philosophy

A new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving: this is the promise of acid communism

Bro he was going to give you the cake, no need to be so stabby

Credit: https://www.existentialcomics.com/

Credit: https://www.existentialcomics.com/

Maybe the last 500 years of Atlanticist colonialism has something to do with it.
And also maybe the CIA: Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism

In this regard, the Frankfurt School under Horkheimer played a foundational role in the establishment of what is known as Western Marxism, and more specifically Cultural Marxism. Figures like Horkheimer and his lifelong collaborator Theodor Adorno not only rejected actually existing socialism, but they directly identified it with fascism by benightedly relying—very much like French theory—on the ideological category of totalitarianism. Embracing a highly intellectualized and melodramatic version of what would later become known as TINA (“There Is No Alternative”), they focused on the realm of bourgeois art and culture as perhaps the only potential site of salvation. This is because thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer, with a few exceptions, were largely idealist in their theoretical practice: if meaningful social change was foreclosed in the practical world, deliverance was to be sought in the geistig—meaning intellectual and spiritual—realm of novel thought-forms and innovative bourgeois culture.

[…]

Finally, the evolution of the Frankfurt School into its second (Jürgen Habermas) and third generations (Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, and so on) did not alter in the least its anticommunist orientation. On the contrary, Habermas explicitly claimed that state socialism was bankrupt and argued for creating space within the capitalist system and its purportedly democratic institutions for the ideal of an inclusive “procedure of discursive will-formation.” The neo-Habermasians of the third generation have continued this orientation.

I'm reading the introduction, and this comic is pretty accurate. One paragraph is compelling and then the next is the most virulent racism you could possibly write. Some of his conclusions seem to be ignorant of the very thing he just wrote as he is completely blinded by the superiority of Germans or some shit.

Big energy

Also, I don't just mean they are reactionary in certain area or in their personal life (Like Aristotle was important for biology despite being an apologies for slavery)?

I mean worth looking into their thinking precisely in areas where they're reactionary.

Possible suggestions (not saying they're justified) that I expect people would put forward include:

• Carl Scmitt
• Heidegger

Never try to engage with Ayn Rand's work in good faith: worst mistake of my life. She and her fanboys are basically the human version of brainy smurf. Even the name, Objectivism, is her bragging about herself. Thus since they are akin to brainy smurf, don't bother arguing with them because they will claim omniscience. Instead, deal with them as the rest of the smurfs dealt with brainy smurf.

Me: "Oil companies are using their private property to inflict environmental pollution that I do not consent to. Since they are using their property for evil, we should limit their use of a property. This way no one gets physically harmed, not even the oil tycoon."

Rand's Response: "This is stupid, how dare you tell someone what to do with their property. Live and let live! It is actually moral to let people use things that rightfully belong to them for immoral reasons."

Native Americans: "I just want to be left alone please."

Rand's response: "No! You are dumb dumbs so the government should steal from you! You clearly aren't blessed with perfect intelligence like me so you don't know what to do with your property. I do! Now make me some treats!"

Native Americans: "Didn't you just say people who own property should do whatever they please with it, and anyone who has a problem with it should mind their own business?"

Rand's Response: "Ugh, you fucking IDIOTS! Clearly you know nothing about my philosophy of IKnowEverythingIsm."

Me: "Uhhh...okay. I gotta say, insisting that you are the standing authority on all knowledge is a little dogmatic, it sounds kind of like a reli..."

Rand's Response: "UGH! RELIGION IS FOR IDIOTS AND IS AN INSULT TO THINKING!"

I genuinely wanted to read something from the right's POV so I could better understand them, lest I become as dogmatic as Rand here. So far, the closest I got was reading some classical liberal stuff like Plato's Republic, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and some Nietzsche. But it seems like anything further is just full on pompous dogshit. The Chapo book had more depth than this.

A coin has it stamped upon its body that it is to serve as a means of exchange and not as an object of use. Its weight and metallic purity are guaranteed by the issuing authority so that, if by the wear and tear of circulation it has lost in weight, full replacement is provided. Its physical matter has visibly become a mere carrier of its social function.

If, then, the ‘real abstraction’ has nothing to do with the level of ‘reality’, of the effective properties, of an object, it would be wrong for that reason to conceive of it as a ‘thought-abstraction’, as a process taking place in the ‘interior’ of the thinking subject: in relation to this ‘interior’, the abstraction appertaining to the act of exchange is in an irreducible way external, decentred – or, to quote Sohn-Rethel’s concise formulation: ‘The exchange abstraction is not thought, but it has the form of thought.’

Here we have one of the possible definitions of the unconscious: the form of thought whose ontological status is not that of thought, that is to say, the form of thought external to the thought itself – in short, some Other Scene external to the thought whereby the form of the thought is already articulated in advance. The symbolic order is precisely such a formal order which supplements and/or disrupts the dual relationship of ‘external’ factual reality and ‘internal’ subjective experience; Sohn-Rethel is thus quite justified in his criticism of Althusser, who conceives abstraction as a process taking place entirely in the domain of knowledge and refuses for that reason the category of ‘real abstraction’ as the expression of an ‘epistemological confusion’. The ‘real abstraction’ is unthinkable in the frame of the fundamental Althusserian epistemological distinction between the ‘real object’ and the ‘object of knowledge’ in so far as it introduces a third element which subverts the very field of this distinction: the form of the thought previous and external to the thought – in short: the symbolic order.

:zizek-ok: We are now able to formulate precisely the ‘scandalous’ nature of Sohn-Rethel’s undertaking for philosophical reflection: he has confronted the closed circle of philosophical reflection with an external place where its form is already ‘staged’. Philosophical reflection is thus subjected to an uncanny experience similar to the one summarized by the old oriental formula ‘thou art that’: there, in the external effectivity of the exchange process, is your proper place; there is the theatre in which your truth was performed before you took cognizance of it. The confrontation with this place is unbearable because philosophy as such is defined by its blindness to this place: it cannot take it into consideration without dissolving itself, without losing its consistency.

This does not mean, on the other hand, that everyday ‘practical’ consciousness, as opposed to the philosophical-theoretical one – the consciousness of the individuals partaking in the act of exchange – is not also subjected to a complementary blindness. During the act of exchange, individuals proceed as ‘practical solipsists’, they misrecognize the socio-synthetic function of exchange: that is the level of the ‘real abstraction’ as the form of socialization of private production through the medium of the market: ‘What the commodity owners do in an exchange relation is practical solipsism – irrespective of what they think and say about it’. Such a misrecognition is the sine qua non of the effectuation of an act of exchange – if the participants were to take note of the dimension of ‘real abstraction’, the ‘effective’ act of exchange itself would no longer be possible:

Thus, in speaking of the abstractness of exchange we must be careful not to apply the term to the consciousness of the exchange agents. They are supposed to be occupied with the use of the commodities they see, but occupied in their imagination only. It is the action of exchange, and the action alone, that is abstract … the abstractness of that action cannot be noted when it happens because the consciousness of its agents is taken up with their business and with the empirical appearance of things which pertain to their use. One could say that the abstractness of their action is beyond realization by the actors because their very consciousness stands in the way. Were the abstractness to catch their minds their action would cease to be exchange and the abstraction would not arise.

:zizek: This misrecognition brings about the fissure of the consciousness into ‘practical’ and ‘theoretical’: the proprietor partaking in the act of exchange proceeds as a ‘practical solipsist’: he overlooks the universal, socio-synthetic dimension of his act, reducing it to a casual encounter of atomized individuals in the market. This ‘repressed’ social dimension of his act emerges thereupon in the form of its contrary – as universal Reason turned towards the observation of nature (the network of categories of ‘pure reason’ as the conceptual frame of natural sciences).

The crucial paradox of this relationship between the social effectivity of the commodity exchange and the ‘consciousness’ of it is that – to use again a concise formulation by Sohn-Rethel – ‘this non-knowledge of the reality is part of its very essence’: the social effectivity of the exchange process is a kind of reality which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic; that is, a kind of reality whose very ontological consistency implies a certain non-knowledge of its participants – :zizek-joy: if we come to ‘know too much’, to pierce the true functioning of social reality, this reality would dissolve itself.

:zizek-preference: This is probably the fundamental dimension of ‘ideology’: ideology is not simply a ‘false consciousness’, an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ‘ideological’ – ‘ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence – that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals ‘do not know what they are doing’. :zizek-preference: ‘Ideological’ is not the ‘false consciousness’ of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness’. Thus we have finally reached the dimension of the symptom, because one of its possible definitions would also be ‘a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject’: the subject can ‘enjoy his symptom’ only in so far as its logic escapes him – the measure of the success of its interpretation is precisely its dissolution. :zizek-fuck:

SOURCE: The Sublime Object of Ideology

Announcements & Information

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:
❤️ Come listen to music with your fellow Hexbears in Cy.tube
💖 Come talk in the New weekly queer thread
🧡 Monthly Neurodiverse Megathread
💛 Read about a current topic in the news
⭐️ June Movie Thread ⭐️

Reminders:
💚 You can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments and discussions over upbears
💜 Sorting by new makes your comrades happy
🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can go here

‏‏‎ ‎
Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Bitch modern humans have been on this earth for six hundred thousand years creating an enormous number of distinct and unique cultures which shape the people living under them. The absolute arrogance to think you can generalize a hundred billion people's worth of experience based on what you've experienced in your one tiny lifetime. Humans are so fucking diverse there is VERY little you can say is "human nature." But no please tell me more about how people are just selfish by default despite all the fucking evidence to the contrary.