rudatron posted:

ahh but the oligarches made bank, and now own upscale properties in inner london, where they send their kids to expensive private schools, so really the whole thing balances out

Dreddout posted:

Hamprince's new av is much more reflective of history posting

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

https://twitter.com/RIPMarkusJ/status/897534616315232258

walgreenslatino posted:

I hate that guy

walgreenslatino posted:

I hate that guy

Top City Homo posted:

this is a very good "debate" of an austrian economic priest getting corncobbed about the ltv

its very funny

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oQ02sTO6PM

Enjoy posted:

his mic keeps cutting out does it improve because it's unlistenable

Karl Barks posted:

highly relevant to this crowd

https://twitter.com/jacobinmag/status/895365777057923074

Top City Homo posted:

this is a very good "debate" of an austrian economic priest getting corncobbed about the ltv

Jizz Festival posted:

I didn't know it was an option to simply not "believe" in mass politics. I wonder what that feels like.

I also wonder what your beliefs look like if given a more concrete form than the extreme abstractions you've been talking in.

Ruzihm posted:

i mean yea that's the usual pov of those who expect a spontaneous revolution. What do you think about council communism?

rudatron posted:

I don't know whether you realize it or not, but you're performing a very subtle sleight of hand here. You've moved the object of contention for the real, actually existing state, the one with police and so on, to a kind of platonic ideal of 'the state'. You're doing that to dodge the criticisms stemming from states forming and changing as a disproof of class preceding state (if state and class where as codependent as you're saying, then bourgeois revolution would be impossible), but in doing so you've introduced other problems: [...]

rudatron posted:

I also see now the problem you're having on our conversation on exchange: you're taking too individualist a perspective. A modern workers works entirely for the exchange of money, but this does not mean they 'produce for exchange' themselves, personally, because the modern worker does not determine the process of production. They are simply compelled to sell their labor, the conditions of which is outside of their control. The process of production is determined by capitalists, and that production is controlled by the requirement to manufacture a commodity for sale. 'Production for exchange' and 'Production for use' doesn't refer to the personal motivations for laboring, whether that be the basic ability to reproduce oneself, or more abstract ideas such as a sense of belonging, gaining social status or whatever. That's not relevant, because that's not what determines the kinds of products being made, and how they're made (ideally, anyway). It's the systemic incentives on firms that's relevant here.

rudatron posted:

It's also kind of malicious to be talking of agitation as 'manipulation' of people, as if appealing to the real concerns of normal people is somehow 'cheating' in politics - that's the entire point! If you're theory isn't speaking to people, as they right now, it is garbage. Conversely, if a theory does appeal to people, that appeal is itself proof that there's a kernel of 'truth' to it, that must be shown the light of day. The key to unearthing that truth is to properly understand reality, and the people in it.

Voltairine de Cleyre posted:

Capitalistic Anarchism? Oh, yes, if you choose to call it so. Names are indifferent to me; I am not afraid of bugaboos. Let it be so, then, capitalistic Anarchism.

Ormi posted:

i had some free time this morning so i decided to go back and write a reply to the stuff sent to me two weeks or so ago, though i'm not really interested in continuing lowercase d&d at this juncture and it'll be my last post along these lines; i'll read replies but if you want to continue the back-and-forth get in touch via pm and we'll do some im thing


i believe in a local, transformative, prefigurative, horizontal and networked politics that seeks to build compounding nodes of power for their own liberatory potential rather than as a stepping stone to insurrectionary seizure of some greater apparatus. it takes inspiration from the evolutionary anarchist traditions, rooted in proudhon's gradualism, the skepticism of the stirnerite strain of individualism which today manifests in various post-left tendencies, and the more recent theories of autonomist marxism and anarchism. it is a critical sibling of syndicalism, not sharing its faith and focus in revolutionary unionism. for further reading on the level of theory, there is the jacobin article which sparked this discussion, envisioning real utopias, particularly chapter 10 ("interstitial transformation"), and kevin carson's entire bibliography, though his as-of-yet unfinished work exodus will probably be the premier introductory text for this subject once published.

on the practical and immediate level, i throw support to the emerging networked 'social economies' of post-recession southern europe (particularly in greece and spain), the northern italian cooperative complex concentrated in romagna, as well as less-developed emanations of this concept elsewhere, be it through non-networked small cooperatives, unofficial "dirtbag unions" (often referred to as workers' centers) or community-supported agriculture. though i'm unconvinced of their longevity, i fully support bookchinite permutations like rojavan democratic confederalism and attempts to apply the same concepts to non-revolutionary situations, like the next system project's "cooperative commonwealth" or the p2p foundation's "partner state" and commoning movement.


i don't expect spontaneous revolution and i don't think revolution in the sense of a ruptural event (see ERU linked above) is even necessarily desirable, though this doesn't mean i support state reform as an end or a particularly useful practical goal, either.


you've continuously tried to paint my position as metaphysical or idealist, which is amusing, because i remain a hard determinist and physicalist. when i say "the" state, i am not referring to a concept which filters down into reality from on high, i am instead referencing states as an abstract grouping of concrete phenomena, a category of social forms which share common characteristics. this should not be a novel position to encounter for marxists, who would posit the defining character of states as class oppression. in my view, these characteristics include a territorial monopoly on violence, class divisions, and some kind of bureaucratic-contractual apparatus for managing disputes between power-holders, most typically in the form of property conventions. you may call it a subtle sleight-of-hand, but it is really a subtle distinction: power (more properly called authority in my milieu, but this is tangential) is not the state, but does require the state in order to be exercised, or indeed exist, at all. and power need not be totally monopolized to be real; even the working class has been granted a degree of state power in most of the world, albeit in a collaborative and ultimately self-defeating form. it's in this vein that i don't consider state socialism to be an oxymoron as social anarchists do. states can certainly be socialist per the definition of those who advocate for them, i just expect the same patterns of domination, exploitation, and oppression to arise from the aforementioned fundamentals.

your historical answer is the correct one. state power was, over centuries, ceded from the nobility to the bourgeoisie. yet this reinforces my argument! bourgeois power did not arise from a vacuum, but was rather deliberately cultivated and privileged, and granted protections, the lack of which would negate the ability for their economic base to grow to such proportions as it did. this power grew into a vacuum, not independent of aristocratic power, but codependent with it. eventually, this growth put strain on the bureaucratic-contractual apparatus's capacity to manage relations between the two bases (such as through france's internal tariffs and high taxes), and this stress was vented in various ways: crushed revolutions and reform in britain, revolution and continent-wide warfare in france, etc.but all throughout this process the bourgeois were not relieved of their state-granted power, did not relinquish it, and in many cases directly seized control of actually-existing institutions that were founded largely to protect aristocratic power. when they didn't, they parlayed their extant privilege into building new state institutions. the reliance of economic bases on state power is contiguous throughout history!


i am deliberately taking an individualist perspective. every social grouping, every class, is ultimately made up of individuals who are experiencing more or less the same things. classes of people ultimately are born out of this exact process. it's this myopia, refusing to look beyond what already exists or consider the potential of people seeing things in a different way that i am extremely critical of in marxism and what led me away from it in the first place. capitalism, obviously, is a system of production for exchange, but it's a grave error to assume that people simply do not care about the driving principle behind exchange, the perversion of which is the perfect encapsulation of capitalism: reciprocity. notions of what is reciprocal and what is not leads to consciousness of exploitation, however that may manifest. reciprocity is what draws people together on an equal basis, rather than scattering them to the winds or placing them in bondage as the first states in the world had done. denying reciprocity will get statists blindsided every time.


the real concerns of normal people are often very far away from the discussions of anyone who buys into theories of mass psychology and its parallel concept of false consciousness. these are the redoubts of the particular kind of radical leftists who want to still feel relevant while picking apart the universe in the hopes of unearthing the grandest prize of all instead of engaging with people directly. that's my perspective on mass politics for those who profoundly lack power, the criticism of it for those who do is different and probably not germane to this debate exactly.

and to the handful of people dropping 'ancap' bombs:

Ormi posted:

i don't expect spontaneous revolution and i don't think revolution in the sense of a ruptural event (see ERU linked above) is even necessarily desirable, though this doesn't mean i support state reform as an end or a particularly useful practical goal, either.

Ormi posted:

Ormi posted:

and to the handful of people dropping 'ancap' bombs:

Top City Homo posted:

give it a minute

there is a lot of fun in the discussion

Enjoy posted:

alright it did improve and it was pretty entertaining... i think jack's insistence on going back over the same stuff point by point ("here's how you disprove a scientific theory") damaged the debate as a whole but not as much as autistic agent breaking down screaming lol

Ormi posted:

Ormi posted:

the real concerns of normal people are often very far away from the discussions of anyone who buys into theories of mass psychology and its parallel concept of false consciousness. these are the redoubts of the particular kind of radical leftists who want to still feel relevant while picking apart the universe in the hopes of unearthing the grandest prize of all instead of engaging with people directly. that's my perspective on mass politics for those who profoundly lack power, the criticism of it for those who do is different and probably not germane to this debate exactly.

and to the handful of people dropping 'ancap' bombs: