Comments below.
Sean Andrews:
I think it was Potemkin, but maybe Krondstat had something like that as well.
In any case, I hope we're not staking out prospects for revolution on children's disgust at cafeteria food: several decades of very bad food have proven no such potential to exist.
s
On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 20:22, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> My daughter just informed me that elementary schools in Oakland are
feeding
> kids meat that McDonalds rejects.
>
> Having just watched Food Inc., this revelation has actually pushed me to a
> state beyond nausea.
>
> Carrol dismisses my concerns about quality of food, but didn't Krondstat
> start over spoiled meat?
>
Several preliminary points. I dismiss Joanna's complaints about food only to the extent that they implicitly sneer at people who love junk food. It's mostly junk-food lovers who will have to overthrow the capitalist state. To sneer at them, even by tenouous implication is to immortalize capitalism.
That aside, I think Sean is wrong in his hope that we are not "staking out prospects for revolution on children's disgust at cafeteriaa food." He is wrong for two reasons. The first is that our hopes should be focused on _insurrection_ , not on revolution. It is a focus on revolution which drags us into arguments about "socialism" which are cunter-productive and grounded in a false conception both of the scope and limits of theory and of human motivation. The only people who think socialism must be the goal of socialist revolution are those who (a) are already "revolutionaries" and (b) ignorant of the process by which they themselves became socialists. Speculatively, and as a mere personal opinion having no theoretical force, I kind of think that socialism may work - but to assert _either_ that it will or that it will not work is to claim possession of a crystal ball, and neither Marxists nor anti-Marxists possess a crystal ball in which they can forecast the future. Socialism as a motive for present action is a pipe dream, a fantasy.
But while focus on revolution (i.e. on the total overturn of capitalist relations, which will take generations to achieve) - while that is a fantasy, focus on insurrection is of vital importance to make sense of current activity. But we must take care here: there can be no scenario for, not theorization of _any_ future event, let alone an insurrection to overthrow the capitalist state.
Let me go back to the first time I read Vol. I of Capital - at a time when I wouldhave said anyone was crazy who thought I would ever become a Marxist. I had the utmost contempt for Marxism while (of coruse) knowing nothing about it. Anyhow the book had an immense impact on me - but NOT at all in the direction of socialism. I remember a conversation at the time when I idly speculated that perhaps the best future for humanity was a return to some moderate form of feudalism. That is, _Capital_, even on first reading, for some at least (at least for me) posed the future of humanity in terms of the destruction of capitalism. I knew nothing of either Lenin or Luxemburg at the time, but what I was feeling was a version of her "socialism or barbarism," but in the form of "non-capitalism or barbarism" with no particular conception of what that "non-capitalism" would consist of but with something like certainty that capitalism not only led to barbarism but _was_ barbarism. Now, a cou0le years later, when I decided that when I learned what it was I would be a Marxist and a Leninist, I of course got interested in that will-o-the-wisp, that pig in a poke, "Socialsim," and I convinced myself and others that the motive for revolution was to achieve a socialist society (with all the crystal-ball gazing, all the writing of recipes for the cookshops of the future, all the ridiculous assumptions as to the "reach" of theory and human thought in general, that such a 'motive' implies.) That motive simply butters no parsnips - it is a form of self-delusion, like believing in Obama. Marx, if I remember correctly, devoted one paragraph in _Capital_ to "socialism," withut using the term. That paragraph says all, I think that can usefully bee said abut "socialism" in any serious theoretical discussion: It is the realm of freedom (a freedom dimly glimpsed by Marx by his knowledge of the embryonic struggles against capitalism, and then _used_ by him not as a vision of the fture but as a perspective by which to LOOK BACK on capitalism as a completed whole, as history, and therefore able to develop his Critique of Political Economy, his demonstration that the onoly escape from the barbarism in which we are trapped lies through the utter destruction of capitalism. That is our motive -we have only vague hopes of what may follow it. And further, we do not know, we cannot know, whether we will ever win this struggle to smash the imfamy. Humanity may lose: there is nothing in our knowledge of the world, of human history, to give any basis for simply assuming "victory." But then, for many humans, when it comes t making the actual choice, do prefer to die on their feet over living on their knees.
So the gate to a future forhumanity can be summarized as one-two-three many insurrections (both successful and failed), and we can see only dimly what the possibilities are on the other side of that gate; we can only see that capitalism creates the _necessity_ (forget the possibility or desirability) of its destruction, and that destruction depends on such insurrections. Thus while there is no blueprint for insurrection, we _do_ need a dim image of it, analogous to the dim image of socialism Marx posits in Capital. (And, pace Marv and his demand for a _socialist_ insurrection, we need only a dim image of insurrection against _any_ modern or semi-modern state, regardless of the motives of that insurrection. Hence counter-revolutions can be as useful an image as a workers- insurrection. And we have such; moreover, we have them echoed, dramatized, made visible in some of the great artworks of the 20th-c, of which perhaps Eisenstein's _Potemikin_ is the greatest. Brecht catches one aspect of it in the pome in which he points out a tank is wonderful weapon but it takes a man to drive it. And Lincoln Stephens caught the same aspect in a series of lectures he gave in Paris, which Pound heard and condensed in the Cantos.
But Potemkin remains supreme, and I have some difficulty here. I can books read to me, and short texts I can read on screen. But there is no way that I would ever see Pottemkin again except as a sort of abstract impredssdionist painting in varius shades of green. I'll have to trust to a shaky memory of seeing it 55 years ago. And I'm particularly unsure about the precise sequence of the exploding lions, the tipping baby carriage, & the sobering of the monocled lady in her Sunday best. They all merge together in my memory, and I think there the three echo each other in the film, but I may be mistaken. The whole of the Odessa steps episode is choreographed against that baby carriage rolling down the steps, and its final tipping over at the bottom is humanity's future plunge into the abysss of barbarism, a barbarism initiated both by the rotten meat at the beginning and the perfection of dress, movement, and firing of the Cossacks (or was it catets?), a part of the sequence which points forward to Tiananmen Square or the Chicago Convention Riots of 1968. Thhen, as the baby reaches the bottom of the steps, the guns of the Ptemkin finally roar and we see the shattering of the Czarist Lions. But without the almost Easter Parade nature of the early parts of the Odessa steps sequence the guns would be irrelevant. And that returns our focus to the Potemkin as the fleet approaches, with those enormous guns (all of modern technology and police brutality caught up there). Clearly the Potemkin mutineers are as helpless against that force as were the monocled woman and mother of the baby in the Odessa steps against the Cossacks. We see the same terrigying precision as the machinery moves the guns into position to destroy the Potemking. And then they do not!
They don't fire: but they could have! It is as though Eisenstein had intuited Luxemburg's grim realistm or seen the implications of Marx's final word in an interview, not long before his death, with a reporter from the U.S. "What is?" the reporter, and after a long pause the old man replied, with a single word: Struggle! And the outcome of struggle, of course, is never predictable - that is why we call it a struggle rather than a mechanical puzzle. And the men on the Potemkin, however cetain their defeat by the approaching fleet, were prepared to fight back - that had already been presaged in the firing of their own guns (even though they knew already that the fleet was approaching) at the Czarist Lions: a futile gesture of revenge for thd death of humanity in the monocoled woman, the fallen mother, the crashing baby carriage. The viewers of the movie know that the gaiety at the top of the steps is doomed, but (I hope) do not whine about it. In Yeats's great poem, Lapis Lazuili, substitute "insurrection" for his "things" in:
All things fall and are built again, And those that build them again are gay.
Capitalism is not evil - it is merely history. I forget now the thread in which one of my posts drew the response from Chuck Grimes, "Fuck You, Carrol." But my point then, and in several of my responses to Joanna, is that leftists have no right to complain about any aspect of capitalism merely to indicate their dislike or the pain it gives them. Too fucking bac.
I want to see the gaiety in such posts, and if there is no gaiety there, then they are reactionary.
And yes, why not children's dislike of cafeteria food being what we stake our hopes for "revolution" (or rther insurrection) in. Why not. That is essentially the way all serius insurrections begin: someone reacts to some stimulus, and before anyone knows it, the Insurrection has begun. They can't be planned. They always surprise us. After all, Lenin did not object to the spontaneous - that would be spitting against the wind. He objected (and rightly) to the WORSHIP of the spontaneous. And he also called Trotsky a windbag for saying there would be no more Father Gapons (a purely 'spontaneous' event), declaring that if there was to be a revolution there must be hundreds of Father Gapons in our future. Why not some grouch who complains of food, and mutinies - not whines - in response.
Carrol
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Comments below.
Sean Andrews:
I think it was Potemkin, but maybe Krondstat had something like that as well.
In any case, I hope we're not staking out prospects for revolution on children's disgust at cafeteria food: several decades of very bad food have proven no such potential to exist.
s
On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 20:22, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> My daughter just informed me that elementary schools in Oakland are
feeding
> kids meat that McDonalds rejects.
>
> Having just watched Food Inc., this revelation has actually pushed me to a
> state beyond nausea.
>
> Carrol dismisses my concerns about quality of food, but didn't Krondstat
> start over spoiled meat?
>
Several preliminary points. I dismiss Joanna's complaints about food only to the extent that they implicitly sneer at people who love junk food. It's mostly junk-food lovers who will have to overthrow the capitalist state. To sneer at them, even by tenouous implication is to immortalize capitalism.
That aside, I think Sean is wrong in his hope that we are not "staking out prospects for revolution on children's disgust at cafeteriaa food." He is wrong for two reasons. The first is that our hopes should be focused on _insurrection_ , not on revolution. It is a focus on revolution which drags us into arguments about "socialism" which are cunter-productive and grounded in a false conception both of the scope and limits of theory and of human motivation. The only people who think socialism must be the goal of socialist revolution are those who (a) are already "revolutionaries" and (b) ignorant of the process by which they themselves became socialists. Speculatively, and as a mere personal opinion having no theoretical force, I kind of think that socialism may work - but to assert _either_ that it will or that it will not work is to claim possession of a crystal ball, and neither Marxists nor anti-Marxists possess a crystal ball in which they can forecast the future. Socialism as a motive for present action is a pipe dream, a fantasy.
But while focus on revolution (i.e. on the total overturn of capitalist relations, which will take generations to achieve) - while that is a fantasy, focus on insurrection is of vital importance to make sense of current activity. But we must take care here: there can be no scenario for, not theorization of _any_ future event, let alone an insurrection to overthrow the capitalist state.
Let me go back to the first time I read Vol. I of Capital - at a time when I wouldhave said anyone was crazy who thought I would ever become a Marxist. I had the utmost contempt for Marxism while (of coruse) knowing nothing about it. Anyhow the book had an immense impact on me - but NOT at all in the direction of socialism. I remember a conversation at the time when I idly speculated that perhaps the best future for humanity was a return to some moderate form of feudalism. That is, _Capital_, even on first reading, for some at least (at least for me) posed the future of humanity in terms of the destruction of capitalism. I knew nothing of either Lenin or Luxemburg at the time, but what I was feeling was a version of her "socialism or barbarism," but in the form of "non-capitalism or barbarism" with no particular conception of what that "non-capitalism" would consist of but with something like certainty that capitalism not only led to barbarism but _was_ barbarism. Now, a cou0le years later, when I decided that when I learned what it was I would be a Marxist and a Leninist, I of course got interested in that will-o-the-wisp, that pig in a poke, "Socialsim," and I convinced myself and others that the motive for revolution was to achieve a socialist society (with all the crystal-ball gazing, all the writing of recipes for the cookshops of the future, all the ridiculous assumptions as to the "reach" of theory and human thought in general, that such a 'motive' implies.) That motive simply butters no parsnips - it is a form of self-delusion, like believing in Obama. Marx, if I remember correctly, devoted one paragraph in _Capital_ to "socialism," withut using the term. That paragraph says all, I think that can usefully bee said abut "socialism" in any serious theoretical discussion: It is the realm of freedom (a freedom dimly glimpsed by Marx by his knowledge of the embryonic struggles against capitalism, and then _used_ by him not as a vision of the fture but as a perspective by which to LOOK BACK on capitalism as a completed whole, as history, and therefore able to develop his Critique of Political Economy, his demonstration that the onoly escape from the barbarism in which we are trapped lies through the utter destruction of capitalism. That is our motive -we have only vague hopes of what may follow it. And further, we do not know, we cannot know, whether we will ever win this struggle to smash the imfamy. Humanity may lose: there is nothing in our knowledge of the world, of human history, to give any basis for simply assuming "victory." But then, for many humans, when it comes t making the actual choice, do prefer to die on their feet over living on their knees.
So the gate to a future forhumanity can be summarized as one-two-three many insurrections (both successful and failed), and we can see only dimly what the possibilities are on the other side of that gate; we can only see that capitalism creates the _necessity_ (forget the possibility or desirability) of its destruction, and that destruction depends on such insurrections. Thus while there is no blueprint for insurrection, we _do_ need a dim image of it, analogous to the dim image of socialism Marx posits in Capital. (And, pace Marv and his demand for a _socialist_ insurrection, we need only a dim image of insurrection against _any_ modern or semi-modern state, regardless of the motives of that insurrection. Hence counter-revolutions can be as useful an image as a workers- insurrection. And we have such; moreover, we have them echoed, dramatized, made visible in some of the great artworks of the 20th-c, of which perhaps Eisenstein's _Potemikin_ is the greatest. Brecht catches one aspect of it in the pome in which he points out a tank is wonderful weapon but it takes a man to drive it. And Lincoln Stephens caught the same aspect in a series of lectures he gave in Paris, which Pound heard and condensed in the Cantos.
But Potemkin remains supreme, and I have some difficulty here. I can books read to me, and short texts I can read on screen. But there is no way that I would ever see Pottemkin again except as a sort of abstract impredssdionist painting in varius shades of green. I'll have to trust to a shaky memory of seeing it 55 years ago. And I'm particularly unsure about the precise sequence of the exploding lions, the tipping baby carriage, & the sobering of the monocled lady in her Sunday best. They all merge together in my memory, and I think there the three echo each other in the film, but I may be mistaken. The whole of the Odessa steps episode is choreographed against that baby carriage rolling down the steps, and its final tipping over at the bottom is humanity's future plunge into the abysss of barbarism, a barbarism initiated both by the rotten meat at the beginning and the perfection of dress, movement, and firing of the Cossacks (or was it catets?), a part of the sequence which points forward to Tiananmen Square or the Chicago Convention Riots of 1968. Thhen, as the baby reaches the bottom of the steps, the guns of the Ptemkin finally roar and we see the shattering of the Czarist Lions. But without the almost Easter Parade nature of the early parts of the Odessa steps sequence the guns would be irrelevant. And that returns our focus to the Potemkin as the fleet approaches, with those enormous guns (all of modern technology and police brutality caught up there). Clearly the Potemkin mutineers are as helpless against that force as were the monocled woman and mother of the baby in the Odessa steps against the Cossacks. We see the same terrigying precision as the machinery moves the guns into position to destroy the Potemking. And then they do not!
They don't fire: but they could have! It is as though Eisenstein had intuited Luxemburg's grim realistm or seen the implications of Marx's final word in an interview, not long before his death, with a reporter from the U.S. "What is?" the reporter, and after a long pause the old man replied, with a single word: Struggle! And the outcome of struggle, of course, is never predictable - that is why we call it a struggle rather than a mechanical puzzle. And the men on the Potemkin, however cetain their defeat by the approaching fleet, were prepared to fight back - that had already been presaged in the firing of their own guns (even though they knew already that the fleet was approaching) at the Czarist Lions: a futile gesture of revenge for thd death of humanity in the monocoled woman, the fallen mother, the crashing baby carriage. The viewers of the movie know that the gaiety at the top of the steps is doomed, but (I hope) do not whine about it. In Yeats's great poem, Lapis Lazuili, substitute "insurrection" for his "things" in:
All things fall and are built again, And those that build them again are gay.
Capitalism is not evil - it is merely history. I forget now the thread in which one of my posts drew the response from Chuck Grimes, "Fuck You, Carrol." But my point then, and in several of my responses to Joanna, is that leftists have no right to complain about any aspect of capitalism merely to indicate their dislike or the pain it gives them. Too fucking bac.
I want to see the gaiety in such posts, and if there is no gaiety there, then they are reactionary.
And yes, why not children's dislike of cafeteria food being what we stake our hopes for "revolution" (or rther insurrection) in. Why not. That is essentially the way all serius insurrections begin: someone reacts to some stimulus, and before anyone knows it, the Insurrection has begun. They can't be planned. They always surprise us. After all, Lenin did not object to the spontaneous - that would be spitting against the wind. He objected (and rightly) to the WORSHIP of the spontaneous. And he also called Trotsky a windbag for saying there would be no more Father Gapons (a purely 'spontaneous' event), declaring that if there was to be a revolution there must be hundreds of Father Gapons in our future. Why not some grouch who complains of food, and mutinies - not whines - in response.
Carrol