Rogueish
02/28/13
My skin always feels cold afterwards,” pronounced Moscow. “Love cannot be communism. I’ve thought and thought and I’ve seen that it just can’t. One probably should love – and I will love. But it’s like eating food – it’s just a necessity, not the main life.
― Andrey Platonov, Happy Moscow
Amanda Palmer’s Accidental Experiment with Real Communism→
10/03/12
Intensified exploitation of the string section should lead to more hand-knitted cassette tapes showing up in the mailboxes of the twenty-four thousand eight hundred and eighty-three backers who ponied up.
(Source: marathonpacks)
07/19/12
A question on academia.edu asks:
Did the Italian Communist Party really have the slogan “the best salami for everyone!”?
IDK if they did, but that is an excellent slogan which I fully endorse.
04/05/12
To reinforce the depth and scope of the dilemma it must be said that Lenin who new what communism meant, in the early days of the Russian Revolution, wrote quite frankly that he could not say what form the new relations of labor would take in a socialist society; no one could work them out but the workers themselves, millions by trial and error; there relations would be “subtle and intricate,” a phrase worth pondering. He trusted to the historical creative energies of the masses (C. L. R. James, American Civilization, 170).
This is an excellent explanation of why it’s so wrong-headed to demand that people working towards communism give an explanation of how communism in general would work.
01/26/12
On FULL COMMUNISM-
cursory notes on the evolution of a memetic non-demand.
You hear it everywhere, these days, if you walk within a certain activist milieu. It’s a token demand, a given. FULL COMMUNISM- I wouldn’t get out of bed for anything less. It’s a joke, a dumb joke. It’s a communist meme. Like all good memes, it’s pretty much devoid of meaning, in terms of content. But its use denotes something else– a Zizekian uber-demand, a demand which goes beyond. FULL COMMUNISM is both a lack, in a very real sense, but also a pointed lack, its very meaninglessness a cry for meaning.
On the fascinating UK ultraleft meme economy.
What do you mean, "doesn't work"?→
03/14/11
I don’t think communism failed and I think that there are important ways that the Soviet experiment succeeded. In fact, I actually don’t think that radical leftists really think that the Soviet Union failed. I think that this language of failure, picked up from capitalist mainstream culture, covers over a more fundamental anxiety, namely, that communism succeeded. In other words, the left isn’t afraid of failure; it’s afraid of success.
Leftists really fear the bloody violence part of the Russian revolution and the Stalin period. At the Taking Control conference (and in his contribution to The Idea of Communism volume), Peter Hallward is quite great on this, emphasizing the legacy of anti-Jacobinism and the historical legacy of a preference for condemning some kinds of violence but not others. What is condemned? The violence of the people, the violence of the people fighting against those who would oppress them. State violence, the force of counter-revolution, is taken to be at some point justified and permissible. Revolutionary violence is condemned, over-condemned, infused with surplus condemnation.
inventing the pain of others: david foster wallace’s kenyon college commencement speech « ads without products→
03/29/10
Isn’t there something oddly solipsistic about David Foster Wallace’s suggestion that the only way to avoid a solipsistic response to the everyday indifference of others is to imagine that they are in the middle of tragedy or drama? It seems to me a kind of communism of boredom would be a preferable response.
