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

[mixed_biscuits]

The man in the street gets really confused when top rank politicians make apparently contradictory plays but if they thought of it as a strategy game with limited information against people also capable of bluffing they might realise what the politician is actually doing. In fact, the board game diplomacy is a good practical introduction to this kind of negotiation scenario.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Not every one, just some of them. Have the protesters even done a risk assessment for their interventions along these lines?

That's more of a concern from a risk POV than being deliberately shot by a member of the "world's most ethical military", is it?

 

[mixed_biscuits]

For instance, just the idea of the anti-lockdown marches was counter-productive: UK government explicitly said they made the regs tougher in anticipation of protest. At least if protests hadn't then happened the regs would be less tough next time. But they did happen because protest precludes cunning.

 

[Mr. Tea]

For instance, just the idea of the anti-lockdown marches was counter-productive: UK government explicitly said they made the regs tougher in anticipation of protest. At least if protests hadn't then happened the regs would be less tough next time. But they did happen because protest precludes cunning.

The "don't struggle while being raped, he'll just get angry and beat you up as well as raping you" school of thought.

 

[dilbert1]

If you've got to look more than half a century ago for the last win...

Why do you automatically assume that the people giving this talk assess it as a victory? You only think on easy-mode eh?

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Why do you automatically assume that the people giving this talk assess it as a victory? You only think on easy-mode eh?

Well, if it was a loss why would they be doing the same thing again? And why would you be posting a loss because that would undermine your point?

 

[dilbert1]

@mixed_biscuits Its an educational talk given by someone who’s not involved with the protest, about the history behind the 1968 Columbia protests, at the encampment at Columbia. The organization the speaker’s affiliated with doesn’t necessarily hold protest in high esteem. I’m not sure what else you’re getting at?

 

[version]

do you guys think what's taking place in the usa could grow into a mass movement?

First We Take Columbia • Ill Will

Lessons from the April 1968 occupations movement

illwill.com

 

[dilbert1]

Ill Will-ass article

 

[version]

Ill Will-ass article

Very.

 

[dilbert1]

Boy, they sure used to talk different back then…

https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/Mark-Rudd-Columbia-Notes-on-the-Spring-Rebellion.pdf

 

[thirdform]

Why do you automatically assume that the people giving this talk assess it as a victory? You only think on easy-mode eh?

you have to remember that biscuits has unparalleled psychokenetic powers.

It would be prudent to note, however, that he has only been able to manifest his self-enslavement to a cuckold dilemma where the cuckolder is always right.

 

[version]

Ill Will-ass article

They published another earlier:

The liberal order overseeing and administering the genocide in Palestine is built upon the marriage of egalitarian values and exterminating violence, upon the intimate coupling of supposedly hallowed rights and the hell it unleashes upon the world. Arms must continue to be delivered, just as their use must be denounced and condemned. Demonstrations must be celebrated, just as orders must be given to smother them with tear gas. Everything thus burns twice, as the fuel of liberal politics and the fuel of liberal carnage, feeding an inferno whose fires rage ever more democratically. If there is no need to resolve the formal tension between its abstract ideals and its violent realities, this is because liberalism is the indefinite elaboration of this contradiction.

[...]

Just as Aquinas imagined that the saved would experience nothing but joy as they looked down upon the damned burning for eternity below, liberals nurture their immaculately beautiful souls as they serenely watch their social order transform ever more of the world to ash. Heaven is little more than the means of managing and maintaining the hell it everywhere sets aflame.

[...]

Liberalism’s recuperation of revolt is what allows it to seek forgiveness for all of its sins, to be perpetually cleansed and reborn. The penance it pays for all of its historical wrongs becomes a source not merely of consecration, but of self-renewal. Past domination is repackaged into marketing material, monuments, and museums, evidence of the liberal order’s progress toward perfection. The heads cracked open by police in Selma are held up as the testament of a post-racial America, rather than as one entry in an archive of racialized brutality that continues to expand. Just as liberal societies always memorialize their own past violence in order to claim that they have freed the world of it, they insist that their violence in the present is an integral part of the liberal order which must be preserved in order to be able to absolve the violence once again. Each liberal order aspires to dominate you without appearing to, to repress you while presenting themselves as the last defense against your repression.

Liberal Infernos • Ill Will

For the struggle against genocide to succeed, the spell of liberalism must be broken.

illwill.com

 

[dilbert1]

Ok @version, I’ll bite. Not one utterance of “capital,” “capitalism” or “capitalist politics” in there, a little stunning. That liberalism, liberal rights and ideals, can be at odds with capital, that capitalist society will always remain in toto illiberal, sub-bourgeois, that fulfilling and overcoming liberalism, prosecuting its revolutionary content, would also mean doing the same for capitalism, doesn’t occur to them. Because they’ve emptied out all the meaning that term holds and simply made it their epithet of choice, something referring to a corrupted attitude or metaphysical state of mind held by the abstract forces of domination.

The idea that the demand for civil rights, what all those “heads cracked in Selma” struggled for, or the demand of the global poor and oppressed to freely secure their livelihoods through gainful employment, are anything BUT liberal is completely asinine. These authors mask their contempt for the Civil Rights movement with feigned sympathy by casting people who risked their lives as victims mistakenly pursuing in vain the very privileges enumerated by the Evil Founding Fathers of the Empire. They want to say that what those in the CRM were really expressing, perhaps unbeknownst to them, was a revolt against the “liberal world order,” the “liberal cosmos,” the “liberal form of life,” because that’s consonant with their own stupid, inevitably liberal “politics” (aka morality). They don’t even want to deal with the liberal pre-history of their OWN anarchist tradition! And for that reason they are as liable as anyone to remain stuck there forever.

The Platypus Affiliated Society – Adam Smith, Revolutionary

platypus1917.org

The Platypus Affiliated Society – Lenin’s liberalism

platypus1917.org

 

[dilbert1]

To be less verbose, I mean of course I get it, and I’ve been there and maybe its a good phase to pass through, but taken by itself its just one big ahistorical hypocrisy burn, that even just at the level of theory gets you nowhere. Talk about clinging to moral high ground as the world burns! Its a very Rousseauian conception, really, this valorization of a non-liberal subject (sometimes exaggeratedly conceived as a non-subject). Its 2024 guys, can we please at least try thinking more interesting thoughts???

 

[version]

Yeah, I found their use of 'liberalism' odd as it seems more or less interchangeable with others' use of 'capitalism', e.g. D&G. The whole recuperation of opposition angle. I've always encountered that attributed to capitalism, not liberalism. I suppose, at a push, some attribute it to 'Neoliberalism' but that's another term that's become increasingly vague over the years.

 

[dilbert1]

The notion you find in Marx and that Platypus is keen to tease out, that capitalism “is the contradiction between bourgeois social relations and the industrial forces of production,” is a lot more clarifying or at least genuinely provocative of thought than this habit of wielding simple terms of abuse. And its not about privileging one side of that dialectic at the expense of the other, either (like Nick Land does following D&G, for instance). Both sides are simultaneously revolutionary and regressive. I know I come off a bit brainwashed these days but for whatever that’s worth its a more interesting frame for thinking about it anyways, I find.

The Platypus Affiliated Society – Capital and labor

platypus1917.org

 

[thirdform]

The notion you find in Marx and that Platypus is keen to tease out, that capitalism “is the contradiction between bourgeois social relations and the industrial forces of production,” is a lot more clarifying or at least genuinely provocative of thought than this habit of wielding simple terms of abuse. And its not about privileging one side of that dialectic at the expense of the other, either (like Nick Land does following D&G, for instance). Both sides are simultaneously revolutionary and regressive. I know I come off a bit brainwashed these days but for whatever that’s worth its a more interesting frame for thinking about it anyways, I find.

The Platypus Affiliated Society – Capital and labor

platypus1917.org

disclaimer haven't read the plat article but as to your formulation...

Not quite.

Capital in its movement expresses the contradiction between bourgeois social relations and forces of production, yes. This leads to the explosive cataclysms which can result in revolutionary epochs or more than not recuperation, yes.

but here there is one important thing to note. Capitalism is fundamentally a process of the collectivisation and socialisation of tributary agriculture, (the agrarian revolution and the abolition of the dominance of landed property) and hence, the suppression of the freedom of the producer. Or put another way: the separation of workers from their material conditions of work. Free labour is freedom from the *land* as Banaji rightly notes.

Thus the issue is also more fundamental at the level of crisis. To quote Lenin:

“‘Anarchy of production,’ ‘unplanned production’—what do these (well-known) expressions tell us? They tell us about the contradiction between the social character of production and the individual character of appropriation”

 

[thirdform]

those Ill Will articles are repulsive piles of stinking shit, btw.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I think the word 'liberal' has been so widely stretched and abused as to be virtually worthless these days, and should probably be retired. Socialists use it as a synonym for 'conservative' and conservatives use it as a synonym for 'socialist'. The author of that piece quoted by version seems to think it more or less means 'psychopath.'

Moreover, if liberalism is the problem, what's the solution? Should we be illiberal instead? But that just means 'authoritatian', doesn't it? Like, you know, Netanyahu and Hamas...