted as adopting in Paradise Lost : he cannot stand the fact that he himself is not God, and decides it is "Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav’n." Even from a materialist perspective, Marx's position makes little sense: shouldn't we instead recognize that we are "just another animal," "a small bit of a vast universe," and not a "supreme being"? If materialism were true, making a god of man is surely an absurd proposition! Marx is, indeed, a genius, full of keen insights into social situations and historical developments. And this explains his lasting...

I am working as a gold prospector. I go out one morning to pan for gold. I wade into the icy waters of an Alaskan river and begin the laborious task of sifting through the stones on the river bottom. After ten hours of work I find a single lump of gold, weighing some fraction of an ounce. I throw the lump in the pouch I keep around my neck. I pack up my gear and get ready to head home. But just as I turn away from the river, I hear a hissing noise and then a splash behind me. I turn around and see that the water is steaming in a certain place. I look there and, lo and behold, there is another lump of gold of the same size as the one I prospected: a golden meteorite has fallen from the sky! I grab it from the water and throw it also into my pouch. Now, I head to town to sell my gold to a buyer. When I dump out the contents of my pouch, I can't even recall which lump took ten hours of labor to acquire and which took almost none. Not only that, the buyer doesn't ask! He has n...

to understand the elite consensus . It is class analysis that is the key: the elite attend the same cocktail parties, read the same editorials, send their kids to the same schools, and just naturally come to understand the world in the same way. Sure, conspiracies take place from time to time, but it is otiose to posit a conspiracy every time the elite agree on some issue: of course they agree, they are acting in their class interest!

A conversation at my local the other night got me thinking about Marx and Engels would have made of notions like "white privilege" and so forth that are used in what is often referred to as "cultural Marxism." The context was that the bartender and another patron (a mildly impoverished young man), both of whom had talked about Marxist analysis a moment before, seemed to be taking the idea of "white privilege" very seriously. Here's my guess: Marx and Engels would have thought this was a great ruse on the part of the ruling class: convince some white guys making $10 or $15 per hour that they are "privileged," and that Vernon Jordan, Colin Powell, and Barack Obama are victims of their privilege, and the rulers have them right where they want them. UPDATE: Changed to give Vernon Jordan the correct last name.