edit: pm me it
Edited by Peelzebub ()
There are also books with texts from the Great Debate which include people like Ernest Mandel. My understanding is that Fidel was fiercely pro-Soviet and mostly ignored Che's advice except for talk of moral incentives. Che was also in favour of crash industrialization which the Soviets mostly nixed. The Soviet line was that socialist integration should follow a 'socialist division of labour' which meant traditional production should be encouraged on favourable terms so that there would be gradual convergence. Che opposed this logic because it would keep the Cuban economy mostly focused on export crops (sugar) rather than redirecting labour to factories. (This is where Maoist critiques of Cuba focus and why they call it Soviet neocolonialism - another example they use is Khrushchev's comments about I think Romania focusing on food for Soviets.)
getfiscal posted:This looks like a brief summary: https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/yaffeh/che-critic.htm
I disagree. Everyone, this summary is not brief. You should not assume it is brief when clicking the link, you may be unpleasantly surprised to find yourself on my side.
A lot of it jarred with unexamened assumptions I previously had. but the bits I tried to track down all seemed to check out. Hmm...
Anyway, thanks to whomever posted it.
Gssh posted:Nearly finished reading Sakai's 'Settlers'... someone posted it here a while back and I hadn't ever run across it before.
A lot of it jarred with unexamened assumptions I previously had. but the bits I tried to track down all seemed to check out. Hmm...
Anyway, thanks to whomever posted it.
welcome
getfiscal posted:i have to do a presentation in one of my classes in a few months and one of the topics available is white settler states. i could give an anecdote from settlers in class and gain five MIM points.
you get extra points if you say "kersplebedeb" out loud
babyhueypnewton posted:welcome
I also read it bc of this thread so thanks from me too
cars posted:Reading technotrots on the cyberizon, I readied Stalins 1-115 for low-atmosphere departure.
this is my favorite technotrot
bPpnMekZULM
getfiscal posted:one of the many lingering effects of my economics degree is that when i read che guevara talking about moral incentives all i can imagine is a child getting gold stickers from the teacher or something like that. one funny quirk in hoxhaism is that they consider khrushchev's campaign to cut expert wages to be crass demagoguery in this way. like a sort of faux-egalitarianism which tried to provide cover for a transition to rule by experts, which was then quickly undone. which is sort of funny in its extreme functionalism. like... khrushchev reduced certain wage gaps? yet another ploy by the new bourgeoisie in the party. although that doesn't necessarily make it wrong - like... an analogy might be how reformists will increase taxes on the rich precisely to stabilize the state's financial position in order to save capitalism. still sort of a stretch.
one of my most precious anarcho-teen memories is when Michael Albert was writing all those essays about Parecon and noted in passing that the Soviet Union did achieve a much greater parity in SOL across the entire population and that seemed like a good thing to him relatively speaking and Znet immediately detonated in a jet-black mushroom cloud.
Since 1998 he has run a radical distro under the name Kersplebedeb, producing agit prop materials as well as important (if underappreciated!) political books and pamphlets. Kersplebedeb is a non-sectarian project, but attempts to explore anti-patriarchal and anti-imperialist politics within an anti-capitalist framework. For the past several years K. has also written in and maintained a blog, Sketchy Thoughts, both as a way to archive facts and observations for his own use, and as a way to try out new thoughts in public.
K. worked as a research assistant on the recently published first volume of The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, and believes that - somewhat counterintuitively - North American activists today can learn some surprisingly relevant lessons by looking at this history of this defunct German guerilla organization. To this end, K. also maintains a website about the RAF and other West German revolutionary organizations at http://www.germanguerilla.com.
tpaine posted:wait did you not make that up??
Lol, have you seen that enormous picture of Arthur C Korn from the Yorba LInda Water District? Sounds like nothing could be that funny, but it really it is
tpaine posted:penis in ear = dance all night
Thanks. yes. we know them all. We all know them all. I can merely assume you post them because a swarm of lovebugs or sugar ants devoured your irl comfort blanket.
Notable thus far is the discussion of death, which seems to both prefigure and debunk the latter romantic-fasciod discourse of resoluteness towards mortality as the essence of human existence that Heidegger would help popularize:
"Man does not at all want to escape from some chain, he wants to stay, he wants–to live. Philosophy, which commends death to him as its special little shelter and as the splendid opportunity to escape from the narrowness of life, seems to be only jeering at him. Man feels only too well that he is certainly condemned to death, but not to suicide. And it is only suicide that the philosophical recommendation would truly be able to recommend, not the death decreed for all."
(n/m)
Edited by RedMaistre ()
The House at Rest
On a dark night
Kindled in love with yearnings —
Oh, happy chance! —
I went forth unobserved,
My house being now at rest.
– St. John of the Cross
How does one hush one’s house,
each proud possessive wall, each sighing rafter,
the rooms made restless with remembered laughter
or wounding echoes, the permissive doors,
the stairs that vacillate from up to down,
windows that bring in color and event
from countryside or town,
oppressive ceilings and complaining floors?
The house must first of all accept the night.
Let it erase the walls and their display,
impoverish the rooms till they are filled
with humble silences; let clocks be stilled
and all the selfish urgencies of day.
Midnight is not the time to greet a guest.
Caution the doors against both foes and friends,
and try to make the windows understand
their unimportance when the daylight ends.
Persuade the stairs to patience, and deny
the passages their aimless to and fro.
Virtue it is that puts a house at rest.
How well repaid that tenant is, how blest
who, when the call is heard,
is free to take his kindled heart and go.
Those not interested at all in the politics or theology of the author may at least find interesting his attempt to wed the presentation of systemic and positive opinions in both areas to a modernist aesthetics, the latter of which is too often assumed to have a natural tie only with nihilism a la Beckett:
"As, after all, it is not entirely impossible that the piece be played some day or other ten or twenty years hence, in whole or in party it is not amiss to begin by these few stage directions. It is essential that the scenes follow each other without the least interruption. The most carelessly crumpled back-drop, or none at all, will do. The scene- shifters will make the few necessary dispositions under the very eyes of the public while the action is taking its course. At a pinch, nothing
need prevent the artists from giving a helping hand. The actors in each scene will appear before those of the preceding scene have finished speaking and will at once have their own share in the small preparatory business. Stage directions will be either clearly posted up or read out by the producer, or by the actors themselves, who will draw the necessary papers from their pockets or hand them on to one another. If they make a mistake, no matter. A rope-end hanging, a back-drop badly drawn and showing a white wall, in front of which the staff goes to and
fro, wilt be most effective. The whole thing must look provisional, developing, disordered, incoherent, improvised in an enthusiastic mood, with happy accidents from time to time; for even in disorder monotony must be eschewed.
Order is the pleasure of the reason; but disorder is the delight of
the imagination.
I suppose my piece to be played, let us say, on Shrouve's Tuesday at four o'clock in the afternoon. I imagine a great hall frowsty a previous audience, invaded again by the public and filled with the buzz of conversation. Through the folding doors is heard the dull clatter of a well-fed orchestra, performing in the foyer. Another little
reedy orchestra in the hall takes delight in mimicking the noises of
the public, leading them and giving them, little by little, a sort of
rhythm and a kind of form.
There comes upon the proscenium in front of the lowered curtain the ANNOUNCER. He is a hefty, bearded fellow, who has borrowed from the best-recognised Velasquez this huge hat and feathers, this cane under his arm and this belt which he manages with difficulty to buckle. He attempts to speak, but every time he opens his mouthwith the public meanwhile making an enormous preparatory tumult he is interrupted by a clash of cymbals, a silly bell, a shriek from the fife, a sarcastic remark from the bassoon, a sly hint from the ocarina^ a belch from the saxophone. By degrees they settle down and there is silence. Nothing is heard now but the big drum, which patiently goes
poom poom, poom, like Madame Barters finger of resignation drumming the table regularly while she endures the reproaches of Monsieur le Comte; underneath all, the side-drum, rolling pianissimo with occasional forte until the public keeps silence. The ANNOUNCER, paper in hand, knocking hard on the ground with his cane, announces:
THE SATIN SLIPPER
or THE WORST IS NOT THE SUREST
Spanish play in Four Days "
Fun stuff too, like Allen Dulles' FBI files:
anyway this passage from camus is pretty entertaining
We know that the economic evolution of the contemporary world refutes a certain number of the postulates of Marx. If the revolution is to occur at the end of two parallel movements, the unlimited shrinking of capital and the unlimited expansion of the proletariat, it will not occur or ought not to have occurred. Capital and proletariat have both been equally unfaithful to Marx. The tendency observed in
industrial England of the nineteenth century has, in certain cases, changed its course, and in others become more complex. Economic crises, which should have occurred with increasing frequency, have, on the contrary, become more sporadic: capitalism has learned the secrets of planned production and has
contributed on its own part to the growth of the Moloch State. Moreover, with the introduction of companies in which stock could be held, capital, instead of becoming increasingly concentrated, has given rise to a new category of smallholders whose very last desire would certainly be to encourage
strikes. Small enterprises have been, in many cases, destroyed by competition as Marx foresaw. But the complexity of modern production has generated a multitude of small factories around great enterprises. In 1938 Ford was able to announce that five thousand two hundred independent workshops supplied him with their products. Of course large industries inevitably assimilated these enterprises to a certain extent. But the essential thing is that these small industrialists form an intermediary social layer which complicates the scheme that Marx imagined. Finally, the law of concentration has proved absolutely false in agricultural economy, which was treated with considerable frivolity by Marx. The hiatus is important here. In one of its aspects, the history of socialism in our times can be
considered as the struggle between the proletarian movement and the peasant class. This struggle continues, on the historical plane, the nineteenth-century ideological struggle between authoritarian socialism and libertarian socialism, of which the peasant and artisan origins are quite evident. Thus Marx had, in the ideological material of his time, the elements for a study of the peasant problem. But his desire to systematize made him oversimplify everything. This particular simplification was to prove expensive for the kulaks who constituted more than five
million historic exceptions to be brought, by death and deportation, within the Marxist pattern
lol
Edited by aerdil ()
A tangent from some reading for an eventual effortpost on technocapitalism/cyberimperialism. It's frightening to think this book appears to be a reference text for some policymakers. It's truely awful.
It does however provide some interesting capitalist/zionist perspective on the influence of military culture on start-ups and technological innovation (one of the central premises of the book).
“There is something about the DNA of Israeli innovation that is unexplainable,” Shainberg (VP - British Telecom) said. But he did have the beginnings of a theory. “I think it comes down to maturity. That’s because nowhere else in the world where people work in a center of technology innovation do they also have to do national service.”
smail, the meaning of anxiety- ideals and beliefs of all kinds suck, reckon with your experience
terrence real, i dont want to talk about it the secret legacy of male depression- unlearn everything youve ever been taught is a male thing to do, males
wright, black boy- trotskyism always sucked
waugh, scoop- pretty good turns of phrase, nazi scum cult book
lorde, zami- the curvy older woman that walks all crazy and doesnt give a fuck is a good role model for leftists
HenryKrinkle posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:wait whats' the context here, who wanted to shoot occupy leaders
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/549516/fbi-spy-files-on-the-occupy-movement.pdf
large PDF of heavily redacted FBI docs on Occupy. the identity of the individual or group that wanted to shoot occupy leaders is redacted for vaguely defined "law enforcement confidentiality" reasons.
anyone remember this. lol