/lit/ - Literature

all fancy culture of today is the culture of paris and san francisco.

begin with Camus, on to Kundera and Kerouac, next go to Murakami and Coelho.

>>519154
I <3 Mackerel nya nya~

>>519161

Watch out for Johnny Walker.

>>519164
:D Partly clouded and a chance on frogs

Ulrike Meinhof, loved by marxists and feminists everywhere

>>519173
but not this Marxist here. In fact, the antics of the Red Army Faction constitute a pretty good example of how not to do class struggle.

>>519173
RAF is an excellent example of What Not to Do.

Hysteric, bourgeois, unfocused violence.

Compare to the street fighting units of the KPD in the 1920s and 1930s for how to do low intensity working class conflict. Or the contemporaneous Autonomia in Italy.

Catcher in the Rye.

>>519200
ugh you guys even poor people are bourgeois now....class awareness does not equal a revolution...unless your talking about j*had

120 Days of Sodom

>>519215
Poor people derive the majority of their subsistence from the investment of their capital seeking return? Given a basic rate of return at 0.5% above inflation and a "poor person's" subsistence level in the west of around USD15000 a year a poor person would possess three million dollars in capital.

>>519200
it was terrorism and expropriation provoked the tsar into giving the progressive intelligentsia a moral high ground.

also, stop being a tripfag. you look silly, you sound silly, you aren't a historian.

Do you mean that shit kind of hipster trend fashionable like reading Marx on the tube or do you mean books about fashion?

The Sartorialist, Scott Schuman
The Style Bible, James Bassil

>>519243
>it was terrorism and expropriation provoked the tsar into giving the progressive intelligentsia a moral high ground.

What constitutes a "moral high ground" given by a tsar?

Normally people associate the achievement of the Duma with the 1905 revolution, not the narodniks. As you'd know from your broad reading, the post 1905 expropriations were a sign of a failing movement, and a terrain of struggle where soviets have been formed in no way equates to the pathetic West German student movement of the 1960s.

~Haruki!~

>>519241
a decidedly outmoded definition of the bourgeoise, but I was speaking of the class lines drawn since paris '68 where the bourgeoisie have coopted people of lower classes into cultural servitude (the carrot, not just the stick anymore)--bourgeois as a mindset which, at least for the US is rampant, according to polls around 80 percent of all people consider themselves ''middle class''...the bourgeosie has always been more of an ideal than a physical entity anyway.

someone kill this thread

>>519254
Oh, as a cultural mentality. You mean they're small French burgers living in towns on the top of hills?

At best you mean petits-bourgeois mentality, a criticism levelled at the workers since at least 1919 in Rühle's declaration that outside of work itself workers possess the consciousness of a consumer. Even then, the nature of consumption identity for the working majority, and the conception of consumption for the capital possessing minority, is a vast and unbridgeable gulf. The television of "Can Dialectics Break Bricks" was the piano of the 1920s was the coal stove of the 1860s.

If you think the proletariat was not coopted into cultural servitude by consumerism and ideology, by carrots, pre 1968 go read EP Thompson on methodism amongst frame knitters.

>>519265
I have read the Glass Makers of Carmaux which actually posits a kind of reflectionary (heh heh) description of the bourgeoisie being coopted into a proletarian struggle. I grasp that you are correct and I was being brash and pig-headed. The most I can make of it is that I think the concept of petit-bourgeois mentality is becoming preeminent in any strategical radical discourse, over say the traditional class lines set forth at the onset of industrialization.

>>519265
you could learn a thing or two from Irigaray's views on universality

>>519247
both the okhranka and the black hundreds, the proto-gestapo and the proto-SA, were reactions on a caesaropapimus blown to smithereens. the german terrorists achieved same reaction and the same hippie backlash in their respective society. i do not approve of terrorism but throwing your teenage commie swearwords at them is too blunt.

>>519270
While I don't disagree that the terrain of working class consciousness is almost entirely dominated and submerged beneath the identity of consumption *in the advanced West, Japan, and South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore* there are still a few factors which make class important.

1) We're not all workers now. The combination of bureaucrats and middle management act distinctly as an interest separate to workers. This extends outside the factory gates. Closely watch "the rich" in activist organisations, and watch their behaviour.

2) Its in the factory occupations, always has been, that power for real social transformation occurs.

3) I have *great* hesitancies about pursuing at anything other than a tactical level cross class alliances to drive the revolution forward. The "New Times" of the 1980s in the Commonwealth communist parties illustrates quite nicely the damage which happens not only to the revolutionary movement, but the immediate social demands revolutionaries fight for, when the centrality of class contest is dropped. (obviously not to be a jerk, this isn't "putting feminism last," but rather "fuck off bourgeois feminists.").

What a bunch of faggot itt!
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>>519283
yes, this is op posting. i need a reading list for the fancy faux philosophy of the disgusting bourgeois. i want to be a poser, not a really cultured person. dialectics can break bricks is dusty. what does you most detested capitalist's daughter read today?

This is the first useful thread on lit in aeons. Can someone paste a jpg together containing all the fashionable books?

>>519277
Spurring violence so that other people get fucked up and hoping for a popular sense of outrage at the state, I'm still sticking with, "Hysteric, bourgeois, unfocused violence," and "pathetic," which seem neither adolescent, nor particularly Marxist. They're also invective, not swearwords. As English appears to be your second language (due to your grammar), a swearword would either be an obscenity (cunt) or an oath (God's wounds).

>>519276
Expand. Do you see my universalising the condition of the working class in capital as similar to the universal category of "male" in discourse? If so, I don't see the problem. The construction of the working class as a universal subject in history has continually subverted the partial meanings assigned to it as a white male identity (Triangle Shirtwaist? CIO's sit downs?).

>>519291
Zizek

>>519303
where do you live? in the insular intelligentsia of the usa? all the bolsheviks were (petty) bourgeois. using it as an insult instantly pidgeonholes you to the highschool commies or the wannabe decadents from the artschools. it is bad taste, don't do it.

>>519282
Do you consider the unemployed to be part of the proletarian class? This to me is the major point of contention. The unemployed do not have an issue central to their identity as a group, although the group identity is inherantly transitory. It would be essential to envelop the unemployed into the proletarian struggle, but how could they play a part in factory occupations. Also, what about people working in the service industry? Do mcdonalds worker really want to fight for the products of their labor?

>>519303
what the fuck is this person saying? can someone translate?

>universalising the condition of the working class in capital as similar to the universal category of "male" in discourse?
i wish i could talk like that. give me a reading list :3

>>519329
its just bullshit rhetoric of idealistic pubescents. ignore it

>>519318
Actually, there were a number of key bolsheviks not from bourgeois / petit bourgeois backgrounds, Shlyapnikov for example. Where are you from that the bolsheviks could be held up as a key example of appropriate revolutionary organisational or recruiting behaviour.

If you take the position, "That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves," then bourgeois is a telling insult. If you examine the causes of the betrayal of the international working class by the Social Democrats in 1914, then bourgeois is a telling insult. If you examine the class background of the IIId internationalists who worked to obliterate working class communism as an "infantile disorder" of self-organising workers much like the Bolsheviks obliterated working class self-organisation in Russia by feeding workers into infantry units and by physically destroying independent workers councils, then bourgeois is a telling insult.

The longer your lifespan=the more evil in your heart. The bourgeoisie included.

>>519322
Marx discusses the unemployed in two catagories:
The Reserve Army of Labour. Workers out of work. Clearly proletarian.
And the members of the reserve army of labour who've fallen out the bottom into the underclass, the "lumpenproletariat".
Both are important reservoirs of labour within capitalism. Organising unemployed workers is bloody difficult, more so when they're not paid permanent unemployment benefits (I've had a number of conversations about this with a former unemployed workers union organiser who achieved "some success", and whose organisation was reliant on the highly political working class nature of the city he organised in.)

While McDonald workers might not want to fight for the product of their labour, and who wants to fight for 40 tonne of pig iron?; they may wish to fight for control over their own labour.

>>519329
Its called a Bachelor of Arts degree which you take seriously. See the Anon who suggested Irigaray, but you'd need Freud, Sociology, and Literary Criticism to get into Irigaray deeply. My key suggestion is to start with the classics of Western Culture. If you want to speak pomo, then after that, start reading some pomo. Hayden White writes literary analysis of social structure, and he writes in English, as in actual *English*.

>>519356
Well, I have to admit you've kind of showed me. Would you consider it a mistake for me to have taken this path into Marxism? (Naked Lunch-Anarchist zines-Society of the Spectacle-Anti-Oedipus:Capitalism and Schizophrenia-Les Chants Du Maldoror) I have only read the manifesto and considered myself allied with marxist views by way of affinity more than knowledge. I suppose I would have to say my political affiliation is more with Surrealism. Do you think that the Marxist position is currently tenable, in an armed revolutionary context?

>>519366
And yes I just gave you a list of fashionable lit, anon. doubles get!

>>519366
If you've only read the Manifesto so far, may I strongly suggest keep reading diverse stuff from the trajectory you're already on. If you don't know about the Italian Autonomists, can I suggest Sergio Bologna, Mariarosa Dalla Costa. Solidarity from the United Kingdom's stuff is also invaluable as stuff in English, plus they translated alot of the Socialisme ou Barbarie stuff.

Marxism offers useful analytical tools to workers, from my perspective, in the area of "knowing ones enemies" and "history of class warfare" mostly. As far as working class armed revolution, don't hold your breath. China's working class is large, angry, and has some deep organisation they could use to over throw the party ala 1956 in Hungary.

As far as tips for armed struggle, the Italian case from the 1960s 1970s is indicative. If you want to go shoot people for a cause, then Lord Byron suggests Go to Greece. I hear they're still killing working class youth, but that some of the youth shoot back.

>>519342
if you look through the pravda articles from 1936-39, that telling insult does stuck in your throat

>>519383
Yes, when the EU passes an 'economic bailout' for Greece, it seems a counterrevolutionary measure more than altruism. I will have to look into the Automatists and try to find more of Solidarity.

>>519343
so soviet marxism was good after all? i've never heared that argument, i'll write it down.

>>519387
Stalin's willing executioners eh? Allow me to compare and contrast by pointing at the class composition of the CNT-FAI.

>>519394
http://libcom.org/tags/solidarity?page=3

itt 16-year-olds & trolls who aren't fashionable at all

>>519340
replace idealistic with 'dimwitted' and it will make a sense.

>>519396
A good example of the Soviet counterrevolution during what should have been an antifascist spanish revolution but which deteriorated into the left devouring itself like some kind of Goya painting.

>>519402
Reading ''third worldism or socialism''.../lit/ has been good for something this morning.

>>519413
Thanks for reminding me of yet another horrible outcome of left infighting.

In 1945 the British occupiers of Southern French Indochina allowed the massacre of the urban Trots by the communist dominated Viet Minh.

>>519430
Are left-wing politics predisposed to infighting or Do left wing politics attract personalities that are so disposed? Troubling indeed.

>>519436
All politics seem predisposed to infighting. The revolutionary and social democratic left seems to value ideological purity of ideas more often than the nationalist or liberal right. Thus more left splits.

Smaller groups have higher economic internal tensions. The left is small. Thus more splits.

Politics attracts crazies, they have more influence in small groups. The left is small. Thus more splits.

Also to the extent that the right is a variety of different tendencies working for the same sponsors, the right has a tendency to come together in coalitions. When Bayer sponsors both right wing parties, it can get them to agree about certain issues.

>>519452
y u got to say it like it is?