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uncop posted:And it's a misrepresentation to claim that Mao wasn't speaking about liberals or liberal attitudes: the communists had been working within the liberal movement under the advice of the Soviet Union, had struggled not to get subsumed in it, and due to Japanese aggression were in talks about fighting as an attachment to the liberal forces again. The communists were recruiting from liberals and ex-liberals, so the party naturally always had a nationalist socdem layer represented by figures like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. I think this depends on what one means by “liberals”: Deng and Liu Shaoqi were still communists and Mao’s concern with them was IMO less to do with their theoretical differences and more to do with the very specific question of who should now be running the Party. That is, I have always believed he didn’t write Combat Liberalism mainly as part of developing his theoretical base but because it was a useful angle of attack against specific people at a time when his position was not secure: the practical concern is driving the theory not the other way round. I agree with you about absolute control though, that was lazy phrasing by me. Better to say that Mao is very very good at intra-Party politics which is why it’s him and not, say, Zhou Enlai that ends up in charge.
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Dec 20, 2020 04:35
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Beefeater1980 posted:I agree with you about absolute control though, that was lazy phrasing by me. Better to say that Mao is very very good at intra-Party politics which is why it’s him and not, say, Zhou Enlai that ends up in charge. It might also have something to do with Handsome Zhou Enlai being the early CCP’s one-man state department and one of the most effective cultural ambassadors for the Party, meaning he was constantly busy overseas and not dealing with the intra party politics at all. To what extent Mao and Zhou had an understanding about this and to what extent Mao was deliberately keeping Zhou too busy to become a serious competitor I’m not sure, however.
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Dec 20, 2020 05:49
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thotsky posted:I have asked this before in another thread I think, but I never found a satisfactory answer (that might be on me). Why is Trotskyism/Trotsky/trots still considered "bad" by many modern, western leftists? Orthodox Marxism, Internationalism, Anti-Stalinism... These things do not seem very controversial among young leftists these days... So why? Well aside from Trotskyism differing very little from other strains of vanguardist communism, to the point where several Trotskyist groups abandoned it once they started researching the movements history in detail, also my favourite anecdote from Ante Ciliga meeting Trotskyists in the Soviet prison system. Not only did they have no problem with the prison colonies and the mass arrest of dissident groups, -their one complaint was that they were being rounded up too!- they weren't worried and were convinced they would be released soon, since Trotsky had spent so much time building the Soviet police system many officers in the NKVD owed their positions to him, so it was only a matter of time before a counter-coup took care of Stalin and his nonsense. https://libcom.org/library/russian-enigma-ante-ciliga its also not remotely Orthodox marxist, the actual orthodox marxists came out of the social democratic movement and their members in the Russian empire had a bad habit of being killed or tortured by Trotsky's red army, especially the Georgians, so a very large number of ortho-marxist criticisms of the early soviet union focussed on him. I also don't believe they're anymore internationalist than many of the other socialist groups which is to say not internationalist at all, I can't think of a Trot group that doesn't operate on a national basis and prioritises the path to power in that nation. I can however think of many large Trot groups who take sides during international conflicts, the SWP supported Iran, Militant supported the UK against Argentina etc. In the UK, Ireland and France (the three I'm most familiar with) virtually every Trotskyist party has been very active in wrecking many important workplace struggles and activist movements, essentially because they think they can benefit from the fallout. And despite some differences between say Healyites and Cliffites, or orthodox and heterodox groupings they've all shown themselves to be manipulators and a danger to anyone trying to get things done. Many parties also have very ugly histories of exploiting, bullying and harassing their own memberships and in recent years a rather large number have been broken up by sexual assault scandals by one or more leader with the rest of the leadership circling the wagons to protect them. There's a mountain of criticism of trotskyism and trotskyist thinkers and groups from nearly every angle. Given how small the currents are it boggles the mind how much terrible nonsense and damage they've managed to do. this list contains a lot of reasons trotskyism and trots are still so reviled today, including my own personal dealings with several of them. https://libcom.org/tags/trotskyism Ferrinus posted:Well, whether he wanted to or not, Trotsky ended up making huge contributions to the western anticommunist playbook such that you get avowed "internationalists" explaining that whatever third world country is not socialist, but merely bureaucratically collectivist, and in fact the true revolutionary action would be to support those who oppose both Maduro and Guaido or whatever. How do you define "neocon"? A Trotskyist with a teenaged daughter. Eh, Trots were in Chavez's governing coalition, back in the day you used to find Stalinist websites warning people not to be lured into the Bolivarian snare because _minister was a Trot party member, or because Chavez made pro Trotsky remarks on the anniversary of the russian revolution etc. Its only this September that the Trots and the Venezuelan communist party have pulled out of supporting Maduro, and that's less to do with ideology and more because he tried to hijack their party leaderships through court orders and police surveillance.
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Dec 20, 2020 07:01
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I would also suggest that younger leftists experiencing their political awakening in the post 2008 world probably aren't going to be looking at decades old parties of half a dozen old farts that are also somehow full of sex criminals, which is what the UK trot party scene is like. There is a cultural gap between the old trots and the newer left that isn't just political.
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Dec 20, 2020 07:08
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gradenko_2000 posted:would the heterogeneity of the CPC support the idea that a "one-party state" is still capable of presenting a diversity of tendencies, groups, and policies? I think it does, but the representation of different interests tends to be covert, and the more interests the party represents, the more watered down it becomes and the more false its unity becomes. I consider the experiment with party governance to mostly have produced an example of what not to do. I think both ortho ML and trots produce false answers because they start from the wrong premises. They fail to produce a clear differentiation between state and government like Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao, and consequently the MLs argue that the party has to govern so as to have a proper party-state, while your trots argue for compromising the party-state in order to produce more dynamic governance. The state is about violence, which class (or classes) get to rule over the others by force, and which need to submit to the rules set for them. The state form of USA, Norway, Brazil, Nazi Germany etc. is/was bourgeois dictatorship: the bourgeoisie set up constitutions that everyone must follow, alongside a violence machine whose purpose is to take over if 1) the rules are being broken by the wrong people, or 2) someone threatens to change the rules in a way that's technically legal but undesirable to the bourgeoisie. Liberal democratic government is bourgeois dictatorship in a hands-off form, while in fascist and military-dictatorial government, the bourgeois dictatorship directly takes over governance. The USSR and PRC were/are analogous to military dictatorship/fascism with the difference that the military and ruling party attempted to be of the proletariat and peasantry instead of the bourgeoisie. That's why once the CCP determines the USSR to have turned capitalist under Brezhnev, they immediately accused it of being a fascist country. My point is that the questions of how the proletarian dictatorship should be secured and how it should be governed are separate questions. There's no inherent issue with letting various class interests talk it out on the governmental side as long as the dictatorship steps in before things get hairy. So preserving the integrity of the dictatorship is the core issue, and sharply contradicts ML and trot goals of putting the dictatorship in position to govern. I don't think having the dictatorship govern is wrong per se, but it's an emergency measure that doesn't last in the long term. In order to defend the Party, the masses have to govern, and they will form separate organisations either openly or in secret as long as the system makes that advantageous to them. But those democratic organisations, even if they were called political parties, would not be not like the Party that stands above the law the same way as police and military stand above the law under bourgeois dictatorship. They tie their own hands enough to preserve the fiction that they also play by the rules, but they can undo that anytime. Bourgeois or petty-bourgeois political parties, if they did exist, would be in a position like parliamentary communist parties under capitalism: were they to win, they'd just get illegally crushed by the Party and the rules would be changed so that they couldn't win the same way anymore. Beefeater1980 posted:I think this depends on what one means by “liberals”: Deng and Liu Shaoqi were still communists and Mao’s concern with them was IMO less to do with their theoretical differences and more to do with the very specific question of who should now be running the Party. That is, I have always believed he didn’t write Combat Liberalism mainly as part of developing his theoretical base but because it was a useful angle of attack against specific people at a time when his position was not secure: the practical concern is driving the theory not the other way round. It's "Combat Liberalism", not "Combat Liberals". The premise is that most communists, no matter how communist they are, are also liberal to a greater or smaller extent, because their starting point was a liberal worldview, and the extent is revealed through their everyday actions. So far I have never talked with a communist that didn't also have a meaningfully prominent liberal side to them. Of course it was a useful angle of attack and he wrote it as a disguised polemic, but that doesn't mean the argument is somehow disingenuous or otherwise dishonest. Mao never presented himself as "pure" either, and he actively discouraged attempts to stay free of liberal influences. He believed in taking non-communist good ideas and making them communist, but opposed taking them without making them communist as Deng's "black cat, white cat" quote argued in favor of. Simply, if you put professed communists in charge of liberal policy, like in France and India and so on, you put their liberal side in charge and they end up doing the work of the bourgeoisie. Immediate practical concern has always driven marxist theory.
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Dec 20, 2020 12:09
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OwlFancier posted:I would also suggest that younger leftists experiencing their political awakening in the post 2008 world probably aren't going to be looking at decades old parties of half a dozen old farts that are also somehow full of sex criminals, which is what the UK trot party scene is like. in the united states in my experience there's also a massive difference between the boomer/genx left and the millenial genz left at least in my anecdotal experiences on the east coast, the boomers were overwhelmingly trots/marxist-leninist the zoomers are all overwhelmingly anarchist/abolitionists or some flavor of maoist even generally the fellow american zoomers i know who say they're on the authoritarian quadrant still are in favor of stuff like prison/police abolition/restorative justice and its a constant source of argument/internal contradiction
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Dec 20, 2020 16:24
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Kanine posted:even generally the fellow american zoomers i know who say they're on the authoritarian quadrant still are in favor of stuff like prison/police abolition/restorative justice and its a constant source of argument/internal contradiction This is because the quadrants are nonsense. There's no inherent contradiction between 'the state should have the authority to wield violence again bad actors' and 'that violence should be as humane as possible, and those affected by it should be offered rehabilitation'.
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Dec 20, 2020 16:48
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Baka-nin posted:Eh, Trots were in Chavez's governing coalition, back in the day you used to find Stalinist websites warning people not to be lured into the Bolivarian snare because _minister was a Trot party member, or because Chavez made pro Trotsky remarks on the anniversary of the russian revolution etc. Its only this September that the Trots and the Venezuelan communist party have pulled out of supporting Maduro, and that's less to do with ideology and more because he tried to hijack their party leaderships through court orders and police surveillance. I'm sure some trots were in the coalition (especially because they're very numerous in South America), and likewise I'm sure you could find some MLs somewhere decrying that alone as a disqualifying factor, but the commitment to "permanent revolution" and against "socialism in one country" that sees individual revolutionary movements as nothing but launching points from which other capitalist governments can and must be toppled in short order means that anyone trying to engage in socialist construction proves thereby that they've been an enemy of the people all along and, frankly, had that color revolution coming.
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Dec 20, 2020 19:10
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fool of sound posted:This is because the quadrants are nonsense. There's no inherent contradiction between 'the state should have the authority to wield violence again bad actors' and 'that violence should be as humane as possible, and those affected by it should be offered rehabilitation'. just seems to constantly be a point of contradiction when people are like "stalins repression was good actually, cops in china are good actually" and then turn around and go "completely abolish prisons/police"
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Dec 20, 2020 19:32
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Kanine posted:just seems to constantly be a point of contradiction when people are like "stalins repression was good actually, cops in china are good actually" and then turn around and go "completely abolish prisons/police" What matters is an institution's class character, not its outward form. You might as well accuse leftists of being hypocritical because they support meatpackers' unions but oppose cop unions.
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Dec 20, 2020 19:48
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Is not being against socialism in one country, or rather, being realistic about how capitalism can and will crush any non-international socialist project pretty standard these days though? Most of these arguments against Trotskyism seem to boil down to either "historical reasons" or at best vaguely related reasons that have little if anything to do with Trotskys big bullet points. Like, some old British dude started an argument in a coop of thirty and now the revolution is off or whatever.
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Dec 21, 2020 00:56
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"some old british dude started an argument and now the revolution is off" I think is a significant part of why people aren't very interested in trotskyism, because that's what a lot of avowed trotksyites seem to spend most of their time doing. And as you note, things like internationalism are sort of implicitly assumed or at least I don't think very many modern lefties are particularly nationalist, and I don't think that's because of a theoretical underpinning it's just they are online and probably got fed the liberal globalization propaganda at school and actually believed it.
OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Dec 21, 2020 |
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Dec 21, 2020 01:03
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thotsky posted:Is not being against socialism in one country, or rather, being realistic about how capitalism can and will crush any non-international socialist project pretty standard these days though? Part of capitalism's attempts to crush socialist projects is manufacturing consent for said crushing among its own leftists (or "leftists") by conditioning them to believe that it's not really socialist (after all, it didn't happen spontaneously and simultaneously across the entire globe) and in fact they are merely freeing oppressed masses from an evil dictator or whatever.
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Dec 21, 2020 01:07
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Cpt_Obvious posted:One of the best parts of Marxism is that it is, in fact, falsifiable. For example, the existence of an anarcho-capitalist state would disprove Marxism, because Marxism posits that the state creates the necessary oppression that capitalism needs. The united states of america.
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Dec 21, 2020 07:16
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mila kunis posted:The united states of america. laws aren't geared toward benefitting the rich with violent state apparatus backing it up, i am very smart
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Dec 21, 2020 10:57
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i say swears online posted:laws aren't geared toward benefitting the rich with violent state apparatus backing it up, i am very smart That's the end state of anarcho-capitalism. We shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good; while the USA has its flaws it does have some beautiful examples of anarchism in action: https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dzmyk/our-broken-unemployment-system-is-a-national-scandal quote:There’s also the fact that our unemployment insurance system is actually 53 different systems, primarily run by individual states and localities. Michael Evangelist, research associate at the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions, told VICE that one federally run program, similar to Social Security, could help address these issues. “If we just had one system it would be a lot more efficient. We’re running up against the inefficiencies of moving 53 different entities to enact all these changes,” Evangelist said. It's a shame this Evangelist is trying to ruin things by proposing the tyranny of a centralized, statist pooling of resources - why should the local autonomous system in Wisconsin or Nebraska have its liberty impinged by standardization? If anything we should be further splitting up unemployment insurance to have thousands of competing, unevenly funded systems by municipality, etc.
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Dec 21, 2020 11:23
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thotsky posted:
 those "historical reasons" are still happening to this day in my town, and those British dudes are the main theorists of trotskyism globally, virtually every active Trot party in existence in the English speaking world is descended from Cliff or Healy ,so yeah sorry looks like you're stuck with them.
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Dec 21, 2020 12:46
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mila kunis posted:That's the end state of anarcho-capitalism.
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Dec 21, 2020 18:23
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I currently work at a factory in State College, PA. I work 12 hour day shifts 3 days on 3 days off. I make $11.50/hr. in (this is average in our area- it's meant to make people want to work overtime for $15 or to pull in the more rural people). Rent prices here are comparable to Philly or Pitt. Due to horrendous mismanagement, the head of our department is now pressuring us 12 hour shift workers to work additional shifts as well as 24-hour shifts. He seems to think we're on some kind of rush hour at a restaurant where the problem meeting our deadlines is that there aren't enough people, and they're not working fast enough. The issue is that the engineers are also the plant management, and they all have more interest working as engineers, so we get to the end of a month and they all panic like a sixth-grader doing their homework on the bus. He's pulling people off of their paid vacations while he himself is on vacation, and we're the type of company with bankable PTO, so those people being pulled in will completely lose that PTO forever when January hits. I'm genuinely ready to be fired if I approach HR tomorrow (they exist to protect the employer, I know). Should I try to call the PA Dept. of Labor, or would that not do anything? I'm just tired of trying to make a living out here. Plan Z fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Dec 22, 2020 |
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Dec 22, 2020 02:19
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Plan Z posted:I currently work at a factory in State College, PA. I work 12 hour day shifts 3 days on 3 days off. I make $11.50/hr. in (this is average in our area- it's meant to make people want to work overtime for $15 or to pull in the more rural people). Rent prices here are comparable to Philly or Pitt. Due to horrendous mismanagement, the head of our department is now pressuring us 12 hour shift workers to work additional shifts as well as 24-hour shifts. He seems to think we're on some kind of rush hour at a restaurant where the problem meeting our deadlines is that there aren't enough people, and they're not working fast enough. The issue is that the engineers are also the plant management, and they all have more interest working as engineers, so we get to the end of a month and they all panic like a sixth-grader doing their homework on the bus. He's pulling people off of their paid vacations while he himself is on vacation, and we're the type of company with bankable PTO, so those people being pulled in will completely lose that PTO forever when January hits. Unless the dept of labor has a reputation for being activists or interventionists it won't amount to much, best advice is to make a complaint with as many co-workers as possible to scare off retaliation and hopefully force management to consider at least some concessions. At my current employer just two workers myself and another filing a joint request for a reduction in hours forced the company to cave and reduce us from 72 hrs per week to 48 on average. Can't really give specific advice not knowing your workplace but this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvrldZlUwe0 was made as a general primer. The IWW has several branches in the area who can be contacted for more specific advice and possible support https://iww.org/directory/union_category/pa/
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Dec 22, 2020 02:41
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I Appreciate the reply. I flatly told them that I wouldn't work any of the requested extra days. We're on a crunch with employment numbers on the 12 hour shifts, so they don't really retaliate against me. I worked in the culinary industry for 15 years, and I never saw anything on the scale of this place.
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Dec 22, 2020 02:57
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Dude seriously organize and form a union the IWW will help facilitate.
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Dec 22, 2020 05:51
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Ferrinus posted:What matters is an institution's class character, not its outward form. You might as well accuse leftists of being hypocritical because they support meatpackers' unions but oppose cop unions. chinese factory worker getting beaten by a cop after trying to organize a strike for better pay/conditions/etc: "this is all fine because the cop has class character" i swear to god this poo poo is like when liberals pretend everything is fine because they elected someone with a (d) next to their name
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Dec 22, 2020 13:10
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Plan Z posted:I currently work at a factory in State College, PA. I work 12 hour day shifts 3 days on 3 days off. I make $11.50/hr. in (this is average in our area- it's meant to make people want to work overtime for $15 or to pull in the more rural people). Rent prices here are comparable to Philly or Pitt. Due to horrendous mismanagement, the head of our department is now pressuring us 12 hour shift workers to work additional shifts as well as 24-hour shifts. He seems to think we're on some kind of rush hour at a restaurant where the problem meeting our deadlines is that there aren't enough people, and they're not working fast enough. The issue is that the engineers are also the plant management, and they all have more interest working as engineers, so we get to the end of a month and they all panic like a sixth-grader doing their homework on the bus. He's pulling people off of their paid vacations while he himself is on vacation, and we're the type of company with bankable PTO, so those people being pulled in will completely lose that PTO forever when January hits. Just be aware: NEVER LET THE BOSS KNOW YOU ARE ORGANIZING UNTIL YOU ARE READY TO MAKE DEMANDS And since you're already ready to be fired, know that it's a real possibility regardless of whether it's illegal or not to fire workers for forming a union. Kanine posted:chinese factory worker getting beaten by a cop after trying to organize a strike for better pay/conditions/etc: "this is all fine because the cop has class character" Cop unions aren't unions. Nobody is justifying Stalin's repression. I seriously don't know who you're arguing with, but they aren't here.
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Dec 22, 2020 14:18
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Kanine posted:chinese factory worker getting beaten by a cop after trying to organize a strike for better pay/conditions/etc: "this is all fine because the cop has class character" That is what I say when a cop (or NKVD agent or volunteer militia or whatever) sends a kulak packing to prevent the burning of fields or slaughter of cows, yes. Sometimes internal repression is necessary.
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Dec 22, 2020 19:24
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Ferrinus posted:That is what I say when a cop (or NKVD agent or volunteer militia or whatever) sends a kulak packing to prevent the burning of fields or slaughter of cows, yes. Sometimes internal repression is necessary. Cpt_Obvious posted:Cop unions aren't unions. Nobody is justifying Stalin's repression. I seriously don't know who you're arguing with, but they aren't here.
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Dec 22, 2020 20:40
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i guess my first mistake was thinking i was going to have meaningful conversations with anyone who unironically says the phrase "class character"
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Dec 22, 2020 20:45
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Cop unions aren't unions. Nobody is justifying Stalin's repression. I seriously don't know who you're arguing with, but they aren't here. Actually, I disagree here - cop unions are unions. If you look at their behavior and their historical wins and losses you see a lot of darkly funny parallels to the struggles other unions have had. Like, you know the insane licenses to kill and protections against any kind of scrutiny cops have in various states, things like their having the privilege to inspect any evidence that's going to be brought against them in court before it's shown or the million and one pretexts they have to claim that they felt kinda scared and therefore aren't culpable for murder? Those are work benefits won for cops by cop unions instead of pay raises. Like, the state wasn't willing to jack their wages up any higher but tossed that crap in as a consolation prize, same as someone else's job might not give them a raise but, hey, here's some slightly expanded health benefits! Cops work for wages, cop unions are collective bargaining institutions that win cops higher wages and better benefits from those cops' employers. The difference between a cop and a line cook is not that only one of them is "really" selling their labor-power to an employer. The difference is that one is part of the repressive apparatus of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and one is not. In all cases it is important to maintain an awareness of the primary contradiction rather than get hung up on similarities in form between institutions with different class characters. Kanine posted:i guess my first mistake was thinking i was going to have meaningful conversations with anyone who unironically says the phrase "class character" Do you also think there was no difference between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht?
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Dec 22, 2020 20:48
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Ferrinus posted:Do you also think there was no difference between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht? Yeah it was definitely a mistake for me to think this exchange would ever be in good faith lmao lol rofl haha
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Dec 22, 2020 20:51
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Kanine posted:Yeah it was definitely a mistake for me to think this exchange would ever be in good faith lmao lol rofl It's obvious that we have an ideological difference here but it's not fair of you to pretend I'm being disingenuous. The police (or the watch, or the militia, or whatever; "cops" are a pretty modern invention) and the military are both violent institutions of state repression. Obviously, I believe that they're good and bad depending on which class is wielding them (and the state as a whole) against its enemies, rather than always bad. If you don't feel up to arguing different that's your business, but don't pretend that I'm not being straightforward and sincere.
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Dec 22, 2020 20:55
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Ferrinus posted:That is what I say when a cop (or NKVD agent or volunteer militia or whatever) sends a kulak packing to prevent the burning of fields or slaughter of cows, yes. Sometimes internal repression is necessary. This attitude is how the sovjets got all their cows killed. If the police had been abolished, the local peasants could have stopped the kulaks. But no, that is too anarchist. We need to give the kulaks the authority to freely kill the cows, while the peasants are only allowed to watch. A few weeks later the cops will show up to arrest some kulaks that may even be the same kulaks as earlier. Clearly an improvement.
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Dec 22, 2020 20:59
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Perhaps the use of violent repression turns whatever class that does it enough into violent repressors who look for things to violently repress, making them not especially dissimilar from the people who did it before.
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Dec 22, 2020 21:03
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believing we can simply take the same structures and then reform them/wield them in a just manner (instead of you know, those structures themselves being the problem) is literally how liberals think/act and its insane to me that authcoms have gotten away with pulling this scam over on people for the last century
Kanine fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Dec 22, 2020 |
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Dec 22, 2020 21:08
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Ferrinus posted:Actually, I disagree here - cop unions are unions. If you look at their behavior and their historical wins and losses you see a lot of darkly funny parallels to the struggles other unions have had. Like, you know the insane licenses to kill and protections against any kind of scrutiny cops have in various states, things like their having the privilege to inspect any evidence that's going to be brought against them in court before it's shown or the million and one pretexts they have to claim that they felt kinda scared and therefore aren't culpable for murder? Those are work benefits won for cops by cop unions instead of pay raises. Like, the state wasn't willing to jack their wages up any higher but tossed that crap in as a consolation prize, same as someone else's job might not give them a raise but, hey, here's some slightly expanded health benefits! Ok, so a union is a collective power structure used to aid productive workers to retain the maximum amount of surplus value from their labor. Cops aren't productive workers, therefore they have no surplus value to fight for. They can use the same tactic as unions and be built for similar purposes as a union (wages, hours, etc.), but they by definition cannot be unions.
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Dec 22, 2020 21:15
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Kanine posted:believing we can simply take the same structures and then reform them/wield them in a just manner (instead of you know, those structures themselves being the problem) is literally how liberals think/act and its insane to me that authcoms have gotten away with pulling this scam over on people for the last century Liberals also operate by never being made to face the consequences of their actions. The idea that one should not tear down those institutions by force if given the opportunity is crazy to me.
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Dec 22, 2020 21:31
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VictualSquid posted:This attitude is how the sovjets got all their cows killed. First off, local peasants did did stop kulaks. The class war between different strata of peasants was by no means one-sided; just like in the great purge there was a good deal of revolutionary/just-plain-vengeful fervor "from below" to mirror the top-down repression. Second off, slaughtering cows and torching fields is something you can sneak out to do in the middle of the night. To actually prevent this from ever happening (rather than preventing it from happening again by separating the perpetrators from their holdings and exiling them to some other part of the country where they have to start fresh) the peasants would have had to constantly surveil anyone they suspected might have counterrevolutionary intentions. Probably they'd have to do it in shifts to make sure the 24/7 watch was never interrupted to allow for crimes to be committed. Probably certain peasants would have to make this their primary job, because it takes a lot of time away from farming or animal husbandry. Hmm, wait... Kanine posted:believing we can simply take the same structures and then reform them/wield them in a just manner (instead of you know, those structures themselves being the problem) is literally how liberals think/act and its insane to me that authcoms have gotten away with pulling this scam over on people for the last century Nope, exactly the opposite. This belief that the institutions themselves on the problem is just liberal idealism. I don't know if you've been following this thread from the outset, but we've actually already had this discussion (or begun to, anyway - bunch of people just dropped off). If you don't understand that "there are cops" is downstream from "there is class conflict" rather than itself being the problem, you start to fool yourself into thinking that changing the outward form of things is going to solve all your problems. There's a reason that some institutions strengthen while others wither away, and it's the class forces driving those institutions. Cpt_Obvious posted:Ok, so a union is a collective power structure used to aid productive workers to retain the maximum amount of surplus value from their labor. Cops aren't productive workers, therefore they have no surplus value to fight for. They can use the same tactic as unions and be built for similar purposes as a union (wages, hours, etc.), but they by definition cannot be unions. Ah, no, I think you're still doing special pleading. There's a lot of work which is only "productive" in the second- or third-order sense, but which is still waged work and subject to collective bargaining. For instance, take a factory's janitors. They don't "make" anything - but they do clear the ground and create the conditions for productive work to occur. Take, also, a stereotypical housewife; she doesn't crank out widgets, but does perform socially reproductive labor that allow her spouse (and perhaps children! yikes!) to go out and do productive labor themselves. Then you've got government bureaucrats and administrators - are their unions also not really unions because their labor is largely logistical? If you understand that cops are the repressive arm of the bourgeois dictatorship, then you understand that - just like janitors or claims checkers - they spend their labor-power creating the conditions for directly productive work to occur. The capitalist mode of production just cannot run without that implicit threat hanging over everybody's heads. And because the people actually, personally enacting that force want bigger paychecks and shorter hours just like everyone else does, they unionize.
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Dec 22, 2020 21:58
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Ferrinus posted:Ah, no, I think you're still doing special pleading. There's a lot of work which is only "productive" in the second- or third-order sense, but which is still waged work and subject to collective bargaining. For instance, take a factory's janitors. They don't "make" anything - but they do clear the ground and create the conditions for productive work to occur. Take, also, a stereotypical housewife; she doesn't crank out widgets, but does perform socially reproductive labor that allow her spouse (and perhaps children! yikes!) to go out and do productive labor themselves. Then you've got government bureaucrats and administrators - are their unions also not really unions because their labor is largely logistical? OK, so there's a lot to unpack here: "Productive workers" include people like janitors (but technically maybe not housewives because they receive no wages) because they make their workplace more "valuable". A factory maintenance crew makes the factory more capable of production. Same goes for many paper-pushers like accountants; all of them are integral to the productive power of their workplace because even if they do not directly create anything of value, they contribute to the labor of others. Cops don't. Cops provide no value towards the production of anything. As you stated they are a tool of repression, and the only purpose they serve is to maximize the profits of investors and business owners by keeping productive workers from retaining their surplus value. Therefore, they cannot form unions. I'll let Richard Wolff explain in more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLCegidwb80
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Dec 22, 2020 22:06
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im glad that abolitionism/acab/decolonization/etc. are the primary currents in american leftism right now because it gives me hope that we won't be repeating the same bullshit that led to what happened with the ussr/china/etc.
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Dec 22, 2020 22:07
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Same, tbh.
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Dec 22, 2020 22:08
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I'm gonna side with Ferrinus on the union question. Cop unions are unions, unions just have ~class character~ like anything else. There is proletarian labor power, middle class labor power and even bourgeois labor power. Trade unions are ultimately cartels over the sale of specific concrete forms of labor, and in advanced capitalist society many kinds of differently positioned concrete people sell labor power as part of what they do for a living. The proletariat are people who have nothing to sell for immediate living income besides labor power, they're forced to take the best offer for employment. Only the unions of the proletariat are proletarian, and a sufficiently successful&atomized union can even lift a trade that used to be proletarian, above the proletariat, and transform its own class character. Cpt_Obvious posted:Ok, so a union is a collective power structure used to aid productive workers to retain the maximum amount of surplus value from their labor. Cops aren't productive workers, therefore they have no surplus value to fight for. They can use the same tactic as unions and be built for similar purposes as a union (wages, hours, etc.), but they by definition cannot be unions. This line of argumentation is wrong in a harmful manner, because probably the majority of the proletariat in first world countries today work in unproductive sectors. Amazon, Wal-Mart, food delivery, telemarketing, cleaning, tourism, the list goes on. The basis for their class status isn't their concrete labor, it's their position within the system in general. They work lovely jobs because they need to sell labor power in order to live, and so they have to take what's on offer without being picky. The decision about whether people are hired for productive or unproductive labor is on capital. Kanine posted:believing we can simply take the same structures and then reform them/wield them in a just manner (instead of you know, those structures themselves being the problem) is literally how liberals think/act and its insane to me that authcoms have gotten away with pulling this scam over on people for the last century It's not that we can simply do that and things are just that easy somehow. It's that we have to use the most effective methods available to us, and if no one has developed and demonstrated more just methods that are also practically superior yet, tough luck. Capitalism is in charge right now because of 1) being a functionally superior form of organization to almost anything out there, and 2) because in the real world, moral virtuousness counts for rather little when it comes to success. Liberals have this martyr complex that ohh, if you can't stand morally above your oppressors, the only moral thing to do is stay a slave and act with a crab mentality toward those who genuinely rebel. That's by far the bigger scam.
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Dec 22, 2020 22:16
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