maupassant, complaining about the literary style of his contemporaries, writes that the french language is supposed to be ”claire, logique, et nerveuse.” are there any good books about how writers describe their own (and other) languages and why?
I'm a Russophile (with immense reservations) in the same way I'm a philosemite (with immense reservations). They definitely make the world a much more interesting place, if not exactly a better one. Both are self-admitted by their members to be best appreciated from afar.
@tropicalcamatte@die_rizzen what do you mean by the creation of a system? kautskyist centrism? does lenin fall prey to this as well? do you think marx would have seen the success of the 2. intl in organizing the working class as a distortion or regression? how do we deal with that if it comes up again?
@tropicalcamatte@die_rizzen and you would say that the bad second intl reading of marx was a distortion via engels? at what point did marx‘s interventions in the socialist movement start to be read this way, and why?
@tropicalcamatte@die_rizzen but is there some way in which the political consciousness of marxists 100-150 years ago was limited due to this misunderstanding (ie hegelianism)? how does the value extracted from marx since the 1960s actually help the prospects for socialism today?
@tropicalcamatte@die_rizzen but do you think that, say, lenin or luxembourg misunderstood something crucial about the whole? did this have political implications?
"The difference between now and late Antiquity: productive forces today would allow utopia.… Truth of Stoa was that nothing remained but falling back into thought, whereas today that thought must fall back upon itself is the delusion of society that is its untruth." —Adorno 1946
(but by that same token, national liberation is most interesting and relevant as mass movements of the global poor and least interesting as elite-driven state-building developmentalism)