cleanhands was probated until (Feb. 13, 2013 06:39:36) for this post!
Scrree posted:marimite posted:
don't you think it's best to say fuck it? Doesn't the 1st world working class have to be re-proletarianized to do any good? I don't really see any way out so I think I'm probably going to move to the third world, but in a way I feel like I'm avoiding the most difficult question of all if I did that.
weeelllll as a person in a similar place (first world petite-bourgeoisie japanese comicbook fan shiteater) who has struggled with the question of 'what is to be done?' i can see your position, but I think the idea of moving to the third world is a bit silly. there is A LOT of good work to be done in these United States; whole countries worth of land lay dissolving under layers of corn and poison, children have their imaginations replaced with shallow consumerism and are stuffed full of drugs when they protest, the world gets harder to even survive in and every answer society gives is actually just a scheme to squeeze a bit more money from the underclass, the midwest bakes, the gulf is toxic, hurricanes batter and cripple thousands each year - you know, all that shit.
the third world is alluring to us because they actually have culture that they can stage resistance from; we see their traditions that are more than a cloaked call of buy buy buy buy and think yes! let me be a part of that. But adopting/cooping another's culture is an easy way out, and even if you are sincere and would die for them, how can you be trusted if you take the easy way with your beliefs? and do they even need you? what can you bring to a group that has lived in the land and dealt with the struggle for generations except for the international prestige that the paleness of your skin brings; at worst your just another person to feed in a world where food and water are becoming ever more scarce.
what needs to be done is, i think, creation. creation of a new culture (the only respectable parts of the white american left generally come from religious or environmental inspiration because litterally every other part of the culture is completely toxic) not in the sense of We Must Build a New Man but that we must learn how to even be human again. the material basis for bourgeoisie mentally must be destroyed and there must be a new material basis to replace it because humans cannot live off of air. i don't mean to disregard the revolutionary potential of cities but the pathetic mewl of the occupy movement has shown that white america is still going fucking nowhere and the real legit urban cultures (minorities okay) self-create new strategies anyway so our dumbasses aren't really needed there.
go to the basics, destroy what material elements of bourgeois life (cars, teevee, etc.) that exist in your life and start working on sustainable food creation, try to create a community of people willing to not be capitalist fuckshits and work on securing a place to harbor those most abused by society. nihilism is ultimately correct in that modern life is meaningless because modernity is designed to be meaningless. kids matter more than sex, food more than spices, and land more than dreams - the crushing despair that meaningless life brings cannot be overcome by acceptance or rejection; only by the creation of meaning.
Shennong and BlinkAndWheeze had a good conversation a while back over whether or not the flight to the countryside is abandoning the masses to a selfish survivalism. I think it kind of is, but if I have to choose between being a dumbass on a street consuming the energy of 1 person screaming at a building or being a dumbass on a field harvesting the energy of 30 people tending crops i'm fucking useless either way but my family + others don't die of starvation in the latter so i choose that (trick question you shouldn't have fields FOOD FORESTRY MOTHERFUCKER).
oh and if your not white than lol this is so self-conscious but you have an anime avatar so you can't blame me for assuming you know
love god and family (if you have neither create them) peace
i agree completely with you mr scrree and if i had more surplus effort than that which i use on my current projects (getyetanotherjob and trynottobesuicidallydepressed) i would write a big effort post about basically exactly what you described, that collection of thoughts and the vain hope that it may result in something better for me/family/community is the only thing i have that is close to a political stance or philosophy. it is a good positive thing.
cleanhands posted:i have No Freaking Idea what d&g wrote about i just know the memes
oh my god i didn't think the probate button would actually do something lol why do i have this power. rip cleanhands. i'm sorry. maybe we should both try reading cyclonopedia
drwhat was probated until (Feb. 13, 2013 06:42:22) for this post!
drwhat posted:cleanhands posted:i have No Freaking Idea what d&g wrote about i just know the memes
oh my god i didn't think the probate button would actually do something lol why do i have this power. rip cleanhands. i'm sorry. maybe we should both try reading cyclonopedia
damn, you're right it does work
elemennop was probated until (Feb. 13, 2013 06:43:23) for this post!
drwhat posted:cleanhands posted:i have No Freaking Idea what d&g wrote about i just know the memes
oh my god i didn't think the probate button would actually do something lol why do i have this power. rip cleanhands. i'm sorry. maybe we should both try reading cyclonopedia
i dont forgive you BUT im willing to read cyclonopedia when i finish the history of jerusalem (not the book, but literally)
cleanhands was probated until (Feb. 13, 2013 21:02:50) for this post!
wasted was probated until (Feb. 13, 2013 21:09:19) for this post!
d4ky posted:marimite posted:But how does a third-worldist practice politics in the first world?
i've been wondering about this myself. mtw theory is incisive, but very paralyzing for us people here. we sit around with the "correct" theory posting youtube videos, while certain groups who live in the countries we exploit actually, y'know, do things to protect and fight for their families and communities. if we attempt to assist them at this point in time, we interfere with their right to self-determination, and if we attempt to build solidarity with our own communities now, people whine about how pointless it all is because it will only lead to fascism to protect the stolen material riches we have. what way is there for us to go, besides to say fuck it (as marimite said), or to destroy ourselves both figuratively and literally?
the constant hand wringing over "what is to be done?" is something i probably find even more distasteful than every other ideological trappings first world leftists carry
i'm not sure where this handwringing comes from, i'm going to guess that it's an over-reliance on the rhetorical games of the monkeysmashesheaven milieu, who for all their occasional moments of theoretical clarity are unfortnately shackled by self-important ad-hoc internet idiocy and more importantly an absolute dearth of imagination, something i would hate to see expand beyond their little cult and into all your beautiful brains
it's something that's self evidently ridiculous to me, like just to begin look at what marimite said
marimite posted:I live in the US, which is of course a more ambiguous case so let's set that aside, and take the best examples of the general trend in first world politics: Northern Europe and Japan. Materially speaking, these places are perpetually on the brink of fascism.
he answers his own question immediately after asking it! why would anyone speculate incredulously over what they could do to aid the proletariat when they sit next to the beating heart of fascism? a nation that is perpetually on the precipice is a nation that you should fight tooth and nail from ever falling into those depths!
the mtw cultists cast aside rigorous analysis in favor of empty polemics. there is a proletariat in the first world. the workers without documents exist. the monstrosities of prison systems and extra-judicial detention that persecutes citizens for their beliefs exist. the systematic violence against and indentured servitude of women exist. the oppressed internal semicolonies of first nation peoples present in the core nations not only exist but are subject to genocide. how anyone can turn away and emptily pose questions about "re-proletarianization" is abhorrent to me
the maoist internationalist movement reformed into a prisoner advocacy group. that's a pretty good model. there are a lot of others. this desire i see a lot for some pseudo-hegelian vanguard that we need to consume all the petty rivalries of "identity politics" in the immortal name of marx that echoes across eternity is so absolutely perverse to me. your pet political theory has no material presence in your backyard, so the fuck what. i have no doubt in my mind that emancipation will never come from the self-absorbed children who wear ideologies like fashionable jackets. the revolutionary must live with people as the fish swims in the sea
arundhati roy said that there is really no such thing as the voiceless, only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard. that's what i see in this hand wringing, whether this is out of a preference to playing self-absorbed ideological games or a fear of the people we should be swimming in, for all their pretenses of radicalism the supposed leftists of the developed world prefer not to hear the exploited in their own backyards
scrree is i believe absolutely correct in his skepticism towards a relocation to the third world, i think it should be obvious how absurd this idea is, and while i suppose i understand the sentiment, what he points to isn't exactly much better... i'm not exactly sure how he made that leap from third worldism to something closer to ideas closer to the frankfurt school or the situationists, vacuous systems of thought that carry a poisonous legacy, but i'm afraid i don't see the point of all of it... i don't buy the concept of the 'new man' anymore, in any sense beyond a consequence of economic practice. i think when you start introducing those concepts and start thinking in terms of (futile) escape from the bourgeois superstructure you start mystifying everything and retreating to idealism... i mean, what is destroying your tv and car going to do? reject the outward signifiers of the petit-bourgeois, fine, i guess, but it's a meaningless gesture if it's divorced from genuine political intervention. the revolutionary must live with people as the fish swims in the sea
the pathetic dreams of the proletariat of the developing world swarming the imperial metropole to fill the mouths of our bankers with lead preached by the msh automatons is a fantasy, the anti-imperialist struggle and eventual transition to an equitable world-system is a dynamic process that has no hopes of succeeding without the cooperation of the people of the global metropole in combatting internally the imperialist militarization of their nations and contributing to networks of a revolutionary internationalism. the bamako appeal is as sound a manifesto as we could hope for
the desperation for a simple collection of tactics that can be applied universally to the first world is worthless. you can't dismiss the enormous variety of shifting tensions, internal contradictions and absolute contingencies of the developed world and retain any integrity as a rigorous materialist. you all know your homes better than i ever could. i am obviously not from the third world but i live in a very different place to most of you. yes, it's a path that requires creativity and relentless research, but i would prefer that struggle infinitely more than those who have the single choice of taking up arms to defend themselves or face slaughter by the imperialist machine
reality is absolutely contingent, it is only through hindsight that we can see the paths that were available to us. all you can do is rebel against the reactionaries at every turn, anything less is a failure of every dimension
blinkandwheeze was probated until (Feb. 14, 2013 07:59:48) for this post!
No trolling on my forums
Edited by babyhueypnewton ()
Edited by marimite ()
i havn't read this but you should talk about it fuckers
marimite posted:im a doo doo head
also a big ol coward man come on
marimite posted:Several things:
First of all, if you can't see yourself or commit yourself to living in the third world, making yourself useful in the third world, how can you possibly have the virtue to purify yourself and work among oppressed nations in the first world? The attitude that this is "absurd on its face" is simply weakness. The references to permaculture are particularly symptomatic, as it's pretty easy to see that a significant amount of initial capital is required to pursue this lifestyle (this is clearly all it comes down to) and the techniques involved rarely leave the first world. So pretty much, it's just eco-fascism.
Second, the moral exhortations of "just do something" are self-serving. Not only is most of the first world, excluding America, on the brink of fascism, the left is either a) actively complicit or b) has no idea what to do about it. All we know is that women and immigrants will be the ones to overthrow the metropolis, but concrete ideas as to how we can make this happen are nowhere to be seen, apart from the limited framework supplied by Maoism. Prison and immigrant activism are cool, but the organizations that do this have no long term strategy. We simply don't have the theory yet, and as zizek is fond of saying, now is the time think. You say I want tactics without strategy, but isn't there also lack of strategy on your part?
Third, if the left is incapable of opposing fascism today, what force is keeping it in check (besides oppressed nations)? Why is America the exception here? Of course, the answer to this is neo-liberalism. Because we have refused to think, they have become more radical than we are. While socialists were creating a new man in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, neo-liberals were creating a new man in America and Germany, homo economicus. Too many Marxists see neo-liberalism as simply the globalization of capital, when it is in fact a new ontological epoch and the culmination of liberal governing technology that is swiftly transforming nations into populations that are the subject of biopolitical intervention. Soon enough there won't even be oppressed nations, just homo sacer, signalling the coming zombie apocalypse.
No joking around!!!! U Think i didnt see before the edit??? U Fuckin nonce???
LETS HAVE A GO
First of all EAT IT
Second of all: there's nothing "Pure" about the third world!! U Fuck! Life's miserable! It sux! I mean not all of it, it's not necessarily a hellscape, but the differences that necessitate a more militant-insurrectionary struggle are definitely horrifying. Das Thing is no purer than the Other thing, the only consideration in revolutionary theory is whether it is correct:
I mean have you lived in the third world? I haven't! But I've lived in the second, and it's no fockin picnic mate. it's desperate, people feel there is no future, you can plainly see they're right. in comparison, it's amazing to live as if your future is eternal to the present, as if nothing will ever change until the entire world ends.
so you do what people here there and everywhere do: you do your part. ya CLOWN! what do you think, a revolution is a virtual reality dinner party with Maoist fireworks???????? WHAT??! Who brings fireworks toa dinner party?! The revolution isnt even one, its fucking filthy, it's long, its boring, its endless, its dirty, its scary as hell, its horrific, someone has to do the dishes, glasses break, peoples families break, people starve and are slaughtered in the streets. can you handle this in your own town much less in a jungle?
so instead of abandoning people you do understand to retreat into some fantasy caccoon so you can emerge as a Che butterfly to descend into a jungle you've never seen, how about you do the dirty work and actually act on your beliefs in a matter relevant to people in real, concrete life. if you don't want to, that's fine, but all you'll become is another withdrawn psycho on a warpath. no thanks, we're all stocked up here!!
literally what you believe
speaking of zizek, he may have said it is time to think, but he also said the only thing that may be possible is to seize what power we may and do what we can. this is what happens in life, you do what you can. the bolsheviks tried for a long time to be the German SPD. through long, hard work dedicated to THEIR situation, they became something more. this is strategy, a comprehensive, focused, disciplined approach to the problem at hand. not to the phantoms in the jungles. its not a masterplan: it is utterly contingent. the problem with many trotskyist parties is not that they don't follow the Bolshevik plan to revolution, is that they dont understand there isnt a Bolshevik plan to revolution.
sorry, all this stuff just reeks of cowardice to me. that may just be a projection of my own fears, but whatever, if you're not willing to throw your body and your lifeswork on the jaws of the warmachine, what is the point of fantasizing going to the third world and doing the same in a much more clownish manner? if you want to feel violent slum-warrior glory rent Dredd, now on DVD. otherwise, you didn't earn it, you've got the impulse of a tourist.
its now on dvd
and your filthy too.
Edited by Crow ()
marimite posted:Ok, since you attack the part of my analysis that's not bullshit, I'll defend myself. For one thing, I'm not talking about becoming Che or becoming a peasant or some other bullshit. I want to teach, and not philosophy or ideology or w/e, just basic education, probably English (or Japanese but the people who would need that are few and far between). I would be employed at a bourgeois institution and probably live a life in many ways very similar to what I have here, just not as nearly as nice. There is nothing grand to what I'm talking about, simply taking my education from a place in which it's totally not needed, to a place where it is. If some revolutionary shit happens of course I'd do all I can to help, but considering who I am, it probably wouldn't be very much. Third world peoples, by virtue of who they are, will always be far more ideologically advanced than myself. All I'm doing is taking some of the small things I know, despite being a first world shit eater, and teaching it to others who can do far greater things with it. Brain drain is one of the worst problems for development in the third world and as long there's no proletarian dictatorship to restrict travel skilled labor will be desperately needed. If I really got involved in crazy political shit, it would be because I came back to the first world with a greater appreciation for the suffering in the world and an actual connection to it.
what would you teach the third world? how does any of this relate to Dredd 3d?
the differences that necessitate a more militant-insurrectionary struggle
There are no variations of how much militant-insurrectionary struggle is needed, as it is needed everywhere in unlimited amounts.
If I really got involved in crazy political shit, it would be because I came back to the first world with a greater appreciation for the suffering in the world and an actual connection to it.
Why not work for Teach for America where you can bask in the radiance of proletarian virtue, work for a bourgeois institution, and pretend you're making a difference by imparting your knowledge of dialectical materialism?
wasted posted:If I really got involved in crazy political shit, it would be because I came back to the first world with a greater appreciation for the suffering in the world and an actual connection to it.
Why not work for Teach for America where you can bask in the radiance of proletarian virtue, work for a bourgeois institution, and pretend you're making a difference by imparting your knowledge of dialectical materialism?
Probably not competitive enough for that lol. I have thought about working in South Central LA though. Like I said, America is an ambiguous case.
marimite posted:I have thought about working in South Central LA though.
woah, 26 sure signs you grew up in the 90's!
marimite posted:im a doo doo head
yeah, you are. you're also not interested in marxism, the proletariat, any form of freedom or justice. you're just interested in these radical ideologies to borrow words from without understanding what they mean to contribute to your self-important cloud of psychosis. you're less than dirt. you're a fascist, you're the definition of fascism, you rid yourself of any conception of material political intervention in favor of the mystique of virtue and purity, picking up concepts you adopted from barely attentive sessions halfheartedly watching an agamben lecture on the egs website while you scroll 420chan, or wherever you come from, as it suits you, wielding them like cloaking machines rather than actually understanding the meaning they carry, in a desperate attempt to hide the fact that you aren't actually saying anything at all. you invoke zizek's invitation to study, but you don't actually have any desire to think. it's so easy to proclaim that we just don't have the theory yet, an argument surmised by skimming through zizek youtubes, when you haven't really spent a day in your life actually thinking.
'we just don't have the theory yet'? fuck you. i don't buy that. maybe the definitive study of imperialist rent in the software industry is yet to come out. so what. we have had the theory we've needed since 1968, since 1966, since 1954, since 1946, since 1917, since 1871, since 1791, since 1789. there is one theoretical proposition you need on which to found revolutionary practice: it is right to rebel against the reactionaries. the revolutionary agents of our history have carried this principle for as long as inequality has existed.
knowledge arises from practice. theory divorced from material interrogation is a dead science of no use to anyone. this is the entire foundation of marxism. it's vile that anyone can so eagerly throw mao to the wind in favor of petit-bourgeois mindlessness. OPPOSE BOOK WORSHIP
marimite posted:Probably not competitive enough for that lol. I have thought about working in South Central LA though. Like I said, America is an ambiguous case.
what movie does your entire body of knowledge of class politics in the developed world come from? is it boyz n the hood or is it menace ii society? did you catch vh1 behind the music: ice cube while you were watching reruns on daytime tv once? you aren't interested in liberation, you're a poverty tourist of the worst kind
marimite posted:Why are people who claim to be internationalists so scared of idk, making actual international connections? The only group in the first world worth helping that doesn't involve this in some sense are black people in America. Otherwise you just end up helping them "integrate", i.e. attaining bourgeois consciousness.
name names fucker. 3 months ago delegates from afghanistan, austria, brazil, canada,croatia,columbia, france, germany, holland, iran, italy, kurdistan, norway, palestine, peru, the philippines, galicia, spain, sri lanka, sweden, switzerland, turkey, the u.k. and more met in hamburg, germany for the international conference in support of the people's war in india. name names. or alternatively go back to telling us all how black people only live in north america
marimite posted:If I really got involved in crazy political shit, it would be because I came back to the first world with a greater appreciation for the suffering in the world and an actual connection to it.
i think it's a pretty safe bet that this is never going to happen
i think there's a lot less anonymity here, online generally and in the rhizzone specifically, than we like to pretend. because people often unintentionally cast themselves in a protagonist position within their own ideas - even when they're being facetious. i also take it as a positive sign that the bourgeois youth's academic wriggling is so unconvincing. Marimba, persyn, you just gotta relax and remember there are poor and exploited people living all around you. "Hate the MESS? Grab a BROOM!" Ykwim?
here, for valentine's day, pierre guyotat's "tomb for 500,000 soldiers." 378 pages of vaguely politically allegorical sexual abuse from a deserter from the algerian occupation
http://depositfiles.com/files/k6ii8egck
"
Tomb For 500,000 Soldiersâ Pierre Guyotat's unique elision of brutal warfare and sexual ecstasy, is regularly acclaimed as the greatest French novel of modern times. Completed when its author was only twenty-five and never before published in English the only copy of a previous translation was destroyed by fire it now appears in a brilliant new version which retains all of the original's detonating sensory power. Guyotat hallucinated the subject matter of the novel as a young soldier during the Algerian War, gazing out from a watchtower over the desert at night. Compacting together elements from mythology, Lautréamont's "Maldoror" and Luis Buñuel's film "Los Olvidados", he assembled a vision of contemporary life as a relentless display of slavery, prostitution and degradation, in which only catastrophic eruptions of atrocity and the delirious intervention of depraved sex acts can possess meaning for the book's lacerated human figures. Ever more relevant as the terror-torn 21st century unfurls, Tomb For 500,000 Soldiers is a headlong ride of exhilaration and horror which precipitates the reader into extreme, uncharted psycho-sexual terrain, a zone Guyotat himself has alluded to as "the anus of the world".