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Nov 7, 2020 01:49
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lmao Regarding the Conquest of Bread, if you feel up to sharing your thoughts on it, I'd love to read them.
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Nov 7, 2020 01:57
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dex_sda posted:Better than mainstream economics have ever done as far as predictive power goes - peep the 2018 nobel prize for economics if you want to recognize how much of a joke that is. I don't know if this is what you meant since it was awarded to two people that year quote:According to the original formulation of DICE, staying below the 2°C as agreed by the Paris agreement would cost more in mitigation investments than would be saved in damage from climate change. An updated damage function revised this conclusion, showing that a warming of around 2°C would be "optimal", depending on the climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases.[35] Lmao
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Nov 7, 2020 02:32
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It's worth noting that some Marxist theorists, e.g. Michael Heinrich, reject the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as an explanation for crises etc., and instead look to other contradictions as explanations. I personally think that their rejection is based pretty much on a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of "tendency", but you may disagree: see Heinrich's argument and Carchedi and Roberts' critique (Roberts being the person who made that graph of the tendency posted earlier). I also have just a minor quibble with dex_sda's explanation: the principal contradiction in capitalism generally isn't, to my mind, the opposition of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall to the need of capitalists for profit. That may be the principal contradiction when it comes to crises, but the principal contradiction of the whole of capitalism is between the proletariat and bourgeoisie - or as Engels puts it in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, "between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation".
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Nov 7, 2020 02:49
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This thread has made me dig out all the poo poo I've bought during Monthly Review sales but never actually read.
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Nov 7, 2020 03:01
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e-dt posted:It's worth noting that some Marxist theorists, e.g. Michael Heinrich, reject the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as an explanation for crises etc., and instead look to other contradictions as explanations. I personally think that their rejection is based pretty much on a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of "tendency", but you may disagree: see Heinrich's argument and Carchedi and Roberts' critique (Roberts being the person who made that graph of the tendency posted earlier). I also have just a minor quibble with dex_sda's explanation: the principal contradiction in capitalism generally isn't, to my mind, the opposition of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall to the need of capitalists for profit. That may be the principal contradiction when it comes to crises, but the principal contradiction of the whole of capitalism is between the proletariat and bourgeoisie - or as Engels puts it in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, "between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation". It's not the only fatal contradiction for sure, but the reason I like to call it the principal one is that it requires very little theory to understand - all you need is to accept that capitalism requires growth and that labor creates value to come to the conclusion it's a self-defeating system. When you start bringing class to it you always get dissidents, but those two things in the profit-vs-growth contradiction are either something that even in neoliberal thought is self evident or easily explainable (like the paperclip machine thought experiment). Just better for opening minds, that's all. dex_sda fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 03:07
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The Oldest Man posted:I don't know if this is what you meant since it was awarded to two people that year basically that laureate made papers how we shouldn't fear climate change because if you draw a relationship in the current world between temperature and gdp you get like 0.1% per 0.1 degree celsius. so if there's gonna be six degree of warming it's just gonna be an 8% hit on the gdp, across decades no biggie. if you know your climate science, you might realise six degrees of warming is like 40 meters sea level rise, hurricanes, volcanoes, loving wrath of god poo poo. But the nobel prize winner in economics says: no, a few percent gdp. Oh yeah, those papers are referenced in the IPCC reports. Fun!
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Nov 7, 2020 03:33
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Let me post some actual content on liberalism, via a detour through Stirner's anarchism. Stirnerite / egoist anarchism might be a meme philosophy nowadays, but its history and influence should be of interest to any Marxist who wants to fully understand and reject neoliberal and liberal reasoning. Grappling with Stirner is what finally pulled me away from liberal and anarchist ideas to socialist ones. Marx and Engels apparently thought Stirner was sufficiently important to write a not-fully-convincing book-length rebuttal of his ideas in The German Ideology (St. Max). Max Stirner is not the first person we'd think of when we're looking for historical antecedents to neoliberalism. To start with, he was writing far too early: his one and only significant work, The Ego and Its Own, alternately The Individual and His Property (yeah...) was published in 1844, which is before most of John Stuart Mill's significant work. Stirner was a member of the young Hegelians - the same group of intellectuals as Marx, who largely abandoned Hegel as it became clear that his ideas about politics and history tended to be useless for progressives at the time. Like other Young Hegelians, Stirner rejected Hegel's idealism. Unlike Marx and Engels, he didn't become a historical materialist - he became a nihilist. The core of Stirner's philosophy is his concept of the individual as a self-creating "nothing". Unlike most philosophers of the 19th century, Stirner doesn't see people as having a fixed "essence" which would entitle them to equality before the law or common consideration under a natural law. He can't find a material basis for things like human rights, so he rejects them as "ghosts". On the other hand he also doesn't see inequalities as having a basis in natural law. He rejects the concept of natural law altogether in favour of the ultimate autonomy of the individual: the individual is absolutely free, and no natural law applies to constrain them morally or otherwise. This is similar to the ideas of existentialists like Nietzsche and Sartre that would come about 50 or so years after Stirner was writing. As a consequence of this rejection of a human "essence", Stirner is opposed to almost every political philosophy and religion, as he believes they can't be grounded in material reality. He rejects the law, the validity of contracts (including the social contract), private property, humanism, socialism, liberalism, Christianity, egalitarianism, and communalist forms of anarchism. His claim is that almost all beliefs constitute "wheels in the mind", which constrain us from realising our lack of essence and therefore our freedom as individuals. One of the quotes he returns to again and again is: "I have set my mind to nothing, and all the world is mine" - by divesting ourselves of what Stirner sees as limiting beliefs, we can realise our freedom to do anything we want. For Stirner, therefore, there are no moral laws, and individuals should pursue whatever makes them happy and fulfilled - regardless of laws. If you don't have money then steal what you need. If you have money and want more money, do anything you like to accumulate more wealth. Mind you, private property also being a "wheel in the mind", don't be surprised if an even bigger individualist than you takes your stuff. The only form of social organisation Stirner approves are temporary "unions of individuals", where people pursue a common goal and are free to leave at any time. This makes Stirnerite anarchism similar to extreme forms of libertarianism, except he also sees property as an illusion and contracts as to be followed only where desired, making him far too XTREME to really be considered pro-capitalist. Stirnerite anarchism, for obvious reasons, was really popular among the more thoughtful depression-era bank robbers and organised criminals, particularly in countries where bank robberies had a political basis. Writers like Jack London were also big fans of Stirnerism. Where does this come into neoliberalism and why should Marxists and socialists care about it? Well, as we're probably aware by now, neoliberals might claim to believe in the power of markets and free exchange but are perfectly willing to contradict their own beliefs if it make number go up. So in practice, we are not dealing with liberals in a meaningful sense, regardless of their rhetoric, but with Stirnerite anarchists. The Stirnerite attack on capitalists is also really interesting if you're debating a libertarian: denying the basis of private property as a "natural law" and suggesting state / private violence is the only thing really guaranteeing their property can really enrage libertarians. I personally see libertarianism by capitalists as a psychological defence against recognising that they're acting in exploitative, amoral ways. Because he pushes liberalism to its logical extreme, Stirner provides interesting clarity on where our priorities lie. If we're ultimately concerned with freedom for the individual, why aren't we Stirnerites? Why don't we rob banks or become predatory capitalists? Why don't we run our society as a cut-throat thunderdome? Stirner's criticisms of the right (from the right) also become unintentional socialist arguments. Of course force is the only thing guaranteeing the private property arrangement - but this is an observation common to Marxists and Stirner. Where they differ is that while Stirner is merely critical of liberalism, scientific socialists aim to build a new set of social arrangements on their observations and criticisms of the liberal order. For socialists, the reason we build is that we explicitly reject our self-interest as the only relevant factor and determine to build based on collective, not individual needs and wants. Even by Stirner's own arguments, a good socialist society would be one which all individuals would consent to being part of. This individualism - socialism connection was explored in depth by Wilde in The Soul of Man Under Socialism: quote:The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. This ties in nicely with other arguments I like to make against pro-capitalists:
Reading Stirner is a great way to take your criticism of liberalism in new directions by giving you the tools to attack it from the right and the left simultaneously. Just don't read the dodgy fanwork Might is Right, that book is real fascist garbage.
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Nov 7, 2020 03:51
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dex_sda posted:It's not the only fatal contradiction for sure, but the reason I like to call it the principal one is that it requires very little theory to understand - all you need is to accept that capitalism requires growth and that labor creates value to come to the conclusion it's a self-defeating system. When you start bringing class to it you always get dissidents, but those two things in the profit-vs-growth contradiction are either something that even in neoliberal thought is self evident or easily explainable (like the paperclip machine thought experiment). Just better for opening minds, that's all. That is very true. I guess I was just using a different definition of principal contradiction, that of the "contradiction whose existence and development determine or influence the existence and development of the other contradictions" for the whole of capitalist society.
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Nov 7, 2020 04:03
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Falstaff posted:Also, hey Grandenko... the first excerpt was from Domenico Losurdo's "Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend" the second excerpt was from Mike Davis's "Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World"
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Nov 7, 2020 04:04
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Cpt_Obvious posted:He didn't starve anyone, famines happened in China just like famines happened in the United States. Blaming Mao for famines is like blaming FDR for the Dust Bowl. Like, sure, they both had policies that affected those occurrences, but he didn't just wave a magic wand and murder people. I'm not sure if I can agree with that, considering the dust bowl was a natural phenomena (maybe climate change affected it, but I only really know about the effects of climate change within my lifetime I will grant) and the great leap forward's massive famines were the result of poor management. The "killed a lot of sparrows" thing is kind of a problem because it meant the population of locust and other vermin that destroyed crops exploded because of a lack of predators, which did severely more damage to the crops than birds eating seeds did. The pressure from higher ups meant that middle managers fudged numbers so the top brass didn't have an accurate estimate of what it was actually like on the ground (incidentally, not dis similar to what happened with the early days of covid-19). Mismanagement was absolutely the biggest cause of the famine. e: I'd have to double check but I'm pretty sure even the CPC itself admits that it was primarily human error.
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Nov 7, 2020 05:37
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Acerbatus posted:I'm not sure if I can agree with that, considering the dust bowl was a natural phenomena American farmers created the dust bowl in a matter of a few years through mass mismanagement of the land. quote:With insufficient understanding of the ecology of the plains, farmers had conducted extensive deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains during the previous decade; this had displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that normally trapped soil and moisture even during periods of drought and high winds. The rapid mechanization of farm equipment, especially small gasoline tractors, and widespread use of the combine harvester contributed to farmers' decisions to convert arid grassland (much of which received no more than 10 inches (~250 mm) of precipitation per year) to cultivated cropland.[4] During the drought of the 1930s, the unanchored soil turned to dust, which the prevailing winds blew away in huge clouds that sometimes blackened the sky. In fact, the US government even promoted this through direct economic incentives (Homestead Act) and capitalist land speculators promoted it as well through propagandist claims that cultivation had permanently altered the climate of the Great Plains to make it more attractive to farmers with the "rain follows the plow" sloganeering campaign.
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Nov 7, 2020 05:59
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Yeah what? I was taught the dustbowl was caused through agriculture, not that it just happened? It doesn't normally happen?
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Nov 7, 2020 08:57
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I'll take your word for it there, not being American it's not something that came up a lot. Regardless, the point I was making was about Mao specifically and not communism in general. I will say I don't think capitalism is a workable system in the long term, but to assume that communism is the solution is just naive. The weakest element of every political system is always the fact that it's being run by people. That doesn't mean trying for better isn't worthwhile, but to assume just changing the system is enough like a lot of people seem to be saying sounds like a setup for disappointment. Acerbatus fucked around with this message at 09:35 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 09:30
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Mismanagement is kind of a constant in society, I would ask what were the differences that produced the difference in severity. China was under a harsh economic blockade (though not nearly as harsh as the Soviet Union had used to be in) which made it very hard for it to import large amounts of food or stop exporting set amounts of it without getting into high interest debt or default on their payments and trigger nasty conditions in their agreements. See, they had already taken lots of debt for economic development purposes, because development required buying expensive foreign designs and that required acquiring foreign currencies quickly. Mortality rates had plummeted and people were making kids as you would expect coming from an era of war, so the population was full of kids and elderly that used to not be there. The peasant methods hadn't increased the productivity of the land much, so the amount of surplus grain was being reduced quickly. At the same time, the peasants were dirt poor and typically had enough food, so like in third world peasant countries generally, there had been little market incentive for private traders (which existed!) to establish a robust nationwide market that would move things around over long distances and at reasonable prices. Some big differences from a regular third world economy though were that traders couldn't go around price gouging and peasants couldn't sell their lands or enter other onerous contracts, which is typically the way peasants whose crops have failed acquire enough money to buy enough price gouged food to feed their family for a bit longer. For food security, the state had invested in a system of localities pooling resources and distributing food to those in trouble. This worked great for elders, disabled and sick people, orphans etc, as partially evidenced by the massive reduction in mortality, but failed against calamities that would engulf whole localities at once. But the system had worked so well that there had been little pressure to develop a dynamic and high-throughput national scale redistribution system. It's not an easy problem to solve, especially in a land with limited communication infrastructure and so on. The stories told to us about the famines in China pick out these "inscrutable Chinese, who would ever do that!" factors like the sparrows and backyard pig iron, instead of facing the fact that the main difference between China and e.g. India at this point in history was not level of mismanagement (I'd say the Chinese were better generally, but the rapid collectivization had eroded that through novelty), but that in India the peasant was free to firesale their lands and freedoms, ruining their life in order to save it, while in China they were not. State and foreign aid doesn't usually count for that much in large-scale famines, China utilized them basically just as well as other countries did.
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Nov 7, 2020 10:12
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e-dt posted:That is very true. I guess I was just using a different definition of principal contradiction, that of the "contradiction whose existence and development determine or influence the existence and development of the other contradictions" for the whole of capitalist society. In that sense your contradiction is definitely the principal one, since all struggle has basis in class. Perhaps I should have used a different word like 'simplest' or 'most obvious' or something. Regardless, I think we both agree that capitalism has multiple problems when analysed in a consistent framework. dex_sda fucked around with this message at 12:07 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 10:50
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Acerbatus posted:I'm not sure if I can agree with that, considering the dust bowl was a natural phenomena (maybe climate change affected it, but I only really know about the effects of climate change within my lifetime I will grant) and the great leap forward's massive famines were the result of poor management. Imagine a scientist is impressed by the "deep ploughing" method of increasing agricultural output. Then imagine that they long ago actually helped spread useful agricultural ideas. That leads to them getting given large scale power over a region's agriculture. Deep ploughing actually is not suitable for the soils in that region. And the agriculture in the region is being totally ruined. Their organisation has a culture where everybody who brings bad news to their bosses gets fired. Based on the fake reports the leaders pat their backs and celebrate and get further promotions. Everybody in the actual region starves or emigrates, depending mostly on the status of the neighbouring regions. Who's fault is it? 1) It is perfectly natural unless it happened in a (different ideology) country, then it was the ideology's fault. 2) It never happened and can never happen unless it happened in a (different ideology) country, then it was the ideology's fault. 3) The local graincounters who would rather risk starving then be fired for accurate reporting are evil saboteurs. 4) The high level leaders are personally moustache twirling villians who personally killed everybody. 5) The organisational structures that favour a high ranking person's pride over the reports from local reality are bad and should be dismantled. This describes many of the famous famines that are often brought up in political contexts. But especially the yuan famine and the dust bowl.
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Nov 7, 2020 12:19
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Purple Prince posted:Reading Stirner Just wanted to thank you for this, it was very interesting to read. Are there other branches of Egoist thought? I've often seen people describe egoists as "on the left," but nothing you describe here seems to fit that bill - as you describe, it seems more like AnCaps on speed.
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Nov 7, 2020 13:18
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Falstaff posted:Just wanted to thank you for this, it was very interesting to read. Are there other branches of Egoist thought? I've often seen people describe egoists as "on the left," but nothing you describe here seems to fit that bill - as you describe, it seems more like AnCaps on speed. Egoists generally describe themselves as post left and, in my experience with a few friends who got really into Stirner, are just tired of trying to make the world better so they find an ideology that says it's okay, they don't have to try.
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Nov 7, 2020 13:49
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note that the egoist etc. post left hasn't got a lot to do with the "anti-woke" "post left" such as aimee terese. if you don't know what i'm referring to with that, don't look it up, they're idiots. if you still want to know, the basic rundown is that they are social democrats with marxist pretensions who echo right-wing ideas about so-called "cancel culture" and have other extremely idiotic takes mostly based on contrarianism like "Bolivia's MAS are actually neoliberal imperialist capitalists and thus the left is actually STUPID for supporting them and CAPITALIST unlike ME who is MARXIST and COOL i SWEAR"
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Nov 7, 2020 15:42
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Continuing my way through Capital...Falstaff posted:This concept of use-value and exchange-value is actually crucial to Marx’s concept of Labour Theory of Value – it helps complete the circle in Aristotle’s thinking about the way the two sides of a commodity interact with each other. I know others have already covered that, and quite well, but I think I'll share my own take on it next so I can make its relationship to these concepts of value explicit. So, if use-value and exchange-value are only loosely related, where does exchange-value come from? It was a question that really perplexed Aristotle. Aristotle posted:Consider an exchange of five beds for one house. These products are not alike. Beds and houses have different qualities and different uses. How, then, can they exchange as equals? Are they really equal? So according to Aristotle, equal exchange of commodities is impossible, because no two objects are really the same (unless someone was exchanging one bed for an identical bed, I suppose, but why would anyone do that?). But Marx suggests that exchange embodies an inherent principle of equality, despite the objects being exchanged having different qualities. When supply and demand are in equilibrium, a commodity costs just so much, not more and not less. But why? What informs that price? If supply and demand balance, there has to be another source that determines exchange-value. Marx suggests that other source is labour. Through labour, we can determine the exchange value of two objects that are materially unlike, with entirely different properties. Suppose we have two hunters, both equally skilled at hunting. The hunters have a choice between hunting for deer or for rabbits. If it requires one day of hunting to catch a rabbit, and seven days of hunting to catch a deer, then only a crazy person would exchange one rabbit for one deer - which is not to say it isn't possible, but such an unequal exchange doesn't really tell us anything about an economic system in aggregate. The constant between different commodities is socially necessary labour-time. Commodities that are totally dissimilar still require workers to take the time to produce them, and this is the basis for exchange. So in this scenario, seven rabbits are equal to one deer, with each part of this exchange embodying an equal amount of labour. Of course, in this, a problem arises in which we need to talk about labour and what it means. Marx divides labour into two different types for this purpose: useful labour, and abstract labour. Different kinds of labour are not the same, even if they might be treated as such. A watchmaker's labour is not the same as a carpenter's labour. They utilize entirely different skills and tools, and they produce different commodities. But they can be treated as they are the same to facilitate exchange. This is the idea behind abstract labour. So useful labour is work activities with unique material properties that are embodied in use value. Abstract labour is work activities that are treated as though they have no distinguishing qualities, and are embodied in value. This is all pretty abstract (Marx put a very heavy emphasis on his conception of labour), so let's break it down a little. When tailors and weavers exchange products, they are not treating their labour as useful, but as abstract: Equating 20 units of linen to one coat means equating coatmaking (the labour of a tailor) to linenmaking (the labour of a weaver). The products are equated, so the labour that goes into them is also equated. Trading one for the other means treating them as equal. Abstract labour, stripped of all its material equalities, means treating all labour as alike. This may not be something people consciously do, they do it regardless of whether they think a coat is truly equal to twenty units of linen. This is despite the fact that the use-value of these different objects are necessarily different, as does the useful labour that went into each object. The material properties, these differences, are simply disregarded to facilitate exchange. ... I need to talk about mud pies now. I don't want to, but I'm going to, because it helps illustrate another element of abstract labour. A common objection to labour theory of value that I've seen over and over again throughout the years, particularly online (and even on these forums at least once), is the mud pie problem. "Oh, you silly commie," so the argument goes, "if exchange-value comes from abstract labour, if all labour is treated as equal, then that would mean I could exchange this mud pie I made for your car, as long as I made it slowly enough." If you've read all the above, it should be immediately obvious why it doesn't work. Besides having no use-value (and lacking use-value entirely means that a thing cannot be a commodity, see my previous post on the subject), a commodity's abstract labour is not based on the actual time spent on something, but rather the amount of equal labour-time that the average producer would expend. Pricing a commodity based on the actual time it takes means it will either distort the market, or else it will languish unsold. Average, equal labour is what people pay attention to, what facilitates exchange, even when it can change rapidly through circumstances seen or unforseen. For example, an artisan cobbler prices her shoes just so, based on how much time most cobblers in her market take to make similar shoes as commodities. One day, an electric shoemaking device is invented that cuts the time required to make these shoes in half. Our cobbler cannot afford this device, and yet her shoes still have half the exchange-value they did the day before, despite her own requisite labour remaining constant, but because the socially necessary abstract labour involved in shoemaking was cut in half. So even if your mud pies somehow had use-value, they would still only have exchange-value based on how long it took the average worker, with average skills for the mud-pie-making field, with average tools, to produce a mud-pie. This divide between useful labour and abstract labour plays a big part into alienation, but I'll save that for another day because it's time for lunch. Falstaff fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 16:15
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Acerbatus posted:Mismanagement was absolutely the biggest cause of the famine. Can you provide your source for this claim? Edit: I'm gonna have to reread and recapitulate Hinton in here aren't I. Crumbskull fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 16:55
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This may seem a bit out of left field, but something I've been wondering for a while is if Marxist materialism ever made its way explicitly into areas of thought other than economics, social relations, and history. Let me back up a bit and give the question some context. I studied and had a short academic career in "ecological psychology", an unorthodox area of psychology that rejects much of mainstream cognitive sciences. There are a lot of aspects to it but one of the most foundational is in philosophy of mind or philosophy of perception. In philosophy of perception there is a long-standing debate between two approaches, indirect and direct perception, with the indirect form being the mainstream approach. In this way of understanding perception, our brains receive "impoverished" stimulus, ambiguous information that on its own is not enough to understand what is happening in the world. Thus, our brains must make assumptions, perform calculations, and all sorts of things to build an internal representation of the world, its best guess given the limited information. And so, we don't really perceive real objects in the world, in fact we are fairly disconnected from the real world in the end, only truly in contact with these mental stand-ins. Anyone who took an intro psych or cog sci or neuroscience class might have been exposed to this view (probably introduced as scientific truth rather a rich philosophical debate). Direct perception, on the other hand, holds that the indirect approach massively underestimates the information available in the patterns of light (or whatever), that we do directly perceive the real world, we have direct epistemic contact with it unmediated by any mental representation. I'll stop here and try to avoid arguing for this view, since that's not the point. I did have a few threads in D&D maybe 5 years ago with provocative titles like "You are not a computer" so maybe someone remembers that. The guy in my profile pic is J.J. Gibson who provides an accessible starting point for any curious about direct perception. Besides philosophy of perception there are other relevant philosophical traditions like the American pragmatists (William James, Dewey, Peirce), who argued that the only way to conceptualize philosophical problems like knowlege, language, beliefs, etc was by looking at the real-world effects of something rather than playing with ideas. For example, truth is not based on logic relationships built upon foundational axioms but rather truth is a functional description of the result of a practical inquiry in the real world. Basically you can see this kind of debate back to Plato vs Aristotle, often called realism (or materialism) and idealism, most notably to me in philosophy of mind but it permeates everywhere. Anyways, in the years since my studies I've been exposed to Marxist thought and particular a materialist view of history. And I can't help wondering how my professors who dedicated their life to a materialist philosophy of mind, and connect their work to various philosophical traditions back to Aristotle, never mentioned Marx. And Wikipedia makes no connection between Marx and pragmatism. I assume politics has a lot to do with it, since these are mainly American philosophies. I don't know where I'm going but I'm wondering if Marx or any of his followers made any connections to philosophy of mind, and if anyone has any specific readings to recommend given my background (I haven't' read most of the foundational works yet). Well, if you google "marx pragmatism" or 'marx "ecolgoical psychology"', you do get some scattered academic papers mostly behind paywalls. Here's two readings that may be interesting: "Dewey, Hook, and Mao: on some affinities between Marxism and pragmatism", and "The dance of pragmatism and Marxism" from marxists.org. Maybe I should have read those before posting but I'll read them now. I'd be curious what those of you think you may be better versed in Marx than I. Edit: poo poo, I guess Sidney Hook (who I had never heard of) was a well-known Marxist philosopher who was a student of Dewey's. I guess have some reading to do... second edit: OK, well, he started out as a Marxist at least... SurgicalOntologist fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 17:33
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Falstaff posted:I need to talk about mud pies now. I don't want to, but I'm going to, because it helps illustrate another element of abstract labour. This is also why, if you just trip over a huge gold nugget in your backyard, that gold nugget isn't suddenly worthless because it only took you 0.3 seconds of labor to find it. The average socially-necessary labor time required to produce a gold nugget, calculated across all humans who are in the process of looking for gold - people assaying land, panning river water, digging mines, all that stuff - is enormous. If you took all the time humans have spent looking for gold and divided it by all the gold ever mined you'd get an enormous number of man-hours per ounce. This is why gold (and diamonds, and whatever) is "valuable" - literally because it's rare and hard to get. Gold's various use-values, which include things like filling cavities, conducting electricity, and looking pretty when you wear it, have nothing to do with gold's value (or, downstream from value, its exchange value, or, further downstream, its price). In a world in which gold was as common as sand, it'd be worth no more than sand was worth, even though it'd remain just as malleable, lustrous, and conductive.
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Nov 7, 2020 18:07
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Falstaff posted:Just wanted to thank you for this, it was very interesting to read. Are there other branches of Egoist thought? I've often seen people describe egoists as "on the left," but nothing you describe here seems to fit that bill - as you describe, it seems more like AnCaps on speed. I think as praxis you can take egoism in a left or a right wing direction depending on how you interpret “unions of egoists” - Stirner’s ideal society is one where all association is voluntary and even agreements like contracts or ties to our family and community aren’t used to constrain people’s freedom. For 1844 this is incredibly progressive, and ties in just fine with what crustpunk anarchists like to do with their time. Or you can decide that laws are useless inventions designed to benefit the weak and start your career in organised crime, really depends on where your priorities lie. Stirnerism is the extreme point of liberalism for this reason, I think - his individualism goes so far that it justifies positions we typically see as “left” or “right” equally well, while also being continuous with liberal thinkers like Rousseau and Locke. E: I also think that Stirner clarifies why direct Marxist arguments against liberalism, and vice versa, are incoherent - the basic assumptions of liberal ideology and socialist ideology are radically different. This is why Marx and Engels have such a hard time grappling with Stirner in The German Ideology (I haven’t read St Max in depth but I remember it basically being Marx popping off about bourgeois anarchists). As Mao said, there are three ideologies - socialism, liberalism, and conservatism, and their fundamental grounds are incompatible. Arguments across ideology don’t tell us anything because ultimately “do you value individuals reaching their maximum potential even at the expense of others, or think some individuals should be prevented from exploiting others so the group is better off” is an emotional call, not a rational calculation. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 18:27
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Ferrinus posted:This is also why, if you just trip over a huge gold nugget in your backyard, that gold nugget isn't suddenly worthless because it only took you 0.3 seconds of labor to find it. The average socially-necessary labor time required to produce a gold nugget, calculated across all humans who are in the process of looking for gold - people assaying land, panning river water, digging mines, all that stuff - is enormous. If you took all the time humans have spent looking for gold and divided it by all the gold ever mined you'd get an enormous number of man-hours per ounce. This is why gold (and diamonds, and whatever) is "valuable" - literally because it's rare and hard to get. Gold's various use-values, which include things like filling cavities, conducting electricity, and looking pretty when you wear it, have nothing to do with gold's value (or, downstream from value, its exchange value, or, further downstream, its price). In a world in which gold was as common as sand, it'd be worth no more than sand was worth, even though it'd remain just as malleable, lustrous, and conductive. Aren't diamonds actually a counter to this theory? Diamonds are largely valuable due to artificial scarcity, due to DeBeers' monopoly and control of the supply, rather than genuine rarity or the effort required to mine them. Or is this theory supposed to be more of a prescriptive theory than a descriptive? (i.e. goods should be valued like this vs. goods are valued like this).
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Nov 7, 2020 18:47
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this is why the great search for rational debate about politics is so hard; while many americans, even supposedly politically educated ones, do not have a hard grip on ideology, they suddenly find that when arguing with someone across a ideological divide, it's like talking to someone in a different universe and its cuz you basically are. their fundamental world view is too different.
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Nov 7, 2020 18:51
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Larry Parrish posted:this is why the great search for rational debate about politics is so hard; while many americans, even supposedly politically educated ones, do not have a hard grip on ideology, they suddenly find that when arguing with someone across a ideological divide, it's like talking to someone in a different universe and its cuz you basically are. their fundamental world view is too different. What are you responding to?
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Nov 7, 2020 19:01
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Very interesting thread! I also agree that it's helpful to strictly delineate what particular political philosophy people are talking about, because it helps with clarity. One thing I've always struggled with is that (in my eyes) a key element of traditional Marxism is that it's deterministic, in that the dialectical process will inevitably result in the eventual emergence of a communist system. And its hard to reconcile that with the wider reality of... just what's happened over the last 75 years. If we move beyond Marxism as deterministic, I think it leaves Marxism as much more a descriptive/interpretive philosophy that provides valuable insights into why things have happened in the past (really, another historiographical lens), instead of a proscriptive philosophy that describes what will happen, if that makes sense. Thoughts?
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Nov 7, 2020 19:03
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Whether or not I believe in the psychohistory-adjacent tendencies of Marxism, that's a bit of a fallacious argument. Thermodynamics predicts that entropy can only increase and yet in local systems it can appear not to for millions out billions of years because of outside inputs.
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Nov 7, 2020 19:20
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I used to have that objection as well, the teleological component didn't seem right to me, but I've been told that Marx himself didn't actually view things this way and that the later Marxist faith in the inevitability if Communism isn't necessarily supported by the foundational literature. The more leftists I meet and speak to in real life (as opposed to social media) the more it seems that the belief in a deterministic process towards Communism is symptomatic of residual liberalism in the recently converted and not really a mainline Marxist belief among those who seriously engage with the theory. Curious to hear other perspectives. Edit: Also, as per the previous poster, I don't really see how it is relevant one way or the other and does not hinder the explanatory power of the Marxist framework even if you do jettison that claim. Crumbskull fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 19:21
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I think it works much better as a criticism than a predictor, and certainly the conclusions you draw from the criticism might mirror marx's own but I think it is a good idea for you to follow whatever train of thought comes to you after being exposed to the idea, not least because just yelling at people to read theory isn't very politically useful. People respond best I think when they can internalize and personalize their politics. You will probably find a lot in common but I think trying to get everyone to adhere to a dogma is a combination of ineffective, dangerous, and needlessly limiting. We should adapt our political theories to our time and place. Also on a personal level I think that the message of personal liberation is a very compelling element of leftist politics and also a very important and enduring one, and also a key road of attack we must pursue against liberals. I don't have very positive associations with orthodox marxists because a lot of the vocal ones seem to be pretty lovely people and very socially regressive, which I think is entirely silly because breaking down social taboos I think is pretty revolutionary, because if you can get people to refuse to subscribe to them you are more likely, I think, to get them to not subscribe to other lovely ideas. Also the right is really throwing its weight in with the social regressives and so I think it is good for us to oppose that and make friends along the way. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 19:25
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enki42 posted:Aren't diamonds actually a counter to this theory? Diamonds are largely valuable due to artificial scarcity, due to DeBeers' monopoly and control of the supply, rather than genuine rarity or the effort required to mine them. Or is this theory supposed to be more of a prescriptive theory than a descriptive? (i.e. goods should be valued like this vs. goods are valued like this). Diamonds are actually the example Marx himself uses - he points out that if some process was developed to quickly and cheaply compress coal into diamonds, the value of diamonds would plummet to be only slightly higher than that of coal. It's important to note that a commodity's value, that is, the average socially-necessary abstract labor time required to procure and/or produce it, is the center of gravity around which its exchange value (how much of some other commodity you can trade it for) and its price (how much of the specific, historically contingent money-commodity you can trade it for) fluctuate. Things often sell for more or less than their value should imply because of various practical on-the-ground factors like canny salesmanship, desperation on the buyer's part, or, as you say, artificial scarcity maintained by cartels. Still, that artificial scarcity is only going to be driving a high price even higher, because even if all mankind were united under one banner, it would be much harder to get your hands on a diamond than on a brick of charcoal, so the value of a diamond is naturally going to be high. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 19:27
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Ferrinus posted:It's important to note that a commodity's value, that is, the average socially-necessary abstract labor time required to procure and/or produce it, is the center of gravity around which its exchange value (how much of some other commodity you can trade it for) and its price (how much of the specific, historically contingent money-commodity you can trade it for). I really like the way you put it here.
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Nov 7, 2020 19:29
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Crumbskull posted:I used to have that objection as well, the teleological component didn't seem right to me, but I've been told that Marx himself didn't actually view things this way and that the later Marxist faith in the inevitability if Communism isn't necessarily supported by the foundational literature. The more leftists I meet and speak to in real life (as opposed to social media) the more it seems that the belief in a deterministic process towards Communism is symptomatic of residual liberalism in the recently converted and not really a mainline Marxist belief among those who seriously engage with the theory. Curious to hear other perspectives. Well, I think the deeper question is "at what point does Marxist theory transition between the theoretical space into the practical space", or, what does Marxist praxis look like in 2020? Also, minor nitpick, I do think some of the descriptions of materialism in this thread are a bit off, inasmuch as materialism in this context has less to do with "things" that you own, and more that material conditions are real and drive consciousness and thought, which is in contrast to other philosophies which focus on ideals, or teleological forces as the precursor for consciousness and human condition. I think it's also important (as someone else pointed out) that Marxism as a descriptive lens to view history has less to do with individual actions and more to do with society as a whole. Is anyone else in this thread familiar with Habermas? Owlspiracy fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 19:32
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Falstaff posted:I really like the way you put it here. Not me, because I forgot the word "fluctuate"! Also I'm pretty sure "center of gravity" is Marx's own phrasing, I just find it really helpful to repeat. The farther you get from value the sillier things can get, incidentally. Marx points out somewhere early in Capital that lots of things with no value might nevertheless acquire prices within human society - for instance, some unworked land, or someone's silence.
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Nov 7, 2020 19:32
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Even unworked land, before it can be sold as a commodity, needs to be surveyed and mapped out by someone who knows how to do those things. You've got me on the silence, I suppose, but I don't think someone's silence could qualify as a commodity, even if it's given a price. I'll have to chew on that for a bit, I think.
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Nov 7, 2020 19:41
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Purple Prince posted:I think as praxis you can take egoism in a left or a right wing direction depending on how you interpret “unions of egoists” - Stirner’s ideal society is one where all association is voluntary and even agreements like contracts or ties to our family and community aren’t used to constrain people’s freedom. For 1844 this is incredibly progressive, and ties in just fine with what crustpunk anarchists like to do with their time. This is a great post and I'm not particularly familiar with Stirner so this was great to read. How do you think a hypothetical Stirner would respond to later critiques by some Marxist scholars that the concept of individualism is a myth, in that one of the consequences of a capitalist system is that it effectively constrains the boundaries of thought, thereby limiting choice in such a way that independent thought is no longer possible, as you're operating between two poles of artificially narrowed possibility? One thing I've always struggled with, too, when talking about leftist philosophies (and liberalism) is that they seem to, at their core, embrace a level of objectivity which I just don't think exists. I've always appreciated that Nietzsche (and it seems like Stirner) is happy to pull the curtain entirely off.
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Nov 7, 2020 19:43
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Falstaff posted:Even unworked land, before it can be sold as a commodity, needs to be surveyed and mapped out by someone who knows how to do those things. Yeah, that's what always struck me about Marx using that as an example - labor does go in to finding arable land or rich veins of ore or whatever, so it didn't seem quite right to use them as examples of things with no value. Still, I understand what he's getting at - if we just happen to have arable land right in our backyard, already, that's as "valueless" to us as the air we're breathing.
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Nov 7, 2020 19:44
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Falstaff posted:
I think anything can be commodified even if no one's figured out how to do it yet. I didn't think guaranteed entropy had exchange value but then bitcoin happened.
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Nov 7, 2020 19:49
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