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We're fighting the wrong battle, brothers
Created by Adam Oct 03, 2018 at 11:26AM EDT
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The Left Can't Meme - We're fighting the wrong battle, brothers
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![4th July 2016, 01:42 #36 https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/195314-Democracy-in-Europe- Movement-(critique)?p=2873559#post2873559 Rafiq o Join Date: Aug 2010 Location: Detroit, Michigan. Posts: 8,246 الاشتراكية هي المطرقة التي نست Admin http://archive.is/rltXP Rep Power: 158 ee Originally Posted by Full Metal Bolshevik -> What is your repeated problem with leftist memes? They serve to spur interest in politics, that's it. I'm sure you dislike FULLCOMMUNISM and similar boards, but I've heard users say they did start coming to the left because of the funny meme's. It is a battleground the Left cannot and will never win. It is for a very simple - and at the same time complex reason. 'Memes' in their ideological function are effectively anti-democratic, because the mockery entails a distance between the subject and their real positions. The essence of my repeated attack on 'left memes' has consistently been that they are in a more general context of taking a distance from one's principles and positions, i.e. of not taking subject and their own capacity to be fully responsible political subjects. It presupposes expert knowledge, which subject take a self-ironic distance from their 'mere opinions'. Memes represent a hostility toward critical thinking, and are strictly a part of the same barbarism of this fallen world, of this never ending tragedy. There is a kind of sadistic and barbarous element to certain kinds of laughter - they serve as almost a religious-like expression of ones devotion to their 'real serious truth' which the object of their laughter fails to live up to. I suspect that the more one accepts the world uncritically, the more inclined to laugh they are, laugh at the various absurdities which are neutralized by laughter, i.e. which is not always reactionary per se, but it is important to keep in mind that that laughter presupposes a level of seriousness and often times the purpose of laughter is to repress being or feeling responsibility for it. the simple reason that the self-ironic distance is meant to be the distance between the actually increasingly rely more and more on in our daily lives, as legitimate, and has the responsibility for them as subjects. Why is this anti-democratic? Why can the Left not win this battleground? Because there will always be things that Leftists will not mock, always things they will not bring themselves to mock or make fun of. 'Leftists' will go about mocking our tradition, but what they will not do is mock that which they reserve to be 'serious' - from cultural issues to mental health. They will not mock r---, they will not mock the holocaust, or depict blacks as subhuman. You fail to understand that in a spontaneous way, many people do find fascist 'memes' genuinely funny, they laugh at them. Leftists still have this decency of not doing this, I suppose. But as they mock our tradition, the reason this is reactionary, is because they do not subject to open criticism their own serious positions as 'Leftists', which often times are cookie-cutter, anti-Marxist, anti-scientific identitarian positions, i.e. university leftism. That is not to say seriousness with our tradition is inversely proportional to seriousness about cultural issues, quite the contrary is true. They should just be consistent about it. Also, do you not also notice how 'meme culture' is also congruent with the most pathetic, narcissistic egotism, how people constantly attribute their woes, their misery and real suffering to their made up 'mental disorders'? Instead of articulating their suffering in its spiritual (historical, subjective) dimension, they attribute it to various different acronyms, i.e. assume forces outside of them are controlling them. The socialist position is that the key to their suffering lies in the contours of their consciousness and subjectivity, in relation to the symbolic order. But they do not articulate it like this, because they don't see themselves as active, responsible subjects. it goes hand in hand with 'meme' culture because both are anti-democratic. One often times really does think that tumblr and 4chan are yin and yang. Of course, how the former is represented by the latter is wrong - it would really be a great thing if 'SJW's' were just like how they are represented by reactionaries but it is not true. The 'SJW' does not even exist. You see the same trends of anti-modernism and so on in so-called 'SJW's'. Of course using this acronym is reactionary enough - we should 'defend' this 'specter' against Fascists unconditionally, but also recognize that in its actuality it is deserving of critique and often times supplements them. They assume they have fully grasped our tradition, and can 'take a step back' and mock it. But they haven't grasped it. They have no understanding of Marx whatsoever. What we should be interested in, is this - they mock our Marx, and our Lenin, but what seriousness do they presuppose that enables them to do this the way they do? Because 'hostile' way, they merely will claim that it's just some good-spirited fun. At the end of the day, however, what real serious understanding of our tradition do they have? There is a political nature to laughter. It has a greater meaning, i.e. laughter does not get 'its last laugh'. Rightists will get their 'last laugh' if we let postmodern irony get its last word. As you should know, for Fascism, or religious fundamentalism, because of the profound faith in the big other, and faith that they are exercising its will, all things are permitted. know for certain they do not mock our Marx and Lenin in a Let me posit you a question. The typical post-modern attitude is to laugh at all things, to make sure that irony and laughter gets its 'last laugh', i.e. is the last thing that both predicates and concludes all real partisanship and life itself. Here is a question: Is it really like that? Are all things really subject to mockery? I claim that there is always an island of seriousness that is exempt from critique in postmodern irony. The only reason a postmodern ironic subject is able to be that way is because they take so much for granted, such as their lives. Yet Socialists who align themselves with the suffering and damned of the world, cannot take anything for granted, cannot live and laugh while standing on a house of cards. If the postmodern ironic subject was actually susceptible to the conditions of life faced by the grand majority of people in the world, if their mothers were sold into sexual slavery, and abused just to support them, if they had to work long hours as children, if they were immersed in the hell that was the wars of the Congo, if they lived as the average Indian slum-dweller did, they would not be so keen on finding the world so funny, now would they. Is this not why Islamist terrorism, or even violent gang attacks from ghettos is so traumatic for the western middle-class subject, i.e. it forces them to really confront just how precarious it all is, just how much of that outside world is seeping in? Laughter ' has its place for everyone, because it even has its place for the most damned and miserable of the world. But this 'place' is not meme culture, which is wholly petty bourgeois and reactionary. It's the need to laugh, afiq, do not laugh and have no temptation And there is a reason. Until you're not a ready to die, until you're literally ready to actually face any and all situations, and conditions, and be fine with that, stop pretending to think laughter gets its last laugh. Until there is no possible thing that could make you serious about something, stop pretending. Your laughter gets its last laugh because you take so much for granted and you are enabled to allow external processes to guarantee your safe, comfortable life. You don't have to take your life seriously when you don't need to. But the grand majority of the planet, including those slum-dwellers in our own country, do. of repressing one's predisposition to laugh. If you laugh away. howeve The neo-Fascists can engage in all the self-ironic mockery they want, while still retaining the 'seriousness' they have with their positions, and why? Because for the Fascist, or for the rightist more generally, the 'truth' of their position is not dependent upon them, i.e. the big other exists independently of them and thus they are free to do as they please, becasue they have a sense that their 'truth' is guaranteed externally. They do not take full responsibility for their positions and this is another reason, as well as example, of the fact that 'memes' go hand in hand with an increasingly anti-democratic culture where the real power, and functioning of society, is less and less recognized to be contingent solely upon its constituents. Memes go hand in hand with a rise of technocratic and 'expert' knowledge. At the end of the day, what is the 'magic' of 'memes'? How do they function so well? Ultimately, 'memes' re-affirm the non-contingency of real life upon the will and actions of individuals alone, as they are. It allows them to retain a distance, and this distance serves to enable them to avoid confrontation with the contingency of their lives. What is the object of the laughter of the postmodern self-ironic subject? It is themselves, or people, positions, and so on. But for them to abstract themselves, or political circumstances in such a way, to 'take a step back' and laugh, what should interest us is where they are standing when they are 'taking this step back', taking this 'god's eye view' within whose horizon all things are permitted to mock, and laugh at. It is the big other, the same big other whose gaze men and women willfully subordinate themselves to, which asserts their own non-freedom and inability to take full responsibility for themselves. What does a meme do? A meme functions like this: It leaves you in a state of... Existential ambiguity, it leaves you thinking - 'that's it', i.e. leaves you to your deadlock. You receive a meme, and you laugh, but the reason it is funny is because it leaves you to your own powerlessness, it leaves you to enjoy it. Why? Because you derive a minimal sense of power from thinking you are aware of your own powerlessness, that this awareness makes you 'in the know' and therefore not a sucker. I am being completely serious when I claim that the key to Communist subjectivity is the overcoming of 'meme- culture', or its context, which is the postmodern self-ironic culture. Overcoming this, not simply shirking from it - but overcoming it in the sense that laughter cannot get its last laugh, is Communism. We have another word for the precondition of this: And it is actual, life-changing, life-affecting, world-shaking, PRACTICE. Mockery, again, is not actually 'opposed' to seriousness. Mockery presupposes an island of seriousness, i.e. the object of mockery is mocked because One should be reminded of Adorno: The laughter of the audience in cinema is anything but good and revolutionary, is instead the worst bourgeois sadism. Or - all cheerful art is a crime against the dead, against the accumulated, speechless pain. 'Meme culture' is inherently sadistic, it is the sadism of ruling ideology, the prevailing hopelessness and lack of confidence-in-oneself, against all authentic political projects. The sadism of 'meme culture' is that one is laughing because of how patently ridiculous they find the notion of actually being able to be responsible and serious about these modernist political projects. Its sadism is how one takes enjoyment in the triumph of 'expert' technocratic discourse and politics. fails to 'be serious'. Why does it fail? Ask yourself this. Also socialist videogames would be interesting, why can't I consume media that appeals to my tastes?! Ah. "Your tastes'. You must work with me here. Look at the above quote. Can you not see the problem? It's just that. Your 'Socialism' is articulated as just a personal 'taste', just a flavor, a cosmetic appearance. This also presupposes other possible 'tastes'. What makes yours 'better', even for you? You will be forced day we're all friends. Yet for actual socialists, our socialism is not an arbitrary taste but a fully constituted ethical duty we are fully responsible for in all our individuality. Let us be clear. You can consume any media you like. You can in fact consume anything you want. You are also, more importantly free to critique the intricacies and meaning of 'your own tastes', more importantly. That is a much harder freedom to accept. admit for you it is arbitrary. You are a socialist, others are 'libertarians', and 'fascists', but at the end of the That is basically the problem I posited with Jacobin. It is not that 'socialist videogames' are a crime, but that Jacobin's opportunism is that it sells 'socialism' as just another flavor, wherein all things can have a socialist spin, including the most reactionary positions and nationalism. Jacobin's basic logic is appealing opportunistically to ready-made trends. It uncritically accepts any and all predominant trends, and then retroactively goes to say "The Left should put a socialist spin on" whatever you like. This is basically all Jacobin is, at the end of the day: What is Jacobin if not any old news publication with a 'left flavor' to it? It functions as nothing else. It is cosmetic. The problem with the logic you present is the problem with the entire 'internet Left'. You effectively render yourself as an uncritical subject within processes far beyond your capacity of control, i.e. you are basically just another consumer and you articulate your 'politics' as just another identity, which there is an abundance of in our consumerist culture. There is nothing more telling then this: You go on twitter, for instance. You find users with various descriptions: Bisexual | Trans | Hispanic | Socialist | Ally, and so on, all of this, all of these signifiers in their user description to signify their identity. Yet in an exact way, there is a huge emergence of Fascists doing the same thing, and it works, i.e. it's just opportunism, so you will find: Catholic | Pro-European | Pro-Traditional Marriage | Race-Realist | Nationalist | Empiricist. In terms of substance, anti-democratic culture where instead of fully assuming political positions (i.e. like a 'totalitarian' or 'fanatic') individuals take a distance from it and identify with things they don't presume to be responsible for. Ultimately in our anti-democratic culture there is a tacit recognition among all subjects that at the end of the day they are 'biased' meager humans, that there is a 'left-right' spectrum and 'da real truth', ultimately, must transcend it. That's why those political spectrum tests are so popular on social media, there is a common political but doesn't take full responsibility for it. There is a tacit solidarity between self-proclaimed Leftists and Fascists here. The goal of actual socialists is to break this. To really be 'fanatics', to be 'totalitarians', to not be scared of being 'scary'. We must do it, on our lives, if we are serious - rely on nothing outside of us for our spiritual dedication to the tradition. When we say we seek to shake this world from its foundations, to really overthrow it, I'm afraid... That we actually mean it. We actually mean it when we say we want to turn this world upside down and blow the lid. You may not mean it, and that is fine. But the Left is no place for you, and it is the task of socialists to make sure of this. terms of the subject, is it not telling that these positions are literally just interchangeable like this? They are just 'tastes' in our consumer culture. And again, it relates to a growing gnized wherein one almost arbitrarily identifies with a position, We don't need to attract more 'left intellectuals'. We don't need more philistines. We need, instead, already committed intellectuals, which at the end of they day cannot be 'herded' into being committed or practically inclined but will do so by their own devices, serious ones, no matter how small their numbers are, to come into contact with one and another even if it means that 99% of Leftists will have nothing to do with a future Left. It is actually not ridiculous to say that 90% of the so-called Left will renege to the inevitable authoritarian-technocratic politics that will emerge which is both culturally 'progressive' as well as anti-democratic and 'politically correct' in its racism. We don't need most of the Left, and we certainly don't need 'Leftists' who are attracted by 'memes'. Last edited by Rafiq; 4th July 2016 at 02:39. [FONT="Courier New"] "We stand for organized terror - this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Revolution and of the new order of life. - Felix Dzerzhinsky [/FONT] لا شيء يمكن وقف محاكم التفتيش ل لثورة Reply With Quote](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/list/001/861/282/c8a.png "why the left can't meme")
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