Some of the best revolutionary attempts in the 20th century (in particular the situationists and their role in 1968) were from staunchly anti-Stalin anti-Mao revolutionaries like Debord.
If your goal is to bring down the actual imperial core, you would do well to look at what movements came closest to doing so. To bring up Debord again, he opposed strictly third-worldist revolution ("the revolutionary project must be realized in the industrially advanced countries") and was wise to do so imo. Some of the greatest AES projects have either been crushed (Sankara, Allende) or had to spend all of their energy on the defense rather than spreading their project (Cuba). No true progress can be made until the imperial machines are dismantled.
Okay, but saying "lmao you dipshits have to topple amerikkka obviously" and not making any progress towards doing that doesn't make him any kind of revolutionary, much less a better one than Sankara, Allende, etc.
France's government collapsed and it was only through maneuvering in partnership with both the right wing and the communist party of France (who opposed the student revolution) that France was able to avoid a full realization of a true revolutionary project.
wowie, he almost achieved something but didn't! That's so much cooler than Mao achieving the most comprehensive land reform in history, smashing all opposition, and setting up a state that America can't invade.
You know, I've run into an ideological issue that I don't think anyone else on this site is willing to address. It's important and they just don't want to talk about it. Really, it's key to our work as effective socialists rather than just China shills. I think you're the right person to ask.
And apparently none of AES is good enough to meet the standards of hex bear dot net user u/activated to qualify as socialist either, and we all know that's the necessary bar for socialist projects to clear.
No. A ton of 20th century Marxists and leftist philosophers were incredibly critical of the USSR and China.
Rosa Luxemburg, Guy Debord, Marcuse, Sartre, Lyotard, Deleuze, Baudrillard. Hell even Lukacs flipped between pro and anti Stalin.
The poor situationists were especially mad because the pro-USSR Marxists in France helped Charles de Gaulle end their socialist revolution after they had straight up toppled the government for a very brief time.
Look, "the situationists were some of the best revolutionaries in the 20th century" is one of the most chauvinistic things I've heard in my entire life. I cannot believe you were seriously making that point. And Rosa Luxemburg supported the Bolsheviks even though she had criticisms.
I'm not really here to argue about the positions themselves, just clarifying that the ubiquity of uncritical examination of Stalinism and even of orthodox Marxism is not what was going on in the 20th century. It is mostly a product of these things being rediscovered after many years of a totally dead leftist project in those countries. The Frankfurt School in particular had great things to say.
edit: I should add though that they were the best revolutionaries in the western European imperial core, yes.
I'm not going to really reply to this because I'm too tired to get into any involved discussion, but this post is about
western "marxist" scholars who shit on AES 24/7
none of which ever actually achieved anything remotely comparable. Obviously, there are criticisms to be made of AES, as with any project. That's not what this post it about.
Also, crediting the situationists, a very small group of academics and artists, for 1968 is just really, really, really not it. 1968 was primarily a movement of labor unions, the largest of which was affiliated with the Marxist-Leninist CPF. Regardless of what you think of the CPF or the Unions' roles, crediting the situationists for a mass movement of the people is clearly ridiculous.
none of which ever actually achieved anything remotely comparable. Obviously, there are criticisms to be made of AES, as with any project.
I think most of them argued that a failed revolution (one that simply rebuilds the power structures of the previous society) are not much different than no revolution and in fact don't constitute a dialectical progression.
1968 was primarily a movement of labor unions, the largest of which was affiliated with the Marxist-Leninist CPF.
CPF opposed it and worked with Charles de Gaulle lmao
You can even find it on the Wikipedia article about it:
"In May 1968 widespread student riots and strikes broke out in France. The PCF initially supported the general strike but opposed the revolutionary student movement, which was dominated by Trotskyists, Maoists and anarchists, and the so-called "new social movements" (including environmentalists, gay movements, prisoners' movement). Georges Marchais, in L'Humanité on May 3, virulently denounced the leaders of the movement in an article entitled "False revolutionaries who must be exposed". He referred to student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit as the "German anarchist".[16][17] Although the PCF and the CGT were compelled by their base to join the movement as it expanded to take the form of a general strike, the PCF feared that it would be overwhelmed by events - especially as some on the left, led by Mitterrand were attempting to use Charles de Gaulle's initial vacillations to create a political alternative to the Gaullist regime. It welcomed Prime Minister Georges Pompidou's willingness to dialogue and it supported the Grenelle agreements. When de Gaulle regained the initiative over the situation on 30 May, by announcing the dissolution of the National Assembly and snap elections, the PCF quickly embraced the President's decision."
And I’m deeply skeptical of your idea that the situationists could have toppled the French state. There were like 2 dozen of them active and an entire military ready to do whatever in response.
It wasn't their numbers, it was their approach. Their politics are politics of radical response to alienation, an alienation that, as we see more and more, is the main stranglehold on class consciousness and mobilization of the modern proletariat.
I think most of them argued that a failed revolution (one that simply rebuilds the power structures of the previous society) are not much different than no revolution and in fact don’t constitute a dialectical progression.
Yeah, the USSR wasn't much different from Russia under the Tsar. Sorry, but opinion ---> :dumpster-fire: for anyone who claims that seriously.
Edit: oh god it's even fucking worse when you apply that logic to China.
It wasn’t their numbers, it was their approach. Their politics are politics of radical response to alienation, an alienation that, as we see more and more, is the main stranglehold on class consciousness and mobilization of the modern proletariat.
Like I said, regardless of your opinion on the PCF and its actions (I'd say that they, like many western parties, were and are not great), you are crediting a tiny group of philosophers and artists for a movement which they absolutely did not start, and in which the vast majority of people definitely had not read Debord.
The poor situationists were especially mad because the pro-USSR Marxists in France helped Charles de Gaulle end their socialist revolution after they had straight up toppled the government for a very brief time.
This is the first I've heard of this, can someone provide a link?
As much as I like Debord, he was not a revolutionary. He had some good analysis of the material basis for the media state and the greater propaganda aparatus of late imperialist financial capitalism, but he never really did anything about it except drink heavily and complain.
This obviously ignores 1968 as well as his role in organizing resistance to France's role in the war in Algeria.
But yes, he was explicitly a revolutionary. That you are equating SotS with propaganda and media, which it is not at all what it is about, is a sign that Debord should maybe have practiced a little of the obscurantism of his peers to avoid unprepared readers misreading it.
It is a work that is about the revolutionary potential of the proletariat and this is captured and misdirected via the loss of subjectivity caused by homogenized experience.
There's a reason his book doesn't stop at chapter 3 but damn do people seem to stop reading there.
I understand that, but would still classify that as analysis of industrialized propaganda and the de realization caused by ever present and invasive marketing.
Propaganda implies intent. The layout of your neighborhood is more important when it comes to spectacle than a billboard, for example. Which is why he has no chapter dedicated to marketing but an entire one devoted to psychogeography. The important part of "images" is that it's whatever you observe, not a literal image on a screen or object.
He goes over this a bit at the beginning of Comments.
I know. I've read both comments and SotS multiple times. Advertising and marketing are two different things. The most powerful and successful American propaganda/marketing crusade was the suburb. The idea of the "American dream". The creation of alienated little worlds that have no ability to self sustain or self organize.
Beyond that the campaigns by Ford and GM to gut and destroy public transportation in favor of private motor cars. These psychogeographic methods of control are directly related to marketing and advertisment. The creation of a false reality.
This stuff didn't just spring out of thin air. It was planned and designed to produce an expected result. It's a tool used to manipulate people into following a specific ideology. Like how video games force you to do certain actions, living in a world designed by financial capitalists and marketers forces people to participate in the markets they deem necessary.
What are you talking about lmao, subdivisions and suburbs are usually built and organized by big landlords or developers that build them based on marketing research. Some of the newer style ones with the little town centers are literally like Nielsen towns, where they just sit and observe purchasing behaviors and social developments.
All that data goes right back into the system to develop the next cookie cutter suburbs perfectly designed to pit neighbors against each other and simultaneously against everyone that isn't from the neighborhood.
Western Marxists sitting in America fused to their armchairs arguing about how China isn't socialist enough.
:debord-tired:
Some of the best revolutionary attempts in the 20th century (in particular the situationists and their role in 1968) were from staunchly anti-Stalin anti-Mao revolutionaries like Debord.
I guess the subjective metric "best" here means "what makes American leftists feel comfy cozy" rather than "most successful"
If your goal is to bring down the actual imperial core, you would do well to look at what movements came closest to doing so. To bring up Debord again, he opposed strictly third-worldist revolution ("the revolutionary project must be realized in the industrially advanced countries") and was wise to do so imo. Some of the greatest AES projects have either been crushed (Sankara, Allende) or had to spend all of their energy on the defense rather than spreading their project (Cuba). No true progress can be made until the imperial machines are dismantled.
Okay, but saying "lmao you dipshits have to topple amerikkka obviously" and not making any progress towards doing that doesn't make him any kind of revolutionary, much less a better one than Sankara, Allende, etc.
France's government collapsed and it was only through maneuvering in partnership with both the right wing and the communist party of France (who opposed the student revolution) that France was able to avoid a full realization of a true revolutionary project.
wowie, he almost achieved something but didn't! That's so much cooler than Mao achieving the most comprehensive land reform in history, smashing all opposition, and setting up a state that America can't invade.
...and then just repeated bourgeois vicissitudes of every other country.
You know, I've run into an ideological issue that I don't think anyone else on this site is willing to address. It's important and they just don't want to talk about it. Really, it's key to our work as effective socialists rather than just China shills. I think you're the right person to ask.
What wine pairs best with state department lies?
Oh shit France is communist? Thats news to me
Wait until you find out that no existing society is communist.
lol yeah, France after situationists, China after CPC, USSR after Bolsheviks. The French are definitely the ones that accomplished the most.
And apparently none of AES is good enough to meet the standards of hex bear dot net user u/activated to qualify as socialist either, and we all know that's the necessary bar for socialist projects to clear.
delete this :agony-immense:
Edit: this is a bit, right? Like, look at the whole 20th century.
No. A ton of 20th century Marxists and leftist philosophers were incredibly critical of the USSR and China.
Rosa Luxemburg, Guy Debord, Marcuse, Sartre, Lyotard, Deleuze, Baudrillard. Hell even Lukacs flipped between pro and anti Stalin.
The poor situationists were especially mad because the pro-USSR Marxists in France helped Charles de Gaulle end their socialist revolution after they had straight up toppled the government for a very brief time.
Oh my god, it's not a bit.
Look, "the situationists were some of the best revolutionaries in the 20th century" is one of the most chauvinistic things I've heard in my entire life. I cannot believe you were seriously making that point. And Rosa Luxemburg supported the Bolsheviks even though she had criticisms.
I'm not really here to argue about the positions themselves, just clarifying that the ubiquity of uncritical examination of Stalinism and even of orthodox Marxism is not what was going on in the 20th century. It is mostly a product of these things being rediscovered after many years of a totally dead leftist project in those countries. The Frankfurt School in particular had great things to say.
edit: I should add though that they were the best revolutionaries in the western European imperial core, yes.
I'm not going to really reply to this because I'm too tired to get into any involved discussion, but this post is about
none of which ever actually achieved anything remotely comparable. Obviously, there are criticisms to be made of AES, as with any project. That's not what this post it about.
Also, crediting the situationists, a very small group of academics and artists, for 1968 is just really, really, really not it. 1968 was primarily a movement of labor unions, the largest of which was affiliated with the Marxist-Leninist CPF. Regardless of what you think of the CPF or the Unions' roles, crediting the situationists for a mass movement of the people is clearly ridiculous.
I think most of them argued that a failed revolution (one that simply rebuilds the power structures of the previous society) are not much different than no revolution and in fact don't constitute a dialectical progression.
CPF opposed it and worked with Charles de Gaulle lmao
You can even find it on the Wikipedia article about it:
"In May 1968 widespread student riots and strikes broke out in France. The PCF initially supported the general strike but opposed the revolutionary student movement, which was dominated by Trotskyists, Maoists and anarchists, and the so-called "new social movements" (including environmentalists, gay movements, prisoners' movement). Georges Marchais, in L'Humanité on May 3, virulently denounced the leaders of the movement in an article entitled "False revolutionaries who must be exposed". He referred to student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit as the "German anarchist".[16][17] Although the PCF and the CGT were compelled by their base to join the movement as it expanded to take the form of a general strike, the PCF feared that it would be overwhelmed by events - especially as some on the left, led by Mitterrand were attempting to use Charles de Gaulle's initial vacillations to create a political alternative to the Gaullist regime. It welcomed Prime Minister Georges Pompidou's willingness to dialogue and it supported the Grenelle agreements. When de Gaulle regained the initiative over the situation on 30 May, by announcing the dissolution of the National Assembly and snap elections, the PCF quickly embraced the President's decision."
It wasn't their numbers, it was their approach. Their politics are politics of radical response to alienation, an alienation that, as we see more and more, is the main stranglehold on class consciousness and mobilization of the modern proletariat.
Yeah, the USSR wasn't much different from Russia under the Tsar. Sorry, but opinion ---> :dumpster-fire: for anyone who claims that seriously.
Edit: oh god it's even fucking worse when you apply that logic to China.
Like I said, regardless of your opinion on the PCF and its actions (I'd say that they, like many western parties, were and are not great), you are crediting a tiny group of philosophers and artists for a movement which they absolutely did not start, and in which the vast majority of people definitely had not read Debord.
This is the first I've heard of this, can someone provide a link?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/article/abs/why-the-french-communists-stopped-the-revolution/6F04F09942CDE95948C2022CEB18E0FA
As much as I like Debord, he was not a revolutionary. He had some good analysis of the material basis for the media state and the greater propaganda aparatus of late imperialist financial capitalism, but he never really did anything about it except drink heavily and complain.
To be fair, he was French, so he'd probably have been doing those things even if he was a revolutionary.
If complaining and drinking heavily makes you a revolutionary, France is full communist and I'm Che Guevara
This obviously ignores 1968 as well as his role in organizing resistance to France's role in the war in Algeria.
But yes, he was explicitly a revolutionary. That you are equating SotS with propaganda and media, which it is not at all what it is about, is a sign that Debord should maybe have practiced a little of the obscurantism of his peers to avoid unprepared readers misreading it.
It is a work that is about the revolutionary potential of the proletariat and this is captured and misdirected via the loss of subjectivity caused by homogenized experience.
There's a reason his book doesn't stop at chapter 3 but damn do people seem to stop reading there.
Even a few pages of this paper clear a lot of it up.
I understand that, but would still classify that as analysis of industrialized propaganda and the de realization caused by ever present and invasive marketing.
Propaganda implies intent. The layout of your neighborhood is more important when it comes to spectacle than a billboard, for example. Which is why he has no chapter dedicated to marketing but an entire one devoted to psychogeography. The important part of "images" is that it's whatever you observe, not a literal image on a screen or object.
He goes over this a bit at the beginning of Comments.
I know. I've read both comments and SotS multiple times. Advertising and marketing are two different things. The most powerful and successful American propaganda/marketing crusade was the suburb. The idea of the "American dream". The creation of alienated little worlds that have no ability to self sustain or self organize.
Beyond that the campaigns by Ford and GM to gut and destroy public transportation in favor of private motor cars. These psychogeographic methods of control are directly related to marketing and advertisment. The creation of a false reality.
This stuff didn't just spring out of thin air. It was planned and designed to produce an expected result. It's a tool used to manipulate people into following a specific ideology. Like how video games force you to do certain actions, living in a world designed by financial capitalists and marketers forces people to participate in the markets they deem necessary.
The suburbs regularly self organize.
What are you talking about lmao, subdivisions and suburbs are usually built and organized by big landlords or developers that build them based on marketing research. Some of the newer style ones with the little town centers are literally like Nielsen towns, where they just sit and observe purchasing behaviors and social developments.
All that data goes right back into the system to develop the next cookie cutter suburbs perfectly designed to pit neighbors against each other and simultaneously against everyone that isn't from the neighborhood.