#12001
[account deactivated]
#12002
[account deactivated]
#12003
[account deactivated]
#12004
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http://www.nknews.org/2014/02/how-i-unintentionally-ended-up-spending-15-years-of-my-life-in-north-korea/

thsi owns. all the comments shriek about how her dad was a crazy murderous tyrant in equatorial guinea but i bet it's like 80% fabricated by anticommunists

#12005
objekt-a.tumblr.com
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#12006
objekt-a.tumblr.com
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https://www.linkedin.com/pub/chad-o%E2%80%99carroll/7b/9ab/94b
#12007
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http://kpolicy.org/reframing-north-korean-human-rights-a-thematic-issue-of-critical-asian-studies/

A cool collection of articles on "human rights" as propaganda and U.S. efforts towards regime change in NK. The one about the National Endowment for Democracy might interest people here. Just found this and read them.
#12008
chickeon
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this is extremely good cheers hueman
#12009
Mike Nelson here.
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i read a short book of lectures by lacan called "my teaching". he's funny.

#12010
hi
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https://twitter.com/DeptofDefense/status/547883425974472705
https://twitter.com/NATO/status/547892564020322304
#12011
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Everyone on my fb is posting about the christmas truce. dunno who wrote this script this year but it's a pretty good piece of propaganda. and we're supposed to believe marxism is reductionist because it reduces human individuality and thought to class interests
#12012
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It hit the frontpage of reddit. I don't know of you guys know this already but I have an account and post there sometimes too.
#12013
political car tune
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there are redditors in the ranks. perhaps a purge is needed
#12014
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does anybody have the war nerds dispaches from nsfwcorp fuck paul carr
#12015
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djbk posted:

fuck paul carr


#12016
hi
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babyhueypnewton posted:

dunno who wrote this script this year but it's a pretty good piece of propaganda.

well, it is the 100th anniversary.

#12017
UNUSUALY COOL
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the taliban should declare a soccer match with the Troops and blow up the stadium
#12018
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djbk posted:

does anybody have the war nerds dispaches from nsfwcorp fuck paul carr


yes.

#12019
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whats going on with paul carr

also lmao i was looking at the war nerds twitter and he retweets wet butt
#12020
hi
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stegosaurus posted:

also lmao i was looking at the war nerds twitter and he retweets wet butt

there's a lot of cross over between ex-FYADs and american journalists and writers these days.

#12021
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
today i read a book where hobsbawm interviews a leader of the italian communist party in 1977. this was basically the peak of their post-war power i guess. it was also the period where they and a lot of other parties took clear positions on the 'democratic road to socialism' or whatever. you get a sense from the book how reformist they clearly are. (since then they fully revised themselves into a social-democratic alliance party)
#12022
[account deactivated]
#12023
Post rating: ~

getfiscal posted:

today i read a book where hobsbawm interviews a leader of the italian communist party in 1977. this was basically the peak of their post-war power i guess. it was also the period where they and a lot of other parties took clear positions on the 'democratic road to socialism' or whatever. you get a sense from the book how reformist they clearly are. (since then they fully revised themselves into a social-democratic alliance party)



Do you think this is came from an inherent flaw in Gramsci's thought, a misinterpretation by revisionists, or the result of the material conditions of labor aristocracy in the Italian Union movement regardless of ideology? It bothers me that revolutionary theorists like Gramsci and Althusser have left nothing but revisionists in their wake.

#12024
Post rating: +
Got some books for Christmas:

Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor
A Secular Age by Charles Taylor
Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson

Charles Taylor is pretty cool. Also got a gift card and ordered:

The Interpretation of Culture by Clifford Geertz
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life by Durkheim
#12025
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DM I've never heard of Charles Taylor so I briefly looked him up. What is he doing that isn't already done by Carl Schmitt or Georgio Agamben?
#12026
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Evidently Los Angeles Jewish faux-British band Sparks wanted to make this manga into a movie with Tim Burton

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mai,_the_Psychic_Girl
#12027
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +

babyhueypnewton posted:

Do you think this is came from an inherent flaw in Gramsci's thought, a misinterpretation by revisionists, or the result of the material conditions of labor aristocracy in the Italian Union movement regardless of ideology? It bothers me that revolutionary theorists like Gramsci and Althusser have left nothing but revisionists in their wake.

i'm not sure. i don't think gramsci himself is responsible really. i think a lot of it comes from the experience of fascism in france, italy and spain. in france and italy there was a conscious decision to build "one state" rather than try to overthrow the new bourgeois republics. this was because they thought there was little appetite to move from world war to civil war, and because the aims of reconstruction were shared by the broad majority. there was also an aim to revolutionize the culture, insofar as they wanted their countries to reject the fascist heritage. once they accepted the "one state" paradigm (which they did in the 1940s even really) then it became a matter of coalition-building and such. part of this was the reality of bloc politics, as in the soviet union wanted to avoid open war in europe. there was also the fact that western europe, with some ups and downs, was prosperous over much of this period, and the parties adapted to treating labour as an interest group. it all seems completely "reasonable" except for the fact that it obviously forgets class struggle and therefore takes on a bourgeois outlook.

#12028
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Let's not forget that 70s italian fascists jocked gramsci's old newspaper name then did a bunch of bombings pretending they were communists. Im pretty sure that did a lot to dull the flames of the peoples revolution
#12029
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im reading a raya dunayevskaya book about rosa luxembourg and my eyes are glazing the f over almost immediately.
#12030
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
a related point though is that a lot of stuff about democratic transition was common currency in the communist movement. italy went the furthest with this but it was vey popular. the soviets themselves had a theory that because there was a socialist camp it was now possible for regimes of all sorts to lean on the soviets and pursue non-capitalist development. and from the mid-1930s onwards it was the line of communist parties to support coalitions with the liberal bourgeoisie against the far-right. this all influenced things like the tripartite alliance in south africa and the allende government. plus in theory most people's democracies believed liberal parties had a role in national fronts, which meant that countries like East Germany had bloc parties that largely corresponded to prewar parties, even the nationalist right. i mean even china still allocates almost a third of parliamentary seats to the guomindang.

i think an important point is that none of this is wrong from some cosmic perspective or something, like, if the PCI (or SACP) really did produce great revolutionary results with their line then that's great. the fact is that they stalled and reversed. and it appears the countries that went the furthest with socialism were the ones that systematically tried to suppress the bourgeoisie, rather than accommodate it.
#12031
UNUSUALY COOL
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yeah i was about to say that there was really zero support for immediate revolutionary action in different european states by the communist parties, including from the kremlin, it's kind of ahistorical to propose a counterfactual where WW2 was followed by a europe wide revolution unless you suggest that everyone in europe was listening to certain asian thinkers back then, which they weren't
#12032
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babyhueypnewton posted:

DM I've never heard of Charles Taylor so I briefly looked him up. What is he doing that isn't already done by Carl Schmitt or Georgio Agamben?



I haven't read Schmitt or Agamben firsthand yet and I'm only just now getting into Taylor so I can't give you a really comprehensive answer yet. What similarities did you have in mind?

#12033
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: ~
there were actually many spontaneous revolutionary actions across europe. communists often dominated antifascist councils that operated in the collapse of the fascist regimes. there were also many strikes against capitalists. the communist party leadership in places like france had to intervene continuously to turn power over to the new bourgeois state or shut down strike action. they also assumed that there would be power-sharing antifascist governments all across europe. the result was that socialists came to power basically anywhere the US/UK didn't have troops (usually through electoral coalitions that were then dissolved into people's democracies).
#12034
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getfiscal posted:

like, if the PCI (or SACP) really did produce great revolutionary results with their line then that's great. the fact is that they stalled and reversed. and it appears the countries that went the furthest with socialism were the ones that systematically tried to suppress the bourgeoisie, rather than accommodate it.



history exonerates comrade bordiga

#12035
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +

babyhueypnewton posted:

DM I've never heard of Charles Taylor so I briefly looked him up. What is he doing that isn't already done by Carl Schmitt or Georgio Agamben?



friends with ramsey clark and trained by gaddafi

#12036
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~

getfiscal posted:

the result was that socialists came to power basically anywhere the US/UK didn't have troops (usually through electoral coalitions that were then dissolved into people's democracies).



yup

#12037
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~
this is exactly why the party structure of that era demands a critical eye, because as i said the parties in those occupied states were not the avenues of militant action and the kremlin wasn't driving it either. i mean that's 101 but i also assume good faith efforts on most of the party leadership to attempt to rebuild from the physical leveling of many large cities. the impetus in a lot of the fringe situations like greece or even italy seems to have been on the part of the cia as much as the proletariat, with conflict being sparked purposely by western agents who never left.
#12038
UNUSUALY COOL
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i guess i should follow that up by saying that i see much of the politics of the soviet union in europe from the 1940s to the 1950s to not be about conquest or a physical buffer or any other sort of euphemism, but instead bent toward the single goal of acquiring and effectively deploying a nuclear deterrent and blunting the west's deployment of the same, and i consider that goal to be 100% the correct thing for them to have pursued. i don't think they were idiots or anything.
#12039
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: ~
today i read c.b. macpherson's "real world of democracy" and julia kristeva's short lectures on psychoanalysis and faith.

the best part of kristeva's lectures were her discussion of an analytic case and how analysis works. the part about religion was only interesting insofar as she sketched out how christianity anticipates many of the positions of analysis.

macpherson's lectures on democracy (from 1965) were useful insofar as he shows that socialist democracies and newly independent countries were both democratic in a broad sense, and would probably become moreso over time. he overestimated the short term gains of socialism though, and was an idealist so he talked about how the west should give massive aid to the poor of the world. macpherson always stubbornly said he never studied marx in detail, but he was a keen observer and came to many of the same conclusions.
#12040
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +

blinkandwheeze posted:

getfiscal posted:

like, if the PCI (or SACP) really did produce great revolutionary results with their line then that's great. the fact is that they stalled and reversed. and it appears the countries that went the furthest with socialism were the ones that systematically tried to suppress the bourgeoisie, rather than accommodate it.

history exonerates comrade bordiga

i've never actually read bordiga. i always thought it was weird he died in 1970 though. that's like how kautsky died in 1938. whenever i read about kautsky's theories i always assume lenin literally killed him in 1919 or something.