shriekingviolet posted:combative overconfident organicist dude out of nowhere was really fun for me, tbh
perhaps the only noob strat worse than rolling with the punches
he came to turkey for a lecture after the gezi "protests" along with zizek and they both were extremely disappointing (badiou was worse than zizek fwiw lol)
the book i posted from is more about love than politics (though he draws a link between them). i don't think he's really useful to read to find anything out about politics, though it does tickle me that he's a celebrity intellectual in france given his politics
c_man posted:badiou isnt bad because he's french, hes bad because he's a university prof whose goal is pushing paper. its correct that the activity of people organizing is influenced by what they read but that doesn't make the people who write it any more radical than what whatever financial times reports describe precisely how much blood jeff bezos is banking per second
again, this lumping together of everyone under a single stereotype just doesn't work. it's not grounded in facts. what badiou writes is influenced by his organizing; his goal has been "pushing paper" in the sense of the sans-papiers
when badiou was getting revved up with that, zizek was running for the presidency of slovenia on a right-wing ticket. do people see why equating the two doesn't work?
sovnarkoman posted:i m not sure if badiou has good content, at least among the stuff mentioned some pages ago. the "blah blah is communism" angle he keeps driving seems, to my untrained eyes, to be a symptom of the lack of any revolutionary basis among the french labor aristocracy
what is your basis for arguing that this is the main thrust of his work (it's not, not even close) or that a guy physically devoted to the cause of undocumented people in France draws his politics from the "French labor aristocracy", from which the sans-papiers are excluded not only by law, but by direct intimidation and violence?
c_man posted:its the same problem as the monthly review. neither are particularly involved with any socialist organizing beyond the odd pronouncement about national or international politics. they have content that's valuable but describing them as having any sort of responsibility for socialist organizing is missing the whole point
my dude. badiou is literally a socialist organizer
if you instead ignore what writers do or don't do, cherry-pick quotes out of context and come at that, even, with the cynical assumption that every philosophical writer in or greatly informed by the communist school is a twee, elitist dilettante, you will more than likely become one yourself, in the same way that people who obsessively accuse their opponents of logical fallacies tend to mangle their own logic, because if that's all political debate is, why not become a pure, empty opportunist?
an economism-based prejudice against philosophical writers and against writing that aspires to theory of culture, devoid of a genuine attempt to approach and understand each writer and their work or demonstrating a mere impoverished feint at the same, will also lead to devaluing and misapprehending the work of marx, engels and lenin even as you read it. you will hold them apart from other writers out of pure idealism and fail to connect what they wrote to their world and yours, or you will eventually realize that they, too, were philosophers and theorists of culture, and abandon trying to understand how or why those aspects form part of their science as that realization fills you with ignorant contempt. read some of the bitter, libelous, self-serving eulogies for the New Left written by current neo-conservatives who once counted themselves among its ranks; those mistakes were exactly theirs, and the bourgeoisie have thrown them their share of scraps for continuing to make them.
given this forum's knowledge of the rise and fall of deadken—a self-avowed dilettante whose appreciation of badiou was shot through with a cynical, wrong-headed insistence that dilettantism was all there was and, conveniently for deadken, Actually Good—i would hope we are all equipped by now with the knowledge of where that approach tends to lead people.
cars posted:sovnarkoman posted:i m not sure if badiou has good content, at least among the stuff mentioned some pages ago. the "blah blah is communism" angle he keeps driving seems, to my untrained eyes, to be a symptom of the lack of any revolutionary basis among the french labor aristocracy
what is your basis for arguing that this is the main thrust of his work (it's not, not even close) or that a guy physically devoted to the cause of undocumented people in France draws his politics from the "French labor aristocracy", from which the sans-papiers are excluded not only by law, but by direct intimidation and violence?
i concede this and confess that i act out of some allergy and lump westerners and the comprador wannabes together quite quickly. i m not angry because these people are "champagne drinking leftists" or elitist trash looking down upon the masses or something, my position is the opposite as most of the time the masses these people willingly or unwillingly represent are most of the time the top 10% of the globe, so the rot comes from the bottom and not from academia s isolated position (in fact, first worlders are as isolated and removed from the rest of the world almost as academia). for example, in "17 contradictions of capitalism", david harvey talks about rents in nyc more than like, global hunger, sweatshops etc as a reason to why we need communism and it would probably strike a chord within first worlders but, from over here, i m like, who gives a shit?
i dont know much about badiou so i ll take your word for it but "this thing, this thing is definitely communism" sort of passages weird me out for this reason. then again i am probably wrong about badiou specifically.
cars posted:c_man posted:its the same problem as the monthly review. neither are particularly involved with any socialist organizing beyond the odd pronouncement about national or international politics. they have content that's valuable but describing them as having any sort of responsibility for socialist organizing is missing the whole point
my dude. badiou is literally a socialist organizer
thats fair. i didnt know about this since it apparently never comes up in the writings of his that ive seen. having read a bit about it im not sure if this is exactly a meaningful hill for you to die on though since it appears that one of the main engagements of his in the early years of the organization includes a heartfelt defense of pol pot.
and in any case, there are plenty of people who are involved in the monthly review (which is one of the only communist publications that i read regularly and i do think it has writing that i at least find valuable) that are involved in "socialist organizing" in one form or another but its not something that is meaningfully present in the output of the magazine. instead, its a collection of articles and books aimed at academics, which will in the very best case be mildly informative and perhaps formative for people who are basically already convinced to go out and Join An Org, and will in the vast majority of cases make up a citation or ten in further academic output because those are the people who are being written to. this is the same with badiou's output and is in stark contrast with things like the communist manifesto (and capital to some extent), state and rev, as well as stuff like settlers, women race and class, etc which are explicit and direct calls to action and are designed explicitly to be assets to people in the struggle, and to the extent that they appear as a players in academic dialogues on social theory and philosophy it is at least in large part due to the effect those writings have in mobilizing people. if you're going to bat for badiou by citing the political work he does that can be so easily cleaved from the academic output which is the reason any of us know his name, then at least we can agree that that output has questionable value for people doing organizing.
edit: for clarification, i dont have a particular bone to pick with badiou, who is probably fine and i guess says some valuable things. ive been thinking about the frustrating role of nominally communist/"socialist" academic output and becoming disappointed in particular with the extent to which it's generally not informed by socialist struggle in an active way, or to the extent that it does it doesnt often produce synthetic work that would be valuable to those people. and it makes me sad.
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His problem is definitely not "defending Pol Pot" since this too is a historically situated political struggle that can't be made into a universal condemnation of "bad" people, it's that the party form for him died with the cultural revolution and May 68 (which perhaps it did in France) without any substitute. But this isn't really surprising, even those who defend the party like Jodi Dean (who as far as I know does has some peripheral involvement with communist parties in America) put it in nonsense liberal terms. Even Fredric Jameson, who is my personal favorite of the academic Marxists, used to talk about a planned socialist economy and defend the historical legacy of actually-existing socialism when the USSR existed but now is friends with the "post-Marxist" clowns like Negri and Zizek.
These people are all better than the post-colonialists I suppose, overall this is all useless. It is disturbing that as the world becomes more radical, academia hasn't followed, and in my experience academia is becoming more reactionary. The tether between academia as an institution with an internal structure and as a knowledge producing institution interested in truth is growing thinner by the day.
c_man posted:thats fair. i didnt know about this since it apparently never comes up in the writings of his that ive seen. having read a bit about it im not sure if this is exactly a meaningful hill for you to die on though since it appears that one of the main engagements of his in the early years of the organization includes a heartfelt defense of pol pot.
badiou's coming from a basically maoist background isn't he? quite a few maoist or similarly inclined orgs did support the cpk back in the day, probably because of the sino soviet split and DK's alignment with china. it seems to have been pretty easy for orgs that followed the anti soviet line of china to accept the cpk's ideas about 'vietnamese imperialism' wholesale, even though retrospectively it's difficult to take them seriously. the information i could find on this defence of his refers to an article from 1979 about the vietnamese invasion, and also says that he regrets his article as of 2012, so i think it's a bit silly to dismiss him because of it when any number of maoist orgs from the same time would have had similar lines.
lo posted:so i think it's a bit silly to dismiss him because of it when any number of maoist orgs from the same time would have had similar lines.
if you read the rest of the post i tried to make it clear that that particular thing isnt that important for what i was trying to get across
This book argues that unreasonable dogmatic beliefs are expressions of socially structured patterns of prejudice. Specifically, prejudice is explained as being produced and dispersed within the confines of the political structures governing the manner in which material human needs are created and met. Classifying various dimensions of prejudice (philosophical, epistemological, psychological, sociological, political, and cultural), the book conceptualises the relation between dogmatic thinking and these facets of human existence. Criticising and comparing a wide range of theories and factual data relating to the growth and expression of prejudice, the book is a theoretical discussion of problems surrounding the production of cultural norms, the psychological effects of filial systems and relations between the sexes, the constitution of modern capitalist society, and elementary principles of political democracy. Drawing on feminism, whiteness studies, Marxist theories of racism and imperialism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and cultural studies, the author examines the constraints placed upon individuals', groups', and nations' propensity for scientific and rational thinking.
will report back in a few months when ive found time to read it.
Petrol posted:really great article about a really bad person (warning: detailed accounts of domestic violence) http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/the-real-story-of-rapper-xxxtentacion-10410980
welp he just got executed sitting in his lamborghini. couldnt have happened to a nicer guy
Petrol posted:Petrol posted:really great article about a really bad person (warning: detailed accounts of domestic violence) http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/the-real-story-of-rapper-xxxtentacion-10410980
welp he just got executed sitting in his lamborghini. couldnt have happened to a nicer guy
that's so cool. he got to ride in a lamborghini
Petrol posted:Petrol posted:really great article about a really bad person (warning: detailed accounts of domestic violence) http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/the-real-story-of-rapper-xxxtentacion-10410980
welp he just got executed sitting in his lamborghini. couldnt have happened to a nicer guy
Is there a democrat version of stormfront, where white liberals post articles about how poor black youth from the ghetto don't live up to our moral values? And then celebrate their deaths? Because I think that's where you meant to post this.
babyhueypnewton posted:Is there a democrat version of stormfront,
lest we forget, hillaryis44.com
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Edited by Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia ()
shriekingviolet posted:babyhueypnewton posted:Is there a democrat version of stormfront,
lest we forget, hillaryis44.com
uh...shes 70
babyhueypnewton posted:Sorry, you're 100% in the wrong here and everyone can see it. This is a typical reaction when white leftists reveal they're just as racist as the people they think they're better than, and it's understandable. Never admit you're wrong, no one will let you live it down. You know that full well since that's exactly what you're doing now to me to try and abandon your racism and leave me holding the bomb.
Did you even read the article? The guy was an irredeemable piece of shit. Being black and growing up poor in no way excuses his behaviour. You might have a case to make if this was a double standard on my part, but I challenge you to go through my post history and identify when I spoken of white abusers any differently. As it stands, it just seems like you're projecting or something because your accusations have exactly nothing to do with reality
Apparently Waka Flocka told X in his DMs to read Gaddafi’s Green Book and that is the most perplexing fact to come to light in any of this today tbh. The Green Book is actually a really important & influential socialist text. This is straight from 🔥’s IG. Now I wanna know more pic.twitter.com/rfYvv6j8pM
— TayGo (@taygogo) June 19, 2018