tpaine posted:trifling little dillholes
toyotathon posted:we are a result of an evolutionary process where the rate of human evolution, today, is like 100x the rate of normal genetic mutation, and it reached this high rate at the dawn of class society 12000 years ago and stayed there. our class is being bred, rapidly, through social forces. every generation's revolutionaries and dissenters and criminals are selectively killed by the state, or put in prison during typical reproductive years, so that every generation protest gets a little quieter. this is the hypothesized evolutionary path of all species which developed class society (the eusocial species), and requires fewer evolutionary steps than inclusive fitness, and the selective breeding apparatus has been observed in all class societies. someday there will be no crime, just obedience, like in the other class species.
yo im skimming this thread and this is some zeitgeist movement shit, idk how anyone would call this a marxist analysis.
toyotathon posted:i mean dangerous to who? this is a tiny red forum with like 1000 lurkers. yall piled on me this thread and i feel like i'm having to fucking argue with every last person here for making rhymes about how earth's dying. do you email scifi writers to tell them gravity doesn't work on their spaceships too, i mean fucking christ. nobody's reading any of this or taking anything i say seriously, it's just us here.
dangerous in the sense that it leads to faulty and unproductive ideas about class. the reason you're getting piled on is because we, your peers and comrades, are taking you seriously enough to engage critically with what you're saying.
toyotathon posted:class society is already naturalized, we're living in it, humans are compatible with it.
i mean naturalise in the ideological sense of treating class as simply a matter of biology, of genetic programming, of human nature. if you really want to gain class insights from societies of insects or whatever, that's your logical precondition. surely it can only be counterproductive for your conceptual framework to have seriously impaired human agency baked in?
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.
But this I know, that every Law
That men have made for Man,
Since first Man took his brother's life,
And the sad world began,
But straws the wheat and saves the chaff
With a most evil fan.
This too I know—and wise it were
If each could know the same—
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.
With bars they blur the gracious moon,
And blind the goodly sun:
And they do well to hide their Hell,
For in it things are done
That Son of God nor son of Man
Ever should look upon!
The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair
For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and grey,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.
Each narrow cell in which we dwell
Is foul and dark latrine,
And the fetid breath of living Death
Chokes up each grated screen,
And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity's machine.
That want is here a stranger, and that misery's unknown;
For where the nearest suburb and the city proper meet
My window-sill is level with the faces in the street —
Drifting past, drifting past,
To the beat of weary feet —
While I sorrow for the owners of those faces in the street.
And cause I have to sorrow, in a land so young and fair,
To see upon those faces stamped the marks of Want and Care;
I look in vain for traces of the fresh and fair and sweet
In sallow, sunken faces that are drifting through the street —
Drifting on, drifting on,
To the scrape of restless feet;
I can sorrow for the owners of the faces in the street.
In hours before the dawning dims the starlight in the sky
The wan and weary faces first begin to trickle by,
Increasing as the moments hurry on with morning feet,
Till like a pallid river flow the faces in the street —
Flowing in, flowing in,
To the beat of hurried feet —
Ah! I sorrow for the owners of those faces in the street.
The human river dwindles when 'tis past the hour of eight,
Its waves go flowing faster in the fear of being late;
But slowly drag the moments, whilst beneath the dust and heat
The city grinds the owners of the faces in the street —
Grinding body, grinding soul,
Yielding scarce enough to eat —
Oh! I sorrow for the owners of the faces in the street.
And then the only faces till the sun is sinking down
Are those of outside toilers and the idlers of the town,
Save here and there a face that seems a stranger in the street,
Tells of the city's unemployed upon his weary beat —
Drifting round, drifting round,
To the tread of listless feet —
Ah! My heart aches for the owner of that sad face in the street.
And when the hours on lagging feet have slowly dragged away,
And sickly yellow gaslights rise to mock the going day,
Then flowing past my window like a tide in its retreat,
Again I see the pallid stream of faces in the street —
Ebbing out, ebbing out,
To the drag of tired feet,
While my heart is aching dumbly for the faces in the street.
And now all blurred and smirched with vice the day's sad pages end,
For while the short ‘large hours’ toward the longer ‘small hours’ trend,
With smiles that mock the wearer, and with words that half entreat,
Delilah pleads for custom at the corner of the street —
Sinking down, sinking down,
Battered wreck by tempests beat —
A dreadful, thankless trade is hers, that Woman of the Street.
But, ah! to dreader things than these our fair young city comes,
For in its heart are growing thick the filthy dens and slums,
Where human forms shall rot away in sties for swine unmeet,
And ghostly faces shall be seen unfit for any street —
Rotting out, rotting out,
For the lack of air and meat —
In dens of vice and horror that are hidden from the street.
I wonder would the apathy of wealthy men endure
Were all their windows level with the faces of the Poor?
Ah! Mammon's slaves, your knees shall knock, your hearts in terror beat,
When God demands a reason for the sorrows of the street,
The wrong things and the bad things
And the sad things that we meet
In the filthy lane and alley, and the cruel, heartless street.
I left the dreadful corner where the steps are never still,
And sought another window overlooking gorge and hill;
But when the night came dreary with the driving rain and sleet,
They haunted me — the shadows of those faces in the street,
Flitting by, flitting by,
Flitting by with noiseless feet,
And with cheeks but little paler than the real ones in the street.
Once I cried: ‘Oh, God Almighty! if Thy might doth still endure,
Now show me in a vision for the wrongs of Earth a cure.’
And, lo! with shops all shuttered I beheld a city's street,
And in the warning distance heard the tramp of many feet,
Coming near, coming near,
To a drum's dull distant beat,
And soon I saw the army that was marching down the street.
Then, like a swollen river that has broken bank and wall,
The human flood came pouring with the red flags over all,
And kindled eyes all blazing bright with revolution's heat,
And flashing swords reflecting rigid faces in the street.
Pouring on, pouring on,
To a drum's loud threatening beat,
And the war-hymns and the cheering of the people in the street.
And so it must be while the world goes rolling round its course,
The warning pen shall write in vain, the warning voice grow hoarse,
But not until a city feels Red Revolution's feet
Shall its sad people miss awhile the terrors of the street —
The dreadful everlasting strife
For scarcely clothes and meat
In that pent track of living death — the city's cruel street.
toyotathon posted:Petrol posted:toyotathon posted:
dangerous in the sense that it leads to faulty and unproductive ideas about class. the reason you're getting piled on is because we, your peers and comrades, are taking you seriously enough to engage critically with what you're saying.
i mean naturalise in the ideological sense of treating class as simply a matter of biology, of genetic programming, of human nature. if you really want to gain class insights from societies of insects or whatever, that's your logical precondition. surely it can only be counterproductive for your conceptual framework to have seriously impaired human agency baked in?yeah i appreciate it, there should be a place to air new ideas and be wrong about them, happy to hear feedback. to be clear what's critical is the class structure itself which is replicated widely - but sparsely - over the animals, without communication or conscious mimicry or recent ancestors. there's a deep logic to reproduction of a social organism over generations, to have them all settle on the same 3-class structure, which happens to look like our own (if you accept the repressing class of police and military as its own class, separate from the class responsible for reproducing ideology and setting division of labor).
i don't really think the hypothesis that the state is a class breeder is dangerous, either the sense of leading to wrong ideas or the sense of leading to regressive ideas. the former since the hypothesis makes predictions like the state should ally with the exploiting/reproductive class, the latter since it'd mean there's a common bond shared by all the world's workers and peasants, the conscious theft of our past selves to mold us into something more suited to class society. seems pretty rotten and i'd certainly wanna know if it's really what the state's up to. it's just a hypothesis though, it makes certain predictions, like that the rate of human evolution should be higher than the background mutation rate, and that the state should do things like practice sterilization, lock people up during reproductive years, etc in order to carry out its class mission. but there must have been proto-state structures to allow it to arrive on the historical scene simultaneously with the surplus. don't really know enough at this point to verify, it'd be a monster research project to either prove or disprove. the social nightmare that was britain, in the 200 years or so of death and starvation it took capitalism to form, might be another interesting place to look.
there's lots of room for human agency, it's the explanation for why we had the fastest transition of any creature into class society. in all the others it took tens of millions of years, we did it a 1000x faster. the reason we did it is because it's extremely successful ecologically. now a third of the earth is farmland. other class animals have dominated their environments, too. instead of having to bake it all into our genes, our giant brains can spend a decade learning every social rule required to carry out a class society, then reproduce the culture through our cooperative child care (another thing only found in eusocials).
understanding the deep logic of class societies could help us build more stable socialisms, if we are able to more precisely identify class roles, like social reproduction, before tasking them to the working class. we are the only class creatures for whom socialism's even possible, since we 'store' class society in our big ol brains instead of genes.
no idea what zeitgeist is unless it's that old youtube movie. eusociality is an active area of biological research.
but eusociality is not a class structure, nor even as a general rule repressive, and i think this is all wrong