Chavista Club World • Page 3

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0853451338/?tag=absolutepunk-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1583672567/?tag=absolutepunk-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1583671455/?tag=absolutepunk-20
"Build it Now": An Interview with Michael A. Lebowitz | venezuelanalysis.com
Marxism In Iran
Marxism and Anti-Imperialism in Latin America
Marxism and Anti-Imperialism in India

I highly recommend this book: The Black Jacobins - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0821421263/?tag=absolutepunk-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/086091884X/?tag=absolutepunk-20

 

you're a doll

 

In an effort to piss even more on the (socialist) Rising we had in Ireland 100 years ago, the government has erected a memorial wall that contains the names of everyone who died in the conflict, including occupying British soldiers: 1916 'Remembrance Wall' unveiled at Glasnevin

 

Hey, these are my folks!

 

"It is in such diverse and diversified conflicts that the communist horizon of the present may announce itself, not in a growing class consciousness, but rather, in a growing consciousness of capital.8 At present, workers name the enemy they face in different ways: as bad banks and corrupt politicians, as the greedy 1%. These are, however, only foreshortened critiques of an immense and terrible reality. Ours is a society of strangers, engaged in a complex set of interactions. There is no one, no group or class, who controls these interactions. Instead, our blind dance is coordinated impersonally, through markets. The language we speak — by means of which we call out to one another, in this darkness — is the language of prices. It is not the only language we can hear, but it is the loudest. This is the community of capital.


When people make the leap out of that community, they will have to figure out how to relate to each other and to the things themselves, in new ways. There is no one way to do that. Capital is the unity of our world, and its replacement cannot be just one thing. It will have to be many."

A History of Separation

 

@nothingsforeverdude not sure if this is exactly the place but you've written on the DSM before right? what are your major critiques of it

 

Anyone know of anything similar to that "How Nonviolence Protects the State" piece? I'm considering writing a paper on the ethics of violence and disobedience for a class.

Something written by, for example, a Black Panther, would probably work well. Not trying to make it about any particular movement, though.

 

"At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect. Even if the armed struggle has been symbolic and the nation is demobilized through a rapid movement of decolonization, the people have the time to see that the liberation has been the business of each and all and that the leader has no special merit. From thence comes that type of aggressive reticence with regard to the machinery of protocol which young governments quickly show. When the people have taken violent part in the national liberation they will allow no one to set themselves up as "liberators." They show themselves to be jealous of the results of their action and take good care not to place their future, their destiny, or the fate of their country in the hands of a living god. Yesterday they were completely irresponsible; today they mean to understand everything and make all decisions. Illuminated by violence, the consciousness of the people rebels against any pacification. From now on the demagogues, the opportunists, and the magicians have a difficult task. The action which has thrown them into a hand-to-hand struggle confers upon the masses a voracious taste for the concrete. The attempt at mystification becomes, in the long run, practically impossible."

Frantz Fanon, "Concerning Violence," From THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH

This Nonviolent Stuff′ll Get You Killed | Duke University Press

Guns made civil rights possible: Breaking down the myth of nonviolent change - Salon.com

 

When you die, make sure there's someone there to upload your mind to a computer so I'll never have to do my own research

 

wow i'm v sorry for taking forever to get back to you on this haha. i meant to reply and then forgot and then forgot about this thread until today

i think my criticisms of the DSM are kind of divorced from what most leftist/anti-authoritarian critiques of it are. like i agree with them, to a certain extent, but they're not what i feel most passionately about. i oppose the DSM mostly from a scientist's perspective, in that it's taken far too seriously for a symptom-based classification system and is actively skewing clinical neuroscience research by having it use flawed operational definitions. (rest of this post is partly copied/pasted from an old post but i still stand by it. trigger warning for mental health stuff)

in any other field of medicine, diagnosing and treating illness (especially with medication!) based on commonly observed clusters of systems would be laughable. imagine going to the doctor because you have chest pain, shortness of breath, and dizziness - and instead of ordering an EKG, the doctor decides that you have "chest pain disorder" and prescribes painkillers instead of treating whatever the underlying cause would be. this is what's happening on a large scale in the modern mental healthcare system. one case study as to how this can go terribly, terribly awry is this autobiography; the main character was diagnosed with a host of mental illnesses (various personality disorders, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, etc.) before a neurologist found enchephalitis.

of course, we haven't yet parsed out the neurobiological etiology of mental illness, or even the extent to which the causes are neurobiological, so there is an argument to be had that they're doing the best they can. talk therapy works. specific medications do effectively treat specific clusters of symptoms. but the DSM is actually partly to blame for the lack of progress in clinical neuroscience, because it provides fixed operational variables that neuroscience must build its case around, when it should be the other way around. the best way to proceed would be to implement a necessarily temporary system of diagnosis (at the very least for research purposes) and for clinical psychologists to work cooperatively with neuroscientists to update the system every few years instead of sitting around parsing abstract lines between diagnoses with no basis in either biological reality or lived reality.

 

Great post thank u. I'm sure I'll refer back to it an lot. Good day to bump this thread too!

 

i changed the tag on this thread to 'world' bc internationalism

 

Couple good articles that have come out recently.

Uber’s Consumer Democracy | Jacobin

The arsonists of Fort McMurray have a name | Martin Lukacs

 

Some good Marxist economics

Fred Moseley and Marx’s macro-monetary theory

 

Burying the White Working Class | Jacobin
Thought this was a pretty good article. It's centred around the US election and has a clear pro-Sanders bent, but in a broader sense I think it's helped elucidate some of my feelings towards moderate liberalism of late.

 

What Comes After Capitalism? Upcoming Teach-Ins Can Show a Way Forward

 

Ask your questions here.

 

Will do. I promise to not to be argumentative in this thread, strictly here to learn. I am very interested in your views on human nature.

 

I've always had a hard time buying into humans "naturally" being a particular way, really. It's all inductive

 

I agree very much with this. It all comes from, upbringing, circumstances ect. I have had a lot of people mentioning to me that people are not naturally individualistic, and I think the view on this has heavy impacts on overall views on which type of society can end up working in the long run.

 

The idea is nature vs. nurture. We have no scientific reason to believe there is any inherent human nature, what we think of as human nature under capitalism is because we are incentivized and socialized to behave in that way. So before when you said your commission or bonus at work incentivized you to work, that is because that is the nature of the society and economy in place. Your bonus makes you want to do well because you need that bonus to live, and because you're supposed to.

Or, at least, that's become the modern marxist view, expressed here: Marx vs. the myth of human nature

Before this he gives examples of Native American societies that didn't show any evidence of greed or necessity of class structure as part of their 'nature.'

It's worth noting that Marx actually had a coherent view of human nature - it isn't a big part of modern Marxist dogma though. Anyway this was written in response to the first one: Marx's view of human nature

This article, when I read it a while ago, made me really consider the "no human nature" philosophical position. Because, as it says:

The idea is, because of the division of labor characteristic of capitalism where you exist as a worker under the unilateral direction of your boss, and your boss under his boss, and on and on until you reach the virtual monarch of the owner/ceo/etc, you become alienated from work. To become alienated from your work in this sense means to have a lack of control of your actions with regards to your work. You just have to do what your boss says. You don't feel like you have control over your own actions in regards to what you are making, how you are making it, or how it might benefit others. And when your life is dominated by your work, when you depend on your work for your continued existence, this extends throughout your entire existence - "ultimately himself." You won't feel in control of your actions if your choices are go into work at midnight because your boss says so or starve because you can't live without that income.

Anyway, this concept of alienation relates to human nature because if there is no human nature, you can't be alienated ultimately from yourself, according to the article. If human nature is a reflection of the society they are born into, a worker subject to the conditions of this labor would be socialized to simply exist in this manner. To be completely dominated by their work and not in control of their actions in this sense would be human nature, which would render Marx's theory of alienation, as Byron says, "untenable," because the implication of this alienation within Marx's revolutionary theory is that this alienation goes against man's nature, thus motivating them to reorganize the economy through revolution when in control of the necessary political power.

However, Byron is arguing from a Marxist Humanist standpoint, and dismisses other views like those of Althusser more or less outright as they are indeed not humanist. I'm sure any convincing critique of the ideas of Byron in this article would be from some Althussian standpoint. And, as with most such things. @Dominick is much, much more versed in Althusser than me.

Also @Dominick u wanna rec some Althusser to me? And maybe some contextual works that would help me understand what he's criticizing exactly?

disclaimer: i don't claim there aren't errors in here and there probably are but I *think* this is a semi-coherent fever-fueled rambling on human nature.

 

Great post, very interesting. I think human nature is maybe our most interesting topic, and like I said, will end up being the basis of our society. Just from personal experience, I find that if my company treats me well, and I believe in what they are doing, and they pay me enough to have economic freedom, I don't mind not having control over every decision that the company makes. If they start to do things that don't allow me to achieve my goals, or feel like I have any control over how I spend my day, I get miserable really fast. It's a very hard balance for any line of work, no matter who has final say over what the entity does. I think the hardest thing for any society is that people think differently and want different things in life. I like the article Dom posted around think tanks for how we solve all these issues, but we haven't found the right answer yet. Hopefully in time, we can find the right balance.

 

@Wharf Rat , the context in which Althusser was writing was after the process De-Stalinization and the ramifications it had throughout the left as Stalin's purges were revealed to be public. The Communist Party in Russia had an outsized influence on parties throughout the world, so once they made that pivot, it caused many to lose faith and some to delve into early Marx to retrieve the ideas which rebuked the bureaucracatic ideology that had a grasp on the left. Althusser wanted to combat this humanism because it wasn't scientific and was predicated on bourgeois idealism. He saw it as a revision of the revolutionary project. The critique made, as I said, is that humanism invokes an essence or ideal human, from which we've been alienated. We saw this sort of idealism in Rousseau with the noble savage. Althusser argues that capitalism is an assemblage of relations which produce ideologies that then produce subjectivities based on an imaginary relationship to those relations of existence. We are, in other words, created as subjects of capital and act accordingly. This is important, because Althusser goes on to say that ideology has a material existence in opposition to humanists who see ideology as a set of ideas in a given person's head. He argues that the apparatuses of capitalism are material and are constituted by the practices, rituals, actions, etc., of the subjects that are subject to them. For example, a police officer believes in justice. He is part of a police department and acts in a certain way to fulfill his role as arbiter of justice. He sees a black kid, who registers as a threat, and guns him down. His actions are not out of the norm, they conform to the practices of the repressive apparatus to which he belongs; it identifies justice in policing black bodies and the subjects act out that ideology precisely because of their relationship to the relations of production, i.e., the maintenance and protection of private property as paramount, and blackness as a threat. He wasn't born to hurt black people and it isn't just a set of bad ideas, as humanists would argue, it is the material realization of ideology as a condition for reproducing capitalism. Anyway, I'm not doing it justice, and I'm at work, but I posted a link to his essay on Ideological apparatuses in the reading group. They also had a feature in LA Review of books. Here is the link:
Marginal Thinking: A Forum on Louis Althusser - Los Angeles Review of Books

 

Thanks! That helps a lot. But then how does alienation work here? Those who aren't in a position of benefiting from those practices, rituals, etc that make up the material existence of ideology are alienated from the ideology? Or something? I do still have to read those, maybe its explained clearly there. I'll get to them this evening or tomorrow.