Yeah, people always say they want more well read leadership.
Which, sure, I understand the impulse. Everyone wants to have to respect someone respectable, you know.
But on the other hand, Justinian was as cold and ruthless as he was learned. He probably massacred like 10% of the population in his capital city in one day.
The inundation of total bullshit overload is something that would even make the most radical Situationist's head explode. On a tangentially related note, if the likes of Kimmel, Colbert, Stewart, et al. whose Trump mockery, while highly amusing, is no substitute for real opposition. Ha! we sure showed that bastard while ICE invades another city. These bastards are beyond shame and just don't give a shit about anything the aforementioned TV guys have to say.
I remember an RT America podcast in 2021 that asked "Do whistleblowers matter?". I don't recall the host and RT is no longer available for casual consumption. They also discussed Wikileaks, Snowden, Manning, etc - all this available information and what became of it? I think about that to this day and you rekindle the memory.
The same could be said generally about someone who is alone in the woods. They may find books to read, maybe they get access to wifi and download some podcasts. What is the point of this consumption? To feel apart of the world they are not? Entertainment? If this person were to never speak to anyone every again - what then? Often I feel like this person. I'm sure many do.
And when it comes to authority, there's a famous quote from St. Paul, "all earthly authority is God's authority". A lot of the information we are asked to consume are invocations of authority. By consuming the information, we reify the authority. We reify the reality.
You're bumping up against this anyways so I'll go there ... an alternative is we can consume the word made flesh :-). There is one power that is given to all of us in the Christian bible, the power to forgive. I'm hanging my hat on that to find peace until the heavenly here after, to heal. There's also the power to love. I don't think of that as a power granted us per se. But it is powerful. Maybe after more healing from my PTSD the loving part will be more natural to me.
I still wonder if our timescales are off, it takes most people and culture a very long time to form damning conclusions that are hard to shake, and much longer for the pressure and consensus to make it into the political structure. That process is very fast when the bombs are falling on you, but it takes a long time in a comfortable imperium. Marx's own conclusions took 150 years to make a decisive impact on the world.
What will be interesting is what happens when ham-fisted authoritarians like the Trumps and Starmers actually try to deliberately limit and force the flow of information. One day you wake up TikTok doesn't work, and you're forced to download a similar looking app with content looking more like Truth Social, Newsmax, and the Israeli Foreign Ministry rolled into one. That disruption might matter. They are blowing up their own spice fields, and the spice must flow...
Loved your surrealistic conclusion--"END TRANSMISSION."
I always saw the spectacle, put in its most positive sense, as a brilliant formulation of Marxist theory at the level of a kind of dialectical poetry.
For me it kinda traced a logic beginning with bureaucracy and ending with the spectacle--a social relation among people completely mediated by images and today, as you say, spy agencies and information.
I also vaguely remember (could be wrong) that having written the "Society of the Spectacle," Debord then largely stopped writing because he did not want his ideas to contribute in any way to the strengthening of the spectacle he was attacking.
But is sounds like your solution "what was central was the organization and getting people on your side convincing them that your party was the answer to their problems," is a recycled Leninism, led again by some new motley crew of intellectuals, who by some kind of magic, have grasped the true nature of reality despite the existence and allure of this spectacle.
Rather than the vanguard I tend to prefer customs, traditions and rituals operating at the town/local community level as a possible way forward. See your interview with Dugin.
Hmmm... I find "customs, traditions and rituals" as vague hodgepodge of social conservatism that can only serve the interests of the elites already in power. Frankly, I think the Russians were better off in the long run with Lenin and his crew than with the preexisting establishment.
"Traditions" is like music to the ears of those in the top of it. Sure, elites vie for power and the centre of power can change dramatically, but I think it's a narrative control sleight of hand to say "it's the natural evolution of society" when elites decide to starve Ireland (or West Bengal, for that matter), enclose the commons, slap export tariffs on wool bound to Flanders, or for any of the coups d'état starting with the "Glorious" Revolution. But let a vanguard party mobilise the masses, and it's "let's not rock the boat".
Still, I agree with you that vanguards don't work in the long run. I think Leninism was the best organisational left-wing solution for the turn of the 20th century. Social democracy only became acceptable to elites because of the spectre of more radical solutions, and whereas social democracy only worked to bring about prosperity to the masses in countries that already enjoyed economic advantage, Leninism can boast about taking two massive countries out of the middle ages (Russia and China).
However, in Russia, and that's a Marxist analysis, Leninism didn't solve the economic calculation problem and ended up creating a managerial class that fostered nationalism in the peripheral SSRs to advance their own economic interests, and accelerated the dismantling of the system in the Russian SSR. In China, the process is under way, too: the CPC is in control of the professionals, with little peasant-worker control, and the professional class can be expected to push for reforms that increase their own slice of the economic cake down the road. It's the problem with democratic centralism over time and I think the reason why Marxists have gone back to the basics (pre-Lenin political economy) and are now exploring cybernetic planning, direct popular input in decision-making and workplace democracy.
I honestly have not much patience for any kind of analysis that starts from cultural mores and traditions. I have never seen a convincing rebuttal to the maxim that how people make things (the mode of production) imposes constraints on culture and pretty much everything else. I don't think I need to bother about Dugin because from what you and others say, he's the conservative equivalent of dead-end "cultural" Marxism. It's not that I find cultural conservatism evil; it's just demonstrably ineffective as an analytical or organisational tool to advance or explain societal changes. It may sound cogent because it explains why people adopt certain attitudes and positions, but it doesn't explain that their adoption is reactive to changes that are fundamentally economic in nature. Dugin only has relevance because the USSR fell. Had it not fallen, the cultural currents he rides on and is the exegete of wouldn't exist.
Even within the limits of Marxism I can find a better way to analyse the current times or propose solutions for the future than falling back to Leninism. There's a strand of thought that says the exhaustion of profitability in capitalism will drive political change in the same way the rise of the factory in the 18th century was the driving force of the replacement of feudalism by capitalism. So we could organise around demands that would accelerate that process, or prevent attempts to replace capitalism with "technofeudalism". Organisation and political movements aren't the same as vanguardism. In fact, if I look at Miller, Dugin, Orban and other intellectual exponents of current conservatism, they resemble an ossified vanguard trying to move the masses away from economic change way more than the grassroots left-wing movements trying to move them the other way.
I've spent the last two years in a bi-monthly meeting with eight other guys from my community--actually in person, in the same room. One thing that seems extremely clear to me from this on-going experience is that such things as customs, traditions, and exposure to different types of religious beliefs have had a profound social and psychological influence on each of us sitting in that room.
Again, this is a discussion with real live people from quite different social backgrounds who do not slip easily into any abstract and almost metaphysical category like the "proletariat."
It sounds like we are both quite skeptical of the Leninism of Debord and a few other failed Situationists from the mid-1960s who used to sit around in cafes in Brussels and Paris to plot their next vanguard steps towards "revolution." In my opinion, what these Situationists could never accept is the actual reality of their profound political defeat and therefore decided to double-down on the even more bankrupt strategy of terrorism during the 1970s.
Back in the real world of 2025, our group is dealing with the tricky issue of the origins of hatred within each of us and how this may play out politically. Would love to hear your suggestions on how this might be handled--right now it seems like a really explosive topic both within our group and within the U.S.
Are we all beyond words now and quite simply preparing for a tectonic power struggle which will make the 1960s look like child's play?
Well, you definitely have more hands-on experience than I. I wish I had an in-person discussion group, too. But my situation is more problematic: I am a native and inhabitant of a country that's far too inconsequential in the broader scheme of things - we could become a cybersocialist utopia and that would do nothing to the megatrends of climate change, for one thing. So I always fear that if I were to start engaging people in discussion, I'd end up more despondent at my powerlessness, not less.
That aside, I don't think "proletariat" is an abstract notion. I think proletarians, or more broadly, labourers, are those who generate material wealth - the ones who produce things: consumer and capital goods. So if you count towards the worker-hours for a company to produce its output, even if you're an accountant or manager, so long as your income is from a salary and not from profit extraction, you're a prole who doesn't own the means of production. There are also the capitalists - a bit of confusion because proles can buy stocks, but we all know no prole who managed to get most of their income from stock returns would stick to their salary jobs -, and the professionals like me, who don't produce material wealth but who have a role in the reproduction of society, teaching the next generation in my case. I think the confusion arises when people try to think of workers as a Borg, and rathers stupidly conclude they're perfectly rational agents who'll act collectively in their own interest as a single mass. I don't think Marx and his contemporaries ever went that far, those are crass generalisations. Even he talked about workers who brecome alienated and atomised and side with capitalists - the lumpenproletariat. I think sociology has made many strides to add nuance to that in the past 150 years, but the distinction of making something, working for a wage and getting your income from exploiting other people's labour, is still the most important one in capitalism.
So, about the origins of hatred in the US, I can't hope to know precise answers, but I suspect Bacon's Rebellion and its aftermath are instructive. That's when the landowning colonial elite decided to break the spine of nascent solidarity between blacks and destitute whites by creating *fake* white privilege: the notion that being white but poor is compensating by having some rights blacks didn't have. Everything that followed, including the fallout of identity politics in our days, starts from there, in my opinion.
The problem with this kind of imaginary privilege is that it's, well, imaginary. But as you say, psychology matters: if white workers remain poor, but at least have an outlet in scapegoating minorities, that might get them going. But then liberals replaced all talk of class with affirmative action *only*. So now whites feel not only are they being left out of the material benefits, but they're being told minorities take precedence in the queue for material support, political representation and social advancement. And on top of that, they're being told their traditional values they found an anchor on are also to be dismissed.
I don't think capitalism is fixable, but consider that in my country, affirmative action for minorities (also blacks in our case) in access to higher education was coupled with social quotas for students of public schools - regardless of ethnicity. That helped a lot to dissipate any animosity poor whites might have had because there was a class-based affirmative action coupled with the colour-based one. It's far from a perfect solution, but it did help a lot. To me, outcomes-based policies should take precedence: if you take the ensemble of disadvantaged people and you tell them you'll raise their standard living to a certain level, that means you'll be helping minorities more than the majority because on average, they're poorer, but because everyone will end at the same level and the majority will also be lifted, I doubt anyone would oppose that.
I don't think I can tell your group how to deal with hatred. What I said about the scapegoating of minorities also works for woman's rights and I think Evguenia said lots of cogent stuff about that. In general, I think the best way to reduce hatred is to reduce the sources of stress in a society. Like the saying goes, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Yasha you crazy for this one (also because I'm feeling mean today you could make this argument in the specific about Holocaust education... knowledge just lies there, it has no bettering effect)
Know I'm going on about it but it's sad to think that one of the reasons that people try to keep informed is that technically, you're supposed to use the information to choose a representative who will enact your informed beliefs. Participating in representative government is increasingly looking like a form of self-abuse.
I do bloc voting, recommend you all try it too. We'll decide collectively who to vote for & cast our ballots. It's actually how you exert power with the ballot & it requires the least amount of informing. And then that power translates to intelligence. Definitely agree that information & power are inversely proportional.
I mean, the Bolsheviks were keen readers of Zemstvo statistics.
It came up quite a bit in the decision-making process both before and after power.
I think it's useful information vs the saturation, as you put it, which makes the difference.
It's hard to strain without being myopic or totally off base.
Stalin was an avid reader, too.
Yeah, people always say they want more well read leadership.
Which, sure, I understand the impulse. Everyone wants to have to respect someone respectable, you know.
But on the other hand, Justinian was as cold and ruthless as he was learned. He probably massacred like 10% of the population in his capital city in one day.
The inundation of total bullshit overload is something that would even make the most radical Situationist's head explode. On a tangentially related note, if the likes of Kimmel, Colbert, Stewart, et al. whose Trump mockery, while highly amusing, is no substitute for real opposition. Ha! we sure showed that bastard while ICE invades another city. These bastards are beyond shame and just don't give a shit about anything the aforementioned TV guys have to say.
I remember an RT America podcast in 2021 that asked "Do whistleblowers matter?". I don't recall the host and RT is no longer available for casual consumption. They also discussed Wikileaks, Snowden, Manning, etc - all this available information and what became of it? I think about that to this day and you rekindle the memory.
The same could be said generally about someone who is alone in the woods. They may find books to read, maybe they get access to wifi and download some podcasts. What is the point of this consumption? To feel apart of the world they are not? Entertainment? If this person were to never speak to anyone every again - what then? Often I feel like this person. I'm sure many do.
Yasha, I equate power with authority.
And when it comes to authority, there's a famous quote from St. Paul, "all earthly authority is God's authority". A lot of the information we are asked to consume are invocations of authority. By consuming the information, we reify the authority. We reify the reality.
You're bumping up against this anyways so I'll go there ... an alternative is we can consume the word made flesh :-). There is one power that is given to all of us in the Christian bible, the power to forgive. I'm hanging my hat on that to find peace until the heavenly here after, to heal. There's also the power to love. I don't think of that as a power granted us per se. But it is powerful. Maybe after more healing from my PTSD the loving part will be more natural to me.
Yes, it’s continuity of form & function
Only the technology & the characters have changed
I still wonder if our timescales are off, it takes most people and culture a very long time to form damning conclusions that are hard to shake, and much longer for the pressure and consensus to make it into the political structure. That process is very fast when the bombs are falling on you, but it takes a long time in a comfortable imperium. Marx's own conclusions took 150 years to make a decisive impact on the world.
What will be interesting is what happens when ham-fisted authoritarians like the Trumps and Starmers actually try to deliberately limit and force the flow of information. One day you wake up TikTok doesn't work, and you're forced to download a similar looking app with content looking more like Truth Social, Newsmax, and the Israeli Foreign Ministry rolled into one. That disruption might matter. They are blowing up their own spice fields, and the spice must flow...
Loved your surrealistic conclusion--"END TRANSMISSION."
I always saw the spectacle, put in its most positive sense, as a brilliant formulation of Marxist theory at the level of a kind of dialectical poetry.
For me it kinda traced a logic beginning with bureaucracy and ending with the spectacle--a social relation among people completely mediated by images and today, as you say, spy agencies and information.
I also vaguely remember (could be wrong) that having written the "Society of the Spectacle," Debord then largely stopped writing because he did not want his ideas to contribute in any way to the strengthening of the spectacle he was attacking.
But is sounds like your solution "what was central was the organization and getting people on your side convincing them that your party was the answer to their problems," is a recycled Leninism, led again by some new motley crew of intellectuals, who by some kind of magic, have grasped the true nature of reality despite the existence and allure of this spectacle.
Rather than the vanguard I tend to prefer customs, traditions and rituals operating at the town/local community level as a possible way forward. See your interview with Dugin.
Hmmm... I find "customs, traditions and rituals" as vague hodgepodge of social conservatism that can only serve the interests of the elites already in power. Frankly, I think the Russians were better off in the long run with Lenin and his crew than with the preexisting establishment.
"Traditions" is like music to the ears of those in the top of it. Sure, elites vie for power and the centre of power can change dramatically, but I think it's a narrative control sleight of hand to say "it's the natural evolution of society" when elites decide to starve Ireland (or West Bengal, for that matter), enclose the commons, slap export tariffs on wool bound to Flanders, or for any of the coups d'état starting with the "Glorious" Revolution. But let a vanguard party mobilise the masses, and it's "let's not rock the boat".
Still, I agree with you that vanguards don't work in the long run. I think Leninism was the best organisational left-wing solution for the turn of the 20th century. Social democracy only became acceptable to elites because of the spectre of more radical solutions, and whereas social democracy only worked to bring about prosperity to the masses in countries that already enjoyed economic advantage, Leninism can boast about taking two massive countries out of the middle ages (Russia and China).
However, in Russia, and that's a Marxist analysis, Leninism didn't solve the economic calculation problem and ended up creating a managerial class that fostered nationalism in the peripheral SSRs to advance their own economic interests, and accelerated the dismantling of the system in the Russian SSR. In China, the process is under way, too: the CPC is in control of the professionals, with little peasant-worker control, and the professional class can be expected to push for reforms that increase their own slice of the economic cake down the road. It's the problem with democratic centralism over time and I think the reason why Marxists have gone back to the basics (pre-Lenin political economy) and are now exploring cybernetic planning, direct popular input in decision-making and workplace democracy.
I honestly have not much patience for any kind of analysis that starts from cultural mores and traditions. I have never seen a convincing rebuttal to the maxim that how people make things (the mode of production) imposes constraints on culture and pretty much everything else. I don't think I need to bother about Dugin because from what you and others say, he's the conservative equivalent of dead-end "cultural" Marxism. It's not that I find cultural conservatism evil; it's just demonstrably ineffective as an analytical or organisational tool to advance or explain societal changes. It may sound cogent because it explains why people adopt certain attitudes and positions, but it doesn't explain that their adoption is reactive to changes that are fundamentally economic in nature. Dugin only has relevance because the USSR fell. Had it not fallen, the cultural currents he rides on and is the exegete of wouldn't exist.
Even within the limits of Marxism I can find a better way to analyse the current times or propose solutions for the future than falling back to Leninism. There's a strand of thought that says the exhaustion of profitability in capitalism will drive political change in the same way the rise of the factory in the 18th century was the driving force of the replacement of feudalism by capitalism. So we could organise around demands that would accelerate that process, or prevent attempts to replace capitalism with "technofeudalism". Organisation and political movements aren't the same as vanguardism. In fact, if I look at Miller, Dugin, Orban and other intellectual exponents of current conservatism, they resemble an ossified vanguard trying to move the masses away from economic change way more than the grassroots left-wing movements trying to move them the other way.
I've spent the last two years in a bi-monthly meeting with eight other guys from my community--actually in person, in the same room. One thing that seems extremely clear to me from this on-going experience is that such things as customs, traditions, and exposure to different types of religious beliefs have had a profound social and psychological influence on each of us sitting in that room.
Again, this is a discussion with real live people from quite different social backgrounds who do not slip easily into any abstract and almost metaphysical category like the "proletariat."
It sounds like we are both quite skeptical of the Leninism of Debord and a few other failed Situationists from the mid-1960s who used to sit around in cafes in Brussels and Paris to plot their next vanguard steps towards "revolution." In my opinion, what these Situationists could never accept is the actual reality of their profound political defeat and therefore decided to double-down on the even more bankrupt strategy of terrorism during the 1970s.
Back in the real world of 2025, our group is dealing with the tricky issue of the origins of hatred within each of us and how this may play out politically. Would love to hear your suggestions on how this might be handled--right now it seems like a really explosive topic both within our group and within the U.S.
Are we all beyond words now and quite simply preparing for a tectonic power struggle which will make the 1960s look like child's play?
Well, you definitely have more hands-on experience than I. I wish I had an in-person discussion group, too. But my situation is more problematic: I am a native and inhabitant of a country that's far too inconsequential in the broader scheme of things - we could become a cybersocialist utopia and that would do nothing to the megatrends of climate change, for one thing. So I always fear that if I were to start engaging people in discussion, I'd end up more despondent at my powerlessness, not less.
That aside, I don't think "proletariat" is an abstract notion. I think proletarians, or more broadly, labourers, are those who generate material wealth - the ones who produce things: consumer and capital goods. So if you count towards the worker-hours for a company to produce its output, even if you're an accountant or manager, so long as your income is from a salary and not from profit extraction, you're a prole who doesn't own the means of production. There are also the capitalists - a bit of confusion because proles can buy stocks, but we all know no prole who managed to get most of their income from stock returns would stick to their salary jobs -, and the professionals like me, who don't produce material wealth but who have a role in the reproduction of society, teaching the next generation in my case. I think the confusion arises when people try to think of workers as a Borg, and rathers stupidly conclude they're perfectly rational agents who'll act collectively in their own interest as a single mass. I don't think Marx and his contemporaries ever went that far, those are crass generalisations. Even he talked about workers who brecome alienated and atomised and side with capitalists - the lumpenproletariat. I think sociology has made many strides to add nuance to that in the past 150 years, but the distinction of making something, working for a wage and getting your income from exploiting other people's labour, is still the most important one in capitalism.
So, about the origins of hatred in the US, I can't hope to know precise answers, but I suspect Bacon's Rebellion and its aftermath are instructive. That's when the landowning colonial elite decided to break the spine of nascent solidarity between blacks and destitute whites by creating *fake* white privilege: the notion that being white but poor is compensating by having some rights blacks didn't have. Everything that followed, including the fallout of identity politics in our days, starts from there, in my opinion.
The problem with this kind of imaginary privilege is that it's, well, imaginary. But as you say, psychology matters: if white workers remain poor, but at least have an outlet in scapegoating minorities, that might get them going. But then liberals replaced all talk of class with affirmative action *only*. So now whites feel not only are they being left out of the material benefits, but they're being told minorities take precedence in the queue for material support, political representation and social advancement. And on top of that, they're being told their traditional values they found an anchor on are also to be dismissed.
I don't think capitalism is fixable, but consider that in my country, affirmative action for minorities (also blacks in our case) in access to higher education was coupled with social quotas for students of public schools - regardless of ethnicity. That helped a lot to dissipate any animosity poor whites might have had because there was a class-based affirmative action coupled with the colour-based one. It's far from a perfect solution, but it did help a lot. To me, outcomes-based policies should take precedence: if you take the ensemble of disadvantaged people and you tell them you'll raise their standard living to a certain level, that means you'll be helping minorities more than the majority because on average, they're poorer, but because everyone will end at the same level and the majority will also be lifted, I doubt anyone would oppose that.
I don't think I can tell your group how to deal with hatred. What I said about the scapegoating of minorities also works for woman's rights and I think Evguenia said lots of cogent stuff about that. In general, I think the best way to reduce hatred is to reduce the sources of stress in a society. Like the saying goes, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
The 'trick' is for the Leadership to run ahead of the people as quickly as possible.
Yasha you crazy for this one (also because I'm feeling mean today you could make this argument in the specific about Holocaust education... knowledge just lies there, it has no bettering effect)
In our present hyper-saturated media environment, information and power have a reverse correlation. (Edited previous comment)
Know I'm going on about it but it's sad to think that one of the reasons that people try to keep informed is that technically, you're supposed to use the information to choose a representative who will enact your informed beliefs. Participating in representative government is increasingly looking like a form of self-abuse.
I do bloc voting, recommend you all try it too. We'll decide collectively who to vote for & cast our ballots. It's actually how you exert power with the ballot & it requires the least amount of informing. And then that power translates to intelligence. Definitely agree that information & power are inversely proportional.
For what it's worth sometimes we advise to leave that ballot blank, too.
One weird trick for future Lenins: step away from the computer.
(But it wouldn't be that simple, would it?)