[lbo-talk] Engels, Zizek, first steps.

John Glastonbury jglastonbury at gmail.com
Mon Jul 4 08:59:51 PDT 2011


I want to thank you all for your responses, both on and off list. It's been encouraging.

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Chuck Grimes" <c123grimes at att.net> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2011 20:52:10 -0700 Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] lbo-talk Digest, Vol 1618, Issue 1

"I favor a different approach since I never had any capital to invest in anything except rent, food, and substance abuse.

So here's my plan. Trick the asshole government with fancy reform sounding words into paying you to start a revolution they can't see coming.

CG

ps. Hope you're laughing. It does work every now and again."

-----

Neither have I..... $500 is BIG money to me.... The most I ever made was when I worked at a personal injury law firm (yuck, I know...) and I made $11.00 an hour, at about 32 hrs/week; an hour commute to and from; rent, bills, etc....

Any tips on how to do that Chuck? Or will this be part of the Zizek reality show special, teaching his audience to write out bogus grants or run for local offices with access to slush funds.. aka the local tax receipts. Then how to abscond with the money and use it to seed protest/activist organizations and cooperatives and local third parties. All the while making ridiculous metaphors out of pop culture.

Class struggle as hucksterism and scam artistry... that's one way to save the masses from the gov't. And, also, would be a useful 'false flag' operation to discredit business and gov't all the more...

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Date: Mon, 4 Jul 2011 08:08:16 -0400 Subject: [lbo-talk] Booyah! Marx and Engels as stock speculators (Was [lbo-talk Digest, Vol 1618, Issue 1)

Not to mention Marx and Engels, whose correspondence reveals them to have each been avid investors in the stock market. Further to Ravi's suggestion, however, there's no indication they considered joining Barings to subvert the system "from within". :)

------ I remember hearing this somewhere; and of course Engels himself WAS a capitalist and he invested heavily in Marx's survival and continued ability to work. Maybe too many of us aspire to be *like* Marx without bothering to remember that he needed people like Engels to support him. I'd even say that we need an army of Engels in finance, industry, banking, etc. to properly nurture those of us who want nothing more than to hole up in the library for years and years working on master-treatises. Imagine how little Marx would have gotten done if he was forced to teach a bunch of bourgeois children he despised?

I also recall reading, probably somewhere on this list or Proyect's, that a few Spanish anarchists millionaires would short the market during times of crisis, effectively making the crisis worse. That approach seems closest to my ideal of a 'marxist' bank or investment firm; i.e. set up positions that will make TONS of money the next time a huge crisis causes investors to panic (not unlike what Goldman Sachs did re: the mortgage market). This money could best be 'invested' in unions that would launch industrial actions at the peak of the crisis... at least that'd be one way of using it.



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