The social machine's limit is not attrition, but rather its misfirings; it can operate only by fits and starts, by grinding and breaking down, in spasms of minor explosions. The dysfunctions are an essential element of its very ability to function, which is not the least important aspect of the system of cruelty. The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned belief in the possibility of capitalism's natural death by attrition. No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.

slotting this into the context of the current financial crises, and hmmm....

getfiscal posted:
i'm sort of a beginner on such things so i probably won't describe it well and will step into various errors.

basically marxist humanism focuses on humanity as being realized (the liberation of their species-being) in the process of history and sees alienation as the key to marxism. althusser suggests that this relies on an early marx who has not rejected hegel's dialectic yet. althusser argues that marx's dialectic is qualitatively different from hegel's, that it isn't just an adopted hegelianism. marx had to "break" with hegel in order to understand history in a scientific way. and so mostly after this "break" he doesn't really talk much about alienation (except again in private journals).

hegelian marxists like lukacs had said, for example, that the proletariat was the subject-object of history. that means that human history was essentially groping towards its own liberation in the form of a proletariat that could see itself as liberator of all and therefore see society as it actually is rather than mediated through class relations. but this objectivity was questioned by althusser, who ended up saying something radically different: marxism was the first theory that didn't see itself as objective and representing all of humanity. so it is theoretically anti-humanist.

for example, bourgeois philosophy almost always implies universalism about itself, it always say that it has come to conclusions about what is natural and timeless about itself. so it might come up with things like "humans are rational self-seekers that self-organize in markets naturally" as axioms that can't really be argued against effectively. marxist humanists played a similar game by implying that classless society was the natural state of humanity and that history was essentially restoring a natural balance but with advanced technology. althusser says, on the other hand, that marxism doesn't make claims about timeless features of humanity, and it doesn't appeal to see society as it really is in absence of distorting features, it rather is a partisan theory of theoretical practice that draws on the class position of the proletariat as the first theory in history that admits it is biased and contingent. in other words, marxism is a theory in service to the proletariat, rather than pretending to be a theory of humanity (as in bourgeois philosophy).

hmmm i see.

deadken posted:
HE HE HE HE HE HE im reading, the unnameable, by, samuel beckett, and, when i'm done, i am going to make an awesome post about it

im reading molloy

babyfinland posted:

deadken posted:
HE HE HE HE HE HE im reading, the unnameable, by, samuel beckett, and, when i'm done, i am going to make an awesome post about it

im reading molloy

its awesome, freakin Awesome bro

discipline posted:
well I'm running though bacevich, d. harvey's "a brief history of neoliberalism", and r. martin's "the financialization of every day life" while reading articles by craig murphy, veltmeyer, will robinson, carvalho, etc. I can get you links to some of the stuff if you have access to j stor I guess.

ok, i know several of those, i was just wondering if it was something different because of the way you phrased it. i'll look up the names i don't know and that should be good

discipline posted:
thought I'd drop off this link in case you have access to jstor and wanna read some good papersumm also I'm reading "the global slump" by mcnally and it's really good so far, very harrowing

thanks, i'll check both out. as far as what i have, maybe this:

A ball of hot money rolls around the world. It seeks anonymity and political refuge. It dodges taxes and sidesteps currency controls. It rolls through offshore shell companies and secret bank accounts, phoney charities and fraudulent religious foundations. It is kept rolling by white-collar criminals, gun-runners, drug dealers, insurgent groups, scam artists, tax evaders, gold and gem smugglers, and, not least, secret service agents plotting coups and financing revolutions. R.T. Naylor explains the origins of this pool of hot and homeless money, its origins, its uses and abuses, how the world of high finance, corporate and governmental, became hostage to it, and the price the world is paying and will continue to pay until the hostages are released.

his style is a little odd, but he wrote the first edition in the midst of the financial blitzkrieg (1986) and has updated it twice since then. he deals with quite a few specific episodes from the Bahamas to Mexico to Poland.

Soviet intelligence was apparently partially responsible because they wanted to hold dollars but didn't want the US to find out, so they got got British banks to agree to hold accounts for them. this helped establish the eurodollar market and ultimately pull the dollar outside US political/legal jurisdiction. at the same time, the US was trying to actively encourage capital flight, so you had pressure from multiple directions.

i remember Giovanni Arrighi relating an anecdote about deals on the eurodollar market being conducted with a telex machine. the computers coming in made it purely algorithmic, which i guess sort of established the critical mass where David Harvey picks up.

the best reasons to read it would probably be a lot of detail on how the political jurisdictions work and details on the complicity of local oligarchies