K-Punk

shiels

shiels

_
thirdform said:
And that's the fundamental weakness of his capitalist realist book. It ends up capitulating to sociological class analysis. In which case there's no real need for all this radical theory. Adam Smith and David Ricardo will suffice.
Click to expand...

can you explain how it capitulates for a slow boy?
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
luka said:
nerds like poetix and third are a thorn in the side of people like me and you. we cant admit theyre smarter than us cos we are the smartest boys in the world but then again they can read all these books that we cant read and say things we dont understand. very troubling. im not sure what the correct response is to the implicit challenge they represent. is it to say i dont read books are for nerds, or what
Click to expand...
its different to being confronted by a maths genious say. they dont ruffle my equanimity in the slightest. theres no challenge there. i cant do maths, so what
 
shiels

shiels

_
luka said:
nerds like poetix and third are a thorn in the side of people like me and you. we cant admit theyre smarter than us cos we are the smartest boys in the world but then again they can read all these books that we cant read and say things we dont understand. very troubling. im not sure what the correct response is to the implicit challenge they represent. is it to say i dont read books are for nerds, or what
Click to expand...

I think they need us in a way. they must do. why would they be on here talking to us otherwise? we must have something they dont
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
maybe they like us cos they feel smart by comparison? maybe they have other people in their lives who make them feel stupid and they take refuge here
 
shiels

shiels

_
Yes its nice to have someone smart enough that you can explain things to and have them not quite get it and feel superior while teaching. But I think theres more to it than that
 
P

poetix

we murder to dissect
Every trained mind has some aspect of the world that it finds comparatively predictable. For people with a strongly-honed awareness of social situations, street smarts, they can see how things are going down in a workplace or public situation, see which way people are going to jump, and make smarter moves as a result. You can't eliminate randomness completely, but you get fewer outright surprises.

One of the more delightful things in life is to find people who can surprise you on your home turf (provided they're not enemies out to get you, obviously). For the social mavens, confident social improvisers who make unusual things happen are a source of great fascination (whereas to me they just look unusually chaotic). For me, as one of those book-learned sorts, people who make interesting and unexpected moves in language and ideas are similarly fascinating. Most Discourse is pretty boring, because most of it is people running around in circles you already know the broad outline of, so it's the ones darting off at odd tangents (who probably just look unusually chaotic to the ordinary observer) you find you want to follow and try to figure out.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
shiels said:
can you explain how it capitulates for a slow boy?
Click to expand...

Well the fundamental problem is capital is always ideologically real. His form of old skool trade unionist politics is just as realist as the atomised conditions we live in today. Trade Unionism and old english state socialism corresponded to when England was an industrial powerhouse. But it was still capitalist. If kpunk wanted to lament the injustices of capitalism then fine. But it's almost as if he would be content with something like the early post-war consensus. For instance I have no reason to oppose capitalism ethically, I'm unemployed on DLA, to survive in daily life I have to suspend belief that capitalism is immoral, it is what it is, it is a force of dispossession, fundamentally. So in that sense we don't live in an increased capitalist realist time when 50 years ago it was less capitalist real. A lot of this is hankering for old organic communities of Britishness and Englishness. Something I note you are genetically obliged to despise. Here is a libertarian communist text putting what I say concretely (sidenote i don't actually really rate this text but it's basically miles ahead of zeno-goff and the likes.)

We do not, in our busy insect-like comings and goings, make the immediate world in which we live, we do not make a contribution, on the contrary we are set in motion by it; a generation will pass before what we have done as an exploited class will seep through as an effect of objectivity. (Our wealth is laid down in heaven.) The structure of the world was built by the dead, they were paid in wages, and when the wages were spent and they were dead in the ground, what they had made continued to exist, these cities, roads and factories are their calcified bones.
They had nothing but their wages to show for what they had done and after their deaths what they did and who they were has been cancelled out. But what they made has continued into our present, their burial and decay is our present.
This is the definition of class hatred. We are no closer now to rest, to freedom, to communism than they were, their sacrifice has bought us nothing, what they did counted for nothing, we have inherited nothing, we work as they worked, we make as they made, we are paid as they were paid. We do not possess either our acts or the world that conditions us, just as they owned nothing of their lives.
Yes they produced value, they made the world in which we now live. The world that now weighs down upon us is constructed from the wealth they made, wealth that was taken from them as soon as they were paid their wage, taken and owned by someone else, owned and used to define the nature of ownership and the class domination that preserves it.
We too must work, and the value we produce leaks away from us, from each only a trickle but in all a sea of it and that, for the next generation, will thicken into wealth for others to own and as a congealed structure it will be used as a vantage point for the bourgeoisie to direct new enterprises in new and different directions but demanding always the same work.
The class war begins in the desecration of our ancestors: millions of people going to their graves as failures, forever denied the experience of a full human existence, their being was simply cancelled out. The violence of the bourgeoisie's appropriation of the world of work becomes the structure that dominates our existence. As our parents die, we can say truly that their lives were for nothing, that the black earth that is thrown down onto them blacks out our sky.
Click to expand...

I.E: our libidinal desires are only important for our grandkids, not for us. Our grandparents libidinal desires are the the desires which choak us to death.

Above all it is our intent to restate the character of the real struggle against capital. Capitalism is not an idea and it cannot be opposed by ideas or by ideas-driven action. There is no debate to be had with it, it has no ideas of its own except to say that all ideas are its own, it has no ideas intrinsic to itself.
Capitalism is, at its most basic level, a social relation of force. Capitalist society is made up of conflicting forces and it is only at this level that it can be undone, firstly in the collapse of its own forces and then in the revolutionary intervention of the proletariat. If capitalism is to collapse then it will do so at the level of the relation of economic forces, all of which (for the moment at least), and including the proletariat, can be said to be capitalist forces. It is during the collapse that revolutionary ideas begin to take hold.
Click to expand...

= we all sell ourselves to being capital to survive. We are as much a real component part of capital and capitalism as the exploiters.


Preamble

libcom.org libcom.org
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Like I'm all for talking about libidinal desires but mine are pretty boring. Have a supermodel mafia daughter girlfriend and shoot people in hipster dalston. It's not very political. One of my housemates dated someone from a famous leftwing publisher and she was well clutchy, proper butterz.

Will be interesting to see how my libidinal desires are interpreted by people living in 2050 though. Will they become tired danny l centrists unable to play the machiavellian game?
 
  • Haha
Reactions: RWY
V

version

Well-known member
thirdform said:
Mark invariably ended up becoming a high priest of ideology, in spite of him setting out to rebel exactly against that.
Click to expand...
There's that bit in Ghosts of My Life where he complains about deconstruction becoming a cult,

"As soon as it was established in certain areas of the academy, deconstruction, the philosophical project which Derrida founded, installed itself as a pious cult of indeterminacy, which at its worst made lawyerly virtue of avoiding any definitive claim. Deconstruction was a kind of pathology of scepticism, which induced hedging, infirmity of purpose and compulsory doubt in its followers. It elevated particular modes of academic practice - Heidegger's priestly opacity, literary theory's emphasis on the ultimate instability of any interpretation - into quasi-theological imperatives. Derrida's circumlocutions seemed like a disintensifying influence."
 
  • Like
Reactions: sus
shiels

shiels

_
hm well i think he's being straw manned a bit here. he isnt beholden to trade unionism at all from what i understand
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top