Zero Books

I know Doug, Nagle and Fisher are somewhat appreciated here, but what about the rest of the press and the actual idea as a whole as Doug explains in his channel trailer?

From looking through the authors, their books and the site, it looks like most are young (20-30) aspiring intellectuals mostly involved in academia ranging from assistants to PhDs, trying to one-up the current cultural trends by criticizing both capitalism and idpol liberals succumbing to it. Tho I'm not sure what to think of it, the books look more like hit-and-run essays to make easy cash off of a counterculture trend and plenty of them are referential to other authors and books within this niche.

Considering all the above, do you think this is the future of the mainstream left - Doug did say he wanted to find a solution to the alienation of modernity and technology, so given the overlapping critique this platform provides, could these ideas actually be the centerpiece of the left in the next decade and a half? Assuming that no dire financial crash would happen.

Also, in light of these books we should rethink our fetish for theory. How many of these worth the read? How many are valid at all? (There are much more ridiculous titles from the site but I don't have the PDFs unfortunately) Most of these authors are first time publishers, and it kind of makes me wonder how would the works of the canonical theorists of the left have looked to us had they been released in contemporary time.

Some of it is shit and some of it is interesting. I'm not sure what you're trying to get at. You're making it seem like these people are exploiting some burgeoning new market to get rich off of when half baked theory has been a staple of the left for decades and nobody gets rich off of it.

I just want to know what Holla Forums thinks of it and if there are some center works that are worth a read besides Nagle and Fisher, and whether this has some potential to have more impact on the future. If half baked theory dominated the left in the past decades, then this could have actual potential.

Half baked theory didn't necessarily dominate. It's just constantly out there. What resonates and genuinely reflects the world stays while the rest gets forgotten about.

Nagle is bad

Doug is a half-read infantile just like any other. His publishing co. is always a "hit and miss": Nagle, touching on the core of the problem, yet missing it since her total lack of theoretical involvement; Fischer, seeing thru theory the decline of it all, yet committing sudoku, cuz he can't into praxis.

Doug is a parasite.

No gf? Really?

I know it sounds stupid, but I can't imagine somebody becoming an unironic Nazi when he has a mentally healthy girlfriend. Girls usually call this shit out and are generally pretty grounded.

Apparently muke's going on their podcast

wew

Agreed. If the left is resting on such naivete (gif related), then they have no future. This crash is going to fuck this country into its dark age.

I liked that one podcast they did about Jordan Peterson, where they're like yeah solzhenitsyn's anti-semetic screeds are an accurate portrayal of the soviet union but socialism isn't as bad as you think either…

lmao I remember that. "Peterson is right, every leftist must read the Gulag Archipelago and learn from it!" - sure, reading the fantasy book of a fascist sympathizer who was lucky to end up in a Soviet prison where he made his fucking degree instead of a German death camp is something the left needs. Well, not surprising considering the retarded chapter about Stalin in Capitalist Realism ("it's not profitable so it sucks") and the fact they now want to have Muke on their podcast, who not only has nothing to say but also is the biggest shit slinger against socialist states ever. Just recently posted under a picture that the GDR is basically fascist, and everybody who respects its legacy is fascist scum.

What annoys me the most is that these people act like nobody has a plan and we have no solutions. Uhm no, we have the experience of the 20th century, we know what it takes to carry out and fortify a revolution, we know the problems, we know the merits. Instead of building from history these people want to hurl us back 150 years and start from scratch. For them, revolutionary history ends with 1921, every other revolution afterwards doesn't count for them, all the developments the USSR underwent afterwards are not worth analyzing. The phenomenon that all other revolutions afterwards took on a Marxist-Leninist character is usually explained with some conspiracy about secret Soviet influence.

…are you guys being serious about muke?

Zerobooks is an anti communist op and nagle is obviously a fascist sheepdog pretending to be some sort of ambiguous socialist.

This but unironically. Have you people read "Kill all normies"? It's fucking trash.

I understand why people go to /leftpol/ now.

We all know Nagle is a closet fascist.

haha that's worse than getting Prof. kermit on. Jesus christ, the left is going to look even more retarded with this twink claiming USSR, China, Cuba ect were all state capitalism.

This Lenin hat is somehow worse than muke

Implying they’re not?

Libs out

How is that a liberal statement? Liberals call all those states socialist or even full blown communism.

honestly I hope Muke fucking dies

Western ☭TANKIE☭s have accepted and internalized the liberal idea of socialism which amounts to the state doing things. The premise that the liberal critique of Really Existing "Socialism", and by extension socialism itself, lies upon is still there but they simply invert the conclusion. It's a political cargo cult that thinks if they wear military fatigues, wave around red flags, and ape the movements of the 20th century long enough they'll conjure up socialism. It's quite sad really.

This is more from retards calling themselves "left" communist who think if they claim it wasn't real socialism libs would not use it as an argument when in reality both libs and leftcoms rely on the same narrative of anti-communism propaganda.


This guy is a good example of what I was referring to. Completely out of touch and prefers to aggregate those who believe USSR wasn't state capitalism to a meme "tankies". When in reality anyone who has actually read Marx and understand a bit about economics would know the USSR was not state capitalism nor was it communism. You don't have to worship Stalin to know "USSR was state capitalism" is an autistic statement.

Doug never said the gulag archipelago was true, he argued that even if you accept all of its claims as true that would not disprove communist theory or Marxism as a whole and that even the exaggerated myths of Stalinist tyranny pale in comparison to the death toll of capitalism. He was trying to turn Peterson’s own arguments against him.

What narrative is that? Libs actively opposed the Soviet Union while leftcoms simply criticized it. Was it somehow free from critique? What's with this leftcom bogeyman? Leftcom is about the most vague grouping on the left. You're being pointlessly sectarian and using that as a basis to dismiss arguments.

I refer to the Soviet Union as state capitalism BECAUSE I read Marx. Maybe you should present an actual arguemnt why the USSR wasn't state-capitalist. I don't think recognizing it for what it was is in any way insulting to the project. When you're constantly threatened with war it doesn't make sense to abandon a centralized state owned command economy. For what it is worth they did the best they could, but calling an economic system socialist when the state took the role of capitalist, extracted surplus value from the workers, and then reinvested said surplus back into the economy, is completely retarded. It was still capitalism albeit capitalism under the control of a workers state. I'm not saying they didn't move well beyond the NEP, which they did. Just that it wasn't socialist. I know plenty of Leninists in real life willing to agree with that. It's only online I see ☭TANKIE☭s with non-arguments throwing a fit about leftcoms(which there are practically none of) whenever state-capitalism is brought up.

Not the same guy, but I'll bite:

1) means of production were publicly owned
2) no labor market (labor isn't a commodity anymore)
3) production overwhelmingly not according to the law of value (except agricultural cooperatives), goods are not produced as commodities in the industrial sector
4.) no wage labor
5.) pay according to quantity and quality to spend on consumer goods, no value-based exchanges, therefore currency wasn't in the money form
6.) in general just social consent about what is produced and how much
7.) welfare state, women's liberation, healthcare and you know, all the other stuff

It's pretty simply actually.

If that is true, then the Left is an utter joke.

Why do tanks think that socialism is when bureaucrats own the means of production? I can understand some of the early experiments in the USSR were classified as socialism, but not long after the NEP was implemented, everything went south.

wew
Also, subsistuting "quality" for "value" doesn't overcome the money form of value.

Which capitalist countries all do, yes.

Bureaucrats are not bourgeoisie. A bureaucrat, or even a CEO in capitalism, has no different relation to the means of productions than you. Besides, the word has become meaningless, since noone seems to be able to properly define it.


You are profoundly mistaken. The gold-backed ruble was not traded internally, it was merely for foreign trade. Even under revisionist rule, the foreign trade didn't make up more than 4%.


Having fun the ignoring the entire post?

Bureaucrats aren't the proles, as well. Unless you really believe every nationalized institution under capitalism becomes socialism. As it stands, you still have "barracks communism".
I don't have a problem with people breaking with him, but you guys should at least admit you share more Nechayev's vision than Marx.

Based on what? Women can be every bit as bigoted and reactionary as guys can.

Just wanted to share my absolute favorite works I've read from Zero Books, the Horror of Philosophy series by Eugene Thacker. I found these to be absolutely fascinating.

I also really enjoyed the "Zizek and Theology" (even though i dont think it was published by zero books) and "One Dimensional Woman" that was already posted by OP. I'd recommend "The Monstrosity of Christ" by Zizek if you want to learn more about his theological writings, which I find oddly interesting.

First off, socialism is not just the abolition of the bourgeoisie but also the self-abolition of the proletariat, but whatever. Again: This depends. In capitalist economies, labor is productive once it adds to the surplus product. In socialism, labor becomes directly part of the total social labor - you need to therefore actually define what a bureaucrat is, which neither the Trotskyte nor the Leftcom critique does, to deny that managerial work is not included in the surplus product is deeply revisionist and doesn't just go against Marx but even against Smith, Ricardo, Cannan, etc. What is a bureaucrat, what is a manager? How do we manage scarcity?

What we can categorize more or less is the post-Stalinist bureaucracy, a class of middle men that was supposed to mediate between the state plan and the increasingly independent enterprises, since that borders at unproductive labor as being purely allocative - but not within the total social product of labor.

I wrote nothing of the sort.

Funny that you'd say that, considering you are completely breaking from Marx in this very thread and replace hard economic class relations with some idealistic notiom of hierachy. If you think that Marx was against a centrally planned economy or appointed experts for resource allocation, you need to prove it.

I'll get to reading "Zizek and Theology". I'm still a brainlet so I hope it'll make things clearer since I tried to read "The Monstrosity of Christ" and I was in way over my head.

No, go back to tumblr or left twitter