Note: I had to leave this for a while before posting because idk it was a bit familiar somehow.
19 July 2025
Last year unreconstructed political Marxist academic Vijay Prashad incited a pileon on Facebook targetting anarchist anthropologist and historian James C. Scott just after he died. Prashad refused to engage with criticism of his post or any points of view that did not support his campaign of essentialising, demonising and morality policing–not least from errant voices pointing out variations on the theme that, that just because Vijay Prashad can’t change, learn, grow or evolve ideas, the same is not automatically true of everyone else.
This seems odd considering the way he has furthered his own career by associating himself with that other great purveyor of petit-bourgeois deviationism, Noam Chomsky. Maybe Prashad was pissed that Scott wouldn’t help him further his own cause (all for the revolution though comrades).
[Note: less us give pause for Noam Chomsky. Maybe it’s for the best he’s not able to see how Prashad and Doug Henwood are enjoying a public circle jerk at his expense: Noam Chomsky, tool of the Man].
Why does this bear mentioning? Because all the points Brad Simpson brings up don’t matter when you need to morality-police someone else’s conduct because you want the spotlight taken of your own attitude and choices?
The Bolsheviks not only worked for thought police themselves, they controlled and were state thought police. Does this bear mentioning? Prashad completely ignores that most obvious fact when I bring it up. It’s almost the though the point of Prashad’s vile antics were to not notice these very obvious facts about the totalitarian inferno of Soviet Russia, but to sweep them under the rug and to reposition himself as the opposite of thought police by making a scapegoat out of Scott when he was too dead to defend himself.
The hypocrisy from opportunistic, technocratic, upper middle class bourgeois scum like Prashad just goes to show how much the alleged superior logical rigour of political marxist dialectics translates in practise. Like most political Marxists, Prashad hates Scott because his work demolishes Marx’s 19th century pseudoscience around alleged ‘iron laws of capitalist development’ and the ‘Asiatic mode of production,’ which ironically enough is based on a reading of world history not dissimilar to that of the Scottish Enlightenment.
More sympathetic to Marx: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/7969_the-idea-of-commercial-society-in-the-scottish-enlightenment-review-by-paul-raekstad/
Less sympathetic to Marx: https://jacobwilliamwilkins.medium.com/karl-marx-stole-some-of-his-ideas-8ded934cbb33
Maybe that’s how Orientalism shows up in Marx’s writings. Whoops.
Prashad’s ghoulish hypocrisy is par for the course for professional politicians looking to use left politics as a stepping stone for their own personal ambitions. Engels was a factory owner and exploiter of wage labour in the same manner as he spent a lifetime critiquing; Lenin’s idea of the transitory state was NEP state capitalism. Does this bear mentioning? It seems more like it bears avoiding.
As the demonstrated antithesis to the political Marxist Utopia of the proletarian state, the dialectical import of the history of the Soviet experiment remains too much for careerists who agree with Lenin that workers are stupid, only capable of a ‘trade union consciousness’ and need stringing along by our betters for our own good.
Here’s one thing I’ve written on the topic myself;
https://www.academia.edu/34881007/The_Leninist_Barrier_to_Socialist_Reconstruction
Prashad’s majestic dialectics can’t touch Scott’s research; therefore he must resort to internet pileons and tools of the class enemy like Facebook. The dialectics of the meta algorithm and dopamine highs. Winning.
There is WAY more where this comes from:
