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happyhippy posted:Wait until you are 40 and you suddenly scare yourself when you realize you aren't thinking of sex every 10 seconds. Joke's on you that happened to me at about... 25?
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Jan 2, 2020 17:04
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I think about sex every 5 seconds. Specifically the deficiencies of the sociological model of sex and gender under late capitalism.  baka kaba posted:*ralph wiggum waving an IOU for a dollar* 
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Jan 2, 2020 17:07
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Purple Prince posted:I disagree, because the reason Marx talks about the capitalist and proletarian classes in Das Kapital is to look at the economic system of capitalism. In Marx's day, absent the social democratic measures we have now, it was easy to separate the two classes. But that separation is not about having a small capitalist class against a mass of workers, it's about identifying the conflict between the classes. By this logic we're basically all hosed though, since the amount of work, both emotional, mental, and physiccal, that it takes to divorce oneself from capitalism entirely, or hell even slightly, is next to impossible for most people. And whilst I don't disagree that we;'re all hosed because the system is so ingrained that it will take a MAJOR global disaster to unseat it, I don't feel like it's a useful shorthand.
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Jan 2, 2020 17:09
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the marx to engels's florida
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Jan 2, 2020 17:14
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thespaceinvader posted:So it has nothing (directly) to do with extracting income from suprlus value generated by others' labour then? ‘Sources other their own labour’ is not the same as ‘ownership of capital’. Sure almost everyone benefits from technology and the division of labour, etc. The bread maker gets better shoes and the shoemaker gets better bread. But the scale of contributions runs from 0 to 60 or so, while the scale of benefits from 0 to 100 billion. State benefits work one way, have one set of political consequences. And capital ownership works a different way and has a different set of political consequences.
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Jan 2, 2020 17:16
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thespaceinvader posted:By this logic we're basically all hosed though, since the amount of work, both emotional, mental, and physiccal, that it takes to divorce oneself from capitalism entirely, or hell even slightly, is next to impossible for most people. And this is the purpose of building parallel structures, both ideological and material, which can serve the purposes of reforming minds, providing material support to comrades, and establishing communities. If you need the first wave of activists to break away from the normal structures of capitalism to achieve that, it's a high price, but in the long run the better the parallel structures get the less hardcore people will need to be to get involved. I think this is what Maoist training camps are meant to achieve although the most famous Anglo attempt (Jonestown) didn't shake out too well.
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Jan 2, 2020 17:16
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Purple Prince posted:And this is the purpose of building parallel structures, both ideological and material, How do you build parallel material structures when the only sources of material are capitlism?
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Jan 2, 2020 17:19
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Wait jim jones was a maoist???
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Jan 2, 2020 17:20
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OwlFancier posted:Wait jim jones was a maoist??? Yeah his whole project was combining maoism and evangelical Christianity as far as I'm aware
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Jan 2, 2020 17:21
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Huh. I only knew about the crazy evangelical part.
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Jan 2, 2020 17:22
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thespaceinvader posted:How do you build parallel material structures when the only sources of material are capitlism? There's a few different models, ranging from the unionist tactic of asking for donations from a community to Stalin's preferred method of robbing banks ("expropriation of funds for the proletariat"). The Black Panthers did a good line in voluntary community support until the FBI smashed them down. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Jan 2, 2020 |
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Jan 2, 2020 17:24
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radmonger posted:The bread maker gets better shoes and the shoemaker gets better bread.  thespaceinvader posted:How do you build parallel material structures when the only sources of material are capitlism? On the shoulders of assholes.
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Jan 2, 2020 17:27
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https://twitter.com/charlotte2153/status/1212696419125084160
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Jan 2, 2020 17:27
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Purple Prince posted:There's a few different models, ranging from the unionist tactic of asking for donations from a community to Stalin's preferred method of robbing banks ("expropriation funds for the proletariat"). Of all of these, the only one that actually comes outside the system of capitalism is robbing banks though. Even if you're aksing communities to donate their materials, they still had to obtain those loving materials somewhere. So, where do you get the materials that you use to divorce yourself from capitalism, other than capitalism, and if the answer is 'from capitalism' well... you didn't actually divorce yourself from capitalism at all, did you? The defition of capitalist as 'literally anyone who benefits from capitalism' is hugely unhelpful, because it encompasses essentially everyone in the modern world.
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Jan 2, 2020 17:29
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OwlFancier posted:Wait jim jones was a maoist??? Yeah the people's temple (and Jonestown) was, superficially at least, based around a Christian-flavoured anti-capitalist ideology with some obvious influences from Maoism in particular. It attracted some good, well meaning people. Real shame the guy in charge was obviously cynical, exploitative, narcissistic, and increasingly unhinged, while cultivating a cult of personality. It couldn't have ended any other way with that setup, but many of those who died had genuinely gone to Guyana to build what they hoped would be a better society.
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Jan 2, 2020 17:29
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Ian lavery isnt great if people are thinking of voting for him https://twitter.com/AdityaRajKaul/status/1194211231839739909?s=19
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Jan 2, 2020 17:30
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thespaceinvader posted:Of all of these, the only one that actually comes outside the system of capitalism is robbing banks though. I mean this is where any project that aims to change how stuff works has a contradiction. You have to get the materials from somewhere, and in a capitalist system that will obviously have some relationship to capital. That doesn't mean what you build has to be a capitalist project. Otherwise the USSR selling gas to the West would make it non-Communist. On Maoism and Jim Jones: I think these are quotes from him? https://youtu.be/MWBjwgxEawo
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Jan 2, 2020 17:34
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thespaceinvader posted:How do you build parallel material structures when the only sources of material are capitlism? If you define capitalism so loosely that it includes absolutely everything, then it stops being much of a viable idea to overthrow it.
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Jan 2, 2020 17:35
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radmonger posted:If you define capitalism so loosely that it includes absolutely everything, then it stops being much of a viable idea to overthrow it. This is precisely the point I'm making, I'm not sure why that's three times in the last couple of pages you've made that argument to me, instead of the person with whom I'm arguing, who actually seems (to me at least) to espouse the position that capitalists are anyone who benefits from capitalism in any way.
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Jan 2, 2020 17:37
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thespaceinvader posted:This is precisely the point I'm making, I'm not sure why that's three times in the last couple of pages you've made that argument to me, instead of the person with whom I'm arguing, who actually seems (to me at least) to espouse the position that capitalists are anyone who benefits from capitalism in any way. I said capitalists are anyone who owns value producing capital. That's not the same as "everyone" and it's obviously a sliding scale. For example, I hold a few thousand pounds worth of pensions, so to that extent I am a capitalist. This basically has no impact on my life. If my main source of income was capital performance and I held half a million quid worth of investments I'd be a lot more concerned with what the markets were up to. But yes, in both cases I'm a capitalist; that's the whole point I was making about how 21st century British capitalism differs from the conditions that Marx / Lenin / Mao were analysing, where the underclass had literally no capital. I said that because of social democracy and then neoliberalism, in the UK right now capital ownership is an intimate part of people's lives. This is not the case in, say, rural India. The material conditions differ across time and space. This is why Mao and Lenin wrote stuff to start with: to look at how Marxist thought could be applied to the specific conditions of their time and place for workers.
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Jan 2, 2020 17:47
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thespaceinvader posted:This is precisely the point I'm making, I'm not sure why that's three times in the last couple of pages you've made that argument to me, instead of the person with whom I'm arguing, who actually seems (to me at least) to espouse the position that capitalists are anyone who benefits from capitalism in any way. I think you are missing that there are three groups: A: people who benefit from capitalism in any way; which, compared to historical alternatives, is pretty much everyone. B: people who make their living by owning things, rather than doing things, being deserved things, or whatever. C: billionaires and Bond villains You jump between A and C without acknowledging B.
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Jan 2, 2020 17:52
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radmonger posted:I think you are missing that there are three groups: ??? No, I just don't think that B is a separate category; there are a lot of people who are being catergorised in B who fit much more clsely in A, and a much smaller number who fit much more closely in C. Pensioners are the former. Small-scale landlords who own and seek rent on maybe a couple of properties that they don't live in, for instance, are likely to be the latter. The former are workers (even if they are currently workers living off the accumulated capital which they worked to accumulate during their lifetime, either through tax and the public welfare system, or through private pensions, or through the contents of their bank accounts, or through money hidden in a loving mattress), the latter are capitalists.
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Jan 2, 2020 18:01
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Purple Prince posted:I mean this is where any project that aims to change how stuff works has a contradiction. You have to get the materials from somewhere, and in a capitalist system that will obviously have some relationship to capital. That doesn't mean what you build has to be a capitalist project. Otherwise the USSR selling gas to the West would make it non-Communist. The Underground Railroad network in the US was a mass undertaking starting in the antebellum South and involving the efforts and material of both abolitionists and enslaved African Americans, but saying "the Underground Railroad network was bad because it used slave labor" would be a take so spicy I don't think even Spiked Online would touch it although I'm not going to toxx on that because they'll probably one up me by February. Every parallel structure comes of opposition to the material conditions that created it. Purple Prince posted:that's the whole point I was making about how 21st century British capitalism differs from the conditions that Marx / Lenin / Mao were analysing, where the underclass had literally no capital. That's not the same thing as the petit-bourgeois storekeeper, it's more like Orwell's commentary on slumlords "Ideally, the worst type of slum landlord is a fat wicked man, preferably a bishop, who is drawing an immense income from extortionate rents. Actually, it is a poor old woman who has invested her life’s savings in three slum houses, inhabits one of them, and tries to live on the rent of the other two—never, in consequence, having any money for repairs."
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Jan 2, 2020 18:04
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OwlFancier posted:Wait jim jones was a maoist??? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWBjwgxEawo e:f;b lmao
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Jan 2, 2020 18:07
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radmonger fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Jan 2, 2020 |
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Jan 2, 2020 18:07
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Guavanaut posted:Even they drew a line between the underclass and the proletariat though, and one of the huge divisions between Marxism/Leninism/Maoism is whether the lumpen would be revolutionary, reactionary, or idiot dead weight. In the 19th century even without the social democracy it wasn't unusual for working class people to try to own more than one slum house as a bulwark against destitution, and then end up losing them in generational cycles. Yeah I think I am presently leaning Maoist without ever having read Mao, so there's that. The old woman in that case is surely a capitalist, but she's also not really wall fodder. I don't think Marx really addresses capital ownership on the micro scale, and obviously it became a big deal for kulaks and peasant landowners in Russia and China, so this seems like an area where you could get a rich seam of theory and practice. To be honest these kinds of people if they were properly mobilised would be valuable allies in building leftism: former proletarians who own capital but aren't committed capitalists can have both the class consciousness and the resources to be really helpful to people trying to set up parallel structures. They're rare but they exist. E: Come to think of it, they're probably similar types to the pensioners in my CLP who started this whole discussion off. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Jan 2, 2020 |
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Jan 2, 2020 18:27
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I do think Combat Liberalism is a good and important text, but I am in no way a Maoist, because Mao was loving horrible from the Great Leap Forward onwards and praising Mao in practice is akin to praising Stalin
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Jan 2, 2020 18:31
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Yeah there's definitely something about the kind of person to lead a militant uprising not being the best person to actually govern after that uprising's successful. Washington possibly being an exception, but then he didn't want to govern in the first place.
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Jan 2, 2020 18:37
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The Graun seems very nervous about the idea of people boycotting newspapers for printing utter bullshit for some reason
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Jan 2, 2020 18:42
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Purple Prince posted:The old woman in that case is surely a capitalist, but she's also not really wall fodder. I don't think Marx really addresses capital ownership on the micro scale, and obviously it became a big deal for kulaks and peasant landowners in Russia and China, so this seems like an area where you could get a rich seam of theory and practice. It is important to separate resentment for her as a bad landlord from resentment for the whole system that forced parts of the working class into that cycle. Venomous posted:I do think Combat Liberalism is a good and important text, but I am in no way a Maoist, because Mao was loving horrible from the Great Leap Forward onwards and praising Mao in practice is akin to praising Stalin You can be a Stalinist without praising Stalin himself, and I don't have a secret shrine to Josip Broz Tito in my under stairs cupboard or anything*, but I think Titoism had a lot of useful thought in it for multinational socialist states in a post-Soviet world. * 
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Jan 2, 2020 18:43
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Purple Prince posted:I disagree, because the reason Marx talks about the capitalist and proletarian classes in Das Kapital is to look at the economic system of capitalism. In Marx's day, absent the social democratic measures we have now, it was easy to separate the two classes. But that separation is not about having a small capitalist class against a mass of workers, it's about identifying the conflict between the classes. Ok cool so you're deliberately muddying the waters, thanks for clarifying. The above post is just the  version of
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Jan 2, 2020 18:51
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goddamnedtwisto posted:The Graun seems very nervous about the idea of people boycotting newspapers for printing utter bullshit for some reason Lmao the model for almost every newspaper and news website now is printing poo poo that'll get you the most outrage clicks possible. The more people you can get sharing their dunks the better. The rights got the easier time of this since all they have to do is find an immigrant and bully them. Liberals have a tougher time because they can't just do leftwing outrage so they commission utter bores to write "the left wing case for the queen" and get their audience to mock it.
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Jan 2, 2020 18:52
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thespaceinvader posted:No, I just don't think that B is a separate category; there are a lot of people who are being catergorised in B who fit much more clsely in A, and a much smaller number who fit much more closely in C. Guavanaut posted:It is important to separate resentment for her as a bad landlord from resentment for the whole system that forced parts of the working class into that cycle. e: Relations with capital AND state really. A retiree living as a dependent of a worker has their interests align with workers. A Buttery Pastry fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Jan 2, 2020 |
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Jan 2, 2020 18:54
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Purple Prince seems to be making a distinction between capital and money which you're not. Someone living off accumulated money (or a state pension) is not living off capital, someone living off the money generated by currently owned capital is. The former might still have their interests align with the capitalist class though, since inflation is generally a detriment to both, unless the state will step in to maintain their position. Which means not just keeping the state pension in line with inflation, but their actual wealth. Yes to both. It's important to update our analysis of capitalism with the times, especially because the whole reason Thatcherism worked is that it gave a much larger section of the population a closer relationship to capital than before.
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Jan 2, 2020 18:58
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Resentment? As far as I can tell, Purple Prince is arguing that leftists need to reckon with the more complicated relations with capital of our modern populations compared to the relations of a hundred years ago. Resentment has nothing to do with that. Because people understandably resent slumlords, especially when they are in slum conditions.
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Jan 2, 2020 19:00
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goddamnedtwisto posted:The Graun seems very nervous about the idea of people boycotting newspapers for printing utter bullshit for some reason He writes that sort of poo poo all the time and the nyt just today was whitewashing that navy seal who did a load of war crimes so bad that his squad were the ones to report him
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Jan 2, 2020 19:03
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Jose posted:He writes that sort of poo poo all the time and the nyt just today was whitewashing that navy seal who did a load of war crimes so bad that his squad were the ones to report him I watched a three arrows vid recently about blackwater doing a big massacre in Iraq and how Fox is doing a hilaribad job of making them out to be the victims and it made me remember hearing about "contractors" in Iraq/Afghanistan getting killed/captured when I was younger, and now I'm wondering if that just always meant mercs lol. I was always slightly confused why they were sending like, plumbers and brickies out to Iraq.
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Jan 2, 2020 19:08
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Purple Prince seems to be making a distinction between capital and money which you're not. Someone living off accumulated money (or a state pension) is not living off capital, someone living off the money generated by currently owned capital is. Again though, the distinction is nowhere near that simple for pensioners specifically. Because what a pension is thought to be by the general public is 'some money i saved whilst I was working, so thatI could spend it when I retire' but what it actually is is 'some money I paid a pension fund which they used as capital for investments on the promise that they would give some of it back to me when I retire'. In principle it's functionally identical to shoving some money into an envelope and sticking it under your mattress, and that's the way I suspect the vast majority of people look at it, but in practice, it's not even close. In principle, a pensioner is living off money they earned, regardless of whether it's a state or a private pension. In practice they're living off money other people are currently earning, regardless of whether it's a state or private pension. In practice, it doesn't loving matter that a pensioner's pension comes out of the dividends of a capitalist's investment, it matters that the other dividends of the capitalist's investment persuaded the pensioner to vote for the toff who's going to sell the NHS the pensioner needs to not die of flu next winter..
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Jan 2, 2020 19:08
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Guavanaut posted:It is important to separate resentment for her as a bad landlord from resentment for the whole system that forced parts of the working class into that cycle. Except the same is true of billionaires (tho maybe not Bond villains). A system with certain properties has those properties. Some of those inside it would prefer it to have different properties. Specifically, ones that let them eat in the morning and sleep at night. There may or may not be a route by which they can organise to active that goal.
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Jan 2, 2020 19:11
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OwlFancier posted:I watched a three arrows vid recently about blackwater doing a big massacre in Iraq and how Fox is doing a hilaribad job of making them out to be the victims and it made me remember hearing about "contractors" in Iraq/Afghanistan getting killed/captured when I was younger, and now I'm wondering if that just always meant mercs lol. I was always slightly confused why they were sending like, plumbers and brickies out to Iraq. Actually fixing the country you've invaded after you've blown everything up would never sell the bloodthirsty American ruling class
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Jan 2, 2020 19:16
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