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Frog Act posted:my stupid loving brother is taking poli-sci graduate classes and it's totally melted whatever was left of his useless, vestigial, succ-decorum brain. he's pivoted from just retweeting Matthew Yglesias and jerking himself off over Locke/Montesquieu to this bizarre thing where he thinks the "best option" for political change is "public goods capitalism" using the new deal as an analogy. he's been telling me for years that we share political goals and we both want to accomplish the same thing, but his pivot into apologizing for actually-existing-capitalism because he's too myopic to even attempt to imagine an alternative was just too loving much for me. god I hate people like this lol. All regurgitation and no thinking. anything different would be too hard, never mind that the Soviets made it work with loving telegraph relays.
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Oct 22, 2020 21:11
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anyway people already said it but your brother is loving lost unless he chooses to go work at a bilingual school in a shithole farming town or a poor neighborhood in a city or something. his college degree was four years of capitalist propaganda, and his job is literally to convince children that actually society will be like this forever so just work hard and never ever use your brain for two seconds. and on top of it all he only works with children with zero external problems.
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Oct 22, 2020 21:19
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Larry Parrish posted:anyway people already said it but your brother is loving lost unless he chooses to go work at a bilingual school in a shithole farming town or a poor neighborhood in a city or something. aren’t these people’s lives hard enough without sending dipshits out to miseducate them
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Oct 22, 2020 21:25
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Larry Parrish posted:anyway people already said it but your brother is loving lost unless he chooses to go work at a bilingual school in a shithole farming town or a poor neighborhood in a city or something. his college degree was four years of capitalist propaganda, and his job is literally to convince children that actually society will be like this forever so just work hard and never ever use your brain for two seconds. and on top of it all he only works with children with zero external problems. what makes it baffling is that we both have the same set of grad / undergraduate degrees in history (he's doing a poli sci one now at a pretty right-leaning university) and learned from the same professors in grad school, and those professors were the ones who introduced me to substantial anticapitalist thought. heck we TAed for the same professor, who encouraged me to pivot from a "regular" thesis to one specifically concerned with a Marxist theoretician in the late 20th century and it's implications for modern revolutionary thought. it's this bizarre thing where we both started with the same basic information but wildly diverged which is probably why all this bothers me so much. like, we had many of the same teachers, many of whom really primed me to move towards a historically materialist understanding of the world informed by historiography which was really very significant for me, but didn't seem to take for most of the others in my cohort and, apparently, past cohorts you're right about the kids in the school though, we live in a city that is poor, Black, and has a terrible underfunded education system but the magnet school where he teaches is full of extremely bourgeois strivers who end up getting washington internships when they're 18 before moving onto a public ivy and working as lobbyists or whatever. often truly awful little gremlins, though i'll grant they're also some of the most motivated and well-informed students i've ever met, which actually makes it worse because that sense of superiority is used almost entirely to perpetuate existing hierarchies and perceptions of worthy expertise
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Oct 22, 2020 21:30
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Ferrinus posted:also "efficient" is a highly misleading and ideological word to bandy about. efficient for whom, and to what end? if the prices consumers pay for goods are higher, but the wages workers receive are higher, that's not really more or less "efficient" than workers receiving lower wages so that consumers can pay lower prices, it's just moving resources from one bucket to another gradenko_2000 posted:This is one of the sections of Blackshirts & Reds that really put me off. Parenti goes all in on the so-called inefficiency of the Soviets economy and I couldn't give a flying gently caress. This has been the hardest part of being a commie in an industrial engineering program. if your view of efficiency is "more profits for stakeholders" then of loving course investment into the workers isn't efficient over the short term! but if your view of efficiency is "efficiently performing it's role in society" then it completely shifts the math. there's also the can of worms for where the added $$$ from making processes higher quality/more efficient goes to. if your savings/increased profit is just getting sucked up by the parasitic ownership class then it doesn't mean poo poo for long term improvement because the process won't be able to sustain the improvements.
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Oct 22, 2020 21:33
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Ferrinus posted:as in, all-in on CLAIMS that it was inefficient or does he buy into those claims somehow (with what i assume is a "yes, okay, but..." framing)? i haven't read it I don't know specifically which part gradenko_2000 is referring to but Parenti does talk a bit about how some people got paid for years without showing up for work and related issues. Frankly I think the fact that this happened and didn't lead to a domino effect of nobody going to work says something about human nature and how much labor actually needs to be performed that capitalists and efficiency hawks would rather not admit.
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Oct 22, 2020 21:33
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Lady Militant posted:industrial engineering program for some perspective here Juan Guaido the fake fail president they tried to install in Venezuela has an industrial engineering degree
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Oct 22, 2020 21:34
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something happened in your life, Frog Act, to make your hate pure. something that didn’t happen in his. internalizing a feeling of disgust at injustice isn’t about historical knowledge or background or education, it’s way more holistic, for lack of a better word, than that someone can know what’s wrong, and not truly feel it - and like you’ve been saying, not have the courage of imagination to see the shape of the necessary alternative, and to believe in it there’s no combination of words or evidence that could convince him that liberal capitalism is not just insufficient but will kill us all. if he changes it will be self-directed and probably incredibly difficult on him - as it has to be
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Oct 22, 2020 21:49
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Oct 22, 2020 21:53
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THS posted:something happened in your life, Frog Act, to make your hate pure. something that didn’t happen in his. internalizing a feeling of disgust at injustice isn’t about historical knowledge or background or education, it’s way more holistic, for lack of a better word, than that this thread helps me cope with the knowledge that I am not crazy nevermind
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Oct 22, 2020 21:58
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oh hell yeah
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Oct 22, 2020 22:04
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THS posted:something happened in your life, Frog Act, to make your hate pure. something that didn’t happen in his. internalizing a feeling of disgust at injustice isn’t about historical knowledge or background or education, it’s way more holistic, for lack of a better word, than that I do agree there’s some abstract character-level trait that seems to predispose people to being able to comprehend the level of suffering around them and then take the subsequent steps of empathizing and envisioning a way to diminish that suffering, one that isn’t entirely predicated in tedious litigations over viability and statistical interpretations in the face of existential threats or tired relitigating ancient arguments about moral utilitarianism I also want to think that people can reason their way into these conclusions, but I can’t help but think it’s incredibly rare and constitutes a major reason why self-styled “progressives” are always fair weather friends when it comes to envisioning qualitative change, because the possibility that their expertise has failed them by leading them to insufficient solutions is just too psychically painful to bear
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Oct 22, 2020 22:10
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I went to Palestine at 14 and it was a pretty shocking wakeup call for me on a whole host of issues from US foreign policy to capitalism but all the college students I was with were unfazed I dont know what it is with people for them to have their radicalization moments
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Oct 22, 2020 22:15
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i never really had a moment where i was radicalized but im poor. i just kind of realized that I was getting lied to at school also. i do have a vivid memory of watching the news at like 9 years old and they were covering an artillery unit outside Baghdad and just being so confused and angry about it lol.
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Oct 22, 2020 22:23
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Lady Militant posted:for some perspective here Juan Guaido the fake fail president they tried to install in Venezuela has an industrial engineering degree which is why it needs more commies Even from a bourgeois perspective ive always liked the story of how Frank and Lilliam Gilbreth started their work by going into a factory and saying "show me the laziest guy you have on site", then they'd figure out all the shortcuts he was taking
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Oct 22, 2020 22:26
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i think part of the reason people half-jokingly advocate “sever” so much is because dwelling too much on why an individual thinks the way they think will drive you nuts, and to no good end. accept you can reach some people, and that you can’t reach others. my life got less painful when i stopped trying to wrap my mind around my dad’s terrible views (dad problems!!!!! psychology alert!!) and just realized he hadn’t reasoned his way to being rightwing, but was there for emotional and cultural reasons that i can’t change what i do try to guard against with myself is what i think led to my dad becoming more conservative with age, which i believe to be social isolation, a need to be assured in his mental superiority over others, and a general retreat into an inner life at the expense of engaging with the world, including the annoying parts also he completely fried his brain as a teenager by doing LSD nearly every day for years, that couldnt have helped
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Oct 22, 2020 22:27
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StashAugustine posted:which is why it needs more commies
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Oct 22, 2020 22:27
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Larry Parrish posted:i never really had a moment where i was radicalized but im poor. i just kind of realized that I was getting lied to at school also. i do have a vivid memory of watching the news at like 9 years old and they were covering an artillery unit outside Baghdad and just being so confused and angry about it lol. the beginning of my radicalization occurred when I was 7 and asked my dad what the difference was between Democrats and Republicans. he said that Republicans were for the rich, and Democrats were for everyone else. he was off the mark but it got me started hating rich people. around the same time I asked him why there was a black history month and not a white history month and he answered "think about what you learn in school, every month is white history month" then when 9/11 happened I started reading about US foreign policy and welp here I am today StashAugustine posted:which is why it needs more commies lol
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Oct 22, 2020 22:32
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your brother might just be suffering from cognitive dissonance between his material reality and education. sounds like he has things pretty cushy and doesn't have to confront anything he's learned except in abstract conversations
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Oct 22, 2020 22:33
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When my family had to move in with my abusive gay dad after losing our house in the 2008 meltdown and I went from old-people-suburbia to tweakers-beg-for-money-on-my-way-to-school my hate became pure.
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Oct 22, 2020 22:40
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Lady Militant posted:This has been the hardest part of being a commie in an industrial engineering program. if your view of efficiency is "more profits for stakeholders" then of loving course investment into the workers isn't efficient over the short term! but if your view of efficiency is "efficiently performing it's role in society" then it completely shifts the math. The only IE I know who didn't get a job helping to lay people off went to work for a union in their organizing department. They do research on firms to help in labor disputes and organzing. Becoming a labor aristocrat union employee is your only choice now. I'm sorry.
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Oct 22, 2020 22:54
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Teachers are the Liberal priest class: True believers who will gladly spread the word for minimal compensation. union teachers fighting for better wages are doing more to attack and dethrone god than any poster
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Oct 22, 2020 22:57
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Larry Parrish posted:i just kind of realized that I was getting lied to at school also people poo poo on theory nerds and post poo poo like "i will never read a book," but for me reading is what connected the dots between being a relatively disillusioned person who asks questions and having an actual leftist worldview. i think, because of my relatively well off background, had i not read a bunch of poo poo about politics and economics and the like, i could've ended up as a libertarian-type. thinking that an unfettered, yet-to-exist market will solve all the problems the state and so-called 'crony capitalism' have failed to is a common intellectual rut that a lot of people with my personality characteristics and social-economic circumstances fall into Finicums Wake fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Oct 22, 2020 |
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Oct 22, 2020 23:00
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Teacher's unions:doing great, feeling fine, definitely NOT rotting corpses.
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Oct 22, 2020 23:01
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Sex with Stalin huh
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Oct 23, 2020 00:51
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apropos to nothing posted:having a degree in political science is basically that one guy in kung pow where they introduce him and say they trained him wrong on purpose as a joke my old history prof came back from sabbatical to find he had a new office, and office services had accidentally put "department of political science" beneath his name on his door. he loves it so much, partly because the poli sci department keeps demanding he get it fixed. im not gonna pretend history majors are better but we did have a lot of fun making GBS threads on poli sci kids every time they tried to turn, say, the norman invasion of england or whatever into some kind of red vs blue political scenario. also Frog Act, why not try to get your brother to read capitalist realism if it worked for you. I know it sounds dumb as hell but ive had a few former students who were into Jordan Peterson or similar crap and asked me for a book recommendation because they were getting pushback and I recommended that and always seemed to work. Dreylad fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Oct 23, 2020 |
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Oct 23, 2020 01:30
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Been watching some Parenti. drat, he's is good. They are not underdeveloped, they are overexploited. So good.
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Oct 23, 2020 05:59
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Finicums Wake posted:i didn't grow up poor, or disadvantaged at all really, but between this and realizing organized religion was a sham, i felt like i was that predisposed to ask the kinds of questions that lead to one becoming a leftist. I didn't read any theory or anything. I just grew up in northern California and actually took an interest in the local history... which is incredibly dark and brutal. Did you know there was slave-labor gold mines, because native slaves were totally legal in California until the Civil War and we ran out of easy labor because they all died due to literal Holocaust-tier conditions? Well, uh, unfortunately, it's true. The Spanish colonization was probably the least brutal thing to happen here, lol.
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Oct 23, 2020 06:12
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Ferrinus posted:as in, all-in on CLAIMS that it was inefficient or does he buy into those claims somehow (with what i assume is a "yes, okay, but..." framing)? i haven't read it    it keeps going like this for the rest of the chapter
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Oct 23, 2020 06:16
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Frog Act posted:while I completely agree with this, the part about not realizing it is key - these kinds of people genuinely believe that "public goods" capitalism and New Dealism is sufficient to diminish these, despite all the historical evidence pointing to past instances of socially democratic policy not only failing to do so, but creating the illusion that it is possible and thus bringing more previously-excluded (and thus potentially antagonistic to) groups into the existing system it's one of the strongest arguments against liberalism from the american perspective
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Oct 23, 2020 13:10
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comedyblissoption posted:the New Deal is itself an argument against New Dealism since it was ripped asunder and its last vestiges are being stomped out correct. The New Deal was the aberration relative to the capitalism that came before and after it, and yet Social Democrats (or even Democratic Socialists) keep looking to it as a guide towards what we can pursue, rather than as looking at its dismantling as evidence that such a model is not long-term feasible.
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Oct 23, 2020 14:18
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from what i understand new dealism only worked at the time because immense economic and propagandistic pressure from the USSR incentivized making small and extremely reversible concessions to labor. nothing on that scale exists and hasn't for decades.
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Oct 23, 2020 14:47
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yeah, a big section of my MA thesis was actually specifically on materialist interpretations of the New Deal through the lens of the idea of artificial negativity, which is essentially a broadening of the concept of controlled opposition into one that understands larger currents in monopoly capitalist society as part of the ongoing process of internalization, whereby previously excluded or marginalized groups are integrated into power structures in a way that flattens organic opposition while still maintaining the inequality and power structures that victimized those groups in the first place. it's largely predicated on a set of ideas about externality and organicism, sort of positing that meaningful opposition to capitalism must emanate from groups that aren't invested in the maintenance of the capitalist order and that, further, the system is able to respond to this by creating types of inorganic opposition - or artificial negativity - that consolidates revolutionary sentiment or desire for qualitative change into small-scale reformism or other manifestations of Liberal performative dissent that is unable to precipitate any kind of real change. in this particular model the new deal was actually an intensification of capitalist rationality insofar as it responded to a capitalist crisis by creating a model that preserved the foundational inequalities of capitalism and incorporated previously dissonant groups (artists, workers, minorities) into the superstructure of capitalist exploitation, thus reducing the likelihood they might participate in communist political projects or otherwise try to form systems of mutual aid or political agitation that are explicitly external to the entire apparatus, which, for artificial negativity theorists, included the government entities responsible for administering the elements of the welfare state that allowed this internalization. these guys generally applied the same logic to the civil rights movement, which they also regarded as a successful attempt at disarming revolutionary sentiment via the extension of de jure civil rights to a population while maintaining the large system that would only empower a small segment of that population (the black bourgeoisie) while simultaneously creating a discursive/jurisprudential smokescreen in the extension of participatory rights in bourgeois democracy. the rub, of course, is that the de facto economic deprivation and pervasive systematic cruelties inflicted on Black americans remained a critical part of the political project of the state, and many of the more radical elements of Black opposition (which they regarded as organic and thus a source of actual negativity and opposition) were subsumed by the larger civil rights movement which now operated within the parameters of the existing system. i can't find the full paper anywhere right now but the abstract here is a decent little paragraph http://journal.telospress.com/content/1978/35/56.abstract
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Oct 23, 2020 14:48
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gradenko_2000 posted:
what stands out to me is repeated references to factories not making things because they’re mandated to sell for too little, which as we know is a consequence of foolishly giving factory managers say in what to make
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Oct 23, 2020 14:51
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CYBEReris posted:from what i understand new dealism only worked at the time because immense economic and propagandistic pressure from the USSR incentivized making small and extremely reversible concessions to labor. nothing on that scale exists and hasn't for decades. There’s a reason bill clinton got rid of the last new deal protections once the collapse of the USSR happened This is why i always laugh at DSA/social democrat types like bernie/aoc who think social democracy is possible (voting lol) without existential pressure on the rich forcing them to allow it Now we call “social democracy” far left in this country lol. The state doesn’t even own production in social democracy haha
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Oct 23, 2020 15:00
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Algund Eenboom posted:Just as in amerika, i think the most important force to organize, radicalize and prepare for possible mobilization, for any potentially revolutionary situation, is the precariat, the migrant workers whose existence in their country is continuously under threat, and who are the ones most being batted around by global capitalism, while at the same time focusing people's anger towards the financial centers of europe like france and germany. Dredging this up from a few pages back but I'm at a loss for what this would look like when done in a way that doesn't force a xenophobic reaction. Absent an existing class consciousness, it's hard to imagine the migrant precariat forming the advance guard of a revolutionary mobilization without finding themselves against the wall with the native working class aiming the rifles. edit: That sounds defeatist, I just mean that even if the precariat are best positioned to animate a revolution, I don't see how they could be successful without the intellectual foundation already being laid in peoples' minds. unlimited shrimp fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Oct 23, 2020 |
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Oct 23, 2020 15:19
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Ferrinus posted:what stands out to me is repeated references to factories not making things because they’re mandated to sell for too little, which as we know is a consequence of foolishly giving factory managers say in what to make That extract could come from any right wing critic because the core argument is 'without the profit motive and aspects of competition of course the system was awful'.
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Oct 23, 2020 15:42
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namesake posted:That extract could come from any right wing critic because the core argument is 'without the profit motive and aspects of competition of course the system was awful'. The irony is that Perestroika only made the system weaker, Gorbachev by allowing managers greater say and keeping price controls only exacerbated supply shortages. He did this during a period when foreign income was drying up by rapidly falling oil prices, so the Soviet Union couldn't import goods either without exhausting the rest of its currency reserves. ------------------------- Also, the whole issue of computer technology/microprocessors was simply about capital investment and the US via federal spending (everything from the development of initial computers during the war to the space race) dump a ton of money into technology and education. This advantage was picked up by American/Western corporations in the 1970s. (Also, after the Cold War ended, much of that investment in education and technology faded and corporations started to shift to far more incremental improvements due to a lack of competition. Look at Intel across the late 00s to 2010s.) The Soviets were working on computers and technology but were constantly behind in part because 1. they started later and really didn't have the resources during the war itself and 2. they simply didn't have the resources afterward to throw at the problem like the US and the rest of the west did. It was predictable they were going to always be about 7-10 years behind the West. There is a reason why the US is currently pissed about the Chinese trying to develop its own microprocessor industry, it would present genuine competition.
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Oct 23, 2020 16:37
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namesake posted:That extract could come from any right wing critic because the core argument is 'without the profit motive and aspects of competition of course the system was awful'. The profit motive was further increased with the Lieberman reforms where managers could increase pay outside of proportion to production This exacerbated shortages because managers of profitable factories made a poo poo load of cash and kept giving raises to their workers and themselves. Those who made more money were able to purchase years worth of goods on the cheap i remember how a lady in moscow, the wife of some factory manager buying 10 years worth of cooking paper Top City Homo fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Oct 23, 2020 |
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Oct 23, 2020 17:03
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StashAugustine posted:which is why it needs more commies yeah lazyness is 100% the biggest driving force behind technological progress lmao
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Oct 23, 2020 17:46
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