guidoanselmi posted:
i wanna write a reply to this but i'm busy measuring the thermal loading from nuclear explosions.

Hahaha i knew you were working for the MIC

discipline posted:

Crow posted:
And like a phantom, perhaps one cannot strangle it, but drive it from the earth with the repetitive incantation and triumph of Truth.

so, How? and what is The Truth?

Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies - Ron Paul

discipline posted:

Crow posted:
And like a phantom, perhaps one cannot strangle it, but drive it from the earth with the repetitive incantation and triumph of Truth.

so, How? and what is The Truth?

probably 'the truth' is along the lines of love and brotherhood, eternal and thus fearless of death, in defensive opposition towards its self-destructive and selfish degradation (and thus eternally vigilant and self-critical).

this is all sort of contingent and really speculative, but i'm thinking:

lifting up the occupied, benighted nations of the world, which necessarily means national liberation and likely development of national industry so that no 'socialist' nation degenerates into a colonial power (best example: khrushchev's obnoxious advice for albania to only plant 'fruit trees and vineyards'). it means an intellectual, spiritual and political brotherhood on the basis of Love and the redemptive transformation of social relations (in the newton's terms of abrahamic redemption, "was blind but now i see").

so, for example, i can see the development of national industry towards a broadening of leisure time to be spent in regards of strengthening strained family and traditional relations. with leisure time, positionally an intellectual commons should be established. i'm thinking here the case of Chinese peasants and workers being encouraged to participate in philosophical debate. this is in opposition to a nakedly selfish pursuit of power and control.

so you leave the wicked alone unless you're acting in self-defense. in my opinion, that's really the sort of thing a true revolution (a revolution-becoming-truth) sets out to do, a defensive maneuver set in particular circumstances that is universalized in love.

so in my opinion, there's isnt some sort of dichotomous Good/Evil relation, but instead an explosive truth, with Good bearing fidelity to it, and Evil distancing itself from it (by manner of self-destructive practice). so, likewise, we do not need to necessarily 'confront' Evil as much as defend against it, confronting it within us, and the TCC fleeing a state seized by a mass movement can only mean one thing, a great, liberatory explosion of truth, warding off Evil. it's a bit like exorcism, you do not destroy the substance of evil, you liberate the subject from it by bearing truth, and thus the subject can realize itself in the glory of God (Truth).

That was fucking long

shennong posted:
i don't see too many groups in the west that can provide even the basics for their communities so i'm not sure who's going to be seizing the state or what that would let them do that they shouldn't already be working on as non-state actors. im also skeptical that its even possible to seize the existing state apparatus without basically immediately being compromised by the TCC and im not sure why you would want to expose yourself to that particularly in the absence of any kind of base of popular support or, again, material base of operations even moderately independent of capital

well, i think you definitely seize the state with a base of popular support. so its important to build a mass movement. and perhaps in a country like U.S.A., that means a sort of Occupy-inspired prolonged civil struggle and the genesis of a shadow state providing basic services and labor action (SOVIETS. SOVIETS). it may be a foregone conclusion that the TCC would compromise the state seized (or generated) by a mass movement, but that is not necessarily bad. it would probably ensure a state 'moderately independent of capital', or maybe a better way to put it is oppositional to capital, holding labor as hostage (like carrying out large-scale strikes, and may mean triggering security action, and the machinations of the war machine).

are we there yet? no, there ARE stirrings of a mass movement that's being built on civil disobedience. it's really important to establish a large base of public support though, which would mean immense discipline, fanatical pacifism (as far as early clashes with riot police), and plenty of martyrs. whatever

shennong posted:
im just not sure what the point of seizing the state is when the context is a state that's increasingly subsumed within the operation of the economic system you're trying to defeat and one that has declining legitimacy among the populace anyway

because you dont 'defeat' an economic system by fantasizing a completely different system or whatever and building your own New System factories and roads and infrastructure on those terms.

maybe you can have a parallel shadow state running services and its own security, kind of like in a protracted people's war, but ultimately they have to start seizing property (which will provoke security responses) or be subsumed into the normal functioning of the system.

the 'declining legitimacy among the populace' is centered around the deteriorating quality of service and the repressive security measures. that opens all kinds of possibilities

Crow posted:
"increasingly subsumed within the operation of the economic system you're trying to defeat"

What is this i dont even

as in the existing state apparatus is integrated into capitalist structures and not easily exciseable, so if we're talking about seizing and making use of existing bureaucratic and administrative structures, you end up with some fairly intractable problems particularly when your cadres are internet marxists who can barely get out of bed in the morning much less administer thousands of civil servants

shennong posted:
you don't need to "seize" an existing state apparatus to make use of existing infrastructure or material relations of production though. i agree with you that the declining legitimacy of the state opens up possibilities, i just don't understand why the endgame is always supposed to be the establishment of a new 20th-century style state with a legal monopoly on force other than that's marxist orthodoxy.

bonclay's mali thread got me thinking about a thing that james scott said offhand in that talk i linked in the sovereignty/subsistence thread about how these hill tribe groups have set up these insurgencies now with state claims. and like the tuaregs in mali are doing this state building thing, and it's like this is the only model we have so let's do that. you don't need a state to fight a state, you don't need a state to run an economy or to provide services (see eg BF's islamic governance thread). but we're locked into this state-centric thinking at exactly the time when states are withering away and dying and the state-economic model of oil driven industrialism is literally killing us all. so why are we still talking about seizing states? to what end? what's the theory here?

states are not withering or dying, the people are withering and dying, the state is growing like some sort of ancient terror that will swallow us all up. thats my theory: ancient terror.

like where do you have 'states are withering away and dying'? i'm not really sure what theory YOU'RE using. the sort of ways that the state is growing is absolutely extraordinary, in terms of repression, violence and surveillance. its fascinating what sort of terms it dictates its universal terms, and theres many ways to approach it, but i cannot possibly see how you came to the conclusion that the 'state is withering or dying'. what kind of facts are these?

like, i really appreciate this sort of apocalyptic urgency and scope that you seem to be approaching here, but as far as i'm concerned, this does not reflect pragmatic reality. it's prone to utopian well-wishing, where you bring in line your own beliefs with the sort of future you imagine, but not to the world as it is. that's great, but how do you connect this to present conditions?

oil is an unknown variable, but that is what we're working with here, and it seems to me that you're 'closing the gap' of new technological flights which are always-obscuring. you run the very serious risk of overcompensating with some kind of rearguard maneuver, theorizing a retreat, which i'm not sure exactly is the proper response to the truly apocalyptic scope we're working with here.

you talked about something like 'reverting back to low energy flows', but to me it looks like we're asymptotically approaching a truly apocalyptic shock, something like the way global climate change is being forecast. those are the terms with which we are contending: world-ending monsters and rupturing planes of totality. seizing the state is just a pragmatic gesture, it's not a dogmatic formula, since orthodoxy is just another rupturing plane