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babyhueypnewton posted:you were mostly right. it wasn't marxist and consistently erased class
what did you like? the stuff about pashukanis and the comrades courts? i think her basic idea (that the persistence of social conflict implies the need for procedure) is right, although i'm not sure that implies liberal procedure in a situation of class struggle.
marimite posted:can anyone recommend me some stuff to read about the 1956 Hungarian counterrevolution? Would be much appreciated.
The Truth About Hungary - Herbert Aptheker
https://espressostalinist.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/the-truth-about-hungary.pdf
Thus you have people like Graeber and Scott who make these huge claims about debt, bureaucracy, power, etc. which sound anti-capitalist but aren't based on anything. We have no reason to take them at face value. All of that stuff mentioned in that book sounds interesting but it's all just made up, meant to make anarchist children feel like they have a complete worldview equal to Marxism.
getfiscal posted:babyhueypnewton posted:you were mostly right. it wasn't marxist and consistently erased class
what did you like? the stuff about pashukanis and the comrades courts? i think her basic idea (that the persistence of social conflict implies the need for procedure) is right, although i'm not sure that implies liberal procedure in a situation of class struggle.
I think implied in both Pashukanis (morality is the concrete existence of the law which is the ideology of the means of consumption) and Althusser (separating law and politics is the socialist goal of jurisprudence) and the very late Marx (Russia can go from communalism to socialism if it can mimic already existing capitalist forms) that it is conceivable to think of a socialist law which is entirely unique to a socialist mode of production, a socialist morality, and socialist ideological state apparatuses. Even if this is only 'law' as the weight of all dead generations, it's something more than 'administration' like Pashukanis believes.*
I think Sypnowich is trying to do something important and uncharted, I just think that she underestimates the amount of Marxist stuff there is to work with and overestimates how useful bourgeois jurisprudence is. There's a good essay I read in Althusser and Law comparing Althusser and Schmitt which I think is a better direction to go if you just don't want to repeat bourgeois jurisprudence but say "but socialists are the ones who really do it!11" working on a thesis about this anyway so maybe I'll have some better ideas soonish.
*Anti-communism runs so deep that Pashukanis's later work is entirely dismissed as being forced on him by Stalin. Whether this is true or not is hard to say, but that it is the default position among the left, requiring no evidence, is remarkable.
"t is true that Levinas-Rosenzweig has suggested, contra Hegel, that genetic, credal or territorial particularities (like Judaism) need not merely be inchoate forms of syntheses ("'the universal and the human''), and that it is possible to move temporally through life and thought against the flow of Hegelian history. He has, moreover, sketched the beginning a logical argument supporting this anti-Hegelian stance: he has labeled the notion that history culminates in the universal a "modern" notion, and thus, perhaps, temporally contingent and vulnerable to refutation. But he has also allowed us to perceive the difficulty of arguing against Hegel. For to label universalist conceptions "modern" merely highlights the fact that the conceptions are in a sense self-proving...
That Levinas-Rosenzweig gives a good deal of credence to the Hegelian conception of history becomes clearer as he begins to define contemporary universalism. "Rosenzweig knows,'' says Levinas, "that Hegel spoke the truth when he affirmed that this was 'the end of philosophy and that philosophers have become superfluous"' (EDM 125/ 260/ 186). 189 The end of philosophy, he continues, is equivalent to the ubiquity of philosophy. In the contemporary world, everyone has become a philosopher, and thus there is no longer any distinction between philosophers and those to whom they philosophize, and thus no longer a distinct thing called philosophy. The end of philosophy means, in effect, that everyone today experiences an unprecedented intimacy between life and thought, and that no one needs to be taught. This seems at first glance like a good thing. But, says Levinas, the end of philosophy should not be confused with an "age of philosophy" in which many or most human beings choose to philosophize. At the end of philosophy, everyone must philosophize. The necessity enters the consciousness of each individual through "the anguished certainty of the inexorable march of history towards goals that surpass the intentions of human beings" (EDM, 125/ 259 185)....
....This is not anti-Hegelianism in the simple sense of a claim that
Hegel was wrong. "Rosenzweig remains Hegelian," says Levinas, "on one point," -- only one point, but one that happens to be the central point of Hegel's philosophy -- that "the subjective protestation is powerless against historical necessity." Autonomy becomes participation in history; the part is a part only by virtue of its relation to the whole. It is because Rosenzweig accepts the basic Hegelian insight that Levinas-Rosenzweig's definition of Judaism becomes, in effect, that of which Hegel knows nothing."
https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstream/11375/15501/1/Ajzenstat%20Oona.pdf
This in notable contrast to Gilian Rose's reading of these two thinkers in The Broken Middle, to speak nothing of more 'aggressive' (to put it mildly) reappropriations of Hegel in the manner Zizek which deride the pair as sources of a postmodern, multicultural decadence.
Edited by RedMaistre ()
babyhueypnewton posted:What anarchists dont seem to understand is that everything in Marxism comes from the simplest thing: the commodity form in Chapter 1 in Capital. Everything follows from that in a series of concrete -> abstract -> larger concrete forever. In this way it's kind of like Spinoza, if you accept the original axiom the argument builds forever until you have a complete picture of everything (obviously this complete picture never happens).
Thus you have people like Graeber and Scott who make these huge claims about debt, bureaucracy, power, etc. which sound anti-capitalist but aren't based on anything. We have no reason to take them at face value. All of that stuff mentioned in that book sounds interesting but it's all just made up, meant to make anarchist children feel like they have a complete worldview equal to Marxism.
it'd be interesting to see Graeber's work re-evaluated in light of his strange pro-imperialism recently
TLDR Summary: The old testament is an early warning from ancient mystic super chill jews about capitalism consuming the earth and we are all going to die a horrid chaotic death as we crash into the wall.
babyhueypnewton posted:I think Sypnowich is trying to do something important and uncharted, I just think that she underestimates the amount of Marxist stuff there is to work with and overestimates how useful bourgeois jurisprudence is. There's a good essay I read in Althusser and Law comparing Althusser and Schmitt which I think is a better direction to go if you just don't want to repeat bourgeois jurisprudence but say "but socialists are the ones who really do it!11" working on a thesis about this anyway so maybe I'll have some better ideas soonish.
mouffe spent a lot of time working on schmitt starting from similar premises as sypnowich (persistence of conflict implies procedure, need for democratic socialism). but in vulgar marxist terms i also am wary of all that partly because this retrieval process is a bonanza in france. like the easiest way to get published is to be like "what would rousseau say about occupy" or whatever.
getfiscal posted:babyhueypnewton posted:I think Sypnowich is trying to do something important and uncharted, I just think that she underestimates the amount of Marxist stuff there is to work with and overestimates how useful bourgeois jurisprudence is. There's a good essay I read in Althusser and Law comparing Althusser and Schmitt which I think is a better direction to go if you just don't want to repeat bourgeois jurisprudence but say "but socialists are the ones who really do it!11" working on a thesis about this anyway so maybe I'll have some better ideas soonish.
mouffe spent a lot of time working on schmitt starting from similar premises as sypnowich (persistence of conflict implies procedure, need for democratic socialism). but in vulgar marxist terms i also am wary of all that partly because this retrieval process is a bonanza in france. like the easiest way to get published is to be like "what would rousseau say about occupy" or whatever.
i feel like today there's lots of fame to be had by positioning oneself as a sort of alternative to marx. lots of people trying to explain what capitalism really is in this new age or whatever
c_man posted:i feel like today there's lots of fame to be had by positioning oneself as a sort of alternative to marx. lots of people trying to explain what capitalism really is in this new age or whatever
yeah. mouffe's work does come from that trend. but she does engage and depend on althusser whose original intention was to buck that trend.
in postwar france basically everyone who wasn't a communist party member was talking about how communism was a dead end and how we needed a free socialist society based on human values. the communist party was sort of still mired in really isolating ideas that didn't respond to emerging cultural issues, just promoting russian films mechanically and stuff like that. once khrushchev denounced stalin the communists got confused and eventually started just parroting the new consensus around humanism more and more. and it was common for leftists to be like hey we don't need lenin in france we need contemporary theory for a democratic society.
althusser's main contribution was being like uhhh actually marx and lenin are needed now more than ever. but he actually had arguments why that was true and why the drift in the communist movement was poorly theorized, including the fact that people who drew a straight line from hegel to marx in order to denounce socialist countries misunderstood the break by marx which focused on the concrete political situation and its determinants rather than ideals. i think there is a treasure trove of stuff in there but i think there is a weird chain of debates where 'stalinists' end up liking him even though he was trying to reject stalinism on real marxist terms instead of a simplistic idealism, in part because a lot of trotskyists and new leftists hated him. the official party leaders didn't like him either because he criticized them constantly, especially with balibar on the prevalent idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat was irrelevant to france (which became the PCF's official position).
but althusser did end up drawn into the idea that he was creating the basis for a new understanding of marxism from the standpoint of contemporary theory, which was magnified by how popular he got, which helped undermine the point i think. and people like laclau and mouffe ended up wedding the gramsci craze with a sort of populist reformism, in a very explicit "this is where we're at after marxism" trend. which needs to be positioned like that in history. but i think a lot of what they said is also useful to think about, especially because groups like podemos are literally the creation of laclau and mouffe reading groups, even if more radical conclusions need to be drawn.
getfiscal posted:c_man posted:i feel like today there's lots of fame to be had by positioning oneself as a sort of alternative to marx. lots of people trying to explain what capitalism really is in this new age or whatever
yeah. mouffe's work does come from that trend. but she does engage and depend on althusser whose original intention was to buck that trend.
in postwar france basically everyone who wasn't a communist party member was talking about how communism was a dead end and how we needed a free socialist society based on human values. the communist party was sort of still mired in really isolating ideas that didn't respond to emerging cultural issues, just promoting russian films mechanically and stuff like that. once khrushchev denounced stalin the communists got confused and eventually started just parroting the new consensus around humanism more and more. and it was common for leftists to be like hey we don't need lenin in france we need contemporary theory for a democratic society.
althusser's main contribution was being like uhhh actually marx and lenin are needed now more than ever. but he actually had arguments why that was true and why the drift in the communist movement was poorly theorized, including the fact that people who drew a straight line from hegel to marx in order to denounce socialist countries misunderstood the break by marx which focused on the concrete political situation and its determinants rather than ideals. i think there is a treasure trove of stuff in there but i think there is a weird chain of debates where 'stalinists' end up liking him even though he was trying to reject stalinism on real marxist terms instead of a simplistic idealism, in part because a lot of trotskyists and new leftists hated him. the official party leaders didn't like him either because he criticized them constantly, especially with balibar on the prevalent idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat was irrelevant to france (which became the PCF's official position).
but althusser did end up drawn into the idea that he was creating the basis for a new understanding of marxism from the standpoint of contemporary theory, which was magnified by how popular he got, which helped undermine the point i think. and people like laclau and mouffe ended up wedding the gramsci craze with a sort of populist reformism, in a very explicit "this is where we're at after marxism" trend. which needs to be positioned like that in history. but i think a lot of what they said is also useful to think about, especially because groups like podemos are literally the creation of laclau and mouffe reading groups, even if more radical conclusions need to be drawn.
noice
getfiscal posted:but althusser did end up drawn into the idea that he was creating the basis for a new understanding of marxism from the standpoint of contemporary theory,
sure but from what i read from his book on reproduction it was still relatively standard marxism, talking about relations of production and commodity production and so on. i'm also thinking of the people who talk like "today's capitalism no longer produces commodities but ideas and feelings"
postposting posted:do you guys ever get the feeling we're living in the bad timeline? like the world- historic victory of the Bolshevik revolution was supposed to inspire the workers of all belligerent nations in world war I to throw off the yoke of the bourgeoisie and realize the folly of imperialist-driven internecine slaughter? that the course of history leading inevitably to international proletarian solidarity was somehow changed when an impossible butterfly flapped its wings and turned the SPD to reformism and cursed us to live in this world where we battle the ghosts of fascists and capitalists that were never meant to be?
yes
HenryKrinkle posted:jacobin published something good about Syria to appease us tankie plebs again:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/syria-civil-war-nato-military-intervention/
That's cool, I like the Atlantic's take today, though.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/assad-syria-devil-endgame-putin-obama/407635/
Bashar al-Assad and the Devil’s Endgame
Will the Syrian dictator’s sinister plan to win over America and Russia actually work?
ilmdge posted:
recommend that u sever, zizek is a bourgeois fraud
littlegreenpills posted:listening to a very standard liberal-keynesian history of the Great Depression on audiobook (written in the early 70s lol) it leaves me wondering if capitalism didn't kill itself already and what we're dealing with is its very robust 80 year old zombie
That is more or less "Damn" Jehu's position. Though he would call it a triumph of the 'fascist' state instead of persistence of a robust zombie.
ilmdge posted:HenryKrinkle posted:jacobin published something good about Syria to appease us tankie plebs again:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/syria-civil-war-nato-military-intervention/That's cool, I like the Atlantic's take today, though.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/assad-syria-devil-endgame-putin-obama/407635/
Bashar al-Assad and the Devil’s Endgame
Will the Syrian dictator’s sinister plan to win over America and Russia actually work?
"In recent months, the Syrian military allegedly used air strikes to help ISIS advance toward the city of Aleppo. Khaled Khoja, a Syrian opposition leader, claimed that Assad’s fighter jets were acting as “an air force for ISIS.”" lol
88888 posted:finished fanshen. peasant land reform seems tough
highly recommend through a glass darkly. starts out with the reverse version of one of those chain emails about the marine who took down the professor in class except it's william hinton vs. someone else's students right after u.s. customs seized the manuscript for fanshen. decades later the guy who taught the class complained that america could have stopped communism if academics had somehow been able to observe and record the real post-WWII lives of the chinese in the countryside lol
postposting posted:do you guys ever get the feeling we're living in the bad timeline? like the world- historic victory of the Bolshevik revolution was supposed to inspire the workers of all belligerent nations in world war I to throw off the yoke of the bourgeoisie and realize the folly of imperialist-driven internecine slaughter? that the course of history leading inevitably to international proletarian solidarity was somehow changed when an impossible butterfly flapped its wings and turned the SPD to reformism and cursed us to live in this world where we battle the ghosts of fascists and capitalists that were never meant to be?
that wasn't a butterfly, that was a bullet with butterfly wings. the world is a vampire sent to drain
cars posted:88888 posted:finished fanshen. peasant land reform seems tough
highly recommend through a glass darkly. starts out with the reverse version of one of those chain emails about the marine who took down the professor in class except it's william hinton vs. someone else's students right after u.s. customs seized the manuscript for fanshen. decades later the guy who taught the class complained that america could have stopped communism if academics had somehow been able to observe and record the real post-WWII lives of the chinese in the countryside lol
i just read the intro, frustrating knowing that all comrades have to go through similar experiences in the west.
Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()
NounsareVerbs posted:Hey what do you guys think of the anti-imperialist opus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(novel)
TLDR Summary: The old testament is an early warning from ancient mystic super chill jews about capitalism consuming the earth and we are all going to die a horrid chaotic death as we crash into the wall.
lol i read that book in high school , it sucks and is dumb but is also bad and retarded, and it stinks and is shitty and bad as well
