Why communist christians must lose friends and alienate people

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword."
(Matthew 10:34)

What can Christ mean when he demands that his followers hate their father and mother, even their own life?

Well, simply that to escape you must disidentify with everything that you have been told that you are. You must hate your father and mother INSOFAR AS they are your mother and father, insofar as they trap you into a localized image of what you are, where you have come from and what you can be. Only when you love those called your father and mother as part of universal humanity can you really achieve the Christian agape, or disinterested love.

This gives rise to the apparent paradox so expertly drawn out by Badiou and Zizek: that Christianity heralds universality by bringing division. Since it is only those who are willing to give up familial, ethnic and sexual identifications who can be committed to universality, Christ's ethical call then divides those so committed from those who remain attached to their bio-tribalisms.

"Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law." (Luke.12:51)

This is identical to the Leninist-Bolshevik tactic of splitting. Lenin's tactic was not to build the largest possible consensus, but precisely to create a dissensus, a hardcore group of those utterly committed to universality.

Family and friendship are two of the most stubborn obstacles to planetary collectivity.

Both tend to be a front for male abuse... I abuse you and destroy you, but it's OK... because in my heart I love you...

The communist needs neither friends nor family, only allies....
 

luka

Well-known member
you are an embarressment to yourself your friends and your family. you probably haven't even joined the communist party. its all a fantasy inside your head. its almost motivating me to make an effort to explain in an articulate way why you're a delusional fantasist. not quite though...

for now all i can say is, smoke a zoot, chill out, have a wank, release some tension...

(dont quote from my book please)
 

john eden

male pale and stale
billy no mates

k-punk said:
This is identical to the Leninist-Bolshevik tactic of splitting. Lenin's tactic was not to build the largest possible consensus, but precisely to create a dissensus, a hardcore group of those utterly committed to universality.

Which obviously had a great track record in the long run, didn't it?

Having just been through a long and serious political split, I'm glad I had mates on both sides, personally. It would have been far nastier without them. No doubt Mark has never experienced "male abuse" whilst going through such splits, or indeed whilst involved with left political organisations, because he hasn't actually experienced any of it first hand.

Ooops! There I go again, personalising things...
 

martin

----
How about actually aping your parents, and becoming them? In this way, we would be able to realise the genesis of the "Regenerating Prole". One who doesn't die, but is reborn at the end of each cycle ( albeit independently of Buddhist magic mushroom waffle about 'reincarnation'). Imagine the State's terror, knowing that its most unruly class-conscious subjects have lifespans of 1,000 years! So the answer is to a) breed like rabbits b) name all your kids after yourself, depending on gender. My dad was called Martin too, incidentally.
 

&catherine

Well-known member
k-punk said:
Christ's ethical call then divides those so committed from those who remain attached to their bio-tribalisms.
I'm not quite sure if the analogy between communism and Christ's ethical call works in this case, for the reason that the communist cause seeks to realise itself on earth, in this life, while Christ, despite all the militating that takes place on this side of death, predicates his claims on a kingdom that will be realised after this life. In this case, I don't really like the implication that communism will be something that takes place after a certain marker in time - that it is something like heaven, a reward that is always 'later', 'to come', rather than some process whose seeds are made of the same stuff as its fruits...

Are you suggesting that the state (small 's' ;) ) of communism will be that of division? Or of peace? I would assume the former, based on your argumentation...

Which leads me, tangentially, to the question of whether this would be any better than what we have at the moment. Why communism, Mark? What's to 'gain', if gain is the word?
 

other_life

bioconfused
you are an embarressment to yourself your friends and your family. you probably haven't even joined the communist party. its all a fantasy inside your head. its almost motivating me to make an effort to explain in an articulate way why you're a delusional fantasist. not quite though...

for now all i can say is, smoke a zoot, chill out, have a wank, release some tension...

(dont quote from my book please)

you were wrong.
 

luka

Well-known member
Obviously I think about this stuff. It's the only time in my life I've truly fallen out with someone and these things do leave scars and you do come back to them in your mind. It makes me uncomfortable being confronted with it but I've never considered deleting my posts or trying to cover it up or excuse it. It's an important episode. Mark was at least half right to think I was becoming more and more anti-intellectual, boorish and determinedly stupid and that my skunk addiction was making me spiritually torpid and gross. I'm quite close now to the positions he held then in terms of a kind of energy management of the organism, the pitch of intensity at which it is desirable to live, albeit there are obvious dangers, and I would want to quibble about a whole range of factors. This is all stuff which is constantly modified by experiential feedback, as we try to learn what it is which works for us at the given moment, how to Get the results we desire; clarity, focus, energy, extended attention span, insight, empathy, joy, intensity and so on. This is where I am and always was very in tune with his way of understanding the world.

Looking back on this now, and especially in the light of having given up alcohol, i am very sympathetic to this notion of friendship as male abuse, albeit these are contracts; to destroy ourselves, together. But this clearly is not the whole story and living without friendship is unsustainable.

This period of time, the posts here and on the blog, personal interactions, I read and think I was right to read, as a personal rejection of me as a person and as a friend, and a personal rejection of others here. I think Mark felt we had let him down, and probably in many ways we did. We weren't willing to work as hard as he wanted us to. We couldn't be what he wanted us to be. But these are always two way streets. We were also asking for things, in our own way. To slow down, to be patient, to be kind. In a cybernetic system other people are also feedback, and we have to pay attention to resistance. It's hard and painful, particularly if you're proud, as I am, and as Mark was. So it's something I'm ashamed of and that I regret, this public spat. You can go through the entire archive and see that my behaviour was very bad but there is a context there and it's personal. I didn't then and I don't now accept this attempt to shirk the personal. I think it's dangerous and dishonest. It would have been good to be able to talk this over and mend differences because there always was this large overlap in the way we looked at things but we never talked to one another again. So there you go. Sad and stupid.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Obviously it’s very admirable for you to write that stuff and take what you need from it, but please don’t feel guilt. What happened to mark obviously retrospectively colours your relationship with him, but that doesn’t make it fair it accurate.

You may have been naughty, but you didn’t do anything truly out of order.

Don’t beat yourself up about it. Nobody on the outside of the situation blames you or feels there’s anything to be held against you.
 

luka

Well-known member
I've got way harsher things in my past and tbh I'm not someone to lie awake at night. But my guess is, as the legend grows, more and more people will come along and uncover this stuff and react in the same way as other_life so I thought I might as well explain how I feel about it in retrospect. And that's how I feel.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
you were wrong.


no, he was right. look at where the remnants of mark's admirers ended up. edgelord pagans, left wing bourgeois social democrats and stupid accelerationists with an understanding of capitalism that would make Keynes, the architect of the hyper militarised organisational form of the authoritarian state, utterly blush. worse than reagan supporters.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
this is what happens when you divorce philosophy from practical human activity. Lenin's party model wasn't transhistorical either, this is where Mark was on the same page as some crude anarchists. the bolshevik party simply wouldn't have been able to come to power in 1918 germany. impossible. and that is the real conundrum we face here, but because Zizek has made a career of quite literally peddling nothing dressed up as something he's worse than salafists. there isn't even a puritanism in Zizek.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
"
The communist needs neither friends nor family, only allies....


this was also rich when he wrote a screed towards the end of his life 'vampire castle' attacking the very concept of allyship.

Anyway, the human being is a ritual of capital and little else. and communists are human beings. they cannot be ascetics in the mould of 14th century west asian and Iraqi sufi anarchists.
 

vimothy

yurp
stupid accelerationists with an understanding of capitalism that would make Keynes, the architect of the hyper militarised organisational form of the authoritarian state, utterly blush. worse than reagan supporters.

their understanding of capitalism is not all that different from a generic marxist one, in many respects. they're just on the other side
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
yeah, mark was on a big anti-weed screed back then, i might even have the blog post bookmarked, he believed it was making things torpid, not his mates in the political class diverting kids into useless leftist activities like broad fronts, getting respect seats, tactical alliance with councils and police during demos, the lot...
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
their understanding of capitalism is not all that different from a generic marxist one, in many respects. they're just on the other side


I'm talking about left accelerationists there, sorry. right accelerationists are just like a mosquito buzzing in my ear at 5 AM when I'm trying to sleep after fajr. just annoying but harmless.

ah yes. and what happens when production based on exchange continues to break down and no cyborg revolution happens? the ubermensch is a bit all up in the air isn't it? we go to euthanising of the species. how joyful.

If you're going to be an accelerationist you might as well be a right accelerationist but as i said there's nothing to package there. I have more respect for right accels than left accelerationists. which look so quaint now. all of them have become the next generation of liberals they all railed against. how taudry. I'm glad my dad is a bit of a conservative nutcase because the last thing i would have wanted is him rocking up to my gaff in leeds cunted off his face on garys at 9 AM.
 
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