To keep from cluttering up the "BBW scene history" discussion, here's a separate space for the most patrician thread derail ever to occur on /gen/.

>>12607 (Cross-thread)

>I've found that it's hard to learn anything about the history of American modern art without reading some interest factoids about CPUSA-adjacent involvement. There's very little talk about that, and the actual ''transition' to AbEx; I think the Partisan Review factors into this somehow.

For sure, Partisan Review in the 50s is where Clement Greenberg and other influential AbEx critics published many of their most significant essays. By that time the PR editorial board were mostly Cold War liberals. PR broke with the JRC/CPUSA in 1936. They're interesting because they published original work by major poets from across the political spectrum, like Eliot (a monarchist) and Stevens (an apolitical bourgeois), despite being closely associated with the Trotskyist movement (Socialist Workers Party). They broke with Trotsky in the late 30s and different members of the staff drifted towards either Cold War liberalism or non-Leninist leftism (anarchism/council communism). Those political debates, as a chapter in history of ideas, were the area that I ended up zooming in on. IIRC they didn't publish anything by Pound, a literal fascist, but they did publish a symposium debating whether it was possible to appreciate Pound's artistic achievement despite his politics. That's a level of intellectual broadmindedness you wouldn't see today, and part of why I find that era so fascinating.

The comprehensive secondary source on this era is Alan Wald's The New York Intellectuals, btw. I don't think this had been proven in the early 2000s when I was immersed in the secondary literature, but a quick check of their Wikipedia page confirms that PR did receive covert CIA funding in the 1950s. (Encounter, a contemporaneous British magazine with a lot of staff overlap, was exposed by 60s New Leftists as having have been CIA-funded, pissing off a lot of the people who had unwittingly written for it.)

>Haha I've been a NEET for a couple years; I don't even have an MA yet. I haven't fully pursued this research topic because I know I don't have a backup plan. I would love to, though.

Sensible man. A day job and access to a university or high-quality public library is all you really need for a satisfying intellectual life. (And if you're a NEET you can dispense with the day job, heh.) I'll never not find this stuff fascinating as an object of historical study, but in terms of adult life satisfaction and relevance to contemporary political reality, it was a waste of time and money and I should have been learning to code. (For a long time I was paying my rent and groceries doing what was basically a glorified university IT job.) I don't want to derail the derail thread with a political discussion, but I'll just say this: nothing will disillusion you with the Left as quickly as hanging around with careerist academic leftists will.

>>12634 (Cross-thread)
No need to apologize! I enjoyed the tangent and I'm glad it took off enough to branch into a thread of its own.

>>12633 (OP)
Also, look up Milicent Patrick. She worked on Chernabog AND designed the Creature from the Black Lagoon! She was one of the people at the Disney studio who didn't strike, along with Marcellite Garner.

Art Babbitt (whom I'm sure you've heard of) DID strike, and was fucked over by Disney for doing so after Disney was forced to rehire him following the strike.

And something else I've picked up on recently -- just how many people who came with Disney from the Kansas City area to Hollywood and branched out to make an impact in animation even outside Disney -- Iwerks, Ising, Freleng, Harman, and Carl Stalling, to name a few! Not to mention the East Coast folks who also came West...

>>12635
This thread is a pleasant surprise! I'm not in anyway shocked that an AbEx related journal was funded by the CIA, a better question might be what counter cultural vehicle wasn't funded by the CIA in the late 50's? In my tertiary exploration of other "Company activities", I have heard that when MKULTRA was going hot and heavy, they were spending so much money on psych experiments they actually lost track of what they were and were not funding! I'm also always intrigued by the strange bedfellows aspects of Communist groups, apparently Trotsky received funding from a wealthy NYC stockbroker, not sure if that's true however. Sorry if my post is off topic.

>>12635
> Partisan Review in the 50s is where Clement Greenberg and other influential AbEx critics published many of their most significant essays.
Clement Greenberg is definitely someone I've been meaning to read more about. We're pushing 30 years past his death and his approach to art still retains its monolithic quality. He's always struck me as someone whose words are just taken as a given nowadays? I never actually read his essays in undergrad (or Harold Rosenberg for that matter). By all accounts he was one of the reasons why the American art market has been able to justify or 'reproduce' itself abroad for so long, though—why bourgeois notions of 'art for art's sake' overtook more marxist conceptions of 'art as a weapon' from the 1920s and 1930s. Again, keep in mind that by the 1940s and 1950s, HUAC was super convinced that modern art was still being used as a 'weapon of communism' with the 'artist as its soldier' (like it had briefly in continental Europe) and the US government obviously didn't want revolution on its shores, much less the appearance of one. So what did they do? Instead of discouraging formalist experimentation like they did with the New Deal's art programs, they pulled a 180° and tried their hand at cultivating it themselves using more covert means—all in in an effort to fight a 'Cultural Cold War' with the Soviet Union.
>Those political debates, as a chapter in history of ideas, were the area that I ended up zooming in on.
They weren't just political debates, though; you already know this, but those debates revolved around how an ascendant post-war American superpower was wanting to present itself on the world stage. Have you ever read Serge Guilbaut's How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art? It was one of the very few contemporaneous books to talk about this re:visual arts. I think there's an intellectual current running from the 'cultural democracy' of the New Deal (embodied by FDR's four freedoms) and the 'free enterprise' art that emerged in its wake. It's why I've found it funny every time I see people call artists (and the styles associated with them) like Jackson Pollock, communist. Pollock himself was incredibly influenced by his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton, who had become the most popular 'realist' painter at the time. Benton even had an infamous falling out with the New York art scene partly due to criticisms from JRC members; he had very contradictory notions of the 'social viewpoint of art' (as Meyer Schapiro might say). Was there really a difference between New Deal liberalism and Cold War liberalism? I mean, Ronnie Raygun was resuscitating FDR through Norman Rockwell illustrations back in the day.
>That's a level of intellectual broadmindedness you wouldn't see today, and part of why I find that era so fascinating.
I find it equally fascinating on account of just how much of it pisses me off, lol. The more I've read about it the more I've got the feeling that real American modern art as never been tried. There was never a school like the Bauhaus or VKhUTEMAS to emerge here because it had all became controlled opposition so quickly. The legacy of the Bauhaus in particular ended with László Moholy-Nagy's aborted efforts to bring the school to Chicago, and Gyorgy Kepes later working on camouflage contracts for the US state department at MIT.
>The comprehensive secondary source on this era is Alan Wald's The New York Intellectuals
This is one of those books I've put off reading for such a long time; I really need to get around to it because I've heard a great deal about the 'trot -> neocon' pipeline over the years.
>I don't think this had been proven in the early 2000s when I was immersed in the secondary literature, but a quick check of their Wikipedia page confirms that PR did receive covert CIA funding in the 1950s.
I wouldn't know! The CIA covertly waging a 'Cultural Cold War' through CCF associated journals and exhibitions was first revealed in like 1966 or '67, but its activities lasted well past after the Soviet Union collapsed. Every couple of years some columnist at a major newspaper likes to shed light on this piece of trivia, and most people tend to discover it through that one 1995 article from the The Independent. I just remembered Peace, Land and Bread have a couple threads on it too (warning: they're an explicitly Marxist-Leninist magazine): https://twitter.com/plbmagazine/status/1416484144922628101
>A day job and access to a university or high-quality public library is all you really need for a satisfying intellectual life.
The nearest university library to me is a 45 minute drive away and my local public library has refused to pay the ILL fees twice already, so I can't say it's been very satisfying. I don't get NEETbux or anything so I'm pretty lumpen in reality. If I go back to school I could live my life like John Williams' Stoner.
>in terms of adult life satisfaction and relevance to contemporary political reality, it was a waste of time and money and I should have been learning to code.
I feel ya. I recently met up with an engineer friend who recently got a job at a major government contractor and at some point in the conversation he had the audacity to ask me if I've ever considered learning how to code. I was just like, "come on man; you've got to be joking, of course I have!" But when you consider all the hubbub over things like a so-called 'Green New Deal' in recent years, mention of federal arts patronage has been virtually absent from the discourse. When an heiress to the Walton family fortune starts her own art museum in the middle of bumfuck nowhere Arkansas (C*yst*l Br*dg*s) and insists that what she's doing is on-par with what was done almost a century ago, I can't help but feel like there's much more relevance to this history than people realize.
>nothing will disillusion you with the Left as quickly as hanging around with careerist academic leftists will
One of my undergraduate professors was a landlord who listened to Chapo; trust me when I say I'm well past that point.

>>12657
Raygun was no Cold War liberal, is the thing. The classic "Cold War liberal" would have to be Hubert Humphrey; Raygun was too busy subscribing to Bircher magazines and promoting the policies of General Electric via television to be much of a liberal in any sort of leftist sense.

how did this derail happen, I do not browse /gen/ regularly

>By all accounts he was one of the reasons why the American art market has been able to justify or 'reproduce' itself abroad for so long, though—why bourgeois notions of 'art for art's sake' overtook more marxist conceptions of 'art as a weapon' from the 1920s and 1930s.

That's an interesting point, although at this point I'm inclined to put contemporary art in a sociological rather than political context. Have you ever read Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction (one of my top ten "books that permanently changed the way I see the world") or Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow?

>They weren't just political debates, though

Oh, totally -- like I said, I originally came at this via my interest in literary criticism. PR broke away from the CPUSA because the Party was pushing crude, didactic "proletarian realism" as the only literary style worth pursuing, meanwhile the best English-language modernist writers (Eliot, Pound, Lewis) were reactionaries. (Except for James Joyce who just wanted his girlfriend to fart in his face). The PR crew wanted a literature that was modernist in form and revolutionary in content.

>The nearest university library to me is a 45 minute drive away and my local public library has refused to pay the ILL fees twice already

Shit dude, that sucks and you have my condolences. I'm lucky to live in a major metro area where I always had access to quality libraries even when I was a retail prole. Happiest year of my life was when I had a little studio apartment within walking distance of both my job and a great public library branch, with no family responsibilities to attend to and no broadband Internet or smartphones to distract me. (This was a long, long time ago, and not just technologically -- at today's rents there's no way I could afford that apartment even on my current salary, much less Iraq invasion era retail wages.)

You probably know this already, but Libgen and the Internet Archive are your friends. IA in particular seems to exist in a weird copyright limbo where they don't try too hard to remove copyrighted content, and depending on the field you can often find interesting academic press scans there, plus a ton of obscure primary sources. There are a couple of users who'll go in person to archives and do cell phone scans of stuff like mimeographs by tiny 1930s splinter groups. Isn't this dope, it's literally the Iron Maiden font in 1939

Haven't done much digging for secondary sources on this topic, but for another obsession of mine (revisionist history of early Islam) you can get scans of just about every English language academic monograph you could want by searching IA and browsing the uploaders' user profiles.

>Was there really a difference between New Deal liberalism and Cold War liberalism?

Well, yeah; you don't have to go full Joe McCarthy to recognize in historical hindsight that there really was a lot of fellow traveling going on in elite liberal circles during the Popular Front period. PR came through the 30s bloody but unbowed because they weren't willing to follow any party line (including Trotsky's) uncritically. Re: the Trot-to-neocon pipeline, the middle stage of the metamorphosis here is being an anti-Stalinist socdem, and that's the perspective from which most of the Partisan Review critics wrote their most enduring work (Trilling's The Liberal Imagination, Dwight Macdonald's Masscult & Midcult, Daniel Bell's The End Of Ideology and Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.) Not all of them became neocons (that was really the younger postwar generation rather than the original cohort), but they were Cold Warriors.

>warning: they're an explicitly Marxist-Leninist magazine

It's all good. Not my politics, but I'll read anything that catches my interest, and I'm too old and tired to argue ideology on the fat girl porno board.

>>12682

It started with a discussion of a 1930s Looney Tune and snowballed from there: >>12418 (Cross-thread)

>>12692
This thread is for sure an interesting and much welcomed one. Besides expressing my gratitude, I don't think I can contribute in a meaningful manner for the time being.

>>12675
That just makes his love for Norman Rockwell all the more bizarre. To this day it's hard to find a Rockwell artbook without Raygun's personal stamp on it.
>>12691
Sorry for the week+half late reply.
>Have you ever read Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction [...] or Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow?
No I haven't! Bourdieu's book looks especially interesting. I'll add em both next to René Brimo's The Evolution of Taste in American Collecting.
>PR broke away from the CPUSA because the Party was pushing crude, didactic "proletarian realism" as the only literary style worth pursuing
If you were a communist artist (or artist who happened to be a 'fellow traveler') in 1930s America, you were stuck between a rock and a hard place: either take a wage for commissions from the myriad of WPA-affiliated departments and make art that can be reduced to a kind of Regionalism—art that was 'anti-modern' in subject but not necessarily in style; helping to promote the broadly liberal interests of the US government, or stay independent and try to make art that aligned itself with the growing party line of Socialist Realism. It's kinda funny because when you look at art criticism in New Masses under Mike Gold—the editor responsible for pushing that crude 'proletarian realism' you mentioned, much praise was had for political cartoons and not much else. I wonder how much the 'Ashcan School' was still affecting people's aesthetic tastes back then, if at all. On the subject of Socialist Realism, though; I think it could literally be described as the first (I'm hesitant to use this word) 'postmodern' Russian art movement. You see, all conversations on Russian contemporary art still begin with Socialist Realism; scholars rarely call back to the Silver Age, and when they do, it's almost always in a bizarre, reactionary tone. It's true that by the 1930s Russia essentially had a fully developed modernism but the source of everyone's contention (among many other things) was the fact artists were being compelled to move past it. As with most things related to Stalin, I suppose one could chalk it up to the lasting problems of Cold War historiography. My point is that American modernism was practically still in its infancy by comparison. So on the one hand, I don't blame Mike Gold et al for doing what they did but on the other hand, the initial creation of Partisan Review as I guess an ideological (or pedagogical?) course correct definitely seemed justified. Its continued existence well into the Cold War, though? Not so much.
>Happiest year of my life was when I had a little studio apartment within walking distance of both my job and a great public library branch, with no family responsibilities to attend to and no broadband Internet or smartphones to distract me.
That's the dream right there. You don't know how many times I've checked the worldcat ID for a book only to find the nearest copy is in an art museum's reference library in a city that's nearly three hours away. Even the university library that's closest to me has its limits. I'm getting to the point of enrolling again just so I can have statewide access.
>You probably know this already, but Libgen and the Internet Archive are your friends [...] There are a couple of users who'll go in person to archives and do cell phone scans
I do and for what it's worth, I'm one of them. Part of the reason why I'm estranged with my local public library is because I begged them to pay the ILL fee for a reference book that I spent a good 2 days scanning with my smartphone; they initially refused, and remained adamant for two more requests, lol.
>Isn't this dope, it's literally the Iron Maiden font in 1939
It is! A lot of those old Trot journals are really pleasing to the eye; especially compared to Peace, Land and Bread's older issues. PCUSA (a splinter Marxist-Leninist party that formed out of CPUSA member clubs in 2014) also brought back New Masses last year, and it's just as ugly.
>Re: the Trot-to-neocon pipeline, the middle stage of the metamorphosis here is being an anti-Stalinist socdem, and that's the perspective from which most of the Partisan Review critics wrote their most enduring work (Trilling's The Liberal Imagination, Dwight Macdonald's Masscult & Midcult, Daniel Bell's The End Of Ideology and Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.)
See now this is the kind of the stuff I need to read more about; I just want to reiterate that. I'll definitely pick up a copy of Alan Wald's book soon.
>Not all of them became neocons (that was really the younger postwar generation rather than the original cohort), but they were Cold Warriors.
It's the original cohort that I'm interested in. Much of the hand-wringing over the connection seem vastly overblown. It's worth pointing out, though.

>>12821
pretty sure Ronnie was against school desegregattions, which was something Rockwell famously painted about

lowkey massive racist asshole, that Ronnie

>>12830
I don't dispute that. A lot of reactionaries love Norman Rockwell's work. The 1980s in particular saw much nostalgia for the kinds of '40s / '50s magazine cover and advertising illustrations he did. It's always been a way of saying the quiet part (a longing for suburban developments governed by racial covenants) out loud. But Rockwell was a New Deal liberal. His version of the classic 'Rosie the Riveter' illustration is emblematic of this; compare it to the one everyone knows. By the time he started gaining notoriety, artists of his kind were well on their way out, destined to be marginalized by the bureaucrats of the 'New American Painting' like Alfred H. Barr, Leo Castelli and of course, Clement Greenberg.

Just what makes these people so salty? The whole board is like this with these comments. Let women choose what they want to do with their lives. Your comments don't sound smart, you actually sound stupid to most normal people when you talk like you're an art expert. Let the women choose who they want. Don't you believe in God? Do you know that there are people that have visions of the future given to them by God? Or do you believe you're living in a virtual reality? Have you ever seen the future days ahead in your dreams? If you ever did I bet it would change your life too friend. The devil is real. Let me ask you this since you sound like a know it all. This is a video from the ID thread in booty of a milf or mother sucking a bbc while the gentleman makes immature remarks about her child nearby. Do you think this is art too? What university did you attend?

>>12832
>>12832
Norman Rockwell was a small town conservative just like Ronald Reagan. The Center-Left in America tend to be far more conservative and believe in the institution. Rockwell was never really popular because interest in Small Town Conservativism died at Pearl Harbor and The Holocaust on top of Rockwell's perfectionism getting the better of him.

Art in America is more about submitting deadlines to magazines than outright skill. Communism never took hold because Parents were afraid that kids were reading capeshit instead of idolizing working class heros like Popeye and Bugs Bunny, or Donald Duck. (People who joined the War infamously hated John Wayne for being a draft dodger and engaging in cowboy talk). It remains unclear how much of racism was due to Patton, or Macarthur's Pride getting in the way of things

What I love about your people most is how you tend to pretend you know everything. For example, a person that listens to country music must clearly love country music because there's no other possible explanation for listening to a certain music for all that time. You know absolutely nothing in reality. But it's good that you know who Ronald Reagan is, so that you get an idea about what I am here on this Earth to do. But you don't know God, and you don't know the future you only pretend to.

You wouldn't know art if it sat on your face.

it’s not much but it’s honest work

i’ve always been a fan of Edmund Wilson

You're demented, and so far you've been wrong about almost everything as far as I can tell. I would have to check my list. Being wrong is... well it's just not right, is it? There's and old addage that goes, "when you assume, you make an ass out of you and I". I get the feeling that your authority will be soon deminishing on this planet. Just in time, too. By the way, you're the only person that thinks you are cute. I personally think you look creepy. The fem counterpart of your kind are a different matter altogether. Truly perfection. Commendable, I would say. Nice chat. Let me know what else you've been conniving and scheming and plotting. I'm curious.

>>12841
I don't like what Edmund Wilson did to "The Love of the Last Tycoon".

>>12852

true, but you know Fitzgerald did say Wilson was his ‘intellectual conscience ‘

>>12837
>>12838
>>12849
What in the fuck are you talking about

>>12856
I really wish Fitzgerald had lived to finish it. There was such great stuff in there.

I have no clue what you crackers are talking about but uhhh communism is uhhh dooky booty

>>12865
America is talking about Communism because Biden wants to fight Communist Russia and China. We get Gay Artists who whine about the Laogai and Laojiao (Mandarin for Prison) despite the fact that Putin was a glowie for Russia and Xi was sent to the Laogai during DaPeng's reforms. Really, Americans are afraid of China having a strong middle class that needs prisoners to work while Boomers can't shoot Blacks and lock up immigrants like the old days when FDR was in charge.

>>12836
Rockwell's 'small town conservatism' was just carrying on the legacy of Thomas Hart Benton's 'Regionalism' from the New Deal era. Benton, Grant Wood and John Stuart Curry (as well as a few others) had all become household names after TIME magazine did a cover story on em in 1934. Of course from a marxist perspective, liberalism is full of contradictions; and both Benton and his most supportive art critic Thomas Craven embodied it to a tee. They didn't want to use art so much as a weapon as they wanted to romanticize (and more importantly, make a profit from) idyllic representations of American life. Benton himself admired the midwest for its 19th century frontier history and ascribed great importance to groups like the Owenites, Harmony Society, and Amana Colonies.

However by the 1940s, this had mostly translated to Benton selling his artwork to bourgeois families and taking advertising commissions from the American Tobacco Company. Ironically, when the attack on Pearl Harbor happened, and after years of squabbling with communist artists in New York (having moved to Kansas City in 1935 just to get away from them); Benton's attempt at anti-fascist art, The Years of Peril (1942) series ended up being his best selling work to date. That 'small town conservatism' which for years had more or less fused itself with the 'cultural democracy' of the New Deal, was suddenly being used as propaganda for the war effort. Rockwell's own Four Freedoms (1943) series of paintings also shows us this transition. Again, by the time WW2 ended, Regionalism had fallen well out of favor; its artists dead or otherwise jaded, like you basically said.
>>12866
Under the New Deal, the Federal Art Project was the only time in US history where there was a serious alternative to the art market and private arts patronage. I'm not trying to repeat myself from the previous thread, but that alone is worth reexamining; especially since federal arts patronage has been virtually absent from 'Green New Deal' discourse for many years now. The WPA-FAP was the first thing FDR's detractors used to accuse him of communist sympathies, but it's long been known that he and members of his cabinet admired fascists like Mussolini—something CPUSA made note of in their initial denunciations before transitioning to a 'popular front' strategy after 1935. America is talking about communism again for a myriad of reasons. The trade union movement appears to be stretching its muscles, having stood up from the fetal position it's been stuck in for more than half a century; its effects can be felt even in the art world. The 2010s saw widespread enclosure of artist estates by gallery megadealers and museums resorting to deaccessioning art objects just to stay afloat, all the while laying off workers en masse. Museum unionization is still a hot button topic, and was further intensified by pandemic-driven austerity.

>>12871
Also >>12836 it's funny that you mention capshit and donald duck. I added these two books to my reading list a couple weeks ago. Been meaning to read more about the history of EC Comics in particular.

>>12871
Also >>12836 it's funny that you mention capeshit and donald duck. I added these two books to my reading list a couple weeks ago. Been meaning to read more about the history of EC Comics in particular.

>>12866
I think both china and america are afraid of me tbf

>>12866
China isn't communistic anymore its transitioned to full on facism since once you have the power you don't have to pretend to believe in the bullshit.

>>12934
China is a communist country. Neolibs are just salty that they can't get their cheap goods from China, and that the government hates American goods. China has a growing middle class that consumes rom-coms, go to theatres, or still live in villages.

Really, Armchair Neocons are making a critical mistake trying to fight China and Russia after losing to the Taliban

>>12871
>>12836
Damn, do you guys know where I can start reading to even CONSIDER getting up to your level? Something is drawing me to the Socialist Utopianism of the 30s for some odd reason, but I can't yet say why- it's probably because I'm always looking for ways to improve my society- and I really want more left-wing theory to contrast to my already present understanding of free market economics.

>>12935
No, >>12934 is right; China has gone fasci, and hoenstly shows that ye olde Horseshoe theory has weight behind it. I mean, you have their "Wolf Warrior" diplomacy, single party, combination of government and business, veneration of the past... with their terrible birthrate I bet they'll start mandating childbirth and kids within a decade or two, if they don't make people want to immigrate there (which would arguably, be too little too late now)

No one is worried. The sooner the government sees that you guys are spying on people's lives society won't matter and once enough people are aware of what you're doing, the better. Uou'll gwt yours eventually. Economics? You guys are a joke.

>>13026
Nothing is happening. Americans are having their culture wars again because Biden just flat out sucks at governing and we're pretty much stuck with Pelosi and Schumer and Clyburn till one of them kicks the bucket

>>13024
Wolf Warrior Policy was based on a movie that paints Chinese Patriotism as good. If you thought Boomers obsessing over Red Dawn, Rambo, and Steven Segal movies to look hyper Fascist was sad, China LARPing as Jack Bauer is even more pathetic. Where as Russia has Soviet Hardliners who think Putin should be stopped, China has no one to stop Xi from acquiring power

>>13024
>Something is drawing me to the Socialist Utopianism of the 30s for some odd reason
Well the specific kind of utopian socialism Benton was drawn to was long outmoded by the 1930s; that's part of the reason why he got into so many spats with CPUSA-adjacent artists in the New York art scene. Benton's father was a Missouri politician in the 1890s who was drawn to the 'radical' reformist tradition as expressed by populists from that era. While said populism precipitated the creation of the Socialist Party of America and Industrial Workers of the World, it was also adopted by the wider 'Progressive' movement as a whole with its comparatively milquetoast aspirations. When shit went down in 1917 however, all of those efforts were rightfully deemed insufficient, for halfway across the world there was for the first time: actually existing socialism—and not some commune in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Benton found marxism alluring as well but came to reject it for, in my opinion, pretty obtuse reasons (said he found it not too dissimilar from the populist rhetoric he grew up hearing around his father, which is patently false).

America has a long history of utopian or otherwise intentional communities dating back to just before its founding, and they've often coincided with religious swells and economic upheavals. In some cases, these experiments even used novel technologies to illustrate their planners' wishes. Problem is, what 'improvements' they brought to society were largely predicated on ignoring important externalities. One only needs to look at the 1894 Pullman Strike or to call attention to an earlier discussion, Walt Disney's weird fixation with company towns to get an idea as to how often these experiments fail. At best, they're scams with a not-so-subtle tendency to fuck over residents / workers at the slightest hint of things going belly up. We're already seeing this happen again with the recent confluence of so-called 'smart cities' and 'smart contracts' by way of blockchain 'DAO' ventures. There are even groups like the Praxis Society who've been attempting to justify their utopianism on an intellectual basis. It's history repeating itself as farce.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7w3am/people-building-blockchain-city-in-wyoming-scammed-by-hackers
https://reallifemag.com/send-in-the-clouds/

I would read pic related to get an even-handed overview these kinds of experiments (at least to the date of its publication, 1992). You can easily fall down a rabbit hole looking up all the different settlements created during the Second Great Awakening alone.

>>13034
>China has no one to stop Xi from acquiring power
There have been Marxist-Leninist-Maoist insurgencies happening for decades in countries like India, Nepal and the Philippines. Ask them what they think about China post-Deng Xiaoping; their answers might surprise you.

>>13042
>their answers might surprise you

I know you didn't mean it this way, but this phrase read like a clickbait headline in the best possible way. I continue to pleasantly surprised and confused by a thread deep in the weeds about politics and art in the 1930s, on...bbw-chan

>>13045
Yeah sorry, I didn't want to expand on that because it's another big rabbit hole that's outside the present scope of this thread.

>>13041
Walt Disney's father was a socialist from Missouri, don't forget.

>>13041
>You can easily fall down a rabbit hole looking up all the different settlements created during the Second Great Awakening alone.
Neat! thank you. I'm very interested in that, because I know quite a few people who think the way to solve all their problems is through polycules and cohousing to leave their debt traps, yet for some reason only a couple of "us" even bother to truly look at state laws to see where it would have the greatest degree of success. Which is honestly, the great failing of other lefties in my generation, our tendency to start fucking around and not actually work on overcoming our parents and the obstacles they left for us, in my limited viewpoint.

>>13034
I haven't seen all of Wolf Warrior yet, but its interesting to see China even copy our boomers and similar problems hoisted onto the youth generation. I have a friend in one of the southern cities studying english to GTFO, and he told me that economically, every 20-something in China will have to make 6 TIMES what their parents did to keep the nation solvent. When their birthrate is less than 0.95 in some territories, that's untenable, even to a nation with $30 Trillion in debt.

>China has no one to stop Xi from acquiring power
Funny enough, China is now openly admitting to spending more money on internal security than external threats- they even just put down a college communist group in 2019-2020. I know you mean checks and balances, but thanks to the US's Republicans and Trump it's not like we aren't going down that path either.

>>13026
Oh look, someone who's not an American is telling the American what their problem is
America's problem is Status Quo and propaganda. >>13034 made a good point with "Nothing is happening"; that's not Biden's dimentia, that's purposeful. Americans DONT WANT to constantly think about their government, and DONT WANT to accept the truth that you can't just scream "SECOND AMENDMENT!!!!" every time a senator does something you don't like, and don't want to accept that we'll have to change. We are a nation of reactionaries addicted to propaganda machines of our own design, spoonfeeding us what we want to hear. We all KNOW this, but nobody knows where to start to make something better, which is why people think we're so lazy.

>>13048
Buttigieg's father is a Marxist scholar, lol

Capitalism save itself from proletarian upsurge by promoting anyone skilled or obedient enough to the PMC (professional managerial class). A lot of those sectors are not subject to ruthless profit/feedback mechanisms. Middle managers really do nothing all day besides send emails and ask for status updates and reports.

>>13458
a Gramsci scholar who worked at Notre Dame, of all places

>>13048
This is something I honestly didn't know; fascinating.
>>13458
I think 'professional managerial class' is a meaningless term. I picked up Capital v03 again recently and Marx himself makes note of the fact that 19th century British industrial capitalists like Andrew Ure already thought that the managers they employed constituted "the soul of our industrial system." If anything, 'PMC' is just another word used to describe a very old, yet familiar set of relations. But of course, there's more it than that. My point is that most people who use that term today in earnest tend to have just as much of a weird fixation on middle managers as Mr. Ure did.
>>13497
Gramsci is like the most de-fanged Marxist theoretician in all of western academia, lol; has been for decades. So it's unsurprising that Buttigieg's politics developed the way they did.

>>13497
>>13561

Notre Dame had an unexpectedly strong Marxology faculty back in the day. Not surprisingly given the location, most of them were Catholic Thomists who were studying Marx in order to refute him, but they did solid scholarly work. If you're interested in the relationship between Marx and Stirner and in discussions of the "epistemological break" between the 1844 manuscripts and the Manifesto, Nikolaus Lobkewicz is mad underrated. He makes a persuasive case for Marx's encounter with The Ego and Its Own being what triggered the break.

Idk if Mayor Butt's dad falls into this category though, he might have been a later hire.

>>12821

>Sorry for the week+half late reply.

No worries bro, I've been meaning to get back to this thread with more book recommends but I don't have the time and energy lately for an effortpost and I don't want to accidentally set off an ideological slapfight by being too flippant.

I take it from your posts here that you're an M-L, but if you're interested in stretching your horizons a bit, the second volume of Bryan Palmer's biography of James P. Cannon just dropped as a scan on Libgen. As an autist for 1930s Trot sectariana, I've been skimming and liking it so far. Palmer's a pretty big deal in Canadian labor history; he's also an orthodox Cannonite Trot who believes Cannon was 100% right all the time, which I don't agree with, but he's read every single mimeographed faction fight document he can get his hands on and seems to be pretty fair-minded in summing up his findings. Might be of interest as an overview of the various tendencies of non-Stalinist Marxism back then.

>>13562
>>13561
Socialism never took root in America because of Roy Cohn. He was a Liberal Gay Jew who got Soviet Spies the Rosenbergs executed, Was the Lawyer behind the Red Scare, and mentored Donald Trump. His dad was also part of B'nai B'rith. Mayor Pete and other Marxists hate Roy Cohn because he got hang with Powerful Men and used money to be a degenerate in Studio 54 during Hyper Conservative America. He even died of AIDs

>>13567
Hoover was gay as the day is long and regularly blackmailed and persecuted people for being gay.

The first openly gay President will be Republican, if he isn't already (Rumors have swirled around Trump for years.).

>>13567
I'm pretty sure Mayor Pete is not a Marxist. Neither was Cohn a Liberal, just like McCarthy was not a Liberal -- both were red-baiting Conservatives.

Also, Stop with the Capitalisation, because It Looks Dumb, my guy.

>>13562
>I take it from your posts here that you're an M-L
I wouldn't really say I'm an ML, but I can acknowledge that's the general direction I've been going in recent years. For the longest time I've had pretty strong anarchist sympathies. Sitting down and finally reading Marx was my idea of broadening my horizons, haha; and it certainly has. Nikolaus Lobkewicz's work on Marx and Stirner sounds like it'd go well with all of my to-reads re:Marx and Nietzsche. I still gotta read György Lukács' History and Class Consciousness, and I feel like once I've done that I can hopefully just skip Destruction of Reason and go straight into Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History and Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel. The latter (from what little I understand) more coherently builds off of Lukács' arguments that Nietzsche was a 'bourgeois critic of modernity'
>the second volume of Bryan Palmer's biography of James P. Cannon just dropped as a scan on Libgen
Are you sure there's more than one volume? I managed to find this: https://brill.com/view/title/55848 — is Revolutionary Teamsters considered the first? That'd probably make sense. And yeah because it's a part of Brill's 'Historical Materialism' book series it'll be a while before Haymarket Books puts out an affordable paperback copy; god bless libgen, aaaaarg, etc. I was already sorta familiar with Bryan D. Palmer because his name shows up a lot next to Paul Le Blanc (look at his funny face). Their three volume history of US Trotskyism looks interesting, but I dunno when I'm gonna find the time to read em all. I've put off learning more about the early history of CPUSA and Trot sectarian groups long enough so I'm gonna have to at some point. Thanks for the rec.

>>13585
>Are you sure there's more than one volume?
*Reads the synopsis* Oh.

>>13582
Eisenhower is the closest thing to red scare conservative that I can think of. He just wanted to Ike after fighting in WWI and watching Douglas Macarthur screw up the war against Korea. The Red Scare was a picture perfect example of why nobody take conservatives seriously.
>>13573
The FBI is turbo gay. Hoover allegedly had a recording of MLK sleeping with his fans and was afraid of Malcolm X for looking dominant.

>>13590
The "forgotten war". Every time I see a Korean war vet in Walgreen's with the ball cap and camo I sigh a little.

>>13590
Funny you say the FBI is turbo gay, considering Eisenhower kicked out all the gays out of the federal government in the "Lavender Scare" -- right down to any gay fucking astronomers.

Hoover hated women. His entire tenure, there was not a single female FBI agent.

>>13604
Hoover could only nut while pointing at someone and saying "you're fired", and my nigga just walked into the room at the wrong time :(
>J. Edgar barked: "One of them is a pinhead. Get rid of him!" Hoover underlings secretly opened the recruits' lockers and measured every hat (hats were mandatory) to find the man Hoover meant. When they discovered three tied for smallest size, all three were dismissed. - TIME Magazine

>>13605
He was such a fucked-up individual, and he had complete power in Washington in his own little fiefdom FOR FIFTY YEARS.

>>13606
DC has always been a law school, law town. Law schools groom their students to be more conservative. It's not like Princeton, Harvard, or Yale where the university abandoned it's christian college roots to become more secular. It's why DC residents freak out over Kavanaugh being a frat bro even though it's ridiculously common in the East Coast, of Trump having multiple affairs despite it being normal in New York having a party life.

Hoover lived through the Mob, Depression Era bank robbers, and other celebrities having illicit affairs and came up as way too turbo gay by 20th Century standards.

Easiest thing to do would have been to fight him legislatively.

The Uniparty is deperate to prevent discussion of the issues. They will put up with any humilation. I mean, a third-rate TV host was leader of the free world.

>>13611
Hoover was the blackmail KING. No way anybody in the legislature would challenge Hoover.

The nutty part is, the closest we got before 1972 to Hoover leaving the FBI was when Tom Dewey was considering putting Hoover on the Supreme Court in 1948 had he won.

>>13611
The critique of Trump before the election was that he's a bully who didn't finish middle school and got shipped to military school. (Military schools are for developing juvenile delinquents into becoming responsible leaders. Trump allegedly gave a private school teacher a black eye and got kicked out of it.) The critique of Trump now is that he aligns with Saudi Arabia and other dictators in a plot to rule the world.

His politics are hard to actually put down because Trump hates the Bushes for abandoning their blue blood roots to move Republicans hard right and he hates neo liberals for making vanity projects. People like to point to his dad joining the Ku Klux Klan (Northerners tend to omit that the Northern Klan was active during the 20s), but Trump hates the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and see them as suckers. 1/6 may or may not have been a disaster because Trump swindled hordes of militia men out of power.

>>13613
It’s mostly about harm reduction at this point. Trump is is an anomaly because his opinions are all over the map.
It’s almost the opposite of a Dem who holds the most milquetoast and bland opinions.

>>13585

>Paul LeBlanc

Along with Palmer and Alan Wald (who wrote the New York Intellectuals book I recommeded earlier), LeBlanc is one of a several Boomers who had been part of the SWP before its implosion in the late 70s and now do academic work on Trotskyism. Also he looks like Pete Postlethwaite lol I'm planning to splurge on the Haymarket paperback of the Cannon bio when it comes out, because I'm looking forward to reading rather than skimming it but there's no way my eyestrain and attention span can handle 1,000+ pages of PDF. The three volumes of U.S. Trotskyism 1928-1965 aren't a history, they're an annotated anthology of primary sources. It's a comprehensive and fair-minded selection, and the contents are well worth reading (I'm perennially drawn to the 1930s because people back then could write), but except for the editors' annotations you can find everything in it on marxists.org.

I hope Palmer lives long enough to finish the next volume of the Cannon bio, because 1938-1941 is the really juicy period in Trot history. That's when Cannon split with Max Shachtman, his primary rival in the American Trotskyist movement who became the original and paradigmatic "Trot to socdem to neocon" figure.

Here's the Lobkowicz article I was talking about. He's anti-Marx but I think his conclusions are solid: https://consciousegoism.6te.net/pdfs/academia/KarlMarxAndMaxStirner.pdf This site is great, it has scans of a ton of rare academic articles on Stirner and the other Young Hegelians.

I'm waiting on that Graeber book on bureaucracy to come in the mail rn, because I've been reading more anarchist theory lately as my wife and I are planning a move off the grid in an area with a decent sized anarchic community.

>>13615
It's impossible because Joe Biden has been causing more damage by talking as if he was Winston Churchill. Democrats are projected to lose the house and Senate because they forgot that being a good wartime president doesn't make for a good peacetime. South Korea is already going hard right and Ukraine is going hard right.

>>13994
South Korea? kek. Have you seen Korean TV in the past 20 years? All of these movements are lead by reactionaries who have not only nren overcome with fear but also use that fear on the population for their own benefit, not unlike what Hitler (and many others) have done in the past. These people are a complete paythetic joke, and they will continue living in unjustified fear and not in liberty until their whole society collapses. As long as they don't take me down with them in their absolute Godless idiocy then I say let them live their lives as they see fit. What they are attempting to achieve is a unified nation, because that's the way or path to communism and total control.

I've never been there and I wouldn't want to, no matter how cute the women may be, but I would assume that the " ground zero" for all this unfortunately is their universities. Young heathens who truly believe that they are more intelligent and better than Winston Churchhill and so many of our grandparents and forefathers. Here the abusers took down murals and statues, but it's all the same evil and greed. It's not enough that we live in a country where the rich get richer (and it has ruined the whole country's economy). They are women and they want it all, but what they really seek is destruction, death, and robbery.

>>13615
Communism has already been achieved in nations like France and Canada. I doubt that it will achieve WWII levels since the hard right are not as competent as they were in the 20th Century. America under Trump is the closest the United States has to hard right due to the Donald destroying neocons in a way that the last election went Deep Blue because nobody trusts the GOP with unlimited power. Deep down, the Squad wants to be more like Trudeau, but they aren't component like Justin to use emergency powers to deal will a threat to Canada.

If California and New York stopped abandoning their status as port cities to become a futurist dystopia, they would be Communism. Of course that requires both states to stop listening to the radical left who has no formal training in science or politics and promotes moonbat theories, and listen to the workers.

>>14013 How has communism been achieved in France and Canada?

>>14015

This is a Kisame word salad post and "wtf are you talking about" is the reaction he wants. Please do not engage.

>>14015
Student Revolution of 1968 helped Canada and France become Communist. Taxes are high, the government funds schools and medical services, and there's true equality. Canada is social democratic because of Treudau's policies. Art in both Canada and France are funded by the government, but the catch is that it has to have merit.

>>14016
I just don't care for the far right because all they do is complain about people living in luxury or not paying attention to what God wants. I also was raised by Black Military Vets, Black Conservatives who whine about Gangsta Rap and being gay yet demand I make them respectable.

>>14019
They aren't fucking Communist, my dude.

>>14025
They are communist. Communism is derived from a French word to mean "of or for the community". You are conflating communism with socialism. Soviet Russia, Laos, China and Cuba are central planned socialist states. You are making the same error that Black People who simp for Assata Shakur or Fidel Castro make in conflating the two.

>>14016
The fact that he uses a VPN to evade any bans and thus the mods do not even try to shut him up at this point is proof positive he does this to troll. He doesn't make coherent arguments and uses niche definitions to bait you into posting.

And it works. Every time. Thankfully he has enough tells that you can pick him out and refuse to engage.

>>14029
I think you have a legit mental illness because I live off the grid with a weak signal. Plus, you guys are derailing a thread that was supposed to be about film and animation. Why don't you admit that your Communist Utopia will never happen because society doesn't like moral fags like you? Moral fags who cry out to mods are the first to go to the gulags. "Kisame" is only rent free in your mind.

Sorry to double post but I am not trolling. Socialists and Communists write in the same beige prose that makes them easy to spot. I just don't understand how the left can make the critique of Disney as imperialist power structure sound so boring. I blame Lenin and Orwell for making the prose boring since their works are very dry.

>>14032
I'm sick of seeing your garbage on the overboard page

You just know he has a friend who he brags to about this internet 'feud' he's in. I can't imagine caring about something so ephemeral and silly.

>>14031
This man put the oldest most liberal cartoon that noone my age has ever even heard of let alone watched on a mannequin's head all while typing a comment that was word for word a copy pasta of what someone else has ALREADY said, a copy pasta that critiques dry prose as being boring writing as opposed to great writing.........

This is why bbwchan will never be great again

>>14033
He's so desperate to control the conversation that he will ignore your point and bring in 3 other complaints that are tangentially related. It's pathetic how much he cares.

>>14034
BBWchan was never good. He's just adding his own garbage to the equation.

>>14036
Jokes on you, because I have not any idea wtf you're even talking about! lol

To whoever reported this thread with your all caps screaming, this is /gen/. People can say whatever dumb shit they want here. If you are mad about communism, hide the thread. If you are this mad about Kisame then stop responding to him. He gives himself away instantly in every post, it's not hard.

>>14045
Who is /gen/ even talking about?

>>14033
I have valid reason to make fun of fetishards. You are a thirty year old man succumbing to peer pressure and falling for an internet rumor made up by Null, a literal Qanon tard who got chased out of 8kun for being too crazy for them. You are acting like boomers who think I am the Riddler from the Batman (2022), when I am just some normie in IRL who works a mundane job. I don't really have a fetish and am heading out to travel. Have fun with your imaginary friend "Kisame", psycho

>>14047
Who said anything about Null? Still licking our wounds after being banned from the Farms, our we?

>>14055
No, I trolled Kiwifarms too by trashing their browser page with misinformation. You guys are actually that stupid and gullible. I feel bad for your parents and peers.

>>14055
>He gives himself away instantly
He always circles back to blaming the blacks for communism. I guess his mother craves BBC or something.

>>14047
>im da riddler babee
Come to this rock, playin' the tough. Ye make me laugh with yer false grum.

>>14064
>>14065
Oh wow, I knew communists were dumb. I didn't know to they were dumb enough to support war crimes. Maybe this is why communist women were loose fuckmeat for to the army while communist men died in Stalingrad.

>>14066
LET NEPTUNE STRIKE YE DEAD WINSLETTE
HARK
HAAAAAAAAAARK
HARK TRITON, HARK
BELOW, BID OUR FATHER THE SEAKING; RISE FROM THE DEPTHS, FULL, FOUL IN HIS FURY, BLACK WAVES TEEMING OF SALT FOAM; TO SMOTHER THIS YOUNG MOUTH WITH PUNGENT SLIME, TO CHOKE YE, ENGORGING YOUR ORGANS TIL YE TURN BLUE AND BLOATED WITH BILGE AND BRINE AND CAN SCREAM NO MORE - ONLY WHEN HE CROWNED IN COCKLE SHELLS WITH SLITHERIN TENTACLE TAIL AND STEAMING BEARD TAKE UP HIS FELL BEFINNED ARM, HIS CORAL-TRINE-TRIDENT SCREECHES BANSHEE LIKE IN THE TEMPEST AND PLUNGES RIGHT THROUGH YER GULLET BURSTING YE - A BULGING BLADDER NO MORE; BUT A BLASTED BLOODY FILM AND NOW NOTHING FOR THE HARPIES AND THE SOULS OF DEAD SAILORS TO PECK AND CLAW AND FEED UPON ONLY TO BE LAPPED UP AND SWALLOWED BY THE INFINITE WATERS OF THE DREAD EMPEROR HIMSELF, FORGOTTEN TO ANY MAN TO ANY TIME, FORGOTTEN TO ANY GOD OR DEVIL, FORGOTTEN TO THE SEA FOR ANY STUFF FOR PART OF WINSLETTE EVEN SCANTLING OF YOUR SOUL WINSLETTE IS NO MORE BUT IS NOW ITSELF THE SEA!

Now after writing this off of a live youtube clip I haven noticed that Thomas might have been into liquid bloating

>>14068
Look at ye, handsome lad with eyes bright as a lady.

>>14068
>>14069
No. I think you have a legit mental disorder. possibly schizophrenia

>>14046
It's this troll that has a very esoteric understanding of communism, Black history, Marvel, Ralph Bakshi, and politics at large in America. He's referred to as Kisame because he namefagged as a Naruto character when he start participating on this site, which stuck after he hopped on other proxies to hide his tags. His other giveaway is seemingly random capitalization of words, which he attributes to phoneposting.

I honestly thought it was autism at first but the usage of proxies and possibly VPNs to evade bans that were tried early on to combat him leads me to believe it's trolling. Though since Chris Chan exists, very possible it's both. I mean, you can get way more people mad at you on 4chan proper. Here it's like 8 coomers.

Just don't engage when you see it. We always have someone who never remembers that lesson.

>>14073
You are crazy to assume that a guy who uses a Naruto character as a pen name is dangerous. I think you may might have a legit mental illness. A lot of these references to Kisame or Chris Chan are too small to work in and outside of the internet.

>>14076
Oh right, almost forgot the escalation via projection. Thanks Kisame!

By the way, since I only really know you from /gen/ - who DO you like to see on this site? Favorite models or camwhores?

>>14077
I dunno man. I am more into Christina Hendricks and easily distracted by her breasts. I think these only fans models are messed up trying to charge 300 per pic

>>14078
2007 called, they want their dated references back.
What an intricate brain this person has.

>>14080
I am behind the times because I live in the suburbs and pretty much fundamentalist. This means that popular culture is pretty pretty much dated since all the radio plays are hits from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s. Plus, the East Coast is pretty big on respecting elders. It's what happens when members of the clergy and the town mayor are the same person

>>14080
>>14082
>>14078
>>14077
>>14076
can you boomers kindly keep your relationship drama contained within whatever two bit cornfield you hail from

>>13622
>The three volumes of U.S. Trotskyism 1928-1965 aren't a history, they're an annotated anthology of primary sources.
The fact they're annotated makes them sound even better! I'm always starved for primary sources because again, no university library access. There was a time where I could spend hours reading a pdf or article sitting in front of a computer screen, but I can't stand the eyestrain anymore. I've gotten into the habit of not relying on web sources (even the good ones you'd find on marxists.org) unless I absolutely have to.
>(I'm perennially drawn to the 1930s because people back then could write) [...] I hope Palmer lives long enough to finish the next volume of the Cannon bio, because 1938-1941 is the really juicy period in Trot history.
Things get really interesting the closer you get to the formal end of the New Deal in 1943 (and for a lot of different people) for sure; so that's unsurprising. I hope Palmer lives long enough too, and will definitely give him and LeBlanc a closer look. Lately though I've found myself on a tangent looking into the 1910s New York art scene. Three things come to mind: John Weischel and his People's Art Guild, the 'Stieglitz Circle' and his 291 Gallery, and of course everyone associated with the founding of the New School for Social Research. Weischel was a reformist 'socialist' who attempted to theorize a more a materialist art and means of arts patronage, whereas Stieglitz (whom everyone now remembers) was much more idea-focused and personality-driven (what many people would consider an equivalent to contemporary art dealers/curators). I'm just trying to get a better understanding of when (how?) the People's Art Guild ended and John Reed Clubs began. Also, as an addendum: when I read Andrew Hemingway's book last year, one factoid that stood out to me was how during CPUSA's 'Popular Front' transition in 1935, the announcement that their John Reed Clubs' would be reforming into the American Artists' Congress was actually made at a conference hosted at the New School. I don't know a damn thing about the 'University in Exile' that was formed there in the 1930s, but do you know if anyone in the Trotskyist side of the American Communist Movement interacted or mingled with the NSSR?
>Here's the Lobkowicz article I was talking about.
Thanks, and bookmarked~

>>14045
I'd like to think the people reporting are complaining about the sheer number of off topic posts, lol. Now you could maybe have an esoteric / conspiracist conversation about many things in the New Communist Movement during the late 1960s through early 1980s, and its place in American art history; but the literature on that is unfortunately even more scarce. Some cool research topics I myself have been neglecting range from things like the Art Workers Coalition, the IIT Institute of Design (or 'New Bauhaus') and Chicago Surrealist Group, as well as America's equivalent to Britain's Fabian Society: the League for Industrial Democracy (what the SDS originally split off from).

>>14087
Computer nerds are too dumb to use casual language. Real practitioners of science have no need for communism or a utopia. Sure, Einstein was a supporter of communism due to the soviets being big on hard science in the 50s, but he didn't abandon science to build comic book science gadgets for the government to impress their allies and make enemies jealous. What people call communism is merely two centuries of political thought out of four point five billion years the Earth has existed. If the logic involves doomsday conspiracies about central government plotting sedition, then the logic belongs to a cult. The last thing America needs is cult like thinking based off one man worship me cults.

>>14084
i dunno bud, you better wish em into the cornfield or somein

Bumping this thread to save it from death, been meaning to get back in here with an effortpost

>>16704
so you going to show some effort?

>>16704
You should left it to die, just like the guards let Stalin to rot in piss

Whenever I think of BBW and communism, I think about what rule 63 would do to leaders of North Korea and Mainland China.

>>16704
I'm still here if you wanna keep talkin

I've never met a communist with any moral, philosophical or even economic conviction. It all seems like a redoubt for the societal oddbits that would be targeted by fascists / nationalists. And because communists defeated nationalists in a very insular reading of western historiography, they ape men who would liquidate their non productive, decadent ass.
That said, it's very interesting that in nearly all manifestations beyond the western world, "communism" seems to take the form of ethnonationalist blood and soil tier reappropriation of property occupying their sacred land. The ussr was only relevant or competitive when it jettisoned the gay Jewish shit and regressed into a more nationalist posture. Whigs btfo imagine that, people that don't fit in with their families are easily ousted from functional society.

Tl;Dr ngmi weirdos, fascism is reliably emergent.

>>18609
Sounds like somebody trying to warp reality to peddle fascism to me

>>18623
>Sounds like somebody trying to warp reality to peddle fascism to me
It really is, even before he labeled it "Gay Jewish shit". You can trust fascists to reveal themselves eventually that way.

Personally, most the commies I've met have since become SocDems to good varying degrees, and most have admitted their opinions were more reactionary than otherwise. And because of that I support them even harder! Most people NEVER realize they only think "one way" as a response to something- and all of them have seen some fucked in half shit and want it to never happen to others again.

>>18661
>>18609
Communism is seen more as performative theater, or amateur philosophy in New York. The problem boils down to AOC abandoning her constituents or De Blasio annoying everyone with his larping as the working man.

>>18623
>>18661
By all means, continue organizing workers. You'll meet the workers :)

>>18666
Oh thanks for the support, man, I'll absolutely keep doing what I'm doing. Us workers gotta stick together after all.
>>18661
Yeah, there's a reason "hiding your power level" is common advice fascists give each other, but in my experience the mask always slips sooner rather than later. Fascists are consistently nothing but incompetent clowns. It's the ones who give almost no indication of their fascist beliefs that are truly effective.

And I like your point about communists who turn towards SocDem thought. Most people are unwilling to admit that they've fallen into the trap of reactionary thought. Especially when they've done so in such a way that leads them to a school of thought that is- in theory- opposed to reactionary tendency. I know I've done it before, I know I've fucked up, and I'll keep trying to be a better person for that exact reason. Like you said, it's good to keep supporting people, no matter how far they've fallen as a part of their journey or not. I like that way of thinking a lot honestly!

>>18609
There's a joke about Judaism being one of the homohating religions and Diodorus Sicilius and Atheneus' reports of Celts being überhomo somewhere, but I can't figure out how to make it not bounce back onto me too
But yeah, communists go from 0 to 100 racist ultranationalists instantly lol, I try to keep a solely historical interest and not look at online weirdos but the way they talk about black people vs Finns, Ukranians, Uiyghurs is the biggest tone shift ever. You're like 16 and live in New Jersey, go play a sport or grind your WoW character instead of arguing about arcane theories and fake glowie operations

>>18669

>the mask always slips sooner rather than later

They can't help skipping straight from the premise to the conclusion while neglecting to explain the intervening steps.

1) Communism in first world countries is a subculture of academics and social misfits that doesn't have any relevance to ordinary people's lives
2) ????
3) Therefore we need a blood and soil ethnostate to smash the you-know-whos

I agree with point one and my interest in 20th century Marxism is just a historical hobby, but the conclusion, uh, doesn't follow.

>>18675

>You're like 16 and live in New Jersey, go play a sport or grind your WoW character instead of arguing about arcane theories and fake glowie operations

Lol, too real

I can understand why it's a thing, but as an oldfag it's been funny/bizarre to watch the rise of the "Stalinism was good actually" tankie subculture from Zoomers who are too young to remember a time when "actually existing socialism" actually existed.

>>18669
>I like that way of thinking a lot honestly!
Thanks! It's sometimes hard for them and I give a little leeway, because American schooling is so shit and behind the times most get "into" comm-meme-ism simply because it's not capitalism, basically for the same reasons any ripshit thinks fascism is a good idea. Nobody understands what a centrally planned economy is or what it means thanks to good old red scare propaganda; it's easy to turn people off from communism in the same vein as the gold standard, because both limit money regardless of how much "work" you can do.

>>18675
Anyone who's met the jews- especially the Orthodox jews- knows they're one of the most conservative members in the US. New York has entire Midwife brigades on ambulances to birth Jewish children because of that religion doesn't allow babies to be born by anyone other than a woman.
>But yeah, communists go from 0 to 100 racist ultranationalists instantly lol,
They're "Brown Commies"; ones that claim to be communistic but wear Fasci uniforms. Not to shout "Hur Horseshoe theory!" but anymore it's becoming more and more true, since under both systems all power is already centralized under a party.
The Ukraine invasion is seriously smashing them right now. Huge portions buy Putin's lies and claim it's a war against American Imperialism (They claim Western but, we really know what they mean) and claim that the ends justify the means- then someone posts the most recent reports of war crimes or tanks loaded with stolen washing machines and toilets and it's like a faucet tap opened on a septic tank of excuses. They can't stand the idea that Russia now, isn't THEIR Russia that oppresses gays or has some of the worst wealth inequality in the world. The other half is (for better or worse) learning why the Military Industrial Complex exists and is increasingly becoming more libertarian, I suppose you could say.

>>18666
>By all means, continue organizing workers. You'll meet the workers :)
I Will! The only reason American workers don't Unionize more is because of the propaganda against the wording.
One of my learning moments was having an ambulance burn down on me with a patient still in it. We had been tossing the idea of "organizing" for a long time, but after that we began to really take it seriously and soon much of the EMS staff was discussing it. We began talking of making our own ambulance service and having what really was a worker-commune style system, but the MOMENT we began calling it a union people began to drop. I find the #1 goal in the USA to organize workers is to know what corpo propaganda is used against you, and bend around it as hard as you fucking can. We ain't a union, we're uh, "labor department"! Yeah!

>>13567
So a gay zionist had a big bone to pick with marxists who were also jewish?

>>18699
My father is literally the guy in that meme and it's driving me crazy. No, he's not Russian. His political beliefs are pretty inconsistent and self-contradictory. First and foremost he is a diehard IRA supporter. Beyond that I might describe him as a fellow traveller with Stalinism and/or Bonapartism, although that isn't quite accurate. There is a very long list of people, ethnicities, institutions and countries he vehemently hates. He regularly goes on unhinged rants (all of which mention "THE *FUCKING* AMERICANS") about seeing these people lined up against walls and shot, and/or seeing these countries get conquered by Russia. I wouldn't care, but he gets so worked up that I'm worried he'll have a stoke one of these days.

>>18728
*stroke

.>>18609
>The ussr was only relevant or competitive when it jettisoned the gay Jewish shit and regressed into a more nationalist posture.
Here in America, a lot of (ostensibly) communist debates in the mid-2010s tended to revolve around obscure 'Market Socialist' thinkers and taking another look at the NEP years, which were decidedly more 'cosmopolitan' than any time in the USSR after 1933-34. People wanted to understand why they were seeing photos of party emblems above Gucci stores in Shanghai, for example, and started to fixate on 'Fully Automated Luxury Communism' as a concept. Shit's ran through at this point; but it was a far cry from the more Maoist-inspired struggles that have happened, and are still happening in the global south.
>>18664
>Communism is seen more as performative theater, or amateur philosophy in New York.
Well yeah. New York today is just a bunch of staging areas for Peter Thiel's corporatist cultural front; your Curtis Yarvin types fucking Red Scare orbiters. I wouldn't take any of it seriously.
>>18695
>as an oldfag it's been funny/bizarre to watch the rise of the "Stalinism was good actually" tankie subculture from Zoomers
We're a whole generation removed from the collapse of the NCM. It makes complete sense that anyone interested in building a communism for the 21st century would want to reevaluate its 20th century components. A lot of Cold War liberal historiography remains difficult to rely upon (Ronald Grigor Suny and Domenico Losurdo have written extensively on that), and the Popular Front era—which was adopted by Comintern under Stalin's leadership, was the last time any US Marxist party saw significant membership. Now of course there's room for critique there; but it's not funny or bizarre to me at all.

>>18728
Nothing super wrong with that meme aside from the Russiaball; this whole conflict has basically felt like a dress rehearsal for third inter-imperialist war. I think the mass of self-described 'communists' with Russian flag emojis in their display names represent a right-deviation in the current Marxist-Leninist trend in the US. They're fun to poke fun at, sure, but lately their rhetoric has adopted a more LaRouchite character, which is alarming.

>>18731
>Ronald Grigor Suny
Great interview on his most recent book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GRS2kMlZsk

User ID c71e93 here, btw, posting from a different location.

>>18731

>Now of course there's room for critique there; but it's not funny or bizarre to me at all.

I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that it's "liberal Cold War historiography" to recognize that the USSR under Stalin was a totalitarian slave state, even if it did carry out a successful primitive accumulation on the Russian peasantry. Following up on those names, the Losurdo book looks interesting enough that I'll check it out some time just to expose myself to an alternative opinion, but I doubt I'll find it convincing. But I like this thread as a book discussion and would rather not derail it with an ideological slapfight, so I'll politely disagree and leave it at that.

(That said, I do think it's worth checking out primary sources from the Thirties for anti-Stalinist takes that aren't Cold War. The LeBlanc Trot anthology is a good starting point if you can get hold of a copy.)

I was a little too flippant in my last post (sorry, got annoyed with the fasho), but as a cynical middle aged guy who (mis)spent his youth in it, I do think that the US radical left is basically a fringe academic subculture and I no longer find its ideas convincing, although I still keep up with it to an extent and continue to find it fascinating as an object of historical study.

>New York today is just a bunch of staging areas for Peter Thiel's corporatist cultural front

Aww, it's not THAT bad. The Dimes Square stuff is ridiculous astroturf, but the nice thing about NYC is how easy it is to ignore the hipsters when there's so much else going on. Even "Dimes Square" itself is just a block in Chinatown to most of the normies on the street at any given time. It sucks that gentrification has strangled old-school low rent bohemia, but that started happening decades ago, long before the current crop of pseudo-trads hit the scene.

>LaRouchite character

Is the Center for Political Innovation affiliated with LaRouche or do they just hit a lot of the same themes?

>>18728

>a diehard IRA supporter... fellow traveller with Stalinism

The fact that the OIRA was technically a Marxist-Leninist party has always baffled my puny burger brain. That's so far from anything you'd see in American political culture that it's hard for me to wrap my head around.

>>18738
>I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that it's "liberal Cold War historiography" to recognize that the USSR under Stalin was a totalitarian slave state,
"Western Soviet historiography has been influenced by our own perspectives of the Cold War" shouldn't be a controversial statement. We've come a long way since the 'totalitarian' school approach. Today it's seen as rather antiquated and reductionist on account of its explicitly anti-communist bias. The days of Cold War Warriors like Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes masquerading as historians is, for the most part, over. They were broadly responsible for pushing the "USSR = Nazi Germany" line that was popular back then. Revisionists like Suny (and others) came out of this wanting to set the record straight. Access to primary sources was severely limited at the time (and continues to be even after 1991); so it's not like they had much to work with, but they're still better overall imo. It's a fun rabbit hole to go down; I highly recommend both for a good laugh and to piss yourself off.
>Following up on those names, the Losurdo book looks interesting enough
Which one? War and Revolution has his takes on Soviet historiography iirc. I do know that his Stalin bio, which has been accused of being straight up hagiography (so much so that even Verso won't publish it; I mean seriously? They published fucking Osama bin Laden many years ago but now they won't touch the work of some dead Italian who one-upped Lukács in his hate-boner for Nietzsche?) will soon be published by Iskra Books.
>The LeBlanc Trot anthology is a good starting point if you can get hold of a copy.
Oh don't worry, I'm planning on doing a bulk buy form Haymarket Books by the end of the year.
>I do think that the US radical left is basically a fringe academic subculture and I no longer find its ideas convincing, although I still [...] find it fascinating as an object of historical study.
I'd barely even call it an academic subculture. An intelligentsia certainly exists (one bolstered by still recent, Trot-influenced publishing houses like Haymarket again) but it's no longer as confined to our university systems as it might've been in the 1980s or 1990s. That's hard for me to imagine anyway because everything I've learned about the 'radical left' in the US has been through independent research whilst tumbling through the job market lol; not at all while I was in undergrad. Kids getting indoctrinated by communist professors at university is a total myth.
>Aww, it's not THAT bad.
Yeah.. I guess it's not. I recently read Rebecca Zurier's book on the Aschan School of painters because I wanted to learn more about their involvement at the anarchist Ferrer Center and with The Masses and just felt like the descriptions of New York that got recounted are totally different to what it's like now. Interesting to discover little factoids like how Andy Warhol was a big fan of Robert Henri though.
>Is the Center for Political Innovation affiliated with LaRouche or do they just hit a lot of the same themes?
I don't think they are; 'Neo-LaRouchite' would be a better way of describing Maupin and his ilk (in the same way PSL are inheritors of Marcyism). Any sufficiently advanced communist conspiracism, etc.

>>18738
>The fact that the OIRA was technically a Marxist-Leninist party has always baffled my puny burger brain. That's so far from anything you'd see in American political culture that it's hard for me to wrap my head around.
Irish politics (both mainstream and fringe) is so far removed from American politics that I generally find trying to discuss it with Americans to be fruitless.
We have three main political parties.
>Fine Gael
Run-of-the-mill neoliberal assholes. Traditionally the party of large-scale farmers, businessmen, the army and most especially the police.
>Fianna Fáil
Extremely similar to FG (i.e. also neoliberal assholes) but slightly more nationalist and populist. Traditionally the party of smaller farmers and business owners, although that distinction is largely a thing of the past now.
>Sinn Féin
The largest and most effective left wing party. Historically strongly associated with the IRA (specifically the PIRA), which means people either love them or hate them. Easily described in three words: socialist, nationalist and populist. Traditionally the party of fringe IRA wingnuts, though these days they are very popular with young people and the urban working class.

We also have a lot of smaller parties and especially a lot of independents, i.e. individuals running for office without joining any party. Independents exploit the highly parochial and insular nature of rural Irish politics to carve out fiefdoms for themselves based on nothing but cronyism. Some of them have libertarian leanings these days, but by and large they only care about enriching themselves and giving their constituents enough "favours" to get reelected. Think Mayor Quimby.

I can come back later and talk about the fringe parties if anyone is curious.

>>18746
>socialist, nationalist, populist
Based James Connolly, the original National Socialist.

Don't let fear define you. It's coming one way or another. Find strength

I'll leave you with one parting gift: Read List. Read about the national system. Find out why you are doomed to failure unless you have a nation.

>>18740
>Rebecca Zurier's book on the Aschan School
It's really good btw. She talks about the painters' backgrounds in newspaper illustration and pictorial journalism. I always forget just how excruciatingly slow photography took to develop as a medium. As late as the 1910s and 1920s, news outlets were still sending out artist-reporters to sketch that day's events so they could then be engraved and printed in the next issue. Some of these artists had socialist sympathies too—having spent a lot of time among the people (not something you'd see from today's reporters); so a big takeaway I had from the book is that the intersection of art making and revolutionary politics is much older than I thought, and often started with cartoonists.

>>18771
Huh that's weird; I've been given a new thread ID.

>>18772
>Huh that's weird; I've been given a new thread ID.
For your valuable contributions to the state, comrade

>>18768
>Read List
What's List? Closest I know is "Von List" in old Iron Pill memes.

>>14073
Lol what a fag.
Idk why this thread exists but that’s /gen/ I guess.
You retards are too funny. I wonder why there was such a big gap in posting after the Russia invasion.

>>19560
It grew out of a tangential discussion regarding scene history; pity that thread's dead now.
>I wonder why there was such a big gap in posting after the Russia invasion.
There wasn't. A few weeks between posts is normal.

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