/edu/ checkpoint Anonymous 17-07-23 11:23:53 No. 19860 [Last 50 Posts]
Everytime you visit /edu/, post in this thread. Tell us about what you're thinking about, what you're reading, an interesting thing you have learned today, anything! Just be sure to pop in and say hi.
Previous thread
>>>/leftypol_archive/580500 Archive of previous thread
https://archive.is/saN3S Excuse me coming through
A quick note on the video @ >>>/leftypol/1538283
Also [vid related] for archival purposes
Around the 29 minute mark Peterson criticizes Marx and Engel's for assuming that workers would magically become more productive once they took over.
This actually happened historically, most of the actually effective productivity tricks work places use now were developed by Stakhanovites.
https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1936-2/year-of-the-stakhanovite/year-of-the-stakhanovite-texts/stalin-at-the-conference-of-stakhanovites/ Reality has a Marxist bias
Anonymous 17-07-23 14:55:22 No. 19864
>>19863 Part of it is sheer practice.
Given your current reading list, jumping between them is fine
though Anonymous 17-07-23 16:31:31 No. 19865
Don't mind me just carting some copypasta in for later use
Anonymous 06-08-23 16:59:51 No. 20134
>>19860 Been thinkin' bout plants. Also, I listened to series 3 of Blowback not too long ago, and it made me quite sad. S. Korea had their soverignity stolen from them by the USA, and they have now been browbeaten into thinking that the North is their mortal enemy.
I also read this article about the history of Taekwondo, and learned that it is intrinsically linked with the politics of the South and the North. I also learned that the version we're taught in the West is the sanitised version, and that the "original" version is still taught in the DPRK.
>Today in North Korea you can still see army commandos practicing “the original form of Taekwondo.” You might even see them practice the final form Choi Hong Hee ever designed, Juche. https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/when-taekwondo-ruled-the-world-by-jay Anonymous 17-08-23 10:36:21 No. 20181
>>20173 I haven't forgotten this, you're asking about Stalin's resignation attempts.
As a related sidenote, Stalin's attempts to cancel his birthday celebrations were met with a firm "it is not about you" for a sense of it.
In regards to the yootoob video attached; I have no words.
Anonymous 29-08-23 06:36:03 No. 20392
<However, traditional Marxism was often satisfied with Marx’s theory of surplus value and exploitation in Capital , volume I. This served as ‘proof’ of the illegitimate domination of the bourgeoisie and the legitimacy of proletarian revolution. His theory of crisis in volumes II and III were likewise understood as a ‘proof ’ of the inevitability of capitalism’s collapse. Capital was celebrated as a socialist ‘bible’ to ground both the legitimacy and the necessity of socialism, but such a reading is not compelling today and the failure of traditional Marxism is not necessarily a negative thing to lament. The end of the Cold War also opened up new possibilities for rereading Marx. What characterizes this ‘new reading of Marx’ (neue Marx-Lektüre ) compared with traditional Marxism is an honest acknowledgement of the incompleteness of his system of political economy. Scholars started to investigate his economic manuscripts, letters, and even notebooks more carefully (Dellheim and Otto Wolf 2018). They demonstrate that although volumes II and III of Capital were not completed during Marx’s lifetime, his critique of capitalism did deepen after the publication of volume I. However, the unfinished character of Marx’s critique of political economy has been underestimated in the past because it became invisible in Engels’s edition of Capital . Engels, editing Marx’s manuscripts after his death, strove to establish ‘Marxism’ as a doctrine to mobilize the working class. He tended to overemphasize the systematic character of Capital so that it could provide a universal ‘worldview’ for the working class. Marx in the Anthropocene (2022) by Kohei Sato, page 175. It is the follow-up to Karl Marx's Ecosocialism . While critical of western chauvinism, Sato is himself ultra-dismissive of the experience in the eastern block, a few negative remarks here and there (following western lefty academic "common sense") and that's it. Lenin is not a source for anything, but some anglo/burger academic randos are. Sato argues against pro-growth types, and he does that by equating economic growth with growth in a raw physical sense (think so many tons of steel produced etc.) and that he equates with more pollution. Is more pollution actually necessary for growth? Suppose person-miles traveled increase by 10 % while there is a per-mile reduction of pollution in personal travel of 20 %, that would be a counter-example (I admit a fictional example is not the best, read on please, a better one is coming up soon). Mainstream GDP measures take inflation into account and inflation measures do take quality of consumer goods into account (the increased processing power of computer chips for example, which certainly is not a development coupled with proportional increase in energy usage by computers). The fans of growth, whether radical or mainstream, are not quite as dim as Sato makes them appear.
Anonymous 03-09-23 13:29:01 No. 20444
Slavoj Zizek - The Empty Gesture, The Mobius Strip, And The Pointe De Capiton
alt:
https://piped.video/watch?v=qKlIfax5Te0 Anonymous 17-09-23 00:53:22 No. 20539
Finished Sleep: A Very Short Introduction by Steven W. Lockley and Russell G. Foster (2012). Most interesting bits:<In a large prospective Dutch study, dementia patients in care homes where the indoor lighting was simply increased to about 1,000 lux from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. (compared to standard lighting at about 300 lux) exhibited a significant slowing in the rate of cognitive decline, improved day-to-day functioning, less depression, and better sleep. These improvements were equivalent to those obtained with prescription medication therapy.
Anonymous 31-10-23 19:55:54 No. 20890
>>20889 That's good anon. Something is better than nothing too.
What type of books or advice are you looking for? I'm not sure such a thing exists tbh.
Anonymous 31-10-23 20:01:59 No. 20892
>>20889 Honestly, a lot of working in big institutions is getting good at noticing how things operate. Just learn and talk to as much people as you can without impeding your work. Ask for a shit ton of help. Never stop asking for help, even from people "below" you. Always be keen on helping people and listening. Avoid drama or getting into fights. Always try to be in good graces with everyone. Avoid getting forced to choose a team in a petty squabble. Give credit to others. Appreciate your coworkers.
Everything else you'll learn on the job.
Another thing, "rules" and processes can always be overruled. Of course don't do illegal shit but I mean a lot of "rigid" processes are actually not rigid at all and pulling the right strings means you can override it or avoid it.
Anonymous 31-10-23 20:20:21 No. 20894
>>20892 >>20893 I suppose that's reassuring. I'm pretty good at the awkwardly charming and sharing glory routine, it's part of the reason I got the job. The courts' staff like me. I guess I've just gone a little feral working on my own for the past year. Haven't worked in an office with more than 2 people in almost 7 years. It'll be strange to work along side other people and be part of a bigger whole.
Also I meant Graeber's The Utopia of Rules, not BS jobs. But BS jobs is a fun one. RIP. Miss that lil' guy like you wouldn't believe.
Anonymous 27-12-23 23:45:44 No. 21222
As I finish the last page of 31 Steps to a Learn a New Language – Fun, Fast & Easy Steps Learn Any New & Foreign Language You Want. This Ultimate Guide Will Help You to Become Fluent With Joy an Strategy – 31 Steps to Learn Smarter – Smart Steps to Get Your Brain Up to Speed. Improve Your Life by Mastering Your Mind and Impress Everybody – Master Learning Box (2015) by Philip Vang I realize that the whole thing was written like email spam ☹<The authors, editors, and publisher have exerted every effort to ensure that any drug selection and dosage set forth in this text are in accordance with current recommendations and practice at the time of publication. However, in view of ongoing research blahblahblah <Paranormal and spiritual teachings aside, meditation is a very basic way to unleash the best function of your brain in a very scientific way. an strategy to a learn a new language? The author knows many: meditating, breathing techniques, yoga (yes, these are three separate steps), jogging, laughing exercises, playing video games, masturbation, having breakfast just to name a few. I'm sure most people are already doing some of these, but if you want to do them all, this will take several hours of your day; and that's just the 31 steps to get ready for language learning without doing it yet. My favorite steps from the other set directly related to language learning are "Step 27: Be Willing to Ask Questions" and "Step 28: Be Willing to Ask Questions".
Anonymous 07-01-24 03:14:50 No. 21363
>>21362 The Knowledge Corrupt
e rs
Anonymous 11-02-24 18:02:02 No. 21574
>>20865 Belated self-(You): Bonnell's
Roots of Rebellion seems to be the closest source I could find to this topic so far. If anyone has any further reading recs, do tell.
Anonymous 02-03-24 13:53:35 No. 21642
Finished the Alan Turing biography by Andrew Hodges. A harrowing tale of the dangers of modern technology, because I got an e-ink device and I usually don't display the page number to have more screen real-estate. I only bothered to check after many hours in already and to my horror realized it's over a thousand e-ink pages (in paper form it's below that, but still). It is easily five times longer than it needs to be. If only I had so much as glanced at the dead-tree version, I would have immediately decided against reading it. I just can't abandon a book in the middle and this took me forever.<Alan Turing was sitting at his desk in Britain while being homosexual and he (Alan, not Alice in Wonderland) was frustrated by the complex signals of society he had to decrypt like the Nazi codes (remember those!) and he had to hide his homosexuality (he was gay), so to his colleagues he was a, ahem… 🤔 one could even say: an ENIGMA (I am very smart) blahblahblah
7ko 02-03-24 15:29:46 No. 21643
To stride anew?
Anyways it turns out the glowies might've killed Paul Robeson, and you mayyyyybe want to reconsider the efficacy of the "meds".
https://mronline.org/2024/02/27/according-to-his-son-civil-rights-icon-paul-robeson-was-a-victim-of-cias-mk-ultra/ Anonymous 03-03-24 06:25:16 No. 21644
Read
On the Abolition of All Political Parties by Simone Weil (1943). There just was an episode about that text on the "You Can't Win" podcast and since it was a PREMIUM episode for paypigs and the hosts are much dumber than I am, I figured why not read it myself instead of listening to these dweebs yappering about it.
https://libcom.org/article/abolition-all-political-parties-simone-weil It also got a preface by the translator and another essay at the end about how great Simone Weil was, which I guess got added because you certainly don't get that impression of greatness from her essay. Here is a sentence from it:
<How many times, in Germany in 1932, might a Communist and a Nazi conversing in the street have been struck by a sort of mental vertigo on discovering that they were in complete agreement on all issues! Her and her two fanboys are in the anti-"totalitarian" camp, you see. It's a shame how anemic this piece is because there is certainly something to the idea that a party apparatus suppresses debate and honesty. When it comes to how to do away with parties she has nothing else than this:
<At election time, if contributors to a journal are political candidates, it should be forbidden for them to invoke their connection with the journal, and it should be forbidden for the journal to endorse their candidacy, to support it directly or indirectly, or even to mention it. Any ‘Association of the friends’ of this sort of journal should be forbidden. If any journal were ever to prevent its contributors from writing for other publications, it should be forced to close. <All this would require a complete set of press regulations, making it impossible for dishonourable publications to carry on with their activity, since none would wish to be associated with them. <Whenever a circle of ideas and debate would be tempted to crystallise and create a formal membership, the attempt should be repressed by law and punished. Well then, how to conduct elections without parties? She got nothing, but there are several ways.
1. We could take the concept of term limits to the next level: Instead of parties, there could be election groups with registered members and there could be regulations for
-how long you can be a member of an election group and then you have to take a time-out for a couple decades
-expiration dates for election groups themselves
-a limit on the proportion of members of the new election group who are from the same old election group (say 1/10)
-a minimum proportion of people with no prior membership in any election group for a new election group (say 2/3)
2. We could use voting systems without party lists like STV or approval with reweighting.
3. We could do away with elections and use sortition.
Glowing Margaret Thatcher 10-03-24 21:12:44 No. 21714
>>21712 So basically, enshrine certain forms of exploitation and do nothing about them. Very cool.
Sass aside, which forms of exploitation would you consider unavoidable and therefore acceptable?
Anonymous 14-03-24 13:33:16 No. 21727
<Marx Saw Capitalisms Doom With Unerring Accuracy Marx identified the tendency of capitalism to try and cut out the actual production of commodities in Volume 2 of Capital. In that work he (with a supplementary note by Engels) stated the following on page 137 of that work.
https://marxengelsinstitute.org/2023/12/10/an-end-long-predicted/ Anonymous 15-03-24 06:51:52 No. 21734
>>21722 Try writing out notes to what you read, then simplify them into concepts and shorthand. Most stuff is just filler anyway, so skimming is allowed.
Also, most people in the west dont even read any non-fiction, so you are already more educated than the majority who just listen to podcasts.
Anonymous 17-03-24 06:46:12 No. 21742
Skimming through Beyond Dispute by Stafford Beer and colleagues (1994). Beer is as pompous as Stephen Wolfram without having the math chops. This is about organizing people into discussion groups using the geometry of an icosahedron (20-sided die) as THE GOLD STANDARD and then there is a lot of babbling about psychology, Condorcet cycles (without calling them that), world citizenship, a (dumb) proposal for package sizes, and uuh Chakras.
Anonymous 17-03-24 17:19:06 No. 21749
>>21742 (me)
>Why not instead picture a 12-sided die as a mini planet of office dorks sitting at hexagonal tables *pentagonal tables
Glownonymous 30-03-24 02:59:27 No. 21822
>>21644 omg she criticizes anti-factionalism of parties and her solution is to ban people to form factions… but for all society. Is this dialectics?
>>21670 Is this where Zizek gets his joke about the vague soviet definition of kulaks? lol
As far as the claim (well, which claim? I'm going with the last, that many other peasants were disaffected), with no knowledge of this specifically it does seem right when looking at feudal/rural-patriarchal relations in general. Social views are not only formed by class but also familial ties and tradition, especially in an especially traditional and family oriented social structure.
>>21714 Plants. I think it's okay to determine where a plant lives, and control some of the conditions of its life, and then harvest it. It's not like this is any different from its natural condition, so it's not like we have made its potential lot worse.
jk, i don't care about exploitation in general, i care about exploitation that is harmful to me and my loved ones [expansive], or which cause diffuse harm to all of society or the environment and can be assumed to impact us all. Otherwise, why care? To me communism is a deeply particular philosophy, rather than universal. Its universalism is imo a caricature given of it by conservatives who just don't see how materially connected all of our struggles are Anonymous 09-04-24 20:07:09 No. 21880
>>21547 There's an article in
City & State New York that attempts to summarize relevant data up to 2018 that I found later, if nothing else.
https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2018/09/the-battle-for-hudson-yards/178151/ Anonymous 25-04-24 07:58:31 No. 22001
Finished Marx and Marxism by Gregory Claeys (2018). This guy is apparently a distinguished professor and expert on the history of political thought. I would have never guessed that from reading this. It seems like an even-handed take at first with direct references, but as it goes on, outrageous quotes by Lenin, Stalin, Mao pile up and the sources turn out to be spooky western cold warriors. Or there is no source at all like when he says that Marx claimed us proles to be particularly<virtuous <was threatened with execution by some communists for introducing these issues <the proletariat’s suppressed sexual urges prevented it from achieving political consciousness. <the weaknesses in Marx’s economics transformation problem , despite the length of this book. A few sentences on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is all you will get here (without even relating that to organic composition of capital). For the most part, he doesn't really criticize, but gestures that he is about to do criticism, like he "criticizes" Marx for his<‘scientific’ nature of the theory of surplus value, while excluding other theories of exploitation <Pleas for a universal basic income become increasingly plausible as we move towards both more skeletal welfare systems and a persistent shortage of well-paid jobs. exception clause is triggered).
Acid-Maoist 01-05-24 18:26:10 No. 22040
>>19860 I've been reading Caroline Elkins' book Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire recently, and I thought I'd talk about it a bit. No PDF or Epub, because I have it in hardback.
The book is actually just as much a history of liberalism as a history of the British Empire, and it's fascinating seeing how the liberal mindset came into existence. Reading the examples from the book, you can really see where the paternalistic British liberal originated, with the idea that we must save the global south from themselves. Hence, African leaders famously complaining about how when China turns up they get a power plant, and when Britain turns up they get a lecture; it was the same back then, but Britain actually had the hard power to back up their rhetoric.
It also explains how Britain's use of force changed between the 18th and 20th centuries, with Britain preferring a "hands-off" approach in the 19th century which gradually failed as Germany, the USA, and the Russian Empire began to industrialise and compete for territory (there's an interesting parallel with America and China in the 21st century, too). Occasionally news of some atrocity that was comitted by the British Army (or one of the private companies they got to manage the colonies, such as the East India Company or the Royal Africa Company) would reach home, and there would inevitably be debates about it in parliament- which usually ended with the crimes being somehow justified and then forgotten about, and occasionally with the perpetrators turned into heroes (the 1857 Indian rebellion and the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion are two good example from the book).
The book isn't specifically Marxist, but is still well worth reading from what I've seen so far.
Anonymous 09-05-24 10:41:43 No. 22071
Finished The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane (2012). The myth is that people just are just naturally endowed with charisma or not and the book is about developing your charisma. Here is a typical excerpt:<Elon Musk, cofounder of PayPal and current CEO of Tesla Motors, embodies focus charisma. As he’ll tell you himself, Musk is very much an introvert. In Tesla’s open office space, his nearly empty desk is in the far right corner, two huge monitors arranged to create a cocoon, shielding him from the rest of the office. does command the room; his presence is immediately felt. If your definition of charisma is that when you walk into a room all eyes are on you, then Bill has it. If it’s that quality that draws people toward you and makes them want to listen to what you have to say, then Bill has that, too.
Glownonymous 11-05-24 01:03:11 No. 22083
>>22071 It's weird that the author seems to only pick people who naturally would have all eyes on them (managers/owners, performers, politicians) as having charisma that draws people to them?? The only one who makes sense here
>>22081 is Mao, since his political praxis consisted of listening to people. But still… leader of a country.
Anonymous 11-05-24 21:59:44 No. 22095
I can't remember the thread in which I read the post, but for some reason an online media group had moved to quote a 19 year old 'book-fan' of Dostoyevsky's literature, in order to hear from her an understanding of the draw among young people to his works.
Glownonymous 16-05-24 00:51:48 No. 22113
>>22085 I just finished Cecelia Bobrovskaya's memoirs, and she describes Lenin as an amazing listener (and Plekhanov, too, in passing - she was inspired by how he took interest in the minutia of practical work)
I think it's just inherent to communist work that we need to be good listeners. Still, my skepticism at the potentially circular methodology of the work stands lol
Glownonymous 16-05-24 01:02:02 No. 22114
>>22113 (me)
to review the book: very funny, very human. I think it would be a fun read even to non-communists.
Really the only practical lesson I learned from it is that the semi-committed, spineless, well-off intellectual types served a very important function, by stitching back together local socialist groups after big busts. They were above suspicion and kept themselves legal, so they would be there when everyone else was in jail or scattered. It really puts weight behind Lenin's exhortations to go to
all classes to spread the ideas and look for comrades. Even though the illegal socialists engaged in constant practical work were suspicious of the strictly legal semi-comrades, they served a purpose in being only somewhat connected to the more serious activity.
Anonymous 25-05-24 17:28:04 No. 22159
Finished Two Texts for Defining the Communist Programme by L. L. Men (1986). For LLM, socialism requires labour vouchers as described in Critique of the Gotha Programme by Marx and Anti-Dühring by Engels, as well as democratic bottom-up voting with the right to recall as in the Paris Commune. By that standard, the USSR was not socialist at any point. Was the USSR moving towards socialism? For LLM it is clear that the Bolsheviks stopped pushing in a socialist direction before the NEP even. LLM shows some awful statements by Lenin and even worse ones by Trotsky, but does not accuse the Bolsheviks of conspiring against the working class from beginning. In general, conscious intention of individuals or groups do not play a big role in the author's picture of history. LLM is also very critical of basically everybody from the Workers' Opposition to the Kronstadt Sailors, anarchists, and various grouplets like the SPGB.The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–1923 Volume 2 by E. H. Carr (1952), referring to discussion about abolishing money:<In January 1920 the third All-Russian Congress of Councils of National Economy at length accepted a thesis which declared that, "in view of the excessive instability of the monetary unit and unit of account (the ruble) ", it was desirable to establish a new unit of economic accountancy " adopting as a basis of measurement the unit of labour ".[1] This proposal was referred to a commission. It occupied for many months the best economic brains of the country; and the term "labour unit" became familiar enough to be known by a current abbreviation as tred (trudovaya edinitsa ). <[1]Quoted in L. N. Yurovsky, Currency Problems and Policy of the Soviet Union (1925), p. 34; it was not included in the published resolutions of the congress. <None of several schemes for replacing money by tred or by some other unit had won acceptance when the introduction of NEP caused the whole project to be relegated once more to the realms of academic speculation.[1] <[1]The discussion occupied an enormous place in the economic literature of 1920 and the first month of 1921; a rival to tred was propounded in the form of a "unit of energy" (ened ). A detailed study of the discussion would have some theoretical interest, but it had little or no influence on future developments. It was influenced by two works of the German economist Otto Neurath which were much studied by Soviet writera of the period: Durch die Kriegswirtschaft zur Naturalwirtschaft (Munich, 1919), and Von der nächsten und übernächsten Zukunft (Jena, 1920).
Anonymous 11-06-24 22:58:07 No. 22284
Finished I've Been Thinking , the 2023 autobiography by the materialist philosopher (though not Marxist) Daniel C. Dennett (born in 1942, died in 2024). A massive cast flashes by, mostly academics, but also Silicon Valley types and even Hollywood.<[John] Searle’s world is full of philosophical nincompoops; mine is full of philosophers who are learned, intelligent, hard-working but often self-defeating presenters of their best ideas. Why would anybody want to be a philosopher if philosophers in general were as stupid as Searle seems to think? (Sir Karl Popper is another philosopher whose low opinion of those who disagreed with him has made me wonder how he could stand being a philosopher.) Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking ).brain-trust lunch . If you care to know what I mean by that, you can find the book on libgen.
Anonymous 29-06-24 21:13:20 No. 22367
>>22366 Yes, Spengler is a bullshitter. His scheme is arbitrary and there are countless counter-examples to any grand tendency or principle he claims, and his stuff is riddled with errors. (I haven't read Spengler, but his annihilation:
Anti-Spengler by Otto Neurath. Available in German as part of
Otto Neurath - gesammelte Philosophische und methodologische Schriften. Band 1 .)
Glownonymous 01-07-24 19:20:55 No. 22380
>>22347 tech sector in general functions largely in the rent sphere, because of IP
But also in general monopolies form out of competition as smaller firms fail to be sufficiently profitable. You'd expect this kind of monopoly firm to have lower margins. Once this happens, monopolies can raise prices to increase margins, but what this is in effect is lowering of the price of money of the whole economy, i.e. reducing wages. In this case consumption suffers and what prevails is necessities. Land rents, utilities, and food (also priced based on land rents) are the most profitable. We see empirically a shift in the economy for a while now in the US e.g. first away from industry, then away even from commerce, to finance, (tech), and land rent. In terms of both top companies, sectors leading gdp growth, and overall share of profits. So there's a long-term trend away from capitalist profits towards rent, as capital burdens production rather than promotes it. Anyways tech is tied heavily with finance and IP rents (and also state intervention and military needs) and so is doing relatively well. I'd see it in that light. Also expect more state expenditure as surplus value with nowhere to go builds up. So again, military spending, infrastructure (lol if we're lucky), state investment and buyouts, etc.
Anonymous 09-07-24 14:46:15 No. 22444
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
Anonymous 11-07-24 19:31:52 No. 22462
I've read most of "Four Thousand Weeks" which, I think, helped me a lot in fighting my perfectionism and reading more regularily. Before reading this book I was always upset about my low understanding or distracted by the facts that various books can give me different perspectives on the subjects I am reading about. Now whenever I'm anxious about productivity I try to tell myself that nothing I do is perfect anyway and I can't fully control my attention/time. Anyway, I decided to try to set a 3 hours goal for studying of whatever general subject I have in mind everyday.
Anonymous 13-07-24 00:28:40 No. 22466
>>22462 that economic history shit sounds intertesting af anon, once I get around to reading that richard wolff book that explains different economic schools, I'll make this my next economic book.
My big problem is that I always end up half way through five books at the same time and it then takes me a ridiculous time to finish any of them. tbh what helped me get my reading hours up was putting small books in the car and backpack(s) so that if im ever randomly board I can just read instead of doomscrolling social media
Glownonymous 27-07-24 05:06:52 No. 22633
>>22631 I guess one way to help ensure these needs would be concerning the question of the introduction of bills, because that's a huge chokepoint like you can have everyone vote on everything all at 1 level, but who decides what to vote on? Petitions are the democratic means of this. A way to ensure that petitions aren't discriminatory over issues that impact a very small proportion of people would be to not implement signature minimums (or keep them small), but have a means of dissension, and have that be the gatekeeping factor (either some threshold of dissension is needed to bar the issue/bill being put forward, or some proportion of pro/signatures to con, or reasoned dissension, etc.). Ideally people who aren't involved shouldn't care to shut down something that has nothing to do with them, and will allow it through. Though it's probably best if petitions aren't directly writing law, but instead are for the creation of a committee to legislate or create an agency etc. to deal with an issue, and to deal with it generally in the direction laid out by the people. That'd b my schema.
Also I just wanna say, democracy starts outside of the political mechanism, in the organization of groups with mutual interest. In a condition of a responsive democracy, but not yet fully altered social and economic relations, historically oppressed groups need to be tightly organized [for the purpose of elaborating self-theory, promoting their agenda/needs, and for carrying out struggle to free themselves or having the organization and will in place to discipline the state somehow if their needs are not met] and see the struggle thru to the end. And if I got a choice, a new democracy I think ought to include within the political mechanism unique representation for historically oppressed groups, based on their organizations. Like some kind of veto power, or power to introduce legislation, or something else that does more than either leaving it up to their extra-state organizing or just over-representing them, e.g.
Actually is none of what I wrote abt a direct democracy? Whoopsie
Anonymous 31-07-24 15:58:56 No. 22646
Finished Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel Dennett (2013).trick ourselves into believing that we haven't changed the essence of the model and are revealing what is always there, merely hidden in the other configurations. So, again the potential fallacy here is the paradox of the heap.<Our minds don’t have a single magnificent summit, consciousness. Contrary to a tradition going back at least to Descartes in the seventeenth century, conscious phenomena are neither the most “central” nor the “highest” phenomena in our minds (Jackendoff, 1987; Dennett, 1991a). A seductive bad image needs a counter-image to neutralize it, so here is a simple imagination-adjuster to start us off: recall Cole Porter’s wonderful song “You’re the Top” and reflect that maybe you’re not the top—not the summit of the mountain, but the whole mountain, and what you know and can tell about the mountain that is you is not the view from the summit, but various views from halfway up. You might like to think of the phenomena of consciousness as rather like the fringe of hair around a bald man’s pate.
Anonymous 12-09-24 21:52:52 No. 22647
Finished
Utopia by Thomas More, in the 2012 Open Utopia version edited by Stephen Duncombe:
http://theopenutopia.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Open-Utopia-fifth-poofs-facing-amended.pdf http://theopenutopia.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/openutopia.epub_.zip If you want to read it yourself, my advice is to directly go to the story (book I & II). The footnotes will clarify anything for the modern reader. The "introduction" is like the worst Channel Awesome stuff: It goes through the entire thing, spoiling everything, has quite a size relative the thing it is supposed to just introduce, and gives an analysis that is made banal and redundant by the footnotes—which are great footnotes! Hail to the footnotes! Well done, Stephen.
Anonymous 19-09-24 09:13:20 No. 22717
Finished The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin (1892, in the 1913 translation by Chapman and Hall). Quotable but overall unconvincing.more authoritarian one.only one way in which Communism can be established equitably, only one way which satisfies our instincts of justice and is at the same time practical (…) In a word, the system is this: no stint or limit to what the community possesses in abundance, but equal sharing and dividing of those commodities which are scarce or apt to run short.<…if this or that article of consumption runs short, and has to be doled out, to those who have most need most should be given. equal personal budgets , so people are in a sense equal and they are their own individual standard when it comes to what they need. Kropotkin wants no budgets and no prices, instead standards set by society for what counts as being needy regarding this or that. And I'm not against such standards, but I'm aware that no matter how democratic the standard-setting procedures are, this standardizing is more authoritarian than the individuals deciding with their personal budgets. Of course, it's possible to have both: The standards of need and using your personal budget as a fallback if you don't qualify for assistance in these eyes of society.<Take, for example, an association stipulating that each of its members should carry out the following contract: “We undertake to give you the use of our houses, stores, streets, means of transport, schools, museums, etc., on condition that, from twenty to forty-five or fifty years of age, you consecrate four or five hours a day to some work recognized as necessary to existence (…) if it does not please you, go and look for other conditions elsewhere in the wide world, or else seek adherents and organize with them on novel principles. We prefer our own.” <This is what could be done in a communal society in order to turn away sluggards if they became too numerous. society sets the standard of work hours . There will never be a perfect consensus on what the proper amount of hours should be just like there will never be a perfect consensus on what counts as need, convenience, or luxury. There is of course a relationship between how many hours humanity works and how much consumable stuff is produced. Why not allow individuals to decide their own work hours and face the consequence of having more or less stuff. (Is there much conflict between this idea and giving people the same consumption budgets? Well, we can think of more free time as something like a consumption item you obtain with your budget. And we can likewise think that way about more pleasant working conditions.)
Anonymous 20-09-24 23:31:45 No. 22741
>>22717 this to me is the principle criticism of communism as such and why i can never be a communist. the value-form (money) rationally distributes goods (including luxuries, like free time) by its inherent credit system which overcomes what smith identifies as "the double-coincidence of wants". think for example how a bus has limited seats - this is why you must pay to access this good, because by this payment, you limit access to the scarce goods. time also separates access, like how in my country, train tickets are cheaper for unpopular hours. however, the more demand means less supply; and so it is with free time. the only way to "decide" who gets free time is to pay for it, which also entails its necessary limits, and credit for this payment, like in pensions - if i work hard then i should play hard, no?
and the more primary issue as you state is the inevitability of individual production. okay - the community might not take your toothbrush, but it will probably take your computer if youre being "too" productive with it.
this communist vision then of "each according from their ability to each according to their need" finds contradiction between need and ability. this is also noted by marx in critique of gotha program as to the inherent inequality of labour-powers. this is also why many doctors leave to america to get paid more for their services.
money thus accords things to Reason, yet also has its own irrationality of course. this irrationality can be managed by a state however, which is also my further anticommunist sentiment - of the primacy of community in the state.
Anonymous 20-09-24 23:51:27 No. 22743
>>22742 i have read the capital trilogy and he never implies any of this sci-fi bullshit, but just talks about "expropriating the expropriators" by a sublation of social property and an end to surplus-value production. this is near the end of vol. 1
marxism is not post-scarcity illusions, but is the self-determination of economic life by central planning. it is the upending of the anarchy of production into a rational order of socially-necessary labour-time.
>chat gpt garbage if you cant comprehend my post then you must be a hypocrite to pretend that you yourself have read das kapital
what i said was very clear; that central planning is necessary, but should not be universal, otherwise you create irrational systems. money is rational in essence, but must also be qualified by a state (like in taxation).
Anonymous 21-09-24 01:10:37 No. 22744
>>22743 the first chapter explains the ltv that you don't understand. communism, the last stage, is the post-scarcity utopia. I would quote engels here but your posts doesn't deserve the effort + you would just throw words at it. I don't think you even understand the points presented to you or how to reply to them
marx never talked about central planning and the socially necessary labor time doesn't have anything to do with central planning. you are using terms you don't understand
Anonymous 21-09-24 01:24:49 No. 22747
>>22744 >the first chapter explains the ltv yes, as abstract labour, or SNLT - which seems irrelevant to this discussion
>communism, the last stage, is the post-scarcity utopia the last stage of what? history? what is "history" to you exactly?
>marx never talked about central planning what does negating the negation of the anarchy of production imply? or is your idea that marx never wanted to seize the means of production to make production a rational process?
>SNLT has nothing to do with central planning it has everything to do with central planning; as the framework for abolish surplus-value. marx says this many times in das kapital - where the notion of surplus-value itself is surplus-labour-time.
the point of communism is "each according from their ability, to each according to their needs", not this UBI post-scarcity you have conjured up. you can want that society, but that is not communism as such.
Anonymous 21-09-24 01:41:07 No. 22751
>>22746 no, my point is that the only way for communists to overcome the value-form is by central planning, and so central planning means the end of exchange and pricing, which to me is inefficient.
"communism" is about reproducing the conditions of primitive communism at a higher stage of development, where use-values are produced outside of the relations of exchange, but by society as a whole rather than individuals. this is only possible by the advent of social labour under capitalism, which leads to crises of overproduction, showing the productive potentials of this mode of production.
>>22748 >you failed to address my points i literally addressed all your points. you just live by slogans so cant deal with them.
>communism is le post-scarcity society this is not even the point made by engels, who himself sees the self-transformation of man toward his own rationality. you order the economy to order the social subject; thats the idea - not that there are infinite materials to waste - but that there would be no waste at all.
again, this phantom you conjure is contemporary conjecture, not anything "marxist" that i have ever encountered
>youve never read marx i have read more marx than 95% of "marxists", but i still disagree with him.
>>22749 i thought you had stopped replying to me?
Anonymous 21-09-24 02:04:10 No. 22752
>>22751 >my point >to me ? we were talking about the marxist definitions, what makes you think anyone cares about your personal definitions
? for example, when I point out that marx never said nor implied that the snlt should replace prices; the way to address it would be to post a quote where he either said either explicitly or reasonably and unambiguously hinted this. your entire idea of marxism comes from a (essentially meaningless) slogan, you are kind of projecting here
? if you mean what does he imply by criticizing the market, the answer is that it doesn't necessarily imply anything, and critic is just a synonym of description. marx described the capitalist economy
production under capitalism is rational according to marxism. just like all the modes that came before. constantly switching the topics isn't being a thinker, you are pivoting from subject to subject to exhaust your opponent and shift the attention from the fact that you have been called out
? another claim marx never made. at most you stop the appropriation of the surplus
notice you didn't address the text quoted, it directly proves that you were wrong about the marxist definition of communism
>the point made by engels that quote isn't from engels. I thought you had read marx
Anonymous 21-09-24 02:44:21 No. 22754
>>22752 >marxist definitions what was un-marxist in my definitions?
>implying that i said that SNLT should replace prices i think youre hallucinating. i never stated that anywhere.
>marx criticising the market doesnt imply anything about resolving the anarchy of production yeah, sure. such a cowardly answer.
>production under capitalism is rational according to marxism. up to the point of its internal contradictions, like crises of overproduction. these show how capital's Reason is bound by irrationality, like how engels states in anti-duhring that the bourgeois revolutions were revolutions of reason, but a reason which only extended to the bourgeoisie itself; "socialism for the rich" and so on.
capitalism is also productive, until it is destructive. these contradictions require corrections.
>another claim marx never made (about abolishing surplus) the freedom of labour is in its freedom from necessity as marx says, which is discovered in SNLT. surplus is surplus-labour which would have to be exploited. thats why central planning also barrs the means of production from their individual use, which marx already describes as the process of the abolishment of handicraft and artisan labour in place of social labour, which capitalism gives birth to. socialism is simply about giving political concept to this mode of production, or like lenin says, he wants society to be a "factory floor". again - not my cup of tea.
>notice you didn't address the text quoted what about it? he is saying the same thing as im saying. communism is about overcoming the division of labour (which creates exchange-value to begin with), and so making labour "life's prime want" (where use-values are the "substance of value" - thus in giving labour its object in this immediate product). this is made possible through greater productivity in social production (where as marx notes, greater productivity lowers the Value of workers by his product being shared by machines. his Value - SNLT - thus is lowered which accords to labour's necessity in its role to society). and so "from each according from his ability to each according to his need". maybe you mistake "productivity" for commodity-production in this case, when as marx deliberately entails - production suffices man's NEEDs, not his desires. this is why communism is a philosophy of poverty.
>that quote isn't from engels i never said it was; i was referencing engels' socialism: utopian and scientific as to the self-transformation of man under socialism which accords to the social mode of production. this is also the idea of "the new soviet man".
>>22753 i never said SNLT replace prices. the first post i responded to was in agreement that labour vouchers would be rational but forbidden under communism according to kropotkin, and so i expanded this general criticism to marxism also.
labour vouchers make sense
communism doesnt
that was my basic point
my point isnt that marx supported labour vouchers, but that he doesnt.
Anonymous 21-09-24 03:06:59 No. 22755
>>22754 >what was un-marxist in my definitions? reading comprehension. I don't care about your definitions. the discussion was about marxist concepts - this is, what marx said, not if your personal ideas follow marxism. every time you write a reply you make the same reading comprehension mistakes. I assume you do this in extremely bad faith or because you are a using ai
>get called out >by X I meant Y all along lmao, another pivot and word salad. that quote disproves your claim that the slogan is anything else but an utopia unfeasible as a program (guess from which book it is) according to marx. it is funny that you thought it was from engels
Anonymous 21-09-24 03:17:07 No. 22756
>>22755 >ur wrong <how >ur just wrong extremely dishonest argumentation
you literally never point out where my definitions are incorrect and you call the substance of my reply word salad, when this is the very marxism i reference and which you pretend to defend
you have no arguments, literally, when i have saturated you with content in return
when i corner you in your amateur idiocy, you just deny it, like you will flippantly deny this reply as well, because in truth, you are the one who is unread
Anonymous 21-09-24 03:24:53 No. 22758
>>22756 >claim you are using marxist definitions <source? >I made it up you still haven't addressed
>>>/edu/22752 <? for example, when I point out that marx never said nor implied that the snlt should replace prices; the way to address it would be to post a quote where he either said either explicitly or reasonably and unambiguously hinted this. your entire idea of marxism comes from a (essentially meaningless) slogan, you are kind of projecting here and better yet, you write things like
>yeah, sure. such a cowardly answer. where you passive-aggressively admit you can't refute the point being made - if marx had made these claims and used these definitions you attribute him, you could just post that. just like you couldn't back up your claim that marx proposed a planned economy where snlt ordered production
of course, whenever pressed you keep the language vague enough so you as to not obstruct
>>>/edu/22757 Anonymous 21-09-24 03:52:47 No. 22760
>>22759 >>22758 i read das kapital a long time ago so cant pull quotes out of my ass. i have notes, not quotes, because quotes in-themselves are purely rhetorical and distract from the larger point being made. any idiot can type in "marx quotes" and not actually engage with the source material.
and on the point about central planning, marx makes direct reference to the self-movement of capital's demise in chapter 32 of capital vol. 1, where centralisation becomes the rule of profit, which thus becomes the rule of social production's overcoming of private property. here the expropriators are expropriated.
so im sure you would accept socialism entailing the centralisation of the means of production, but somehow you miss the point about this leading to the central planning of the economy by the state - which is communist dogma for a reason.
or are you a stalinist who accepts the socialist commodity? where does surplus-value fit into your vision of communism if you accept the role of this surplus? to me its very clear marx wants to overcome the value-form and division of labour, which means overcoming exchange and thus entering into centrally-planned production, which entails the order of production by SNLT, since to marx, man has his ends in this.
this again is why marx imagines an economy based on necessity (from each according to his ability, to each according to his need), which by definition limits social production to its determination in necessity, which has its basis in SNLT as its principle.
no?
your ideas of a post-scarcity society is not marxist in concept. labour being life's prime want doesnt mean we just make shit in a pile; it means labour becomes free in its determination to necessity (in use-values); where individual and social labour are bound up in the same destiny. this is the concept of central planning as such - what i want must be accorded with the wants of everybody else, since production has become social in kind.
and all this is based in the "end of history" which is supposed to return us to (primitive) communism at a higher stage of development, to return us to the substance of labour (in use-values). as marx states, before commodities, there were only use-values. communism is about returning to this, which is only possible by central planning.
this is not even controversial at all except to obtuse contrarians like yourself apparently.
i am already right. im just trying to show you that youre wrong.
>>22759 yes, capitalism is rational, until its not. ive already said this.
Anonymous 04-10-24 07:33:50 No. 22794
Marx and Le Capital —Finally a Marx book for redditors? No, it's a 2022 collection of essays about Kapital's French translation, the collection edited by Marcello Musto. It's endless hairsplitting.modern French appears twice. Three essays mention the French edition injecting the term "industrial ladder" into some sentence (I agree with the third of these saying it doesn't make a big difference). Six people are jacking off in their separate essays about what "aplatir" means. Marx promising the reader a "scientific value" of the French version independent of the original gets mentioned nine times.<A peculiar destiny presides over the creation of this book, for its translation into French is a true act of creation. <The author is an exile living amid the fogs of the Thames; the publisher is also an outlaw, who as if by a miracle escaped three gangs of killers sent to shoot him on the infernal day of 24 May!* The man who put us in touch with each other, your son-in-law, is also an outlaw, driven into exile by the winds of persecution and followed by your beloved daughter and the poor dear child, whose frail health causes you so many worries. <Born in the midst of suffering, your book will perhaps earn me much persecution; I willingly accept it.
Anonymous 07-11-24 11:37:03 No. 22884
>>22814 There was a modernised text that /edu/ used to have .pdf of before the great server crash.
Link unrelated
https://johnhawks.net/weblog/four-stone-age-sites-with-ancient-wooden-artifacts/ Anonymous 09-11-24 09:51:58 No. 22890
<There is an obvious contradiction between centralism, an essential element of socialist planning, and self-management, also essential to socialism, since the more power the center wields the less is left for workers in the enterprises. But this contradiction can be managed and even become a positive factor if certain conditions are present: objective circumstances must allow for a significant limitation of central control, and the economy must be able to provide workers with economic security and a decent standard of living. Without the first, self-management is not meaningful; without the second, workers cannot be expected to sacrifice local group interests for the general good. Both conditions were absent in Russia. Our to Master and to Own (2011) by Immanuel Ness & Dario Azzellini (eds.), a massive tome about attempts at workers' control from the 19th century to the 21st.of my life I am barely capable of giving a summary. Do you have deep knowledge about Algeria, Indonesia, and Chile? Do you also have experience living in Germany before World War II? Then you might be in a position to write a proper review of this. Otherwise, stick to reviewing a chapter about something you know well.
Anonymous 20-11-24 15:25:27 No. 22954
Finished my piece on Babeuf (French Revolutionary, proto-Communist) for my serialized book on the Proletarian Revolution:
https://devetsil.substack.com/p/political-emergence-of-babouvism-33e?r=1vkaa7 (every section will be free to read of course…I hope it inspires other comrades to research and write about what they're interested in and share it with the world).
Currently, I am working on the section dedicated to Blanqui. Afterwards, will be the section on Proudhon. Finally, Section 2 is dedicated specifically to Marx where I will be analyzing (1) Marx's concept of the revolution, (2) Marx's critique of civil society and the political state, (3) Marx's doctrine of the commune, and finally (4) Marx's problem of the proletarian party.
Babeuf and Blanqui (I want to eventually translate his untranslated book Capital et Travail) are relatively interesting revolutionaries despite being forgotten and invariably acknowledged via fragments by Marx and Lenin. I am not keen on Proudhon but I think it is critical to examine Proudhon's doctrine of the proletarian revolution to end Section 1 to show why the First International went toward Marx in lieu of Proudhon.
Soboul, Albert. A Short History of the French Revolution, 1789-1799. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977, p. 141.
Anonymous 21-11-24 15:56:51 No. 22959
Reading Continental Reckoning by Eliott West. IT is a very interesting book, also Karl Marx is a racist fuck who was jealous that he never made it to the Unites States in time to become enriched. So Marx wrote an incel manifesto instead of going to the gym, saving up some money and moving to the United States to play in one of the greatest game fields ever conceived by man.
Also, 80% of people who made it to California did so by boat either through Panama or Cape horn, the great Oregon Trail wagon crossing to California is largely over represented.
https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496233585/continental-reckoning/ Anonymous 22-11-24 22:21:11 No. 22973
Finished Erewhon by Samuel Butler (1872).before birth , and so babies are seen as people of defective character who choose to be born.
Moffin' 13-12-24 17:27:50 No. 23167
I have been reading "Red Code", italian book about our health service.
Spoiler: the situation is pretty bad
>>>/leftypol/2078215 So far, our basic family medics have become petit-bourgeois; and as such have been using their "unions" to minimize public service and slowly substitute it with their private studios and services, which has worsened the overall system in a number of ways, starring with the fact that people with low-urgency needs now flood our hospitals Emergency Rooms because they can't access affordable basic healthcare or checkups otherwise.
Anonymous 15-12-24 08:46:17 No. 23172
Finished The Politics of Democratic Socialism—An Essay on Social Policy by Evan Frank Mottram Durbin (1940). After an enthusiastic start a feeling sets in that this "essay" (normal people would call that a book) is ten times longer than it needs to be, and you start to see notes that are often little essays in themselves.not firm on what Marxism even is : He claims Marxism to be dramatically gloomy and contrasts that with an optimism of the classics. What about rampant Malthusianism among the classics? And why would the end of capitalism be gloomy to you? He claims Marxists to confuse relative and absolute misery, despite Marx explicitly making the distinction.hollow empiricism part of his critique: The material, economic explanation of history is something he equates with selfish motives of individuals . He makes a lot of what's in your mind, but how much empiricism can you do without observers outside your head; and he talks much about subconscious processes at that, so not even self-observation will do. I am not even totally hostile to his position critical of the fundamentalists. He is right that England has gone through a lot of reforms, capitalism has shown itself to be more flexible than anticipated, but this subconscious psychobabble stuff is useless. We can speculate all day about these processes and unknown real motives being this or that. He talks about the importance of a good childhood for the psyche, but then doesn't look into the childhood of any socialist agitator.broken logic part of his critique: He claims logically economics is either the one fundamental cause of everything in history or one of many equally important ones; and since it isn't the former, it must be the latter. He claims Marxists either claim the former or a mysterious and logically impossible third option. But of course a third option exists, that of the factors having different weight. He even briefly mentions that and then drops it and plays confused. How can something be fundamental, but only in the long run , he asks, that must be nonsense… Look man, after filling my tank I am not much constrained in where I drive, but as the tank gets close to running out I am drawn again to where the gas stations are located. A big stock of surplus allows us to do all sorts of silly things, but as the stock depletes economic constraints make themselves felt more and more.big fan of the horseshoe model , equating Nazis and socialists. Actually, his position is all over the place, he oscillates between equating them and saying the Nazis are far worse. And in the end, he admits his belief that British socialists are not at all prone to violence like the Bolsheviks (which didn't stop him from slandering socialists in general with his ramblings about those evil thoughts and feelings you don't even know you have, but he somehow just "knows" you have them). What to do if the authoritarian socialists become a dangerous threat though? He muses that maybe the parties he considers totalitarian should be banned if they got around 40 % electoral support or… maybe earlier? Again he is oscillating wildly about what the proper evidence of a threat would be, swinging from observable violent acts to kafkaesque subconscious guilt. Maybe he will consult your star sign, too.fruits of democracy he says, meaning this openness for the tree making these fruits, by which he means the democratic individual psyche. No freedom of speech nor assembly for the totalitarians! The fruits don't make the tree, he says. But won't experiencing tolerance make you tolerant? Come to think of it, trees come from seeds, so even the fruity metaphor that he likes so much disagrees with him. Fruit and tree is like egg and chicken. There is mutual interaction.
Anonymous 21-12-24 01:12:10 No. 23221
Going through my reactionary studies again, this time with Huerta de Soto's Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles . I didn't have any desire to study the ancap canon further after seeing Gene Callahan's blatant strawmen within the first 20 pages of his book, so it was refreshing to see his acknowledgement of how, no, Marx wasn't ignorant of "marginal utility" or "supply and demand" or any of that, before he switches the topic to technique reswitching. It always loops back to that, doesn't it:>Dennis: Sure, the Soviet Revolution pushed the nation forward, b-but our engineers!!! >de Soto: Sure, Marx wasn't muh mudpie theorist, b-but credit and interest!
Anonymous 21-12-24 03:15:26 No. 23224
>>23221 Well, perhaps that's a false equivalence. Soto's not as blatantly
dishonest as fascists are on this one, I could see why someone sees interest in that way.
Anonymous 30-12-24 08:45:34 No. 23309
>>23284 yockey's "soul" is racial (physiognomical)/civilisational, which is a different conception from marx's class society. you can try and quantify this as a factor of "(re)production", but its not a quantity, its a quality. you cant create a formula for society and then expect different peoples to live that way (francs could never build germany). different peoples create their own societies. you can be marxist-hegelian and see that the geist in history is due to different modes of production; different societies are just differences in technical ability. well, yockey is a disciple of spengler who wrote on technics, and spengler's point is oncemore that techne is qualitative, not quantitative, like how cats and dogs develop different characteristics based on their souls, which as yockey says is "the element of elements" (quintessence).
there are no universal machines. this is what marxists fail to understand. the ancients had mechanical technologies; even hephaestus created androids, but it wasnt a capitalist age, so had less concern. the character of labour then is not purely quantified, but qualified. this also relates to yockey's hegelianism, where he criticises darwinism as a victorian-capitalist myopia for example. simply, marx reverses the order of things. he imagines that the bourgeoisie are possessed by capital, when it is the opposite relation; capital is reflective of its master's intentions. thus, not all labour, and not all capitals are made equally. people say that "the only colour capitalism cares about is green", but that isnt true. as we saw before regulations, businesses would racially discriminate all the time. thus, capitals are particularised in themselves. here, quantity turns to quality. exchange is incommensurable; abstract labour becomes concrete labour. this is the marxist apocalypse (free markets).
you can call the productive base of a society its soul, but this misses the totality of the Concept. the body still metabolises even if the soul is absent. it moves, but is surely dead. the soul then is the life of the body (not the drive of the body), which is unquantifiable, as an essence of the thing itself. it can be qualified by different attributes, but this only manifests as the body itself. so it is dialectical in the same way that aristotle understands it. the soul is the essence of a substantial form, whose content is material. you cannot "create" a soul; the soul is what creates (is the soul then analogous to labour-power? in some sense of potency, or will, but it is a personified will, which is different from a marxist perspective of labour. labour to marxists is end-oriented, while the soul is an end in-itself. one is, only to be).
this is what is to be understood about yockey's spenglerianism then; civilisations rise and fall like any organism, which means the soul leaving the body. the body remains thus, but as a husk. a society then "rots" when it loses its soul, and must decompose thereafter. the question then concerns the nature of this soul. a marxist sees it in class dynamics, while yockey sees it in civic composition. the soulless society is the anonymous society. the soul is the intelligibility of man; his formal reality. the formless mass is unintelligible and therefore contentless. death means rotting; melting into nothingness - this is the cosmopolitan capitalism of the multicultural anti-society. can you have germany without germans? and the moment you ask "what is a german?" you already perceive the unintelligibility of the nation, and so perceive its immanent death - if anyone can be a german, then no one can be, and so there is no germany as such (this suits the marxist for political purposes, yet the marxists also wishes to preserve the west in content while abolishing its form, but it cannot be done).
if you accept racial reality as a factor of production however (as a quantity which can be measured and so commensurated with others), what will be your conclusion? no marxist will ever admit there are racial/ethnic Differences, so that is where you are already challenged by yockey in concreto. in the abstract, you can contort any idea into the other, since this is the nature of abstraction, where all encircle the One, but all abstractions have their concrete example. the "soul" of yockey's conception has its concreteness, which is epistemically challenging to you. the ends of materialism is always to become epistemically-challenged anyway, so…
[giovanni gentile thinks of the basic social essence as "socius". the socius concerns an intrinsic sociality to things. this is similar to aristotle's genaeology of the polis, which first begins in the family, as the basic family unit, which then extends into the village, and finally into the city. race then is the concept of an extended family. race and class then are bound together. a patrician and plebian are ordained by birthright. free man and slave alike. one's role is the content of his heritage as the sin of his father; as a worldly debt. this combination thus applies to caste (vana; colour). one has caste, and this is his vocation (as described in plato's myth of metals). class society then is a racial society. the division of labour entails the division of men into types. yockey's soul then is the arche-type of society. marx might say that you are what you do, while yockey might say, you do what you are. this is also the internal struggle of socialism; why must the proletariat be saved from themselves? from wence doth the revolution arise? only in those who have the right to rule; the legitimate. this is included in lenin's vanguard party.]
to find some commensuration with your marxism though, i did actually hear that yockey killed himself while being detained for being a soviet spy. other right wing thinkers like ernst junger also found affinity in a certain flavour of bolshevism. a man like kerry bolton even vindicates stalin as a "national socialist", like how ᴉuᴉlossnW calls stalin and roosevelt alike "fascists" respectively. what is common in all this is the spectre of a legitimate rule. sovereignty is given (by the people), not taken (from the people). this is the extended social contract. the people do not hate the idea of leaders as such, but only the illegitimate. right is whats right. what is marx except a "great man" of the left, for example? his word is scripture and his stature is sacred. in this then we glean the perennial patriarchy of which politics is only a shadow, like to plato, time is the moving image of eternity. between the left and right thus is the Concept of each.
Anonymous 31-12-24 14:15:00 No. 23318
>>23316 Could you give some examples of that phenomenon of class society collapsing without another exploiting class to take the reigns?
That sounds pretty interesting
Glownonymous 11-01-25 03:59:11 No. 23401
>>23172 On Education, N. K. Krupskaya, published by foreign language press has unique stuff abt his early life. On marxists.org you can find another biography of Lenin from Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin or Memories of Lenin. Bobrovskaya wrote a small biography on him. For historical context maybe just read histories and compare dates. I've only read Bobrovskaya's biography and A Prophet Armed for context on the russian communist movement. I know Stalin wrote on this too so I'd check him out next if I wanted to read more abt that.
>>23138 The Shock Doctrine
Anonymous 15-01-25 04:00:30 No. 23427
usually todd is an excellent thinker, but here he mystifies the capitalist process too much as a "pure excess" which has no concern for social reproduction. he situates this character of capitalist society as against former ones which are apparently "ecological". he fails in his thinking of course since what defines capitalist modernity against the middle ages and more antique societies is the "liquidation" of social forms into their singular commercial product. capitalist society is the uniquely conservative society; the abstract society of axiomatic property rights. here, no contradiction is permitted, and therefore, contradictory excess is regulated into the contractual agreement. all passion is subdued by a tyrannical reason; men are made into machines (which is the motif of early modern philosophy, in decartes and hobbes for example - science too defines this age, where once again, man becomes the instrument of an abstract methodology). capitalist society is the protestant society. the excessive society is the pagan and catholic society of ritual waste, piracy and public executions.
lucifer Anonymous 18-01-25 03:00:30 No. 23433
first is this reference i found from a 1650 edition of "the divine pymander" (an english translation of the hermetica). it depicts the goddess standing upon a crescent moon wherein she represents the universal dancer (like shiva and his nataraja, or dance of destruction/flux). anyone with knowledge of the tarot will also recognise this image as "the universe/world" card, which is the final in the deck. the crescent moon is typically absent from standard editions however. a star and crescent moon is seen today as an islamic symbol, but this was only officially cosigned by the ottoman empire in 1844, with limited use before then, and it is actually an ancient symbol going back to babylon. the 8-pointed star is the morning star inanna/ishtar (lucifer), which is shown in conjunction with the sun and moon. it was also adopted by byzantium, where here it is reversed with a symbol of artemis/diana. selene is another moon deity associated with the crescent moon, and is depicted in conjunction with phosophorus (the morning star).
lucifer Anonymous 18-01-25 03:11:54 No. 23434
first is this reference i found from a 1650 edition of "the divine pymander" (an english translation of the hermetica). it depicts the goddess standing upon a crescent moon wherein she represents the universal dancer (like shiva and his nataraja, or dance of destruction/flux). anyone with knowledge of the tarot will also recognise this image as "the universe/world" card, which is the final in the deck. the crescent moon is typically absent from standard editions however. a star and crescent moon is seen today as an islamic symbol, but this was only officially cosigned by the ottoman empire in 1844, with limited use before then, and it is actually an ancient symbol going back to babylon.
Anonymous 19-01-25 03:11:20 No. 23439
>>23436 >You improve your intuition through practice <"virtue is a habit" - aristotle >When outside, you look at some spot and try to picture what does the spot you are at right now look like from over there i am very good at these sorts of "indirect" or "impersonal" imaginings (literally, the creation of images), but i struggle very hard to picture someone's face in my mind. i liken this to how light enters the eye most from the side, which is why if we stare at a dim light in the dark, it will seem to "disappear", but if we look away, it returns, but indirectly. this bears relation to the unconscious as well, where its impossible to will ourselves asleep; we can only fall asleep when we stop thinking about it - but we also cant think about not-thinking about it (like how in buddhism, you cant desire non-desire).
irl i recognise faces immediately but i am terrible at remembering names. i am also retarded when it comes to remembering the names of streets and places. maps confuse me, yet i will always know where i am. i dont get lost.
>>23434 also wanted to add that "the lovers" here refers to both adam and lucifer being the lovers of a conflicted eve. we have adam's burning bush and eve's tree of knowledge, with the serpent (seraphim) in it. this structure is also the qabalistic trinity of binah-chochmah-keter, or hades-poseidon-zeus.
Anonymous 23-01-25 16:42:25 No. 23447
this african goddess displays a mystery to established science and history, as this article indicates:
https://www.allaboutvision.com/en-gb/resources/blue-eye-colour/ >"All blue-eyed people may have a common ancestor" <It appears that a genetic mutation in a single individual in Europe 6,000 to 10,000 years ago led to the development of blue eyes, according to researchers at the University of Copenhagen this can be explained by her being related to blue-eyed people in her past, but from when? i have also seen reports of black couples having children with pale skin, blue eyes and blonde hair. some afrocentrists see this as proof of an annunaki root race, whereby all races were born of an original black godship (like how yakub created white people).
an alternative theory is the aryan root race, wherefrom all the peoples came who currently occupy the planet - this is theosophically traced through all the world religions which have the aryan brahmin as their founders - the aryans themselves however come from the hyperboreans, of which nietzsche describes as blonde beasts; the adamic race before the fall of man.
some aryanists like robert sepher attempt to debunk the "out of africa" theory by positing separate developments of the races, archaeologically supported by items like the world's oldest skeleton being in germany; also the german "lion man" statuette.
others posit an atlantean collapse of an ancient civilisation, survived by the golden thread of celtic druids, who passed on their wisdom to the egyptians, or the atlanteans themselves living underground.
in all this, the concept of humanity is more mysterious than we imagine.
Anonymous 24-01-25 02:19:59 No. 23449
Just finished reading J. Sakai's The Shock of Recognition, a short text about fascism. Thought it gets fascism mostly right, with the exception of buying its revolutionary rhetoric as fact instead of just rhetoric. In fact it's the most reactionary ideology possible, creating colonial slavery from ground zero.
I don't know how much the part where the author says the big bourgeoisie had no say at all in Nazi Germany is true, which inspired me to read Tooze's Wages of Destruction later.
Understanding Islamic traditionalism as a form of fascism makes this book really good in the sense that it accurately tracks the universal petty bourgeois nature of fascist ideology.
https://trueleappress.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/kersplebedeb-com-the-shock-of-recognition-j-sakai.pdf Anonymous 25-01-25 13:56:55 No. 23454
>>23449 >picrel the idea that fascism is a revolutionary force non-bourgeois and non-proletarian in character is a sentiment shared by julius evola in "orientations" for example, where he sees "the man amidst the rubble" as superseding these concepts. in caste terms, it is the warrior as against the merchant and labourer.
"protracted crisis" reminds me of maoism and a peoples' agitation. i see the definite link between maoism, fascism and anarchism in the political negativity they affirm, which is at once a bourgeois anti-politics (hence, the phenomemon of the radlib) but also of anti-social activism (which is why terrorism is celebrated by all these tendencies, since it attempts to make contradiction tangible - something exuded by today's fascist satire. this notion of giving a face to the "accursed share" is also the mode of what i call "revolutionary pornography" in the bataillean tradition of propaganda. misanthropic vegans do this when they show us factory farming footage for example).
i would agree since so many fascists including myself are lumpens who steal all the time; it is our place in the social order, as bottom feeders (i would more generally say however that fascism is more of a "criminal state" in general, where the criminals constitute a sublime order of thuggery - the prisoners run the prison). i have been homeless for around 19 months for example and must have stolen nearly 100k of things from shoplifting alone. ive also broken into people's houses and been close to killing people and stuff like that. anarchists also do this when they "squat" and whatnot. shoplifting is also seen as anarkiddy "praxis" so i share a further aesthetic in this regard, except that i invert my identity. even though i am homeless i dress nice and spit on the scum; i dont live amongst the dispossessed, and this i think attunes to evola's nietszchean idea of an aristocracy of the soul, in that i believe i am spiritually superior, yet materially equal. i would thus also describe my position as fitting into a "leisure class" typical of lumpens, or a "consuming class"; that is, i exit the stock of capital by my privilege as a free being. bastiat saw this natural aristocracy as inherent to capitalism.
and yes, the popularity of the nazis with the lumpens and de-classed makes sense also. ernst junger (one of the thinkers of the "conservative revolution" in germany wrote that the lumpen possessed radical potential. you will most often see the unemployed and generally lumpen at fascist rallies.
>pan-islamism well we know about ᴉuᴉlossnW and the sword of islam dont we…? but also the history of wahhabism and fundamentalist islam is interesting - like american evangelicalism, it is a purely modern phenomenon, which obviously carries a reactionary essence.
Anonymous 02-02-25 14:15:31 No. 23502
I have been wondering why people so often commit the sunk-cost fallacy. Maybe there is an actual advantage to continue for a bit when one already feels that one is wrong, so as to better grasp what the effects of the mistake are like, expecting useful information for facing similar situations? Early examples of economists reasoning with utility diagrams show the marginal utility line entering negative territory. The standard today is to either stop drawing the line at zero marginal utility because why would a reasonable person inflict self-damage (or worse they make the weird stipulation that any increase in consumption always brings additional positive utility, however small).Discourse on Method by Descartes. He says some situations are like trying to get out of a forest with little to no information on what the best route is. His advice: Some straight lines are better than others, but any straight line leads out of the forest. So commit.
Anonymous 04-02-25 06:26:34 No. 23508
here is a good talk with avgi saketopoulou on a defense of freud's concept of infantile sexuality. in it, she appeals to the involuntary response of the body, which manifests perversely to seemingly unattractive phenomena. in this, she is dissolving the subjective "eros" to an "intersubjectal" force of irresistability. i would personally call this power "cupid" in the light of a desire, even forbidden to ourselves. she says that she is inspired by georges bataille, and therefore priviliges communication over symbolisation. her point is that the drive is not a "bio-logical" instinct, but is an objective motivity that leads bodies to their end (or to freud, a prima materia). the drive in light of sexuality thus pertains to this property, that it is guided from beyond itself and thus enters into trauma. this is why queer perversion is native to sexuality, and so in its particularity, reveals its inner essence. this general purview of object-ivity in sex must be grappled with in the era of dildos, sex dolls and extreme fetishes. all sex is a queer incongruence, which we see most especially in "nature". sex is not about sex, as oscar wilde tells us. it is about power.
Anonymous 06-02-25 02:07:22 No. 23518
>>23511 so… whats the issue exactly? that article clearly expresses marx's ambiguity, which continues into capital vol. 1, where "value" and "exchange value" seem to be conflated, yet made distinct. as he develops chapter 1, he begins to make a dialectical development as to the "value form" (or phenomenal form of value) and "value" as such, yet he qualifies this relation as an exchange-relation of commodities, not as embodiments of labour. value measures embodied labour *between* commodities (according to SNLT), not a quantity *within* commodities.
this is one criticism i thus hold against that article where he states;
>"But the value itself of the commodity can in principle be specified without any such reference to other commodities, in terms of the abstract labor required to produce it" this is incorrect, as marx writes here in chapter 1 of capital vol. 1;
>"If, however, we bear in mind that the value of commodities has a purely social reality, and that they acquire this reality only in so far as they are expressions or embodiments of one identical social substance, viz., human labour, it follows as a matter of course, that value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity" yet as he continues,
>"we started from exchange value, or the exchange relation of commodities, in order to get at the value that lies hidden behind it. We must now return to this form under which value first appeared to us." he once again sees value as only attaining its social reality in exchange, yet also sees it as something "hidden behind it". this is just an invocation of hegelian appearance and essence; you cant have one without the other. its not either/or, its both.
one resolution i have to this is to re-read marx in the logic of markets; the exchange-value of commodities is determined in their relation to their supply (such is a relation of commodities) - this is the antagonism between the duration and intensity of labour power for example; that greater intensity (embodiment) means less time (and thus a lesser value), as marx writes here,
>"The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth […] and consequently fell to one-half its former value." and as marx writes here,
>"if we could succeed at a small expenditure of labour, in converting carbon into diamonds, their value might fall below that of bricks. […] The value of a commodity, therefore, varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productiveness, of the labour incorporated in it." the dialectic between capitalist production and exchange is the same between value and exchange-value.
Anonymous 06-02-25 02:51:45 No. 23519
>>23509 yes that's true. those who speak do not act, for action is subsumed within its mediation (simulation). bataille in "literature and evil" speaks of how words escape the minds of the repressed; libido is sublimated into this expressive form, like how the priestcraft over-produce culture by a surplus of literature. otherwise to say, those who don't masturbate may nonetheless engage in mental masturbation. this is where fiction and fantasy is born; from the gap of desire.
i myself see a major difference between plato and aristotle in this way, where plato is priestly and homosexual, while aristotle is worldly and heterosexual. this is why aristotle theorises the concept of "catharsis" for example, by generalising the logic of orgasm (and thus "telos"), and in this, he is able to produce his thinking systematically. in plato by contrast, he is firstly a playwright, and secondly, scattered in his thinking, by the nonlinear publishing of his socratic dialogs. this finds its sublimity in "phaedo" however, where socrates reveals that his "daemon" (muse) has given him inspiration to write fictions such as aesop's fables; or in the terms of "republic", noble lies for useful instruction. in the canonical sequel to republic, "timaeus", for example, plato fictionalises a pythagorean philosopher called timaeus to tell us the secrets of the universe. this third-person mediation of narrative is different from aristotle's direct immediacy. this can also be called the difference between the abstract and concrete.
personally, i am much more abstract in my sexuality and therefore mediate its object by the text of desire. this is why i say that i am not sexually attracted to women, but only erotically attached. i find women much more attractive when they are clothed, and when they are naked, i am traumatised by their bodies. i find kissing much more appealing than fucking (this can be explained by many reasons, like anal/oral fixations in psychosexual development, oedipal dysfunction, and so on, but it can also be formulated by lacan's objet petit a, or the self-obscurity of desire; a clothed woman is more attractive because her clothing signifies what is underneath, but to approach nakedness is to lose the self-obscurity of nakedness thus, like how a christmas present loses its negative surplus once the wrapping paper is ripped off. it is the same with clothing, which acts as wrapping paper for the woman - this then accumulates a surplus jouissance which is spent in orgasm).
i similarly enjoy talking vulgarly with people, but in a way that parodies (or defaces) the pretension of sexuality, by overidentification. it is a reverse phallus, which then allows for my own castration, and so liberates me to my femininity. in this, i find greatest enjoyment flirting with women, yet never soiling this phantasmatic friendship with sex. this bears similarity to lacan's equation of enjoyment in the drive; "i could be talking or fucking and it would be the same difference". here, i prefer the social masturbations of oral excesses. yet, oral sex digusts me; giving or receiving.
zizek in this clip gives a similar account, in how sex can be interpassively mediated by objects, for us to then be entered into authenticity (in my fantasies i also often imagine pleasing women with dildos and other devices which simulate my participation; this also adds to the horizon of cuckold fantasies, in how an object substitutes itself for us - one possible analysis is that this simulates a division of labour under capitalism, especially with the racial dynamic, which objectifies the stand-in as a phallus. i myself have masturbated to thoughts of my own mother being fucked by black men).
where it concerns sex however, we must be mindful that what gives it its qualities is the erotic formality of its narrative. this is why all porn requires a storyline for it to be enjoyed. sex then is not a pure act of organic intensity, but a mediated act of social signification. this is also why incest porn is so popular, because of the transgressive logic of taboo. in this is also a gendered difference in how we relate to sex. women prefer erotica (abstract mediation), while men prefer the image of sex (concrete immediacy). this is also the literary soul of women, whom read more books than men and watch more TV shows, while men may watch more movies. here, the form of narrative is also considered, between the serial and finite. i much prefer closed narratives, yet achieve my libidinal charge from a porno's storyline.
my femininity is priestly, like plato, yet my imperative is to systematicity, like aristotle. i enjoy fictions, yet hate extended stories. here is my liberalism and my despotism; my foreplay and orgasm (however, my favourite dialog is not a systematic treatise like republic, but my favourites are parmenides, euthyphro, apologia, phaedo and symposium - short but open dialogs). the spectre of a woman's "multiple orgasms" and a man's single blotch of seed also plays into this. a woman satisfies herself continuously, while a man seeks finality.
so to return to the question of words and actions. words mediate actions, while actions are wordless. this is the same difference between the erotic and sexual. one can achieve mental masturbation as easily as bodily masturbation. words are born from repression, as nietzsche might also understand it. these words of mine are my will-to-power; the craft of priests (this is also why the left create more words than the right, due to caste types. the left are more abstract, or inward, while the right is more concrete, or outward. this is also represented in the forms of political literature; "the left cant meme" since they are verbose, while the right can meme since they are generally anti-intellectual. long-form and short-form. you can deduce a political ontology from this analysis, and some have, i.e lerouch; plato vs. aristotle… my own perspective is that a philosopher [philo-sophia; lover of wisdom] is an androgyne, since he is both husband and bride to himself; this is the contraction of his feminine nature, whereby he worships the goddess that lives within himself; this sophia is also the "bride of Christ". plato is the last formal philosopher, while aristotle is the first scientist - where "science" means "knowledge" and so denotes the particularisation of wisdom by giving theoretical specificity to being, such as aristotle's "substance" over plato's "idea". world-history's movement is marked by this progress from plato to aristotle thus. this is why plato is aristotle's teacher, and aristotle is alexander the great's teacher; this golden chain is also greece's end).
Anonymous 09-02-25 07:42:17 No. 23546
>>23519 >i similarly enjoy talking vulgarly with people, but in a way that parodies (or defaces) the pretension of sexuality, by overidentification. it is a reverse phallus, which then allows for my own castration, and so liberates me to my femininity. in this, i find greatest enjoyment flirting with women, yet never soiling this phantasmatic friendship with sex. this bears similarity to lacan's equation of enjoyment in the drive; "i could be talking or fucking and it would be the same difference". here, i prefer the social masturbations of oral excesses. yet, oral sex digusts me; giving or receiving. Methinks your definition of "femininity" is the cartoonish mutual absence of "masculinity".
Men are also literary. Women read more books because they read more romance novels.
Men are more inclined to read more sci-fi or fantasy which is longer.
Also men also make and enjoy erotica.
We don't always rely solely on images.
Anonymous 11-02-25 01:07:47 No. 23564
>>23546 my definition of femininity is object-ivity (or the ego of one's body), while masculinity is subject-ivity (or the ego of one's identity). this has its genital relation whereby women are castrated while men are phallic. knowledge is also gendered along the lines of intuition and reason. this is why 95% of all "intellectuals" are men while intellectual women are lesbianic. homosexuals are feminine because they convert their anus and/or mouth into a vagina, while lesbians are masculine by simulating the phallus. my point is that to be entered into a critical discourse of one's gender, you must become queered as an androgyne. the issue with homo/trans-sexuality however is that these identities are hysterical, and therefore ontological rather than social categories (hence the idea of being "born gay" or having a "female brain"; these are essentialist categories, basically). thus, one must enter into awareness of his contradiction. in my opinion, only the heterosexual (homoerotic) possesses this power most effectively. how would you define the genders?
mostly where it concerns non-fiction. fiction is a feminine category (since it is born from repression/castration). sci-fi also acts as a semi-fiction, with its abstract worldbuilding.
>men enjoy erotica yes, but unconsciously. the dialectic of arousal is that it mistakes the appearance of the sexual for its erotic essence, when the true substance of sexuality is narration (i.e. fiction). this is why i say that i am womanly by appealing to the object-ivity of sexual desire (in the text of the fantasy).
in kantian terms, masculinity is spatial by taking the appearance of things as their rational form, while femininity is temporal by taking the narrative as its essential form. both are right and both are wrong. you need a "synthetic a priori" to unite the two.
Glownonymous 11-02-25 07:25:22 No. 23570
>>23508 >sex is not about sex, as oscar wilde tells us. it is about power. At the moment i'm reading Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone and she goes even further in revising Freud. Here the oedipal complex for example results from the powerless child identifying with the likewise oppressed mother. Later then the boy is expected to imitate the father, and he does under the promise of worldly power, repressing the desire to kill his father. She also makes an interesting case about gendered attraction, namely that the sort of power the child desires over its parents differentiates it from an initiial union of the emotional and sexual. Therefore "penis envy" is to be taken entirely metaphorically, as the envy of male power.
The chapter on childhood might also be of special interest to newgene:
<The cult of childhood as the Golden Age is so strong that all other ages of life derive their value from how closely they resemble it, in a national cult of you; "grownups" make asses of themselves with their jealous apologetics ("Of coure I'm twice your age, dear, but …). There is the general belief that progress has been made because at least in our time children have been freed from the ugly toils of child labor and many other traditinoal exploitations of past generations. In fact there is even the envious moan that children are getting too much attention. They are spoiled. ("When I was your age …" parallels "It's a woman world …") Anonymous 11-02-25 08:02:30 No. 23571
>>23570 yes, well "penis envy" is really phallus* envy, with the penis only being a form of the phallus (which can be objectified in many different symbols, most notably guns and cigars - which is why these phallic items occupy the aesthetics of right-wing politics). sunglasses in particular are the phallic symbol par excellence, since they quite literally create a "gap" (of signification) between the subject and the world, which gives him symbolic mastery over it (like how the penis is externalised). its the same difference between being in a car and staring at people on the street (even though you would never do this without the "screen" of the phallus). this symbolisation is not just in man however, but also occurs in dogs (vidrel) where the illusion of "distance" creates a relationship of alienated power. after the gap is closed, the phallus shrinks and inverts.
i find phallus to be inauthentic and so i dont engage in any sort of "tough-guy" behaviour to please my ego, even though i have in the past. you will see in picrel also a sort of symbolic physiognomy where it concerns political orientation, between the "castrated" and "phallic".
Anonymous 11-02-25 08:55:32 No. 23573
>>23572 >transition from hard to soft power like deleuze's disciplinary to control societies in the advent of managerialism? it reminds me of dan harmon's description of the workplace being ruled by "suits" and then overtime, "sweaters", or "nice guys" who nonetheless contract an implicit relationship of power. its the same description as zizek's "postmodern father" paradigm also, where power has its discourse in a new superegoic disjunction, where the old model was shame at indulging too much in pleasure, while today's unconscious is based in the shame of not indulging enough (creating cultural myopias like FOMO - "fear of missing out"). materially, this corresponds to the burgeoning of a "consumer society" displacing industrial society.
but maybe youre right then, that castration is just a cynical performance, or "strategy" of reproduction, as others suggest. i do nonetheless think that authentic masculinity is castrated (like how Christ is crucified), so perhaps we can qualify between deception and earnesty in this realm. what you are saying is that most "nice guys" are not nice? i would agree in nietzschean terms. weakness is not mercy or innocence.
Glownonymous 11-02-25 09:37:05 No. 23576
>>23575 >the possessiveness of young love also mimics oedipal attachment In terms of power all heterosexual relationships are oedipal. Your clip illustrates this, where the child does not simply love, he has not yet separated emotional from romantic love but has already internalized that one of them can only be expressed in a monogamous relationship of power. Being confronted with this the child is all but impotent, the "healthy" oedipal adult can act on these desires yes, though i wouldn't necessarily call him child-like.
The crux remains this: Rather than receiving a wife from another patriarch, men are raised with the image of romantic love and rather than being expected to marry, now women have to want to be wooed.
Anonymous 11-02-25 10:08:45 No. 23577
>>23576 well i would say that all romance is an infantile fantasy. this is why the libido is generally sublimated, to develop a relationship to desire that isnt entirely possessive. this is why the alienating object of the father is part of positive development, since it allows us to come apart from the mother (by unconsciously revealing her sin; lest we become catholics, worshipping the "virgin mother"). this is why i say that priestcraft worship the oedipal goddess, and by this, express their inherent homosexuality (since as we see with nominally fatherless homes, homosexuality is more common, showing how the over-attachment of boys to their mothers actually inverts desire of the object, whereby the boy internalises a feminine subjectivity). its a good question to ask, why is the gay man easily attached to women, yet disgusted (and even fearful) of feminine sexuality?
the father to the heterosexual is supposed to represent the boy's internal subjectivity (lest he live in eternal rebellion), but with his absence, the boy is "wed" to the mother and undergoes a traumatic disenchantment.
so heterosexuality is always borne from a certain illusion, yet homosexuality can be equally ideological, as i note here:
>>23564 gays uncover a certain truth, but are too underdeveloped to theorise it properly
Anonymous 11-02-25 10:58:11 No. 23579
>>23578 i am criticising *all* systems from the root of human desire. pointing out the structure of heterosexual power cannot overcome it, except by mediation, which is best expressed in sublimated art and crafts (with some imagining the production of commodities themselves having a psychic quality - like how water bottles resemble penises. if we look at pagan antiquity, there was also an interesting blend between pornography and utility). to me, symbolic castration only means a mutual recognition of masculinity by dissolving the phallus. this can be achieved in friendships where you make jokes about each other and so on. this is why the guy who can give it but cant take it is the most tyrannical character of all. todd mcgowan thus theorises that the humour of castration is self-deprication, while the humour of phallus is the mocking of others. so as a form of praxis, all i ask for is self-criticism via jokes. male friendship is naturally liberating, but equally tribal, and thus oppressive to outsiders.
>Male heterosexuality and homosexuality both contain the definition of femininity as objectivity as a mark of their oedipal psychosis. yes but they relate to the mother in different ways, which is of central significance.
>This movement from individual desire to sex essentialism precisely constitutes the terrible crown of male socialization, wherein the trauma is displaced onto all of womanhood and its fetishistic conceptions, "developing a relationship to desire that isnt entirely possessive" as you say. can you expand on what you mean here?
Glownonymous 11-02-25 11:41:05 No. 23580
>>23579 >i am criticising *all* systems from the root of human desire The only desire produced under patriarchy that can be said to have arisen from nature is unconditional, motherly love, all others are the product of historical necessity. That is not to say any of them are desireable in itself, desires can be changed and they should be.
>can you expand on what you mean here? The madonna/whore complex is an example of this, wherein the trauma of being unable to express sexual love is repressed by reducing all women to one of these two fetishistic categories. A man affected by this appears entirely normal in the eyes of society, maybe even virtuous through his committment to the moral goodness of his family, that is until he kills a hooker.
Anonymous 11-02-25 11:49:41 No. 23581
>>23580 i think you are too optimistic
as i say, men have not changed, they have only been able to express themselves in different ways.
toddlers love playing violent video games, yet give us warm smiles of kindness. man is a dual being. angel and demon.
what yoy must do is realise that society is built on sin; that the food we eat, the liquids we drink, the air we breathe, the technologies we use, are all drenched in blood.
now, can it be different? yes. but can we wipe away the debt of existence? no. and even "motherly love" has its limits, as we see with abortion. infanticide is even common in other animals.
my position is to find a creative way to express my libido; some reproduce biologically, others culturally - some cannot *create* and so they destroy instead.
i am a pessimist, which makes me realistic, i think.
Anonymous 11-02-25 12:24:02 No. 23583
>>23582 well, surely you must believe in species-being?
and i am only as "essentialist" as the laws of nature permit me to be. if man is limitless, then why not grow wings?
if in your mind, society is a groundless "choice", then what purpose does abstract society have to "man" in the first place? you are taking the capitalist position of making man a secondary entity to his own affairs, such as marx describes in "the fetishism of commodities", where man is objectified (alienated) as a material relation between himself to serve the subjectivity of value.
>transient this implies contingency, not necessity. all societies are necessary in the progress of history, and they do not disappear, but remain, as marx writes in the preface to capital vol. 1,
>"Alongside the modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif! [The dead holds the living in his grasp. – formula of French common law]" kojin karatani in "the structure of world history" makes a more sophisticated argument in regards to modes of exchange (akin to graeber's notion of cycling credit and money societies, and thus the establishment of a social ontology, or tendency of social organisation).
i feel like you are surrendering your reason here.
Glownonymous 11-02-25 12:45:10 No. 23584
>>23583 This admission that change is possible is the apriorism necessary for ruthless critique, otherwise we can only ever justify the current state of things in its particular moment.
>if man is limitless, then why not grow wings? Through society and consciousness alienated from animal existence, humans already have limitless potential. Concerning the family question this takes the particular form of artificial insemination and ultimately in vitro conception.
>society is a groundless "choice" Obviously not: "What is rational is real; And what is real is rational.”, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please", you know the drill.
>they do not disappear, but remain You can't use the mere existence of history and unequal development to claim "nothing ever happens". The tree is predicated on the seed and even reproduces it, but it is not a literal container for the seed either.
Anonymous 11-02-25 13:09:12 No. 23585
>>23584 i never claimed that nothing ever happens, but that things can only change from within what they already are. society is a formal construct, yet there still are many different types of society. change is also a return to the same, like how spring turns to winter, and winter turns back to spring. if your idea of change is a suspension of the laws of nature, then you are naive, as i have already stated.
>critique critique is a theoretical project. if you treat criticism as unconditional, then wouldnt you have the imperative to demolish communist society as soon as it was established? le eternal revolution?
>humans already have limitless potential no, our alienated essence (abstract society) has limitless potential, but we are limited as beings. this is why treating our infinity as primary is false consciousness; "we" do not live forever, society lives forever.
>You can't use the mere existence of history and unequal development to claim "nothing ever happens". i am claiming that everything is always happening; the living and dead exist together in eternity. "unequal development" will always be a reality. and as karatani and graeber make clear, even within capitalism, we still achieve forms of "everyday communism" based in modes of exchange. capitalism is only the formal reality of our particular social intercourses.
Glownonymous 11-02-25 13:21:16 No. 23586
>>23585 >if you treat criticism as unconditional, then wouldnt you have the imperative to demolish communist society as soon as it was established? I would and maybe i could follow it, but more likely it would become the task of the next generations.
I more or less agree with your post. We started this tangent because you said the current spectrum of human desires was an expression of something immutable, despite being man-made in its current form. The burden is on you to reveal this species-being, which i find to be an absurd concept in itself.
Anonymous 11-02-25 13:45:57 No. 23587
>>23586 >We started this tangent because you said the current spectrum of human desires was an expression of something immutable, despite being man-made in its current form. its not about any particular objects of desire which express an essential human nature, but only that we can speak of desire itself. what must man desire? that is the question. if we achieved a post-oedipal society, what would eros look like, for example? the cynicism of this thinking however is that it is an essentialism in reverse, since it attempts to overcome "social constructs" to get at man's "real" nature, despite the fact that man's nature is inherently social. the further divulsion then becomes a choice; what *should* man desire? but this has its internal critique in the question, "who decides?" and why? simply, those who are able to decide; those in power, and why should we have leaders? and thus we enter into antagonism.
but all of this presupposes man's choice in the matter. but what is prefigured of this activity? to me, it is the construct of *society* itself. if man is a social creature, then his internal limits begin by the limits of society. to me, the most basic social ontology is mutual recognition, as graeber extrapolates. a society can have debts, division of labour and property, but in the end, it must possess some form of mediation by which its members are self-recognised. this is the constitution of social being itself, interpersonally and collectively. in the end, this is a relationship of equality, and so this is man's determination. whether friends, family, acquaintances or even strangers or pets, man must relate to himself through others. no man is an island. thus, all "choices" man makes are made from this original stipulation (where even intensely alienated societies can still achieve mutual recognition by consuming commodities, which acts as the social product).
so man's nature is necessitated upon this basis, which carries all other things, like morality, religion, art, sexuality and so on. in the end, you can link these back to the structure of society. even the thoughts in our heads have a particular language…
Anonymous 11-02-25 14:21:24 No. 23589
>>23588 well once again i only see internal limits to sex
if sex is free, why not have sex with children, animals or corpses? who and what is able to be "liberated"?
sex is not free; we see this with fetishes, where the subject of sex is particularised to an object. we eroticise what we cannot possess; this is the psychoanalytic point. why do we always search fr the lost object in a mouth or anus or vagina? because it is a lacking object a priori.
so sex is not liberating in itself, but only ideological
this is why gay politics is recursive and loses its theoretical grounding
thus, eros must be sublimated by its alienation for us to truly "liberate" it via indirect social expression. its liberation is its internal negativity. multiplicity is not a positivistic relationship, but a negative relationship to being. this is precisely why man experiences his alienation in society, but can be alienated in a way that serves his desire (since desire begins in the other itself).
Glownonymous 11-02-25 14:57:14 No. 23590
>>23589 >who and what is able to be "liberated"? People from the pathology caused by heterosexuality.
>we eroticise what we cannot possess Are fetishes not produced, precisely in moments when something else cannot be acquired? Lack does not in itself necessitate the production of desire, it needs to be mediated. Absence in itself is as much not-being as it is not-yet-being, conceptually a matrix, even a priori it need not remain as such.
>thus, eros must be sublimated by its alienation for us to truly "liberate" it via indirect social expression. I cannot prove you wrong on this one, because i have yet to confront the object of my desire and confirm it to embody pleasure. The type of sublimation you describe does not seem to resolve the relevant contradictions though, only to displace them.
Anonymous 11-02-25 15:20:09 No. 23591
>>23590 >People from the pathology caused by heterosexuality well to me, heterosexual identity obscures a homoerotic (bisexual) essence, so at once, eroticises the "forbidden" constitution of its subjectivity (which is why heterosexuality and homosexuality both begin by an a priori homophobia). yet, as we see from femboys, transsexuals and other icons, hets are clearly attracted to them, but unconsciously, so this "pathology" you are describing is not the theoretical access to queer bodies, but only the self-limitations of sexuality itself - yet, the erotic suffices precisely by this prohibition, and thus adds to sexual enjoyment (such is the incest taboo, which is nonetheless expressed in its sublimated form via pornography). to put it in liberal terms, a heterosexual man can enjoy fucking another man, yet a homosexual man can never enjoy fucking a woman. so who's pathological now? 😛😁🙂↕️
again, if your idea is that we overcome all taboo and then finally we become "liberated" you are just a foolish essentialist who thinks sex isnt social, but is mechanical, akin to de sade's concept of the public orgy. i am dialectical on the other hand.
>Are fetishes not produced, precisely in moments when something else cannot be acquired? no, i dont think its rational, but is very irrational. the foot fetish for example on the face of it seems more religious than sexual. it is a total submission to an object. the repetition of the fantasy however (in the ritual of the orgasm) points at us trying to possess some-thing, but never quite getting it. thats why sexual fantasies are these perfectly crafted narratives where we enter into its own internal logic. we lack the object, but can never have it.
>Lack does not in itself necessitate the production of desire, it needs to be mediated yes, but lack is still the essence of whatever is desired, which is why we want it. if we had it, we wouldnt desire it.
>because i have yet to confront the object of my desire and confirm it to embody pleasure my general point is that everything we do is driven by a sublimation, and thus serves as the motor for creative activity. whenever we arent masturbating, we're "mentally" masturbating or whatever. my point is that there are things we'd rather do than have sex, and thats when creativity begins.
>The type of sublimation you describe does not seem to resolve the relevant contradictions though, only to displace them. yes absolutely. i dont think you can resolve contradictions except by advancing them further into negativity. life is suffering, and so on. but if you understand the death drive, you can understand how we simultaneously enjoy our suffering, so its fine. if things ever get too bad, we can just kill ourselves ;^)
Glownonymous 11-02-25 15:38:31 No. 23592
>>23591 >well to me, heterosexual identity obscures a homoerotic (bisexual) essence Only insofar as each of us can be socialized into any sexual attraction, where heterosociality creates the conflict you describe.
>you are just a foolish essentialist who thinks sex isnt social, but is mechanical Even though a conversation isn't the mechanical relaying of speech either, it can both take place in the context of various power relations and without such a context. I'm not an idealist, we cannot return to a pre-patriarchical state if there ever was one, we only have the means to negate it.
>the foot fetish for example on the face of it seems more religious than sexual No, it is very obviously not, i've seen foot fetishists themselves explain it: Despite not being very sexual on the face of it, you rarely see a strangers feet therefore seeing and going so far as to touch someones feet is a very intimate act.
Anonymous 11-02-25 15:57:26 No. 23593
>>23592 >Only insofar as each of us can be socialized into any sexual attraction, where heterosociality creates the conflict you describe. well, truth be told, my deepest point is that without heterosexuality, there also wouldnt be homosexuality. sexual orientation is internally contradictory. the great liberal deception is that you are "born gay", which is just uncritical discourse that attempts to ontologise sexuality as an irreconcilable (material) difference, rather than symbolic commensuration.
>Even though a conversation isn't the mechanical relaying of speech either, it can both take place in the context of various power relations and without such a context. yes but at the same time, reason is universal, and thus all form of intelligible communication is "equal" in itself. discourses can be unequal or discursive, but these cant really be quantified either. if you could paint over class society with idpol, the bourgeoisie would have done it by now. what remains thus is a formal analysis, rather than particular analysis, of social relations.
>we cannot return to a pre-patriarchical state if there ever was one, we only have the means to negate it. but negation can only mean mediation.
>Despite not being very sexual on the face of it, you rarely see a strangers feet therefore seeing and going so far as to touch someones feet is a very intimate act. i will admit that i have a foot fetish. in particular i fantasise about my mother's feet (which i used to massage when i was younger), and in the depth of incestual fantasy, i become more and more infantile. this is psychological regression, which is common in religion (with God being our "father" who saves us from ourselves). also, "abba" as a name of God transliterates as "dada" and so signifies a sort of infantilism. the eucharist also is about consuming another person, like how we drink mother's milk - or how the foot fetishist attempts to consume the object. my general point is that fetish itself is a religious prefigurement, with sex being a form of religious ritual.
Glownonymous 11-02-25 16:24:36 No. 23594
>>23593 >well, truth be told, my deepest point is that without heterosexuality The disappearance of heterosexual attraction would naturally necessitate the disappearance of the sexes, cue various arguments about the transitional stages of a post-oedipal society.
>but negation can only mean mediation. This is where you're wrong. The double negation sublates the former foundation in its own positive movement.
>if you could paint over class society with idpol, the bourgeoisie would have done it by now. Would you say the same about race relation? The current psychosexual condition is inherently interwoven with class society. Firestone argues exploiting women on the basis of their reproductive capacity was their anthropological origin.
>sex being a form of religious ritual Rather i think it is the opposite. Religion being the alienated expression of human social relations can itself carry sexual connotations.
Anonymous 11-02-25 16:46:30 No. 23595
>>23594 >The disappearance of heterosexual attraction would naturally necessitate the disappearance of the sexes, cue various arguments about the transitional stages of a post-oedipal society. what would a post-oedipal society look like politically?
>This is where you're wrong. The double negation sublates the former foundation in its own positive movement. yes, however i am still under the presumption of a patriarchal instinct in the male sex (since phallus emerges naturally from the genital relation). you can only mediate this by negativity, but not erase it. this is also a contention between feminist and marxist theory. is patriarchy a form of class society, or is class society just a form of patriarchy?
>Would you say the same about race relation? how do you mean?
>The current psychosexual condition is inherently interwoven with class society. yes i agree.
>Firestone argues exploiting women on the basis of their reproductive capacity was their anthropological origin. yes, the appropriation of the means of reproduction as it were. i think this may have commensuration with freud's anthropology in "totem and taboo" also, where the "primal father" of tribes acted as sexual monopolists, and civilisation began by killing the father and distributing the available mates (with this murder being symbolised in totemic rituals). the "death of God" is a motif older than Jesus.
i heard they gave money to monkeys once and they ended up creating a sex economy out of it, thus prostitution being "the oldest job in the world". to me, a woman's body is also inherently valuable, and so transacts a price.
to smith and marx, the first price was labour, but perhaps it was woman herself.
>Rather i think it is the opposite. Religion being the alienated expression of human social relations can itself carry sexual connotations yeah thats fair. its either/or to me since its dialectical. religion and society are the same thing in different terms, even as feuerbach would understand it.
Glownonymous 11-02-25 17:01:44 No. 23596
>>23595 >is patriarchy a form of class society, or is class society just a form of patriarchy? As a mathematician i figure there is no way to know outside of anthropological research, because both can be restated in their respective terms.
>since phallus emerges naturally from the genital relation If it comes down to it, castrating every existing phallus is not outside the realm of possibility. Artificial phalli are plentiful after all.
>how do you mean? Race relations are also interwoven with capitalism, therefore you cannot "paint over class society [specifically the aspects which the relations are contingent on] with idpol", yet deeming racial equality as functionally impossible would be even absurder.
Anonymous 11-02-25 17:16:38 No. 23597
>>23596 >If it comes down to it, castrating every existing phallus is not outside the realm of possibility. well this is the ultimate absurdity of feminist logic, no? castrate all misbehaving boys? lol. only a deranged lesbian can come up with that. but this is also a paradigmatic question that is asked; if not patriarchy, then what? matriarchy? robert graves says that before patriarchies, humans lived under matriarchies, but they werent any more peaceful. in the end, i embrace contradiction. there are no "final solutions" (ironic considering my flag 😛), but we all learn from history, dont we?
>Race relations are also interwoven with capitalism, therefore you cannot "paint over class society [specifically the aspects which the relations are contingent on] with idpol", yet deeming racial equality as functionally impossible would be even absurder. yes i completely agree. race and class are basically the same thing, which is why even antisemitism has its intrinsic class relation (with lenin identifying it as a primitive form of class consciousness akin to trade union consciousness, although, i would say that antisemitism *can* be anticapitalist, but only contingently; its necessary being expresses anticommunism - so dialectically, you can be so close yet so far). for example, your average joe wants to publicly hang the "bankers", "elites", "oligarchs" et al, but hesitates when it comes to the "capitalists". here, signifiers matter. in the former are implied jews, but in the latter, something non-jewish is included. so the limits of anticapitalism are the limits of antisemitism imo. the fascinating sublimity of antisemitism is that it brings all races together for a brief moment lol, but to me, this is a world-historical consideration, where it concerns both christianity and islam fighting to be the "real jews". so its complicated. i'll leave it there for now.
Glownonymous 11-02-25 17:26:21 No. 23598
>>23597 >humans lived under matriarchies, but they werent any more peaceful And in primitive communism people were only united in barely subsisting. It's never a question of returning to a previous state.
>i embrace contradiction This is again where we fundamentally differ. All contradictions need to be resolved, it is a question of how not if. I don't know how a post-oedipal would look like, but i wouldn't rule out any deranged lesbian death squads that would put the NKVD to shame (>ᴗ•)
Anonymous 11-02-25 17:43:10 No. 23599
>>23598 >All contradictions need to be resolved but this is like imagining that you can have the perfect orgasm, or taste the perfect food. if we understand that pleasure is a release of tension, and not a mechanical influx of dopamine, then we must be mature and realise that all things must be mediated, lest we chase after illusions. you can never possess the no-thing of your desire, all you can do is mourn its loss by fantasising about it.
if you equally understand that all of society is bound by the mutual antagonism of self and other, then you see the internal contradictions. as i say, liberals and other anti-social thinkers attempt to overcome contradiction by positing essentialism, but it fails. what we should strive for then is a mutual recognition that mediates an intrinsic alienation, since that is what society must necessarily be.
>but i wouldn't rule out any deranged lesbian death squads that would put the NKVD to shame it'll be your balls being cut off first. on this note, you should watch the film "zardoz" which delves into this theme of the segregation of the genders.
Glownonymous 11-02-25 18:08:15 No. 23600
>>23599 >imagining that you can have the perfect orgasm, or taste the perfect food This would be utopianism. I'm arguing about what aspects of a new society i see in the old and honestly admitting i don't have a clue how to get there.
>we must be mature and realise that all things must be mediated Numerous contradictions have intensified and ultimately been resolved throughout history. In the struggle for the women's vote, there was a clear organization along gender lines. Even though the prospect for change looks bleak both in terms of marxism and feminism, we have a framework of analysis and thus the means to discover revolutionary potential. While women do not have the same timebomb as the economy has attached to it, crises compound and there is bound to be a right moment to strike, organize, then strike again.
>it'll be your balls being cut off first. I don't have strong feelings about them either way, only then you would need artificial testosterone because every human requires some of it. If they gave me enough painkillers and anatomical guidance, i would unironically do it myself. Who did you think you were talking to?
Anonymous 11-02-25 18:48:09 No. 23601
>>23600 >Numerous contradictions have intensified and ultimately been resolved throughout history i wouldnt use the word "resolved", but maybe "advanced" or "progressed". as marx wrote, just because a new mode of production is advancing doesnt mean the entire world has caught up. i find it funny for example when westerners say "slavery has been abolished", when theres never been more slaves in human history. another paradox is with something like climate change; yes there is this massive pollution, but at the same time, there are more and more forests being grown. this is why hegel (and marx) understood world-history to be geographical, like marx writes here in the preface to capital vol. 1,
>"As in the 18th century, the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so that in the 19th century, the American Civil War sounded it for the European working class. In England the process of social disintegration is palpable. When it has reached a certain point, it must react on the Continent." this is why the concept of historical progress has to be understood, not necessarily as a transformation of the whole world, but only as the conditions that create a new way of orienting society. some might say that certain art-forms or peoples embody world-history, but they are necessarily particular, yet even in their particularity, they create a formal relationship to their idea which possesses the world. a good example is film. did you know that the invention of the movie camera happened at the exact same time in both france and america? this is weltgeist. another example is transsexuality today. the signifier of its identity spawned its mass unconscious identity. does this mean everyone will become trans? no. it only means that transgender identity is progressive of history's idea at the moment. it has served a place. what creates the new is giving signification to history's actuality. i can go deeper into the qabalism of it all but i'll leave it there.
>Who did you think you were talking to? i was talking to a slave of a hypothetical matriarchy apparently. now you see symbolic castration come full circle? 🥲
Glownonymous 11-02-25 19:17:04 No. 23602
>>23601 >a new mode of production is advancing doesnt mean the entire world has caught up Things leave noticeable remnants as often as they don't. Looking back at tribal modes of productions there are patterns that remain in modern society and many that don't, you cannot wholesale claim no creative destruction has taken place. Do you honestly want to suggest people from a millenia ago would understand todays society as a "reorientation" of their own?
>weltgeist You mean the human spririt i.e. the sum of all scientific and cultural knowledge organized by various institutions and individuals.
>i can go deeper into the qabalism You've peaked my interest. I never understood liber 777.
Anonymous 11-02-25 19:49:50 No. 23603
>>23602 >>23602 >Looking back at tribal modes of productions there are patterns that remain in modern society and many that don't, you cannot wholesale claim no creative destruction has taken place. i would re-focus things to modes of exchange. primitive modes of exchange like gifting are still in use, and capitalism itself couldnt function without collecting history into itself. the great marxist illusion is that the whole world is capitalist and all of society is mediated by commodity exchange. if we just step back a bit, we realise that large swathes of the west have effectively missed the industrial revolution. this is history's own uneven development in the progression of the idea.
>You mean the human spririt i.e. the sum of all scientific and cultural knowledge organized by various institutions and individuals well that would be a secular way of looking at it
>I never understood liber 777 its called "the book of lies" for a reason 😈
my point on qabalah is a very rationalistic one, that all of the english language is made up of 26 letters. 26 letters create the depth of all knowledge; therefore the mind is a closed system, a flat circle, circling in on itself. how then is knowledge possible, if all sounds have already been made? well, all words have been written, but just not in the same order. thus, it is the arrangement of words (gematria) that creates intelligibility. the mind thus becomes reflected as a shape of itself in society.
so, everything has already been said, but just not in the same order.
<"God said […]" <"in the beginning was the WORD" according from the sepher yezirah (or the "book of abraham" in islamic tradition) God created the world from the 22 letters of the hebrew alphabet, which also corresponds to man (which are also the 22 cards of the tarot arcanum). gematria is the science of "geometry" or of ordering these letters in the right order to then have control over reality.
words have spell-ings and so on.
basically, language is literally magic, and the mind is made of symbols. if you harness the right symbols, you can control the world (like the norse runes).
the movie "pi" also explores this briefly.
society is role-playing; saturnalia showed us this..its all a great game of the gods, and we are pieces on a grand board. this is why heraclitus thought children were most enlightened, for they played games, like zeus.
Glownonymous 11-02-25 20:17:24 No. 23604
>>23603 >primitive modes of exchange like gifting are still in use What about the disappearance of dowry, or is that too specific? It looks like we will continue this semantics game, unless you clearly say what you think differentiates modes of exchange from other societal features, allowing them to remain in some capacity. How do you demarcate contradictions that may only be mediated?
>therefore the mind is a closed system You might call me verbally regressive for this, but i see language as merely a transcription of thought. The mind works like an unstructured graph of qualiae, even words are ultimately dissolved into singular nodes only defined by their associations. If we hook up a modern computer to a teletypewriter and use it as our only means of interaction, in which ways does it constra1n the types of computations that may be done?
Flood detected; Post discarded. ajab Anonymous 11-02-25 20:43:04 No. 23605
>>23604 >It looks like we will continue this semantics game, unless you clearly say what you think differentiates modes of exchange from other societal features, allowing them to remain in some capacity well the marxist idea is that modes of exchange express value between commodities. that isnt my meaning. admittedly, i generalise the concept, since graeber in "debt: the first 5000 years" also seems to be credit relations as intrinsic to society, and thus interpersonal relationships. this is why he tracks the etymology of certain manners to see how they relate to forgiving debts. the term "friend" itself originally signifying "free" association. the terms "thank you" and "youre welcome" also imply an indebtedness and a corresponding forgiveness of debts. some people still say "i owe you one", and when speaking of revenge people say they want "payback", or when we do good, we "redeem" ourselves. here, it seems as if human society is infested by economic signifiers, and thats true, but only symbolically. a debt for example, is imaginary, unless you back it up with force. thus, it can be forgiven or punished at any time. so i would say that "exchange" to me is just another way of talking about social interactivity. commodity-exchange in particular arises under different circumstances. i would say that what distinguishes between modes of exchange is where it concerns the object of exchange, which can be inherently tied to production, but i would also say that you can make a marxist appeal to distinguish between a lumpen, a peasant, an artisan, and a proletariat. my point is just that there arent as many proletarians in the world as people imagine, and that internally (and this is to marx's point), capitalism literally cannot afford to proletarianise the world (which is why it creates the reserve army of labour in the first place). so i still see capital's internal contradictions, but i dont humiliate myself pretending to be a "prole", as if my existence is revolutionary. thats cope. in my vocation, i am a lumpen anyway, so perhaps you can write me off as a reactionary bottomfeeder; its true enough.
>i see language as merely a transcription of thought. The mind works like an unstructured graph of qualiae, even words are ultimately dissolved into singular nodes only defined by their associations so basically, you think we have too many words? we are all lost in translation for the same concepts? i disagree, since to me, particular signifiers matter.
>If we hook up a modern computer to a teletypewriter and use it as our only means of interaction, in which ways does it constra1n the types of computations that may be done? why would it be different to how we talk now? because we are losing the medium of typing? to me, the mind is always mediated, which is why we only remember dreams as we wake up. the mind is not an object, but is a subject. you cant grasp the mind since it doesnt just live in our heads, but lives in society.
Glownonymous 11-02-25 21:08:57 No. 23606
>>23605 >capitalism literally cannot afford to proletarianise the world This an interesting concept that mirrors the unequal development inherent in imperialist economy, but wouldn't the falling rate of profit sooner or later drive capitalists to cannibalize these reservers? Are there simply too many of these stabilizing factors, does profit need to approach zero first? For example in the west it seems like gift-giving, that has long been connected to social capital, has become perceived as even more transactional lately. Compare that to the pre-modern idea of hospitality.
>so basically, you think we have too many words? Thought is less constra1ned than language. We use nuance in language to approximate the nuance in our own internal thought patterns.
>the mind is always mediated True in a formative sense, yet a developed mind is after all able to assume the alienated position of a philosopher. There is a nuance here or intiuitive and gnostic thought would be impossible.
Anonymous 11-02-25 21:30:23 No. 23607
>>23606 >but wouldn't the falling rate of profit sooner or later drive capitalists to cannibalize these reservers? well, the welfare state along with subsidies have mitigated various crises of "overproduction" (unemployment) by converting the lumpen into consumers, to create profits. the trend of automation is only a further lumpenisation which is why if you got rid of all of unprofitable jobs in the economy, at least 20% of employees would be shafted. now a marxist mjght naively suggest a reindustrialisation to make labour "productive", but this is not the point. marx's predictions have come true, that our labour-power is to such an extent that we can all share positions of employment and thus drive down the working day. the crisis of capital is coming to a head thus, where it will either offer UBI or it will crumble (it is already crumbling after all). the issue with capital is that its simply too productive, and so it has no need of lumpens except as consumers.
>For example in the west it seems like gift-giving, that has long been connected to social capital, has become perceived as even more transactional lately. Compare that to the pre-modern idea of hospitality. well, monetisation =/= value-creating. if i give you £100 then somehow that £100 gets back to me, we do nothing except engage in symbolic exchange, like birthday cards and presents.
>Thought is less constra1ned than language i think its dialectical. for us to conceive a thought, it must be expressed in some concrete form. there is no image of thinking; there is only speaking the unspeakable. thinking has no meaning if it doesnt enter society. this is why i say that if we consider the mind as an object, it contains infinity within itself; so the purpose of society is to unravel this infinity in words.
>There is a nuance here or intiuitive and gnostic thought would be impossible explain
Glownonymous 11-02-25 21:55:58 No. 23608
>>23607 >the crisis of capital is coming to a head thus, where it will either offer UBI or it will crumble (it is already crumbling after all). So if it is fated to collapse, all outmoded modes of exchange that feed into the economy will likewise, or do you assume capitalism will be superseded by something precisely because it can reterritorialize them?
>monetisation =/= value-creating The value is created by stimulating demands for gifts, cash being frowned upon outside of certain social contexts like a childs birthday or a wedding.
>for us to conceive a thought, it must be expressed in some concrete form Yes, but once we have received enough forms (i think this is the psychological stage of realization), we can in some cases autonomously perceive of the world around us and freely adapt our conceptions to suit reality. If dialectics is the motion of thought after all, the wealth of synthesized thought is greater than that which we can realistically receive, while still occupyin g the entire spectrum of abstract and concrete. You're right that language can state some thoughts more clearly, this clarity coming at a considerable cost. Combing through infinity for something is easy when you're doing it all the time. I find myself thinking of past events, past emotions, past thought processes more often than going through the letters of the alphabet to find the right word (i do this only when struggling to express myself in language).
Anonymous 12-02-25 21:41:08 No. 23617
>>23608 >>23608 >So if it is fated to collapse, all outmoded modes of exchange that feed into the economy will likewise, or do you assume capitalism will be superseded by something precisely because it can reterritorialize them? i consider capitalism to primarily be a mode of distribution, not a particular form of commodity-exchange. as marx notes, the essentially capitalist commodity is labour-power, which produces surplus value (through its use-value, not its exchange-value), so you might say capitalism is based in wage-exchange, but thats getting too thickety, especially since wage-labour has existed throughout all of history. marx says that bourgeois society is crafted via "primitive accumulation" whereby private and social property becomes bourgeois (commercial) property through state re-allocation. the capitalist himself as marx says is a miser (a hoarder), but a mercantilist hoarder, turned investor. in money, property and power, he is a monopolist, which is from where he is able to create dependence for the public. so the capitalist is in the first place, a monopolist, not a humble competitor. this constitutes what i call "the end of exile" where capital is deterritorialised yet labour is made entirely territorial (the factory and prison in modernity are the same thing, as foucault understands). marx gives an example where those who wished to flee early industry were forced to work by being hunted down, but the cruelty of capitalism (and what constitutes its unconscious) is that the wage-slave is forced to sell himself, and so his surplus is hidden, via the appearance and essence of labour.
the issue then is that capital's sphere of exchange is too limited. to exchange means to share; to give, and not take. the capitalist exchanges for labour-power but he doesn't give enough in wages. he hires men, but doesn't hire enough men to work. the contradiction here is that money is how we (legally) access commodities, yet society's money is sterile in a dusty vault. the limit of the capitalist is that he literally cannot invest all his money into society, but only into profit. this is why the drive for profit undoes profit, since in the end, no one has a job, so no one has money.
this state of affairs also gives us a contemporary paradox, where in some sense, consumerism acts as an ideological rival to capitalism, by reversing the imperatives of the relations of production (the same way that in the west, the superstructure took precedence over the economic base, causing many marxists to actually become quasi-reactionary in attempting to revive industrial subjectivity). the crises of overproduction thus have inverted into crises of underconsumption; this i think has shifted capitalist subjectivity from production to exchange. the reserve army of labour then (as a surplus proletariat) have proven to be the revolutionary subject, even as engels writes in a preface to capital vol. 1,
>"While the productive power increases in a geometric, the extension of markets proceeds at best in an arithmetic ratio. The decennial cycle of stagnation, prosperity, over-production and crisis, ever recurrent from 1825 to 1867, seems indeed to have run its course; but only to land us in the slough of despond of a permanent and chronic depression. The sighed for period of prosperity will not come; as often as we seem to perceive its heralding symptoms, so often do they again vanish into air. Meanwhile, each succeeding winter brings up afresh the great question, “what to do with the unemployed"; but while the number of the unemployed keeps swelling from year to year, there is nobody to answer that question; and we can almost calculate the moment when the unemployed losing patience will take their own fate into their own hands." i think its for this reason that the socialist causes across the world have never been led by an industrial proletariat, but only by the mass of the "people" (akin to the nationalism of the french revolution). this is why all successful socialisms also appear as nationalisms and why the "reactionary mass" is what it is; Spirit.
so maybe i am a succdem (a "social fascist", or a "bourgeois socialist" as marx calls the lasalleans in critique of the gotha program), but to me, re-distribution is the key transition from capitalism into socialism, which then broadens the sphere of exchange, as industrial production (via automation) becomes more and more alienated. lenin said that his vision of socialism was society as a factory floor, but to me, its more like a shopping mall (or the internet). this however is only the primary stage of socialism, which will become much more communal overtime, as exchange becomes decommodified and enters into a symbolic framework. socialism means a mass gift-economy. thus you will have a form of public religion, as hegel understands it, and the end of history shall be twain met by prehistory. the solemn tomb of the factory is now expessed in the pagan feasts of music festivals, as a form of a collective identity. we have become increasingly culturally mediated. Jesus turns water into wine.
so to conclude, capitalism crumbling only means the liberation of mankind, either by reverting historical forms, or by advancing them, since it enters us into free exchange either way. as mark fisher says, "capital is an anti-market"; an "anti-culture". what we want is "markets, not capitalism" et al. what people want is to live in a society.
well i was using a marxist concept of value. if we share a fixed amount of cash, we can only engage in commodity-circulation (C-M-C) and thus never expand trade into an expanded market of goods. this is why symbolic exchange is primarily interpersonal, while commodity-exchange, turned to capital-circulation (M-C-M'), is international, since it inscribes a surplus. travel is a rent on goods, as the "bridge tolls" of the past tell us, and still today.
by forms of thought, do you mean something like an alphabet and grammar? a symbolic framework to conceptualise with?
>if dialectics is the motion of thought after all, the wealth of synthesized thought is greater than that which we can realistically receive, while still occupyin g the entire spectrum of abstract and concrete well this is the paradox as i say. all knowledge is actual to the mind, and the mind can be expressed by 26 letters. therefore, all of knowledge is self-completed in-itself, and so what we do is negatively construct in-complete knowledge (like how there are too many books to read or too many movies to watch). to have knowledge thus is to lose the self-completion of knowledge. there is no original thought or original speech, but only an original *sequence* of thought or speech. this is why as hegel says, "history is the spirit emptied out into TIME".
well all languages are self-limiting, and this is the dialectic. whenever we think, we are embodying the formless infinity into a finite being, but if we only dwelled in the formless, we would have no thoughts at all. to know every-thing is know no-thing, such as socrates says. however, i see a progressive embodiment of mind in creation, and therefore appeal to my own ignorance as a limited creature. now, where it concerns languages, something is *always* lost in translation, and so infinity has no name. the occult delusion is that you can call upon the name of God as tetragrammaton (YHWH). vain works.
but language is not the only form of communication. animals communicate, computers communicate; even atoms communicate. art-forms often express the nameless. ah, but does this then qualify as a form of knowledge? well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so it cannot be said to be *known* until it is spoken of, and therefore entered into a social judgement (such that if i see a UFO and have no proof, i might as well be hallucinating. only in re-presentation do things attain reality). so i think there are forms of un-knowable communications which we are constantly engaging in, but poetry is giving infinity a name, and art is giving it a face. they capture some-thing, but not every-thing, and we should be glad for this sake, for elsewise, we would have no-thing at all. this is my own "materialism" and vitalism. laugh til you cry; live til you die. so mote it be.
Glownonymous 12-02-25 22:27:37 No. 23618
>>23617 >i consider capitalism to primarily be a mode of distribution Commodity exchange directly gives rise to commodity production, both reinforcing the precedence of bourgeois interests and naturally encroaching on other modes.
>the reserve army of labour then (as a surplus proletariat) have proven to be the revolutionary subject From my cursory knowledge it appears this group has often supplied the foot soldiers to revolution and reaction alike. Do they constitute a revolutionary subject with their own class interests or are they only fit to be used in the name of anothers?
>re-distribution is the key transition from capitalism into socialism I don't see how you could have commodity production without commodity exchange. Isn't state capitalism the natural solution to the task, socializing industry from the bottom up?
>well i was using a marxist concept of value. I should have phrased that more clearly. Raising the social expectations for gitf-giving grows the market for gift products, that can consequently be exploited, thus raising the rate of profit in this industry. Maybe your argument that consumerism indicates a shift towards the more forceful cultivation of new markets is accurate, but i see this as a thread existing from its mercantilist origins and already becoming very prominent in imperalist exploitation.
By its nature it is something i cannot freely observe. I only know that concepts come to me faster than words, because when thinking in words i noticeable subvocalize each syllable.
>well all languages are self-limiting The conceptual beauty of all language (programming languages included) its being as thought. It may be endlessly modified, be adapted and mutate itself into whatever serves its function. The tarot perfectly embodies this: There are various orthodox interpretations of the arcana, yet the common approach is to meditate on them and derive your own meanings from a particular deck. This creates a symbolic language describing numerous personal, social and metaphysical relatioships to a degree of sophistication beholden to the reader.
Anonymous 12-02-25 23:43:19 No. 23622
>>23620 >You know that language was derived from pictograms and phonemes? >Even in religion, a lot of God's get their power from mere words. Christianity talks about how Christ was a Logos before he was manifested as Man. <"in the beginning was the WORD >Also, language is more phonetic than it is graphemic. >In fact, alot of letters had phonetic changes throughout the centuries. >>23621 >Like how you find women more attractive when they're clothed than nude. Youre more romantic than erotic. >Men are more "concrete" in their reaction but to say they're not abstractionally inclined is wrong.
Anonymous 12-02-25 23:44:54 No. 23623
>>23618 >Commodity exchange directly gives rise to commodity production, both reinforcing the precedence of bourgeois interests and naturally encroaching on other modes. well both are self-included of course. its a chickeuygh situation, like how marx in ch. 5 of capital vol. 1 says,
>"impossible for capital to be produced by circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to originate apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and yet not in circulation. We have, therefore, got a double result." thats dialectics.
also, commodities are not just a capitalist construct to marx, but exist in all forms of exchange, which is marx's theoretical limit. he does qualify this in ch. 2 by saying that "value" (abstract labour) only mediates exchange when it is taken as such, so in marx's anthropology, the line between barter and commodity-exchange is thin.
graeber says that all exchanges incur at least a psychic debt which mediates between persons, and i would agree, except that i dont think simply mediating a formal transaction makes a medium of exchange a "measure of value". you cant quantify resentment for example - which is why for some, it doesnt matter how much you offer them, they will still hate you. i had a similar experience where i hated my step-dad and he tried to show me how much he loved me by listing all the things he bought me. to him, love has a price (a quantity). to me, its priceless (a quality). we might say then that an item becomes a commodity by contracting an exchange-value, at the theshold where the priceless gains a price. a symbolic exchange of goods is different, since the money you give always comes back to you.
>From my cursory knowledge it appears this group has often supplied the foot soldiers to revolution and reaction alike. Do they constitute a revolutionary subject with their own class interests or are they only fit to be used in the name of anothers? we might say they are revolutionary *objects* in most cases then. but my point on subjectivity is that in the logic of markets you have supply and demand, and translated into hegelian terms, you have servants and masters. in the dialectic of the market, the consumers are the ones who *demand* and the capitalists are those who *supply*. value is created by consumption, so like the servant, the social determination is given to the inferior, who rises to superiority. the lumpen have been made into a consuming class (a "leisure class"), showing how capitalism hinges on reacting to this group. ernst junger in his text "total mobilisation" also calls the lumpen more revolutionary than the proletariat i believe.
>Maybe your argument that consumerism indicates a shift towards the more forceful cultivation of new markets is accurate, but i see this as a thread existing from its mercantilist origins and already becoming very prominent in imperalist exploitation. maybe. it might just be a house of cards. i hear leninists refer to the west as superimperialists and labour aristocrats. probably. but nonetheless i only speak from what i can understand. what has happened in the west since ww2 seems important.
>I only know that concepts come to me faster than words, because when thinking in words i noticeable subvocalize each syllable. yes, i dont deny the presence of the mind, but it still must present itself in spatio-temporal terms. this is part of hume and kant's critique of rationalism. for the mind to attain reality, it must be self-limited as an actuality. lacan says "the unconscious has the structure of a language". we often see how the symbols of the mind act like metaphors. so the question is, do natural symbols create the mind, or does the mind create symbols? again, its the chicken and egg.
>The tarot perfectly embodies this: There are various orthodox interpretations of the arcana, yet the common approach is to meditate on them and derive your own meanings from a particular deck. this is like the death of the author. if you interpreted the tarot a certain way but then found a dusty manuscript and it was from the creator of the tarot explaining the symbols, what would happen to your interpretation. i suppose it matters whether youre more catholic or protestant in the end. dogmatism versus individual judgement. let us not be cowards however and say "its all interpretation". the purpose of judgement is still make a *correct* (normative) judgement.
Anonymous 19-02-25 17:40:37 No. 23667
>>23575 Methinks this is mostly projection. Because most young love isnt anywhere like this. That's an adult impression.
And irony is. Adults are more tyrannical in their way they look down on the opposite sex and lower age groups
Anonymous 19-02-25 19:40:54 No. 23671
>>21004 >>21155 Vast majority of classic works are this.
And especially for works that existed before the printing press, who knows what the original story was?
Theyve been subject to revision so many times.
Anonymous 20-02-25 21:55:09 No. 23675
>>23672 That's mostly due to social conditioning of young adults.
Irony is, I find that adult love has the same problem.
Also, young women who complain about their bfs being clingy are the same ones who complain about not getting any adoration.
Anonymous 20-02-25 22:02:17 No. 23676
>>23581 Man is not above the animals.
The problem with modern society is that everyone acts like any sort of incident is the first of it's kind
People think all problems are caused by social media or smartphones.
Irony was, the pre-Internet days had alot more hubris.
People used to spread rumors like crazy
People would skip town to cheat on their spouses and maintain bastard children for years.
People used to do crazy sports activities that would involve death. Street brawling, live ammunition war re-enactments, staged train crashes, etc.
People fetishize history while refusing to engage with it logistically.
King Solomon says "There's nothing new under the sun".
Despite this, humans are willfully solipsistic.
The whole MAGA era is especially telling of this
Anonymous 20-02-25 22:06:05 No. 23677
>>23577 >>23576 >>23575 Idk why people like to pathologise male psychosexuality based on their social relations with their mothers.
People always wanna complain about "mommas boys" or just mother-son relations in general.
Boys are not allowed to be loved without being pathologised by society as being spoiled/enabled.
Yet nobody complains about daddy's girls.
Girls are given lots of affection from mom and dad without philosophical harassment.
Why is that?
Anonymous 20-02-25 22:27:18 No. 23678
>>23577 > this is why the alienating object of the father is part of positive development, since it allows us to come apart from the mother (by unconsciously revealing her sin; lest we become catholics, worshipping the "virgin mother") That's a cliche machismo conservative talking point. And I disagree with that because it reduces the sexes to cartoonish stereotypes.
Most male faux pas is overcredited to "fatherlessness". If that's the case, then it means fathers are inefficient entities.
Anonymous 20-02-25 22:29:12 No. 23679
>>23672 > most men never forget their first love (while women do). the case of oedipal attachment is clear - thats why Wrong. It's because society is gyno centric ethicality.
If men were forgetful of their first lives they'd be accused of chauvinism.
Alot of women also remember their first lives but they're not encouraged to appreciate them because young women are told that they're "better than that"
Anonymous 21-02-25 04:29:02 No. 23686
>>23674 read evola's "orientations" as a general introduction to his work. mein kampf is also not a theoretical work, except in gimpses, where Hitler gives autobiographical accounts of his enemies, like how he saw labour unions purposefully disrupting industry, which then led to crises of employment - hence the fascist idea that liberals and communists work in conspiracy with each other - thus the concept of a *national* labour union is a foundational concept, which was also implemented in the USSR and italy, since otherwise you get an internal competition of workers, which marx and engels referred to as "the aristocracy of labour" as a holdover from the feudal guild system of protected labour. the theoretical work of national socialism is rudolf jung's "der nationale sozialismus" from 1918. gentile's and ᴉuᴉlossnW's "doctrine of fascism" is also beginner stuff, along with "capitalism and the corporate state" by ᴉuᴉlossnW, which is less of a theory of corporate government and more an historical approach to the development of production; what marx calls "social production", ᴉuᴉlossnW calls "corporatism", and thus in 1933, ᴉuᴉlossnW saw that "capitalism" had been abolished in place of "corporatism".
i'll attach all the pdfs.
Anonymous 21-02-25 04:49:17 No. 23689
>>23675 >That's mostly due to social conditioning of young adults. all societies condition its forms of love. there is no "pure" affection, but it is always mediated.
>Also, young women who complain about their bfs being clingy are the same ones who complain about not getting any adoration. its well-known that you cant please women, but the male delusion is that you can, hence the idea that if you "grind" your way into the middle class, suddenly stacy will want you, and then the "debt" the man holds against the woman comes to light. the feminist truth ofc is that women dont owe men anything.
>>23676 yes i agree. history is extremely myopic. vidrel illustrates this point well.
>>23677 i would say its because its men who are the critics, and so give responsibility to themselves. the general paranoia of symbolic castration also causes the homophobia of this criticism, and thus the divine irony that to say to your girlfriend "i love you" in front of your guy friends makes you a "faggot". to love a woman makes you a homosexual, how strange.
>>23678 >That's a cliche machismo conservative talking point. the conservative logic is that the father "makes" you a man by submitting you to a series of ritual traumas, but the psychoanalytic logic is that you just need a minimal alienation from the mother (an inaccessibility, represented by the father), so as to desire her, without being consumed by her (otherwise you get a generation, in tandem with market failure, who live in "mother's basement" [the womb] simulating an eternal childhood. this is oedipal dysfunction, and so i would say a real "conservative" should want to regulate the housing market to give his children an independent heterosexuality, not subject his children to the "challenges" of "competition". there is a positive and negative orientation of masculinity, then).
>>23679 no, i disagree. i think men just love at a deeper level, since they yearn for mother. it is ALWAYS men who complain that they love their partner more.
Anonymous 21-02-25 05:20:56 No. 23690
>>23689 >the feminist truth ofc is that women dont owe men anything. This right here is the answer to all of our problems with heterosexual relations.
Irony is, most of our arrested developmental folks were born with fatherly influences.
But I agree with your last sentence about how "competition" is not a virtue but rather a farce.
You might be right
I did say four and half years ago that men are sentimental beings, more so than women.
Men are always trying to "save the day", thinking themselves as the superhero and end up falling on their faces sometimes literally.
(Especially if you watch romcom movies).
Society complain about teenage love yet the adults fall into the same traps that teenagers do but even more potent in consequence.
Society likes to brag about "adult" love being more finalized but from what I see, people are just bored and sneak around to "rejuvenate" themselves.
Anonymous 21-02-25 07:46:09 No. 23692
>>23690 >This right here is the answer to all of our problems with heterosexual relations. well its hard to accept that love is unrequited. this is the crux of the male condition; living in an unrealised fantasy. the man above all else is an escapist. here, i would reverse schopenhauer's judgement of women, in applying it to men.
>But I agree with your last sentence about how "competition" is not a virtue but rather a farce. well i put "competition" in quotation marks, because in the first place, there's nothing "free" about the housing market. there is no competition, but only monopoly. but secondly, yes, competing for your own home is not how you measure the virtue of a society. many conservatives are starting to see these concerns about "the land question", especially georgists of all sorts. but the case is at hand, that you cant properly start a family if you have no independence. this is why i once hopefully imagined that in the future, all conservatives would have to become socialists, but now i have no hope for the useless and pathetic political right, and so depend on the left, who also disappoint me, but who are redeemable.
>Men are always trying to "save the day", thinking themselves as the superhero and end up falling on their faces sometimes literally. yes, yes. thats why the superhero archetype is male, with the female only typically being a sex symbol. only a man can have the delusion of self-sacrifice; monogamy and loyalty are male concepts.
>Society complain about teenage love yet the adults fall into the same traps that teenagers do but even more potent in consequence. adult love is always impure and cynical. it becomes a rational calculation. to me, love is always doomed, unfortunately.
Anonymous 21-02-25 10:12:21 No. 23697
>>23696 This is a not the worst take, actually. Especially taking """continental philosophy'"" at face value, zizek et al. But unfortunately, this is divorced from reality, as per usual. What one would perhaps call "idealism". Butler is very neitzchean tbf.
I can't watch the video unfortunately, so I can only speculate what this moron is saying. Transvestites are one of two things, men in drag, or men dressing up as women. Transsexuals isn't even a category nowadays.
A reactionary is completely divorced from reality, as per usual. It's all so tiresome. It feels like the spectacle isn't even related to actual reality, but we're somehow forced into it, and give our opinions about literal non-issues. Like the toilet ban in middle of fucking nowhere USA. Or trans people in the Olympics (a made up fantasy scenario that is completely irrelevant to all 8 billion motherfuckers alive on this earth, except the 10 other olympic competitors in the fantasy scenario).
So, so tiresome.
Anonymous 21-02-25 10:19:53 No. 23698
>>23697 - there's nothinhg inherently invalid about idealism
- yes i am using the term transvestite correctly. i also believe crossdressers are more radical than transsexuals, since they mediate the contradiction of gender identity rather than closing the "gap", which is what essentialists do.
- why is transsexual an invalid term? why is transgender better? ive never got an answer to this.
Anonymous 22-02-25 20:06:06 No. 23708
>>23697 midwit in every sense of the word.
I remember when I thought like you.
Keep reading.
Anonymous 27-02-25 23:56:13 No. 23741
>>23738 >The problem with conservatives is that conservatism doesn't really exist
Anonymous 28-02-25 01:59:03 No. 23744
>>23742 >Fascism and communism share more similarities than differences.
Anonymous 01-03-25 04:03:22 No. 23753
>>23744 Good argument. Useful insights.
>this is also why populism is inherently right-wing, since it seeks to abandon universality for an exclusive generality It falters here; The Communist counter argument is that real universality is in the objective condition of the Proletariat.
Also polite hint over at →
>>23752 Anonymous 01-03-25 20:21:11 No. 23765
>>23753 >The Communist counter argument is that real universality is in the objective condition of the Proletariat. but this has become inverted today, where "tankies" are seen to be nominally right-wing by seeking to censor issues like race and LGBT. its in this denial of the "other" which makes it an exclusive generality. if "proletariat" signifies the "majority", it implicitly denies the "minority" of the majority, which is why all references to race or LGBT are syncretised into class politics, like how people attempt to equate race and class, or queerness with class (this happens both ways, where queerness is over-coded as either bourgeois or proletariat, but can never assume its own independence). to me, its this denial of contradiction which shows how the "all" obscures the non-all of its own symbol.
this is the uncritical essence of populism, which also manifests itself as an anti-intellectualism. you will notice for example that "the left cant meme" because they must write so much, while the right can meme since it obscures the intellect. the left "speaks", while the right leads with the un-spoken, since the symptom of right-wing subjectivity is to politically negate. this negativity is the general (particular) rather than universal (total) spirit of politics, where again, the right-winger speaks against "the rich", "the elites", "the oligarchs", and so on, but never says, "the capitalists", since this makes political opposition something positively-oriented. the left however in their positive orientation also sacrifice a popular politics, and this is the nature of historical progress - "the last shall be first"; what is contingent becomes necessary. you must have noticed that the political left has always been "elite", but an elitism that seeks to represent the masses, while the right puts up "men of the people" who inwardly, only represent themselves. this is the contradiction of political ontology. i would sum it up concretely in the difference between BLM and ALM. to say "all lives matter" seems to include "black lives matter", yet it actually excludes it, but to say "black lives matter" is to include "all".
Anonymous 01-03-25 20:35:24 No. 23767
>>23756 >"Muslims are savages they mutilate their women and kill gays". Yet, these same religiopolitical pundits also advocate for violence in discipline.
Anonymous 01-03-25 23:47:35 No. 23771
>>23769 >people blaming [x] for contemporary issue >That's because of the assumed audience. >Irony is, there's a lot of sociodiversity in right wing patronage. They even adapt the same universalisational platitudes as the left.
Anonymous 03-03-25 01:05:11 No. 23784
>>23778 ive been using leftypol since around 2016 so ive probably interacted with most people. my only flaw is that im an attention-whore flag-fag, but youre a namefag, so we cancel each other out :)
>>23779 this article is the pinnacle of "circumlocution", or the principle of saying much without saying anything. generally, we can say that philosophy is western because there is something uniquely alienated about western man, which is why he founds his thought on an abstract reason which separates the self from the world. this separation continues into modernity with decartes' "i cogito", and furthermore, into western capitalism, with its individualistic ethos.
david graeber in "debt: the first 5000 years" ingeniusly traces the beginnings of philosophy coinciding with the creation of the first metal coins used for money in greece. here, man is confronted with his own alienation, where money represents all things within itself. here is the principle of reason tied inextricably to class society. thus, the free man is "rational" while the unfree are "irrational"; the master and slave are coincidentally linked in mind and pocket (this still continues today of course with myths of meritocracy tied to I.Q.).
i would say that this is the first cause of western philosophy - but philosophy is not merely the act of thinking, but the act of thinking-being (rather than simply being). for being to be contemplated, it must exist as something apart from ourselves - in the west, this anti-social ontology is reflexive, while we might read more "holistic" treatments in the east - buddhism and hinduism for example preach the non-self, while the west is based on the individual soul, which also births monotheism - now islam also develops a monotheism, but different. islam and judaism both treat God as "beyond" representation, while Christ is inherently western, by being a demi-god. here, heaven and earth meet in contradiction. in islam for example, Christ does not die on the cross, like how in islam (with judaism alike), sin is a monetary settlement embedded in the divine law. here, there is no original sin, but only the sin of misconduct, while in christianity, we are born in the sin of an unpayable debt. to me, this is western man's alienation.
this is also why to me, capitalism is inherently western, with its origins beginning in modernity and the protestant reformation (as per max weber). the expansion of the northern empires to north america, and the continental empires to south america show this tract of development in "the new world" and its historical mode of conduct. there has been discourse for example, about the libido of each project, with the "seductive" south and calculating north, aligning with the catholic and protestant subjectivities, relatively. in this, "the new world" is born from western hands. like marx writes in a preface to capital vol. 1, the bourgeoisie are represented in the american revolution, but the proletariat are represented in the civil war - here, history lives in the US. in the revolution, the US shrugs off the UK & in the civil war, shrugs off the continent.
philosophy in modernity also has its geographical character - empiricism in the UK, rationalism in france and german idealism in germany, which each represent calvinism, catholicism and lutheranism. in the UK, God is above his creation, in france, He is within His creation, and in germany, He is in-between (like luther's reformism which nonetheless preserves the eucharist and Crucifix - here, contradiction lives in the body of Christ, while in the UK, the cross is empty - while in france, man himself is treated as God).
the article ends with the feeling that the east can introduce contradiction into our scheme of thinking, but this ignores the primary contradiction of being which causes western man's contemplation. the issue is that the paradox is resolved in the east, but it cannot be in the west. the abstract contradiction has inverted into a concrete contradiction - by these means, world-history itself is western, but this self-determination also seeks its own end. thus, the west must encounter the world to resolve its own identity, and by this, the world itself becomes western (capitalist).
the article concludes by putting the world into philosophy, but this only means the world becoming western, by continuity.
Anonymous 15-03-25 17:38:01 No. 23915
I have a secret pleasure with bodybuilding history. Despite being a Randian, egoist goober with some very questionable theories on gym routines, Mentzer was showing some interesting focus on critiquing the ideology surrounding gym culture. As far as I know, he is the only man to have critiqued the social aspect of the gym in any serious way. Everyone else defends it.>he's a meth addict >he's a sore loser >he's a grifter selling tapes >he's a liar >he's a cuck >he's a homosexual (not beating the fascist accusations with this one)
Anonymous 16-03-25 01:50:14 No. 23922
>>23915 good post.
also to add, the productivist ideology of the gym ("making gains") pairs itself nicely with the contemporary gymbro CEO archetype, common in petit-bourgeois idolisation. the logic of accumulation is reproduced in contradistinction from the accumulation of fat in the obese person - here, the marxist dichotomy between wealth (use-value) and value (exchange-value) exemplify themselves, where the more gains the gymbro has, the more alienated he becomes, while the moe fat the obese person has, the more they have positively condumed toward pleasure. here then, as per a freudian analysis - fat is on the side of pleasure, while gains are on the side of the death drive. this is also part of the paradox, that a roided up gymbro is way more likely to die early than a fat person, since the drive toward gains is expressed by the drive toward self-destruction, while the fat of the obese person is nominally "nutritious". thus, as per wealth vs value, we also enter upon the dichotomy of consumption vs production. this is also mediated by popular philosophies of today, with hedonism and asceticism (which mimics the historical clash between epicureans and stoics in the post-aristotelian moment - or the regressive turn - in nietzschean terms - from epistemology into ethics). now, of course sexually, heterosexuals are on the side of the pleasure principle while homosexuals are on the side of death drive. historically then it should be noted that in the zeitgeist of the industrial period (lets say around 1867, where marx first publishes capital vol. 1), the term "homosexual" was first founded in 1868, with heterosexuality coming in 1869 - so then, as freud understands the pleasure principle to ultimately be derivative of the death drive, heterosexuality is affective of a primary homosexuality (autosexuality), and so commodity-circulation (C-M-C) is only constitutive of a larger capital accumulation (M-C-M'). as people have said also, bodybuilding only attracts the male gaze, which makes it a homoerotic activity, but not sufficiently homosexual - its this contradiction which makes straight men fans of other men, but without the ultimate prospect of reciprocity. bodybuilding then is pure tragedy, as yukio mishima understood.
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