http://lets-get-fiscal.tumblr.com/post/112363639495/12-year-olds-in-1955-i-need-some-cash-ill-get-a
Most importantly, the Parisian government decided to come to an understanding with the results of the peasants insurrections in the countryside, despite the natural reluctance of the political class to sympathize with it. While dodging the more radical plans for land reform, the Directory at the same time opted not to push for a British style partage-division of the commmons-that one-sidely favored the large landowners through enclosure of the land by the few who already owned large estates. Instead, local communities were allowed to proceed with far more egalitarian redistributions, consolidating the gains that would lead to the so called golden age of the French peasantry which was arguably the social basis for the broader democratization of national culture during the 19th century. Key in the unfolding of the ideological debates around this question were unfortunately obscure figures like François de Neufchâteau and Antoine-Francois Delpierre, men more akin to the Italian Enlightenment and the English agrarian radicalism of Paine and Spence than to Rousseau (or Plutarch, for that matter).
The main 'point' can perhaps be best summed up by these lines from the conclusion:
Vivid images of the French Revolution remain compelling. The storming of the Bastille, the trial of the king, the volunteer armies of 1792, even the Terror-all are dramatic and serious, in some cases wonderful, images of the capacity of humans to make their history, for good or ill. Faced with this color and drama, with difficulty we turn our attention to the slow processes of civilization, of the creation of social bonds, of the possibility of symbolic communication, of work and learning...
The transformation of the way farmers and peasants talked about their land was of more significance than any constitution.
Kind of still mulling over how to fit this within my own developing thoughts of late about the historiography of the French Revolution, so I will leave it at that.
Edited by RedMaistre ()
Normie Finkelstein posted:On my first day at the Guardian office, the staff assembled for a meeting on armed struggle and overthrowing the state. Oh my god, I inwardly trembled, armed struggle. This wasn’t college games anymore, it was the real thing! Suddenly I was overcome with this sinking feeling that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a revolutionary after all. In fact, the closest we ever came to armed combat was when an ultra-Maoist sect unimpressed by the Guardian’s revolutionary credentials sought a showdown. Leaving work one evening I noticed a grim-faced mob all wearing the trademark lumberjack boots, blue jeans and work shirts of the Revolutionary Union approach our building. I quickly rang up Fred at the front desk, who, I was later told, braced for the worst with wrench and crowbar in hand. (At the time he was eighty years old.) The RU’s plot was foiled, however, when they crowded into the elevator and it sank to the basement. It seems that they hadn’t read the bourgeois warning about maximum elevator capacity.
djbk posted:Can you guys search your library site for guyotat? English translations are overpriced, thanks for looking, pdf or epub are acceptable cheers
http://www.mediafire.com/view/?vdu91e8vl5rcdjr
http://www.mediafire.com/view/n8tmjl1eidi5db5/pierre-guyotat-eden-eden-eden.pdf
animedad posted:i lolled:
Normie Finkelstein posted:On my first day at the Guardian office, the staff assembled for a meeting on armed struggle and overthrowing the state. Oh my god, I inwardly trembled, armed struggle. This wasn’t college games anymore, it was the real thing! Suddenly I was overcome with this sinking feeling that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a revolutionary after all. In fact, the closest we ever came to armed combat was when an ultra-Maoist sect unimpressed by the Guardian’s revolutionary credentials sought a showdown. Leaving work one evening I noticed a grim-faced mob all wearing the trademark lumberjack boots, blue jeans and work shirts of the Revolutionary Union approach our building. I quickly rang up Fred at the front desk, who, I was later told, braced for the worst with wrench and crowbar in hand. (At the time he was eighty years old.) The RU’s plot was foiled, however, when they crowded into the elevator and it sank to the basement. It seems that they hadn’t read the bourgeois warning about maximum elevator capacity.
this is every anti-communist cliche in the book. now I despise Finkelstein for making me read about his mental problems, cowardice, and poor understanding of the world. *sigh* 
It is surely the case that politicians do launch illegal wars on the basis of lies, etc, but what Krog’s quote implies is that (a) he believes that it is possible to have a US or UK which would presumably still be world powers, but would not be imperialistic, would obey principles of international legality, would not make false statements, etc etc. In other words, he is from my perspective a state utopian. For me this is absurd. NATO is an imperial power and the idea that it would act as anything else is bizarre. How could it? We’re dealing with Darth Vader here. It’s unreformable.
Edited by ilmdge ()
Me, since I think NATO is Darth Vader, the problem doesn’t come up. If Darth Vader wants to intervene against some other mini-Darth to save a bunch of revolutionaries, how can one react but to say, “cool! that’s pretty ironic but I’m really glad it happened.” Does that mean I “support” Darth Vader? Of course not. He’s an evil imperialist. Does that mean I’ll be out protesting what he did just because I know his ultimate motives are bound to be insidious? No, of course not either, because first of all, protest implies I think Darth _could_ be acting in a more principled fashion, and second of all - and this is critical - I’m not a political party or government that has to have a “line” on every world issue anyway. But like the author of this piece, I will certainly step in to make my opinion known once Darth actively starts to try to subvert the revolutionaries, as he inevitably will.
hes good and smart "lets let the imperialists overthrow this regime and not speak up because we can just speak up after the bombings but befre they subvert the reolution" lol ok
babyhueypnewton posted:animedad posted:i lolled:
Normie Finkelstein posted:On my first day at the Guardian office, the staff assembled for a meeting on armed struggle and overthrowing the state. Oh my god, I inwardly trembled, armed struggle. This wasn’t college games anymore, it was the real thing! Suddenly I was overcome with this sinking feeling that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a revolutionary after all. In fact, the closest we ever came to armed combat was when an ultra-Maoist sect unimpressed by the Guardian’s revolutionary credentials sought a showdown. Leaving work one evening I noticed a grim-faced mob all wearing the trademark lumberjack boots, blue jeans and work shirts of the Revolutionary Union approach our building. I quickly rang up Fred at the front desk, who, I was later told, braced for the worst with wrench and crowbar in hand. (At the time he was eighty years old.) The RU’s plot was foiled, however, when they crowded into the elevator and it sank to the basement. It seems that they hadn’t read the bourgeois warning about maximum elevator capacity.
this is every anti-communist cliche in the book. now I despise Finkelstein for making me read about his mental problems, cowardice, and poor understanding of the world. *sigh*
It's like, if your formative experiences (the ones that taught you a lot about the world) was Maoism, embrace that shit man! it could be so much worse
animedad posted:It's like, if your formative experiences (the ones that taught you a lot about the world) was Maoism, embrace that shit man! it could be so much worse
good point.
the preconditions for my political awareness were the iraq war, reading about 'democratic socialism', mental illness, and learning from quind and mccaine about things. but it wasn't until i read MIM stuff that i started taking communism seriously. bless those people. i should stop speaking ill against maoists.
getfiscal posted:animedad posted:It's like, if your formative experiences (the ones that taught you a lot about the world) was Maoism, embrace that shit man! it could be so much worse
good point.
the preconditions for my political awareness were the iraq war, reading about 'democratic socialism', mental illness, and learning from quind and mccaine about things. but it wasn't until i read MIM stuff that i started taking communism seriously. bless those people. i should stop speaking ill against maoists.
MIM ftw...
animedad posted:anyway Huey, have you read that Battle for China's Past book by Mobo Gao? i decided I hadn't learned enough about China and picked it up, seems decent enough
I have the pdf on my comp but haven't gotten around to it. let me know how it is
babyhueypnewton posted:Oh also read Pashukanis who was very good, J.J. Lecercle's "A Marxist Philosophy of Language" which was also good, and Habermas which was bad. I hope in 2015 we can finally move away from going "beyond Marx" in everything since it usually results in beyond shit. if anyone's interested in the first two I can talk more about them.
actually we need to go even further beyond Marx until we reach the point on the graph Marx^2
NoFreeWill posted:babyhueypnewton posted:Oh also read Pashukanis who was very good, J.J. Lecercle's "A Marxist Philosophy of Language" which was also good, and Habermas which was bad. I hope in 2015 we can finally move away from going "beyond Marx" in everything since it usually results in beyond shit. if anyone's interested in the first two I can talk more about them.
actually we need to go even further beyond Marx until we reach the point on the graph Marx^2
Would that be this 'communo-capitalism' I'm suddenly hearing about?
(edit: victimized by poe's law once again)
Edited by RedMaistre ()
Et lacrimatus est Karl.
"Mr. B. has dubbed us ASSASSINS. It would be curious to know what epithet this Gentleman!!! would give to those ruffians (mostly in the pay of Government) who were concerned in the meditated, attempted massacres of Lynn and Yarmouth!—In the mean time, I wonder how juries relish these things. But it matters not. They are not to be used any more, I suppose, on such occasions.
Having exhausted his stock of Newgate wit, the metaphorical Proteus now turns his hand to medicine and surgery, and cures low fevers with amputation and the caustic. It must be confessed, however, that his language is sufficiently scientific. “Whilst the distempers of a relaxed fibre prognosticate and prepare all the morbid force of convulsion in the body of the state, the steadiness of the physician is over-powered,” &c. “The doctor of the constitution shrinks from his own operation. He doubts and questions the salutary but critical terrors of the cautery and the knife.” The doctor thus disgraced, anon he becomes a soldier, learns the Brunswick march, and “takes a poor credit even from defeat.” Then again he is an eulogist; a politician; a lawyer; a resurrection-man, dealing in rotten carcases; a “jurist;” a letter-founder, and a printer’s devil; an engrosser of parchment rolls, and an engraver of brazen tablets: and all in one single page.
And now he is a dancing master, whimsically enough employed in “bowing to the enemy abroad,” which, it is sagaciously remarked, is not the way “to subdue the conspirator*” who is breaking the fiddle “at home.” Having displayed these harlequin tricks in his own person, he proceeds to try his dagger of lath upon other objects. In ten little lines “anarchy” is a rattlesnake; a “focus,” endowed with magnetic powers; a “venomous and blighting insect,” that “blasts and shrivels, and burns up the promise of the year,” occasions “salutary and beautiful institutions to yield dust and smut,” and turns “the harvest of the law to stubble.” At last, to crown the whole, tired of agriculture and natural history, and having panted round the whole circle of metaphor, he returns, like a hare to the squat he started from, takes up his old profession of physic again, and gives us an emetic of pustles and blotches, and “eruptive diseases,” which “sink in and re-appear by fits.” The malady, however, which is now under his care, whatever it may be, has, somehow or other, a conversable faculty—a sort of intellectual “fuel,” which holds treasonable correspondence “with the source of regicide,” and cunningly “waits for the favourable moment of a freer communication to exert and to encrease its force.” This is really the most intelligent, artful, intriguing, philosophising disease I ever heard of. What a loss to the readers of “Medical Transactions,” that the doctor has not favoured us with its name, its diagnosis, and the peculiar characteristics of its exterior symptoms.
Wonderful man! most incongruous, and most brilliant phenomenon of genius! how hast thou the power to make even nonsense fascinating, and give charms to sheer malevolence! Thou art, indeed, a compound at once strange and terrible: but, it must be confessed, thou art an entertaining mongrel. Full of beauty, and of ferocity, as the royal beast of Bengal; and driven onward by the same blind impulse of rage and ravin—thy hideous roar is ever prophetic of blood: But “the tyger is frequently lost in the ape;” and indignation is disarmed by splendid absurdity:—while the tricks and antics of a wild, extravagant, frantic imagination have a sort of witching charm, that defies the sober severity of judgment, and occasions even the absurdity itself, to be accepted as a sort of atonement for the depravity we should else abhor!"
-From The Rights of Nature against the Usurpations of Establishments
Such has been the case in many a nation—in Genoa—in Switzerland—in Holland twice—in America; and such was the case in France. Opinion had grown till it had burst its chains; circumstances concurred that gave opinion weight: the court seemed to yield; but coercion was prepared. Monopolies (gigantic in wickedness) were planned and executed, to put the subsistence of the people in the power of their oppressors; and fresh massacres were resolved, and organised: but the project transpired: force was repelled by force: Lambesque was discomfited; the people flew to arms; the Bastille was taken; Broglio fled; and Paris escaped a second feast of Saint Bartholomew. But still there were silver-headed traitors to the cause of man, pensioned profligates, at the ear of royalty, advising coercion—from within, or from without—it mattered not. A foreign combination produced a foreign war; and Louis XVI, who had sworn to defend the constitution of new opinions, kept up (as Mallet du Pan, his confidential agent confesses, in his Correspondance Politique pour Servir a l’Histoir) a secret intercourse with the despots who had leagued for its destruction. But surely the “great changes in opinion,” resulting from “the application of force,” in these instances, are not much calculated to encourage established governments to a repetition of the experiment."
-From The Rights of Nature Against the Usurpations of Establishments by John Thelwell
c_man posted:im just in it for the dank
catchphrase