I didn’t defend a link – I pointed out that Chinese commies might be reading Gramsci too.

I have done more than wikipedia’d Gramsci – I have read him as a primary text. Not because I have wanted to, mind, but because it was required reading on my university course – and I was studying Cinema!

Gramsci was marxist at his core, so viewed the world with that lense. However, if you unpick his arguments, you can take a lot from what he was writing and incorporate it into your own way of seeing.

For instance, I have read posts on this blog by people like Redbaiter, who discuss how liberal ideologies are infecting public institutions, etc. Gramsci was writing about ‘ruling elites’ (ie, capitalism), but his writing could equally apply to liberal ones too.

And so to China – although, as you point out, China is run by capilalists now. I am sure whatever they beilieve is a mishmash of Mao and who knows what. Gramsci’s prime concern was ‘cultural hegemony’, which I think the Chinese elites have a very active interest in preserving. That’s why I didn’t think Gramsci would necessarily be out of sync with them.

Hope that’s cleared it up, Jack5

What a dick. It is alongside industrialisation and International Law too. You assume this is meant as a list of “bad” (i.e. “not left”) things.

DPF: “I may be wrong here but I suspect if you hand in an essay about how free trade based on an international legal framework is responsible for lifting tens of millions out of poverty, then you’re not going to get an A.”

What a dick again.

You should offer to lecture a course on political web-nuttery for them.

“Blogosphere 101: How to be outspoken on topics you don’t understand, but assume you wouldn’t like.

The course will no doubt be highly popular with those looking for new ways to criticise & belittle european history.

China’s economy is now capitalist, with the Chinese apparatchiks transformed into capitalists, with only some in the military lagging, and the peasants transformed into a vast reservoir of casual labour.

The cropping up of “Gramsci” in the influences on Auckland university lecturers does raise an interesting point. This is what Wikipedia says of the Italian communist ideologue:

Gramsci posits a strategic distinction, between a War of Position and a War of Manoeuvre. The war of position is intellectual, a culture war in which the anti-capitalist politicians (communist leaders sponsors, socialist scholars, and ideological subversives) seek to have the dominant voice in the mass media, other mass organisations, and the schools (and actively conduct ideological subversion).

That may be why you have a prominent Trotskyist teaching journalism students at another Auckland tertiary institution, and why we have the drift to the Left in the NZ MSM, neglected by absentee foreign owners, or in the case of tabloid TV, by its main owner the state.

Ephemera may have a point about similarities in the thought of Mao and Gramsci, in that they both developed independent Marxist lines.

Regardless, what a gem for marketers of NZ education overseas lies in the Auckland lefty lecturers. Come to Auckland and study the Gramsci line (or the Trotsky line, or the general Marxist line) What next? Great Leap Forward agriculture at Lincoln and Massey?

Surely not even a dinosaur communist surviving in NZ like a tuatara could believe the new middle-class parents of China, the country’s new bourgeoisie, want to send their children to be educated in a remote-land university where some lecturers are even mildly in synch with Mao. To increasing numbers, Mao is a monster who murdered tens of millions in the Great Leap Forward.

Even if they did want a communist education for their kids, middle-class Chinese would send them to Cuba or Belarus, or find some backward institution in the Chinese hinterland.

Where do you think all of the loony leftist who foul this blog get their doctrine from??

If their heads weren’t filled with crap from commies such as Mohsen (proselytizers posing as lecturers) there would be a vacuum in its place.

They made an exception for Peter Zohrab, You’d be hard pressed to find anyone else from Victoria university who has experienced that fate.

If you want to know where Helen Clark and her cronies got their ideas you need look no further. Helen Clark was radicalised at Auckland University. Unfortunately the ideas of the radicals have now become mainstream. Homosexuality after decades of effort from a relatively few but highly motivated group of queer activists is now enshrined in law as a human right. Judges for example now tend to have the radical view of race which sees all colonialism as bad and have a jaundiced view of the history of New Zealand as full of the most extreme forms of racism. Union leaders are of course still deeply imbibed in class warfare and the views of Communist radicals like Gramsci are widely believed.

Worse still, if you get up the lecturer’s nose too much then the Dean may not give you a positive reference to be admitted to the bar via a Law Society recommendation (the usual route). This means you have to spend a fortune to convince a High Court Judge that you should be admitted. Peter Zohrab knows all about this – AFAIK he still has not been admitted.

that said, the lecturers were very impartial on that one, and did mark on the basis of merit/argument/logic, not viewpoints.

“Shame on us! For shame! If only I were more enlightened! Please, paul, lead me from the darkness! ”

Even if you were being sarcastic, you have made pauls point for him – Next time, rather than hinting at a feeling of intellectual inferiority, just say “Fuck off”.

Look at some of the unwashed that attend such classes and you’ll see a collection of no-hopers who will spend a decade at Uni preparing for a career in welfarism, union reps or Labour/Green MPs.

WHat you say does makes sens. I have a very superficial understanding of history, and want to learn more about this kind of thing. What I was trying to address, though, was DPF’s astonishment that capitalism would be bundled together with slavery and genocide.

One can be a fan of 21st century capitalism and still acknowledge the economic drivers at play in the aforementioned issues.

Slavery was borne out of 15th century capitalism? What?

I guess people just went back in time and inserted laws governing the keeping of slaves in most religious texts, including the bible. Anyway, it was not capitalism that made it wider in use; most of it was actually the approval of a certain religious institution…

This little hive mind you’ve got going here can’t handle any sort of challenge to its victim mentality world view. This whole thread is just a fearful stream of “oh my god the foreigners are brainwashing our kids”. As if any of your kids are ever going to study law. As if any of you could raise a child without violating a restraining order.

Bunch of shivering bitches, your only consolation the knowledge that you’ve found a filthy nest of like-minded impotent losers, rejects, and internet tough guys to comfort you through the darkness of your mid-life crisis.