Crow posted:

I mean, it's simple, really. Repentant troops can help us kill the unrepentant ones, mercy kills really, a labor of love, on the way to the top military brass who will be summarily executed. If they haven't defected yet. I guess the answer lied in the middle, smack dab in my post.

deadken posted:

Crow posted:

Wow damn i guess everything really is impersonal and there's no responsibility for anything. I think troops are great, why yes i am a pieace of fuckin shit.... God damn do i own, as a peace of shit ...I go fuck my self on the daily, JEsus fuck

yeah basically

ken this is really weak, you can't take an antihumanist stance denying the autonomy of the individual after identifying the profoundly humanist category of class consciousness as the site for a solution of these problems, something that is completely rooted in the idea of the autonomy of the subject

deadken posted:

if people have false consciousness it's because leftists aren't broadcasting their ideas loudly and comprehensively enough. soldiers have been an essential class element in every revolution.

this idea is entirely predicated on the argument that you dismissed out of hand, the idea that individuals make decisions based on their considered moral calculus, yet somehow you think the clarity and spread of radical propaganda is enough to change their minds en masse? ff you deny that troops make a reasoned judgment about the horrific implications of enrolling in the u.s. military as opposed to acting nakedly in their class interests as is determined by the reproduction of inhuman forces, why do you think they will be susceptible to making a reasoned judgement, based on the singularly humanist tactic of raising consciousness, to fight for a socially progressive cause? If a troop has the individual autonomy required to change the path of their life based on an exposure to the ideas of a leftist message, they also have the autonomy to consciously and intentionally take part in the slaughter of innocents. it's ridiculous that you can deny a factor exists only to use it as the entire basis of your idea of a solution. individual do not have autonomy, but the spread of our propaganda will grant it to them? is it possible to take a stance more idealist than that?

where i stand is that i buy the antihumanist view of social relations. structures that determine violence and inequality in society are engaged in the roughly autonomous reproduction of themselves and produce the subjectivity of individuals in society. the mechanisms of class division instill in social groups a subjectivity based on class interests. the bourgeois act in the interest of the bourgeois, the proletariat act in the interest of the proletariat. but these structures do not reproduce themselves simply through the efficacy of their ideas, they reproduce themselves through affecting material reality by the forceful mobilization of social forces that, through a process of subjectification, reinforce the social order that gave birth to them. having taken this into account, the only clear path i see to actually weaken the reproduction of the structures of violence and inequality is to eradicate the social forces through which the reproduction of these forces is made possible. i don't think ending the lives of every last u.s. troop is going to put a final end to the reproduction of imperialism anymore than i think executing every last rapist is going to end rape, but it sure isn't going to hurt. how can you expect to target the structures of imperialism without taking a violent opposition to the forces that allow these structures to enforce themselves on a material plane? troop hate is effective agitprop because it identifies who the enemy is, not play dishonest rhetorical games to endear ourselves to people who do not have our interests at heart in the first place

the people in the u.s. military are not the proletariat. they do not possess any synchronicity with the interests of the proletariat. why does the labour aristocracy suddenly embody an opportunity for progressive social mobilization? why should we suddenly throw any critique of the average u.s. citizen as complicit in the exploitation of the global proletariat to the wind? these people slaughter innocent children because it is in their class interest to do so. there is an evident psychopathy at work, the forces of imperialist agression are schizophrenic, we live in a society where the murder of pakistani children is understood as the vehicle of the benevolent global expansion of peace and freedom across the globe, an empire in decline near declaring itself the most powerful military force the world has ever seen, aren't you lucky it has your interests at heart ... just because this sociopathy is produced so widely and so inhumanly by the structures of social inequality doesn't mean it doesn't exist

what ken seems to want is the labour aristocracy of the imperialist nations, enthralled by the mystique of a radical leftism degenerated to the practice of myth, the abstract significations of rank & file, the cartoonish propaganda that "our enemy is your enemy too!" (which far from simply being profoundly untrue also reeks of the anticapitalist propaganda of the nazis, one which places responsibility solely on the small group of financial elite, the big bad jewish parasites who run our world, making an innocent victim out of the labour aristocracy we should be condemning)... this isn't marxism, this isn't leftism, this is the corporatist allegiance of the military and labour aristocracy

deadken posted:

he blames those under the influence of false consciousness for having false consciousness because his analysis is not built on any solid theoretical base.

as if fascism masquerading as leftism is any more stable?

Crow posted:

there's no such thing as false consciousness: everything is damned in the scope of infinity.

deadken posted:

there are people here who defend red terror, and i'm kinda one of them, but in red terror a lot of people die, some of whom probably didnt deserve to. theres no difference in the process of deciding how many kulak vs how many afghan deaths are acceptable. it depends on the overall telos. i happen to think that communism is good and defending are american homeland is dumb but there's nothing to differentiate the two processes of moral calculus that makes the red guards good dudes and us soldiers sociopaths

see here's a huge problem, you have a sort of negativist, subtractive program of ethics that doesn't make really make sense to me in building a communist (liberated) subjectivity. which if your aims are different, is well and good, but i'm not sure what you plan to do with these ethical coordinates other than enact some sort of repetitive Pure Mayhem.

like what's the Red Terror? comparing the contradiction of relations (ie. dialectical relation) of the Red Terror to the Afghanistan invasion is like comparing a conquest of inner space (as in, a total discipline of the human) versus conquest of externalities (an obsessive and doomed manipulation of bodies beyond personal control). in your relation to this, which is really a nonrelation, you betray the liberatory ethical dimension: the Red Terror is only necessary as a defensive measure of justice, while the war in Afghanistan etc is quite clearly (as demonstrated in a number of texts posted in LF through the years) a neurotic, horrific misadventure. the only 'necessity' of the latter are as a markers for a truly dark eschatology: there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

and so this becomes fraught with negativity: the only facts of the two instances worth mentioning to you is a clinical bodycount. and a bodycount without an intervention of a universal ethical subjectivity is exactly the problem in modernity