DagSeoul: Positions, Populations, Punk, Poetics

The Five Jones Boys “Mr Ghost Goes to Town” available on The Human Orchestra compilation LP (1985).

This is how I think of the US I know. A bunch of fucking things that look like they came from somewhere else surrounding something that is an unhealthy mixture of everything else that has been deep fried and drowned in, basically, ketchup and mustard.

And the idiots will drink Sake with this. They will then hop on their vintage bikes and scooters and go away, back to their hip homes in the pseudo-ghettoes on the edge of urbanity and not too far from their suburban roots. They will complain about work and heartburn.

a lot of excessive contempt today. where’s Praise. i have to get away from the computer.

Deleuze wins.

Deleuze, the Spinozan or the Kantian or the Kafkan

It’s in this way I see many Marxists. I know it might not seem fair, but I sweat this about myself and my colleagues. I might expect too much.

@friendsofkarlmarx: I hope you know I’m not directing any of this at you. I was sparked by a discussion elsewhere and have been venting. ^^

Sentiments aren’t acts. You can’t erase your social status by moving across town.

Being a poor college student, learning to live on your own after having left the comfort of home, working part-time while going to school during the day, traveling around the world on a shoestring, living on ramen and eggs for a month when you’re low on cash: these things don’t make you working class.

And this is a problem with so many students who find activism only after experiencing a crisis on their own during the safety of a semester. That’s consumerism; that’s tourism. Safely transgressing the social order between classes, marching from time to time: it’s just not activism in any way.

It’s not that I don’t trust students. I trust students. It’s that so many leave university or college and settle back into their legacies. It’s that we simply cannot deny that feeling you want to do something is not doing something.  

And quite frankly, if you’re living in Cambridge, Mass, I know that’s a romanticization. Maybe you’re thinking of home. And I was talking about white and white passing Marxist United States. I’m venting about one kind of problem.

A Marxist Statement

“maybe where you’re from”

@friendsofkarlmarx: you do see the problem with this distancing gesture, right. when it comes to our overall project, you do understand you cannot do that.

rosebud

they’re going to remake all the literary and cinema classics and leonardo dicaprio will star in every one. you won’t realize this until it’s too late and your children grow up with his face for every face. when they close their eyes it will be a singular white face after the other, a sly white repetition becoming a generality, the same white smile and practiced adorable eyes.

thanks for permitting me to express my frustrations.

NOTHING FOR YOU EVERYTHING FOR YOU

And don’t they realize they’ll be the first casualties of the revolution? It’s the dogmatic intellectuals who’ll be slaughtered with the rich pigs. Who needs them? Who trusts them? They’re all bosses.

I think this recognition is what leads to their seething contempt for people who enjoy street-work.

I think this is what happens when we all recognize that dialects doesn’t need the administration of the dialectics.

I have a book here. I can read it or beat you with it…is usually how I feel when hanging out with THEE MARXISTS.

I have one anecdote about my Marxist youth. It was after only a year of hanging with my Marxist pals on campus, who I was thrilled to find hiding in a dark corner of the campus, that I ran from them to the streets, back to my actual friends, and began organizing. You know, hanging with people and working with people who had different ideas about things—people I felt needed a colleague and collaborator who appreciated their difference rather than a student who was going to tell them how to behave and what it meant to behave that way.

We have Marxism, which I love to think about and use. Then, we have Marxists. This is the unfortunate truth of the matter. And even when they get together to talk about this problem, they seem completely unaware that they are doing it without others. 

I don’t know what it is with the tradition post Red Scare Mid Twentieth Century, but it can really suck the blood from your bones.

BORING

Like who wants to sit around and listen to a bunch of highly educated mostly men wondering about why they are not appreciated?

For you Marxist white dudes, a moment of clarity. If you want to know why many, if not most, people of color think you’re all just a bunch of elitist assholes, if not outright closet bigots, listen to and read the many white and white passing Marxists on Cornel West. I’ve never met a fellow Marxist who hasn’t reveled in shitting all over West for all the worst reasons. It’s classic stuff. Just scour the internet for those awful discussions. And reflect.

The archive persists as well as all your excuses.

I’m writing this because, once again, I’m having a “Hey, Gary, why are anarchists more popular than Marxists” kind of discussion. Really?! Marxists can be the worst sort of clueless.