roseweird posted:why are you always talking about jews now
Isn't the real question, why are YOU talking about Jews? Lol?
littlegreenpills posted:have you ever been anything other than a person who eats food, wears clothes, and lives in a space which has been manufactured entirely by people you can't see from materials whose flows and dependencies you'll never understand, and crucially whose personal allotment of this multitude of products is decided for her via a system of wage labor that's utterly arcane even to those who control it?
NoFreeWill posted:the cool part of capitalism is us rich white people benefiting from it, but since that isn't as true anymore we mad.
i disagree capitalism still works really fucking well for me personally but here's the thing: it's still really bad
what is it made out of. how did they get that specific shade of blue
getfiscal posted:alasdair macintyre once wrote that "for the stalinist the actual course of history is the horizon of morality" which i think is very insightful. what matters for people like grover furr is a minimal plausibility that a historical situation could be understood in a certain way, not whether it was correct or not. stalinism becomes tolerable because it is understandable. people end up supporting almost anything that happened as potentially reasonable rather than thinking about whether they actually support it. and because the actual always has some minimal level of plausibility, they can support anything. obviously more than just this works this way, but it's a bad idea, i think.
why dont you be a grover furr, like, occupationally
Mr. Furr is an embarrassment to Montclair State and to the education system of New Jersey. Surely, he deserves to be terminated, not so much for his beliefs, but rather for being an especially bad teacher. I have corresponded with the Chairperson of his department, Emily Isaacs and with Frank J. Schwartz, assistant to the president. Both Ms. Isaacs and Mr. Schwartz have provided me with essentially the same reply. Simply, that it is Mr. Furr’s first amendment right to say anything he wants. It is the position of the English Department and the office of the president of Montclair State that Mr. Furr, in his capacity as an employee of Montclair State and by extension the State of New Jersey, has an absolute first amendment right to say anything he likes. It is further their position that even though Grover Furr is in the English Department of Montclair State, he can continue teaching his radical theories concerning Stalinism as part of the English Department’s curriculum. Montclair State claims that it is powerless to make Mr. Furr stay on topic and teach English. Finally, it is Montclair State’s position that Grover Furr has an unlimited and unqualified first amendment right to post anything on his official Montclair web page regardless of how inaccurate or offensive it might be. In fact, Mr. Schwartz is rather proud of Mr. Furr, in an email he wrote: “One of the most important functions of any university is to serve as a sounding board for ideas and opinions. To that end, it is critical that we permit any perspective to be voiced.” Apparently, Mr. Schwartz is unable to distinguish scholarship from propaganda and English literature from communist diatribes.
swampman posted:lmao, did you know that if you google grover furr, something i've done recently, one of the first images to show up is a picture of grover furr with a cancellation sign over his face, hosted at stopgroverfurr.blogspot.com
roseweird posted:swirlsofhistory posted:
I don't extend my well wishes to you and I hope you have a very sad time alone
i mean, i won't? i have friends, and dates, i just don't have a job, so... idk. have fun at work swirls
I would rather have no friends or dates than New York City ones of those
roseweird posted:alienation is alienation from a natural oneness that completely escapes us.
roseweird posted:and really what does this mean? it is meaningless unless everyone does the same kind of work, has the same kind of education, has access to the same resources, etc etc. what classes are u gonna abolish? all the useless ones probably? but some people are not that useful, sorry. maybe when we refine human life into some kind of perfectly symmetrical crystalline cell it wil all work out???
youre making recourse to some personal definition of these terms you hold in your head. language is mutable, you can hold your own definition of what "alienation" or "class" as it suits you for your own thought but if you are talking to people who hold these terms as representative of specific categories explicated and defined through over a century of literature it makes no sense to use them in any other context. you are accusing people talking about the abolishment of class or alienation of not making sense because it doesn't work with your own definition of these concepts, when it is a specific, clear and internally consistent framework we are using. i mean you are literally walking into a discussion between marxists and asking What class do you guy want to abolish anyway?? as if this isnt the single focal point of the entire system of thought. i'm not saying that this is a framework of thought that you need to accept yourself, but it's insane to accuse it of being a meaningless one just because it uses concepts separately from your preconceived understandings of them. if you dont make an attempt to understand these concepts as they are being used you might as well be speaking another language
like if you aren't satisfied with marxism because it doesn't address the alienation from natural oneness or whatever then fine, there are a lot of points you might reasonably find unconvincing about a materialist, socialist analysis. but you act as if marxism is addressing specifically this alienation from natural oneness, and offering salvation from it that you see lacking, when it's addressing alienation as a specific definable process that occurs with the capitalist organisation of production. class doesn't refer to an arbitrary delineation of social groupings, it is defined as a specific relationships with the means of production, of which equitable access alongside an end to commodity production will abolish all classes. no classes are "useless", they all have functional roles in the capitalist mode of production, the abolishment of class is a process through which these roles are superseded, made useless, by a qualitatively opposed distribution of the means of production
the point at which marxism addresses the spiritual or ethical dimensions of human existence is established from the starting point of an understanding that the material conditions of the forces and relationships of production have a necessarily intertwined relationship with the spiritual, ethical and cultural dimensions of social existence. sure, this relationship is a complex and reciprocal one but ultimately i do not think it is possible for a qualitative shift in either of these spheres to occur without a comparable shift in the other. i don't think it is possible for a change in these dimensions of social existence to occur without a fundamental shift in the organisation of the mode of production, and i dont think it is possible for this shift to be maintained without developments in the cultural sphere (the lesson of the cultural revolution)
roseweird posted:but that is the tenor of much socialist discussion and it eclipses meaningful discussion of reform and progress within current conditions, because we are waiting for a purifying revolution.
you have a really fundamental misunderstanding of the arguments that are being made if you think the perspective of people here simply believes in revolution as just some pursuit of abject purifying violence for authentic self-actualization or whatever. i mean someone like huey is a psycopath who comes close to romanticizing that aspect of it but i think that'd even be an uncharitable reading of someone as insane as he is. like, you seem to think people adopting a revolutionary socialist position wouldn't adopt a program of peaceful reform and progress if they thought this was even possible, you seem to pathologise their arguments as a pursuit of violence as an end in itself
the problem is that this resolutely isn't a possibility. this is a dimension of what people are saying that you don't seem to engage with. the particular structures of production under capitalist society necessitate the maintenance and expansion of processes that result in the unimaginable violence, devastation and abject suffering of human life. these processes are recursive and self-sustaining. as such, greed is not a salient factor in any way, the individual motivation of agents that compose the capitalist class have absolutely no bearing on the existence of these processes, as long as these structures exist. that's what lessons is saying to you, it doesn't matter whether the head of a firm is motivated by greed alone or upholds the virtues of charity and selflessness, as members of the bourgeois class their existence depends on the expansion of this violence
that's the reason why lessons is bringing up jews - first of all his point was that your idea of getting money together to organise a factory or other such institution as some kind of path to positive social change is effectively saying the same thing as "lets start a concentration camp to end the existence of concentration camps." secondly he's pointing out that by focusing on greed as opposed to the structural conditions of society you are reproducing the arguments made by fascism - you are laying the blame of this violence onto a group of specific agents belonging to some cultural grouping distinctly defined by greed. that's what the fascists do, they just have a particular name for this group
the recursive reproduction and expansion of these processes that endlessly promote human suffering and destitution exist particular political-economic structures allow them to. by confining social mobilisation to only within these structures, you passively or actively aid and abet this violence. like benjamin says, the forward march of history is a storm that continuously adds to the catastrophic accumulation of wreckage and debris, it is only revolution that provides the emergency brake to this process. the only way to end the catastrophic accumulation of human misery engendered by capitalist society is to seize the means of production from those who posses it, putting an end to the mode of production that allows these processes to exist. the bourgeois class that posses these means will not give them up peacefully, they will have to be forcefully repossessed. whatever violence might occur through this seizure is a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of blood produced by the bourgeois economic system. "robbing a bank's no crime compared to owning one"
what paths of reform and progress within the current system do the adivasi peasants have available to them? the peasants who have no control over their own subsistence, whos lands are stolen from them to satiate international capital accumulation, who are murdered, assaulted, tortured and raped by the security forces that represent the current system to discipline them against their political mobilisation? why should they behave in complicity with this system? why should we?
roseweird posted:blinkandwheeze posted:
the recursive reproduction and expansion of these processes that endlessly promote human suffering and destitution exist particular political-economic structures allow them to.
the world is all wrong and after reading these books i can tell you exactly why!
rosewierd, i think the problem with your reading of that sentence is that your operating off your own personal definition of human suffering and destitution, and, tell me if im reaching here, but, it would seem that definition is centered around your own experience of huuman suffering, and destitution.
roseweird posted:blinkandwheeze posted:the recursive reproduction and expansion of these processes that endlessly promote human suffering and destitution exist particular political-economic structures allow them to.
the world is all wrong and after reading these books i can tell you exactly why!
oh come on
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
roseweird posted:blinkandwheeze posted:the recursive reproduction and expansion of these processes that endlessly promote human suffering and destitution exist particular political-economic structures allow them to.
the world is all wrong and after reading these books i can tell you exactly why!
marxism is not about trying to categorically understand and end all human suffering! its specifically about addressing the suffering created by our current economic relations and has a huge wealth of research examining previous economic relations and the different forms of misery those have engendered. obviously sometimes marxists engage in utopian rhetoric but that happens in all political and philosophical movements.
for all your criticism of marxists for being too unyieldingly "big picture" or something it really just seems like you can't make peace with the fact that socialism does not offer a definitive answer to problems of human nature and thus reject its value outright. stick to jesus for that problem.
roseweird posted:sorry to offend, bnw, but i'm disillusioned by this talk and don't feel books would help. i should probably tend to the living of my life at some point. ttyl
Lol be disillusioned all you like, im not saying you need to be a damn Marxist or read a book or whatever, but maybe you should stop spending pages and pages accusing Marxists of not making sense, ignoring real possibilities of change (????) and behaving only out of some violent pathology, when you havent made the slightest effort to actually understand any argument or perspective different to your own. why do you expect people to be charitable towards you when you dont extend that to anyone else. Just a thought lol
again as bnw says you can reject marxist analysis if you want to. but bnw's post did a really good job summing up the reasoning behind a lot of aspects of marxism youve been attacking. so i guess what i want from you and everyone else in this forum is to engage with them in good faith and with an open mind, or just not engage with them at all. ignore it or come back later. go to sleep.
unsurprisingly most people on this forum are working whatever jobs allow them to sustain themselves or help their families or maybe are pampered students or NEETs or whatever, some engaged in activism, some not, everybody playing roles that are suspiciously similar to others with their ~*class background*~. Its ok to do what is needed to prosper in your own life so long as it is done with some moral consideration. the point of being internet marxists imo (insofar as there is any point to any philosophy or social analysis) is to inform our personal morality and to help preserve a perspective and a practice that might be helpful when the ~*material conditions*~ necessitate radical change.
ie; not marxist, erases class.
