All this talk about “the liberal communists Bill Gates and George Soros” and how “the neoliberals are now more leninist than the Leninists” is getting increasingly :sus:
Huh? Y'all people are consuming doomerism theory from an incoherent anticommunist yank? (Forgive the redundancy)
Leninism is when you use the immense power of the state to do things?
Imagine reading a book by someone who probably knows someone named Archibald or Hugh
A friend of mine told me it was good and not too long so I decided to get it and give it a read. Tbf the first 3 and a half chapters have been pretty good for the most part until he got onto the weird stuff I mentioned.
I don’t know anything really about Lacan so I was just nodding through all the bits where he talks about Lacanian stuff and trying to understand them.
Also the bit where he said that being born British could be considered a sickness was pretty funny.
Lacan is a brain virus that infects academic leftists and makes them see all kinds of weird shit. It's like muscle bros taking acid. You see part of the picture, but then become convinced that because you saw past a small part of the illusion of ideology, you saw past everything, rather than grasping how little we actually know and understand about reality.
And then you lecture and write books on it forever becoming increasingly disconnected from working class and activist movements.
This is basically Fisher and Zizek distilled. The only thing saving the chapos is that they are too lazy to read Lacan, and only Matt is kinda academic enough to fall for it.
I'm intrigued, do you have a semi or non academic intro to Lacan? I can deal with some smarty pants words but not all of them so it doesn't have to be completely dumbed down.
To me stuff like Lacan or Deleuze and similar stuff always seemed like impenetrable bloviating.
Regrettably, I don't, at least not off the top of my head. I'll look into it this weekend and if someone else chimes in, go with them. The most basic way I can describe it is dialectical psychology, which you would think makes sense, and does, but also gives you an ideological vasectomy in the process (because it renders both you and itself impotent). It's alot like nihilism or absurdism with more steps.
Lol, I don't know anything about Deleuze.
Skimmed his book 'postcapitalist desire' he is explicitly an anticommunist. He refuses to use the word because of the 'unspeakable evils' of communism and extols the hippies.
Might want to read and not just skim it then, his commentary on the cultural significance of hippies was enlightening to me.
It's also not his book, but a collection of his lectures published post-humously.
We probably shouldn't talk about how the hippies basically created Silicon Valley, a.k.a. probably the most insidious purveyor of capitalist realism on the planet.
If I recall, the group zero books whom published this book and a lot of the people that ran with it were either succdems or trots. They tried to enter the breadtube sphere as an intelligensia movement that wanted to bring "modern socialist ideas" to the internet "working class" (I'll remind you we're talking about breadtube)
And then one of them went on Cumtown to promote his book and was Hey Fellow Kids as fuck
“the neoliberals are now more leninist than the Leninists”
Did he really fucking say that? :guts-rage:
Read Capitalist realism and the section about market stalinism
If you actually read it, it was never really defines what makes it especially “stalinist” it just explains how corporations are authoritarian
He basically just uses Stalinist to mean overly bureaucratic which he does roughly explain. The language he uses isn’t always great but I think it’s an overall insightful book but quite pessimistic though I think that’s fair given when it was written. I do think the “state of the left” has slightly changed since then but maybe that’s just terminally online brain
ok but that just normal corporation bureaucracy. I just feel like Fisher being a Br*t clouded his judgement on the authoritarianism of Capitalism since he probably grew up in a Soc-Dem Capitalist Nanny state. He just can't fathom how this same Capitalist State can show its teeth when the Labour rights movement died and neoliberalism can go full swing
British trots bring out "stalinist" in practically everything they write, they have never recovered from MI6 using them as a weapon of division against communism itself. As a result of intelligence interference the entire existence of being a Trot revolves around being anti-Stalin and they trot it out everywhere.
It's really fucking boring once you realise it. They can't stop talking about it. Shut the fuck up and move on jeez.
Still i still fail to see how is not a persistent problem with bureaucracy than the perceived “stalinism”.
You can literally said the same thing can happen in a capitalistic bureaucracy or a corporation bureaucracy with salaried employees.
Tbh that section was always weak but the book is decent to pill the libs
“the neoliberals are now more leninist than the Leninists”
so you're saying neoliberals are trotskyites
You’re joking, but because I think Fisher is using Leninist to mean “authoritarian meanie” I think technically he might agree.
IMO it's two things:
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Fairly universally disliked (or at least, made fun of). Not many people want to stick up for them.
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They're known for being sectarian and I think that makes folks (I admit this includes me lol) feel justified.
I don't know if I condone it but I do try to get away with it!
This is basically my understanding. They've been weird and disruptive without contributing much for a century now so they're not really taken seriously most places.
True, though I'm glad we're not really fair, ha. There are certain tendencies among the Western left that end up just being support for the American empire with extra steps and you really can't avoid at least implicitly crapping on them by calling out their ideas as such.
Anyways not really trying to justify it so much as take a stab at thinking about why it's (quietly) accepted.
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in every thread i've ever seen bashing them, i haven't seen a single person say "hey, quit it, i'm a Trot!" many here will give Trotsky his due, but i've never seen anyone claim affinity with a Trot party or tendency. We even have some anprims here! It really gives one the impression that it's a total dead end.
