The Socialist Response

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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby minime » Tue May 08, 2018 12:22 am

Iamwhomiam » Mon May 07, 2018 10:19 pm wrote:I simply pointed out your frivolous response in posting a reference to the video had a much different effect than you could have imagined. It was very powerful snark.

I doubt you're so very evil that you would do that to intentionally cause me discomfort.

Jackass, yeah, but not wicked.


Number 1 then. Your milieu.
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby Burnt Hill » Tue May 08, 2018 12:33 am

Wow. Capped off with an insult. I am impressed.



:twisted:
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby minime » Tue May 08, 2018 12:37 am

Anyways...

JoJoCivil, where are you?
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby Iamwhomiam » Tue May 08, 2018 12:41 am

We're far off topic. You misunderstood my intent. I did not misunderstand your snark. First posting the video and then following it up next with Now. Your snark had a far different impact upon me than you intended and your being a jackass is apolitical.

The capitalist response to socialists of all sorts is to mock and ridicule all and any suggested solutions to social ills caused by greed. Humiliate, demean and declare God's willed it to be as it is.

I have no need to engage with you, minime, not on this subject. Your sole intent in continually bumping your three lures was no more than a strawman looking for participants to mock. I'm not playing. Capitalist, that about covers my name-calling. Jackasses are just stubborn creatures.
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby Burnt Hill » Tue May 08, 2018 12:46 am

Well said Iam, thank you.
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby minime » Tue May 08, 2018 12:54 am

Iamwhomiam » Mon May 07, 2018 10:41 pm wrote:We're far off topic. You misunderstood my intent. I did not misunderstand your snark. First posting the video and then following it up next with Now. Your snark had a far different impact upon me than you intended and your being a jackass is apolitical.

The capitalist response to socialists of all sorts is to mock and ridicule all and any suggested solutions to social ills caused by greed. Humiliate, demean and declare God's willed it to be as it is.

I have no need to engage with you, minime, not on this subject. Your sole intent in continually bumping your three lures was no more than a strawman looking for participants to mock. I'm not playing. Capitalist, that about covers my name-calling. Jackasses are just stubborn creatures.


Yes, please, and thank you. Number 1 then. Off you go.

JoJoCivil?

Anyone? Elvis, care to flesh out your position?
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby Burnt Hill » Tue May 08, 2018 1:15 am

I understand that this is your very own Socialist Response minime, but it also feels like a thread derailment. If I were to conduct am experiment I would start my own thread. That way those who wish not to participate in your experiment could continue on here unfettered with your distractions. Sorry it is a distraction even though I think your framing has some merit.
Unless you started the thread. :eeyaa

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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby peartreed » Tue May 08, 2018 1:19 am

It is so refreshing to read intelligent insights and accompanying astute commentary from both Iamwhomiam and Burnt Hill, along with their entertaining indifference to low-brow attacks. I've enjoyed years of their perceptive participation, including revealing analysis of critics. Keep up the good work. It is valued and increasingly rare around here.

Since Mac accused me of being a "Socialist Alliance" with AD, I've taken a newfound pride in social causes based on the golden rule and its application to lift the downtrodden and persecuted out from under exploitation and manipulation by anarchists and antagonists seeking attention and personal power by defiance of human decency and moral default.
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby minime » Tue May 08, 2018 1:53 am

Burnt Hill » Mon May 07, 2018 11:15 pm wrote:I understand that this is your very own Socialist Response minime, but it also feels like a thread derailment. If I were to conduct am experiment I would start my own thread. That way those who wish not to participate in your experiment could continue on here unfettered with your distractions. Sorry it is a distraction even though I think your framing has some merit.
Unless you started the thread. :eeyaa

I wish I didn't expect you to give me a number now, do you understand?


The following is from whom on page 20 of this thread, after 100s and 100s of posts of insults and mudslinging from nearly all concerned, and having absolutely nothing to do with Socialist Response.

"Nice of you to keep Luther's thread on topic, minime. I disagree with your choices, but they are yours, not mine."

So, yours is a revisionist history. Since he/she/it said that I have done nothing but continue to exhort others to propose practicable Responses, in keeping with Luther's OP. So far, Luther and Elvis have made the only worthwhile contributions to the thread, in my opinion, while you others, in general, have reduced yourselves to your baser instincts. As seems to be your wont. Confronted by my plea to return to a conversational mode, the argument moved immediately to another thread without abate. You could look it up.

Anyone?
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby Burnt Hill » Tue May 08, 2018 2:33 am

I thought I was in conversational mode.
And I am not talking about continuing to exhort others to propose practicable responses, that's wonderful. You have done other than that though.
I have revised no history, perhaps my feelings have changed as your approach has.
You are brilliantly aware that you are making things too personal aren't you?
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby liminalOyster » Thu May 10, 2018 9:48 pm

Not sure if disproportionate level of psychodrama here is a simple reflection of Trumpian end times or good evidence of speculative black ops line item approved at the tail end of Cheney's years for a secret program to assess threshold of social group cohesion or implosion using a so-called "web forum" with a bunch of randomly selected conspiracy theorists and misanthropes.

If latter, I predict RI suddenly gone one day with all traces removed, redacted and denied sometime around October this year.
"It's not rocket surgery." - Elvis
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby mentalgongfu2 » Fri May 11, 2018 2:38 am

So far, Luther and Elvis have made the only worthwhile contributions to the thread, in my opinion, while you others, in general, have reduced yourselves to your baser instincts. As seems to be your wont. Confronted by my plea to return to a conversational mode, the argument moved immediately to another thread without abate. You could look it up.

Anyone?


My clearly biased opinion is that my own contributions have been quite worthwhile, despite the fact they have engendered no discussion. Perhaps due to me exhorting people to step away from personal attacks and actually discuss the topic. Or maybe they just weren't that interesting. None of them were groundbreaking thoughts or analysis, but certainly better than personal sniping. If anyone feels my contributions were or are not worthwhile, you are free to continue to ignore them. Rather than re-stating them, I would encourage anyone to refer back to prior pages of this thread should they wish to discuss my thoughts on socialist responses. I'm loathe to go back and copy/paste them at this point.

I will merely say that communalism - which I would describe as a form of socialism, is the only viable choice for a society that wishes to not destroy itself from the inside.
"When I'm done ranting about elite power that rules the planet under a totalitarian government that uses the media in order to keep people stupid, my throat gets parched. That's why I drink Orange Drink!"
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Fri May 11, 2018 7:45 am

Worker co-ops, communal housing, co-operative institutions and projects all have their place as part and parcel of a movement to radically challenge top-down power. Hippies and anarchists may emphasize building prefigurative projects, labour unions immediate campaigns of working class advancement. All of this can be- and should be- complementary, in my view.
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Mon May 14, 2018 8:54 pm

This connects:

The revenge against the commons of the ZAD

Why French police, in its biggest operation since May 68, is prepared to kill for Macron’s neoliberal nightmare — and how the ZAD fought back.

Image
Armoured cars against bicycles.

The restart of the negotiations on Wednesday went badly, nothing shifted, despite the presence of ex-TV personality Nicolas Hulot, now minister of ecological transition, in charge of the ZAD case since Marcron’s election. He is flown in specially to Nantes in the presidential jet. Following the meeting with us, he gives a press conference in the palatial hall of the prefecture. The government’s hard line is held, the rights of property and the market reign, there will be no global or collective contract for the land — we have to give individual names and land plots by the 23rd or face evictions. In a rhetorical flourish he ends, “ecology is not anarchy.”

Not surprising for a man whose “ecology” involves owning six cars, signing permits for oil exploration and supporting the nuclear dump at Bure. Hulot is simply the “eco” mask for Macron’s “make the planet great again” form of authoritarian neoliberal green capitalism. But his statement shows Hulot’s absolute ignorance of the history of both ecological and anarchist thought. Many of the first theoreticians of ecological thinking were anarchists.

Élisée Reclus, world-famous geographer and poet, whose beautiful idea that humans are simply “nature becoming aware of herself,” fought on the barricades of the 1871 Paris Commune. The nineteenth-century geographer Peter Kropotkin spent many years in jail and exile for his politics, but was renowned in scientific circles as an early champion of the idea that evolution is not all a competitive war of “red tooth and claw” but instead involves a cooperation, what he termed mutual aid. From the 1950s onwards, US political philosopher Murray Bookchin (now best known for the influence he has on the Kurds to build a stateless form of municipal confederalism, taking place in the autonomous territory of Rojova – Northern Syria) brought ecology and anarchy together.

At the heart of Bookchin’s social ecology is the idea that humans dominate and destroy nature because we dominate ourselves. To avert ecological collapse we had to get rid of all hierarchies — man over woman, old over young, white over black, rich over poor. According to Bookchin, our greatest lesson to gain from the natural world was that we had let go of the idea of difference, and reclaim the concept held by many small-scale organic societies, of unity in diversity. Diversity being the basic force of all bio-systems. He envisioned a world that would be neither communist nor capitalist, but what he called Communalist. “The effort to restore the ecological principle of unity in diversity,” he wrote, “has become a social effort in its own right — a revolutionary effort that must rearrange sensibility in order to rearrange the real world.” For him the question of society, to reframe Rosa Luxembourg’s socialism or barbarism, was: “anarchism or extinction.”

When we truly inhabit an eco-system, it becomes obvious that life has no control center, no hierarchy, no chiefs or bosses, no governments or presidents. Every form of life is a self-organizing form of commons — deeply connected and interdependent, always changing, always embedded and entangled — from the cells in your fingers to worms in your the garden, from the trees in the forest of Rohanne to the bacteria in your gut. As biologist and cultural theorist Andreas Weber says, all life forms “are continuously mediating relationships among each other — relationships that have a material side, but also always embody meaning, a sense of living and the notion of belonging to a place.” The more we observe the living world in all its complexity the more we are able to understand how to become commoners, how to truly inhabit a place and see that the separation between the individual and the whole is a fiction.

Image
Evictions in ZAD de Notre Dames de Landes, March 2018

“In the ecological commons,” writes Weber, “a multitude of different individuals and diverse species stand in various relationships to one another — competition and cooperation, partnership and predatory hostility, productivity and destruction. All those relations, however, follow one higher principle: only behavior that allows for the productivity of the whole ecosystem over the long term and that does not interrupt its capacities of self-production, will survive and expand. The individual is able to realize itself only if the whole can realize itself. Ecological freedom obeys this basic necessity.”

And so to be really free is not to be an individual able to operate free from constraints, but to be tied to beneficial relationships with people and habitats, relationships that feed you materially and psychologically. Without a tie to your food, you starve; without the tie to lovers, you sadden. We are free because we are linked. Freedom is not breaking our chains but turning them into living roots and veins that connect, share, flow together and enable us to change and evolve in common.


More: https://roarmag.org/essays/revenge-agai ... -eviction/
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Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Mon Jun 04, 2018 10:38 pm

“Appealing to an audience which no longer exists” – Daphne Lawless at the Left Forum in New York City

So we have a marginalised and increasingly self-marginizing Left activist subculture, drifting into complete irrelevance. And on the other hand – a resurgence of Fascist and right-wing populist organisation, under the names of “white nationalism”, “the alt-right”, or even just “populism”. I don’t have time to explain the story in detail if you haven’t noticed, but for 30 years the smarter cookies in this disgusting crew have been leading a “metapolitical” intervention into the areas of popular culture such as populated by alienated youth, to whitewash their genocidal ideology and find forms of imagery and words by which it can become tolerable again in the new era.

In the 1990s, I was part of several struggles to push these people out of Gothic and neo-pagan subculture. Twenty years later, this same scum have taken over the entire Internet subculture of anonymous imageboards, or “chans”, through a more cunning application of the same things they did back then.

So what I believe we have is an intellectual surrender and capitulation of much of the activist Left – in some places, a majority – to the success of right-wing populism. It’s a disgusting opportunism of the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” variety, combined with a grudging appreciation of how the Trumps, the Farages, the Le Pens etc are “sticking it” to the hated liberals.

We’ve seen this before. In 1928-1935 we called it “Third Period Stalinism”. Although I think there’s something left out of traditional Left historiography of that fateful era where the Communist International abstained from the fight against Hitler, leading inevitably to the Second World War. It’s that it wasn’t just that the Stalinised German Communists thought that the Social Democrats and the bourgeois liberals were no worse than the National Socialists. It’s that there was a dirty secret, an essential programmatic agreement between the Reds and the Brownshirts over several things – as seen when the Nazis and KPD campaigned together to bring down the Prussian government in 1932.

I’ve written on this subject in several articles over the last few years, which are available at fightback.org.nz. The milder form of this phenomenon I named “conservative leftism” – a left which has given up on the ability to imagine a better future, and can only support a kind of nostalgic return to the certainties of 1960s-style social democracy in Europe, or – in the US – FDR’s New Deal or LBJ’s Great Society.

Two problems: it’s a dangerous move to compete with fascists in the nostalgia market. They’re much better at it. Secondly: to wind the clock back also means throwing the victories of the social movements in the neoliberal era under the bus. Under the guise of sneering at “IdPol”, they’re willing to say things like “no-one cares about trans rights in Michigan”. Ha ha, because there are no trans people in Detroit?

This is an appeal, not to the downtrodden and oppressed to seize the reins of their own future, but an appeal to the frustrations of the previously privileged who are losing their privilege. This is precisely the opposite of how socialist groups have traditionally tried to organise – by appealing to the vanguard of the struggle, the people who’re organising themselves already, they’re putting the masses into motion, they’re becoming a force to be reckoned with. Because to do that, you would have to look at the LGBT movements, organisations like Black Lives Matter, even the urban liberal-Greens who are winning struggles for sustainable energy, transit, housing, etc. And that’s because the dogmatic activist Left has nothing to say to such movements except to tell them at their victories are not real, “IdPol”, actually part of the neoliberal problem that needs sweeping away.

I call this tendency on the activist Left a “zombie plague”, in that it takes over the minds of previously sound comrades and turns them into the kind of people who can dehumanize and sneer at actually-existing struggles for basic democratic liberties, and cheer on right-wing nationalist authoritarian capitalists as they “do the job”, “the job” being, apparently, outraging liberal sensitivities. We are seeing the birth of an actual Red-Brown tendency – the final form of the monster – in which people who still consider themselves to be socialists call for unity with the right-wing populists (the Trumpists, the Brexiteers, Russian imperialism etc.) on the grounds of bringing down the filthy neoliberal elite. And then you see people using “globalist” as a snarl world, a dog whistle one step down from “international bankers”.

To paraphrase Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense: “I see Red-Brown people, walking around. They don’t know they’re Red-Brown.” We need a recomposition of the activist Left which will once again reach out to the vanguards of struggle, rather than chase after a reactionary trend in the belief that if clever socialists take control, it won’t be reactionary any more. We need to organise the victims of Trumpism, not its supporters.


https://fightback.org.nz/2018/06/03/app ... york-city/
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