Friday, July 3, 2009

The Coming Insurrection

"The Coming Insurrection" is the book i'm currently reading. This guy is terrified of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCU4psxF_L4&feature=player_embedded

I can't wait to see what happens when he actually reads it, cuz it's some dense philosophical shit that you need at least a passing understanding of critical theory, marxism, post-modernism, etc in order to begin to understand. I especially wonder what he'll think of the parts where they attack the left and call for its destruction.

I don't agree with most of what the book says, a lot of it is a bourgeois complaint about alienation, romantic notions about what pre-capitalism was (or even what pre-civilization was), way too much focus on the negative and tactics that are mostly still too conventionally political (they're looking for excuses to break shit when really we need to work on building shit).

But, i do love the way that even the pull quotes this reactionary fox news guy chose include some of the ideas i find valuable in the book. Things like "the elaboration of collective self-organized forms of life" does that really sound negative to anyone? I mean, "collective self-organized form of life" sure makes for a more reasonable definition of "freedom" than the average american is generally able to muster. What will happen when conservatives need to respond to this definition of communism?

It's kind of like the hypothetical: what would've happened if Marx hadn't dumbed it down for the manifesto in order to inspire the masses into a premature revolution? What if all communists were smart?

Curious?
Read The Coming Insurrection yourself.

Curious but too busy to read all that?
Read CALL (which i actually like more).

Curious but too busy to read even that?
Then you'll just have to keep scratching your head in bewilderment when shit like Greece starts happening everywhere all the time. Cuz this is where those people are coming from.

1 comment:

Kurt Hartwig said...

He's not going to address any of the substance of the book - he's going to tackle it rhetorically, the same way he previewed it rhetorically. He's claiming Ghandi and MLK as heroes for the right at this point - and tying both fear (fear the violent left) and righteousness (we are peaceful, I'm not telling you to shoot anyone), and persecution (Jon Voigt, conservative, I'm just saying).

and he's pretty good at it to look at his numbers and just to evaluate his performance.