Dennis Redmond:
> This constant harping on personal disloyalty to the
> Revolution, as if anti-capitalist mobilization were
a
> simple moral choice, is not productive. We need maps
> of multinational capitalism, critiques of its
> structures, and narratives of its social networks.
Dennis, tone is very difficult to convey on an email list. If I come across as hostile to you, I want to apologize to you for that. I do not intend to attack you personally or put you on trial for disloyalty to the revolution.
I just think that in your haste to criticize the U.S. (which we all know, being the most developed capitalist nation, is also the most barbarious, as Noam Chomsky notes, that is no contradiction), you tend to play down how bad things have gotten over here. The situation of refugees and immigrants is really atrocious, the repressiveness of the EU border regime is a scandal. The welfare state is being dismantled. EU is not distinguishing itself from the US, but is becoming more and more like it.
I agree with your last point about mappings. If you haven't yet, you need to read Altvater and Mahkopf's Grenzen der Globalisierung: http://www.dampfboot-verlag.de/buecher/75-6.html
Chris Doss:
> I'm not sure there's actually any proof those
> formulas are even true, or that specific social
> relations follow from them.
Commodities are not exchanged for one another? Money is not invested with the intent of being capitalized?
> I think Capitalism (capital C) functions in Carrol's
> private religion as Satan in a fallen world.
Can we please stop with these sleazy speculations about the supposed internal world of other lbo-talk posters?
> redemption will arrive mysteriously from some place
> in the future and we can't really affect its coming
I can't speak for Carrol, but there is definitely an element of the messianic in the struggle for communism.
You need to read up on Walter Benjamin, Chris Doss!
"Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal nexus of various moments of history. But no state of affairs is, as a cause, already a historical one. It becomes this, posthumously, through eventualities which may be separated from it by millennia. The historian who starts from this, ceases to permit the consequences of eventualities to run through the fingers like the beads of a rosary. He records [erfasst] the constellation in which his own epoch comes into contact with that of an earlier one. He thereby establishes a concept of the present as that of the here-and-now, in which splinters of messianic time are shot through.
Surely the time of the soothsayers, who divined what lay hidden in the lap of the future, was experienced neither as homogenous nor as empty. Whoever keeps this in mind will perhaps have an idea of how past time was experienced as remembrance: namely, just the same way. It is well-known that the Jews were forbidden to look into the future. The Torah and the prayers instructed them, by contrast, in remembrance. This disenchanted those who fell prey to the future, who sought advice from the soothsayers. For that reason the future did not, however, turn into a homogenous and empty time for the Jews. For in it every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter."
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