There is a spectrum haunting C-SPAM. I, on the contrary,

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BrutalistMcDonalds: Oct 4, 2012; Lipstick Apathy

Frog Act posted:

remember when this thread was about reading Marxist books?

it was better then

it's also named after a former subforum prone to drama and splintering into offsite forums

just saying

# ? Jan 24, 2020 21:34

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# ? May 20, 2024 18:50

Sheng-Ji Yang: Mar 5, 2014

Frog Act posted:

remember when this thread was about reading Marxist books?

it was better then

GalacticAcid made a thread about reading leftist stuff if you want that

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3859434

# ? Jan 24, 2020 21:38

Frog Act: Feb 10, 2012

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

GalacticAcid made a thread about reading leftist stuff if you want that

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3859434

hmm word I'm gonna have to bookmark this thread and post there cus I've got a good pile of books that merit further discussion

reading Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism rn and I can definitely see why he shot himself lol

# ? Jan 24, 2020 22:03

apropos to nothing: Sep 5, 2003

lol this owns

# ? Jan 24, 2020 22:55

Victory Position: Mar 16, 2004

Frog Act posted:

remember when this thread was about reading Marxist books?

it was better then

this thread has a dark and sinister history, for you see, it wasn't about reading Marxist literature...

...

...it was about the PSL 😱😱😱

# ? Jan 24, 2020 23:00

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

bernie panders

# ? Jan 24, 2020 23:05

Tijuana Donkeyshow: Jan 1, 2008

smarxist posted:

sorry, someone posted SJY's hilarious projection and i couldn't hold my tongue

still waiting for my REQUESTED BAN

post goatse you loving coward

# ? Jan 24, 2020 23:23

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

i hadn't heard about any of the offsite drama and after a full friday's worth of ppl posting about it i still don't understand who or what is behind it, so my only contribution to the discourse is 'nice meltdown'

# ? Jan 24, 2020 23:27

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Frog Act posted:

hmm word I'm gonna have to bookmark this thread and post there cus I've got a good pile of books that merit further discussion

reading Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism rn and I can definitely see why he shot himself lol

I dunno I found it kinda hopeful? But he had a lot of bad stuff going on in his brain and I can't imagine worrying about twitter and twitter drama helped. But I guess he'd fall into the "posting is praxis/building material support" camp like a lot of online addicted people

Also, as always, free Larry Parish

# ? Jan 24, 2020 23:52

Percelus: Sep 9, 2012; My command, your wish is

i think posting lmm should be a ban too, or anything containing music from hamilton

honestly goatse is far less obscene

# ? Jan 25, 2020 00:29

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

la chinoise pwns

# ? Jan 25, 2020 01:06

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

Frog Act posted:

remember when this thread was about reading Marxist books?

it was better then

Cross posting:

gradenko_2000 posted:

I just finished "The Origin of Capitalism", by Ellen Meiksins Wood.

The first point the book makes is that "capitalism" is a very specific economic system that isn't just "people trading stuff". The act of buying a good cheaply and selling it for a higher price later on, or somewhere else, is just commerce, but it isn't capitalism. The feudal system of serfs having to work for a lord, or even the Enlightenment-era absolutist system of taxation to a centralized bureaucracy are both examples of appropriation of value, but neither of those are capitalism.

Under a strict definition, capitalism was an economic system that began sometime in the 16th to 17th century, and began specifically in England.

The central thesis of the book lays out a case against the popular narrative that the emergence of capitalism is a deterministic conclusion of a society that manages to hoard enough "primitive accumulation" (as Marxists might put it), followed by or in conjunction with the establishment of market behavior. By such standards, the development of capitalism would be inevitable, and is bound to happen as soon as a country / region / state becomes rich enough and decides to sever the fetters of feudalism.

Rather, capitalism developed in England, first and only, because of a specific confluence of factors. In no particular order:

1. The Enclosure movement, or the conversion of common land into private property, and the accompanying ideological rationale that justified it (as driven by liberal thinkers such as John Locke), followed by the enforcement of such rights by The State.

2. The dispossession of land from serfs. This would eventually lead towards the formation of a proletariat. That is, the absence of a similar movement in, say, France or Germany, meant that the peasants in those countries still owned the means of production, and did not have to resort to having to sell their labor-power (and nothing else).

3. The development of land rents based on some contemporary measure of "market value", as opposed to fixed rents as practiced in feudal societies.

Under feudalism, the overlord of a feudal land-holding would extract productivity from serfs via a combination of military and economic coercion, but as long as the serfs could meet that demand (and granting that sometimes they didn't), there was not much of a need to produce more than that, and the serfs still actually owned the same land that they worked. Under absolutism, the extraction was done via taxation, and the extractors were part of a centralized bureaucracy, but the same dynamics largely applied.

However, under English "agrarian capitalism":

A person could now own land (i.e. become a landlord in the capitalist sense), and then rent out the land to tenants. The amount of rent could vary, and therefore there was an incentive for the landlord to adjust their rent rate to whatever could bring them the most profit, lest they be bought-out by richer landlords.

The tenant could hire workers to work the land, and any difference between the value of the harvest, and rent they had to pay, was profit, and so there was an incentive to reduce costs-of-production and labor costs, improve yields and outputs, and so on.

The workers did not own any land, and had to sell their labor-power to earn a wage.

Since the product of the land (i.e. food) was what would be used to pay off the cost of the lease taken out by the tenant, and since there was now a market in leases, then the price of the food would itself be subject to market forces. And this would reverberate down to everything else.

The end result was that the landlords and the tenants were now incentivized to engage in profit-maximization behavior, while workers had to work to survive. The value extraction had shifted from being performed by the political/economic merger of the feudal lord, to being performed by the purely economic imperatives. The author harps on this phrase a lot, and it's important, because it highlights that once the system "got going", everyone was "trapped" in it.

The book later goes on to contrast this to how other countries, such as the Dutch Republic or France, did not develop capitalism, because they lacked the same conditions in one or two critical ways. Capitalism eventually spread to these other countries as capitalist-logic started applying to Britain's commercial and later imperialist ventures, but capitalism was spread TO them, rather than it developing outside of England in its own right, and never quite in the same form, or with the same effects.

It's a good book, and I'd highly recommend it, in particular because it shows what recent scholarship can do to challenge and iterate on orthodox Marxism.

The other thing I'd like to add is that the author criticizes Market Socialism as an impossible compromise, because the historical record shows that once agrarian capitalism got going, its effects spread all throughout the economy as to be inescapable, and it's foolish to think that you could subject SOME parts of the economy to market logic, and not others (on top of the assumption that markets are a good way of distribution in the first place)

# ? Jan 25, 2020 02:11

Mister Bates: Aug 4, 2010

Victory Position posted:

this thread has a dark and sinister history, for you see, it wasn't about reading Marxist literature...

...

...it was about the PSL 😱😱😱

what's up with the PSL these days anyway? I have a bunch of friends who are members or candidate members but they have zero presence local to me so I don't actually know all that much about what the organization is doing.

# ? Jan 25, 2020 03:12

swimsuit: Jan 22, 2009; yeah

apropos to nothing posted:

lol this owns

dw your time will come again, trot........

# ? Jan 25, 2020 03:36

swimsuit: Jan 22, 2009; yeah

anyone seriously invested in this forums drama is a dumb nerd

go organise in your local communities idc if youre an anarchist or a trotskyist or an ml or a left acc

# ? Jan 25, 2020 03:38

swimsuit: Jan 22, 2009; yeah

GalacticAcid posted:

bernie panders

# ? Jan 25, 2020 03:38

Homeless Friend: Jul 16, 2007

Lightning Knight posted:

they denied my account. I just wanted to say hello before forgetting to ever log in because there�s no phone app

lmfao

# ? Jan 25, 2020 03:39

lobotomy molo: May 7, 2007; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Lightning Knight posted:

they denied my account. I just wanted to say hello before forgetting to ever log in because there�s no phone app

you're a cop, op :shrug:

# ? Jan 25, 2020 03:42

Homeless Friend: Jul 16, 2007

smarxist posted:

sorry, someone posted SJY's hilarious projection and i couldn't hold my tongue

still waiting for my REQUESTED BAN

to not ban, and forever have the temptation of posting, is the worst punishment of all

# ? Jan 25, 2020 03:43

Homeless Friend: Jul 16, 2007

lk is probably the one who closed my great alternate name thread, so they deserved it

# ? Jan 25, 2020 03:50

Homeless Friend: Jul 16, 2007

permabanarchism

# ? Jan 25, 2020 03:52

apropos to nothing: Sep 5, 2003

Homeless Friend posted:

to not ban, and forever have the temptation of posting, is the worst punishment of all

# ? Jan 25, 2020 03:55

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

https://twitter.com/AzadiPars/status/1220427149242486786

# ? Jan 25, 2020 04:25

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

gradenko_2000 posted:

Cross posting:

The other thing I'd like to add is that the author criticizes Market Socialism as an impossible compromise, because the historical record shows that once agrarian capitalism got going, its effects spread all throughout the economy as to be inescapable, and it's foolish to think that you could subject SOME parts of the economy to market logic, and not others (on top of the assumption that markets are a good way of distribution in the first place)

great post -- I'm working through Thomas Piketty's book and while I think it has some flaws it's refreshing to have people burrow down on capitalism specifically and what it is, not just vague handwaving about the roman republic being capitalist or other ahistorical nonsense. I'll have to check this book out after I'm done with piketty

# ? Jan 25, 2020 04:25

Terrorist Fistbump: Jan 29, 2009; by Nyc_Tattoo

gradenko_2000 posted:

Cross posting:

The other thing I'd like to add is that the author criticizes Market Socialism as an impossible compromise, because the historical record shows that once agrarian capitalism got going, its effects spread all throughout the economy as to be inescapable, and it's foolish to think that you could subject SOME parts of the economy to market logic, and not others (on top of the assumption that markets are a good way of distribution in the first place)

Good summary of the book. Reading it a couple years back was a wake-up call for me because it really clarified the scale of the effort required to abolish capitalism in a way that even reading Marx didn't do. It's got deep, deep roots outside the political sphere that can only be uprooted through a sustained, intensive effort over decades if not centuries.

# ? Jan 25, 2020 05:08

StashAugustine: Mar 24, 2013; Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

actually on the subject of reading, does anyone have a simple read on a history of women's participation in the workforce from a marxist perspective?

# ? Jan 25, 2020 06:24

Homeless Friend: Jul 16, 2007

pretty broad

# ? Jan 25, 2020 06:55

StashAugustine: Mar 24, 2013; Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

Homeless Friend posted:

pretty broad

Im going to interpret this as a bad pun

But also to be more specific, from a historical perspective theres sort of an idea that women only started working in when the sixties happened when Marx was writing about it in the manifesto; and ideologically I'd like someone smarter than me and with more background in feminism to give a Marxist perspective on the idea that women's liberation = more wage labor without making an rear end of themselves. (Silvia Federici maybe?) These will probably have to be different sources tbh

# ? Jan 25, 2020 07:19

Homeless Friend: Jul 16, 2007

Dismantling wage labor=liberation is easy, you just look at the results of the very policies that stance is used, in part, to justify overseas. Women are wanted as workers exactly because they are in that predicament, they have much less leverage and more social responsibility. The double burden is just as true outside of the global north as it is in it. Now just imagine that with a 12hr or more work shift. Ask that person then, where is the liberation in this? A feminism that cannot even cope with the inclusion of the majority of the women in the world is no feminism at all. bernie panders 2020.

sources: I read imperialism in the 21st century and planet of the slums recent which sort of touch on this, although I cant say they're what you're looking for. Like I said, it's broad and highly dependent on how you want to target (ie the 60's thing is pretty white phenomenon)

# ? Jan 25, 2020 07:49

StashAugustine: Mar 24, 2013; Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

Cool thanks. This started as an argument with a (disco elysium voice) traditionalist going on about how communists want to make women work but while I doubt he's reachable I wanted to formulate my own thoughts on it

# ? Jan 25, 2020 07:52

Homeless Friend: Jul 16, 2007

Instead of thinking about the women, tell him to think about the children: some 10%+ of the population of which is, shall we say, enticed to labor.

# ? Jan 25, 2020 08:02

Sheng-Ji Yang: Mar 5, 2014

https://twitter.com/TrueAnonPod/status/1220965446150524928

# ? Jan 25, 2020 08:07

StashAugustine: Mar 24, 2013; Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

To defeat the Bug, we must understand the Bug

# ? Jan 25, 2020 08:11

uncop: Oct 23, 2010

StashAugustine posted:

Im going to interpret this as a bad pun

But also to be more specific, from a historical perspective theres sort of an idea that women only started working in when the sixties happened when Marx was writing about it in the manifesto; and ideologically I'd like someone smarter than me and with more background in feminism to give a Marxist perspective on the idea that women's liberation = more wage labor without making an rear end of themselves. (Silvia Federici maybe?) These will probably have to be different sources tbh

I found August Bebel's "Woman and Socialism" a pretty good historical materialist summation of the feminist thinking in the workers' movement of the time. Given who Bebel was, it definitely wasn't just some disconnected theorizing from a man. It's long but the chapters seem like designed so that you can start at the phenomenon you're interested in. It must show its age in a bunch of ways by now but it also takes a perspective into things that you don't really see often from feminisms of today.

What affected my thinking the most is the conception that non-aristocratic women had been kept intellectually stunted in a very real way by confining their sphere of existence, so sexist ideology used to seem intuitively correct, and capitalism enabled feminism in more ways than one. Like, there were two main paths out of the underdevelopment. The bourgeois way where women fought for their right to family and property and used marriages and inheritances to develop themselves into independent equals of bourgeois men. And the proletarian way where poverty forced women out of the home to work and the working life developed them into independent equals of proletarian men, so they would struggle against the family wage, for equal personal wages, and for fully universal suffrage etc. Since poverty drove women's participation in the labor force, working women had greater influence among the most militant sections of workers than just their one quarter to one third share of the workforce would suggest. Consequently there were also two different strains of the women's movement born out of two different struggles that had a lot of common goals but also a bunch of deeply opposed ones.

Chapter 13 has statistics on women wage workers in different countries at the turn of the century and one thing stands out that may explain the common view about the sixties: USA had by far the smallest proportion of women workers, and from other research we know that the proportion was also racially stratified. White US women were comparatively speaking true middle class housewives who suddenly entered middle class professions that e.g. black men or working black women had scarcely had access to.

# ? Jan 25, 2020 08:41