It's not "mindfulness", either. It's the idea that it should be a net gain in calories for anyone to make an active effort to ignore the past, like, it's your own fault if you can't ignore the drain on your future dream-achieving daily energy that results from growing up working class plus you have a felony drug conviction or live with trauma and so on. And you don't even have to be in that situation, it's pretty much, if anything keeps you from acting autonomously to do whatever you want, you're doing it to yourself because you aren't acknowledging that obstacles in life are fake.
It's a solid case of a life "philosophy" where the bourgeoisie's example acts as pure poison to everyone else. At least with the current "act as dumb as new money kids and you'll suddenly become one" thing, people have the benefit of covering for stuff that drags them down by blaming whoever last pissed them off.
It's not all bad, I guess. I knew someone as a young adult who was really into Eckhart Tolle and they were pretty angry a lot of the time, which seemed weird to me at the time because of the Tolle quotes I'd seen on posters here and there, mostly because I was really still a dumb kid back then who didn't really understand the context of that person's life. But reading this book helps me kind of understand what was going on there, which is probably a good thing.
cars posted:The core idea of this Tolle book is: the past is not connected to the present. Memory is an affectation that keeps you from actualizing your full potential, and the past has no power to drain the energy you need to achieve a life goal of some sort of saturated-color vartamāna experience of the present moment. So if the repercussions of any past life event or the impact of your background are interfering with your happiness, it's because you haven't properly banished those effects with your individual mind.
It's not "mindfulness", either. It's the idea that it should be a net gain in calories for anyone to make an active effort to ignore the past, like, it's your own fault if you can't ignore the drain on your future dream-achieving daily energy that results from growing up working class plus you have a felony drug conviction or live with trauma and so on. And you don't even have to be in that situation, it's pretty much, if anything keeps you from acting autonomously to do whatever you want, you're doing it to yourself because you aren't acknowledging that obstacles in life are fake.
It's a solid case of a life "philosophy" where the bourgeoisie's example acts as pure poison to everyone else. At least with the current "act as dumb as new money kids and you'll suddenly become one" thing, people have the benefit of covering for stuff that drags them down by blaming whoever last pissed them off.
It's not all bad, I guess. I knew someone as a young adult who was really into Eckhart Tolle and they were pretty angry a lot of the time, which seemed weird to me at the time because of the Tolle quotes I'd seen on posters here and there, mostly because I was really still a dumb kid back then who didn't really understand the context of that person's life. But reading this book helps me kind of understand what was going on there, which is probably a good thing.
writing my genius philosophical masterpiece that claims the ideal life is to be the brain damaged love interest in Adam Sandler romantic comedy "50 First Dates"
Cargo cult practice is the basis for most of the hot stuff out there right now telling young people how not to be miserable. Try your best to imitate the people you envy, not at the level of personal habits or outlook, but in all the obvious surface ways that will just make you look like a desperate wannabe. Try to pretend you have the same "instincts", ignore every substantial difference between you and them that allows the people you envy to act that way and get results you yourself never will, and you'll somehow rewrite your entire life history into theirs.
The old model for self-help advice was, adopt the ten secret habits of the secretly-hard-working bourgeoisie and improve your personality into the magic one that makes money fly at you. And with the equivalents today, there's still this air of, "Here are the secrets," but it's wrapped in this contradictory pseudo-science pitch that says, "All I'm telling you are obvious things everyone knows, but like most people you're not brave or smart enough to accept them, try and prove me wrong by buying my book." And probably the biggest irony is that the easiest way to get duped by that stuff is to figure that anyone can just write a book like that too and bilk money out of people the same way.
shriekingviolet posted:writing my genius philosophical masterpiece that claims the ideal life is to be the brain damaged love interest in Adam Sandler romantic comedy "50 First Dates"
i would be extremely not surprised if the guy who wrote the script for that has bought every Eckhart Tolle book
Like, if you spent your whole life in a culture telling you you're poor because of your inferior habits, then buying books that claim they'll improve you by telling you the same thing has a certain appeal. But it's a smoother experience to go on a Web site that tells you to buy an expensive watch you can't afford to get dates, and then when that doesn't work, because women who care about expensive watches and can identify the brand on sight will never mistake you for someone who can really afford one, you start watching a YouTube channel recommended by that Web site that explains that your life sucks because women have banded together to stop you and people like you from becoming eternally happy superhumans.
dimashq posted:I have a sorta nebulous question. Does anyone have any suggestions for radical books dealing with something in the realm of bio/medical issues, anthropology, and feminism? my girlfriend wants suggestions (she is a med student and loves reading stuff about medicine) and i told her i would consult the zzone. she is getting into feminist literature (rn the second sex, and we're gonna read caliban and the witch at some point).
the book you might be looking for is one i have been on and off reading - Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology. it talks alot about medicine and anthropology and feminism. it has chapters like "american gynecology: gynocide by the holy ghosts of medicine and therapy" and "nazi medicine and american gynecology". its american radfem but it still has some good things
cars posted:The core idea of this Tolle book is: the past is not connected to the present. Memory is an affectation that keeps you from actualizing your full potential, and the past has no power to drain the energy you need to achieve a life goal of some sort of saturated-color vartamāna experience of the present moment. So if the repercussions of any past life event or the impact of your background are interfering with your happiness, it's because you haven't properly banished those effects with your individual mind.
It's not "mindfulness", either. It's the idea that it should be a net gain in calories for anyone to make an active effort to ignore the past, like, it's your own fault if you can't ignore the drain on your future dream-achieving daily energy that results from growing up working class plus you have a felony drug conviction or live with trauma and so on. And you don't even have to be in that situation, it's pretty much, if anything keeps you from acting autonomously to do whatever you want, you're doing it to yourself because you aren't acknowledging that obstacles in life are fake.
It's a solid case of a life "philosophy" where the bourgeoisie's example acts as pure poison to everyone else. At least with the current "act as dumb as new money kids and you'll suddenly become one" thing, people have the benefit of covering for stuff that drags them down by blaming whoever last pissed them off.
It's not all bad, I guess. I knew someone as a young adult who was really into Eckhart Tolle and they were pretty angry a lot of the time, which seemed weird to me at the time because of the Tolle quotes I'd seen on posters here and there, mostly because I was really still a dumb kid back then who didn't really understand the context of that person's life. But reading this book helps me kind of understand what was going on there, which is probably a good thing.
yeah, a lot of actors are Tolle devotees I think. I guess it sorta makes sense for people trying to climb the ladder socially. spiritually, I cant imagine a worse thing for you. a big thing for me was when I dug into some family history, and it made me feel not so alone, I made connections in my brain that will last much longer than most of my social web.
It’s more helpful for being honest with myself about my own motivations than anything else, but occasionally it has the added benefit of stuff like being able to remind people of news stories from a few years ago that directly contradict the sort of mass amnesia the same sources feign on stuff like U.S. foreign policy.
I have always had a pretty good relationship with my family, I still see them and talk to them a lot, and I wonder if that’s why that stuff is so important to me.
cars posted:Yeah I agree. One of the most helpful things I figured out about myself when I was younger is that history is almost a moral value for me, the importance of trying to connect what’s happening now with earlier events.
this is something my high school history teacher made a very intense effort to make sure we picked up and, it worked! at least for me.
c_man posted:anyway, i finished "there is a tree more ancient than eden" in probably a record of longest time for me to get through that many pages. mostly due to me having been able to find less time to read it for a long time, but it was also pretty dense and im not that satisfied that i got everything out of it that i could have. it was really enjoyable to read though. i might try divine days at some point but id want to see if i could find, like, annotations or something. i read some other stuff in the mean time as well, like fun home, which was cool. im gonna read a bunch of audre lorde poems next.
divine days is strangely less dense even though its very long, because most of it is written in a much more 'normal' prose style. the main thing about that one is that it a a series of stories that sort of branch of and digress into other stories and these are the point in themselves, theres not really one main 'plot' that he returns to per se. i dont think there are any real annotations of his work like you get with joyce or someone because hes an almost unread writer who is also critically neglected, unfortunately
What interested me were some of the structural issues that the story implies. First, almost all of the "white" sympathizers to the Black Liberation Army were jewish. Their parents had been communist party members in the 30s during the period when the former national minorites that made up the IWW were becoming white while the European existence and general popularity of fascism in the US made jews lag behind in the process. By the late 70s, most jews had been made white but a few stragglers could still trace that history. That history is dead unfortunately and I don't expect the next radical era to have any traces to labor bundism/syndicalism or the communist party in New York. The terms of white settlerism appear to have been set and there are no new admittances.
Second, one of the articles points out her rabid fanaticism and indifference towards human life:
The Judy Clark I knew had two distinct sides. She was capable of warmth and joy. But her smile could vanish in a moment, replaced by an accusing finger. “How many people did you kill in Vietnam?” was her sudden jab across a Park Slope kitchen table at a friend roiled by nightmares after his return from the war. Stunned, he shook his head.
“Judy, it was a war,” he said.
“Yes, and you were the invading army,” she insisted. “How many did you kill?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/magazine/judith-clarks-radical-transformation.html
Besides the fact that she is obviously correct at the hypocrisy and racism of the PTSD "stab in the back myth" of American suffering in Vietnam, at a more general level how many Vietnamese people died in American concentration camps, POW camps, or just indifferently slaughtered? Very few even had the opportunity to turn into liberals, let alone confront their killer at the dinner table. This story is notable for its exceptionalism, as in any society capable of revolution Clark's opinion would be common sense and not insanity. Do we really expect Americans as a whole to act like her? Do we really expect Americans as a whole to take up arms and make revolution (over years and with millions of deaths) as the Vietnamese did? The power of privilege is that even those who have courage get the opportunity to falter in the face of hopelessness, but at least they saw reality for a moment. Those who remain on the left with illusions that the first world isn't like the third world so we don't need to imagine mass armed struggle and instead we need to be in the business of coalition politics to build hegemony are the real danger, they'll always be around to weaken the revolutionary left as Clark's ex-communist parents who weaponized anti-communist leftism in the CIA's "Dissident magazine" and the liberal mythology of the civil rights movement against her in a time of weakness.
As for myself, I would not take the odds of survival for a Vietnamese peasant during the American invasion combined with the odds of success of an American urban guerrilla. But at least I don't pretend that cowardice is actually symptomatic of the "multitude" no longer needing revolutionary proletarian struggle. The terms aren't that stark, our current reading of that book about the Red Brigades in Italy (compared to the Weather Underground and May 18th communist organization) shows that even the first world is fractured. And for every Judith Clark there are a dozen Black Panthers still in prison who don't get a New York Times expose. But the general refusal to take the ideas that emerged out of the failures of the new left seriously: the labor aristocracy, white skin privilege, unequal exchange and instead act like Bernie Sanders saying he is opposed to open borders like it's common sense or a compromise we have to make with the white working class is revealing.
Populares posted:I fucking hate youtubers and twitch streamers and they will be the first against the wall when I take power.
"Let us take, for example, a bus which passes at the moment when we are crossing the street. We are accompanied by an idealist with whom we are arguing about whether things have an objective or a subjective reality and whether it is true that our ideas create things. It is quite certain that, if we do not want to get run over, we will both be very careful. Thus, in practice, the idealist is obliged to recognize the existence of the bus. For him, practically speaking, there is no difference between an objective bus and a subjective bus. This is so true that practice easily proves that, in life, idealists are materialists."
but what is it that compels them to continue arguing as idealists? READ MORE TO FIND OUT
toyotathon posted:babyhueypnewton posted:Do we really expect Americans as a whole to act like her? Do we really expect Americans as a whole to take up arms and make revolution (over years and with millions of deaths) as the Vietnamese did?
YES! i expect that of my people, just not in their kurrent klass konfiguration
always look forward to your posts bhpn... that's interesting you say that whiteness is now 'fixed' in terms of which nationalities qualify for first drippings. the culture is shifting the skin-privilege discussion to promoting, at least on the west coast, 'black'/'brown' groupings. unstable skin racism again trying to lump lots of different nations into class skin barcodes. i don't like anything about this conversation, esp what it reflects, leftover west coast style apartheid workplaces (clerical/maintenance/cleaning/food preparation performed by the chicano nation). i remember hillary clinton going after obama in a 2008 debate hectoring him to comment on 'black/brown' issues, small example but i remember it b/c it was a first US media moment where i was like 'oh shit that's racist as fuck'. so i think the idea is being promoted somewhat. you saying whiteness is fixed, that's my observation/reading too since the 60s, w/ other racist ideas still changing. i don't think whiteness assimilation is a universal solvent for class consciousness but i see what you're getting at with which groups made liberal transformations since the 60s, like east coast jews. to what extent do you think the black, chicano, many native nations, many asian nations here, have too?
It's actually amazing to me how decadent monopoly capitalism has become. France, which is the bastion of civil nationalism and turned a diverse population into a nation during the French revolution, can't integrate less than 15% of the population and instead has kept them as an internal colony for decades to the point that even working class protests like the "yellow vests" have a white man's bargain with the ruling class like the anglo-boer war. I don't expect America which is closer to Rhodesia than France to be able to integrate much larger populations of black and hispanic people. It would have seemed amazing if Rhodesia had elected a black premier like Obama to oversee apartheid but I guess in light of the persistence of white economic rule in post-apartheid South Africa and Zimbabwe, perhaps it wouldn't be so amazing. Anyway, the persistent criminalization of black life and the remarkable continuity of settlerism over 400 years is pretty interesting.
Nietzsche was a historical figure who represents the most acute expression of petty-bourgeois disillusionment with capitalism's progressive potential. The petty-bourgeois as a class is unstable so he has been used as an expression of its reactionary tendencies (fascism) and its progressive tendencies (situationism, surrealism, existentialism, poststructuralism), and his continued relevance is the result of the continued struggle within that class. For the proletariat he has very little to say but no one in China is reading Nietzsche to understand their daily factory life, he's already a thinker for westerners trying to find their place in a fundamentally new world just as that same class was trying to find its place at the beginning of monopoly capitalist imperialism at the turn of the 19th century. I think that's valuable, at least if you're not completely cynical and think the first world can play some role in the proletarian revolution.
Of course that's not an answer, in fact it's a dangerous non-answer since it allows you to project yourself onto proletarian indifference. By asking this question , you've already shown that you are in the horizon of Nietzsche. As he says in anticipation of the entire Freudian revolution:
"Freedom of the will"- that's the word for that multifaceted condition of enjoyment in the person willing, who commands and at the same identifies himself with what is carrying out the order. As such, he enjoys the triumph over things which resist him, but in himself is of the opinion that it is his will by itself which really overcomes this resistance. The person doing the willing thus acquires the joyful feelings of the successful implements carrying out the order, the serviceable "under-wills" or under-souls - our body is, in fact, merely a social construct of many souls - in addition to his joyful feeling as the one who commands. L'effet c'est moi . What happens here is what happens in every well-constructed and happy commonality - the ruling class identifies itself with the successes of the community. All willing is simply a matter of giving orders and obeying, on the basis, as mentioned, of a social construct of many "souls": for this reason a philosopher should arrogate to himself the right to include willing as such within the field of morality: morality, that is, understood as a doctrine of the power relationships under which the phenomenon "living" arises.
http://nietzsche.holtof.com/reader/friedrich-nietzsche/beyond-good-and-evil/aphorism-19-quote_b174f01df.html
Notice the explicit reference to the ruling class, taken from Hegel's master-slave dialectic which connects it to Marx and Gramsci (despite Gramsci's own distaste for Nietzsche which was for political reasons). Hegemony here is not a positive value but rather a balance which justifies itself as positive both as a social system and a balance of drives and beliefs within the individual psyche. The role of philosophy is not justification but genealogy: uncovering the historical, political, economic, and pleasurable circumstances that led to the emergence of this balance (and the instability in this balance for Marxism as politics). The individual reemerges only in a very different form, now submerged to entire social apparatus and the inaccessible range of unconscious pleasures which themselves are the effect of the social (what is called ideology in Marxism).
Ideology is not limited to the first world. But the reason I limit this discussion to it is because Nietzsche (and Freud) represent a response to Kant completely severing the thing-in-itself from our knowledge of it (in Marxist terms the objective laws of motion of capital and the ability of men to "make their own history"). In weakened terms, he is trying to restore some concept of the will after previous efforts failed to withstand the absolute alienation of human beings under the capitalist mode of production. Lenin represents the peak of this effort (not in chronological terms but in terms of the coherence of his lived philosophy, at least as it became represented to global communist parties) though he also left the door open to the opposite interpretation scattered through his writings.
https://monthlyreview.org/2012/12/01/lenin-and-the-aristocracy-of-labor/
Not only has the unconscious been colonized by capital (the last refuge of humanist Marxism) but the dual failure of the Leninist party model in the West and the cultural revolution in the East (and it's petty-bourgeois offshoots) has led to the revenge of Kant: the greatest communist party in the world advocates a historical determinism not even the second international would dare advocate precisely where the furthest experiment in political will was conducted (thus the only possible terms of debate today are Maoism vs Marxism-Leninism, the brilliance and tragedy of Marx and Lenin being that at various times and places they advocate both), the Bolshevik revolution has been reconquered by the historical determinism of third worldist theory, the best and only explanation for the previously highlighted failures, and even the comintern's revived second international ideology (in Althusser's terms and sometimes in Trotsky's) has seen a revived reputation in the face of renewed fascism. For me, we do not live in a world of human will anymore, and the questions or communist theory are fundamentally different when imperialism takes the (final) form of value production. Ideology itself has to be reevaluated, not in terms of a crisis of Marxism (which is as strong as ever at least in terms of population under its ostensible rule) but in terms of a complete reversal of the "subject of history:" now it is the third world at the center and we western intellectuals are forced to grasp in the dark with incomplete theory and separation from history. In Marx's time, philosophy was a late and impotent attempt to understand history (put in terms of German backwardness in all but philosophy), Marxism was a unification of philosophy with (French) politics and (British) science and communism represented the merging of these in historical fact: the socialist world was advanced in all three. The USSR under Stalin completed Lenin's revolution: a backwards nation was able to build socialism and surpass Germany, the most advanced capitalist nation of the time, and emerge as the world leader of a global communist movement which attracted all the serious intellectuals of the age. The slow decay of this moment as imperialism reasserted itself (there are many moments one could pinpoint as the critical juncture, focusing on China again I'll say highlight the moment when Mao claimed that he had only built socialism in "a few places in the vicinity of Peking" to Nixon in 1972) brings us to a different problematic. We now find ourselves perhaps back at Marx's moment where all of our philosophy and theory is an impotent reaction to he forward march of history, expressed among other things in the severing of cultural revolution and political economy.
Returning to Nietzsche, he is ambiguous as well, and his greatly weakened form of human history can justify both men making their own history and it not being on their choosing. Given that every possible point of theory is already given in Marx and Lenin and our task is to read them in actual history as it unfolds, one could argue he is superfluous as are all the other figures I mentioned. But if his shock therapy to liberal ideology which is present in the early Marx but disappears in the later, more scientific Marx (not that anyone reads Marx anyway) and is always disguised in Lenin as polemics against long forgotten figures helps to pull you out of petty-bourgeois naivete then he is valuable.
1. What importance does the study of philosophy have for the militant worker?
A practical one. A militant worker who does not interrogate the origin and reproduction of bourgeois ideology and philosophy, who does not discern between idealism, mechanical/vulgar materialism and dialectical/historical materialism, will act on the basis of necessarily confused ideas, and impede the real movement for their liberation, not advance it. Theory and practice must be mutually reinforcing: ineffective and/or harmful practice is evidence of incorrect ideas, and unclear half-concepts have never withstood the test of practice . So: to engage with philosophy; to know its history and successfully identify its trends and currents; to link independently formulated concepts together by their commonalities, and thereby synthesise them into something stronger, more robust; all of this intellectual activity is directed towards a practical problem: the production of effective revolutionary theory. A 'militant worker' who does not concern themself with this problem is no militant at all.
hoping this is good and not just restating/circling around the question. my first try at this in my notebook said the same thing but was really clunkily phrased. this was late into the night so i got stumped on "why specifically dialectical materialism"? guess i'll be trying to think ab it when i'm Out And About today
babyhueypnewton posted:The difficulty is that there are very few scientists but "science" as an ideology is widespread and an identity character for many white men (the recent effort to recruit a comprador "fuck yeah science" class among women and people of color is a failure in my opinion, the grip of white men is too strong and liberalsm already too weak as an ideology).
Its not a big part of the publicity but the foundation for the "get minorities into STEM" pushes is the fantasy that being an "engineer" or whatever is a surefire way towards equal bourgois rights for minorities (income equality, public respect, pb lifestyle, etc), while simultaneously "addressing" a "labor shortage" in technical fields (engineers are paid too much and eat into profits). Its really not that different from ambitious parents wanting their kids to become doctors or lawyers and will have the same trajectory. there a comfortable glut of lawyers right now and salaries are dropping and so are job openings. outside of specific trendy "money making" specializations, medicine is also no longer a surefire catapult to a bourg lifestyle. In each of these cases, its increasingly necessary to enter management to get a comfy share of the loot. The MD of yesteryear is the MD/MBA of today (MD/PhD if you think youre elon musk). This has always sort of been the case for engineering, more than law and medicine anyway, but its going to become more and more true in the coming years. Another way to look at it is that to the extent a profession becomes socially devalued (e.g. as a means to access a bourg lifestyle) it becomes less the exclusive purview of white men.
speaking of rural, when i was a kid in rural MN (read: lower income but all white except on & near the rezes, where I bet none of this applied) in the 90s/early 00s there was a huge and very well funded push to get kids into engineering programs. full rides with stipends into brand new facilities with fancy dorms and rec-rooms were offered to just about any high school student with any aptitude. an interesting predecessor to the trend of the last decade imo
Edited by c_man ()