There is a spectrum haunting C-SPAM. I, on the contrary,

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > There is a spectrum haunting C-SPAM. I, on the contrary,

«‹›1217 »

uncop: Oct 23, 2010

Ferrinus posted:

i'm pretty sure this is wrong on the technical, marxian-political-economy level so long as the things you're producing are determined and distributed based on their use-value rather than their exchange-value. like yes if you help to manufacture a car and that car is then sold (at state-mandated prices, bought by state-mandated wages, which are used as top-down rationing/distribution mechanisms rather than emergent avatars of the will of the market) to some other worker than the use-value of your labor-power has directly benefited that other worker rather than you, but it's not like i'm alienating myself from my labor if i weave you a coat and give it over as a present. the point is that it's not being peeled away from your corpus in order to add to private profits, for no other reason but that it will increase those profits faster and with absolutely no regard for the nature of the commodities whose sale is finally realizing those profits

You're right that there could be no alienation if things were produced and distributed based on use, at least if Marx wasn't somehow horribly wrong. But distribution based on use in a generalized sense (i.e. it's not just healthcare that is free at the point of use, but all the basic stuff so that one could conceivably live without ever having any money) is a full communism thing. The state determining prices changes nothing regarding that: even in unregulated markets commodities are sold at prices that are *not* equal to their values. The point is that on aggregate, they must be sold roughly at their combined value. And in The Economic Problems of the USSR, Stalin admits that it was true for the USSR based on practical knowledge that it was happening.

Luckily though, distribution based on use isn't needed to get rid of alienation. What would be needed is integrating every worker into the planning process in some way and getting their consent for decisions. Then, there would be no entity alien to the worker taking the product of their labor and making it mysteriously disappear while producing wages out the ether, but the worker themselves would be involved in what happens to the product and why, and what their compensation is concretely based on and how it works from the perspective of the entire economy. (Distribution based on use in the future is not possible without this sort of open planning process anyway because needs are too personal for some alien planning commission to be able to distribute to the population based on what they personally need when those needs aren't objectively scientifically solved somehow like how it's solved what people who want to be pro athletes need to eat.)

Basically, the USSR could have been a heavily de-alienated society if it didn't keep organizing its planning like war planning. Soviet science had already begun producing legit knowledge about how to efficiently democratize the planning process since before the 70's, when Salvador Allende's government tried to put that knowledge to use (and to my knowledge, the planning itself worked without major issues). But at that point, the bureaucracy would have to have been principled enough to throw out a huge chunk of itself as unneeded and reduce them to regular workers, which they couldn't do because they were revisionists intent on justifying their own privileges.

# ? May 7, 2020 05:24

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 11, 2024 23:49

Homeless Friend: Jul 16, 2007

apropos to nothing posted:

if im obnoxious ill stop posting here then. only reason i do is cause lots of people in online spaces, even this one, are looking to get organized in some way and want to help in that process. namaste.

if autism sneaks was ever the reason i'd stop posting, id take that info to the mass grave.

# ? May 7, 2020 05:29

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

apropos to nothing posted:

yes ive read that. where is the support for the imperialist powers against the ussr? he is critical of the ussr for invading poland, but doesnt call into question its status as a workers state. read this published from the same period where he is specifically defending the analysis of the ussr I laid out. ill quote some key bits:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/09/ussr-war.htm

"Those who seek nowadays to prove that the Soviet-German pact changes our appraisal of the Soviet State take their stand, in essence, on the position of the Comintern � to put it more correctly, on yesterday�s position of the Comintern. According to this logic, the historical mission of the workers� state is the struggle for imperialist democracy. The �betrayal� of the democracies in favor of fascism divests the USSR of its being considered a workers� state. In point of fact, the signing of the treaty with Hitler supplies only an extra gauge with which to measure the degree of degeneration of the Soviet bureaucracy, and its contempt for the international working class, including the Comintern, but it does not provide any basis whatsoever for a reevaluation of the sociological appraisal of the USSR"

and later:

"What do we defend in the USSR? Not that in which it resembles the capitalist countries but precisely that in which it differs from them. In Germany also we advocate an uprising against the ruling bureaucracy, but only in order immediately to overthrow capitalist property. In the USSR the overthrow of the bureaucracy is indispensable for the preservation of state property. Only in this sense do we stand for the defense of the USSR

There is not one among us who doubts that the Soviet workers should defend the state property, not only against the parasitism of the bureaucracy, but also against the tendencies toward private ownership, for example, on the part of the Kolkhoz aristocracy. But after all, foreign policy is the continuation of policy at home. If in domestic policy we correlated defense of the conquests of the October Revolution with irreconcilable struggle against the bureaucracy, then we must do the same thing in foreign policy as well. To be sure, Bruno R. proceeding from the fact that �bureaucratic collectivism� has already been victorious all along the line, assures us that no one threatens state property, because Hitler (and Chamberlain?) is as much interested, you see, in preserving it as Stalin. Sad to say, Bruno R.�s assurances are frivolous. In event of victory Hitler will in all probability begin by demanding the return to German capitalists of all the property expropriated from them; then he will secure a similar restoration of property for the English, the French, and the Belgians so as to reach an agreement with them at the expense of the USSR; finally, he will make Germany the contractor of the most important state enterprises in the USSR in the interests of the German military machine. Right now Hitler is the ally and friend of Stalin; but should Hitler, with the aid of Stalin, come out victorious on the Western Front, he would on the morrow turn his guns against the USSR. Finally Chamberlain, too, in similar circumstances would act no differently from Hitler."

trotsky is defending the USSR on one extremely narrow and completely theoretical point - he is fighting with the "bureaucratic collectivsm" theorists in order to support his own "degenerated worker's state" theory, both of which are the dumb western leftist poo poo that my boy marcel van der linden skewers so succinctly in my link upthread. trotsky doesn't actually refer to any of the USSR's actions or strategic determinations, internally or internationally, with anything but doomsaying or outright contempt - like he's sketching out a scenario there in which the USSR basically builds the nazi military that allows hitler to conquer western europe, before hitler inevitably turns on stalin, whose evil exceeds perhaps even hitler's own. and trotsky repeatedly restates his desire that the soviet people rise up in an insurrection against the soviet bureaucracy in the exact same way that he expects the german people to rise up against the german bureaucracy. he's cheerleading the ussr undergoing another revolution at the same time as the nazis are building up next door!

Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 05:35 on May 7, 2020

# ? May 7, 2020 05:33

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

uncop posted:

Then, there would be no entity alien to the worker taking the product of their labor and making it mysteriously disappear while producing wages out the ether, but the worker themselves would be involved in what happens to the product and why, and what their compensation is concretely based on and how it works from the perspective of the entire economy.

i get what you're saying here. i figured that even if the centrally planned economy isn't SUPER good at being responsive (there's a computer that's just making its best guesses and mostly succeeds at making sure there's enough food year to year) the fact that your labor-power was getting discharged into the same pool you're drawing from, for the principal purpose THAT you are able to keep drawing from it, meant that you weren't technically being "alienated from your labor" in the way you would be if you were selling it to uncle pennybags who only went on to feed you because he needed to keep the machines running

# ? May 7, 2020 05:54

T-man: Aug 22, 2010; Talk shit, get bzzzt.

apropos to nothing posted:

if im obnoxious ill stop posting here then. only reason i do is cause lots of people in online spaces, even this one, are looking to get organized in some way and want to help in that process. namaste.

never stop posting comrade, then your enemies win

e: finally got my nojoe back hooray

# ? May 7, 2020 06:07

Jewel Repetition: Dec 24, 2012; Ask me about Briar Rose and Chicken Chaser.

T-man posted:

never stop posting comrade, then your enemies win

e: finally got my nojoe back hooray

Be sure to post your best while you're repping us

# ? May 7, 2020 06:17

BrutalistMcDonalds: Oct 4, 2012; Lipstick Apathy

Ferrinus posted:

trotsky is defending the USSR on one extremely narrow and completely theoretical point - he is fighting with the "bureaucratic collectivsm" theorists in order to support his own "degenerated worker's state" theory, both of which are the dumb western leftist poo poo that my boy marcel van der linden skewers so succinctly in my link upthread. trotsky doesn't actually refer to any of the USSR's actions or strategic determinations, internally or internationally, with anything but doomsaying or outright contempt - like he's sketching out a scenario there in which the USSR basically builds the nazi military that allows hitler to conquer western europe, before hitler inevitably turns on stalin, whose evil exceeds perhaps even hitler's own. and trotsky repeatedly restates his desire that the soviet people rise up in an insurrection against the soviet bureaucracy in the exact same way that he expects the german people to rise up against the german bureaucracy. he's cheerleading the ussr undergoing another revolution at the same time as the nazis are building up next door!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5k_arVcqR8

# ? May 7, 2020 07:02

Dreddout: Oct 1, 2015; You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5k_arVcqR8

This was also stalins reaction to barbarossa

# ? May 7, 2020 07:17

Top City Homo: Oct 15, 2014; Ramrod XTreme

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5k_arVcqR8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdTBIQDPZt4

# ? May 7, 2020 07:26

T-man: Aug 22, 2010; Talk shit, get bzzzt.

Jewel Repetition posted:

Be sure to post your best while you're repping us

i will post the most T-manly i can

# ? May 7, 2020 07:40

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5k_arVcqR8

apropos to nothing posted:

if im obnoxious ill stop posting here then. only reason i do is cause lots of people in online spaces, even this one, are looking to get organized in some way and want to help in that process. namaste.

I like your posting, people who know stuff should post unless they have something more important to do with their time. You bring historical facts into play so people can't argue on the basis of ignorance and have to get deeper into what the facts imply. You force people to make some effort to show how you're wrong when you are.

Ferrinus posted:

i get what you're saying here. i figured that even if the centrally planned economy isn't SUPER good at being responsive (there's a computer that's just making its best guesses and mostly succeeds at making sure there's enough food year to year) the fact that your labor-power was getting discharged into the same pool you're drawing from, for the principal purpose THAT you are able to keep drawing from it, meant that you weren't technically being "alienated from your labor" in the way you would be if you were selling it to uncle pennybags who only went on to feed you because he needed to keep the machines running

Well, the core of the theory of alienation is that people are controlled by things, the theory of commodity fetishism describes that core of the phenomenon of alienation. When the production process becomes social, it also becomes too complex for any single person to understand how their product is made if no effort is made to enable them to understand it. And if the product is produced for appropriation by some entity that commands the worker rather than negotiating with them, the worker couldn't recognize the product of their own hand even if they literally personally found it in a shop and bought it for themselves: they would experience it as buying a mysterious thing with inherent value and so on rather than as a social relation between themselves as a producer and themselves as a consumer. In a non-alienated society, the worker understands concretely what labors their products are made of and where those products go to the point where they could go visit the producers of their inputs or the consumers of their outputs and shake their or their representatives' hand and discuss how production could be done better. They might not recognize their own product if they just randomly found it in a shop, but they could trace it and know it was in that shop at that moment.

As long as the capitalist exists, they won't let things be any other way, but taking the capitalist out of the picture isn't in itself enough because the core of the issue arises from the socialization of production rather than the private appropriation of the product. The new thing capital brought into political economy wasn't private property sold on the market, it was the socialization of production in order to produce for a market. Socialism keeps the socialized production but has to figure out how to put the producer back in conscious control of it in a similar way as the producer is in conscious control of private production (e.g. artisan and peasant production). Practice produces knowledge, i.e. control of a system produces understanding of the system, and the dialectic of control and understanding (something feels wrong -> improve it!) destroys the objective basis for alienation.

The stakhanovist movement contained a sort of half-step toward worker understanding by raising workers into managers: so long as the worker-manager stayed loyal to the workers, they could act as a mediator between the plan and workers rather than just an overseer of workers for the plan, they could improve things based on understanding them so far as it served the plan. The Cultural Revolution in China took another step with an experimental system of enforced co-management where the designated manager had to make their decisions together with a workers' representative. That means the manager needed to actively relay knowledge to any representative that the workers happened to elect, and the representative needed to relay knowledge to and take input from the common workers. I don't have the time to check who the third part of the co-management system was, but IIRC it was the planner, in which case factory floor workers suddenly had a sort of democratic input into the plan itself. My personal take is that communists needed to take that basic idea and keep iterating on it like the Japanese would iterate on a car design to turn it from barely functional to state of the art over decades. And that Soviet science could already answer where to begin that iterative process although it couldn't go very far without first having a test bed for its theories in society.

# ? May 7, 2020 08:10

Atrocious Joe: Sep 2, 2011

US Senator Josh Hawley just learned the word imperialism, and he loves saying it all the time now

https://twitter.com/HawleyMO/status/1257635105192980480?s=20
https://twitter.com/HawleyMO/status/1258455785945862144?s=20

# ? May 7, 2020 19:57

BrutalistMcDonalds: Oct 4, 2012; Lipstick Apathy

tomorrow is a big day

# ? May 7, 2020 20:02

Raskolnikov38: Mar 3, 2007; We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold

is russia still doing the parade? i guess they could just send the NBC troops through

# ? May 7, 2020 20:04

Lady Militant: Apr 8, 2020; The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Atrocious Joe posted:

US Senator Josh Hawley just learned the word imperialism, and he loves saying it all the time now

https://twitter.com/HawleyMO/status/1257635105192980480?s=20
https://twitter.com/HawleyMO/status/1258455785945862144?s=20

they are playing with fire because in a match up between the lame rear end square u.s. democracy with tight haircuts n diet coke and SOVIET IMPERIALISM for how interesting something sounds to zoomers cause its not even close

# ? May 7, 2020 20:11

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

uncop posted:

I like your posting, people who know stuff should post unless they have something more important to do with their time. You bring historical facts into play so people can't argue on the basis of ignorance and have to get deeper into what the facts imply. You force people to make some effort to show how you're wrong when you are.

Well, the core of the theory of alienation is that people are controlled by things, the theory of commodity fetishism describes that core of the phenomenon of alienation. When the production process becomes social, it also becomes too complex for any single person to understand how their product is made if no effort is made to enable them to understand it. And if the product is produced for appropriation by some entity that commands the worker rather than negotiating with them, the worker couldn't recognize the product of their own hand even if they literally personally found it in a shop and bought it for themselves: they would experience it as buying a mysterious thing with inherent value and so on rather than as a social relation between themselves as a producer and themselves as a consumer. In a non-alienated society, the worker understands concretely what labors their products are made of and where those products go to the point where they could go visit the producers of their inputs or the consumers of their outputs and shake their or their representatives' hand and discuss how production could be done better. They might not recognize their own product if they just randomly found it in a shop, but they could trace it and know it was in that shop at that moment.

As long as the capitalist exists, they won't let things be any other way, but taking the capitalist out of the picture isn't in itself enough because the core of the issue arises from the socialization of production rather than the private appropriation of the product. The new thing capital brought into political economy wasn't private property sold on the market, it was the socialization of production in order to produce for a market. Socialism keeps the socialized production but has to figure out how to put the producer back in conscious control of it in a similar way as the producer is in conscious control of private production (e.g. artisan and peasant production). Practice produces knowledge, i.e. control of a system produces understanding of the system, and the dialectic of control and understanding (something feels wrong -> improve it!) destroys the objective basis for alienation.

The stakhanovist movement contained a sort of half-step toward worker understanding by raising workers into managers: so long as the worker-manager stayed loyal to the workers, they could act as a mediator between the plan and workers rather than just an overseer of workers for the plan, they could improve things based on understanding them so far as it served the plan. The Cultural Revolution in China took another step with an experimental system of enforced co-management where the designated manager had to make their decisions together with a workers' representative. That means the manager needed to actively relay knowledge to any representative that the workers happened to elect, and the representative needed to relay knowledge to and take input from the common workers. I don't have the time to check who the third part of the co-management system was, but IIRC it was the planner, in which case factory floor workers suddenly had a sort of democratic input into the plan itself. My personal take is that communists needed to take that basic idea and keep iterating on it like the Japanese would iterate on a car design to turn it from barely functional to state of the art over decades. And that Soviet science could already answer where to begin that iterative process although it couldn't go very far without first having a test bed for its theories in society.

thanks for this writeup. is there a separate term for the specific difference between your labor-power's use-value being seized by a private capitalist instead of going directly into community stores that ISN'T "alienation"? or should i just understand alienation as having an important affective dimension on top of being a bare-bones accounting of who gets what

# ? May 7, 2020 20:57

Proust Malone: Apr 4, 2008

Atrocious Joe posted:

The global economy needs reform top to bottom to stop #China economic imperialism & secure the needs of American families

Not quite 14 words, but partial credit...

# ? May 7, 2020 21:08

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Dreddout posted:

This was also stalins reaction to barbarossa

I like the story of how, after hearing news of the invasion, he went up to his cottage and waited, fully expecting the party leadership to execute him for his gross incompetence. Instead a couple of senior military/political leaders (Zhukov was one maybe?) showed up and asked him what the hell they should do.

# ? May 7, 2020 21:22

indigi: Jul 20, 2004; ^{how can we not talk about family

when family's all that we got?}

I'm bitter that I can't get any Michael Parenti books on Kindle

# ? May 7, 2020 21:47

Centrist Committee: Aug 6, 2019

indigi posted:

I'm bitter that I can't get any Michael Parenti books on Kindle

https://b-ok.org

# ? May 7, 2020 23:17

MizPiz: May 29, 2013; by Athanatos

https://twitter.com/meohmyapplepie/status/1258517535219044353?s=19

# ? May 8, 2020 00:33

smarxist: Jul 26, 2018; by Fluffdaddy

Centrist Committee posted:

https://b-ok.org

and zamzar.net if you need to convert epub to azw3

# ? May 8, 2020 00:37

BrutalistMcDonalds: Oct 4, 2012; Lipstick Apathy

it's victory day

# ? May 8, 2020 14:17

3: Aug 26, 2006; The Magic Number; College Slice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4HojrYcVck

# ? May 8, 2020 16:45

Top City Homo: Oct 15, 2014; Ramrod XTreme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MC0Om8v8H7g

# ? May 8, 2020 16:53

Top City Homo: Oct 15, 2014; Ramrod XTreme

and the classic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0xGimfwDL4

# ? May 8, 2020 16:57

Sheng-Ji Yang: Mar 5, 2014

3 posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4HojrYcVck

lol

# ? May 8, 2020 19:16

Lightning Knight: Feb 24, 2012; Pray for Answer

kim isn�t dead so it�s time to re-up a classic

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QbC6dLG_dQY

# ? May 8, 2020 20:34

3: Aug 26, 2006; The Magic Number; College Slice

Lightning Knight posted:

kim isn�t dead so it�s time to re-up a classic

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QbC6dLG_dQY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwoSFQb5HVk

# ? May 8, 2020 22:04

A4R8: Feb 28, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liMlM4rhkkA

# ? May 8, 2020 22:08

Top City Homo: Oct 15, 2014; Ramrod XTreme

Reading this article

every page makes me feel utter contempt for chumpsky

https://static1.squarespace.com/sta...atible+Left.pdf

quote:

One chronicler notes that in the case of the SDS �early international contacts with representatives of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, the Republic
of North Vietnam, Cuba, European Communist parties, and assorted Third World guerrilla groups were important in forging an international perspective for the
Movement in its later stages.� A New Republic columnist noted that �the most striking fact about the young radicals was the extent to which they identified with
the Viet Cong.�15 Julius Lester, a spokesman for SNCC and speechwriter for Stokely Carmichael, wrote that �we are trying to follow in the footsteps of Lenin,
Mao, and Fidel.� Eldridge Cleaver travelled to Cuba, Algeria, China, and North Korea; the Black Panther Party�s required reading list included Malcolm X, Mao,
Frantz Fanon, and Che Guevara. �We must establish a true internationalism with other anticolonial peoples,� said George Jackson, �Only then can we expect to be
able to seize the power that is rightfully ours, the power to control the circumstances of our day-to-day lives.� �Comrade Che is alive,� wrote Lester after
the Argentine�s assassination, �on East 103rd street.�16

In contrast, Chomsky said �Guevara was of no interest to me; this was mindless romanticism, in my view.�17 Speaking of mindless romanticism, even then, as the
eyes of Western revolutionaries were looking to Cuba, Africa, and Asia, the professor was pointing to the anarchist Erewhon of Spain circa-1936 as �the most
convincing example� how to do revolution�namely, �a very sudden, spontaneous� revolution. In contrast to those post-colonial Third World states beginning the path to self-determination, Chomsky highlighted this lovely sounding place as �a nearly classic example� of non-violent revolution to be emulated, �which was successful at least for a year or two in developing a collective society with mass participation and a very high degree of egalitarianism and even economic success.�

These comments were part of a debate with several thinkers including Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag on the subject of nonviolence. Unlike the others, Chomsky at least had positive things about the socialist societies being built in China, Vietnam, and Cuba (Arendt said �As to the Viet Cong terror, we cannot possibly agree with it, just as we couldn�t agree with the terror of the National Liberation Army in Algeria. People who did agree with this terror and were only against the French counter-terror, of course, were applying a double standard.� And as liberals know, hypocrisy is the worst crime of all, certainly worse than colonialism).

But to have inveighed against these revolutions at this time would have been to lose all credibility in activist circles, which is why you�d be hard-pressed to find revolutionaries of the era who had much interest in the thoughts of Hannah Arendt.

Nevertheless, while making these concessions to prevailing radical sentiment, Chomsky muddied the water quite a bit by using the term �non-violence� interchangeably with the concept of �enjoying popular support� and then proposing that revolution would happen as it �did� in Spain, through �a possibility of spontaneous revolution� which would somehow restrict itself to using violence only in ways that were morally unimpeachable. If so few revolutions conform to the Chomsky template it may be because for the people of Algeria, the Congo, Cuba, and Vietnam, life under imperialism and colonialism was intolerable. They couldn�t wait for morally pure revolutions that erupted
everywhere non-hierarchically because they were not making revolutions in heaven, where such ideal conditions are possible.

They had to radically change this world under the constraints that existed in real life. Chomsky sometimes invokes anarchish-sounding ideas to compel compliance: when
arguing that bombing Libya would be a �humanitarian intervention,� he said �it would be too strong to hold that [the burden of proof for believing the White
House] can never be satisfied in principle�unless, of course, we regard nationstates in their current form as essentially holy.�
This is a non-sequitur�it does not follow logically that one who doesn�t believe in Western �humanitarian interventions� �regards nation-states as holy,� but it does help Chomsky paint skeptics and anti-imperialists as people motivated by irrational worship of the nation-state.

Towards the end of the discussion, a man in the audience made the points that 1)the Cuban revolution was both violent and enjoyed widespread popular support, 2) the discussion did not touch on the major revolutionary factor in American life, namely black resistance, and 3) the discussion was mostly academic navelgazing: �It seems to me that until you can begin to show�not in language and not in theory, but in action�that you can put an end to the war in Vietnam, and an end to American racism, you can�t condemn the violence of others who can�t wait for you.�

In his hagiography of Chomsky, Robert Barsky muses that the professor�s work �is built upon particular precepts that are explained with regard
to individual issues (Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East), but that it implicitly poses, without fully answering, questions� Chomsky will not tell us how to act.�18 �

[T]he question about which I have least to say�is the question of the forms resistance should take,� the professor said in an article published in
December 1967 titled �On Resistance.� Chomsky claimed to agree that the recent Pentagon protests had signaled a shift from �dissent to resistance,� but he was far
less clear about what either term actually entailed, other than to say that �resistance requires careful thought, and I do not pretend to have very clear ideas about it.� In this area, Professor Chomsky has provided the most useful framework for understanding the difference between himself and the rest of the radical milieu.

Speaking on the subject of scientific inquiry, Chomsky explains the dichotomy between problems and mysteries:
Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing
knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an
explanation would even look like.

For countless activists, changing the world was a problem to be solved. For Chomsky, it was and remains a mystery to bedevil us. For some reason, of all the
revolutionaries of the era, the man who would become the face of the Western �Left� was one of the few people who wasn�t grappling with the issue of how to
actually make revolution.And while Chomsky had few ideas about what activists should do, he also differed
from his peer group in that he had lots of idea about what activists shouldn�t do

Top City Homo fucked around with this message at 22:03 on May 10, 2020

# ? May 10, 2020 21:52

Sheng-Ji Yang: Mar 5, 2014

https://twitter.com/taintgunner/status/1259712755969536000?s=19

# ? May 11, 2020 06:13

Prince Myshkin: Jun 17, 2018

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

https://twitter.com/taintgunner/status/1259712755969536000?s=19

Gonna need a crate full of those Lenin face masks.

# ? May 11, 2020 06:29

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

https://twitter.com/BigProsody/status/1259879707127934976

# ? May 11, 2020 18:10

A4R8: Feb 28, 2020

Be vigilant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvkUXT0pMYE

Communism is coming.

# ? May 12, 2020 19:11

Finicums Wake: Mar 13, 2017; Can't post for 8 years!

leo panitch on the recent economic crisis:
https://theanalysis.news/interviews/pandemic-shows-need-for-democratic-central-planning-and-public-ownership-leo-panitch/

# ? May 12, 2020 21:07

LittleBlackCloud: Mar 5, 2007; xXI love Plum JuiceXx

Can anyone explain the emergence of people who seem to be syncretizing anti-revisionism with very American style idpol stuff?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYUmUh2gpJA

# ? May 12, 2020 22:37

BrutalistMcDonalds: Oct 4, 2012; Lipstick Apathy

LittleBlackCloud posted:

Can anyone explain the emergence of people who seem to be syncretizing anti-revisionism with very American style idpol stuff?

i saw the headline and length of the video and decided to click back to this red letter media review of independence day (1996). i probably already have the gist of it.

it's an interesting question and i don't think i can easily sum it up. my feeling is that on the one hand, the notion (although i'm not suggesting you're making this) that marxism-leninism is like a "workerist" thing and unconcerned with the political superstructure as a distraction is a misnomer. in a sense the only way out of this is through, that to build unity within the working class is to oppose racism full stop, that these are democratic struggles to be supported in their own right, and they shouldn't be dismissed as mere "identity politics." but workerism is a thing in some groups, like the trotskyist SEP which publishes the WSWS, frequent target in this sub. that ted cruz tweeted a link to the WSWS other day is a funny little irony. the CPGB-ML, which is a pretty twisted little anti-revisionist group in the UK, is like a fossilized stalinism from the 1950s that instructs its member to cut their hair like tommy robinson because that's what working-class men look like, apparently.

i also think american MLism diverged quite a bit though from the foreign parties which the american "parties" emulate, so MLism can become like an identity, and a cargo cult, as opposed to a set of tools, and the party internal structures take the form of a miniaturized leninism more concerned with having the correct "line," but democratic centralism in the early 1900s didn't demand that everyone in the party agree on everything, or have the same opinions about historical topics. they aimed for diversity of debate (including openly in the party papers) but unity of action, like if the party voted to stand in the elections, it'd be prohibited to issue "calls" for boycotting the elections as the elections are going on. so it feels like these parties take decades of history, and then compress it down to a small size, and call that a praxis, even though what the (successful) historical parties they're emulating were doing were changing and adjusting their own methods based on the situation they were in as it evolved, and were in very different situations to begin with! it's just weird, but feels like in "galaxy quest" where they try to transport the alien pig creature through their teleporter and it materializes on the pad inside out and then explodes in a shower of goo.

like look back at the video you posted. like (a) okay let's not kid ourselves that this is partly a fashion statement. (b) the subject is that the DPRK is good but some people think it's bad. okay, maybe it's good. maybe it's great! but the actual ability of marxist-leninists to do anything about this situation is extremely small, so the question about whether to support them or not is an intellectual exercise at best, fandom at worst. there's very little talk here, if the DPRK is super-duper awesome, about what to do to support it in a meaningful way. or whether it's a smart move to build your independence as a person, or your independence as a political organization, on this question. but i think a lot of groups do so there's endless splitting.

# ? May 12, 2020 23:35

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 11, 2024 23:49

ToxicAcne: May 25, 2014

What's with Western leftists unironic support for the Chinese government? Some posters on r/chapotraphouse stated that the Uighur concentration camps were really vocational and reeducation camps and that it was the Uighur's fault for not assimilating and learning Mandarin. Does this kind of thinking come from some misplaced defence of "actually existing socialism"?

# ? May 12, 2020 23:47

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > There is a spectrum haunting C-SPAM. I, on the contrary,

«‹›1217 »