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Barbara MacLean and Bruce Lerro are co-founders and organizers for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Follow them on Facebook and Twitter. http://planningbeyondcapitalism.org/
SHARE Friday, June 13, 2025 Jean Piaget vs Lev Vygotsky: Communist Criticisms of Genetic Epistemology
How important are small groups to a child's individual development? Piaget says they are inconsequential while Vygotsky says they are vital. Piaget says that cognitive development ends before 20 years of age. How can it be that for the next 50 years there is no cognitive development? Are all of Piaget's' stages of development universal or do they vary with social class and the type of society?
SHARE Tuesday, June 3, 2025 Building Bridges Between Vygotsky and Marx
One hundred years ago the Marxian psychologist Vygotsky wrote a famous paper "Crisis in Psychology" in which he rejected both the mechanist materialism of behaviorism and the idealism of introspection for constructing a new dialectical Marxist psychology.
Just as Marx discovered the cell of capitalism in commodity production, Vygotsky wanted to find the cell for psychology. What could it be?
SHARE Saturday, May 10, 2025 Beyond Socialist Purity: From Beatific Otherworldliness to Messy Transitions
The world economy is peppered with fault lines. On one hand the rising in the East of the BRICS nations and their friends. On the other in the West a rapidly declining Yankeedom and its European vassals. What are socialists in the West to do with this malestream, this great turning point? There is no room for either purism or enmeshment.
SHARE Saturday, April 5, 2025 Militant Neo-Pagans Neither Forgive Nor Forget: Why Neo-Pagans Should be Anti-Christian and Anti-Capitalist
Paganism (whether animism or polytheism) has been treated horribly by Christianity in the desecration of images, temples, librarians or the killing of witches.
But how do Neopagans react? This article throws down the gauntlet & says we should have no reconciliation w/Christianity. I also attack capitalist idolatry, reification & exploitation of nature and society. We should dance on the graves of capitalists.
SHARE Friday, March 21, 2025 Part II of Neoliberal Micro-Psychology vs Communist Macro-Psychology: From Flatland to Spaceland
Here is a slow-motion study of how psychological propaganda works. Lev Vygotsky was a communist psychologist who did his work in the Soviet Union almost 100 years ago. What happens when his books and projects are imported into the capitalist West? Capitalism, social class, alienation are eliminated from the discussion. In its place is a social contract, romantic self.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 11, 2025 Neoliberal Micro Psychology vs Communist Macro Psychology: From Flatland to Spaceland Part I
When I was in graduate school in psychology I asked my social psychology teacher whom I suspected of being a marxist "Why don't psychologists ever talk about capitalism? Why don't they talk about social class, exploitation and the alienation of labor?" She said to me, "have you ever heard of Vygotsky?" My ship had come in.
SHARE Friday, February 7, 2025 Take Your Clothes Off and Keep Your Mouth Shut: My Twelve Years in a Union as a Fine Arts Model
What do you imagine the life of an artist's model is like? Like any working-class job you do better with a union. But how hard is it to sit in one place? It's very difficult without a limber body & knowledge of your physical limitations. My work with teachers made me a better artist, allowed me time to read, write & provided me with a good income as I made a transition to college teaching. I loved this work.
SHARE Monday, January 27, 2025 What is a Working Class Hero?
Years ago John Lennon claimed that a working class hero is something to be. Many people see Luigi as a working class hero. Tina Turner, herself working class, told us we don't need another hero. In this article we show they are all wrong. The life of socialist revolutionary Elizabeth Gurley Flynn takes us higher, deeper & broader into working class heroes.
SHARE Friday, January 3, 2025 Towards a Neopagan Process Thealogy: How it Can Enrich Communism
The revolutions in physics at the end of the 19th century had powerful implications for Western philosophy. The rise of complexity theory 75 yrs later added to the crisis. Process philosophy provided a framework for this new science. Continued rumblings in theology produced process "theology". Then the radical women's movement attempted to paganize process theology. Can communists ignore this? We don't think so.
SHARE Sunday, December 8, 2024 Ungrateful Lying Upstarts: The Western Denial Of The Eastern Origins of Their Civilization
For the educated layperson here in the West the rise of China & the Middle-East appears to be about 30 years old. Before then it seems the West had dominated for about 500 years-others for 2,000 years. However, author John M. Hobson exposes this framework as the creation of 19th century Eurocentric propaganda. Rather the window of time where the West has led the East is less than less than 200 years.
SHARE Saturday, November 2, 2024 Cross-Cultural Comparative Politics: Social Science or Cold War Propaganda?
The field of comparative politics took off in the 1950s in Mordor & for 10 years it never lost its anti-communist tinge. It is part of a self-propagandizing triumphalism that includes domestic political science, neoclassical economics & international relations theory. All these fields are ideological smoke screens that keep the West from facing its deep political and economic decline in the face of the rise of the East.
SHARE Saturday, October 19, 2024 The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers: How They Can't Face Their Loss to the "Eurasian Miracle"
China Russia, India & Iran are blossoming in harnessing energy and building infrastructures. Economically BRICS currency will eventually marginalize the dollar. What is amazing is the vast denial system that Mordor and its vassals has hypnotized itself into believing. This article is about how the ideology of Eurocentrism paternalism racism and imperialism keeps the West in a fog about how badly its situation actually is.
SHARE Tuesday, October 1, 2024 Choose-Up Games from the Sandlots of Jamaica, Queens NY
My 13-year love affair w/sandlot baseball 7 to 20 years old. Our choose-up games had no managers&no umpires, yet we self-managed the games ourselves. We used rags for bases, rarely had enough players&often had to cover 2 infield positions and 2 outfield positions simultaneously. The field had stones if you were lucky and rocks if you weren't. Our players could have been the East Side Kids where brawling was just an insult
SHARE Friday, September 13, 2024 The Collective Creativity of Workers: From Unconscious Sleeping Giant to Builder of Barricades Part II
Romantic ideas about creativity begin&end with individuals. But in capitalist societies when workers engage in collective-creativity such as natural disasters & how workers build workers' councils in revolutionary situations. Workers have always been creative. But they have always done so unconsciously. But under unique circumstances this sleeping giant awakens to produce marvelous social experiments suppressed by capitalists.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 1, 2024 The Collective Creativity of Workers: From Unconscious Sleeping Giants to Conscious Builders of Barricades Part I
In the West our notions of creativity are baked with the assumptions of a romantic theory of art. This usually limits our conceptions of creativity to individuals. But there are forms of collective creativity workers engage in that are unconscious due to the alienation of class society. However in the conditions of natural disasters, social movements & revolutionary situations workers make their collective creativity conscious
SHARE Sunday, August 25, 2024 Absolutist, Relativist and Cynical Thinking Styles: How Yankees are Blockheads
Outside of the US despite class the people of Mordor are rightfully seen as not knowing anything about geography history or politics. Our article draws on research that most Yankees cannot clearly think about ill-structured, complex problems. Instead they think in an absolutist relativist or cynical manner. At a macro-level this applies to their political parties & on a micro-level to romance or individual lifespan.
SHARE Monday, August 5, 2024 Holistic vs Analytical Thinking: East vs West and The Ecological, Political and Economic Reasons for Their Differences
Why would the ancient Chinese excel at algebra & arithmetic but not in geometry as the Greeks did? Why do the Chinese learn verbs at a faster rate than nouns? Why do Westerners learn nouns at a faster pace? Why are Easterners more conforming to their in-group than Westerners but more hostile to strangers than those in the West? For one author the answer is not religious. Rather, it is ecological, political and economic.
SHARE Saturday, July 27, 2024 "Dictatorship" and "Democracy" as Loaded Language: Anti-Communist Cold-War Propaganda
The term "dictatorship" has been used and abused by the Anglo-American Empire for the last 100 years. Believe it or not the Mordor ruling class was sympathetic to dictators in the 1920s and 1930s. Then it was used to tar and feather communism. So too "democracy" was feared by the rulers for most of its history. It was only cleaned up and sanitized after WWII.
SHARE Friday, July 19, 2024 "TOTALITARIAN" ANTI-COMMUNISM: Loaded Language Straight Out of CIA, Neo-Con Playbook
"Totalitarianism" has been used & abused by Anglo American elites for the last 100 years. It was looked upon favorably in the 1920s & 30s to restore "order" to capitalist crises. It became a negative word during the WWII to attack both fascism and communism. Cold War liberals in the 50s championed themselves as an alternative to communism. It still comes in handy today even though the word has been declared unscientific.
SHARE Saturday, July 6, 2024 The Dark Side of Left-Brain Operations: Part II Schizophrenia, Modern Art and Western History Part II
In Part I of this article I showed how when the left brain gets out of control the results can be either schizophrenia or modern art. In Part II I show how the worst aspects of the Reformation, the Enlightenment and Industrial capitalism can be linked to habits of the left brain gone haywire and manifested in material structures.