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

[dilbert1]

@shakahislop German bathroom stall report

 

[thirdform]

What do you think of the idea of Lasch (and others) that some people get into 'radical' politics as a form of self-actualisation and that it's a selfish, therapeutic thing for them? That, or it's a palatable way of running from their own issues.

sheer nonsense. all politics are a form of self-actualisation. radical, reformist or conservative.

Lash has made a load of people perpetually stuck on basic mode.

 

[Mr. Tea]

@shakahislop German bathroom stall report

View attachment 19199

That ought to do the trick, I reckon.

 

[thirdform]

lol mad you posted this, don't you see what he's saying here is thick as shit? I don't have an issue with him being a zionist in the privacy of his own room, but A) those tracks were mediocre and B) the two state solution is basically approval of what Israel is doing. Seems bit absurd for everyone to do a 180 on this and then be like oh it's totally good for Germany's electronic music scene to censor voices on Palestine.

 

[version]

sheer nonsense. all politics are a form of self-actualisation. radical, reformist or conservative.

Lash has made a load of people perpetually stuck on basic mode.

I think you're being obtuse. You know what he meant. He was talking about a particular type of person who treats politics as a hippyish voyage of self-discovery.

 

[thirdform]

The example that comes to mind for me is the ongoing dj voices vs nowadays dispute, where she seems to be mixing the crimes in gaza with her own employment etc disputes with the owners of the club. I don't know what went down obviously but from the outside it feels like some kind of psychodrama being played out that is only very very distantly related to the cause she's appealing to.

I used to chat to Kristin. I probably don't agree with her on a lot of things (I'm not an anarchist) and you are probably right that this is very distantly related to Gaza. What I find absurd though is that all that is needed for Americans, Brits and Germans to go full mccarthyite is to speak on a cause that is dear to many people. That should be no grounds for dismissal or censorship.

To reappropriate an anti-german thesis to send them into meltdown: 'Palestine is the attempt of muslims to reach communism. It is precisely because Israel is no longer the anti-nation that we are for Palestine.'

Obviously, I don't subscribe to this thesis, but neither can the anti-germans refute this misappropriation.

 

[version]

lol mad you posted this, don't you see what he's saying here is thick as shit? I don't have an issue with him being a zionist in the privacy of his own room, but A) those tracks were mediocre and B) the two state solution is basically approval of what Israel is doing. Seems bit absurd for everyone to do a 180 on this and then be like oh it's totally good for Germany's electronic music scene to censor voices on Palestine.

Seems like a complete idiot. If his response to being flamed is to apologise and take the tracks down, why did he release them in the first place? What did he think was going to happen?

 

[thirdform]

I think you're being obtuse. You know what he meant. He was talking about a particular type of person who treats politics as a hippyish voyage of self-discovery.

Correct, I'm being obtuse because Marxism seeks to transcend politics. This is very clearly expressed in the numerous texts of Marx and Engels. If people want to be lazy, I cannot be held responsible for that.

 

[version]

Marxism seeks to transcend politics

Sounds a bit hippyish.

 

[version]

That ought to do the trick, I reckon.

Dilbert sat on the bog with several coloured pens.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I think you're being obtuse.

You have, like, encountered third before, right?

 

[version]

You have, like, encountered third before, right?

Who?

 

[Mr. Tea]

Who?

Fighting talk!

Prepare to be challenged to a traditional oil-heavy Kurdish wrestling match, with robo-sodomy for the loser.

In the bogs in the Spoons in Crouch End.

 

[thirdform]

The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not "abolished". It dies out.
Engels | Chapter II: Theoretical, Part III: Socialism, Anti-Dühring | 1877

Democracy is, as I take all forms of government to be, a contradiction in itself, an untruth, nothing but hypocrisy (theology, as we Germans call it), at the bottom. Political liberty is sham-liberty, the worst possible slavery; the appearance of liberty, and therefore the reality of servitude. Political equality is the same; therefore democracy, as well as every other form of government, must ultimately break to pieces: hypocrisy cannot subsist, the contradiction hidden in it must come out; we must have either a regular slavery — that is, an undisguised despotism, or real liberty, and real equality — that is, Communism. Both these consequences were brought out in the French Revolution; Napoleon established the first, and Babeuf the second.

Progress of Social Reform On the Continent by Frederick Engels October 1843

No government in the whole world has issued decrees about pauperism at a stroke and without consulting authorities. The English Parliament even sent emissaries to all the countries in Europe in order to discover the different administrative remedies in use. But in their attempts to come to grips with pauperism every government has struck fast at charitable and administrative measures or even regressed to a more primitive stage than that.
Can the state do otherwise?
The state will never discover the source of social evils in the “state and the organization of society,” as the Prussian expects of his King. Wherever there are political parties each party will attribute every defect of society to the fact that its rival is at the helm of the state instead of itself. Even the radical and revolutionary politicians look for the causes of evil not in the nature of the state but in a specific form of the state which they would like to replace with another form of the state.
From a political point of view, the state and the organization of society are not two different things. The state is the organization of society. In so far as the state acknowledges the existence of social grievances, it locates their origins either in the laws of nature over which no human agency has control, or in private life, which is independent of the state, or else in malfunctions of the administration which is dependent on it. Thus England finds poverty to be based on the law of nature according to which the population must always outgrow the available means of subsistence. From another point of view, it explains pauperism as the consequence of the bad will of the poor, just as the King of Prussia explains it in terms of the unchristian feelings of the rich and the Convention explains it in terms of the counter-revolutionary and suspect attitudes of the proprietors. Hence England punishes the poor, the Kings of Prussia exhorts the rich and the Convention heheads the proprietors.
Lastly, all states seek the cause in fortuitous or intentional defects in the administration and hence the cure is sought in administrative measures. Why? Because the administration is the organizing agency of the state.
The contradiction between the vocation and the good intentions of the administration on the one hand and the means and powers at its disposal on the other cannot be eliminated by the state, except by abolishing itself; for the state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities, since the scope of its own power comes to an end at the very point where civil life and work begin. Indeed, when we consider the consequences arising from the asocial nature of civil life, of private property, of trade, of industry, of the mutual plundering that goes on between the various groups in civil life, it becomes clear that the law of nature governing the administration is impotence. For, the fragmentation, the depravity, and the slavery of civil society is the natural foundation of the modern state, just as the civil society of slavery was the natural foundation of the state in antiquity. The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery. The state and slavery in antiquity – frank and open classical antitheses – were not more closely welded together than the modern state and the cut-throat world of modern business – sanctimonious Christian antithesis. If the modern state desired to abolish the impotence of its administration, it would have to abolish contemporary private life. And to abolish private life, it would have to abolish itself, since it exists only as the antithesis of private life. However, no living person believes the defects of his existence to be based on the principle, the essential nature of his own life; they must instead be grounded in circumstances outside his own life. Suicide is contrary to nature. Hence, the state cannot believe in the intrinsic impotence of its administration – i.e., of itself. It can only perceive formal, contingent defects in it and try to remedy them. If these modification are inadequate, well, that just shows that social ills are natural imperfections, independent of man, they are a law of God, or else, the will of private individuals is too degenerate to meet the good intentions of the administration halfway. And how perverse individuals are! They grumble about the government when it places limits on freedom and yet demand that the government should prevent the inevitable consequences of that freedom!
The more powerful a state and hence the more political a nation, the less inclined it is to explain the general principle governing social ills and to seek out their causes by looking at the principle of the state – i.e., at the actual organization of society of which the state is the active, self-conscious and official expression. Political understanding is just political understanding because its thought does not transcend the limits of politics. The sharper and livelier it is, the more incapable is it of comprehending social problems. The classical period of political understanding is the French Revolution. Far from identifying the principle of the state as the source of social ills, the heroes of the French Revolution held social ills to be the source of political problems. Thus Robespierre regarded great wealth and great poverty as an obstacle to pure democracy. He therefore wished to establish a universal system of Spartan frugality. The principle of politics is the will. The more one-sided – i.e., the more prefect – political understanding is, the more completely it puts its faith in the omnipotence of the will the blinder it is towards the natural and spiritual limitations of the will, the more incapable it becomes of discovering the real source of the evils of society. No further arguments are needed to prove that when the “Prussian" claims that “the political understanding” is destined “to uncover the roots of social want in Germany” he is indulging in vain illusions.

Critical Notes on "The King of Prussia"...

early works of karl marx

www.marxists.org

The German bourgeoisie, which had only just begun to establish its large-scale industry, had neither the strength nor the courage to win for itself unconditional domination in the state, nor was there any compelling necessity for it to do so. The proletariat, undeveloped to an equal degree, having grown up in complete intellectual enslavement, being unorganised and still not even capable of independent organisation, possessed only a vague feeling of the profound conflict of interests between it and the bourgeoisie. Hence, although in point of fact the mortal enemy of the latter, it remained, on the other hand, its political appendage. Terrified not by what the German proletariat was, but by what it threatened to become and what the French proletariat already was, the bourgeoisie saw its sole salvation in some compromise, even the most cowardly, with the monarchy and nobility; as the proletariat was still unaware of its own historical role, the bulk of it had, at the start, to take on the role of the forward-pressing, extreme left wing of the bourgeoisie. The German workers had above all to win those rights which were indispensable to their independent organisation as a class party: freedom of the press, association and assembly — rights which the bourgeoisie, in the interest of its own rule ought to have fought for, but which it itself in its fear now began to dispute when it came to the workers. The few hundred separate League members vanished in the enormous mass that had been suddenly hurled into the movement. Thus, the German proletariat at first appeared on the political stage as the extreme democratic party. Engels | Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848–49)

 

[thirdform]

Sounds a bit hippyish.

no, the disgruntled hippy is monsieur Lash.

 

[thirdform]

this is basic hegelianism right. the negation of the negation. yani think about it yar! It is fidelity to the hippy politics of personal liberation. He needs to abandon this construction and negate his disavowal of hippies. otherwise he will always remain faithful to them, just like Marquis De Sade was ultimately faithful to christianity precisely because it criminalised sexual perversion. Sublate, not invert!

 

[version]

I was actually reading some Marx the other day. A letter he wrote to someone about Ireland. It's more appropriate for the EU thread than this one though.

 

[thirdform]

I was actually reading some Marx the other day. A letter he wrote to someone about Ireland. It's more appropriate for the EU thread than this one though.

btw I was calling Lash lazy, not you. you cannot be held responsible for the sins of intellectuals, some of the most stubborn and prejudiced people on gods earth.

 

[version]

Phew!

 

[thirdform]

I was actually reading some Marx the other day. A letter he wrote to someone about Ireland. It's more appropriate for the EU thread than this one though.

Luke hates Marx for this reason. Part of it is homegrown British antisemitism, but what fuels his antisemitism is his abiding anti-irishness.