CptKrkIsClmbngThMntn

The fact that so many books still name the Beatles as "the greatest or most significant or most influential" rock band ever only tells you how far rock music still is from becoming a serious art. Jazz critics have long recognized that the greatest jazz musicians of all time are Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, who were not the most famous or richest or best sellers of their times, let alone of all time. Classical critics rank the highly controversial Beethoven over classical musicians who were highly popular in courts around Europe. Rock critics, instead, are still blinded by commercial success. The Beatles sold more than anyone else (not true, by the way), therefore they must have been the greatest. Jazz critics grow up listening to a lot of jazz music of the past, classical critics grow up listening to a lot of classical music of the past. Rock critics are often totally ignorant of the rock music of the past, they barely know the best sellers.

-once they are done coming, I am less leftist.

Ah damn I read it as George Soros

Been so long since I've seen this meme format

Yes, but hardly anyone actually has it in powder form, so I'm 99% sure law enforcement would be counting the weight of the paper blotter if they're hoping to screw someone over. They certainly have done that with cannabis - not just the nugs but any paraphernalia or full brownies will be put on the scale and they'll be charged with pounds of weed or whatever.

This but unironically.

There is already massive tension between department faculty and admins at many universities

It reminds me of one of Graeber's Bullshit Jobs/Utopia of Rules points that many of our actually useful public institutions (within the realm of education, healthcare, etc.) have become bloated with class middlemen - a vertically swelling stack of bureaucratic administrators that manage the tension between owners and labourers with increasingly technical systems of means testing and whatever else. These people have a distinct class position from actual educators, so even though professors can be all over the place ideologically depending on their department, it's really not a huge surprise to me that the sociology folks are on the right side of history here.

The last stage of the Marxist evolution of communism involves the decay of state institutions through neglect, as they become redundant in a post-scarcity no-cops Utopia.

But there are a bunch of prior stages (including capitalist industrialization even!) that are neglected. And even then, the utopian end-game is routinely disputed by the subsequent generations of Leninists and Maoists who believe we will never truly escape the revolutionary cycle.

There absolutely are Already Existing Socialist states attempting to move themselves from primitive accumulation, through industrial capitalism, and into a collectively governed socialist post-scarcity society. And people absolutely are living in them. And none of them are Utopian (although the quality of life in many of these countries is exhaustively propagandized to be by degrees to be between Unbearably Hellish and FALGSC-adjacent).

The problems that these countries typically have, however, aren’t ones that armchair communists on a niche western internet platform are capable of solving. You’re not going to break the Cuban blockade. You’re not going to settle the endless territorial disputes plaguing Vietnam. You’re not going to undo the legacy of generations of apartheid in South Africa overnight. You’re not going to Make the USSR Great Again.

So maybe save yourself some angst and stop trying to tell Nicholas Maduro and Kim Jung Un how to do their jobs. Maybe worry more about why your local chapter of the DSA can’t get a teacher’s union off the ground.

Did /c/menby get shut down? Why?

Is there a good space where I can post to ask for some advice with an ongoing identity crisis revolving around my gender?

I knew a guy from a family with a super successful business. Right out of high school he carved off a chunk of his family's business and ran it well enough, so he was always completely set in terms of money and career, but he's always had more artistic sensibilities and curiosities than most business types I've met so I'm not sure he was ever fulfilled by it. After a breakup a few years ago he sold off the rest of the business, started traveling, and never really stopped. I think he's restlessly searching for meaning and community but has zero class consciousness and so he hasn't been able to realize that his position at the top of the pile is what makes that impossible to find. For a while he was trying to pull me out on adventures but I was never able to afford it and wouldn't have been comfortable frolicking around the world with him paying for everything.

I'm not struggling to put food on the table so obviously there's a bit of privilege in saying this, but I wouldn't trade places with him for anything.

There's a good point there but I think it's even a bit more nuanced. Castro's father did not come from old money. From what I understand he was born a poor peasant in 1875 and spent the first quarter of his life doing hard labour and military service. Fidel wasn't a pure bourgeois class traitor - he was from an upwardly mobile family that hit a limit. There's an interesting bit in a book about this:

Speaking broadly, it seems to me activist milieus can best be seen as a juncture, a kind of meeting place, between downwardly mobile elements of the pro­fessional classes and upwardly mobile children of the working class. The first consist of children of white-collar backgrounds who reject their parents' way of life: the daughter of a tax accountant who chooses to work as a carpenter, the daughter of veterinarian who chose to live as a graphic artist, the son of a middle manager who chooses to become a civil engineer or professional activist. The other consisted of children from blue-collar backgrounds who go to college. In historical terms, both correspond to a classic stereotype. The first repre­sents the classic recruitment base for artistic bohemia; if not children of the bour­geoisie, as they were often assumed to be in 1850s Paris, where the term was first coined, then children born to members of administrative or professional elites, living in voluntary poverty, experimenting with more pleasurable, artistic, less alienated forms of life. The second represents the classic stereotype of the revolutionary, particularly in Global South: children of the laboring classes (workers, peasants, small shop-owners even) whose parents strived all their life to get their sons or daughters into college, or even who managed to get themselves bourgeois levels of education by their own efforts, only to discover that bourgeois levels of education do not actually allow entry into the bourgeoisie, or often, any sort of regular work at all. One can compile endless examples among the ranks of the last century's revolutionary heroes: from Mao (child of peasants turned librarian), to Fidel Castro (unemployed lawyer from Cuba), and so on. In fact, both bohemia and revolutionary circles have historically tended to be a meeting place of both.

Obviously this is a highly schematized picture. First of all, it leaves out some significant groups entirely: for example, those who adopted bohemian lifestyles because their parents were bohemian, or the children of professional activists. One should not underestimate the degree of self-reproduction in such sub-class­es. Also: while the stereotype of the bohemian as rich kid-secretly supporting his absinthe habits with money from home, eventually either to die of dissipa­tion or go back to the board of daddy's company-is strikingly similar to the stereotype of the activist as trust-fund baby, it is probably no more accurate. Certainly there have always been scions of the bourgeoisie in both milieus, all the more influential for their money, social skills, and connections. But bohemian milieus of the last 150 years never really consisted primarily of children of the up­per, or even professional, classes. As Pierre Bourdieu (1993) has recently shown, the social base for nineteenth century bohemian culture in Europe emerged, in part, through exactly the same processes that shaped social revolutionaries in the Global South: among talented children of peasants, for example, who had taken advantage of France's new educational system, and then found themselves excluded from conventional elite culture anyway. What's more, these milieus tended to overlap. Bohemia was full not only of working-class intellectuals and self-taught eccentrics, but outright revolutionaries. The friendship between Oscar Wilde and Peter Kropotkin was not atypical; actually, it could be taken as em­blematic. Similarly, revolutionary circles have always been filled with children of privilege who have rejected their natal values: Karl Marx (lawyer's son turned penniless journalist) being the archetypical example. Every Mao had his Chou En-Iai, even Castro had his CM. The constitution of both milieus, then, is really quite similar. Which probably helps explain why artists have felt so consistently drawn to revolutionary politics.

Yes! I haven't gone exploring enough but I like "everything" spice and cayenne pepper in mine.