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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Even identifying with whiteness means you're buying into a constructed racist identity based on a presumption of superiority. Being a white-skinned descendant of European peoples is incidental to the concept of "whiteness" which is an ephemeral concept that shifts when it's convenient, so much so that it can even extend to people who aren't even white Europeans when it's suitable to the purposes of colonialism and capitalism. Whiteness is an ideological tool of capitalism meant from the beginning to prevent class solidarity.
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May 10, 2018 11:25
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Which is, incidentally, what makes "You need to kill the white man in your mind." something that is literally impossible to do. Because whiteness, like all identity, is not a 'deep', intrinsic part of you - it's the surface 'interface' between you + the rest of the world, outside of your control.
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May 10, 2018 11:32
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They're only able to refuse extreme exploitation because of their privileges. Explaining the most basic concepts to you is infuriating. White guys aren't able to refuse sub-par landscaping work and field hand work because of local labor power, it's because of a legal regime which had to be realized by long gone labor struggles which have been eroded over time. If you believe that laborers have the agency then you may as well believe that capitalism is a choice informed by false consciousness. Whiteness is another form of false consciousness. Sakai didn't say white workers perform no useful labor, he didn't even say the white middle class performs no useful labor. Read it again. quote:But the real welfare is for white middle-class people. You have entire office buildings and cities full of people who don’t actually produce anything. They move paper around, they bill people, they do things, but they don’t actually produce anything. Everything that is produced is produced somewhere else by somebody else. And the question is how long can that be maintained? It's astounding that you can argue at length that the United States doesn't produce commodities in one thread, and then come in here to claim that J. Sakai when talking about the white middle class not producing anything - pretend he's saying that they're not performing useful labor. It's thoroughly delusional.
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May 10, 2018 11:34
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what the hell are you smoking, that passage is clearly dismissive of the social utility of bureaucratic office work (even if we pretend that that is what employs the majority of white people, instead of a tiny minority). and if you concede that those 'privileges' are the result of long ago labor struggles, then you undermine the thesis of a labor aristocracy, in cahoots with capital.
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May 10, 2018 11:40
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fondly remembering this sequence of events from the bernie thread before the 2016 election
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May 10, 2018 11:49
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https://redguardscharlotte.wordpress.com/2018/05/09/postmodernism-is-bourgeois-ideology-and-we-support-violence-against-it/
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May 10, 2018 11:56
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rudatron posted:what the hell are you smoking, that passage is clearly dismissive of the social utility of bureaucratic office work (even if we pretend that that is what employs the majority of white people, instead of a tiny minority). labor aristocracies aren't in "cahoots" with capital, they're intentionally cultivated to prevent class consciousness and international solidarity. J. Sakai isn't implying that the white middle class doesn't perform useful labor, he's implying that they are overpaid for that labor well above what any rational society would consider its value compared to the production of commodities. That's what the welfare takes the form of: a social compact between capitalists (the ruling class) and the middle class (their attendants), that guarantees their material and social security. Earnings for social labor are purely socially determined, because there's no material cost input to determine the real value of that labor.
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May 10, 2018 12:04
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Morzhovyye posted:fondly remembering this sequence of events from the bernie thread before the 2016 election lmao
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May 10, 2018 12:06
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Anyway, for somebody who claims to reject identity politics rudatron has a weird habit of adopting the reactionary chud framing of it.
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May 10, 2018 12:07
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i hope sakai resettles both of you on some faraway island where you can't poo poo up threads with your dumb personal fights you both pretend are intellectual arguments
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May 10, 2018 12:28
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after all of this discussion, one very important question is still up in the air: does J. Sakai have a Twitter account or does he live on through someone else
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May 10, 2018 16:02
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Weeping Wound posted:after all of this discussion, one very important question is still up in the air: does J. Sakai have a Twitter account or does he live on through someone else he's george ciccariello-maher
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May 10, 2018 16:05
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Actually he's wint
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May 10, 2018 17:25
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https://twitter.com/dril/status/21784678138642432
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May 10, 2018 17:30
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yea white collar office workers are totally receiving welfare from the capitalist class and are not in fact having their labour power exploited since as we all know in our modern financialized global economy someone digging ditches is totally generating more value for the capitalists than someone working an office The excerpts from Sakai here have been illuminating, in that he's not really saying anything of value.
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May 10, 2018 17:38
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He's just making observations and leaving the audience to fill in the gaps with what is very obviously implied but never said. Sakai is the lefts' Jordan "that's not what I'm saying" Peterson.
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May 10, 2018 17:43
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Wheeee posted:yea white collar office workers are totally receiving welfare from the capitalist class and are not in fact having their labour power exploited since as we all know in our modern financialized global economy someone digging ditches is totally generating more value for the capitalists than someone working an office then there are those white collar workers who are paid very handsomely from the proceeds of surplus value to crack the whip and put a lid on resentment from below white collar/blue collar is a really lovely class distinction
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May 10, 2018 17:54
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May 10, 2018 17:58
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Jordan B Free
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May 10, 2018 18:02
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idk i’m actually enjoying this argument i lean towards most office work is unnecessary and actually useful administration and coordination is a slim minority of white collar work
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May 10, 2018 18:17
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Yandat posted:i lean towards most office work is unnecessary and actually useful administration and coordination is a slim minority of white collar work but is it unnecessary as make-work or sinecures, or is it unnecessary but still done because organizing an efficient bureaucracy is hard?
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May 10, 2018 18:28
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There must always be a certain amount of clerks who don't participate in production but perform necessary work (people who order the materials, people who do payroll, people who do inventory). You're not really gonna get away from that unless you have some super AI doing it instead.
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May 10, 2018 18:29
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most office work is probably necessary in the context of a hierarchical capitalist arrangement. you need them to maximize profits and to keep the system going. you need the vast army of supervisors to make sure workers aren't in the bathroom the entire day. you need the army of bureaucrats to deny insurance claims. you need the army of advertisers to flood the cityscape and airwaves with propaganda to sell your product. you need to pay the endowment to the university to have the economists propagandize your world view. you need the army of police you can call to club the heads of strikers. and so on and so forth in a non-hierarchical work arrangement, you probably don't need the army of supervisors to crack the whip and so forth and get your factory workers to wear diapers on their shift. you're still gonna probably need people whose responsibility is to coordinate work across groups of people.
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May 10, 2018 18:33
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Prav posted:but is it unnecessary as make-work or sinecures, or is it unnecessary but still done because organizing an efficient bureaucracy is hard? i mean first we can kill all the collections and sales people then we can see how things are still running
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May 10, 2018 18:34
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comedyblissoption posted:most office work is probably necessary in the context of a hierarchical capitalist arrangement. you need them to maximize profits and to keep the system going. you need the vast army of supervisors to make sure workers aren't in the bathroom the entire day. you need the army of bureaucrats to deny insurance claims. you need the army of advertisers to flood the cityscape and airwaves with propaganda to sell your product. you need to pay the endowment to the university to have the economists propagandize your world view. you need the army of police you can call to club the heads of strikers. and so on and so forth dont forget all of the marketing to other instances of capital. Stuff like chinese companies hiring mediocre white guys to do busy work just to make themselves look internationally relevant.
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May 10, 2018 18:34
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Prav posted:but is it unnecessary as make-work or sinecures, or is it unnecessary but still done because organizing an efficient bureaucracy is hard? It's both, although the biggest waste by far is people put into management roles who just delegate all their responsibilities onto their subordinates so they can gently caress off - because they got in on the ground floor and won't be fired.
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May 10, 2018 18:43
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not all socially useful work generates capital, and not all work that generates capital is socially useful almost all director and executive level managers are useless narcissistic parasites because thats just the personality required to get there in the first place. competency alone will get you into middle management if youre lucky but beyond that its all about the sociopathic careerism Wheeee fucked around with this message at 18:53 on May 10, 2018 |
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May 10, 2018 18:50
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also it's important to realize that if you don't need all this extra layer of cruft that is designed to keep the system of capitalism going, you could free up the labor that is occupied with sue-ing uganda because they want anti-smoking labeling on tobacco products and use it for something deemed socially necessary and productive in a more democratic fashion we take babies and indoctrinate them in institutions of propaganda churning out obedient workers and we take some of the brightest of them and shovel them into the maw of private entities so they can figure out how to sell propaganda better in a search engine or how best to maximize the generation of fraudulent loans to people and sell them to suckers elsewhere
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May 10, 2018 18:55
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Wheeee posted:yea white collar office workers are totally receiving welfare from the capitalist class and are not in fact having their labour power exploited since as we all know in our modern financialized global economy someone digging ditches is totally generating more value for the capitalists than someone working an office https://www.simplyhired.com/salaries-k-ditch-digger-jobs.html quote:The average salary for ditch digger jobs is $64,424*. Ditch digging is a capital intensive process that requires specialized knowledge to work the machines. Wheeee posted:not all socially useful work generates capital, and not all work that generates capital is socially useful All socially useful work is work that recreates labor, so it does generate capital. The creation of capital is always a collective process. There's no denying that the middle class performs necessary labor to facilitate business, but the question becomes does an office clerk really perform labor that's four or five times worth the labor of a line worker? At some point you're reaching a crest where you're being compensated well in excess of the value of your labor, if for nothing else than to maintain your loyalty and discretion. That's the social compact between the middle class and capital. The middle class is generously compensated for running the affairs of capital. Pener Kropoopkin fucked around with this message at 19:06 on May 10, 2018 |
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May 10, 2018 18:58
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Wheeee posted:not all socially useful work generates capital, and not all work that generates capital is socially useful Yes, even if you limit it to work deemed useful by the ruling class of society, capital likes doing stuff like paying laborers to build bombs so some instances of capital can blow up other instances of capital. That's "useful" to capital, which dictates how society's labor is run, and it doesn't generate capital.
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May 10, 2018 19:05
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yea that was a terrible example, most construction work is at least semi-skilled labour oops
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May 10, 2018 19:09
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Wheeee posted:yea that was a terrible example, most construction work is at least semi-skilled labour It's a holdover from like the 30s-50s when ditch digging was still being done by hand or by chain gangs. My parents told me when I was a kid that if I didn't do good at school I'd have to become a ditch digger, but if I had become a ditch digger I'd be way better off.
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May 10, 2018 19:10
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:There's no denying that the middle class performs necessary labor to facilitate business, but the question becomes does an office clerk really perform labor that's four or five times worth the labor of a line worker? At some point you're reaching a crest where you're being compensated well in excess of the value of your labor, if for nothing else than to maintain your loyalty and discretion. That's the social compact between the middle class and capital. The middle class is generously compensated for running the affairs of capital. just being paid well doesn't mean you aren't being exploited of actually socially necessary and productive labor that you yourself produce
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May 10, 2018 19:12
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:All socially useful work is work that recreates labor, so it does generate capital. The creation of capital is always a collective process. if the use of some labor-power doesn't produce surplus value (viewed from the aggregate) then it doesn't net generate capital, it net consumes it. aggregate of surplus value = aggregate profit = aggregate growth of capital. If you lower the aggregate surplus value, then you lower the aggregate growth of capital (measured in value, anyway) this is why the labor of a private military force bombing a factory can reduce aggregate growth of capital despite being a profitable employment for the instances of capital that pay for their employment. Ruzihm fucked around with this message at 19:20 on May 10, 2018 |
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May 10, 2018 19:18
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Ruzihm posted:if the use of some labor-power doesn't produce surplus value (viewed from the aggregate) then it doesn't net generate capital, it net consumes it. The mistake you're making here is assuming that military work has social utility. What I mean is that socially useful work recreates productive labor - like the homemaker who washes your clothes and maintains the home, or your drug dealer. It's impossible to make everyone perform productive labor. comedyblissoption posted:that depends on how you define middle class and line worker. for example, is a programmer a line worker and middle class? a surgeon? the designer of tools? Well, the problem with that is how do you know you're being exploited if you don't see the books? Does a report have measurable value? Are managers really being exploited? Capitalists intentionally obfuscate the real value of labor by exploiting their control of information. This masks just how much earnings are socially determined in order to maintain the fiction of meritocracy. As for programmers, programmers really do create commodities through their labor, which are the programs they create through their coding. They could demand a premium for that labor because the demand for programmers always exceeded how many programmers there actually are, but there's been a long running strategy of training and importing as many programmers as possible so that they can slash their earnings. Pener Kropoopkin fucked around with this message at 19:43 on May 10, 2018 |
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May 10, 2018 19:29
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Well, the problem with that is how do you know you're being exploited if you don't see the books? Does a report have measurable value? Are managers really being exploited? Capitalists intentionally obfuscate the real value of labor by exploiting their control of information. This masks just how much earnings are socially determined in order to maintain the fiction of meritocracy. it would be opinion on whether or not the programmer or musician is living off exploiting the labor of the farmer or whatever in such a system, but I think that's a question that's really not very interesting or worth thinking about when there are far larger problems
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May 10, 2018 19:46
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUGpApcvGiU&t=5601s
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May 10, 2018 19:47
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comedyblissoption posted:"real" value of labor is always going to be an opinionated and necessarily political decision. however, under a market economic system of valuation (with all its flaws), software programmers, musicians, tool-designers or whatever are necessarily exploited by a capitalist because they would never be hired by a capitalist unless they were exploited You're really confusing the issue here, because programmers, musicians, and tool-designers all produce commodities - it's just that they're producing intellectual properties and not physical commodities. The middle class is the class that performs the necessary intellectual and social labor which recreates the business cycle, but while middle class labor can certainly have its price determined it's impossible to determine the value of that labor in the same way you can measure the value of commodity production. It leads you into the ridiculous assumption I was hinting at before that managers are being exploited, because nobody would hire them if they didn't get more out of their labor than they were being compensated with. You can claim there are larger problems to worry about, the problem we're dealing with here is trying to understand why the middle class tends to be so reactionary in favor of capitalism. That the middle class is effectively paid off in excess of its real labor value to secure its loyalty to capital, has explanatory value.
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May 10, 2018 20:02
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well yah that's why I was wondering about what you meant by "middle class" and "line worker" since a lot of people dump direct commodity/service producers into the bucket of middle class I would agree by your definition of middle class that there is definitely a class distinction between the necessary workers of commodity production and those who may not be necessary that in capitalism serve other supervisory or whatever roles.
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May 10, 2018 20:07
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comedyblissoption posted:well yah that's why I was wondering about what you meant by "middle class" and "line worker" since a lot of people dump direct commodity/service producers into the bucket of middle class I'm sure people would disagree with my definition of the middle class too, but that's also part of how bourgeois society cultivates false consciousness - by confusing the class dimensions of society. I'm not even 100% confident that what I'm saying is accurate, I'm just trying to define what I mean ITT.
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May 10, 2018 20:09
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