struggle sessions

reading group. a participant said lenin meant dictatorship of the proletariat “ironically” which sums up the political line of the group...

was reading on "rootless cosmopolitanism" today. the linked article sources a book i think i'll get on jews in the soviet union.

read minghella’s mini manual today. it made me realize an issue with guerilla warfare that should’ve been obvious: you sabotage the economy you’re working to take over. that’s obviously problematic in some ways.

the dsa network on twitter is discussing the fucking dumbass lenin take and the psl network is discussing the attack on syria

a note to myself for later:

i meant to note i finished the shanghai textbook (the lotta version) yesterday

notes on identity politics

i just had the strangest premonition on seeing an article about china being "relied on to advance globalization"...

But here is something we must do now in the economic field. We must win the competition against the ordinary shop assistant, the ordinary capitalist, the merchant, who will go to the peasant without arguing about communism. Just imagine, he will not begin to argue about communism, but will argue in this way—if you want to obtain something, or carry on trade properly, or if you want to build, I will do the building at a high price; the Communists will, perhaps, build at a higher price, perhaps even ten times higher. It is this kind of agitation that is now the crux of the matter; herein lies the root of economics.

Spinoza said: Omnis determinatio est negatio — every limitation or determination is at the same time a negation.

Let us take any algebraic quantity whatever: for example, a. If this is negated, we get -a (minus a). If we negate that negation, by multiplying -a by -a, we get +a², i.e., the original positive quantity, but at a higher degree, raised to its second power. In this case also it makes no difference that we can obtain the same a² by multiplying the positive a by itself, thus likewise getting a². For the negated negation is so securely entrenched in a² that the latter always has two square roots, namely, a and — a. And the fact that it is impossible to get rid of the negated negation, the negative root of the square, acquires very obvious significance as soon as we come to quadratic equations.

thinking about a conversation i had with a coworker perhaps 4 years ago now

Only those are worthy of the name of Communists who understand that it is impossible to create or introduce socialism without learning from the organisers of the trusts. For socialism is not a figment of the imagination, but the assimilation and application by the proletarian vanguard, which has seized power, of what has been created by the trusts. We, the party of the proletariat, have no other way of acquiring the ability to organise large-scale production on trust lines, as trusts are organised, except by acquiring it from first-class capitalist experts. We have nothing to teach them, unless we undertake the childish task of “teaching” the bourgeois intelligentsia socialism. We must not teach them, but expropriate them (as is being done in Russia “determinedly” enough), put a stop to their sabotage, subordinate them as a section or group to Soviet power. We, on the other hand, if we are not Communists of infantile age and infantile understanding, must learn from them, and there is something to learn, for the party of the proletariat and its vanguard have no experience of independent work in organising giant enterprises which serve the needs of scores of millions of people.

When the systematic, determinist historical march of the Hegelian Absolute Spirit is “turned on its head”, what has often been the result has been the systematic, inevitable historical march of the economic base, i.e., the economic determinism of the theory or the productive forces.