[Xmca-l] Re: Burning...
Andy Blunden
andyb@marxists.org
Sat Aug 24 19:02:11 PDT 2019
Thanks for the reminder, David. The "Transitional Demands"
(at least as applied in our own times) always struck me as a
bit fake. It is possible to push a transitional demand if
(1) At the same time you are fighting for a demand that is
achievable without global transformation, and (2) The
demands are taken from the existing struggles, not a history
book. But I had forgotten about this; my reasoning is different.
Martin, Of course! I do not object to generalisation, and
understanding the molecular unit of analysis, C-M-C and the
molar unit M-C-M are essential starting points. That's why I
said: "once we have grasped the simple fact hat we live in a
capitalist world." But beyond M-C-M there are other
important units composing the world capitalism system.
In some capitalist countries the governments are working
quite bravely to protect a fragile environment, and even in
Brazil Wagner tells us that there are social forces trying
to do so, but overcome not just by large capital, but by a
narcissistic, authoritarian president and large-scale
agrobusiness.
Do you know the tendency known as the Impossibilists? These
are people who think of themselves as Marxists but endlessly
repeat that "Socialism is impossible until the working class
understands ...." It is this destructive kind of thinking
which I see as flowing from ascribing every disaster simply
and directly of capitalism, as if the economic system is not
mediated by culture. Culture is changeable.
But I tear my hair out over this just like everyone else.
Let's see what the Neoliberal leaders of World Capitalism
come up with at the G7, eh? :)
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 25/08/2019 7:18 am, David Kellogg wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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
>>> <mailto: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 <mailto: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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