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Ferrinus posted: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. isn't just determining that land is arable a form of labor, though? when i start looking for places to plant stuff i call the university and they send down a grad student to collect soil samples and i get back a report of all the findings and a judgement on what the soil is good for. now that's a free service but at some point my taxes ended up paying for it in some way, and labor was performed at every step of the process, right?
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Nov 7, 2020 19:51
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Serf posted:isn't just determining that land is arable a form of labor, though? when i start looking for places to plant stuff i call the university and they send down a grad student to collect soil samples and i get back a report of all the findings and a judgement on what the soil is good for. now that's a free service but at some point my taxes ended up paying for it in some way, and labor was performed at every step of the process, right? Yeah, all that stuff's labor and should be creating value somewhere, although when you get into products like information or computer code you end up with funny-looking relationships between the labor that goes into creating means of production and then the value that those means actually pass on to commodities made with them. I guess I'd defend Marx's example in this way: what you might end up paying for a license to develop that unworked land isn't just the wages of the agronomists and surveyors you sent out to check if it was usable (or those wages plus or minus a percentage based on negotiating ability, cartelization, etc). You'll be charged a premium for the land itself, even if no one's worked on it. Hell, you might pay for land that you know nothing about, because you've got a hunch that it'll be valuable in the future and are willing to gamble! That's an example of prices arising from social relations other than "someone did work to make this usable".
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Nov 7, 2020 20:06
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Aruan posted:Very interesting thread! Kind of echoing some of the later replies but Marxism isnt really deterministic in that specific way. Ex-liberals tend to retain some of that faith based thinking, and this is an expression of it. But what Marx predicts is capitalism inevitably creating instability, which in results in many chaotic effect but extremely often results in class conflict of some kind. This conflict is, as you've noted, usually not organized politically along Marxist principles. While Marxism allows one to explain a lot of things in our society that liberal thought does not, it isnt magic. People are constrained in their actions and thoughts by their material reality, but one part that people forget is that people still have choices in how they respond to things like economic instability or police brutality. This is why later communist thought leaders like Lenin and Mao were such advocates of the vanguard party concept. People arent going to organically reinvent communism every time theres a major shortage or a healthcare crisis or something, so it's up to us to use materialism as a guide, not as some kind of faith where Daddy Marx will deliver us to post scarcity through the inorexable laws of dialectical materialism.
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Nov 7, 2020 20:11
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Larry Parrish posted:Kind of echoing some of the later replies but Marxism isnt really deterministic in that specific way. Ex-liberals tend to retain some of that faith based thinking, and this is an expression of it. But what Marx predicts is capitalism inevitably creating instability, which in results in many chaotic effect but extremely often results in class conflict of some kind. This conflict is, as you've noted, usually not organized politically along Marxist principles. While Marxism allows one to explain a lot of things in our society that liberal thought does not, it isnt magic. People are constrained in their actions and thoughts by their material reality, but one part that people forget is that people still have choices in how they respond to things like economic instability or police brutality. This is why later communist thought leaders like Lenin and Mao were such advocates of the vanguard party concept. People arent going to organically reinvent communism every time theres a major shortage or a healthcare crisis or something, so it's up to us to use materialism as a guide, not as some kind of faith where Daddy Marx will deliver us to post scarcity through the inorexable laws of dialectical materialism. I think you're describing the natural evolution of Marxist theory away from Marx - which is good! I would love if someone who really knew the ins and outs of Maoist thought could describe some of the key differences between Marx and Mao. All of this is, of course, really distinct from socialism.
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Nov 7, 2020 20:20
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well. its important to remember that Marxism is more a marriage of socialism to the scientific method than anything. mao has differences of interpretation with Marx, but I see it less as a conflict or difference than an adaptation of the core concepts to the material conditions of post-imperial china. maybe you could say this is splitting hairs, but idk, that's how i see it. every communist thinker is a refinement of the core theory, and much like various models of the atom, they are all good at examining some parts of the 'true' nature of the atom, and remain useful.
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Nov 7, 2020 20:31
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Larry Parrish posted:well. its important to remember that Marxism is more a marriage of socialism to the scientific method than anything. mao has differences of interpretation with Marx, but I see it less as a conflict or difference than an adaptation of the core concepts to the material conditions of post-imperial china. maybe you could say this is splitting hairs, but idk, that's how i see it. every communist thinker is a refinement of the core theory, and much like various models of the atom, they are all good at examining some parts of the 'true' nature of the atom, and remain useful. Oh no, now someone is going to post Karl Popper (who I think makes some good points, but I feel this is where conversations of early Marx always go!). I would describe myself as "skeptical" towards early Marxism but think that later Marxist thought does have excellent insights into how capitalism controls culture and shapes how any of us think about these things, to the point where there conceivably are criticism of capitalism that none of us can express because we lack the language and understanding to even recognize them. Owlspiracy fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 20:31
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Also I think a lot of them are adapted to a time and place and it is very important for them to be, because they wouldn't gain traction if they weren't. The evolution of leftism in a time and place both refines previous approaches and also necessarily incorporates the needs and wants of the people of the time.
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Nov 7, 2020 20:33
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that is why its extremely important to remember that material conditions is not just a catchphrase; marxist thought without adaptation to circumstance is just hot air
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Nov 7, 2020 20:42
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Larry Parrish posted:that is why its extremely important to remember that material conditions is not just a catchphrase; marxist thought without adaptation to circumstance is just hot air If nothing else Marx is notable for saying "hey, you know the world around you? theres conditions within the world that cause that" and not a phenomenological concept of other.
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Nov 7, 2020 21:02
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I reread the prefaces to Capital recently and was struck by the fact that the big distinction Engels drew between Marx and the liberal economists of the time was just that Marx understood capitalism itself as a transitory phenomenon with physical causes and effects rather than some kind of underlying cosmic constant.
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Nov 7, 2020 21:14
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"of the time"  I suppose I wonder whether or not that position is more or less forgivable now or then. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 21:17
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Aruan posted:Oh no, now someone is going to post Karl Popper (who I think makes some good points, but I feel this is where conversations of early Marx always go!). I would describe myself as "skeptical" towards early Marxism but think that later Marxist thought does have excellent insights into how capitalism controls culture and shapes how any of us think about these things, to the point where there conceivably are criticism of capitalism that none of us can express because we lack the language and understanding to even recognize them. "marxism as a science" and materialism just mean measuring poo poo and collecting data from the real world rather than sitting around trying to reason through problems abstractly. anything more than that is nerd poo poo that beginners don't need to worry about, or the stuff of academics and theoreticians best identified by their use of citations, proper sentence structure, and multi-paragraph posts.
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Nov 7, 2020 21:28
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Centrist Committee posted:"marxism as a science" and materialism just mean measuring poo poo and collecting data from the real world rather than sitting around trying to reason through problems abstractly. anything more than that is nerd poo poo that beginners don't need to worry about, or the stuff of academics and theoreticians best identified by their use of citations, proper sentence structure, and multi-paragraph posts. Thats a good question - should this thread be as approachable as possible?
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Nov 7, 2020 22:29
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Aruan posted:Thats a good question - should this thread be as approachable as possible? An excellent question: Yes. This thread is very much supposed to be educational, where anyone can wander in a get a basic idea as to what socialism is about, and ask questions from more knowledgeable people. And those more knowledgeable people can also have a healthy discussion about the entire field. This is supposed to be a place for people of all levels of expertise.
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Nov 7, 2020 22:35
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Aruan posted: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? I am not sure Stirner ever addresses the question of individualism as myth, and perhaps that’s what makes him a liberal at heart. I could be wrong as I don’t have a copy of The Ego and Its Own with me to check at the moment. He comes pretty drat close to a materialist psychology by denying the power of fixed ideas as an adequate explainer of people, but instead of talking about material factors determining thought a la Marx or later critical theory, takes the slightly mystical step common to Hegel, Schopenhauer and Buddha and asserts the individual is self-creating and self is a “productive nothing”. Bear in mind that using the individual as the basic unit of analysis is a philosophical tradition going back to Descartes, and is one of the things that defines liberal political thought. I am not sure Stirner would see an analysis based on social-material factors as rigorous or “real” philosophy .
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Nov 8, 2020 02:33
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Crumbskull posted:Can you provide your source for this claim? I'd honestly struggle to find sources that said otherwise. The source I will personally vouch for the most as opposed to have just quickly done some looking up is Yang Jisheng's Tombstone (or 墓碑 if you prefer). It's meticulously researched and a rather hard read, as it goes into farmers being beaten to death, the cannibalization, the detention centers, the coverups... It's a gripping read, if you're into that kind of thing. If you want some sources online though: Here's an interview with Chinese economist Mao Yushi. https://www.aljazeera.com/program/episode/2016/1/11/chinas-great-famine-a-mission-to-expose-the-truth/?gb=true Here's a paper from the NCBI's site https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127087/ I don't have an online link, but the Encyclopedia Britannica describes the famine as having been caused by "The inefficiency of communes, compounded by natural disasters"
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Nov 8, 2020 03:10
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Acerbatus posted:I'd honestly struggle to find sources that said otherwise. Appreciate it, going to spend some time with this and write up a post. Its been a while but the last time I researched this I came away with a pretty different understanding of what happened than the dominant western narrative, which these sources are fairly representative of. For the record I literally know barely anything about communism in China except as it pertains to agriculture and don't have a position on Mao really (haven't read him), although from what I do know it sounds to me like Deng did a bunch of dumb liberal poo poo but I've heard other people say its complicated and was necessary to have a blended economy for contingent reasons or whatever. Point being I'm just genuinely curious about questions of cooperatized/collectivized food systems, I'm not taking the position that 'Mao did nothing wrong' or whatever.
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Nov 8, 2020 06:56
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re: "Marxism as a science" does one's Marxism require the 'thick' capital theory - the declining rate of profit, the immiseration of the working class? That is: not just any political crisis but a specific crisis of endogenous overaccumulation of capital (this is derided in some corners as an Anglospheric Keynesian bastardization of the theory) or is it merely a methodology, a way of analyzing society that places a premium on economic class as a cohesive actor and concept, without any specific claims about statistical aggregates The latter gives Marxism much more breadth but likewise doesn't say very much about the material world. If it can explain anything it explains nothing These can't both be asserted at the same time, and one should avoid careless equivocation between the two ronya fucked around with this message at 07:49 on Nov 8, 2020 |
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Nov 8, 2020 07:26
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well, it kind of is both, at least to my understanding. the part of Marxism that is purely about class relations can describe basically any polticial crisis; the concept that all political struggles are inherently class struggles. of course before capitalism subsumed the European feudal order, class relations were more complicated than worker vs ruling class. but the aristocracy still existed when Marx was alive, as did the dwindling artisan class, and it is taken into account. maoism and leninism specifically have a lot to say about including the peasantry into a worker vs bourgeoisie Marxist theory. however the economics part, I think, has much more to say about capitalism and mercantilism than anything else. he uses the decline of feudalism, the privitization of common pastureland etc to illustrate how the capitalist economy functions. but to my knowledge Marxist economics is not exactly radical stuff; adam smith has very similar things to say about landlords and other rentiers.
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Nov 8, 2020 08:16
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Yes - all the classical theories have some of the shared weaknesses (e.g. the comovement problem* plagues Smith, the Austrians, and the classical Marxists) the vol-2-capital-theory stuff isn't a salad bar, though - it's a cohesive strata that stands or falls together. You can't say, well, I don't want to insist on the falling rate of profit, but I want to keep the crisis of overaccumulation and all it implies - because the crisis is deduced from the TRPF conversely, the all-political-struggles-as-class-struggles framework is a method but not a set of uniform conclusions - one can propose any number of new classes and propose how they would interact, subject to the sole proviso that each class is defined in relation to their role in economic production, and none of these conclusions need be particularly left-wing * observed tendency for both consumption and investment to increase and decrease at the same time across the business cycle, rather than moving in opposite directions. For all the classicals, business cycles are endogenous, so it is necessary to explain this within the confines of the model
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Nov 8, 2020 09:29
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Whats the comovement problem?
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Nov 8, 2020 10:05
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I don't know if this is the right thread for this, but does anyone have any good resources on starting a worker owned co op? And can a worker owned co op be considered a non profit business? I've been mulling over some things, and I see a good economic opportunity where I am to put something like this into practice if I weren't just one person with an idea. I live in an area called the Conejo Valley, pretty close to the oxnard plains and good farm land. I work in two different restaurants. Last year I lost a good job I liked at a fast casual restaurant because of an Uber driver crashing into the van I was living in, and mid management at the restaurant not communicating that to upper management causing them to think I stopped showing up to work for no reason and they fired me. Frustrated with life amongst this bullshit and no van to live in, and no job and no money, I decided to leave the country with all I had, about $1900 at the time and a suitcase of clothes and a portable speaker, and get a one way ticket to Europe to try and make something work. I bounced around and eventually got some under the table work at a burrito joint in east Germany because I found a sick rear end dude from Cali in Berlin who landed me a job and helped out with a room too. While I was there I learned a little of the German recycling system and that they separate their food waste to put it to good use like composting. I did my time in Germany, set to move on and to get more knowledge. I got a one way ticket to London, denied entry and stranded in Calais after a night in border jail. Train hopped to the airport and flew in, checked out London, and stayed with my buddies in Scotland on their couch for about two weeks in Glasgow. One of my buddies does phone banking for some non profit and the other is a construction guy (by the way, both young and able to pay for their sick rear end pad with a couch and have some money left over to go to the pub and stuff). Set to get more knowledge, I bought a one way ticket to Morocco for 70 pounds and showed up with all my money, about $600. I was living there for a month when Covid hit and I was stranded for five months because of border closures and really only managed to survive on the good will of a family that let me stay with them. Anyways, because of that unforseen circumstance, I'm back in the US, sleeping on my parents couch, working two restaurant jobs that I like but could never provide me with the living wage I need to get the gently caress out of my loving parents house and get my own couch in even a small lovely apartment. So, I was thinking about how great it was that in Germany, they have the bio waste, which I think might be state run but I'm not sure. They had this, and I was also making enough working at a restaurant, like 9 euro an hour, (even just part time) to pay my share of an apartment! And have money left over! I was thinking today at work, that it would be good business to take care of food scrap waste at these drat restaurants I like working at if they could actually get me off this loving bull poo poo loving couch. Obviously, taking care of the food scraps is a good thing, and a good sustainable practice. There's a lot of restaurants on the strip I work on, local owned ones too, that most definitely have food scraps. And being so close to the oxnard plains, there's definitely farm land that could use these food scraps to compost or do something with. I don't know the exact science but I know the food scraps can be used. I see an opportunity to take ownership of something while providing a good sustainable service to the local economy with good honest work. I'm not a money or profit driven person, I just like honest work that I could feel better about if it actually got me a position in life better than this loving couch in my parents house, that I, a 29 year old semi college educated man, is loving living on. I would want my wages to be such that I could afford a meager rear end shanty apartment without spending more than 30% of my income on it (it would be probably 80% of my income right now, and where I live). It would be a good thing to take care of the food waste from these restaurants, I know there's a lot of it - my dishie at night at just one restaurant easily fills two trash cans full of food scraps from plates and dishes, and then there's even the non edible organic food waste from prep ingredients too. And my morning job where we serve fruit stuff, we easily fill several trash bags a day with banana peels and strawberry stuff. And all this good food stuff that can't be eaten just gets mixed with landfill waste. This town isn't far from the soil, I don't see why this isn't being done already. Where I'm at, is I see a good use of waste and I know where to get it, and it should be done anyways just as good practice but it's not, but I don't know how I could organize this on my own. But I do know this should be organized and the people that do it should be paid fairly, and if I organize with other like minded workers, we could collectively seize this opportunity to do good and take ownership as workers and get what we deserve, our own couches at our own little spot and a normal amount of money to keep that going without having to suffer for it basically, and maybe some god drat insurance or something. The reason I ask if this could be a non profit while at the same time having an explicit purpose to "make money" for the workers, is I don't see a way to aquire the money resources for this without soliciting local non-food businesses to contribute donations with the incentive that it's a tax write off that supports the local economy. It seems it would be hard to both get restaurants to donate and also be expected to separate the food waste from the other waste to have it be picked up by us, they are struggling enough as it is. I thought this was a really unique idea, until I googled "compost co op" and saw a worker owned co op business in MA that does exactly this (https://www.thecompostcooperative.com/), or is making an attempt to. I reached out to them asking if they could share some knowledge or resources with me, so I hope I hear back from them. Other barriers I'm facing, is that even though it's a blue state it's a pretty red area. Not a lot of people here think of good business outside the context of make lots of money. And I think the leftists would be confused into thinking this is capitalism because its also a business. I'm just not sure. I feel really isolated and stuck in this broken system, I see a way out, but I don't know where to start with making it happen. Any advice? Trollipop fucked around with this message at 11:50 on Nov 8, 2020 |
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Nov 8, 2020 11:35
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Better to see what permits you'd need to collect, transport, and dispose of food waste before designing the breakroom. Googling suggests that your city gives a local company EJ Harrison & Sons an exclusive contract for kerbside pickup of compostable food waste. Commercial composting is heavily regulated in California, for groundwater and air emissions reasons - you can't just deliver it to farms. There's a theme here about how regulatory institutions with mass-democratic mandates pre-empt, substitute for, or supervene upon worker self-determination and sovereignty here, perhaps... ronya fucked around with this message at 12:18 on Nov 8, 2020 |
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Nov 8, 2020 12:12
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Trollipop posted:I don't know if this is the right thread for this, but does anyone have any good resources on starting a worker owned co op? And can a worker owned co op be considered a non profit business? I've been mulling over some things, and I see a good economic opportunity where I am to put something like this into practice if I weren't just one person with an idea. You might want to ask about this in Business, Finance, and Careers, they have threads on management and running nonprofits, and people with business and leadership experience. Making your own business, even a nonprofit, is a complicated undertaking! Great idea, though, and best of luck! Hope it's a success!!
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Nov 9, 2020 02:58
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You've probably seen this already, but just in case: you might want to reach out to the US Federation of Worker Co-ops which seems to have resources to facilitate exactly this sort of thing. That said I don't know much about them outside of their existence, so YMMV.
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Nov 9, 2020 05:33
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ronya posted:conversely, the all-political-struggles-as-class-struggles framework is a method but not a set of uniform conclusions - one can propose any number of new classes and propose how they would interact, subject to the sole proviso that each class is defined in relation to their role in economic production, and none of these conclusions need be particularly left-wing This is one of the most important fuckin' things that we don't get taught in schools until tertiary: analytical frameworks not as solutions to problems but as ways of examining problems and solutions. It's something I've actually had to use as a programmer and that moment of someone saying "if we analyse this solution through this lens and it's fine then the solution is fine"- when my default lens that I didn't even know I was using told me otherwise- was a severe increase in my ability to deal with poo poo.
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Nov 9, 2020 23:14
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Somfin posted:This is one of the most important fuckin' things that we don't get taught in schools until tertiary: analytical frameworks not as solutions to problems but as ways of examining problems and solutions. It's something I've actually had to use as a programmer and that moment of someone saying "if we analyse this solution through this lens and it's fine then the solution is fine"- when my default lens that I didn't even know I was using told me otherwise- was a severe increase in my ability to deal with poo poo. Yah, I had a crack-ping moment about half a year ago when trawling through DnD that my worldview was fundamentally different than those of big L Liberals. It's why I started the OP the way I did, because if you reframe clashing worldviews as philosophical viewpoints and not political teams, people are far more willing to engage in good faith instead of kneejerk reject everything. Anyway, I know I've been telling you guys that I'm working on a Labor Theory explanation for the OP, and I assure you it's coming. Going forward, I think I'm going to post them here ITT first to make sure that I don't make similar mistakes like with the labeling of Marxism as 'Socialism', which is an important differentiation.
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Nov 9, 2020 23:40
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Yah, I had a crack-ping moment about half a year ago when trawling through DnD that my worldview was fundamentally different than those of big L Liberals. It's why I started the OP the way I did, because if you reframe clashing worldviews as philosophical viewpoints and not political teams, people are far more willing to engage in good faith instead of kneejerk reject everything. I did very much like your breakdown of liberalism- it might be good to get a post about neoliberalism and the idea of a default or subconscious framework going at some point. I've had one argument in D&D where someone responded to my accusation that they were approaching the issue at hand from a neoliberal viewpoint that unless you went to a right-wing tertiary institute you can't be considered a neoliberal, which is obviously wrong, but it's also the sort of statement that would take a couple of paragraphs to explain why it was wrong.
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Nov 9, 2020 23:44
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Somfin posted:I did very much like your breakdown of liberalism- it might be good to get a post about neoliberalism and the idea of a default or subconscious framework going at some point. I've had one argument in D&D where someone responded to my accusation that they were approaching the issue at hand from a neoliberal viewpoint that unless you went to a right-wing tertiary institute you can't be considered a neoliberal, which is obviously wrong, but it's also the sort of statement that would take a couple of paragraphs to explain why it was wrong. I'm sure other people will have different ideas, but my defining feature of "neoliberal" is a post-Keynesian economic outlook. IE, the government should not "manipulate" the economy via spending programs because they distort the market and cause bad unforeseen outcomes, the market is a force of good generally both because it is 'optimal' and because it increases choice (which is itself an a priori good), and government deficits and debt are bad. I most often spot them via the inclusion of market ideology and terminology in non-economics domains. IE, school choice, being able to choose a healthcare plan, "marketplace of ideas," and "the laboratories of democracy" are all flags that someone has internalized a market-centric view of the entire society and is defining "good" as "more market control" and "bad" as "less market control." If someone with that mindset is espousing some kind of government regulation, it's almost always going to be in service of opening more things to market exploitation, like municipal broadband pre-emption laws or using free trade laws to enable business interests to "open markets" (read: stripmine) areas that are trying to resist that. Edit: I think another way I would characterize it is "faith-based laissez faire economics." The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Nov 10, 2020 |
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Nov 10, 2020 01:36
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The Oldest Man posted:If someone with that mindset is espousing some kind of government regulation, it's almost always going to be in service of opening more things to market exploitation, like municipal broadband pre-emption laws or using free trade laws to enable business interests to "open markets" (read: stripmine) areas that are trying to resist that. Yeah, neoliberalism isn't pro-market, anti-goverment. It's just pro-market, period. Big government in the right activities can be a boon to the neoliberal agenda. Another kind of pro-market government intervention, perhaps the most important one, is incarceration. It removes from society people who aren't useful to the market as either producers or consumers, keeps the other plebs in line, creates new business opportunities in the prison complex...
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Nov 10, 2020 05:50
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:You've probably seen this already, but just in case: you might want to reach out to the US Federation of Worker Co-ops which seems to have resources to facilitate exactly this sort of thing. That said I don't know much about them outside of their existence, so YMMV. They are good. I messaged that guy, my job is helping peoppe stary co-ops so if anyone else is interested PM me and I'll share me e-mail. Do not talk to normal business/non-profit advisors about starting co-ops, imo, they are not at all the same thing and those folks are ignorant about to actively hostile towards the model as a rule. Edit: The federation is more like a network/trade association than an actual federation, and they don't really do development. You should see where the nearest USDA funded co-op developmwnt center is and contact them to start.
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Nov 10, 2020 06:22
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Social contract theory doesn't really holds out as a description of government, especially if it assumes consent. Oppressed people don't "consent" to oppression. Slaves do not "consent" to slavery. It is coercion that enforces these contracts, not consent. And calling it consent erases the violence necessary to enforce it. Going back a couple of pages to this good and thoughtful post. It’s probably correct that all political power arises from the threat of violence. I don’t think that totally invalidates the social contract model though. All the decorum and rituals and superstructure that have been built are, I think, ways of avoiding having to find out who wins a conflict where the outcome is uncertain. Only a moron would provoke a conflict they knew (or ought to have known) they were going to lose. But a lot of the time it’s uncertain whether the ruling class is capable of exercising its coercive power if it comes to a real (violent) conflict. So you have parliaments and elections and judicial review of government actions and the concept of individual rights and so on as a series of concessions by the powers that be that accumulate over time and are effortful to roll back. I think this is the concrete form of which the fiction of a “social contract” is an abstraction.
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Nov 10, 2020 09:56
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The most impactful challenge to the class framework of the old left was not postwar liberalism but the postwar New Left. Liberalism today might echo Galbraith's bemoaning of 'private opulence and public squalor', but it's much harder to see liberalism today echoing Galbraith's comment on the red schoolhouse. Likewise the sheer spitting contempt and hatred Marx has for the lumpenproletariat who betrayed the Commune to Napoleon III is barely gasping today on the far left. These were big changes! Both class-based vanguardism and elite-based liberal technocracy are passé... The individualism is calling from inside the house. I don't think it's contractarianism at fault.
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Nov 10, 2020 14:57
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Tom Hayden, writing in 1961:quote:The problems are immense. We of the left, however, find no rest in theory, and little hope in leadership. Liberal philosophy has dealt inadequately with the twentieth century. Marx, especially Marx the humanist*, has much to tell us but his conceptual tools are outmoded and his final vision implausible. The revolutionary leaders of the rising nations** have been mostly non-ideological, either forced to be so or preferring (as is the case of Guevara***) to forge their political views in the heat and exigencies of revolution and the present... ed notes: * a reference to Marxist humanism, i.e., Eurocommunism v1, a 1960s tendency formed in the wake of the Polish October/Hungarian uprising and the Secret Speech but not yet the Prague Spring - where an explicitly Marxist but undominated Central Europe still seemed possible ** in 1961 it was still far from obvious that the wave of decolonising Afro-Asian nations would mostly lean Soviet; the 1955 Bandung conference was quick to denounce Soviet domination unambiguously as imperialism, a good three decades before the Evil Empire. Proxy confrontations until then had mostly resolved in the West's favour, or at least successful containment: Greece, Korea. The Suez crisis mainly damaged Western unity but not irrevocably so. The Congo crisis was still bubbling. The Berlin crisis did not seem irresolvable. *** not a big fan of Khrushchev's 'peaceful coexistence' **** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Democratic_Action - shorthand for viewing the welfare state as both political instrument and goal ne plus ultra ***** can you see the trauma from a Great Depression and two World Wars making itself felt? From Geoff Mann's book on Keynesianism, seven decades later: ronya posted:Apropos of nothing, reading Geoff Mann's In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution, trying his best to steelman contemporary liberalism: Mike Beggs review with similar remarks, etc. Embracing the twin tumults of the free market and permissive society would be what eventually separates neoliberalism from postwar liberalism - but otherwise, the commonality is its enduring commitment to benevolently elite programmes ronya fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Nov 10, 2020 |
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Nov 10, 2020 16:38
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Beefeater1980 posted:Going back a couple of pages to this good and thoughtful post. It’s probably correct that all political power arises from the threat of violence. I don’t think that totally invalidates the social contract model though. It's equally plausible that the ruling class would win and knows it, but exerting direct physical control over the citizenry has historically been an expensive undertaking, and that the superstructure is a cost-saving measure that's become normalized. IE, our current form of democracy traces back to a compromise solution between a ruling aristocracy and a monarch, not to a compromise solution between a ruling class and a ruled class. Notice that decorum and the rule of law goes directly into the shredder as soon as there's a way for the ruling class to profit from ignoring it.
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Nov 10, 2020 16:41
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Paris 1968 showed that direct physical control of the citizenry in the capital is unnecessary; it has no legitimacy if it cannot win subsequent elections.
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Nov 10, 2020 17:04
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Beefeater1980 posted:Going back a couple of pages to this good and thoughtful post. It’s probably correct that all political power arises from the threat of violence. I don’t think that totally invalidates the social contract model though. Then, I would argue, that the model of Monopoly on Violence is a far more accurate description. It's a conservative narrative, to be sure, and it goes something like this: Everyone is naturally an rear end in a top hat, and in order for people to stop being assholes (stealing, raping, murdering) there has to be an overbearing SUPER rear end in a top hat who is more powerful than everyone and enforces the law. He has the Monopoly on Violence, the sole capacity and privilege to exert violence upon other people, and he uses it to maintain order. This narrative was used primarily to justify the monarchy against the rising tide of "democracy". Obviously, there's a lot of problems with this narrative: People aren't necessarily assholes, there's nothing stopping the king from being an rear end in a top hat, and the idea that the king would necessarily use the Monopoly on Violence solely to enforce a fair peace is an absurdity I don't think I have to explain. However, There is kernel of truth in this narrative: The biggest ape with the biggest club is in charge, and everyone lives in fear of getting bashed in the face so they do whatever he says. Pay your taxes? Better than the club. Starve instead of stealing? Better than the club. Go die in Vietnam? Better than...oops. And with this narrative, we can see the holes in the law and why they exist. 1. Sometimes the club isn't that scary. If you want me to risk my life in a jungle halfway across the globe, I might just tell you to go gently caress yourself. Burning a draft card or fleeing to Canada may be a far more preferable option because even if you catch the club it isn't as scary as being maimed or killed. 2. There are only so many apes with clubs to enforce the law. If I wanna smoke a joint and the apes say no, then you have to both discover that I'm smoking AND find me before the size of your club even matters. Edit: (how could I forget this one) 3. The reality is that if all the smaller apes with smaller clubs ever decide they don't like the big guy, they toss him out on his rear end. The big ape never really had unilateral control of anything, the reality is that obeying the big ape was less dangerous than not. When that flips, that's when there's some sort of upheaval. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Nov 10, 2020 |
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Nov 10, 2020 17:16
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Cpt_Obvious posted:
Going back to the Stirner reading earlier, I think one way you can tell the difference between a conservative and a neoliberal (even when they're espousing the exact same set of policies) because the former is totally comfortable with this as a philosophy of governance and typically won't find any need to couch it in an abstraction of natural rights. I (or my team) have power, we have the guns, we have the support of the leg-breakers, therefore we are in charge and we will use violence to stay there and keep order. This is OK because anyone else would just do the same thing in our place. Meanwhile, a neoliberal will support the exact same mechanisms of control (naked force being used against perceived threats and dissenters, for example) but will talk circles around the issue of why. Their conception of natural rights from the liberal heritage includes some ideas about personal liberty, but the reality of implementing a market-first philosophy in the real world is that a lot of people don't want to turn their ground water or whatever over to the control of Nestle and will resist that so they must be suppressed to enable market actors to invade. Reconciling self-determination with a religious belief in the superiority of the market as the ultimate hammer for all nails requires a lot of mental gymnastics.
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Nov 10, 2020 17:34
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The Oldest Man posted:Meanwhile, a neoliberal will support the exact same mechanisms of control (naked force being used against perceived threats and dissenters, for example) but will talk circles around the issue of why. Their conception of natural rights from the liberal heritage includes some ideas about personal liberty, but the reality of implementing a market-first philosophy in the real world is that a lot of people don't want to turn their ground water or whatever over to the control of Nestle and will resist that so they must be suppressed to enable market actors to invade. Reconciling self-determination with a religious belief in the superiority of the market as the ultimate hammer for all nails requires a lot of mental gymnastics. one of the clever ways I've heard it put is that neoliberals will chalk everything up to "market forces", and then will claim that that's non-violent, even when the phrase has the word "force" right there in the latter half!
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Nov 10, 2020 17:43
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The Oldest Man posted:Going back to the Stirner reading earlier, I think one way you can tell the difference between a conservative and a neoliberal (even when they're espousing the exact same set of policies) because the former is totally comfortable with this as a philosophy of governance and typically won't find any need to couch it in an abstraction of natural rights. I (or my team) have power, we have the guns, we have the support of the leg-breakers, therefore we are in charge and we will use violence to stay there and keep order. This is OK because anyone else would just do the same thing in our place. not really, it's really easy to synthesise. You might not want to sell your groundwater, but your local government might, or your central government might. "Who, exactly, has the right to sell something that may or may not have once been part of a commons?" is a question with a long pedigree, but the nub of the problem is not difficult to grasp This loops back to the metaphorical apes in the sense that one's tactical choice in clubs can slip away for completely unrelated reasons - e.g., one's standards might shift from "I'm satisfied with well water" to "I want piped pressurized water like everyone else in the developed world" - the increasing degree of integration into more complex networks of production means that existing social relations can go for a toss. A social relation to how water is extracted based in a community consensus - a community solidarity could be sustained through passive resistance and sabotage of defectors - can transform into individualist divergence in wants and needs through the introduction of production technologies developed elsewhere - it is not even necessary for anything to have been dissatisfactory locally ronya fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Nov 10, 2020 |
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Nov 10, 2020 17:49
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