Fascists are artists; communists are politicians

[Anonymous No.22120984]

>Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. ... All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. ... “Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.
Excerpt from "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), Epilogue

[Anonymous No.22121025]

>>22120984
First man to get fascism right.

[Anonymous No.22121100]

wojaks are not art

[Anonymous No.22121104]

>>22120984
>"real politics is when you're communist, and the more communist you are the more political it is"
>t. retard
Nothing new here. Here's a radical proposition coming from a lower class guy: I don't give a damn about "property". My "right" is not to "change property relations", and if I did have that right, I would not use it under normal circumstances. My "right" is to do what I find to be important and valuable - that is, protecting and contributing to my community. If the community is healthy and has its needs met, I don't give a damn if some members of it are absurdly wealthy and others only have what they need. Not all of us are so ripped apart by envy and materialism that we need to have everything other people do. Nor do we all need smug leftist intellectuals to do our thinking for us, telling us what our real "rights" or "desires" are.
What's real "politics"? As far as I am concerned - community, solidarity, hierarchy. And the removal of social ills, weird ideologies included.

[Anonymous No.22121162]

Anyone interested in Benjamin from a right or left perspective should read the short chapter on him in Lilla's Reckless Minds. Really puts his work in perspective. Buck-Morss is good too.

[Anonymous No.22121168]

>>22121104
Real healthy community you got there guy. So I guess that makes you a faggot loser bitch then, huh?

[Anonymous No.22121182]

> Fascism itself, the mystery of its appearance and of its collective energy, with which no interpretation has been able to come to grips (neither the Marxist one of political manipulation by dominant classes, nor the Reichian one of the sexual repression of the masses, nor the Deleuzian one of despotic paranoia), can already be interpreted as the "irrational" excess of mythic and political referentials, the mad intensification of collective value (blood, race, people, etc.), the reinjection of death, of a "political aesthetic of death" at a time when the process of the disenchantment of value and of collective values, of the rational secularization and unidimensionalization of all life, of the operationalization of all social and individual life already makes itself strongly felt in the West. Yet again, everything seems to escape this catastrophe of value, this neutralization and pacification of life. Fascism is a resistance to this, even if it is a profound, irrational, demented resistance, it would not have tapped into this massive energy if it hadn't been a resistance to something much worse. Fascism's cruelty, its terror is on the level of this other terror that is the confusion of the real and the rational, which deepened in the West, and it is a response to that.

[Anonymous No.22121190]

>>22120984
>>22121182
the post-war bad interpretations of Fascism were an intentional project

[Anonymous No.22121191]

Thank you for the source, OP

[Anonymous No.22121199]

This essay again...
Smart people keep telling me to read him, yet every time i dip my toe it's this kind of equivocal nonsense reading like a wannabe zealot .

Competently written but so simple i almost never know what to say. Like Orwell, he feels to me like one of those authors who gets sold to yo by politically unsophisticated people as ' the only guy you need to read'.

[Anonymous No.22121290]

>>22121182
Sauce?

[Anonymous No.22121292]

>>22121168
I am not an American, homo. Neither is fascism.
>>22121182
Mangled writing. No excuse for such sloppiness.

[Anonymous No.22121562]

>>22120984
Benjamin larps as an intellectual, navel-gazing games while chewing away one fag after the other. You can mention Marinetti and - surprisingly he doesn't - D'Annuzio and the Republic of Fiume as predecessors to fascism, but in truth they were both eccentric preludes that had little to do with the wish of men who had served in WW1 to wrest from the political as such the sobersided taste of civilian life and to replace it with militancy, action and death

[Anonymous No.22121614]

>>22121562
>militancy, action and death
sign me up

[Anonymous No.22121620]

>>22121290
A footnote in Simularca if I remember correctly. He goes to say that marxists are idiots who never "got" what fascism is about.

[Anonymous No.22121992]

The introduction of aesthetics into political life is not a historical phenomenon that first occurs with fascist movements. It’s much older than that. But I do agree that it’s something fascism aims to do. But the relationship between politics and aesthetics is visible also in communism and in mass movements in general. I like Jünger for this reason because he rightly understood the age of technology and mass movements killed the child of the enlightenment and that at bottom of all of these mass movements in the technological age only nihilism waits. He spent his whole life getting beyond all of it, which for someone born just before the 20th century it is an almost Herculean task. Serious people are still obsessed with them today, but I guess that’s a sign of the times more than anything.

[Anonymous No.22122003]

bump

[Anonymous No.22122023]

>>22121992
But aesthetics is a means to the politics of communism. Fascism itself is almost an art.

[Anonymous No.22122025]

>>22122023
I don’t agree and that could never be a statement of fact.

[Anonymous No.22122027]

>>22120984
Babby’s first benjamin book

[Anonymous No.22122033]

>>22120984
That doesn't make any sense.

>the masses strive to eliminate property
Communist wishful thinking

>fascism gives people the ability to express themselves
Fucking what?

>fascism values art, which leads inevitably to war
>why? Because it just does, ok?

[Anonymous No.22122034]

>>22121290
a complete retard

[Anonymous No.22122041]

>>22122025
Proletarian literary figures commonly criticized aestheticists and pure literature. Aesthetics was never the end goal of communism.

[Anonymous No.22122047]

>>22122041
Some people wrote some things. So what? Someone wrote the OP and yet I’ve already made it clear that I don’t agree.

[Anonymous No.22122062]

>>22122041
>>22122047
I think both fascism and communism merely made use of aesthetics. Neither was inherently aesthetic or sought aesthetics as an end goal. The statement that communism made use of art but fascism was art can never be a statement of fact. The mad Austrian painter and the Italian never said that the goal of their politics was aesthetic, even if they might have alluded to aesthetic aspects of the movements.

In my opinion, fascism appears to us and more concerned with aesthetics than communism by virtue of the fact that fascism is more closely related with nationalism and romanticism. Both of these modern movements are basically coping with the sense that something bad has happened with the thrust into modernity, the first real tragedy of which was the brutalizing of the proletariat worker and which culminated in the brutalizing of people generally in the first world war. Communism sought to progress forward historically and made use of aesthetics for that end. Fascism looked back at mythic origins and romantic sensibilities about what had been lost and hoped to recover something, which necessarily demanded an aesthetic program. In so far as fascism was more aesthetic than communism, this is why. But that’s just my opinion.

[Anonymous No.22122086]

>>22120984
Fascism is the collective pursuit of greatness. The aestheticization of politics comes as a consequence of this, but it's not an aim in itself. And the reason why fascists are less eager to turn all art into state propaganda, like leftists do, is because doing so stripes art of its greatness.

[Anonymous No.22122088]

>>22120984
This is a bunch of nothing, no disrespect.

[Anonymous No.22122095]

>>22122086
Define greatness

[Anonymous No.22122100]

>>22122062
People tend to gloss over the fact that communism promised the end the oppression of the worker in modernity, but fascism, national socialism especially, promised to end modernity entirely.

[Anonymous No.22122331]

>>22120984
Fascists are conformists. Bound. Their art, manufactured en masse.

Communists* synchronicity. Free. Their art, a multiplicity

*soviet union was not communism. The Communist Party was no more communist than the Democratic Party stands for democracy. They don’t of course.

[Anonymous No.22122355]

>>22122331
There is no communist art, only propaganda that depicts workers heroically. It’s not art. It’s just realist propaganda. Communist art has never existed anywhere.

[Anonymous No.22122405]

>When those guys mythologize politics, it is propaganda forced upon the masses
>But when we mythologize politics, it is merely an aesthetic expression of the will of the masses
Cope.
Hitler never secured a majority vote and had to resort to forceful suppression of the opposition and the people's constitution. Even more embarrassingly, Lenin couldn't win his own post-revolution election and the Maoists were so divided they started literally eating each other. It's never had anything to do with values, let alone aesthetic.
Both movements have had to so thoroughly water themselves down over the decades precisely because they never accurately reflected the desires of the proletariat to begin with.
Modern culture warriors can't even compete with Marvel slop and Kpop. That's how much their 'aesthetic' is worth.
>The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life
The introduction of aesthetics? The Catholic Church existed centuries before these idiots did and they somehow did a better job of it with far more abstract ideals and through far less direct means.
How can anyone even read this brainrot spook faggotry and nod along?

[Anonymous No.22122409]

>>22122405
Nigga, that's a Benjamin quote. He was very much not a fascist.

[Anonymous No.22122430]

>>22122355
There are thousands, alive today.
The artist wants most of all to create, secondly to be complimented, thirdly to live to repeat this successfully. The contemporary requirement of money in order to pay the state off for breathing its air and walking its streets is an oppression we all have to endure, and the artist often hates it more than the radical. Why you will often see the radical artist

>onre probagambah dat depicks wurkrzz huroicy. IZNOTART!!! IZ PROGAGAGAAa!
I just fucking told you state socialists like the Soviet Union are not communist. Commune is no state, no capitalism, no money debts. In no way was the Soviet Union communist and I show it to you with those simple words

[Anonymous No.22122453]

>>22120984
leftists be like, all art can be interpreted through a political lens, so all art should be leftist propaganda, and if you tell them that you don't quite enjoy their propaganda, they will tell you in the most pedantic tone that all art is political so you're wrong for not liking it

[Anonymous No.22122489]

>>22122430
>Commune is no state, no capitalism, no money debts
unicorns aren't real and there's no reason to account for them in conversations about biology.

[Anonymous No.22122512]

>>22120984
>The people I like are good, the people I dont are bad
Fuck off

[Anonymous No.22122515]

>>22122512
Is it really polemic to say nazis are bad and socialists are good? It's just common sense.

[Anonymous No.22122537]

>>22122515
>national socialists bad
>international socialists good
??

[Anonymous No.22122547]

>>22122430
So some LARPing buffoon makes “art” in his form and calls himself a communist but buffoons can’t do the same and call themselves fascists.

[Anonymous No.22122555]

>>22122430
Show me some communist art then.

[Anonymous No.22122570]

>>22120984
>We ought not to forget the vast irrational movement of our time which produced public festivals and mindless emotionalism on an incredible scale: National Socialism. The practice of “classifying,” and thus dismissing, Nazism should stop, for it represents a real Freudian repression on the part of intellectuals who refuse to recognize what it was. Others lump together Nazism, dictatorship, massacres, concentration camps, racism, and Hitler’s folly. That about covers the subject. Nazism was a great revolution: against the bureaucracy, against senility, in behalf of youth; against the entrenched hierarchies, against capitalism, against the petit-bourgeois mentality, against comfort and security, against the consumer society, against traditional morality; for the liberation of instinct, desire, passions, hatred of cops (yes, indeed!), the will to power, and the creation of a higher order of freedom. When I read the following: “The mob disclaims all responsibility, either for those who join it, or for what will happen tomorrow. Their actions and words are free of traditional restraints. They believe what they are doing and saying is simply the truth at the moment. ... I do not represent anyone; I think what I say voices the feelings of the students as a whole. ... He is a reflection of them just as they are the reflection of science. It takes me back thirty-five years to when I first read Alphonse de Chateaubriant’s Te Deums to Hitler. There we have the one and only great revolution of irrationality which ever occurred, the great festival (the greatest by far): what it did to reinforce the state, technology, propaganda, and all the rest, is history. Any orientation of that nature will have the same results. That is why current invocations to irrationalism and to the mystique of revolution fill me with dread. For their only possible outcome was demonstrated by Hitler. The consequences of uncontrolled irrationality are inevitable and predictable. There is no intrinsic virtue in Eros, whereas there is a menace behind those dark forces which were unveiled and used solely for inflicting on mankind the worst disaster it has ever known.

[Anonymous No.22122594]

>>22122555
Monday entangles itself with Tuesday
and the week with the year:
time cannot be severed
with your weary shears,
and all the names of the day
the water of night clears.

No man can call himself Peter,
no woman Rose or Mary,
we are all sand or dust,
we are all rain in the rain.
They have told me of Venezuelas,
Paraguays and Chiles,
I don’t know what they’re talking about:
I know the skin of the Earth
and I know that she has no last name.

When I lived among roots
they delighted me more than flowers,
and when I talked to a stone
it echoed like a bell.

It is so slow the spring
that lasts the winter long:
time has lost his shoes:
one year’s four centuries.

When I go to sleep each night
what am I called, or not called?
And when I wake up, who am I
if it wasn’t ‘I’ who was sleeping?

This is to say that as soon as we
are thrust out into life,
that we come newly born,
that our mouths are not filled
with all these dubious names,
with all these mournful labels,
with all these meaningless letters,
with all this ‘yours’ and ‘mine’,
with all this signing of papers.

I think to confound things
mingling them, hatching them new,
seeing through them, stripping them naked,
until the light of the world
has the unity of the ocean,
a generous integrity,
a crackle of starched perfume.

[Anonymous No.22122639]

>>22122594
Sounds about this commie

[Anonymous No.22122712]

>>22122537
>why does drawing arbitrary lines in the sand undermine a project founded on solidarity???

[Anonymous No.22122717]

>>22122537
REMINDER

Marx:
>Poland has demonstrated in 1863 and further proves every day that it cannot be done to death. Its claim to an independent existence in the European family of nations cannot be refused.
>Wherever the working classes have taken a part of their own in political movements, there, from the very beginning, their foreign policy was expressed in the few words – Restoration of Poland. This was the case with the Chartist movement so long as it existed, this was the case with the French working men long before 1848, as well as during that memorable year, when on the 15th of May they marched on to the National Assembly to the cry of “dive la Pologne!” – Poland for ever! This was the case in Germany, when, in 1848 and ’49, the organs of the working class demanded war with Russia for the restoration of Poland. It is the case even now; – with one exception – of which more anon – the working men of Europe unanimously proclaim the restoration of Poland as a part and parcel of their political programme, as the most comprehensive expression of their foreign policy.

Engels:
>There could, indeed, be no two opinions as to the right of every one of the great national subdivisions of Europe to dispose of itself, independently of its neighbours, in all internal matters, so long as it did not encroach upon the liberty of the others.

Lenin:
>Victorious socialism must achieve complete democracy and, consequently, not only bring about the complete equality of nations, but also give effect to the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, i.e., the right to free political secession. Socialist Parties which fail to prove by all their activities now, as well as during the revolution and after its victory, that they will free the enslaved nations and establish relations with them on the basis of a free union—and a free union is a lying phrase without right to secession—such parties would be committing treachery to socialism.

>Just as mankind can achieve the abolition of classes only by passing through the transition period of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, so mankind can achieve the inevitable merging of nations only by passing through the transition period of complete liberation of all the oppressed nations, i.e., their freedom to secede.

Everything you have been told by commies about internationalism is wrong and unorthodox. Marx, Engels, and Lenin were all perfectly fine with individual, highly self-conscious nations continuing to exist through and after the proletarian revolution, and even saw these as necessary vehicles of the revolution.

[Anonymous No.22122719]

>>22122712
too bad solidarity is a fantasy

[Anonymous No.22122720]

>>22122717
Marx on the necessity of socialist movements focusing always on their "local" national class conflict and on the formation of a social republic, NOT on utopian internationalist liberation theology or "intersectionality":
>Of all countries, England is the one in which the antithesis between proletariat and bourgeoisie is the most developed. For that reason the victory of the English proletarians over the English bourgeoisie is decisive for the victory of all oppressed peoples over their oppressors. Thus Poland is not to be freed in Poland, but rather in England. You Chartists, therefore, have no need to proclaim pious wishes about the liberation of nations. Just strike your own enemies here at home and you will know with pride that you have struck a blow at the entire old society.

Marx glorifying the Paris Commune:
>The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune. The cry of “social republic,” with which the February [1848] Revolution was ushered in by the Paris proletariat, did but express a vague aspiration after a republic that was not only to supercede the monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that republic.
> The few but important functions which would still remain for a central government were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally misstated, but were to be discharged by Communal and thereafter responsible agents. The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence.
>While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society.
>The Communal Constitution has been mistaken [!] for an attempt to break up into the federation of small states, as dreamt of by Montesquieu and the Girondins, that unity of great nations which, if originally brought about by political force, has now become a powerful coefficient of social production.

[Anonymous No.22122724]

>>22122720
Marx on the peaceful coexistence of the nationalities within an international socialist economic framework, NOT the dissolution of the nationalities, except perhaps over a very long term - certainly not PRIOR to the revolution, or as a condition of it. Note that Marx, Engels, and Lenin continuously speak of the "great nationalities" and the "natural nationalities" - by which they mean the post-feudal, perfectly rational conglomeration of feudal territories into states according to natural ethno-linguistic/cultural differences, carried out by the bourgeoisie, which WILL NOT BE ABROGATED by the revolution:
>The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
Read: Local national revolutions (seizures of states by the proletariat and the transformation of those states into social republics) must obviously precede long-term, international, global socialism. See the above quote about the Chartists and England.
>National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. ... In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.
Note nations will not be abolished, differences between them are simply vanishing to the point that conflict is no longer necessary. The proletariat in each country has more in common with its proletarian brothers in other countries than with the bourgeoisie of its own nation. Does that mean the nation is no loner "great" or "natural?" No, although perhaps things will change even more a hundred or a thousand years after communism is the global norm.

The key distinction to understand in the actual thought of Marx/Engels is the distinction between the idea of NATIONALISM, in the sense of bourgeois ideological appeals to "national unity" over proletarian inter-national unity, and the idea of the NATION. Marx and Engels were opposed to the first, because it was a powerful propaganda tool. But they were otherwise (1) INDIFFERENT and (2) ONLY STRATEGICALLY INTERESTED in the latter.

[Anonymous No.22122729]

>>22122717
>points to communist nationalists and vanguardists to imply that ancoms don't exist
>>22122719
Then why pretend to socialism? If you just want power for your class, say it. Don't be a coward.

[Anonymous No.22122731]

>>22122724
Meaning, they assumed nations would continue to exist for some time, and that revolutions would occur in nations, NOT due to a spontaneous "international workers' revolution." The latter is basically incoherent and incomprehensible to them, because their conception of meaningful revolution necessarily takes place within the concrete context of a nation: an organized workers' movement with very high levels of solidarity wages a meta-political struggle to wrest control of the state away from the bourgeoisie and turn it into a social republic rather than a bourgeois republic - see the plans for the Paris Commune above, and note Marx and Engels are very explicit about debunking bourgeois propaganda claims that the Commune's constitution called for the dissolution of France into an archipelago of communard mini-states. The bourgeois nation-state is to be SUBLATED into the proletarian nation-state; the bourgeois nation-state's tendency toward conflict between bourgeois nation-states is to be sublated into the post-proletarian, communist nation-state's tendency toward cooperation.

Will this lead eventually to more historical developments and mergers in how these "great nationalities" organize and understand themselves? Undoubtedly, since it will be a global transition to communism as the norm in relations of production. Is this really relevant or even interesting from the practical communist's perspective? NO. Even more importantly: Is the merging or dissolving of the "great nationalities" a PRECONDITION of revolution? Absolutely, categorically no. The opposite is true: the existence of highly self-conscious and economically organized bourgeois republics (i.e. non-monarchical nation-states) is the precondition of the proletarian seizure of them and their transformation into social republics.

Does Lenin, the great breaker-upper of the arbitrary, feudal tsarist empire, with its messy conglomeration of subject states and nationalities accumulated over the centuries, move toward a more radical internationalist "let's all fuse together" perspective than Marx/Engels did, because of the practical circumstances of the Russian Revolution? NO, the exact opposite happens. He becomes THE most sophisticated and explicit Marxist theorist in favor of the continued existence of nationalities and nations AFTER the communist revolution in human history. He explicitly criticizes anyone who tries to impose the jackboot of Russian imperialism back on the former Russian Empire's subject states by saying that this would be the surest way to poison the communist revolution. The famed "International" was to be a VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATION of post-revolutionary national states with LOCAL self-organization according to communist relations of production, voluntarily proving Marx right by joining together in economic harmony - NOT dissolving all their particularities into one great "proletarian culture."

[Anonymous No.22122733]

>>22122717
>>22122720
>>22122724


Nobody gives a crap. Totalizing narratives have been debunked, chudley fuck-little, or should I say, not at all. Your perpetual revolution is nothing but fart-sniffing.

>>22122729
lost the plot

[Anonymous No.22122740]

>>22122731
CONCLUSION:
No communist in history has been an "internationalist" in the way this concept is currently pushed, and certainly none of the important ones have. We have been lied to. The New Left of 1968 was internationalist from a (NEO)LIBERAL perspective, not a Marxist one. Just as it was composed mostly of bourgeois and (increasingly) wealthy students from the vague student movement, which instantly supported Marcuse's (known OSS/CIA asset) and Habermas' (probable asset) dilutions of Marxist theory with psychoanalysis and French poststructuralist dog shit (there are CIA documents celebrating this - google "The CIA Reads French Theory"), it also supported deliberately vague hippie (also a movement significantly "shaped" by the CIA, to render it the youth movements harmless) internationalism and "third worldism," of the typical college campus variety: vague talk of racial harmony, vague "anti-conservative" (anti-patriotism) sentiment that is really just a rebellion against daddy, vague rebelliousness in general that is easily turned into hedonism, consumerism, and luxury drug use.

Again, you have been lied to. All meaningful Marxist and socialist movements, all the ones anyone has ever actually been afraid of enough to suppress them with terror and police action, have been nationalist socialist/Marxist movements. Post-war America was not afraid of a spread of "communism," which they knew was a decrepit religion of the dying USSR. They were afraid of the spread of "national communism" in the sense of Ho Chi Minh ("first we must save the nation, then we can worry about the class revolution") or Salvador Allende (collaborating with Juan Peron, and both were targeted in exactly the same way), because national communism was a PROVEN technique of anti-imperialism. The CIA went from suppressing communists in the '50s to promoting New Leftist pseudo-communism in the '60s and onward.

Become a national communist or any other variant of third positionism if you want to actually piss off global capitalism. Or become an "intersectional" internationalist communist, who effectively agrees with US State Department propaganda on all important points, only disagreeing with it on vague notions of vague global socioeconomic harmony that are irrelevant because all your plans require you to "educate" third worlders to "spontaneously" join your international cryptobourgeois workers' movement that you thought up in your elite university for a hundred years before anything else can happen.

The moral of the story is that you can be a nationalist and a Marxist, or a Marxist and a nationalist, as long as you are not the specific stupid kind of nationalist Marx and Engels disdained, who believes the bourgeoisie's calls to patriotism and thus to accept the bourgeoisie as the natural leadership caste. Marx and Engels were not anti-nation or anti-nationality, not opposed to ethnocultural states.

[Anonymous No.22122753]

>>22122717
>>22122720
>>22122724
>>22122731
>>22122740
this guy, this guy marxes

[Anonymous No.22122760]

Reminder that you have been lied to. Marx would have been a third positionist had he lived to see the 20th century. He would have disavowed the Bolsheviks, and even Lenin himself disavowed Stalinism and would not have recognized the fully crystallized USSR.

You can absolutely be a socialist and a communist without being an internationalist. "Internationalism" in current leftism is a tool to make socialists weak, it's designed to turn it into a feel-good crypto-liberal hippie circle. Marx was NOT an internationalist of this kind. No actual communist wanted the utopian and childish "dissolution of nations."

>>22122729
>>22122733
>leftists proving as always don't even care what Marxism is or what Marx said
Like I said, crypto-liberals.

[Anonymous No.22122777]

>>22122760
Leftism predates Marx, and he was a flawed thinker and man. This is as convincing a line of reasoning as saying if you aren't on board with the Nicene Creed, you aren't christian, or if you're critical of the state, you want everything to descend into utter chaos.
Besides, Marx's nationalism was pragmatic and he constantly returned to a long term international project, he just didn't prescribe it as a first step.

[Anonymous No.22122784]

>>22122760
leftism has been debunked. rightism has been debunked. All narratives are relative. Your heckin revolution is of totally artificial value in theory and in practice it's been a total shitshow, regardless.

[Anonymous No.22122790]

>>22122777
Pre-Marx leftists weren't real leftists. Their understanding of the world was still platonic. Real leftism only starts existing with historical materialism.

[Anonymous No.22122792]

Carroll Quigley on Rockefeller et al. astroturfing of the left:
>Because of its dominant position in Wall Street, the Morgan firm came also to dominate other Wall Street powers, such as Carnegie, Whitney, Vanderbilt, Brown-Harriman, or Dillon-Reed. Close alliances were made with Rockefeller, Mellon, and Duke interests but not nearly so intimate ones with the great industrial powers like du Pont and Ford. [Because] ... of the great influence of this "Wall Street" alignment, an influence great enough to merit the name of the "American Establishment," this group could ... control the Federal government and, in consequence, had to adjust to a good many government actions ... [which they had secretly supported ]. The chief of these were in taxation law, beginning with the graduated income tax in 1913, but culminating, above all else, in the inheritance tax. These tax laws drove the great private fortunes dominated by Wall Street into tax-exempt foundations, which became a major link in the Establishment network between Wall Street, the Ivy League, and the Federal government.

>More than fifty years ago the Morgan firm decided to infiltrate the Left-wing political movements in the United States. This was relatively easy to do, since these groups were starved for funds and eager for a voice to reach the people. Wall Street supplied both. The purpose was not to destroy ... or take over but was really threefold: (1) to keep informed about the thinking of Left-wing or liberal groups; (2) to provide them with a mouthpiece so that they could "blow off steam," and (3) to have a final veto on their publicity and possibly on their actions, if they ever went "radical." There was nothing really new about this decision, since other financiers had talked about it and even attempted it earlier.

All the intelligent Marxists inevitably become third positionist and non-internationalist, effectively national socialists. Christopher Lasch did. Paul Piccone of Telos did:
https://c2cjournal.ca/2009/06/where-marx-and-conservatives-meet-the-writings-of-paul-piccone/

Even the Frankfurt School members all repudiated international revolution. Horkheimer and Adorno believed communism failed because its underlying Hegelian premise turned out to be untrue, the premise of the superior "rationality" of an international proletariat (the same premise that made Marx believe everyone would inevitably become atheist materialists; and the same premise that Sorel debunked when he turned Marxism into fascism, enabling Mussolini and others like Primo de Rivera to appropriate it). It turns out that rationality is always MEDIATED - mediated through cultures, symbolic systems, and half-rational half-instinctual associations. AKA: Nations. Marx and Engels in fact already knew this, which is why even they were never internationalists in the sense of anti-nationalists. Sorel was right: nations are necessary. The fight for socialism is a crusade, not a deterministic foregone conclusion.

[Anonymous No.22122798]

>>22120984
That is the fucking stupidest reduction of Benjamin's argument I've seen thus far.

[Anonymous No.22122806]

>>22122790
Good for you anon, you found a simple and digestible justification for close-mindedness. Shame it relies on essentially pointless reasoning.

[Anonymous No.22122821]

>>22122790
Marx got most of his ideas from French leftists in the 1830s. Pic related. Pro-nation socialists, communists, and socialists like Proudhon and Louis Blanc are suppressed with the convenient narrative that Marx's short-sighted rationalistic-materialistic atheism "debunked" them, but he adopted most of their ideas.

Historical materialism is not a self-contained method, it is a deconstructive technique. Read Horkheimer's essay "Traditional and Critical Theory." You can be a perfectly good "historical materialist" and critical theorist without having some stupid materialist/atheist metaphysics.

Marx's own metaphysics were incredibly naive: he was an 18th century French reductionist materialist, bordering on the reddit-tier materialism of d'Holbach and la Mettrie. Engels' metaphysics, basically a materialism that tries to integrate Haeckel's fanciful Darwinian cosmology, are also well-known for being naive and bizarrely un-Marxian and "bourgeous" by Marx's own standards (hence the perpetual mystery that Marx is said to have approved of Engels' ideas). All this is irrelevant when you realize they were just Berlin Enlightenment atheist materialists with one foot awkwardly in the 18th century, and they thought the only "idealist" metaphysics possible was the right Hegelianism they repudiated in their early 20s, or the Schelling lectures that Engels didn't understand or like in Berlin in 1842.

None of this matters, because you can simply realize - using historical materialist critical theory - that they were limited by their time and context. Marx's ideas continue to work perfectly fine once you remove the reddit atheism, and they are enhanced tenfold when combined with an idealist metaphysics and nationalist praxis, which is why Mussolini, the greatest Italian Marxist next to Gramsci, succeeded like he did by adopting the theories of Sorel and other Italian Marxians like Corradini.

Again, the fossilized pseudo-Marxism that is presented in today's universities and monopolized by crypto-liberal non-proletarian hippies has nothing to do with actual Marxism, AND it is also used to suppress other forms of leftism that can be usefully synthesized with Marx. You can be a Marxist and a Proudhonian and a nationalist and a socialist all at the same time. Don't listen to what any self-proclaimed leftists tell you. Always see and think for yourself.

[Anonymous No.22122829]

>>22122821
>the greatest Italian Marxist
>Gramsci
There's nothing great about Gramsci.

[Anonymous No.22122834]

>>22121104
You sound like a Soviet peasant trying to cope with reality of failed socialism.
>It's all about muh community
>*Drinks*
>So what if party leaders are infinitely more powerful and wealthy than us?
>*Drinks*
>Important thing is to keep this societal structure because muh pleb values depend on it
>*Drinks*
>As far as I'm concerned, real politics is about removal of social ills and weird ideologies

[Anonymous No.22122846]

>>22122821
>don't take in information
>think for yourself
the words of a genius

[Anonymous No.22122894]

>>22122829
Gramsci is amazing, one of the few truly original Marxists after Marx. And unsurprisingly, he is effectively a national socialist. He is deeply influenced by Sorel and Bergson, he is a champion and theoretician of the subaltern (just as Corradini was with his theory of proletarian nations, and just as all nationalists whose nations are enslaved by capital and foreign finance are), and he basically admits openly that there is no ultimate Hegelian rationalist justification for communist praxis, one has to make a moral choice. He was also, in practice, an Italian nationalist who resisted the dissolution of Italy's national autonomy by the Comintern. In this he was very much a follower of Lenin.

There's a reason that, unsurprisingly again, the French New Right, the one that synthesized with Piccone's post-Marxism, calls itself neo-Gramscian, and why Samuel Francis' "nationalist-socialist" praxis is effectively Gramscian.

Also worth noting, Sorel admired Lenin and Mussolini equally, and most national socialists and fascists admired Lenin as well. Fascism / national socialism are the natural conclusion of socialism and communism. Nobody doubted this until post-1945 liberalism decided it wanted a pet "leftist" "official opposition group" safely tied up in the back yard to make people think there is still some resistance to it, but they had to de-fang and de-claw the dog first (by making it "internationalist" in the crypto-liberal sense).

>>22122846
Not sure what you mean, I said don't take any person's or group's claims without a grain of salt and always research for yourself.

[Anonymous No.22122919]

>>22122894
People as ugly as Gramsci should have the moral duty of excluding themselves from society as much as possible, no matter how smart they may be.

[Anonymous No.22122946]

>>22122033
>the masses strive to eliminate property
The masses strive to eliminate the property structure.
Learn to read.

[Anonymous No.22123382]

>>22122834
So what do you want me to do, cope and seethe because I don't have sixteen billion dollars but other people do? What use would that be to me? I don't need that. What am I gonna use it for? Money is for women and fags. You, as a straight man - presumably as a straight man - don't really have a special need for money. Women and fags can at least buy jewellery, make up and clothes. What are you gonna buy? A luxury car? NFT monkeys for a quarter mil? Is this 'real politics'? Go ahead and tell me.
Sorry to break it to you, chief, but if you actually go among "the masses", you will see that we couldn't care less about the "property structure". Here's what we care for: our families, friends, neighbours, communities, health, housing and bread. That's it. That's literally it. Who has power is irrelevant unless people are using it to harass us. Who has wealth is irrelevant if we all have enough to cover our needs.

[Anonymous No.22123391]

>>22120984
>me smart :)))
>fascist stupid :(((
>t. communist jew
WOAH

[Anonymous No.22123490]

>>22123382
>Who has wealth is irrelevant if we all have enough to cover our needs.
Too simplistic. They are trying right now to define our needs for us.

[Anonymous No.22123659]

>>22122489
>This way we once lived didn't exist. Unicornism
>Give up! Give uuuup!

>>22122555
Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called himself an anarchist. A communist is someone who lives in the commune.

[Anonymous No.22123748]

>>22123659
>This way we once lived didn't exist.
we never lived that way. The notion of property has existed since the birth of the soul—even children are territorial.

[Anonymous No.22123766]

>>22122047
THE most /lit/ thing I have ever read lmao. Make it a banner.

[Anonymous No.22123786]

>>22120984
I've always thought that celebrated leftist writers like Brecht and Joyce always seemed more like engineers than they did artists.

[Anonymous No.22123800]

>>22122790
Historical materialism predates Marx, y'know.

[Anonymous No.22123876]

>>22123382
Eat ze bugs and take your dumbass kids to animated movies with scatological humor you ignorant impotent.

[Anonymous No.22123915]

>>22123382
Because they're using that 16 billion dollars to drop chem trails on your head you stupid fuck.

[Anonymous No.22123927]

>>22122821
Why did the second-greatest Italian marxist put the greatest Italian marxist in jail for over a decade?

[Anonymous No.22124072]

fascism is the merger of aesthetics with politics and social organization. fascism is a seduction of myth and symbol that captivates and mobilizes the masses for the ends of the state. it is a violent affirmation of a collective identity and destiny in an atomized rootless society pacified by the logic of neoliberal instrumental rationality

[Anonymous No.22124083]

>>22124072
Fascism is when you are allowed to make doing bad things illegal in a society, instead of saying this is not "rational" enough and the only real way to get people to stop doing fentanyl and watching porn all day is to have a final ultimate spiritual utopian revolution all or nothing

[Anonymous No.22124115]

>>22124083
wrong. Fascism is when the police are mean. The meaner the police, the fascister the state.

[Anonymous No.22124122]

>>22123490
>>22123876
It certainly feels bizarre to watch communists deploy right wing talking points against me. As I said, the community is important. This means solidarity, moral standards, and - as I said earlier about power - not using force on us plebs, whether to define us or engineer us or suppress us or what have you. You don't need to be a communist, or want to destroy "the property structure" or support wealth redistribution in order to uphold these standards. From my perspective, it is precisely the communists - among many others - who try to impose things on my people by force or subterfuge, and to corrupt the culture and the morals of the community.
>>22123915
Let's say that is so - the problem is the people and the chem trails in question, not them having 16 billion dollars. This isn't a challenging concept.

[Anonymous No.22124340]

>>22122555
>Show me some communist art then.
Here's one of my favs:

https://youtu.be/GwQyOPOeQHA?t=212

>>22122894
>Gramsci is amazing, one of the few truly original Marxists after Marx. And unsurprisingly, he is effectively a national socialist.
He used the term once if I remember right, that the goal of the proletarian revolution would first take concrete form in the national socialist state, because the state is how movements first enter into "real" history, and become something real instead of a myth, but communism exists only insofar that it's international, so these states would be set up and enter into relations with each other, to help them survive and develop, and eventually bring about the communist international in which national states would be eliminated, because they are organs of competition. But that exists for some time, so the competition between national capitalist and national socialist states necessitates that communists come to learn to love the state, an army, discipline, the suppression of counter-revolutionary subversion, etc. That was from his essay "The State and Socialism" (1919) in the Italian socialist newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo ("The New Order"), which is a term that Mussolini would later adopt for the fascist regime, in which Gramsci was imprisoned.

Anyways, Gramsci goes on to say:

"In this sense, the socialist, proletarian movement is against the State, because it is against the national capitalist States and against the national economies, which stem from the national State and are conditioned by it ... [However] The dictatorship of the proletariat is still a national State and a class State. The parameters of competition and the class struggle have been changed, but competition and the classes continue to exist. The dictatorship of the proletariat has to resolve the same problems as the bourgeois State, of external and internal defence. These are the concrete, objective conditions that we have to take into account. To talk and act as though the Communist International already existed, as though the period of struggle between socialist and bourgeois States, of pitiless competition between communist and capitalist national economies, was already behind us, would be a disastrous error for the proletarian revolution."

>Also worth noting, Sorel admired Lenin and Mussolini equally, and most national socialists and fascists admired Lenin as well.
Not sure if the admiration was mutual. I also recall Goebbels (I think) saying something, like, Stalin has accomplished all these feats, man I really admire him, it'd be a shame to shoot him when we're victorious... I almost want to exile him to an island somewhere. While Stalin would've had the whole Nazi leadership shot, which did happen to many of them.

>Fascism / national socialism are the natural conclusion of socialism and communism.
Were you the same anon saying just a second ago that the fight for socialism isn't a deterministic foregone conclusion?

[Anonymous No.22124357]

>>22120984
>My political beliefs make me inherently artistically superior
Reddit-tier faggotry

[Anonymous No.22124910]

>>22124122
>not the 16 billion
It IS them having 16 billion dollars because "dollars" are not equatable to wealth generically. Currency generally and fiat currency in particular and the dollar bill most of all is a tool designed for social engineering which has created the preconditions for chemtrails to begin with. We aren't trading cows anymore, smart one. Through inflation and taxation your control over your so called "community" diminishes every day. Go and try to be a good influence or whatever sentimental crap you are about to say, but captilaists are in your children's heads imploring them to think of burger kind and minecraft and worse. It's an entire environment of manipulatuon and control. Ever heard of subliminal messaging? How do you compete with that? The technology and economic infrastructure isn't just accidental or an aside, it's a deliberate frame work who's purpose is to oppress YOU.
>watch communists deploy right wing talking points
That's because you don't know anything about labor politics except ridiculous propaganda misdirection, which is what people have been telling you the whole time. But you are so full arrogance and moral indignation (which in your case, as has been pointed out, is based on more propaganda, or more accurately it is based on NOTHING) that you'd rather make sentimental throw away clamor than try to understand anything, and in almost undoubtable certainty, you'd rather bloviate ignorantly than read a fucking book.

[Anonymous No.22124924]

>>22123382
Mussolini was a Socialist.

[Anonymous No.22126071]

>>22122946
NTA, but that's still commie wishful thinking

[Anonymous No.22126111]

>>22120984
Pretty good. Another way of describing it, useful to me, is that fascism is masculine and communism is feminine. Aesthetics comes about from production as mastery of nature. Evolution is war and men are made to compete for the most productive ends. Politics and beurocracies have always been feminine and the men that spend their lifes as politicians become feminine.

Strange times we are living in where the feminine sensibility has come to dominate absolutely.

[Anonymous No.22126199]

>>22124910
Cool rant on fiat currency etc, but again, you are not addressing my main point. There is nothing about fiat currency that inherently makes it anti-community or anti-civilisational. Regardless of whether we consider fiat a positive or negative phenomenon, its use can be fully controlled by a strong, political state. Capitalists do what they want under the current system because it is their system, not because they have money - if you look at the PRC, which, it should be noted, is not exactly of impeccable socialist character, capitalists are brought to heel and this works just fine. As it would under any strong state.
I've probably read more about socialism and Marxism than you have btw.
>>22124924
Yeah but he was also based.

[Anonymous No.22126204]

>>22124357
No, my morals make me inherently superior, but then again, everyone is morally superior to the nazis, despite what this website wants to believe.

[Anonymous No.22126215]

>>22121104
As an upper class guy whose opinion matters more than yours, your indifference to power is why you're so manipulable.

[Anonymous No.22126225]

>>22124340
Not art

[Anonymous No.22126230]

>>22123659
Photography isn’t art so

[Anonymous No.22126234]

>>22122919
Gramsci was such an ugly man. It's beyond me how anyone can pay attention to anyone this repulsive.

[Anonymous No.22126259]

>>22121104
Capitalist property relations are what is destroying communities though.

[Anonymous No.22126418]

Communism is the separation of aesthetics and political life. Hence they fail at both. Communists want to be part of only the most imagined community in history, the international proletariat, while rejecting imagination and community. Even capitalists and the ruling class know they have to manipulate imagination and community to remain unthreatened. Communists have a small window of opportunity when material destitution and rage work in their favor, then they are lost.
And already Aristotle understood that property relations are important, as did the subsequent supporters of republics. Extreme polarization of property without a "middle" tears apart a political community, which requires its members to have a stake, some amount of leisure, education, friendship even. He recognized M-C-M and M-M are destructive of these. This is just more of a problem with capitalist wage labor, property relations, money and states. How do you maintain a state not captured by entirely indifferent if not predatorial creditors without capital controls, national solidarity and the like? In that sense the international, global political economic environment is important and can't be ignored, but communists in practice seem more concerned about systemically non-threatening moralizing about it (imperialism, white people bad, open borders now, etc).

[Anonymous No.22126445]

>>22120984
>Fascists are artists; communists are politicians
That's what you get from the quote? Kek

Read "The Total Art of Stalinism"

[Anonymous No.22126448]

>>22126215
As a lower class guy who has experience with your sort, trying to get people like me into your dialectical framing is actually the main way you get to manipulate us. A truly apolitical working class person cannot be manipulated politically, although ideally he would be able to articulate his own politics in order to defend his interests, free of upper class ideological scheming.
>>22126259
Communism does that too, though. And we both know that the text in the OP is not referring to just any old correction - it is referring to instituting a communist system. "The working class will (and must) naturally institute communism." This is the belief. Actually, we don't naturally do anything - it takes active, conscious will to do things. And the corrections we want to institute do not involve the establishment of a communist system.

[Anonymous No.22126454]

>>22122829
kek
>>22122894
> Nobody doubted this until post-1945 liberalism decided it wanted a pet "leftist" "official opposition group" safely tied up in the back yard to make people think there is still some resistance to it, but they had to de-fang and de-claw the dog first (by making it "internationalist" in the crypto-liberal sense).
Holy fuck
>>22122919
>>22126234
post selfie

[Anonymous No.22126461]

>>22126418
>Communism is the separation of aesthetics and political life.
>communists in practice seem more concerned about systemically non-threatening moralizing about it (imperialism, white people bad, open borders now, etc).
literally never happened
>>22126448
>A truly apolitical working class person cannot be manipulated politically
kek

[Anonymous No.22126499]

>>22126461
>kek
It's true.
>"Nooooooooooooo worker please pay attention to our propaganda, please, vote for us, give us money, approval, engagement, time, effort, please worker think of the propaganda think of the political agency you'll receive from doing our dirty work, worker please don't leave noooooooooo"

[Anonymous No.22126509]

>>22126499
Who are you quoting here?

[Anonymous No.22126524]

>>22126509
Literally anyone who wants to manipulate the masses is like this. The best way to spite the consumerist system? Buy only what you need, support only what truly reflects you. The nature of the system is such that there will always be people who fall for the spectacle. But the only ways to stay free of the control of the system is either to go against it (prepare for state repression) or to pull away from it. Anything else will mean accepting your role as a tool. Which some people may be perfectly fine with. But it's still being a tool, and in the context of the conversation that is a bad thing.

[Anonymous No.22126555]

>>22126524
>Literally anyone who wants to manipulate the masses is like this.
What zero understanding does to a motherfucker.
Have a good day.

[Anonymous No.22126566]

>>22126555
>copes
>seethes
>leaves
You have a good day too, anon.

[Anonymous No.22126937]

>>22126448
>apolotical working class person cannot be manipulated
This whole time you've been hiking up your pants and saying "actually us lower class guys don't give a damn about you stuffy jerks! We just care about community!" So are you not being chemtrailed right now? Or are you what he have all said: politically ignorant, being thrown in the grinder, and manipulated to react in the exact way that you are right now when we tell you about it?
>>22126199
And for all this talk of "commie wishful thinking" your idea is that somehow, magically, because hitler will just stomp his feet and make it happen, the main vehicle behind social control will all of a sudden be neutralized? Where do you think capitalists get $16billion from? Hand threshing wheat and churning butter? Not anti community? It removes any link between community and value by definition!

[Anonymous No.22127187]

>>22126937
This is just an exercise in slipperiness now. You're deliberately misrepresenting what I have said. I said that the working class is indifferent to politics so long as politics does not interfere with it. This is true. And your chem trail stuff does not somehow negate that. It's a conditional statement.
With regard to manipulation, it cannot be denied that the working class is being manipulated by capitalists. It also cannot be denied that the working class is getting manipulated by leftists as well. And presumably you take issue with this chiefly because you want more people to be manipulated by leftists. As I said, the organic self-assertion of the working class looks very different from communism.
The rest of your post is once again based on overlooking what has already been covered. Can politics triumph over economy? Yes, we know this. So this is one obvious solution. Is class based resentment over the "extraction of surplus value" necessary or important to the working class? Decisively no, so long as there are enough resources to go around for everyone, as I already said before. Capitalist activity only becomes exploitation and predation when it deprived the community of its needs. And we are in such a situation right now, and it would be good to solve it. But communism is not at all the only or automatic solution to the problems the working class faces.

[Anonymous No.22127419]

>>22127187
"It would be good to solve it" is such an unbelievably laughable understatement. You're wishy-washy. At least card carrying fascists and bunker-dwelling libertarians SAY interesting things. You're right, you'd be better off scrounging for sardines and worrying about your kid's report card than talking about politics. You must be a fucking riot at bible study though. You're poor, you're retarded, you suck. "Woooo a commie poverty shamed me but Im the proletariat, that's hypocritical!" you're simple. Be the poorest retard plastic drinker you wish, faggot.

[Anonymous No.22127436]

>>22127419
>"You HAVE TO be a tantrum-throwing baby if you want to be anti-capitalist, anything else is not real politics! Normal people who raise their children are boring and bad and not capable of engaging with politics, only cool schizoids like me and my communist buddies can do that! Don't you want to be weird and ineffective like me yet?!? Don't you?!?"

[Anonymous No.22127882]

Why has such a book as picrel only been written about Hitler, not Stalin or Mao?

[Anonymous No.22128057]

>>22127436
This is 4chan chud, you can say anything you want and you choose to sound like a sunday school teacher. That means you're boring.

[Anonymous No.22128346]

>>22127882
anon has no idea what he is talking about

[Anonymous No.22129558]

>>22128346
Yes, I totally take that book with ET on it seriously. What art did Stalin make?

[Anonymous No.22129897]

>>22121562
Incredibly dumb to think there isn’t a lineage from Futurism and D’Annunzio to mid-20th century European fascism. Lo Stato Libero di Fiume galvanised Mussolini and was one of the final stress that converted him from socialism to fascism (that and Nietzsche). D’Annunzio and Marinetti even signed Gentile’s Manifesto degli Intellettuali del Fascismo.

[Anonymous No.22130270]

>>22129558
>Yes, I totally take that book with ET on it seriously
>judging books from covers
That's the retarded anglo edition, for illiterate barbarians. This is the italian edition (picrel)
>>22129897
>Lo Stato Libero di Fiume galvanised Mussolini and was one of the final stress that converted him from socialism to fascism
literally never happened
D'Annunzio was homosexual and Mussolini considered him a rival because he had much more charisma.

[Anonymous No.22130403]

>>22121190
Correct.

[Anonymous No.22130868]

>>22120984
if you read that essay and extracted "fascists are artists; communists are politicians" then you legitimately are retarded

[Anonymous No.22130873]

>>22123748
>the notion of property has existed since the birth of the soul -- even children are territorial
>he thinks that the capitalist idea of "property" and the child's idea of "that's mine" is the same thing

[Anonymous No.22130911]

>>22130873
yup

[Anonymous No.22132272]

>>22120984
>War is the fascist artistic masterpiece