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OwlFancier posted: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. So in a liberal republic (what Lenin called the ideal shell for capitalism), individual politicians are ultimately propped up by the system of capitalism and therefore are only able to maintain themselves in their positions by serving capitalism. This is why they all dance to the tune of rich donors and condemn looting in lockstep and keep voting to go to war and so on. There are powerful forces of natural selection at play - it's not even a matter of individual people being corrupted or turned, but just that anyone who won't serve capital doesn't get to become or stay a politician. One way or another, they'll be removed. If I strike my wizard staff into the ground and, in a wave of eldritch power, transform our mode of production but leave all political offices intact, an interesting thing occurs. Suddenly, political power flows not from the bourgeoisie but from the proletariat. Politicians who fail to serve proletarian power are the ones who get selected against and winnowed out of the system. Venal, greedy autocrats concerned with nothing more than sweet kickbacks and self-aggrandizement will find that they can only get those kickbacks if they support the electrification of the countryside rather than if they support the invasion of Iraq. Same short-sighted assholes, same disinterested populace, same seemingly-irreconcilable principal-agent problem... but the material basis of political power has changed, the class content of the state dictatorship has changed, and therefore results differ. The delegation of decision-making isn't the same thing as the delegation of power, and class power will express itself through whatever specific, contingent forms happen to be thrown together out of ad hoc necessity.
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Nov 16, 2020 01:01
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Yeah see I don't think that's true, I think that the apparatus of the government (as an example of, as i posit, a large institution with its own power that actually exists) is its own thing, that exists both by pandering to capital and also by pandering to and controlling the populace through the mechanism of decision delegation and the effects that political centralization have on the press and other information dissemination mechanisms (if decisions are centralized in one body of people they become the subject of information, true or false, they are made into celebrities) I think that the government has far less control over capital (and inclination to control it even if they did, because their welfare isn't in conflict with capital like the rest of us, they get paid regardless) but I don't think that makes them just an extension of it, I think they are A Thing in and of themselves and that many of the mechanisms they have to exert control over the populace still function without capital. I also, again, very specifically think that delegation of decision making is delegation of power, because even if you retain the theoretical ability to recall that delegation at any time, the act of delegating it allows the person you delegate it to to use your delegation to make their own decisions and it is then incumbent upon you to voluntarily check up on them all the time. When presumably not having to do that is the whole point you delegated to them in the first place. And this is specifically made easier when delegates are making decisions as part of a centralized process which does not happen right in front of you, and where the outcomes of that process are a product of the cumulative decisions of many delegates and when they are put into action by people who are not the delegates, because that serves to essentially launder the decisions of the delegates and diffuse responsibility. Same principle as a firing squad. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Nov 16, 2020 |
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Nov 16, 2020 01:11
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Ferrinus posted:So in a liberal republic (what Lenin called the ideal shell for capitalism), individual politicians are ultimately propped up by the system of capitalism and therefore are only able to maintain themselves in their positions by serving capitalism. This is why they all dance to the tune of rich donors and condemn looting in lockstep and keep voting to go to war and so on. There are powerful forces of natural selection at play - it's not even a matter of individual people being corrupted or turned, but just that anyone who won't serve capital doesn't get to become or stay a politician. One way or another, they'll be removed.
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Nov 16, 2020 01:12
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A personal anecdote regarding hierarchy and specialisation. A while ago I took part in an art exhibition which was organised along broadly collective lines. However we needed someone to look after the curation, finances, publicity, and so on. I ended up being asked to do finances because I was “good with numbers”. I’m not really an artist and had already finished my main display piece for the exhibition so I focused on making sure everything else was in order. We didn’t have a large budget so I tried to use what we did have as efficiently as possible. As it emerged this meant that everyone else started looking to me for guidance on what the show would look like and how we’d make it work. This was actually pretty annoying as I had other things to get on with (like setting up my own exhibits) and everyone else was doing basically nothing for the group because they saw it as my responsibility to organise everything relating to the exhibition as a whole. Again, I wasn’t curating the show and didn’t want that role - I was the accountant. At the end of the day I ended up having to directly ask and direct people to do the responsibilities they’d agreed on at the start of the project. I was pretty pissed off by the whole experience. This dynamic - of hypothetical equality but real hierarchy - seems to be common in the art and academic worlds. I’m not sure the extent to which this is people recreating the capitalist model based on their own built in prejudices (whoever controls finances controls everything) versus the inevitable outcome of giving one person responsibility for material concerns versus an inevitable result of group dynamics where there’s no explicitly egalitarian structure for decision making, but as an anecdote it gave me a fair amount to think about.
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Nov 16, 2020 01:24
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Crumbskull posted: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? don't affiliate yourself to schools of thought and see your duty as a servant to uphold it. An acolyte who barely knows their own literature, never mind the wider field, charging around waving a banner is just engaging in public foolishness. Don't let the first persuasive pamphlet you happen to read determine the rest of your intellectual life; most issues in life are complex, and constructing sympathetic narratives around complex issues is just an exercise in rhetoric, not reflection instead, first look for literature reviews to know what the major schools are in a field or issue (as a distinct coherent body of thought, not by left v right - there's a lot of non-Marxist left-wing thinking out there, for instance). Then, to contextualize a particular school, look for introspective literature where champions of an individual school are talking to each other unguardedly over open issues (in journals or academic books), or for synthesis literature where adherents try to engage in fusion - this is a research strategy that requires relatively little time for a lot of payoff university reading lists are often freely available and are a great way to obtain a grounded overview, albeit this is a serious time investment (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 16, 2020 01:30
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ronya posted:instead, first look for literature reviews to know what the major schools are in a field or issue (as a distinct coherent body of thought, not by left v right - there's a lot of non-Marxist left-wing thinking out there, for instance). Then, to contextualize a particular school, look for introspective literature where champions of an individual school are talking to each other unguardedly over open issues (in journals or academic books), or for synthesis literature where adherents try to engage in fusion - this is a research strategy that requires relatively little time for a lot of payoff You seem to be putting all your emphasis on consensus opinion, not the theory itself.
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Nov 16, 2020 01:32
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Purple Prince posted:A personal anecdote regarding hierarchy and specialisation. Yeah, lots of practical anarchist theory since the 70s deals with avoiding those problems. Mostly by cleanly delineating those responsibilities, plausibly designating a planner who explicitly isn't dealing with the money. And preventing you from taking over the group by making sure someone else is the accountant next time. And preventing you from using your fresh specialized experience to take over by making you teach the staff you learned to some other group members. There is also the lens of "social capital", which describes moneyless capitalism that might apply here. It was originally meant to describe ivory tower academics who use their fame to get grad students and then gain more fame from the student's results which replicates M-C-M'. I personally consider it a bit overdone but it is sometimes applied to administrators in the SU.
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Nov 16, 2020 01:37
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Cpt_Obvious posted:You seem to be putting all your emphasis on consensus opinion, not the theory itself. the reason for looking for essays written by, for, and within a consensus is so that the participants are frank about what the extant disagreements or open issues are exhaustive "author A says X, and another B replied Y, and author C highlighted that Z, and..." is, again, wont to be 1) a serious time investment, and 2) renders the problem of setting the earlier reading in context into a kind of chicken-and-egg recursion anyway I'm sorry if this comes off as a bit "first, do your homework and eat your veggies" but yes there's a minimal legwork that should be done. I feel like you're asking the wrong question. If I tell you, well, I think Kaleckian neo-Marxist/post-Keynesian economics is interesting and worth examining, it would absolutely be the wrong thing to grab it and rely on it for every issue you come across. Rather, one should be able to assess various mainstream takes and the various heterodox takes (of which poor Michael Kalecki would only be one) and envision how they would apply
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Nov 16, 2020 01:54
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Edit: Deleted. Inflammatory.
Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Nov 16, 2020 |
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Nov 16, 2020 02:15
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I gotta tell yah, ronya, your line of reasoning is just completely alien to me. This idea that truth is derived from consensus seems absolutely at odds with just about every rational narrative there is. poo poo, it's like the opposite of science, it's authoritarianism with a diploma. It's...well it's weird to me. It's weird to think that in the year 2020 we have people who discard the concepts of independent thought and observation. That instead of drawing conclusions from perceived reality, one would rather call a friend. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 02:38 on Nov 16, 2020 |
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Nov 16, 2020 02:32
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ronya posted:don't affiliate yourself to schools of thought and see your duty as a servant to uphold it. An acolyte who barely knows their own literature, never mind the wider field, charging around waving a banner is just engaging in public foolishness. Don't let the first persuasive pamphlet you happen to read determine the rest of your intellectual life; most issues in life are complex, and constructing sympathetic narratives around complex issues is just an exercise in rhetoric, not reflection This is a real non-answer in a lot of words.
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Nov 16, 2020 02:37
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OwlFancier posted:Yeah see I don't think that's true, I think that the apparatus of the government (as an example of, as i posit, a large institution with its own power that actually exists) is its own thing, that exists both by pandering to capital and also by pandering to and controlling the populace through the mechanism of decision delegation and the effects that political centralization have on the press and other information dissemination mechanisms (if decisions are centralized in one body of people they become the subject of information, true or false, they are made into celebrities) I mean, there is a sense in which everything is its own thing. The government is a separate institution from private capitalist firms. Private capitalist firms are separate from other private capitalist firms. Different parts of the government are their own things, like, the Supreme Court is a specific institution with its own specific quirks and means of self-perpetuation and there are ways that the court actually competes with other aspects of the government as well as ways that it works with them and so on. However, recognizing the existence of a bunch of separate interacting and possibly competing components in a broader system is only the first part of dialectics. The second part is actually synthesizing what you're seeing into some sort of actionable theory. Like, sure, politicians are different people from CEOS. There is at least some contradiction between the desires and actions of politicians and the desires and actions of CEOs. Similarly, there are distinctions to be made between the yolk of an egg and the shell of an egg, or the lungs of a person and the heart of a person, or the labor of a weaver and the labor of a tailor. It might look at first glance like an eggshell and a hatching chick are in conflict with one another! But if we've been perspicuous in our study we can see that they actually work in tandem; that one is supposed to protect but ultimately resist and be destroyed by the other. Liberal politicians pander to private capitalists for basically the same reason that grandparents pander to their grandchildren (and sometimes restrict the actions of private capitalists for the same reason that even the most doting grandparents might sometimes restrict the actions of their grandchildren). They are not actually in conflict. quote:I also, again, very specifically think that delegation of decision making is delegation of power, because even if you retain the theoretical ability to recall that delegation at any time, the act of delegating it allows the person you delegate it to to use your delegation to make their own decisions and it is then incumbent upon you to voluntarily check up on them all the time. When presumably not having to do that is the whole point you delegated to them in the first place. And this is specifically made easier when delegates are making decisions as part of a centralized process which does not happen right in front of you, and where the outcomes of that process are a product of the cumulative decisions of many delegates and when they are put into action by people who are not the delegates, because that serves to essentially launder the decisions of the delegates and diffuse responsibility. Same principle as a firing squad. This is reversible, though. If I ask Jeeves to fetch my slippers, I am delegating my power and authority to Jeeves. He's the one who picks which pair of slippers to fetch me. Maybe they won't be the ones that go best with my smoking jacket! What if, through incompetence or malice, he makes me look bad and I don't realize it! VictualSquid posted:So, as that process didn't happen in the SU that proves that the proletariat wasn't in charge there? Your theory seems to imply that. It did, though. Compare the USSR to the Tsardom. In both cases the country contained government bureaucrats, police officers, priests, propagandists, all sorts of institutions of delegated decision-making. Nevertheless, because the actual material power base of these administrative institutions were different - because the class character of the state was proletarian rather than bourgeois - immense leaps in quality of life and industrial capacity took place that a monarchical or capitalist society would simply never have been able to bring itself to bring about.
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Nov 16, 2020 03:03
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Cpt_Obvious posted:What I'm hearing is that you don't have a more comprehensive theory, and in fact all theories are correct and incorrect depending on who you ask. No no no. Not "who you ask" but "what you apply it to". I don't think the social sciences are really sufficiently mature to have comprehensive theories - rather, theories are false, and the argument comes down to whether the specific way in which the theory is false changes any conclusions in a particular case On the theory vs methodology point I made very, very much earlier upthread I come down pretty hard on the methodology side. Marxist capital theory struggles to explain basic macroeconomic observations on business cycles and requires a great deal of baggage to just to render itself internally consistent in many formalisms. Comprehensive theories of everything stand or fall together, and a good chunk of it is wobbly! But does that invalidate a class-centred analysis as a methodology? No. In many cases the presumption of socioeconomic class as defined by a role in production is really good enough, which is why two-factor models abound even well outside Marx. Cpt_Obvious posted:I gotta tell yah, ronya, your line of reasoning is just completely alien to me. This idea that truth is derived from consensus seems absolutely at odds with just about every rational narrative there is. poo poo, it's like the opposite of science, it's authoritarianism with a diploma. Truth is not derived from consensus. My point about seeking essays where the writers are targeting a like-minded audience is just a study trick to quickly gain context (noting that all of us ITT are almost certainly not paying £lots for full-time professional experts to walk you through the field). "Read Bakunin" is almost certainly going to be less useful than "First, read a lit review from an intro course on Bakunin, then read some contemporary Bakuninists arguing with other Bakuninists about what he said or meant on whatever, then read Bakunin for yourself". Conversely, "Read criticisms of Bakunin by anti-Bakunin authors and then apologetics responding to those critiques" won't get you as far - you'll drown in a century of scholasticism. Nor would "discard Bakunin because the first incisive criticism I read showed me his anarchism wasn't a comprehensive theory". ronya fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Nov 16, 2020 |
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Nov 16, 2020 03:05
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Ferrinus posted:This is reversible, though. If I ask Jeeves to fetch my slippers, I am delegating my power and authority to Jeeves. He's the one who picks which pair of slippers to fetch me. Maybe they won't be the ones that go best with my smoking jacket! What if, through incompetence or malice, he makes me look bad and I don't realize it! Again, no, this isn't you and another person who lives in the same house as you, this is you interacting with a structure with its own inertia that you have no direct contact with. Just because you can hypothetically pick someone else doesn't mean you, or most people, will. This is how representative democracy works.
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Nov 16, 2020 03:10
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Ferrinus posted:It did, though. Compare the USSR to the Tsardom. In both cases the country contained government bureaucrats, police officers, priests, propagandists, all sorts of institutions of delegated decision-making. Nevertheless, because the actual material power base of these administrative institutions were different - because the class character of the state was proletarian rather than bourgeois - immense leaps in quality of life and industrial capacity took place that a monarchical or capitalist society would simply never have been able to bring itself to bring about. Also, I do not agree that the leaps in quality of life and industrial capacity in the SU were qualitatively superior to what happened after bourgeois revolutions. Even though they are impressive compared to feudal systems.
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Nov 16, 2020 03:23
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OwlFancier posted:Again, no, this isn't you and another person who lives in the same house as you, this is you interacting with a structure with its own inertia that you have no direct contact with. Just because you can hypothetically pick someone else doesn't mean you, or most people, will. This is how representative democracy works. Jeeves has his own inertia, and Jeeves and I have very little contact. There are days when I hardly see him! Who knows what he's getting up to? He might be my majordomo. He might coordinate all the rest of my staff! I've ceded massive amounts of my power to him! Or have I, though. VictualSquid posted:The point is not the material wealth, the point is the increasing or decreasing equality of power. The ruling groups gained increasing power at the expense of the masses. Which either means it wasn't proletarian rule or that proletarian rule is insufficient to transition to true communism. Uh, that doesn't make any sense. Again, we're comparing the Tsardom to the USSR. The USSR objectively did much, much better for the masses, as measured in years of expected lifespan, literacy rates, daily calorie intake, etcetera. Why didn't the Tsar double everyone's lifespan? If you aren't willing to cede that socialist regimes did better than liberal ones, I won't raise the question of China vs. India, but when we compare the monarchy to the Soviet Union we discover that, although both states contain ruling hierarchies, corrupt bureaucrats, prisons, etc, one of them is massively more beneficial to the citizenry than the other. Just massively, massively more resources spent on developing and enhancing the masses. This is a pretty clear example of the masses gaining power at the expense of the ruling class!
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Nov 16, 2020 03:38
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ronya posted:I don't think the social sciences are really sufficiently mature to have comprehensive theories - rather, theories are false, and the argument comes down to whether the specific way in which the theory is false changes any conclusions in a particular case ronya posted:On the theory vs methodology point I made very, very much earlier upthread I come down pretty hard on the methodology side. Marxist capital theory struggles to explain basic macroeconomic observations on business cycles and requires a great deal of baggage to just to render itself internally consistent in many formalisms. ronya posted:Comprehensive theories of everything stand or fall together, and a good chunk of it is wobbly! It's like fixing a bug in computer code. You don't toss the whole thing, you adjust it to work.
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Nov 16, 2020 03:44
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Wow, hard disagree there. This is anti-intellectualist at it's core. And, certainly, I am an anti-intellectualist when in comes to certain fields (some fields are corrupt, evil in nature, or outright wrong), I think it's rather dangerous to discard with the study of complex systems like politics, economics, and the human mind. Also, if no political system is right, then one must assume that no political system is wrong and leads open the door to fascism and greater evils. I don't think "the theory must be right, or we open the door to fascism" constitutes intellectualism, for what it's worth. But I have the sense, again, that this discussion is not going to go anywhere.
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Nov 16, 2020 05:10
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ronya posted:I don't think "the theory must be right, or we open the door to fascism" constitutes intellectualism, for what it's worth. But I have the sense, again, that this discussion is not going to go anywhere. No, it's that if no theories can be declared correct, no theories can be wrong, including fascism.
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Nov 16, 2020 05:30
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And, yes, declaring a massive collection of scientific fields unscientific without justification is indeed anti-intellectual.
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Nov 16, 2020 05:45
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Cpt_Obvious posted:No, it's that if no theories can be declared correct, no theories can be wrong, including fascism. Define “wrong”. If you mean “logically inconsistent” then I have a thought experiment for you: Suppose our premises are “all blondes are wicked” and “the wicked should be killed on sight”. It follows that all blondes should be killed on sight. Ethically our theory is clearly awful, but logically it is perfectly consistent. To decide if a political (or economic) theory is correct or incorrect we have to first examine it and then decide what premises we accept. This almost can’t be a rational decision as they will tend to hinge on assertions of morality. For fascism: - There is a natural hierarchy. Some people are superior to others and this is not a product of socialisation. - Superiority of character ought to be rewarded: inferiority ought to be punished. - The best arenas for testing superiority of character are competitive and aggressive. War is the best arena of all. And so on. Now the theory of a natural hierarchy of people is pretty reprehensible, but it’s not like it’s based on more than bald assertion. Arguments we might make against natural hierarchy can always be refuted through clever argument (ah, this one blonde might be smart and altruistic, but they will always have animal urges which lead them back to their inferiority: a problem the clearly superior brunettes don’t have). We might say: the bases of political theories can be subjective (no theory can be correct), but we need to understand what those bases are so we can test our moral reactions to them. So saying no theory is correct is to say moral theories are grounded not in objective truths but in consensus about what we value. I don’t think this opens the door to fascism, as most of us wouldn’t agree to the blonde inferiority premise in the first place.
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Nov 16, 2020 05:52
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Here's the thing. When you reject the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism, you open yourself up to the irrational fantasies of liberalism, which is, as we all know, just fascism in its embryonic form.
Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Nov 16, 2020 |
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Nov 16, 2020 06:08
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Purple Prince posted:.. I don’t think this opens the door to fascism, as most of us wouldn’t agree to the blonde inferiority premise in the first place. Note: I am very much not claiming that the fascists are correct. Quite the opposite.
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Nov 16, 2020 06:29
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Ferrinus posted:Here's the thing. When you reject the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism, you open yourself up to the irrational fantasies of liberalism, which is, as we all know, just fascism in its embryonic form. Aha, but the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism doesn't care if you believe in it, because it believes in you. Cpt_Obvious posted:And, yes, declaring a massive collection of scientific fields unscientific without justification is indeed anti-intellectual. Marxism is not scientific in the way you're using the word here - and many people, including myself, would argue against the existence of any objective "truth", even amongst fields you would probably consider quite scientific (I don't know if we want to go down a post-modernism rabbit hole here). ronya is saying that Marxism isn't even a particularly good theory because it doesn't explain many things that easily observable - which is a problem for a theory - but that it is useful as a methodology, because Marxism suggests at the most basic level that economic conditions are significant in analyzing human societies, which is useful. Owlspiracy fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Nov 16, 2020 |
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Nov 16, 2020 06:42
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Ferrinus posted:Uh, that doesn't make any sense. Again, we're comparing the Tsardom to the USSR. The USSR objectively did much, much better for the masses, as measured in years of expected lifespan, literacy rates, daily calorie intake, etcetera. Why didn't the Tsar double everyone's lifespan? If you aren't willing to cede that socialist regimes did better than liberal ones, I won't raise the question of China vs. India, but when we compare the monarchy to the Soviet Union we discover that, although both states contain ruling hierarchies, corrupt bureaucrats, prisons, etc, one of them is massively more beneficial to the citizenry than the other. Just massively, massively more resources spent on developing and enhancing the masses. The Tsar didn't double everyone's lifespan because he was a Tsar and not the bourgeois. The bourgeois did double everyone's lifespan because they were not Kings. The SU doubled everyone's lifespan because they were not Kings. Being better at industrializing then the monarchy does not mean that you are better at industrializing then the capitalists. Fast industrialisation is a feature of capitalism to such an extend that Marx early theories recommended that a feudal country should spend some time as a bourgeois state before having an actual socialist revolution. Though Lenin did in fact prove that a socialist revolution can also lead to rapid industrialisation at similar rate as a bourgeois revolution. Also, my main point is: The Russian revolution lead to the masses gaining power at the expense of the feudal ruling class. But they did not gain enough power to start marx's proposeded mechanism of transition from mass rule to full communism. And because that did not happen, any future post-revolutionary society needs to have a theory explaining that failure and a plan for avoiding that failure.
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Nov 16, 2020 13:09
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VictualSquid posted:The Russian revolution lead to the masses gaining power at the expense of the feudal ruling class. But they did not gain enough power to start marx's proposeded mechanism of transition from mass rule to full communism. I'm trying very hard not to be glib as I write this, and certainly this isn't the only reason that the USSR did not transition to full communism, but I think the failure of a global socialist revolution to catch on, and the capitalist encirclement that followed the failure of such a world-spanning movement, are huge factors in why the USSR developed in the way that it did, potentially even if you never changed anything else about Marxist-Leninist theory.
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Nov 16, 2020 13:23
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gradenko_2000 posted:I'm trying very hard not to be glib as I write this, and certainly this isn't the only reason that the USSR did not transition to full communism, but I think the failure of a global socialist revolution to catch on, and the capitalist encirclement that followed the failure of such a world-spanning movement, are huge factors in why the USSR developed in the way that it did, potentially even if you never changed anything else about Marxist-Leninist theory. But it still means that you need a plan to make sure that doesn't happen again. I don't care if it is a plan to make sure that there is a revolution everywhere approximately simultaneously or a plan to make your attempt at communism succeed despite capitalist encirclement.
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Nov 16, 2020 13:45
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Aruan posted:Ronya is saying that Marxism isn't even a particularly good theory because it doesn't explain many things that easily observable - which is a problem for a theory - but that it is useful as a methodology, because Marxism suggests at the most basic level that economic conditions are significant in analyzing human societies, which is useful. I think "Marxism doesn't explain certain things" requires a lot more detail than just this hand-wave. In the case of business cycles, for example, those are treated in Theories of Surplus Value by Marx himself. Without a real example of where the failings specifically are, it's not possible to dig up any literature on where these (possibly) have been treated by Marx or subsequent authors working within a Marxist framework.
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Nov 16, 2020 16:39
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Disnesquick posted:I think "Marxism doesn't explain certain things" requires a lot more detail than just this hand-wave. In the case of business cycles, for example, those are treated in Theories of Surplus Value by Marx himself. Without a real example of where the failings specifically are, it's not possible to dig up any literature on where these (possibly) have been treated by Marx or subsequent authors working within a Marxist framework. I mean, in my eyes the biggest failing of Marxism-as-a-theory is that the dialectical process has seemingly only strengthened capitalism, which is a critique that was echoed by later Marxists, i.e. Critical Theorists.
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Nov 16, 2020 18:26
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VictualSquid posted:Feudalism and Capitalism are different things. Yo, I said in the very post you're quoting that I'm not intending to litigate the ability of capitalism vs. the ability of socialism to increase living conditions. What we're talking about is the difference between having certain institutions of rule and administration and the actual class power that backs those institutions. Anarchists assign institutions themselves decisive force and agency such that the sheer presence of a bureaucracy or a supreme soviet or a town dog catcher exerts an unavoidable corrupting influence. But, in fact, history shows that you can take the same people in basically the same hierarchies and dramatically change outcomes just by changing which class is in charge! Here was our discussion up to now: i posted:If I strike my wizard staff into the ground and, in a wave of eldritch power, transform our mode of production but leave all political offices intact, an interesting thing occurs. Suddenly, political power flows not from the bourgeoisie but from the proletariat. Politicians who fail to serve proletarian power are the ones who get selected against and winnowed out of the system. Venal, greedy autocrats concerned with nothing more than sweet kickbacks and self-aggrandizement will find that they can only get those kickbacks if they support the electrification of the countryside rather than if they support the invasion of Iraq. Same short-sighted assholes, same disinterested populace, same seemingly-irreconcilable principal-agent problem... but the material basis of political power has changed, the class content of the state dictatorship has changed, and therefore results differ. you posted:So, as that process didn't happen in the SU that proves that the proletariat wasn't in charge there? Your theory seems to imply that. i posted:It did, though. Compare the USSR to the Tsardom. In both cases the country contained government bureaucrats, police officers, priests, propagandists, all sorts of institutions of delegated decision-making. Nevertheless, because the actual material power base of these administrative institutions were different - because the class character of the state was proletarian rather than bourgeois - immense leaps in quality of life and industrial capacity took place that a monarchical or capitalist society would simply never have been able to bring itself to bring about. you posted:The point is not the material wealth, the point is the increasing or decreasing equality of power. The ruling groups gained increasing power at the expense of the masses. Which either means it wasn't proletarian rule or that proletarian rule is insufficient to transition to true communism.
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Nov 16, 2020 19:25
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Ferrinus posted:You seem to be shifting the question into a few different arenas, like did socialism do better than liberalism would have, why did socialism ultimately get replaced by capitalism in some socialist countries, did the soviet people lose power over the course of the SU's existence. We can discuss all these if you want, but I'm not willing to simply lose my initial point, which is that it is class dictatorship itself that controls who gets what, not the institutions through which that class dictatorship expresses itself. You said: If the ultimate power lies with the people then the hierarchical structures will rot away. I said: The hierarchical structures didn't rot away in the SU, which shows that the power there didn't lie with the people. Then you started talking about industrial capacity and the Tzar, both of which I consider irrelevant to the discussion.
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Nov 16, 2020 19:44
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VictualSquid posted:Ok, let me paraphrase my understanding of your argument, if I am wrong can you reformulate it? (while rubbing my temple and pinching my nose) You did not actually respond to a post of mine in which I discussed or predicted if or how the state would wither away. You responded to a post of mine in which I baldly stated that even if the exact same institutions survive, and if those exact same institutions retain the exact same self-sustaining tendencies that make institutions so dangerous, those institutions will nevertheless act differently and produce different material outcomes because the material basis of their power has changed and therefore the people in those institutions literally, physically, need to do different things in order to maintain their personal power and privilege. You claimed the Soviet Union as a counterexample, but actually it's a perfect example of what I'm talking about, because despite its containing pretty much all the old hierarchies in some form or another it achieved dramatically different results for its people. If I'm a venal, greedy, corrupt bureaucrat in the Tsardom, I maintain my position and all my perks by pandering to the Tsar and the church. If I'm a venal, greedy, corrupt bureaucrat in the Soviet Union, I maintain my position and all my perks by making sure the five year plan is hitting its benchmarks (or at least pretending that it is, but that's harder to keep up and won't work if literally everyone does it). If or when I'm going exit the stage of history is a separate question which, again, I'm happy to discuss, but I won't allow you to just pivot to it and in so doing pretend that the point I did make has somehow been answered or refuted.
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Nov 16, 2020 19:52
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Ferrinus posted:(while rubbing my temple and pinching my nose) You did not actually respond to a post of mine in which I discussed or predicted if or how the state would wither away. You responded to a post of mine in which I baldly stated that even if the exact same institutions survive, and if those exact same institutions retain the exact same self-sustaining tendencies that make institutions so dangerous, those institutions will nevertheless act differently and produce different material outcomes because the material basis of their power has changed and therefore the people in those institutions literally, physically, need to do different things in order to maintain their personal power and privilege. I would say that as the structure of power is the most important part explaining the behaviour of the structure, it makes little sense to consider it the same structure after a change. Even if the personal and formal organization stays the same. But I consider this point semantics. My point on the SU is not as a counterexample to your theory. I am saying that while the people had significantly more power then under the Tzar, they did not hold the majority of power which limited the positive results materially.
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Nov 16, 2020 20:07
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ronya posted:don't affiliate yourself to schools of thought and see your duty as a servant to uphold it. An acolyte who barely knows their own literature, never mind the wider field, charging around waving a banner is just engaging in public foolishness. Don't let the first persuasive pamphlet you happen to read determine the rest of your intellectual life; most issues in life are complex, and constructing sympathetic narratives around complex issues is just an exercise in rhetoric, not reflection Yah, o.k. thanks mate but I was actually asking your opinion, not to be condescended to about how to learn stuff. Edit: I'm so pissed off now lol Crumbskull fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Nov 16, 2020 |
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Nov 16, 2020 20:15
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VictualSquid posted:I agree that the most important part is the distribution of power. And that the material base of power is the primary determination reflected in the outcome of the structure. If the people did not hold the majority of power, why did they benefit in the majority from the decisions made by Soviet governance? Do you think CPSU's steering committee members were all getting riches and luxuries in even greater proportion than the workers and peasantry were benefiting from the rationalization of agriculture and development of industry?
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Nov 16, 2020 20:21
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Ferrinus posted:If the people did not hold the majority of power, why did they benefit in the majority from the decisions made by Soviet governance? Do you think CPSU's steering committee members were all getting riches and luxuries in even greater proportion than the workers and peasantry were benefiting from the rationalization of agriculture and development of industry? If a capitalist chooses to reinvest all his income, while living like a normal person does he stop being a capitalist?
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Nov 16, 2020 20:32
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Aruan posted:I mean, in my eyes the biggest failing of Marxism-as-a-theory is that the dialectical process has seemingly only strengthened capitalism, which is a critique that was echoed by later Marxists, i.e. Critical Theorists. how do you think the adoption of, specifically, dialectical materialism has strengthened capitalism, compared to Hegelian dialectics? I'm definitely less familiar with the Frankfurt School than with other offshoots of the Germanic Marx/Freud/Hegel trinity, but my general impression was that it tended to lean into a kind of psychiatric sophistry rather than seriously engage with its own critics. I generally found the field to be just too distant from praxis to be very relevant to my experiences. Ferrinus posted:If the people did not hold the majority of power, why did they benefit in the majority from the decisions made by Soviet governance? Do you think CPSU's steering committee members were all getting riches and luxuries in even greater proportion than the workers and peasantry were benefiting from the rationalization of agriculture and development of industry? If the people did hold the majority of the power, how were they unable to prevent the party apparatus from collapsing the Soviet Union and setting themselves, and associates, up as oligarchs, who demonstrably are getting riches and luxuries in ever greater proportion? Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Nov 16, 2020 |
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Nov 16, 2020 21:08
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VictualSquid posted:I don't really care that much about luxury. I care about accumulation of power. No, because his income is being invested in his own private property. Whether the surplus value he reaps goes to his stomach or goes to his factory infrastructure, it's still going to him. There were no private capitalists in the USSR; surplus value could only go to state infrastructure, which is why living standards shot up so quickly and why capitalism was never able to reassert itself until, extremely late in the game, the economy was liberalized, firms were released from the state direction, etc. A soviet bureaucrat could, in point of fact, accumulate luxury; their privileged place in the direction of production made it easy to be first in line for the best apartments or new models of car or whatever. However, they could no more accumulate power than could a bureaucrat in a capitalist system, because they're a conduit through which power acts, not a source of power in and of themselves.
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Nov 16, 2020 21:15
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Ferrinus posted:No, because his income is being invested in his own private property. Whether the surplus value he reaps goes to his stomach or goes to his factory infrastructure, it's still going to him. There were no private capitalists in the USSR; surplus value could only go to state infrastructure, which is why living standards shot up so quickly and why capitalism was never able to reassert itself until, extremely late in the game, the economy was liberalized, firms were released from the state direction, etc. To me it sounds like the bureaucracy had accumulated all the power they could under the existing formal structures/MoP and then reinvested that power into a switch to a different structure that is even more favourable to them.
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Nov 16, 2020 21:30
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ronya posted:don't affiliate yourself to schools of thought and see your duty as a servant to uphold it. An acolyte who barely knows their own literature, never mind the wider field, charging around waving a banner is just engaging in public foolishness. Don't let the first persuasive pamphlet you happen to read determine the rest of your intellectual life; most issues in life are complex, and constructing sympathetic narratives around complex issues is just an exercise in rhetoric, not reflection This is one thing if we're having discussions about the contemporary literature or the evolution of contemporary thought on a particular subject or something. If we're academics talking about like, the history of structural Marxism specifically and you haven't read Althusser you're probably going to be at a disadvantage in the discussion, but it doesn't invalidate your thoughts on the topic. There's a tendency in academic circles, which it seems to me like you're reproducing here, to view criticism and commentary - or just later work in general - as some kind of strictly linear development, when really that couldn't be further from the truth. Moreover, if we're going to be Marxist about it, this is a hideous mangling of the dialectic: time and the process of motion (philosophical, economic, social, whatever) never stops flowing, but it doesn't mean there's a direct progression of ideas from A to B to C. It flows through. eg. Focault doesn't supplant Marx, if only because both Marx and Focault and their ideas were necessarily products of their time and space. Same with journals or arguments or whatever attempts at synthesis you care to check out. A broad understanding of the contemporary debate about a topic might be useful in some sense (mostly academically), but aside from that it's not very valuable. We're not on Leftism v.3.5; Marx is useful if he helps explain the world. Marx is especially useful if it reorients your relationship to the world in such a way that it informs praxis. Marx remains essential because his ideas as so fundamental and important to any sort of left thought, even "non-Marxist" left thought. Like, what we're doing here in this thread is mostly masturbatory, because it's fun to talk about this stuff, but it's not very useful beyond the broad strokes -- what is your relationship to your labor, the product of your labor, and the profit your boss takes. How does that inform our current situation? What can we do about it? What does a world look like where that is changed for the better? All stuff anyone can easily grasp in like a ten minute overview of Marx's writing. Who gives a poo poo about "the wider field"? Who gives a poo poo about knowing all of the literature? Who in the world could possibly, ever, give a single poo poo about academic debates so far removed from actual lived reality that they're only relevant or interesting to other academics? If "correct thought" and best practice lie somewhere deep inside thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of pages in university reading lists it's totally worthless. The ideas are useless for anything other than academic fart-huffing because they require so much investment and can't be communicated easily. What you're doing here is the grossest kind of simpering gatekeeping. None of this poo poo matters. Everything written in a book is already dead. These things only have any value in how they inform our thoughts and actions today, and if they can't be communicated in the first place they're as worthless and embarrassing as your r/atheist rear end attempts at brutal owns. ronya posted:An acolyte who barely knows their own literature, never mind the wider field, charging around waving a banner is just engaging in public foolishness. jfc
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Nov 16, 2020 21:41
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