twilight of the fetishes @autonomystic - Tumblr Blog

“How many times do you see where a man or woman has shot another through jealousy! The standard of purity has decided that it is right, "it shows spirit," "it is justifiable" to—murder a human being for doing exactly what you did yourself,—love the same woman or same man! Morality! Honor! Virtue!! Passing from the moral to the physical phase; take the statistics of any insane asylum, and you will find that, out of the different classes, unmarried women furnish the largest one. To preserve your cruel, vicious, indecent standard of purity (?) you drive your daughters insane, while your wives are killed with excess. Such is marriage. Don't take my word for it; go through the report of any asylum or the annals of any graveyard. Look how your children grow up. Taught from their earliest infancy to curb their love natures—restrained at every turn! Your blasting lies would even blacken a child's kiss. Little girls must not be tomboyish, must not go barefoot, must not climb trees, must not learn to swim, must not do anything they desire to do which Madame Grundy has decreed "improper." Little boys are laughed at as effeminate, silly girl-boys if they want to make patchwork or play with a doll. Then when they grow up, "Oh! Men don't care for home or children as women do!" Why should they, when the deliberate effort of your life has been to crush that nature out of them. "Women can't rough it like men." Train any animal, or any plant, as you train your girls, and it won't be able to rough it either. Now will somebody tell me why either sex should hold a corner on athletic sports? Why any child should not have free use of its limbs? These are the effects of your purity standard, your marriage law. This is your work—look at it! Half your children dying under five years of age, your girls insane, your married women walking corpses, your men so bad that they themselves often admit Prostitution holds against PURITY a bond of indebtedness. This is the beautiful effect of your god, Marriage, before which Natural Desire must abase and belie itself. Be proud of it!”

—Voltairine de Cleyre, “Sex Slavery” (1890)

edwad

I just finished The Worldly Philosophers and I want to continue more down this little rabbit hole. I understand that Heilbroner only looked over classical economics so could you suggest some pre-classical economic books? Also do you know any good books I can read about Marxian thought to continue after The Worldly Philosophers? If you already got a list somewhere could you refer me to that?

heilbroner looks at more than just the so-called classicals, he just doesn't really consider anyone before smith (which is a major weakness imo). if you want to pursue this stuff further, there's decent collections of primary lit out there (meek's precursors of adam smith, heilbroner's teachings from the worldly philosophers, monroe's early economic thought, etc) and some decent-to-good secondary lit (meek's economics of physiocracy, rubin and schumpeter's more ambitious histories of economics, etc). for a survey of marxian thought after heilbroner's TWP, howard and king's history of marxian economics is the gold standard imo. i can also just give you a bunch of websites that might be useful:

history of economic thought website (general resource, like a wikipedia for econ thought)

online political economy listserv (long email chains between marxy economists)

economics in the rear-view mirror (great resource with a lot of archived historical econ shit and general tidbits)

mcmaster university archive for the history of econ (sorta like the marxists.org of econ)

processedlives

“Tact, like empathy, is based on a certain form of mutual understanding. But while empathy implies the idea of entering someone else’s mind inasmuch as it is linked to the presumption that ‘I know how you feel’, tact exists to create a form of bonding between individuals that is not based on the idea of intrusion but, conversely, on the respect for existing boundaries, and on a willingness not always to assume that one knows. While empathy requires resonance and proximity, tact is there to restore distance, and to accept the diﬀerence between the individuals involved in order to protect and preserve their dignity. Tact is based on an attention towards otherness.”

— Katja Haustein, “How to Be Alone with Others: Plessner, Adorno, and Barthes on Tact” (via mehreenkasana)

beguines

Rather than saying what love is or how it works, Dunayevskaya says that we have to create the conditions that will enable people to get creative and experiment with new and different forms of human relationality. She notes that we cannot really do that in a capitalist society because capitalism instrumentalizes everything human for its own power. Every human energy and motivation is something for capital to seize.

Dunayevskaya explains her point with reference to the splitting of the atom. The possibility of splitting the atom, hypothesized by Einstein's theory of relativity, preceded actually doing it by roughly forty years because, according to Dunayevskaya, the atom was only split after capitalists saw that they could do it in the interests of their own power. So it became a catastrophic and destructive thing as opposed to something potentially liberating and useful for human life. When it comes to love, theorists like Eva Illouz have shown how the commercial interests of capital have historically and rather thoroughly seized on human aspirations for love and have created endless romantic utopias for the marketplace. This is perhaps an inevitable fate for love in a capitalist society. Indeed, from capital's perspective, what better fate than a commodity for something that everyone wants?

This is why, for Dunayevskaya, love is only able to become what it presently is within the limits of a capitalist society. In a world governed by money and ruled by the logic of capital, love will not and cannot be developed to its full and possible flourishing. We may and do love within the limits of the space and time of a life organized by capital in a world governed by money, but we must understand that those limits affect what we do and how we do it. The world of capital would have to be abolished for us to really see what love can do. Kollontai tried to imagine that world, but none of us has ever lived in it. So when asked about love, Dunayevskaya could only speak of the abolition of capitalism as the first part of an answer, the remainder of which would have to be worked out from there.

Richard Gilman-Opalsky, The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value

anarchotolkienist

I think that one of the core insights of "Christian thought" or whatever is just simply that doing good does not come naturally to us, but that it is possible to practice it, with the help of regret, repentance, grace, and that the more you practice these things the more naturally does it come to you. You can completely disagree with what virtues Christianity assigns (I'm fairly convinced, but you don't have to be) but I think that thinking like a Christian virtue ethicist would be helpful for basically any social movement.

We have a society that encourages the particular social virtues of a certain type of liberalism (self-expression, self-aggrandisement, pride, individualism, economism, racism, etc), and these virtues both create people in its image and create the society we live in, which produces more people Like That.

We as socialists or anarchists have a different set of virtues that we want to encourage in people (solidarity, independence, direct action, mutuality, etc). The question we need to be asking is, what contexts and places make these virtues easier for people, create 'our' people, and how can we multiply those contexts as much as possible, how can we produce a subject that is shaped into practicing our virtues and avoiding our sins as much as possible?

improvisedliturgy

[S]exuality and love do not live in the bedroom of Oedipus, they dream instead of wide-open spaces, and cause strange flows to circulate that do not let themselves be stocked within an established order. Desire does not ‘want’ revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right, as though involuntarily, by wanting what it wants.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

llleighsmith

“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”

—

Walter Benjamin (via hqlines)

This is one of my favorite things written by Walter. And it’s one of the most misunderstood ones. In a letter to Brecht, he touches upon this again - and this is shortly before he kills himself when the Nazi presence reached Portbou, at the French–Spanish border (Bataille writes about this). He explains this statement in a simple way: Hope mystifies a person, place, object. Hope can be dangerous and often restricting if clung on to too desperately. And in love, we often cling on to hope before we even begin to know the person of our affection. The idea is to love them by knowing them - discovering them, understanding them - without hope. And the thing is simple: the antonymous reality of hope is not always despair. Sometimes - often - hope is despair itself. Despair taints, mars, hurts. The opposite of hope can be elucidating; it can be acceptance without abject powerlessness; it can be resolve without expectation. And for that, Walter would always point at beginning at one’s own heart. Fortifying it before going anywhere else.

(via king-woman)

estrellasrojas

"Pitiful, abject nations, you have taken leave of your senses! You cling stubbornly to evil and are blind to what is good. You allow the best part of your income to be taken from you, you let your farms be pillaged, your houses despoiled and stripped of your ancient ancestral possessions! You can claim nothing as your own, and it seems you would be glad to be allowed to rent from someone else your possessions, your families and your very lives. And all this devastation, this misfortune, this ruin is not visited upon you by an enemy—or rather, it does come from an enemy, and from the man to whom you give the power he has, for whom you so courageously go to war, laying down your lives without hesitation to make him more powerful. Your oppressor has but two eyes, two hands, one body, and has nothing that the least of your infinite number of citizens does not have—except the advantage you give him, which is the power to destroy you. Where did he get those eyes which spy on you, if you did not give him them? Would he have all those hands to strike you with, if he did not get them from you? Those feet which trample upon your cities, where did he get them if they are not your own. What power has he over you, if it is not the power you give him. How would he ever dare attack you, if you were not his accomplices? What could he do to you, if you were not receivers of the goods this thief plunders from you, the companion of this murderer who is killing you, traitors to yourselves? You sow your fruit so that he can destroy the harvest. You furnish your houses, so that he can pillage them. You bring up your daughters to sate his lust. You bring up your children so that (at best) he will take them off to fight his wars and be butchered, or make them ministers to his greed and instruments of his vengeance. You accustom yourselves to hardship so that he can enjoy a life of luxury and wallow in foul and base pleasures. You make yourselves weak so that he can be strong and oppress you ever more harshly. The very beasts would not endure these humiliations if they were capable of feeling them. But you can deliver yourselves if you make the effort—not an effort to deliver yourselves, but an effort to want to do so. Resolve to be slaves no more, and you are free! I am not asking you to push him out of your way, to topple him: just stop propping him up and, like a great colossus whose plinth has been taken from under him, he will crumble and be shattered under his own weight."

—Étienne de la Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1577)

improvisedliturgy

If enslavement was the reduction of life to the time of the plantation (“lifetime converted into labour time”), a mode of production that rendered human life as “work,” the improvisatory nature of Black music was moving away from time as this singular experience. The play, the sound, was a reminder that “labour time was not life-time.” To reach for life was to create something else with time, beyond that labor time.

Joshua Myers, Of Black Study

hamjensgar

“For an identity to be an effect means that it is neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary. That the constituted status of identity is misconstrued along these two conflicting lines suggests the ways in which the feminist discourse on cultural construction remains trapped within the unnecessary binarism of free will and determinism. Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturally intelligible. The critical task for feminism is not to establish a point of view outside of constructed identities; that conceit is the construction of an epistemological model that would disavow its own cultural location and, hence, promote itself as a global subject, a position that deploys precisely the imperialist strategies that feminism ought to criticize.”

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

pmamtraveller

Luca Ponsato - Does Anyone See My Suffering

collapsedsquid

Arbitrary state power can cut in many directions

Marion’s ideas about data, the state and the private sector are expressed in half a dozen articles with various co-authors, and pulled together most succinctly in work that has yet to be published. So I’m not linking, but instead providing a likely imperfect summary of her and her co-authors’ contribution. For current purposes, the key thing to understand is that the game between the state and the private sector has changed. Once - and not too long ago, the state had much more and much higher quality data than private sector actors, and was much better capable of using it. Think e.g. about the work that the U.S. Census Bureau does, collecting data in tidy and well ordered (albeit sometimes problematic) categories and making it available. Now, the tables have turned. We live in a world where much much more, albeit much messier data is available, and the best tools for managing it and making it useful belong to the private sector rather than government statisticians. This is one important aspect of a broader process of state transformation. The US government - like other governments - has increasingly contracted out many tasks that used to be core parts of state functioning to the private sector. This may or may not create greater efficiencies, depending (accounts vary). Undeniably, it hollows out state capacity and the capacity of the state to function independent of contractors. Governments find themselves increasingly incapable of carrying out even very basic functions without the help of private sector actors. As government becomes more dependent, private sector actors become more powerful, whether or not they choose to exercise that power. Sometimes, the government may be able to shift responsibilities to actors it thinks more trustworthy: the Trump administration has done everything it can to shift certain government data functions towards Palantir, and away from Booz Allen, Accenture and other, more traditional contractors. Sometimes, it is nearly impossible to get rid of a contractor; their knowledge is so particular, and their systems so deeply integrated that they become effectively irreplaceable. This is the dirty secret of the Trump administration push to both privatize government functions and increase executive authority at the same time. Extensive privatization of government functions and unitary executive theory are really hard to reconcile with each other, no matter how hard regime apologists try to claim that they go hand-in-hand.The more that the government relies on outside actors to carry out its core function, the more vulnerable it becomes to those private actors’ wants and desires, which may differ sharply from those of the administration itself. That is likely a big part of the Trump administration’s discomfort with Anthropic. The push to discipline Anthropic comes from the need to reconcile its desire for top-down authority with its reliance on AI companies to carry through the large scale transformations that it wants to carry through. To reshape the public sector in its image, the Trump administration needs reliable private actors. But trying to discipline those actors may create its own difficulties

milkboydotnet

“To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.”

— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

dostoyevsky-official

It is a pessimism both exaggerated and understated. It is exaggerated because Clark finds the roots of the left’s defeat in human nature, in “the human propensity to violence” and an inevitable “hankering after evil” woven into our very being. He finds it also in modernity itself, which has created such atomised, unthinking, obedient individuals that they are “no longer material for a society”, a phrase borrowed from Nietzsche. These are not new ideas; but to root the left’s demise in human nature and the nature of modernity is to deny the possibility of any resurrection. Indeed, Clark urges the left to abandon utopian ideas and embrace in its stead a “tragic sense of life”. The tragic vision, which sustains a conservative view of the world, sees in the flawed and limited character of humans a warning against grand social change, insisting that faith, tradition and hierarchy are necessary guardrails against barbarism, a way of acknowledging, in the words of Leszek Kołakowski, the Polish Marxist turned Christian philosopher, “life as inevitable defeat”. Yet, for all this, Clark’s despair is also understated, because today’s political malaise is more profound than he envisions – or is commonly acknowledged. It is not just the left that has imploded. Liberal and conservative traditions, too, have become drained of much of their life-force. What we call liberal norms – democracy, equality, freedom of speech and association, the right of nations to self-determination and so on – became social realities largely through the efforts of radical movements and working-class organisations, and often in the face of ferocious opposition from liberal elites that sought to limit the scope of these norms, denying the majority of society, indeed the majority of the world, basic democratic rights. It was through the struggles of the dispossessed – of slaves to emancipate themselves, of colonial subjects confronting imperial rule, of the working class organising to improve their lives, of women claiming the right to vote – that liberal norms were made universal rather than remaining the exclusive property of a privileged few. The erosion of that radical universalist tradition has befuddled the left, detaching it from liberal traditions, and from class politics, and leaving the remnants more authoritarian and identitarian. It has also discombobulated liberalism. Without the buttress of radicalism, liberals themselves have become more illiberal, whether on free speech or democracy, and less willing to address issues of social inequality or working-class needs. Conservatism emerged initially as voicing hostility to modernity, and yet adapted to the new world so efficiently that it become a dominant governing force in a world painted largely in liberal tones. Over time, not liberalism but working-class and socialist movements became conservatism’s principal enemy, an antagonistic relationship that helped define what conservatives wished to conserve. The erosion of the radical tradition has brought confusion to conservatism, too. Conservatives today seem to understand how to rip up the existing order, but have little conception about what should replace it, or what they wish to conserve. And so, we arrive in an age in which it is not just that the left has lost but that the main political traditions of modernity have all become exhausted.

sivavakkiyar

“There is a handwritten draft in which Caesar instead of Zarathustra is the bearer of Nietzsche’s tidings….That is of no little moment. It underscores the fact that Nietzsche had an inkling of his doctrine’s complicity with imperialism.” from Benjamins Arcades project

memecucker

Anyway I like how Chattopadhyaya put it when he said Jesus wasn’t any kind of socialist (because there’s no evidence Jesus ever thought that hard about how society works) but he did have a rudimentary critique of property. Siddharta was similar and Chattopadhyaya compares their respective early movements by saying Siddharta had the more robust theoretical critique though Jesus’ earliest followers may have had a more radical praxis in terms of setting up communities. In both cases however their respective founders critiques of property and implicit critiques of class would be undone by the introduction of monasticism which transformed a critique of society into a spiritual discipline reserved for a small group of spiritually-elite people

o-fantasma

i think as anti trans laws increasingly escalate its a good time to remember that the law on paper is not the same as how policing actually works there are all sorts of crimes that happen every day and that u actually couldnt prevent at any systematic level cf shoplifting this escalation marks an upping of pressure but its odd to hear people talk like eg we, tma ppl, actually cannot go in women’s bathrooms anymore - getting challenged in a bathroom is always possible but does it happen every time, even most times a tma person enters a woman’s bathroom? does this happen to all of us - with our various social differences across race and class and fatness etc etc - to the same degree? there are real things to be afraid of but largely it seems to me a problem of how much of this stochastic terror atmosphere any one of us can tolerate from one day to the next and thats a real problem! i know i personally cant take much more of this lol my interest is simply in properly identifying what it is i cant take much more of and what cracks might appear in that firmament what can be done to crack shit open as far as “we” can in the meantime

o-fantasma

this is not nearly adequate as an account of possible action so whats my stake here? well fear is an interesting affect its very interesting to me politically sticky hard to contest when someone is scared its the point where people need comfort or you need to reject them sticky but high stakes lots of ppl i know are very scared by increasingly aggressive enforcement of immigration laws eg we use this same word ‘fear’ for eg how a white woman might react to a black man whistling near her fear; - it can be worth digging into, spending time with to me this sorta cracks in the firmament line is one angle of approach like i say, maybe inadequate, but i’d like to start somewhere

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twilight of the fetishes