By: Ronald Thomas West

The Decline of the West & its Shaping by Long-Standing European Misconceptions on the Essence of Society and Being

t should be said first that the following observations offer a view that does not originate with Western thought, and therefore in the Western academic sense may be deemed insufficient.

This is for two reasons, primarily; 1) the thought that all analysis must be subject to exam for the fact of necessary cultural bias, when bias must be synonymous to belief, and; 2) this essay does not delve deeply into the subject academically but necessarily notes certain phenomena in a context of inter-cultural observation, exogenous to what is known as the ‘Institution’. This is necessitated by the observation that Western academia can be (more often than not often is as a matter of rule) a feedback loop where mistaken ideas are perpetrated by a process of ‘peer review’, or subjected to strict framing by ‘empiricism’ (3rd party interpretation) with a vested interest in protecting a status quo.

The method used here is not Western but derives from an oral history form exogenous to European culture. This method proposes a story constructed from metadata and is a hybrid in that philosophical elements of non-Western oral history and related to underlying principles of thought and a format is applied to (or superimposed upon) Western metadata.

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 By: Jafe Arnold

Marx and the Indo-European Mode of Production

f the three main socio-political ideologies of modernity – Liberalism, Marxism, and Fascism (and their offshoots) – Marxism is arguably the most complex, scientific, and paradoxical. On the one hand, the theories of Karl Marx are no less contextually rooted in their 19th century Western European environment than other thinkers and currents that contributed to the first and third political ideologies. On the other hand, Marxism proved to be something more historically commanding and globally relevant than the myriad of other 19th century frameworks and theories which proposed a socio-political trajectory of modernity based on one or another meta-historical philosophical narrative. Societies claiming to be consciously guided by Marxist ideology and realizing its political pivot – the “dictatorship of the proletariat” – once covered nearly half of the globe for half of the most turbulent 20th century, thereby shaping a unique experience of modernity for more than a billion people and rather convincingly insisting that communism would be “the end of history.”

In this installment, we will address the dilemma of Marxism from two standpoints: (1) weighing the benefits, downsides, and paradoxes of Marx’s framework, and (2) demonstrating the relevance of Marxism’s identification of the relations of production and class to understanding the mythological, sociological, and political-economic developmental trends that uniquely affected primordial Indo-European society. With these analyses integrated into our arsenal, we can move ever closer to understanding the modernity that we are leaving, how it came about, and the multipolar world into which we are moving.  In order to broach such, we must first establish why it is worth picking Marx up again at all. Continue reading →