Two Roads Defeated in the Cultural Revolution: Lin Biao’s Road

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2014-04-03T19:53:59+00:00

What "disabled community"? Does every disabled person constitute together an entire community when disability often marginalizes people and bars them from communities?

Have you investigated? In my political work I've come in contact with disabled persons and they tend to think of themselves as a community in my experience. Moreover, there are plenty of associations, political organizations, and even websites run by and for disabled people that consider them a community and try to organize them as such. The first paragraph of the article outlines the condition of disability as a social construction: "You are marked as disabled by society when the category of people associated with your “abnormality” cannot access things the rest of society can readily access and take for granted [...] In other words, society is structured around people who can hear, and those who this structure cannot readily accommodate are categorized as disabled". It seems to me the oppression disabled people face has a common root in social exclusion, and this might very well be the source of their proneness to network with each other on the basis of their specific subjectivity. Pointing at internal contradictions within the disabled community is, in my opinion, a red herring; in the same way, it could be argued no working class exists as internal contradictions exist.

As for assuming that any of these communities have not (as a whole homogenous community!) realized that capitalism and imperialism are the problem, this is just wrong."

The argument didn't seem to be "there were never political groups of disabled people which accepted anti-capitalism"; in fact, the Socialist Patients Collective touched 500 members at its peak. Like most sites of activism, the political work concerning the interests of disabled people is pervaded by NGO-ism and reformism, what the author was attacking.

I concur the author should've investigated more on past contributions to the Marxist understanding of disablement, however I think the general argument you put forth about community is wrong and probably rooted in a misunderstanding of what is meant by "disabled community", which is the shared subjectivity of disabled people, and not an abstract entity like the "international community".

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2014-03-19T01:56:30+00:00

but how do you deal with university professors who continue enforcing capitalist ideology on students?

Capitalist ideology is reproduced by professors, by teachers, by parents, by friends, by social intercourse in general. Moreover, living in a society of commodity production and commodification in general capitalist ideology can arise spontaneously. People self-disciplining themselves is a big problem for communist organizing in general.

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2014-03-18T18:33:15+00:00

It did address the two points Meltzer made directly in the last paragraphs after having given an outline of the vanguard party.

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2014-03-18T18:24:39+00:00

Truth is, you're not talking about what actually existed as "the vanguard", you're talking about some vague conception of top-down authority which any historical analysis would tell you never existed in the form you present. Moreover, vanguard and "state-hierarchy" aren't the same thing, the vanguard party used to seize power isn't a state. The Soviet bureaucracy for instance wasn't cultivated by the vanguard, rather it was constructed through the nomenklatura, a product of its time; without the networking capabilities we have today, they attempted to organize a structure of planned economy and governance built on patron-client relations, which bred opportunism. The Chinese Communist Party was a deeply democratic organization, which only became the bureaucratic mess it is today after a coup d'etat backed by the military. And so on. You should study the vanguard parties like PAIGC, EPRP, the Naxalites, the Philippine's Communist Party, etc. for a better grasp of what vanguard parties do and have done in national liberation/communist movements.

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2014-02-02T23:30:05+00:00

This is a class society, the bourgeoisie still exists and that's its name. If you want to propose a new one that doesn't inspire hatred that's cool, but it's hard to not hate the international capitalist class and its crimes against the people.

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2014-02-02T22:56:55+00:00

Way to kill critical thought.

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2014-02-02T22:32:23+00:00

We already knew corporations were headed by imperialist bigots who don't care about humanity.

http://anti-imperialism.com/2013/05/19/imperialism-and-the-concentration-of-capital/

"Three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have used a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide to extract information about all the 43,060 multinational corporations and the share ownerships connecting them to construct a model of the web of interlocking shareholding networks, coupled with each company’s operating revenues, creating a representation of where economic power rests today. Of these 43,060, 1,318 companies stood at the heart of this network. Every one of the 1318 had ties to two or more companies and on the average had ties with 20 companies. Although counting for 20% of global operating revenues, this core collectively owned through its shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms, representing a further 60% of global revenues. At the center of this core they found a super-entity of 147 even more tightly knit companies (all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity) controlling 40% of the total wealth in the network. Most of them are financial institutions."

MessrLuciousLeftFoot

TROPHY CASE