[Marxism-Thaxis] Killing Joke
A lot of music watchers have argued that Jaz Coleman, the frontman of Killing Joke, is over the deepend in paranoia and conspiracy, but when he shouts stuff like 'Fuck the bankers' and 'take back your country' at a concert in Greece, he seems pretty sane to me. He uses the mass rock concert platform to provoke and antagonize. But I would bet it was music like Killing Joke the kids in the UK were listening to when they tried to do something about the government. And The Blood on Your Hands video will never make it to US TV. Over on Marxmail, they were having a discussion about metal and Rammstein and politics and it seems to me that Killing Joke largely invented the sort of artistic spaces Rage Against the Machine and Rammstein would inhabit. It might seem ironic that Killing Joke had to go towards a metal sound to find a new audience, but in a way that takes them back to their beginnings 30 years ago, when they sounded like they were from another planet. The conclusion on Marxmail about Rammstein seems to be that because they are ambiguous, they are not real left. But I think ambiguously is the only way using popular forms of music to provoke political thinking work. It starts with the reaction like: what the f- do they actually mean with those lyrics, with that music, with those images in their video or at their concert? http://thequietus.com/articles/04796-jaz-coleman-on-killing-joke-and-absolute-dissent Jaz: I'm more concerned with food supply. Yes, there must be change. But staples are going up so fast. Food prices are predicted to go up 40% in the next couple of years. People's wages are being slashed. Where is it leading to? You don't have to be Einstein to work it out. It mustn't be allowed to get to that. What is required is a sweeping green communism. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T869Obl03oEfeature=related Killing Joke 'In Excelsis' In Excelsis lyrics Liberty is ours to protect The glorious pursuit of happiness The rights of free speech by consent The right to express discontent The glory of freedom, simple liberties In excelsis The rights of man to eat and drink and breathe In excelsis The glory of freedom The glory of freedom In excelsis In excelsis The glorious pursuit of happiness In excelsis In excelsis In excelsis In excelsis Liberty our common goal Smash the cabals that control This world is ours We won't be sold No profit, interest or loans The glory of freedom, simple liberties In excelsis The rights of man to eat and drink and breathe In excelsis The glory of freedom The glory of freedom In excelsis In excelsis The glorious pursuit of happiness In excelsis In excelsis In excelsis In excelsis The glory of freedom, simple liberties In excelsis The rights of man to eat and drink and breathe In excelsis The glory of freedom The glory of freedom In excelsis In excelsis The glorious pursuit of happiness In excelsis In excelsis In excelsis In excelsis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc-YDG7GG0sfeature=related Killing Joke 'Here Comes the Singularity' Here Comes The Singularity lyrics World population mass has reached the critical Humanity shall function as a single cell Machines design and clone a different race of man Who is the architect, who is the hidden hand? Kneel down and freedom’s gone Speak out – something’s wrong So when society breaks down in screaming insanity And when the sky cracks open Here comes the singularity Military industrial complex on the rise Let new Pearl Harbours take no-one by surprise One million people marched against a traitor’s war No weapons found and no-one heard their call Kneel down and freedom’s gone Speak out – something’s wrong So when society breaks down in screaming insanity And when the sky cracks open Here comes the singularity Foundations and shareholders identified on lists Big corporations dismantled brick by brick Investment bankers crushed like lilies under feet Let Baboeuf and Saint-Just pass judgement from the street Kneel down and freedom’s gone Speak out – something’s wrong So when society breaks down in screaming insanity And when the sky cracks open Here comes the singularity Kneel down and freedom’s gone http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62cbc_EDQxk Killing Joke (live in Greece) 'Absolute Dissent' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4v66x7nXCsfeature=related Killing Joke 'Blood on Your Hands' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXQbgqRTvI4feature=related Killing Joke 'Total Invasion' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naUAuptzUb4feature=related Killing Joke 'European Super State' ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Tunisia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbMKsVVwstUNR=1 ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] revolutionary situation
The Tunisian revolution was sparked , according to one report, by an act of self-burning by an unemployed college graduate who was selling fruit on the street and had his carts taken away by the police. Lenin said a revolutionary situation exists when the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way and the masses no longer want to live in the old way ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Straight shooters
http://metrotimes.com/columns/straight-shooters-1.1092038 Politics Prejudices Straight shooters All I want is a weapon of mass destruction By Jack Lessenberry Published: January 19, 2011 A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. Those are the actual words of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, held sacred by our nation's gun nuts. They are powerful words indeed, regardless of the fact the clause is poorly written, and clearly means something different than almost everyone thinks it does. No matter that many of its fervent defenders don't even know what the Second Amendment really says. True, others have memorized and can unthinkingly recite these words, sort of like Roman Catholics in the old days repeating Latin incantations they didn't understand. Language and the meanings of words change over time, but it is clear that what adoption of the Second Amendment really meant was that people should be allowed to have weapons (arms) in case the government had to quickly throw together a militia to drive off marauders, or put down some local illegal uprising, like the Pennsylvania farmers who rebelled over whiskey taxes a couple of years later. Naturally, it logically follows that the citizens ought to be able to keep these arms in their homes, as in, on two hooks over the fireplace, since most people didn't have anywhere else to put them to begin with, and many used their rifles to go hunt dinner, much of the time. Bear in mind too that the nation in which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written was a collection of small, rural states, with a total population of slightly less than four million people about the size of metropolitan Detroit today. High-tech arms meant a single-shot musket, accurate to within a hundred yards or so, maybe. Once you fired it, it took close to a minute to reload. If you shot it more than a few times in a row, it was apt to overheat and misfire or blow up in your face. This was not seen as a weapon of mass destruction, but more like a household appliance one could use for defense. So it was logical to stipulate that the citizens had the right to keep and bear arms, when these were the arms. What's crazy is that these words, written for practical reasons in a primitive, largely rural world, are today being used to justify making it legal for a mentally troubled person to buy a high-tech weapon of mass destruction and turn it on helpless civilians. Anyone who thinks the framers of the Constitution intended that is, to put it politely, crazier than a shithouse rat. Nobody I know has remarked on this, but what's going on here isn't a problem of rights so much as a problem, first of all, of language, specifically, the word arms. Throughout much of history, arms meant bows and arrows and pieces of metal that men whacked away at each other with, at close quarters. Then came gunpowder. The Founding Fathers may have expected continued improvements in weaponry. But none of them could have imagined anything like Jared Loughner's Glock, a weapon of mass destruction good for one thing only: killing. There is more difference between a Glock and a Revolutionary War-era musket than between a musket and a stone club. Maybe even between a musket and the pistol Sirhan Sirhan used to shoot Bobby Kennedy in a hotel in 1968. Had Loughner had a normal pistol, he might have gotten five or six shots off before being subdued. Instead, he killed or wounded 19 people within seconds, and might easily have got even more, if he could have gotten a second clip into his gun. Nobody in their right mind thinks the Founding Fathers would have wanted to make it possible for this sick young man to spray a peaceful crowd with lethal ammunition. Yet that's what all sorts of ideologues and ignorant fools, some of them on the nation's highest courts, claim. All this really stems from a problem of semantics. Specifically, allowing the term arms to be applied to anything that kills people. Someone, somewhere, needs to come up with some way of defining arms in a common sense way. We also need, I think, to stop using the term gun control, which immediately polarizes everyone, and ends anything like rational give-and-take. These two steps may make it easier to move on and enact some sensible regulations. This won't be easy; someone has to stand up and defy the political power of the National Rifle Association, a group run by fanatics who are determined to block any limitations on weapons. Otherwise, we are going to continue to be doomed. More than 10,000 of us a year, anyway; the number killed, like little Christina Greene, by gun violence. Another 85,000 or so are shot and survive, like Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. If that's the world we are willing to settle for, very well. If you are young and poor, you are probably more vulnerable than I am. But even so, if
[Marxism-Thaxis] Crisis on the corner
http://metrotimes.com/columns/crisis-on-the-corner-1.1092036 Crisis on the corner Should we legalize drugs to save the hood? By Larry Gabriel Published: January 19, 2011 Print Email Twitter Facebook MySpace Stumble Digg More Destinations The War on Drugs has been fought from corner to corner in black communities across the United States. Although African-Americans make up only 13 percent of the general population, 40 percent of drug offenders in federal prisons and 45 percent of offenders in state prisons are black. It's not that blacks make up 40 or 45 percent of American drug users. A study of New York drug arrests from 1997 to 2006 by sociologist Harry Levine and drug policy activist Deborah Small found that 18-to-25-year-old whites are more likely than blacks or Hispanics to smoke marijuana, yet blacks were five times and Hispanics three times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. Similar statistics can be found in all kinds of studies out there. All of it leads to black and brown communities where young men committing victimless offenses get criminal records, get sent to jail, lose their families, and enter a system wherein a life of crime is more likely than getting an education and a job. So it's amazing that the drug war and civil rights haven't been more closely tied together the way linguist and conservative political pundit John McWhorter links them in a recent column for the The New Republic's website titled Getting Darnell Off the Corners: Why America Should Ride the Anti-Drug-War Wave. I don't know what that guy on the corner is named, Pookie or Tyrone or whatever, but McWhorter wrote ... with no War on Drugs there would be, within one generation, no 'black problem' in the United States. Poverty in general, yes. An education problem in general — probably. But the idea that black America had a particular crisis would rapidly become history, requiring explanation to young people. The end of the War on Drugs is, in fact, what all people genuinely concerned with black uplift should be focused on. ... And, in fact, he says all drugs should be legalized. Some civil rights groups have nibbled at the edges of the drug war, sometimes suggesting that marijuana is not as bad as other drugs. The California NAACP went that route last year when it came out in support of Proposition 19 to legalize marijuana in the state. Proposition 19 lost by a 53.5 to 46.5 percent vote in November. But California NAACP President Alice Huffman threw down the gauntlet in saying marijuana law reform is a civil rights issue. Neil Franklin, president of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition who worked with Huffman in creating the NAACP policy, casts some wisdom on the roiling waters of drug policy debate. We went to a prison here in Baltimore with a section for juveniles; it's a high school in prison for them, says Franklin, an African-American with more than 30 years policing experience in Maryland. We did a workshop with 12. I think 10 were there for drug violations. We asked them what your neighborhood would be like if drugs were legal tomorrow. The number one answer was that they would have no money. There would pretty much be no money in their households. The drug market provides more money into those communities than anything else. The second answer was that the police would no longer harass us if drugs were legal in the community. The kids focused in on two important issues: economics and police-community relations. Legalizing drugs would cut the economic legs out from under the drug business because legal drugs would be cheaper and easily obtainable. Drug dealers would no longer be able to finance terrorizing neighborhoods, and drug addicts would be a public health issue not a law enforcement problem. Regarding community relations, growing up without an adversarial relationship with the police goes a long way in creating citizens who would rather cooperate with law enforcement than fight it. Despite the failure of the drug war to reduce the use of illicit drugs, support for prohibition remains strong among many African-Americans. Carl Taylor, a sociology professor at Michigan State University who focuses on crime and other urban issues, takes a hard line against legalization. I contend strongly that illegal drugs, legal drugs and alcohol are truly the barbed wire around the neck of the black community. I see not one serious plus in my life experiences professionally or personally from illicit narcotics. ... I don't agree with McWhorter. I don't think he knows what he's talking about. If you put the black market out of business, the fellas out on the street are still going to find deeper and better drugs. Just because I don't know what to do doesn't mean you do something that you've got to be out your mind to do from where I'm sitting. The ignorance of very distorted socialization, the racism, the discrimination is not going to go away, the failure of the family structure,
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental difference
US lawyers in establishing the legal fiction of the personhood of the corporation or the Personhood of Capital make a nice representation of the deep bourgeois ideological illusory concept of Individual Determinism. Capital is a profoundly determining _social_ institution in capitalism, natch. By making Capital fictional individuals, the story, i.e. Lie, of Individual determinism is internally consistent. CB On 1/5/2011 10:13 AM, c b wrote: “In community, the individual is, crucial as the prior condition for forming a community. … Every individual in the community guarantees the community; the public is a chimera, numerality is everything…” – Søren Kierkegaard, Journals Pace Kierkegaard, of course , for we social determinists , this is absolutely backward, fundamentally wrong. The social, the communal, the community is prior to individuals. Kierkegaard's statement is a basic maxim of bourgeois ideology, whether as existentialism, libertarianism, Social Darwinism, positivism, Reaganism, Tea Parting et al. In all , the individual is primary over and determinative of the social. It is an error in the understanding of the levels of organization of reality, and specifically of human life. Human culture, society and history constitute an emergent level of reality, in which the whole is more than the some of its parts, and is determinative of the parts. It is a philosophical error concerning the relationship of the whole and the parts. The human individual is a social individual. Even Kierkegaard was; he just didn't know it. So, is the most radical libertarian; they just don't know it. Our species name should be, not homo sapiens, but homo communis. Our high level of sociality is the differentia specifica of our species. But no-one lives in a vacuum. ^^^ CB: Hello ! Exactly. No _individual_, no ONE, lives in a social vaccum. No one is an isolated individual. This is the fundamental bourgeols ideological trick, foolishness. It is rife among the intelligencia of bourgeois society. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental Difference: bourgeois' myth of individual determination of society
the larger human community is predicated upon the pre-existence of individuals. With due respect, this is the crux. Social determinists r saying that the community is not predicated on pre-existing , independent, isolated individuals, or “selves”. Rather the opposite: Society preexists the individuals. There have never been a bunch of preexisting individual persons who then got together and made the group. Robinson Crusoe is a myth so to speak. Even more an individual ideas are all rooted in their culture. Take remarkably unique individuals like Mozart , Newton or any genius. Their ideas are developments of socially generated topics. Newton understood this and said he stood on the shoulders of giants, most of them dead when he lived, by the way. This is a key point. Human Society includes dead generations. Maybe this makes it clearer how society preexists individuals. Ironically, the word itself gives the message. Individuals are not divisiable, or can’t be divided out from society. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental Difference: Personhood of Capital
(The Myth of the Wizard of Oz) [lbo-talk] Mommy, can a corporation be embarrassed? Eubulides paraconsistent at comcast.net [Mereological mayhem for methodological individualism] http://www.propublica.org/blog/item/as-citizens-united-turns-1-u.s.-supreme-court-considers-corporate-personhoo As Citizens United Turns 1, U.S. Supreme Court Considers Corporate Personhood Again by Marian Wang ProPublica, Jan. 19, 2011, 1:37 p.m. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments today on a case between ATT and the Federal Communications Commission, revisiting the legal concept of “corporate personhood” last strengthened under the court’s Citizen United ruling on corporate campaign spending. (That controversial ruling has its first anniversary this week.) The case before the court focuses on whether ATT, a corporation, can stop government agencies from releasing information obtained for law enforcement purposes by claiming such disclosures would violate the company’s “personal privacy.” The phrase is included as an exemption in the text of the Freedom of Information Act, a federal law that instructs government agencies on what information to make public. As the SCOTUS blog notes, however, there’s no specific definition of the words “personal privacy,” so it’s not clear whether a corporation can qualify as a person in this case. The lower court, the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, sided with ATT in an earlier ruling, stating that corporations are capable of being embarrassed, harassed and stigmatized by public disclosures. If the Supreme Court agrees, it could limit how much information federal agencies are able to release about the companies they've investigated. (Here's Bloomberg, with more background.) In the appeal before the high court, a review of the briefs in support of each side shows a number of news organizations and government openness and watchdog groups backing up the FCC. Major business groups—namely the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable—have filed briefs in support of ATT. Justice Elena Kagan, it’s worth noting, was solicitor general at the time when the FCC and U.S. government petitioned the Supreme Court to review the ATT case. She has had to recuse herself from considering it, and should the court split 4-4 without her, the lower court’s decision would stand. Kagan’s successor as solicitor general, Neal Katyal, has argued that “a corporation itself can no more be embarrassed, harassed, or stigmatized than a stone.” According to early reports on the day’s proceedings, the high court showed signs that it agreed. A transcript [PDF] of the oral arguments has also been made available. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental Difference: Mommy, can a corporation be embarrassed?
, Eubulides wrote: [Mereological mayhem for methodological individualism] ^^^ CB: Yes indeed US lawyers in establishing the legal fiction of the personhood of the corporation or the Personhood of Capital make a nice representation of the deep bourgeois ideological mythical concept of Individual Determinism. Capital in the form of Capital enterprises is a profoundly determining _social_ institution in capitalism, natch. By making Capital, which is obviously a social institution, into fictional individuals or persons, the story, i.e. Lie, of Individual determinism is made internally consistent. CB from another discussion of methodological individualism : c b wrote: “In community, the individual is, crucial as the prior condition for forming a community. … Every individual in the community guarantees the community; the public is a chimera, numerality is everything…” – Søren Kierkegaard, Journals Pace Kierkegaard, of course , for we social determinists , this is absolutely backward, fundamentally wrong. The social, the communal, the community is prior to individuals. Kierkegaard's statement is a basic maxim of bourgeois ideology, whether as existentialism, libertarianism, Social Darwinism, positivism, Reaganism, Tea Partying, personal responsibility of the poor for their poverty, psychologism and phenomenology in social science, Margaret Thatcher's there is no such thing as society, Robinsonades, rational/reasonable man in law and economics, et al. (Personhood of the Corporation). In all , the individual is primary over, prior to and determinative of the social. Society is a collection of sovereign individuals, It is an error in the understanding of the levels of organization of reality, and specifically of human life. Human culture, society and history constitute an emergent level of reality, in which the whole is more than the some of its parts, and is determinative of the parts. It is a philosophical error concerning the relationship of the whole and the parts. The human individual is a social individual. Even Kierkegaard was; he just didn't know it. So, is the most radical libertarian; they just don't know it. Our species name should be, not homo sapiens, but homo communis. Our high level of sociality is the differentia specifica of our species. But no-one lives in a vacuum. ^^^ CB: Hello ! Exactly. No _individual_, no ONE, lives in a social vaccum. No one is an isolated individual. This is the fundamental bourgeols ideological trick, foolishness. It is rife among the intelligencia of bourgeois society. http://www.propublica.org/blog/item/as-citizens-united-turns-1-u.s.-supreme-court-considers-corporate-personhoo As Citizens United Turns 1, U.S. Supreme Court Considers Corporate Personhood Again by Marian Wang ProPublica, Jan. 19, 2011, 1:37 p.m. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental difference: Menu of choices presented to a free will is socially determined
Bad faith http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith_%28existentialism%29 A critical claim in existentialist thought is that individuals are always free to make choices and guide their lives towards their own chosen goal or project. The claim holds that individuals cannot escape this freedom, even in overwhelming circumstances. For instance, even an empire's colonized victims possess choices: to submit to rule, to negotiate, to act in complicity, to resist nonviolently, or to counter-attack. Although circumstances may limit individuals (facticity), they cannot force persons as radically free beings to follow one course over another. For this reason, individuals choose in anguish: they know that they must make a choice, and that it will have consequences. For Sartre, to claim that one amongst many conscious possibilities takes undeniable precedence (for instance, I cannot risk my life, because I must support my family) is to assume the role of an object in the world, merely at the mercy of circumstance—a being-in-itself that is only its own facticity ^ CB: Well yes, Comrade Sartre, Ye Olde problem of free will and determinism. Humans do have free will; so do dogs. But a human individual still exercises her choices among alternatives that are given to her _by society_. The alternatives or menu from which she chooses do not originate and well up from within her individual being or person. The feelings and emotions that determine her choices are learned from her society and culture; their genesis is not in her individual infinite soul or psyche or Mind. Valuing supporting one's family is learned and socially determined. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental difference: Menu of choices presented to a free will is socially determined
In other words: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. — Karl Marx (The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) Bad faith http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith_%28existentialism%29 A critical claim in existentialist thought is that individuals are always free to make choices and guide their lives towards their own chosen goal or project. The claim holds that individuals cannot escape this freedom, even in overwhelming circumstances. For instance, even an empire's colonized victims possess choices: to submit to rule, to negotiate, to act in complicity, to resist nonviolently, or to counter-attack. Although circumstances may limit individuals (facticity), they cannot force persons as radically free beings to follow one course over another. For this reason, individuals choose in anguish: they know that they must make a choice, and that it will have consequences. For Sartre, to claim that one amongst many conscious possibilities takes undeniable precedence (for instance, I cannot risk my life, because I must support my family) is to assume the role of an object in the world, merely at the mercy of circumstance—a being-in-itself that is only its own facticity ^ CB: Well yes, Comrade Sartre, Ye Olde problem of free will and determinism. Humans do have free will; so do dogs. But a human individual still exercises her choices among alternatives that are given to her _by society_. The alternatives or menu from which she chooses do not originate and well up from within her individual being or person. The feelings and emotions that determine her choices are learned from her society and culture; their genesis is not in her individual infinite soul or psyche or Mind. Valuing supporting one's family is learned and socially determined. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental difference: Ressentiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment Ressentiment Question book-new.svg This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2007) In philosophy and psychology, ressentiment (pronounced /rəsɑ̃tiˈmɑ̃/) is a particular form of resentment or hostility. Ressentiment is the French word for resentment (fr. Latin intensive prefix 're', and 'sentire' to feel). Ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one's frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the cause generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability. A term imported by many languages for its philosophical and psychological connotations, ressentiment is not to be considered interchangeable with the normal English word resentment, or even the French ressentiment. While the normal words both speak to a feeling of frustration directed at a perceived source, neither speaks to the special relationship between a sense of inferiority and the creation of morality. Thus, the term 'Ressentiment' as used here always maintains a distinction. Contents [hide] * 1 History * 2 Perspectives o 2.1 Kierkegaard and Nietzsche o 2.2 Scheler o 2.3 Weber o 2.4 Sartre * 3 References * 4 See also [edit] History Ressentiment was first introduced as a philosophical/psychological term by the 19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard[1][2][3]. Friedrich Nietzsche later independently expanded the concept; Walter Kaufmann ascribes Nietzsche's use of the term in part to the absence of a proper equivalent term in the German language, contending that said absence alone would be sufficient excuse for Nietzsche, if not for a translator.[4] The term came to form a key part of his ideas concerning the psychology of the 'master-slave' question (articulated in Beyond Good and Evil), and the resultant birth of morality. Nietzsche's first use and chief development of Ressentiment came in his book On The Genealogy of Morals; see esp §§ 10–11).[1] [2]. The term was also put to good use by Max Scheler in his book Ressentiment, published in 1912, and later suppressed by the Nazis. Currently of great import as a term widely used in Psychology and Existentialism, Ressentiment is viewed as an effective force for the creation of identities, moral frameworks and value systems. [edit] Perspectives [edit] Kierkegaard and Nietzsche The ressentiment which is establishing itself is the process of levelling, and while a passionate age storms ahead setting up new things and tearing down old, razing and demolishing as it goes, a reflective and passionless age does exactly the contrary: it hinders and stifles all action; it levels. Levelling is a silent, mathematical, and abstract occupation which shuns upheavals. ... If the jewel which every one desired to possess lay far out on a frozen lake where the ice was very thin, watched over by the danger of death, while, closer in, the ice was perfectly safe, then in a passionate age the crowds would applaud the courage of the man who ventured out, they would tremble for him and with him in the danger of his decisive action, they would grieve over him if he were drowned, they would make a god of him if he secured the prize. But in an age without passion, in a reflective age, it would be otherwise. People would think each other clever in agreeing that it was unreasonable and not even worth while to venture so far out. And in this way they would transform daring and enthusiasm into a feat of skill, so as 'to do something, for something must be done.' Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages: A Literary Review (T)he problem with the other origin of the “good,” of the good man, as the person of ressentiment has thought it out for himself, demands some conclusion. It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the great birds of prey for taking the little lambs. And when the lambs say among themselves, These birds of prey are evil, and he who least resembles a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite, a lamb,—should he not be good? then there is nothing to carp with in this ideal's establishment, though the birds of prey may regard it a little mockingly, and maybe say to themselves, We bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even love them: nothing is tastier than a tender lamb. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality Ressentiment is a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one's own inferiority/failure onto an external scapegoat. The ego creates the illusion of an
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental difference : objectivity of human consciousness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Nothingness Analysis While a prisoner of war in 1940/1941 Sartre read Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, an ontological investigation through the lens and method of Husserlian phenomenology (Husserl was Heidegger's teacher). Reading Being and Time initiated Sartre's own enquiry leading to the publication in 1943 of Being and Nothingness whose subtitle is 'A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology'. Sartre's essay is clearly influenced by Heidegger though Sartre was profoundly skeptical of any measure by which humanity could achieve a kind of personal state of fulfillment comparable to the hypothetical Heideggerian re-encounter with Being. In his much gloomier account in Being and Nothingness, man is a creature haunted by a vision of completion, what Sartre calls the ens causa sui, and which religions identify as God. Born into the material reality of one's body, in an all-too-material universe, one finds oneself inserted into being (with a lower case b). Consciousness is in a state of cohabitation with its material body, but has no objective reality; it is nothing (no thing). Consciousness has the ability to conceptualize possibilities, and to make them appear, or to annihilate them. ^^^ CB: Conscious _is_ overwhelmingly created by objective _social_ reality, by culture. This is fundamentally wrong. Individual human consciousness is a thing, a socially made thing. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
