Bourgeoisning

This is a rendering. Nobody is gonna see this irl

It’s already happening. You’re right, city and state governments are cancelling their flock contracts and just replacing with Motorola and Axon ones.

The Flock cameras are highly vulnerable to cyberattack, and the public outrage creates a situation to replace the old cameras with better ones while publicly condemning Flock.

It is a part of the dialectical materialist method, its a basic property of immanent critique, negation of the negation, or like others have mentioned unity of opposites.

Its like, by the time members of society are able to critique parts of of society, the object of criticism has already completely taken over. Its like you can’t just know the true nature of a thing in order to revolutionize it, because the thing exists concretely as a social and historical set of relationships. Its like, by the time we see a part of society for what it is, it’s already totally taken over.

The way to change it is to first understand its deeply contradictory nature, and then overthrow or abolish the concrete social/economic base for its existence.

In Theses on Feuerbach, Feuerbach Wrote this book The Essence of Christianity where he theorized that the church served all these social functions in society, so as materialists we should keep the social functions but get rid of all the religious hooey. Marx really thought this was a great advancement, but criticized Feuerbach. His criticism is the actual turning of Hegel on his head, fusing Hegelian dialectics with scientific materialist philosophy, negating the idealist character of both leaving behind a dialectical materialist method. He said:

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis.

But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice.

Basically, by the time anyone realized that the Holy family, God the father, Mary the mother, and Jesus Christ the son, was derivative of the nuclear family, itself a historic social relation that has changed and taken on a different character at different times, the idea of a nuclear family removed from the holy family was completely foreign concept to most people, save a few cranks and heretics. Even today, changes in the definition of family are met with extreme virulent backlash from whom? Religious fundamentalists. “Marriage is one man, one woman, with the goal of having children.” This is reinforced heavily by scripture and religious doctrine. The idea of gay marriage is still widely rejected, and where it exists it is the target of ceaseless attack.

Marriage, the family, is a major center of religious power. Liberal society doesn’t defeat it in theory, you have to fight these fuckers on every front. The European bourgeois attacked the church as they held immense land, power and resources; and the bourgeois are incapable of sharing power indefinitely. The church is a husk of what it once was, and still they wield immense power over our lives, by defining the family based on its own principles. But where did these principles come from in the first place? They were coopted from the organic association of human families, as they were organized under monarchic rule. The ideological family suited the aims of the monarchies and the major religions which established themselves around the same time as monarchies enshrined the human family into the holy family so that the human family disappeared as a thing unto itself, and only exists as God’s family. And it is only by literally stripping power from the church is any kind of family other than the holy definition of it able to assert itself in society.

Its like, you can criticize the old thing all you want, if we are to be rid of it, it must be smashed, the basis for it eradicated, before we can replace it with something new.

All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it.

– 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon

No particular order

We want the Airwaves.
Bonzo goes to Bitburg.
Sheena is a punk rocker.
Pet Semetary.
I Wanna be your Boyfriend.

Looking at my list, I’d say I like their mid-tempo stuff, but Rockaway Beach is and Rock and Roll Highschool are honorable mentions

Workman is actually fucking incredible

end to a promising project

The “project” being Peruvian socialism, as the term will be forever demonic thanks to this grave-digger

Motorola is also a player

Thanks for the recc, I’ve read Marx’s letter (on behalf of the English IWMA) to Abraham Lincoln, but hadn’t considered there was a collection of writings from that time. I think of the years before 1867 as Marx being like shut up in the library of England so yeah I’m curious about his correspondence and organizing outside of that work.

Dubois mentions some early American Marxists before the civil war but said they didnt really know what to make of the issue of slavery. I’m actually not very aware of the early history of American Marxists, I don’t know of any real serious showing of American Marxists until the St. Louis commune of 1877

Other than Anti-Duhring and Capital, what works in the m&e canon evolved into ML? I also think there’s a major omission in this statement since The German Ideology has been commonly referenced by any ML I’ve had the privilege of discussing theory with.

The major theories that I’m aware of that Marx mostly abandons by Capital is the idea that socialism only develops out of Capitalism, and he kinda drops the theory of Lumpen Proles, although his class analysis in the 18th Brumaire is so insightful and important that I’d be reluctant to.say he completely abandoned this theory (although I used to kinda think that.)

They’re just turning around and having new companies install cameras, its a bait and switch

I’ll def check that work out, but I’d have to recommend reading Black Reconstruction in America before any other work. I’ve never read another book as thorough and soaring of an analysis on every level, and its beautifully written.

But the M&E collection will be interesting to do a comparison, I don’t know much about the movement in Europe to oppose trade with the south. I’ve heard that workers movements in England had kept these efforts at bay, but Dubois cites northern fears of the South resuming trade with England, Spain, etc., as one of the catalysts for arming former slaves who self emancipated into the Northern armies.

It was as Frederick Douglass said in Boston in 1865, that the Civil War was begun "in the interests of slavery on both sides. The South was fighting to take slavery out of the Union, and the North fighting to keep it in the Union; the South fighting to get it beyond the limits of the United States Constitution, and the North fighting for the old guarantees;-both despising the Negro, both insulting the Negro.

– Black Reconstruction in America

Black Reconstruction in America by WEB Dubois is essential reading

Is this sarcasm?

To the capitalist, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need – be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity – seems to him a luxury

Oh interesting, Marx had some comments about the how the nuclear family arose alongside monarchy but wasn’t created by monarchy, but Tue nuclear family inherited the contradictions of society at large.

I haven’t read that one, but given my interest in this subject I’ll have to look it up.

This legit confused me, thanks, so I should just refer to the emergent castes as castes?

Like, why did it swing toward consolidation of power rather than deeper forms of egalitarianism? Probably crisis, scarcity, natural disaster, war. We have to think about these systems globally and locally. The conditions didn’t exist in one place to develop into castes and classes, but they did in the next area over. Scarcity of resources or opportunities to accumulate material or social resources drive expansionist, imperialist development. What makes the process tick, according to Marxism, is a dialectic relationship between opposing forces.

Spinoza has a line in Ethics which I think is interesting:

After men persuaded themselves, that everything which is created is created for their sake, they were bound to consider as the chief quality in everything that which is most useful to themselves, and to account those things the best of all which have the most beneficial effect on mankind. Further, they were bound to form abstract notions for the explanation of the nature of things, such as goodness, badness, order, confusion, warmth, cold, beauty, deformity, and so on; and from the belief that they are free agents arose the further notions of praise and blame, sin and merit.

If this has some merit, which I think it does but there’s def problems with Spinoza though you gotta love his efforts to construct human nature from first principles, then the “cardinal sin” of class society is one part of society, which is a part of nature, begins to consider itself above and beyond nature. But what drives this IMO is a slow process of material need which leads to accumulation of social capital, that negates the old egalitarian material basis and replaces it with an informal caste that negates the old formal egalitarian basis for human society.

The truth is you are probably just gonna have to work to find specific answers to your question, in my experience these questions exist as a sort of discomfort that drives us to seek answers. Recognition of some objective factor conflicts with something subjective within you that drives you to seek an answer outside of you. This inside/outside, negating old ideas with new ones is the motor of revolutionary criticism. Something like this process happens to people when society goes through changes. This happened to those people who formed those old egalitarian societies when they followed external pressures to change their own societies, just as it happens to us. This inside/outside struggle is the driver of human and social change. All social questions resolve themselves in the practical activity of the people who make up the society. In order to really understand, we have to get rid of abstraction and seek evidence.

But since these class societies arose at different times and in different ways, and much of the old ancient records didn’t survive, then we can look at more recent examples of revolution to understand social change. Detailed analysis of the French revolution, the Russian revolution, the American civil war, the Haitian revolution, WW1, WW2, the Chinese revolution, and the times leading up to them, can provide some insight.

Black Reconstruction by WEB Dubois is one of the best such analyses. He really gets into the weeds of the classes, the opposing forces, the material and social negations, that led to a drastic and necessary material change to the means of production in society. Another good example is Gramsci’s study of the Risorgimento and Passive Revolution. But just by the way you ask the question, seems to me like you are on a personal journey that won’t feel satisfied until you’ve basically transformed yourself and the way you think about the world. At least, that’s how it worked in my experience and from what I’ve seen in the experiences of others

I just wrote a comment about this in the last few weeks, but idk if it got removed or what.

In Marx’s ethnological notes on Lewis Morgan, he reviewed Lewis’s work on the ancient Roman gentiles, and their communal lifestyle. So I’m basing what I’m gonna describe on those notes. Keep in mind these social forms existed like 50 BC to 500 ad, and feudal/monarchic society predates that by like 8000 years or something.

There were these egalitarian communes of families with a shard ancestor called the Gens, which were genuinely fraternal social organizations where people shared resources and personal property was redistributed upon death of a member. Over time, distinct sections of the Gen seemed to accumulate different forms of social capital. So you got a group of like doctors, or academics, or leaders, engineers, or manual workers. Not formal divisions mind you, but if you were a member of the Gen you knew which people to go in order to get some function of your society. There was still like a genuine fraternity among the Gens at this point, and the functioning of society for the individual members was formally dependent on egalitarianism.

As this social capital concentrated within a group, the informal divisions hardened into castes, called Gentes. There was still respect and fraternity among the members of the Gens, but Gentes are now starting to act according to their own best interests. The egalitarianism still exists informally, but its more like a principle or value than a need in order for each little Gen society to function. Cultural momentum, not a necessity for survival.

Eventually, the Gentes start jockeying for political power and social position. This process destroys the genuine egalitarianism in every form, and replaces it with social competition and hierarchy. Eventually, one caste, one gent, dominates all others. This creates the “ruling class”, which simultaneously creates the other hardened classes. All egalitarian sentiment has been wiped away, both formally and informally, as far as it existed as an essential way that society functions.

In older forms of society, there were many classes that depended on each other for their established place in the hierarchy. Under feudalism the church existed as part of the power structure that maintained monarchic rule. This was extremely stable. But the creation of the bourgeois class created a new middle class that was driven by the relentless search for profit. This relentlessness means that the bourgeois class could not share power. They destroyed the formal power of the church, then the formal power of the monarchy. The capitalist’s ability to buy people, to change society, to formalize their own rule, led to their ability to subordinate the old classes and transform them into capitalist institutions. This is the process that leads to the two formal classes of capitalism, worker and capitalist. But I think its worthwhile to treat informal classes, such as peasant and lumpen, middle and small capitalist, nouveau riche and tech oligarchy classes, though there are others, as “real” since they reflect peoples experiences and real accumulation of social capital.

At the same time, there is one relentless search for profit, one global system that determines the character of all others, that determines the central contradiction around which is accumulated the material possibility for a new socialist society