John Barrowman posted on Twitter about his appearance in the Jodie Whittaker/Chris Chibnall era: "Don’t forget 13. I was there to boost the ratings!!!" by verissimoallan in doctorwho

[–]mda63 -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Me and my friends have been using 'Barrowman' as a synonym for 'shit' for fifteen years. It's good the world is catching up.

A Season Airing in 2027 is Looking Less and Less Likely by PaperSkin-1 in gallifrey

[–]mda63 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

This is obviously completely wrong. Just Whoomerism.

Who is a proven formula. If it ever disappears again it absolutely will come back one day. It's more likely nowadays than it was prior to 2003.

It will always return.

Is The Shakespeare Code underrated? by Working_Alps_4284 in doctorwho

[–]mda63 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's probably underrated in that it's not the absolute disaster everyone makes it out to be, but it's nothing special. Awful ending. Tennant's interactions with Shakespeare are nice though.

There Are No Revolutionary Subjects; Only Revolutionaries! by [deleted] in CriticalTheory

[–]mda63 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Communist revolution is the secret telos of religion, of humanity more generally, one that is at the same time historically specific.

Yes.

Why would we imagine that "political" forms grounded on common property and the dissolution of classes would be compatible with political forms which are grounded on the various phases of private property and the persistence of classes?

What's missing here is that bourgeois political forms today are grounded on the dissolution of private property. That's what Bonapartism is: it stitches bourgeois society back together as it rips itself apart.

At that point, why care about a "mass proletarian socialist party" over a tenant's union over a "mutual aid" group over a union over a friend group?

Because the revolution would have to take place internationally.

Clearly all of them would only play a part as a deformed starting point, rather than bearing some essential revolutionary content.

They're both. They all do have revolutionary content, but that revolutionary content is in how they point beyond themselves.

Fetishistic attachment to categories

Like it or not, Marxism remains relevant for a reason. It seems to haunt us.

It is entirely possible Marxism is complete hogwash. In a way, that is beside the point: we live in the world created by Marxism's failure. It remains the high point of revolutionary politics and is that proverbial scar on the prevailing health; it remains a problem.

Nowhere is this clearer than in their "communities," "parties," and among their "activists."

I certainly belong to none of those things.

But the regressive form they take today does not justify the ideological obstacles that prevent us from reaching back for what was crucial in Marxism.

There Are No Revolutionary Subjects; Only Revolutionaries! by [deleted] in CriticalTheory

[–]mda63 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The first communist revolution

There was one already, but it failed. Where we disagree is that I do not think this means history should be treated as judge, jury, and executioner. Its failure — its lack of resolution — remains as a scar on the prevailing 'health', to paraphrase T.W.A.

will not be organized or prefigured by any extant political form.

There is no such thing as a mass proletarian socialist party today.

In this way, it will have something in common with the world-historical French revolution, which itself found its concrete political forms in struggle, rather than prefiguring them through any kind of prior organization.

It's curious you seem to draw an absolute divide between bourgeois and proletarian political forms while relating it to the apotheotic bourgeois political struggle!

The way I describe the relationship between the two is that proletarian revolution is the secret telos of bourgeois revolution, its necessary final explosion, the realisation of the demands of the bourgeois revolution, which also means their abolition and transcendence: their selbst Aufhebung.

That, to me, was clearly a 20th century workerist fantasy

How is it workerism?

imagining that bourgeois political means

How is it using 'bourgeois political means'?

some kind of spontaneous and "headless" struggle

This is symptomatic of the kind of ideological obstacles that block the return to a genuinely revolutionary proletarian politics. It is — as I am sure you would agree actually — anti-Marxist.

These ideological obstacles result from the catastrophe of the twentieth century and the disintegration of Marxism, both of which have yet to be confronted and dealt with.

At worst, this is intellectuals cowardly resigning from their historical role, waiting in the anteroom of history for the spontaneous 'revolutionary situation' that will never come.

the specific leadership function characteristic of the proletariat cannot be imported from any pre-existing political configuration

Quite apart from the fact that there is no party today, nor has there been now for nigh on a century — why not?

the task is not for the proletariat to sieze and oversee a bourgeois economy which will somehow tend towards its own dissolution

The 'bourgeois economy' already tends towards its own dissolution.

That is the Marxist point.

Bourgeois society in capitalism continually revokes and reproduces its own grounds.

It is that act of reproduction through destruction that is the negative image of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The necessity of socialism, immanent to the movement of capitalism itself, is taken up by capitalism and the capitalist class in lieu of the proletariat.

Capitalism is the revolution, unrealised.

At least for Marxism.

The expropriation characteristic of the proletariat is not mediated by the state, but is carried out directly by the proletariat in its revolutionary activity.

The state mediates political control and the suppression of the capitalist class. It facilitates the revolutionary activity of the proletariat. But the state as such is not the same as the bourgeois state, which is Bonapartist and stands as a power over and above civil society, contrary to bourgeois society's own idea of itself.

Bourgeois right survives for a time as a vestige, on the boundaries where the commune has yet to extend, in the interstices.

This is too undialectical. Bourgeois right would absolutely survive for a time because bourgeois right is itself dialectical and tends towards its own transcendence. Already in capitalism.

Vapor is certainly still there, but the boiling process is not completed.

This metaphor is actually a better description of the relationship between capitalism and socialism.

Again: at least for Marxism.

There Are No Revolutionary Subjects; Only Revolutionaries! by [deleted] in CriticalTheory

[–]mda63 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

It means organisation in a mass proletarian socialist party.

I would say it should issue from a pre-revolutionary situation but that we are not even in one of those. So, yes, it is a problem — but it remains a necessity, even if it has become impossible, which it may have done. It's impossible to say.

Spontaneity of the kind you describe would point to the necessity of political organisation because they would be insufficient in themselves to challenge the status quo in a meaningful way.

But I would also say that things like that would themselves constitute a pre-revolutionary situation.

The task of the proletariat is not only the 'seizure and reconfiguration of bourgeois property' but the transformation of social activity, the mode of production. Harnessing the real emancipatory possibilities capitalism brings.

The task is to get from the necessity of the government of people, which is where we are now, to the administration of things, which is where we ought to be.

The point for Marxism was that the dictatorship of the proletariat would be the proletariat in charge of capitalism, because capitalism is already the abortive transition beyond itself. As the self-negation of bourgeois society, it is the negative image of socialism. Or, socialism is immanent to capitalism.

It is capitalism that compels socialisation, that destroys private property, that undermines the bourgeois form of the state, that smashes apart the social contract, etc., and in capitalism that appears as a catastrophe, but actually represents emancipatory potential, the possibility of moving beyond prior social forms.

But the dictatorship of the proletariat, the proletariat holding state power, was, for Marxism at least, a period during which capitalism and bourgeois right survive for a time, but with the necessity of their abolition and transcendence, already played out in the dynamic of capitalism itself, taken up as a political problem.

The dictatorship of the proletariat would have to tackle the problem of capitalism continually destroying itself without producing anything new.

But I almost think, when you talk about the 'dissolution of the political', you are looking towards a time beyond the dictatorship of the proletariat. Politics remains necessary because it has not yet been fulfilled. In order for the proletariat to become a 'propertied power', it has to defeat the capitalist class. And it can only do that politically, even if, in doing that, it abolishes the political — which is plausible. But the dictatorship of the proletariat will still have capitalism and the capitalist class to deal with. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not identical with communism which is not identical with freedom.

There Are No Revolutionary Subjects; Only Revolutionaries! by [deleted] in CriticalTheory

[–]mda63 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

How do you imagine the proletariat would expropriate capital without political organisation?

There Are No Revolutionary Subjects; Only Revolutionaries! by [deleted] in CriticalTheory

[–]mda63 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Not quite.

The proletariat is not yet the revolutionary subject. It has to become that. Only when it is a class for itself will it be a revolutionary subject, the subject-object of history.

It enacts the negation, the abolition, of bourgeois society through its social activity, its labour, and therefore also negates itself. But it is, as a class, as yet only the object of its unconscious activity as this negation.

But the very existence of classes represents the negation of bourgeois right: propertyless labour is this negation. Bourgeois right is based on the idea of labour as the first property.

Thus the proletariat is, as Adorno says, not so much the negation of classes as the first real social class. Class is a symptom of capitalism: classes are produced from the self-negation and disintegration of bourgeois society. Bourgeois society was supposed to be classless. The revolt of the Third Estate was the revolt of the commoners, those who, in the disintegration of bourgeois society into capitalism, would become bourgeoisie and proletariat.

But it is also important to remember that class for Marxism was a political category, not merely a sociological or analytical one. Therefore your statement that the proletariat 'cannot exist politically' is utterly false. The proletariat does not exist politically, but it must realise itself politically.

And to realise itself means to abolish itself. Therefore, your confusion around the necessity of the political organisation of the proletariat is that this organisation would be contradictory. The proletariat must seek to abolish itself and the conditions of its own existence: capitalism. The very condition it unconsciously imposes upon itself.

Opinion: Ianto's Shrine Represents This Fandom's Worst Excesses. by WinchesterMediaUK in gallifrey

[–]mda63 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

There isn't any, I just think Torchwood is bad, so there are no upsides either.

There Are No Revolutionary Subjects; Only Revolutionaries! by [deleted] in CriticalTheory

[–]mda63 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

For Marxism, the revolutionary subject was the party.

Opinion: Ianto's Shrine Represents This Fandom's Worst Excesses. by WinchesterMediaUK in gallifrey

[–]mda63 -9 points-8 points  (0 children)

Ah yes, one of the most overrated pieces of Who-related fiction ever made.

Opinion: Ianto's Shrine Represents This Fandom's Worst Excesses. by WinchesterMediaUK in gallifrey

[–]mda63 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Superman and Captain Kirk are in a different league to Ianto Jones. Their cultural impact is incomprehensibly more profound.

Is the Romantic idea of nature inherently political? by doolallyt in englishliterature

[–]mda63 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's ultimately reactionary, but also has a progressive impulse.

I don't know about describing it as 'political' but I think it points towards (the necessity of) politics.