@one-divides-into-two - Tumblr Blog

“Katie,” from To Speak While Dreaming by Eleni Sikelianos

can’t even listen to music anymore

#everything just makes me sad these days

Philosophy, at its minimum, is the discipline of letting one’s commitments generate consequences one did not choose in advance.

Reza Negarestani, “Rational Inhumanism Vs Landian Anti-Philosophy.”

we will learn to need each other

#Bandcamp

coolest show I’ve ever played (dilly dally and cali kicks don’t count)

alienpapacy

“Poetry in general doesn’t do anything, there are just individual poems. Some of them I don’t get, some of them seem banal, some of them change my life. So there you go. It’s bound to be a spectrum, it’s the same with bagels.”

— Anne Carson, in a CBC Interview, 10/30/2016, about Ben Lerner’s book The Hatred of Poetry

not a regular tumblrina anymore (sad) because i am a twitter hotgirl now

he’s unstoppable btw

“Implicit in all the attempts to fit the gay movement into various “more revolutionary” categories is the assumption that calling it a democratic rights movement or a reform struggle is somehow a defamation, a downplaying of its importance from the viewpoint of Marxism. Nothing could be less true. No one knows what will spark the next outburst of the class struggle. The overthrow of the Haile Selassie government in Ethiopia (a movement forward, regardless of one’s assessment of the present regime) followed a traffic stoppage that occurred when a taxicab driver in Addis Ababa parked his cab in the middle of the main thoroughfare to protest high gas prices. Two days later 100,000 demonstrated and four days later the government fell. The 1905 Russian Revolution was begun in earnest when Father Gapon led a peaceful march of 200,000 workers to the Winter Palace to petition the Tsar for such demands as freedom of assembly, freedom of speech and the press, and an eight-hour working day. The portrait of the Tsar and church icons that headed the march did not prevent the Cossacks from following orders and killing a thousand workers. The turning point in the Iranian revolution was the refusal of the Shah to heed the demands of democratic rights and economic reforms by the Iranian oil workers, who also marched under portraits of the Shah until they were fired upon.

Marxists support democratic rights struggles not as a matter of sentiment, moralistic well-meaning, or even the illusion that formal gaining of democratic rights is equivalent to a corresponding change in the working class’s consciousness. After all, Holland has had no laws prohibiting homosexual behavior for more than a century. Yet the oppression of gays and consciousness of the working class in regard to the oppression is not markedly different from that in the U.S.

Support and active participation occur because democratic rights struggles have the potential for exposing the true basis of oppression - not that of laws, but that of property relations. Such struggles are not important in and of themselves, but for the potential they have in contributing to the possibility of and showing the necessity of revolutionary change.

When such struggles attain a mass character, whether on their own or because of their initiation by revolutionaries, it is not a question for revolutionary organizations to vouchsafe abstract support but to intervene in such a way that they can aid the struggle materially, learn from the self-activity of the oppressed and critique the limitations of the struggle.”

In Partial Payment: Class Struggle, Sexuality and the Gay Movement

"slime is the revenge of the in-itself [...] it transcends all distinctions between the psychic and the physical, between the brute existent and the meanings of the world; it is a possible meaning of being."

j.p. sartre, being and nothingness

#soooo true bestie

kiss me like its our last day on earth // maybe this will kill me so I don't have to see the end

#Bandcamp

“It is wrong theoretically to equate the two tasks as if they were on the same level: “the task of preparing for an armed uprising” and “the task of leading the trade union struggle”. The one task is said to be in the forefront, the other in the background. To speak like that means comparing and contrasting things of a different order. The armed uprising is a method of political struggle at a given moment. The trade union struggle is one of the constant forms of the whole workers’ movement, one always needed under capitalism and essential at all times. In a passage I quoted in What Is To Be Done? Engels distinguishes three basic forms of the proletarian struggle: economic, political, and theoretical—that is to say, trade union, political, and theoretical (scientific, ideological, and philosophical). How can one of these basic forms of struggle (the trade union form) be put on a level with a method of another basic form of struggle at a given moment? How can the whole trade union struggle, as a “task”, be put on a level with the present and by far not the only method of political struggle? These are incommensurable things, something like adding tenths to hundredths without reducing them to a common denominator. In my opinion, both these points (the second and third) of the preamble should be deleted. Alongside “the task of leading the trade union struggle” can be put only the task of leading the general political struggle as a whole, the task of waging the general ideological struggle as a whole, and not some particular, given, modern tasks of the political or ideological struggle. In place of these two points mention should be made of the necessity of never for a moment forgetting the political struggle, the education of the working class in all the fullness of Social-Democratic ideas, and the need to achieve a close, indissoluble connection between all manifestations of the workers’ movement for creating an integral, truly Social-Democratic movement.

An armed uprising is the highest method of political struggle. Its success from the point of view of the proletariat, i.e., the success of a proletarian uprising under Social-Democratic leader ship, and not of any other kind of uprising, requires extensive development of all aspects of the workers’ movement. Hence the idea of contraposing the task of an uprising to the task of leading the trade union struggle is supremely incorrect. In this way the task of the uprising is played down, belittled. Instead of summing up and crowning the entire workers’ movement as a whole, the result is that the task of the uprising is dealt with as a thing apart.”

Lenin, in a letter to S.I. Gusev regarding a resolution from the Odessa Party Committee on the trade union struggle (13 October 1905)

#lenin

Our standard for evaluating the quality of reform cannot simply be to see how much the masses benefit, because there are differences between short-term and long-term benefits, between local and global benefits, and between superficial and fundamental benefits. In addition, we must also recognize that if the people do not have the power to defend their own interests, the existing welfare will not be preserved; and if the people do not have the ability to defend their rights, the existing rights will also be lost. Therefore, for their own welfare, the people must fight for their own power, and to fight for their own power they must cultivate their ability to fight for power. Among the three of welfare, power and ability, the most important is the ability of the masses to defend their own rights. Only with ability can there be power, and only with power can there be welfare.

Therefore, the standard for evaluating the quality of reform is to see whether the people, especially the working class, who make up the vast majority of the population, have improved their class consciousness, strengthened their organizational ability, expanded their class ranks, and enhanced their combat effectiveness. In other words, the standard for judging the quality of any social phenomenon, thing, or event is whether it is conducive to improving the revolutionary nature of the masses. This is the basis for distinguishing true and false Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, this is the correct standard for us to view and evaluate the nature of reform, and this is the core of the mass line. Chairman Mao said, "The people, and the people alone, are the motive force behind the making of world history." Once the people rise up, they can change the world, and only when the people rise up can they change the world.

If a reform is the result of people's struggle, even the smallest victory is worth celebrating (such as the rights protection movement for migrant workers' schools in the suburbs of Beijing), but why should we thank the rulers? If a reform is implemented by the ruling class out of its own interests (such as universal higher education), a part of the people only temporarily benefited, why should we thank the rulers? They plundered the people's wealth ten times, and only returned less than one half of the stolen goods, and the people should be grateful to them like slaves?

from 'Cold Wave: On the Rise of "[Socialism with Chinese] Characteristics" Capital and the Road to Re-Liberation of the Chinese Working Class.'

Writing through or about grief is a confrontation with containment, both in the self and on the page. It sanctions an inclination to digress, not only because revisiting is an organic and necessary part of the experience, but because it is an unstable state and subject, prone to a volatility that resists attempts to find forward motion or shape. There can be a holiness about the parenthetical, the cadence of interruption that affords you the scaffolding to approach a subject that feels dangerous. However, if you’re a writer and so obligated to the work of exclusion that brings an end into sight, it is a terrible crisis to be lost in that digressive purgatory. That shapelessness can be chronic, in part because it can feel, when there is no beginning, middle, or end, that there is no way out. Bereavement makes a mockery of borders and by extension narrative. It’s somewhat of a paradox, too, in that to engage with it is to engage with permanence — the foreverness of death, of grief — but also with what happens after death, whether those questions are spiritual or the practical problems of being the person who is still alive and tasked with the quotidian, like showering or deciding whether or not to stay alive. So it should be noted that grief is sometimes this, grappling with your own desire to die.

Raven Leilani, ‘Death of the Party,’ in n+1