Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Hooray for crackpot realism:

I agree with Zizek and just about all other red hot rad thinksters: the destruction of the existing state -- no matter its form democratic or otherwise -- is the necessary first step toward true societal sublation(*). But revolution is not just around every corner. Part of Clio's righteous work is the day to day battles within the confines of the existing institutions.

Take the reins of the State and make it work for you!

Nice work, paine. Very nice. Glossy Karl hugs you from his grave.

_____________________

NB: the foregoing commentary is not to suggest I find Zizek to have all the answers, but rather, to suggest that paine has only one, and it's the one Glossy Karl told him about.

oxy
you are a gem

i drive by
turn into this blog site
and sure enough every time
you bark
just as regular as a neighbor's dog

my what a big reflexion u have my dear

----------------

"a self-liberated
freeform activated isolate
operating a safe distance from the state
and of course
from the concrete movements
that right now
are making tomorrow out of today. "

to snatch up a father favorite here
oxy:
can caliban recognize his reflection ??

invoking
c wright's ' crack pot ' paradigm
becomes
game set match in certain minds

built out of a sturdy handful of reflex arcs
and applied against the proposal
of any form of limited objective struggle
or mass participation ...
perhaps ...short of total insurrection ???

the limited possibilities
presented by social reality today
used as alibi for opportunism
and worse capitulation
well merits the recycled use
of the departed mr mills deft
indictment of kold war liberalism

but plastering this label everywhere ?? ?

like red green's duct tape ???

http://www.wpt.org/blog/uploaded_images/redblog5-759068.jpg

I guess the really good thing about all this, Owen, is that you'll never actually take up gun, shovel, bat, brick, molotov cocktail or armed desire and put paid to the order that exists.

You're too busy self-pleasuring with fantasies of a revenant Papa-Uncle Joe (and his newly reborn brigade of econ-econs) to actually rebel.

Not that there's anything wrong with onanism, even your variety. While you while away beneath the mothering shelter of a future that never arrives, ticking off your episodes of self-induced ecstasy, the nation-state that actually exists is actually breaking the last dregs of labor in the service of those corporations you pretend to despise.

And fuck Zizek, too. You onanists deserve each other. Beware the splash, though. I hear it gets sticky when you guys get altogether in a single room.

What a pair of bookends Oxy and JC make. Leather-brained cynicism at one and preening anti-intellectual teen-talk at the other.

And once again: Never was an epithet clankier, clunkier, miles-off junkier than "Glossy Karl," btw.

Yeah, Dawson. I'm so wrong on that, your only criticism is mockery, rather than showing how I'm wrong. Varnish over gloss, shellac over varnish, with a final coat of polyurethane. I hear Karl's under there somewhere -- the real Karl, the Karl who lived off inherited wealth while criticizing "capital."

Yup. Best we can do is managerialism. Best, for sure.

Paine, if I thought declaring analogs to Mills' pithy phrase was "game-set-match," I'd be a lot stupider than actually is the case. I'd be more like Dawson, in other words.

You can argue with a phantasm that you imagine to be me. Cool by me. I may even laugh along. But I'll never mistake it for you addressing my points in logical, coherent fashion.

As to "caliban," I have no clue. Congratulate yourself on using a name I don't know. Damn, you're a smart dude, aren't you?

Slav-oy--one of my favorites!

could we have a picture credit for the monster slaying epic? who painted it, please?

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_uyDf-1CW6Xk/Swm2DhJMUkI/AAAAAAAABiM/TzyfTCkr4bg/s1600/Ariel-And-Caliban-1837.jpg

by David Scott

jc

i'm curious how you know so much about
my cloistered wack off cellular existence ???

"the nation-state that actually exists is actually breaking the last dregs of labor in the service of those corporations you pretend to despise."

crow fly thesis buried here

reform is impossible
all struggles shy of insurrection futile

is that about it jc ???

-----------------
oxy

"showing how I'm wrong"
oxy dear heart you need to make
a substantive claim first

you simply jeer and boo
so far as i can see
and no matter the subject
--outside a few legal areas --
you perform
an admirable function
but not one
conducive to much
beyond repetition
affirmation
or a boo back

Re-read my first comment, op. If you're not simply stumping for Glossy Karl's Dictatorship of the Proles, which supposedly will arrive by Ubermanagerial Hypercompetent Meritocrats taking the reins of power, then what are you arguing and why do you disagree with Ego-Boy Zizzlepizzle?

I don't expect substance in response to this, much as you ignored it the first time around.

Owen,

Are you still surprised that I don't advocate reformist meliorism, or the tinkering with monetary supply and marginal rates? That I take aim at economic nationalism precisely because it depends on a disciplinary state which never ends up looking like its noble minded advocates envision, ensconced as they are in academic institutions, shielded from consequence and social experiment, hiding behind their tenure, preaching to the proletariat like the comfortable bourgeois that they are?

That's of course not what it's "all about." I think people ought to struggle in whatever manner suits them. Including you, even if I mock you from time to time, in the full anticipation that you can give as good as you get, even if it's in Engelist Haiku.

I just don't believe all attempts are equally valid, or develop from an accurate understanding of material conditions.

And in agreement with good Rosa Lichtenstein, I think that most "revolutionaries" are really just burgher dwelling mystics:

http://www.anti-dialectics.co.uk/

"Re-read my first comment"
okay

i find this :

"Take the reins of the State and make it work for you!"

again
this is simply too generalized a response

as with the usual jc/oxy expostulation
at least around here

"state baaaad...hell fire goooood "

fair enough

next !!!!

karl hardly figures
at this
nihilist toddler in neck plug's level

jc

"I don't advocate reformist meliorism, or the tinkering with monetary supply and marginal rates"

and i couldn't agree more

perhaps the full scope
of
the hi fi commanding heights
or as Al calls it
fractional reserve socialism
escapes you
its neither tinkering nor melioristic

"I think people ought to struggle in whatever manner suits them...I just don't believe all attempts are equally valid, or develop from an accurate understanding of material conditions."
how true

but it's jejune advice if you haven't
more then this to say

Owen,

I guess you don't give as good as you get.

"Fractional reserve socialism"? Capitalist banking socialism? Egads...

You appear to fundamentally misunderstand power, and the state, operating under the assumption that a state captive to the vanguard (or whatever you want to call it) will become something other than every other state which has ever existed. You seem to ignore the observable data - that a state, to maintain its existence, must have both a captive and armed staff, and a captive resource base and supply chain. That its members must therefore devote a portion of their control to the maintenance of that control. All states follow this logic of survival, which is why all states come to resemble each other.

Do you have any examples form Clio's Ledger which don't end up as monopolies of force dedicated to perpetuating themselves, Owen? A single one? Or is it all predictably shuffled off into the ever receding utopian future?

The Perseus-Andromeda-Cetus painting comes from the inimitable brush of the one-and-only Piero di Cosimo. You can see it in the Uffizi, if you're sharp-elbowed enough to cut through the clot of German tourists perpetually surrounding it, like seraphim about the jasper throne of Hashem. -- Or no, they're really not much like seraphim. I don't know why I said that.

Nice, innit? Full of wonderful stuff, like the fanciful tromba-marina and even more fanciful hurdy-gurdy in the right foreground.

As for Caliban etc., see here.

CF -- Why "glossy"? Thick of me, no doubt, but I'm not getting the reference.

Stair steps JC, one step at a time not in a single bound.

jack
if you weren't so anxious to exterminate the fleas u might look into a few things some

here perhaps is a start line
is the course of class societies
headed any where ??

if...in part ...its going towards
stateless-nessthru classless ness
as we engelians suggest
and if
class society propells itself "forward" thru the metamorphic process of state forms
then of course each successive state form
must yield to the next until ..well
we will see just how it works out
when we work our way there
thru one ghastly betraying
state form after another

we being the nth issue of
the n-1 issue of the n -2 issue...
of the issue of the issue of us
oxy u and me jc

cold type
prints the thesis

"what are you arguing and why do you disagree with Ego-Boy Zizzlepizzle?"
in the dark all cows are black eh oxy

none are so in the dark as those that will not turn on a light

the dark oxy you're happy in it
but
that's when they nipped off your nuts

-----------------
" Dictatorship of the Proles"

a fairly straight forward criterion eh ??

the rule of the have nots

" which supposedly will arrive by Ubermanagerial Hypercompetent Meritocrats taking the reins of power"

no

that's guardianism
a platonic aspiration
state craft operating with a complete grasp
of an "eternal" set of social truths
like euclidian geometry

such conceptions
lacking in a clear notion
of metamorphic motion
transform the perfecting of means
into the goal not the progression towards ends

as world historical society moves thru its forms toward its ends these forms realize themselves with only adequate means
not ever more perfected means
like a succession of pilot models

look into the various stages of proofing
a theorem
and you'll see this in miniature

Who mentioned a "single leap"? Not I. Tilt at windmills...

"class society propells itself "forward" thru the metamorphic process of state forms
then of course each successive state form
must yield to the next until ..well
we will see just how it works out"

So you don't actually have a single example? Does Clio know your such a faithless lover?

it might help to structure
the notion of class society first
with a quick accounting
of its evolved institutions
ie superstructure as a self conflicting and conflicted totality first
that is before trying to move on to the harder task
requiring more complete and supple skills
that are required to grasp... even in part
at the meaning of class society's
most defining feature
that complex of
eveloved and ever morphic institutions
that constitute "the state"
of by and for that society

and this guy's supposed to be a Stalinist. I want my money back

I don't see any examples (above) of a state which did not become an institution devoted to perpetuating itself, Owen.

I see some Engels, Gramsci and Trotsky, in free verse.

Rosa L was right. "Revolutionaries" have a million excuses for why they continue wait for Hegel's Ghost to compel them into action.

Can you offer a single, specific concrete example of a state which does not act like a mafia, Owen?

Just one?

Or is that transformation always delayed until the arc of history recognizes itself and gets with the program?

perhaps part of the problem
one might have with grappling
our one and only
hideously imperfect vehicle
of deep social transformation
the state

arises

when the premiere question
remains what is the truth
not
what is to be done
its as if one expected to suddenly rise
from a crawl
straight into a sinuously fall free walk

the proles will stand up
on their d of p legs
many times b4 they can walk reliably
on them anywhere they desire to go

I know, Owen. You have the secret key. You can see clearly, because you have the training in the Mystical Alchemy of Hegel's Holy Spirit...

...it's just that you cannot actually use that secret key to give a concrete example, if the interlocutor doesn't have his own special apron and sacred tongue.

[Rosa Lichtenstein has a 12 Step program for that.]

"like red green's duct tape ???"

Oh god. Y'all got that down in the states? Please tell me you haven't seen Corner Gas. Some cuts are best kept by the butcher.

jc
hey states as mates is complex and contradictory

we can't live with em and we can't live without em

Clio uses time to resolve old knots into new knots

time
you stateless wingless larvae
have no role for time you wait
in your cocoons your pupal casings
never struggling to get out
never able to free your wings

you're a moth dip shit not a caterpillar

well that's a bit much

the state is something
collectively intentional
a something that stablized
not so far from the fringe of society's own chaos

it lacks the lovely finalities of any stage
of a purely Holometabolic system

i embrace stalinism just as i embrace
any of clio's class clash
socially constructed monsters

recall the gods in the end
could only defeat the titans
by mobilizing
these very misbegottens
of mother earth

So, no example?

I shouldn't have expected it, really. What can one truly expect from a bourgeois mystic flamen Quirinalis who has turned revolution into Roman Augury, his fingers in the entrails, seeking signs and portents of the animating numen of History His Hegelian Self...

jc
come now
am i being obscure here ??
society ..class society in particular has evolved will evolve thru state forms
that thesis i'll assert

society's state forms
"realize" themselves
more or less "completely"
thru time and thru
qualitative self modifications
the state is a collective product
a collective construction of society
to the extent it is formed intentionally it is only experimentally so
failures exceeds success during the key formative stages

to compare the competence of soiciety "running " an older state form
to that same society trying to run a new state form even as its being invented on the fly ???

please

the new state triumphs over the old simply because in the end the old state
gets dragged by the ever changing society around it
into a context where it can't function
effectively anymore
it rips itself apart
crumbling at the feet of the class that
must now sieze the challenge to build a new state to its own tentative specifications

there is always a first try a first toss a first game
that is the challenge and the burden of class agency
the hope resides in this however
there will inevitablt be more chances
Clio will give us all the time we need

---assumptions here ??
Clio Herself needs continued opportunity
surely some final fire ball
might intercept Clio's trajectory
but hey even then
we start again
at least in enough run thrus
to press on uncrowed un oxed
un self bound

Of course you're being obscure. You write in free verse, and you literally fuck with clausal breaks.

I get it. You don't have an example of a single state which doesn't become a self-perpetuating ruling machine.

So, the dense terms of opaque intent.

Your reply, I imagine? "In the future, Jack..."

How does that differentiate you from any other mystic? Your god is a billion people you've never met.

examples of unicorns i can't produce jc

only plow horses
that shit in their stalls
and some indeed are critters of monsterous mien

i suppose one can say based on existing evidence
relying on the nastiness of monsters
is a necessary part of the victory of new
over old

stalin and robespierre

released from tartarus
to turn the tide

ah and yet of this scene
i can give many examples
https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/prec/www/course/mythology/0200/430.jpg

the old state crumbling in on itself

that is all the incentive i need
to continue my membership
in the congregation
of anti burg-state conspiring equals

"You don't have an example of a single state which doesn't become a self-perpetuating ruling machine"
exactly they all fall in the end

and here is where we need to focus
if we wish to communicate

is history going anywhere
ie
is society headed toward a self resolution of its problematic
the clash of classes
the requirements of civilization so far
the exploitation of hu man by hu an

recall it might not get there

but has Clio manifested intentions
thru the actions of her agents

You think we need to rehash your faith in Hegel and my countering atheism?

Hegel was a Hermetic mystic. Literally.

History has no purpose, no direction an augur can read in the flight of economic geese. It has no teleology. Teleology is a fiction.

Scratch that.

Teleology is a lie.

...but before I get back to the real and satisfying labor of cleaning my flat, I want to express my appreciation for your paeans to Robey and Uncle Joe.

I'm sure Napoleon Three and Putin would like to thank you as well...

"History has no purpose, no direction an augur can read in the flight of economic geese."

now u must know where that line takes you ??

" history has no purpose no direction
an augur can read in the flight
of economic geese "

one way to take this line
Clio might have a purpose
but its unknowable by us eh ??

but now we have this from u

history has no teleology ..period

any human imposed teleology is a lie

perhaps a state supporting or state undermining lie
but a lie
that is a fabrication at its inception
a fiction told at first deliberately
by those who know better
how 18th century of u ??

not even an illusion a lie

and behind the lie is what

just one damn thing after another ???

a duel of self serving lies

do the lies alter outcomes ??

if so what have we now

one damn thing after another modified by
self serving lies

to what end is the sum of this trail of lies ??
nulified by the gyrations of inherent historical chaos ??

much to cover here

at any rate
course altering self organizing processes might indeed result from a lie

you my friend must ever make your escape into over arching decisive
at random processing forces
such randomness is as miraculous as free will eh ??

the obverse of a mind dominated
material world is a mind absent material world
where ..i guess minds exist if they exist
are as inconsequential as un-maned television monitors
what we agents are and how our thoughts interact with each other and influence
our actions seems to be set aside
by those who consider social reality some product of random or at least utterly unknowable forces
which operationally amounts to much the same thing
once poorly known becomes first unknown and then unknowable the outcome is a self stymied thought loop
convenient for the self de activated soul
nothing seems better to some souls
then to run up against a big impossible
you can believe in

often the corrosive faithlessness
of the nihilist causes eruptions of doubt about this impossibility
best contained by repeating the various simple nihilist mantras
while steadfastly traducing the belief in the impossible by conduction some nub of a social life

and it can be minimized ..this nub

i think of that self supporting bio dome
of a few years back
big bonehead sponsor ed bass
turned out after 200 million dollars of inputs
the dome "only needed "
the occasional infusion from outside
of one thing or another from time to time
of course given the good faith
of the original purest missionaires
that small infusion amounted
to a refutation and the totalitarians
in the end broke with the reductivism max types like ed bass
to head off for totalization oriented
funding elsewhere
the site was sold for 50 million by ed to
developers
the dome itself ??

eaten up by a university
i think
for climate change research

http://www.biospheres.com/experimentchrono1.html

can you see your mind as one of these bio domes jc

oxy of course has no problem with bad faith
he knows he's all about facetiously nasty
false pretext and funstering
he's sucking in outside oxygen at a full gallop

you .. not so much..........maybe

a compression:

jc thinks marx is hegel and oin turn hegel is leibnitz

lots of trail ahead for you jc
if u choose to continue the pilgrimage

beware the inversions
progress by regress
regress by progress is the least of it

christian never faced such post hegelian topology

Owen,

Are you really asking me to believe that history reveals itself by not revealing itself, that it has a purpose in which a person can place faith by not knowing it?

Again, you are a bourgeois mystic, with ruling class pretensions, safely ensconced in a tower of privilege, meting out augured predictions to a proletariat that doesn't even know you exist.

I won't take your pilgrimage, Owen - because I'm not a mystic seeking signs and portents from a podium paid for by the doyens of capitalist academia.

Your mystical language may suit you. And I hope you stick to tinkering with it in quiet oblivion - because the last thing the world needs is another set of Lenins and Trotskys to pretend that their state won't end up like all the others, that their priesthood will be the one that finally ushers in the advent of the holy city.

I do not worry bourgeois academics, so long as they don't end up advising Prime Ministers and Presidents, not that I think a Kissinger you'll ever make.

And before you prance off another prattling poesie, about what you think I think - my argument **is** with your Hegelianism, not your appropriation of Marx.

Should you ever find a moment to deal in realities - I'd still like to see a single example of a state - any state, even one which snuggle into the pre-determined slots on your artificial arc of history - that did not become a self-perpetuating machine?

Think you have it in you?

http://revcom.us/socialistconstitution/SocialistConstitution-en.pdf

i offer this up to
the anarcho turbo narco clepticocal fiends

chew away comrades

its all yours

behold this mound of statist blubber !!!!!

Your example is a fiction which has a time share in Bob Avakian's brain, and nowhere else?

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/scientists-propose-oneway-trips-mars/

There needs to be a suitable venue for a true Marxist experiment.

"Are you ... asking me to believe that history reveals itself by not revealing itself"
no

"Are you ...asking me to believe ... it has a purpose in which a person can place faith by not knowing it?"
of course not
though i like that phrase

of course history itself is Clio
revealing her puposes ..too late to act on
of course a look at the past
may not be a reliable
basis for anticipating the future
hence the use of visions and revelations

reading history this way
to the extent we can
is quite like reading the bible
as the mediated word of god
with a belief it contains in
more or less metamorphic and coded form
as a source for revelations of the end time

spinoza on the prophets is interesting here
voltaire looks like shecky green in comparison

the high 17th century baroque
towers over the enlightenment

too bad its hard to see this from here

marxism as an essay in science
i submit
operates only so
in the extended present on the extended present
the qualitatively future is only discovered by working our way thru the exyended present into this future

so what is this extented present
and how is confusingly
overlapped with the bum steering
elements of extended past

Marxism is a name for the branch of science that investigates the impact of classes on human society. See Marvin Harris's chapter in his infamous TRAT book for the best explanation of its core. See also Karl Korsch for the point that the Marxian point is method of inquiry, not defense of any particular scientific or propagandistic output.

Marxism can and frequently is taken to be a religion or a narrow political position. But it is not necessarily so.

As to states perpetuating themselves, that is simply a childishly stupid standard. Individuals and all past and possible manifestations of free-anarcho-hunting-gathering bands try mightily to perpetuate themselves. So, what is to be done? Suicide? Genocide? Or perhaps actual thought and self-criticism and acceptance that there are real, hard, nasty imperatives to being homo sapient?

Meanwhile, Sweden and Switzerland exist as states. They have not behaved entirely as un-self-restrained world-destroyers. Chavezian Venezuela, Moralesian Bolivia, the original Sandinista Nicaragua, Ho's proposed Vietnam circa 1945: All doing and promising mostly quite decent things, and all would've done much better, had each not been immediately and vigorously undermined. Which, of course, is why they were undermined.

Meanwhile, JC is obviously incapable of tracking op-san's repeated attempts to ask questions about actual human history and actual human behavioral contexts and the relationship between classes and states. If the next event isn't the Molotov cocktail that ignites the magical arrival of the Great Nirvana of rule by entities that do not rule and do not try to perpetuate themselves, JC's not having it and calling it names.

P.S. to JC: All the name-calling could most certainly be turned back against you soi-disant "revolutionaries" who know or should know the now-proven history of the teenage notion that a coup-d'etat automatically equals a whole new society.

P.S. The United Nations is a state, albeit among the world's weakest ones.

Is its record genocidal? To the extent it is, is that because of its very nature and existence, or because of its undemocratic structure, domination by wealth, and the earliness of its hour on Clio's stage?

Let us hear the anarcho answer to this. One surmises it is 100 percent in agreement with the American hard right's...

Fr Smith:

CF -- Why "glossy"? Thick of me, no doubt, but I'm not getting the reference.

Chuckles gave his clue earlier, talking to Dawson:

Varnish over gloss, shellac over varnish, with a final coat of polyurethane. I hear Karl's under there somewhere -- the real Karl, the Karl who lived off inherited wealth while criticizing "capital."

Yup. Best we can do is managerialism. Best, for sure.

Forgive me for not treating A True God with the deification He deserves.

Dawson,

You are an expert misreader. I appreciate that. Again - I don't think the great future is one molotov cocktail away.

I think people who think Marxism is a science - a fucking science ferchrissakes, and take that vulgarity wherever you want it, Dawson - are wrong.

And that's a comfort. Because, unless they are really nasty assholes like Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Pot and Mao, and have the support of foreign capitalists looking to contain some other foreign enemy, they stay safely irrelevant holed up in entirely capitalist institutions which pay them to be obscurantist and irrelevant to the point of sad and depressing dramedy.

But, hey - you'll misread this too and insist what I really mean is that people shouldn't struggle in whatever man suits them unless they think that they can toss a single bomb and get a perfect justice...

By the way, Dawson - fuck you kindly. How's that for "name calling," ye fucking concern troll?

Paine,

Obfuscatory, decoder-needing insults may please you, but they're not really providing the explanation that I've twice requested.

I know, I'm not as smart or accomplished as an egghead like you. Seriously. I speak only one language -- dirty provocateur -- and have to look up the Latin and Greek and German and Italian and Mandarin that you toss around so proudly... err, ahhh, naturally.

So pat yourself thrice on the back, and keep showing us Kissinger's Best.

--Chucky

Dawson's supplication is sweet. Will he give his heart, his life, for the cause?

St Mickey of Dawsonia? The truest martyr?

Bwaaaah hah hah. I call Paine "a Kissinger," then go read comments upstream and find that Jack has said Paine won't ever become a Kissinger.

But Jack -- I think he already has, in his mind at least.

Oxy,

Heh. Sadly, it will probably mean that Dawson and Owen will treat with us as if we are part of single unit, and not just two guys who disagree about a whole bunch of shit, but happen to genuinely share a disdain for "materialist" dialecticism.

Dawson,

"Meanwhile, JC is obviously incapable of tracking op-san's repeated attempts to ask questions about actual human history and actual human behavioral contexts and the relationship between classes and states. If the next event isn't the Molotov cocktail that ignites the magical arrival of the Great Nirvana of rule by entities that do not rule and do not try to perpetuate themselves, JC's not having it and calling it names."

Paine's one "historical example" was a screed from Bob Avakian proposing a future state (that somehow manages to do away with the current one, despite the complete dominance of society by the corporations which profit further from the state they pay for - though Avakian and all other dialectical mystics are generally vague and unclear on how and when Clio will open her legs and let the future out) which one imagines Bob Avakian will run for the good of the proletariat.

True enough, Jack.

It sorta makes me wonder when Michael Albert will stop using the pen-name "owen paine."

Or... wait... was it Chris Hitchens using the pen-name "Michael Dawson"?

I can't keep those Former Leftists separated, they're so alike, I'll just have to treat them as the same person.

Op-san, what have we here with Oxy and JC? CIA both? FBI both? Some mix? Or just migrant morons?

Nice try, you too dunces.

As to misreading, well, Oxy's tried that particular gambot before and burnt himself up on it every single time.

As to you, JC, I can admit that my interpretation of your position isn't literal in the sense of direct quotation, but you might want to survey your peers on this site.

Meanwhile, as misreading and Marxism and science, you are the one who quite obviously an blatantly is misreading what was said. Marxism is not a science. It is a name for the scientific study of the impact of classes on human history.

If it helps your feeble reactionary teenage brain, it is a sign of the disguised contempt for science in existing capitalist society that we even need a thing called "Marxism." The point is not the label. It is the activity.

Fuck you, meanwhile. I wouldn't let you in my front door. I greatly prefer Oxy, who at least doesn't strike "revolutionary" poses while talking absolute shite.

P.S. to JC, he of the "you misread me" protest:

I said you two are bookends. Despite Oxy's attempt to rescue his "glossy Karl" fart, "bookends" generally denotes two different things squeezing something.

I think Oxy is an FBI agent, actual or merely aspiring.

You? I just think you're just some half-baked abortion from the half-bakery of the half-baked left. Though I wouldn't rule out spookery by you, given your obvious stupidity and completely unfounded aggressive attacks. Give yourself time. Your thoughtless contempt for actual human concerns can serve you well, if you play your cards right, if you aren't already, Jack.

I fear that Owen may have shot himself in the footnote. Everybody's been so busy with the marginalia that nobody's paid any attention to the subject of the post, which I thought was rather interesting, and worth pondering.

the marginalia seem to be
the genitalia here

to repeat the point

zizik like many a global bookish rev type
prefers the invented
mind game tools of struggle
to those at ready at hand out there
on terra firma

and in doing so
his preference for a direct route
to the final conflict
suggests the masses moving left
abjure national sovereignty
right when the people of the PIIGS
find them selves
trapped in a nasty EBC made procrustean bed

a time when each of these people's
is most in need of their powers
of national liberty

even if the threat of leaving the euro
only looks substantial enough
to maybe happen
can i imagine a meliorative policy response by the ECB
ie
a credit policy aimed at easing the imposed stag regime
maybe even lifting it sooner with fiscal
measures
only if the sacred common market looks to be about to rip itself apart
into its national components
will the MNCs stooges release the reservoirs
of credit/cash to the various strapped national budgeteers
and allow them by deficits galore
to at long last
restore something like " normal"
job market conditions to the PIIGS

progressive nationalism is not a folly
anymore then progressive populism

and the people's macrocrats
well schooled in effective demand forex and synthetic credit
now have a clear opportunity
and i dare say opught to have
a clear conception of what can be done
and should be done

if only the steps necessary to break
with this largely MNC inspired
commercial paradigm called
a multinational multi state
common economy ..common only in its friendliness to corporations

the market sysytem de facto must
be rebuked by an agent of the people
ie the nation state must re assert its sovereignty

its a passing irony i think

here i
the most into it of into it types
along with fb
when it comes to the practical macro policy
possibilities
challenges
and hazards of todays various national economies north and south
--at least here
among this motley circle
of fellow dull pinks---

is dragged off for a side allewy set to
over the dynamics of the class struggle at the most general and abstracted
of levels

not even about
the interaction of
super structure and base
but about the possibility of usefully reading
ie
prophetically "reading "
among the pre figurations
portents and stage specific
"universalities"
clio's future path
even when the subject
in the great world historical scheme of things is
just her next coupla steps

Dawson,

I appreciate your illustration of the authoritarian impulse, which cannot allow for the perspective of another unless that view also confirms its own, and which reduces the other to an inhuman adjunct, all in the name of a "humanity" over which it invariably exercises control. Or wants to control. Or would only control if only the universe would agree with its "science" and get with the program. Thank you for that, "scientist" of the social.

Or should I write, "hypocrite"? Don't you have another book to sell, explaining why capitalist selling is bad and shit?

MJS,

You're probably right.

Respect,

Jack

Again, Dawson's "mature, adult" response to me and my Glossy Karl shorthand is to call me a stupid kid who aspires to Feeb status.

It's a shame Dawson hasn't any game, eh? The irony abounds, overflows, and washes down the holler, sweeping all the tarpaper shotgun shacks with it. Mining is good! Incidental damage is unavoidable down here on Buffalo Creek!

Dawson is the Glenn Greenwald of "consumer rights" thinking. Not far from Elizabeth Warren, in other words.

But hey he's got a clever pen-name, naming himself after the alienated Black dude on LOST.

Postum Scriptum:

How, exactly, are my comments indicative of FBI agent or wannabe status? I'm helping the Government with my comments? That's pretty fucking ironic, given Dawson's constant slavering after The Noam (MIT = AUTHORITY, baby!) and Glossy Karl.

I'm helping the State by criticizing the State? How does that work, Mikhail? Spill your soybeans, bubke.

I want to remind one and all that Cluster is a fictitious entity, as it constantly asserts. While Rosa Lichtenstein is sometimes claimed to be an artificial intelligence (and, therefore, also fictitious) entity, Cluster is fictitious only.

Although, as part of the fiction, Cluster frequently claims that "you don't know me or my family" etc. and occasionally "reveals" elements appearing to be facts from a actual personal history (whose?), there is no THERE THERE. Don't waste pixels abusing this Cheshire cat of a commentator.

Respectfully (and esp. so to C.F.),

C.S.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Edward_Burne-Jones_-_Perseus.jpeg

jack

vast majority of human
existence

societies were "dominated" by
stateless states

a few lasting into mid 60s

given aactually potential abundance
and faciliity with which belief
can be modified

we can do same again

steps and/or la violencia
depends on particular social
formation/conjuncture

we will do same again
all systems have limits

Dawson - "The point is not the label. It is the activity."

true but the activity must interact with solid theory.\. something i learned after years in the guate highlands and peten, and again after some rank and file union work in us o a mfg

no question in my mind
nothing in our biology
--itself now modifiable --
nothing at all
prevents a state less society
and one
perched on a higher technical/material limb
then supports tribalism

however
we have to get there from here
and that i suspect a good deal of zig zag
one step back two steps forward groping
and alas the season of the state
will continue a while longer

Juan,

I think terms like "stateless states" are without value. It's like arguing for redless red.

right o op, self-organization is process so no doubt lots of back and forth, gropings - i'm not talking about some mystical global; or regional, 'communitas' [though turners work was interesting just as genep's 'rites of passage' maay have some fit.

jc term stateless states may have little value unless it prompts consideration of the transcendence of nation-state system, movement beyond centralized states.

differently, when - everyone - is the state we have a stateless state''''''which have existed before.

suamigo