What is the current state of Mighty Mango thought, even as it has less than 1000 days left to do its damage. And more importantly what is to be Dumb, since many have to deal with the everyday life indignities of Trumpworld in its more insidious forms like being asked whether we’re citizens because of skin color. Such is the current state of the personality (disorder) cult that is Trumpism, which only has crystallized the racist nativism of several generations.
As amusing as his petty-bourgeois fetish for gold-plating has been, there remains a cultural commodification of concepts privileging some (skin) colors over others as though their essence was somehow more privileged relative to human rights.
BTW, if you are asked, "Are you a citizen?" by CBP or any other question by any other law enforcement authority, you may refuse to answer. In some states you're required to identify yourself. In no state must you identify your citizenship or residency status.
The continuing fatigue will unfortunately last longer than 1000 days, and infect even those whose comfort comes from relatively conventional conceptions of everyday life. Because corporate media.
The Grand Unified Theory of Trump got a boost Thursday when two articles attempting to quantify the collateral damage were simultaneously published in Politico (“Trump’s Ever-Mounting Scrap Heap”) and The New York Times (“For Many, Life in Trump’s Orbit Ends in a Crash Landing”).
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In the last year, Trump made his D.H.S. secretary his chief of staff, moved his C.I.A. director to State, and is now considering moving his chief of staff to the V.A..
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“I think that loyalty has always been a one-way street with Trump, and he doesn’t really care about the wreckages he engenders as long as he comes out where he wants to be,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien told the Times. “Ronny Jackson’s reputation would never have been in play had the president not put him up for this job.” Wilson offered a more damning portrait of Trump’s dehumanizing, transactional approach to interpersonal relationships. “Trump betrays everyone: wives, business associates, contractors, bankers and now, the leaders of the House and Senate in his own party,” he told The Washington Post. “[Party leaders] can’t explain this away as [a] 15-dimensional Trump chess game. It’s a dishonest person behaving according to his long-established pattern.”
www.vanityfair.com/...
The actual damage is far deeper, considering the state of public order, where we have programs like “Live PD” making the subjugation of the populace a reality show.
Darn those counter-revolutionaries, doing the job of restorationists and defenestrating the left in the name of “moderation”. How ever closer is Network 23 because if the gamergaters get power, life will be as coarse as 4Chan or the WHCD.
There is a cultural revolution, if inventing villains is necessary. But stamping out “cultural marxism” in a democratic republic can unfortunately become a campaign of eradicating incorrect thought. More interesting is how in the Trumpian context, you should buy his Tchotchkes to join.
Trumpists are in search of such imaginary enemies and bolstered by residuals of 1950s anti-communism that could tolerate homosexuality as long as it never revealed itself to get married or buy wedding cakes. Trump’s shameful treatment of Roy Cohn after contracting AIDS is a classic example. because in the Mango’s mind, he’s the victim. And so horrifying contradictory is his supporting antisemitism in supporting (neo-) Nazis.
The conspiracy theorists claim that these “cultural Marxists” began to use insidious forms of psychological manipulation to upend the west. Then, when Nazism forced the (mostly Jewish) members of the Frankfurt School to move to America, they had, the story goes, a chance to undermine the culture and values that had sustained the world’s most powerful capitalist nation.
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The theory of cultural Marxism is also blatantly antisemitic, drawing on the idea of Jews as a fifth column bringing down western civilisation from within, a racist trope that has a longer history than Marxism. Like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the theory was fabricated to order, for a special purpose: the institution and perpetuation of culture war. We can even nominate an author for this lunacy: William S Lind, a polymath of the American hard right, who sought to put rightwing activism on a new footing as the cold war drew to a close.
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It allows those smarting from a loss of privilege to be offered the shroud of victimhood, by pointing to a shadowy, omnipresent, quasi-foreign elite who are attempting to destroy all that is good in the world. It offers an explanation for the decline of families, small towns, patriarchal authority, and unchallenged white power: a vast, century-long left wing conspiracy. And it distracts from the most important factor in these changes: capitalism, which demands mobility, whose crises have eroded living standards, and which thus, among other things, undermines the viability of conventional family structures and the traditional lifestyles that conservatives approve of.
The story of cultural Marxism is also flexible and can be tailored to fit with the obsessions of a range of right-wing actors. As such, it’s one example of an idea from the extremes which has been mobilised by more mainstream figures and has dragged politics as a whole a little further right.
www.theguardian.com/...
And yet there can be and should be cultural revolution, even if it’s only occasionally telling truth to power, because all we have left is the occasional and arbitrary signs of wealth. All that glitters might not be gold in a real world. “The real problem for Aristotle, and the Greeks of classical Athens, was not wealth, but avarice, for which the myth of King Midas and his “golden touch” served as a popular cautionary tale.”
“If it sometimes seems to be more [than a metal],” Paul Krugman explains, “that is only because society has found it convenient to use gold as a medium of exchange—a bridge between other, truly desirable, objects. There are other possible mediums(sic) of exchange, and it is silly to imagine that this pretty, but only moderately useful, substance has some irreplaceable significance.”
maoistrebelnews.com/...
However, others have found that in need of further ‘cultural’ explication, and that is what signifies the necessity for artists or cultural workers in a neoliberal capitalist economy. Darn that class struggle. We only have 995 days left.
...ascription of value to a good through trade or exchange somehow de-natured it, or robbed it of its essence. Its true value was its “use value”, as opposed to its “exchange value.”
politicaltheology.com/...
The relative autonomy of science during the Chinese Cultural Revolution was also like the relative autonomy of art, although because the military kept it intact, much like the banking system, despite the stagnation.
Of the many manifestations of Sinophobia in Trumpworld is to on the one hand desire the dictator-for-life implications of Xi Jinping thought, even if the Art of the Deal was ghost-written. OTOH, there’s the production of knock-offs while attacking the intellectual property piracy that in fact must lead any future overthrow of capitalism.
Mighty Mango Thought should be so lucky as to manifest a cultural revolution, or even put a dictator-for-life in, even as that seemed necessary for the US under FDR during WWII, made even more tragic as Truman seemed not to know anything about the Manhattan Project.
Teachers, officials, intellectuals, and cadres were persecuted, humiliated in public, beaten, and tortured. Universities and schools had to shut down; theaters and films were banned and books destroyed if they did not comply with official propaganda. The development of the society stagnated for around a decade, particularly in the fields of art, literature, science, research, and education.
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The PLA, but mostly Lin Biao himself, gained increasing influence in domestic politics, which soon led Mao to mistrust him. After Lin Biao died in 1971, Premier Zhou Enlai took the lead to slowly improve China’s economic and domestic development again. China’s academic and science institutions gradually came back to life; scholars and scientists were rehabilitated. However, most cultural life remained strictly controlled and radical communist forces, under the leadership of Mao’s wife Jiang Qing and the so-called „Gang of Four“ maintained their power through control of the propaganda. Zhou Enlai focused mostly on improving China’s foreign relations again, most notably helping to orchestrate the visit of President Nixon to China in 1972. It was not until Mao Zedong’s death in January 1976 that the remaining driving forces of the Cultural Revolution were overthrown, paving the way for China’s recovery beginning in 1978 under Deng Xiaoping.
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The Chinese government’s cherry picking of cultural memory to either use it as a political or economic tool has not left much room for Chinese society to develop an authentic culture on its own. In addition, the control, restriction, and guidelines of the Communist Party continue to affect the cultural life of Chinese society. Art, books, newspapers and the Internet are subject to increasingly severe state censorship; religious beliefs, traditions, and customs are allowed provided they do not conflict with the principles of the Communist Party or appear to be a threat to the state and society. Which parts of the old Chinese culture are worth retrieving is an ongoing ideological question debated within China, most notably in view to the revival of the old Confucianism ideas. The Chinese government led by president Xi Jinping encourages the revival of Confucianism, but older cadres still see it opposing their Communist ideology.
cpianalysis.org/…
AI WeiWei is only the latest exemplar of what will continue to be cultural resistance’s need to find ideological space or relative autonomy, despite suffering under PRC repression.
It was not until 1974 that new features not based on model performances again appeared on Chinese screens. However, documentary production, the development of new film equipment and colour stock, as well as training (political and otherwise) for film personnel did continue. Also, foreign films — primarily from North Korea, Albania, and North Vietnam — continued to be shown. Clark decisively demonstrates throughout the book that cultural production across the arts — not just in the realm of the model opera or filmed performances—took place during the GPCR, and often in unlikely places. The line between underground and agitprop blurred as Red Guards battled for aesthetic as well as ideological space and took their militant forms of amateur cultural expression to the countryside. Moving from the unofficial to the subversive, literature, in particular, saw the mimeograph machine as a tool of not only political propaganda but also romance novellas, porn, autobiographical accounts, and translations of foreign works.
9 Rather than heaping opprobrium on the model operas, films, and other cultural products of the Cultural Revolution, Clark takes these works seriously, tracing the roots of each in earlier works, and pointing to the creative input of the professional and amateur artists involved. In fact, this book begs for others to go a step further and look even more closely at individual texts for further insight into the ways in which these works made—and continue to make—waves aesthetically as well as politically. Clark has opened the door and put “culture” back on the agenda for scholars still struggling to come to grips with the domestic as well as international impact of the GPCR.
Gina Marchetti, « Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History », China Perspectives [Online], 2010/4 | 2010, Online since 15 December 2010, connection on 29 April 2018. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/5356
Sunday, Apr 29, 2018 · 11:28:17 PM +00:00 · annieli
ACM SCHEDULE
April
29th: Annieli
May
6th: Ian Douglas Rushlau
13th: NY Brit Expat
20th: Greenandblue
27th: Annieli
June
3rd:
10th: NY Brit Expat
17th:
24th: Annieli
July
1st:
8th:
15th:
22nd:
29th: Annieli
Hi Comrades and Fellow Travellers:
Can comrades consider volunteering to keep this stellar group going? We need to fill the dates for May! Our one opening in May has been taken by Ian Douglas Rushlau. I’ve put the dates up for June and July, so let’s start working on them. :)
Alternatively, we love it when members put something in the queue so that we can use it when we have an opening. If you want to do that, please put something that is not time-constrained and something that has not been posted either in your own blog here or in another group’s blog previously. There are so many things going on and we have so much to learn from each other.
Please make your interest in hosting known in the Comments below this post, send kosmail to NY Brit Expat, or send a note to dkanticapitalistgroup@gmail.com