On 6/1/2021 at 3:13 AM, cyanobacteria said:

 

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assuming what he's saying is true (which is arguable), it's still using economic growth/wealth as the measure, which to me screams of capitalist thinking. the well-being and happiness and sustainability of its inhabitants is all that should matter (and idk, maybe the collapse in '91 or whenever was maybe in some small way a sign that the people weren't happy?). GDP/whatever is a factor in the equation, but any country allowing it to dominate at the expense of huge swathes of the population is failing. and any country that must invade and impose its rule on others (USSR) is failing as well. 

  On 6/2/2021 at 1:43 AM, auxien said:

assuming what he's saying is true (which is arguable), it's still using economic growth/wealth as the measure, which to me screams of capitalist thinking. the well-being and happiness and sustainability of its inhabitants is all that should matter (and idk, maybe the collapse in '91 or whenever was maybe in some small way a sign that the people weren't happy?). GDP/whatever is a factor in the equation, but any country allowing it to dominate at the expense of huge swathes of the population is failing. and any country that must invade and impose its rule on others (USSR) is failing as well. 

failing is relative.  is it failing in comparison to what it would have been like if it had been a liberal revolution? we will never know.  but to claim it's failing in absolute terms is not meaningful.  by this logic just about all the most "successful" capitalist countries are also absolutely failing which I would agree, hence the need for socialism.  russia went from a backwater monarchy to a world class communist-led nation and raised the quality of life of its people far beyond what they had before, without the need to resort to the type and degree of imperialist behaviors exhibited by the competing capitalist powers of the time.  this constant rejection of the USSR's massive success is ahistorical

  On 6/2/2021 at 1:57 AM, cyanobacteria said:

but to claim it's failing in absolute terms is not meaningful.

i mean the country's government literally collapsed so i'd say to 'claim it failed' is simply being able to acknowledge reality? starting from the basis of fact and reality is pretty meaningful my dude.

  On 6/2/2021 at 1:57 AM, cyanobacteria said:

by this logic just about all the most "successful" capitalist countries are also absolutely failing which I would agree

yeah

and

so did the USSR

saying capitalism is bad doesn't mean you have to suck the cock of a failed nation. current capitalism is bad in many ways, also the USSR failed. not mutually exclusive.

  On 6/2/2021 at 1:57 AM, cyanobacteria said:

russia went from a backwater monarchy to a world class communist-led nation and raised the quality of life of its people far beyond what they had before

raised quality of life of some of its population. see my link in the initial post. and basically every nation that chose to industrialize and trade with the outside world prospered over the same time period. there were plenty of 'backwater monarchies' ...and i'm no history buff but i think most of them transitioned out of that around the same time, if not before. but i guarantee that most of them were not in possession of one of the hugest land masses in the world (relatively rich in natural resources i seem to remember? could be mistaken there) as well. Russia did middling to okay for the most part, and they definitely had some outstanding aspects, but overall? not anything to be envied really, especially when you take into account the many, many, many missteps. 

  On 6/2/2021 at 1:57 AM, cyanobacteria said:

this constant rejection of the USSR's massive success is ahistorical

claiming the USSR. a failed nation, was a 'massive success' is a fucking troll move if i ever saw one. thought you were being earnest but that's a joke mate.

you can claim the USSR had some successes, sure, obvious. but the doofus you posted in the video seemed to have his head even more twisted than you man, check what people are saying with some logic man, that's all my point is. 

  On 6/2/2021 at 3:46 AM, auxien said:

i mean the country's government literally collapsed so i'd say to 'claim it failed' is simply being able to acknowledge reality? starting from the basis of fact and reality is pretty meaningful my dude.

yeah

and

so did the USSR

saying capitalism is bad doesn't mean you have to suck the cock of a failed nation. current capitalism is bad in many ways, also the USSR failed. not mutually exclusive.

raised quality of life of some of its population. see my link in the initial post. and basically every nation that chose to industrialize and trade with the outside world prospered over the same time period. there were plenty of 'backwater monarchies' ...and i'm no history buff but i think most of them transitioned out of that around the same time, if not before. but i guarantee that most of them were not in possession of one of the hugest land masses in the world (relatively rich in natural resources i seem to remember? could be mistaken there) as well. Russia did middling to okay for the most part, and they definitely had some outstanding aspects, but overall? not anything to be envied really, especially when you take into account the many, many, many missteps. 

claiming the USSR. a failed nation, was a 'massive success' is a fucking troll move if i ever saw one. thought you were being earnest but that's a joke mate.

you can claim the USSR had some successes, sure, obvious. but the doofus you posted in the video seemed to have his head even more twisted than you man, check what people are saying with some logic man, that's all my point is. 

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yes the USSR was a massive failure, that's why it took the US decades to eradicate their leftist influence from the world through mass murder and coups

i reckon marx would have called idm bourgeois decadance but also he would have been pretty into gabber

  Quote

Much of Breaking Things at Work is devoted to a compelling examination of the ancestors of today’s accelerationists — the techno-utopians haunting the corridors of the history of the socialist movement. Far from a 21st-century curiosity, Mueller argues, the fantasy that socialists could simply grab hold of the productive apparatus of capitalism and transfer it into the hands of the working class lurked behind the strategic failures of the left throughout the 20th century.

As Mueller acknowledges, this attitude has antecedents in the work of Karl Marx himself. Marx felt that it was a good thing that the labor movement in Britain eventually seemed to outgrow the “crude” tactics of the Luddites, learning to “distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which uses those instruments.” In a famous passage from the Grundrisse, the preparatory manuscripts for Capital, Marx speculated that the development of capitalism was pushing towards “an automatic system of machinery.” Since this mode of production would not rest on the exploitation of living laborers, it could be made the foundation of a socialized economy where workers acted only as “supervisors” of machinery — no longer grist for the satanic mills of capitalism.

Marx’s view of technology was highly ambivalent, however, and it evolved significantly over time. In the first volume of Capital, for instance, he remarked that “it would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working-class revolt.” Innovation under capitalism did not just aim to improve efficiency but to enhance employers’ control over unruly workers.

These complexities were smoothed over during the consolidation of so-called “Orthodox Marxism” in the late 19th century, the version of Marxist thought that dominated the Second International after Marx’s death in 1883. The German writer and activist Karl Kautsky, often referred to half-jokingly as the “Pope of Marxism” for his role in consolidating the new orthodoxy, saw the steady, politically neutral development of the “forces of production” as the throughline of history. For a long time, capitalism had served to enhance the power and technological sophistication of these forces; but a period of crisis loomed on the horizon, a moment at which a workers’ revolution could take over the machinery of production and restart its progressive development under socialized control.

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Emergency Breaks: Gavin Mueller’s Breaking Things at Work explores the failures and mistakes of the technophilic left (Real Life)

  On 8/27/2021 at 8:52 AM, iococoi said:

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Even money some capitalist leech owns that joint. 

  On 8/27/2021 at 8:52 AM, iococoi said:

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Looks like it comes straight out of a David Lynch movie. Add a bunch of people wearing rabbit costumes, a stroboscope, a smoke machine and some disturbing background music, and you're ready to go.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/20/eat-the-rich-why-millennials-and-generation-z-have-turned-their-backs-on-capitalism

  On 6/3/2021 at 12:28 AM, Cryptowen said:

i reckon marx would have called idm bourgeois decadance but also he would have been pretty into gabber

That's what Adorno said about jazz lol

(Wait did someone say that and that's why you said that? If so sorry I'm dumb)

For me (ymmv) Marx is in this category with (e.g.) Freud, where their ideas got refined over the next couple generations, and so you get the Frankfurt School and whatever generation Fredric Jameson was and the Lacanians and Deleuze/Guattari and by the time you get to Mark Fisher (or whomever from this generation) you got some well-sifted good ideas and finally a good understanding of why the Revolution never came:

  On 9/22/2021 at 5:54 AM, LimpyLoo said:

That's what Adorno said about jazz lol

(Wait did someone say that and that's why you said that? If so sorry I'm dumb)

For me (ymmv) Marx is in this category with (e.g.) Freud, where their ideas got refined over the next couple generations, and so you get the Frankfurt School and whatever generation Fredric Jameson was and the Lacanians and Deleuze/Guattari and by the time you get to Mark Fisher (or whomever from this generation) you got some well-sifted good ideas and finally a good understanding of why the Revolution never came:

 

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castration fear

 

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holy shit youre back

  On 9/22/2021 at 5:54 AM, LimpyLoo said:

That's what Adorno said about jazz lol

its been a while since i read adorno but i remember having mixed feelings about his thoughts on popular music. like i feel like a decent amount of early/mid 20th century intellectuals look down their noses at pretty much any kind of music a person could actually dance to, and equate it all with soulless mass-produced commodity music. Sometimes the critz feel on point, when they're actually addressing a certain kind of soulless mass-produced pop commodity, or the kind of stuff that'd get played in the background of car commercials. But there's a lot of other music they write off where i'm thinking "pretty sure you don't actually see why this appeals to people". Not every kind of music can be equated with Schoenberg, nor should it

But yeah largely agree wrt Marx. He revolutionized a lot of things but was also clearly limited by the technology & the social milieu of his day. imo it speaks to how rich his work was that so much stuff has been written since trying to figure out why it didn't pan out the way he predicted. a person probably could still use marx as the foundation of their economic/social thought but personally i don't. i've read a shitload of his stuff but that's mainly because he's such a prominent figure. it's kinda like reading plato without neccessarily becoming a platonist.

summary and discussion of Paulo Feire's book "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" which puts forward a revolutionary Marxist dialectical materialistic reconceptualization of education as a dialectical process between the teacher and the student, with the teacher learning from the students exactly what needs to be taught to them based on their own desires, needs, and culture, putting them on equal footing, rather than treating the teacher as the oppressor trying to store knowledge into the minds of the intellectually oppressed students, among other beautiful descriptions

https://redmenace.libsyn.com/pedagogy-of-the-oppressed

  On 9/22/2021 at 3:38 PM, Cryptowen said:

its been a while since i read adorno but i remember having mixed feelings about his thoughts on popular music. like i feel like a decent amount of early/mid 20th century intellectuals look down their noses at pretty much any kind of music a person could actually dance to, and equate it all with soulless mass-produced commodity music. Sometimes the critz feel on point, when they're actually addressing a certain kind of soulless mass-produced pop commodity, or the kind of stuff that'd get played in the background of car commercials. But there's a lot of other music they write off where i'm thinking "pretty sure you don't actually see why this appeals to people". Not every kind of music can be equated with Schoenberg, nor should it

But yeah largely agree wrt Marx. He revolutionized a lot of things but was also clearly limited by the technology & the social milieu of his day. imo it speaks to how rich his work was that so much stuff has been written since trying to figure out why it didn't pan out the way he predicted. a person probably could still use marx as the foundation of their economic/social thought but personally i don't. i've read a shitload of his stuff but that's mainly because he's such a prominent figure. it's kinda like reading plato without neccessarily becoming a platonist.

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about 500 pages into the grundrisse. probably gonna try to track down a copy of theories of surplus value next

 

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I disagree entirely on marx, when I read him I find it completely relevant both to my personal life, my understanding of society and political economy, the lives and jobs of myself and my family, and nothing at all has changed that makes this not the case in all these years

my guys and gals at the manchester branch of the young communist league joined the march against the conservative party conference the other day. beautiful stuff

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch03.htm
'We, the workers, shall organize large-scale production on the basis of what capitalism has already created, relying on our own experience as workers, establishing strict, iron discipline backed up by the state power of the armed workers. We shall reduce the role of state officials to that of simply carrying out our instructions as responsible, revocable, modestly paid "foremen and accountants" (of course, with the aid of technicians of all sorts, types and degrees). This is our proletarian task, this is what we can and must start with in accomplishing the proletarian revolution. Such a beginning, on the basis of large-scale production, will of itself lead to the gradual "withering away" of all bureaucracy, to the gradual creation of an order--an order without inverted commas, an order bearing no similarity to wage slavery--an order under which the functions of control and accounting, becoming more and more simple, will be performed by each in turn, will then become a habit and will finally die out as the special functions of a special section of the population. ' (edited)

(Sorry if this is jazz)

 I was fucking shocked when I saw this. These should be amputated from the Left...

dsa is libs

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-pseudo-intellectual-comment-generator-for-men

  On 10/8/2021 at 1:07 AM, auxien said:

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-pseudo-intellectual-comment-generator-for-men

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