#16161
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n17/adam-tooze/tempestuous-seasons

Interesting argument about the goal of Keynesian being to stave off revolution. Things it suggests about its relationship with recent Bonapartism is disturbing to say the least.
#16162
i get pissed off when people reduce author intentionality to "sincere vs ironic" especially in regards to Machiavelli

here at tHE rHizzonE that sense of liminality is palpable
#16163

Caesura109 posted:

Yeah, that's basically a summation of how finance at major banks like QIB works.



you showed a lot of grace not jumping down someone's throat for trying to lecture you on it... don't know if that's very rhizzone but the effort is appreciated

#16164
[account deactivated]
#16165

marimite posted:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n17/adam-tooze/tempestuous-seasonsInteresting argument about the goal of Keynesian being to stave off revolution. Things it suggests about its relationship with recent Bonapartism is disturbing to say the least.



Just realized, it's going to be cool as hell when the left is blackmailed into supporting bailouts for the stock market.

#16166
Have you guys seen this:
https://samkriss.com/
#16167

When I die, they’ll bury me deep in the ground.



with a good shovel, no less

#16168

ilmdge posted:

Have you guys seen this:
https://samkriss.com/



appears to be Idiot Joy Showland the weblog of disgraced former tHE r H i z z o n E poster “deadken” aka Sam Kriss, a site made famous through biting send-ups of its material by Internet superstar “tpaine”

#16169
it seems there's been a new post. here's a teaser:

A rich kid's manifesto
by Sam Kriss

Not too long after the election, I was walking downtown on 6th Avenue in Manhattan (I can spend my life permanently on vacation because my parents are rich) when I passed a sign, frosted into the window of a fast-casual Mexican chain restaurant, that said ‘Queso at Chipotle: not fake news.’

That sign reminded me that my parents are rich.

To say that everything is political is no longer an insurrectionary act, not now that everything really is. I evaluate actions based on their potential to make me seem like a cool rebel, and disdain them when that novelty wears off. Every swollen mosquito of a transnational corporation has a codified set of progressive values. Every conversation in pubs or coffee shops ends up being about politics. Every online dating service promises to pair you with some stranger who shares your opinions or will fight you over them; the pretence that you’re in it for something as absurd as sex is just a euphemistic fiction. Another euphemistic fiction was my gimmick of pretending to be a feminist before sexually assaulting women. How are you meant to deal with the unacceptable politics of your extended kin at Christmas? I cannot perceive of any political consequence worse than an awkward conversation because my parents are rich. Let some bright-eyed bores help you, with their handy online guides. Read my blog about politics. Family dinners everywhere now follow the same messy form: two scripted one-person performance pieces trying to share a single stage, a discordance kaleidoscoped into infinity. Children, I hear, are constantly offering wise pronouncements on the state of the world, castigating the stupidity of our leaders in ways that seem strangely un-childlike, with none of the good sharp mockery of a playground insult, but judicious, rooted firmly in good morals and good policy. They ought to be talking about my wise pronouncements instead. ‘Liberating ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost – a form of blackmail and ultimatum.’ Chicken sandwiches, sports shoes, coffee machines, craft supplies, burritos, and sitcoms are political, sold politically, consumed or not consumed politically. Music videos are political. The personal is political.

Not for me though. I don't understand sexual boundaries and my parents are rich.

As a performative Marxist, I'm long accustomed to the practice of describing everything with lugubrious overwrought metaphors to make myself sound smarter. Domination with its leprous grimace, bubbling away under a blank façade of mere social life. I find the hidden propaganda in films and TV because enjoying things at face value is for the proles; the material basis of history; the networks of social relations that dominate our lives in the workplace, in the streets, or in the bedroom. Everything that parades itself to the senses is a crust over the deep subterranean well of the political. Once the political nature of things is made overt, we’ve been announcing for decades, we will all be one step closer to being free.

The well has become a geyser now, and I have never been further from my freedom. I got called out as a sex pest and my parents are rich.

Walter Benjamin wrote that fascism is the aestheticisation of politics, and communism politicises art. Well, we’ve politicised art; every glue-gun assemblage of hunched material, every glorified mirror in mixed or digital media, declares itself as an affront to Trexit and Brump. I'm not aware of any other frontiers of political struggle because my parents are rich. But where’s our communism?

It would be foolish to assume not only that there’s still something more profound beneath it all, but that what lies beneath is still more politics.

Today, to abandon the world of politics is the last, the only, and the truest political act. My parents are rich.
#16170
damn, he didnt just rape women, he also raped the world of politics, what a political act, what a hero
#16171
houellebecq got married again. may he find happiness.
#16172

shriekingviolet posted:

every glue-gun assemblage of hunched material



lol

#16173
ahahah i thought that entire post was a parody and not just a minor edit
#16174
a lifes work that reads like godspeed you black emperor liner notes
#16175

kinch posted:

ahahah i thought that entire post was a parody and not just a minor edit


#16176

kinch posted:

ahahah i thought that entire post was a parody and not just a minor edit


i was gonna say it was a bit longer than it needed to be. lol

#16177
Sam Kriss detonator semtex credible target u-238 plutonium pakistan islamabad training explosives nuclear fission reaction
#16178
I really hate the Sam Krisses of the world.
#16179
I’ve finally started reading FNFI and it’s quite good. I will say our friends in the USSR are coming off pretty problematic so far. More principled critiques of soviet international policy from actual anti imperialists are in pretty short supply so this has been rather eye opening, having not been very familiar with Sino Soviet relations before.
#16180

rolaids posted:

More principled critiques of soviet international policy from actual anti imperialists are in pretty short supply



i've posted this a bunch already but the espresso stalinist has a ton of articles on all kinds of revisionism. more on the soviet union here: https://espressostalinist.com/marxism-leninism-versus-revisionism/soviet-revisionism/

#16181
also, that site posted this quote which made me laugh a bit:

Molotov on Mao
Posted on August 13, 2018

“How did you like Mao Tse-tung?

He offered us tea. And he talked about meeting Stalin and when it would be convenient….Stalin hadn’t received him for some days after he arrived. Stalin told me, “Go and see what sort of fellow he is.” He stayed at Stalin’s dacha Blizhniya.

I talked with Mao and then suggested to Stalin that he receive him. He was a clever man, a peasant leader, a kind of Chinese Pugachev. He was far from a Marxist, of course–he confessed to me that he had never read Marx’s Das Kapital.

Only heroes could read Das Kapital. When I was in Mongolia talking with the Chinese ambassador–he was nice to me–I said, “You want to create a metals industry quickly, but the measures you have planned–backyard blast furnaces–are improbable and won’t work.” I criticized the Chinese, and our people reproved me later. But it was such obvious stupidity!…Backyard blast furnaces to produce worthless metals–nonsense.”

– Felix Chuev, “Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics” (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), p. 81.
#16182

Synergy posted:

rolaids posted:

More principled critiques of soviet international policy from actual anti imperialists are in pretty short supply

i've posted this a bunch already but the espresso stalinist has a ton of articles on all kinds of revisionism. more on the soviet union here: https://espressostalinist.com/marxism-leninism-versus-revisionism/soviet-revisionism/


Sorry, I should've been more clear. espresso stalinist has a lot of the Hoxhist antirevisionism that I am familiar with, but FNFI is attack the USSRs international policy at the very early stages, ie in China during the mid 20s on through, during the early Stalin era and perhaps even under Lenin, ie, the appointment of Mikhail Borodin, Wang Ming, etc.

#16183
who remembers? molotov remembers.
#16184
i just finished bad blood: secrets & lies in a silicon valley startup.. awaiting the theranos-style expose of elon musk now, i also started stars in my pocket like grains of sand, which is a cool queer sci-fi book
#16185
http://chuangcn.org/journal/two/an-adequate-state/
#16186

marimite posted:

http://chuangcn.org/journal/two/an-adequate-state/


This is interesting, but the presentation is a bit off. The way this is translated and written up makes it seem like the author is just having a conversation with themselves.

#16187
it's a little bit weird but extremely informative. for a while now i've been aware that China has left the "socialist road" through a mixed economy but i didn't realize the CCP had become that corrupted with capitalist intergration. the conversation suggests it's in the initial stages of becoming an imperialist superpower which is really depressing.
#16188
When Crow comes back to this forum he's going to kick people into the sky and kick them again in midair like Neo from the matrix.
#16189

Synergy posted:

it's in the initial stages of becoming an imperialist superpower



this combination of words is meaningless

#16190
fyi the cpi(maoist) put out a document analysing china recently and their conclusion is that china has become a social imperialist power (note that i havent read the thing in full myself and i dont know if im really qualified to assess their claims anyway): http://www.revaim.org/uploads/booklets/China%20-%20A%20Modern%20Social-Imperialist%20Power.pdf
#16191
There was a lot that was interesting in that interview but the framing is all wrong. Besides the silly conclusion about "20th century movements," the idea that Maoism and SoEs make capitalism stronger because they are in its long term interests makes no sense. People sort of half ass talk about "state capitalism" or if they are really serious try to analyze modern China in relation to 70s South Korea or even Taiwan. But ideology and capitalism itself are not so malleable. Every attempt at state backed capitalist development has been explicitly anti-communist and had far less power than China does over the market. They also were basically allowed to scceed by becoming junior partners in imperialism and given a ton of money and market access. A state capitalism that resembles China would be something entirely different, which is why on the most essential question after rightly skewering leftists outside the CCP has no answer: what do the 1.3 billion Chinese people who aren't part of this great capitalist coup think? All he can say is they have no thoughts. This is the typical problem one runs into with anti-communism from the left. If China or North Korea are so successful at suppressing dissent that there is no resistance, why doesn't every regime follow their lead? This guy instead offers a model of decentralized control and passive acquiescence but at the expense of any working class consciousness at all. At least liberals like to fantasize that the Chinese working class is just waiting to be liberated, something ironically closer to a Marxist conception of class consciousness. Liberals too are closer to Marx since the idea of state capitalism makes no sense, the person being intervened does not advocate it but has no real explanation for what Chinese capitalism is or how it went from mass socialism to capitalism (notice the cultural revolution gets a single line where it is basically dismissed for Trotskyism). I started reading that website because it seemed much more interesting than the usual debates but I've been increasingly disappointed with the derivative nature of ultraleftist "analysis," even in the veneer of area specialization, not to speak of its reactionary core. I'll check out that CPIM doc, maybe it'll be better than ultraleftism or parroting Xi.

Edited by babyhueypnewton ()

#16192
there is a new magazine being created called "commune" which is going to focus on the ultraleft radical chic stuff but in 'accessible' 'popular' style. hopefully it will cause some sort of interact from jacobin. as it seems though i don't think they are going to have full-time staff or anything so they might just start a bunch of twitter beefs (which i don't understand)
#16193

babyhueypnewton posted:

on the most essential question after rightly skewering leftists outside the CCP has no answer: what do the 1.3 billion Chinese people who aren't part of this great capitalist coup think? All he can say is they have no thoughts.


This is what I mean when I say it seems like the authors' interview with themselves. They have either genuinely found, or otherwise imagined, a Chinese labor activist who mostly agrees with their position, to the point that he has the same lack of regard for the actual thoughts and feelings of the Chinese proletariat.

It is the same attitude they betray in their self-introduction in the first issue of their journal:

http://chuangcn.org/journal/one/a-thousand-li/ posted:

Chuang is a collective of communists who consider the “China question” to be of central relevance to the contradictions of the world’s economic system and the potentials for its overcoming. For us, this question is not primarily historical. Our interest has little to do with the professed socialism of a country run by a “Communist Party” left over from the peasant wars of last century. Instead, the question raised by China is founded in the present. As a lynchpin in global production networks, Chinese crises threaten the capitalist system in a way that crises elsewhere do not. A bottoming-out in China would signal a truly systemic crisis in which the overcoming of capitalism may again become the horizon of popular struggles.


That China is not really communist is taken as a given; that it is circling the economic toilet bowl is not only assumed but hoped for. What is the difference between this position and that of western financial press over the last decade?

#16194
china is pursuing brocialism with balding characteristics
#16195
chairman jason statham
#16196
all of this china talk and no one bothered to mention that as of like yesterday the PRC is officially 69 years old. need to step up our game
#16197
thats the sex number lol
#16198
[account deactivated]
#16199
[account deactivated]
#16200

Caesura109 posted:

English poetry is yuck, getting into Arabic poetry, way more fun to memorize and pronounce



English poetry has been handicapped for centuries because nothing rhymes