|
we need more MBAs
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2021 07:57
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 16:18 |
|
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:can we just form the goon communist party (no sex weirdos allowed) too many past and present mods
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2021 08:25
|
|
|
need experienced supply planners to make sure your factories and factory complexes are receiving the right market signals without killing your consumers, your economy or your environment a good factory manager will make wrong decisions if they’re getting the wrong inputs (like making high margin items instead of basic consumer items despite rampant market shortages)
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2021 10:03
|
|
|
We've been doing a lot of canvassing to get people to put up union signs in Bessemer lately and what we've heard from people living there is that we're the first people to actually come by where they live lol. Apparently most of the dsa stuff has just been in Birmingham
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2021 10:11
|
|
|
Gavin Newsome allowed PG&E to both dodge criminal liability for one of the worst man-made fires in American history and then also raise rates to pay the paltry fees they did end up having to pay. If he became a communist he would hopefully kill himself.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2021 11:06
|
|
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:can we just form the goon communist party (no sex weirdos allowed) First they came for the sex weirdos, and I did not speak up because I was on probation for getting into yet another argument about soup in PYF
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2021 11:53
|
|
|
i say swears online posted:we need more MBAs what a snipe
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2021 14:25
|
|
|
BrutalistMcDonalds posted:i dunno if we should be in charge. we're pretty angry and get heated a lot I’ve never been mad, actually.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2021 15:59
|
|
|
SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:We've been doing a lot of canvassing to get people to put up union signs in Bessemer lately and what we've heard from people living there is that we're the first people to actually come by where they live lol. Apparently most of the dsa stuff has just been in Birmingham I feel like it would be a complete game changer for the DSA if every major branch had the resources to hire like half a dozen paid full-time organizers. Speaking as someone from Oregon it’s hard to reach out to the rural areas when almost everyone is from the Portland area and working a full time job already
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2021 16:09
|
|
|
was thinking about one of my favorite ttrpgs the other day, stars without number revised. i was looking through the world tags and came across this entry that i did a double-take at now the writer of the book styles himself as stridently anti-political and never discusses anything other than his games, but lol also our anarchist comrades take a beating too  the game of course assumes a capitalist mode of production as the default, which isn't surprising, but it still makes me laugh that these entries exist in the way that they do while claiming to be non-political
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2021 17:39
|
|
|
i say swears online posted:we need more MBAs https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2021 17:50
|
|
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:can we just form the goon communist party (no sex weirdos allowed) but u repeat yourself
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2021 19:45
|
|
|
Chomskyan posted:I feel like it would be a complete game changer for the DSA if every major branch had the resources to hire like half a dozen paid full-time organizers. Speaking as someone from Oregon it’s hard to reach out to the rural areas when almost everyone is from the Portland area and working a full time job already I mean none of us are paid organizers here either
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2021 19:55
|
|
|
BrutalistMcDonalds posted:(1) are we qualified to run a factory this is a poo poo posting forum for goofing off though, so of course we're not a cadre ready operate a factory, let alone the commanding heights of the economy. if by 'we' you mean goons, then we're unfit to run much of anything, for we can hardly keep a subforum together. if by 'we' you mean the left more broadly, then whether we're fit to run anything or not gets more complicated. the question of how the left can acquire the technical and organization know-how to actually run things is important, though. like, in texas here we just had a clear, public demonstration of why running critical infrastructure on the basis of the profit motive doesn't work—ERCOT's inability to prepare for inclement weather, resulting in rolling blackouts across the state, etc. the left's diagnosis and explanation of the problem is basically correct, as far as i can tell. and the left's proposed solution—bringing ERCOT under public ownership and control, democratizing decision making regarding the energy grid, using state-level long-term planning rather than market mechanisms to expand and fortify the grid, etc—are surely worth pursuing. but then, as you're getting at, the obvious question arises: who on the left actually knows how to do this? it is useful here to compare to left's 'strength' and its institutional underpinning (or lack thereof) with the right's. like, when the right wanted to design ERCOT, they had william hogan, a market worshipping ghoul from harvard, design the market structure. hogan himself is relatively unimportant, as they could've picked from any number of market worshipping technocrats that the economics profession pumps out to fulfill the same task. the left has nothing like that. there might be a few leftist economists that get posted around here in cspam (some of them post-keynesian MMTers, some of them marxists) that could actually implement these systems, but there aren't all that many of them and they don't have the ear of power. there are plenty of non-leftists who might have the technical know-how to redesign an energy grid in the aforementioned fashion, but because they aren't leftists they aren't pursuing, on their own, socialist solutions to these problems (and they're not backed by a working class movement than can implement them). there are like a handful of econ departments in the country that teach this kind of lefty economics technocrat stuff, but they're in the vast minority, and they have little penetration into the various policy-making apparatuses that turn these theories into policy to be implemented. i just used texas's energy grid as an example. for virtually all of these problems we talk about and propose fixing, there's the same kind of lingering question: who on the left knows how to do this? unlike the right, we don't have legions of technocrats, scientists and engineers organized and working on these things Finicums Wake fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Mar 2, 2021 |
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2021 20:13
|
|
|
Serf posted:was thinking about one of my favorite ttrpgs the other day, stars without number revised. i was looking through the world tags and came across this entry that i did a double-take at now it's like when people mumble about how humans are just naturally pieces of poo poo despite millennia of history saying it's pretty much exclusively the domain of the severely mentally ill and the ruling class. you see man just naturally wants to enslave and control, and please pay no attention to this 'fact' being a convenient excuse for why nothing can ever change
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2021 20:17
|
|
|
BrutalistMcDonalds posted:
Goon project: nuclear brinksmanship
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2021 21:42
|
|
|
Finicums Wake posted:i just used texas's energy grid as an example. for virtually all of these problems we talk about and propose fixing, there's the same kind of lingering question: who on the left knows how to do this? unlike the right, we don't have legions of technocrats, scientists and engineers organized and working on these things they don't have to be leftists to take a paycheck. plenty of people who'd describe themselves as socialists or communists work for google, Boeing, Pfizer, Coca Cola, etc. that's what the money's for
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2021 21:44
|
|
|
lol an engineer doesn’t need to be a party official to apply a socialist solution in fact, the old technocrats were exactly engineering’/science people who agreed with socialism because it defended actual scientific/rational solutions for social problems, not hindered by profit
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2021 22:09
|
|
|
the engineers don't do the profit motive stuff anyway, they'd flip the same switches and fix the same equipment. mandating exchanges between power plants, providers and customers be set at certain prices is a solution, as well as removing any exchange at all. just tell the senior director of operations or w/e of power plants and providers to prioritize service over making number go up. it's only board directors and others that have a direct stake in profits and share prices that skew the incentives toward the perverse
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 00:20
|
|
|
i'm not saying every engineer must be a leftist themselves or involved in the party, or that somehow the technical knowledge engineers have is somehow dependent upon their political ideology, or that the only way to get them to use those skills to implement socialism is by converting them to socialists (yes: you can pay them), etc i'm saying that i seriously doubt it's as simple as removing the people at the top, going "oh i'll just send a memo to a senior director of operations or w/e" and then it'll all work itself out. that's not a plan or a strategy, it's just handwaving away the problem. and, because it's not that simple, having some leftists who have this technical know-how involved in the party is important, not only for coming to power but for knowing what to do afterwards when i get to my pc, i'll find it, but there's a great quote in this book i have about socialist planning where some bolshevik theorist says, basically, "we came to power but don't know how to actually do all this planning stuff, in a practical and concrete sense" then it became a scramble to figure it out in the midst of crisis. repeating that mistake would be dumb, if it can be avoided e: this issue gets even more complicated when we're talking about technical knowledge regarding the social domain rather than the physical. or, to put it slightly differently, when we're talking about, say, an economist rather than like a mechanical engineer. what an economist knows and the course of actions they suggest is highly ideological. so, yeah, maybe those people need to be part of the party in a way that engineers don't. and maybe we need to think about the kinds of institutions that train economists, how they've been captured by the right, etc. Finicums Wake fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Mar 3, 2021 |
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 01:20
|
|
|
i say swears online posted:the engineers don't do the profit motive stuff anyway, they'd flip the same switches and fix the same equipment. mandating exchanges between power plants, providers and customers be set at certain prices is a solution, as well as removing any exchange at all. just tell the senior director of operations or w/e of power plants and providers to prioritize service over making number go up. it's only board directors and others that have a direct stake in profits and share prices that skew the incentives toward the perverse Also, in the US and elsewhere, plenty of electric companies are publicly owned anyway, either by the city, the state, or the feds. There's not really a technical question to how any of it would work in a communist system.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 03:41
|
|
|
PERPETUAL IDIOT posted:Also, in the US and elsewhere, plenty of electric companies are publicly owned anyway, either by the city, the state, or the feds. There's not really a technical question to how any of it would work in a communist system. they're run according ti carefully constructed market mechanisms which were constructed on the basis of underlying physical and engineering constraints. if you're a market communist, then sure: the ghouls we pay to construct markets could be bought off to construct 'communist markets.' but if you're interested in planning i can tell you this: there are very few people alive who have studied the past implementations of these approaches, much less how they could be grafted onto something like ERCOT. and anyone with these skills is probably an aging academic, and not an active member of your local org edit: i'm open to being wrong about this. maybe "how to centrally plan a modern economy and run it better than capitalists do" is very well understood. and on top of that, maybe there are tons of people out there that have ideas of how to do it, other than a handful of nobodies like cockshott or ellman etc. who are near death if anyone can tell me knows how to plan the economy, please link me to their work Finicums Wake fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Mar 3, 2021 |
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 05:03
|
|
|
there's a marxist hardcore comp sci guy who basically walks through solving price signaling, but I can't find the link at all and there's number crunching and solution gauging in guys like Kropotkin as well I think what feels weird about the question is more that once you have a willing government with a planned economy, a whole bunch of things actually become incredibly straightforward in ways that feel "wait how in the gently caress, is that it?!?!" and yes, that's it like, you brought the example of the early USSR, but rather that was more due to the sheer clusterfuck of almost everything gone not just bad but really really bad. Yet, they had a famine relief plan right out of the gate, they made the red army out of almost nothing into a force that beat the whites and the whole rest of the ww1 participants from the baltic to the pacific, electrified the entire union in five years (when 10 were expected)... but that's well known. I believe what you mean is how do you solve the quandary with getting people to get goods and services in ways that feel similar to what we have, like, how do I get to spend accumulated labor power in the service of the Commune into things that I use or services to consume, like a sophisticated consumer economy. In a rather funny way, Amazon and Wal-Mart did prove a lot of what many theoreticians (not academics, these are the types of the communist party of russia/CCP who would work at planning and design without being necessarily bureaucrats) considered the main difficulties regarding a command economy: very large scale logistics accompanied with the necessary communication infrastructure are essentially the major physical requirements which required the development of computer tech to fully address. A local warehouse lacks soap, so it instantly communicates how much soap has been consumed by that city's district to the main warehouse, which then supplies the data to the planning system to see if the current soap production is calibrated to demand, so now the main warehouse supplies the soap needed, etc the true major hurdle imho is getting people to understand that we already have the tools and means to have a radically different life, and that requires a social transformation that must be truly revolutionary in execution. Like, above all else, getting people to understand "hey, in your job, you will have so many hours of the week that are going for social production (to provide for all necessities of modern life), then the rest of it you get to do whatever the hell you want, it's all yours", with shelter, food, clothing, healthcare and education and all the basics fully covered edit: no idea why that line break edit2: line break disappeared, reactionary ghost work dead gay comedy forums fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Mar 3, 2021 |
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 05:39
|
|
|
christmas boots posted:First they came for the sex weirdos, and I did not speak up because I was on probation for getting into yet another argument about soup in PYF
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 05:46
|
|
|
Finicums Wake posted:they're run according ti carefully constructed market mechanisms which were constructed on the basis of underlying physical and engineering constraints. I agree with you that there are challenges in transitioning to a planned economy, but I don't think the electric grid is really one of them. ERCOT itself is the way it is to graft market mechanisms onto a system that doesn't really need them. A hypothetical USSA nationalized power company would have no need for what ERCOT or any other ISO does. All the planning for where and when to build plants would be done by bureaucrats whose whole job is doing exactly that. Maybe if you kept a soviet model and wanted to have the Mexico power company and the USA one and the Canada one you might need some central authority and basic rules around how to settle and trade but nothing like ERCOT.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 05:48
|
|
|
the answer is you figure it out as you go along and repurpose the existing institutions that make sense the institutions are basically designed to facilitate complete control handovers as a feature lol
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 09:54
|
|
|
yeah it's important to remember that as complex and painful as the soviet transition was, they did it in the middle of a civil war and literally like 40 years of major civil unrest and two world wars. and they did it with loving telegraphs and railroads. the biggest hurdle is how to organize the people to begin this great project. I'm not saying it shouldn't be thought about, but there's a lot of private infrastructure in the US just waiting to be seized. I think taking power and holding it would be much harder
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 13:18
|
|
|
is there a name for people who claim to be marxists but also think capitalism has won and any worker/socialist/communist revolution is impossible to occur ever in the future? running into more and more people like that these days
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 17:47
|
|
|
Serf posted:was thinking about one of my favorite ttrpgs the other day, stars without number revised. i was looking through the world tags and came across this entry that i did a double-take at now
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 17:51
|
|
|
Trabisnikof posted:is there a name for people who claim to be marxists but also think capitalism has won and any worker/socialist/communist revolution is impossible to occur ever in the future? yea that’s called “podcast brain”
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 17:51
|
|
|
Trabisnikof posted:is there a name for people who claim to be marxists but also think capitalism has won and any worker/socialist/communist revolution is impossible to occur ever in the future? I think it’s possible to conclude that without diverging from Marxism. Why do you need a special name for them? If an asteroid was certain to hit next week and someone expresses doubts over a worker’s revolution in that timeframe, it doesn’t make their claims to being Marxist any less or more valid. It’s hard to blame someone looking at the situation today and guessing that nothing we want will happen in time, and they might be right. I don’t think there’s anything better to fill up the remaining time but I’m also pretty sure we will fail.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 17:54
|
|
|
mawarannahr posted:I think it’s possible to conclude that without diverging from Marxism. Why do you need a special name for them? If an asteroid was certain to hit next week and someone expresses doubts over a worker’s revolution in that timeframe, it doesn’t make their claims to being Marxist any less or more valid. It’s hard to blame someone looking at the situation today and guessing that nothing we want will happen in time, and they might be right. I don’t think there’s anything better to fill up the remaining time but I’m also pretty sure we will fail. I guess I'm more meaning the people who think that under any situation capitalism was inevitable and would always destroy all workers before they're able to do anything about it. A step beyond the asteroid scenario. I'm just curious if there is an existing ideological line here within Marxist thinkers that also argued capitalism would ensure it was impossible for a worker's revolution to occur.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 18:01
|
|
|
Trabisnikof posted:is there a name for people who claim to be marxists but also think capitalism has won and any worker/socialist/communist revolution is impossible to occur ever in the future? Is that not just a type of Doomerism? I would also count Marxists who have resigned themselves to propping up local centrists in elections or Anarchists who wish to keep a local social centre going as their political horizon as being Doomers in all but name.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 18:19
|
|
|
Trabisnikof posted:I guess I'm more meaning the people who think that under any situation capitalism was inevitable and would always destroy all workers before they're able to do anything about it. A step beyond the asteroid scenario. Sounds like Herbert Marcuse tbh, but New Left (?) is a little outdated
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 18:26
|
|
|
thotsky posted:Is that not just a type of Doomerism? I would also count Marxists who have resigned themselves to propping up local centrists in elections or Anarchists who wish to keep a local social centre going as their political horizon as being Doomers in all but name. as you're pointing out, doomerism isn't exactly a consistent ideological label. i'm curious if there is a existing line of marxist thought that comes to the conclusion that capitalism was always going to prevent any worker's revolution or if it is really just the marxist flavor of non-ideological doomerism mawarannahr posted:Sounds like Herbert Marcuse tbh, but New Left (?) is a little outdated thanks, i'll read into him a bit to start
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 18:29
|
|
|
if you believe in any kind of end of history (with the possible exception of full human extinction) you don't sound very marxist to me
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 18:39
|
|
|
I do think that the contradictions of capitalism are integral enough to marxist thinking that people who believe in hyper-competent galaxybrain capitalism are not real marxists.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 18:47
|
|
|
the New Left and marcuseian left is still arguably hegemonic, it's very recent that cracks have become visible in their hold over contemporary radicalism and New Left tendencies still dominate the main left-wing parties and factions in the west it's well worth reading marcuse (and the rest of the frankfurters like habermas and adorno et al), but one should keep in mind that his project has failed utterly in terms of practical politics and habermas has been reduced to shilling for the EU
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 18:49
|
|
|
Cerebral Bore posted:(with the possible exception of full human extinction) good news!
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 18:51
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 16:18 |
|
|
People who think that they're marxist but that any kind of revolution is impossible so they're going to ignore politics and just not be a comrade anymore have a name they picked already. Had a few people who stopped all organizing work, they call themselves post-left
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 18:56
|
|