Pill Pod 116 - Guattari & Negri's Communism (Exclusive)
Added 2023-03-24 15:00:05 +0000 UTCWe speculate on moral panics before getting to the meat of a post-marxist, 80s, political theory text: "Communists Like Us" by Felix Guattari & Toni Negri. Still looking for a post-Marxism that hits...
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Revisiting this a month later contrapoints has a very different answer to what’s driving the moral panic lol
Nathan Forman
2023-05-08 04:08:54 +0000 UTCI wasnt ready for Eric to destroy me and my fellow STEMcucks! Did that count as a moral panic over the educational system? Lol. Fun discussion, though, and can relate to this comment ^ , coming from the biomedical side.
Miguel de Jesus
2023-04-18 16:33:57 +0000 UTCSounds a bit like reheated new left Marcuse to me
Max Monheit
2023-04-09 23:32:56 +0000 UTCMediocrity is the source of moral panics. The kind of person who relies on received ideas without any criticality. The kind of person who needs moral certainty under their feet.
Khemith
2023-04-01 04:43:00 +0000 UTCEngineer here. Apropro the discussion of creativity, whether people use education to better humanity, ourselves, or a tool to acquire capital, an instrument, in self reflection it's clear to me that I chose engineering over architecture or English writing (both were solid avenues for me) because I was told I could get a job in it, and that I probably couldn't get a job or a good paying one with an english writing degree, writing poetry to inspire and uplift others etc and so on, not that I knew I would eventually come to very much enjoy the creativity I could express through engineering, in systems modeling, in field service work debugging problems and coming up with on the fly solutions. And I couldn't have predicted that 13years in that enjoyment of creativity would eventually succumb once again to a demoralizing "fuck this shit, I just want to make enough money to quit and live in the woods with a simple life growing my own food and being off the grid because I can't stand the bureaucracy and bullshit of bosses and deadlines and soul crushing business travel and managers that do nothing and have no idea how what they manage actually functions. It ebbs and flows, but if in the end, capitalism is always the soul crushing backstop in my own arc. Brief glimmers of enjoyable creativity, bookended by the invisible guiding hand of the market. Living in a capitalist society, I felt I needed to be an engineer and after enough time being one, felt I would rather just be a farmer. If I had been raised in a non capitalist society where all work was available without such competition and threat of poverty and lack of healthcare, where I didn't feel I needed to be an engineer to avoid remaining in the lower rungs of society, I think I wouldn't have such a strong desire to be a farmer, or an engineer, and maybe I would have stumbled into something entirely different. Or maybe I could have enjoyed still being a engineer. It is a case of being a fish in water. How does a fish even begin to know the possibilities of a bird? Maybe I am a butterfly dreaming it is a man. Shits whack, that's all I know.
ageOfBumFires
2023-04-01 02:08:02 +0000 UTCIsn't moral panic just displaced helplessness and lashing out against an oppression people feel but can't seem to locate or aren't prepared to admit to? Like, can't believe in the fundamental, systematic alienation and exploitation and emptiness of society, so will latch on to these rediculous premise surges when they present themselves. I feel like things aren't going well but it's too complicated to understand, and this person says video games are corrupting, and I don't play video games, and they are something new, and my childhood was heaven on earth, so it must be this new thing, because things were great when I was a child and I had absolutely no idea or memory of what was going on. It's good water-cooler talk too. You get to feel like you're in another tribe. The more tribes you accumulate and consume the less alienated you think it makes you, the less powerless it makes you feel. I just want to garden. Everything is too ridiculous to be taken seriously. You know plants talk in >=20kHz range? Wild.
ageOfBumFires
2023-03-31 23:26:12 +0000 UTCI recall the passage on "the solidarity of the shaken" from Jan Patočka's Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History written in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s. These lines seem to resonate especially well in times that shake the world like these, in the "time of the realising of Force", such as war including cold war, "The solidarity of the shaken—shaken in their faith in the day, in "life" and "peace"—acquires a special significance, especially in the time of the releasing of Force. Force released is that without which "day" and "peace," human life defined by a world of exponential growth, cannot exist. The solidarity of the shaken is the solidarity of those who understand. Understanding, though, must in the present circumstances involve not only the basic level, that of slavery and of freedom with respect to life, but needs also to entail an understanding of the significance of science and technology, of that Force we are releasing. All the forces on whose basis alone can humans live in our time are potentially in the hands of those who so understand. The solidarity of the shaken can say "no" to the measures of mobilization which make the state of war permanent. It will not offer positive programs but will speak, like Socrates' daimonion, in warnings and prohibitions. It can and must create a spiritual authority, become a spiritual power that could drive the warring world to some restraint, rendering some acts and measures impossible."
Echoes from Elsewhere
2023-03-30 14:27:17 +0000 UTCLike the consumerism binge on top of Jesus's birthday, on top of Saturnalia, on top of whatever OCD pagan shit was previously done at winter solstice; new ideologies map over the nodes of the old. Truth is probably the most influencial node of any ideology, it colonises and erases all its others with extreme prejudice. Currently it seats rationality, championing intellectual reasoning which manifests as some kind of transhumanist mechanisation fetish. The irrational society painted by critical theory, in particular Baudrillard and semiotics, much better accommodates symbolic and emotional reasoning, and I think could be a contender to rationality as truth, that actually engages with alienation. If God was truth then truth has the actual power of god.
Alex B
2023-03-29 13:47:15 +0000 UTCThe moral panic discussion was very interesting! Christian hegemonic societies (because that’s the one we’re stuck with but probably applies to many other social / cultural arrangements) need a scapegoat or more accurately, a boogieman to help define who’s in and out of the ‘proper’ social order. There always seems to be a mix of the perennial favourites (Jews, black people, poor people, queer people, and promiscuous women), historical-economic conditions, and random events that provide opportunities to whip up fear and outrage. And to help explain why all isn’t well in the world. It’s also worth thinking about what any given ‘panic’ is responding to in terms of what’s an acceptable-convenient scapegoat for that moment in history. You’ll see that often the silly satanic stuff pops up when there’s no other ‘other’ currently being scandalised. Examples: the witch trials happened after the Jews had more or less been hunted down or expelled from Europe. Then the churches needed another ‘other’ to blame and to keep everyone on their toes. The obvious choice was … women! During the height of the Cold War, the capitalist-Christian west got a lot of mileage out of the ‘reds under the beds’ boogieman. And the 80’s -90’s satanic panic seemed to stir up once commies were no longer a threat (of course there were other contributing events and simultaneous but related panics; AIDS). And then we got the Iraq war and then 9/11 that gave us the ‘axis of evil’ and the ‘middle eastern terrorist boogieman’. Of course I’m speculating all this but it would be interesting to map these events and ‘panics’ to see how they’ve connected or played off one another historically.
Jo Marie
2023-03-28 08:41:01 +0000 UTCLeading to*social change not occurring because of consciousness
Giovanni
2023-03-28 05:42:58 +0000 UTCI am interested in an episode about baudrillard and to hear further explained on how the social doesn’t exist leading to consciousness raising failing
Giovanni
2023-03-28 05:39:10 +0000 UTCLaziness or the subjective cash out of an unconscious libidinal attachment towards oppression via wage labor.
Zack Klug
2023-03-27 12:55:54 +0000 UTCI love what y'all do. I just started reading Communists like Us 3 days ago and just saw this. Wild timing. 🔥🔥🔥
Keanu Clark
2023-03-27 02:08:45 +0000 UTCRight now, capitalism is going through so many crises, and inequality has hit such heights, that the right-wing media machine needs to keep drumming up ever more reasons to focus on anything but capitalism, from minorities in Disney movies, to trans people existing, to non-binary M&Ms. The culture war is just one giant distraction from the ravages of neoliberalism. The children thing works so well, because it's one of those issues that completely bypasses anything approaching logical or rational thinking and goes straight for the feels, total amygdala stimulation, an appeal to an unconscious aspect of the superego. "People are intelligent enough to get their biases validated" <3 And this is why the leftist activists or whatever shouldn't give a fuck, because most people want their biases validated, not knowing the truth. Most people have their mind made up on all these issues, and in a world where the algorithm will make it easier than it's ever been to find that validation, almost no good will come from engaging them in good faith. This is a symptom of the humanist liberal belief that people are fundamentally rational and that they're generally searching for truth. No lol. Guattari and Negri are right about not focusing so much on the working class cause its so fragmented. It's why the idea of mass revolution is pretty much a dead 20th century relic now. Info capitalism definitely has destroyed solidarity because of neoliberal hyperindividualism, or the death of the social. Being a communist is to be anti-state. This isn't new, and you can find Marx critiquing the state as well in several instances. A communist society is by definition a stateless society. Victor's derision stems from his shitlib sensibilities, and his continuous failure to see the state as the method by which private property is maintained. And, god, the cringe at Victor's complaining about "protest against everything, be against everything". Yes. Again, this isn't controversial if you actually understand basic Marx, who in the German Ideology said: "“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” I guess it's easy to empathise with Peterson if your understanding of Marx is on the same level. The abolition of work is a post-left concept which is about not just the end of surplus value extraction, but the end or minimisation of coercive labour, of activity done for the sake of "being productive", of activity seen primarily as a tool of instrumental reason. Work should be replaced by play as much as possible: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work However, this is also technically not new, as Marx wrote about the abolition of labour as well: https://libcom.org/article/abolition-labour-marxs-teachings-uri-zilbersheid It's a reaction to the cult of work that sprang up as part of capitalism as the ideology of the Protestant work ethic which still persists strongly to this day. Also, division of labour is a consequence of modernity, of organic solidarity that emerges as a necessity of many people living together in a relatively small space like a city or a metropolis. And while it's a "good thing", in the sense that it allows such a complex and dense (population-wise) society to function, it is alienating, as people typically would like to try their hand at different things, at wanting to cultivate multiple skills over a lifetime, not have to focus on specialising at just one because that's where the money is. Creativity doesn't even necessarily enter the equation here, just that people have multiple interests, and they'd want to have the time and resources to develop them all. This is what I'd say Guattari and Negri are rightfully arguing for. And again, this harks back to what Marx said about this: "For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” This is the one of the essential features of communist life. Uncle Bob or people who don't feel this way can do what they like, but this shouldn't constrain everybody else. It's like Erik said, y'all gotta stop deviating so much from Marx, cause you end up losing sight of the situation.
anacidcommie
2023-03-26 14:38:42 +0000 UTCGood for the armaments business class
Steve B
2023-03-25 07:39:08 +0000 UTCSmall differences on the post-Marxist Left will be its demise, just as they were its making. Contradiction is constitutive, though i share your interogative sentiment
Steve B
2023-03-25 07:30:25 +0000 UTCYes, read Fatal Strategies lol
Walker Goff
2023-03-25 03:31:31 +0000 UTCCan't we all just get aloooong :(
Ashley H
2023-03-25 02:40:45 +0000 UTCVictor, there is moral panic on the left. But you're totally wrong that it's overexaggerated. I'm from the South. It's goddamn repressive.
Walker Goff
2023-03-25 02:07:41 +0000 UTCI have a friend that's into crypto who has definitely been panicking recently. As for larger "everything is going insane"--that has been going on in the US for a long, long time. It isn't even just Trump. Before that it was the Tea Party. Before that, it was the financial collapse. Before that, it was the War on Terror. It feels like America is always in a state of moral panic.
Walker Goff
2023-03-25 02:06:14 +0000 UTCGreat conversation / episode, thanks!
SJ
2023-03-24 17:58:53 +0000 UTCLast but not least and probably in the spirit of Marx. As consciousness rose in the process of evolution and the possible challange to biology that entails. A thought as an anti-capitalist as an evolutionary change that lies outside capitalism that would finally bring about a challenge to it. Simple things like: don't work people to death. Instead of one person per job, let's have 2. Which is totally a challenge to capitalistic structures.
Susan H
2023-03-24 16:31:36 +0000 UTCKnowing almost nothing about anti-oedipus - I heard a talk on it - a discussion of schizo and the proscenium arch: the breaking of the 4th wall - probably akin to Zizek's obscene. Exposing and receding stage in life.
Susan H
2023-03-24 16:15:54 +0000 UTCEthics vs morality. Objective morality vs how to act ethically/
Susan H
2023-03-24 15:48:51 +0000 UTCAl Gore won the popular vote
Susan H
2023-03-24 15:46:54 +0000 UTCOf note: Part of the "Satanic Panic" was that there were secret underground occult practices of abducting children and having them do unspeakable acts and releasing them with a warning not to tell anyone.
Susan H
2023-03-24 15:32:04 +0000 UTCI had a thought recently: Everyone is just trying to deal with REALity. With Lack and desire and the expression Pain. Looking for release as Freud would say. "We are trying to return to the inorganic state." I am not sure what or how to resolve this tension. Our current politics is merely a symptome of the rise of the Real to consciousness. A really cool paper on this: "Freud's Masterplot" by Peter Brook.
Susan H
2023-03-24 15:28:48 +0000 UTC
