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When irony flies over their heads…

Georgia NeSmith
6 min readSep 20, 2020

In response to:

Hmmm. It appears that either the article to which this was a response was removed, or I have been blocked from seeing it. Oh well. I’m leaving my response [revised, updated, and new material] here anyway.

Photo by Tachina Lee on Unsplash

Wow. This is utterly bizarre. After reading this piece I simply had to go and read the Tim Wise article you reference and assert that it condones violence as part of the movement to bring about racial equality. That is, true racial equality and not mere abstract ideas.

You say Tim Wise’s article promotes violence as a means of social change. But I couldn’t find a single sentence that does any such thing. Nonetheless your statement at the beginning of this article makes it sound like promoting violence was Wise’s organizing theme. For the life of me I cannot figure out where you got that.

So maybe you should use some actual references to Wise’s article instead of relying on whatever memory you have of what you read, and your resistance to it — probably in anger against the straw man you constructed whole cloth from Marx and Wise — and ready to dance all over both, it seems.

That is the only explanation I can think of for your somewhat wacky assertions here.

You talk about Marx, but you summarize him using what the Russians did in their revolution. Apparently your only knowledge of Marx comes from whatever knowledge you have of the Russian revolution and its aftermath.

Have you read even a sample chapter of Das Kapital?

BTW, Russia in no way represents Marx’s ideas other than in a caricatured way. The revolution wasn’t supposed to be peasant against aristocrat. That’s skipping over a whole very large development of economy that Russia never had, namely industrial capitalism. The Russian revolution occurred under the conditions of aristocratic rule over the peasants, with the beginnings of mercantile capitalism. The Russian economy was largely agrarian, not industrial.

According to Marx, before capitalism would crumble under the weight of its own contradictions, it had to be fully…

Georgia NeSmith

Retired professor, feminist, writer, photographer, activist, grandmother of 5, overall Wise Woman. Phd UIA School of Journalism & Mass Communication, 1994.