babyhueypnewton posted:stegosaurus posted:- continuity and rupture: philosophy in the maoist terrain (im taking notes on this one, ill post them when i finish)
why would you read this? maybe his real work is better because his blog has not shown me he's competent at anything or particularly interesting as a thinker and the fundamental idea that maoism is only what we say it is and not what mao say it is based on the real history of the chinese revolution is so on-its-face crazy to me.
well he claims that the RIM was the first organization to formulate what he calls 'maoism as maoism' so it isnt entirely disconnected from 'real history' but it is definitely further away from a direct synthesis of the lessons of the chinese revolution than MZT. its an interesting claim and i wanted to see him explore it in detail. as a 65-75% unironic partisan of MIM thought i have to at least engage with a book like this.
getfiscal posted:the core argument JMP and others make here (Canada) is that 'movementist' activists have focused entirely on building power without a concrete theory of revolution that could instantiate it in actual institutions. the notion of people's war gives them a shortcut so they can imagine actually taking power. and the way they arrive at that is by suggesting every other option is impossible. so even if people's war is extremely unlikely in canada, since everything else will inevitably fail it is the right one. this is why they don't see it as a paradox that they have no real theory of people's war for canada beyond simple declarations. the fact that the police would find it trivial to arrest many of them if they started engaging in adventures doesn't occur to them. notably because it appears a number of them have already been arrested in entrapment schemes.
when you square up to the reality that its either movementism, maoism third worldism, or studiously abstract protracted peoples war, it doesnt seem so absurd of a position
Edited by odobenidae ()
now reading something more interesting, Turning Money Into Rebellion - the unlikely story of denmark's revolutionary bank robbers; the rhizzone, it seems, are mostly reading kersplebedeb books
tears posted:wierd, just read jmp's the communist nessessity, read this book if for some reason you feel the need for 160 pages of words about how the invisible committee was a dead end...
now reading something more interesting, Turning Money Into Rebellion - the unlikely story of denmark's revolutionary bank robbers; the rhizzone, it seems, are mostly reading kersplebedeb books
Why read, when you can post?
odobenidae posted:getfiscal that really sounds a lot like what the pcr-rcp people told me, but i agree (and i think they also agree to an extent) with what stego said. they admitted that the idea of a people's war seems really far fetched at least to us now but insisted that we should worry about that when we get there.
while im not super surprised their rhetoric is based on political shruging instead of analysis it is eyerolling since this is the exact complaint they have about every other organization's similar conclusion
stegosaurus posted:getfiscal posted:the core argument JMP and others make here (Canada) is that 'movementist' activists have focused entirely on building power without a concrete theory of revolution that could instantiate it in actual institutions. the notion of people's war gives them a shortcut so they can imagine actually taking power. and the way they arrive at that is by suggesting every other option is impossible. so even if people's war is extremely unlikely in canada, since everything else will inevitably fail it is the right one. this is why they don't see it as a paradox that they have no real theory of people's war for canada beyond simple declarations. the fact that the police would find it trivial to arrest many of them if they started engaging in adventures doesn't occur to them. notably because it appears a number of them have already been arrested in entrapment schemes.
when you square up to the reality that its either movementism, maoism third worldism, or studiously abstract protracted peoples war, it doesnt seem so absurd of a position
tears posted:how the invisible committee was a dead end
I don't really have time to read 160 pages on this, could you briefly say what you thought were the main arguments?
stegosaurus posted:getfiscal posted:the core argument JMP and others make here (Canada) is that 'movementist' activists have focused entirely on building power without a concrete theory of revolution that could instantiate it in actual institutions. the notion of people's war gives them a shortcut so they can imagine actually taking power. and the way they arrive at that is by suggesting every other option is impossible. so even if people's war is extremely unlikely in canada, since everything else will inevitably fail it is the right one. this is why they don't see it as a paradox that they have no real theory of people's war for canada beyond simple declarations. the fact that the police would find it trivial to arrest many of them if they started engaging in adventures doesn't occur to them. notably because it appears a number of them have already been arrested in entrapment schemes.
when you square up to the reality that its either movementism, maoism third worldism, or studiously abstract protracted peoples war, it doesnt seem so absurd of a position
neither this nor that, aber das Konzept Stadtguerilla
getfiscal posted:the core argument JMP and others make here (Canada) is that 'movementist' activists have focused entirely on building power without a concrete theory of revolution that could instantiate it in actual institutions. the notion of people's war gives them a shortcut so they can imagine actually taking power. and the way they arrive at that is by suggesting every other option is impossible. so even if people's war is extremely unlikely in canada, since everything else will inevitably fail it is the right one. this is why they don't see it as a paradox that they have no real theory of people's war for canada beyond simple declarations. the fact that the police would find it trivial to arrest many of them if they started engaging in adventures doesn't occur to them. notably because it appears a number of them have already been arrested in entrapment schemes.
I don't know why opposing one's own imperialism is so hard. I guess it's not glamorous?
Gssh posted:I don't really have time to read 160 pages on this, could you briefly say what you thought were the main arguments?
its pretty much as getfiscal sums up at the top, "movementism is bad blah blah blah", but really if the tarnac9 wanted to go and sabotage some trains because they read some pomo words good for them, go wild, who cares
tears posted:Gssh posted:I don't really have time to read 160 pages on this, could you briefly say what you thought were the main arguments?
its pretty much as getfiscal sums up at the top, "movementism is bad blah blah blah", but really if the tarnac9 wanted to go and sabotage some trains because they read some pomo words good for them, go wild, who cares
http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2012/10/lets-avoid-being-sucked-back-into.html
But ten or fifteen years ago it was considered old-fashioned to define as a communist and most of us were "anarchists" by default because we were raised at the end of the cold war where we saw the revisionist end of actually existing socialisms collapse––where we were fed a steady diet of Animal Farm and anti-communist history gleaned from simplistic high school textbooks. We didn't want to associate with an ideology we believed to be a failed ideology; we had no idea that the international revolutionary communist movement was already reinventing itself and moving forward even though the capitalists had apparently claimed "the end of history." Thankfully, communism as an ideology has now been reclaimed by the left at the centres of capitalism and, though it is often still limited to the already-converted left, we don't have to feel like dinosaurs when we raise the red flag at a demonstration.
the whole thing becomes understandable when you realize this kind of 'maoism' is really anarchism which takes the Wuhan uprising in China as the form of anarchism that 'worked.' these people broke with anarchism but never broke with anarchist ideology and it's fascinating how far down the path you can go in sounding like a Marxist-Leninist without ever having to give up on idealism and petty-bourgeois individualism.
but the fundamental truth of Marxism, that the base determines the superstructure, is completely alien from this idea. the cultural revolution is used as an example of ideology leaping ahead of material circumstances, the maoist revolutions used as an example of revolutions succeeding in a "non-revolutionary" period, maoist politics are asserted as ideological correctness against the temptations of reality (as getfiscal points out), and maoist practice is asserted as a way for the individual to 'be' communist. these are all inputs of marxist terminology for anarchist terminology though, reality is at best secondary and the difference between Badiou and these politics is just a matter of quanity. In general, that whole school of thought like Jodi Dean is just a dead end in which communism is argued in thought with facts only as a weapon in ideological disagreement. actual investigation of why Nepal is revisionist, for example, is completely absent from western maoist parties since once one becomes revisionist there is no more reason to use it as a weapon and it drops off the face of the earth. the same thing is true for the 'red guard austin' recent attempts at sending people to Syria:
https://redguardsaustin.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/internationalism-is-a-matter-of-life-and-death/
the reality of the situation and the actual consequences of sending random people to Syria with a letter from the RGA saying 'I'm not CIA' is totally secondary to the ideological need to act as if one were already in the revolution, the classic anarchist lifestylism.
getfiscal posted:I think there is something useful in the Cultural Revolution sort of talk, which is the insight that a socialist state is somewhat chaotic thing, because it is still a period of civil war, and freezing it into certain permanent structures - even if those structures are democratic in a formal sense - can underestimate both the 'creative power of the masses' and the ability of rightists to use procedure to get people to submit. The difficult part is that the chaos itself can lead to calls for 'normalcy' - like chaos in itself is not a good thing - and there's no reason to believe that an ad hoc revolutionary institution is more sustainable or radical over time unless the material conditions for mass participation are built there. Which is where (these sorts of) Maoists end tending towards the "only the most extreme left-wing talk is right", rather than what sort of leftism is sustainable. It is almost trivially easy to criticize people from the far-left because everything looks terrible from the vantage point of a realized communist future.
The problem is that is based on a lie. And I used to be there for exactly the reason you pointed out, I even argued with you once that Venezuela was socialist while China was not because one was "moving" towards communism and the other wasnt (at least for the purposes of the simple dichotomy you posed to reveal the fundamental logic of the problem). But I realized that the cultural revolution was 10 years long and no one I talked to had any interest in what really happened, particularly after Mao met with Nixon. Complaining about liberal great man theory and then not being able to talk at all about the real structures of a ten year period and simply writing it off because Mao did something you personally disagree with is not a good look. It was just religious iconography which represented a utopian future. I think that's the best kind of utopia because it asserts that China was ahead of the west in human achievement (undermining white supremacy in a great way) and it has something concrete to really look at even if many people choose not to actually look into the concrete. Well I did and I think there is a middle ground between the extreme utopianism we're talking about and the "economism" of China today which I think describes the ML position. There were concrete structures of the cultural revolution and new ways of thinking about production, management, politics, the military, law and justice, etc. which weren't just anarchic flashes in the pan which it must be emphasized had almost no popular support (which defenders of the ultra-left fail to mention) but weren't just the revisionist norm we think of In china today or the Soviet Union post-Khruschev.
babyhueypnewton posted:the reality of the situation and the actual consequences of sending random people to Syria with a letter from the RGA saying 'I'm not CIA' is totally secondary to the ideological need to act as if one were already in the revolution, the classic anarchist lifestylism.
I don't disagree with what you're saying, although I'd guess on the lifestylist spectrum RGA fall well behind a clown like PissPig. Regardless it is an endemic problem.
The point I want to bring up is that lifestylism is all about broadcasting oneself and this narrows our view of the kinds of people that would travel to Rojava. We only see the narcissists; hence our criticism, although correct, becomes broadly dismissive.
With the correct approach there is probably some benefit from joining in armed struggle and learning how to organize/prioritize/resolve conflict/etc in that kind of hostile environment. The knowledge, discipline and relationships that grow from irl common struggle can be valuable to the individual and to their struggle at home.
chickeon posted:i can only find that in djvu, anyone got it in anotehr format?
theres a thing to rejigger djvus into pdfs
tears posted:Turning Money Into Rebellion - the unlikely story of denmark's revolutionary bank robbers
This was extremely good shit if you want to read about how a small group of sweater-vest wearing middle class danes stole millions so they could give it to the PFLP
Populares posted:I'm reading Hezbollah's 2009 manifesto, I've recently become fascinated with them, does anyone know of any good books about their history in English?
Special Force and its sequel Special Force 2: Tale of the Truthful Pledge, there are English patches available for both.
Populares posted:I'm reading Hezbollah's 2009 manifesto, I've recently become fascinated with them, does anyone know of any good books about their history in English?
Naim Qassem wrote a book called "Hizbullah: the story from within", which you could read if you were interested "the story", from within Hizbullah, by Naim Qassem
http://www.saqibooks.co.uk/book/hizbullah/
marlax78 posted:anyone wanna join my 2017-2018 K. Kautsky book club
I was actually just reading Kautsky on the Erfurt program or whatever via that communist research cluster reader (https://communistresearchcluster.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/communist-interventions-volume-i-european-socialism-and-communism-reader-now-available/). he seems v boring.
gyrofry posted:he seems v boring.
exactly how i like it
Populares posted:I'm reading Hezbollah's 2009 manifesto, I've recently become fascinated with them, does anyone know of any good books about their history in English?
Check out 'Hizb'allah: Safavid Mercenaries of Shaitan?' by an anonymous human rights activist in the Free Syrian Army (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2017).
It is hoped that this study by P J James as per the decision by the Central Committee of CPI (ML) shall help the Marxist-Leninist forces an all those who take positions against the imperialist system and aspire for a socialist future to scientificically approach the present international and national situation when the imperialist system especially US imperialism is dominating the whole world through neocolonial methods. Such a scientific understanding will create conditions for chalking out the Programme and Path of Revolution in each country according to the concrete conditions there, always upholding the principals of proletarian internationalism
- K N Ramachandran
http://www.cpiml.in/cms/books/item/24-introduction-to-the-book-imperialism-in-the-neo-colonial-phase-kn-ramachandran
very. good. shit.
your_not_aleksandr posted:I have finally purchased all four of Grover Furr's books including Blood Anus and I'm astounded at the level of scholarship he's put into them.
*morpheus voice* what if i told you there was....a fifth book
i understand in advance that the non-economic parts of what mason is gonna write is probably gonna be terrible, but it should be thought provoking.
after this, i'm either gonna read a bunch of frankfurt school + frederic jameson/zizek stuff, or stuff on urbanism.
It's a pretty good history of the CIA in the early days, covering stuff like MKUltra, Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Cuba, etc. The Author's a real Kennedy lover though.