/lit/ - Literature

>>9789282
What's with this meme that only Americans are anti-communist? Is this /leftypol/ trying to associate anti-communism with "dumb Americans", and communism with European high culture?

If so, that's quite ridiculous. There is a good tradition of anti-communism in Europe that, if anything, is more radical than in America. If the United States had McCarthyism, Europe had right-wing death squads.

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals. It gives them power, so they promote it.

>>5303260
And Raymond Aron - The Opium of the Intellectuals, for an analysis of Marxists themselves.

>"Probably the intellectual has more difficulty than the common man in freeing himself from this ideology which, like the State which derives from it, is his especial handiwork. The Soviet government rules in the name of a doctrine elaborated by an intellectual whose life was spent in libraries and interpreted for the past century by countless other intellectuals. Under a Communist régime the intellectuals, sophists rather than philosophers, rule the roost. The examining magistrates who unmask deviations, the writers coerced into socialist realism, the engineers and managers who are supposed to execute the plans and to interpret the ambiguous orders of the central authority—all must be dialecticians. The Secretary-General of the Party, master and arbiter over the lives of millions of men. is also an intellectual: at the end of a triumphal career he offers to the faithful a theory of capitalism and socialism—as though a book represented the highest accomplishment. The emperors of old were often poets or thinkers; for the first time the emperor actually reigns qua dialectician, interpreter of the doctrine and of history."

>>5254028
/lit/ is leftist for the same reason /biz/ is pro free market.

Don't know about pro libertarian, but some good anti-communist/anti-socialist works are

Raymon Aron - The Opium of the Intellectuals
Leszek Kolakowski - Main Currents of Marxism
Czesław Miłosz - The Captive Mind
Arthur Koestler - Darkness at Noon
Alexander Zinoviev - Yawning Heights
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn - The Menace of the Herd
Jean-François Revel - Last Exit to Utopia
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago
Igor Shafarevich - The Socialist Phenomenom

/lit/ is marxist for the same reason /biz/ is pro-free market.

>"Probably the intellectual has more difficulty than the common man in freeing himself from this ideology which, like the State which derives from it, is his especial handiwork. The Soviet government rules in the name of a doctrine elaborated by an intellectual whose life was spent in libraries and interpreted for the past century by countless other intellectuals. Under a Communist régime the intellectuals, sophists rather than philosophers, rule the roost. The examining magistrates who unmask deviations, the writers coerced into socialist realism, the engineers and managers who are supposed to execute the plans and to interpret the ambiguous orders of the central authority—all must be dialecticians. The Secretary-General of the Party, master and arbiter over the lives of millions of men. is also an intellectual: at the end of a triumphal career he offers to the faithful a theory of capitalism and socialism—as though a book represented the highest accomplishment. The emperors of old were often poets or thinkers; for the first time the emperor actually reigns qua dialectician, interpreter of the doctrine and of history."

Raymond Aron - The Opium of the Intellectuals
Eric Hoffer - The Ordeal of Change

It's fun because it adresses the reason why 80% of the works listed here are popular with the academic left.

>>4977824
Why is /biz/ pro free-market?

People will support the ideologies (they believe) give them power. And left-wing ideologies gives a lot of power to intellectuals. The intelligentsia as a class is a result of the Enlightenment after all, they gotta be loyal to it's project.

>"Probably the intellectual has more difficulty than the common man in freeing himself from this ideology which, like the State which derives from it, is his especial handiwork. The Soviet government rules in the name of a doctrine elaborated by an intellectual whose life was spent in libraries and interpreted for the past century by countless other intellectuals. Under a Communist régime the intellectuals, sophists rather than philosophers, rule the roost. The examining magistrates who unmask deviations, the writers coerced into socialist realism, the engineers and managers who are supposed to execute the plans and to interpret the ambiguous orders of the central authority—all must be dialecticians. The Secretary-General of the Party, master and arbiter over the lives of millions of men. is also an intellectual: at the end of a triumphal career he offers to the faithful a theory of capitalism and socialism—as though a book represented the highest accomplishment. The emperors of old were often poets or thinkers; for the first time the emperor actually reigns qua dialectician, interpreter of the doctrine and of history."

Raymond Aron. The Opium of the Intellectuals

Because Marxism gives absolute power to the intelligentsia. I mean, someone gotta be that central planner/political commissar.

"Probably the intellectual has more difficulty than the common man in freeing himself from this ideology which, like the State which derives from it, is his especial handiwork. The Soviet government rules in the name of a doctrine elaborated by an intellectual whose life was spent in libraries and interpreted for the past century by countless other intellectuals. Under a Communist régime the intellectuals, sophists rather than philosophers, rule the roost. The examining magistrates who unmask deviations, the writers coerced into socialist realism, the engineers and managers who are supposed to execute the plans and to interpret the ambiguous orders of the central authority—all must be dialecticians. The Secretary-General of the Party, master and arbiter over the lives of millions of men. is also an intellectual: at the end of a triumphal career he offers to the faithful a theory of capitalism and socialism—as though a book represented the highest accomplishment. The emperors of old were often poets or thinkers; for the first time the emperor actually reigns qua dialectician, interpreter of the doctrine and of history."

Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals