#lumpen/proletariat

[theburialofstrawberries]

my problem w glass onion is that it said 'idea smart but guy dumb', when whatever janelle monae scribbled on that napkin looked incomprehensible. if you want to extend the musk metaphor, hyperloop travel in a modern urbanizing world is a dumb idea, fully automated driving is a dumb idea. there’s simply no reason to give alpha ANY credit....there are better ways of satirizing elon musk’s success than ‘he stole a good idea’ (namely, focusing on all the dumb desperate idiots comprising the international financial class looking to get rid of their surplus capital SOMEWHERE like hot potato because the capitalist machine needs to be keep running!)

and I lied I have 2 problems. see, at the executive level, andi would have been raking it in. you’re telling me she lost all her money in the court case to live in some modest sympathetic suburban home where she pours her own guests tea? you’re telling me the edward norton character didn’t settle quietly so as to not frighten the stock market and instead controversially carved her out in a public court? i mean her implied complicity in all of the klear stuff up until the moment of signing the big deal + her estrangement from helen (who seems to bear the general burdens of a working class life but does not seem to have gotten an assist from her sister) + her hanging about these assholes makes her a total asshole to me. I get why helen wants to solve her murder, I get why its important to establish andi’s intellectual property in order to establish motive for the murder, I just don’t understand why that last is supposed to be cathartic. again, the burning mona lisa, very cathartic. but am i supposed to feel emotional about backstabbing venture-capitalist legislator-buying weirdos stealing each others bad ideas and having public cat fights over their shitty start up, just because one of them happens to be smart and have a fabulous sense of fashion 

#that tweet about how after getting radicalized you start feeling bad when batman beats up the lumpen proletariat #i have yet to read the last post i reblogged but critiques of the wealthy need to be more analytically sharp for heavens sake

[abr]

La vera Ecoansia: l'invasione dei climascemi.

Confrontate le due foto sotto: la prima auspicio-obiettivo wokissimo modernissimo per il prossimo futuro delle città; la seconda, lavoratori-commuter della Cina anni '70 nel pieno della Rivoluzione Culturale.

Vedete differenze, ideologiche oltre che pratiche? NO, perché non ce n'è: i cinesi andavano in bici perché di auto non ne avevano e credevano di non volerle, roba da kapitalisti egoisthi; i woke perché credono di non voler le auto ma in realtà non potranno più permettersele.

Daimler e Porsche, Ford e Bentley, quel paio di intere generazioni cresciute col mito auto e moto uguale libertà per i giovani, anche di scopare, si rivolteranno nella tomba.

Questo BACK TO THE FUTURE dei woke climascemi ha un nome accattivante e ipocrita, da anglosassoni puritani che poi s'inculano i bambini: ACTIVE TRANSPORT, designa tutti i mezzi a motore umano (anche se poi quelle flaccide checche cellulitiche ci piazzano sotto il motorino elettrico da ricaricare).

Scarp del tennis (cit.), bici e monopattini ma anche risciò e portantine ciclate: mica solo per i postofisso quindi, anche per gli artigiani e le consegne - funzionale questo alla crescita del sottobosco nerastro sfruttabile del neo lumpen proletariat sottopagato urbano. Descamisados mobilitabili alla venezuelana per tenere eventualmente in riga le "classi medie privilegiate", oltretutto.

Active Transport uguale "la città in 15 minuti". Per molti ma non per tutti: i Fedez e la Kasta godranno di droni automatici che in 15 minuti li portano all'aeroporto senza dover scendere al livello del suolo solcato da aulenti ascelle, direttamente dalla cima del loro Bosco Verticale (i veri boschi sono orizzontali ma pazienza, viviamo in un mondo fake di plastica peggio di Barbie). Un bellissimo futuro alle spalle.

Questa discrasia tra il Dover Essere (tutti woke) e il Voler spingersi nonostante i divieti oltre la barriera dei 15 minuti che come gli racconteranno i padri loro si-può-fare (altra cit.): ecco la vera fonte di ecoansia.

#ues

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

By Kim Ives

Today, Haiti may be in the opening days of its second social revolution, which differs from a political revolution (like Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s 1990 election) in a crucial way. An oppressed, exploited class not only seizes political power but also control of the economy, by wresting ownership from the ruling class of the nation’s means of production: its land, factories, banks, stores, transport, utilities, communications, and other economic mainstays.

Today’s revolution is also being carried out by men whom many in the West, including some “leftists,” regarded as sub-human. The revolutionaries are simply characterized as “gangs” or “thugs,” and, indeed, some of them not only committed crimes but survived off of crime, most notably kidnapping. But many others in the Viv Ansanm coalition, which now is battling the Haitian National Police (PNH), fought the criminal “gangs” with which they are currently united. Both the formerly crime-based and crime-fighting armed groups, now united for “system change,” arise directly out of Haiti’s proletariat and lumpen-proletariat in Port-au-Prince, the sprawling capital of close to three million souls.

#Haiti #revolution #working class #Port-au-Prince #imperialism #slavery #Haitian Revolution #Marxism #Kim Ives #Struggle la Lucha

[apas-95]

it's a snappy point, but I think that 'the alt-right is the gentrification of fascism' is representative far more of the perception of fascism than its reality

like in the US consciousness, fascism is an affliction of the poor, just the specific manifestation of gang violence among white trash. the image of the suave, suit-and-tie neonazi, speaking calmly on a university campus, just completely short-circuited that understanding. even among the left, these people could only be seen as figureheads leading a wider movement of assuredly working-class street-fighting skinheads, and even when the demographics of the movement revealed themselves, in charlottesville and the capitol, it was still difficult for many to accept that the people lining up with rifles, swastikas, and tiki torches were, to a man, lawyers and doctors, middle-class businessmen, and their kids.

the idea that fascists were taking private planes to go throw heils was, like, uncomputable to many, especially those who'd invested so much into the 'save the poor misguided youths who fall down the Alt-Right Rabbithole' narrative - even as their $10k+ tactical gear made clear exactly what their class position was. it honestly seems like a large part of that aversion comes from the fact that most of the 'thought leaders' pushing these lines were, themselves, middle class. they'd bought into the idea that the working class was naturally backwards, full of white-collar republicans, and needed some leftist, academic, intellectuals to lead them out and forwards. the idea that it was, really, precisely that class of privileged intellectuals that made up the mass base of fascism completely debased their entire position

perhaps, though, is the more frightful likelihood that, yes, during the US's beautiful 'end of history', when the rest of the world starved, bled, and cried, and US kids got a nintendo, US neo-nazism was just an aesthetic, picked up by the white lumpen-proletariat. but, as the spoils of war dried up, a real fascist movement, with the class character all fascist movements have had, began forming.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Khomeini’s Conquest

The months following the fall of the Shah was a springtime of revolution, a period of conflict and social struggle that provided a challenge to the new authorities. When workers returned to work, in many industries they did so under the control of the shoras (workers councils). Political organizations, suddenly free to operate after years of repression, began to flourish. Neighborhoods self-organized under the control of local committees. Universities became bases of left-wing opposition. The provinces were in rebellion.

How could such a broad based popular movement, with the oldest and largest left in the Middle East, result in the establishment of a clerical theocracy? While repression played a large role, the full story is far more complicated.

While the proletariat was strong and militant enough to overthrow the regime, they were not in a position to assert their hegemony over the movement. Moreover, almost immediately after the fall of the Shah, conflicts began to manifest within the coalition of revolutionary forces. While the movement was broad and popular, its leadership was drawn from the petit-bourgeoisie of the bazaari-clerical alliance. The problem for the new regime would therefore be to somehow establish undisputed political hegemony over this diverse patchwork of revolutionized groups, as well as the masses more broadly.

It was not merely through extreme violence in the streets that Khomeini and his supporters were able to solidify their leadership over the popular movement. Certainly, they did employ lumpen-thugs (calling themselves the Hezbollah) to attack opposition rallies and break strikes. But their success was equally due to ideological manipulation. If there was one overarching ideological trait of the 1979 revolution it was anti-imperialism. Far more than an outcome of some religious revival or resistance to modernity, the Islamic ideology of the day assumed the form of a Third Worldist populism, one which would become so hegemonic over the revolution that all questions relating to it would eventually be seen through its prism. This was especially the case for the left, who contributed to this ideological confusion. It was through the manipulation of anti-imperialist ideology that the Khomeinist clergy was able to secure and maintain its hegemony over the revolution.

A key factor in Khomeini’s ability to rapidly gain control over the movement lay in the near-total political vacuum that existed under the Shah’s dictatorship. The entire weight of the regime’s repression had been turned against the communist movement and the secular nationalists. For the masses of rural people who flooded into cities during the decade preceding the revolution, their traditional community having been disrupted by the land reform, the mosque was often the only place where they could find remnants of that community. However, mosques were not neutral, but under the control of the cleric, who found in this newly dispossessed population a ready audience. These cultural affinities were fused with a utopian-populist ideology that promised to end corruption and inaugurate a period of justice, uniting the various classes into an abstract people.

It is often suggested that the regime of Muhammad Reza Shah was hostile to Islam, or was pursuing a program of radical secularization. This is inaccurate: like his father, he was more interested in bringing religion under the control or service of the state. Although he sought modernization and national development, his approach to religion depended on how it served the state. For the Shah, the main enemy was the communist and left-wing opposition. Although the Pahlavi regime certainly promoted a nationalist ideology that emphasized the pre-Islamic past, the regime was not averse to using Islam when it served its purposes. It pursued a strategy that would be replicated throughout the region, encouraging religious ideology to counter the popularity of the Left. While the full repressive and propagandistic force of the state was wielded against the left, the Islamic forces enjoyed an incredible freedom, and even encouragement. Far from closing down mosques, the last Shah funded more mosques, prayer halls, and religious services. So long as they did not directly challenge the state or the monarchy, they were free to operate. This was especially the case if they directed their ire against godless communism. Many of those clergy who would be important figures in the Khomenist movement during the 1979 revolution featured prominently in magazines and newspapers, and regularly appeared on radio and television. Of course, there was repression against the religious political opposition, but only of groups that directly opposed the regime. Those figures who stayed away from direct discussion of politics were given room to maneuver, which was unthinkable for the left.

Khomeini’s intransigence and relative freedom of expression while in France soon made him the symbolic leader of the revolution — proof that symbols, when invested with enough power, become powers of their own. Khomeini enjoyed a network the communist movement could only dream of, with a strong following among middle and lower ranking clergy. As tapes of Khomieini’s speeches were widely shared and distributed, mosques everywhere soon became a platform for voicing dissent. During the revolutionary insurrection of 1978–79, the neighborhood committees that would later serve as an important base of the revolution were organized out of mosques in which the cleric was in control. These were increasingly controlled by a centralized revolutionary committee composed of Khomieni’s supporters. Those that had remained independent were soon brought under control. These committees soon began to organize militias.[19] Over time, these committees were all brought to heel, usually through violent repression. What they couldn’t dominate by means of loyalists, they broke through frontal repression. But it was in Kurdistan where the autonomy from the central government was maintained the longest. This partially explains the repression that the state has always levied against the people there, who never fully accepted the Islamic Republic.

On November 7th, 1979 Khomeinist students took over the American Embassy. The crisis came at a perfect moment, when economic problems and frustration with the revolution was beginning to grow. One cannot understand the hostage crisis unless one recognizes that it was less about conflict with the US than about defeating the domestic opposition, particularly the Marxist guerrilla groups. It had the dual outcome of both forcing the resignation of the liberal nationalist provisional government and defeating the radical left, who still battled for hegemony over the anti-imperialist revolution. Prior to the hostage crisis, the new regime had no intention of opposing the United States. In this sense, the embassy takeover was the anti-imperialist spectacle perfected: by drawing attention away from the struggles taking place in the rest of the country, students who only recently would have been seen by their Marxist counterparts as religious fanatics and rectionaries could now present themselves as the vanguard of the anti-imperialist struggle. In this way, the crisis helped the religious factions defeat the left and secure their hegemony over the revolution.

From 1980 to 1983 the state launched a “cultural revolution” with the intention of purging the universities and educational institutions of radical left influence. Schools were shut down, faculty purged. Resistance was met with severe repression, leading to fierce battles between leftist students and Islamist thugs. The same was the case with the worker’s councils in the factories, although in this case the initiative lay with the left-wing parties. Although the councils developed spontaneously out of the strike committees organized during the mass strike of 1978–79, they enjoyed the participation of the Left, who were invited to play a role in their direction. Whereas those workers councils that were dominated by the Khomeinists often tended to be corporatist in ideology, the more radical worker’s councils were democratic in nature.

This difference points to the decisive question — by no means unique to Iran — of the internal diversity of the working class. The rapid and uneven character of capitalist development over the previous decade had created a significant though not unsurpassable chasm, a phenomenon common to many nations in the global south, particularly where development is marked by advanced technology, as opposed to more primitive forms of accumulation. This chasm meant that there was an important cultural difference between “new” and “old” workers, one that the Islamists played upon and used against the left and working class movement. There was a marked difference between the newly-proletarianized manual laborers or unemployed workers and second generation urbanites, who enjoyed different sources of entertainment and tended to support the secular parties of the left. This included white collar workers, but also “skilled” workers in modern industries including oil, gas, and petrochemicals, which were central to the state and economy. Similar differences existed at the level of education, as well as in lifestyles. The clergy played upon this difference with their ideas of cultural imperialism. Imperialism was affiliated not merely with the rule of capital, but with all facets of Western culture, Marxism included. The upper sectors of the working class were characterized as Westernized, a trend consistent with Third World populism elsewhere, particularly in nations that are not among the farthest flung regions of the periphery and underdeveloped, but which are developing more rapidly in the direction of the global system.

Like fascist regimes before them, the Khomeini regime used disorder to establish order. They did not merely conquer the state but also seized power in the street, through the action of their revolutionary committees. By 1983 they had defeated all their political opponents. From the beginning, the Islamic Republic always incorporated a segment of the population into its police apparatus to surveil and repress the rest of the population. This policy allowed it to channel the cultural resentment of the lumpenproletariat into the regime’s repression, and marked an important departure from the preceding regime.

#Khomeini #iran #middle east #Anti-imperialism #history #Ill Will #insurrection #Class Struggle #Autonomy #anarchism #resistance #prison abolition #acab #jail #prisoners #autonomy #revolution #community building #practical anarchism #anarchist society #practical #practical anarchy #anarchy #daily posts #communism #anti capitalist #anti capitalism #late stage capitalism #organization #grassroots

[drumlincountry]

short shorts that say "lumpen proletariat" across the arse

#I am not adapting this to American vernacular u can parse it I'm sure #Me Fein

[homomenhommes]

lumpen proletariat

[punisheddonjuan]

I just absolutely love it when listening to a podcast when one of the hosts (completely out of nowhere and only tangentially related to the topic) pulls out some variation of "everyone has autoimmune disorders now because they're miserable" heavily implying that they're of the belief that all chronic illnesses are psychosomatic. And it's always said in the tone of "these people annoy me personally". I don't know why I keep hearing leftists spout this kind of shit. Is it a lack of knowledge? Latent misogyny? Some melange of views around the "lumpen proletariat" and disabled bodies being unproductive bodies? A lazy gloss on Gabor Maté/Bessen Van der Kolk's whole (already kind of reductionist in my view) schtick? I wish I fucking knew. But I'm sick of hearing it.

#it was amber from chapo this time #quote: if you watch daytime tv there are two commercials that are on all the time #one a medication that costs a billion dollars for all these autoimmune diseases that people have now because they're miserable #i swear to god it happens every few months #and even more frequently on twitter #disability #blog #personal history

[pinklion813]

I cannot help but like Saw Gerrera.

He’s an evil character certainly. Saw targets civilians, kills and tortures POWs. He’s a mess of paranoia who serves as example of a person who’s worst aspects have been brought to the fore by war.

But.

Saw Gerrera is willing to throw down as both terrorist and revolutionary. He fights the empire relentlessly, harnessing anti imperial sentiment and ACTING on it. He’s willing to free wookiees on Kashyyyk when no one will (even though he abandons them later). Speaking of, his organization is diverse, in aliens and himself being a person of colour. Giving the impression of them in the Star Wars galaxy being lumpen proletariat. The people who’d be most disenfranchised by the Empire representing more of a people’s struggle. Plus in Andor he is shown to be unwilling to work with human supremacists which gets him points from me. Don’t work with racists it ain’t a good idea (plus it’ll turn out bad, remember what happened to Walter White in Breaking Bad?).

My problem is that Saw’s less revolutionarily nuanced then I’d like (Byproduct of not being written by people who know what actual anarchists are I guess). He’s more caricature of violent revolutionary descending into paranoia. This is really expressed by the fact that violence is Saw’s main tool and he and his partisans do not embrace a diversity of tactics. It hurts their credibility and isolates the Partisans as terroirists.

Still I love him with Luthen, I appreciate his struggle and I acknowledge his faults. Regardless of them though, it’s important for the rebellion to have someone who will fight the empire for the right reason. Because the empire is evil and facist. And it is of import to note that Saw acts (irresponsibly maybe) but in service of The Cause, helping the oppressed by hurting the system of oppression.

(I will not credit him with Tech’s death. Saw wasn’t responsible for the Batch and it was pure coincidence they ran into each other that day. Saw did his mission, fucking shit up. If you wanna credit anyone with Techs death give it to the people literally shooting at them. The Empire. (plus It is good whenever someone try’s to kill Tarkin.))

#star wars #saw gerrera #partisans #star wars rogue one #revolutionaries are cool #real anarchism is fuckin cool #i just think they're neat #may the fourth be with you #even though I’m late #only by a few minutes! #star wars jedi fallen order #andor #andor series #star wars andor #anarchism #leftism #bad batch #star wars bad batch

[nonameweebu]

Lumpen Theory : Genealogy of a Panoptilumpenism (Part 1)

“ Terrible things happen daily of which we are not aware of, hidden under the pretense of normality and coherence of the world you and I are forced to experience. Together, but yet so far away, a digital sea of modern colonization exists. All that is hidden is understood to exist as oppression, and that oppression is but the systematic death once the inevitable misery catches up to the rowdy prosperity of the cybernetical un-friendship orders.  “

.

What became projected as a refusal to expand on the different forms which the oppressed populations of the world took, the Lumpenproletariat has always been nothing more than a slur. The Lumpen  have seen their potential, actions and even existence reduced to a mere splinter of class society under the classical Marxist framework, and even more reductive under a liberal scope. 

The liberal status quo seeks to uniform these outliers, to create a non-porous, fully glossy and brand new form of governance that does not imply the existence of the faults and burdens called Lumpen. And the Marxist seeks to merely fault it for the errors of its own actions. What both of these conceptions have in common is simply their will to reduce struggle to a mere flaw, forgetting the moments and large periods in which the Lumpenproletariat took apart of, not as the subject of a movance or drive towards a narrative goal, but more-so as the undisputed net losers of the movements of the societies we trap  our thought around. The construction of a “better world” under the progressive stance implies the wiping down of the impurities the liberated subject of the  Lumpen are : there cannot be a better world for those  at the bottom of the existence of the present state of things, and the future ones if we try to be cynical. Engels retains the crown of anti-lumpen sentiment, very early on embarking in hatred towards a group he barely defined in order to assert the position of the proletariat as the unique pawn in their path of the progress of history. Nothing constructive comes from the Lumpenproletariat, and this understanding leads to conceiving them as historically “scum” and “opportunists”, friends of reaction and the status quo. The myth of the Lumpen representing the outdated populations of the early-modern urban development is something that persists nowadays. Mercenaries, crooks and “parasites” are what Engels, and then Marx, meant and explicited by the Lumpen, entities devoid of revolutionary character, outside of the glorious proletariat and most importantly, in opposition to it. In many regards, the reductionism that Marx and Engels apply to this strata of the population  is clearly tied to the events they analyzed ever since 1848 and the many abuses the working population suffered because of this undisclosed exploitative Lumpenproletariat. The vagueness of what they even imply by Lumpen at this stage makes for it to become the quick insult many cement the term as, even when Marx’s own conception evolves when Capital arrives. His true, real critique of political economy outside of the realizations he has on the conditions of the revolting bodies involving themselves in England, France and other areas of the  European theater, comes with the realization of a new concept that will be very useful following up : the  one of Lumpenization, or understood as the process that turns sectors of a viable population towards a much more precarious, fluid and non-protected existence, basically creating a larger aflux of Lumpen.

Efforts from the capitalist systems turned the varied populations of an evolving society into elements of what he saw as being the “exploitative degeneracy” that constituted the element to oppose inside his notion of the Lumpen, making it not a desirable process, but more so a subjected one with the whole entire violence of the state and capital behind it all. A scheme so simple in its perpetuation that it gets overlooked and assimilated into the “natural” processes of capital, alongside  commodity production and fetichisation. His opposition to the Lumpen is, as commonly described, political. But nonetheless, I see his opposition as coming from a severe lack of will towards a deep understanding of  outside regards, or as Ernesto Laclau would put it in this same topic, "the limits of Marxist determinism“ . In short, Marxism, as the established framework of analysis and understanding of class society guided by the proletarian socialist meta-narrative, has no room, nor want, to establish a thoughtful consideration of what the Lumpen REALLY are, outside of all value and moralistic judgement many engage with nowadays. The conditions of such a shift and change in the perspective of the Lumpen should be set, first of all, on the basis of a “non-marxist” framework, one that does not establish a subject for revolutionary progression above all other possible material analysis. 

Combating the many forms the systematic train of thought Marxism has historically represented comes in the originally Marxist realization of the end of the “labour movement”. The late Paul Mattick essentially considered the labour movement to be “dead” and non-existent in the modern times of the postwar world. No longer could the forms of organization of the working class combat capitalism the same way it once used to. No longer can the proletariat unite under the thought of Marx or Lenin in order to advance the  progression of social systems. No longer could liberation be achieved by the same old conceptions of revolution we had carried around essentially since the early Fourrieriusts. As he would put it : “The labour movement preceded Marxian theory and provided the actual basis for its development. Marxism became the dominating theory of the socialist movement because it was able convincingly to reveal the exploitative structure of capitalist society and simultaneously to uncover the historical limitations of this particular mode of production.” On this same basis, Marxism was able to grasp the concept of leading progressive revolution in terms of using a same, concrete and particular subject, one not free but alienated and exploited, with enough potential to set itself free and dissolve the forms that put it there to begin with. But no  longer can that be seen as a coherent labour movement, and the flaw comes with this essentialization of The Proletariat, the utmost important cog and at the same time, the main pawn to the creation of Marxist analysis.

With this in mind, many properly Marxist groups through the (mostly) modern history of class struggle (1960’s-80’s) have undertaken this fallacious class consideration, and taken on a Lumpen defense, one that does confront the previously mentioned un-legitimate attacks from the early socialist revolutionaries. Denning, Fanon and even Marcuse embark in the commonly found “revolutionary potential of the Lumpen”, explaining its colonial history as being the “radicals of the radicals”, a sort of unmeasured group full of revolutionary fervour, similar to what the classical proletariat can achieve if set  under the line of class consciousness. While these defenses have served as the proliferation of the term in a less commonly conceived pejorative notion of the Lumpenproletariat, they fall under the baseline that creates the issues of Marx and Engels : they create a new revolutionary subject,  this time more radical, not removed from any constructive logic in order to achieve the building up of a concise class identity. It cannot be said that this is truly the liberatory form of the Lumpen. We should in turn, consider this defense as the first kind hearted attempt to remove the monopoly of revolt from the hands of the western and white proletariat  in order to atomize  it further into greater depth. Back to the first international and the period of the mere inception of the Lumpen-Prole divide, Bakunin encountered a similar attempt, as the label he was attributed of the “Prince of the Lumpen” was a simple reaction towards what he had conceived as a preferential strategy to out-socialist the marxists. In order to defend the vague and, very un-deleuzian, nomadic peasantry of the remains of economic development in the European labour world, he provocatively took on the position of “Only the Lumpen can liberate and act towards the social revolution”. To repeat myself one last time, this is not but a change in the subject of history and a retention of the notion of the progression of history towards a being-just and not a liberatory becoming. 

The role of the diversification of the relations under the precognition of the Lumpen is one that serves a greater purpose, but once again, the Lumpen is already a liberated subject, only constrained by its own influenced volition. The repetition of the subject form instead of its abolition and liberation on a general form is nothing brand new or outstanding, and hence the proclaimed Lumpen defense of these authors remains incomplete, inconclusive and truthfully useless for a construction of the real genealogy behind the liberation of Lumpen. One group, however, embarked in the tale to liberate and act upon the Lumpen’s condition with greater notions and wider conceptions on how to approach it, this being the Japanese New Left (JNL). In reality, this wide movement of social upheaval in the Japanese islands was much more than just a grouping of pro-Lumpen students. From the Trotskyists and Maoists that confirmed the improvised parties and informal revolutionary groups at the borderlines of the control of the state, many groups seeked an avant-garde approach to acting upon the conditions of the Japanese sphere, and a revolution of Japanese culture as a whole after the fiasco of the expansion and construction of a cultural identity on the precognition of the expansion of the empire. This pre-conceptual imperialist nature to what it meant to be Japanese inherently implied a re-thinking of what groups constituted as the internal operations of the Japanese cultural machine, and those that conformed a noumena, purposely blinded and devoid of any constructive forms on which to base themselves on. The bulbous mass of deformed victims of the violence of the Imperial Japanese construction became the allies of the revolutionary groups : ethnic minorities were, for many groups of denominational variety, the main primary focus on their struggle. Doing so bought them the hatred of some more orthodox Marxist groups, claiming their “non focus on class” as being contrary to the bouillant social climate that might at the time host an actual revolutionary movement. The ethnic minorities that they sought to protect under many circumstances were grouped up vulgarly under the notion of all being Lumpen, below the Japanese worker. And under such framing, groups of students in Tokyo and Osaka claimed this aspect proudly, hailing the defense of the Lumpen into action, seeking to organise outside of the prefecture of Osaka proper the members of the Lumpen, in the case of Japan, the prostitutes, day labourers and marginalized ethnic groups that were comprised as the poster children of this movance popping up in the area. The so-called “inner colony” of the newly constructed Kamagasaki council, constituted of the Lumpenproletarian actors that constitute a majority of the activity in that area, was considered “the 3rd world inside the 1st world”. The notion here implies a heavy dose of colonial relations into the logic of the interaction with the Lumpenproletarian populations. This relation exists because of the following parameter:

Lumpenproletariat = Alienated > Proletariat ----------> sense of outside -------> colonial logic is applied for it, maintaining margin and distance with class society.

That last part remains an integral part of the actions of the JNL on the eyes of the Lumpen : the alienation due to the misery and visceral exploitation of the Lumpen from the whole of Capitalist social actors makes them a subject of the “borderlands” of class society, outside, but remaining on the grasp of the exploitation they phase. Because of this separation, they are unable to construct a destructive imperial entity, just like the Japanese proletariat, willingly or not, did. Of all the groups that appeared during this clearly intellectually fertile time in Japanese class struggle, the East-Asian Anti-Japaneist Armed Front (EAAJAF) remains as the biggest and best example of how to envision the lumpen. Many of the Marxist groups, specially those in accord with Eiji Oguma’s notion that the Anti-Japaneist movement had a clear “post-structuralist character, understanding its use of pseudo-history as realization of the “linguistic turn” ”, none of them actually continued and carried out the proposed total and radical deconstruction of a Japanese cultural identity itself, basing themselves around the “zenkyoto” form, or joint struggle committees that were used as organs that can be classically found on any other Marxist organization. On this, the Daidoji couple that founded the front did so in a non-explicitly “opposition” towards the general direction of the Zengakuren, that by then had abandoned all sense of radical deconstruction and erasure. The group held on to the stance that became the more Lumpen-friendly out of a movement that already greatly considered this sector. Their direct attacks on the Empire, whether it be via the numerous sabotages like in 1974 or simply the intellectual intention behind their collective writings and most specifically the Hara Hara Tokei, had crumbled, as Till Knaudt would say, the entirety of the still not anti-Japaneist enough New Left. Their actions are an expression of the concerns of the victims of this newly appearing virtual-colonialism that is so omnipresent in their conceptions. Basically founding an armed struggle group on the collaboration and retaliation of the Lumpen against even the workerist Prole identity seemed too far for the anachronistic Marxists of modern discourse, and even the ones at the time acting as formal opposition to the EAAJAF, but in reality is the utmost example of an action, an attitude and a thought against the anti-lumpen sentiment, and one favorizing its revolt, self-abolition and proliferation as the vector of the creative destruction they so wanted to see unfold on the Japanese archipelago. The Lumpenproletariat then follows the agitation that it is brought, not prescribed like in the case of the proletariat, and perpetually seeks the total liberation that is the lustful object of Communistic projects : a liberation from all sides of class society, an affirmation of non-exploitation.

Similarly, Deleuze, in his lectures on the State War Machine, retook this term and applied a machinic logic to the developments of capitalism he saw in the later part of his life. The “3rd world inside the 1st world” was then the 4th world, an absurd difference between the affluent perfection of the wealth created and then fetichized by the rich populations, and the misery created, not in response, but in consequence of such development. Total misery contrasted to total virtuosity of capital’s developments. As such, the 4th world is the situation in which Lumpenization occurs, one in which the machine of Capital, that we will from now on describe as “Technocapital”, perpetuates modes of production and exploitation in order to conceive a “virtual-colonial” situation. This neologism is something I have coined to describe that distance in the treatment of the Lumpenproletariat that was considered a form of colonial relationship by the JNL theorists. This relationship relies on distance and separation, all geographical, social and economical distance from class society, to the Lumpen inhabitants of its borderlands. Added to this notion, we have the central word of Panoptilumpenism, a porte-manteau word encompassing “panopticon” and “Lumpen” to define the effect that is to be understood as the self-biopolitical regulation of the Lumpenproletariat that is on itself the reason of their sense of “outsideness” and non-liberation, as a direct result from the total alienation they face and the absolute bottom of the barrel position in society that they held, and still hold, in relation to other groups. Panoptilumpenism, to be more concrete, is the genealogical perpetuating coincidence that pin-points the raison-d’etre of the Lumpenproletariat in its various forms.

Part 1 -

#philosophy #politics #antiwork #anarchism #foucault #lumpen #theory

[revindicatedbyhistory]

the phantom troupe are the first lumpen proletariat national democratic revolutionary group

[thevagueambition]

Les Mis and Disco Elysium feel like opposites in a lot of ways even though they tackle a lot of the same subjects and are both, ultimately, when you get down to it, Hopeful Despite All The Pain

I suppose Disco Elysium has to dig a lot deeper for that hope, and that the hope feels slighter -- Les Mis is idealistic, optimistic about the future, the potential of Progress. The revolutionaries are Good People, they are The Ideals of Progress and The People and The Republic made flesh. They do what is necessary, but they despair at it. Les Mis has a lot of Utopian Socialism in its fabric.

Disco Elysium is sarcastic and bleak and mean-spirited and full of unpleasant people. No-one’s a hero. Not Harry, who can be a fascist at worst and a self-aggrandising tankie at best. Not Kim, who is a Moralist, a Centrist, status quo is the best we can hope for, “every school of thought and government has failed in this city but I love it nonetheless”, not the union, which may protect their people but is steeped with corruption, not the one remnant of the revolution you come across, who represents the grief of its failure, not the hope of its ideals. Disco Elysium is the Communism of a Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union -- the failures of the Soviet Union, the trauma of the Soviet Union, the grief for an idealistic belief in Communism.

Disco Elysium is pessimistic Communism to Hugo’s Utopian Socialism, I suppose. Disco Elysium’s world and story was created by proles -- maybe even lumpen proles by some definitions -- while Les Mis was a bourgeois man observing the proletariat.

They are stories about similar things split in time, tone and class. And I love them both

#i also love being coherent akdjskldjsldj

[abr]

Due calcoli della serva - ditemi se sbaglio eh.

Ipotizziamo che le batterie delle auto elettriche abbiano una capacità media di 50kWh (oggi poche ci arrivano), con consumi medi di 5km/kWh (poche superano i 7km/kWh: dipende anche da fattori esterni tipo salite/discese e temperatura esterna). Da cui una autonomia massima teorica di 250km con un "pieno" elettrico; un'auto a motore termico ne fa il triplo ma pace, fingiamo pure che ciò stia bene alla metà degli utenti.

Ipotizziamo quindi che, senza pianificatori europei del cazzo, su base "di mercato" (solo aiutini tipo divieti e limitazioni di transito), si arrivi a un certo punto a elettrificare 20 milioni di mezzi, metà del parco auto circolante italiano oggi.

Un'auto in media fa 20.000km/anno, circa 50km/giorno. Significa che serviranno 20m*20k/5 = 80TWh di potenza elettrica aggiuntiva media annua. Oggi in Italia si consumano circa 300TWh totali di elettricità (2021): significherebbe aggiungere +25% ai consumi elettrici. Altro che risparmi. Fattibile? Spoiler: non credo (btw, da tale numero si capisce l'enfasi verso la delocalizzazione industriale e la riduzione dei consumi con scuse varie guerresche).

La vera domanda da farsi sarebbe, si può fare in modo green, altrimenti è una presa per i fondelli? Oggi in Italia si producono circa 25TWh da fonti rinnovabili (fonte Gse). Quindi servirebbe aggiungerne più del triplo.

Dice sia fattibile: vedi Germania che ne produce oltre 130TWh. Crediamoci, intanto però là aumenta il consumo di carbone; mobilitiamoci (tosando le burofurerie locali che rallentano tutto, mica solo gli impianti rinnovabili). Resta da gestire il problema cogente del bilanciamento di potenza (fv e vento non sono costanti) e dei picchi di domanda che so, a pasquetta e ferragosto. A proposito di green, ci sono le centrali nucleari alla francese; solo ne servirebbero diverse, diciamo: le più potenti generano 1.6GW di potenza, cioè producono meno di mezzo TWh in un anno.

Sin qui i conti facili, meno costosi. Lasciamo pur stare come si fa approvvigionare tutto il litio cobalto terre rare che serve ( e i relativi costi socio-ambientali); lo scoglio finale è portare tutta quella potenza capillarmente fino alle colonnine, ai garage nei condo. Si fa col fv sui balconi? In contemporanea con lo switch dai riscaldamenti a gas alle pompe di calore elettriche? Ciao core.

Fingiamo pure che i prezzi della auto elettriche scendano un po' all'aumentare dei volumi venduti (toh, il tanto vituperato "mercato"); in ogni caso, per quanto detto sinora, mi sa che è TUTTO UN BARBATRUCCO PER APPIEDARNE UN BEL PO'. Il che, pensando alle Karen con la Yaris, in fondo confesso non sia prospettiva che mi dispiaccia più che tanto.

In realtà stan dicendo: "Vieni, vieni in città, che stai a fare in campagna?" (cit.). Come foste contadini cino-indiani o allevatori nigeriani (questi ultimi aiutati a decidere da un po' di terrorismo islamico); come fecero del resto coi nonni meridio-polesani trapiantati a Torino e Milano. Perché in città ci stanno i Trasporti Pubblici efficenti (per andare da dove dican loro a dove voglian loro), la Sanità e le Squole (stipendifici maximi), i riscaldamenti centralizzati (cioè spegnibili: chiedere ai malcapitati quest'inverno) e i monopattini a nolo.

Gli zombie sinistri godono: si torna al Lumpen Proletariat, alle periferie straccione ma stavolta non per produrre facendo vivere una generazione o due nella merda, sperando di meglio per figli e nipoti: é per NON consumare, NON fare figli ed eliminare i vecchi (ma non gli Schwab o gli utili idioti alla Mattarella, tutti con 80+ anni).

[romanticpapers]

إن الأمة مهما بلغ غناها فلن يصل الأمر قط إلى أن يصبح كل الناس فيها أغنياء، فالغنى يقتصر في العادة على قلة، والغالب أن يبقى سواد الـشعب بـين مياسير، وهم الذين يسمون في المصطلح الغربي بالبورجوازية العالية la haute bourgeoisie، ومساتير وهم الذين يسمون بالبـورجوازية الـصغيرة La Qpetite bourgeoisie، ومعوزين وهم البروليتاريا، ومملقين وهم الذين يسميهم الإشتراكيون المتطرفون الألمان بإسم بروليتاريا الأسمال Lumpen Proletariat

الحضارة / حسين مؤنس

#حسين مؤنس

[cuetzpalin1234]

Chicano report back on International Day Against Police Brutality

Today is Friday March 15, 2024. It is International Day Against Police Brutality. Yesterday on Thursday March 14th, I decided to write this piece since there are several things going on this month. March marks Women’s Herstory Month, Social Work Month, the Cesear Chavez March, the historic Chicano blowouts, and so much more. This day also marks the 2-year anniversary of the murder of Kevin Johnson by police. It happened in March of 2022. If you are new to the story, you can find out the details here: Man killed by SAPD officers shot 12 times, including 8 times in the back, autopsy shows (ksat.com). However, I must say that the capitalist media has never been the greatest source of information. If you are familiar with Malcolm X you can remember he was quoted saying, “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

What happened to Kevin Johnson is a case and point. We can see another case and point currently going on right now with Palestine. They are portraying the colonized Palestinians who are the oppressed as the villain or terrorist and the Israeli Zionist colonizers who are the oppressor as the hero and victim.

Since we have been conditioned for some time now by the capitalist system, their narrative almost always goes unquestioned because people believe the working poor (working class) and “criminal” class (lumpen proletariat) are elements that should be looked down upon society. Whether it is within or without those classes, there are people out there who willingly advance reactionary ideas that were developed by the capitalist system to criminalize those very two classes.

According to Romero (2001), “Characterization of this population as super predators is socially constructed through a racial lens-the lens that reflects the images of White middle-class youth as “our” children and Indigenous/Latino (& African) adolescent males as violent, inherently dangerous and endangering” (p. 1084). Based on my research I found that John DiLulio was the “academic” proponent behind calling inner city youth “super-predators” and he described those very same youth as “growing up surrounded by deviant, delinquent, and criminal adults in chaotic, dysfunctional, fatherless, Godless, and jobless settings” (Romero, 2001). Is it any wonder why the following people who were also murdered by the police were portrayed the same way to the public? Marquise Jones, Charles Roundtree, Andre Hernandez, Norman Cooper, Jesse Aguirre, Darryl Zemault, Eric Mejia, Damian Daniels, Antronie Scott, and the list goes on unfortunately.

All this capitalist propaganda and/or "Copaganda" we see when something like this happens is designed to keep us from the truth and justice. The truth is the masses of working African and Indigenous people or even so-called gangs or street organizations are not the main problems that we face. Of course, everyone bears responsibility for keeping these reactionary ideas going, which is why I am involved in an organization working for justice to see that these ideas are checked. We should be directing our attention to the African and Indigenous/Latino/Hispanic petit bourgeoisie. The majority in that class who were not involved in the struggle benefit from the sacrifices made by people involved in social movements struggling for liberation. They don’t want us to focus on how they got to those positions off the backs of the masses of people, those two classes mentioned before. They don’t want us to focus on how it was the masses who pushed the capitalist system to allow programs to be created to have an African and Indigenous petit bourgeoise, which for the system meant protecting its interests and keeping the masses in check.

You can see this play out in the case of Kevin Johnson. After the day Kevin was killed by police there were news reports following the reaction from the police and the community. If you pay attention, you can see that the strategy of pacification was implemented. Just like how Malcolm X described the difference between the field slave and the house slave on the plantation. The slave master would use the house slave to keep the masses of field slaves in check when they would rebel. Just like when the community righteously rebelled against those officers for killing their family member, their brother, their friend. The capitalist media busts out the house slave, but this time it's the Black over seer. Former San Antonio law enforcement officer looks to bridge relations between police and community (ksat.com) This ex-police officer stated, "The community has gotten afraid of the police and, I believe the police became afraid of the community". When cops are not blatantly using their brute force under the "Iron Fist" approach, they are using community policing model as another tool under the guise of the "Velvet Glove" approach to infiltrate our communities to keep us from becoming militant.

Please don't take this out of context. The masses wanted us to gain knowledge and skills that would benefit our movement for justice. So, we must not avoid attending college, but we must become more conscious about our situation here in the US because it affects us politically, socially, culturally, and economically. For more context and background just look up the Kerner Commission report: 1968 Kerner Commission Report | Othering & Belonging Institute (berkeley.edu)

It is time to start challenging the dominant narrative and creating our own platforms to share our narrative so we can tell our own side of the story without it being coopted or watered down. The problem is too many people do not want to get involved in an organization working for justice for whatever reason they may have. I am always down to meet people where they are at, but we must challenge those reactionary ideas when they come up in our work. Most working-class people today are not class conscious. Instead of uniting together to defeat the capitalists to build a better society they want to be involved in that system and milk it as much as possible.  The criminal class whether it be from the African or Indigenous community is designed to exploit the people instead of uniting with the masses of their people to try and find collective solutions to the problems which come from the system that sets them up to be outlaws. If you understand how capitalism works you understand these paradoxes because the masses of people are propagandized in a certain way to see how the world operates and appears to be. This means we cannot hold our people in contempt. We must hold the capitalist system in contempt. We have to go beyond just being anti-racist. We must be anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-colonial. Why does this system allow a criminal class to exist in the first place? To keep us from organizing and fighting back against it. It serves the adversaries of the masses of our people. Just look at all the drugs coming into the community, for example. Just look at who makes up the masses of people who are incarcerated. That is why the so-called criminal justice system makes sure to keep crime going among our people. We tend to leave the system of capitalism outside of the analysis, thus always placing blame on the very same people who are being held in the grip of that system. Take for example, the 1033 program that is being implemented as we speak or the Project Safe Neighborhoods program. Did you know that these programs even existed? Do you know anything about them? If you do your research, you will understand that the situations people are put into like those mentioned above are not random. People are being systematically targeted. Particularly, the African and Indigenous community.

Thinking about brother Malcom’s words I thought to myself if people here are consuming news or information that is providing a narrative that is bought and paid for by big multi-national corporations then that must mean why so many people are so miss informed about so many things that are and should be important to us. This is why so many people must hear what reactionary entertainers have to say about our problems, or even your local/national news giving only a tip of the iceberg level of analysis if any instead of asking the hard questions and looking at the root of the problem. Fear is used to control us. It makes the masses afraid and portrays actual revolutionaries and revolutionary organizations on the frontlines bringing you information based on truth and justice as violent and loveless. This is how the system keeps us divided and dependent. It is love that guides us revolutionaries not hate. Join an organization working for justice today!

[askgothamshitty]

ive seen some disagreement over this certain topic but would women and those who identify as women be a class on its own?

Anonymous

20 Apr

I guess it depends on how you define “class”. Marxists say it’s a group of people with the same relationship to the means of production. So their answer would be “no” since women can be proletariat or bourgeois (or petty bourgeois, or lumpen…). But radical feminists define class differently (“a system of stratification where people are grouped together because of their social status”, described one of my mutuals). So their answer would be “yes”.

I’m not sure where I land. I guess I agree with the radical feminist definition but I would use a word different than “class” so as to not confuse with Marxist terms. Because it does make sense to me to say that women are a socially constructed group placed in a hierarchical system vis a vis men as a group.

#patriarchy #curiouscat