autonomystic

[autonomystic]

Is there something you recommend reading to understand Rousseau's legacy in the right? Alain de Benoist is about to publish on it but I would be interested in a critical assessment.

George Mosse’s work, especially The Fascist Revolution, could serve as a good overview, but otherwise it’ll probably have to be a lot of home cooked research. Some basic points to hit would be Rousseau’s doctrine of the general will, Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s interpretation of Rousseau’s nationalism in his Addresses to the German Nation, and Giovanni Gentile’s attempt to make a single cohesive fascist system of thought out of Fichte’s nationalism and idealism

[autonomystic]

maybe you're not the person to ask but lately i've been seeing a lot of people discussing the bible and how actually leviticus was not talking about homosexuality but actually pedophilia and personally every time i see that sort of thing i'm filled with doubt. do you feel that i'm being reactionary or is there more to investigate in that feeling?

I think that at least as far as the Christian tradition goes (which I’m assuming yr talking abt from the phrase ‘the bible’) that Romans 1:26-27 presents much worse issues than anything in the Torah - both insofar as its a part of the Christian specific scriptures as well as the fact that its basically completely unambiguous.

My general disposition towards this is that i think proof-texting and trying to have these debates about whether these passages mean homosexuality as we currently understand it (impossible since gender based ‘sexuality’-identity wasnt really a thing then) or if it meant pederasty or temple prostitution is not really effective in terms of debates with homophobic religious conservatives. It’s not clever or in depth biblical exegesis that changed numerous religious people’s minds on this topic - it’s gay social movement (both inside and outside these communities).

Christian religious progressives I think commit the error of treating conservatives and homophobes as much more theologically rigorous than they are, and act as tho all of their behavior and belief comes from the textualism they claim. It just ain’t so - christian sexual mores (along w lots of other christian ethics) came abt as a complex interaction of different factors over centuries, they are much more dependent on their surrounding culture (and political concerns) than they are on biblical interpretation.

Part of a mature approach to the faith to me feels like maybe not needing to change everything in the texts to vindicate whatever belief system you have, and living w some discomfort w the tradition if yr going to be in it from a non-traditional perspective rather than trying to argue for its lack of imperfection.

[autonomystic]

Adorno against "nothing ever happens":

Criticism of tendencies in modern society is automatically countered, before it is fully uttered, by the argument that things have always been like this. Excitement - so promptly resisted - merely shows want of insight into the invariability of history, an unreasonableness proudly diagnosed by all as hysteria.

The accuser is further informed that the motive of his attack is self-aggrandizement, a desire for special privileges, whereas the grounds for his indignation are common knowledge, trivial, so that no-one can be expected to waste his interest on them. The obviousness of disaster becomes an asset to its apologists - what everyone knows no-one need say - and under cover of silence is allowed to proceed unopposed.

Assent is given to what has been drummed into people's heads by philosophy of every hue: that whatever has the persistent momentum of existence on its side is thereby proved right. One need only be discontented to be at once suspect as a world reformer. Connivance makes use of the trick of attributing to its opponent a reactionary and untenable theory of decline - for is not horror indeed perennial? - in order by the alleged error in his thinking to discredit his concrete insight into the negative, and to blacken him who remonstrates against darkness as an obfuscator.

But even if things have always been so, although neither Timur nor Genghis Khan nor the English colonial administration in India** systematically burst the lungs of millions of people with gas, the eternity of horror nevertheless manifests itself in the fact that each of its new forms outdoes the old. What is constant is not an invariable quantity of suffering, but its progress towards hell: that is the meaning of the thesis of the intensification of antagonisms. Any other would be innocuous and would give way to conciliatory phrases, abandoning the qualitative leap. He who registers the death-camps as a technical mishap in civilization's triumphal procession, the martyrdom of the Jews as world-historically irrelevant, not only falls short of the dialectical vision but reverses the meaning of his own politics: to hold ultimate calamity in check. […]

Horror consists in its always remaining the same - the persistence of 'pre-history' - but is realized as constantly different, unforeseen, exceeding all expectation, the faithful shadow of developing productive forces. The same duality defines violence as Marx demonstrated in material production: 'There are characteristics which all stages of production have in common; and which are established as general ones by the mind; but the so-called general pre-conditions of all production are nothing more than … abstract moments with which no real historical stage of production can be grasped.'

In other words, to abstract out historically unchanged elements is not to observe neutral scientific objectivity, but to spread, even when correct, a smoke-screen behind which whatever is tangible and therefore assailable is lost to sight. Precisely this the apologists will not admit. On one hand they rave about the derniere nouveautés [latest news] and on the other they deny the infernal machine that is history. Auschwitz cannot be brought into analogy with the destruction of the Greek city-states as a mere gradual increase in horror, before which one can preserve tranquillity of mind. Certainly, the unprecedented torture and humiliation of those abducted in cattle-trucks does shed a deathly-livid light on the most distant past, in whose mindless, planless violence the scientifically confected was already teleologically latent. The identity lies in the non-identity, in what, not having yet come to pass, denounces what has. The statement that things are always the same is false in its immediateness, and true only when introduced into the dynamics of totality. He who relinquishes awareness of the growth of horror not merely succumbs to cold-hearted contemplation, but fails to perceive, together with the specific difference between the newest and that preceding it, the true identity of the whole, of terror without end.

**I think Adorno's remark about India here is diminishing of the gravity of colonialism and creates an unjustified distance between Auschwitz and EIC/British rule over India, which was likewise marked by horrific butchery and the deaths of millions, and thus he bends the stick too far in the opposite direction of his criticism - but I don't think this really diminishes the claim overall.

[autonomystic]

Most people you’ll meet in any given setting in the U.S. believe in a kind of race realism, even the liberals believe in a moral race realism if not a biological one

[autonomystic]

Favorite decolonialist authors and books?

Notebook of a Return to the Native Land + Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire

Black Skin, White Masks + Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

History of Pan-African Revolt by C.L.R. James

Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam by Muhammad Iqbal

Sociology of Islam by Ali Shariati

Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh

Groundings with My Brothers by Walter Rodney

Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América by Rodolfo Kusch

Philosophy of Liberation by Enrique Dussel

Black Metamorphoses by Sylvia Wynter

Basic Call to Consciousness by the Haudenosaunee

Native Science by Gregory Cajete

Ch'ixinakax utxiwa by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

As We Have Always Done by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Peace, Power, Righteousness by Taiaiake Alfred

Red Skin, White Masks by Glen Coulthard

Autonomy is in Our Hearts by Dylan Eldridge Fitzwater

Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Critical Thought in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra by the Sixth Commission of the EZLN

[autonomystic]

Bosses Don’t Need a ‘What Did You Do’ Email. They’re Already Tracking You.

The question that Elon Musk lobbed to federal workers in an email set off anger and angst from unions and employees. It also prompted some head scratching from corporate America, where technology tracks worker productivity at a granular level to answer that question in real time. At a click of a button, managers can check how many pitches a sales person made this week, how quickly a customer service representative resolved a complaint, or the progress an engineer made on an assigned task.  Some companies have taken to using sophisticated data analysis tools to spy on their employees, sifting through millions of emails and chat messages and calendar appointments to measure productivity. Executives say the intel allows for quicker and more nimble feedback, allowing them to shuffle resources according to the data. Productivity in the U.S. has been on the rise, in part because of new technologies. [...] Monitoring technologies also have downsides. They may only measure a sliver of activity, while potentially eroding trust between employees and managers. Employees wonder why they were hired to do the job and then distrusted by those who hired them, she said.

[autonomystic]

But anyway, there's no more point complaining in advance about misinterpretations, since you can't predict them, than fighting against them once they're made. It's better to get on with something else, to work with people going in the same direction. As for being responsible or irresponsible, we don't recognize those notions, they're for policemen and courtroom psychiatrists.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on Anti-Oedipus

[autonomystic]

"The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In [Richard] Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment." But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage."

—Max Weber, "Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism," The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904)

"The principle of irrationalism contained in every religion was explicitly formulated in Jansenism in the sharpest terms. Nevertheless this irrationalism was given the appearance of rationality because it presupposed a rational relationship between this-worldly good works and their other-worldly reward-salvation (253). Renunciation, obedience, submission, are rewarded because they smooth the way to other-worldly salvation. In this education of the masses in obedience, in diverting them from this world, from the improvement of their earthly fate and from the fight against the corrupt might of rulers, the role of religion in bolstering capitalism is given clearer expression than in its direct political-economic manifestations in questions of usury, interest, trade and wages. This is the visible spirit of capitalism, not only of the Protestant Ethic but of every religion aimed at the domestication of the masses."

—Henryk Grossman, "The Beginnings of Capitalism and the New Mass Morality" (1934)

[autonomystic]

“Atomization is advancing not only between men, but within each individual, between the spheres of his life. No fulfilment may be attached to work, which would otherwise lose its functional modesty in the totality of purposes, no spark of reflection is allowed to fall into leisure time, since it might otherwise leap across to the workaday world and set it on fire. While in their structure work and amusement are becoming increasingly alike, they are at the same time being divided ever more rigorously by invisible demarcation lines. Joy and mind have been expelled equally from both. In each, blank-faced seriousness and pseudo-activity hold sway.”

— Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 84

[autonomystic]

There’s a thing Sorel says about how a decayed bourgeoisie that doesn’t provoke a true situation of intense class warfare with a class conscious proletariat burning with hatred for an enemy that is appropriate to its task of self-emancipation and learning self-governance in the military tasks of struggle instead tends to lead to mediocre, nationalist, class collaborationist imperial politics of simply arguing over the distribution of spoils. That’s what American politics have become, and now the dragons of monopoly capital are lazily and indifferently watching while the state shoves more slop into their hoard.

The bourgeoisie are now a bunch of hypebeast kids, Reddit users, and fucking losers who have no concept of a class strategy apart from tossing authority over to whatever guys will help maintain their share of the hoard. And the American workers just weakly accept losing their little share of the slop, they don’t put up any resistance. The whole thing is cold, dead, and numb. You can see the whole “common ruin of the contending classes” playing out. And it’s hard not to want to see the whole thing just swept away (which is where you get the “President Xi, fire at will” memes). As much as there’s aggressive appropriation of the spoils on behalf of monopoly capital here, there’s no real class warfare. There’s no passion and there’s no drama and there’s no life. Just a bunch of half sleeping people either working their bodies to death or guarding their hoard with paranoia while waiting to die

[autonomystic]

Despite often being at odds one thing that unites psychoanalysis and many branches of feminism, and which I think is crucial to any serious politics, is an understanding of the absolute centrality of sexual violence to the structure of society

[autonomystic]

I love your takes, but I feel super, super lost with what you were trying to say about the natalism one. I feel like you're saying that there is no contradiction on wanting more babies, a higher population number and punishing mothers, but can you elaborate on that a bit more, because it does seems contradictory. I'm not disagreeing with you, I just want to understand it better.

alright there's a perennial debate (on here but also in a wider cultural sense) that goes on where people start noticing that some of the ways in which we socially and economically de/value children, parenthood, and specifically motherhood are internally contradictory. how can it be that there is immense social and economic pressure to heterosexually partner and reproduce, and yet most public and social infrastructure is also profoundly hostile to children and their guardians? why is it that this person couldn't find a doctor to perform a voluntary hysterectomy because their bodily preferences were subordinated to the medical valorisation of their fertility, and yet this other person was forcibly sterilised or coerced into using contraception because the prospect of them reproducing is framed as socially destabilising and degenerative? how are 'family values' touted by politicians who openly and explicitly also hate real existing families? do they want people to have more children or fewer? is it more counterculture and rebellious to have children or to not have children? to have sex or to not have sex? to partner off? to be polyam or monogamous?

the answer broadly speaking is that the oppositions people see here are only surface-level. the bourgeois state's interest is in biopower, and this produces competing demands: for some people to partner off and reproduce, and for others to be exterminated. the valorisation of the white middle-class nuclear family is the same as the devalorisation of its negations: racialised people, disabled people, family arrangements other than nuclear and heterosexual, etc. you can't understand the demand that people reproduce if you don't understand it is necessarily also accompanied by the demand that other people don't. these aren't actually contradictory once you understand that what the bourgeois state wants has nothing to do with your individual behaviours and everything to do with how many 'desirable' bodies it has at its disposal. that economic consideration is what creates both the natalist policy meant to encourage [some people's] reproduction, and the exterminatory policy meant to suppress and eradicate [other people's] reproduction.

usually this kind of conversation very quickly devolves into a privilege framework argument, where people are trying to find some kind of social hierarchy that is hegemonically applied top-down and that rewards, universally, certain behaviour choices over others. again, the "people who marry and reproduce are privileged and socially rewarded over me #childfree" versus "actually some people still have to fight tooth and nail to even get medical support / approval to have children, let alone actually get access to the kind of economic and social support necessary to raise them" debate. it's smoke and mirrors because there is no universal privileging of the choice to have children or not have children. what there is, is a privileging of certain people on the basis of the economic assessment of them as biological assets, and the inverse (and mutually constitutive) devaluations of everyone else. really over-discussed examples here but to give them anyway: this is why, for example, french natalist policy and the USA's constant efforts to strip back welfare-net policies in order to harm (primarily) black families are both arising from the same basic impulses of two imperialist nation-states. obviously there are different histories and contextual factors that have resulted in france and the US trying to skin the same cat in different ways. but what they share is an underlying interest in trying to shore up their population in both size and 'fitness', understood here in its full racialised and eugenic meaning.

[autonomystic]

“I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn’t find the proof. It was just a feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force - a wild pain and decay - also accompanies everything.”

— David Lynch

[autonomystic]

“The natural social form of human existence that Marx wants to free from its subjection to the "tyranny of capital" is itself conflictual, torn apart; both happiness and unhappiness are possible in it. His liberation would not be access to an angelic world, but rather entry into a story in which the human being would live his own drama and not, as now, an alien drama that sacrifices him day by day and leads him, without his being able to intervene at all, to destruction.”

Bolivar Echeverria, “Use Value”: Ontology and Semiotics

[autonomystic]

Deborah Cook, Adorno, Foucault, and the Critique of the West:

Among other things, Adorno took from Hegel the idea that individuals are deeply affected by historical conditions, but he objected that Hegel went too far when he effectively identified individuals with these conditions. To be sure, when Hegel is read as an expression of the Zeitgeist, he was right in one sense – individuals are submerged under what Adorno often calls ‘the universal’: late capitalist society. Hegel’s idea of absolute spirit – a totality that allows nothing to escape – points to an important dimension of our current plight to the extent that it mirrors "the experience of the superior coercive force inherent in everything that exists by virtue of its consolidation under domination." Yet this idea is also untrue because the social integration of human beings is by no means total. Just as things always elude concepts, human beings remain nonidentical with respect to society. Indeed, the idea of nonidentity, derived from Hegel but wielded against his system, lies at the thematic core of Adorno’s work. Adorno insists that the "need to lend a voice to suffering is an expression of all truth." He also charges that Hegel (especially in his later work) tended to legitimate the suffering that our subordination to existing conditions has caused. Criticizing Hegel’s ‘theodicy’, Adorno objects that Hegel apologetically takes the side ‘of what exists’, thereby rationalizing human suffering. Furthermore, he rejects Hegel’s view that ‘failure, death and oppression are the inevitable essence of things’ to which individuals must simply submit. Against Hegel, Adorno argues that experiences like these are not just ‘avoidable’ but ‘criticizable’ because the course that history took was by no means a necessary one. The domination of human beings over the natural world, over other human beings and over themselves was neither inevitable nor predetermined. History’s trajectory could have been changed for the better at any time, and Adorno believes that it can still be changed in such a way that unnecessary suffering is eradicated.

[autonomystic]

“In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.”

—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Proletarians and Communists,” The Communist Manifesto (1848)

[autonomystic]

“The erosion of communal child-rearing in America in favor of individualistic suburban spaceships means a good American is guaranteed their own miniature human to torture. Me and every child I met in these adjoining cells was their parent’s personal test subject. Rows and rows of artisinal micro-ideologies, waiting to send another fucked-up human into the world. Indeed, it could be posited that this is the true “cracking open a cold one with the boys”.”

— http://slimedaughter.com/games/twine/closest/