paul_soccer12 posted:

there can not.

smarxist posted:

politics is a meta process created by society/civilization and the state of the means of production/ownership and its relationship to the masses, it's not a binary left/right, but more of a gradient between preserving and strengthening those relationships or seeking to abolish them and create new relationships, and everywhere in between the current base/superstructure. you can't abolish the superstructure (neoliberalism) without fundamentally altering the base (private enterprise). the means of production are meaningless without relationships to the people who own/control them, they're just capital, or dead labor. the base/superstructure also would seem to possess mechanisms that recreate itself and reinforce itself, even when assailed vigorously by abolitionists (communists). these are largely due to cultural inertia, socialization, ideological brainwashing through false consciousness, where the values of the benefactors of society are programmed into the masses, subtly, even sinisterly.

there are no relationships that exist outside of our global paradigm at this point, nor have there meaningfully existed any for hundreds of years now due to colonization (outside of defeated revolutions, latent revolutions, or.... whatever China is doing), so there are no politics that exist outside of what exists now, that's partly a reason why revolution is so hard to imagine and enact, you gotta start from scratch on a lot of things! if you DO get to that point though, I think competing ideologies/relationships/arrangements can form, there will absolutely be dissention about how to handle certain aspects of the new arrangements, but history tells us we'll probably get another dominant base and create another superstructure, we just have to create one that's more sane/rational/equanimous and vigorously develop it until we can rehab the species. there'll probably still exist a gradient of differing thoughts, but unless you gently caress up real bad and create a psychotic system of contradictions that immiserates a vast majority of people, it'd be difficult to create the conditions of another paradigm shift, because there'd be no incentive to fight and die for one

Maximo Roboto posted:

errr there was Left Opposition, Right Opposition, and good ol' Stalin centrism centralization

Maximo Roboto posted:

errr there was Left Opposition, Right Opposition, and good ol' Stalin centrism centralization


there would be people wanting to cosplay peaceful pre-agricultural societies built on mutualism and lack of hierarchy, and others who would cosplay barbarian warlords built on oppression and slavery

quote:

mutualism and lack of hierarchy

quote:

oppression and slavery

a few DRUNK BONERS posted:

the conceptualization of politics as a two dimensional line (or euclidean plane) that we should place ourselves is a deliberate neoliberal invention and we would do well to free our minds from this cartesian paradigm. but how do we even think about this?

splifyphus posted:

Like this:



Fascism is the politics of the Imaginary, Liberalism is the politics of the Symbolic, Communism is the politics of the Real.

The left/right line and the authoritarian/libertarian|economic/social grid are indeed all constructed from a fundamentally liberal perspective. The interlocked Lacanian triple ring is a way out of this, as long as one understands that there's no neutral perspective from which to view the terrain - you're already in the structure somewhere.

quote:

A political diagram that is not liberal could probably only be made from within a revolutionary movement as it moves.

bagual posted:

real fuckin easy, actual absolute monarchy, the genesis of the left-right split in modern-era politics is basically arguing what to do after it was gone

Victory Position posted:

get this



what if politics, but on the moon

alarumklok posted:

i propose politics be on an up/down spectrum, so that all the times i texted 'u up?' were me wanting to discuss the interlocking mechanisms that propel society forward towards a more just distribution of wealth

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

where's Sun Ra fall on the facebook meme political compass

Black Perspectives' analysis of a 1973 interview with Sun Ra posted:

Ra, ever the consummate self-promoter, believed he was the first to explore the idea of the Space Age in his music and poems, thus opening the door for the white race to “realize that well yeah, I can do that now because someone is talking about it.” In other words, Ra and his ideas were the catalyst for humans to travel towards and explore space. Ra seamlessly transitions away from this topic to his thoughts about Angela Davis. Ra views Davis’s acquittal and release as another example of this logic. Ra recounts how he informed individuals in Philadelphia that if only someone Black and sincere would speak out in Davis’s defense, then the creator would set her free. Thus, the all-white jury’s verdict of “not guilty” was only possible because Ra first put forth the notion that Davis would be exonerated. With this statement, Ra single-handedly positioned himself as the sole arbiter of Davis’s freedom while also dismissing the work of her legal team and the transnational grassroots activism that led to her acquittal.

Ra’s logic turned misogynistic as he continued speaking about Davis’s trial. For Ra, Davis’s incarceration was an example of men “ganging up” on a woman whose beliefs they disagreed with and offered further proof to his belief that “men are supposed to protect women.” Even though he was defending Davis, Ra articulated a male-centric hierarchy that positioned women as unequal to men while reaffirming a view that men must shield women from attacks. Whether these attacks were physical, emotional, or intellectual is unclear, but Ra’s views reinforced a worldview in which women need protection.

Ra further declared that any anger about Davis’s Marxist-inflected politics should be steered away from her and instead directed towards the men who taught her these leftist ideologies. Ra discounted Davis’s political agency by suggesting that she was merely a vessel for socialist political thought and her own experiences or intellectual labor had no role in shaping her political beliefs. It is unclear whether Ra was upset with Davis’s revolutionary politics or her male teachers, but Ra’s words inflicted damage regardless. Ra reinforced a phallocentric hierarchy, while also dampening one of the most prominent political voices of the era. In discounting Davis’s political stances, Ra shattered any sense of Pan-African solidarity from his perspective. In other words, Ra’s freedom dream of intergalactic travel was the only political stance he viewed as having any currency.

Venomous posted:

pretty sure that if he were still around today he'd be considered a hotep, especially since he was misogynistic and paternalistic regarding Angela Davis:


so yeah, pretty fuckin authoritarian right-wing tbh

Great musician tho

bagual posted:

real fuckin easy, actual absolute monarchy, the genesis of the left-right split in modern-era politics is basically arguing what to do after it was gone

Weka posted:

Nah. Just because the terms originated in revolutionary France doesn't mean the things they describe first came about there. Afaik and atleast since the magna carta England has never had an absolute monarch yet their were definitely political groups you could identify as being left or right prior to the French revolution.

Victory Position posted:

get this



what if politics, but on the moon

Private Cumshoe posted:

frankly society isn't going anywhere until we can finally distill politics from left-right abstractions to the subject and object

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

Weka posted:

It seems like you're mostly just saying political ideologies evolved over time.

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

what characteristics would determine if someone is wanting to be a caveman in a left or rightwing way

Mandoric posted:

The opposite; I'm saying the useful portion of describing political ideologies, rather than the majoritarian-elitist or change-consistency axis you mistake for left-right, is describing which class they favor. Further, before that class is relevant in the dialect driving the era's politics (or before it exists at all!), thought about it hypothetically or nascently existing is like considering pre-Copernican tales about being carried aloft to the firmament by angels our first documented space travel.

To say otherwise does nothing but create a confusion between serfdom and "from each according to his ability", a confusion of Yeltsin as a leftist and the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR as right-wingers, a confusion which inevitably sets leftism again minority cultures (whose concerns and traditions are after all minoritarian and traditional,) a confusion which underpins some of the worst parts of bourgeoisie politics.