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We were discussing book recs recently. Here is the anarchist review dog and a Vietnamese communist recommending that the Critique of the Gothaer Program is one of the first things a socialist should read. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lebgIDnaAXk
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Nov 14, 2020 16:24
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VictualSquid posted:We were discussing book recs recently. Here is the anarchist review dog and a Vietnamese communist recommending that the Critique of the Gothaer Program is one of the first things a socialist should read. I would also recommend that readers of Marx's criticism of the gotha program follow it up with Bakunin's criticism of the social democratic program which goes beyond the Marx/Lassalle divide and assesses the movement as a whole. https://archive.org/details/acritiqueofthegermansocial
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Nov 14, 2020 16:39
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I'm working on a piece which takes on the topic of existential risk and effective altruism from a socialist, leftist standpoint. I want to argue that the best way to reduce existential risk and support long-term flourishing would be to adopt socialism. What arguments can be made which support this view? Can Marx's theory of crises and contradictions in capitalism be applied to analyses of long-term existential risk? I feel like I have the beginnings of this in an ecological argument based on the current progression of climate change thanks to unchecked liberal capitalism, but I was looking for more solid theoretical foundations.
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Nov 14, 2020 17:47
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Disnesquick posted:I mean, we don't actually need parties at all. They are very much a construct of an incredibly antiquated semi-democratic system designed to support the management of a country by an established elite. In the case of the Anglosphere, these systems were designed somewhere in the 14th century. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest using 14th century technology to solve 21st century problems is pretty dumb. I guess this depends on what you mean by "parties". If you mean a group of people with the same platform sitting in a legislature, sure. In a broader sense though, you're always going to have groups and organizations rally around causes and collectively argue for certain things. I totally agree that democracies shouldn't require parties, but this line of argument is more about the enforcement of a single party. If what you're proposing is more direct democracy, but still freedom to assemble and collectively argue for something without an ossified party system, I don't think we're disagreeing.
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Nov 14, 2020 17:59
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DrSunshine posted:I'm working on a piece which takes on the topic of existential risk and effective altruism from a socialist, leftist standpoint. I want to argue that the best way to reduce existential risk and support long-term flourishing would be to adopt socialism. What arguments can be made which support this view? Can Marx's theory of crises and contradictions in capitalism be applied to analyses of long-term existential risk? I feel like I have the beginnings of this in an ecological argument based on the current progression of climate change thanks to unchecked liberal capitalism, but I was looking for more solid theoretical foundations. Sounds like you're trying to recreate Bookchin's ideas from scratch. I think you'd benefit from looking at his Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, and Post Scarcity Anarchism
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Nov 14, 2020 18:16
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Baka-nin posted:Sounds like you're trying to recreate Bookchin's ideas from scratch. I think you'd benefit from looking at his Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, and Post Scarcity Anarchism Thank you!
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Nov 14, 2020 18:41
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enki42 posted:I guess this depends on what you mean by "parties". If you mean a group of people with the same platform sitting in a legislature, sure. In a broader sense though, you're always going to have groups and organizations rally around causes and collectively argue for certain things. I am reading your question to be "how to maintain democracy under a single 'party'". I don't think there's any solution that isn't either an immediate, or eventual, nullification of that single party via its extention to every citizen. Otherwise you've effectively just recreated the bourgeoisie under a different name. Your point about being unable to prevent collective bargaining is an important one, and indeed collective bargaining is useful. It's also very dangerous when e.g. a sufficiently last group tries to use that mechanism to consolidate power (and thus recreate class). Any advanced form of socialism needs to have mechanisms to ensure that such larger-scale concentrations are disrupted as an emergent property of the dynamics of that society.
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Nov 14, 2020 19:08
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The Commodity Cycle, Capital Accumulation, and Exploitation Here we’re starting to get into the real core of Marxist theory. Where does profit come from? If we start with a sum of value, where does the surplus value come from? Just what is this “capital” at the heart of capitalism, and how does it work? Marx argued that there were two different basic ways people interact with money. Whether you’re employed or self-employed, direct producers sell in order to buy. Capitalists, on the other hand, buy in order to sell. Let’s take three different producers of commodities: Bob, who works as a cook making burgers in his wife’s diner; Linda, who pays Bob a wage and sells the burgers in her diner; and Mr. Fischoeder, who runs a chain of burger restaurants along the waterfront. Both Bob and Linda sell in order to buy. Bob sells his labour as a commodity – his ability to make burgers – and Linda sells the burgers produced by Bob to customers. In both cases they take the money they receive and spend it on the other commodities they need to live (because too many extra burgers lose any use-value to them – they need clothes, shelter, etc.) Their ultimate goals are the use-value inherent in these commodities. This is not true for Mr. Fischoeder. He isn’t directly producing anything – instead, he is a money-owner, a controller of the super-commodity. His goal is to buy commodities (even if that commodity is just labour) to sell them, thereby spending money to get money. He doesn’t actually want the use-value inherent in any of these things (he might not even like burgers!), but only the exchange-value. Here we see two cycles at work. Bob and Linda live in a cycle of Commodity>Money>Commodities, or C-M-C, where money is simply a middle step to buying more commodities. But for Mr. Fischoeder, money is the beginning and ending of the exchange, a reverse cycle to Bob and Linda: Money>Commodities>Money, or M-C-M. Of course, if the second M is equal to the first M, then Mr. Fischoeder has wasted his time. No capitalist would spend a thousand dollars to pay others to make and sell burgers if they were only going to get a thousand dollars back at the end of the cycle. Mr. Fischoeder seeks to profit from the exchange. Luckily for him, as the supercommodity, money can make more money; M-C-M can become M-C-M`, where M` is a greater sum than M. This difference between M` and M is the origin of surplus value. (Note: All this means that, contrary to liberal economics’ conception, Bob and Linda, as proles, interact with the economic system in a fundamentally different way than the capitalist class. It's a difference in kind, not in degree.) So money doesn’t actually become capital until it engages in this self-expanding value cycle – unless it becomes M`, it’s still just money. This surplus value can take three different forms: Profit, Interest, and Rent. If Mr. Fischoeder didn’t spend his own money in the initial burger-chain investment (which he probably didn’t), then some of M` needs to go to paying the interest. If Mr. Fischoeder rents any of the land or equipment in his burger restaurants, then another portion goes to paying rent. Anything left over becomes profit – surplus value to be used however Mr. Fischeoder likes, but primarily as either dividends (i.e., personal use) or as Capital: A new investment, which in turn will generate additional surplus value. Writ large, a capitalist society is therefore an Accumulation of Capital. Capital Accumulation is one of the defining principles of capitalism, the economic end goal of the whole system. Profit keeps the system going – without it, without this capital accumulation, everything grinds to a halt. The rich need to get richer. So let’s say Mr. Fischoeder spends $90 making X burgers, which he then sells for $100; he’s now selling his commodities above their value. The problem is, Mr. Fischoeder can’t just arbitrarily charge whatever he wants for his burgers – outside of monopolies or cartels, the market sees to it that commodities tend to have prices that hover around their value based on their average, socially required labour. Here’s a problem, though: If everyone charges $100 for X burgers, then Mr. Fischoeder isn’t actually gaining anything – or rather, whatever he gains as a seller he loses as a buyer. So this surplus value can’t occur in the exchange for it to truly be profit... It has to come from somewhere else, and Marxism argues that this surplus originates in process of production, between the M and M`. On its own, money only has the power to become commodities: M-C. And as we’ve seen, M-C doesn’t create surplus value. But more happens in M-C-M` than just exchange; whatever Mr. Fischoeder buys with M, he doesn’t simply re-sell those things, but rather he buys commodities to turn into new commodities which are in turn exchanged to M`. And the only commodity that is even capable of doing this is human labour, so necessarily this is where surplus value finds its origin, in transforming C to M`. Furthermore, since the exchange value of material commodities are socially determined (and hover around a particular value), this means that for M` to actually be greater than M, the capitalist must pay less for the human labour commodity than its actual value. This is the source of profit, and which Marx terms Exploitation. Without exploitation, capitalism cannot exist. Marx posted:But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. This is one of the major contradictions of capitalism: the capitalist class needs to pay the proletarian class as little as possible in order to maximize profit, and continually works to keep wages low... And yet they also need to sell the commodities produced by the system to that very same class they are underpaying, so in attempting to maximize profit they are necessarily harming their ability to actually exchange the commodities produced. Over a long enough period of time, this is going to lead to crises of liquidity, ever-shrinking proletarian buying power, and falling standards of living. Falstaff fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 14, 2020 20:21
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witchy posted:The "Lenin's testament" you're talking about is mostly likely a fake (per Kotkin). The other stuff Ferrinus is claiming is off though, as Stalin definitely did leverage his position as party secretary and close confidant of Lenin to consolidate power even before his formal ascension to leader of the USSR. Characterizing the succession as an open referendum ignores that it was pretty much a factional struggle among the elite central committee. The other thing about the NKVD remaining stagnant also has me scratching my head when it was disbanded in 1930 and then reconstituted wholesale in 1934 with the OGPU rolled into it to boot. What I mean is that power flowed back and forth between different people and factions but didn't consolidate in the sense that at one point it rested with the people but then after that point it rested with a minority of those people, or one person, or whatever. The NKVD is a good example - the Soviets straight dissolved the institution of the police upon the successful revolution, then basically created their own not-technically-police in order to deal with crime, then disbanded and reconstituted them again, etc. But the decisive power is not the day-to-day existence of a man with the formal title of NKVD head, the decisive power here is the power to form or disband an NKVD at all. Bureaucratic and interpersonal maneuvers involving trading on existing reputation and backroom dealing and so forth can change the specific day-to-day things that power does, but the source of that power is the Soviet people. It was "consolidated" all along. On the other hand, it was also "decentralized" and "democratic" all along because of the federated structure of the soviet state, the way that "higher" soviets were composed of representatives from "lower" soviets, and so on. A commonly-referenced Marxist concept is "commodity fetishism", referring to the way that people attribute power and vitality to commodities themselves because they don't realize that those commodities only have value as products of human labor. I think a lot of people are guilty of what you might call "institution fetishism", such that the effects, positive or negative, of class conflict expressing itself through this or that institution are blamed instead on the institution themselves. Like, if there simply hadn't been a central committee then all the bad things wouldn't have happened or at least would have happened with less severity. But that central committee merely reflects power; it doesn't create it.
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Nov 14, 2020 20:49
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But that critique applies just as well to our current society, and begs the question of why change anything at all?
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Nov 14, 2020 20:51
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OwlFancier posted:But that critique applies just as well to our current society, and begs the question of why change anything at all? The thing to change, of course, is which class is enforcing a dictatorship, not the specific outward form of that class dictatorship. Injustice doesn't actually flow from hierarchy (formal or informal), it flows from the dictates of the existing mode of production.
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Nov 14, 2020 20:58
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I feel like that collapses if you think there are literally any other factors involved in society than production. And also if you believe in literally any concept of institutional or social inertia.
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Nov 14, 2020 21:10
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OwlFancier posted:I feel like that collapses if you think there are literally any other factors involved in society than production. And also if you believe in literally any concept of institutional or social inertia. Institutional and social inertia are real but they're not decisive. Like, there's also such things as institutional and social decay, or simply cultural drift. What decides if an institution will stagnate, strengthen, mutate, or crumble? Not some inborn, essential power of institutions as institutions but the social forces that actually give rise to those institutions and which those institutions mediate in turn. Marx and Lenin predicted that institutions of state repression would naturally decay as their actual source - class conflict - became less pressing. We should definitely expect the obverse to be true: the sharper class conflict, the more prominent and resource-rich those institutions will become. But we shouldn't put the cart before the horse.
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Nov 14, 2020 21:17
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Ferrinus posted:Injustice doesn't actually flow from hierarchy (formal or informal), it flows from the dictates of the existing mode of production. I would strongly disagree here and make the case that injustice does actually flow from hierarchy, whatever the means of production. I would evidence this with the case of Yugoslavian self-management giving rise to a beaurocratic class. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that hierarchical relationships are predisposed to the emergence of class, and therefore class conflict. I would go further that justice is a concept that can only be used to arbitrate between equals and therefore any inter-class dynamic will be fundamentally unjust. The (supposed) marriage of equality under law and gross inequality under economy as the primary pillar of Liberalism is what I would point to as it's most fundemental contradiction. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Nov 14, 2020 |
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Nov 14, 2020 21:55
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Disnesquick posted:I would strongly disagree here and make the case that injustice does actually flow from hierarchy, whatever the means of production. I would evidence this with the case of Yugoslavian self-management giving rise to a beaurocratic class. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that hierarchical relationships are predisposed to the emergence of class, and therefore class conflict. Okay, wait. Putting aside for a moment the specific foibles of Yugoslavian "market socialism", you're telling me that self-management gave rise to a bureaucracy. Isn't that an example of hierarchy springing from some existing relation of production, rather than hierarchy coming first and causing problems in and of itself? In general I'm not really sure about your verbiage and bedrock assumptions here, because a bureaucracy isn't the same thing as a class in Marxist terms and class itself originating from hierarchy rather than the two being sides of the same coin doesn't really track with those ideas as I understand them.
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Nov 14, 2020 23:02
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Ferrinus posted:Okay, wait. Putting aside for a moment the specific foibles of Yugoslavian "market socialism", you're telling me that self-management gave rise to a bureaucracy. Isn't that an example of hierarchy springing from some existing relation of production, rather than hierarchy coming first and causing problems in and of itself? I think you're focussing too much on the term beaurocracy here. The fundamental point is that allowing hierarchy to creep into what should be a post-class mode of production will have the innevitable result of class reproduction. The hierarchy does come first, even when it's just a whiff.
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Nov 15, 2020 00:22
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Falstaff posted:This is one of the major contradictions of capitalism: the capitalist class needs to pay the proletarian class as little as possible in order to maximize profit, and continually works to keep wages low... And yet they also need to sell the commodities produced by the system to that very same class they are underpaying, so in attempting to maximize profit they are necessarily harming their ability to actually exchange the commodities produced. Over a long enough period of time, this is going to lead to crises of liquidity, ever-shrinking proletarian buying power, and falling standards of living. to clarify an important point: Marxian firms do not maximize profit, but instead maximize the rate of profit (ratio of surplus value to capital invested) this is why Marxian Mr Fischoeder does not at any point say: welp my additional capital accumulation will earn a negative return at the margin, so I'm going to just spend on on a holiday instead Firms fundamentally behave differently in the analytical-Marxism formalism; it is from these differences that the different larger behaviour emerges* - this why the Marxian macroeconomy overaccumulates capital and immiserates labour (because it produces too much capital, even beyond the point of profit maximization, and produces too little consumption goods, even as the soaring capital accumulated makes whatever remaining employed labour ever yet more productive**). And yet it cannot stop because, again, Marxian firms do not maximize profit * Kaleckians and other Marx/Keynes-synthesis "crisis of overaccumulation" schools also typically bundle a somewhat different theory of the money and labour markets. The Marxian firm theory alone yields overaccumulation but does not (off the top of my head anyway) generally yield other common left-wing-heterodox-econ concepts like a paradox of (labour) costs (the claim that decreasing wage levels tends to decrease rather than increase employment - the labour-market mirror of the Keynesian paradox of thrift in the money market). The important point here is that if one forces Marx into an analytical box of neoclassically rational individuals doing marginally rational things, the Marxist characteristics emerge from different agent behaviours in the model and much of the literary desiderata is necessarily discarded or trivialized. The interesting behaviour in the framework entirely rides on whether the stylization of what-firms-really-maximize is true in reality (or whatever other choice of bolt-ons to an otherwise neoclassical analytical formalism) ** compare the other classical heterodox school still standing today, the Austrians, who base their irrational capital investment on a different argument but have otherwise strikingly similar macroeconomic dynamics. As I remarked previously upthread, all the classical schools tend to share this dynamic. ronya fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 15, 2020 02:00
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 Public Service AnnouncementBaka-nin is sharing a big archive of cool stuff: Baka-nin posted:Over the years I've been building an archive of texts on labour history, revolutions, theory and criticism. Currently there's about a 1000 entries (that are ok to share around) including essays, blogs, translations, comic books, art, audio tapes, documentaries and films. There's a lot there and I'd hate for a hard drive crash to take everything, and its good to share, so here's a couple of ways to access them. Will be added to the OP. Thanks a ton Baka-nin!
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Nov 15, 2020 02:46
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Disnesquick posted:I think you're focussing too much on the term beaurocracy here. The fundamental point is that allowing hierarchy to creep into what should be a post-class mode of production will have the innevitable result of class reproduction. The hierarchy does come first, even when it's just a whiff. Can you explain where you think hierarchy comes from and what it does in this formulation? Maybe give an example? It's not like pre-, currently-, or post-socialist Yugoslavia was a classless society.
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Nov 15, 2020 03:00
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While I agree that the mode of production necessitates some things, like cops, social classes etc, I also think that hierarchies can just be self sustaining, that they have their own inertia, especially in a world where they are so prevalent because people grow up believing them to be good and reproduce that belief. It's visible in poo poo like racism, sexism, homophobia etc, the establishment of hierarchies of ways of being just for the sake of it. Sure they might be used by capitalists to uphold their position, but there are a lot of people who just genuinely think they're good, who genuinely believe in them, and I think that the fight against that sort of thing is pretty much a separate thing from the fight to change the mode of production in society. I think that because those things can be used as weapons for the capitalist class that fighting them is very useful to the fight to change the mode of production but I also think that it is entirely possible for people and societies that are committed to changing the mode of production to just... not care about fixing those things or even to uphold them. The idea that all injustice is rooted in production is just... bizzare? There are clearly self sustaining forms of hierarchy that have bugger all to do with production and can serve as an axis along which to reproduce classes if you somehow removed the current ones. Specifically in the context of recreating classes through hierarchical organization in production though, the problem I would anticipate is that if you start deferring people's decision making to representatives, that encourages people to become politically disengaged. I think that is primarily why so many people are so bad at politics now, in fact, because our political system almost entirely removes people from the decision making process, they can vote for representatives but the representatives then go and deliberate together, and form committees, and parties, and branches of government and all that poo poo, and fundamentally the effect is that there is a central government that makes the decisions be it the national or the local government, and you as a person have next to no ability to exert direct control over your surroundings, your home, your community, your workplace, it is all controlled by some institution that might as well be on the moon for all it actually connects to you. And as people become politically disengaged it degrades the ability of the political process to function. I believe that people need a very tangible link in their political practice to feel like it is worth doing and especially to want to expend time and effort understanding it. The lack of that link, the abstraction of decision into things that are done by representatives is what leads people to become politically careless, and even if you had things like recall mechanisms, why would they get used? If people are used to delegating their decision making to others why would they care? Would they retain the ability to give a poo poo about carefully vetting the people they elect? Or does it breed political complacency? Does it start to breed notions of "electability" where there is a sort of self-sustaining idea of what people must do to be "electable" which serves to narrow the range of acceptable political expression? Does it not start to build a political class? A group with distinct power from the majority of people (in practice even if not technically, technically everyone could write in lenin for the presidency, after all, but the existence of mainstream political groups ensure that political energy is discharged among lines amenable to those groups and their existence creates an obstacle to the establishment of any new or divergent groups, they have their own agenda created from among the ideas of their serving members and as full time politicians they have different material interests than the people they represent). Fundamentally I think as much as possible of people's lives needs to be centered very directly within their immediate experience, their decision making needs to concern their immediate surroundings as much as possible and an immediately local assembly with direct power over their surroundings should be the primary form of political activity in their lives. You need that immediate link and feedback from decision to action to change in circumstances, otherwise politics becomes something you engage less and less with, you're not making decisions any more, you're picking someone else to talk to a bunch of other people you never see so they can make decisions maybe. While we doubtless want some things to exist that require a degree of centralization and abstraction of decision making away from people's immediate experience, I think that having that immediate political sphere is important for keeping people engaged and will help them to make the occasional more remote decision with greater care, not least because they would have a strong, politically active group with which to discuss it. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:49 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 15, 2020 03:23
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Does anyone have any resources or insights about how marxist analysis applies to the public sector? I know many people employed here and it's difficult to make the traditional arguments because there isn't really a 'capitalist' boss as such, and these workplaces are often very under-resourced anyway even though the stated goal of everyone involved is basically the same (for examples council homeless engagement services).
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Nov 15, 2020 06:02
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Everything contains contradictions, and the interplay of those contradictions against each other and the surrounding context governs each thing's ongoing transformation. Any institution, hierarchical or otherwise, contains a self-sustaining tendency. However, it also contains an opposite tendency to decay and attenuate. Many hierarchies have loosened or outright dissolved because the conditions that create and strengthen them have vanished. For instance, fewer people affiliate themselves with organized religion now than twenty or fifty or a hundred years ago, despite the fact that organized religion is a largely hierarchical institution with very powerful ideological and material incentives to sustain and increase its power (and which is often useful to capital). Under capitalism, much that is solid melts into air! It's not actually philosophically tenuous to be against "hierarchy" generally because you just end up playing word games. Whether something is hierarchical or centralized or coercive or whatever is basically a matter of diction. Any kind of artifice or decision-making on a medium to large scale will necessarily involve feats of task delegation and division of labor that will be painted as hierarchical, authoritarian, or whatever by someone who's already decided that they're your enemy for other reasons. Separately, political engagement is a limited resource. People with lives to lead and mouths to feed don't actually have huge reserves of time and psychic energy with which to adjudicate questions of governance, and it's an imposition (though often a small one) on their lives to get them to weigh in on political questions. Often that imposition needs to be made because the questions are both important and impossible to answer without public buy-in. Nevertheless, the term "public servant" exists for a reason - it's the mayor's job to take care of a bunch of crap I don't want to deal with! In my leftist organizing, I avoid actual leadership positions like the plague because they involve a ton of social and administrative work I don't want to deal with; I much prefer to help with art or copyediting or whatever. Does this mean that the people who do take up leadership roles are slowly metastasizing into a political "class" with power over me? No! A class is a group of people with a distinct relationship to the means of production, not just, like... some guys with similar jobs. Like, do you think politicians in America are a distinct class? Do you think the power of a Trump, Obama, or Bush is somehow distinct from the power of an Amazon or a Lockheed Martin? To imagine that liberal democracies are the way they are because of voter complacency and depoliticization isn't materialist. Complacency and depoliticization are the result, not the cause, of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. They need to be actively manufactured by such institutions as the police and the media. They don't creep in and corrupt things that would have been good otherwise.
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Nov 15, 2020 06:24
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I think that it is both, that conditions affect people and people affect conditions, people are material things and their thoughts, en masse, create very material effects, societies are full of the ambient values and habits of the people that comprise them and they can perpetuate themselves and the conditions of the world that sustain them. I do not think it makes sense to view people as purely constructed by only certain aspects of society rather than the whole thing, or to suggest that the way they are constructed does not feed back into society. Abstration of power creates apathy, creates further absraction of power, creates further apathy. I do not see it as a one way relationship. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 06:37 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 15, 2020 06:32
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if you already think the general meetings of voluntary clubs and societies are tedious and yet full of traps for the unwary - so how about that sinking fund motion, huh - imagine a club where it's EGM time all the time and you can't opt out
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Nov 15, 2020 07:21
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OwlFancier posted:While I agree that the mode of production necessitates some things, like cops, social classes etc, I also think that hierarchies can just be self sustaining, that they have their own inertia, especially in a world where they are so prevalent because people grow up believing them to be good and reproduce that belief. It's visible in poo poo like racism, sexism, homophobia etc, the establishment of hierarchies of ways of being just for the sake of it. Sure they might be used by capitalists to uphold their position, but there are a lot of people who just genuinely think they're good, who genuinely believe in them, and I think that the fight against that sort of thing is pretty much a separate thing from the fight to change the mode of production in society. I think that because those things can be used as weapons for the capitalist class that fighting them is very useful to the fight to change the mode of production but I also think that it is entirely possible for people and societies that are committed to changing the mode of production to just... not care about fixing those things or even to uphold them. The idea that all injustice is rooted in production is just... bizzare? There are clearly self sustaining forms of hierarchy that have bugger all to do with production and can serve as an axis along which to reproduce classes if you somehow removed the current ones. Historical materialism doesn't claim that production determines everything about society, it claims that it sets the hard limits around what a society can be like. The hierarchical organization of various institutions is part of those hard limits. Material power to influence people rules, the ability to do the most with the least is what counts. For instance, to defeat racism for good, a non-racist society has to be considerably better able to utilize its resources than a racist one. And even though hierarchies *seek* to sustain themselves, once a non-racist society is considerably better able to utilize its resources, there's rather little a racist ruling hierarchy somewhere else can do to hold onto its power long-term. But between those two points, there's a long period when the two kinds of society will be evenly enough matched that both have trouble knocking each other out, and the fight can still go either way. Moreover, in the middle of a struggle to change society, a progressive movement is forced to rely on socially backward structures while they still haven't figured out progressive alternatives that are more effective as well. For one, society is going to rely on a vertical military hierarchy where all sorts of privileged elements are going to rise to the top because they had better opportunities to become effective leaders. This has historically been true of both revolutionary societies and reformist progressive societies. So there's also a struggle to defend social progress against those backward forms of organization over the long term, because it takes time to render them unnecessary and discardable. And as long as the two sides are materially evenly matched, the fight within a society can go either way as well. In conclusion, there are no two separate struggles, they're one interconnected struggle: the struggle to render all these hierarchical forms of organization into outdated technology that can't materially compete against the new free, nonhierarchical forms of organization. It's not possible to make it by just focusing on one half or the other, either the forces of production or the relationships between people. If the forces of production are evolved in a way that doesn't require organizing the people in a different way, they're just as useful to the backward social forms than the progressive ones, and the fight continues. If the relations between people are evolved in a way that doesn't evolve the forces of production, the people haven't gained any additional power to defeat the backward social forms for good. You either win both struggles or you win neither. But the struggle over production is fundamental, because it determines whether all other victories can be taken away in an instant or not.
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Nov 15, 2020 13:49
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Ferrinus posted:It's not actually philosophically tenuous to be against "hierarchy" generally because you just end up playing word games. Whether something is hierarchical or centralized or coercive or whatever is basically a matter of diction. Any kind of artifice or decision-making on a medium to large scale will necessarily involve feats of task delegation and division of labor that will be painted as hierarchical, authoritarian, or whatever by someone who's already decided that they're your enemy for other reasons. Assuming you meant tenable there. I don't think that's true. Hierarchy is a pretty well-defined dynamic and fundamentally a matter of power imbalance. Between two equals, coercion cannot exist without a MAD aspect. If we're equally good fighters, you can't really coerce me with a knife because the fight will kill both of us. Even if you did convince me that you're insane enough to actually choose that outcome rather than accept equality, it's not a sustainable way to gain leverage over a community because you're just one person and solidarity will create a very firm power imbalance of the many against the one. Hierarchy, however, implies that, for whatever coercive reason (whether structural or rooted in direct violence), you can apply a small amount of labor (telling me what to do) in exchange for a large amount of labor (I perform some intensive task). Hierarchical communism assumes that the hierarchy can be tamed by ensuring the high-power individual never exploits this dynamic for personal gain, only for the good of the community but as the labor-transfer is the foundation of that dynamic, it's already capitalist in nature. Founding a socialist society on capitalist relationships and then trying to apply other controls to attempt to reign in the negative outcomes innate to those relationships has its own collapse built in to its genesis. Ferrinus posted:Separately, political engagement is a limited resource. People with lives to lead and mouths to feed don't actually have huge reserves of time and psychic energy with which to adjudicate questions of governance, and it's an imposition (though often a small one) on their lives to get them to weigh in on political questions. Often that imposition needs to be made because the questions are both important and impossible to answer without public buy-in. Nevertheless, the term "public servant" exists for a reason - it's the mayor's job to take care of a bunch of crap I don't want to deal with! In my leftist organizing, I avoid actual leadership positions like the plague because they involve a ton of social and administrative work I don't want to deal with; I much prefer to help with art or copyediting or whatever. Does this mean that the people who do take up leadership roles are slowly metastasizing into a political "class" with power over me? No! A class is a group of people with a distinct relationship to the means of production, not just, like... some guys with similar jobs. I absolutely hate dealing with political decision-making too but I think OwlFancier hit the nail bang on its head (with the people's hammer of course). Disengagement is absolutely toxic to heterarchy, unfortunately. The time put in is (and must be recognized) as a burden on each citizen. We don't engage entirely for selfish reasons of ensuring our own interests are represented but also because the engagement of every citizen is a hard requirement to keep the system working. We've seen what happened to the Keynsian society when people disengage: the elite can buy off the disengaged generation and then recreate the horrors of Liberalism for everyone after that. Political engagement keeps the structures alive for all the comrades to come as well as those currently extant and that is worth the burden. Might be worth drawing a parallel with Greek ideas around democracy here, since some of those societies (I'm mainly thinking of Athens) also cast politics as a responsibility rather than a privilege. Ferrinus posted:Like, do you think politicians in America are a distinct class? Do you think the power of a Trump, Obama, or Bush is somehow distinct from the power of an Amazon or a Lockheed Martin? To imagine that liberal democracies are the way they are because of voter complacency and depoliticization isn't materialist. Complacency and depoliticization are the result, not the cause, of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. They need to be actively manufactured by such institutions as the police and the media. They don't creep in and corrupt things that would have been good otherwise. Yes, I think politicians across Liberal democracies are a distinct class. My primary experience before coming to the States has been in the UK Labour party, where white collar managerial types have crept in at every level and utilized the fragments of power they were granted to make it nigh impossible to oust them. The disengagement here came in the fracturing of the Unions, on which the party was based pre-80s. The only medium for actually being heard for most members is now tedious meetings which have very little, if any, observable effect on the material so, for the average worker, are not worth bothering with due to the greater pressures on their time. As you point out yourself, these people have mouths to feed. For the more PMC types without those pressures, the marginal utility cost of regular attendance is lower so they can more consistently ossify the structures around themselves. This is, I believe, an entirely materialist dynamic. Hierarchy begets class and class begets hierarchy. The two are so entwined as to be barely distinguished, at least for anarchist thinkers. I absolutely believe that these things creep in and corrupt things that were otherwise good (my change in the wording here from.your precise words is exactly intentional) and keeping that corruption at bay is a work that cannot ever cease. The price of peace is eternal vigilence. Ferrinus posted:Can you explain where you think hierarchy comes from and what it does in this formulation? Maybe give an example? It's not like pre-, currently-, or post-socialist Yugoslavia was a classless society. In the self-management of Yugoslavia, workers were meant to handle their own beaurocracy, e.g. the white collar stuff like accounts and planning. Basically a real anarcho-syndicalist setup. However, more-and-more these tasks were delegated to a distinct set of workers (i.e. a nascent beaurocratic class) who ended up leveraging their control over the other workers for personal benefit, creating class and class conflict out of the hierarchy that was allowed to creep in. I'd have to go looking for some real references on this particular one. I think there was a Jacobin article that skimmed on it. My general observation on all the above is that hierarchic relationships can be more efficient in terms of specializing the concept of leadership to managerial workers. However the side-effects of that specialization are too dangerous for us to handle right now, with existing social technology/science. Maybe a future innovation will solve that and square to circle to allow hierarchy without class dynamics but, right now, I am firmly of the belief that we cannot effectively disentangle the knot and hierarchy will reproduce class, slowly but surely.
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Nov 15, 2020 15:50
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Disnesquick posted:I absolutely hate dealing with political decision-making too but I think OwlFancier hit the nail bang on its head (with the people's hammer of course). Disengagement is absolutely toxic to heterarchy, unfortunately. The time put in is (and must be recognized) as a burden on each citizen. We don't engage entirely for selfish reasons of ensuring our own interests are represented but also because the engagement of every citizen is a hard requirement to keep the system working. We've seen what happened to the Keynsian society when people disengage: the elite can buy off the disengaged generation and then recreate the horrors of Liberalism for everyone after that. Political engagement keeps the structures alive for all the comrades to come as well as those currently extant and that is worth the burden. Might be worth drawing a parallel with Greek ideas around democracy here, since some of those societies (I'm mainly thinking of Athens) also cast politics as a responsibility rather than a privilege. This is also why I place the emphasis on immediacy. Politics is shite, but getting together with people you know to work on a project together that you materially benefit from is not. If you know the people you're doing it with and you can see the immediate benefit it becomes a lot less tiresome. Not all things can be organized that way but I think you can put a lot of people's immediate workplace and residential governance into that sort of structure.
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Nov 15, 2020 16:06
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OwlFancier posted:This is also why I place the emphasis on immediacy. Politics is shite, but getting together with people you know to work on a project together that you materially benefit from is not. If you know the people you're doing it with and you can see the immediate benefit it becomes a lot less tiresome. Not all things can be organized that way but I think you can put a lot of people's immediate workplace and residential governance into that sort of structure. Oh for sure. I only didn't put this kind of thing up there because I'd felt you'd already made this point and there wasn't much to gain from restating it. ronya posted:if you already think the general meetings of voluntary clubs and societies are tedious and yet full of traps for the unwary - so how about that sinking fund motion, huh - imagine a club where it's EGM time all the time and you can't opt out That's basically any office job. AnSyn meetings are much radder and tend to involve better post-meeting socializing. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 15, 2020 16:28
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Disnesquick posted:Assuming you meant tenable there. I dunno about what exactly you're referring to by "hierarchical communism", but the highly developed forms don't expect to "tame" hierarchy or ensure that individuals don't exploit their positions for personal gain or that hierarchy over the economy doesn't reproduce class or capitalist relations. It's the opposite, really. They expect to produce a situation where those individuals can't organize among themselves to seriously betray society without destroying themselves in the process. Basically, the revolution isn't over as long as they exist. They just can't be gotten rid of with force because they're historically necessary. They have to be made unnecessary first. People don't found socialist societies on capitalist relationships and then attempt to reign in the capitalist institutions because they're dumb or opportunist, they do it because those are the cards they've been dealt. Capitalist technology isn't designed to allow workers to self-manage it, it only lets workers be the ones to give political and board-of-director style direction to economic development. The ability to self-manage has to be built up from first principles so that management isn't some special thing only a select educated few can do. The understanding of that was already in at least Engels's writings. Anarchists feuded with him & Marx for a reason: they were in favor of letting actual industrial capitalists initially keep their private enterprises and so on, while the workers would gradually learn to take over more and more of the everyday functions of enterprise.
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Nov 15, 2020 18:04
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Principal-agent problems caused by professionalized management are a very real threat to worker control of the means. EDIT: While I am personally sympathetic to the anarchist idea that systems of dominance self-perpetuate and should be avoided to the greatest extent possible, I don't think that there is a ton of value over arguing wether 'heirarchy is bad' like, on principle, rather than in the context of specific organizational forms from specific episodes in history. Crumbskull fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 15, 2020 19:23
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ronya posted:if you already think the general meetings of voluntary clubs and societies are tedious and yet full of traps for the unwary - so how about that sinking fund motion, huh - imagine a club where it's EGM time all the time and you can't opt out You seem well versed in economic theory and also to see some big flaws with marxian analysis, I'm wondering if there is an economic theory that you personally feel has more validity and/or use?
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Nov 15, 2020 19:28
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uncop posted:I dunno about what exactly you're referring to by "hierarchical communism", but the highly developed forms don't expect to "tame" hierarchy or ensure that individuals don't exploit their positions for personal gain or that hierarchy over the economy doesn't reproduce class or capitalist relations. It's the opposite, really. Hierarchic communism would be the permanent revolutionary vanguard model. The idea that you concentrate power into a party apparatus in order to fundamentally change the means of production with the total intention of disassembling that at some point in a future that never quite happens. Eventually you just admit that you've recreated class and bam! fuerdai. I'm not convinced that Bakunin/Marx feuds from a hundred years ago have much relevance now. Yeah, I basically agree that you work with what you have but the whole point of anarcho-syndicalism is Praxis Now. We can run all kinds of small scale experiments without having to lean on capitalist social tech. The problem we have is that it's become pretty clear that social collapse doesn't have to result in socialism. That manifest destiny of lazy Marxism has no place on a planet where four degrees of warming and gigadeaths are already locked in. It's going to take effort and vision to avoid a return to fedualism. We just don't have the luxury of time any more.
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Nov 15, 2020 21:48
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Disnesquick posted:Assuming you meant tenable there. Yeah, I meant tenable, that was a brain fart. What I mean when I say that you're playing word games is that you're only calling power imbalances hierarchies when it suits you. For instance, there's a power imbalancewhen most but not all members of some kind of anarchist commune decide to undertake a project that's unpopular with the minority; the minority can't just sabotage it or gently caress off or whatever because they still depend on the majority for other survival needs and social validation and so on. Presumably, that's not a "hierarchy" because the power imbalance is between many people and a few people, rather than one powerful person and one weak person. But here's the thing: if I'm a Soviet bureaucrat and you're a lowly factory worker, my ability to gently caress with you is also a matter of the many versus the few. I can't magically make you do things using my superior fighting ability. What I can do is leverage the fact that I am on the side of the majority; most people in our society agree that everyone, you included, should undertake some kind of project, and if you disagree that's tough cookies because you'll lose social standing or maybe even physical goods if you go against the grain. Material factors, principally the weight of numbers, are the decisive element in the exertion of power. "Hierarchy" is a way to describe some such imbalances. It has no magic power in and of itself. You're also playing fast and loose with "capitalist". Capitalism isn't when somebody tells you what to do. Capitalism is when the means of production are held in private and goods are produced principally for their exchange values in search of profit. Division of labor, or the transfer of labor, or the creation of more value than was expended in an act of labor, are not actually capitalism. They both preceded capitalism and will outlive it. Also, this "for personal gain" stuff is silly. You think that Stalin did all the authoritarian totalitarian hierarchy stuff for personal gain? Guy lived in an apartment with a roommate! quote:I absolutely hate dealing with political decision-making too but I think OwlFancier hit the nail bang on its head (with the people's hammer of course). Disengagement is absolutely toxic to heterarchy, unfortunately. The time put in is (and must be recognized) as a burden on each citizen. We don't engage entirely for selfish reasons of ensuring our own interests are represented but also because the engagement of every citizen is a hard requirement to keep the system working. We've seen what happened to the Keynsian society when people disengage: the elite can buy off the disengaged generation and then recreate the horrors of Liberalism for everyone after that. Political engagement keeps the structures alive for all the comrades to come as well as those currently extant and that is worth the burden. Might be worth drawing a parallel with Greek ideas around democracy here, since some of those societies (I'm mainly thinking of Athens) also cast politics as a responsibility rather than a privilege. Political disengagement is an important hurdle for the left, generally, to overcome in order to carry out its project, so I'm not pretending it's trivial or something. However, like I said, you are putting the cart before the horse. It's not materialist to claim that Keynesian economic stimulus dried up because the people disengaged, like if only more of the working class had done a better job of keeping up with the news and attending block meetings then the rate of profit would have stopped falling and the bourgeoisie wouldn't have had to strip all the copper out of the social safety net. These things don't happen because people in compromising circumstances start thinking bad thoughts! quote:Yes, I think politicians across Liberal democracies are a distinct class. My primary experience before coming to the States has been in the UK Labour party, where white collar managerial types have crept in at every level and utilized the fragments of power they were granted to make it nigh impossible to oust them. The disengagement here came in the fracturing of the Unions, on which the party was based pre-80s. The only medium for actually being heard for most members is now tedious meetings which have very little, if any, observable effect on the material so, for the average worker, are not worth bothering with due to the greater pressures on their time. As you point out yourself, these people have mouths to feed. For the more PMC types without those pressures, the marginal utility cost of regular attendance is lower so they can more consistently ossify the structures around themselves. Alright so I flatly and totally disagree on your basic wording here; politicians aren't a class. A class is a social group with a particular relationship to the means of production (like, they own them and use them to extract profits, or they don't own them and must sell their labor-power to survive, or they own a little bit but are on the cusp). "Politician" is not itself a class, it's a job. It is often useful to distinguish between people based on their jobs (there are currently significant material differences between programmers and janitors, for instance), but if you start slinging the word class around willy-nilly you'll just end up causing confusion. Like, the history of all heretofore existing societies is the history of class struggle, right? So, like, the struggle between politicians and business owners? No!!! Politicians are the representatives of particular classes. They certainly have their own perks and privileges and social conventions, but so do electricians. To continue my previous example: Barack Obama is not somehow on a different team from Jeff Bezos. He's not a representative of the class of politicians (or former politicians, I guess), he's a representative of the bourgeoisie. You don't even have to be in a class to be on its "team" - cops by and large don't own private property from which they reap profits, but they're still servants of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie on the final estimation, not members of some kind of distinct "cop class" struggles against other classes and therefore drives history. quote:In the self-management of Yugoslavia, workers were meant to handle their own beaurocracy, e.g. the white collar stuff like accounts and planning. Basically a real anarcho-syndicalist setup. However, more-and-more these tasks were delegated to a distinct set of workers (i.e. a nascent beaurocratic class) who ended up leveraging their control over the other workers for personal benefit, creating class and class conflict out of the hierarchy that was allowed to creep in. I'd have to go looking for some real references on this particular one. I think there was a Jacobin article that skimmed on it. Well the problem I have here is that at no point was Yugoslavia a classless society. Hierarchy didn't "reproduce" class; the bourgeoisie are just going to be waiting in the wings in any socialist project (and they'll frequently be able to count on class solidarity from the bourgeoisie of other countries), and if you fail to repress them while drifting close and closer to having regular-rear end profit-generating free markets then they're going to regenerate sooner or later. It's a "this is how you get ants" situation. The alternative explanation - that humans simply aren't psychologically ready to engage in the delegation of labor, and we need to stop all specialized administrative work until we can figure out what's going on - just doesn't scan.
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Nov 15, 2020 22:25
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Ferrinus posted:A class is a social group with a particular relationship to the means of production (like, they own them and use them to extract profits, or they don't own them and must sell their labor-power to survive, or they own a little bit but are on the cusp). "Politician" is not itself a class, it's a job. It is often useful to distinguish between people based on their jobs (there are currently significant material differences between programmers and janitors, for instance), but if you start slinging the word class around willy-nilly you'll just end up causing confusion. Like, the history of all heretofore existing societies is the history of class struggle, right? So, like, the struggle between politicians and business owners? No!!! Politicians are the representatives of particular classes. They certainly have their own perks and privileges and social conventions, but so do electricians. I think this comes close to but does not demonstrate why a group of people with particular power can not be a driving force in history. Saying "it's not a class because class only relates to the means of production" and "things that do not relate to the means of production cannot drive history" are both statements but one does not prove the other, and largely I think seems to be trying to gatekeep the term "class" as a means of dismissing the possibility of other historical drivers or the application of historical forces to anything other than production. While I acknowledge that production certainly has a great primacy among historical forces I do not believe it is the only one and I am highly dubious of people who do. It is possible to suggest that particular roles have more or less weight on driving the world but I do not think it is correct to say "there is literally only one role that matters" the idea that all of history is class struggle only makes sense if you have a more inclusive concept of what classes are. I think marx calls it base and superstructure, I would suggest that there isn't really a big difference between base and superstructure, they both reinforce each other and both have a degree of independent inertia. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 15, 2020 22:31
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OwlFancier posted:I think this comes close to but does not demonstrate why a group of people with particular power can not be a driving force in history. Saying "it's not a class because class only relates to the means of production" and "things that do not relate to the means of production cannot drive history" are both statements but one does not prove the other, and largely I think seems to be trying to gatekeep the term "class" as a means of dismissing the possibility of other historical drivers or the application of historical forces to anything other than production. While I acknowledge that production certainly has a great primacy among historical forces I do not believe it is the only one and I am highly dubious of people who do. There's a dialectical relationship between base and superstructure, but there's a reason that one is called the "base" and the other the "superstructure" rather than their being called, I don't know, the east side and the west side. In the final estimation the superstructure rests on the base, not the other way around. Barack Obama, personally, exerts a great deal of power and influence. Things have happened on the historical scale that would not have happened if that one man hadn't been in the driver's seat of the American empire. But from where does he get that power? What actually enables him to act on the world stage, and, at the same time, restricts his ability to act on the world stage? Could Obama have nationalized Amazon if some leftist had managed to sneak into his house and shoot him with a mind control dart shortly after he took office?
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Nov 15, 2020 22:58
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That's conflating individuals with social structures. The question that would be more appropriate is not whether obama specifically had the presidency, the question is what effect does the existence of the presidency have on society. And yes I know that "base and superstructure" implies a particular relationship, that's why I don't really think of it in those terms because I don't really agree with the definitiveness of that relationship.
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Nov 15, 2020 23:01
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Ferrinus posted:You think that Stalin did all the authoritarian totalitarian hierarchy stuff for personal gain? Guy lived in an apartment with a roommate! Wait, what's this? This is the first I've ever heard of this, and a cursory google search isn't turning up anything. Could you provide more details about this?
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Nov 15, 2020 23:16
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Baka-nin posted:Sounds like you're trying to recreate Bookchin's ideas from scratch. I think you'd benefit from looking at his Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, and Post Scarcity Anarchism I just wanted to thank you again for these recs. It's exactly the sort of structure I'd like to build my thinking upon! Ecology and Revolutionary Thought posted:Obviously, man could be described as a highly destructive parasite, who threatens to destroy his host — the natural world — and eventually himself. In ecology, however, the word parasite, used in this oversimplified sense, is not an answer to a question but raises a question itself. Ecologists know that a destructive parasitism of this kind usually reflects a disruption of an ecological situation; indeed, many species, seemingly highly destructive under one set of conditions, are eminently useful under another set of conditions. What imparts a profoundly critical function to ecology is the question raised by man’s destructive activities: What is the disruption that has turned man into a destructive parasite? What produces a form of human parasitism that not only results in vast natural imbalances but also threatens the very existence of humanity itself? Key to the ideas that undergird my thinking is the central point that consciousness, sentience, and the ability for conscious beings to evaluate their conditions based on utilitarian calculus - what brings them pleasure or avoids pain - are natural phenomena, but without which the universe would lack objective meaning. It is the interpretations and sensations of conscious beings that give rise to a universe where "valuable", "moral", or "good" have any meaning at all. And since we find consciousness naturally existing (else we wouldn't be here to talk about it) the question should be - how do we maximize good for conscious beings? In that light, I, and thinkers that adopt the label of "effective altruism", tend to think about questions like "What actions can be taken that maximize the number, lifespan, and goodness for conscious beings? What will help bring about the maximum number of conscious beings to exist in conditions that they find pleasant and good?" Obviously because, as Bookchin writes, the present existential risks which are faced by the human species, and by large numbers of conscious creatures on this planet, are caused by the way that human beings have chosen to organize their society, it would behoove us to change our social organization to one which would better support flourishing and decrease existential risk. In the very long term, since the ultimate existential risk would be the increasing intensity of the sun as it matures over the next billion years, it would be the greatest benefit to spread life to other worlds on this timescale. It's my belief that only a post-scarcity society that has been organized on democratic and communist principles would be the best and only way to achieve this.
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Nov 15, 2020 23:34
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OwlFancier posted:That's conflating individuals with social structures. The question that would be more appropriate is not whether obama specifically had the presidency, the question is what effect does the existence of the presidency have on society. Well, forget Obama. Can the president - any president - nationalize Amazon? Can someone who wants to nationalize Amazon become president? In what way does the president serve the interests of "the presidency" as opposed to of capital? Falstaff posted:Wait, what's this? This is the first I've ever heard of this, and a cursory google search isn't turning up anything. Could you provide more details about this? Molotov's and Stalin's families shared an apartment; you can find mention here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polina_Zhemchuzhina. Of course, the leader of the USSR had vacation homes and dachas to meet foreign dignitaries at and so on.
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Nov 15, 2020 23:36
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Ferrinus posted:Well, forget Obama. Can the president - any president - nationalize Amazon? Can someone who wants to nationalize Amazon become president? In what way does the president serve the interests of "the presidency" as opposed to of capital? I think that the people who work in the political system are very interested in preserving the existence of the system that keeps them in their positions of relative power, part of that is achieved by allying themselves with capitalists who fund them, but another part of it, I would argue the part that is why we have politicians involves convincing people that the system we have is good, important, and should have a monopoly on the way we achieve change in society. If you somehow snapped your fingers and changed how our economic mode of production functioned overnight, that class of people would still want to maintain that monopoly of power, and with the removal of capital they would, arguably, become the dominant form of power. They have a degree of legitimacy of their own, they may be very intertwined with capital but the structures and the people within them have authority over people by virtue of the fact that people believe they do, and that belief is related to, but still separate from, the economic underpinnings of society. Of course, we would normally hope that the process by which the economic change is achieved would instead center power in the people directly and by the time the transformation was achieved the old political organizations and their participants would have lost legitimacy, but the question is relevant especially if you're advocating for state capture as the means of achieving revolutionary change, what if that isn't true? What if also, in an attempt to create a viable nation (presuming you have not achieved simultaneous worldwide revolution) you want to quickly recreate a bureaucracy capable of managing a nation-scale quantity of people and production and defend it? Said bureaucracy is likely to comprise members of the previous bureaucracy that might suddenly find themselves amenable to the new government if the alternative is looking very wall shaped, there is a structure there and it is always under pressure for reasons of expediency and societal inertia to have more power delegated to it, if it is not already a power center because the revolution is vanguardist and is trying to use the power of the state to implement changes. I am saying there is a strong tendency in society to trust the system and that I think that is partly a natural thing, things that exist for a long time become "normal" to us and we stop paying attention to them, and partly because the participants in the system encourage us to trust it, because that trust affords them power, power to act contrary to our interests for as long as they can obfuscate that they are doing that in some way, and there are a lot of ways they can do that with the capabilities that are afforded them by their very existence as empowered decision makers who are geographically removed from the people who nominally grant them that power, and whose decisions are processed into centralized government actions thus further abstracting away their responsibility for things that end up happening. This, I think, is perhaps the main disconnect, you seem to say that that power is only ever an expression of what people want, I would suggest that it is possible for people to agree that other people should be in charge but for there to be a disconnect between that, and what the people in charge actually do. There is a disconnect between the desires of the people who elect people to power and what the people in power actually do, and I think that is facilitated by the process of delegating power to them itself and by the process of centralized decision making helping to anonymise and/or diffuse the link of responsibility between representatives and ensuing government actions. And I think this is particularly something to worry about in a society that is aiming to, or has managed to, change the mode of production, because again I agree that that has a great primacy in determining how our society is shaped, but I think that changing it to a more egalitarian and participatory one runs the risk of allowing other forms of power to ascend, and the biggest ones I would be wary of are likely to be resemble and even be based on other power structures within our current society. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Nov 16, 2020 |
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Nov 15, 2020 23:54
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