4 May
2013
4 May
'13
6:07 a.m.
Aestetix & Yo's-
Names are nouns, but I puzzle over the term "proper noun," because a
name is an arbitrary character-string that only appears noun-like
because we say so. A "proper" type of noun should be one with some
degree of linguistic meaning, for example through etymology ("bike" is a
contraction of "bicycle", that has "two things that rotate", from
which
we also derive "motorcycle" that is also colloquially a "bike"), and
names should be "improper nouns" because they don't follow that rule.
The linguistic meaning of "given names" is limited, though perhaps
sufficient for their historic purposes. Conventionally they convey
gender, which is only useful in remotely assessing whether someone is a
potential sex-partner. By geographic origin they often convey
ethnicity, though this is starting to break down through cultural mixing
(most of us are mutts, with two or more ethnicities in our families).
Sometimes they convey religion, usually by inference from geographic
origin or resemblance to historic names identified with specific
religions. At one time they conveyed occupation, as with "Baker" and
"Smith," though thankfully we have overcome mandatory hereditary
assignment of jobs.
There was a time when we could infer, for example, that "John Smith" was
almost certainly male, probably Christian ("John" as Biblical name), and
probably an ironworker ("blacksmith"). Bluntly put, this would tell you
whether John Smith was someone you could mate with, someone with whom
that mating would be approved by your own church, and where he stood in
the socio-economic hierarchy. The use of "Miss" and "Mrs." for women
("Miss Jane Smith") further emphasized that in a patriarchial culture,
males had a prerogative of ascertaining the eligibility of females as
mating partners.
Today all we can be reasonably sure of is that John Smith is male. He
might be a Buddhist or an atheist by his own choice, and he probably
works at a desk rather than a forge, and his ethnicity might be a
combination of English, French, Kenyan, and Chinese for all we know.
Some day perhaps we'll have to guess at John Smith's gender. That would
be progress.
-G.
On 13-05-03-Fri 11:30 PM, aestetix wrote:
You've opened a can of worms here :)
Since elucidated discussion seems to be the modus operandi lately, I
have a few thoughts on this matter that are worth contributing. Feel
free to ignore at your pleasure (free listening is just as important
as free speech).
I think that the two key elements of your essays, food and power, are
rather interchangeable depending on the contexts. It's (hopefully)
obvious why we need food. Power in a more abstract sense is
fascinating to me, though. Other words that come to mind are drive,
charisma, persuasion, but also intellect, and most important, control.
IMHO, one of the most fundamental elements of control is language, as
shared patterns are effectively a way to communicate and attain
various levels of self-mastery. An easy way to experience this is to
try to understand a foreign language: there might be some hints of
familiarity within the chaos, and as we find them, it's a bit like
setting markers around, and using the markers to control the direction
of your ultimate understanding. You can extend that to vocabulary and
concepts as well. One of the hallmarks of a good education is the
ability to curse someone out without using the generic "fuck shit
damn" slurs.
Language is composed of words, symbols which point to meanings, and
one of the most interesting set of words is our names. And you all can
guess where I'm going with this one ;)
Hail Eris,
aestetix
PS: it might be worth doing another cryptoparty soon.
On 5/3/13 7:58 PM, GtwoG PublicOhOne wrote:
2) Where the power is, and where it isn't.
Now we come to the proletariat and the
lumpenproletariat.
For this, credit also goes to a good friend of
mine who I won't
name here, but who's welcome to name him/herself if s/he so
chooses: s/he got me thinking down this trail a few months ago.
The proletariat is the working class: basically
defined as people
who have full-time jobs or at least jobs that provide sufficient
income for the core necessities (shelter, clothing, food,
transportation, sanitation, communication), but who have little or
no ownership stake. This includes people who are in business for
themselves, but earning a working class income: they own their
employment, but their economic wellbeing is at the same level as
that of a wage-worker.
The lumpenproletariat is the level below that:
basically defined
as people whose employment is marginal at best, and whose access to
the basic necessities is frequently interrupted in some way. The
unemployed, homeless, couch-surfers (another form of
homelessness), people who live at the margins of the law in order
to survive, and people who earn their livings on criminal activity.
This also includes wage-workers whose wage income is not sufficient
to provide their basic necessities from month to month: they have
jobs, but their economic wellbeing is at the same level as that of
someone who's marginally employed at best.
Decades ago, the Bay Area left/radical community
made the deadly
strategic error of embracing the (essentially Maoist) analysis that
the lumpenproletariat is the revolutionary class. This error
continues to this day, in the ideology of Black Block tactics,
which are founded on the idea that expressing rage and provoking
police over-reaction will somehow spark The Revolution.
The very same tactic in more obviously violent
form pops up in the
ideology of the extreme right: such as the Hutaree, a group that
was busted by the FBI for planning to shoot a bunch of cops and
then set off bombs at their funerals, in the attempt to provoke
martial law and thereby set off a "revolution" from the extreme
right.
But here's the nexus of the problem:
To the oligarchy, the lumpenproletariat is
disposable: their roles
in production and consumption are so minimal that they can be
totally disregarded. They have NO power. N-O power. As
individuals or as any kind of collectivity or class.
When a social movement identifies with the
lumpenproletariat
and/or attempts to organize the lumpenproletariat, the movement
effectively short-circuits its efforts into something that is
inherently doomed to failure. They may as well be trying to
organize the squirrels on the Cal Berkeley campus to strike for
better teaching-assistant salaries. How seriously do you think the
UC Regents would take the threat of a squirrel strike?
The proletariat is where the power is: the power
to produce and
consume at the level that drives the engine of oligarchy, is also
the power to refuse consent in a meaningful way.
The power of the proletariat takes two forms:
One, the power to remove themselves from the
oligarch's engines of
production: by going on strike (which translates to the power of
collective bargaining), by going into business for themselves, and
by developing alternatives to conventional capitalism such as
cooperatives and other forms of production that subordinate capital
to labor.
Two, the power to remove themselves from the
oligarch's
consumption matrix: by boycotts (consumer strikes), by
anti-materialist or "simple living" principles that reduce
consumption levels (the equivalent of consumer general strikes), by
shifting their consumption to alternative institutions such as
coops, credit unions, and small local producers (e.g. buying
veggies at the farmers' market rather than Safeway), and very
importantly for _us_ as hackers/makers/etc., the power to build
for our own use.
This is real power. It's the power that
makes the oligarchs quake
in their boots and have nightmares. And it's the power that gives
the oligarchs strong incentive to keep us distracted, digressed,
and disempowered by wasting our time trying to organize a squirrel
strike.
-G.
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