[Xmca-l] Re: Burning...

[David Kellogg]

My dear Martin--

Something there is about the way you read--or maybe it's the way I
write--it's very likely the way I write, with all its multiple embeddings
and whatnot--one of us always manage to get things, as Vygotsky say,
ass-backwards. So, on the one hand, I was not denying that capitalism
turns nature into raw materials for prouction. That's not at all peculiar
to capitalism; it exists in all societies without exception, and it's not
even as pronounced in advanced capitalist societies as it was in some
pre-modern societies (American slavery devastated the soil as well as the
population that worked it). As a result we can expect (and you prove this
when you rummage around, even rhetorically, for Bill Gates's e-mail
address) to find many capitalists ostensibly and even actually on the side
of nature: renewable resources are just good business. In Brazil, for
example, it appears that the really big agrobusiness companies are far more
aware of how dangerous the fires are for international trade, while the
much smaller, i.e. less capitalized, enterprises are more tightly aligned
with Bolsinaro and more inclined to pyromania. I think that dividing one's
enemies is always just the other side of uniting fellow travelers, friends,
and, as Andy says, comrades in arms.

But on the other hand, I do not think that the solution is more capitalism,
or a gentle transition to some gentler form of capitalism, or that
capitalism is and always will be the only game "we" know how to play. I
 was trying to say that it works better when we raise transitional demands,
demands which force capitalism itself to expose the links between basic,
fundamental, democratic, not-obviously-anti-capitalist stuff like the right
to breathe air with oxygen in it and teh struggle against capitalism
itself. That is how whole classes can acquire a perezhivanie of the
existential threat they really exist in, how they can seize conscious
awareness of the existential threat of capitalism. Anything else is going
to lead to what Vygotsky calls empty verbalism. I don't think that class
perezhivanie or the graspture of conscious awareness is ever gentle,
though: the reason I was using sexual transitioning as a metaphor was that
it's not crisis-free at all, even if you take hormones "gradually" (one
transgender woman described it as having to do adolescence twice). Finally,
I think that the current crisis tells us is that capitalism is a game
nobody really knows how to play: it's a game that is playing us as a
species and even as a whole social situation of development. (And, on a
personal level, I am supposed to teach a class called "Specialism and
Start-ups" this semester, and I really don't have a clue how to start!)

Leave it to Andy, with his  heritage in Trotskyism and his preternatural
erudition iin Marxism, to know exactly what I was getting at. It ws this:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tp-text.htm#mt


David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article:
Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
understanding narratives by
Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663

Some e-prints available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663



On Sat, Aug 24, 2019 at 10:19 AM Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:

> I think that once we have grasped the simple fact hat we live in a
> capitalist world, and that there is a hellovalot that has to happen between
> now and a situation where we don't live in a capitalist world, we need to
> think about how to understand and change our situation ...
>
> Rather than the truism that the object of all government and economic
> activity in the world is capitalist accumulation, I think we should
> recognise the truth put forward by the Regulation Theorists, which agrees
> with Activity Theory -- government and economic activity can be conceived
> of as a number of independent, interconnected *activities* (projects)
> like business management, trade, wage determination, distribution, price
> determination, a finance system, as well as environmental protection,
> taxation, legislative, judicial, political and policing systems - every one
> of which is culturally variable and is within the grasp of governments and
> an organisation people to challenge and change.
>
> The destruction of the amazon forests and their crucial role in
> maintenance of everyone's atmosphere and the world's biological and
> cultural resources is a real problem. I don't know the answer. But we can't
> solve by starting with the largest possible generalisation.
>
> Units of analysis comrades.
>
> Andy
> ------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 24/08/2019 8:46 am, Martin Packer wrote:
>
> Hi David,
>
> I don’t think what you’re saying negates the assertion that capitalism,
> with its pernicious tendency to turn every aspect of nature into “raw”
> materials and “natural" resources, is the source of the problems in the
> Amazon and many other parts of the world. You’re probably correct, though,
> in suggesting that the solution might turn out to be more capitalism. It
> is, after all, the game that we play so well, and in fact the only game
> that we know how to play.
>
> So transition rather than revolution? Okay, I’m game. Who takes the first
> turn?
>
> Martin
>
>
>
> On Aug 23, 2019, at 4:14 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Wagner:
>
> You were, I remember, interested in gaming culture. But if I remember
> correctly, you weren't just interested in gaming culture "in the
> wild"--when you look at gaming culture on line  in the wild, you see that
> it's often associated with misogyny, violence, and Alt-right motifs (e.g.
> the "Lost Cause" of southern slavery in the USA--my brother, for example,
> has been doing a regular blog for Matrix games on the anniversaries of the
> civil war, and his work is very often commentated by pro-slavery gamers).
> You were interested in gaming culture as a vehicle for
> teaching-and-learning in schools--both as a vehicle of conveying content,
> and as a way of mediating the role of the learner from passive recipient to
> active participant.
>
> Well, consider THIS video, which was made by a transexual woman who
> started out (male) in the on-line gaming culture making videos to try to
> talk to Alt-right people about their support for Donald Trump. I apologize
> for the coarse language, and some of the rather risque jokes, but you will
> see it is part of the message. (I also do not endorse the call to vote
> Democratic: Al Gore ended "An Inconvenient Truth" with a stirring call to
> elect democrats, and in 2008 Americans dutifully did, with no discernible
> effect whatsoever on any of the issues raised in this film.)
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6GodWn4XMM
>
> Now, in some ways, it is srikingly similar to your video--the spokesperson
> is carefully chosen and made up, there is a direct appeal  to the (male)
> viewer which doesn't eschew sex appeal. But here's what I think is
> different.
>
> a) ContraPoints manages to use many of the Alt Right's own
> arguments--their aesthetic, their humor, and even, at one point, their own
> racism (when she argues that unless climate change is tackled, we will have
> to deal with hundreds of millions of dark-skinned refugees). She even ends
> with the idea that all successful political struggles are essentially aimed
> at mythical enemies.
>
> b) ContraPoints, nevertheless, does not have to disguise her own Marxist
> agenda or her own actual persona--she simply presents it as part of a
> panoply of gamer identities.
>
> c) ContraPoints is neither minimalist ("don't take an airplane to
> ISCAR") nor maximalist ("no es fuego, es capitalismo!")--she doesn't want
> to simply "meliorate" capitalism, nor is she happy to simply blame
> capitalism for everything (in fact, elsewhere she points out that
> capitalists themselves are not to blame--since they are helpless and
> largely harmless patsies for Capital itself, hence Martin's appeal to Bill
> Gates!)
>
> d) Instead, ContraPoints is a transitionalist (no pun intended). That is,
> she begins with simple demands which are in no way anti-capitalist--but
> which neveretheless compel attention even in children (that's the point of
> the eroticism, the watermelon, the knife, etc, but she could also do the
> same with the demand for a living minimum wage, or protection for
> indigenous peoples, or simply putting out the fires). Because these demands
> are not inherently anti-capitalist, the inability of capitalism to satisfy
> them needs to be explained. In real political struggles, this is often done
> by the capitalists themselves: we cannot make a profit if we increase
> wages, protect indigenous people, or--in the case of Bolsinaro--try to put
> out the fires (Bolsinaro says Brazil doesn't have the resources, which is
> probably true). A transitional programme then demands proof--open the
> account books to prove that there is no money for minimal wages, no land
> for indigenous peoples, no resources for fighting firest. It is then
> capitalism itself which has to demonstrate its own bankruptcy--and create
> its own, united, educated, and purposeful gravediggers.
>
> Of course, the most obvious objection to this kind of transitional
> programme is that her humor is misplaced and that this struggle is not a
> game. Sometimes the humor is beside the point--the suicide rate among
> transgender women is somewhere around forty percent, and some of
> ContraPoint's work has a strong flavor of the person in the bath
> self-medicating and self-treating. But I know that you, of all people, will
> never object that struggle is not a game!
>
> (By the way, I'm not going to ISCAR either--same reason!)
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New Article:
> Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
> pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
> understanding narratives by
> Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
> To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>
> Some e-prints available at:
>
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 23, 2019 at 7:35 PM Wagner Luiz Schmit <
> wagner.schmit@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> A short video about this:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfiutlJ7uWc
>>
>> So yes, it is capitalism
>>
>> Wagner
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 9:08 PM Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
>>
>>> This is a satellite image not of fire per se but of the carbon dioxide
>>> the fire is releasing (redder = more CO2) from the weather site Windy.
>>>
>>> Perhaps worth sharing? Who has Bill Gates' email address?
>>>
>>> Martin
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
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