Acts of Resistance

version

Well-known member
The other day I was reading the comments under something to do with Mark and someone left the following,
capitalism has eaten you people
blm and the like is pre-co-opted. perfect for you types
youre on the side of global neolib capitalism. Whatever bougie academics push you eat up. You’re harmless to the likes of google, Amazon, and the rest of the ruling class. They don’t fear you. Your ideas are a flaccid dick
wasted 10 yrs of my life on this hamster wheel. get off and stop being pointless
Learn what makes the ruling class uncomfortable and try to encourage it in little ways. Mostly shitposting
I agree with at least some of that -- lol at 'mostly shitposting' though -- I've posted on here before about Amazon having a Marxism and Communism section etc. It begs the question: What are the acts of resistance still available to us? @Linebaugh and I briefly discussed it and the first thing that came up was inactivity. Stop working, stop buying things.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Man this is why I insist we view capitalism as an expression of something more fundamental than ideology, even more fundamental than economic reality. I think it is the only way to preserve the amount of our passion/energy it would take to prevent a real dystopia.

Whether or not it necessarily means we enter theological territory, I'm not sure.

But it seems like thinking of ways to trip up capitalists is an exponentially uphill battle. We're probably already facing the wall.

Sort of like how a fugitive's task can only get more difficult, in principle. Every mistake the fugitive makes, the police's task gets easier, more of a case is built. But every mistake the police make, the fugitive is merely granted more time - more time to make mistakes.

edit: that is, every mistake anti-capitalism makes gets absorbed/subsumed by capitalism, whereas every mistake capitalism makes merely grants a breath of fresh air for anti-capitalism.

So perhaps tolerate capitalism and turn our attention toward enlightening people, toward mitigating the forces that make capitalism worse than it needs to be. I don't think it needs to be as awful as it promises to be, and it promises to be awful if we keep at it the way we are, no?
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
If we can make a good case here, a solid system, we may even manage to siphon energy from any fragmental alt-right movement and attract souls from such bases.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
Stop working, stop buying things.

I've typed up 5 different responses before deleting. Nature of the topic, every talking point feels futile and stupid.

There's a farmers organization in my neighborhood that gives out free food once a week. You get no say in what you take home but its alot of very good food- a variety of fresh veggies and even packaged goods from grocery stores. If you planned it right some weeks the haul could last you until the next time. Its not intended as a feed-the-needy event, anyone and everyone is encouraged to come, but the nature of the event skews the demographic.

Community oriented action like that feels the only form of inactivity-as-resistance possible (outside of traditional labor practice- strikes and etc.), communities organizing themselves in such a way that they effectively take large chunks of their economic activity off the grid by providing for them internally. Of course not every community is in a position to set up this sort of thing.
 

luka

Well-known member
There's all sorts of things 'the system' 'the Man' feels threatened by, you only need to see how they crack down on various movements, not all of which, eg ravers, are political or oppositional. Often they just involve a redirection of attention and concern and a kind of transvaluation.

The problem is how to maintain the cohesiveness and commitment when they release the hounds.
 

luka

Well-known member
You could be a political movement, a religious or cult movement, a party movement or anything else but they'll come and smash you. It happens at every scale from Cold War down to cointelpro and the criminal justice bill.
 

luka

Well-known member
Your hero Pynchon always talks about this. Against the Day which I couldn't be bothered finishing is full of anarchists hounded vindictively by the state and its agents
 

luka

Well-known member
I have a hard time figuring out what Stan's theology demands of us in terms of actions. Getting a job in Tesco/Walmart?
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I don't think the facile/bargain accelerationist sensibility of "voting for Trump to speed up capitalism" is quite hitting the mark. It may seem like an obvious miss, but I think it might be a matter of nuance.

If we acknowledge that capitalism is the human-economic expression of forces far more primal than humans - the tendency for the fate of the machine to favor compounded growth over linear growth - it may allow us to move on and better identify precisely what is possible within capitalism.

There are an infinite set of possibilities within it. We would be taking capitalism as a roundabout means to communism, the latter being a far more advanced state of society than we have often supposed it to be.

In terms of actions, most of this would manifest, perhaps, as a mood shift, a shift of energy away from the lethargy and fatigue of opposing something like capitalism. Perhaps such a shift could enable us to more robustly become cosmopolitan.

Part of the trouble, in terms of appealing to activism, is that the action here could primarily be abstract, consisting largely of what values are upheld and spread.

Neoliberalism seems like something we could perhaps focus on optimizing. It seems to be a less essential zone of ideology than capitalism, a less essential zone that perhaps carries within it more of a variety of expressions. The metaphysical task would be to find ever more optimal expressions, democratically, for the capitalist ontology.
 

luka

Well-known member
You do sound a bit like a malfunctioning robot when you just repeat these empty slogans Stan. How can we get you back into the cut and thrust of actual dialogue? There's been some totalising event in your psyche which has fused the neutrons perhaps?
 

luka

Well-known member
it's the rhythm of consciousness in a way, the forming of totalilties and the subsequent exploding of them.
 

luka

Well-known member
I don't want to sound too abrasive. The forming of a totality is the highest act and achievement of a mind, but we outgrow them. They end up restricting us and we need to discard those shells to grow,
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
At the most skeptical, that just hasn't happened yet with this shell. More optimistically, it would be a framework that would encompass and administer such a shedding cycle, much like a kind of post-natal womb or matrix.

If we're talking about building ceilings over our heads, which function to keep the elements at bay at the cost of impeding growth, then it seems this issue was resolved around two years ago, upon building an infinite ceiling that managed to keep the elements out and not impede growth.

A minimally theological approximation of the infinite, minimal dogmatically? Liturgically?

But there isn't as much to gain from arguing that the problem doesn't exist, than from understanding how it might exist beyond my recognition, or if the project is built, partially or wholly, on bad faith.

The malfunctioning robot point is poignant because it does feel like I'm unable to connect some of this stuff to the familiar reality. Like I've wandered beyond the earshot range, and only eroded echos reach the tribe.

Is your point that I should preserve some kind of failsafe thread, the pulling of which would unravel whatever dogma has been erected, in the interest of a fresh, decalcified agility? In order to implement such a function, I would need to be willing to demolish the system around it - only thing is, the system was designed to be calciphobic, to prevent dogma from staining the walls.

If there is anything rigid about it, such can be removed without razing the whole framework. In fact, I'm not sure that would even be possible.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I want to join yyaldrin's gang - if we're all fucked anyway then it at least sounds cool and fun.
 

sus

Well-known member
What about navigating the Scylla of Chinese global authoritarianism and the Charybdis of industrializing nations' carbon emissions
 

sus

Well-known member
a Minnesota city council made promises too

they're called "strategic speech acts of self-preservation"
 
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