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Odobenidae posted:Yeah, the British had nothing to do with that. The group of British who left Britain and later evolved into Americans, yes. Not the purebred original British working class.
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Sep 8, 2016 18:03
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:I think my answer would be that the plan for folks in the USA and Western Europe should be to try to stop the wars, stop the flow of weapons abroad, smash...patriarchy How do you smash something that doesn't exist?
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Sep 8, 2016 18:06
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I keep thinking about the definition of imperialism. We take as given that Imperial Rome was not imperialist. But surely there is a word that describes the phenomenon of, for example, Roman legions marching into independent Armenia to reinstate a friendly monarch who had been deposed. What is that word? Similarly, we take as given that the USSR was not colonialist. But what word does one use to describe the effective creation of Russian colonies in conquered territories?
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Sep 8, 2016 18:08
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Well the immediate concern right now, is that the neocolonial cycle of First World imperialism is still being perpetuated today. That even the social democratic parties of developed countries like France and Germany are actively participating as beneficiaries of this global exploitation. They couldn't even organize a European Union without turning eastern and southern Europe into the economic peripheries of Germany. But according to the Marxists in the UKMT thread in D&D the EU is the ultimate saviour and guardian of worker's rights?? especially the 50% of greek, Spanish and portugese youth who are unemployed and in poverty. the EU really safeguards their rights to not be saddled with a national debt by enforcing austerity
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Sep 8, 2016 18:09
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Jack of Hearts posted:I keep thinking about the definition of imperialism. We take as given that Imperial Rome was not imperialist. But surely there is a word that describes the phenomenon of, for example, Roman legions marching into independent Armenia to reinstate a friendly monarch who had been deposed. What is that word? 
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Sep 8, 2016 18:22
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The Saurus posted:How do you smash something that doesn't exist? Get The gently caress Out Of Here You Horrible Little Worm
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Sep 8, 2016 18:23
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Turn off your webcam.
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Sep 8, 2016 18:38
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Jack of Hearts posted:Suppose everything you say is true. Then the solution is simple: stop taking the loving bait. There are definitely liberals who use the USSR to discredit anything to the left of Bernie Sanders, but I don't understand why all you vanguardists immediately have to jump in to defend Stalin-sama's honor every time it happens. E.g., this thread's got 10x more stalinist accusations than it does anything interesting to say about that period if hillary clinton posted 12% growth, year after year after year, you don't think we'd let her get by with a few thousand political prisoners? you don't think ezra klein would write op-eds to defend it? "these people threaten 12% growth" is all she'd have to say to throw a bunch of BLM activists in prison. if hillary clinton then went on to defeat literal hitler, you don't think a whole mass of people would turn a blind eye to a genocide? one challenge that i've heard indigenous american activists face is that, loads of americans believe that "we won" and all the indigenous people are gone. that's in america, 2016. it's an incredibly interesting period in russian history, made monochromatic by the discussion ITT.
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Sep 8, 2016 19:26
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Mofabio posted:if hillary clinton posted 12% growth, year after year after year, you don't think we'd let her get by with a few thousand political prisoners? you don't think ezra klein would write op-eds to defend it? "these people threaten 12% growth" is all she'd have to say to throw a bunch of BLM activists in prison. The Clinton administration had 4% growth, and they got away with the Crime Bill, welfare reform, financial deregulation, and so on. The largest prison strike in US history is being planned for tomorrow, by the way. https://www.thenation.com/article/this-week-may-see-the-largest-prison-strike-in-us-history/
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Sep 8, 2016 19:38
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I feel the American populace will probably sour slightly on Hillary when she expels all the Bernie supporters from the Democratic Party and then has them shot, 12% growth or not.
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Sep 8, 2016 19:38
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Jack of Hearts posted:I feel the American populace will probably sour slightly on Hillary when she expels 90% of her own supporters from the Democratic Party and then has them shot, 12% growth or not. Fixed your analogy.
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Sep 8, 2016 19:43
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:This is a very fair point as far as it goes, about the vernacular. However even on its own terms, whatever geopolitical harmful things that were done by the various socialist and "socialist" regimes in the 20th century are far overshadowed, by whatever metric you like, by those of liberal, feudal, and fascist regimes. It is a derailing tactic directly analagous, in my opinion, to talking about black-on-black crime in a discussion of the carceral state. Pener Kropoopkin posted:Well the immediate concern right now, is that the neocolonial cycle of First World imperialism is still being perpetuated today. That even the social democratic parties of developed countries like France and Germany are actively participating as beneficiaries of this global exploitation. They couldn't even organize a European Union without turning eastern and southern Europe into the economic peripheries of Germany. the problem here is that socialism is a positive program, not just a negative one. whataboutery isn't valid as a defence against criticisms of imperialism, but the psl proposes the socialist transformation of society as a solution, and it's not just legitimate but obligatory to get out your ledgers and say 'well what actually happens if X' if someone proposes X. i don't think this is a comparison socialism can't survive. the history of capitalism is full of heinous acts, and socialists are entitled to dissociate from the errors of our own history by saying that they're there to be studied and moved on from. but saying that you're doing that is commonplace, and people will do it and then go on to claim that the soviet union never invaded poland or whatever daft poo poo. it has to be something you actually do, not just talk about. this isn't a call to engage disingenuous liberal whataboutery of course. but that's precisely the problem, people keep taking the bait. aimo one of the big lessons of really existing socialism is just how weak it is at besting national chauvanism and militarism. both the big success stories, the ussr and china, fell prey to it. however it's notable that they did so in a way that was 'inherited' from their predecessors, suggesting simple social inertia is part of the cause - people grow up in a certain environment of attitudes on how nations relate to one another and this doesn't go away immediately with the mode of production. but this doesn't preclude a gradual change over generations in light of the cost of war, the difficulty and uselessness of conquest, increasing availability of information and public distaste for violence and so on. it's possible we're seeing this happen already but i'm going to wait and see if we can get out of the economic doldrums and the rise of china before declaring the capitalist world system is also capable of it.
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Sep 8, 2016 19:47
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the st. Petersburg defence: what I did wasn't a crime because I define the word 'crime' as acts committed by capitalists
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Sep 8, 2016 19:49
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Peel posted:this isn't a call to engage disingenuous liberal whataboutery of course. but that's precisely the problem, people keep taking the bait. what color would you say that bait is?
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Sep 8, 2016 20:13
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Peel posted:aimo one of the big lessons of really existing socialism is just how weak it is at besting national chauvanism and militarism. both the big success stories, the ussr and china, fell prey to it. however it's notable that they did so in a way that was 'inherited' from their predecessors, suggesting simple social inertia is part of the cause - people grow up in a certain environment of attitudes on how nations relate to one another and this doesn't go away immediately with the mode of production. but this doesn't preclude a gradual change over generations in light of the cost of war, the difficulty and uselessness of conquest, increasing availability of information and public distaste for violence and so on. it's possible we're seeing this happen already but i'm going to wait and see if we can get out of the economic doldrums and the rise of china before declaring the capitalist world system is also capable of it. The reactionary wave sweeping through Europe, the USA, Brazil, India, and Japan makes it pretty clear that it isn't. We could just as well "get out of the economic doldrums" by emulating Singapore.
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Sep 8, 2016 20:16
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Constant Hamprince posted:the st. Petersburg defence: what I did wasn't a crime because I define the word 'crime' as acts committed by capitalists To be fair to people who try and define imperialism, I bet they never thought in their wildest dreams that some empire would be so brazen as to pack up an entire country's industry and ship it off by train.
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Sep 8, 2016 21:29
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Homeless Friend posted:To be fair to people who try and define imperialism, I bet they never thought in their wildest dreams that some empire would be so brazen as to pack up an entire country's industry and ship it off by train. Fun fact: Soviet industry was so notoriously terrible at producing reliable consumer goods that even after they had pillaged the Eastern Block of industrial equipment Polish, Czech and East German-manufactured goods were still prized as luxury items. To their credit, Soviet leaders eventually realized this but they were never able to break the fixation on quantity over quality.
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Sep 8, 2016 23:29
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The Saurus posted:Not the purebred original British working class. hmm also the dalai lama is cool and good
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Sep 9, 2016 01:57
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:This is a very fair point as far as it goes, about the vernacular. However even on its own terms, whatever geopolitical harmful things that were done by the various socialist and "socialist" regimes in the 20th century are far overshadowed, by whatever metric you like, by those of liberal, feudal, and fascist regimes. It is a derailing tactic directly analagous, in my opinion, to talking about black-on-black crime in a discussion of the carceral state. No it's because normal adjusted adults living outside your bubble of childish definitional nonsense have a broader and more complex criteria for scoring good and bad than 'capitalist/not capitalist'.
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Sep 9, 2016 02:20
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Get out you rude weird throwback, I don't troll whatever swamp you hang out in. Show some drat respect.
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Sep 9, 2016 02:30
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Serious question: how would one define the word "scientific" as it's used in M-L literature? I have no idea how it's meant to be parsed.
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Sep 9, 2016 23:08
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Jack of Hearts posted:Serious question: how would one define the word "scientific" as it's used in M-L literature? I have no idea how it's meant to be parsed. have you tried reading engels
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Sep 9, 2016 23:14
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Homework Explainer posted:have you tried reading engels Yes...
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Sep 9, 2016 23:28
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The idea is that dialectical materialism conceivably talks about geopolitics in a manner that is testable and therefore scientific. I was never adequately convinced of that though.
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Sep 9, 2016 23:33
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Fiction posted:The idea is that dialectical materialism conceivably talks about geopolitics in a manner that is testable and therefore scientific. I was never adequately convinced of that though. That was my take, but I figured I was being uncharitable. I'm open to an interpretation that makes the use of the word less pretentious.
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Sep 9, 2016 23:55
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Jack of Hearts posted:That was my take, but I figured I was being uncharitable. I'm open to an interpretation that makes the use of the word less pretentious. Remember Marx and engels were philosophers and its slightly less so
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Sep 9, 2016 23:57
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You also can construct an internally logical view of history through the lens of economics > everything else. But even so
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Sep 9, 2016 23:58
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Fiction posted:Remember Marx and engels were philosophers and its slightly less so With Marx and Engels it's cool. Nietzsche had his own weird use of "scientific" too. Something in the water in 19th century Germany. It's later users, including Lenin, who throw me.
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Sep 10, 2016 00:08
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Jack of Hearts posted:With Marx and Engels it's cool. Nietzsche had his own weird use of "scientific" too. Something in the water in 19th century Germany. It's later users, including Lenin, who throw me. It's probably more that in the mid 19th century, the word "scientific" had different and possibly looser meanings than it does today. IIRC, much of what many people understand as The Scientific Method, and specifically falsifiability, came out of an effort by a philosopher of science (Popper I think?) to tighten the standards up because he believed (rightly or wrongly) that stuff like Marxism being touted as a science was anachronistic and overblown. The other thing to consider, since I mentioned anachronism, is historical context. When Marx came along, socialism as an ideology was not very empirical. Arguments for it were carried mostly by moral force and its ideas proceeded from pure reasoning. So the fact that he started by looking at history and the operation of capitalist economies was a distinguishing feature. There's also the insistence on something like an experimental cycle to see what works in different circumstances and adjust theory. These broad methodological principles not make Marxism "a science" in a modern sense, but they brought it closer to being scientific than its contemporaries. Whether or not actual Marxists in the real world today live up to this potential is another story.
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Sep 10, 2016 01:13
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Bro Dad posted:hmm Is he.
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Sep 10, 2016 02:09
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Yes. Yes he is. What does that link say to you?
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Sep 10, 2016 02:21
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Holy poo poo, the old Dali Lama was a US asset?!
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Sep 10, 2016 02:38
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Im with the tankie on this one
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Sep 10, 2016 02:49
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Not that i, a liberal, entirely blame the dalai lama for stacking that paper as a us foreign policy propaganda asset for basically his whole life. That motherfucker is ballin
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Sep 10, 2016 02:51
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Jack of Hearts posted:With Marx and Engels it's cool. Nietzsche had his own weird use of "scientific" too. Something in the water in 19th century Germany. It's later users, including Lenin, who throw me.
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Sep 10, 2016 04:40
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the infallible scientific truths of Marxism-Leninism
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Sep 10, 2016 07:52
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popper's idea of science is the one geeky teens learn as 'the scientific method' and use to argue with evangelicals on the internet, but its relation to science as actually practiced is pretty questionable. this is the case in natural science and goes quadruply so for social science where all your data is terrible. the deployment of the popperian definition of science as a weapon against marxism-in-general in the modern day is a little silly considering that afaik the only field of social science in which marxist or marxist-inspired thinking has actually been excluded from the academy is economics (natch), and dsge macro is blatantly unpopperian and arguably a complete empirical failure justified only by its theoretical virtues. social science is difficult and proceeds slowly, and epicycles are a healthy and normal part of the scientific process.
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Sep 10, 2016 12:49
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Peel posted:popper's idea of science is the one geeky teens learn as 'the scientific method' and use to argue with evangelicals on the internet, but its relation to science as actually practiced is pretty questionable. this is the case in natural science and goes quadruply so for social science where all your data is terrible. Being falsifiable and being easy to falsify are completely different things. Economics will always suffer from data and control problems, it's still falsifiable in a popper sense. Second, marxism isn't a science. Third it doesn't matter as much as it seems. It could theoretically be a science, but it's supporters could be driven by ideology. Climate science is science but its irrelevant for deniers to point that out when their particular stance is entirely ideology. Fourth, we saw the above right here in the posting you were smart to criticize: "Why is capitalism bad?" -> "It's imperialist" -> "Why is it imperialist" -> "Because it's capitalist" Which marxism, with its labyrinth of definitions, lends itself to: "Why is capitalism bad?" -> "Exploitation" -> "What's exploitation" -> "Capitalism"
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Sep 10, 2016 14:52
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Yo, dogg, there was no "First," in that post!
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Sep 10, 2016 15:02
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asdf32 posted:Being falsifiable and being easy to falsify are completely different things. Economics will always suffer from data and control problems, it's still falsifiable in a popper sense. 'economics' is not falsifiable in a popper sense. economics is a field of study, not an empirical proposition. economics can contain falsifiable propositions, for example, 'the rate of profit in capitalist economies will fall over time'. the claim that this has been falsified is one of the standard arguments against the marxist economic theory it derives from. the response to this can involve rejecting the theory (marxian economics is a degenerate research programme), modifying the theory (the simplistic formulation doesn’t consider X, which has delayed the effect), or disputing the experimental design (profit is being derived incorrectly, if you do it properly you see that the profit rate does indeed decline). all have been tried and are valid scientific moves. this is of course why i brought up dsge. dsge macro is a research paradigm not an empirical proposition and is not falsifiable as such. but it can produce falsifiable propositions, and regularly does, which is how it got its reputation for empirical uselessness. it’s also often accused of being a basically ideological project, rooted in a desire to obtain results showing that state interference in the market is bad. but despite these it has defenders - it just needs more data and more theoretical widgets to start paying bigger dividends, or it is useful for ‘analysis’, or it has theoretical virtues in that it disciplines analysis in a certain way. there are economists who think dsge is fine, economists who think dsge was a big mistake, and economists who think that it has big problems but should be a big part of macroeconomics going forward, because of those theoretical virtues. i wanted to avoid the k-word since while his book is on my shelf i haven’t read it yet, but these difficulties of applying popper's idealised view of science to actual practice are what led to the displacement of his characterisation by kuhn’s and later philosophy of science. popper doesn’t work well even for natural science let alone social. it's an ideal, not a practical reality. the rest of your post isn’t really relevant. we spent the whole page talking about the history of the interaction of the terms ‘marxism’ and ‘science’. nobody least of all marxists thinks the claims people make tend to be independent of their ideology. and the point about the slippery use of the term ‘exploitation’ to smuggle normative points around is irrelevant, though the context reminds me that an even better out-of-marxism example than right-liberal ‘coercion’ is the use of ‘efficiency’ in marginalist economics.
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Sep 10, 2016 16:34
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