K-Punk

[shiels]

Russell Brand done the Capitalist Realism audiobook

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

Check out this great listen on Audible.com. After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The audiobook analyses the development and principal features of...

www.audible.co.uk

 

[Leo]

I wonder now how closely the vehemence of Mark's defense of music and art from a given period coincided with the success or not of his career at that time. Not that this would undermine it at all, but I did always wonder where the energy for those extremes of assertion came from.

I love when old timers return, welcome back @mind_philip

 

[mind_philip]

Cheers - my mind is still absolutely boggled that this place is almost twenty years old. Glad it's still here.

Another thing I wish I'd appreciated about Mark at the time is that all his talk of bodies without organs, Deleuze, Rhizomes etc. wasn't an act of spontaneous intellectual creation, but him riffing on his PhD thesis. But I suppose putting up a scholarly wall was at least part of the point for him (though he also lowered the drawbridge often enough).

 

[Diefreien]

Guess this is the best place to put it. A question I had to myself the other day: did Land and Fisher keep up any sort of relationship (whether working or just talking like friends) after Land went full right-wing?

 

[luka]

Yes

 

[sus]

Anyone know a guy named Jeremy Gilbert

I am reading his obit of Mark and he seems like a real self-congratulatory twat

 

[DannyL]

I know of him. He's a socialist intellectual, wrote a bit about "Acid Communism" IIRC a few years ago. Corbyn fan and supporter.

 

[john eden]

He is part of the ACFM podcast with Nadia Idle and Keir Milburn. I have mixed feelings about him but it is an interesting countercultural approach to left-Labour politics.

 

[sus]

Interesting

The piece was framed as an obit but he mostly props up himself—how his predictions about various people were all validated by time, how he had all the right ideas and Mark was astray for the 90s and early 200s, but eventually Mark came over to join Jeremy in the light and saw the one true path

many such cases I suppose, there's a reason tropes about the vanity of grieving exist.

 

[...]

Interesting

The piece was framed as an obit but he mostly props up himself—how his predictions about various people were all validated by time, how he had all the right ideas and Mark was astray for the 90s and early 200s, but eventually Mark came over to join Jeremy in the light and saw the one true path

many such cases I suppose, there's a reason tropes about the vanity of grieving exist.

Shrewd assessment.

 

[thirdform]

Guess this is the best place to put it. A question I had to myself the other day: did Land and Fisher keep up any sort of relationship (whether working or just talking like friends) after Land went full right-wing?

A very good question, given that Nicholas Land confuses constant capital with fixed capital. Which is of course how the necessity of raw materials in the production cycle is totally neglected in his analysis.

 

[mind_philip]

Just noticed that Spotify has an officially curated Hauntology playlist. Mark perhaps haunting a future he would have wanted to hate.

 

[Woebot]

Anyone know a guy named Jeremy Gilbert

I am reading his obit of Mark and he seems like a real self-congratulatory twat

he's a serious-minded socialist and was a close friend of mark's so was certainly devastated by his death. one of the good guys.

 

[Woebot]

i think the shock/trauma of mark's death influenced/personalised quite a lot of the obituaries. that's to be expected. people felt very emotional. it was incredibly shocking and upsetting.

mark's politics really came to the fore - his death was put forward as a political event as though he was martyred.

i was devastated but felt differently about it - i didn't think it had very much to do with politics - i thought of it in terms of health - and also the kind of pressures that middle-aged men find themselves under.

i'm fully aware that people have historically argued that health, and especially mental health, are explicitly impacted by capitalism. it's a valid point-of-view - but i know plenty of people both supposedly immune to these forces by privilege who suffer - and many who fare much worse (especially friends in the third world) who aren't affected.

 

[john eden]

That's interesting @Woebot but a bit reductive I think.

Surely the point is that physical and mental health (and ill health) take on specific forms under capitalism.

So the increase in things like cancer over the last 200 years have to be weighed up against a general increase in life expectancy, for example.

Clearly privileged people are not immune from physical and mental ill health. "The Crown" is basically a Netflix drama about bad mental health outcomes for privileged people.

But at the same time privileged people do, by definition, have better access to healthcare and greater life expectancy than those that are underprivileged. Which is political.

 

[Woebot]

privileged people do, by definition, have better access to healthcare and greater life expectancy than those that are underprivileged.

statistically the deadliest diseases are caused by bad diets (not defined here as malnutrition), alcohol and smoking.

The top 10 causes of death

WHO act sheet on the 10 leading causes of death. In 2021, the top 10 causes of death accounted for 39 million deaths, or 57% of the total 68 million deaths worldwide. The top global causes of death, in order of total number of lives lost, are associated with two broad topics: cardiovascular...

www.who.int

here the guardian point out that "Rich nations dominate the list of countries most burdened by the full range of mental illnesses" with 7 affluent nations in the top 10 countries in the DALY:

One measure of mental illness that has become a gold standard over the past 30 years is the disability adjusted life year (DALY) – a sum of all the years of healthy, productive life lost to illness, be it through early death or through disability.

Mental illness: is there really a global epidemic?

As the Guardian launches a series looking into the extent of the global mental health challenge, we examine the issue, how it is treated and the myths surrounding it

www.theguardian.com

 

[john eden]

Yes and the poorest people in the richest countries have the worst diets and lowest life expectancies in those countries.

 

[Woebot]

Yes and the poorest people in the richest countries have the worst diets and lowest life expectancies in those countries.

ok, sorry i thought we were talking about affluence - not relative affluence.

@john eden i think we should probably take this somewhere else.

to be clear i'm not making a right-wing argument - a case for capitalism and the status quo and so forth.

 

[john eden]

ok, sorry i thought we were talking about affluence - not relative affluence.

Well we can talk about whatever we want Matt as long as we’re not at cross purposes.

The issues that affected Mark might not have been an issue if he lived in Mozambique or in feudal times in this country. And he may have stood a better chance of dealing with them if he had been more privileged. I’m not sure if any of this is especially helpful though.

 

[sus]

IMO it's modern pesticides that is at fault for mental health tanking. You get pesticides, and some refrigeration practices, you can scale up your population centers.