babyfinland posted:

Tinkzorg posted:

babyfinland posted:

if it makes you feel better i think that even managing to resolve this problem you've posited wouldn't really resolve fundamental problems (that determine political failure of your ultimate goals) originating in the metaphysics

post-capitalist anime production is a foregone conclusion, maybe uve heard of this lil thing called historical materialism?????

like youre right that "politics" dont "work", but i dont think thats reducible to some incidental constellation of the material conditions, but the (very logical and expected, if the processes are analyzed) product of western political thought whose attainment has gathered acceleration since the french revolution. the gradual indistinction of constitutive (state/political institutions) and constituting (principle of sovereignty, a state "for the people", for the "race", for the "revolution") power, blurring into a single political power which we see, and can be viewed in both capitalist mass society as well as the socialist and fascist totalitarian projects, is problematic because they already assume, on the aristotelian potentiality vs actuality metaphysic, the indistinction of justice and violence. the point is not to better manage this justice-violence matrix, or even to try to postulate (as i think the left tends to do) some sort of ideal program that prevents the exhaustion of the constituting power into the constitutive power that results in this justice-violence marriage but the postulation of a metaphysics that doesn't rely on potentiality actualizing itself, for itself, so that the principle of sovereignty is not also smuggled into whatever emancipatory efforts, inevitably to assert itself once again regardless of particular constitutive or constituting form

getfiscal posted:

i'm not a shitty, insignificant individual.

well you're certainly not insignificant when it comes to GIRTH

babyfinland posted:

i think instead of trying to figure out a politics that does work from the vantage point that Oh No Politics Broke How Can We Fix It, we should view the present circumstance as the really real state of politics, and try to understand instead why this broken faulty thing was "working" at all all along until now

ahh duality

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

Scandinavian social democracy has given it's citizens possibly the highest standard and quality of life of any group of organisms in the 6 billion year history of the planet and the author of this piece just wallows in cynicism and bitterness.

talk about first world fucking problems.

thats mostly what scandinavians do with their unprecedented luxury

getfiscal posted:

if black panthers want to whip themselves on the back all day then that's fine.

i'm gonna hang out and post jokes on the internet instead.

people like you should be put to actual use in a communist society. how do you feel about a career in agriculture, more specifically as compost?

Doug posted:

babyfinland posted:

Doug posted:

babyfinland posted:

i think instead of trying to figure out a politics that does work from the vantage point that Oh No Politics Broke How Can We Fix It, we should view the present circumstance as the really real state of politics, and try to understand instead why this broken faulty thing was "working" at all all along until now

ahh duality

what do you mean

i mean in the mathematical/optimization way. instead of looking at a specific politics in terms of fixed constraints you instead analyse the constraints involved, taking your politics as "fixed". though that wasn't really what you said!! sorry.

i think that is what i said actually

Tinkzorg posted:

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

It's May! Go outside and feel the sun on your face and force a smile and count your blessing you live in a society where the hard work of men and women have given your peers one of the longest life expectancies, the best chance of surviving infanthood and one of the best gender equities in history.

why. like why would you look at a country like sweden and say "this is great". i look at it and say it drab and terrible precisely for the same reasons you praise it. thankfully its all being dismantled and replaced by a neoliberal hellhole at ludicrous speed so i mean its a moot point.

same except my country

Empathy posted:

The left has destroyed all reverence for virtue as a result of cultural Marxism. While this method succeeded in marginalizing all tradition, making everyone into an alienated, valueless hedonist, it hasn't made a dent in capitalism, which no longer has to feel subject to any sort of moral code whatsoever.

Is it any wonder why the "kids today" have no interest in serious revolutionary struggle? The problem with the left's strategy of completely invalidating morality via relativism is that no no one has any reason to subject themselves to the left's vision of morality. Multiculturalism has made everyone nihilists, and the left is now viewed as just another anachronistic priesthood. The idea of attacking the fundamentals of society in order to collapse it and make fertile ground for revolution ended up being a kamikaze attack, which successfully destroyed Western civilization, but left behind a people capable of no moral behavior, who thought morality was another quaint tradition to be discarded, all awaiting and even cheering on the inevitable fall into barbarism.

futurewidow posted:

if the left doesnt have the balls to fuck then they're practically women

hahaha, but to a degree tho, like americannazbro, i agree with the validity of that anecdote. i think what zizek says needs to be understood in what he inherits from mao, that is, the fundamental principle of dare to struggle, dare to win. in slavoj's eyes, and i think this is a very accurate judgement, it's the latter that is absent from this particular field. you see the canonization of events and figures - the spartacist uprisings, the prague spring, allende, the corpse god trotsky and his numerous death cults - that are marked more by anything by their defeat. zizek talks about how the suppression of the prague spring is what saved its emancipatory spirit, had it run its own course it would have collapsed under its own weight and there would be no reason to wistfully romanticize it. apart of this then is the maxim big ziz reiterates, and i think this is comes from the later work of althusser to a degree, that what is needed by the left is simply to take power where it can. so there you get his absolute veneration of "lenin at the gates", but maybe more telling is his very deep respect for jean-bertrand aristide

i think i've posted this here before but this post by signalfire (who appeared to at some point have spontaneously transformed into a m-l-m blog as opposed to their previous bordigist perspective, haha, more power to them) touches on the same issues:

Revolutionary theory worthy of consideration is the product of successful revolutionary practice and nothing else. Its not a question of restricting oneself to a closed canon; We are happy to pay close attention to the writings of Amilcar Cabral for example, because he won a war.

--

futurewidow posted:

hm, i see where you're coming from but i don't entirely agree. there isn't a strong ideological basis, sure, but I think protests normalize the idea of taking action/voicing discontent outside of the parliamentary system. there is also a big difference between the quebec protests have been ongoing since February & peaking at 200,000 people and your average protest. it's not just a "march for one day and go home" sort of thing (like the pathetic "Day of Action" seen in Ontario at the end of April- where "action" is some poxy speeches & a tired march before everyone is bussed home)

i do agree with you here fw, i think you identify the really important role that this kind of struggle plays. but at the same time, i think that audacity to struggle needs to be matched by that aspiration to victory, glory, that daring to win. the proliferation of cabals dedicated to death-gods or the worship of spontaneous action i think speak to the absence of these aspirations. we might flirt eagerly, but yes, maybe we don't have the balls to fuck...

as to why that is, i think is pretty simple, we just look to our dear friend, the familiar concept of the labour aristocracy. i think a consequence of that process of development is the instillation of the fear of death. we have so much more to lose than our chains. blah blah blah. we don't fuck because we're afraid of the big mama bug that will eat us when we're done. to zizek again, that's where i think comes one of the most important parts of his political philosophy to me, the reorientation of the proletariat away from traditional notions of the industrial working class to the part-of-no-part, placing the revolutionary subject in the subject of apartheid, the lumpenprole identified by the panthers or the young lords, the youths of the banlieues, global shack dwellers, undocumented workers, whatever. the condition under which something like the labour aristocracy can be sustained builds new and radical zones of exclusion, that in this old fashioned dialectic, gives birth to its own gravediggers. these zones of exclusion are only going to get a lot bigger as the instability of our world-system progresses...

babyfinland posted:

the cultural realm is probably the most productive arena for marxism atm but what the conservatives call "cultural marxism" is not in the least historical-materialist, it is bourgeois in class orientation

which actually brings me to this article by peter hallward on badiou's political orientation that has really helped clarify a lot of things for me:

True politics is exceptional, an exception to the contemporary cliché that 'everything is political' (LDP, 1.12.91: 6). Politics proceeds as indifferent to 'dialectic of the objective and the subjective ...; the deployment of subjective thought should take place from within the subjective itself, through the hypothesis of the foundation of the subjective in the subjective and not in the confrontation of the subjective to the objective', let alone in 'reference to the economy, the state, alienation, etc.' (LDP, 1.12.91: 7). The kind of subject-object co-ordination proposed by Habermas' increasingly state-centred conception of politics, for instance, serves only to block the necessary violence of political presentation within the legal norms of re-presentation (cf. Habermas, 1996; LS: 140 n.37). As far as Badiou is concerned, socio-economic 'analysis and politics are absolutely disconnected':6 the former is a matter for 'expertise' and implies hierarchy, the latter is not. A generic or axiomatic politics asserts affirms the 'political capacity of all people', the principle that 'everyone can occupy the space of politics, if they decide to do so' (LDP, 28.05.98: 3). Whereas the sort of sociology practised by Badiou's contemporaries Balibar and Bourdieu can only 'discuss' political issues, true political sequences transform the 'objects' of such discussion into militant subjects on their own right.7

That everyone can join in a political process means that the dichotomy (or division into two) of political antagonism is not to be thought in terms of a purely destructive competition. A political process does not pit two well-defined antagonists against each other in a life and death struggle for supremacy. There is, strictly speaking, only one political actor, namely the we that comes out or demonstrates in the real of fraternity (i.e. in the element of pure presentation as such). What resists the organised political we is not an alternative political subject so much as the brute inertia of re-presentation, which is nothing other than the inertia of the status quo itself. Politics thus proceeds through the invention of new subtractive mechanisms of formalisation that can confront and transform this formless resistance to change (LS: 89).

Today, however, now that the 'age of revolutions is over', Badiou admits that 'I have been obliged to change my position as regards the state. The guiding principle can no longer be, in a unilateral way, "de-statification". It is a matter more of prescribing the state, often in a logic of reinforcement. The problem is to know from where politics prescribes the state' (Badiou, letters to the author, 17.06.96; 13.10.97; cf. 'Politics and Philosophy', 1998: 114-115; TA, 26.11.97). Recent political sequences -- the Palestinian Intifada, the uprisings in East Timor and Chiapas, the student mobilisation in Burma in 1988 -- have proceeded in large part as attempts to answer this question, in terms most appropriate to the particular constraints of the situation. Among the most consequential ongoing efforts is the massive Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil: rather than persist in the futile pursuit of land reform through established re-presentative channels, the MST has organised the direct occupation of farmland by the landless poor themselves, allowing some 250,000 families to win titles to over 15 million acres since 1985. What the MST has understood with particular clarity is that legal recognition can only be won as the result of a subjective mobilisation which is itself indifferent to the logic of recognition and re-presentation as such. The remarkable gains of the MST have been won at what Badiou would call a 'political distance' from the state, and depend upon its own ability to maintain a successful organising structure, develop viable forms of non-exploitative economic cooperation, and resist violent intimidation from landowners and the state police.10

Badiou's own Organisation Politique (OP) was conceived as part of an answer to much the same question: from which precise points is it possible, in today's 'democracies', to force change upon the state of our situation?11 How is it possible to organise an effective political force without reliance upon the institutional re-presentation of a party (liable to corruption) on the one hand or the pseudo-spontaneity of a mass-movement (liable to fatigue) on the other. Though it remains something of an organisational experiment, the OP is testimony to what even a handful of committed militants are able to achieve. The OP intervenes only on particular questions, raised by specific confrontations or events, always guided by the strict, axiomatic assertion of subjective equality: political equality for everyone living in the national community, residence papers for the sans-papiers, political empowerment of all workers as workers, equal universal access to health and education, and so on. Badiou insists that these interventions don't add up to form a general programme or party line. 'God protect us from "socio-political programmes"! The essence of modern politics is to be non-programmatic. Politics, as we conceive it in the OP, promises nothing. It is both without party and without programme. It is a prescriptive form of thought, discerning possibilities entirely inaccessible to parliamentarism, and one that works entirely independently for their realisation' ('Réponses écrites', 1992: 70). If politics has taken up a position distant from rather than simply antithetical to the state, it remains committed to a homogeneously subjective orientation.12

for this conception of politics, the socioeconomic program, the notions of political economy, are not the universal dogmas of the party but that which arises from this contingent part-of-no-part. the role of marxism, is instead a near religious commitment to the people, a communist culture, a system of worship and glory and truth...

Doug posted:

the left needs to listen to me! i know whats up

hey i'm listening. what's up doug?