Pill Pod 163 - Controlled Opposition ft. 1Dime
Added 2024-04-08 20:17:38 +0000 UTCThis week we discuss how modern liberal democracies co-opt resistance and adapt to internal opposition as a mechanism of inverted totalitarian control. Our guest is Tony from 1Dime, who made a video on what he calls "contained opposition", find it here: https://youtu.be/7uPevWDAYFI.
Comments
Thank you for having 1Dime on.
Khemith
2024-05-08 11:53:34 +0000 UTCThe age of mass politics is over and capital is definitely not threatened by ideological fantasies of the masses becoming class conscious and rising up like it's Russia in 1917. The state is never the collective will of the people. It is, and always was, the collective will of those running it, who have different material interests to those they govern. We haven't even gone into the state having a monopoly on violence as Weber rightfully pointed out, and how that represents a consolidation of power of the state entity at the expense of actual, concrete individuals. Further, your view of individualism is extremely myopic as it is for the vast majority of leftists. The collective is and has always been an abstraction, and the problem is that people aren't individualistic enough, because if they were, they'd realise that what's good for society is good for the individual and vice versa. Also, much of your individual subjectivity derives from the social world you inhabit. But humans are not a hive mind species, they are social, but society is composed of interacting individual egos influencing each other. To let your individuality be subsumed into a group identity is an authoritarian, fascist tendency that must be resisted as much as possible. "But even if I am active in the field of science, etc. – an activity which I am seldom able to perform in direct association with other men – I am still socially active because I am active as a man. It is not only the material of my activity – including even the language in which the thinker is active – which I receive as a social product. My own existence is social activity. Therefore what I create from myself I create for society, conscious of myself as a social being. My universal consciousness is only the theoretical form of that whose living form is the real community, society, whereas at present universal consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such in hostile opposition to it. Hence the activity of my universal consciousness – as activity – is my theoretical existence as a social being. It is, above all, necessary to avoid once more establishing “society" as an abstraction over against the individual. The individual is the social being. His vital expression – even when it does not appear in the direct form of a communal expression, conceived in association with other men – is therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. Man's individual and species-life are not two distinct things, however much – and this is necessarily so – the mode of existence of individual life is a more particular or a more general mode of the species-life, or species-life a more particular or more general individual life." - Marx
anacidcommie
2024-05-08 07:50:24 +0000 UTCNow 5 people know about "After Effects"
Khemith
2024-05-08 04:58:35 +0000 UTCClass comes from one's proximity and relation to the means of production right? The state would then simply be the collective will of the people in the naive sense and a smart administration in the dull sense of how states usually work. And yes they are ideological. Yes they impose their will. But anything other than collective action is not going to change material condition on your terms. Capital is not threatened at all by individualism. Ill end with that.
Khemith
2024-05-08 03:40:09 +0000 UTCMaybe on the level of the masses it's a part of post-history malaise, inverted forms of expression and subconscious collective shame producing hyper-individualism?
Alex B
2024-04-18 06:11:50 +0000 UTCIsn’t that what western state/media propaganda are doing rn with the whole Israel/Palestine conflict? And yeah, Perry’s 100% right about how that’s how a child learns to contain feelings. In post Freudian object relations theory, that’s how the child overcomes primitive splitting and learns that a person can have both positive and negative aspects to them at the same time, and without this kind of containment, you get a borderline personality orientation (not necessarily the DSM disorder).
anacidcommie
2024-04-15 18:56:55 +0000 UTCIn Phillipa Perry's "The Book you Wish your Parents Read" teaching a child a healthy way to contain feelings requires meeting their feelings with calmness, not denying or suppressing, while showing alignment/understanding; but engaging in collaboration to solve problems is part of it too. I'd imagine the psychological fallout would be severe if that practice was used to normalise abuses or climate-mega-genocide, but on a state level it would probably look like a depressive humanism
Alex B
2024-04-12 18:01:20 +0000 UTCHis hair is stupid I don't like it ngl
Y M
2024-04-12 12:33:32 +0000 UTCTony’s part identification as a Leninist is pretty telling. I get the critique of anarchists being so allergic to power that they end up never touching it, but at the same time, his ideas on the state and class are extremely naive. If you have a state, you have class. This is unavoidable. You have the governors and the governed, and the former are inevitably going to be afforded structural privileges the latter lack, creating at least 2 separate classes with diverging socioeconomic interests. Further, the former are systemically incentivized to accumulate power and keep it using propaganda and all the fun stuff the neoliberal state does. It’s an effective soft power system, to be sure, but it will never bring about communism, as communism is the abolishing of class, state and money as byproducts of the abolishment of private property. So while a lot of leftists can be idealistic, Tony is being naive af here, thinking that you can somehow make use of the neoliberal state machinery for socialist ends. That has never and will never happen. What is far more likely to happen, as I’m pretty sure Tony knows, is that you will be co-opted by the system and you’ll become another centrist or perhaps a Putin. Either way, the hegemony of capital remains unthreatened. There’s a reason post structuralist type radicals and even those Lenin disparagingly called the “ultra left” are critical of the state for at least just these reasons. This is to say nothing of how the system is supposed to solve the kind of alienation that is inevitable under the mass societies of modernity.
anacidcommie
2024-04-12 05:37:31 +0000 UTCGreat video fire emoji
Jack
2024-04-11 21:16:15 +0000 UTCNo, they reference another podcast during the conversation with 1Dime that they say will remain unnamed.
Andy Louie
2024-04-09 16:02:39 +0000 UTCthat was a great episode. Illuminating conversation, I felt a dialectic going on. There was opposition between Vitor and 1Dime, but leading to better clarification instead of showing who wins or who's right. Made me understand 1Dime's video with greater depth (and lead me to it)
Sabataí
2024-04-09 16:02:33 +0000 UTC1dime?
Sabataí
2024-04-09 16:00:10 +0000 UTC"Can't Get You Out Of My Head" is not Adam Curtis' latest documentary work. His latest is called "Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone".
Andy Louie
2024-04-09 15:32:40 +0000 UTCGreat episode, loved 1Dime and Victor’s conversation. I would enjoy hearing some more of Pills and 1Dime’s discussion on the utility of post-revolution strategy!
Nick
2024-04-09 15:08:42 +0000 UTCSo could someone name this other podcast that was referenced but unnamed in the episode?
Andy Louie
2024-04-09 14:19:25 +0000 UTCAwesome episode, really liked it! Now I want to read the 1dime's dissertation. Also, I know what after effects is but do not know how to operate it, I'll look into that so I can better appreciate your videos pills ;)
DrNeville
2024-04-09 12:55:23 +0000 UTCMore tools to hurt my neoliberal friends.
Jonathan Knowles
2024-04-09 00:43:08 +0000 UTCThat was great. Also love the silence while 1Dime is laying out his work in the beginning and everyone just kinda forgets that he laid out a lot up until minute 26.
hoppi
2024-04-08 23:15:48 +0000 UTC1dime let’s gooooo
Whatsacriticaltheory
2024-04-08 22:46:38 +0000 UTCMister Pill
Ashley H
2024-04-08 20:20:21 +0000 UTC
