ReadFanon [any, any]

There are studies about people like you (said in the most positive of ways).

I’d ditch my car for the bike entirely if not for road trips.

The next step is to tally up the yearly costs of owning a car with all that this incurs, then weigh that against how many days per year you typically go on road trips and how much car rental would cost you in the amount of days you’d have to hire a car for.

If it looks like you’d more or less break even without factoring in those surprise costs that happen with car ownership (“Gee, that’s a nice alternator you’ve got there! It sure would be a shame if some day it decided to shit itself and then you’d have to pay for a tow to the mechanic’s to replace the thing while missing a day of work…”) and you think you’d be fine renting for road trips then you’re probably going to be better off selling the car, especially in the long run.

What I’d do from there, if I decided to pull the trigger, would be to set up a secondary bank account and automatically transfer money that would go to typical car-associated costs like insurance/registration/gas and set up an automatic transfer into that secondary account. Also set aside enough money to replace your ebike from the sale of your car so if anything happens you aren’t going to find yourself in a tricky situation. Then use the money that accrues in that secondary account to fund car hire when you’re ready for your next road trip. It’s going to be painful shelling out a thick wad of cash for a car rental on your first road trip but keep in mind that car ownership is a financial form of death by a thousand cuts that you rarely think about since it’s just the cost of doing business.

Honestly, over time I’d expect that the secondary account would start filling up faster than you can spend the money on car rentals which might free you up to buy other things you want.

The other option is to find a good friend or loved one who would be willing to split the costs for car sharing arrangement between the two of you. This would be a little bit tricky to navigate and you’d want to make sure that you’ve got the right person to do this with but if you went about it the right way you should be able to come up with a mutually-beneficial arrangment.

I’m broke lol, I’m not about to throw cash at S4A if I can just pique their interest instead and get them to think they came up with the idea to narrate the article by themselves

I used to be a terrible mischief-maker in my younger days but, with maturity, I’ve channeled this urge into achieving win-win outcomes for everyone. I have confidence in myself to get this one over the line by leveraging just the right amount of influence at the right moment.

Oh you were thinking of paying haha? I’m just gonna try drawing their attention to the article in such a way that it will just make sense for them to want to narrate it. I got a strategy all planned out already, just gotta wait until an opportunity presents itself to me - likely in the next few weeks. Will keep you posted.

Hell yeah! I didn’t even think about why having anthologies would be a problem until I encountered your post so it’s been a good learning opportunity. It’s not so bad having an anthology because you can timestamp within a playlist but it just makes more sense to have them as separate books because it’s more user-friendly that way.

I’ll see if I can entice Socialism For All to narrate the Jones Manoel article. S4A is on an Anti-Trotskyist reading arc right now and Manoel’s article fits neatly into that scope, plus the article is short - I’d guess it’s well under 30 minutes of runtime for a narration so I feel like that might be enough to get it over the line. I’ll see if I can work some magic in the next few weeks.

Elementary Principles of Philosophy
How To Be A Good Communist

Alright, the only thing I haven’t done is Lavender & Red because I S4A is still in the process of recording that one. I’ll have to remember to finish the job once they have completed it but that aside your playlist is complete.

Wage Labor and Capital
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Getting there!

Unlimited hot soup on the lap of Trotsky!

On Practice and Contradiction
Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Other ones are in the pipeline but I have to redownload them because I ran out of space on my harddrive and deleted some of the original files since I wasn’t expecting to need them again.

I’m tired of learning new things

What Is To Be Done?
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
State and Revolution

Okay I need to sleep

Btw I’m working on splitting the audiobooks at the moment. I’m gonna have to get to it tomorrow because Audacity wasn’t playing well with my computer.

I don’t know if you saw my edit, but I will try to squeeze it in!

Of course I didn’t see your edit. Do I strike you as one of those ?

Just kidding. About the hostile tone that is. I actually didn’t see it but that’s awesome thanks for letting me know. Also know that your comment inspired me to make this and submit it to the emoji comm lmao

For real, whenever I come across a baby leftist I have to restrain myself from acting like some sort of deranged person from a time travelling scifi movie who has come back to warn people about the dire reality of the future while I recite this article at them at a near-shouting volume.

Instead I’m like “Oh um, you know, uhhh… just be careful of the political organisations who sell you on this idea of them being the valiant underdog and how great everything could have been if only they weren’t robbed of their opportunity. You want to find an organisation that has a positive future perspective rather than just lamenting the past.”

I know that the character limit is tight but I just remembered that the short piece by Jones Manoel titled Western Marxism Loves Purity and Martyrdom, But Not Real Revolution could have saved me years wasted as an eclectic radical. I think it dovetails nicely after Left Communism but it’s updated and takes aim at people who idolise Che yet despise Castro and Stalin, that sort of thing.

I’d like to suggest it, if there’s room and you think it’s suitable. Also if you haven’t read it yet, goddamn you should because it’s really incisive.

I don’t think this can be measured in a vacuum.

Let’s explore some different cases as a thought experiment:

A country achieves communism. I don’t think this is possible tbh but let’s go with it.

We can expect to see the “proles” consuming more than they would otherwise as they’d have all the products of their labour.

Let’s presume that people are people and that they aren’t going to suddenly develop much more class consciousness and a spirit of internationalism. Obviously I think that a communist society would go a long way towards this but let’s ignore that for argument’s sake.

Unequal exchange would mean that the communist society would be taking advantage of this arrangement, perhaps more than they would be able to otherwise.

But if this is the situation, we also have no bourgeoisie who do rampant exploitation of the third world. We have no more corporations. We have no more bourgeois democracy inflicting imperialism upon the world.

Perhaps consumption drops a whole lot purely by virtue of the fact that people would rather work 4 hours a day or 3 days a week. Perhaps in freeing up the products of labour and what would otherwise be capital and surplus value under the previous system, people are able to manufacture and acquire products designed for repairing with replaceable parts rather than for planned obsolescence. Perhaps people would be able to be more conscious consumers, opting for the things that have a lower environmental and social impact rather than working two jobs as part of a single-parent nuclear(ish) family and only being able to choose the simplest and most readily available options rather than carefully considering what they would genuinely prefer. Perhaps lots of people devote their time to things like gardening and producing food themselves because they only need to work 15 hours a week in their factory job to cover the rest of their needs.

It’s hard to estimate what it would look like exactly, especially in an unbiased way, but even in a conservative estimate I’d say that it would be a net-benefit for the third world as the degree of exploitation and the worst excesses of consumption would be largely curbed, not to mention all of the excesses of capitalism and imperialism being eliminated (from that society anyway).

So let’s look at a genuinely SocDem society next:

Imperialism is dead in the water. Capitalism is hemmed in. Billionaires are reduced to having no more than, say $10 million in net worth. If corporations still exist they are brought to heel and they are held accountable for their inevitable excesses.

Honestly in this society I would expect the net benefit to the third world to be worse than the example above but it would still be much better than what we have today.

Next is to consider things as they are today:

Increased wages are going to lead to increased consumption. But things like earlier retirement and better healthcare, education, environmental and workplace safety etc. are going to reduce the impacts on the third world - healthcare, especially stuff that is way downstream, has a big footprint. Workplace and public health and safety makes things better for everyone. Carving out chunks of profit to go towards better conditions generally means less money for wars and less money going towards imperialism, not always but more so than not. Workers having unions and solidarity means that there’s more chance of things like general strikes, which can achieve good outcomes for the third world.

I think under this scenario we could expect to see a net benefit that is significantly reduced compared to a SocDem hypothetical scenario. It might even come out as a wash, if you really want to make a conservative estimate.

Idk this argument seems overly simplistic and very undialectical honestly. It’s a bit like the reactionaries who complain about veganism or measures that benefit the environment and they charge vegans with being responsible for the deaths of animals due to industrialised agriculture or they concern-troll over the carbon footprint of a proposed expansion to rail transport.

I mean, yeah, there’s definitely an environmental footprint that gets incurred when you manufacture a car seatbelt and that’s fine. But if 100,000 seatbelts prevent one single person from becoming a permanent wheelchair user then the comparative environmental footprint is vastly in favour of making those 100,000 seatbelts because the environmental footprint incurred by the necessary medical and accessibility interventions from one preventable case of someone ending up as a permanent wheelchair user are far greater.

This is not an argument in favour of eugenics or to lay the blame for the social and environmental impacts of being disabled at the feet of the individual though. I’m just trying to highlight that we should not fall victim to an overly reductionist assessment of things in a very static way or otherwise we end up with well-intentioned measures that can have ramifications that are far worse than what we prevent.

Likewise we should not oppose fighting for better working conditions in the first world out of concern that any improvements here are simply going to make things worse in the third world because it’s not nearly as simple an arrangement as one where improvements here necessarily make things worse over there in equal measure.

I’m in some other English-speaking shithole halfway around the world from you so I don’t have any brands that I’d be able to suggest unfortunately.

It’s going to depend on your use case.

Are you just looking to do walking? If so it might be worth considering a walking pad - they’re more portable and stowable, you can set it up in front of a TV or a desk with your tablet on it with a stand. Good if you just want to get some steps in or to use at a standing desk and that sort of thing.

If you’re looking for the option to jog or run or you want to have incline settings then a treadmill is the way to go. The most important considerations here are tread length and horsepower (generally speaking the higher the horsepower, the longer your treadmill will last.)

Also try to stick to regular recommended maintenance, especially if you’re using either regularly.

I mean, as discipline psychoanalysis is essentially dead in the water and has been since before Anna Freud even died her well-deserved death, may she rot in piss.

Whereas psychology as a discipline has greatly expanded and is extremely dynamic and it has analytical and descriptive power that outclasses psychoanalysis in all respects.

I don’t think that anyone but the most avid psychoanalist would argue that psychology is on par with or somehow inferior to psychoanalysis. My point was more about how in terms of outcomes for patients, you’d assume that psychology would have completely surpassed psychoanalysis given that it isn’t based on crackpot nonsense but rather it draws on, what, like a solid century of genuinely scientific endeavour and application. But that’s not the case - for all the advancements that psychology has made, and they are massive, in some ways it still seems to be stuck achieving outcomes on a rough par with the Austrian School of Sex Wizards and Oneiromancy.

Basically: Wrong ideas -> Wrong conclusions -> Respectable outcomes

vs

Good ideas -> Good conclusions -> Respectable outcomes

Which is just to say that something can be extremely flawed and yet still be useful. I wouldn’t encourage anyone to approach Freud without very healthy skepticism but that also applies for plenty of other things too and even if its foundations are false, its analysis is false, and its conclusions are false doesn’t mean that it is devoid of anything useful. All it means is that you’re going to have to separate out the wheat from the chaff and the ratio of wheat:chaff is going to be much less than desirable.

Herbert Marcuse was generally pretty ant-Soviet and started the trend of scholars deriding the proletariat in America, which I always found to be pretty bad.

Very much so but this goes right to the sorta second wave of then-leaders of Frankfurt School, specifically Horkheimer and Adorno, in the era post Walter Benjamin and Erich Fromm et al. Horkheimer worked very hard to suppress mentions of things like class conflict in what other Frankfurt School theorists would publish in order to efface the materialist underpinning of Marx-inspired analysis and it’s no coincidence that the Frankfurt School retreated into really pretty sordid cultural critique imo and there’s an argument that Horkheimer could have actually intervened to rescue Walter Benjamin from the fascists but decided to leave him to his fate, although the primary source is an academic work in German so I haven’t been able to verify this directly myself.

Tbh that second wave of the Frankfurt School in exile was extremely disdainful of the proletariat and of Marx while they actively courted the bourgeoisie by adopting a pseudo-Marxist revisionist angle.

What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!).

—Lenin, The State and Revolution

And yes, it seems to be in relation to Goerg Lukacs’ humanism, not Raya Dunyayevskaya’s.

Ah, not so bad then.

I don’t know how to think of Deleuze and Guatarri.

Relatable lol.

D&G has gotta be some of the toughest of the Frankfurt School theorists and their magnum opus, Anti-Oedipus (which Capitalism and Schizophrenia is one part of) is a direct response to Lacan so if you want to truly get yourself right across D&G then you really have to start from Lacan.

I’ve avoided them because they seem to have coming from the psycho-analysis tradtion and isn’t that academic tradition basically bunk?

Yeah, it is and yeah, it is. But I think it’s important to be cautious about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Freud gets derided a lot, especially from psychology (it turns out the call was coming from inside the house the whole time 😱😱) but a whole lot of that is due to them wanting to position psychology as a much harder science than arguably it is, or ever could be, and so they use Freud as a whipping boy; “Look at how scientific we are, we even denounce the forefather of psychology for being insufficiently scientific!!”

Psychology as a discipline is always frantically trying to adorn itself with anything that confers it with the aura of being scientific when tbh it’s just desperate to be something more like biology than it manages to be but also less like sociology which it loathes and which it cannot acknowledge how proximal it is to it.

If you contrast how contemporary psychology relates to Freud vs how it relates to BF Skinner, it says a lot. Skinner made some major contributions to psychology at the time but a lot of his contributions are have been superceded, if not completely disproven by none other than the man, the myth, the self-mummyfying Noam Chomsky just about as soon as Skinner dropped his theory on linguistic development. Sure, Skinner was much more scientific than Freud was but that was as much a product of his time as anything else, and what really gets overlooked is that Freud too made major contributions to psychology in his own time. (There’s also a massive discussion about the sociology of scientific knowledge which I’m just going to completely sidestep or otherwise I’m going to write forever and nobody wants that. Also it’s bizarre because I wrote a comment somewhere completely different on Hexbear on a subject entirely unrelated and I was channeling the spirit of Harry Collins, a big figure in SSK, just before. How odd.)

Anyway, what I’m driving at is that while Freud was wrong about plenty that doesn’t mean that he was wrong about everything or that his conclusions were not valuable. For example, he revolutionised psychology by asserting that the pathology a patient was experiencing could be resolved internally by the patient. Prior to Freud, mental illness was basically considered to be a product of things like “poor moral character” and shit like that, with the solution being that you just beat or torture the patient until they straighten up and fly right, or you just consign them to the asylum forever.

(I’m going to try and rein myself in a bit but there’s another tangent I’m about to spiral off on about the earliest reform attempts of the asylum and the role of Richard Paternoster, who was a colourful character by all reports, and how his incarceration in a mental asylum is a perfect example of the stuff Foucault discussed.)

But perhaps surprisingly, you’d think that psychology would have surpassed psychoanalysis and yet comparative analysis between CBT, the gold standard for psychosocial treatment, and psychoanalysis shows roughly equivalent outcomes. So basically you have a pseudoscientific approach to, like, dream analysis and psychosexual development and whatever but there’s indications that it’s about as effective as the most highly regarded and widely celebrated treatment method in psychology today.

All of this is to say that very faulty reasoning can still arrive at something useful.

And I think that’s what the Frankfurt School does - it isn’t just an effort to extend or defend psychoanalysis, it’s something that gets drawn upon conceptually as an influence. Think like the way that Hegel is to Marx - there are things in Hegel that no materialist would agree with but Marx drew a lot of inspiration from Hegel despite that fact. And although Marx was a Young Hegelian, Marx didn’t just go on to try and extend Hegel’s philosophy in his writings but instead he took what was useful, applied what he thought was most relevant, and discarded the rest.

Once upon a time, when I was younger, I picked up Leviathan by Hobbes. I’m sure you know the only bit that people ever quote from him - that life, in the state of nature, is solitary, poor, nasty, brutal and short. I was naïve about reading Hobbes at the time and I disregarded what he had to say because the foundation that he developed his political philosophy from was so false that I found it to be objectionable. The thing is though, he wasn’t writing as a historian or an anthropologist, he was writing to elaborate on a (then) modern political philosophy. Another more common reason why Hobbes gets dismissed out of hand is because what he argues for, what his Leviathan represents, is essentially totalitarian in nature.

But although I strongly disagree with his conclusions and his muthologising or speculation about humans prior to the advent of “civilisation”, there are still important ideas in Leviathan - there are valuable observations and arguments and, equally so, there are observations and arguments he makes that are important to understand in order to refute the foundations of liberalism.

Learn from my mistake. You don’t have to agree with an author to read them, and you don’t have to agree with the basis of their argument nor even its conclusion to find useful things within it. That was what I was gently encouraging you to take away from my criticisms of McLuhan - his conclusions are crackpot-tier and I’d argue a product of his political and religious convictions but he still made important observations and arguments despite starting from a bad place (imo) and ending up with bizarre fanciful conclusions (imo).