tears
tears
Post rating:
+
marx wrote his dissertation on Democritus (The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature) Democritus was the so called first theorist of the atom (his founding role is yet another established fact in science); but guess who taught democritus, yep, u guessed it
shoulda looked deeper marx, couldnt break outta man history
shoulda looked deeper marx, couldnt break outta man history
Constantignoble
Constantignoble
Post rating:
+
same with Diotima vis-a-vis Socrates
from Mary Ellen Waithe's History of Women Philosophers books, i understand ancient women philosophers you never hear about also had fuckin sick names like Arete and Axiothea and Mechtild and Hadewych and Roswitha
from Mary Ellen Waithe's History of Women Philosophers books, i understand ancient women philosophers you never hear about also had fuckin sick names like Arete and Axiothea and Mechtild and Hadewych and Roswitha
serafiym
serafiym
Post rating:
+
I've been coming back to this book every few weeks for the past few months now, and I still can't wrap my head around the idea that the lumpen can be defined just by theft. If that was the case what differentiates any position that extracts surplus value from the definition of lumpen? If it's illegal theft we're talking about, then why are we including pigs and death merchants in all of their state-backed decadence in the list?
The newest development on this question for me is when I researched the history of slavery, particularly landowning classes and their waxing/waning role in the state. It introduced me to the idea of competing methods of organizing production, namely the historical dynamics between slavery, serfdom and tenant farming, compared to a system of wage labor (the pinnacle of 'free' labor). Co-class rule was very common in the days where this was inciting revolutions and violence, and in places like Brazil the settler-colonial landowners won out but accepted the Republican reforms, going onto become the first proper monopolist bourgeois in Brazil instead of the petty-bourgeois urban guys who started off the Republican movement in the first place. That was in this essay: https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.jstor.org/stable/2162955 "Hahn, S. (1990). Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective"
So this got me thinking. What if we could make a materialist analysis that the "lumpen" category can fall under people involved in production or distribution at odds with the legality of the state, but similar to political-economic fractures in the ruling-class, open to constant flux? We see this in the organized cartels of South America where they exert state influence over several local areas but also over the government in league with the pigs. There's constant assassinations, conspiracies, crises, etc over this stuff, an obvious solidification of lumpen cartel power, just as what happened in Brazil or the American South with export-reliant landowners. But what I think applies a lot to Sakai's analysis that the stick-up guy isn't going to give much of a shit about anyone else is that the lumpen is comprised of multiple ways of production and sustaining someone's life (what's a good word for the doppelganger of employment?): outright slavery in places like Libya, prostitution (which we all agree isn't parasitic), small-time drug harvesting that people sell to the cartels for processing, robbers that need commodities or money, etc. It's a myriad of different things. I think if you look at it this way, it gets passed the pejorative overtones of the word that aren't useful and looks at the lumpen realm as reflections of production, surplus value extraction, primitive accumulation even, etc. With this I would disagree that pigs and etc are lumpen but very often when lumpen organizations are useful they can fuse together like narcostates or the Blackstone Rangers. They both make their money differently and fuse with the state on completely different levels, but they're dominant enough in their conditions for self-assertion.
If any of you have ideas or criticisms of this I wanna hear them.
The newest development on this question for me is when I researched the history of slavery, particularly landowning classes and their waxing/waning role in the state. It introduced me to the idea of competing methods of organizing production, namely the historical dynamics between slavery, serfdom and tenant farming, compared to a system of wage labor (the pinnacle of 'free' labor). Co-class rule was very common in the days where this was inciting revolutions and violence, and in places like Brazil the settler-colonial landowners won out but accepted the Republican reforms, going onto become the first proper monopolist bourgeois in Brazil instead of the petty-bourgeois urban guys who started off the Republican movement in the first place. That was in this essay: https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.jstor.org/stable/2162955 "Hahn, S. (1990). Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective"
So this got me thinking. What if we could make a materialist analysis that the "lumpen" category can fall under people involved in production or distribution at odds with the legality of the state, but similar to political-economic fractures in the ruling-class, open to constant flux? We see this in the organized cartels of South America where they exert state influence over several local areas but also over the government in league with the pigs. There's constant assassinations, conspiracies, crises, etc over this stuff, an obvious solidification of lumpen cartel power, just as what happened in Brazil or the American South with export-reliant landowners. But what I think applies a lot to Sakai's analysis that the stick-up guy isn't going to give much of a shit about anyone else is that the lumpen is comprised of multiple ways of production and sustaining someone's life (what's a good word for the doppelganger of employment?): outright slavery in places like Libya, prostitution (which we all agree isn't parasitic), small-time drug harvesting that people sell to the cartels for processing, robbers that need commodities or money, etc. It's a myriad of different things. I think if you look at it this way, it gets passed the pejorative overtones of the word that aren't useful and looks at the lumpen realm as reflections of production, surplus value extraction, primitive accumulation even, etc. With this I would disagree that pigs and etc are lumpen but very often when lumpen organizations are useful they can fuse together like narcostates or the Blackstone Rangers. They both make their money differently and fuse with the state on completely different levels, but they're dominant enough in their conditions for self-assertion.
If any of you have ideas or criticisms of this I wanna hear them.
Edited by serafiym ()
babyhueypnewton
babyhueypnewton
Post rating:
+
I just read this essay
https://nacla.org/news/2019/06/05/outsourcing-repression
About para-state violence in Colombia and Brazil and thought of similar things. The essay itself is pretty basic so you won't get much from it but the question of lumpen-state collaboration and settler violence in general has me thinking about how useless the Weberian definition of the state is, something basically all anarchists and many Marxists take as given. This also gets into unsatisfaction with the Benjaminian concept of the law as state-making and state-preserving violence (obviously an expansion of Weber).
In Weber's case, the definition is pointless and very misleading, since the only way it can describe how the state actually functions in a colonial context is if the core of the definition is on legitimacy and not violence, but then the point is to explain legitimacy which is a question of class hegemony rather than a monopoly of violence, a more productive starting point. How can we talk about a monopoly of violence in Colombia when the state not only relies on paramilitaries for its very survival but even gives them an economic function in a whole international network of semi-legal drug trade which is nevertheless indispensable for functioning of imperialism (to the point where the president of the leader of the core state sets himself up against the law)?
Legitimacy/hegemony allows us to speak about a constellation of forces which are rooted in the interests of the capitalist mode of production but are not directly involved in production itself (the state). The function of violence only comes back on partial form, since while it is ultimately the foundation of these forces, we can't abstract away the ideological state apparatuses so easily. I'm wary of theories that minimize the violence at the foundation of the state and think western bourgeois republics are somehow not applicable to Leninism but the reverse idea, that only legal violence constitutes the state, is easily outflanked by fascists who can forward their own violence as the essence of the nation against the state while the left is forced to defend the state's monopoly as is happened in India and the left's impotent attempts to beat back the RSS. A lot of this is simply the refusal to imagine a mass base of reaction by socialists and imagine the violence of the law as some ideological structure that can be broken through propaganda rather than something eagerly applied without ideological coercion by a whole class alliance of lumpen/settlers/labor aristocracy/petty-bourgeois.
As for Benjamin, it's not that he's wrong, but needs to be complemented. Settlers are not an extension of the law, in fact they are often opposed to the law because it gets in the way of the state's justice. Hence lynching, cowboy revenge fantasies, or even settler rebellions/coup d'etats. But they are am extension of the justice of the law, or the originary violence of the law as a permanent state of exception. I'm not comfortable with those terms yet since I'm thinking of an essay by Derrida where he makes the law/justice separation and the erasure of the latter by the former and then defends justice against law. Any black man subject to the white man's "justice" after a court trial came to the "wrong" conclusion knows there's nothing inherently liberatory about justice as long as capitalist imperialism remains, Marx's critique of Kant applies just as well to today's idealists. And of course Agamben, babyfinland's favorite philosopher, is just a copy of Heidegger's fascism without the courage of political commitment, I don't care for any theory of law which unifies the rupture of capitalism and all other historical forms which in appearance have law and the state.
For a while people thought about this with Hezbollah and some future where non-state actors hollow out the state and exceed it along with leftover naivete about the Zapatistas. That utopian dream is gone and I doubt anyone would argue that given the centrality of the nation state in Syria and the cynical usage of such ideas by American imperialism and the YPG. But the problem of violence simultaneously against the law and necessary to consitute its reproduction remains, at least in situations where the clear terms of the nation state against international imperialism are not in the table.
The entirety of "western Marxism" was a reaction against the idea of the state as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, expressed through violence and repression. Western Marxism failed, easily outflanked by neoliberalism abandoning the hegemonic functions of the state and the right presenting itself as the only force opposed to neoliberalism, and today's politics call for a return to a crude emphasis on repressive violence. I think the lumpen and settlers are good starting points to overcome the Western Marxist impasse and bring violence, legitimacy, and law back into an economic class which act as the shock troops of the law's justice, a fair way to describe how police have become the legal lynchers of the post-civil rights era.
https://nacla.org/news/2019/06/05/outsourcing-repression
About para-state violence in Colombia and Brazil and thought of similar things. The essay itself is pretty basic so you won't get much from it but the question of lumpen-state collaboration and settler violence in general has me thinking about how useless the Weberian definition of the state is, something basically all anarchists and many Marxists take as given. This also gets into unsatisfaction with the Benjaminian concept of the law as state-making and state-preserving violence (obviously an expansion of Weber).
In Weber's case, the definition is pointless and very misleading, since the only way it can describe how the state actually functions in a colonial context is if the core of the definition is on legitimacy and not violence, but then the point is to explain legitimacy which is a question of class hegemony rather than a monopoly of violence, a more productive starting point. How can we talk about a monopoly of violence in Colombia when the state not only relies on paramilitaries for its very survival but even gives them an economic function in a whole international network of semi-legal drug trade which is nevertheless indispensable for functioning of imperialism (to the point where the president of the leader of the core state sets himself up against the law)?
Legitimacy/hegemony allows us to speak about a constellation of forces which are rooted in the interests of the capitalist mode of production but are not directly involved in production itself (the state). The function of violence only comes back on partial form, since while it is ultimately the foundation of these forces, we can't abstract away the ideological state apparatuses so easily. I'm wary of theories that minimize the violence at the foundation of the state and think western bourgeois republics are somehow not applicable to Leninism but the reverse idea, that only legal violence constitutes the state, is easily outflanked by fascists who can forward their own violence as the essence of the nation against the state while the left is forced to defend the state's monopoly as is happened in India and the left's impotent attempts to beat back the RSS. A lot of this is simply the refusal to imagine a mass base of reaction by socialists and imagine the violence of the law as some ideological structure that can be broken through propaganda rather than something eagerly applied without ideological coercion by a whole class alliance of lumpen/settlers/labor aristocracy/petty-bourgeois.
As for Benjamin, it's not that he's wrong, but needs to be complemented. Settlers are not an extension of the law, in fact they are often opposed to the law because it gets in the way of the state's justice. Hence lynching, cowboy revenge fantasies, or even settler rebellions/coup d'etats. But they are am extension of the justice of the law, or the originary violence of the law as a permanent state of exception. I'm not comfortable with those terms yet since I'm thinking of an essay by Derrida where he makes the law/justice separation and the erasure of the latter by the former and then defends justice against law. Any black man subject to the white man's "justice" after a court trial came to the "wrong" conclusion knows there's nothing inherently liberatory about justice as long as capitalist imperialism remains, Marx's critique of Kant applies just as well to today's idealists. And of course Agamben, babyfinland's favorite philosopher, is just a copy of Heidegger's fascism without the courage of political commitment, I don't care for any theory of law which unifies the rupture of capitalism and all other historical forms which in appearance have law and the state.
For a while people thought about this with Hezbollah and some future where non-state actors hollow out the state and exceed it along with leftover naivete about the Zapatistas. That utopian dream is gone and I doubt anyone would argue that given the centrality of the nation state in Syria and the cynical usage of such ideas by American imperialism and the YPG. But the problem of violence simultaneously against the law and necessary to consitute its reproduction remains, at least in situations where the clear terms of the nation state against international imperialism are not in the table.
The entirety of "western Marxism" was a reaction against the idea of the state as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, expressed through violence and repression. Western Marxism failed, easily outflanked by neoliberalism abandoning the hegemonic functions of the state and the right presenting itself as the only force opposed to neoliberalism, and today's politics call for a return to a crude emphasis on repressive violence. I think the lumpen and settlers are good starting points to overcome the Western Marxist impasse and bring violence, legitimacy, and law back into an economic class which act as the shock troops of the law's justice, a fair way to describe how police have become the legal lynchers of the post-civil rights era.
blinkandwheeze
blinkandwheeze
Post rating:
+
babyhueypnewton posted:As for Benjamin, it's not that he's wrong, but needs to be complemented. Settlers are not an extension of the law, in fact they are often opposed to the law because it gets in the way of the state's justice. Hence lynching, cowboy revenge fantasies, or even settler rebellions/coup d'etats. But they are am extension of the justice of the law, or the originary violence of the law as a permanent state of exception.
i think you're misunderstanding benjamin here by conflating him with weberian notions of state-making/state-preserving violence rather than benjamin's law-making/law-preserving. you're missing that benjamin already clearly accounts for what you're talking about, "law-making" violence is specifically identified as contrary to state-preserving violence and defined by criminal activity, strikes & rebellions, the extra-legal norms of warfare etc. & presents these forms are an extension of the originary violence of law in contradiction to the judicial-legal norms of the state. benjamin very clearly makes this distinction already that you're alleging is absent, which is why he's careful to talk about law rather than concerning himself strictly with the considerations of statecraft like weber
blinkandwheeze
blinkandwheeze
Post rating:
+
benjamin doesn't present law-making & law-preserving violence as homogenous but rather as frequently in contradiction to each other, something that enforces a crisis of legitimacy in the state, which seeks to present itself as adhering to universal norms of jurisprudence while denying & disavowing the extra-legal violence which grounds its sovereignty. which in turn empowers the further extra-legal violence of social currents that rightfully see themselves as acting in greater fidelity to the originary grounds of national sovereignty than the legal norms of the state itself, and its pretence of abstract & absolute principles of universal jurisprudence & administration that are used to justify its law-preserving violence
blinkandwheeze
blinkandwheeze
Post rating:
+
which is also why benjamin isn't just an anarchist, or simply repeating the standard anarchist mythology of the foundation of the state, because he recognises anarchist "revolutionary" violence is law-making in its own right
babyhueypnewton
babyhueypnewton
Post rating:
+
thanks, that's helpful, I'm trying to wrap my head around the law/justice separation, which as you imply is usually an anarchist statement about the inability of the law to capture justice or the infinite potentiality of justice's individuality against the rigid and structurally determined universality of law. How anarchists deal with the lawlessness of the frontier I'm not sure, presumably in the same way they deal with the forced conscription and informal hierarchies of anarchist experiments: by ignoring them. Marxist theorists of law are basically all anarchists these days though, the only ones who even talk about "socialist legality" are Chinese legal theorists and they merely take bourgeois legal norms at face value.
[account deactivated]
[account deactivated]
[account deactivated]
serafiym
serafiym
Post rating:
+
Surprised I never posted this bit of information to this thread Toyot. Essentially this goes into how several Florida police departments used theft to line bonus paychecks and better gear through asset forfeiture programs. Then they most likely used a lot of that start-up cash to work with cartels or scam them for even more money.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2015/07/10/florida-cops-laundered-millions-for-drug-cartels-failed-to-make-a-single-arrest/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2015/07/10/florida-cops-laundered-millions-for-drug-cartels-failed-to-make-a-single-arrest/
Gssh
Gssh
Post rating:
+
from stories i've been told this same program has also been used for seizing property in traditionally black innercity neighborhoods and formed backbone of 'gentrification' process in certain areas. it's not even large scale criminal assets that get seized e.g. a teenager living with their grandmother gets arrested for dealing weed which results in their home being seized.
[account deactivated]