So this wildly fascinating clip is doing the rounds - retweeted by no less than Trump himself and taken up and ran by Tucker Carlson and general anti-Chinese fearmongers - but the takeaway that people are wringing from it seems to be all wrong.



People are focusing on the close ties between Wall Street, China, and Biden-as-establishment. That's not news to anyone with half a brain, despite this being highlighted by xenophobic fucksticks on the right. What's interesting is what the speaker himself flags as of paramount importance: that the decoupling between the US and China is exactly what China wants. And the opening of the Chinese financial sector will mean foreign - European and US - companies having to play by Chinese rules, and fostering a far more independent Chinese economy less beholden to (waning) US hegemony.

The real issue this raises is the willingness of capital to undertake that shift, with the carrot of a billion-person market just waiting to be plunged into. In other words: a capitalism unfettered even by the minimal pseudo-democracies of the "West". That's the real meat of the talk, not the conspirational rubbish about Hunter and Biden being a wall-street lapdog. Everyone knows that piece of shit is deep in their pockets. And Biden may well facilitate this shift to the benefit of China with wall street in tow. It'll be interesting to see how much his 'stand up to China' bluster is just that. Insofar as he's a servile wall street cuntfuck, there's every chance he'll hand China right over to them.

Biden picks Raytheon board member to be SecDef. Mainstream media can only talk about how he's the first black SecDef. Fuck Biden's intersectional imperialism. Fuck Biden's everything, of course.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/12/08/biden-picks-raytheon-board-member-to-lead-the-us-war-machine/

"The mass media are reporting that the Biden camp has selected former general Lloyd J. Austin III to be the next secretary of defense, assuaging fears among antiwar activists that the position would go to bloodthirsty psychopath Michele Flournoy as commonly predicted.

As has become the standard ritual for Biden’s cabinet picks, the mass media are holding a parade to celebrate the fact that Austin would be the first Black chief of the US war machine while virtually ignoring the murderous agendas he has facilitated throughout his career. As head of Central Command Austin actively campaigned to resurrect the Pentagon’s spectacularly failed program of trying to arm “rebels” in Syria to fight ISIS, and in 2014 he backed immunity for US troops from war crimes prosecutions by the government of Afghanistan. He helped spearhead the Iraq invasion, and he is a member of the same private equity fund which invests in defense contractors as Flournoy and Biden’s warmongering pick for Secretary of State Tony Blinken."

Sure, but precisely to the degree that these trends hold across the class is prima facie evidence that the drivers for them are sociological - that is, interpersonal and contexual - and not 'psychological' and individual. To the degree that psychology has anything to do with it, it would be in a derivative or secondary capacity.

That said, you're still describing intra-class behaviour - what happens, as it were, once you 'get there'. I suppose that goes some way to answering the OP, but considering the capitalist tendency to isolate, atomize, and psychologize - exemplified by people like Brett - every effort should be made to foreground exactly the opposite of that.

Also, to add to your links - the rich are more likely to be narcissists: "Those with more highly educated and wealthier parents remained higher in their self-reported entitlement and narcissistic characteristics. “That would suggest that it’s not just [that] people who feel entitled are more likely to become wealthy,” says Piff. Wealth, in other words, may breed narcissistic tendencies — and wealthy people justify their excess by convincing themselves that they are more deserving of it."

https://healthland.time.com/2013/08/20/wealthy-selfies-how-being-rich-increases-narcissism/

My expectation is that the 1% are ordinary people as far as psychology goes. — Pfhorrest

I mostly agree. I did very much like this tendency chart that was doing the rounds a while ago though - it's from Ruby Payne's A Framework for Understanding Poverty, and which I found struck quite close to home:



These broad-stroke correlations of course need to be understood as an etiology that moves from social position to behavioural tendency and not the other way around.

The whole problem with the current discussion is in trying to cash out the OPs question in terms of personality traits or personal psychology - it’s an utterly inane effort, first because outside of population-level studies it’s entirely speculative (in Bretts case just pulling shit out of his arse), and second, well - the global 1% holds approximately half of the worlds total wealth. If anyone thinks that this can be accounted for in terms of psychology, they ought to go back to elementary school and re-learn how the universe functions. As the meme goes: have you ever considered the possibility that Jeff Bezos just works 184 billion times harder than you? It’s just fucking absurd to even think about it in these ‘personalistic’ terms.

No amount of personality quirk is going to explain the accrual of wealth on that scale upwards: any even half-adequate explanation can only be structural, needing to account for how it is anyone at all could occupy that kind of position in society. The enabling conditions of such disparity are sociological and political in the first instance, and psychological at a point at which no one should give a shit anymore other than just a just-so story. If the 1% are parasites, it is not because they have any kind of behavioural disposition of any sort: they are parasites by virtue of their occupying a structural position in society with disparity as it is. The most lovely, talented, hard-working, virtuous, kind, and giving person could belong to this class: they would still be a fucking parasite insofar as their wealth would objectively be built off the backs of others.

There's a deep and annoying temptation among those who fancy themselves not unintelligent to imagine that stupid people can't be successful - belied everywhere by evidence. It's classist first of all, but it's also self-serving bullshit designed to allow self-identificaion and aggrandisement: those successful people are like me (and I am not a moron!) so maybe I can be successful too! These people are of course the stupidest of all. The ranks of the successful are everywhere populated by drooling mongoloids, as the current president-eject so amply illustrates.

Anything Wolfgang Streeck or Mike Davis or Robert Brenner
Andreas Malm's Fossil Capital
Gindin and Panitch's The Making of Global Capitalism
Ellen Wood's The Origin of Capitalism

So much!

No, Trump is a realist see, which is why he has not at any point been denying reality like the clown he is since the election and has gracefully accepted his loss. Most definitely not living in a fantasy world.

Trump is a realist. That is his gift. He's dealing with the world the way it really is. — Hippyhead

:rofl:

On the other hand, people as, uh, 'gifted' as Hippyhead are exemplary of how Trump gets to be as popular as he is. Morons mistaking other morons for brilliance.

There is literally nothing political about 'pessimism', which is a sideshow for privileged first-world whiners luxuriating in their own romanticized self-pity. Which follows from it not being philosophy either, but a post-hoc ratiocination of conclusions long-reached by way of the psychological foibles of low-grade misery.

An interesting perspective from one of my go-to commentators:

"American institutions have often been the friend of the most authoritarian projects, as I argued in my first book ... And in fact, to the extent that Trump’s politics had any juice at all, it was precisely because the institutions support that politics. Where would Trump be without the Electoral College or the Senate confirming his judges and justices—and where would Trumpism be under a Biden administration without the Senate and the courts?

It’s ironic to me that people would choose this moment, and Trump’s presidency, to assign the label “fascist” to the right, for what fascism is about, above all else, is a politics of strength and will. That’s why fascists traditionally loathe the constitutional order: because they think it constrains the assertion of political will. The irony of Trumpist/GOP politics is that it is completely dependent upon the constitutional order. In that regard, it’s almost the complete opposite of fascism

... It seems so strange to me that people spoke so much of authoritarianism under Trump when what we’ve been seeing for years now, including the Trump years, is political impotence, the absence of political will. And without the left getting its act together, I don’t see that changing any time soon. That is something to be very worried about".

I still think Trump is something of an aspirational fascist - he's still a race-baiting nationalist who trades on a cult of personality - but he's simply too incompetent and too stupid of a human being to do anything about it.

No one needs to respond to your made-up bullshit with actual figures other than to point out the fact that you're making shit up.

Aw, you upset that your larping isn't being taken seriously?

No, I'm not engaging with shit you pulled out of your arse other than to call it out for having been pulled out of your arse.

And that's supposed to be some kind of differentia specifica? What's next? That most of them have skin? Vacuity in place of fabrication. Wonderful.

In any case considering that most of the rich have their money tied up in assets which are managed by other people, there's every chance that the rich can indeed be lazy do-nothings. If we're working off lazy stereotypes, I have every confidence that my local bus driver works far harder than some trust fund baby somewhere. But that's neither here nor there, given that making shit up based on lazy preconceptions is a shit way to argue.

It's not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing its the fact that you fabricated shit out of thin air and expect anyone to put in any effort to take that shit seriously.

No you fuck, you don't get to make shit up and ask to be proven wrong.

It's hard to imagine the degree of ideological indoctrination it takes to make up fantasy lists of supposed behavioural and psycological traits of the 1% - assuming they can be totalized as a group outside the narrow metric of wealth - and then have the gall to ask to be proven wrong. People like Brett really think this is character creation in D&D or something. 10 points to charisma! -4 to humility! Fucking larping rubbish.

Destroy or attenuate the profit motive. There's no reason why the world has to be fucked up because of some man-made institution that could be otherwise.

IF there were only workers and no owners (no 1%), THEN what there would be some sort of socialist economy operating. Yes, the 90% would have it instead. Workers and their children make up the majority of the population. They would keep the value of what they produced. They would be better off because they would possess the surplus value they produced. — Bitter Crank

Yep. The pandemic proved what everyone already knew - that if the 1% dropped dead tomorrow, nothing at all would change. All value comes from those who produce, not the parasitic leeches who expropriate the value of their labour.

Your body appears to itself, which you are.

Watching these people eat themselves is my politically favourite thing right now.

11. They are societal parasites.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/30/europe/france-security-law-change-intl/index.html

The French set half of Paris and more on fire and tore down fucking everything, and lo and behold, the ruling party are promising a change to their shitty law restricting people from filming the police.

Lesson to be learned: set shit on fire and break everything and fuck those who whine about 'riots'. The ruling class needs to learn how to fear.

Wilden and identity politics?

Nathan Widder, 'A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy — Number2018

From the essay collection? I've a couple of articles in there, but not that one. Sounds interesting.

Necessary why? Should be thought, according to whom and for what reason? — csalisbury

Necessary because the fortunes of our concepts are derivitave of the fortunes of the world at large, and without tracking the latter you can't track the purchase that concepts have on it. Concepts like the imaginary and the symbolic and so on have their own degree of consistency and autonomy from the real, and the way in which they track the world can't be taken for granted. The historicization and 'anthropologization' of concepts - especially 'developmental' ones - is necessary make them more than speculative thought experiments or just-so stories.

So I went and read the excursus on Lacan. Loved it.

"For the child’s own mirror image cannot as such add anything to the child’s self”-findings that has not long since been set up within it at the level of vocal, tactile, interfacial and emotional games of resonance and their inner sediments. ... In a sufficiently well-formed biune mental structure, pictorial self-perception occurs in the child—which occasionally notes its reflection in a glass, metallic or watery medium— as an exhilarating, curiosity-inducing additional layer of perception on top of an already dense, encouraging web of resonance experiences; by no means does the image in the mirror appear as the first and all-surpassing information about its own ability to be whole; at most, it makes an initial reference to its own appearance as a coherent body among coherent bodies in the real visual space, but this integral being-an-image-body means almost nothing alongside the pre-imaginary, non-eidetic certainties of sensual-emotional dual integrity."

Really nice. What I would go on to further emphasize though, is the necessity of appending to all this a 'materialist' analysis of all this: i.e. the 'primacy' of the one or the other (imaginary or symbolic) should be thought not just in ideal, stadial-teleological terms, but also with respect to the conditions which 'bring out', as it were, the one of the other in a sociological setting. To use a too-obvious example, 'identity politics' is precisely what happens when imaginary identification becomes the primary mode of political practice, say. Wilden also has some incredible stuff on how money functions in the imaginary mode:

"The special characteristic of commodities, however, is that one particular commodity of the original circulation of use value (in which objects are simply different from each other) is thrown out of the system to become the Marxian "general equivalent of exchange": this is gold or silver or shells, or some such similar commodity. There is no such general equivalent in Symbolic exchange, although there is exchange value. The general equivalent is characteristic only of Imaginary exchange. The general characteristic of exchange value is that it is the SIGN OF A RELATION (as in language). But in imaginary exchange, the general equivalent turns all exchange value into the SIGN OF A THING ... In our culture, money does not represent a relation between people as does the 'symbolic object'. As the valorization of an ENTITY, money under capitalism represents Imaginary relations between things, and the 'things' it represents are the 'clear and distinct' people who are exchanged - as alienated objects - in the system".

This is the kind of stuff I love.

I think that's pretty fair. My own speculative take on it is that imaginary identification does not preceed symbolic identification but in fact proceeds it. That is, the mastery of relations comes first, and then the identification of "things" comes after. The imaginary is the rigidification, and not the condition, of the symbolic. The order of psychogenesis needs to be jiggled around a bit.

Freud, perhaps interestingly, had a somewhat more irenic account of ego-formation, with his notion of the originary 'oceanic feeling' which is then gradually whittled away.

This is cool but I wonder how much of this is beating on an open door. The mirror stage, qua stage, is for Lacan marked by failure from the beginning - the integration never truly happens, which is why the subject is then further propelled, as it were, into the symbolic, where there is some measure of compensation for the failure of identification at the level of the imaginary. The conditional that Sloterdijk lays out - "If it were genuinely the case that one could always find a self-blinding imaginary element of this type at the bottom of a self, it would at least explain why the subject in a Lacanian universe only finds wellbeing, or at least order, in the symbolic" - is, as far as I can tell, granted by Lacan.

Anthony Wilden puts it well when he notes that the ego that emerges at the level of the imaginary is "an essentially paranoid construct", one that is "founded on the OPPOSITION and IDENTITY between self and other. The ego involves the purely dual, either/or, relationship of master and slave. In a genetic sense, then, the child is born as an undifferentiated 'a-subjective' being. According to Lacan, the child's first discovery is that of DIFFERENCE: the difference between self and world. Through the Imaginary relationship to others, this difference will become an opposition. The child cannot become a subject until he or she can say 'I', but in learning to say 'I', the child will always begin by meaning 'he' or 'she'.

So long as the child lives in the dual Imaginary relationship with the mother (whom Lacan calls the real Other, as opposed to the father, who represents, but who is not, the symbolic Other), the child is trapped in a short-circuit. It is through the oedipus complex, in which each apex of the family triangle comes to mediate the dual relationship between the other two, that the child passes into the 'normality' (one uses the word with reservations) of a three-way, Symbolic relationship, in which opposition is mediated by difference. In the Symbolic, the subject can say 'I': he or she has passed from the subject-object, object-object relationships of the Imaginary into what the phenomenologists would call the INTERSUBJECTIVITY of the Symbolic" (System and Structure, capitals in the original).

Perry Anderson - Lineages of the Absolutist State
Perry Anderson - In The Tracks of Historical Materialism

Moar histore.

When covid is pretty much done for the US, — Benkei

Ah, so 2057 then.

Assuming Trump does not have a sudden change of heart in the next two months, he will have been the first US president since Carter to not have sent US forces into new conflicts during his tenure. This is one of the few bright spots of his presidency.

Would anyone like to make bets as to how long this will last under a Biden admin? A PF betting pool, perhaps?

Would that we be so lucky. I fully expect a renewed flood of 14 y. o. Petermites in the forum soon after his new book is released, if not sooner.

The idea that a solution to its internal strife is to invade it is too idiotic to respond to, not to mention patronising and ignorant. — Baden

:up:

I know Strike Anywhere - I didn't realize they were still around! Will give that a spin.

ahhm, Haven't listened to UNKLE in aggess.

CL:

Not far enough; and vice versa. That there isn't more of a generalized traffic between both philosophy and science - in both directions - is a sad indictment on both.

Presumably because people lack imagination.

My fav comparison: