Since it's been a while since we had an Israel/Palestine thread...

[dilbert1]

Newton, what a phillistine. Think of all the people killed by gravity. Least effective thinker!

 

[dilbert1]

@mixed_biscuits Of all people, I dare you to turn your brain on and listen to the man. Because his position on the conflict probably has a lot in common with your own, but for reasons you might not expect.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Lives gained??

...because the Marxist implementations tended to be quite keen on reducing births, which will affect the net increase.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Newton, what a phillistine. Think of all the people killed by gravity. Least effective thinker!

Gravity wasn't invented by Newton, he conceptualised it.

Marx should be considered an information hazard, being highly memetic and unsurpassedly antisocial.

 

[dilbert1]

He had a very normal amount of friends, actually. They would drink lots of booze together at the pub. Not that I expect that to impress you, @mixed_biscuits whom I can only imagine as the shining bright exuberant light around which every social function you grace your guinea pig presence with orbits.

 

[dilbert1]

Do you realize I’m not trying to defend or convince you of Marxism? Or argue its correctness? Or even cite Marx? I didn’t even post the video because I think it’s all correct. I simply supposed, based on previous comments, you might find some of the thoughts expressed therein interesting or challenging. Cutrone’s position is extremely contrary to mainstream and almost all radical Left sentiment, another reason I thought of you. You were happy to clap along when I rehashed many of his points, before you realized they were associated with the Bad Team. Personally, I like to regularly stress-test my own beliefs by listening to people who directly challenge them, whose words make me reflexively uncomfortable while at the same time pushing me to get beyond well-worn habits of thought. But if you want to keep rehearsing the same boring flame war (which you happen to suck at btw), that’s your own perogative. Makes this place a lot more boring, though.

 

[thirdform]

More food for thought, for anyone who managed to sit through that funny ass debate. I’ve just started the first video. @mixed_biscuits you will be happy to know all the posts of mine in this thread which you’ve liked were prompted by thoughts in response to a man who calls himself The Last Marxist

utter spectacle.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Lives gained??

Pro-natalist @mixed_biscuits is probably counting history's most prolific rapist, Genghis Khan, as a sort of secular saint, due to the vast number of pregnancies he caused.

 

[version]

Pro-natalist @mixed_biscuits is probably counting history's most prolific rapist, George Galloway, as a sort of secular saint, due to the vast number of pregnancies he caused.

 

[thirdform]

which doesn't mean there isn't some good stuff in there, (all spectacle expresses a real sentiment, after all) but this idea of marxists engaging with liberals like finkelstein is spectacle. Maybe when I have the energy to watch it I will.

I'm not a situationist, but Khayati's article in the 60s is still the best treatment of this issue.

Two Local Wars

The Arab-Israel war was a dirty trick pulled by modern history on the good conscience of the Left, which was communing in the great spectacle of its protest against the Vietnam war. The false consciousness that saw in the NLF the champion of "socialist revolution" against American imperialism...

libcom.org

 

[thirdform]

The attachment of this spectator consciousness to alien causes remains irrational, and its virtuous protests flounder in the tortuous paths of its guilt. Most of the "Vietnam Committees" in France split up during the "Six Day War" and some of the war resistance groups in the United States also revealed their reality. "One cannot be at the same time for the Vietnamese and against the Jews menaced with extermination," is the cry of some. "Can you fight against the Americans in Vietnam while supporting their allied Zionist aggressors?" is the reply of others. And then they plunge into Byzantine discussions . . . Sartre hasn't recovered from it yet. In fact this whole fine lot does not actually fight what it condemns, nor does it really know much about the forces it supports. Its opposition to the American war is almost always combined with unconditional support of the Vietcong; but in any case this opposition remains spectacular for everyone. Those who were really opposed to Spanish fascism went to fight it. No one has yet gone off to fight "Yankee imperialism." The consumers of illusory participation are offered a whole range of spectacular choices: pacifist demonstrations; Stalino-Gaullist nationalism against the Americans (Humphrey's visit was the sole occasion the French Communist Party has demonstrated with its remaining faithful); the sale of the Vietnam Newsletter or of publicity handouts from Ho Chi Minh's state . . . Neither the Provos (before their dissolution) nor the Berlin students have been able to go beyond the narrow framework of anti-imperialist "action."
The antiwar movement in America has naturally been more serious since it finds itself face to face with the real enemy. Some young people, however, end up by simplistically identifying with the apparent enemies of their real enemies; which reinforces the confusion of a working class already subjected to the worst brutalization and mystification, and contributes to maintaining it in that "reactionary" state of mind from which one draws arguments against it.

The peaceful coexistence of bourgeois and bureaucratic lies ended up prevailing over the lie of their confrontation. The balance of terror was broken in Cuba in 1962 with the rout of the Russians. Since that time American imperialism has been the unchallenged master of the world. And it can remain so only by aggression since it has no chance of seducing the disinherited, who are more easily attracted to the Sino-Soviet model. State capitalism is the natural tendency of colonized societies where the state is generally formed before the historical classes. The total elimination of its capital and its commodities from the world market is the deadly threat that haunts the American propertied class and its free-enterprise economy -- this is the key to its aggressive rage.
Since the great crisis of 1929, state intervention has been more and more conspicuous in market mechanisms; the economy can no longer function steadily without massive expenditures by the state, the main "consumer" of all noncommercial production (especially that of the armament industries). This does not save it from remaining in a state of permanent crisis and in constant need of expanding its public sector at the expense of its private sector. A relentless logic pushes the system toward increasingly state-controlled capitalism, generating severe social conflicts.
The profound crisis of the American system lies in its inability to produce sufficient profits on the social scale. It must therefore achieve abroad what it cannot do at home, namely increase the amount of profit in proportion to the amount of existing capital. The propertied class, which also more or less possesses the state, relies on its imperialist enterprises to realize this insane dream. For this class, pseudocommunist state capitalism means death just as much as does authentic communism; that is why it is essentially incapable of seeing any difference between them.

Throughout the British Mandate period the Arab resistance in Palestine was completely dominated by the propertied class: the Arab ruling classes and their British protectors. The Sykes-Picot Agreement put an end to the hopes of the Arab nationalism that was just beginning to develop, and subjected the skillfully carved up area to a foreign domination that is far from being over.(1) The same strata that ensured the Ottoman Empire's domination over the Arab masses turned to the service of the British occupation and became accomplices of Zionist colonization (by the sale, at very inflated prices, of their land). The backwardness of Arab society did not yet allow for the emergence of new and more advanced leaderships, and every spontaneous popular upheaval ran into the same coopters: the "bourgeois-feudal" notables and their commodity: national unity.
The armed insurgence of 1936-1939 and the six-month general strike (the longest in history) were decided and carried out in spite of opposition from the leadership of all the "nationalist" parties. They were widespread and spontaneously organized; this forced the ruling class to join them so as to take over the leadership of the movement. But this was in order to put a check on it, to lead it to the conference table and to reactionary compromises. Only the victory of the fullest, most radical implications of that uprising could have destroyed both the British Mandate and the Zionist goal of setting up a Jewish state. Its failure heralded the disasters to come and ultimately the defeat of 1948.

 

[other_life]

"The arm of critique is the prelude to the critique by arms." Aahh!! The old "Reddit switcheroo"!

 

[thirdform]

Where the situationist line of thinking is wrong is to see the bureaucracy as an autonomous class, as if the international mode of production does not matter and the personages of the bourgeoisie (capital without capitalists?) indeed. Even if salaried employees direct state property, it is still bourgeois, as all property is class property, as it expresses a material and juridical relationship. It is erroneous to see the relations of production as distinct from the relationships of property, and merely a mechanical huristic which pits order givers against order takers. An order taker can have a consciousness well beyond mercantile exchange, yet must purchase in accordance to capitalist property relations.

see:

The batracomiomachia, 1953

www.international-communist-party.org

What they want to prove is that nationalised State property is not socialism, which is correct, but the path taken is wrong. They say that the relations of production are one thing and the forms of property another. In Marx they are instead two aspects of the same thing. Whether a private bourgeois company, or a State one, the form of property is the same; to understand this, rather than thinking about the factory and machinery, focus instead on the relationship between the wage labourer and the product. The bourgeois form of property exists when the worker has lost any right to appropriate the company’s product. Naturally this is also the case as regards the means of production, but this derives from the material fact of associated labour: it would be quite something (even if it was decided by an autonomous factory council) if the workers could each walk off with a brick from the wall and a cog each from the machinery…
And yet the starting point is one of Marx’s most perfect pronouncements, the 1859 Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, certainly written on one of those days when those cursed carbuncles of his weren’t making him lose the will to live, or one less of those awful cigars had been smoked. We will cite it in its entirety, placing the words that weren’t quoted from the text in brackets:

 

[thirdform]

Marx should be considered an information hazard, being highly memetic and unsurpassedly antisocial.

Being personally anti-social is highly responsible, actually. unlike the allotted time for couch potato engorging spectator consciousness in present day society.

Now, if you speak of the elimination of antisocial activity sure, but then we would have to eliminate the vocalisation of your inimitably good opinions.

 

[dilbert1]

which doesn't mean there isn't some good stuff in there, (all spectacle expresses a real sentiment, after all) but this idea of marxists engaging with liberals like finkelstein is spectacle. Maybe when I have the energy to watch it I will.

I'm not a situationist, but Khayati's article in the 60s is still the best treatment of this issue.

Two Local Wars

The Arab-Israel war was a dirty trick pulled by modern history on the good conscience of the Left, which was communing in the great spectacle of its protest against the Vietnam war. The false consciousness that saw in the NLF the champion of "socialist revolution" against American imperialism...

libcom.org

Interesting and very prescient text. And Cutrone likewise discusses the parallels with the anti-Vietnam War movement at length. He’s criticizing Finkelstein, who as a former Maoist and boomer still partly holds on to an attendant New Left moralism. These devastating opening comments by Khayati already in ‘67 about the American and European Left, comments which at the time no doubt expressed a marginal and unpopular position toward a moment now fondly memorialized, are very much aligned with Cutrone’s criticisms. Without the benefit of hindsight of course, but a heavy dose of intellectual honesty and political sobriety that the Situationists were able to offer from time to time

The absence of a revolutionary movement in Europe has reduced the Left to its simplest expression: a mass of spectators who swoon with rapture each time the exploited in the colonies take up arms against their masters, and who cannot help seeing these uprisings as the epitome of Revolution. At the same time, the absence from political life of the proletariat… has allowed this Left to become the "Knight of Virtue" in a world without virtue. […] The European Left is so pitiful that, like a traveler in the desert longing for a single drop of water, it seems to aspire for nothing more than the meager feeling of an abstract objection… wherever there is a conflict it always sees Good fighting Evil, "total revolution" versus "total reaction." The attachment of this spectator consciousness to alien causes remains irrational, and its virtuous protests flounder in the tortuous paths of its guilt. […] The antiwar movement in America has naturally been more serious since it finds itself face to face with the real enemy. Some young people, however, end up by simplistically identifying with the apparent enemies of their real enemies; which reinforces the confusion of a working class already subjected to the worst brutalization and mystification, and contributes to maintaining it in that "reactionary" state of mind from which one draws arguments against it.

 

[thirdform]

Interesting and very prescient text. And Cutrone likewise discusses the parallels with the anti-Vietnam War movement at length. He’s criticizing Finkelstein, who as a former Maoist and boomer still partly holds on to an attendant New Left moralism. These devastating opening comments by Khayati already in ‘67 about the American and European Left, comments which at the time no doubt expressed a marginal and unpopular position toward a moment now fondly memorialized, are very much aligned with Cutrone’s criticisms. Without the benefit of hindsight of course, but a heavy dose of intellectual honesty and political sobriety that the Situationists were able to offer from time to time

It's worth noting that Khayati went to Jordan to fight alongside the DPFLP in 69-70.

Whilst it's good that Cutrone is criticising Finkelstein for romantic moralism, something I have no objection to, I find a lot of these ultra-left tendancies fail to realise that a defeated vanguard gravitates to its defeated and recuperated parties. This is the chief error of autonomism, and the more or less non-bolshevik, council influenced tendancies. In rejecting the party-form, they merely hypostatise it into a schematic mechanism of domination, they cannot see parties in their dynamic movement.

Whilst Sbardela wasn't a left communist, this treatment of the confusion of Tronti and co. on this issue is prescient and deals with a lot of the questions even the most ultra/post-left/the left is dead types don't want to acknowledge.

This is the core of the argument. Sbardella’s critique of Tronti is subtler than might first appear, however. Following an insight not only of workerism itself, but also of a much older left communist tradition, he recognizes the historical institutions of the workers’ movement as founded on expropriation. Classical parties such as the PCI indeed represent the will of the class, but only as separate and alienated from the class. Parties monopolize political subjectivity. Yet this does not mean that the pure unmediated activity of the class is therefore inherently revolutionary, as a certain naively left communist position would imply. On the contrary: when the class suffers material defeat, its strategy, too, is thrown into disarray. Workers then find themselves huddling around whatever concentrations of power still survive. In these circumstances, spontaneity leads to bad politics, not because workers lack direction from a proper revolutionary vanguard, but rather because the objective situation leaves them few other options. In such a period even the most impeccably committed cadres are only capable of organizing defeat. It is not the case, according to Sbardella, that an oppositional subjectivity always exists. It is rather constituted and deconstituted in the flux of the class struggle. For all their emphasis on class composition, the workerists around Tronti failed to recognize this fact.
Sbardella argues that Tronti and his comrades were hoisted on their own petard. Because they had idealized proletarian subjectivity as invariably revolutionary, they were unprepared to properly analyze the Italian proletariat’s retreat into its own stultifying institutions. They were then left with no choice but to ratify this retreat as one more masterstroke of the proletariat’s undoubtedly correct, if inscrutable, strategy. When the struggle in the factories began to heat up again at the end of the ‘60s, however, Tronti and his followers were blindsided once again. Having already declared the PCI to be the authentic expression of the workers’ subjectivity, they were left with no way to respond to the new avalanche of defections. This accounts, Sbardella argues, for the emergence of Tronti’s utterly mystified doctrine of the “autonomy of the political.” If it was true that the workers had delegated their political will to the Party, then that Party implicitly would retain its legitimacy as the political expression of the class, even if – as indeed actually happened – that authority were to be turned against the class itself. What becomes autonomous here is not the class but rather its political representation. And this autonomization then has no effect other than to conceal, and to oppose, the real movement of the class.

The NEP of Classe Operaia (1980) - Viewpoint Magazine

The errors to which Sbardella sees Tronti falling prey are, on the one side, an uncritical acceptance of immediacy and spontaneous action, and on the other side, an equally uncritical acceptance of political mediation as the direct expression of proletarian subjectivity. In fact the two errors...

viewpointmag.com

 

[thirdform]

Hence left communists have always averred:

However, all this was not sufficient for us to accept the idea that once such a form of class representation is born (and leaving aside here the fluctuations, in every sense, of its representative composition which we are not able to examine here), a majority vote, at whatever moment and turn in the difficult struggle waged by the revolution both domestically and externally is a reliable and easy method for solving every question and even avoiding the counter-revolutionary degeneration.
We must admit that the soviet system, due to the very complexity of its historical evolutionary cycle (which incidentally must end in the most optimistic hypothesis with the disappearance of the soviets along with the withering away of the state), is susceptible of falling under counter-revolutionary influence just as it is susceptible of being a revolutionary instrument. In conclusion, we do not believe that there is any constitutional form which can immunise us against such a danger – the only guarantee, if any, lies in the development of the domestic and international relations of social forces.

Bordiga: Force, Violence and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle

 

[mixed_biscuits]

He had a very normal amount of friends, actually. They would drink lots of booze together at the pub. Not that I expect that to impress you, @mixed_biscuits whom I can only imagine as the shining bright exuberant light around which every social function you grace your guinea pig presence with orbits.

Yes, I am exorbitantly social.

What I meant about Marx being antisocial is that his theories have the tendency to kill societies.

 

[Mr. Tea]

What I meant about Marx being antisocial is that his theories have the tendency to kill societies

Israel is Marxist now?!

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Do you realize I’m not trying to defend or convince you of Marxism? Or argue its correctness? Or even cite Marx? I didn’t even post the video because I think it’s all correct. I simply supposed, based on previous comments, you might find some of the thoughts expressed therein interesting or challenging. Cutrone’s position is extremely contrary to mainstream and almost all radical Left sentiment, another reason I thought of you. You were happy to clap along when I rehashed many of his points, before you realized they were associated with the Bad Team. Personally, I like to regularly stress-test my own beliefs by listening to people who directly challenge them, whose words make me reflexively uncomfortable while at the same time pushing me to get beyond well-worn habits of thought. But if you want to keep rehearsing the same boring flame war (which you happen to suck at btw), that’s your own perogative. Makes this place a lot more boring, though.

Look at dilbo playing to the thumbwits. I don't know what you're talking about re my changing my mind on realising that blah, but there's nothing wrong with reappraising someone's position on realising that its part of some nefarious grander scheme and so, in their particular case, unhelpful.

It's like living next door someone who practises the crossbow while wearing a police jacket and thinking 'oh good, I'm so happy to be protected by such a skilled marksman' before learning the chap had been fired from the police 7 years ago after having gone postal on the force's firing range...puts things in a different perspective.