#223: The Limits of System ... (1 of ?)
Added 2024-09-13 08:22:04 +0000 UTC"An eternal law of history"
vs.
"We are just dust falls from demagnetized patterns – Show business –"
One last push to save a Gaza family from genocide.
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Sri Lankan parliamentary election held in yesterday was won by a former Marxist leaning leftist party in a landslide. I’ll update you guys on how it goes for me under a former Marxist party. Fuck! Jokes apart this party won because they promised to clean up the mess created by elite nepotistic parties who inherited the ruling of the country after the British left us in 1948.
Ravindu Shehan
2024-11-16 09:07:59 +0000 UTCAll said with love, Michael
Tvvvv
2024-10-02 20:48:46 +0000 UTC(FWIW I don't think we actually disagree very much at all, we're just not taking "Marxism" to mean the same thing)
Michael S. Judge
2024-10-02 19:16:46 +0000 UTCHence, as I was at pains to say over and over, "orthodox Marxism" – because the good and sometimes even incredible things that resulted directly FROM orthodox Marxism were virtually never orthodox. I think I made it about as clear as I possibly could that his basic analysis of history and class is still the foundation of almost any serious polltical thought, and I wouldn't be here doing this if that hadn't happened. But I also think it's important to draw a distinction between "Marxism" as Karl Marx wrote it, "Marxism" as it has actually worked for good in the world, and "Marxism" as a set of tools you can reshape and expand upon rather than a doctrine of history. There's no smear intended. But if anybody wants to be serious about it now, in 2024, there's no point pretending that Marx's understanding of the immediate future was anywhere NEAR as good as his understanding of the past, and there's also no point pretending that everything he wrote or said is scripture, particularly when, as you say, the people who have done the most with his basic analysis had to break with orthodoxy to do anything at all. This is why I put him in with Freud, Nietzsche, and Darwin. From each we get a toolkit that has not just commented upon, but massively shaped, all subsequent history; from each, we also inherit a series of errors, instances of the bigotries of their specific times and places, AND a constituency who will always try to ossify their work and treat it like the Holy Sepulcher rather than what it was, and is – a beginning. A place to start.
Michael S. Judge
2024-10-02 19:15:08 +0000 UTCI mean if you can’t get on board with it, then you can’t get on board with it and it ultimately doesn’t matter. I like a lot of your stuff but I don’t get onboard with everything in sort of the same way. I can’t say whether or not a man in the 1800’s was racist as much as I can’t say whether or not a man today is not racist. And whether or not capitalism taking over the world was some god-touched premonition or whether he was just a guy looking through his key hole view of the world and extrapolating, it happened either way. The colonial empire left and capitalism still is going strong in India. I think Marx sounded hopeful in the quote that we might not have to suffer under capitalism forever. But maybe he was wrong about that. He’s dead though, so who cares. Although, I will say that his ideas and those that have expounded on them have been the basis for some of the most successful anti-colonial/anti-racist/ feminist /etc movements and struggles globally. Those ideas took us to space in a program that put dark skinned people and women intentionally in the program. It just seems like a weird smear to aim at these ideas and the movements they inspired when looking at it. I personally haven’t come across anyone who has any better ideas about how to combat the demon of capitalism. Maybe someone will or maybe we won’t have to or maybe we’ll end the human project prematurely. It’s hard to say from where we are now.
Tvvvv
2024-10-02 18:54:42 +0000 UTCRacism was never really the point here – he was a German guy writing in like 1855, of course he was racist, everybody was racist – but I can't sign onto the idea that there is a single political evolution you can grab from, say, Germany, and then slap onto, say, China, and the vicissitudes of that political evolution are such as to pre-sanctify human barbarity and death as necessary means to a necessary end, because the end *isn't* necessary, in the philosophical meaning of the word – we WISH it were, we may or may not believe it or find it intellectually probable in any given case, but it doeen't have to happen, as evinced by the fact that it hasn't happened. The point is the European myopia, the idea that anyone, never having been to India, not speaking the language, possibly never having met a single Indian, would apply that same sense of structural necessity to a country which is almost unimaginably bigger and more complicated than France or Germany – particularly when it didn't work in France or Germany either. The aforementioned "you" wasn't meant to suggest any kind of individualist Great Man conception of history; it was to draw a line between people who are about to fight and die for a belief in something like, let's say, the basically Marxist view of class struggle and its outcome, vs. people who have nothing materially at stake in one such conflict and still decide on behalf of anyone who WILL die that their deaths are simply grist for the mill. I don't really care much which mill is at issue, political, religious, ethnic, economic, etc., and – because this all started with people asking me questions – I can't describe myself as an adherent to that part of the theory. And the apparent "objectivity" of such analyses is a common and very effective way to sneak in teleological fixations that are very subjective indeed.
Michael S. Judge
2024-10-02 17:14:20 +0000 UTCFinal thought, people are getting ground down under the gears whether or not anyone brings it up or not.
Tvvvv
2024-10-02 16:58:08 +0000 UTCI agree that the utopian vision may never come. Capitalism possibly has outmaneuvered humanity. My issue with the way this quote was presented was that it posed it as racist in a way that is not in the statement unless you think that Marxism is a racist western chauvinist political philosophy and if you think that then throw the whole thing out . But from the Marxist perspective it does not damn the Indians as a people but simply lays out that capitalism would gobble it up and subsume it in some way, if not by this exact means that was unfolding at that time. Mao and Lenin’s projects did attempt to square a circle by not being as developed but still attempting to revolutionize. It would just be difficult to argue that those projects did not get absorbed and reconfigured by capitalism eventually when we look at them today. And as far as any individual doing something, well that seems counter to the entire conceptualization of how these things are suppose to work. So “you” doing something as an individual was just never the idea. Maybe this dock workers strike will lead to mass organization that will lead to the revolution or maybe the current unfolding world war but I’m doubtful, personally. What I like about Marxism is that it really doesn’t matter what I think.
Tvvvv
2024-10-02 16:56:00 +0000 UTCThis is my point, because 1) he can only apply the Western European heuristic to the idea of revolutionary social change *anywhere*, which people like Lenin and Mao were about to circumvent via processes that did not follow those parameters, and 2) Marx is prescribing brutal misery in the name of a revolution that, almost 200 years later, still hasn't happened, and appears exceedingly unlikely to happen anytime soon. He's gone from describing the machinery of the Western European past to imposing that machinery upon the rest of the world's future. If you (the general "you," not you specifically) wish to subject yourself to lifetime of nightmares as a necessary phase of "the revolution," that's one thing; it is quite another to sit in a British library, no less, and to arrogate other people's suffering to a historical protocol you've slapped onto hundreds of millions of strangers' lives, simply because you have decided that capitalism, and here in its most unrestrained predatory form, is universally prerequisite to anything less murderous than capitalism. The problem is the "universal" part, which always ends with someone trying to tell me why lots and lots and lots of people (whom neither of us will ever meet) must, regrettably, go down screaming under the wheels of the jagannath.
Michael S. Judge
2024-10-02 15:57:04 +0000 UTCI dont think the Marx quote is especially inflammatory or racist. I know it’s positioned next to the Hegel quote to make it appear so but he seems to be just describing the reality of colonialization and capitalism. Like of the powers of the world at that time, the British Empire was the most technologically advanced and was a central power of capitalism. That’s the base Marxist idea of societies needing to go through capitalism to get to communism. The social and technological advancements are essential. It’s not because the Indians or the English are superior racially. It’s just the way development unfolded that led to Britain getting to that stage of advancement prior to other places. It would have been someone else colonizing them if not for the British. As the rest of the world that was not as developed was gobbled up through colonialism. He seems to just be stating what happened from a Marxist lens.
Tvvvv
2024-10-02 15:28:57 +0000 UTCSecond that
Dies Irae63
2024-10-02 05:01:00 +0000 UTCI didn't do a good enough job making it clear – really this should've been an 150-minute mega episode, and I hope part 2 will make it obvious why I bring these things up in the first place (apart from being directly asked about them on numerous occasions), I was just too sick to do it all at once – but the point was not so much that a guy born in 1818 was racist, big surprise, but the insistence upon a single model of both real-time political change and general historical progression so thoroughly born of, and limited to, a particular genesis and background that its answer for "What about places that aren't like Europe?" is "Make them Europe first," which is arguably where most of the important sequelæ to Marxism as such have had to rework & improvise. Even the Bolshevik Revolution, which I think it's fair to call the first major practical success of Marxism in action, happened in a place whose social order, economy, internal balance of factional power, physical dimensions, etc., had almost nothing to do with the Europe that Marx knew about. His maxim, and it was not an ironic one, that the bourgeois were the most revolutionary class in history, and the core primacy of that in his thought, isn't too well borne out by the places were some version of communism actually happened
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-23 13:14:20 +0000 UTCThis will come up at length in part 2, but the internet is the paradigmatic modern "counterinsurgency" weapon: hidden in plain sight, easily explained away as something innocuous, capable of turning a vast profit on its operations, superb at obscuring just where the fuck all that money and information ends up & to whom it belongs
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-23 13:04:46 +0000 UTCHe's stated as much in previous episode. SAGE is something he's brought up many times https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environment SAGE > phoenix program > COINTEL program > modern policing programs (LApd in particular) The fact that more than 50% of Tor exit nodes are explicitly owned by the FBI says a lot about the state of the internet as a whole
John H
2024-09-23 12:48:12 +0000 UTCI don’t think there was anything novel said in this episode. I think most people would agree European philosophers from a certain era were racist because just about everyone was. Of course Marx’s general analysis still stands as the best tool we have (with asterisks).
Gabriel M
2024-09-21 23:21:16 +0000 UTCHave you read Surveillance Valley? I’d be curious on your thoughts on the theory that the origins of the Internet stem at least as much from counterinsurgency as from nuclear war planning.
Trazdat
2024-09-19 19:56:44 +0000 UTCJust don't let me die before you get to the Rathenau scene!
Scott
2024-09-19 15:16:02 +0000 UTCoops. I didnt mean to post the above. I meant to jot some notes finish later respond later. What you are describing about tuning in and builiding a receptacle riitual environment to recieve something sounds incredibly out there until you see it happen to people independantly again and again and again. It makes a lot of sense where diifferent personality issues where the ego needs to be in contorl or the source of would block any kind of authentic art. I use brainspotting , qEEG and ETT and a bunch of other wierd modalities to heal patients trauma buit also reconnect them to creative projects. You have to discuss all of these ideas at the END because at the begining it would be too weird before they felt these things happen. I laugh about that with people in the last session a lot. What these modalities are doing is pulling the brainstem through deep implicit emotions that it either avoids or is enmeshed with to "complete" the emotional arc. The mid and front brain freak out for a couple days where they dont understand their new relationship to emotion and self. People feel things strongly and have bizzre prescient mythy dreams and are kind of tired and ornery. After that they are all done and many describe this process youare describing almost identically. I dont want to be too technical but on the qEEG you can "see" this happen and there is a neurological basis for your minotaur screaming in the labyrinth of the brainstem hearing someone elses scream metaphor. Trauma and intuition come from the same part of the brain and feel the same. It requires egoless theta wave states to let that trapped information out by confronting it to sort through it and tell it apart. There is a personality type that you get that is failry consistent iif you are in the traumatized/dissociative/psychosis adjacent synesthesia world that makes you uniquely capable at seeing and helping trauma patients get trauma out of their own brainstem. If you are around Texas you should look up someone that has an ETT light device and experience one. They are really weird and can give a lot people visions. It is really hard to or explain sell anyone on this kind of therapy that hasnt done it the work themselves so our approach is to use brain based medicine that does it super quickly for someone in 20min so they dont have to intelecualize it or buy in emotionally. Trauma patients are bad at having faith that something will work for them. I would love to show you our pupilometry stuff where you can "see" what the brainstem is feeling BEFORE a person is aware of the feeling by watching the PNS and SNS fight each other based on paradoxical emotional resoponse in the sub corticle brain. It is wild.
Joel Blackstock
2024-09-18 16:00:53 +0000 UTCAs much of a genius as Marx was, he was still subject to his material conditions and the time and place in which he was raised. He likely never met a single person who wasn’t a Euro-supremacist
YourBabysFather
2024-09-17 12:53:41 +0000 UTCHi MSJ, I hope you’re well. Very interesting episode as always - looking forward to the next one! On the subject of the nuclear bomb as a transformative force have you ever come across the Australian (where I’m from ahah) magazine Arena? John Hinkson from Arena has written extensively on the nuclear bomb as representative of a larger transformative techno-scientific revolution. It’s Marxist writing but it breaks with a lot of the assumptions underpinning orthodox Marxism. I think it’s right up your alley - lmk if you’re interested and I’ll link some articles :-))
Angus Cameron
2024-09-15 22:16:35 +0000 UTCman, your thoughts and the way you let us take part, just always hits the spot
Watermane
2024-09-15 21:20:54 +0000 UTCIt's one of my favourite novels! I love how it brims with OCD. The Cathedral-minutiae, ticks & antennae, the diameter of hair + lice, et al. MSJ I think you'll take to it.
Conor Walker
2024-09-15 16:49:48 +0000 UTCSo much to think about in this episode (as ever), unfortunately the koan my brain has chosen to meditate upon these last few days is “baby girl Hegel serving cunt”
Adam
2024-09-15 10:35:52 +0000 UTCI also think a ritual CAN be more than the sort of transactional exchange you're describing, it doesn't HAVE to be that mercenary, but you're right for most people at most times
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-15 04:31:40 +0000 UTCAll the really great art that's ever been made, while it may very well involve some elements of conscious planning and architecture, hinges upon the artist's ability to make him- or herself a very specifically-shaped vessel for the cosmos to flow into or, if you prefer, up and through, like an oil derrick. There's a lot of that, dissected with characteristic patient obsessiveness, in Proust
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-15 04:30:38 +0000 UTCIt's amazing how your able to describe such specific phenomenological fodder that I am chewing on but with a jewlers lense. Your nest and ideas being dead or growing thing that I made me realize why I encourage myself and patients to use the animistic perspecitve that we do. you give up a little bit of your conciousness to make the universe concious. It will teach you well. A ritual is just you externalizing somethings in order to withdraw them later so you have more control over it but animism is closer to the Neolithic condition.
Joel Blackstock
2024-09-15 03:48:55 +0000 UTCOh Catholicism is the best form of Christianity, for certain, unless you can locate the rare sect of truly sincere Quakers who'll tell you "Hurting people is bad and Jesus is our example of not hurting people," and that's it – Catholicism is the only Western form of Christianity that has any RELIGION in it, any connection to the pagan-animist world that preceded it by 10,000 years (the Coptic Christians get this as well), but 1) you're not supposed to admit it, and 2) you only discover it once the Church has had plenty of time to make a psychiatric burn victim of you
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-15 00:26:12 +0000 UTCPlus it inevitably leads to people discovering, say, drugs, and having a (hopefully short) interlude of thinking "Well if I'm evil and doomed already, then why not be the King of Hell and really do my shit," and a fair number of such persons never actually escape that phase, or alternate between it and crocodile-tear piety until they die
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-15 00:22:23 +0000 UTChonestly Jean Cauvin as an agent of cosmic evil is so self-evident that I'm not sure I need to talk about it
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-15 00:19:11 +0000 UTCAmerican Protestants – who aren't even Christians, who either worship American nationalism in the form of Jesus or are LARPing as Old Testament Hebrews – don't know shit about some damn decades. They don't even know the word. It blows my mind that those motherfuckers go to a convention center once a week to listen to a guy named Pastor Todd who wears a headset mic and has a band that sounds like U2, and I'm told that I grew up in "the same basic religion as them"
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-15 00:18:32 +0000 UTCWhere is there room for self-exploration or even self-acceptance when, even in the car, it's time to do a decade? Or, Hell, even the whole Rosary.
Colin Helpio
2024-09-15 00:13:38 +0000 UTCI'm a confirmed Catholic and your thoughts on positive feelings and Catholicism really resonated with me. The first thing you learn growing up Catholic is that if something is fun it's probably a sin.
Colin Helpio
2024-09-15 00:02:07 +0000 UTCEverything you said about Irish Catholicism was like you were reading my mind, so thanks again for what you do
hypervigil
2024-09-14 21:42:04 +0000 UTCthis has nothing to do with anything but can we talk about jean fkn cauvin/jan pierterszoon coen/the dutch east india company n why calvinism is satanic
Laura
2024-09-14 21:15:31 +0000 UTCthis is all painfully on the mark wow i went to a Protestant school in Florida for most of my childhood, which was all of the autocannibal morality, but instead of pagan ceremonies we had 'chapel' where the entire school sat on gym bleachers at 8:00am in 100% humidity and, for example, a firefighter would walk on stage and share that he was once called to rescue a woman who had sat on her couch uninterrupted for so long that her skin began to rot and fuse with the upholstery. the lesson? she had strayed from God's instruction and succumbed to Sloth, and our fates would be as severe or worse if we chose to do the same. i was myb 8 lol later i was a patient for a couple years at a youth psychosis clinic and during my first interview my psych involuntarily scoffed when I shared that I was raised Christian in the south, and told me I was no less than her 7th new patient that month with that background. "i'm already dead and this is hell" unfortunately remains undefeated in explanatory power when you've inherited an ethics of self disgust from such a young age that there was never a "you" to try and return to that wasn't already constituted by hating yourself. life is only rendered possible by your guiltiness of it ect ect
demiurge lovato
2024-09-14 16:04:22 +0000 UTCThanks for this. It’s funny, I consider myself to be a Marxist AND I agree 100% with everything you said. For me it’s about a method of analysis, so really one can use “Marxism” to disprove Marx. It’s a very useful lens, but where orthodox Marxists go wrong is confusing what they see through that lens for reality itself.
Brian
2024-09-14 16:00:55 +0000 UTCBrilliant episode as always. I wanted to put this Russell Means transcription here because I find it relevant to the episode and also because he is relevant to where I live and who I live with. https://www.filmsforaction.org/news/revolution-and-american-indians-marxism-is-as-alien-to-my-culture-as-capitalism/ I also wanted to say that sometimes I boil down my issue with Marx to his totalitarianism. The whole thing where he thinks Western civ is superior to all other civilizations and that his version of communism is the only right way to live – that's totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is when someone declares they know the one and only right way to live (their way). I feel sympathy for your pain and experience with your perpetual migraine. I can't even imagine. I wish I could offer more than my sympathy and whatever power my prayers may have. I appreciate what you do on this show. Thank you Michael.
Jack
2024-09-14 05:25:44 +0000 UTCSorry rambling perhaps
Adam
2024-09-14 03:51:10 +0000 UTCIn some Jews, this understanding of God’s senselessness obviously contributes to whacked ideas — fuck it, Palestinians are basically amalekites, God says kill them. In other words, they justify their own senselessness with Gods. Most of the reform American Jews I know took a lot more skepticism and caution from this conception of the big man, though — if the absolute authority is sometimes senseless, then surely worldly authority is not beyond reproach
Adam
2024-09-14 03:50:25 +0000 UTCI realize you were referring to those portions of the Bible as crosses to bear (ha) but I have to say that anything entitled The Five Sorrowful Mysteries piques my interest
Adam
2024-09-14 03:43:51 +0000 UTCThe metaphysical melange you’re talking about there always made Catholicism more beautiful and attractive to me than most Christian sects. I will say that, at least in reform and conservative varieties, Judaism accepts the caprice of God a little more readily, such that not every thought or utterance is made reflect on the fate of your everlasting soul. Sometime God’s a dick. Sometimes he’s good to us. Not much use in trying to deduce which particular actions he condones (obviously we have our guidelines — Ten Commandments and such, but your rabbi never pretends to know which rituals you can proceed with for repentance; which type of apology God wants). Maybe this is a stretch, but I’ve always seen Christianity’s general acceptance of depicting God as a man as some extension of this difference. We were taught at my synagogue to conceive of God as incorporeal — in everything — and therefore as mysterious as everything else. It’s a little easier to imagine him wagging his finger at you when, yknow, he’s painted at the Sistine chapel with fingers.
Adam
2024-09-14 03:34:30 +0000 UTCAlso, speaking of Romanians & fascism—the filmmaker Radu Jude is really perceptive about this shit. His “Bad Luck Banging” is probably the best COVID era film I’ve seen that actually addresses what pandemic life was like and he pulls no punches in it talking about his country’s denial of their fascist history
Ashley Naftule
2024-09-14 00:30:11 +0000 UTCSomeone once described the Nazis asking the Romanian Iron Guard to tone it down a bit as being the genocidal equivalent of telling the smartest kids in class to stop throwing off the curve for everyone else and that’s the first thing I think about whenever the topic of Romanian fascism comes up.
Ashley Naftule
2024-09-14 00:28:03 +0000 UTCOh I don't mean it's ONLY military-strategic, just that it doesn't fit under the more determinedly theoretical frameworks of yr Classico Marxism
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-13 23:50:37 +0000 UTCI have not, never even heard of it, but I sounds like I should. Have you ever noticed that Romanians have a special kind of access to the innermost heart of fascism
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-13 23:45:01 +0000 UTC"but that's more purely military-strategic" Better minds than ours should look at this - I don't think it's purely military-strategic but something older, deeper, broader, more organic to the human flesh. The snake oil salesman pushing counter-insurgency tactics, "spreading Democracy" et al. Hack historians say the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu; the Americans at.... I dunno, Tet '68? But the Vietnamese had been repelling invaders for 800 years!
Rohmer Simpson
2024-09-13 23:42:44 +0000 UTC(And THAT'S all when Catholicism is nominally going "well." I beg thee, imagine thence the feeling of being about 14, with all that etched into your spinal column, and THEN you realize that you're at constant risk of one of the worst things that can happen to anybody – 2 different priests at my childhood church were "reassigned" for fucking or trying to fuck kids, and I later found out that it was a national hotspot for child predators in the 1970s – and that nobody in your life who's supposed to be a trustworthy authority figure has warned you about any of this, though they all knew, and that they've all been involved in silencing and covering up prior incidents, and that IF anything happens to you and you're dumb enough to try talking about it, you'll be told it couldn't have happened like you remember, be forced or bribed to recant, and probably be coerced into a personal apology to the priest for "lying about him." And all this when you're trying to figure out what the fuck sex and girls/boys/whatever are, meaning your first exposure to all of that is epidemic child molestation, meaning you might, oh, say, just to pick a totally random and not at all personal example, be convinced that anything Of the Flesh is irredeemably evil and that, if you're not vigilant and self-restraining to a phenomenally OCD standard that is beyond the scope of human control, that same Flesh will come for you and find you and turn you into a monster just like the monsters you're now afraid are waiting behind every closed door. Such a hypothetical person, not meant to resemble any real person[s] living or dead, would probably have a real normal brain that only gets more normal as time goes on, wouldn't you say.)
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-13 23:41:42 +0000 UTCWell really, we're not supposed to tell anybody this, but if you grow up seriously Catholic, it's basically the ethics & partial metaphysics of Judaism + the ritual and partial metaphysics of paganism, especially of the Greco-Roman-Levantine variety. This, I daresay, is a great IDEA for a religion, and there are certain Catholic mystics & artists who have found their way to a version of Catholicism that I would happily adhere to (if the word "Catholic" weren't already useless), except that most of the pagan parts of the Catholic Church are designed to make you feel real bad, and the Jesus-specific metaphysics of the Gospel & Pauline epistles tend to overrule the infinite-mystery, borderline-negative-theology part of Judaism – so it's not just that you gotta feel real bad, it's that the metaphysics don't really allow you any conclusion except "What I feel bad about is my fault, therefore shameful, therefore never to be spoken aloud." And if you're thinking, "Hey, that sounds like a religion designed for pedophiles to get away with molesting children," well. I'd love to disagree. But. Let's see if I can do this off the top of my head: The Agony in the Garden, The Scourging at the Pillar, The Crowning with Thorns, The Carrying of the Cross, and The Crucifixion. Blammo!, no resources consulted, because my childhood religion has something called The Five Sorrowful Mysteries, and they're so deeply printed on my brain that I can still name them (in order, no less), even after nearly 25 years' absence from Catholic mass. The Agony in the Garden, I'll tell you what. If you ever want to know how serious somebody is, and that person is nominally Catholic, ask that person how often (s)he thinks about The Agony in the Garden. I, for example, have refused to take the Eucharist at every funeral on the Catholic side of my family, so that's gotta be about 21.5 years of abstention; if the mood strikes me, however, I can and will spend an entire night alone, in the dark, chain-smoking, looking at nothing, listening to nothing, just thinking about The Agony in the Garden. They stole that part of TRUE DETECTIVE from me.
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-13 23:30:40 +0000 UTCBook question for MSJ: have you read Cartarescu’s Solenoid? It’s a really dense, interesting novel that feels like the sort of thing you could sink your teeth into (especially with how much it talks about the 4th dimension/exits/fascism as a kind of Dreamtime).
Ashley Naftule
2024-09-13 23:29:45 +0000 UTCThere are obviously many pitfalls to growing up Jewish in America — many of them painfully apparent atm — but boy every time you talk about your spiritual priors I feel thankful that nobody did that to me. Sorry brother
Adam
2024-09-13 23:09:45 +0000 UTCAlso, somebody's gotta do a really good Abimael Guzmán biopic, because it's fucking crazy that a philosophy professor at San Cristóbal Huamanga University, author of such blockbusting best-sellers as THE KANTIAN THEORY OF SPACE, put together a revolutionary popular army *in his late 40s* and was the face of the single most frightening anti-American force in South America for 15 years.
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-13 22:03:40 +0000 UTCExactly the sort of "nondialectical," and correct, idea that got Benjamin in trouble. Imagine asking someone to accept their genocidal replacement of their entire culture & society by bourgeois capital colonization because it will eventually, allegedly, create the sort of proletarian class formation that will eventually, allegedly, lead to revolution along communist lines. That, arguably, is the most important philosophical element of Maoism (the MOST important Mao contribution, I would argue, is figuring out a model of guerrilla warfare that the world has never figured out how to defeat, but that's more purely military-strategic). Mao was not gonna wait for industrialized proletarianization to set the stage for a revolution, and against astonishing odds, he figured out a way to make things happen that Marx, – given his penchant for dressing up his own assertions in metaphysical certainty, which seems like an incurable German disease – would probably have called something like "an objectively incorrect analysis." It is hard-unto-impossible for any Westerner really to KNOW anything about China, not just now but over the last 80 years, so I don't really see much purpose in adopting a "stance" at the moment, but when you put Marx and Mao next to each other (and throw Lenin and Stalin and Che in there too if you want), it becomes very obvious why Mao and Che were the faces you saw on placards in every revolutionary movement from the ’50s onward – especially in the Third World, or among exploited peoples who were pseudo-integrated into a "stable" political order. From the FLN to Sendero Luminoso, you can only see yourself in the bedrock of Marx's heuristic, but you can sure as hell look at Mao and Che and think "THAT could be the FUTURE."
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-13 21:59:04 +0000 UTCYou know, that line from Benjamin's Theses about how the working class are "nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren" has honestly never sat totally well with me. I think a bit of a visceral aversion on my part to anything that sounds at all like desire for vengeance or retribution has made it hard to take Benjamin's point seriously enough. But the way you explained the potential justificatory/teleological narrative of Marxism in terms of colonialism is finally allowing it to cohere, so thank you for that. Also I love your point about giving ideas a place to live. That is an explanation of something I never thought would or could come to sense in real words.
David
2024-09-13 21:33:51 +0000 UTCo Bobby B will feature heavily, in one way or another, in pt. 2 of this
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-13 21:29:11 +0000 UTC“The secret story is the one we’ll never know. Although we’re living it from day to day thinking we’re alive. Thinking we’ve got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn’t matter. But every damn thing matters, it’s just that we don’t realize. We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another. We don’t even realize that’s a lie.” Roberto Bolaño
Rob Dag
2024-09-13 18:13:50 +0000 UTCThe "give your idea a place to live and line it with things that they like" stuff is some of the only really actionable creative advice I've ever heard; a dunce like me can pass that along to fellow (in my case) writers in a way that may even make sense when I put it into words.
Rohmer Simpson
2024-09-13 18:13:14 +0000 UTCGreat ep. Interested to how this theory applies to Africa as well as India and Asia. These great thinkers called eastern ppls primitive civilizations….i can only imagine the way they thought of Africans and their history/ future. must be monstrous
Venetia’s glue gun
2024-09-13 17:15:33 +0000 UTC
