Saying hi

[Bifi]

Hello,

I am happy to have found this forum and looking forward to many interesting discussions.

I am an Eastern-European Immigrant in mid-thirties, living and working in Austria. Combining organisational science, sociology, political science and anthropology I study the workings of governmental bureaucracies.

I would not call myself an Orthodox Marxist. I am inspired by Gramsci, Williams, Althusser, Hall, Poulantzas and Foucault. I believe in the role political parties have to play and the requirement of their link to broader popular movements. I also believe that violent action can have mobilising effects and can be justifiable. I believe that to prevent large-scale suffering of humans and other species a radical global redistribution of wealth and natural resources as well as sharp overall decrease of consumption and thus lifestyle change is needed (socially equitable and environmentally sustainable degrowth). The nature of states (in terms of institutional and political-economic arrangements) will have to change too. Pessimistically I believe that we passed the tipping point and due to our collective inability and embedded interests and power assymetries we won't be able to prevent said suffering. I think the events associated with the already now unfolding spiral downwards will cause the emergence of new type of societal challenges and mainstreaming of right-wing attitudes. This will bring the need to significantly rethink leftist politics - for example, in the direction of more nihilistic, more violent as well as less humanocentric attitudes. And yes, I am an anti-fascist and anti-authoritatian.

And I would also like to get back into political activism.

As a researcher I believe that in this day and age authoritarian power relations are inscribed into everyday practices and objects, and these are not necessarily always traceable back to class struggle or some other big abstract categorical conflict. Granted, these practices and objects are always open to colonisation attempts that would make them part of coordinated strategies of power linked to capital accumulation, but instead of being their expression or effect, in many cases they precede and enable such strategies. This link between large state projects or strategies of power and between everyday practices and objects is something that occupies me intelectually at this moment.

[Q]

Welcome :)

If you have political questions, you can ask them in the Learning forum. That's why it's there after all!

If you have questions about your account, don't hesitate to send me a PM or ask here.

[RedWorker]

Honestly, your post just looks like you've missed the insights of Marxist analysis, even though you portray yourself as being past them. Violence is neither a blessing nor a sin per se - but there are very serious reasons for the criticism of direct action and the politics based around it. This controversy already is hundreds of years old.


I believe that to prevent large-scale suffering of humans and other species a radical global redistribution of wealth and natural resources as well as sharp overall decrease of consumption and thus lifestyle change is needed

1) A movement which qualitatively re-structures society cannot be based on opposition to 'large-scale suffering of humans'. These can, rather, only be the ideal justifications, in the same way that "freedom", etc. are the justifications for bourgeois society.
2) A 'redistribution of wealth' points to a reformist project that would inevitably not challenge capitalism.
3) Such a 'redistribution of wealth' is, in any case, not even possible within capitalism.
4) Talking about a "decrease of consumption" and "lifestyle change" is pure reformism and smells of idealism. It is not that every individual should change his patterns to change the patterns of society, rather it is that society dictates the patterns of the individuals.


As a researcher I believe that in this day and age authoritarian power relations are inscribed into everyday practices and objects, and these are not necessarily always traceable back to class struggle or some other big abstract categorical conflict.

Is there any evidence for this? These everyday practices are the result of class society - not that class society is the result of these everyday practices. That would be inversion of cause and effect, seriously missing out on Marx's insights on materialism.