twilight of the fetishes

“A left-wing tabloid had slavered its venomous spittle all over the Great Idea, as Count Leinsdorf might have put it, calling it just another sensation for the ruling class in the wake of the latest sex murder, and this caused an honest workingman who had been drinking to lose his temper. He had brushed up against two solid citizens pleased with their day's business who, convinced that a contented frame of mind could express itself anywhere, were rather loudly airing their approval of the great patriotic campaign they had read about in their paper. Words were exchanged, and as the proximity of a policeman encouraged the citizens as much as it provoked their attacker, the scene became increasingly impassioned. The policeman began by watching it over his shoulder, subsequently turning to face it and then coming closer; he attended as an observer, like a protruding offshoot of the iron machinery of the state, which ends in buttons and other metal trim. There is always something ghostly about living constantly in a well-ordered state. You cannot step into the street or drink a glass of water or get on a stretcar without touching the balanced levers of a gigantic apparatus of laws and interrelations, setting them in motion or letting them maintain you in your peaceful existence; one knows hardly any of these levers, which reach deep into the inner workings and, coming out the other side, lose themselves in a network whose structure has never yet been unraveled by anyone.

whats your favorite book you've read that you think people would be surprised by? aka favorite book that doesn't match your general reading tendencies

“There has been an optical illusion, that is, an excessively passive Marxist reading of a bourgeois politics as being based on the “rights of man,” as a universalist ideology of the citoyen that masked the particular class interest of the bourgeois. Whence a workers’ horizon of thought as essentially a critique of ideology and as a retrieval of its ultimate truth in the Marxist doctrine of human emancipation. These things remain painfully present. What still has to be calculated is the politico-practical damage, the blockage of the development of the class struggle that has been occasioned by the incomprehension of the political origins of capitalism. Once again, these are the reasons behind this choice of a work of research that, over the long term, aims to remove this blockage, even, and amongst other things, putting a web of problems back into play. In reality, in modern classical bourgeois political thought there was not only a knowing false consciousness, which is to say ideology, but also realistic objective description of nodes, passages and, yes, problems – of course, this is truer in the case of great conservative thought than in so-called revolutionary thinking. So, I repeat, from Machiavelli to Hobbes, politics becomes State, technique [tecnica] becomes machine, accumulation becomes power and the practice of politics wins, that is, conquers and conserves domination. In between there are the wars of religion, social revolts, a civil war turning into revolution, the “general crisis” of the 1600s and a first crisis of bourgeois culture in which the unity and rationality of the Renaissance intellect crumbles. In the course of this fiery ordeal, it is a fact – as historically indubitable as it is politically rich – that the unity and concentration of power, and hence the reality of sovereign power, comes before and founds the liberty, sovereignty, and the very property of the bourgeois individual. It is on this latter material base that the need for the ideology of modern politics emerges and does so quickly, already in the sixteenth century with natural law theory and Calvinism. What follows, Locke, the liberal tradition and later democratic thought, cannot be understood without these ideological sources; but they also cannot be understood without those great material, structural processes of the organization of power as a function of what will become the history of the accumulation of capital. What emerges here is a weighty problem that has yet to find its great historian. Upon these two aspects of ideology and power the religious unity of the world is shattered. The protestant ethic operates as an ideological support for a very specific epoch of the spirit of capitalism: it appears as a tactical relation, not by chance expressed in certain sociological categories, Weberian ideal types that interpret, describe, explain but do not change and do not propose to change the conditions of the investigation according to a practical outlook. The historical nexus represented by the relation of power and capital – the conquest and exercise of power, the accumulation and development of capital – is posed in the form of the strategic nexus of the relation between Catholicism and capitalism. And on the side, more distant historically but conceptually tighter, it appears as the ambiguous functional interchange of theology and politics. This is where we must plunge the knife of discovery so as to uncover the nerves, the ligaments, and the relations of the political in a determinate historical point; here is perhaps the privileged field for an anatomy of power; without doubt, this is the terrain upon which for a long time it will be necessary to work with the means of production of the critique of politics.”

do you know of any good books or readings regarding pedagogy and/or children's education?

really interested by the egoism quotes you posted the other day. what do you appreciate about stiner et al's points and what do you think are their weaker arguments? also, do you think leftist have a tendency to be stuck in the past, and if so do you think that tendency has a negative effect on its reach?

“How many times do you see where a man or woman has shot another through jealousy! The standard of purity has decided that it is right, "it shows spirit," "it is justifiable" to—murder a human being for doing exactly what you did yourself,—love the same woman or same man! Morality! Honor! Virtue!! Passing from the moral to the physical phase; take the statistics of any insane asylum, and you will find that, out of the different classes, unmarried women furnish the largest one. To preserve your cruel, vicious, indecent standard of purity (?) you drive your daughters insane, while your wives are killed with excess. Such is marriage. Don't take my word for it; go through the report of any asylum or the annals of any graveyard. Look how your children grow up. Taught from their earliest infancy to curb their love natures—restrained at every turn! Your blasting lies would even blacken a child's kiss. Little girls must not be tomboyish, must not go barefoot, must not climb trees, must not learn to swim, must not do anything they desire to do which Madame Grundy has decreed "improper." Little boys are laughed at as effeminate, silly girl-boys if they want to make patchwork or play with a doll. Then when they grow up, "Oh! Men don't care for home or children as women do!" Why should they, when the deliberate effort of your life has been to crush that nature out of them. "Women can't rough it like men." Train any animal, or any plant, as you train your girls, and it won't be able to rough it either. Now will somebody tell me why either sex should hold a corner on athletic sports? Why any child should not have free use of its limbs? These are the effects of your purity standard, your marriage law. This is your work—look at it! Half your children dying under five years of age, your girls insane, your married women walking corpses, your men so bad that they themselves often admit Prostitution holds against PURITY a bond of indebtedness. This is the beautiful effect of your god, Marriage, before which Natural Desire must abase and belie itself. Be proud of it!”

I just finished The Worldly Philosophers and I want to continue more down this little rabbit hole. I understand that Heilbroner only looked over classical economics so could you suggest some pre-classical economic books? Also do you know any good books I can read about Marxian thought to continue after The Worldly Philosophers? If you already got a list somewhere could you refer me to that?

“Tact, like empathy, is based on a certain form of mutual understanding. But while empathy implies the idea of entering someone else’s mind inasmuch as it is linked to the presumption that ‘I know how you feel’, tact exists to create a form of bonding between individuals that is not based on the idea of intrusion but, conversely, on the respect for existing boundaries, and on a willingness not always to assume that one knows. While empathy requires resonance and proximity, tact is there to restore distance, and to accept the difference between the individuals involved in order to protect and preserve their dignity. Tact is based on an attention towards otherness.”

Rather than saying what love is or how it works, Dunayevskaya says that we have to create the conditions that will enable people to get creative and experiment with new and different forms of human relationality. She notes that we cannot really do that in a capitalist society because capitalism instrumentalizes everything human for its own power. Every human energy and motivation is something for capital to seize.

I think that one of the core insights of "Christian thought" or whatever is just simply that doing good does not come naturally to us, but that it is possible to practice it, with the help of regret, repentance, grace, and that the more you practice these things the more naturally does it come to you. You can completely disagree with what virtues Christianity assigns (I'm fairly convinced, but you don't have to be) but I think that thinking like a Christian virtue ethicist would be helpful for basically any social movement.

[S]exuality and love do not live in the bedroom of Oedipus, they dream instead of wide-open spaces, and cause strange flows to circulate that do not let themselves be stocked within an established order. Desire does not ‘want’ revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right, as though involuntarily, by wanting what it wants.

“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”

"Pitiful, abject nations, you have taken leave of your senses! You cling stubbornly to evil and are blind to what is good. You allow the best part of your income to be taken from you, you let your farms be pillaged, your houses despoiled and stripped of your ancient ancestral possessions! You can claim nothing as your own, and it seems you would be glad to be allowed to rent from someone else your possessions, your families and your very lives. And all this devastation, this misfortune, this ruin is not visited upon you by an enemy—or rather, it does come from an enemy, and from the man to whom you give the power he has, for whom you so courageously go to war, laying down your lives without hesitation to make him more powerful. Your oppressor has but two eyes, two hands, one body, and has nothing that the least of your infinite number of citizens does not have—except the advantage you give him, which is the power to destroy you. Where did he get those eyes which spy on you, if you did not give him them? Would he have all those hands to strike you with, if he did not get them from you? Those feet which trample upon your cities, where did he get them if they are not your own. What power has he over you, if it is not the power you give him. How would he ever dare attack you, if you were not his accomplices? What could he do to you, if you were not receivers of the goods this thief plunders from you, the companion of this murderer who is killing you, traitors to yourselves? You sow your fruit so that he can destroy the harvest. You furnish your houses, so that he can pillage them. You bring up your daughters to sate his lust. You bring up your children so that (at best) he will take them off to fight his wars and be butchered, or make them ministers to his greed and instruments of his vengeance. You accustom yourselves to hardship so that he can enjoy a life of luxury and wallow in foul and base pleasures. You make yourselves weak so that he can be strong and oppress you ever more harshly. The very beasts would not endure these humiliations if they were capable of feeling them. But you can deliver yourselves if you make the effort—not an effort to deliver yourselves, but an effort to want to do so. Resolve to be slaves no more, and you are free! I am not asking you to push him out of your way, to topple him: just stop propping him up and, like a great colossus whose plinth has been taken from under him, he will crumble and be shattered under his own weight."

If enslavement was the reduction of life to the time of the plantation (“lifetime converted into labour time”), a mode of production that rendered human life as “work,” the improvisatory nature of Black music was moving away from time as this singular experience. The play, the sound, was a reminder that “labour time was not life-time.” To reach for life was to create something else with time, beyond that labor time.

“For an identity to be an effect means that it is neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary. That the constituted status of identity is misconstrued along these two conflicting lines suggests the ways in which the feminist discourse on cultural construction remains trapped within the unnecessary binarism of free will and determinism. Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturally intelligible. The critical task for feminism is not to establish a point of view outside of constructed identities; that conceit is the construction of an epistemological model that would disavow its own cultural location and, hence, promote itself as a global subject, a position that deploys precisely the imperialist strategies that feminism ought to criticize.”