Wez
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Almamater – So why go into such detail about what you are doing on this forum? You have made your life my business through discussing it here. What you don’t like is my identifying it as ‘individualistic’ rather than socialist. Am I mistaken?
ALB -Here’s a question for you – what is the force of gravity composed of? Similarly what is the force of electromagnetism composed of or the strong and weak nuclear forces? These are meaningless questions surely?
DJP – ‘From that you can work out a strategy for getting your message out there. If you end up reaching nobody it doesn’t matter how much you want to undermine consumerism.’
Having been a graphic designer all my working life I perfectly understand how marketing ‘works’. I had to endure endless meetings where people tried to second guess the tastes of others – very tedious. The best advice I ever got was ‘make the show that you would want to listen to. If it fails then so be it but don’t play anything merely because you think the audience would like it.’
Almamater – ‘I do not like anybody giving me order and telling me what to do, and I do not want to participate in any party activities, committees, or even writing for the socialist standard .
I am running my own websites’How very bourgeois individualistic of you Almamater – don’t you believe in democracy?
TM – Originally I think Freud thought of the libido as an actual chemical entity – which led Reich on his fruitless search for ‘orgone’. Sigmund thought that science was a matter of ‘matter’ and hoped his psychoanalysis would one day be described in a similar style as was physics. Since quantum mechanics nobody thinks of physics in that way.
ALB & BD – I’ve always thought of the concepts as metaphorical like ‘a force of nature’ or ‘desire’ being a manifestation of the sexual instinct. In the end all language (including that of science) are metaphors. They still seek a complete scientific explanation for the ‘force’ of gravity. The ‘quantum’, photon, singularity, dark matter etc. are all metaphors.
DJP – I don’t know the reasons why you can’t ‘get involved’ but it maybe that, like myself, you have serious health issues that might preclude me occasionally from proceeding with such a project. As a broadcaster I invited DJs onto my show to discuss their favourite albums which, as it turned out, were all political at their heart. I hope it doesn’t ‘all come down to marketing’ since the broadcasts will seek to subvert and undermine consumerism and its demographic designations.
TM – Yes Freud had abandoned his old ‘libido’ theory (to which ALB always refers) in favour of a thoroughly psychological one containing the rival forces of ‘Eros’ (the life force) and ‘Thanatos’ (the death instinct). I find his mature work more interesting than his earlier more ‘mechanical’ theories.
ALB quotes Feud saying: ‘One of the passages from Freud that was read on the programme was that humans are born with “the instincts to destroy and kill, which we assimilate as the aggressive or destructive instincts”. By “we” he meant “psychoanalysts” and which rules out as completely utopian a free society without a repressive state.’
Freud had no political understanding whatsoever which is why his theories need the addition of a Marxian perspective. Marx’s theory of alienation has profound psychological implications which can be, and have been, explored by those using psychoanalytical techniques. We do not reject Darwin’s work because he was a Christian so let’s give Freud some slack for being a Viennese petty bourgeois. My contention, along with that of the Frankfurt school, is that Freud’s ‘death instinct’ has its roots in the alienation created by capitalism.
DJP – I understand why you reject my more ‘populist’ ideas but if we go your route aren’t we in danger of ‘preaching to the converted’ and attracting just the educated minority who are interested in political theory? Your contention that a music content would be ‘trite cliche’ would seem to exclude one of the most powerful vehicles of communication available to our species. Have you seen the massive audiences at rock concerts etc.? And what does ‘talk about socialism’ mean – politics is a part of everyday lives and we need to link ordinary experiences with socialist consciousness and I don’t think an endless list of intellectual lectures as on MHI is attractive to the ‘average worker’. Anyway this is just my perspective and you might be correct but perhaps we might attempt a ‘synthesis’ of our different approaches?
DJP – That looks good – and we have quite a large archive of debates etc. that we could post. However the MHI website does look a bit ‘dry’ so perhaps we could add some ‘rebel music’ with a DJ and some more eye catching graphics? I’m not a big fan of ‘phone-ins’ but they do seem to attract audiences. We could provide movie and music reviews etc.
Almamater – I always wanted to try and set up a radio station so that we could respond to events as they happen. The cost is minimal (I believe although I don’t know the cost of licenses etc. these days) to set up an online broadcast. I was told that we don’t have the personnel but if any comrades are interested in such a project let me know as I have some broadcasting experience and these days we can all broadcast from home.
BD – I notice that you haven’t answered my question – what have all of your establishment experts got to say about the relationship between political ideology and psychological development/character? At least the synthesis of the work of Freud and Marx has given us a working hypothesis as used by the Frankfurt school. Or do you think, like ALB, that the atavistic hatred and cruelty witnessed by recent history was merely a matter of ‘false consciousness’?
TM – I think you’re putting to much store in the ability of both sides to control events. I don’t know that Putin is any kind of military genius so his tribal bourgeois instincts will direct his actions as they will that of NATO (a.k.a. US oligarchs).
