Transient_Grace posted:

diamond_galas posted:
the way i see it is, people have good AND bad sides to them, and they have to choose which side they're going to listen to. just my two cents.


that's not how it works, some people are just born chaotic evil.

and they go on to make great pirates of the carribean moveis satring jonny deeep

babyhueypnewton posted:

Impper posted:
huey you should work on your second point more to clarify it and make it better writing because it seems kind of muddy as it is. your points about trots & so on are good but the actually cool/interesting point you're making is one about western psychology maybe, i.e. similarities in trots & liberals & social democrats, lUzer psychology, etc.


I remember in another thread you said liberals are the real enemy, and I agree. There is a common neurosis that trots, liberals, anarchists, left-populists, etc all share. If we can all agree that material conditions and ideology reflect and create each other, determining the failure of the western left in ideological terms is just as important as understanding the material causes of the current crisis and the failure of the left to address it.

Of course, this is a forum of people who rejected marxism because of some personal weakness/obsession with themselves and latched onto every crazy ideology imaginable, so I didn't expect much.

agreed, fascists make better natural allies of Tru Marxists than trots or anarchists

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

Impper posted:
huey you should work on your second point more to clarify it and make it better writing because it seems kind of muddy as it is. your points about trots & so on are good but the actually cool/interesting point you're making is one about western psychology maybe, i.e. similarities in trots & liberals & social democrats, lUzer psychology, etc.


I remember in another thread you said liberals are the real enemy, and I agree. There is a common neurosis that trots, liberals, anarchists, left-populists, etc all share. If we can all agree that material conditions and ideology reflect and create each other, determining the failure of the western left in ideological terms is just as important as understanding the material causes of the current crisis and the failure of the left to address it.

Of course, this is a forum of people who rejected marxism because of some personal weakness/obsession with themselves and latched onto every crazy ideology imaginable, so I didn't expect much.

agreed, fascists make better natural allies of Tru Marxists than trots or anarchists

I think this is an interesting argument that's been made here before, based on analysis of globalization and the defense against trans-national capital on nationalist borders. I would like to see it actually fleshed out and not just hinted at though.

Also, has anyone read Andrew Kliman's: the Failure of Capitalist Production (other than McCain )? I think the argument that "globalization" and "finance capitalism" are populist garbage left over from the neo-keynsean critique of Marxism to be fascinating, it would radically change left strategy.

getfiscal posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

Also, has anyone read Andrew Kliman's: the Failure of Capitalist Production (other than McCain )? I think the argument that "globalization" and "finance capitalism" are populist garbage left over from the neo-keynsean critique of Marxism to be fascinating, it would radically change left strategy.

quind did: http://openletternews.org/2011/11/29/editorial-capitalisms-obvious-criminality/

is that quind? lol he's a bit before my time but we should get him to post here

getfiscal posted:

vegas odds say that none of us will have an appreciable effect on a national campaign so maybe we should worry less about steeling ourselves for the mass slaughter of trotskyists and instead try to be nice and read a bit and have fun.

I know this is a troll but every communist and every party has said this exact thing. The bolsheviks complained about how isolated they were from the masses and spent most of their time writing long polemics against other communists (with personal insults from Lenin himself). Bordiga was an asshole and the Italian communist party spent most of it's time criticizing itself when it wasn't splitting itself further. The cuban revolutionaries were like 50 people for a while and that che and the castros survived was dumb luck. The most successful and the least successful communist parties have had pointless splits, personal rivalries, failed policies and incorrect ideas, isolation from the masses and periods of repression.

Mao, Stalin, Che, etc aren't magical people, they were just like everyone else except they had scientific minds, courage and conviction, and lived in the right time and place (as well as creating that time and place). We're living in 1964 (or 1930), unrest and socialist revolution will be on the upswing for a long time. Your attitude belongs in 1982 (or 1956), when it would have still been unwelcome but at least expected.

swirlsofhistory posted:

Also, has anyone read Andrew Kliman's: the Failure of Capitalist Production (other than McCain )? I think the argument that "globalization" and "finance capitalism" are populist garbage left over from the neo-keynsean critique of Marxism to be fascinating, it would radically change left strategy.

just so you know, Kliman is a disciple of Raya Dunayevskaya, proto-cliffite/'left-communist' economist (in the marxist pejorative sense)

Dunayevskaya emigrated to the United States and joined the revolutionary movement in her childhood. Active in the American Communist Party youth organization, she was expelled at age 18 and thrown down a flight of stairs when she suggested that her local comrades should find out Trotsky's response to his expulsion from the Soviet Communist Party and the Comintern.

lol awesome. yeah I noticed he was on the "marxist-humanist" website which set off alarm bells, but as y'all can see there's a lot of trot history. this is interesting to know.

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

Hmm, I just noticed the ideologies/movement of Trotskyism, Maoism and Stalinism are all based around personalities.

Is this personality worship something unique or inherent to Marxist thought? We don’t talk about Hitlerism or Qutb and even the preppiest neoliberal banker in London or new York probably wouldn’t refer to themselves as a Reaganist or Thatcherist.

Basically: Why does the role of leadership personality play such a prominent role in defining these subbranches of Marxism?

Badiou posted:

From a general point of view, the “cult of personality” is tied to the thesis
according to which the party, as representative of the working class, is
the hegemonic source of politics, the mandatory guardian of the correct
line. As it was said in the thirties, “the party is always right.” The problem
is that nothing can come and guarantee such a representation, nor such a
hyperbolic certainty as to the source of rationality. By way of a substitute for
such a guarantee, it thus becomes crucial for there to be a representation of
the representation, one that would be a singularity, legitimated precisely by
its singularity alone. Finally, one person, a single body, comes to stand for
this superior guarantee, in the classical aesthetic form of genius. It is also
curious, by the way, to see that, trained as we are in the theory of genius in
the realm of art, we should take such strong offense at it when it emerges in
the order of politics. For the communist parties, between the twenties and
sixties, personal genius is only the incarnation, the fixed point, of the doubtful
representative capacity of the party. It is easier to believe in the rectitude
and the intellectual force of a distant and solitary man than in the truth and
purity of an apparatus whose local petty chiefs are well known.

AmericanNazbro posted:

babyfinland posted:

this obsession with trots is the racism of socialism, the method by which socialism justifies its use of the sovereign decision to kill and threaten its own population with war and discipline, expose bare life to death, etc

thats why when you read hueys posts in this thread you cant help but picture a huge skinhead in steel toe boots

i dunno tom. there is an "obsession" with routing out trots because they have historically attempted to subvert actual political movements

they are an enemy of any communist the same way a liberal is because trots and liberals are effectively one in the same. their rhetoric is different but their actions ultimately propagate capitalism

There are some interesting questions of history going on here but part of me still can't help but feel that goons talking about building Stalinism and rooting out the trots might as well be Ignatius Reilly going on about theology and geometry

AmericanNazbro posted:

babyfinland posted:

this obsession with trots is the racism of socialism, the method by which socialism justifies its use of the sovereign decision to kill and threaten its own population with war and discipline, expose bare life to death, etc

thats why when you read hueys posts in this thread you cant help but picture a huge skinhead in steel toe boots

i dunno tom. there is an "obsession" with routing out trots because they have historically attempted to subvert actual political movements

they are an enemy of any communist the same way a liberal is because trots and liberals are effectively one in the same. their rhetoric is different but their actions ultimately propagate capitalism

the idea that a minority of deviant socialists have ruined revolutionary movements to the extent that stalinists claim is really absurd and places the proletariat they supposedly lead in such a position of political subordination that it rivals if not exceeds that of bourgeois class domination in democratic society

i mean this is the precise mechanism of antisemitism in relation to the german race that nazi society contained. and you are not defending any "actual political movement" here, lets be honest: youre defending the soviet union's legacy as a state, specifically as a "revolutionary state", the notion of which i think is the real point of contention for the marxists on this forum

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

Ironicwarcriminal posted:
Hmm, I just noticed the ideologies/movement of Trotskyism, Maoism and Stalinism are all based around personalities.

Is this personality worship something unique or inherent to Marxist thought? We don’t talk about Hitlerism or Qutb and even the preppiest neoliberal banker in London or new York probably wouldn’t refer to themselves as a Reaganist or Thatcherist.

Basically: Why does the role of leadership personality play such a prominent role in defining these subbranches of Marxism?

Badiou posted:
From a general point of view, the “cult of personality” is tied to the thesis
according to which the party, as representative of the working class, is
the hegemonic source of politics, the mandatory guardian of the correct
line. As it was said in the thirties, “the party is always right.” The problem
is that nothing can come and guarantee such a representation, nor such a
hyperbolic certainty as to the source of rationality. By way of a substitute for
such a guarantee, it thus becomes crucial for there to be a representation of
the representation, one that would be a singularity, legitimated precisely by
its singularity alone. Finally, one person, a single body, comes to stand for
this superior guarantee, in the classical aesthetic form of genius. It is also
curious, by the way, to see that, trained as we are in the theory of genius in
the realm of art, we should take such strong offense at it when it emerges in
the order of politics. For the communist parties, between the twenties and
sixties, personal genius is only the incarnation, the fixed point, of the doubtful
representative capacity of the party. It is easier to believe in the rectitude
and the intellectual force of a distant and solitary man than in the truth and
purity of an apparatus whose local petty chiefs are well known.

Understandable but it’s also so….i dunno, psychotic……*shivers*

I guess it's no different to having Jesus or the Prophet or whatever

actually its the opposite of psychotic, since schizophrenia describes post-modern ideology of surface and spectacle, the opposite of great Ideas like communism

babyfinland posted:

weak effeminate trots that need purging for the race of true revolutionaries to proliferate and become strong enough to conquer the fat merchants in their towers

this. epic this ftw!!

babyfinland posted:

Groulxsmith posted:

AmericanNazbro posted:

babyfinland posted:

this obsession with trots is the racism of socialism, the method by which socialism justifies its use of the sovereign decision to kill and threaten its own population with war and discipline, expose bare life to death, etc

thats why when you read hueys posts in this thread you cant help but picture a huge skinhead in steel toe boots

i dunno tom. there is an "obsession" with routing out trots because they have historically attempted to subvert actual political movements

they are an enemy of any communist the same way a liberal is because trots and liberals are effectively one in the same. their rhetoric is different but their actions ultimately propagate capitalism

There are some interesting questions of history going on here but part of me still can't help but feel that goons talking about building Stalinism and rooting out the trots might as well be Ignatius Reilly going on about theology and geometry

for me its a question of historical methodology; history and politics sort of exist in the same philosophical space regarding the question of universality and agents of change, and in stalinism i think there is this dissonance wherein it claims that it is the proletarian class, but only in a subordinate mode, that this class both has ultimate historical agency but really that it has none until it acquires those precise mechanisms of power that enable its self-emancipatory potential in the first place

actually, i just thoguht of this, this is reflected in zionism as well. i.e. the paradox of the embodiment of the jewish race in a state form

you've repeatedly used "stalinism" and "totalitarian" in the past without defining either. Since this thread is specifically about how neither word has any meaning beyond a liberal misunderstanding of power and an innate weakness in the trot psyche, you really have to defend this.

if by "stalinism" you mean marxism in general, which I believe you do, your criticism is laughable. pretending that 100 years of theory about the historical role of the proletariat in the face of the revolutionary movements happening in the backwards countries of the world doesn't make it not exist.

AmericanNazbro posted:

statickinetics posted:
maybe it's possible to think about capitalism and the political response to it without having to see it through the lenses of stalinism, trotskyism or any irrelevant historical paradigm that only old people who "forgot to die" (heh, zizeK) still cling to??? like almost as if global capitalism is in a qualitatively different form today than it was in the pre-1970's era (let alone since the formation of the USSR) and our analysis of it/political action needs to reflect that? maybe none of this shit matters at all?!!


agreed: global islamic caliphate

I don’t often agree with with American NazBro but this truly seems like the only practical and feasible method of uniting humanity or at least offering an alternative to dystopian liberalism.