How about you fags stop jerking off in yet another Chapo Trap House thread and talk about some REAL shit.
>Camatte: The Wandering of Humanity
>1. Despotism of Capital
>The disintegration of consciousness which can be seen in manifestations like the women's liberation movement, the gay liberation movement and anti-psychiatry (which are only possible after the work of Freud, Reich, and the feminist movement at the beginning of this century) is not part of the simultaneous emergence of revolutionary consciousness, but only reflects the end of bourgeois society based on value, on a fixed standard which affected all levels of human life. The disintegration began when the general equivalent conflicted with circulation. If the former general equivalent gave way, it was lost. The State had to force all subjects to respect a normalcy based on a standard which established the values of society. The law of value imprisoned human beings, forcing them into stereotypes, into fixed modes of being. The highest development of morality appeared in Kant's categorical imperative. By engulfing the general equivalent, by becoming its own representation, capital removed the prohibitions and rigid schemas. At that point human beings are fixed to its movement, which can take off from the normal or abnormal, moral or immoral human being.
>The finite, limited human being, the individual of bourgeois society, is disappearing. People are passionately calling for the liberated human being, a being who is at once a social being and a Gemeinwesen. But at present it is capital that is recomposing man, giving him form and matter; communal being comes in the form of collective worker, individuality in the form of consumer of capital. Since capital is indefinite it allows the human being to have access to a state beyond the finite in an infinite becoming of appropriation which is never realized, renewing at every instant the illusion of total blossoming.
Can we have a discussion on Jacques Camatte?
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Based.
>In the era of its real domination, capital has run away (as the cyberneticians put it), it has escaped. [7] It is no longer controlled by human beings. (Human beings in the form of proletarians might, at least passively, represent a barrier to capital.) It is no longer limited by nature. Some production processes carried out over periods of time lead to clashes with natural barriers: increase in the number of human beings, destruction of nature, pollution. But these barriers cannot be theoretically regarded as barriers which capital cannot supersede. At present there are three possible courses for the capitalist mode of production (in addition to the destruction of humanity - a hypothesis that cannot be ignored):
>complete autonomy of capital: a mechanistic utopia where human beings become simple accessories of an automated system, though still retaining an executive role;
>mutation of the human being, or rather a change of the species: production of a perfectly programmable being which has lost all the characteristics of the species Homo sapiens. This would not require an automatized system, since this perfect human being would be made to do whatever is required;
>generalized lunacy: in the place of human beings, and on the basis of their present limitations, capital realizes everything they desire (normal or abnormal), but human beings cannot find themselves and enjoyment continually lies in the future. The human being is carried off in the run-away of capital, and keeps it going.
How do the self-proclaimed "marxists" of today cope with this shit?
>Bourgeois society has been destroyed and we have the despotism of capital. Class conflicts are replaced by struggles between the gangs-organizations which are the varied modes of being of capital. As a result of the domination of representation, all organizations which want to oppose capital are engulfed by it; they are consumed by phagocytes.
>It is the real end of democracy. One can no longer hold that there is a class which represents future humanity, and a fortiori there is no party, no group; there can be no delegation of power.
>Advertising crassly reflects the fact that capital is representation, that it survives because it is representation in the mind of each human being (internalizing what was externalized). Advertising is the discourse of capital: everything is possible, all norms have disappeared. Advertising organizes the subversion of the present for the sake of an apparently different future.
There will be no tomorrow, no past, no nation, no man, but a fresh, ice cool Coca Cola and a Royale with Cheese.
From here to infinity.
>generalized lunacy: in the place of human beings, and on the basis of their present limitations, capital realizes everything they desire (normal or abnormal), but human beings cannot find themselves and enjoyment continually lies in the future. The human being is carried off in the run-away of capital, and keeps it going
sorry, but this actually sounds pretty fuckin based, how can we make this happen?
Literally keep riding the big neo-liberal/progressivist dick and I think we'll get there.
And I think this is the most likely conclusion.
what about NS revolution and esoteric hitlerism? that's probably the one solution you haven't thought about.
I have high doubts capital would see a societal collapse of such calibre to be benefical to its perpetual existence.
its the last taboo, if you hate the system so much why don't forge yourself into the ultimate Enemy of the system, regardless of how ridiculous and self parodic it seems. Imagine if you will a leaderless army of bloodthirsty satanic national socialists wrecking havoc all over america
Put your trips back on Deep&Edgy
They don't. He was largely hated in his time, and those of us who followed Camatte were left trying to maintain some semblance of the original value within a festering return of the racket after it had been thoroughly liberalised/capitalised. This meant being forced into sexual/racial misconduct trials a decade before anyone else was experiencing it, a rigid academia of professional bourgeois marxists, and something of a void of the last few communists/marxists in existence. Strangely enough, this meant that even these final places were to succumb to the regression of the racket - capital, or whatever it was, ossified from within the sanctuary. This was the completion of generalised lunacy.
Although perhaps there remains some redemption here. We see, first of all, that we no longer even have to contend with marxism. Apart from the obvious defeat at the political level, even resignation, they have completely abandoned their own philosophy, they have embraced the racket. On the level of culture generalised lunacy is now a common trait of humanity, its mores, perhaps even its rites. This was my own contention for years and it has finally come true. What this awakening to generalised lunacy means for us is that we have been forced to enter into organisational conflict, and this conflict essentially awakens another resubjectivisation of the human, potentially even away from capital. We see this most clearly in the overtly political nature of these conflicts, even deeper forces presenting themselves, and the subsumption of capital by political necessity.
This looming destruction of the human can lead either to capitulation or an awakening in which the question of a total humanity/gemeinwesen presents itself as a necessity of survival (and in that sense which appears beyond even Marx's categorisation). There is great danger in this, and the possibility of an even deeper form of nihilism, but such totalising force always brings the possibility of resolution, a new age. We must seize upon that future before the left/right/center does, before new rackets appear.
Landfags not wanted.
>The struggle of people against capital has only ever been seen through the narrow focus of class. The only way to be regarded as a real adversary of capital has been to actively identify oneself with the proletariat; all else is romantic, petit bourgeois etc . . . But the very act of reasoning in classist terms means that any particular class is confined within the limits of class analysis. This is particularly important when one considers that the working class has as its mission the elimination of all classes. It also avoids the question of how that class will bring about its own autodestruction, since this classist analysis prevents any lessons being drawn from the tragic intellectual fate of those people who set themselves in opposition to capital without even recognising or identifying their enemy (as with Bergson, for example). Today, when the whole classist approach has been deprived of any solid base, it may be worthwhile to reconsider movements of the right and their thinking. The right is a movement of opposition to capital that seeks to restore a moment which is firmly rooted in the past. Hence in order to eliminate class conflict, the excesses of capitalist individualism, speculation and so on, the Action Francaise and the Nouvelle Action Francaise (NAF) envisage a community which can only be guaranteed, according to them, by a system of monarchy. (See particularly the chapter on capitalism in Les Dossiers de l'Action Francaise).
>It seems that every current or group which opposes capital is nonetheless obliged to focus always on the human as the basis of everything. It takes diverse forms, but it has a profoundly consistent basis and is surprisingly uniform wherever human populations are found. Thus by seeking to restore (and install) the volksgemeinschaft, even the Nazis represent an attempt to create such a community (cf. also their ideology of the Urmensh, the "original man"). We believe that the phenomenon of Nazism is widely misunderstood: it is seen by many people only as a demonic expression of totalitarianism. But the Nazis in Germany had reintroduced an old theme originally theorized by German sociologists like Tonnies and Max Weber. And so in response, we find the Frankfurt school, and most notably Adorno, dealing in empty and sterile concepts of "democracy", due to their incapacity to understand the phenomenon of Nazism. They have been unable to grasp Marx's great insight, which was that he posed the necessity of reforming the community, and that he recognised that this reformation must involve the whole of humanity. The problems are there for everybody; they are serious, and they urgently require solutions. People try to work them out from diverse political angles. However, it is not these problems which determine what is revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, but the solutions put forward - i.e. are they effective or not? And here the racketeer's mentality descends upon us once again: each gang of the left or the right carves out its own intellectual territory; anyone straying into one or the other of these territories is automatically branded as a member of the relevant controlling gang. Thus we have reification: the object is determinant, the subject passive.
You write very eloquently.
Where do we go, if we choose to move beyond the political binary of today?
The racket and lunacy seem to be too deeply ingrained into the public consciousness, in such a way that we might never recover from its choking grasp.
Forever wandering aimlessly.
I lack hope, but I'm not willing to give up.
Following Camatte's definition of Nazism I think we would have to assume a shift within anyone trying to reinvigorate fascist ideas, or anything similar. Perhaps this comes down to nothing more than a shift in the idea of the original man (nrx/neoabsolutism etc suggest this comes down to a renaissance/enlightenment revivification rather than Roman). The more passive, even primitivist methods of conflict employed by both the Left and Right suggests this as well, as opposed to the apocalyptically violent situation of the World Wars.
And yet, this could quickly devolve into simultaneous conflicts of total war and localised apocalypse, the Somme next door to forests of the dead hung on pikes. Or the Thirty Years War with semi-automated weapons.
As I said above, this forces an all new conception of humanity and his organising principles, perhaps even at the religious level as we have been seeing for some time. I don't think anyone on the Left or Right is truly prepared for the changes we are about to witness.
There is obviously, if nothing more, a deep feeling that a total undoing of society is necessary. And as I have said elsewhere, we are already seeing the end of the modern period unfolding before our eyes (if we take Schmitt's conception of modernity and law as a foundation).
youtu.be
Thank you.
My own ideal would be a new religious foundation, but i don't see this forming without catastrophe and hundreds of years of struggle.
Instead, we must attempt to lay the groundwork for this new form of humanity within what is essentially an unending catastrophe apocalypse. And I guess to follow Camatte's classification of possible futures I would say the following are the most likely:
A sustained deepening of crisis, regional conflicts, and political awakening finding itself in a nihilist pragmatism.
The worst war in history, worse than total annihilation through nuclear war as a world civil war sustains itself for half a century or more.
Continuation of the migrant crisis forcing separation of races, counter-emigration of whites, and then eventually a long series of minor conflicts.
Slow breakdown of continentalist allegiances and balkanisation of countries, forcing a mix of democratic and autocratic politics rather than any capital controls, technocracies, or confederations.
Potentially a deep division of rural and urban as people seek to escape the cities, immigration, compounding crises, automation, etc. And then some form of civil war between these disparate regions, perhaps forced by survival/starvation.
A nuclear war with Russia/Chinese victory, and Westerners having to survive within the end of its culture becoming real rather than formal.
In short, we will have to learn to live as the victims of the worshippers of Dionysus, as rended beings. There is no ubermensch coming, it is against the spirit of the age. We would have to instead show our ability to endure such impossible conditions and slowly be given the pieces of the image of a complete human again. Something of a metaphysical liberalism in reverse until we can once again envision the form of gemeinwesen, the necessity of old hierarchies, and an enduring organisation based on eternal laws. For me, a return to understanding the Western spirit is mandatory, while trying to avoid the pitfalls of the divided state of humanist politics (left/right/center), and ideally a return to some form of confederation/regionalism.
Hopefully that makes sense, been a long day and I'm tired. If you want more of a Camatte/capital explanation I can try later on, I've just fallen out of belief in that although I still have great respect for Camatte.
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I'd love to hear more of you!
I've been reading mainly Wandering of Humanity as of now, but I've also got a great interest in Heidegger.
I feel as if I'm holding pieces of some grand puzzle in my hands, wrapped in cloth that I slowly begin to unravel.
I think the confusion of our time will lead people to find something older and essential to continue a worthwhile existence here.
And maybe finally we'll find dasein, our place in being and learning to let things be.
And I wish I'll at least witness the beginning of such time, even if I first have to see the velvet dawn of fathers burying their sons.
I post writings and thoughts here:
mandalietmandaliet.blogspot.com
Much that is posted is quite esoteric in its form, but I also plan to do more straightforward essays like what I have written in this thread. I also have an interest in Heidegger but am no expert on him.
I wouldn't mind discussing this more tomorrow, so if you have any thoughts or any quotes we could try to work through that would be nice.
I think the following quote suits our times quite amptly:
>What is called thinking?
>11/29-39
>Devastation is more uncanny than mere destruction [Verwüstung ist unheimlicher als Vernichtung]. Destruction only sweeps aside all that has grown up or been built up so far, but devastation blocks all future growth and prevents all building. . . .
>The devastation of the earth can easily go along with a quaranteed supreme living standard for man, and just as easily with the organized establishment of a uniform state of happiness for all men.
The eternal boredom Heidegger often spoke of has set upon us once again.
And it's truly a terrifying prospect, that if we want to truly reshape ourselves in avoidance of this boredom on one hand and rejection of devastation on the other, we must willingly throw ourselves into the midst of complete destruction.
this isn't good.
Cope
Yes, an interesting quote. In relation to Camatte I wonder how much this devastation feeds into the need for resubjectivisation. I think of the first quote posted and the 'illusion of total blossoming.' It would also be interesting to consider at what point this devastation is first felt, if it somehow creates the various political forms of capital.
For instance, is devastation what leads to fascism and the escape of capital?
What's wrong with it?
I'm liking your writings, friend, keep it up. I'm liking your esoteric, metaphysical stuff, any articles specifically you'd recommend? The more dense and metaphysically obscure the better
Is this the OP? If you're looking for something related to Camatte and capital I would recommend these:
mandalietmandaliet.blogspot.com
mandalietmandaliet.blogspot.com
The latter, Museum, was basically an attempt to escape from Camatte's trap, the pessimism of the totality of capital, the ruination of the human. It was actually written several years ago as part of another project, but serves as a jumping off point for this project and the moment I realised capital is dead.
There is some presocratic thinking in the former article, so it may be considered dense.
For the esoteric and metaphysical stuff, I think my analysis of Euthyphro is good, although it still needs a proper edit.
This is basically my cosmology, and perhaps the introduction to a series of myths I have planned:
mandalietmandaliet.blogspot.com
And this is basically an introduction to the problems I see with humanism, perhaps a jumping off point on how I would differ in worldview from most modern philosophers
mandalietmandaliet.blogspot.com
And I have multiple writings coming up on war, liberalism, dialectics, modernity, and the conflicting theologies of Greek religion and Christianity.
In any case, thanks for your comment. Definitely looking for people to have discussions with on related topics.
Your archive is pretty small, I'll read all your stuff actually, but I like what you're saying and how you're saying it.
Ignore that imposter, I'm the real OP.
I went through some of your writings earlier today and I've enjoyed them quite a bit, especially the 'Short Letter Against Humanism'.
I haven't written much at all myself, might start something when university begins next autumn.
I'm fundamentally in agreement with everything you're trying to say. Its nice to see were all drinking from the same stream.
Thanks, both of you. If you have any writings of your own to share, or just random thoughts about what you have read, I'd be glad to discuss them.
Chapo threads are fun. I didn't read your post.
This says a lot.
Dialectical materialism ends in cat memes on Facebook.
Cheap.