lo posted:

serafiym posted:

"Thus by now stigmatizing as 'socialistic' what it had previously extolled as "liberal," the bourgeoisie confesses that its own interests dictate that it should be delivered from the danger of its own rule; that to restore tranquillity in the country its bourgeois parliament must, first of all, be given its quietus; that to preserve its social power intact its political power must be broken; that the individual bourgeois can continue to exploit the other classes and to enjoy undisturbed property, family, religion, and order only on condition that their class be condemned along with the other classes to like political nullity; that in order to save its purse it must forfeit the crown, and the sword that is to safeguard it must at the same time be hung over its own head as a sword of Damocles."

all this kind of stuff struck me as basically describing how fascism emerges out of liberalism despite being written more than 50 years before fascism existed. smart fella that marx!

yeah what Marx wrote about France during this time is easily some of the best social analysis of an entire state - especially its "security apparatuses." made me get to thinking real hard, especially since i read it during the 2020 insurrection.

Synergy posted:

as i kind of expected, Ben Norton split from the Grayzone to start Multipolarista which seems like a better (ML) perspective to follow. without someone like Ben to balance out Max Blumenthal's downward trajectory, i have real concerns about the future of the Grayzone. i know it's a bit silly to be so focused on one news site but I feel like they made a real impact on what little anti-imperialist discourse there is and it's a shame what happened.

We have the tool of Marxist science to keep the good and throw out the bad, and you're writing this like we don't. Politics are not comic-book company shit-stirring fanboyism. There is no reason to substitute brand loyalty over critical thought. If something is branded "Multipolarista" or "Gray Zone" or whatever, we still engage with it critically and determine what in it is worth keeping and what isn't.

cars posted:

Silver Screen Saucers, which looks like it’s going to be a critical review of the dialectic between Hollywood science fiction and the fed-infiltrated subculture of folk UFOlogy. But surprise: its premise is that UFOs must necessarily be visitors from other worlds and that existing UFOlogy is no less than the objective study of those visitors, and the question it asks is: To what degree does Hollywood’s version reflect spontaneous osmosis of UFOlogy’s near-100%-accurate accounts of direct encounters with space aliens, and to what degree does Hollywood reflect the only other possibility, the U.S. government purposely guiding the public toward gradual acceptance of certain hidden truths from among those highly accurate accounts? The scholarship is as bad as it sounds and the writer seems like some sort of one-man disinfo campaign all on his own but darned if it isn’t a Fun Book.

it really gets my goat that all the anti skeptic ufo guys are convinced that it must be Alien spacecraft and not a million other wild and wacky unconventional explanations. well except for jacques vallee i guess

lo posted:

i'm reading 'the unknown cultural revolution' by dongping han.

I've just finished reading this as well, really cheered me up.

Synergy posted:

I feel like they made a real impact on what little anti-imperialist discourse there is and it's a shame what happened.

Watching Max Blumenthal's brain gradually cook was pretty sad to me, and it is unfortunate that it will be used as ammunition to discredit the good work he used to do. I think his decline highlights an important lesson in how important the Immortal Science is to analyzing capitalist empire correctly. Without a proper critical framework for engaging in class treason many liberals unfortunately go down Max's path of getting one or two things right before their critical faculties crack under the pressure of not being able to reconcile the Western aggression they've learned to see into something coherent. Eventually they lose their shit or retreat back into the safety of saying "I called it, this was wrong!" a decade later when it no longer matters.

Of course we aren't beholden to rebel journalist brand loyalty or whatever but I also think it's Cool and Good to recognize and respect people's efforts, I wish Ben Norton all the best in the new project.

nearlyoctober posted:

in the spirit of sharing private experience and at the risk of a public confessional, here's some context to my above grandstanding:

i read marx on a whim 7 years ago and spent the next 4 years proudly rehearsing his system laid out in capital. i was a liberal who said "science doesn't care what you believe," except with marx instead of bill nye. of course, marx offers a thing that pop-physicists do not and it slowly eroded my ego. after 4 years of being tossed around and only intuitively trusting marx and a certain marxist lineage (corresponding to that of this forum), i ended up reading a neo-classical economics textbook. halfway through the textbook i had a neurotic break; i could identify where marx and the bourgeois economists diverge, but i couldn't identify fundamentally why one was correct and the other wasn't. sure i had soundbite answers but i had no fuckin clue what the words i spoke meant. i just said them and hoped that they would stun other people like they stunned me if i actually thought about them. "correct abstraction" etc. i guess this is the fallout of learning online.

so my primary question was "how do we know things?" or "how do we know we know things?" combine this with an utter ignorance of the entire canon of western literature, and you get my study list from last year. i started with hume at the beginning of covid and aimlessly skipped around, and by 2021 i realized i would need to proceed chronologically. so i went to homer. some books i didn't spend much time on. my grip on plato's republic isn't great, but then i spent like 4 months on the bible. obviously i've accrued more questions than just my primary one, similar to how you might start working out for the sake of vanity, but continue for the sake of your heart and spirit.

so with kant i'm finally ready to move past the first attempt i made at answering my primary question (with hume). for now, i just want to understand kant's critique in itself. since i posted above, i think i answered my own question: i watched a few lecture series in preparation for the critique of pure reason, and the best companion texts i could find were jill vance buroker's guide and lucas thorpe's kant dictionary.

i've been such a recluse through my studies and i've never had much opportunity to justify myself "out loud," so there it is. i wonder if anyone else has followed a similar trajectory. anyway i'll be back in a few months with some post-hegel thoughts, once i've confronted marx again.

i think you will be glad you went through this process no matter the outcome. but i think that explaining why marxism is correct and neo-classical economics is not is a good exercise that any serious marxist should try out.

for me, there are a couple ways of examining a theory. one is looking at its axioms, its first principles, as well as how it derives its conclusions from those principles, and see if they make sense or have any errors. the second way is to look at its ability to explain or illuminate real-world phenomena.

one way to look at the difference between Marxism and neo-classical economics is that Marxism is built on the first principle that labor is the source of value under capitalism, while for the latter it's marginal utility. really, all the classical economists thought labor was the source of value, Marx was just the last one. i believe it was Richard D. Wolff who said that if you believe in the labor theory of value, the rest of Marxism is practically an inevitable endpoint. the idea that human work is the engine of society, and labor is the specific historical form it takes under capitalism, is such an intuitively correct idea to me that i would find it difficult to mount a serious argument against it.

marginal utility seems like it might have some merit, but once you start working out its postulates (with indifference curves and all the other boring stuff they make students do in Econ 101), you quickly realize that it collapses when trying to explain anything more complex than a single agent with perfect knowledge. most economists know this, and kind of shrug their shoulders and say it's just a simplistic model and shouldn't be taken so seriously, before advising some politician that economic theory demands that you cut welfare.

second, Marxism has extremely broad explanatory powers, particularly when it comes to crises of capitalism, which other theories of economics struggle to explain. i have never seen an economic theory that can explain the Panice of 1873 AND the Great Depression of the 1930s AND the stagflation crisis of the 1970s AND the Great Recession of the aughts. Neo-classical, Keynesianism, MMT, Austrians... they can maybe explain or two with their pet theories, but they struggle to explain them all.

either way, i hope your project goes well. if you're truly going through Western philosophy from beginning to end, i think you're going to find Hegel to be a pretty shocking break. but ganbatte, because in many ways he's Marx's mirror image. even Marx's enemies grudgingly admitted he was a genius and a writer of astonishing talent. even Hegel's admirers apologize for him and admit that he is the worst writer who ever lived.

Synergy posted:

i'm talking about the general public's access to anti-imperialist news. most people are going to have brand loyalty whether you're talking about a news site or a party, that's just how people think.

Synergy single-handedly bringing back classic web 1.0 Internet meme "Concern Troll" here on tHE r H i z z o n E

e_dt posted:

read Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses". Very clear writing and good analysis!

In french ?

lo posted:

tears posted:

hey tears there's this article i stumbled across a while ago by a mathematician who says that all mathematical education is flawed that might interest you, seems to overlap with some of the stuff you've been reading recently but it's about maths rather than science https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

I loved this article, read it a long time ago. If i remember, he says math should be considered more as an art. Math teachers tryna shoehorn the subject - to make it practical - usually fail miserably cus everything past basic functions is extra for most people (at least for the menial jobs they are allotted under capitalism). Problem is - he thinks math as art should be "art for arts sake" - which as you know is bourgeois art - for pleasure and enjoyment only. What would proletarian mathematics look like?

Edited by marknat (March 24, 2022 20:16:57)