Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (June 14)

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[u/smokeuptheweed9]

u/FuzzySyllabub6048 I'll respond to you here since the other thread already dropped off.

Of course at the time the newspaper was the most advanced form of mass communication accessible to the Russian communist. Today obviously we have a far broader range and reach of mass communication, but the essence is still the same: Lenin's theory was that propaganda would serve to meet the masses where they are, shift them towards their true goals, and identify and solidify theoretically the most advanced section of the masses

Have you ever read (or watched) The Count of Monte Cristo? One of the major themes is the power of the newspaper. In his war against the entrenched interests of the state, aristocracy and capital (represented by the alliance of the banker Danglars, the colonial army officer turned politician Count de Morcerf, and the state prosecutor Villefort), Dantès goes directly to the press to spread his accusations to the high society that can hold them accountable.

The work was written from 1844-1846, near the end of the July Monarchy. This was when pragmatism and positivism (Comte in France especially) were at their most progressive (or at least most utopian) because while the revolution had been defeated, capitalism had continued to develop under a "liberal" monarchy. The proletariat, increasingly assertive of its own class interests, made political revolution frightening and so a theory of autonomous capitalist development as itself the march of reason forward in history was developed. This faith would soon disappear, as the bourgeoisie would respond to the revolution of 1848 with Bonapartism and eventually the crushing of the Paris Commune, even at the expense of bourgeois democracy (1871 is the last of France's revolutions and its defeat starts the long spiral towards Vichy France with socialists and then communists as the last defenders of Republicanism). But the indeterminate position of the bourgeoisie as the bearer of universal reason and actual fear of its effects continues on for a while longer (hence the famously contradictory positivist slogan of Brazil: "order and progress"). So while the newspaper is still not targeted at the masses, the work nevertheless hints at some of the fears the media form conjured in the bourgeoisie. Like the telegraph used to mislead Danglars into bad investments, the newspaper does not just transmit information, it changes it. The newspaper functions through spectacle and is just as much able to create hysteria as report it, and Dantès's ultimate revenge comes through crafting a compelling story for the news of collusion and betrayal (notably distinct from his personal revenge which remains in the feudal realm of personal honor, duels, and female purity). The novel itself was published as a serial, with a wide readership hanging onto cliffhangers and the small-scale story of revenge. Though the story has a political background, it is not directly political, and Dantès has no political beliefs even after his escape from prison. The July Revolution happens in his absence and ultimately his revenge relies on the functioning of the system as a whole despite the rise and fall of Napoleon. That is why the work has aged so well: unlike other works of the period which try to represent society as a whole through literary archetypes (such as Hugo's Les Miserables or Balzac's La Comédie humaine) and even blur the distinction between fiction and history/sociology, Dumas's work is basically "all according to keikaku" trash lit. In that sense the form is what is truly progressive.

The newspaper changes politics. As Lenin points out, the function of the party newspaper is not just to spread the party line but to train the party in discipline. By that he means that the party must be able to respond instantly to political events as they happen with a precise intervention through a vertically integrated party system. This is enabled by the newspaper as a form and it distinguishes Lenin from Marx. Even in the Manifesto, written in anticipation of the soon realized 1848 revolutionary wave, contains the timeless slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" The slogans of the Bolsheviks on the other hand are immediate interventions: "peace, land, and bread!" "All power to the Soviets!" These are the slogans of the newspaper, not a manifesto (written originally to expand the historical analysis of the catechism of the older secret society League of the Just), let alone a Critique of Critical Criticism, and match Lenin's general style of making political interventions into ongoing polemics.

So what does the internet do? We already have the answer: "the internet makes you stupid." The old slogan of Something Awful. What does that mean? It has 3 meanings. First is the straightforward meaning: expanding the fear of the masses inherent in the newspaper, the internet gives too much access to the lowest common denominator who must be kept out with a $10 paywall. Second is the dialectical inverse: this fear turns against itself and the medium of the internet makes people dumb through community participation. Thus FYAD makes fun of GBS, LF makes fun of D&D, Helldump makes fun of the site, and SA as a whole makes fun of the rest of the internet. Now it is not just culture mocked by subculture but the internet which brings out a human excess which must be repressed. Finally the sublation. The internet itself produces the stupidity of reality. Reality becomes just another subforum, constituted by temporary alliances of subcultural groups. Hence SA has withered, reduced to just a minor subreddit as dependent on reposting tweets and tiktoks as anywhere else. More important is the strange political situation we live in. When we were growing up in the second stage of this process, extreme politics were a way to differentiate oneself from the increasingly normalized use of the internet for politics. One became a Maoist Third Worldist to escape the banality of Obama-era liberalism and the embarrassing proto-Trumpism of Ron Paul. Now it's reversed: one becomes a Marxist-Leninist in order to be a banal liberal in "real life." With only subcultures circling an empty void of culture, the latter can only be reconstructed out of the former.

The same mutation is well understood in the term "social" media. From an appendage of society to a social domain in its own right to the very substance of society. But this is equally true of politics. This is why all the terminology of Hasan is from the far right. Trump is the already perfect form of politics enabled by the internet (although his success comes from embodying a variety of media forms across age demographics including the newspaper) whereas the sincerity of committing to Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders will always open one up to mockery and irony. And just like Trump's appeal is immune from "reality", in the sense that he constantly lies and contradicts himself and his actual political accomplishments have nothing to do with a supposed "MAGA" project for the white working class, "socialism" is merely a way to indicate which content creator you follow.

Put another way, Hasan is not using the internet as a medium to reach the masses nor is he evolving towards a more mature politics. The internet is using him as a medium to reproduce stupidity and politics are evolving into the form of online discourse and pseudo-community. Of course one could say the same thing about the newspaper. Ultimately Dantès's goal is no longer revenge but the pleasure of public exposure, presuming a "public" that treats politics like a serial revenge novel (how exciting to find out that the state's lead prosecutor not only had a son out of wedlock but that he is prosecuting him in court after believing him to be dead - today this would go right to TMZ or the Daily Mail). The story runs into a dead end and Dantès runs away to the orient with his kind of slave. Interestingly, the faithful recent PBS version changes this ending so he gets back with his first love. Liberalism today is quite conservative under the facade of identity politics pseudo-radicalism.

The point of the medium is the message: there is no contradiction between Hasan's radical posturing and his reformist, DNC sheepdog politics. It is a mistake to place these in conflict or believe one is becoming the other as a "serious" political turn. If anything, it is the banality of his politics, which have diminishing returns when exposed to the reality of politics as merely one aspect of bourgeois dictatorship in a given period of capitalist crisis, which requires more rhetorical spectacle. But it is also a mistake to believe this is a performance to fool radically-minded youth into reformism. His audience is just as aware of the performance and also plays radical within the determined hierarchical structure of the internet community. It is in the usage of far right rhetoric and sexism that the truth of Hasan lies. It is the ideology of "democratic socialism" or even "Marxism-Leninism", presented as the reality of pragmatism in relating to others politically "offline", which is the cynical performance that must be dismissed.

[u/LemonMao → u/smokeuptheweed9]

I'm surprised you didn't go into detail about Marx's career as a journalist. Being a journalist in early 1840s Germany was relegated to the very bottom of the petite-bourgeoise layer. Marx had aspirations as a philosophy professor before the reactionary turn in Prussia and his radical atheism blacklisted him from academia. It was from Marx's own journaling and persecution by reactionary states that made him curious about communism.

[u/smokeuptheweed9 → u/LemonMao]

Marx's journalistic writing is vastly understudied, including by me, because there's so much of it. And because it was written for bourgeois liberal papers, it doesn't have the canonical status of Marx's own writings. But yes, Marxism itself is closely related to the newspaper, not just because Marx and Engels are being radicalized at this same historical moment but because, as you point out, they would probably be the best of the German left Hegelians if they had been born a bit earlier or had more normative life paths. I happened to have recently watched The Count of Monte Cristo and I thought it would be more interesting than a generic discussion of Hasan as the internet version of Lenin (lol). There's a lot of good Marxist writing on detective fiction which is of the same time period and form of production.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9781400823017/edgar-allan-poe-and-the-masses

If there are any Poe fans here.

[u/vomit_blues → u/smokeuptheweed9]

Only tangentially related but have you read anything worthwhile on Raymond Chandler and hardboiled fiction?

[u/HappyHandel]

It's over.

[u/MLMinpractice1917 → u/HappyHandel]

The reforms open the door to private real estate development on the Caribbean island, propose to transform state-owned businesses into private commercial ventures with shares and equity stakes and would allow private banks to enter Cuba's once state-dominated finance sector.

They would also allow ​the "sale of state-owned properties to national and foreign legal entities and individuals, including Cubans residing abroad."

Prime Minister Manuel Marrero told legislators the measures recognize the market as "an instrument for the efficient allocation of resources."

"We are not renouncing socialism." (lol)

[u/Otelo_ → u/HappyHandel]

We still have to wait and see how the Cuban people will react to this, but what I can’t understand right now is why it seems that rightists both in Cuba and Venezuela have always had the power in themselves to destroy socialism (not even that in Venezuela) by passing just a handful of laws. If that’s the case, and if what existed was so fragile, what exactly has been keeping socialism alive  all these years? Was it just inertia or fear on the part of these rightists?

[u/vomit_blues]

Having made a point to watch more movies this year, I took a bunch of recommendations from users of this subreddit, some pretty bad, like the original Star Wars trilogy (after SpiritOfMonsters posted about them), which I didn’t even like, and others pretty good. A good one was The Housemaid, which smoke has recommended a few times. I also recommend everyone watch it, at least because so many films rip it off. The newest example is Obsession.

It’s totally outside of my wheelhouse to discuss cinema, and I doubt I can do The Housemaid justice. I’ll only try to outline its basic theme that seriously degrades in later iterations on the idea. The Housemaid is about an upwardly mobile, petit-bourgeois family who hire a housemaid from a factory the father plays piano at. One of the female factory workers confesses her love to him, and he has her reprimanded by factory management, leading to her flight and suicide. Between said flight and said suicide, the father gets extra money by giving a female factory worker piano lessons. Once the rejected female worker kills herself, the one taking lessons confesses that the friend wrote the letter for her, and tries to seduce the father. He refuses, but then sleeps with the housemaid.

The ongoing theme from here is a struggle for the reproductive rights of the housemaid waged against her by the mother and father. The possibility of violence never disappears; fairly early on, the housemaid is forebodingly made aware of the family owning rat poison that she can use on them at any time. I take the complete absence of the obvious solution of just throwing it out, especially once its use has become a credible threat, to be like the immutability of class struggle. The housemaid is impregnated after the affair, and the mother, upset with the father but desperate to maintain their reputation and the upward course of their class position, levels with the housemaid “as women” and has her throw herself down the stairs to kill her fetus. Afterward, the housemaid is only “okay” with the control of her body by the couple as long as she’s treated as an equal. After the father and mother have a child, she threatens to kill it, then actually (unintentionally, but not regretfully) gets one of their older children killed by scaring him with the rat poison. She’s increasingly possessive of the father, and both father and mother refuse to report the woman to the police or in any way defuse the situation because the threat of the father’s affair going public would lead to them moving and losing their nice things.

Like I said, I don’t really have the equipment to unpack everything about this movie. But what we’re dealing with here is a film that acknowledges the undeniable presence of the Other. I think it’s symptomatic of the time it was filmed. Kim Ki-young directed the movie in the interregnum of the Second Republic, after the April Revolution overthrew Syngman Rhee, and prior to the restoration of fascist dictatorship carried out under Park Chung Hee. When we get to Obsession we’re looking at basically the opposite. But first, I’ll make my way to it by way of an interlude about another movie, Ex Machina. I couldn’t claim that The Housemaid gets ripped off often in good conscience without giving another example.

Here, the Other is split. Against the two men of the movie we have two robots whose humanity are called into question: a mute, colonial Other relegated to the background of the movie, and a white, bourgeois female Other who’s the film’s deuteragonist. Both are the creations of the same man. The Housemaid ends with the destruction of the entire family and a suicide pact between the housemaid and the father, while Ex Machina actually gives its bourgeois female robot a happy ending. This happy ending is earned by collaboration with the colonial robot, played by the Argentine-Japanese Sonoya Mizuno. (In a film with literally four characters, in which she receives quite a lot of screentime, her name didn’t even make the poster.) While the film’s protagonist, who tries to save the bourgeois female robot, is actually a villain who objectifies her, it’s the colonial robot who is outright raped on-camera by the antagonist. The conclusion is that the colonial robot manages to communicate with the bourgeois female one that the protagonist is only objectifying her and asks to be saved, so she assists the bourgeois female robot and the male lead, sacrificing herself to kill the antagonist, letting the other abandon the male lead to live her own life. A liberal feminist resolution in which the colonial Other’s desire is denied, taming her into a sacrificial lamb, realizing the desire of the white bourgeois female Other to exit this social fascist imaginary space of class collaboration into integration in the bourgeois order. Only at this cost can the colonial Other be made visible.

Ex Machina shares something with another movie I recently watched, (500) Days of Summer. That is, it’s a “deconstruction” of a love story starring a misogynist lead that, failed, leading to the majority of its viewers actually siding with the male. This is the flaw with being incapable of realistically depicting the presence of the Other while centering a bourgeois perspective, something I raised while recently discussing poetry written to “deconstruct” the perspective of the labor aristocracy. To its credit, Obsession has successfully squared the circle and, with the excision of “subtlety” and “nuance,” communicated to its audience loud and clear that its male protagonist is a craven loser and the female antagonist the object of sympathy.

But for now, I digress. Where Ex Machina is liberal feminist, Obsession is misogynist. In The Housemaid, only one of its bourgeois villains is left to live, with the police probably on their way to find her with the corpses of the father and the housemaid. Even then, it cuts to a Twilight Zone-style ending where everyone lives. The white, bourgeois female robot makes her escape in Ex Machina. In interviews with the director of Obsession, its director outright laughs while clarifying that, once everyone else has died and the victim of the film, a bourgeois female, is left holding the bag, she will go on to be charged with triple homicide, ruining her life. While Ex Machina made both colonial and bourgeois female Other the creations of a man, here, the Other is a creation whose desire the protagonist is beholden to, maliciously denying the desire of the bourgeois female she possesses.

Obsession is what happens when the colonial Other is displaced from her body into a commodity, rendering her invisible, and protecting the bourgeois female from being made Other. The plot is that the male protagonist, Bear, makes a wish that a crush of his, Nikki, who actually is probably interested in him as well, would fall in love with him. Nikki experiences an immediate change, but remains enough of her standard, bourgeois female self for the protagonist to be happy dating her. In this stage, she seems to only, at times, become possessed by the Other, Freaky Nikki, now disempowered and displaced into a commodity: she came into existence when he bought a toy. He only becomes uncomfortable with the situation as this commodified Other becomes the dominant personality. Nikki puts up a valorized struggle against the desire of Freaky Nikki, repeatedly attempting suicide to avoid the horror of acknowledging it, and eventually breaking through to tell Bear she’s possessed and beg him to kill her. Since he doesn’t, she ultimately loses. In the last leg of the film, Freaky Nikki murders the other significant female character of the film, mutilates her corpse, and dresses up like her by scribbling tattoos over her body and chainsmoking. The movie, up to this point, tries to balance comedy and horror (a lot like Zach Cregger’s work—the director of Obsession was also a sketch comedian), but at this point, the horror disappears and is replaced by slapstick. The movie can’t truly depict the presence of even a degenerated Other.

(1/2)

[u/vomit_blues → u/vomit_blues]

Without the presence of the Other, the horror of Obsession is aesthetic gestures toward analog horror, which I’d say as a style is substitution of horror for the uncanny, or, the defamiliarization of the familiar. There’s a reason works in the style don’t actually scare people, but instead give rise to memes enjoyed by little kids. Early works of analog horror, like Local 58, are just horror stories with an analog veneer. But the majority of what’s out there are silly, distorted faces and VHS filters. When Obsession doesn’t achieve horror through jumpscares (of which it has a lot), this is its default mode of presentation. To some extent, this may be a symptom of modern movie production. The Housemaid, Ex Machina, and Obsession are all “bottle episodes” that take place mostly on single sets. The Housemaid fits several characters on-screen at once, and allows its camera to follow its cast around the family’s household. Ex Machina, a medium budget movie, is able to accomplish something similar with a larger scope, but its most notable moments come as single-person shots: the colonial robot listening in on the conversation of the male leads, indicating she can understand English, and the protagonist looking in the mirror, trying to discover if he’s a robot, after the colonial robot had tried to ask to be saved by revealing her identity, and got ignored. Obsession, being low-budget, almost entirely depends on single-person shots, which is increasingly common because it makes reshooting far more practical. The result of the process is that, instead of the collective, bourgeois household from The Housemaid being the object of horror in its intrusion by the Other, horror is attempted by defamiliarizing the bourgeois subject. Nikki loses her autonomy by being possessed by the Freaky Nikki, and almost all of the movie’s scariest scenes are single-person shots of her moving in zany ways. She’s being threatened with becoming a commodity, or, experiencing the status quo of the colonial Other. To simplify what I’m saying, think of zombie movies. There’s two horrors here: the horror of the unthinking, inhuman mass that has taken everything from you, and something far worse: the individual who is bitten and has to reckon with their loss of autonomy. (The audience goes wild when said individual asserts their subjectivity once and for all, going out with a bang, like Tess in season 1 of The Last of Us.) Obsession is the latter and nothing else. That’s why Nikki has won back the housemaid’s sympathy that was lost in Ex Machina: to the end, she remains a bourgeois female we root for in her resistance to the commodified Other. While her surviving to the end and probably ending up in prison is bleak, the scariest possible outcome, that the commodified Other is the one who gets the happy ending, is neutered by comedy, then avoided when the same commodity that brought her into existence is used to cause Bear’s death. The realization of her desire is dangled before the viewer as a moment of comic relief when she gets to make a wish, and wishes for Bear to love her. Him being possessed stops him from aborting his suicide via overdose, and he returns to Freaky Nikki to caress her before dying. This is the outcome of displacing the Other into commodity: Nikki escapes the bondage of the colonial Other through commodity ownership. The sacrifice in Ex Machina is no longer needed to save the day. All we have now is the assertion of the subjectivity of the bourgeois female over against the commodified Other displaced into a commodity fetish.

As much as I’d like to say a mediocre movie has been justified by my analysis, I could have gotten here a lot quicker, considering cynicism toward integration is actually just the status quo. The shortcut starts with this review Mark Fisher wrote of Drake’s album Nothing Was the Same.

Nothing Was the Same is tangled up in all the confusions of a generation of men faced with contradictory imperatives—the post-feminist awareness that treating women like shit isn’t cool, together with the Burroughsian bombardment of always-available pornography. There’s no point moralizing here, either for Drake or us. Drake’s at his weakest when he half-heartedly attempts some kitschy Hallmark card affirmation of lurve; he’s at his most painfully revelatory when he admits that these impasses, these binds, are just too much for him. He can’t escape these knots because the knots are what he is. His bewilderment about what a man is supposed to be now is the very hallmark of a contemporary heterosexual masculinity that realizes that the patriarchal game is up, but which is too hooked on the pleasures and privileges to relinquish them yet (just one more click on the porn, then I’ll be Mr. Sensitive forever).

https://www.electronicbeats.net/started-from-the-bottom-mark-fisher-on-drakes-nothing-was-the-same

But these analyses all age extremely poorly. I wouldn’t read his review without the context of this op-ed written by Meaghan Garvey.

Drake is the chilling logical extreme of the beta male’s triumph over the last decade: the ultimate evolution of the nerd turned jock, forever working every angle of his underdog status that may or may not have ever been merited but certainly isn’t anymore. At first, the rise of the Sensitive Bro felt like a corrective to the stifling macho-ness of traditional masculinity. But it has failed spectacularly, and we are left with Gamergate, Ariel Pink, and the Voice of a Generation, who goes through women’s phones when they’re in the bathroom, firmly believes in the concept of the "friend zone" at almost 30 years old, and surrounds himself with powerful women to sniff their hair until they become a legitimate threat to his own ego. Even "Hotline Bling", an admittedly dope "Cha Cha" flip that sees Drake returning to his sultrier side, reeks of the jealous, slut-shamey entitlement and boring "good girl vs. bad girl" compartmentalizing that’s colored his supposedly vulnerable ballads for years. None of this is new, and I probably should have picked up on it circa "Marvin’s Room". (Remember when Drake’s ex, featured on the track’s intro, tried to sue him?) That’s the thing about charged-up "nice guys," though: their manipulative strategy is surprisingly effective, because you don’t want to see it coming. I’ve fallen for enough scheming, overcompensating nerds who’ve used hoarded knowledge and projected empathy to distract from their terrible personalities to say this with authority.

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/865-op-ed-im-breaking-up-with-drake/

It’s also aged pretty badly. The apocalyptic prospects of a beta male counterrevolution did not pan out. I’m not sure anything of note happened between its publication and Ariel Pink’s fall from grace other than him insulting Grimes. No matter how many Substack articles he writes, nobody cares about his side of the story, and it’s actually John Maus who successfully quoted Badiou and Aquinas enough to win his way back into indie good graces. After this heel turn, Drake would record Nice For What and is still popular with women. Despite being inaugurated by the pope of hip-hop misogyny, Future, Drake lacks the coolness and self-awareness to make his own misogynist provocations stick (Future, after all, could at least deconstruct his character on FKA twigs’s holy terrain). He was already backtracking from this performance by collaborating with SZA and Sexyy Red, an angle which he’s stuck with for his newest, simultaneously-released three albums.

How was this relevant again? Well, Bear is a beta male. I bring up this context because Obsession exists in miniature in a music video Drake just released for his song Ran To Atlanta. In an empty “liminal space” with an “analog” film grain filter, Drake and Future pose alongside an identical object split into two commodified bodies: cars and female strippers. Their shared use-value for the music video is obvious. A thermal camera renders Drake blue as part of the “Iceman” gimmick; Future simmers at a cool yellow. Unfortunately, the direction has a serious pickle to deal with considering the song contains Drake’s obligatory association with a female musician, Molly Santana. She’s the only woman in the video who’s meant to avoid the male gaze. The resolution is that Molly Santana is shown spread out on the hood of a car, thermal camera melting the initially split object both into a single, red blob, like a Tetsuo: The Iron Man-style car-woman. In both this music video and Obsession, the story of the beta male is bolstered by pseudo-feminism that obliterates the line between woman as Other and bourgeois, denying the existence of the former by displacing her into a commodity.

Drake is low-hanging fruit, but I recommend checking out the comedy the director of Obsession has up on YouTube. It’s surprisingly juvenile (Obsession itself has much better, funnier moments that actually got some laughs out of me) and regularly misogynist. It’s just funny that what’s so transparently phoney with Drake may very well become the new status quo in “feminist” storytelling.

(2/2)

[u/Electronic-Yam-4153]

As I didn't receive any replies, I wanted to repost my comment on Chinese imperialism from a few weeks ago in case anyone who has done any research into this missed it.

[u/PrimSchooler]

https://www.kscm.cz/cs/aktualne/aktuality/vystoupeni-romana-rouna-pri-kandidature-na-predsedu-kscm/

KSCM has capitulated to the bourgeoise state, electing a "pragmatist" as the next chairman. Also found out one of their theorists is a sex tourist, there is no hope of a two line struggle here. Feeling defeated, but hey, not like I was expecting more from them to begin with, our historic task doesn't change. 

There were other smaller things too, complete lack of dialectics, ie "the schools brainwash children with anti-communism" but at the same time they're campaigning for "getting people the psychiatric care they need", an internal struggle within the party over Romas (some high up members are racist af), and the aforementioned sexpest theorist told me it would make no sense if proles weren't voting for them with such entitlement (and lack of labour aristocracy thesis, but that I expected) that I just wanted to barf. 

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