I wonder how many mega-sellers "IMPERIALISM IS FUCKING BAD"-movies/books are there and libs don't get it.
*watches Star Wars ep VI *Misses the similarities between the US in Vietnam Such a good, wholesome movie!
I remember one take was that the hunger games was about how bad communism is. Yes the story about rich people watching poor kids die for fun and a revolution is started against said rich people
It’s obviously the American colonists and the British Empire! You can tell because the good guys are fighting for Freedom, which is what Americans do.
Dude, I never watched them but goddam never heard of that obvious connection
all of them, nearly all well liked media is leftist
except like 24 and some Michael Bay stuff
The Black Panther movie has so many nods to actually good politics, then shits the bed anyway. I can't tell if Coogler left dog whistles to the good politics he wanted to put in but Disney wouldn't let him, or if it's just performative lib BS. Killmonger grew up in Oakland of all places? Can't be an accident.
Killmonger is my favorite MCU hero. Shame his revolutionary spirit was crushed by a technocratic xenophobic monarchy that then transitioned to libshit
I would never watch marvel shit, but the comments I heard about that movie are disgusting, like, any sane person would cheer for "the bad guy" plan but he was bad so his ideas are totally wrong.
I watched it in the theater with a comrade, and I had a hard time explaining it to them afterwards, that while I liked the movie, I didn't think it worked as a teaching tool, like I kept hearing.
Everyone is just going to associate with the class they think they're a part of, excusing their bad bits and inflating their good ones.
And sure enough...
It's still a great film. It just doesn't have any pedagogical qualities, imo.
Kind of reminds me how the CEO and founder of Buzzfeed used to be a critical theorist, and wrote an essay about how "late capitalism not only accelerates the flow of capital, but also accelerates the rate at which subjects assume identities. Identity formation is inextricably linked to the urge to consume, and therefore the acceleration of capitalism necessitates an increase in the rate at which individuals assume and shed identities" using writings by Jameson, Guattari, and Deleuze. Kind of insane that he wrote about how the internet can perpetuate this, and then founded a company that did exactly that.
You would make a great libertarian cult leader, the internet site would be great, you just need to change "capitalists" for "(((them)))" in your rants. Think about it, your family wouldn't have to worry about medical costs anymore...
The marxist to doomer to tech bro pipeline.
If the stupidest possible thing is going to happen it might as well be done by someone aware of how stupid it is.
Ads. It's all about ads. Buzzfeed as a site fosters quick "identity creation" by having all those stupid quizzes, and then can tailor ads to fit that newly adopted identity constructed by the quiz. It's very scary because the scholarly reason why all of this works is laid out in the paper I linked! He just took the theory and applied it to a website to make bucket-loads of money.
Yeah, like Bezos, without him there wouldn't be so many people unironically wanting to guillotine rich people.
Turns out that manifesto on disrupting just-in-time infrastructure I picked up at the anarchist book fair was by Bezos.
That article ends with "A successful contemporary politics has stakes in defining the rhythmic flow between schizophrenic and identificatory impulses. Hopefully, alternative rhythms can challenge, or at least syncopate, the accelerating rhythm of late capitalism."
If anything it reads like a manifesto of why Buzzfeed exists rather than any betrayal of previous beliefs. It basically argues that what capitalist marketeers are doing seems to be effective, so let us co-opt these strategies towards our own ends.Buzzfeed produces a very specific type of culture; it is bourgeois and liberal but as LGBTQ person I can tell you that absolutely I would rather be in a room with a random Buzzfeed reader than random person that dislikes Buzzfeed or even random Chapo just given influx of stupidpol chuds. That website is is like an anti-venom for bigotry.
Much of it is also a gateway drug to BuzzfeedNews, which is a lib-left publication with articles like this one: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/otilliasteadman/pandemic-nurses-onlyfans-sex-workAnd besides, the type of people that are liable to visit Buzzfeed are the exact same that could get easily sucked into alt-right and conspiracy thinking instead; it is no coincidence that Breitbart has such a similar approach.
The worst Buzzfeed can be reasonably accused of is hypernormalisation and telling people to vote democrat.
I mean seriously, the kind of person that reads and agrees with this: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/political-violence-inequality-us-election
They are inches away from being radicalized into leftism; all they are really missing is class consciousness and some praxis. God knows I would rather have ex-BuzzfeedNews flooding into Chapo than ex-Stupidpol.
To put it bluntly, the schizophrenic work of dissolving bigotry is much more difficult and time consuming than the intellectual work of reading a few essays on Marxism.
I am a Marxist with an MBA
MBAs are horseshit, some basic business management stuff and a whole lot of "how to maximize value." They mostly teach you to look at every asset (human assets too) and make sure you are extracting the absolute maximum amount of profit from it you can get.
It is for real Marxism but what if applied to evil.
Also a Marxist with an MBA. MBAs definitely don't know anything about Marxism; shit, they mostly buy into neoclassical economic fairy tales.
They probably put that picture of Foucault up to feign sophistication.
They probably put that picture of Foucault up to feign sophistication.
replace foucault with any other black and white picture of a thoughtful bald guy with glasses and it will be the same for them
I’ve been thinking about grad school for something more related to my changing interests - Sociology or Philosophy maybe
Although I would caution you to really do your homework before jumping into this, law school might be worth considering.
Labor studies, cultural studies, and Anthropology all have a high concentration of radicals. That said, a lot of them will invoke Marx and then shift to talking about what companies can do to be more responsible. The academy has a lot of marxists who have to be liberals to get paid, it's a weird dynamic.
If you do a post grad in almost any of the humanities, you'll certainly draw from cultural studies and anthropology.
That actually looks interesting. I do have a lot of interest in socialist economic planning (for which I have a lot more to learn)
The only reason capitalist ideological hegemony demonizes Marx and discourages people from consuming communist literature is because of the danger of "infection" where the reader might become outraged at the conditions that sustain their lives under capitalism, for various reasons. Otherwise it's quite useful to read Marx, even if you're evil.
I had fun getting mine, but it was a 12 month program and I was a grad assistant so I just sort of fucked around drinking and studying for a year. Def good to understand how the enemy thinks tho, and it demystifies a lot of horseshit.
Also MBA opened a lot of non-business possibilities for me. I now work in environmental restoration and management.
Not an insignificant amount of that. I'm working for the EPA though so it is mostly science based and measurable results. Nothing that'll save the arctic sea ice, but def stuff that'll make local water features healthier and reduce the numbers of invasive species. Helps when you aren't in an org dependent on fundraising or profit too.
the dumbest thing for a capitalist to do is believe in their ideology
They don't believe that shit is good for everyone, they know it works for them.
One company I was at air gapped the people who actually developed policy and ran the company, and the people who dealt with investors, who were basically salespeople with no admin responsibility.
Actually it allowed the people who owned and ran the company to never talk to investors, fleece them of money, and lie about potential profitability.
Which ya know, fine, let them, no skin off my nose.
My partner worked as a linkedin-data-scavenger and I have heard about some but good lord.
Executive, Operating, Technical, Managing(?), Product, Financial, Strategy or Security, Development(?).
? are ones I've never heard of, but probably exist.
Also Chief Delivery Officer in some agencies. As in the head of things that actually provide the services.
That is a clear sign of decay. Getting high on your own supply is never good.
Damn, just found out about this panopticon. Haha, what if we expanded and privatized it?
I have no idea what Amber's take is, but publications like The Economist and the Financial Times, generally put forward the perspective of a segment of the bourgeoisie in ways that are surprisingly honest.
Like I remember an issue of the Economist from a few years ago on the environmental crisis, and some of their takes were like the market mechanism is choking out the rollout of renewable energy technology and sending the whole industry into a "circle of death," and that the world is "losing the war against climate change. "
The part they don't get to, because it's a bourgeois perspective, is that socialism is the answer to capitalist crisis--be it political, environmental, or economic--so in that sense, no, Marxists and MBAs don't share the same knowledge and perspectives.
“Hear me out. Since it’s all prisons, don’t you want to be in the “prison of warden” instead if the “prison of prisoner?”
I have a business degree and yeah, this is very true. Like they both refer to labor as. Variable capital. For a reason.
At least in managerial accounting they had fixed costs instead of constant capital and variable costs instead Of variable capital
I mean Foucault did open himself to a lot of different interpretations. He was also interested in the neoliberal experiment before his death. Not to say that he would've carried on if he was still alive, but the point stands.
Palantir is a Surveillance Capitalism company. Foucault, among other things, talked about the Panopticon, a theoretical prison in which the prisoners' behavior is controlled because they know they could be watched at any moment but are never sure when they actually ARE being watched.
There's probably more to say about Foucault here, I don't know a LOT about him, but that's the bit that jumped out at me
Cuz you asked for a "primer". And that's a tool for picking PCR primers.
It's a great joke I swear.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/
His big thing was looking at how social control happens in the modern world, especially how people are made docile through social pressure and the constant possibility of surveillance. Largely informed by his time in mental hospitals and as a Maoist political prisoner in France.
Postmodernism is de facto the philosophical basis for neoliberal ideology, so this is internally consistent.
It is why Jordan Peterson is a hilariously wrong hack.
no, its not. stop trying to distill broad historical philosophical movements into one sentence hot takes
Postmodernism is de facto the philosophical basis for neoliberal ideology
How so?
I first encountered the argument from David Harvey:
For almost everyone involved in the movement of '68, the intrusive state was the enemy and it had to be reformed. And on that, the neoliberals could easily agree. But capitalist corporations, business, and the market system were also seen as primary enemies requiring redress if not revolutionary transformation: hence the threat to capitalist class power. By capturing ideals of established individual freedom and turning them against the interventionist and regulatory practices of the state, capitalist class interests could hope to protect and even restore their position. Neoliberal was well suited to this ideological task. But it had to be backed up by a practical strategy that emphasized the liberty of consumer choice, not only with respect to particular products but also with respect to lifestyles, modes of expression, and a wide range of cultural practices. Neoliberalization required both politically and economically the construction of a neoliberal market-based populist culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarianism. As such it proved more than a little compatible with that cultural impulse called "post-modernism" which had long been lurking in the wings but could now emerge full-blown as both a cultural and an intellectual dominant. This was the challenge that corporations and class elites set out to finesse in the 1980s.
The ruling elites moved, often fractiously, to support the opening up of the cultural field to all manner of diverse cosmopolitan currents. The narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity became the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture. Artistic freedom and artistic license, promoted by [New York City]'s powerful cultural institutions, led, in effect, to the neoliberalization of culture...The city's elites acceded, though not without a struggle, to the demand for lifestyle diversification (including those attached to sexual preference and gender) and increasing consumer niche choices (in areas such as cultural production). New York became the epicentre of postmodern cultural and intellectual experimentation. Meanwhile the investment bankers reconstructed the city economy around financial activities, ancillary services such as legal services and the media (much revived by the financialization then occurring) and diversified consumerism (gentrification and neighborhood "restoration" playing a prominent and profitable role). City government was more and more construed as an entrepreneurial rather than a social democratic or even managerial entity...
--A Brief History of Neoliberalism, by David Harvey (2005)
But Mirowski's detailed and nuanced description of neoliberal ideology in Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste is what most got me onto it. The fragmentation of identity as a series of masks (worker/manager/commodity/entrepreneur/etc) to don depending on the situation; reduction of the idea of collective action to the level of being unthinkable; reduction of political participation as an extension of personal expression and virtue; idea that political change can only be achieve through participation in markets; exaltation of market activity and commodity consumption as the highest form of personal expression - all these alements are very much in line with the postmodern idea that there is no universal truth or structure to the known universe. That power is interpreted not in terms of known, material, structural forces but in vague, relativistic terms.
Postmodern Or, The Cultural Logic of Capitalism by Frederic Jameson is unfortunately still in my backlog but I imagine it expands on this conception a great deal.
