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i get the impression that gun is mostly a symbolic rejection of a sort of particularly american liberalism which is seen as effeminate and ineffectual so it makes sense that it's mostly an american thing
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Jun 7, 2020 13:01
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ToxicAcne posted:What was the reason behind the collapse of the french left during that time period? It's really surprising that many of the leaders of the 68 protests became neolibs. i think ardennes is somewhat overstating the degree to which those specific intellectuals became liberals, but it bears remembering that the government bought off the workers during the sixty-eight rebellion and defeated it that way - it was becoming clear that organising the workers to stage a revolution was not a viable strategy, and so an alternative had to be formulated, prominent among them the march through the institutions, where cadres would get positions in important international and national positions and subvert them from a position of power. this they did, but as they shaped the institutions with their values and outlook, material reality and political consensus was shifting around them and suddenly they were imposing austerity on greece and sinking refugee ships in the mediterranean
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Jul 7, 2020 22:20
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like, the PCF is still around and still has its old school outlook, it's just kept bleeding and bleeding e. the prevailing attitude in western europe was that that the Soviets were more or less revisionist at this point and were committing acts of imperialism in a way very much parallel to the west. the lighthouses were mainly mao's china and to an extent albania, so soviet allegiance was a big point of contention even before prague '68 V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Jul 7, 2020 |
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Jul 7, 2020 22:22
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ToxicAcne posted:I think a large part of the appeal of Anarchism in the west is that it allows you to believe in socialism without confronting anti-communist beliefs that the population holds. In the Chomsky article that I linked earlier, the author mentions that one of the reasons why Maoism was so big amongst 60s radicals was because it allowed them to Marxists without confronting their anti-Soviet indoctrination. the maoist critiques of the soviet union were for a large part entirely valid though
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Jul 11, 2020 00:38
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Pomeroy posted:Mao's valid critiques are the ones that "Maoists" now have to pretend never existed. in my country the maoist tendency was legitimately very strong and has active descendants with parliamentary representation right now. i personally know several of ex-maoists and have read some of their texts from the time, from their newspaper the class struggle which firmly espoused the party line most of the time in the seventies. the term consistently used for the soviets was 'social imperialist', I.e. that their dealings with the post-colonial and non-soviet world was always geared towards the interest of the soviet union's geopolitical position and status, though with the meaningful distinction that the mechanisms involved were not bourgeois accumulation but rather a form of chauvinist, defensive socialism. this critique - basically that they treated the soviet-aligned communists not as agents of communism, but as agents of the geopolitical interest of the soviet union - is imo perfectly valid. the soviets consistently, from stalin onwards, left local communist groups in the lurch when it suited them again, in my country the maoist descendant party remains the most firmly anti-american and consistently left-wing group in the country, more so than our eurocommunist-descended socialist party
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Jul 11, 2020 11:15
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there were a number of doctrinal shifts and differences in our maoist tendency, and i guess that the mainstream accusation of social imperialism was more in line with mao's primary texts than i'm presenting, but the point is that the line was emphatically 'a pox on both houses (but especially the US, gently caress NATO)', and what's been inherited now is a heavily eurocommunist-flavoured maoist descendant which nonetheless is very consistently anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-NATO - and deeply skeptical of the modern PRC. e. the point i was making is that the anti-soviet tenor of the class struggle articles mostly focus on the soviet use of foreign communists as basically imperial agents, not on projecting the soviet union as a fully monopoly capitalist state - there's a lot of criticism of bureaucratic decay and examination of what really went wrong with the soviets (it's just taken as granted that they hosed Up at some point), but the general feeling is much more anti-american than anti-soviet V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Jul 12, 2020 |
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Jul 12, 2020 00:32
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i always rather got the impression that the cameras etc weren't really actively supervised beyond the dudes on the other side taking the odd peek unless they had some reason to review so a panopticon, not constant active surveillance. otherwise they could've just forbidden being alone, it's no more outlandish than a lot of the stuff in that book
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Jul 13, 2020 03:05
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this, uh, took a turn
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Jul 14, 2020 08:47
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stalin was intensely personally involved in every major decision, military and civilian during the war and did a lot of frankly mind-boggling work with turning soviet society into a wholly military camp while maintaining civilian control re: the comparison between lenin and stalin, i maintain that lenin was much more an emigre intellectual politician where stalin was a partisan, bank robber and labour leader. the exile party and the underground party are legitimately different structures and while the wartime organisation became something very different, stalin does seem to have continued his underground party mentality after the civil war resolved, which it seems reasonable to assume that lenin would've handled in a different way - and which would've had consequences, especially for how the inner party functioned
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Jul 14, 2020 14:58
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VictualSquid posted:Nah, unequal wealth and living standards are less important then unequal power. They are also symptoms of the unequal power. the question of power is always a question of class power, ref: modern-day USA which gets to claim the mantle of a democracy (with significant buy-in from the people) while fairly demonstrably having rather narrow interests represented in the grander policy of things
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Jul 14, 2020 21:20
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social conservativism is basically dead, it died in the sixties and just went away. it's the ideology of social cohesion, slow reforms and well-defined liberties and obligations at each step of the social ladder. it's basically the ideology of the aristocracy. it used to be possible to quite genuinely be a very decent person and a cognisant conservative under a banner of fear of excess etc. most contemporary self-described conservatives are just hateful, if they're cynically self-interested that's usually the least horrifying ones, because they believe in nothing but tribalism and power and will fight very hard to maintain those even as the policies they promote erode their precious cultures - this then gets turned outward into the nastiest kinds of chauvinism, but it's not really conservativism except for being generally aligned with the powers that be liberals are an often revolutionary breed, and while many contemporary conservatives are also liberals (and they share the obsession with individual rights) they're notably different in e.g. their view on when violence is acceptable and the role of the state. the modern liberal believes in objective truth and good faith, the contemporary conservative absolutely does not
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Jul 29, 2020 00:08
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of course, when push comes to shove they're only enthusiastic about ground rent &c, but the mass following of old-style conservativism tends to still have a strong preoccupation with individual liberty and obligation - the arch-example of this type is the peter hitchens variety of weirdo much like the social democratic elite, when it comes down to it, is interested mainly in keeping a homogeneous and disciplined labour movement, whereas the rank and file will tend to genuinely believe in equality of outcomes and natural justice - if you seriously push an older social democrat, they'll almost inevitably revert to venerating wage labour. social democracy, incidentally, has also been pushed firmly to the margins even in its own parties my point about contrasting old-school social conservativism and contemporary conservativism is to emphasise the difference in social interest between the aristocrats and high bourgeoisie of old, and the contemporary financialised bourgeoisie. whether you want to call it a different ideology (i'd argue that it is, since the trappings are so different and it appeals to very different people) or the same one with a different direction isn't that important, but that the nature of conservativism has changed and how *is* important - and i'd argue that the 'social' part just no longer applies as the ruling class has been liberated from the land, so has conservativism
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Jul 29, 2020 11:08
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i also get the impression that a lot of older lefties are genuinely more alarmed by trumpism than the younger set
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Aug 3, 2020 20:50
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i suspect that a lot of it has to do with the sheer chaos and vulgarity of the trump regime distinguishing it from previous republican presidents in a way which i'm guessing a lot of older lefties see as a bellwether for outright fascism. the direct threat to their lives from his covid nonsense might also be a factor
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Aug 3, 2020 21:14
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it also bears mentioning that nojoe is a fundamental endorsement of electoral democracy - it means embracing a particular voting strategy to achieve some aim rather than the easier 'idgaf just vote blue i guess' what i'm saying is, people are too quick to assume bad faith imo
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Aug 4, 2020 11:30
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well no, but a commitment to nojoe involves an affirmation of the importance of electoral politics - actively refusing to vote for a candidate necessarily assumes that such a vote would be meaningful in some sense, i.e. it's an electoralist strategy
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Aug 4, 2020 11:55
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Dreylad posted:maybe I'm missing the thrust of the argument here, and I may be a beb idiot, but the whole nojoe thing seems predicated on the idea that the democratic party has to actually commit to earning people's vote through concrete policy proposals instead of just wailing and shrieking and scolding for it. yes, this is quite right - if you've wholly given up on electoralism, the nojoe pledge makes no sense, because it does specify 'joe' - if you're opposed to voting in principle, it's a redundant statement
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Aug 5, 2020 11:12
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strict rationality is a cognitive trap for the communist. we must demand unreasonable things because the game has been thoroughly rigged in such a way as to make resistance irrational - but without resistance, we're doomed
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Aug 6, 2020 08:02
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there's a reason the analytical marxists never really got anywhere - economistic rationality was always a means of control, not of liberation. habermas was right
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Aug 6, 2020 08:05
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MLs tend to have a much more flexible analysis of e.g. the revolutionary potential of peripheral and a more pragmatic take on issues like the national question IME - trots, because of their specific rejection of the soviet programme as actually socialist, have to be a lot more dogmatic and positivist about what constitutes socialist politics. there's also a weird tendency for trots to sympathise a lot with luxemburg's doctrine on the role of the party, namely that it should be prepared for a revolutionary moment to emerge by proliferating its cadres in as broad a way as possible and then let the movement simply coalesce around it, which turns into annoying entryism where MLs try to just set up elaborate networks of front organisations instead of trying to subvert existing orgs fallen MLs join islamic cults or turn into demagoguery and immigration paranoia. fallen trots become neocons. fallen eurocommunists start working for the IMF i guess
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Aug 10, 2020 09:42
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ToxicAcne posted:What are you referencing here ? Sounds legitimately hilarious. I've read that Maududi was influenced by Leninism, and that the JeI is structured like a Marxist Leninist party. While I can see the comparisons, it seems like stretch. a number of anecdotes, mostly from norwegian politics (e.g. https://no.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trond_Ali_Linstad) as well as your baby finland types it's not especially well-established empirically, but it legitimately seems as though conversion to islam is a fairly common come-down from serious maoism and i've never heard of, like, a khruschevite going that way
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Aug 11, 2020 09:42
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dex_sda posted:the funny thing about the sectarianism is that anarchists also have lots of beliefs how exactly to structure a horizontal society, yet those organisations manage to unite anarchosyndicalists with queer activists with liberation catholics and even the odd communist-but-the-communist-parties-here-are-poo poo-so-ill-hang-with-you-guys without much problem thanks to radically democratising the process. but there is a culture of acceptance (and even affection) of dissent and differing opinions among anarchists, as long as the dissent is socialist in nature, and it's something I don't see nearly as often on the ML side anarchists are also extremely sectarian, but in terms of moral demands rather than official doctrine IME
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Aug 12, 2020 15:55
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honestly i've stopped bothering with the weirdo sects, i much prefer engaging in the broader labour movement in my country and am much happier and less paranoid as a result
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Aug 12, 2020 16:09
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Lady Militant posted:I once met a member of PSL that thought that caring about climate change was bougie. One of the most weird convos iv ever had. it is, to some extent. a huge part of the evironmental movement are basically middle-class moralists a la extinction rebellion, and dealing with climate issues requires some severe poo poo. most workers, in the west or elsewhere, genuinely do not seem to be much moved by environmental issues when weighed against security and community. their main use to socialists is imo as a case for why capitalism just absolutely has to go, no educated lib can actually respond with any substance and they'll start raving about batteries on cruise ships and poo poo the lack of genuine popular support for climate policy is sincerely pretty horrific, but it seems to be very real
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Aug 12, 2020 16:22
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Peanut President posted:this is absolutely wrong radical left activist groups almost always care a lot about climate issues. voters, by and large, don't, or they may try to isolate them by voting for bourgeois Green parties who have more mainstream authority on the issue and still don't break 5-10% most of the time both corbyn and sanders presented pretty serious plans for climate action and were defeated, corbyn because there was something else perceived to be more important (but there always is) and sanders because the democratic elites just didn't like his agenda. there's no reason to believe that anyone that serious on the issue will emerge for the foreseeable future
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Aug 13, 2020 10:33
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gradenko_2000 posted:China Mieville is an abuser and I wouldn't give him money didn't this turn out to be him cheating on his girlfriend and her taking it really hard?
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Aug 14, 2020 16:54
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organised religion will tend to bring its own organisations and power centres into being. plus, religion has a tendency to act as the soul of a soulless world - i.e. it contextualises suffering and grants dignity where there is none. in some cases this is helpful, but for the most part it absolutely isn't. if you're a revolutionary, you want people to be upset at their suffering and to avoid them thinking that they'll be rewarded for persevering and enduring poo poo in the afterlife this is also why marx became skeptical of moral justifications later in his career - capital goes to some pain to emphasise that capitalists aren't evil people, they're just playing their role. the point being, you can't fix capitalism simply by replacing people, the whole thing has to be uprooted spiritualism generally doesn't really contribute anything necessary to socialism. in latin america, the church has a more proletarian character and clerics can use their positions to do stuff that others can't - generally, religious institutions are more disciplined and much more conservative than that
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Aug 16, 2020 18:12
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it does also bear noting that lenin's professional revolutionaries would for a large part be actual professionals, financed through various criminal enterprises - stalin cut his teeth being a very effective enforcer and fundraiser in the caucasus, particularly in baku the revolutionary's life wasn't simple, but a lot of bolsheviks were basically fugitives who couldn't expect to hold down a steady source of income and so absolutely had to receive funding from elsewhere - basically, lenin's party is one which demands that the rest of your life be subordinated to politics, whereas martov's isn't
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Aug 18, 2020 23:16
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yeah, or, like, malinovski the okhrana had agents at every level of these fortress organisations, they were a seriously scary institution. not that it was enough in the end...
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Aug 19, 2020 00:05
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Finicums Wake posted:hot take: the most advanced metaphysics (and therefore theories of materialism) have been in analytic philosophy. and most of what dialectics is trying to get at is captured by complex systems theory and poo poo like that. so if you want a fully updated take on what socialists meant by dialectical materialism that'll pass for Science, you'll need to integrate insights from those. yet no one is doing this, so diamat, as it stands, is a degenerative research program the issue with takes like this is that a lot of the big stuff in philosophy of science was literally invented specifically to reject the thesis of scientific socialism as scientific - both popper and lakatos are pretty clearly in this camp, for instance. analytical formalism has its place, but even on its own terms it becomes very silly very quickly. i've gotten more useful insights from reading gadamer alone than i have everyone from frege to kripke - actually-existing science, for example, only cares about popper insofar as taking falsificationism as a formal requirement, no working scientist seriously tries to falsify their own theories
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Aug 20, 2020 08:34
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this becomes especially clear in the most applied philosophies like ethics, where analytical takes inevitably end up in some ridiculous hyper-theoretical dead end which are entirely irrelevant to anyone's actual lives and which thus fail the most basic test, which must be if one can improve the world using this knowledge in short, i am with montaigne on this issue: the real use of philosophy is to prepare for death
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Aug 20, 2020 08:38
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Finicums Wake posted:analytic metaphysics is different than phil of science. it was basically revived by quine, much to his chagrin i'm guessing. but nowadays there's plenty of stuff relevant to marxism going on under the title 'social ontology'--i.e. trying to understand how social relations are able to give rise to things like institutions and organizations. the people writing this stuff aren't marxists, but they're basically arguing for why marx's methodology and metaphysics were correct in the first place i was trained by one of these departments and almost nothing i learned was in any way relevant to reality, it was mostly basically paper masturbation i left after doing a bachelor's, so perhaps that was too soon, but i feel as though i gave it a fair shot at that point
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Aug 20, 2020 09:02
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Hodgepodge posted:i dunno, the people at cern certainly talk a good game on being disappointed that results aren't giving them any clues to what is wrong with current theory of course people do try to attack whatever paradigm is in charge, but if i have an idea about how the world is which nobody else has had, i'm not going to actively look for ways to demonstrate that i'm wrong, i'm going to try and construct a compelling narrative that lets me explain why my point of view is at least reasonable to consider and valid. falsificationism has a place in this in that it's a good rhetorical device (both good in the sense that it's effective and the sense that it's good for society that science values it as a rhetorical device), but at least from where i'm standing in the life sciences i've never seen anyone actually take it seriously beyond that. the actual reason for the rise of analytical philosophy in professional philosophy has very little to do with merit or usefulness, it's because it fits the model of scientific publication and the standards of the basically industrialised modern academy better. you can produce some theorem explaining something novel about certain propositions fairly easily, and those can be subject to meaningful peer review, at least so long as enough other people are also doing the same sort of philosophy. since the biggest and most prestigious universities that carry what happens to be the international language of academia are also overwhelmingly analytical, analytical philosopy blossoms and everything else dies away apart from some weirdos in, like, italy
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Aug 20, 2020 09:09
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the academy has a web of incentives and restrictions which are almost entirely banal, production-related things, just like everywhere else. the actual merit of a theory matters much less than its form, who's pushing it, how it's funded etc. we've left the model of the academy as trying to replicate the gentleman scientist of old; now it's treating knowledge as a commodity, and like any other commodity it drives towards scalability, uniformity of standards and uniformity of doctrine. it's very hard to get anything published or recognised if it's not in english these days, for instance, outside of a few very select fields, which massively boosts the centrality of english-language institutions. in some cases, this is good, like in my own field; in many other cases, it's Very Bad, such as in social economy where a demented cult of the stock market has supplanted the more useful administrative perspective of old - a cult directly related, by the way, to the drive towards analytical formalism.
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Aug 20, 2020 09:18
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dex_sda posted:it's taken extremely seriously in physics. if your experiment doesn't falsify the theory being tested it will simply never get attempted, ever. i'll take your word for it, but also clarify since it's not obvious from my post that you quoted: what i mean isn't that people don't design experiments as showing X or the absence of X, it's that they'll design that experiment in such a way as to tilt the scale towards showing X rather than not-X, or to relativise the observation of not-X; in short, the scientist very much wants to see X. in life sciences, people will also frequently observe not-X without X being seen to have been conclusively falsified; this is probably different in most of physics.
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Aug 20, 2020 09:28
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Hodgepodge posted:it's more than attacking the current paradigm; the entire point of huge and enormously expensive particle colliders is that current theory is at a dead end. we know it's incomplete, and therefore wrong, but experiments keep confirming our expectations. we've poured enormous resources into new theory and ended up creating interesting new fields of math which do not seem to yield insight into physics. so it's an instructive point at which the problem is that without new empirical data our model of physics cannot be improved, and we're stuck going through a hypercharged version of medieval attempts to derive insight into material reality through Aristotle or the Tao. ah OK i misunderstood where you were going, apologies
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Aug 20, 2020 09:33
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i'm going to have to think on this; it doesn't *feel* like a substantive rebuke of my thesis, but it might be and i will need to examine it for a bit - it feels like your description of physics is a fairly special case, where because progress has stagnated and nobody can formulate an alternative that's coherent with known data and which would generate substantially new hypotheses, you're left with legitimately trying to prove that the present framework is wrong somehow, but this is pinch of salt stuff - effectively, there's no counter-narrative that's at all compelling or useful, and so you're left trying to knock holes in the present narrative. i can accept that under those circumstances, fairly serious falsificationism is the order of the day and revise my earlier statement on the matter (though i don't think i accept it as refuted in a serious way). though as i say, i'll have to mull it over a bit; i know it's a cop out.
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Aug 20, 2020 09:49
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Pomeroy posted:Why in god's name should anyone care? Just do anyone who knows you a favor and die. dude chill out
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Aug 20, 2020 09:59
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dex_sda posted:@VIL: So I'll actually show a couple pages from Einstein because this subject makes my inner nerd go, in favor of showing how even in 1915~ physics treated falsifiability as a big deal: the foundational text of the theory of general relativity is Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie, published in 1916. It bears mentioning that Einstein published bits and pieces of his theory before this, but this was the big boy, probably the biggest intellectual achievement of humanity, with very few citations (weird for science even then) - as if Einstein had conceived the theory ex nihilo. i think you're reading into my position something that isn't there. i am by no means suggesting that scientists do not try to make predictions and then test them against reality, i'm saying that in the progress of normal science the project is not to actively attempt to refute a theoretic framework as far as it can be refuted, the project is to try to explore reality and produce knowledge that meets some industry standard. this goes back to some idiosyncracies of popper's doctrine of science, which is what i'm arguing against - briefly, popper will say that because the only thing you can know is negative - i.e. you can say "X leads to Y and X", then if you don't have Y the statement is wrong. to popper, this is the only sort of knowledge that can be relied upon, it's the only statement about the world which can be seen as scientific. my point is that this is not what's going on in most science, and by your account it's not what einstein's doing either - einstein's pretty confident that he's right, and he's setting out some tests that can be checked empirically. not to do this would indeed be deeply irresponsible for a scientist; in the life sciences as well, a theory does need to have some downstream application or to be concretely useful in some way that prior theory was not, such as by being able to generate predictions or by explaining observations that were not previously explained. to popper, science is the project specifically of seeking out inconsistencies and tearing down theory - a statement about reality which cannot be conclusively shown to be true or untrue is by definition unscientific, which is where you start having serious friction with the life sciences' practice of science - life sciences, like marxism in some respects, are mostly sciences relating to tendencies, dispositions and potential. you do not falsify evolution by pointing to the bird of paradise, you invent the principle of sexual selection. formal modelling work has ben undertaken to try to buttress this, to some success but not total; all we know is that those loving birds are out there and surviving somehow with their ridciulous plumage. basically my statement about falsifiability is more limited than i think you're assuming - of course science tries to make predictions and explanations of reality, that's what the whole project's about, and the more specific you can get the better. the point is that something like marxism, which is also a doctrine of tendencies more than about one-to-one laws, claims a mantle of scienticity based on its making sense of the world and making general predictions - popper's big objection is precisely that because there's no obvious failure point of the theory, it's pseudo-scientific, but by that same standard so is evolutionary theory. now, popper himself waffled a bit on the topic of evolution, but the point is that a theory clearly doesn't need a precise and specific failure point in order to be scientifically valid. now, you can rescue weaker senses of falsificationism and that is, indeed, useful as a method of science, but hardly anyone takes its deeper implication - that one needs some entirely specific make-or-break prediction in order for one's work to be science - seriously, in my experience. that would require scientists to construct a theoretical framework and then actively and sincerely seek to undermine it, and that's not how humans work. e. the reason i'm given pause by your description of contemporary physics is because it sounds as though there's no obvious way forward apart from pushing our present framework as far as it'll go, i.e. there's very limited other new knowledge to produce, so in that framework it makes more sense that people are pushed into thinking specifically in terms of falsification V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 10:54 on Aug 20, 2020 |
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Aug 20, 2020 10:50
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if my objection here seems tawdry, it's because it is; this whole way of doing philosophy is imo pretty tawdry. popper makes up a theory to explain why marxism isn't a science, and is left without a good answer to one of the biggest scientific endeavours of the modern era, because of a dependence on a rather dubious formal relation which is the only way he found to formalise a criterion by which he could dismiss marxism. you can even make some fairly specific predictions based on the marxist project! you can try to measure things like the rate of profit (it should trend negative over time), the profitability of ownership versus labour (see piketty, though he's not working in a marxian framework) and a whole swathe of stuff connected to imperialism and development. what you don't have is a single, specific failure point where you can say, aha, the rate of profit in such-and-such sector went up for a week, therefore marx is wrong, and that is the sort of falsificationary formalism i'm arguing against.
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Aug 20, 2020 11:03
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