One shouldn’t go around believing in them, of course, but I think there’s something to be said for the construction of conspiracy theories as a mode of political analysis; trying to come up with an entertaining conspiralogical explanation for events is a nice way of exploring the various interests and affects caught up in them. My current research focuses on who is really responsible for the Celebrity Big Brother racism row. My money is on the BNP and Ken Livingstone, hand-in-glove; doubtless one of the housemates was their cat’s-paw (Jo O’Meara, perhaps? Or Ian “H” Watkins, his lovable camp persona just a front). Read more↴
So it turns out Hillary Clinton isn’t just an isolated Communist conspirator, either:
We know that in 1991, the Soviet Union “spontaneously” collapsed and that its leaders, who remain in power to this day, suddenly, independently, at precisely the same moment, inexplicably transformed into…Democrats!
He continues: Read more↴
Now that Hillary Clinton has announced her candidacy:
The Democrats will, with the 2008 election of Hillary Clinton as President, finally succeed in their long-term goal of bringing real, live communism permanently, irrevocably, to our shores.
“If only,” you’re saying. Read more↴
The Guardian last week saw some particularly high-quality entries in the competition to write the stupidest thing possible about religion. Tobias Jones is terrified of “totalitarian” Richard Dawkins, who is apparently poised to carry out a genocide of religious believers. A. C. Grayling fights back, accusing homophobic protestors of “an obscenity against human rights” (whatever that means), and a desire to institute widespread torture. Grayling loses in the “who’s the stupidest” stakes because the particular religious people he is incoherently attacking are indeed bastards; but Jones does say one thing that is slightly suprising and might be worth a bit more comment: Read more↴
Actually surprisingly good article by Bob Avakian in this week’s Revolutionary Worker:
At any given time, while in an overall and ultimate sense consistently and systematically applying the communist world outlook and method, in the best possible way, enables you, ultimately and in a fundamental and all-around sense, to get more deeply to the truth than any other world outlook and methodology—qualitatively so—this doesn’t mean that at any given time you necessarily have the truth about something. That’s a contradiction we have to learn to handle much more correctly than it has been handled in the past of our movement, and in the history of the socialist countries.
And reading articles like this does tempt me to join the RCP.
The sound film, far surpassing the theater of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story.… [Sound films] are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts.
— Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 126
It seems like a bit of a cheap shot to characterize Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of the culture industry as the complaints of old men bewildered by modern culture. But I think there’s something to that, not just in the culture industry theory, but in the Frankfurt school’s theory more generally. Read more↴