Why do we watch films and TV programmes filled with murder and death? To work toward a peace with the traumatic knowledge of our own inevitable death, and the constant deaths of people worldwide.
Video is a cup. Film is a cup. The word is a cup. You don’t drink the cup.
Something about the season and the light and the weather and the vague uncertainty around almost returning to eased restrictions - we’re in a liminal space, standing on a dozen shores.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see someone walking backwards down the street.
I have felt fear before. The struggle will not end today so, if I am lucky, I will feel this fear again. This fear is the threshold of progress. This fear is a gate we walk through and know the peace of good action.
20201006 LINKS
https://illwilleditions.com/the-return-of-john-brown-white-race-traitors-in-the-2020-uprising/
“Violence with racists is inevitable. But there are enough of them, and they have enough guns and support from the state that we cannot defeat them on military terms alone. Confronting them on the streets is important, but in the long term we must also try to convince some of them that their commitment to whiteness only subordinates them to the bourgeoisie. This will be a slow, difficult, even dangerous process, but it can be done.”
Theses on the White Proletariat White people, like all people, are divided by politics and class. These divisions were revealed through the recent uprisings, which showed us that there are whites who are willing to go the distance, and there are whites who are willing to violently defend capitalism and the state./ We need a revolutionary strategy for white proletarians not in spite of, but precisely because of their racism. Enrolling the white proletariat into a white supremacist alliance has been a crucial tactic of American capitalism, for the simple reason that white workers have always been the largest demographic in this nation. A successful proletarian revolution requires breaking up this alliance./ The white proletariat has revolutionary potential, but this potential is simultaneously inflected with racism and anti-Blackness. This contradiction takes the form of a civil war within the white proletariat. This civil war is defined, on the one hand, by solidarity with the rest of the proletariat, and on the other hand, by whiteness./ The so-called ‘white outside agitator’ is the name for a living creature who breaks the spell of a united white bloc of civility, protocol, and allegiance to capitalism and the state. It reveals that there are white people who are not invested in whiteness./ As more white race-traitors emerge, they too will be hunted down and murdered. In this sense, law and order is not only about disciplining Black and Brown proletarians but also white race-traitors. This is the revolutionary fate of all proletarians who pose a threat to the racial order./ The white proletariat is not frozen. It can change, evolve, and break from its history of settler colonialism, racism, and imperialism. We need not entertain romantic illusions in order to see this. Actual people make revolutions, not saints and angels./ The historical moment that sheds the most light on the current white proletariat is the era of the Civil War. This history powerfully informs the trajectory of what will come. The Civil War and Reconstruction are the unfinished business of this land. Only crisis, civil war and revolution can smash the alliance between the white proletariat and capitalism.
There is a lot of abstract and shallow accounting of how whiteness is to be overcome through guilt, self-sacrifice, charity, and interpersonal behaviors, but the clearest road ahead is when whites join the mass struggle, fight the police, burn cop cars, burn police stations, burn courthouses, burn department of corrections buildings, and commit their bodies to the uprising.
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2020/9/10/degrowth-and-mmt-a-thought-experiment
With this approach, the age-old question of “will we have enough GDP in a degrowth scenario to provide for thriving lives?” becomes irrelevant. We can generate the funding for public services and the job guarantee without even a thought to GDP. GDP becomes an irrelevant indicator. Indeed, parts of the economy that are presently measured by GDP might shrink, but that’s okay because GDP is not the primary arbiter of provisioning. In the scenario I have described, the majority of provisioning is done directly. So, exchange-value (GDP) might decline but use-value (access to the things we need to live well) improves.
This leaves us with an interesting point. MMT proposals align elegantly with one of degrowth’s key observations, namely, that if growthism depends on the perpetual creation of artificial scarcity, then by reversing artificial scarcity — by providing public abundance — we can dismantle the growth imperative. As Giorgos Kallis has put it, “capitalism cannot survive under conditions of abundance”. MMT provides an opportunity for us to create a post-growth, post-capitalist economy.
20201002 EDGE OF TOMORROW As Sequences
SEQUENCE 1
Exposition
Establish starting role of hero as pro persuader
Inciting incident: being solicited to go to the front lines
Contest leads to being sent in worse conditions, the guise of a deserter
Introduced to supporting characters, people who have power over hero in new circumstances
SEQUENCE 2
Initial attempt and failure to win battle
Main incident: the time loop begins
SEQUENCE 3
Playing with time loop and testing limits
Developing incident: meeting mysterious figure who seems to know about whats happening (Rita), and invites collaboration
SEQUENCE 4
Trying to reach Rita
Closure on mechanism and establishing rules of time loop
New objective created: find the Omega
SEQUENCE 5
Iteration training and trying for new objective
Finally accomplish stage 1 (get off the beach)
Make it to open road in a car
SEQUENCE 6
Character revelations and tension in car and at cottage
Leads to stronger relationship between Cage and Rita
Rita dies
Cage decides to fight alone
High point: Cage finds supposed Omega location but it’s a ruse and a trap
SEQUENCE 7
Reunion with Rita
New objective: find the Omega’s real location
Get locator maguffin from General and learn Omega location
At the cost of time loop power
SEQUENCE 8
The Last Hurrah: Escape and recruit squad to assist
Get to general objective area
Squad die
Rita and Cage accept their deaths, Cage is finally a soldier
Kiss
Victory at the cost of lives
Through good luck Cage gets to time loop again
Brief denouement, implying possible heroic romance
All of the plot drama is based around travelling to a place, or acquiring an object. Most of the momentary drama is based around staying alive/avoiding arrest. Some of the momentary drama is based around persuasion. These persuasion scenes stand out: avoiding being sent to the front by the general, convincing the sergeant of Cage’s officer status, asking Rita to not fly the helicopter, persuading the general to share the locator maguffin, persuading J-squad to join the last hurrah.
Those first three do not lean on foreknowledge afforded the hero by their special status and so are more thrilling in their uncertainty.