babyfinland posted:
right on blinkandwheeze
i think what futurewidow said about building culture gets to an important point too though, that not everything revolutionary is going to come from the pages of das kapital, or communists, or is goign to be something overtly political per se. people are going to oppose injustice and oppression the way they know how, and we should be able to understand this in a pluralist way. i don't really know what a specifically "communist culture" would be, but manifestly expressing a revolutionary ethos of love and mercy and justice etc is what you can do anywhere, no matter what, so i totally appreciate and agree with the sentiment.
yeah, i really like this. from there i feel as though a lot of time gets wasted asking questions like "well, what is injustice then? what is oppression?" which can serve a purpose but it seems like people want these intellectual questions to completely determine their practice, as if people didnt already internalize things like this. it can easily become a tool of domination, a logic that determines if people's experiences are actually oppressive. for me this thinking strays really far from my conception of what it means to be a revolutionary
noavbazzer posted:
then wouldn't it be more honest if you said that the job of first world communists is to figure out what they should be doing
i mean when you have stated objectives that are pretty vague and you don't really know what you would do to achieve them then it just seems like you're relying on something to happen that will make it all clear. "the job of first world communists is to focus on reorienting ourselves to the fact that it is 2012 and capitalism has achieved global hegemony and seemingly obliterated all competing economic modes" sounds more accurate to me. you can't realistically hope to oppose capitalist cultural hegemony and offer an alternative to anyone if you're operating on what Das Kapital and Imperialism can tell us about the 21st century's political economy and the delusion that the communist parties of the world are as relevant as when the USSR was still around.
dont get me wrong i sympathise but if more or less old school marxism wants to offer something to the fight against global capitalism it needs a lot of new theoretical work done and that may very well be the only kind of work that first worlders can contribute to that cause at this point in time.
what kind of new theoretical work do you mean though? if anything, capitalism holding global hegemony and obliterating all other modes of production means that Olde Marxe Theorie is more applicable, not less - given he was talking about an abstract, idealised, "perfect" capitalism. this objection is brought up by pretty much everyone speaking against marxism, and i've never heard any reasonable suggestions for what's missing.
you also seem to talk as if history is in stasis. it's fairly obvious that we're heading for a big ol' conflagration of value, whether caused by war or environmental disaster, and it's almost certain this will cause massive shakeups in the social composition of the first world. marxists should be getting themselves ready for the future, as much as confronting how capitalism is acting today.
anyway, i think the theoretical battle is often massively overplayed in detriment to the organisational battle. organisation has been the key to any successful movement - good theory just gives you a nice advantage.
EmanuelaOrlandi posted:
people (like us) who have to ask 'what is oppression?' are scum who will have no part in any meaningful revolution
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lmao don't be a fucking idiot. asking "what is oppression" on a theoretical level is Real Fucking Important. why do you think newton's black panthers split with black supremacists: it was down to a different understanding of the nature of oppression.
littlegreenpills posted:
why are we all about revolutioning. are there slum dwellers in mumbai who like to LARP being middle class Americans or something after watching a pirated subtitled dvd of clueless starring Alicia Silverstone? Who The Fuck KNows
more smug horseshit from a liberal coward
gyrofry posted:
would j sakai have supported the german communists in 1919? why or why not? show your work
who gives a shit what some outdated anarchist thinks. just because someone wrote something useful doesn't mean we need to treat them like a Church Father or something.
jools posted:
who gives a shit what some outdated anarchist thinks. just because someone wrote something useful doesn't mean we need to treat them like a Church Father or something.
that was the joke my guy
blinkandwheeze posted:
Refreshingly non-dogmatic or tediously opportunist?For small groups of intellectuals to assert that they have “transcended” MLM-to declare the lessons of the accumulated revolutionary experience of the world proletariat as “obsolete” and to substitute in place of the knowledge gained from real social practice, their own idle, individualist and inconsistent speculations is utter and shameless idealism worthy of the Holy Family.
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.
But as for the intellectual megalomaniacs who think they can overturn the concentrated knowledge gained from the sacrifice and struggle of millions to transform the world over more then a century with a few blog posts or pretentious and incomprehensible contributions to the Verso catalog, we are not offended we are merely amused.
this is a good point but it should be applied to marxism itself as well
gyrofry posted:jools posted:
who gives a shit what some outdated anarchist thinks. just because someone wrote something useful doesn't mean we need to treat them like a Church Father or something.that was the joke my guy
I was on a roll, my Guy
jools posted:
well he's a trot innit
it was my first experience being in a roomful of trots and bearing witness to their insanity, hopefully my last
jools posted:gyrofry posted:jools posted:
who gives a shit what some outdated anarchist thinks. just because someone wrote something useful doesn't mean we need to treat them like a Church Father or something.that was the joke my guy
I was on a roll, my Guy
tootsie roll
Lessons posted:
people who are still thumping on about idealism vs. materialism in the 21st century are cool and i hope to count myself among their number someday
you're an atheist lol
babyfinland posted:Lessons posted:
people who are still thumping on about idealism vs. materialism in the 21st century are cool and i hope to count myself among their number somedayyou're an atheist lol
did you think that statement was anything less than one hundred percent sincere
Lessons posted:babyfinland posted:Lessons posted:
people who are still thumping on about idealism vs. materialism in the 21st century are cool and i hope to count myself among their number somedayyou're an atheist lol
did you think that statement was anything less than one hundred percent sincere
ya i thought it was sarcastic, since u were talking about something i had said, so obviously "snide passive aggresive jab" was a safe bet
littlegreenpills posted:
lmao calm down jools
please don't gaslight julian
futurewidow posted:littlegreenpills posted:
lmao calm down joolsplease don't gaslight julian
he'll go up like the hindenburg!
And that's just Marx. How can we talk about the revolutions that succeeded/failed or the failure of communism when our understanding of history is so poor we can't even conceive of these things outside of the propaganda of American scholarship. And I don't mean this forum, scholarship on the USSR and other socialist countries is so poor that there are a only a few scholars in the world who can even be considered worth something and they constantly have to qualify everything they say with anti-communist propaganda.
Talking about the time for action sounds really nice, but unless you want to just get yourself killed or play pretend revolutionary in the streets throwing rocks at police, you need to understand history and economics at a minimum and pretending you already do is just egoism and hipster, lifestyle politics.
babyhueypnewton posted:
How can we talk about going beyond Marx when we don't even understand it? Can anyone here honestly say they have a proper understanding of what money is, or how rent functions in a capitalist economy, or how the state functions, or the different moments in the creation and distribution of capital that lead to different contradictions. Cause I sure don't. And yeah you can't wait around forever, a proper understanding of political economy can take a lifetime. But people on this forum or on others who say we need to leave Marxism in the dust never seem to actually know what they're proposing we leave behind.
And that's just Marx. How can we talk about the revolutions that succeeded/failed or the failure of communism when our understanding of history is so poor we can't even conceive of these things outside of the propaganda of American scholarship. And I don't mean this forum, scholarship on the USSR and other socialist countries is so poor that there are a only a few scholars in the world who can even be considered worth something and they constantly have to qualify everything they say with anti-communist propaganda.
Talking about the time for action sounds really nice, but unless you want to just get yourself killed or play pretend revolutionary in the streets throwing rocks at police, you need to understand history and economics at a minimum and pretending you already do is just egoism and hipster, lifestyle politics.
if you don't understand marxism then why are you so committed to it?
you're basically arguing what i'm saying, that we should continue to pursue marxism as an instrument to benefit people and take it seriously in that way, but that also means understanding its limits and failures
babyhueypnewton posted:
Also since when is it OK to believe in god? Just because goatstein is a dumb troll and "new atheists" are liberals doesn't mean religion isn't stupid and poisonous.
babyhueypnewton posted:
How can we talk about going beyond Marx when we don't even understand it? Can anyone here honestly say they have a proper understanding of what money is, or how rent functions in a capitalist economy, or how the state functions, or the different moments in the creation and distribution of capital that lead to different contradictions. Cause I sure don't. And yeah you can't wait around forever, a proper understanding of political economy can take a lifetime. But people on this forum or on others who say we need to leave Marxism in the dust never seem to actually know what they're proposing we leave behind.
And that's just Marx. How can we talk about the revolutions that succeeded/failed or the failure of communism when our understanding of history is so poor we can't even conceive of these things outside of the propaganda of American scholarship. And I don't mean this forum, scholarship on the USSR and other socialist countries is so poor that there are a only a few scholars in the world who can even be considered worth something and they constantly have to qualify everything they say with anti-communist propaganda.
Talking about the time for action sounds really nice, but unless you want to just get yourself killed or play pretend revolutionary in the streets throwing rocks at police, you need to understand history and economics at a minimum and pretending you already do is just egoism and hipster, lifestyle politics.
If Marxism didn't exist, we would have to invent it.
babyhueypnewton posted:
Talking about the time for action sounds really nice, but unless you want to just get yourself killed or play pretend revolutionary in the streets throwing rocks at police, you need to understand history and economics at a minimum and pretending you already do is just egoism and hipster, lifestyle politics.
marx nerds are also engaging in lifestyle politics, and it's not so much "we have to do something!!" as much as we just have to face the fact that if we want to accomplish anything politically we need to build organizations. as for the rest of that you're inflating the problem. our enemies don't understand history either, but they won and as such don't have to write up justifications for their failures.
babyfinland posted:babyhueypnewton posted:
How can we talk about going beyond Marx when we don't even understand it? Can anyone here honestly say they have a proper understanding of what money is, or how rent functions in a capitalist economy, or how the state functions, or the different moments in the creation and distribution of capital that lead to different contradictions. Cause I sure don't. And yeah you can't wait around forever, a proper understanding of political economy can take a lifetime. But people on this forum or on others who say we need to leave Marxism in the dust never seem to actually know what they're proposing we leave behind.
And that's just Marx. How can we talk about the revolutions that succeeded/failed or the failure of communism when our understanding of history is so poor we can't even conceive of these things outside of the propaganda of American scholarship. And I don't mean this forum, scholarship on the USSR and other socialist countries is so poor that there are a only a few scholars in the world who can even be considered worth something and they constantly have to qualify everything they say with anti-communist propaganda.
Talking about the time for action sounds really nice, but unless you want to just get yourself killed or play pretend revolutionary in the streets throwing rocks at police, you need to understand history and economics at a minimum and pretending you already do is just egoism and hipster, lifestyle politics.if you don't understand marxism then why are you so committed to it?
you're basically arguing what i'm saying, that we should continue to pursue marxism as an instrument to benefit people and take it seriously in that way, but that also means understanding its limits and failures
lol it's clear you don't know a thing about marx. all of the examples I brought up are well known as subjects Marx left unexplored or under explored either in the grundisse or in volumes 2/3 of capital which he was loathe to get into too deeply because they did not fit into what he thought of as his overall scientific vision and were the work of historians.
how can you talk about it's limits and failures when you don't know a thing about it's limits?
babyhueypnewton posted:
Also since when is it OK to believe in god? Just because goatstein is a dumb troll and "new atheists" are liberals doesn't mean religion isn't stupid and poisonous.
just because its obviously wrong doesn't mean its poisonous imo, and there's a lot of evidence that points to the contrary