Articles by: Bruce Lerro

The Power of Magick: Why Materialists, Atheists And Marxists Need It

The Power of Magick: Why Materialists, Atheists And Marxists Need It

 Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the Will.   ― Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth            ORIENTATION Throwing the baby out with the bathwater In two articles I wrote in 2019, Facing the Music: Religion, Nationalism and Sports Have Enchanted the Working Class; Socialism Hasn’t  and Re-Enchanting Socialism: How Not to Throw[Read More…]

by 29/01/2021 Comments are Disabled Life/Philosophy
Name Me One Country Where Capitalism Works: A Thirty-Year Reckoning

Name Me One Country Where Capitalism Works: A Thirty-Year Reckoning

ORIENTATION When I first considered myself a socialist revolutionary in 1970, I was hounded by free marketers’ challenge: “name me one country where socialism works”. These market fundamentalists would then hold up the most strident expectations for socialism: Everyone is exactly equal with no classes. There is an abundance of goods which are conveniently circulated. Political rule is not dictatorial.[Read More…]

by 12/12/2020 Comments are Disabled Life/Philosophy
Invasion of the body snatchers: How political science and neoclassical economics zombifies the Yankee population

Invasion of the body snatchers: How political science and neoclassical economics zombifies the Yankee population

ORIENTATION Why do political science and neoclassical economics go in one ear and out the other? A human being who has a fully integrated social body understands that economics is about a social system of circulation of goods and services. In other words, provisioning for the population.  Politics is the collective process of evaluating and deciding a) where have we[Read More…]

by 26/11/2020 Comments are Disabled Life/Philosophy
Dictatorship And Democracy As Loaded Language: Anti-Communist Cold-War Propaganda

Dictatorship And Democracy As Loaded Language: Anti-Communist Cold-War Propaganda

ORIENTATION In my last article I showed how the word “totalitarian” was used as a loaded vice word to attack the Soviet Union after World War II and to red-bait communists around the world. The use of the word totalitarian began in the 1930s, but even before then in the 1920’s, the word “dictator” began to surface in order to[Read More…]

by 28/10/2020 Comments are Disabled Life/Philosophy
Image courtesy  Hermit

Like A Rowboat In A Typhoon: Why 2020 Center-Right Yankee Election Outcomes Are Dead In The Water

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed up the world…. The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. William Butler Yeats   ORIENTATION How dare you? “Oh, great, that’s all we need. A cynical radical leftist who is[Read More…]

by 19/09/2020 Comments are Disabled World
Political And Spiritual Cults: From Rapture To Complicity To Aftermath In The Shadow Of 20th Century Yankeedom

Political And Spiritual Cults: From Rapture To Complicity To Aftermath In The Shadow Of 20th Century Yankeedom

“The party is always right, even when it’s wrong” – Democratic Workers Party slogan ORIENTATION Everybody knows what cults are People who join cults are mentally unstable before they join and less educated than the general population. True or false? Cult members also define themselves as lonely. True or false? Most people who join cults are from the poor and[Read More…]

by 11/09/2020 Comments are Disabled Life/Philosophy
Lost at Sea: Left Liberals Have No Party

Lost at Sea: Left Liberals Have No Party

I wrote this article over four years ago in 2016 for the purpose of challenging left liberals to face the fact that they have no party. In re-reading it today, everything I said in the original article remains true. In fact, the Democratic Party has leaned even further to the right over the last four years. In the face of uprisings of[Read More…]

by 12/08/2020 Comments are Disabled World
ca. 2004, New Zealand, Pacific --- Flock of sheep, New Zealand, Pacific --- Image by © Mula Eshet/Robert Harding World Imagery/Corbis

Revolutionary Group Dynamics: How Minorities Influence Majorities, From Group Complicity To Collective Creativity

Orientation From the macro to the micro When it comes to stereotypes of the masses of revolutionary people, the masses have built barricades that look like forts which they hide behind, armed with guns. But if we trace the behavior of masses back far enough to pre-revolutionary situations, masses become groups. In order to understand how masses of people become[Read More…]

by 20/07/2020 1 comment Life/Philosophy
Neoliberal Psychological Romanticism: From The Primal Scream To The Collective Unconscious – Part II

Neoliberal Psychological Romanticism: From The Primal Scream To The Collective Unconscious – Part II

Orientation In Part I of this article, I begin by grounding neoliberal psychology in the political and economic reality of neoliberalism between 1970 to 2020. First, we discussed the historical origins of neoliberalism, and then its economic exploitation, mystification and ideological use to control people. I briefly discussed the realities of the practice of neoliberal economic policies which has resulted in cannibalization of the[Read More…]

by 09/07/2020 Comments are Disabled Globalisation
Neoliberal Psychological Realism: From Barbie Dolls To Hook-Up Sex

Neoliberal Psychological Realism: From Barbie Dolls To Hook-Up Sex

Orientation In this two-part article, I trace facets of neoliberal psychology over a 50 years period, from 1970 to present. The first facet of neoliberal psychology is the “realist” phase in which capitalists strip the individual of as many of our social, qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) relations as well as our historical and cross-cultural identities so that everything can[Read More…]

by 01/07/2020 Comments are Disabled Globalisation
Facing The Music: Religion, Nationalism And Sports Have Enchanted The Working Class; Socialism Hasn’t

Facing The Music: Religion, Nationalism And Sports Have Enchanted The Working Class; Socialism Hasn’t

Religion, nationalism and sports as propaganda for the ruling class In the closing section of my course Brainwashing Propaganda and Rhetoric: Dark Psychology in the 20th Century, I ask my students to compare organized religion, nationalism and sports, not only to determine the kind of propaganda they are (black, gray or white), but also the devices and artifacts that are used. This includes[Read More…]

by 19/11/2018 1 comment Life/Philosophy
Big Brother Facebook: Drawing Down The Iron Curtain On Yankeedom

Big Brother Facebook: Drawing Down The Iron Curtain On Yankeedom

Leading a double life When my partner, Barbara, first opened an account on Facebook, she used it in a way that most people in Yankeedom use it. Her network was an eclectic assortment of family, current and former workmates, new and old friends, neighbors and relatives living in other parts of the country. Most of what was posted on this[Read More…]

by 17/06/2018 1 comment World
Greater Of Two Evils: Why The Democratic Party Is Worse Than The Republican Party For 85% Of The U.S. Population

Greater Of Two Evils: Why The Democratic Party Is Worse Than The Republican Party For 85% Of The U.S. Population

How to conceive of the two-party system Lesser of two evils Among liberals and the different types of socialists, when the subject of the Democratic Party comes up, there are at least two variations. One is the familiar liberal argument that the Democratic Party is the “lesser of two evils”. For them, the Republican Party is the source of most,[Read More…]

by 03/04/2018 2 comments World
Do You Socialists Have Any Plans? Why We Need Socialist Architects

Do You Socialists Have Any Plans? Why We Need Socialist Architects

Claim and Qualification For the first time in well over 70 years, the words “capitalism” and “socialism” can be circulated among the general public in the United States. However, what I am going to claim in this article is that the only way 21st century socialism is going to get any traction or respect from the working class is if[Read More…]

by 14/09/2017 1 comment Life/Philosophy
Lost at Sea: Left Liberals Have No Party

Lost at Sea: Left Liberals Have No Party

In the periphery of the circles in which I travel, people do not actively defend what it means to be a member of the Democratic Party. They come on much stronger when they say they are against the Republican Party. And why not? The Republican Party is the party of old money, inheritance, white supremacy and fundamentalist Christianity. Republicans and[Read More…]

by 11/07/2017 3 comments World
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