On Partisanship, Projection and Defining the Battlefield

One of the things I've noticed through the years is that partisan intellectuals spend more time defining their enemies than they spend scrutinizing their own ideas.

I know Democrats who can recount every transgression committed by Trump since his infancy and Conservatives who can recite every moral transgression attributed to "liberals" in the French Revolution.

This process is called "projection." Psychological projection was a favorite topic of Sigmund Freud. Partisan projection is one of the most common political techniques.

Marx stands out as one of the most cited intellectuals in history.

Marx's accumulated works provides one of the best examples of projection in action. Marx wrote a huge three tome work called "Das Kapital" which defines the position of his enimies the hated "capitalist." Marx wrote a short pamphlet called "The Communist Manifesto." But he never clearly defined how Communism would work.

Marx's life work is a nasty trick to define his enemies into a corner.

Marx took this strategy from "Art of War." Both Sun Tzu and Machiavelli taught that the way to win the a battle is to define the battlefield.

In yesterday's post, I made the claim that Marx is the father of Capitalism

I believe that the reason that Marx spent his life defining "capitalism" was because he was trying to define a battlefield for a future revolution. The unfortunate result of Marx's work is that people a century and a half later are still mucking around in the battlefield he created.

The picture is "La Mort sur la champ de bataille" by Stefano Della Bella dated 1648. I pilferred the image from the National Gallery of Art.