toyotathon posted:realized falling asleep last night that i missed the dang book's point, that this whole time, it hasn't been bourgeoisie rule, it's been co-class rule. shared rule between lumpen and bourgeoisie. a parasite class alliance. pretty radical stuff mr. sakai.
i did not get this vibe at all, like he spends ages arguing against marx's conception of the lumpen as "vagabonds"; the whole chapter on marx seems to be adressing this, as he sayss on page 28: "there is a widespread theoretical mistake in the movement. to reify the crude over-simplification of the thery understandable for marx and bakunins times an age ago" andd that the lumpen is not a uniform "class" but a "partial-class" or "non-class" which doesnt line up with "co-class rule" at all imo
toyotathon posted:most of the book's spent poking holes in this kind of lazy heuristic: prostitution is illegal but is not lumpen,
I don't agree with this, i don't see where Sakai denies the lumpen character of sex workers. They also produce nothing, and also it's only "illegal" the way drgs are illegal, like, not really illegal if you're the right person in the right place. Of course they're of a much different character but.. I think a lof of luimpen behavior can be summed as "i do whta I know is (at least partly) wrong, destructive, to me, to everyone around me, out of financial necessity." For some lumpen cultures that is more justifiable than others, depending on their internal definition 'f "necessity".
toyotathon posted:all of ch6 and ch7 is about sex work, concludes with: "What i can see is that old male left views on the politics of sex workers have been simplistic and wildly inaccurate. There are also problems of their class positioning, in the lumpen/proletariat. Of fitting them into any male-centered class, maybe. And may people have long asked, how can prostitutes be "parasites on society", if the only person they might exploit in a Marxian sense is themselves?"
Prostitutes have to play along with men's objectification of women to survive. Theres a bit of a problem with using "parasite" to describe all lumpen when their compensation and behavior are so wildly different, but - prostitutes are "parasitical" off the inflated wages of men, and esp of rich men, and in their attempt to survive, they undermine female solidarity against patriarchal oppression. The continued practice of sex work is predicated on the continued practice of gender oppression. Their social role is to enable misogynists. Am i being too harsh here?
We can use imperialism’s wars itself as our depth gauge of their historic decline. Two generations ago the u.s. empire fought a great world war 2 against other industrial capitalist powers. A brutal, bloody, fighting toe-to-toe war of near-equals in which millions of soldiers crisscrossed oceans and borders, leaving well over 60 million dead bodies as their rotting residue. In one single European battle alone, in one week in a forgotten Luxembourg forest, 33,000 white GIs died in combat (with another 10,000 dying from exposure and disease). And it doesn’t mean a thing now.
Then one generation ago the u.s.empire threw a 500,000 man expeditionary force that was the heart of the u.s. military into a protracted, eleven-year war to stop Communist-led national liberation movements in three Southeast Asian countries. To their white surprise, they lost big time and 58,000 GIs and Marines and sailors and airmen lost their lives as well (though to be sure they each got an engraved line on that spiffy black wall in Washington – ’cause in America there’s always a prize in every box of crackerjacks). And it doesn’t mean a thing now.
Today, in contrast, the u.s. bubble empire, with its heavy-technology storm troopers, struts and preens itself in decadent ecstasy whenever they can recapture any small, poverty-stricken Third-World capitalist neo-colony (often done in a fake war, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, with cooperating bribed warlords and generals). Hollywood invasions of Haiti, Afghanistan, Panama, tiny Philippine islands or dysfunctional oil field dictatorships mark the true level of their beat power now. But if a few hundred or a few thousand of its mercenary techno-legion GIs get whacked, then the whole society is weeping and wailing. Privileged amerikkka is too soft to slug it out anymore. We might say that the u.s. empire is less like a great military power in the old sense and more like a superbly-armed private mafia for a gated suburb. Its power is very dangerous on a tactical level – like a SWAT team blowing down your front door will really put some concern on your mind – but strategically it is more and more dysfunctional and immobilized.
i am reading it and lolling, in the "selected quotes" i am making
Goons
These are people whose jobs have an aggressive element but, crucially, who exist only because other people also employ people in these roles. The most obvious example of this are national armed forces.
Edit. WHat i didn't realize is that this is an excerpt from Graeber's upcoming book that seems to be a soft socdem/ancap/libdick-safe version of some of the notes about white lumpen The "Dangerous Class" And Revolutionary Theory
Edited by swampman ()
swampman posted:Goons
These are people whose jobs have an aggressive element but, crucially, who exist only because other people also employ people in these roles. The most obvious example of this are national armed forces.
Edit. WHat i didn't realize is that this is an excerpt from Graeber's upcoming book that seems to be a soft socdem/ancap/libdick-safe version of some of the notes about white lumpen The "Dangerous Class" And Revolutionary Theory
This has actually become popular in "post-colonial" studies and ethnic studies in bourgeois academia. Bunch of safe, idealist histories of settler colonialism with buzzwords about "biopolitics" and "discourses" thrown in and trivial "critiques" of Marx. Sakai has never once been cited and the class position of academics as comprador intellectuals obviously unspeakable. I've suffered through a few now and keep telling anyone who will listen to read settlers dot org. I guess it's inevitable even settlers will be the target of cooption as the Empire continues to crumble.
swampman posted:
Many duct-taper jobs are the result of a glitch in the system that no one has bothered to correct – tasks that could easily be automated, for instance,
what a great friend of the worker this graebber fellow is
toyotathon posted:but i would not call the woman the parasite, or blame her for enabling misogyny, for not fighting it harder. men like that prey on passivity. he wanted her to quit her job and become truly dependent. i don't think prostitutes had any hand in this perverse arrangement, first second or third order. he wants to own her, not rent her. i guess when i say 'parasitism' i mean fairly direct theft. and maybe also profits wrung from stoking addictions, gambling and meth dealing and whatever. wringing an addict dry, making them lose control over their wallet, maybe that is a form of theft, an indirect theft, but maybe that's my middle class prejudice trying to cram in square pegs. i do not consider rich johns to be helpless, forced by their dick urges to buy sex work. the transaction is as consensual as anything else in capitalism's marginalized layers.
I meant only, their labor is not socially productive. The patriarchy fog is so thick, it took me a while to understand the phrase "sex work is work", where I had at first wondered, oh, it's taxing and stressful and pays nothing but is it really work since it's not socially productive?? When the simpler point is that these women need to eat, so unless I'm offering something else for them to do, stfu. So parasite is not accurate to the way I've been using it, although it's one half of the bourgeois view of prostitutes ("the oldest profession" is the other half). But iirc women forced into prostitution by individual men make up only a small percentage of sex workers, and most "choose" it out of economic necessity. And most johns aren't self-aware misogynists looking to subjugate someone, they buy sex as one way to use up their commodified leisure time. I don't mind including sex work in with more outright evil kinds of lumpen for that reason. as a product of capitalism's need for throughput, for activity, for work to be done for the sake of creating work, and this need gives lumpen their revolutionary potential...
babyhueypnewton posted:swampman posted:Edit. WHat i didn't realize is that this is an excerpt from Graeber's upcoming book that seems to be a soft socdem/ancap/libdick-safe version of some of the notes about white lumpen The "Dangerous Class" And Revolutionary Theory
This has actually become popular in "post-colonial" studies and ethnic studies in bourgeois academia. Bunch of safe, idealist histories
reminds me also of how Manufacturing Consent came out two years after Parenti's Inventing Reality, and became vastly better known
though i guess it's less objectionable, since at this point i'd settle for any media crit at all to penetrate the popular skull
Constantignoble posted:babyhueypnewton posted:swampman posted:Edit. WHat i didn't realize is that this is an excerpt from Graeber's upcoming book that seems to be a soft socdem/ancap/libdick-safe version of some of the notes about white lumpen The "Dangerous Class" And Revolutionary Theory
This has actually become popular in "post-colonial" studies and ethnic studies in bourgeois academia. Bunch of safe, idealist histories
reminds me also of how Manufacturing Consent came out two years after Parenti's Inventing Reality, and became vastly better known
though i guess it's less objectionable, since at this point i'd settle for any media crit at all to penetrate the popular skull
what a coincidence that settlers came out in 1979 and the vomit known as a people s history of united snakes came out a year later........,.,,,,..
(disclaimer: i actually havent verified the years so uhm)
Petrol posted:its the most bougie fucken thing lol. why do all these people in the west get paid to do useless bullshit nothing jobs, wonders me, the professor of anthropology,
Hey now anthropology professor is a very important job... of reproducing the bourgeois discourse of colonialist polygenism!!! Zing motherfucker!!
Constantignoble posted:reminds me also of how Manufacturing Consent came out two years after Parenti's Inventing Reality, and became vastly better known
This is mainly because Chomsky's writing on the topic offers no positive argument about the structure of Western society that could dissuade the reader based on the reader's own biases, unless maybe if they have a strong world-historical bias in favor of the Israeli state. It's all lining up media narratives with reports from the same media that contradict those narratives.
There was probably a time when that was useful to get people in the English-speaking world to question news reports about foreign policy, it that matters at all, but now it seems quaint in that context. The foreign bureaus Chomsky criticizes mostly don't even exist anymore, and the reporting is done by someone flying in and asking a State Department-funded "activist" to confirm anonymous statements from the State Department. There's no counter-narrative to construct from odds and ends of Western news stories anymore.
cars posted:Petrol posted:its the most bougie fucken thing lol. why do all these people in the west get paid to do useless bullshit nothing jobs, wonders me, the professor of anthropology,
Hey now anthropology professor is a very important job... of reproducing the bourgeois discourse of colonialist polygenism!!! Zing motherfucker!!
(edit: i don't mean to derail, if you want to talk more about not-sakai maybe reply to my user page or something, and/or ignore me)
this is not accurate to all anthropology anymore (as you probably know, and it is a joke, i know), but it is a viewpoint that i had for a long time, and then i went and talked to some anthropologists. at least some schools will sit you down very early on and explain that colonial anthropology and the foundation of the capitalist system are intimately entwined, and the real mission of the anthropologist is to illustrate with actual documented experience, hard facts, how life is actually lived by different cultural groups (and do so while correcting the twisted bullshit used in the past to justify exploitation and genocide and etc.) (it bleeds into a ton of other related fields obviously.)
it can be done well and for good ends. i think Graeber is doing his best. he has influenced millions of people to consider the terrors caused by capitalist structures in Debt. the story about him being a bourgeois piece of shit to a carpenter is disappointing. i suppose it's not that surprising considering he has been in academia his entire life. still shitty.
he's trying to write all the books / do all the work he described in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004, 55pp), and that is at least admirable and sometimes very useful; he's trying to get past the concept of State and get at "what do people actually do". he was strongly influenced by his experience in Madagascar where he felt that essentially the State did not operate in the far reaches, and hadn't for a very long time -- and why do we assume the State has anything to do with anything, or privilege it above any other kind of more-or-less organized group?
none of which is revolutionary here on the rhizzone, but writing things from that perspective and getting millions of people to read it is pretty cool. you don't have to be an anarchist to make use of that perspective -- popularizing the idea that we can look at, evaluate, and potentially discard various constituent groups of the state -- and the mere fact that the state is groups, which is hard to see for many people -- also popularizes the idea that it can be revolutionarily changed or transformed, too.
i think he would agree with the idea that his main task is just trying to highlight that our social structures are just the people practicing them, and please everyone notice that you are the people.
i spoke privately with one person who worked with him for years, and i might be misremembering a bit, but i think they pretty much said he is not saying anything new exactly, just loudly and self-importantly, but-- importantly-- also accessibly. (they still seemed to be fond of him despite his narcissism and disorganization and imperfection.)
that little article/excerpt thing in the guardian makes it sound like he has no idea how anything actually works
drwhat posted:cars posted:Petrol posted:its the most bougie fucken thing lol. why do all these people in the west get paid to do useless bullshit nothing jobs, wonders me, the professor of anthropology,
Hey now anthropology professor is a very important job... of reproducing the bourgeois discourse of colonialist polygenism!!! Zing motherfucker!!
it can be done well and for good ends. i think Graeber is doing his best. he has influenced millions of people to consider the terrors caused by capitalist structures in Debt. the story about him being a bourgeois piece of shit to a carpenter is disappointing. i suppose it's not that surprising considering he has been in academia his entire life.
that was my point, how dare a career academic of pretty much any stripe cast judgement on the usefulness of any other profession. glass houses mother fucker!!!!
Constantignoble posted:babyhueypnewton posted:swampman posted:Edit. WHat i didn't realize is that this is an excerpt from Graeber's upcoming book that seems to be a soft socdem/ancap/libdick-safe version of some of the notes about white lumpen The "Dangerous Class" And Revolutionary Theory
This has actually become popular in "post-colonial" studies and ethnic studies in bourgeois academia. Bunch of safe, idealist histories
reminds me also of how Manufacturing Consent came out two years after Parenti's Inventing Reality, and became vastly better known
though i guess it's less objectionable, since at this point i'd settle for any media crit at all to penetrate the popular skull
Althusser did it better in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, also a way cooler title than "Manufacturing" Consent; the media doesn't trick us, the constituting of subjects within ideological apparatuses in conjunction with class interest is "consent" i.e. ideology