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Ferrinus posted:i read a little althusser recently, he seems pretty sharp his work on overdetermination was a big early influence on Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, whose conceptualization of class as a process I found useful. supposedly Wolff’s more recent work on SDEs is an application of the lessons taken from this but I haven’t been interested enough to see what he’s up to. Knowledge and Class is a good book.
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Mar 5, 2021 01:04
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ToxicAcne posted:So where would you say the new radicals are coming from? My guess would be students who went to university and got thrown down into the proletariat (words like precariat I'm finding are misleading) anyways. i'd expect most radical leaders to emerge out of the masses of newly immiserated people, yes, but i'd not be surprised if they came from business school or military backgrounds rather than academic educations. most of the western academic tradition has had its political potential deliberately neutered, after all really the great strength of the labour movement of old was that they were actually able to build serious, powerful structures and start developing their own elites. this takes serious organisational heft, though, and it's unclear where you can get that in the west these days - certainly most of the organisational flora doesn't really have much direct power beyond campaigning potential, which you can mostly just buy anyway
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Mar 5, 2021 01:12
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it also does bear noting that the sixty-eighter students were actually not the ones who flinched in sixty eight, the french communist party and workers' organisations were bought off by the government. the subsequent careers of cohn bendit and that lot of renegades are, of course, a decrepit remnant and a bad memory, but at the time they were the most serious revolutionaries on the ground
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Mar 5, 2021 01:16
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dead gay comedy forums posted:Adorno is a great read to consider cultural production, just disregard anything he talks about popular art iirc, the only jazz he had been exposed to was like german marching bands trying to cover american jazz music
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Mar 5, 2021 01:30
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also, re: may 68 the communist theorists who were out in the streets and supporting the revolution were exactly the type of people typically called "infantile leftists:" council communists, situationists, etc. the official communist party was a corpse, at that point, of course, but it makes you think twice about all these western marxist-leninists' diatribes against ultraleftism. or at least it does for me
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Mar 5, 2021 01:31
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People talk about how we're headed towards "neofeudalism" but under feudalism you still had The Commons and people still owned (in a loose definition) their plots of land. The main thing was that your surplus value as a peasant/serf was appropriated from you at the point of a sword. The techno-nightmare some people envision under Supreme Overlord Bezos or whatever isn't "neofeudalism", it's slavery.
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Mar 5, 2021 02:34
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i don’t think the PCF was a corpse at all in 1968
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Mar 5, 2021 04:53
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GalacticAcid posted:i don’t think the PCF was a corpse at all in 1968 i was under the impression that they were no longer a serious revolutionary party by then, and that their failure to back the may 68 revolt was a symptom of that. at least that's how i've heard the story told. if you have cool stuff i can read about the leftists in post-war france, i'd be interested to read more
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Mar 5, 2021 05:01
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Finicums Wake posted:i was under the impression that they were no longer a serious revolutionary party by then, and that their failure to back the may 68 revolt was a symptom of that. at least that's how i've heard the story told. if you have cool stuff i can read about the leftists in post-war france, i'd be interested to read more https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/04/19/1968-when-the-communist-party-stopped-a-french-revolution/ this didn't have a paywall the last time i read it but it struck me, who doesn't know the history that well, as a sensible telling of events the short version is that the PCF was genuinely, legitimately close to the french working class, and didn't push for full on revolution because the french working class wouldn't have supported it themselves
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Mar 5, 2021 05:21
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gradenko_2000 posted:People talk about how we're headed towards "neofeudalism" but under feudalism you still had The Commons and people still owned (in a loose definition) their plots of land. The main thing was that your surplus value as a peasant/serf was appropriated from you at the point of a sword. Perhaps the most bittersweet thing about such an experiment into regressing the mode of production is that the attempt will cause the self destruction of the American empire. The military is able to maintain the hegemony of the empire because not only is it furnished with great amounts of war material that it can expand on training, but it also can draw in educated and able-bodied to staff the ranks of its enlisted and officers. Regression not only threatens the former - for patchwork infrastructure and stagnant capital hampers extraction of resources to turn in war material and the logistics involved - but also the latter both by deaths and by dwindling the pool of the population that can meet the peacetime standards. This would eventually cause a crisis where the once invincible American military is defeated in conventional warfare and with it the the loss of overseas neocolonies that it relies for markets and resources followed by decay and collapse.
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Mar 5, 2021 05:28
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it's completely anecdotal but i know more ex military organizers than any other particular background. that said 'got a masters degree and realized the debt payments will take 100 years' comes in second. a close third is just your regular working class for life until promoted into union leadership
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Mar 5, 2021 05:55
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i've been active in organisations of various kinds to various extents for many years and the orgs that get anything done are usually the ones with a well-defined purpose and a relatively narrow remit. the one closest to my heart ideologically is also completely dominated by do-gooder student lefties, who are mostly nice people but not very effective organisers. the worst ones are the ones who see organisational work as basically resume-building, those people can be actively detrimental
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Mar 5, 2021 07:08
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Ferrinus posted:https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/04/19/1968-when-the-communist-party-stopped-a-french-revolution/ I haven't read the article myself, but the argument that I've generally heard, in qualified defense of the PCF, was that it was not that they or the French working class did not want a revolution, but that they did not believe they had any chance of victory. A revolution requires more than the subjective readiness of the working class; if the ruling class and their state are not in crisis themselves, they can be quite capable of drowning a revolution in blood, and they had to consider the certainty that such a revolution would be waged not only against the French ruling class, but all the NATO powers.
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Mar 6, 2021 05:03
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Finicums Wake posted:i was under the impression that they were no longer a serious revolutionary party by then, and that their failure to back the may 68 revolt was a symptom of that. at least that's how i've heard the story told. if you have cool stuff i can read about the leftists in post-war france, i'd be interested to read more Ah okay that I wouldn’t object to...by “corpse” I was thinking like, insignificant or tiny. PCF might have ceased being a fully revolutionary outfit by then but it still commanded a lot of support.
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Mar 6, 2021 16:04
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Larry Parrish posted:feudalism as a proto-dictatorship where everyone is intentionally kept a filthy dirt farmer is very much a liberal construct to canonize themselves after the fact. not that it wasn't like that in some places, like Russia. im not educated or w.e. so maybe there's a better description but imo feudalism was instead characterized by the lack of the nation state. instead of state services and bureaucracy you just have the resources of whatever lord, who you'd enter a contract into. generally renting land and paying it back in goods. the education of the worker doesn't play a lot into that. there was a big divide amongst medieval historians about whether they should even be using the term "feudalism" when everything we might describe as feudal encompasses a huge number of different economic relationships and systems, from the serfdom of russia and eastern europe to the smallholding peasant in france and britain, and there's tons of differences between even those things. this is some serious pedantic nerd poo poo tho. V. Illych L. posted:i've been active in organisations of various kinds to various extents for many years and the orgs that get anything done are usually the ones with a well-defined purpose and a relatively narrow remit. the one closest to my heart ideologically is also completely dominated by do-gooder student lefties, who are mostly nice people but not very effective organisers. the worst ones are the ones who see organisational work as basically resume-building, those people can be actively detrimental this is my experience as well. the most effective group I'm a part of has a very narrow focus and it's able to get meetings with high level politicians, have some impact on legislation and is basically closer to power than any broad leftist group. of course it helps that this group is focused on agriculture so it doesn't tend to attract the career-builders. also the executive tells anyone who rolls in with ideas to go do them which tends to scare off the armchair activists. Dreylad fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Mar 6, 2021 |
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Mar 6, 2021 16:18
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How do you guys spot the resume builders?
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Mar 6, 2021 16:33
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If your organisation is an absolutely clusterfuck which doesn't accomplish anything for long enough then they leave.
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Mar 6, 2021 16:37
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ToxicAcne posted:How do you guys spot the resume builders? people who want to get in on all the networking opportunities (meeting with politicians, press, connecting with other organizations), but do none of the actual work needed to accomplish any of that stuff
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Mar 6, 2021 18:53
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namesake posted:If your organisation is an absolutely clusterfuck which doesn't accomplish anything for long enough then they leave. I would say that they are the ones who tend to create these situations in the first place and they tend to not leave while pretending it they are doing lots
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Mar 6, 2021 19:03
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GalacticAcid posted:Ah okay that I wouldn’t object to...by “corpse” I was thinking like, insignificant or tiny. PCF might have ceased being a fully revolutionary outfit by then but it still commanded a lot of support. yeah i was being imprecise and polemical, my bad
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Mar 6, 2021 19:59
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gradenko_2000 posted:People talk about how we're headed towards "neofeudalism" but under feudalism you still had The Commons and people still owned (in a loose definition) their plots of land. The main thing was that your surplus value as a peasant/serf was appropriated from you at the point of a sword. agreed. there is no going back to something akin to feudalism, and neofeudalism is a bad term to describe mass technological society under universal surveillance and a rentier privatized economy. it is a new thing, and not directly comparable to past forms. we have already entered into these new horrors of social relations and i think it can last longer than people think, and maintain its own form of stability
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Mar 6, 2021 20:05
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yeah it might be more apt to talk about us going back to the early days of capitalism when the bourgeoisie and state were united in systematically stripping away the commons and extending the workday in order to force people into wage labor and maximize absolute surplus value. each individual prole owning literally nothing and instantly losing every last cent of their wage to rent-seekers as soon as that wage is paid isn't at all feudalism, but rather the capitalist ideal on top of which anything resembling a welfare state is a temporary historical accident
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Mar 6, 2021 20:10
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it’s always a surprise to see what capitalism can manage to adapt to, and watching it adapt to ecological destruction while employing the tools of machine learning and digital surveillance, well it’s going to be a joy
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Mar 6, 2021 20:14
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the philosopher nick bostrom uses the term 'singleton' to refer to any global, humanity-encompassing system of government and control. i like the concept because it is neutral as to the form such a system will take or whether it will be good or bad. theoretically, at least, full communism would considered a singleton. but let's not kid ourselves: if we end up with a unified global government system, it's going to be dystopian as hell
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Mar 6, 2021 20:21
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Larry Parrish posted:This is why I just generally ignore anything outside the US. It's not that I don't care or that it doesn't matter, but I can't affect it and I'll just be trading different propaganda shop zingers with fellow morons. it's been good to read histories of radical movements from other countries as I've been learning more. but agreed, at the end of the day I wish I could read like trade papers from regional workplaces in my area, more than 800 page summaries of mass movements of the past. it's the biggest hole I feel every day. and hell its exactly something Lenin talked about in What Must Be Done so it's been a goal for people for decades and decades and decades. I should find more zines in my area or something
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Mar 6, 2021 20:43
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I meant what is to be done. hell you all know what I meant probably.
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Mar 6, 2021 20:49
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being part of an international is good because you can read analysis of current events in other countries which often time helps inform politics nationally, rather than just reading history. the analysis of comrades in Greece and Spain regarding Syriza and podemos I know was very useful to comrades in the uk in shaping their approach to Labour under corbyn and for us in the us with similar broad left formations, their positives their negatives their potentials and also their pitfalls.
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Mar 6, 2021 20:56
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the internet kind of destroyed little local newspapers and poo poo like that. if you're a company that wants to zpend money on ads, or just some rando posting in the classifieds, you're much more likely to buy online advertisements than put something in the local alternative weekly. and if you're some kind of lefty writer, you're much more likely to make a blog or submit something to like jacobin than look to your local press to get your start. the internet has helped a lot of leftists gain a foothold in the media sphere that they wouldn't have otherwise, but there's still a vacuum to be filled now that there aren't a ton of tiny leftist news shops dotting the country like in the late 19th and early 20th century. idk much about the economics of running such an operation today, especially since i have no experience in journalism or as a writer, but the structural barriers to creating one seem large. it bums me out Finicums Wake fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Mar 6, 2021 |
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Mar 6, 2021 20:57
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Classifieds are the big ones tbh. Facebook and Google draw the ire but I think Craigslist hurt local papers more than any other single site. Not that it’s specifically their fault, some form of craigslist would have materialized regardless I'd say
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Mar 6, 2021 22:41
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ToxicAcne posted:How do you guys spot the resume builders? ime they're usually people who are eager for formal positions and who show up with a lot of sound and fury. they're super active for like a couple of months until they get some kind of position, at which point they lose interest for the more drudgey work. typically they like being faces and coming up with ideas, but you can never really be certain before they up and leave for something else
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Mar 7, 2021 00:15
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were Mao and the CPC as incredibly, unbelievably lucky as Lenin and the Bolsheviks in terms of the circumstances and events leading to their successful revolutions? since reading October I keep thinking about how the Russian communists could have been defeated or severely reduced in power at several points during 1917 if not for the ridiculous incompetence of their opponents/a few very lucky coincidences
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Mar 7, 2021 00:24
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Ferrinus posted:yeah it might be more apt to talk about us going back to the early days of capitalism when the bourgeoisie and state were united in systematically stripping away the commons and extending the workday in order to force people into wage labor and maximize absolute surplus value. each individual prole owning literally nothing and instantly losing every last cent of their wage to rent-seekers as soon as that wage is paid isn't at all feudalism, but rather the capitalist ideal on top of which anything resembling a welfare state is a temporary historical accident well, at least studies into workforce optimization turned into actual guidelines and beliefs for themselves, like LEAN and Six Sigma or whatever
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Mar 7, 2021 00:29
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I think that's just history to a degree - a storm or sudden illness or horse throwing a shoe or two brilliant figures with similar politics hating each other because one spilled a drink on the other at a party one time means a really unlikely transfer of power is what actually happened. Also the Chinese communists got smashed a lot harder than the bolsheviks which is pretty impressive considering how many russians got exiled.
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Mar 7, 2021 00:30
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ToxicAcne posted:How do you guys spot the resume builders? Watch and see who freaks out when you get crosswise with NGO liberals.
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Mar 7, 2021 00:31
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the resume people also normally study something like international development or journalism or gender studies or the like - that is, paths without specific careers obviously laid out for them. i've never met anyone involved in volunteer work who was doing natural science stuff who was a climber - the formal skillset dovetails very poorly with the resume addition ideologues are usually not resume people, but they're also often not the people you want in leadership positions because they tend to have hobby horses and hangups which makes everything take longer. some builders are also very obvious in that they don't care about talking to non-ranking (I.e. non-useful) people from other organisations it's very difficult to discern a certain kind of sincere activist from most builders, though. the best defence against it is simply not letting new members have certain important positions imo - so chair, treasurer and whoever handles membership data should all be relative veterans, and you want someone without a formal position in charge of the nominating committee or equivalent to make sure that they don't get dazzled. once, my local chapter was almost totally taken over by a clique of charming guys who left basically overnight and it took months to fix the damage, retrieve logins, account for all funding, get them formally booted from their positions etc at least two of those guys now work in politics, which makes me legitimately angry
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Mar 7, 2021 01:20
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dont put anyone with a polisci degree in charge of anything. worst case scenario theyre opportunists or careerists, best case scenario all of their political instincts are wrong because they studied polisci.
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Mar 7, 2021 01:24
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leftist orgs would probably save themselves loads of headaches if they just asked for a resume before letting people into leadership positions
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Mar 7, 2021 01:25
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a lot of the time it's genuinely hard to fill all the necessary positions - i've often taken the nominating committee gig and it's thankless stuff, you have to manouever very carefully to avoid pissing people off while keeping the obvious bad seeds out. i once got accused of doing a power grab and i just thought 'power over *what*, our $5000 annual budget?' while remaining polite and offering some pablum about diversity to justify my decision
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Mar 7, 2021 01:31
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indigi posted:were Mao and the CPC as incredibly, unbelievably lucky as Lenin and the Bolsheviks in terms of the circumstances and events leading to their successful revolutions? since reading October I keep thinking about how the Russian communists could have been defeated or severely reduced in power at several points during 1917 if not for the ridiculous incompetence of their opponents/a few very lucky coincidences Well they were a successful revolution so yeah they were pretty lucky, but in practical terms that just means they had the right people in the right place at the right time to overthrow the regime
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Mar 7, 2021 01:47
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Dreddout posted:Well they were a successful revolution so yeah they were pretty lucky, but in practical terms that just means they had the right people in the right place at the right time to overthrow the regime I realize you have to be lucky to win any conflict in general, but the soviets seemed to have a lightning-strikes-thrice level of luck
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Mar 7, 2021 02:01
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