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caps on caps on caps posted:So you may disagree because capitalism, but everything we know indicates that people care a whole lot. Sociologists would also chuckle at the notion that social hierarchies are voluntary. To say that it’s not feasible to tackle the concrete social hierarchies of today because there will always be some abstract form of social hierarchy is just a mask of cynicism. Capitalism is historically unique here because the intersection of technology & current conceptions of property allows for extreme social hierarchies to find objective expression in ever escalating ways. The usage of all-encompassing language like bourgeoise & proletariat is to bring to the forefront of general consciousness a formalization of a caste system that was previously hidden informally, embedded in the everyday 'free' choices we make with the flow of capital. This is why the effort to teach these concepts isn't a form of condescension, as it's a critique of a form of thought as opposed to a lack of intellectual capacity. We address these objective social hierarchies by dismantling the conditions that allow for extreme resource distributions, which can be done external to and supersedes any individual's psychology, as their preference for relative superiority will take on new meaning as it becomes tethered to something substantial (Leaving aside the questionable extension of the psychological profiles of particular subjects to humanity absolutely). Obviously, this is easier said than done, as the extant conditions in the US are nowhere near bad enough to build a political movement necessary to achieve something so high-minded, as the inadequacy of the market can be continually obscured by locating problems in the individual through racism/sexism/etc., and exploitation & violence are effectively exported overseas; at least until further catastrophes. KVeezy3 fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Jan 2, 2020 |
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Jan 1, 2020 16:08
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caps on caps on caps posted:I guess in consequence it's the same ol' problems that have been discussed many times. It would be nevertheless interesting what the left strategy is to unite wage laborers, seeing as the category seems so ill fitting in its current form. I don't know if that is a specific necessity. While the functional distinctions are clear. When you look at the #metoo for example the stresses on the lives of rich proles are often very similar to the "proper proles" the differences are more about quality than kind. We just have shittier versions of the same problems. However if we call them petite bourgeoisie and write them off, how many people are we actually losing? From a tactical perspective I think the inequality of america is getting to where we don't need them to make a mass movement. Medicare for all and concrete plans to make things better will win some of them over. Are there enough middle managers to make a difference as a voting bloc?
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Jan 3, 2020 20:31
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Postmodernity is dissolving into Romanticism. Grand narratives are coming back wether we like it or not.
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Jan 3, 2020 21:07
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Edit: I honestly think I am derailing this thread, which is about a book. Let me just say that the right wing's grand narrative is simple and compelling to people in today's social hierarhies. Please don't be so dogmatic when crafting a program for the left, as to ignore the current social relations as they are perceived via status cues by most of society. Because it'll be necessary that the future left is less of a failure than in the past thirty years. That is all. Haramstufe Rot fucked around with this message at 11:50 on Jan 4, 2020 |
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Jan 4, 2020 11:30
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Reznor posted:I don't know if that is a specific necessity. While the functional distinctions are clear. When you look at the #metoo for example the stresses on the lives of rich proles are often very similar to the "proper proles" the differences are more about quality than kind. We just have shittier versions of the same problems. However if we call them petite bourgeoisie and write them off, how many people are we actually losing? I like the wobblies' definition of working class. If you can hire or fire people, you're management. That also happens to be the most relevant power in #metoo.
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Jan 4, 2020 14:30
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caps on caps on caps posted:Edit: I honestly think I am derailing this thread, which is about a book. That’s not only what it is about. Your contribution to the discussion is appreciated.
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Jan 4, 2020 16:39
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VideoTapir posted:I like the wobblies' definition of working class. If you can hire or fire people, you're management. That also happens to be the most relevant power in #metoo. Is it a useful distinction? I think the store manager of a McDonald's is more like a worker than the owner. Yes they can hire or fire, but they also have to worry about being hired and fired. I think in most cases though their bugging and firing power comes from upstairs more than their discression. Further to my knowledge most lower management types are paid salary and not in a profit shared manner. So in a real way they have similar lived experiences being constrained by forces out of their control.
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Jan 5, 2020 07:55
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The Inner Conflict in Socialist Belief cont. So we have this problem of harmony. The bourgeois principle doesn’t work because of disharmony, ie. markets don’t distribute wealth equitably, and democracies can be controlled by pre bourgeois and bourgeois powers degrading them into democracies in name only. Socialism identifies these failures in the present. But in the future it expects a system that doesn’t fail in the same way. There is then a leap between what is, and what is expected what ought. The expectation ends up having to be immanent, if it is transcendent is is deprived of it urgency and energy, here Tillich calls transcendent expectation “anti-revolutionary ideology”. But this gap it creates the alternation of: hope and disappointment, Utopianism and compromise. That is the consequence of the is of disharmony now with the expectation of a future harmony. The reactions to this inform the current divisions on the left. One way to deal with it is to borrow “progress” from the bourgeois. Tillich asserts that to do this make the proletariat moment “a purely intrabourgeois affair”. This is the split between reform and revolution. Here he defined Communism as representing the revolutionary side. A leap to the wholly new through a complete social revolution. But the context of that leap is a radical “this worldliness”. This is a potential contradiction. ( Tillich exempts Bolshevism in Russia, He characterized that revolution as one where the revolution was occurring against pre-bourgeois powers rather than bourgeois ones) Anyway here he outlines what he sees as the goals for religious socialists. To make clear the jump between current disharmony and future harmony is recognized as what it is faith. To reveal the conflict that results as a consequence. And to attempt to create a symbolic solution that adequately deals with the conflict.
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Jan 15, 2020 23:55
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There seem to be a bunch of very meaningful holes in the categories in this book from the perspective of applying them into the present, at least going by your explanations (I haven't read the book). It seems obvious to me how it stems from where and when it was written, but correct me if I make inferences that just aren't true given the text as a whole. First off, the harmony expected by the believers in the bourgeois principle has never actually been real, it has always been an illusion that people have collaboratively participated in building. The break in the harmony never appears or disappears, it only moves around and seems to appear whenever it enters the walled-off section of society that writes the history that we read. Capitalism has always had the mass of the people within its limits excluded from liberal rights defined by the bourgeoisie for themselves. When capitalism was a national phenomenon, the majority of people living within the borders were not extended equal rights by any means. The seeming harmony after the 60's or so was due to the disharmony being expelled beyond the national borders after capitalism had developed into a united world system and made the turn from terror to conciliation possible with regard to highly exploited minorities. But that process didn't even go that far before being forced to turn back around as the disharmony within the oppressed nations animated them to win further rights and expel part of the disharmony. My point is that when harmony seems impossible to restore in a certain location, it's nowhere near as world-shaking as it seems to the people who have lived in the liberal bubble, for most people in the world it's just business as usual. Second, abstracting real existing society to just a bourgeoisie and a proletariat is not possible, and causes Tillich to mislocate social forces that would not have been hard to locate if he had been to open a history book before having decided on his categories. Tillich's concept of the radical bourgeoisie contains both what could be called the radical bourgeoisie (those who radically disrupt old social relations and ways of thinking wherever bourgeois ideology does not yet dominate) and the radical middle classes (those who seek social harmony on the basis of the bourgeois principle with democracy as their tool to acquire the same rights as the bourgeoisie had merely granted the propertied). He assigns to the radical bourgeoisie the honor for what they fought against to tooth and nail, for decades, everywhere, every step of the way. Democracy as we know it is undoubtably the product of an alliance between the middle classes and the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. Obama was radical bourgeois only in the sense I use, looking at his practical track record he was extremely ready to compromise on any middle class democratic values the held when it came to people outside the US-liberal bubble. Third, we have gone far along enough within capitalism that romantics don't have to look at feudal or pre-feudal structures for their primary inspiration anymore, and don't. Today, what they typically want is the golden age of imperialism back, the 50's or the 70's or so depending on their stance on women and minorities. In Europe, classical social democratic values are now the expressed values of political romantics and the proto-fascist parties in basically every country are voted by a massive amount of people who want basically what is construed as socialist in a very progressive sense in the USA right now. Romantic myths love harmony across class lines based on religion or nation or something equivalent, where everyone was seemingly content in their position in the social hierarchy. The golden age of social democracy was exactly that. The time of a bourgeois-proletarian alliance on the basis of mutual prosperity through plunder of third-world nations. People who seek that state of affairs are not progressive, they are reactionary. They used to be progressive in the bourgeois sense, letting imperialism run wild destroying traditional relations around the world, but bourgeois radicalism has moved past that stage onto the stage of global industrial supply chains that is incompatible with first-world social-democratic desires. And they were never progressive in the proletarian sense, actually advancing socialism in the world. The reason for that is that their socialism depends on excluding the majority of the workers of the world from participating in anything but the most brutal semi-tributary capitalism. It's a complete dead end development because of its economistic core, ideologically transforming the proletarian struggle into a national struggle for a more equitable share of what their bourgeoisies win in international competition. Social harmony itself is a middle-class illusion enabled by the liberal mythology and news-bubble that externalises existing disharmony into the fault of pre-capitalist practices. In established practice seeking harmonious developments mainly produces right-wing errors and revolutionary socialism has only succeeded in heightening the level of disharmony in society, since the new is forced to coexist with the old for a long, long time due to the global nature of capitalism. I agree that developed democracy requires a considerable level of social harmony, but that isn't really something that is attainable more than locally within the world system. If you make the mistake of privileging the nation as the locality that matters, as things stand, you can only find meaningful harmony and democracy in alliances of opposing classes that find greater unity in opposition to other nations. That is, either temporary defensive alliances or insatiable robbers and warmongers. Hardly in socialist countries, in which there will be intense internal struggle as long as socialism hasn't yet become a self-sustaining system where people interpret capitalist ideological influences in a socialist manner as naturally as the first staunch liberals interpreted their historical influences in a capitalist manner. And that can't become the case until the illusions of the superiority of capitalism are dispelled. Firstly, socialism has to be economically self-sustaining enough for its success to not fluctuate based on what happens in the capitalist system, and secondly, capitalist countries must not be able to produce a false image of superiority by externalising the poverty that their prosperity requires into other countries. Edit: I'll quickly clarify my basic difference of opinion about harmony where it seems like both of us are just talking about the limits of harmony under capitalism. I get the feeling that Tillich at least at the time was in the mainstream pro-imperialist camp of socialism, believing that the bourgeoisie had a civilizing mission in the world: they would bring prosperity and harmony where they went, even if getting there would take time after breaking down the traditional social relations. They'd just eventually hit a hard limit, after which socialists would have to take over. That view would be antiquated and has been shown to be the worst kind of wrong. TBH it was a mistaken and confusing exaggeration for me to say that establishing socialism within a capitalist world system decreases social harmony, it was only genuinely fought for in places where it could and did bring principally harmonious developments. The point I was reaching for was that when analysed through western middle-class values, the intent to find even greater harmony and prosperity for themselves as individuals than they currently experience, genuine socialism necessarily appears like a dead end that holds no promise. uncop fucked around with this message at 08:26 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 16, 2020 12:38
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Bar Ran Dun posted:I do agree with this. So I have been trying to think of how we can avoid continuously talking past each other and I think maybe the first step to doing that is for me to ask you a very straight forward question. Can you explain Obama's failure to bail out underwater homeowners during the financial crisis? Can you reconcile that with the much more vigorous efforts made to rescue the financial system? Decisions like that one, or his later efforts to cut social security and medicare, or his strong advocacy for the exact same kind of trade deals that he opposed as a candidate, are coherent and actually quite predictable using the theoretical frame of "Obama the Neoliberal Democrat" (I'm somewhat simplifying for the sake of argument, we can refine this definition later if you want). I can root my explanation of his behaviour in the bloc of large economic investors who finance the Democratic party and the web of relationships these large political investors have with power centers in the government and media. Can you give me some compelling examples of how the interpretive frame of 'Obama the Christian Democrat' somehow enhances our understanding of him or allows us to better predict his behaviour? Can you demonstrate how your perspective on him gives you some special insight or otherwise enhances your understanding of his administration's actions on this key issue?
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Jan 24, 2020 16:55
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Helsing posted:Can you demonstrate how your perspective on him gives you some special insight or otherwise enhances your understanding of his administration's actions on this key issue? His choices in Libya and Syria are certainly informed by his Christian Realism. Helsing posted:the theoretical frame of "Obama the Neoliberal Democrat" (I'm somewhat simplifying for the sake of argument, we can refine this definition later if you want). Where does that frame, that discourse, come from Helsing? I think I know a way to communicate it what I’ve been trying to get at. There is a truly wonderful movie that has just come to Prime. It is very on topic for this thread, it deals with socialism, capitalism, American Christianity, and anti immigrant prejudice, called Sweet Land. https://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Land-Elizabeth-Reaser/dp/B0817NXS3N/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=sweet+land&qid=1579916899&s=instant-video&sr=1-1 Here’s what I would say. All of these things we are talking about are in that movie. They’re also all inside the congregation, within the church community of the film. Well, socialism in the movie is both from inside and outside of the church (accurately). Anyway the point here, is that word antimony (which may not be the best translation, but I only have this version of the book). The idea of inner conflicts where both (or even many) sides arise from the material reality of a thing. ( side note In Tillich’s later thinking I’m pretty sure this concept turns into the dynamics of faith.) Anyway this is the root of our talking past each other. There is a fundamental difference in the way we look at the world. It also relates to the discussion of grand narratives that happened earlier in the thread. To use the movie The pastor that won’t let them marry, that doesn’t say anything about the unfettered capitalism eating his congregates farms, is also the one that collects funds from the congregation (making a socialist choice ) to save the protagonists (inspired by the protagonists self sacrifice for another family). Helsing posted:Can you explain Obama's failure to bail out underwater homeowners during the financial crisis? Can you reconcile that with the much more vigorous efforts made to rescue the financial system? Helsing I saw what happened in 2008 in a real way, how the financial crises had spilled into the real economy. Ships stopped. Shiploads of cargoes already paid for were being rejected by receivers. The poo poo had truly in a real way hit the fan. They prevented a depression. Not bailing out homeowners was as much a failure as preventing a depression was a success. It laid much of the foundation for our current fascist resurgence. He failed to recognize both what was possible and what was necessary! I would have also at the time. He still hasn’t; even criticism fundamentally based in irony, is not immune to irony. The real question to me isn’t reconciling what he did. The question is how to get the inner conflict within my faith and the way I think, much of which I share with him, to come down on the side of socialism rather than neoliberalism. Uncop I was working on a response to your post. I’ve just been busy as poo poo.
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Jan 25, 2020 06:22
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Just a heads up, week after next week I’m traveling for work. That means I’ll be able to write in hotels while I have absolutely nothing else to do. Expect some responses and new chapters, sorry I haven’t had time new job.
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Feb 16, 2020 00:12
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Ok, so is there like a Complete Idiot's Guide To Society Under Socialism? Because I consider myself to be a smart guy and all the terms in this thread make my head spin. Maybe this could be an effective propaganda tool. Answer some questions like "Can I choose my job?", "Will my current quality of life be the same?" "Will everyone be paid the same? If so, what is stopping everyone from becoming janitors leaving us without doctors?", Etc. So far whenever I ask any of these questions I get either a "We don't know", "We will figure it out as we go", or get accused of asking them in bad faith. I don't think that is very productive for trying to sell people on this.
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Feb 18, 2020 08:57
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AceOfFlames posted:Ok, so is there like a Complete Idiot's Guide To Society Under Socialism? Because I consider myself to be a smart guy and all the terms in this thread make my head spin. The thing is, you can’t really define socialism in general as a system except as something that all socialist movements, regardless of their professed goals, end up working toward. There are lots of statements of political intention, but they conflict with each other and historically have a very variable track record of what actually gets there in reality. The pure essence of socialism is to make the outcomes of society more responsive to the general human will: it’s whatever you want but limited by historical conditioning, which is initially immense. The specifics of the system that arises depends on what is found to increase the potential for human self-determination, and have to keep changing because the barriers need to be overcome one by one, each requiring new methods of overcoming. Moreover, there are local differences that create different barriers, like how for people of colonised nations there has been no way but to first overcome political dependence and then economic dependence on exploiters. In the Global North, the immediate barrier seems to me to be the rule of the bourgeois definition of economic growth over political decisionmaking. I mean how political initiatives are considered the height of irresponsibility if they don't pay for themselves in a way that doesn't hurt growth, and politicians are basically fired from executive positions if they let people do things that look like they may have hurt growth. Keynesianism has been used as sort of a happy ideological tale to claim that enacting what people want can actually more than pay for itself, but the limits of that argument lie where the ideology begins conflicting with reality. Theories of socialism are all conjencture based on studying society from some perspective or another, formed in service of the struggle to enable you to choose your job, preserving your quality of life, giving you what you need and deserve, while also getting everyone to assume such positions in society that it works as a whole and the others also have the same possibilities as you. The theoretical claims can't be interpreted as workable political promises any more than other forms of intellectual conjencture can. To begin to make political promises one needs a coherent political organization that is able to use power for coherent ends. Moreover, those promises need to be based on the situation at hand rather than the ends or ideals or most of them will inevitably be broken in the short term. uncop fucked around with this message at 09:52 on Feb 18, 2020 |
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Feb 18, 2020 09:26
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My patience for a certain kind of cowardice ran out completely a few years ago, on the day when an American former friend with one breath asked me to look for a job he could do in Serbia in case he ever needed to flee USA cause he's scared shitless of what Trumpists might do to him, with the second breath defended the actions of ICE, and with the third breath quoted Stephen Pinker at me as a prelude to telling me I should stop worrying about a sick friend, "get some meds to relax", and tell him what I think of his new shotgun. If the question "Will my current quality of life be the same?" is a demand for assurances, I have none to give. Those who need them the most are never given any, let alone those who are in direst need of actual improvement.
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Feb 18, 2020 13:42
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uncop posted:The pure essence of socialism is to make the outcomes of society more responsive to the general human will: it’s whatever you want but limited by historical conditioning, which is initially immense. I think this right here is incredibly important. Sartre said “existentialism is a humanism “. One could steal and modify that. The content of our systems should be human and for humans. Contextual systematized humanism, socialism is a humanism. The content and beneficiary of our systems should be all of us collectively.
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Feb 18, 2020 18:24
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Bar Ran Dun posted:I think this right here is incredibly important. Sartre said “existentialism is a humanism “. One could steal and modify that. The content of our systems should be human and for humans. Contextual systematized humanism, socialism is a humanism. The content and beneficiary of our systems should be all of us collectively. Maybe, but I was just describing the historical actuality of socialist thought and I'm not sure if I'd agree about the shoulds. Existentialism, at least, is an individualist, anti-essentialist brand of humanism that I flat out disagree with philosophically. It requires a subjective idealist starting point to even be able to conceive people as existing prior to being determined to conform to any blueprint that is independent of their will. Philosophy rant incoming! The marxist humanist (Dunaevskaya & co.) standpoint is an okay humanism. It conceives the individual person to unavoidably be an instance of a historically determined, self-transforming species-being (human nature). For marxist humanism, reality as it stands is fundamentally not humanist, crucially because it forces people to exist in a manner that runs counter to their nature. That means one can only live a humanist life through exceptional circumstances. And it considers mainstream humanisms to be false consciousness that runs counter to their objective of actually transforming society to actually work according to humanist principles. Even marxist humanism has confusions because of its hegelian focus on the universal. It veers into marxist hegelianism where only universals represent genuine truths. When humanity in the real world doesn't appear to share in a common universality, a historical subject (the proletariat or somesuch) must be posed that represents the universal at the moment, and those who aren't part of that universal must be rendered either historically passing or altogether "nonhistorical". For a dialectic of human nature, nonhistoricity is nonhumanity. So when they confront the issue while holding onto the hegelianism, marxist humanists are forced to either deal with the implication of subhumanity or to extend their historical subject beyond any point of practical usefulness. For nonrevisionist historical materialism, the people of the world all taken together right now actually don't and can't even share a common good or, by extension, a common nature. Instead of universals, history produces local generalities that differ from and are opposed to each other in various ways. The generalities must engage in struggle where some are denied in favor of others and others engage in compromises between equals. A suitable concrete sequence of struggle and unification, struggle and unification, is the only theoretical way to approach the appearance of a genuine common good and common nature, bit by bit. I believe that we fundamentally enter antihumanist territory with the position that not all people share even the same humanity. It sounds messed up to question a common humanity and by extension common human rights and so on, but it's altogether less messed up than having to conceive some peoples as subhuman to preserve the concept of humanity in the face of real peoples who refuse to conform to that vision of it. I also find it preferable to the Sartrean individualism where the common human nature is limited to an ahistorical freedom that technically anything could have regardless of its participation in natural and historical humanity. Once we are firmly in antihumanist territory, it's not unintuitive to begin asking whether human good is enough of a goal, even if it's common human good. For humanity as mere humanity, it's only natural to exploit all aspects of non-human nature to the extent that it's sustainable for humanity itself. But humans share e.g. a common sapience with lots of species, should we not progress to develop a common good between sapient life if we had the means, even to the extent that it denies aspects of common human good? Granted, lots of humanists would answer with a conception where humanity already is sort of like the rational consciousness of nature and its genuine good could only represent the good of nature in general as well, but it's the same bullshit logic that every supremacist ideology produces. Basically, there's no utopia waiting down the road, we will never escape the feeling that things are unsettlingly flawed. Each victory will raise new and more complex issues into the spotlight, and make people who used to look great look a bit lovely after all. There's no universalist "should" that won't go embarrassingly out of date someday.
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Feb 19, 2020 17:14
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uncop posted:Maybe, but I was just describing the historical actuality of socialist thought and I'm not sure if I'd agree about the shoulds. Existentialism, at least, is an individualist, anti-essentialist brand of humanism that I flat out disagree with philosophically. It requires a subjective idealist starting point to even be able to conceive people as existing prior to being determined to conform to any blueprint that is independent of their will. Philosophy rant incoming! My own personal humanism is a religious one. We are all children of God. Brothers and sisters of Jesus. We are all a mother’s child. Anyway form is not content. When you say something like this: “There's no universalist "should" that won't go embarrassingly out of date someday.” I don’t really disagree and would even go further. Any structured set of beliefs we can posit will eventually crucify. They will be emptied and used to oppress. The water is wide and I cannot cross over it, nor do I have wings to fly. But form is not content. What can be emptied can be refilled or the content can reappear some where else. I should also be... less abstract. When I’m saying content I mean grace. It occurs to me that there is something else going on. One of the things that happens in apocalyptic thought, is that the apocalypse doesn’t happen. And the expectation of socialism, is apocalyptic. The early Christians thought Jesus would return in their lifetimes and bring about the Kingdom of God. The timeline gets extended after the end fails to come. Eventually it gets moved back all the way to the end, the end of everything, unreachable for us and functionally equivalent to never. But, when this happens, it also becomes immanent “behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” That tension between immanence and never, a metaphor I’ve always liked is this one Pete Seeger used: “I honestly believe that the future is going to be millions of little things saving us. “I imagine a big seesaw, and one end of this seesaw is on the ground with a basket half-full of big rocks in it. The other end is up in the air. It’s got a basket one-quarter full of sand. And some of us got teaspoons, and we’re trying to fill up sand… “One of these years, you’ll see that whole seesaw go zooop in the other direction. And people will say, ‘Gee, how did it happen so suddenly?’ Us and all our little teaspoons.” There isn’t a utopia down the road. There is us and our little spoons. We can have expectation without being wed to a particular construction. Before and after us, just people with little spoons. I think that is a negation of a negation.
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Feb 21, 2020 06:43
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How do you feel about the values you've spent your life honouring being used by Buttigieg to attack the only candidate who is actually trying to build a movement of working class people?
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Feb 24, 2020 00:12
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There is a working class movement. Look for the Trump flags.
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Feb 24, 2020 01:59
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asdf32 posted:There is a working class movement. Look for the Trump flags. trump exists in a void of alternatives that you created. no matter how many red flags you burn, your workers will never vote for buttgig. butt no matter, the empire will fall regardless. and even if you find that lone gunman for to take down bernie, there'll be others to take his place. the dream of a better world isn't that easy to kill, even if you've succeeded for the moment in dividing the working classes through sectarian hatred
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Feb 24, 2020 02:14
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asdf32 posted:There is a working class movement. Look for the Trump flags. the people you pay to wipe your rear end and raise your children, because you consider yourself above such things, are also human. i understand this causes you pain to acknowledge. better a little now than a great deal more later.
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Feb 24, 2020 03:43
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Kurnugia posted:trump exists in a void of alternatives that you created. no matter how many red flags you burn, your workers will never vote for buttgig. butt no matter, the empire will fall regardless. and even if you find that lone gunman for to take down bernie, there'll be others to take his place. the dream of a better world isn't that easy to kill, even if you've succeeded for the moment in dividing the working classes through sectarian hatred Correct but Trump is the one creating that dream in a way that actually connects with the working class.
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Feb 24, 2020 15:52
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asdf32 posted:Correct but Trump is the one creating that dream in a way that actually connects with the working class. I would love to know your thoughts on the upcoming inevitable Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders and his ability to connect with the working class.
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Feb 24, 2020 15:54
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He's still wrong but asdf32's argument is at least comprehensible once you realize that his definition of 'working class' excludes non-whites.
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Feb 24, 2020 23:43
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the argument of trump offering anything to "the working class" still remains completely incomprehensible to me. american political establishment created a generation of white workers that were not allowed to believe in anything except xenophobic fascism. and now your liberals are shocked, that after forbidding the working class from openly striving for their own benefit as socialists, they would actually support the guy openly espousing those ideals. what the gently caress, if the only ideology permitted to white workers is fascism, then they're going to turn out fascist! until a better alternative comes along. and so, the libs grow to be more terrified of bernie sanders than trump. i wonder where that might lea- oh right, the march on rome
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Feb 24, 2020 23:56
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Helsing posted:How do you feel about the values you've spent your life honouring being used by Buttigieg to attack the only candidate who is actually trying to build a movement of working class people? I wrote this below for another thread. I was trying to get someone else to understand another more left poster: “It is problematic to tell purely who feel they aren’t free to calm down. Sometimes the rational response generates an even larger angrier reaction. There is a gap. Many of us are on the side that has benefited from modernity our existence is within the group that benefits. But a lot of the doomposters have not benefited. Their experience, the existence they participate in is different. When you go with: “tone it the gently caress down” what they perceive is this person has no idea, this person has not experienced what I have, they conclude what this person represents does not bear fruit. Then everybody is talking past each other.” Any way this is the part that matters as to your question: “Many of us are on the side that has benefited from modernity our existence is within the group that benefits” This is not unrelated to the discussion with Uncop. We each have our separate existence. Some of the existence we each individually participate in can be categorized: Class, race, etc. Those different categories of people interact with shared symbols, “the values you've spent your life honouring”. Those differences in real experience create differences in how we interact with the shared symbols. That’s the gap. How do I feel about this gap, this separation, that I see everywhere, not just in Pete. I mean I have some beliefs that overlap with yours. How do I feel when you use them to attack things I don’t think should be. This is the state everyone exists in Helsing. It’s not a peculiar thing to me. It is a consequence of existing.
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Feb 25, 2020 01:20
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The Inner Conflict in the Socialist View of Human Nature. “Human beings become human being by participating in universal reason. Only human beings, but also every human being participated in it.” This is Tillich’s description of the Bourgeoisie understanding of human nature. It is very much from the enlightenment and it is informed by two different understandings of one concept, The Logos. (Stoic and Christian, this is beyond this book and in Tillich’s later works). Anyway this forces other aspects of our humanity to be subject to reason. We see this in conversions over the years that have occurred here in D&D. This does something problematic, “ Thereby the level of a human being that can be designated as the center is lost, a level that is more primordial than the abstractions of subjective rain on the one hand or than an objective drive mechanism on the other.” These would be what is talked about in psychoanalysis and in will against the bourgeois principle. The tabula rasa and the rationalist interpretation of human nature, these come from the bourgeois principle. This results in a view that democratic thought must be pedagogical thought. If the population is educated properly it will vote correctly. There is a presupposition that we can be educated. But socialism has a different situation. Tillich observes that in Marx there is prehistory before the classless society and history after. In other words in socialism there is a jump for unreason to reason. The situation now, the reality is not reasonable, everything is hosed. The desired future state isn’t. “Between reality and expectation lies an abyss”. In other words: Reality as it is now ??? Luxury gay space communism. And Uncop is correct. This : “Basically, there's no utopia waiting down the road, we will never escape the feeling that things are unsettlingly flawed. Each victory will raise new and more complex issues into the spotlight, and make people who used to look great look a bit lovely after all. There's no universalist "should" that won't go embarrassingly out of date someday.” Is true. The conflict is between that and the expectation that we can do better, that we can have socialism or communism, that we can progress.  But socialism can take the bourgeois understanding of human nature that people are reasonable and can be educated. This causes an under estimation of charismatic individuals. It also causes a dearth of impressive symbols ( an anti religious tendency). But to not do this can justify authoritarian tendencies. The way out is reason against reason. This relates directly to Helsing’s question for me. This is where the gap is. Where reason with one set of experiences is against reason with another set of experiences. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Feb 25, 2020 |
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Feb 25, 2020 03:13
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Bar Ran Dun posted:But socialism can take the bourgeois understanding of human nature that people are reasonable and can be educated. This causes an under estimation of charismatic individuals. It also causes a dearth of impressive symbols ( an anti religious tendency). But to not do this can justify authoritarian tendencies. Surely the belief that "people are reasonable and can be educated" invites its own sort of authoritarianism.
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Feb 25, 2020 03:37
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just another posted:Surely the belief that "people are reasonable and can be educated" invites its own sort of authoritarianism. Yes. There is an abyss between where we are now and where we want to be. "people are reasonable and can be educated" does invite an authoritarianism. And it creates the existentialist reaction, the gently caress no “I’d prefer not to.” When we see people go gently caress technocrats, that is this that reaction. Existentialism and psychoanalysis are this type of reaction. The way out is negation of negation. X, not X, not not X. One, two, then a multiplicity.  Edit I want to make it clear here "people are reasonable and can be educated" isn’t the way out. Because it’s not true, what it promises has to be fulfilled while it it is not true. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Feb 25, 2020 |
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Feb 25, 2020 04:21
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"People are reasonable and can be educated" and "people are reasonable and already know better than they let on" seem like the only way to build a democratic mass politics when you don't believe in democracy for its own sake but that the political system should serve goals that you happen to find reasonable for them. I go with the hope that the latter claim is true, that people are actually very quick to intuit their own good within a political framework and would behave differently if politics offered them more concrete options to take control over their lives rather than basically bread and circuses. That generally speaking, if people decide to elect a Donald Trump as president, or even love and support an absolute monarch, it tells more about the limitations imposed on their thinking by the system than it does about their inherent reasonability. And I should expect their reason to conflict with mine and be capable of correcting me, educating me. In fact, letting people correct me is the only way we can end up finding the same solutions reasonable together. Education from above could only overcome social contradictions if there were *universal* reason that those that are above represent and everyone else has to take as given or be unreasonable and unworthy of political participation. Universal reason is the big bourgeois take on human nature, that they have full humanity in that sense and everyone else has various levels of imperfection in their own. That's how it never seemed weird to early liberals to be living with a category of subhuman that didn't have human rights by themselves, only the right to be "raised up" by a "patron" as he saw fit.
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Feb 25, 2020 05:56
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I don't mean to derail with pedantry but I am trying to interpret these equations in a way that doesn't break down under any scrutiny and I am failing. Let's say "educated" is taken to mean "ample subject-specific knowledge committed to long term memory", and "reason" to mean -- what? "The general human capacity for resolving, through reflection, the question of what one is to do," or, generally, the ability to reach rational conclusions with reference to discernible facts. Okay. Given those definitions, "people are reasonable and can be educated" is trite, and true. It does not follow, though, that a properly educated populace would vote "correctly." I don't see any inner conflict at all unless you presuppose that Reason, acting on perfect knowledge, tends towards socialist conclusions. But that is an enormous leap of faith.
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Feb 25, 2020 07:01
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just another posted:I don't mean to derail with pedantry but I am trying to interpret these equations in a way that doesn't break down under any scrutiny and I am failing. Universal reason is precisely the presupposition that every reasonable person tends toward similar, objectively correct conclusions, when knowledge between them is equalized through education. When it doesn't, the person for whom it doesn't is conceived as out of their mind, dominated by emotion, or the like. Even now, people who claim that democracy would work far better if citizenship demanded more education are more often than not thinking on these lines, that they hold keys to universal reason and if plebs only knew what they do, the plebs would agree with their already held notions. People who believe in universal reason always reveal that democracy for them is just a method of legitimizing technocracy, because after assuming universal reason, technocracy represents the best that can be done anyway, because those who know best just do what we would do ourselves if we only knew better. Our "democratic" societies are built based on the idea that the vote is just a validation step that punishes technocrats who would reason based on their own good rather than the common good. The claim that people are reasonable, in its soft form, means that they can be educated to believe what you do, and in its more radical form means that when they don't believe what you do, they are not being led to their conclusions by lack of knowledge or inability to reason like civilized men, but precisely knowledge that you don't have and ability to reason based on it. Socialists can continue the bourgeois tradition of believing that their ideology represents universal reason at work and that those who don't agree with it should just be followers rather than leaders, or they can conceive themselves as students of what seems to be good and empowering for people and follow empirical observation where it leads them. The former is to try to educate people to have the "correct" opinions, the latter is to to try educate people to be able to see their own good and the need to arrive at collective good clearly and take as "correct" opinion the understanding that their democratic debates and clashes produce. uncop fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Feb 25, 2020 |
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Feb 25, 2020 08:28
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AceOfFlames posted:Ok, so is there like a Complete Idiot's Guide To Society Under Socialism? Because I consider myself to be a smart guy and all the terms in this thread make my head spin. Still chewing on replies, but this approach has actually been done in depth by libertarian socialists in the so-called Anarchy FAQ, that also deals a lot with socialist questions in general, like private enterprise, property conceptions etc. Latest edition can be found here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq E: Particularly this bit, I think: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-10-17
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Feb 25, 2020 10:49
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The Anarchist FAQ is interesting that it it declares likely outcomes for a struggle based on that they are probably technically possible and that anarchists want to make it all happen. "We must point out here that we are discussing the social and economic structures of areas within which the inhabitants are predominately anarchists" indeed. I like anarchists from a moral perspective though. Enabling anarchists to do their thing seems like a decent yardstick for a realistically free society. Like, right to pseudo-secession into autonomous territories of whatever size that retain the responsibility to provide certain basic rights to their inhabitants, to comply with ecological regulation and similar inescapable social responsibilities, to compensate for local privileges they gain in relation to the average citizen and damages if they harm some long-term investments, and to refrain from allowing foreign states in or otherwise utilizing violent means to subvert the general system. Ironically, a right to secede and rejoin and resecede on different terms that would be used in practice would have to create a hilarious bureaucracy to deal with it all in a way that doesn't leave obvious loopholes to exploit for local privileges.
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Feb 25, 2020 13:10
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Bar Ran Dun posted:
You hold your favorite candidate for President to the same standard that you have for me, a poster on the Something Awful forums? You don't think that's a rather low bar for someone who wants to be President of the United States?
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Feb 25, 2020 17:48
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uncop posted:The claim that people are reasonable, in its soft form, means that they can be educated to believe what you do, and in its more radical form means that when they don't believe what you do, they are not being led to their conclusions by lack of knowledge or inability to reason like civilized men, but precisely knowledge that you don't have and ability to reason based on it. I see, thank you. This is a distinction without a difference, though: quote:The former is to try to educate people to have the "correct" opinions, the latter is to to try educate people to be able to see their own good and the need to arrive at collective good clearly and take as "correct" opinion the understanding that their democratic debates and clashes produce. What is the difference between educating people to have the correct opinions, and educating people to see their own good? Perhaps the Liberal and the Socialist legitimize their prescriptions with appeals to different philosophical traditions, but in either case, the claim is that there is a caste of teachers with access to a knowledge of the methods of human flourishing that, when taught, will reproduce their politics on a societal scale.
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Feb 25, 2020 19:17
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Something else going on is that basically there are different versions of “reason” different roots for the symbol. They imply different conclusions depending on which one, one starts from. The enlightenment is going to be informed by the way the stoics thought of the logos. Christian or Jewish use of the symbol is different. Optimism or pessimism about education and reason is related to this.
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Feb 25, 2020 22:02
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From a lecture he gave in the 50’s at Harvard : THE STOIC TRADITION, which is the second one of great importance for the understanding of Christian theology. The Stoics were, more than Plato and Aristotle together, important for the life of the later ancient world. The life of the educated ancient man in the world of rulers, coming from Alexander the Great in the Macedonian Empire, or coming from Rome and taking away the independence of all nations - the life of the educated man in these periods was shaped mostly by Stoic tradition. Therefore it is even more important than the Platonic tradition, for the life of the people. I have dealt with this from the point of view of life, of the courage to take fate and death upon oneself, in my book The Courage to Be. There I show that Christianity and the Stoics are the great competitors in all the Western world. But now I show in this lecture something else: Christianity has taken from this great and always present competitor - present even today a lot of fundamental ideas. The first is the doctrine which will bring you into despair when we come to the history of Trinitarian and Christological thought, namely the doctrine of the Logos. but we must deal with it, otherwise no part of the Christian dogmatic development can be understood. Logos means word, and means also the meaning in a word, the reasonable structure which is indicated by a word. Therefore logos also can mean the universal logos or law of reality. This is the way in which the first one who used this word philosophically - Heraclitus - -used it. The logos is the law which determines the movements of all reality. Now this logos was used by the Stoic as the Divine power which is present in everything that is, and which has three sides to it, all of which have become extremely important in the later development. The first is the law of nature. The logos is the principle according to which all natural things move. It is the Divine seed, the Divine creative power in everything, which makes it what it is. And it is the creative power of the movement of everything. Secondly, logos means the moral and legal law, what we could call today, with Immanuel Kant, "practical reason," the law which is innate in every human being when he accepts himself as a personality, with the dignity and greatness of a person. It is the moral or legal law. This is equally important and even precedes the other. When you see in classical books the word "natural law, " we should not think usually of physical laws, but of moral and legal laws. For instance, when we speak of the "rights of man," as embodied in the American Constitution, that would be called by the Stoics and all their followers in all of Western philosophy, natural law. The rights of man are the natural law, which is identical with man's rational nature. But it is also identical with man's ability to recognize reality. It is not only practical reason; it is also theoretical reason, It is man's ability of reasoning, because he has the logos in himself and can discover the logos in nature and history, From this follows, in Stoicism, the man who is determined by the natural law, by the logos; he is the logikos , corresponding to, determined by, the logos: the wise man, But the Stoics were not optimists. They did not believe everybody was a wise man. Perhaps only a dozen, and no more, reached this ideal. All the others were either fools, or between the wise and foolish .. the majority of human beings, those who are in the process of improvement, those who are - -as we would say in America - under the power of education. All this was a fundamental pessimism about most human beings. The Stoics were originally Greeks, but they also became Romans, and some of the Roman emperors were some of the most famous Stoics. When Stoicism came in the hands of the Roman emperors - e. g , Marcus Aurelius - they applied it to the political situation, for which they were responsible. The natural law, in the sense of practical reason, had the consequence that every man participates in reason by the very fact that he is man. And out of this they derived laws which were far superior to many things which we find in the Christian Middle Ages. They gave universal citizenship to every human being, because he potentially participates in reason. Of course, the Stoics - and certainly not the Stoic emperors, who knew people - were optimistic.about man and believed he was actually reasonable. But what they meant was that man potentially participates in reason and that through education they might become actually reasonable, at least some of them. That was their presupposition, from which presupposition they did the great and tremendous thing: they gave Roman citizenship to all citizens of the conquered nations. Everybody could become a Roman citizen or, finally, was declared to be such by birth. This citizenship was a tremendous equalizing step. Further, the women, slaves and children, who in the old Roman law were the least regarded and developed human beings, became equalized by the laws of the Roman emperors. This was done, moreover, not by Christianity, but by the Stoics, who derived the idea from the belief in the universal logos in which everyone participates. (Of course, Christianity has another foundation for the same idea: human beings are the children of God who is their Father.) Thus the Stoics conceived of the idea of a world state embracing the whole world, based on the common rationality of everybody. Now this certainly was something in which Christianity could enter and develop. The difference was that the Stoics did not know the concept of sin. They knew the concept of foolishness, but not of sin. . Therefore, STOIC SALVATION is salvation through reaching wisdom. CHRISTIAN SALVATION was a salvation through reaching Divine grace. And these two things still fight with each other in our days.
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Feb 25, 2020 23:09
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Helsing posted:You hold your favorite candidate for President to the same standard that you have for me, a poster on the Something Awful forums? You don't think that's a rather low bar for someone who wants to be President of the United States? I try to look at everyone that way Helsing. Also I voted for Bernie. Pete, I just have quite a lot in common with.
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Feb 26, 2020 03:17
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