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Tho Gavin: equally the 60s counterculture was subverted into precisely the bedrock of the consumer society (probably not fair to include the Panthers and the like in there tho...)

This gets onto something I was meaning to discuss here actually, as regards insults/offence vs other stuff. Part of the result of "Political Correctness", the originary movement and the response to it and then the gross confusion as to what it all actually meant has been to imagine that its not...

Not just money combined with interest (though it is an ontological spell undoubtedly)... but in its current form PRODUCT-as-identity and above all ever more abstracted systems of CREDIT . But as well as being an emergent property, specific actors a various times have had roles in determining...

Well yes. Precisely. And why is that? Also I think the degree to which south american states are outside of capitalism is up for debate, although merely the atempt to remove themselves is in itself laudable (and in all liklihood a reaction to the aggressive foisting of the harsh-end of Chicago...

Which was why it was ridiculous to kill that thread altogether.

Absolutely OTM.

Im not talking about "animalistic anarchy". I'm talking about a form of "commonsensical" humanism that shuts down the thought of the possible, of things ever being different (and strangely, that things were ever not thus). In maintaining the present as the only time which has ever existed its a...

It appears absolutely unbreakable. However, the intricacies of the system of interdependence and precisely calibrated interactions means that if a few key parameters shift one way or that, it could collapse. Or at least, be forced to shape-shift fundamentally, most likely into a less comfortable...

No, not exactly. Its that the nature of Capitalist realism is such that it excludes from its seamless world the possibility of anything radically different (in terms of a possibility) which isn't intrinsically disastrous. So within the terms of the present situation, there is nothing but...

We're already there! What else would you describe the kind of humanism which is the abiding doctrine of liberal-consumer-capitalist societies? The human reduced to an animal, suitable only for making comfortable.

But to actually make it happen is the very opposite of a comfort blanket. The real question therefore is whether you think option 3 is possible or productive. What is the point of purchase upon which we can alter the system by increments? If you believe, as I do, that it resists such efforts...

Mr Tea's argument is that whilst we do not live in a perfect world by any means, he cannot see an alternative which is better and that therefore before we embark on any project of drastic political change we must first know that it will preserve all the good aspects of the present day situation...

The entire point is that we can never know that that won't happen. That is the nature of risk, of the gamble involved... one which the people of the twentieth century took repeatedly, with often disastrous results. But this does not mean that we ought to give up on taking the risk.

Mr Tea's analysis, as he would probably admit, is marked by fear above all else. It is this fear which curtails any possible future risk inherent in resolving systemic problems. To my viewpoint it doesn't actually matter if it "gets worse" in many of the terms Mr Tea understands, as the very...

Yer I've read 80% of Phenomenology Of Spirit, missing out some of the less than thrilling segments. The Kojeve I've read a few scraps of, but yes I can see what he's doing, his own reading of Hegel against the text- or rather he takes the one dialectic he likes and applies it to the the rest of...

Its a tough read, but undoubtedly worthwhile. The Hyppolite is good shit, Kojeve wants to read it all in terms of master/slave dialectic for some reason. I did find that a bit baffling- I mean the political reasons for doing so are plain but the text doesn't really support that the line of...

Also Mr Tea, you are pretty much accepting that "our" lives ARE better now. Perhaps we live longer and are more productive, but on several other yardsticks of well being we don't seem to be very mentally sound. The alienation involved in this social form results in incredible amounts of misery...

But lets face it the majority of people here use it when they have a need to rant and have no other legitimate recipient at hand for said rant... Or at least that's how I use it. I admit that I deliver pretty much identical ranting bullshit to anyone who is willing to listen offline as well...

As much as any idea is a virus though! But yes, a particularly virulent strain which seems impossible to shake off. But this is why the consumer dimension is as important as the capitalist one, in the way which it reconfigures the relation between the individual and the world, at the level of...

In total agreement with you here. Indeed furthermore it seems obvious that drugs function as a tool which mops up those who have the most to gain from the overthrow/collapse of Capital, (the most disenfranchised) and turns them into harmless little loops of the hedonic mechanism.