DagSeoul: Positions, Populations, Punk, Poetics

"I am the determined foe of the capitalist system, which denies the workers the rights of human beings. I consider it fundamentally wrong, radically unjust and cruel. It inflicts purposeless misery upon millions of my fellow men and women. It must, therefore, be changed, it must be destroyed, and a better, saner, kinder social order established. Competition must give place to cooperation. ‘Each for all’ is a far more stimulating and effective doctrine than ‘each for himself.’… Oh, no, it is not human nature that we have to change. Our task is not so difficult as that. All that is necessary to make this world a more comfortable abode for man is to abolish the capitalist system."

Helen Keller, 1913 (via socialismartnature)

(via love-among-the-tombstones)

"The lesson? So long as power and hierarchy exist, they will be used by those at the top to live off the sweat and blood of those at the bottom. This is as true of self-proclaimed workers’ and socialist regimes as of any other kind. The only use for power is exploitation. And the very existence of power will transform those who wield it into exploiters, whether you call them “capitalists” or use some other name."

Kevin Carson (via psychogeographicalsomaticism)

Don’t organize because EXPLOITATION is the only possible result?

“The only use for power is exploitation.” WTF. I like Carson’s attempt to look at capitalism as it is rather than as the Austrian theorists, for example, want it to be. I really dig that. But this is some bullshit about power. It simply doesn’t work this way.

Power relations are always already there. They don’t appear when, let’s say, workers organize to collectively speak with more power than they could as individual employees. You can call that exploitation, if you want, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Moreover, this hierarchy based on The Top and The Bottom lacks credibility. Power doesn’t work this way. White supremacist capitalism insists that poor whites carry water for wealthy whites. The members of the classes at The Top are effectively absent in the exploitation that occurs in everyday racist capitalist practice. The Capitalist class doesn’t dirty it hands in such capitalist work. It tricks poor whites into signing on to the individualist manifesto that brings with it the promise of potential riches should man be self-reliant and personally responsible and non-violent.

To collectively organize with an attention to race, class, sex and gender is an effective way to take from “those at the top” what they stole from “those at the bottom”. To attempt to claim that such organizing and its attempt to bargain results in exploitation is simple-minded and attends to a view of history that, I think, Marx, who Carson appreciates, would be opposed to constructing.

The more I think about this quote, the more I’d like to see it in context with its text. It seems like a Carson might be trying to make a point that is being left out. It seems like this has been cut to promote a problematic individualism v collectivism binary.

(via foucaultofyou)

basedrevolution:

overtheeventhorizon:

Another lecture by David Harvey on Capitalism and Marx, he also talks about the seizure of State power.

Notable quotes include:

“I wouldn’t want to see an anarchist collective running a nuclear power station” [in relation to the requirement of hierarchical systems in socialism, supposing we “smash the State” instead of seizing it]

As far as “seizing” instead of “smashing” the state goes, even Lenin used the rhetoric of smashing it. The bourgeois state absolutely must be smashed, and then the socialist state can come into being. “Seizing the state” sounds like something a democratic socialist would say. “We don’t need revolution, we need to seize the state through the ballot box!” Of course this isn’t the context of what Harvey was saying, but “smashing the state” doesn’t need to be an anarchist notion. 

It isn’t an anarchist notion. The capitalists have done just fine smashing it, have they not?

(Source: baseddzerzhinsky, via frightfulhobgoblin)

The Many Become One And Are Increased By That One

As you’ll see, I misused horizontally in the post below. I think I wanted to change an instance using FIND and change all instances from vertically to horizontally, which makes for confusing reading. Suffice to say, some of the instances of “horizontally” should read “vertically”. This is what happens when you type and edit posts in between classes. Sloppy, I know. The binary horizontal-vertical is not really cutting it for my purposes, anyway, and is a stand-in while I work out a different way to write about with more useful language.

dagseoul:

In my last post I wrote:

The longer I teach, I began in 1999, the more I become a student advocate, the more I see my role in the school and classroom as vertically integrated with role my students perform. The more I see our role in direct opposition, in a healthy and productive manner rather than destructive, to the administration and state. Being a student advocate permits me to be an advocate for teachers.

(Updated on April 16: Beginnings of an essay I’m writing about producing space in classrooms. I’m trying to figure out how to address my concern with space and horizontal and vertical just don’t cut it. The two words are shitty training wheels for me to get my thoughts straight as i try to find a better vocabulary. One-dimensional v. multi-dimensional and horizontal v. vertical aren’t the best way to put it, but it’ll do for now. Maybe i need to think about words like transversal. Your suggestions, input are always welcome. Love dialogue. Also want to note i’m using a Whiteheadean concept, the many become one and are increased by that one. I didn’t write that. I’m citing it, implementing it.)

I’m going to go with the flow of thought here and see what I can get out of it, so I can see what I think about the ideas implicit in my statement. I’m not sure vertically integrated is the best way to put it. I’m trying to argue that classrooms are spaces typically, uncritically and horizontally [ed. 5.24.12: apparently, I misused horizontally here. I think it’s clear I meant vertically] constructed to reinforce and passively instruct traditional power structures. Most of us would likely agree with this. Only an authoritarian would take issue so soon.

I believe teachers have the ability to dis-include—in this case, I like dis-include more than exclude—and disrupt traditional, passively accepted power structures by teaching in media res so to speak. Simply describing a teacher stepping from the front of the classroom into the middle of it may seem trite but to accomplish such a small step first requires many more complex rhetorical moves than may not be apparent. Many theorists have discussed what it means to teach in media res. It’s not a new idea. So, I’ll leave the groundwork alone at the moment.

Rejecting traditional, vertical hierarchies in the classroom in favor of a horizontal [note: see the binary doesn’t really work. I have to work on this, but I’m stuck with it for now, so bear with me] framework permits active critical thinking, promotes a tolerance for social difference, insists that conflict can be resolved peacefully, and instructs students and teachers that there is more to cooperation in our society than the future cooperation between employee and employer, boss and worker, master and slave. In addition, it allows for the cultivation of a multi-dimensional classroom.

The traditional classroom is one-dimensional. It occupies a particular space in time and insists that it stays put statically reinforcing an important power structure for future members of the workforce, of consumer culture. It becomes a voice in the unconscious, dogmatically instructing citizens how to behave. Students can look back to their notes only to point to what they learned because the traditional, horizontal structure is not dynamic. It’s remembered, stored away, celebrated on anniversaries, nostalgic, lifeless.

I’m trying to get at intention. The vertically-constructed space of traditional classrooms promotes the worst aspects of rugged individualism in our culture. Traditional classrooms are populated with students and teachers who are permitted to possess their own intentions, goals, objectives, and points-of-view only in so far as their claims are articulated within their appropriate positions within the hierarchy. For example, a student can disagree with her teacher as long as she agrees to obey the teacher. (Two things about this need to be developed further: the agreement to obey is silent and conversation about it is generally not permitted; students are taught that they are free to participate (see freedom of contract and employment at will) and that they can have opinions, but they must decide to choose the authorized correct answers exams. Both of these things are considered good cooperation.)

Traditional classrooms construct and model social space that prohibits critical thinking from successfully working. Traditional classrooms conduct discourse that insists dynamic rhetoric exist in static positions. We really do dis-empower the radical potential for public discourse and habituate participants to embrace self-interest as an interest that knows its proper place. Moreover, a student who competes for the highest position must also be willing to dispossess classmates. Self-interest as an interest that knows its proper place is a grotesque representation of the democratic ideal that the many become one and are increased by that one.

This is why selfish and static ideological and political positions represented by libertarianism are so popular with young people. Libertarianism is the unapologetic acceptance of self-interest for benefit of an individual in competition with everyone else and companion to none. For no rational reason, we teach students that this is in everyone’s best interest. We instruct students to become individuals in spite of their communities rather than individuals that produce their communities. Community is represented as a burden. We teach that John Galt is a heroic individual rather than the reality about his static, lifeless, dreadful existence as a sycophant to the wealthy elite.

In traditional classrooms, teachers insist that a community is only as strong as its weakest link. Teachers and students together work to create value for their classroom, as the best communities can make more money, can learn more, can enrich themselves. (See Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan and Race to the Top.) The traditional classroom passively models the market in such a way that knowledge and experience become much less important than a good work ethic no matter what the task. In this way, the traditional classroom produces a society of slaves to the authority of an elite class.

If we reject, even silently reject, the traditional classroom and produce a vertically integrated space in which to conduct lessons, we can provide classrooms wherein multiple intentions can conflict and daily discourse permits original social difference yet requires grand attempts to reach a healthier consensus. This is the fulfillment of the many become one and are increased by that one.

I suppose the key to what I’m thinking about here is that by teaching in media res—refusing to (re)produce a vertically organized space that promotes status-seeking behavior and refusing to play master to a student’s slave—we can actively destroy the worst aspects of capitalist culture, combat Empire without aggressively politicizing the classroom, encourage students to understand that thinking for themselves doesn’t mean competing with other self-interests, fully recognize a healthy consensus in a society that embraces original social difference, and empower students to be strong, confident, critically-minded individuals because they’re confident that we’re all working together for different ends with similar means towards a common cause.

"

A new analysis of racism builds on the best of Marxist theory (particularly Antonio Gramsci’s focus on the cultural and ideological spheres), and yet it goes beyond by incorporating three key assumptions:

1. Cultural practices, including racist discourses and actions, have multiple power functions (such as domination over non-Europeans) that are neither reducible to nor intelligible in terms of class exploitation alone. In short these practices have a reality of their own and cannot simply be reduced to an economic base.

2. Cultural practices are the medium through which selves are produced. We are who and what we are owing primarily to cultural practices. The complex process of people shaping and being shaped by cultural practices involves the use of language, psychological factors, sexual identities, and aesthetic conceptions that cannot be adequately grasped by a social theory primarily focused on modes of production at the macrostructural level.

3. Cultural practices are not simply circumscribed by modes of production; they also are bounded by civilizations. Hence, cultural practices cut across modes of production. (For example, there are forms of Christianity that exist in both precapitalist and capitalist societies.) An analysis of racist practices in both premodern and modern Western civilization yields both continuity and discontinuity. Even Marxism can be shown to be both critical of and captive to a Eurocentrism that can justify racist practices. Although Marxist theory remains indispensable, it obscures the manner in which cultural practices, including notions of “scientific” rationality, are linked to particular ways of life.

Socialist Theory of Racism, Cornel West (via cosmopolitan-fascist)

(Source: le-kif-kif)

good things on my dash.

rethinksocialism:

““Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”

—

Frédéric Bastiat (via theyounglibertarian)

If you would read what this is quoted from (The Law) in context, Frédéric Bastiat is clearly speaking of the archaic Utopian socialism. One thing I find hilarious is Bastiat’s suggestion that Robespierre is a socialist! Robespierre wouldn’t even remotely fit the picture of a Utopian socialist — let alone a Marxist (scientific) socialist.

Your posts have consistently proven that you have a complete disregard for facts, that you either do not care to or have never done any research on that which you oppose, and you obviously do not care to try and correct your mistakes or learn from them. You do not even have an ask or submit box where one could take up debate with you.

I’m open any time.

Address your mistakes or at least defend them. 

tell me about it.

(via )

servile-masses-arise:

socialistguineapigs:

reason-in-revolt:

cuba is not socialist.

it’s an authoritarian regime. trade unions are oppressed and the workers are still fucked over, it’s been under castro and his ‘revolution’ (which was basically a load of middle class people overthrowing a horrible regime to put in place another rather shitty regime, it…

True, Cuba is not socialist. But I would argue that it isn’t any more authoritarian or less democratic than a country like the US. The poor have power there in the sense that they get insanely good health care and mental health care, free education throughout life, free food and housing. The poor in the US are listened to far less than the poor in Cuba.

Lower infant mortality rate, higher literacy, better mental health, and much more of a community focus, make Cuba a far better country to live in than the US for even middle-class Americans.

Eh? Cuba is a far better place to live than in the US? I’m no fan of US society but that is bullshit. Cubans aren’t allowed to travel, they are not even allowed to talk politics with tourists and there’s only one newspaper. There’s free healthcare but no drugs in the clinics. People are paid in a currency that’s worth nothing, they are forced to use the black market for which the punishment is long term imprisonment. Shit, not paying your busfare will get you jailed in Cuba. Ordinary people are not allowed internet access. It’s fucked. 

The US is fucked too but at least they allow you to leave. Cuba is literally a prison.

(via class-struggle-anarchism)

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

Tonight I had the honor of attending a reception at the Permanent Mission to the UN of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in New York. The reception was in honor of DPRK leader Comrade Kim Jong Il, who passed away last December. Tomorrow, February 16, would have been his 70th…

I had friends like this at university. Always using the word comrade as if it meant something.

FYML is always good for laughs.

sievetronix:

Omonoia 1948 Ultras Gate 9

dagNotes: on individualism

“There is a deep complementarity between individual agency and social arrangement. It is important to give simultaneous recognition to the centrality of individual freedom and to the force of social influences on the reach of individual freedom. To counter the problems that we face, we have to see individual freedom as a social commitment.” —Amartya Sen

I just read this Sen quote being reblogged and praised.

I want to say about it that when it comes to socialism and individualism, libertarians typically muck it up. And for obvious reasons that I need not go into here, reasons that have to do with white, enlightenment notions of capitalism and liberty, as well as the free market.

I think a simple maxim exists that can preserve the integrity of individuals within socialism. The individual must be a subject in social relation with others. This is in opposition to popular libertarian interpellation of the individual, a constitution of the individual as a subject being-free-from-others.

That’s it. An individual is only an individual being with others.

Capitalism is the enemy of individual freedom.

from one of my favorite blogs:

servile-masses-arise:

Capitalists often cite individual freedom as a positive attribute of their system. Why is it that a system that produces mindless and bland conformity (as we all know from our experience of life) gets to pose as the champion of the individual? 

It’s down to some basic fallacies. The capitalist says “you can go out and be whatever you want, do whatever you want, follow your dreams, work hard to achieve them!” etc. What they actually mean, however, is that you can go out and earn money however you want. Of course, we all do want money, because under capitalism, we’ll starve without it. So this supposed ideology of the individual begins with everyone wanting exactly the same thing. 

This ‘freedom of the individual’ then boils down to choosing between the jobs available to that individual, or starting their own business, or starving. Hardly anyone is lucky enough to have a job that no one else does. That choice generally leads to conformity, doing exactly the same thing as many other people, every day, in the same place, with the daily humiliation of having to pretend that this is what you actually wanted.

Some ‘lucky’ workers will be able to follow a ‘career path’ in which this mapped out, preordained, conformist work lasts continuously until they are old, with the financial remuneration slowly but steadily increasing over the decades.

Or, you can start your own business, and ‘compete’ in the marketplace. This is the capitalists favourite choice, the one that really seems to sell the ‘individual freedom’ line. The problem is that competition implies conformity. You can only ‘win’ if you are all playing the same game. There’s a tiny amount of people who have had a genuinely unique business idea, but the rest are all doing exactly the same thing as their competitors, but they are trying to do it slightly better, or cheaper, or faster.

Despite the capitalist rhetoric of ‘risk taking’ that option is really only available to the rich, for whom it’s not a real risk at all. The small businessman, given a choice between conforming to market norms and the possibility of homelessness, almost always chooses conformity. So, that’s a dead end for individualism too.

None of the choices that capitalism offers the individual avoid conformity. For all their lies about freedom and liberty and individualism they produce a robotic and lifeless society, which in Emma Goldman’s words;“condemns millions of people to be mere nonentities, living corpses without originality or power of initiative”

Capitalism is the ideology of the uniform, the time card, the name tag and the stop clock. It’s the ideology of boredom. It is standardised, predictable and dull. It is the enemy of creativity, free expression and self determination. For all its bullshit about liberty, capitalism is the mortal enemy of individual freedom.

(Source: class-struggle-anarchism)

For the last time: Nationalization is NOT socialism.

(Source: )

marxandsparks:

Bill Shankley: Hero, Socialist, Scousest Scotsman you could ever meet. 

Celtic fan here, Hail Hail, but I love this clip of Shankley. Had to post it.

(Source: what-was-e-schatology)

bicyclesforafghanistan:

Matewan - Directed by John Sayles

A labor union organizer comes to an embattled mining community brutally and violently dominated and harassed by the mining company.

Starring:    Chris Cooper, James Earl Jones, Mary McDonnell, Will Oldham
Genre:     Drama | History
Director:    John Sayles
Release Date:    June 30, 1988
Runtime:    135 minutes

…In case you need further proof that a boss is not something worth having. If you can’t find it in your library or local film shop, click the picture to download. For evaluation purposes only, of course.

One of the best films to come out of the US. Would be on my top ten American films of all time.

On Libertarianism

We have only one thing in common, as a result of what should be permissible original social difference, and that is our human being. For all our difference, that is the same.

When you hear libertarians speak about individual liberty, it’s important to think first about what they are doing with their dehumanizing liberty discourse. The purpose is never about liberty itself. That may be the subject; it’s never the object. They are not talking about original social difference. Rather, they are constructing ideology: an imaginary representation of reality to be used for a purpose. They are politicizing our difference, our being. And not for free either. They are in service of value and power. They are in service of the free market, their fetishized Liberal Social Order. In other words, the State as it is and, through their ideological representations, as it could be.

If our goal is to abolish the State, it must be a meaningful attempt. Let me see the libertarians’ actions speak for their care of liberty and the individual in community with other individuals, and in community with nature. I’ll know it when I see it.

When I hear it, I don’t trust it. We need a new language of liberty rather than a construction of liberty.