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rudatron
May 31, 2011

by Fluffdaddy
speaking of prolix

Aeolius posted:

The third question that I forgot to ask in my previous post was "what's the end-game for absolutely insisting that the USSR be excluded from the category of 'socialist'?" But thankfully, you answered it anyway: "that's important if we want the term 'socialism' to be the goal of socialist worker movements." To be clear: The USSR's system is not "the goal"; it's one socialist project out of many, built in its own context — a context that included the property of being unprecedented in history. It was far from perfect, but we do the workers' movement no great favors by fudging categories just to maintain the purity of socialist-state-as-utopia.
I could ask you the exact opposite question: 'what is the point in demanding that the USSR was socialist, practically?' By saying 'we are socialists, we want to create socialism, the USSR was socialist', you're explicitly linking together something that nobody int he world wants, to your stated goals. If you have to rip out a propaganda handbook from the 1970s and go 'well you see here actually it was socialist but not quite good enough and we'll do better next time', you've already lost the debate. You are handicapping yourself, for no other reason than for bullshit historical baggage/making sure you don't upset the 1 hold over tankie. There's no intellectual foundation for it, it's just a case of falling into the mental prison of over-wrought marxist jargon, and losing sight of what actually maters - the standard of living and the state of life for ordinary people which, in the USSR, was total loving bullshit.

quote:

It's actually pretty fraught. In the way it tends to be imagined by the more-Trotsky-than-actual-Trotsky sorts (Tony Cliff & co.), of the state acting as one giant capitalist, it runs into some pretty major problems straightaway. Per Marx, "capital exists and can only exist as many capitals"; market competition being both the inner nature and reciprocal interaction of capital, it would make zero sense to conceive of a unitary "virtual capitalist" who somehow persists and grows through bouts of autarky. This is far from the only issue here (does production for exchange predominate internally, then? where's the enormous accumulation of surplus value as profit? how does it manage to avoid both crises of overproduction and inflation? and again, where's that drat labor market? etc).
I don't know why you think I'm a trotskyist, I've never said I was a trotskyist, I do not give 1 flaming poo poo what trotsky said or thought. I used the term 'state capitalist' because it works. Bringing up useless objections like 'where is the labor market? Is there production for exchange' all ignores the one, single reason it is a useful term, the objection you have never ever refuted nor even engaged with - all the means of production was owned by the state, the state was not owned by the people. It is state capitalist. It acts, in relations to the workers who it employs, as a capitalist employer. It, in essence, acts like a giant corporation. Whether it produces for use or exchange, what it does with that surplus, and whether or not there is a labor market (labor gets transferred inside corporations all the time without an actual labor market, yet that employee-employer relation is not any more 'socialist' for not having an internal market) - none of that poo poo matters.

quote:

The coexistence of multiple modes of production generally involves varying degrees of embeddedness in a primary mode,
Stop right there. This is nothing a way for you to dodge issues of power imbalances, by dismissing those imbalances as not being of 'the primary mode'. Pray tell, what materialistic, scientific metrics are you using to distinguish between what is 'primary' mode, and what is the 'secondary' mode, hmm? If you refer to soviet propaganda/apologia that states 'yeah man the state is totes socialist' as evidence, like you did with that Albert Szymanski book, aren't you engaging in the most egregious form of idealistic thinking?

quote:

Now, I'm not 100% sure how to tackle your request for a definition of "ownership," since I think we use this word the same way, inasmuch as we both recognize a place in this continuum for "public property." Consider a public park; you are a partial owner of it, and yet you are not free to just walk in an start chopping down trees or tagging up the place on whim. Does this mean you are not in control of it? Certainly not in the absolute sense of your own toothbrush or TV, both perfectly fit canvases for whatever graffiti one wishes. But the distinction between personal and public property under socialism is as crucial as the distinction between personal and private (and, indeed, public) property under capitalism.

To actually exercise the degree of control one has over public property requires following procedures to receive authorization from the appropriate jurisdiction, subject to consultation or review or the like. This is probably obvious to you. In fact, I don't expect that I'm informing you about anything here, so much as I'm encouraging you to make connections between things you already recognize, in different contexts. For example, you already gave a very clear affirmation of the importance of planning, so consider how important jurisdiction becomes when planning supplants the anarchy of production. Just as any given line worker usually can't up and change the factory's schedule, I'd bill it rare that single factory can unilaterally change the regional priorities. Does this mean the people in question don't control these things? Not, again, in the absolute sense of personal property. But they do have a stake and a say. Local worker councils have representation in regional councils, and so on up, and one seeks change at a given scope by negotiating these levels of authority.
I already included that in my hypothetical I asked you to ponder, as 'accountability' - I exercise that control, alongside all other appropriate owners, through an agent, that is accountable to us in some way, collectively. That accountability did not exist in the USSR, ergo there was no collective control, ergo all 'public' property was actually still 'private' property - it was merely 'private' property of the party apparatus, whose use was mediated through the state.

Ownership is control. It is not some stupid loving deed on paper, it is not some empty declaration, it is the potential for action, mediated through a system of law.

quote:

Anyway, to call the nomenklatura a "class," as I said before, one must discard the specific Marxist definition of the word, conflating an economic owning class with a political elite. One can even find prominent Trotskyists discussing this at some length:
Bullshit. If a specific subset of all workers are the ones granted exclusive, unaccountable control (such as 'the party'), that subset of the workers, solely by virtue of being able to exercise that exclusive control, are in effect a class-unto-themselves. There is no meaningful definition of class that can do what you want it to do. If class is to be a social stratification based on tangible social relations, and not merely ones of 'likeness', or 'personal pedigree', or 'cultural similarity to what I reckon is working class', the internal power structure must be taken into account and must itself be part of what is defining for a 'class'.

quote:

The simpler, and better-supported answer, is that the powerful political elites of the USSR were political elites and not an economic class.
I love this quote for how breathlessly it ignores that politics cannot be cleanly separated from economics, something that liberals never seem to get. To hear it come from a self-professed marxist is proof of your revisionism.

quote:

Anyway, I don't aim to minimize your concerns about accountability.
Alright, here's where I start my rant.

This is your central problem: you're continuing to place these 'concerns of accountability' on the periphery of your characterization of social structure.

To you, a social structures just is, oh but then you have some 'perturbations' from that, so you need to correct, right?

Wrong.

This displacement mirrors in some way the movement of the horrors of modern capitalism from the first world to the third. People look at conditions in the first world, go 'wow capitalism is such a success, if only those third worlders could Do It Right' - Ah, but they are not independent systems, they are not even different versions of the same capitalism, they are the same capitalism, they are part of the same system, the perturbations are an inherent, valid part of the complete whole. The third world is poo poo only because the first world is so shiny and pretty.

You've done the same thing, you have a 'primary mode of production' in the soviet union, in which everything works like you say it does in your stupid pamphlet, oh but then you have holodomor are hungary are all those other things/secondary modes. You stress how all soviet workers were part of a union! But then you read the accounts of people who actually lived there, and it turns out that none of that poo poo mattered, corruption was rampant and you only got jobs depending on who you knew.

No, they're the same. Accountability is class, because accountability is power structures, and class is power. How is it distributed, who gets it, who doesn't. If you have an aristocratic system, kill all the aristocrats, select 10% of the population of Harding Working Class Guys, and replace those now vacant aristocrat positions with those new working class guys, do you have a workers paradise? No you moron, you get a new aristocracy. Aristocrats are not inhuman creatures that come from the deep, they are made of flesh and bone. Their actions are a consequence of the incentives on then. Enforcing quotas to ensure that some % of the party must come from suitably humble beginnings no more constitutes an attack on entrenched power, than does requiring that that the only 'true' capitalism has the capitalists guys being the ones who didn't inherit their wealth (bill gates vs. rockefeller) - it's nothing but imposing virtue politics onto what should be a modern, scientific way of analyzing social structures.

And this is your real crime - not your verbosity, nor your terrible anime screenshots, not even what I can only assume is a fetish for words like 'problematizes'.

No, your real crime is that you aren't marxist.

In your mind, the failure of the USSR wasn't a systemic fault, it was a growing force of 'liberalism' - how could that have grown in the first place, exactly? If the primary mode of the base was socialist, then Isn't this pinning the blame on the spread of 'liberalism' placing the super-structure cart before the base horse?

rudatron fucked around with this message at 13:13 on Feb 25, 2017

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deadgoon
Dec 4, 2014

by FactsAreUseless

Plutonis posted:

Threat title related:

As Japan prepares to celebrate Valentine’s Day, a cranky group of Marxist protesters has called for an end to public displays of love, claiming it hurts their feelings.

Members of Kakuhido, or the Revolutionary Alliance of Men that Women find Unattractive, unfurled a giant “Smash Valentine’s Day” banner as the party-poopers set off to try and overthrow the annual celebration of romance.

The grumpy comrades elicited curious looks from passers-by in the trendy Shibuya district where they rallied against commercialism and chanted other buzz-kill slogans such as “Public smooching is terrorism!”

“Our aim is to crush this love capitalism,” the group’s public relations chief, Takayuki Akimoto, said.

google says this is a real thing

capitalism has driven everyone insane

namesake
Jun 19, 2006

"When I was a girl, around 12 or 13, I had a fantasy that I'd grow up to marry Captain Scarlet, but he'd be busy fighting the Mysterons so I'd cuckold him with the sexiest people I could think of - Nigel Mansell, Pat Sharp and Mr. Blobby."

Isn't that a regular thing? I've heard of something similar happening before.

Prav
Oct 29, 2011

Plutonis posted:

Threat title related:

As Japan prepares to celebrate Valentine’s Day, a cranky group of Marxist protesters has called for an end to public displays of love, claiming it hurts their feelings.

Members of Kakuhido, or the Revolutionary Alliance of Men that Women find Unattractive, unfurled a giant “Smash Valentine’s Day” banner as the party-poopers set off to try and overthrow the annual celebration of romance.

The grumpy comrades elicited curious looks from passers-by in the trendy Shibuya district where they rallied against commercialism and chanted other buzz-kill slogans such as “Public smooching is terrorism!”

“Our aim is to crush this love capitalism,” the group’s public relations chief, Takayuki Akimoto, said.

finally, an org for me

Fallen Hamprince
Nov 12, 2016

Plutonis posted:

Threat title related:

As Japan prepares to celebrate Valentine’s Day, a cranky group of Marxist protesters has called for an end to public displays of love, claiming it hurts their feelings.

Members of Kakuhido, or the Revolutionary Alliance of Men that Women find Unattractive, unfurled a giant “Smash Valentine’s Day” banner as the party-poopers set off to try and overthrow the annual celebration of romance.

The grumpy comrades elicited curious looks from passers-by in the trendy Shibuya district where they rallied against commercialism and chanted other buzz-kill slogans such as “Public smooching is terrorism!”

“Our aim is to crush this love capitalism,” the group’s public relations chief, Takayuki Akimoto, said.

these guys are the only true marxists, everyone else is revisionist

Fallen Hamprince
Nov 12, 2016

Revolutionary Front for the Advancement of Akimotoist-NoGFist Thought

deadgoon
Dec 4, 2014

by FactsAreUseless
how do you convince incels to think past reactionary ideology and become revolutionaries

The Brown Menace
Dec 24, 2010

Now comes in all colors.


Defeat chadpitalism and seize the means of reproduction

crazy cloud
Nov 7, 2012

by Cyrano4747
Lipstick Apathy
i'm pol pot irl

deadgoon
Dec 4, 2014

by FactsAreUseless
pol pot would have exterminated the bohemians along with the academics

crazy cloud
Nov 7, 2012

by Cyrano4747
Lipstick Apathy
pol pot would have won

Tardcore
Jan 24, 2011

Not cool enough for the Spider-man club.

Plutonis posted:

Threat title related:

As Japan prepares to celebrate Valentine’s Day, a cranky group of Marxist protesters has called for an end to public displays of love, claiming it hurts their feelings.

Members of Kakuhido, or the Revolutionary Alliance of Men that Women find Unattractive, unfurled a giant “Smash Valentine’s Day” banner as the party-poopers set off to try and overthrow the annual celebration of romance.

The grumpy comrades elicited curious looks from passers-by in the trendy Shibuya district where they rallied against commercialism and chanted other buzz-kill slogans such as “Public smooching is terrorism!”

“Our aim is to crush this love capitalism,” the group’s public relations chief, Takayuki Akimoto, said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7w0eqUBp3c

jarofpiss
May 16, 2009

i say when ur in a rich man's house there's nowhere to spit but his face

etalian
Mar 20, 2006

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3-n3TMzL6o

and i must meme
Jan 15, 2017

deadgoon posted:

how do you convince incels to think past reactionary ideology and become revolutionaries

apparently there was a period of time when communism was popular on r9k cause marx said it guaranteed every man a wife or something

KiteAuraan
Aug 5, 2014

JER GEDDA FERDA RADDA ARA!


Plutonis posted:

Threat title related:

As Japan prepares to celebrate Valentine’s Day, a cranky group of Marxist protesters has called for an end to public displays of love, claiming it hurts their feelings.

Members of Kakuhido, or the Revolutionary Alliance of Men that Women find Unattractive, unfurled a giant “Smash Valentine’s Day” banner as the party-poopers set off to try and overthrow the annual celebration of romance.

The grumpy comrades elicited curious looks from passers-by in the trendy Shibuya district where they rallied against commercialism and chanted other buzz-kill slogans such as “Public smooching is terrorism!”

“Our aim is to crush this love capitalism,” the group’s public relations chief, Takayuki Akimoto, said.

This is the plot of an anime isn't it?

Comrade Cheggorsky
Aug 20, 2011


pol pot murdered a lot of people and died peacefully in his sleep, sounds like a winner to me

The Brown Menace
Dec 24, 2010

Now comes in all colors.


deadgoon posted:

pol pot would have exterminated the bohemians along with the academics

this but with sexhavers

Bryter
Nov 6, 2011

but since we are small we may-
uh, we may be the losers

Plutonis posted:

the Revolutionary Alliance of Men that Women find Unattractive

New thread title

Pener Kropoopkin
Jan 30, 2013

https://youtu.be/huXNdLQt_bk

R. Guyovich
Dec 25, 1991

a giant rudatron post based on ahistorical reckons and deriving its persuasive force from sentence structure instead of sound argument? well i never

R. Guyovich
Dec 25, 1991

ps shut up baloogan. is that simple enough for you

Prav
Oct 29, 2011

dude loves to Debate & Discuss

deadgoon
Dec 4, 2014

by FactsAreUseless

The Brown Menace posted:

this but with sexhavers

isn't that what bohemians are

Hubbert
Mar 25, 2007

At a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
drat it feels good to be back in (neo-)LF

Fiction
Apr 28, 2011
Baloogan the FBI literally assassinated Fred Hampton gently caress off with your YouTube anti sjw video level analysis please

Fiction
Apr 28, 2011
Hurrr I love conspiracies but don't know anything about COINTELPRO durrr

Morzhovyye
Mar 2, 2013

please do no read baloogan's posts unless he posts a music video or a song

DOCTOR ZIMBARDO
May 8, 2006
Heads up disillusioned Democrats, read Marx and Lenin and get involved with the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

ThaumPenguin
Oct 9, 2013


"Bat'ko the Manarchist"?

Dreddout
Oct 1, 2015

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Aeolius
Jul 16, 2003

Simon Templeman Fanclub
rudatron i think i was a lot more charitable to you than you're being to me. I had been earnestly looking forward to your reply but now that it's here i'm kinda like... maybe i've been mistaking you for a different poster? maybe someone else with like a cartoony av -- i wanna say V. Illych L. maybe, but the truth is i don't SA enough these days to keep good track

i'll do the courtesy of a reply, but I'm gonna go briefer with it than the last one, stay tuned

edit: it is technically briefer, as word count goes

Aeolius fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Feb 26, 2017

ThaumPenguin
Oct 9, 2013

Aeolius posted:

rudatron i think i was a lot more charitable to you than you're being to me. I had been earnestly looking forward to your reply but now that it's here i'm kinda like... maybe i've been mistaking you for a different poster? maybe someone else with like a cartoony av -- i wanna say V. Illych L. maybe, but the truth is i don't SA enough these days to keep good track

it was me actually

Fallen Hamprince
Nov 12, 2016

DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:

Heads up disillusioned Democrats, read Marx and Lenin and get involved with the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

great idea! joining PSL is a great way to indicate to the future/present fascist regime that you're not a real threat and can be safely ignored

The_Politics_Man
Aug 25, 2015

Fallen Hamprince posted:

great idea! joining PSL is a great way to indicate to the future/present fascist regime that you're not a real threat and can be safely ignored

lol you're trying to hard

R. Guyovich
Dec 25, 1991

tons of cops joined the 1,000-member socialist workers party but the government doesn't REALLY see communists as a threat

Breakfast All Day
Oct 21, 2004

Fallen Hamprince posted:

great idea! joining PSL is a great way to indicate to the future/present fascist regime that you're not a real threat and can be safely ignored

hamprince has got us here. the psl is a worthless org. they've even lost to donald trump as many times as the dnc!

Baloogan
Dec 5, 2004
Fun Shoe

R. Guyovich posted:

ps shut up baloogan. is that simple enough for you

homework-san!!!!!!!!!!!! Q_Q

BENGHAZI 2
Oct 13, 2007

by Cyrano4747

namesake posted:

No one does fake news like Stalin!

Also I guess none of you know who Danny Dyer is, so that probably isn't that funny.

Danny fuckin Dyer, mate?

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Thug Lessons
Dec 14, 2006


I lust in my heart for as many dead refugees as possible.

rudatron posted:

speaking of prolix

I could ask you the exact opposite question: 'what is the point in demanding that the USSR was socialist, practically?' By saying 'we are socialists, we want to create socialism, the USSR was socialist', you're explicitly linking together something that nobody int he world wants, to your stated goals. If you have to rip out a propaganda handbook from the 1970s and go 'well you see here actually it was socialist but not quite good enough and we'll do better next time', you've already lost the debate. You are handicapping yourself, for no other reason than for bullshit historical baggage/making sure you don't upset the 1 hold over tankie. There's no intellectual foundation for it, it's just a case of falling into the mental prison of over-wrought marxist jargon, and losing sight of what actually maters - the standard of living and the state of life for ordinary people which, in the USSR, was total loving bullshit.
I don't know why you think I'm a trotskyist, I've never said I was a trotskyist, I do not give 1 flaming poo poo what trotsky said or thought. I used the term 'state capitalist' because it works. Bringing up useless objections like 'where is the labor market? Is there production for exchange' all ignores the one, single reason it is a useful term, the objection you have never ever refuted nor even engaged with - all the means of production was owned by the state, the state was not owned by the people. It is state capitalist. It acts, in relations to the workers who it employs, as a capitalist employer. It, in essence, acts like a giant corporation. Whether it produces for use or exchange, what it does with that surplus, and whether or not there is a labor market (labor gets transferred inside corporations all the time without an actual labor market, yet that employee-employer relation is not any more 'socialist' for not having an internal market) - none of that poo poo matters.

Stop right there. This is nothing a way for you to dodge issues of power imbalances, by dismissing those imbalances as not being of 'the primary mode'. Pray tell, what materialistic, scientific metrics are you using to distinguish between what is 'primary' mode, and what is the 'secondary' mode, hmm? If you refer to soviet propaganda/apologia that states 'yeah man the state is totes socialist' as evidence, like you did with that Albert Szymanski book, aren't you engaging in the most egregious form of idealistic thinking?

I already included that in my hypothetical I asked you to ponder, as 'accountability' - I exercise that control, alongside all other appropriate owners, through an agent, that is accountable to us in some way, collectively. That accountability did not exist in the USSR, ergo there was no collective control, ergo all 'public' property was actually still 'private' property - it was merely 'private' property of the party apparatus, whose use was mediated through the state.

Ownership is control. It is not some stupid loving deed on paper, it is not some empty declaration, it is the potential for action, mediated through a system of law.

Bullshit. If a specific subset of all workers are the ones granted exclusive, unaccountable control (such as 'the party'), that subset of the workers, solely by virtue of being able to exercise that exclusive control, are in effect a class-unto-themselves. There is no meaningful definition of class that can do what you want it to do. If class is to be a social stratification based on tangible social relations, and not merely ones of 'likeness', or 'personal pedigree', or 'cultural similarity to what I reckon is working class', the internal power structure must be taken into account and must itself be part of what is defining for a 'class'.
I love this quote for how breathlessly it ignores that politics cannot be cleanly separated from economics, something that liberals never seem to get. To hear it come from a self-professed marxist is proof of your revisionism.

Alright, here's where I start my rant.

This is your central problem: you're continuing to place these 'concerns of accountability' on the periphery of your characterization of social structure.

To you, a social structures just is, oh but then you have some 'perturbations' from that, so you need to correct, right?

Wrong.

This displacement mirrors in some way the movement of the horrors of modern capitalism from the first world to the third. People look at conditions in the first world, go 'wow capitalism is such a success, if only those third worlders could Do It Right' - Ah, but they are not independent systems, they are not even different versions of the same capitalism, they are the same capitalism, they are part of the same system, the perturbations are an inherent, valid part of the complete whole. The third world is poo poo only because the first world is so shiny and pretty.

You've done the same thing, you have a 'primary mode of production' in the soviet union, in which everything works like you say it does in your stupid pamphlet, oh but then you have holodomor are hungary are all those other things/secondary modes. You stress how all soviet workers were part of a union! But then you read the accounts of people who actually lived there, and it turns out that none of that poo poo mattered, corruption was rampant and you only got jobs depending on who you knew.

No, they're the same. Accountability is class, because accountability is power structures, and class is power. How is it distributed, who gets it, who doesn't. If you have an aristocratic system, kill all the aristocrats, select 10% of the population of Harding Working Class Guys, and replace those now vacant aristocrat positions with those new working class guys, do you have a workers paradise? No you moron, you get a new aristocracy. Aristocrats are not inhuman creatures that come from the deep, they are made of flesh and bone. Their actions are a consequence of the incentives on then. Enforcing quotas to ensure that some % of the party must come from suitably humble beginnings no more constitutes an attack on entrenched power, than does requiring that that the only 'true' capitalism has the capitalists guys being the ones who didn't inherit their wealth (bill gates vs. rockefeller) - it's nothing but imposing virtue politics onto what should be a modern, scientific way of analyzing social structures.

And this is your real crime - not your verbosity, nor your terrible anime screenshots, not even what I can only assume is a fetish for words like 'problematizes'.

No, your real crime is that you aren't marxist.

In your mind, the failure of the USSR wasn't a systemic fault, it was a growing force of 'liberalism' - how could that have grown in the first place, exactly? If the primary mode of the base was socialist, then Isn't this pinning the blame on the spread of 'liberalism' placing the super-structure cart before the base horse?

http://www.fastswf.com/hpG4Y28

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