#6881
Post rating: +

pescalune posted:

Going to a conference at a local university about the "Rebirth" of Marxism. Seems like it will be pretty well attended. Unfortunately it's going to be totally dominated by a certain type of Post-Marxist and Marxist academics as well as various stripes of Trot so I imagine a lot of it will be irritating. With Toni Negri as keynote speaker that was to be expected I suppose. The other is Jodi Dean who I'm at least fairly interested in. Quite tellingly the only paper on socialist states is entitled "Marxism and genocide: hauntings of the Khmer Rouge".



Yeah I was just forced to read a bunch of stuff on "immaterial labor" and Empire for a class. And these people think they are Marxists. I guess they are if we consider the people who Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao consistently opposed and consistently betrayed the world revolution for the spoils of imperialism in their respective eras "Marxists." That's why I can never get too mad at J. Sakai, it's so refreshing compared to this "post" crap. Though there was a revealing sentence in one of the papers which talked about the Italian autonomists (the awful ones like Negri not the cool ones like Federici) ignoring Capital for the "fragment on machines" in the Grundrisse, as if you can forget the most important work of political economy and arguably science in history for a few scattered notes that were never meant to be published. It's a torturous path to be a "post-Marxist" but one these people have to take because the minute you stop pretending Marx matters is the minute the proletariat of the world stop pretending you matter.

#6882
Ireland
Post rating: +
Empire honestly seems like what somebody would come up with as a parody of academic marxism it's so out of touch. I mean you just had to look at Aghanistan (1 year later!) to see that it was bullshit. What's irritating about a lot of these people is that not only do they oppose most of what Marx, Engels, Lenin etc said and did, they don't even uphold a lot of the people that the 5 Heads opposed. They're totally uprooted from even the most bizarre or wrongheaded traditions, uprooted from any part of the history of class struggle (except, if they're being generous, May 68 in Paris). I can respect Trots or Leftcoms more than I respect these people. The cherry picking you mention is definitely a good point as well, they're so opposed to the idea of a line or consistency that everything about what they believe and espouse is jumbled and confused, a patchwork to justify inaction and opposition to any serious past attempt at revolution.

Edited by pescalune ()

#6883
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +
When you know communism is correct but every time you respect a communist you get zapped with the electricity
#6884
Post rating: ~

pescalune posted:

Going to a conference at a local university about the "Rebirth" of Marxism. Seems like it will be pretty well attended. Unfortunately it's going to be totally dominated by a certain type of Post-Marxist and Marxist academics as well as various stripes of Trot so I imagine a lot of it will be irritating. With Toni Negri as keynote speaker that was to be expected I suppose. The other is Jodi Dean who I'm at least fairly interested in. Quite tellingly the only paper on socialist states is entitled "Marxism and genocide: hauntings of the Khmer Rouge".


can you report back on the khmer rouge talk, i want to hear what their arguments are for DK being marxist

#6885
Post rating: +
Its pretty simple. Red as we all know, is the color of communism. Guess what rouge means in cambodian. Case closed
#6886
Post rating: ~
oh i dont think their reasoning will be very good, im just curious as to what the current academic 'vogue' is on the topic
#6887
Post rating: ~
yeah same i was just crackin wise
#6888
Ireland
Post rating: ~

lo posted:

can you report back on the khmer rouge talk, i want to hear what their arguments are for DK being marxist


Unfortunately there are 4 talks going on simultaneously at this conference all the time, so I'm sorely tempted to skip that one just because it's guaranteed to be awful. Conference just started, sitting next to Negri listening to Paul Murphy one of our Trot TDs (members or parliament)

#6889
Ireland
Post rating: +
Huh. Turns out Negri doesn't actually speak a word of English. I suppose it was somewhat Anglo-Centric of me to assume he would. Unfortunately that also meant an absolutely excruciating lecture for him that took an hour and 20 minutes since they had to translate everything he said paragraph by paragraph, only time at the end for a few questions. I'm sure I missed much while I struggled to stay awake as him and his translator droned on. The topic was supposed to be why we need to "Return to Marx" and well...I didn't understand what the fuck his rambling explanation was much of the time, but it didn't seem like there was much reason to return to Marx at all. There was certainly some babble about the Multitude and the commons and how the working class has changed and the service economy. Someone raised the question of how the Multitude applies to say China where there is an enormous industrial working class, to which he rather weakly replied "while there is a large working class the situation has changed considerably in the past decade" without real elaboration. Said that he thinks old Leninist marxism is stuck in 1917, and the USSR hampered the global revolution by refusing to take into account changes in the composition of the working class. He concluded with "the party form as the communists practiced is dead, and social democracy is shit". Well, at least we could agree on something. I stole his pizza later as revenge.

Other two talks I attended were pretty much the same sort of blather. Explanations for why the Precariat, the Multitude etc were the new revolutionary class. And unyielding obsession with "the commons", "the square" and "spaces" as sites of resistance, as if the mere presence of people in a place constituted revolution. Analysis of how generation was one of the new "modalities in which class is lived". Absolutely no concrete notion of how to achieve the unity of this multitude beyond vague stuff about "identifying pivotal actors" and cross pollination of ideas. I was pleasantly surprised that the sole anarchist speaker chose to present a paper on Althusser's critique of historicism (after the requisite denunciations of Althusser's "Stalinism" and wife murder) which I found fairly interesting, really should read more Althusser.

Thus ends my tedious summary of the first day of this conference. Tomorrow Jodi Dean is up as well as a couple of other talks, perhaps it will prove more interesting.

Edited by pescalune ()

#6890
Post rating: +
Negri seems like the theory equivalent of stock images of business meetings.
#6891
Post rating: +
the effort westerner "thinkers" put into distorting theory in order to be able to include parasites in some sort of nebulous revolutionary entity is very inspiring imo
#6892
Post rating: +

pescalune posted:

Huh. Turns out Negri doesn't actually speak a word of English. I suppose it was somewhat Anglo-Centric of me to assume he would. Unfortunately that also meant an absolutely excruciating lecture for him that took an hour and 20 minutes since they had to translate everything he said paragraph by paragraph, only time at the end for a few questions. I'm sure I missed much while I struggled to stay awake as him and his translator droned on. The topic was supposed to be why we need to "Return to Marx" and well...I didn't understand what the fuck his rambling explanation was much of the time, but it didn't seem like there was much reason to return to Marx at all. There was certainly some babble about the Multitude and the commons and how the working class has changed and the service economy. Someone raised the question of how the Multitude applies to say China where there is an enormous industrial working class, to which he rather weakly replied "while there is a large working class the situation has changed considerably in the past decade" without real elaboration. Said that he thinks old Leninist marxism is stuck in 1917, and the USSR hampered the global revolution by refusing to take into account changes in the composition of the working class. He concluded with "the party form as the communists practiced is dead, and social democracy is shit". Well, at least we could agree on something. I stole his pizza later as revenge.

Other two talks I attended were pretty much the same sort of blather. Explanations for why the Precariat, the Multitude etc were the new revolutionary class. And unyielding obsession with "the commons", "the square" and "spaces" as sites of resistance, as if the mere presence of people in a place constituted revolution. Analysis of how generation was one of the new "modalities in which class is lived". Absolutely no concrete notion of how to achieve the unity of this multitude beyond vague stuff about "identifying pivotal actors" and cross pollination of ideas. I was pleasantly surprised that the sole anarchist speaker chose to present a paper on Althusser's critique of historicism (after the requisite denunciations of Althusser's "Stalinism" and wife murder) which I found fairly interesting, really should read more Althusser.

Thus ends my tedious summary of the first day of this conference. Tomorrow Jodi Dean is up as well as a couple of other talks, perhaps it will prove more interesting.


the important question here is, what kind of pizza does negri like?

#6893
[account deactivated]
#6894
[account deactivated]
#6895
Post rating: ~
did you win
#6896
mt.real
Post rating: +

AZ_IZ_OT posted:

someone started a fight with me because I insulted them over their unwillingness to sell me beer during nyc’s sunday morning dry hours


nootropic-fueled aggression training is working out i see

#6897
Post rating: +

toyotathon posted:

gf overheard the whitest shit tonight. someone's bright idea to get around a drug patent by setting up a drug manufacturing plant on an indian reservation, since it's international territory. legal arbitrage + FDI + indian parasitism. be on the lookout! lurking whites with dumb ideas are everywhere.


needless to say it's also laughably wrong/naive, federal jurisdiction into indian country is totally unimpeded because how the fuck wouldn't it be given basic history

#6898
[account deactivated]
#6899
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +

toyotathon posted:

gf overheard the whitest shit tonight. someone's bright idea to get around a drug patent by setting up a drug manufacturing plant on an indian reservation, since it's international territory. legal arbitrage + FDI + indian parasitism. be on the lookout! lurking whites with dumb ideas are everywhere.



*scrolls down to thirdplace's next post so hard my mouse explodes into shrapnel*

#6900
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +

AZ_IZ_OT posted:

someone started a fight with me because I insulted them over their unwillingness to sell me beer during nyc’s sunday morning dry hours



buy them an account

#6901
Ireland
Post rating: +
Oh, just realised I never summarized the rest of that dull conference. Jodi Dean had an hour long rant about how identity politics is bad and people should just treat each other as comrades in the movement. Somehow the mere act of solidarity and calling someone a comrade would be enough, though there was a bunch of Lacanian psychobabble mixed in there so perhaps I misunderstood the thrust of her argument. Still, odd stuff. After that I was sick of hearing about Europe and Amerika so I went to one of only 2 talks about the entire rest of the globe, about the history of socialism in Guyana which was actually fairly interesting.

Io, it was a totally plain mini pizza, tasted like shit. Easier to swallow then Empire at least

Since then, Ireland has it's big Abortion referendum coming up in 2 weeks so been knocking on doors for the incredibly liberal campaign. Probably gonna pass but it'll be close.

Edited by pescalune ()

#6902
Post rating: +

pescalune posted:

there was a bunch of Lacanian psychobabble mixed in there so perhaps I misunderstood the thrust of her argument


I think you can be confident you got the whole thing

#6903
[account deactivated]
#6904
Post rating: +
#6905
[account deactivated]
#6906
[account deactivated]
#6907
Post rating: +
I’m getting settled in at my fish selling job... and no one wants the tails of the fillets! It’s so wasteful and it pisses me off. No pinbones! it’s just as good!! JUst don’t cook it as long you dummies! Some people have a problem with salmon bellies too which is insane to me. That’s like the best part of the fillet
#6908
Poronto
Post rating: ~
gordon ramsay website has no recipes for that disgusting crap
#6909
Post rating: +
I got some temporary work washing dishes at a resort for a month, which'll be good for travelling in the summer. I'm not paying anything for accommodation but I do know they charge people for it in the staff house. Also apparently two weeks ago they started introducing charges for the evening dinner, which used to be free. Not only is that bogus on a principled level, but the result is that hardly anyone now eats the dinner, even though it's cheap, because who wants to pay? So where everyone used to socialize in the evening for dinner now hardly anyone does unless they're doing so intentionally. If I was staying here longer I'd think about doing something about it, but I've never actually done any organizing anyone and the prospect when you're actually confronted with it seems really difficult and awkward, something I know I have to get over in the future.
#6910
[account deactivated]
#6911
Black Belt
Post rating: ~
Saved a strawberry bush in an overgrown plantbed and stuck a black raspberry bush next to it. Gonna have a frontyard of berries! Also in MELI now so I'm pretty excited.
#6912
Post rating: ~
we're gonna have so many saskatoons again this year i am so pumped
#6913
[account deactivated]
#6914
Post rating: ~
german forests have been managed for centuries but i get it
#6915
Post rating: +
my dad was a forester for a while and the more i think about it i should have done exactly what he did
#6916
Post rating: +
ive been reading 'paradise found: nature in america at the time of discovery' recently, and there was an anecdote in that about how the early british settlers went a bit mad because of the abundance of trees, and started making everything humanly possible out of wood, even things that wouldn't be made that way in britain
#6917
Post rating: ~

stegosaurus posted:

my dad was a forester for a while and the more i think about it i should have done exactly what he did


#6918
Post rating: ~
i love felling trees with a big chainsaw, when they hit the ground they go wumph and the earth shakes,
#6919
Post rating: ~

tears posted:

when they hit the ground they go wumph and the earth shakes,


TOO EASY, JOKE OMITTED

#6920
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +++++
Went on a date with someone, about whom i had not known, but they mentioned it right away, that their dad is a cop and brother was in the army and just got back from Korea. I asked if the brother spoke good Korean and they said no, not a word. I said that's pretty disrespectful, if you're gonna be in Korea, yknow, you gotta speak Korean. They didn't like that joke, even though I really committed to it for a few rounds, which was a problem because that is my most amicable troop related material. Needless to say, we have been happily marrie dfor 50 years