|
I actually wanna try and print some of them out like that.
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 00:43
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 25, 2024 10:50 |
|
|
Comrade Koba posted:having way too much fun with this now maybe, "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder?
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 00:46
|
|
|
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 00:54
|
|
|
Flavius Aetass posted:Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism Elon Musk's dank new bestseller!
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 01:25
|
|
|
making stalin’s “the tasks of business executives” look like a lovely business bestseller would b funny ofc that was just a speech and not a book but still
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 03:36
|
|
|
looks like the union got its rear end kicked in Alabama. what a shame
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 04:08
|
|
|
love the redsails
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 04:50
|
|
|
If this isn't a good place for this conversation, let me know. I'm writing a novel, I've finished the first one, and now I'm writing / drawing a webcomic. I'm writing a semi-communistic society where all basic needs are provided for, Food, Water, a Home, Education, and a public works program that does community entertainment (theater, music, book writing, etc.) but still functions on the underpinning of capitalism (There are entertainment and luxury goods that must be purchased with currency, like having a bigger house, having a garden, taking care of a pet etc. etc.) I am doing this for two reasons, one in Kitty Quest (my novel,) I have this society get torn down by capitalist fat cats who gank the eternal emperor and set up a much more laissez-faire version of capitalism, which ends up removing all personal freedoms and uses violence to outlaw magic that would allow people to feed and home themselves, essentially stripping away education of the most basic rights of magic. This system is what the characters rebel against in my novel series. Is it over the top to portay the semi-communistic society that precluded this as having people committing murder, or stealing, or getting violent to horde resources for themselves and their lords? Is it realistic to have conflicts over what essentially amounts to luxuries? I feel like I'm not smart enough to write the setting, and I worry that I'm falling into like peak liberalism. I posted this question to a few discords to get a lot of opinions, but my understanding of this after someone pointed me in the right direction, is that I could read about Marxist's ideas of primitive accumulation? When feudal societies made the transition to capitalists ones? Are there good resources to read to learn more, get a better handle on the setting I'm trying to write? I'm not an academic by any means though, so maybe just talking it out would help?
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 05:25
|
|
|
i assume that semi-communistic or outright communistic societies will have their fair share of interpersonal violence, although less to none of the kind that stems from existential stress and resource scarcity (theft, gang violence, whatever). bar fights, blood feuds, domestic abuse, and so forth will presumably be lessened by the presence of general social welfare, freely available physical and mental health care, etc, but not actually magicked away. interpersonal conflict that occasionally rises to the level of violence could easily come from struggles over perceived social status and access to luxuries or recognition. whether you literally get one civil engineer secretly murdering a rival in order to be the one who gets to redesign the municipal waterworks and therefore win the order of lenin comes down to individual personalities and the level of drama you want to inject in the story you're telling. the extent to which this violence is handled by police, or "police", or a culture of community care and intervention, or whatever, is contingent on the history of that society and its current circumstances/ideological development. what i would be inclined to raise my eyebrow at and pick apart in a story like yours is exactly how it is capitalism gets restored. surely it can't JUST be a matter of a single royal getting assassinated, because a socialist society is presumably one that is ruled in some fashion by the majority of the population (the working class in specific, who in some way - direct voting, sending delegates to higher decision-making bodies, whatever) decide what gets done with the means of production and how the general social product gets divided and reinvested. if in this story the workers' ability to generate value through labor is represented literally as magic, how does a capitalist conspiracy actually enforce that magic being outlawed? wouldn't the wizards of the general populace dramatically outnumber whatever enforcers are sent to dispel all their conjurations or whatever? on the other hand, if it turns out that this king was like, the source of all magic, and without that one figurehead the workers simply cannot maintain control over their own way of life, that should raise the question in the characters' minds of where their power was actually coming from and if all along they've just confused socialism with what was really just an extremely generous social-democratic welfare state. maybe all along they were drawing all their mana from the imperial plunder of your fantasy setting's third world Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Apr 9, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 05:37
|
|
|
 Comrade Koba posted:having way too much fun with this now 
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 05:49
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:i assume that semi-communistic or outright communistic societies will have their fair share of interpersonal violence, although less to none of the kind that stems from existential stress and resource scarcity (theft, gang violence, whatever). bar fights, blood feuds, domestic abuse, and so forth will presumably be lessened by the presence of general social welfare, freely available physical and mental health care, etc, but not actually magicked away. interpersonal conflict that occasionally rises to the level of violence could easily come from struggles over perceived social status and access to luxuries or recognition. whether you literally get one civil engineer secretly murdering a rival in order to be the one who gets to redesign the municipal waterworks and therefore win the order of lenin comes down to individual personalities and the level of drama you want to inject in the story you're telling. the extent to which this violence is handled by police, or "police", or a culture of community care and intervention, or whatever, is contingent on the history of that society and its current circumstances/ideological development. Magic is the currency in the story is literally measured in KiloJoules. Someone needs a certain amount of calories to survive a day, a certain amount to stop aging, and a certain amount to cast a spell. The Queen has the biggest store of this, as it is their government that regulates who gets what, when. When she dies, who ever was in charge of the stockpile becomes the ruling party, and the tiny fiefdoms, now unshackled by paying to fund the old government quickly goes into turbo exploit mode, trying to steal and grift as much as they can from the people. Because they own the literal equivalent of a days work, one of their praetorian guard types could easily wipe out entire cities of people. So people kowtow, there are some revolutionaries who fight, but slowly over hundreds of years education and power is taken from them, until they reach a point where they barely have enough magic to sustain themselves. Because the currency can be used to feed ones self without food, and to stop aging or supplements ones ability to do labor, we start seeing things like eating and sleeping becoming luxuries. Boba Pearl fucked around with this message at 06:38 on Apr 9, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 06:27
|
|
|
Boba Pearl posted:Magic is the currency in the story is literally measured in KiloJoules. Someone needs a certain amount of calories to survive a day, a certain amount to stop aging, and a certain amount to cast a spell. The Queen has the biggest store of this, as it is their government that regulates who gets what, when. When she dies, who ever was in charge of the stockpile becomes the ruling party, and the tiny fiefdoms, now unshackled by paying to fund the old government quickly goes into turbo exploit mode, trying to steal and grift as much as they can from the people. Because they own the literal equivalent of a days work, one of their praetorian guard types could easily wipe out entire cities of people. So people kowtow, there are some revolutionaries who fight, but slowly over hundreds of years education and power is taken from them, until they reach a point where they barely have enough magic to sustain themselves. something this is missing about the development of feudalism into capitalism is that capitalism didn't just steal everyone's existing wealth, it also developed the forces of production to heretofore unheard of levels. if there are wizard peasants performing daily oblations to collect mana from their individual sacred glades and mushroom rings, and tithing a portion of their mana to a feudal queen, then the rise of the wizard bourgeoisie should entail marketization and enclosure on the one hand but also (likely ruinous to the environment) immense advances in power generation and conjuring abilities that draw the willworking class into immense spell formations that allow them to snap off rituals previously inconceivable. the mystic capitalists themselves are compelled to do this by the laws of market competition, whether or not they're personally greedy, virtuous, lazy, etc generally i think if you don't pay some kind of attention to where the power comes from and what mechanisms even allow a government to harvest and reallocate it, you run the risk of accidentally writing an antisemitic parable where a tiny evil conspiracy has stolen away our life-essence just because they're evil and they like to do that kind of thing
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 18:00
|
|
|
I don't really understand, I thought the rise of capitalism was a purposeful thing that happened because it allowed a bunch of people to create power and wealth more efficiently then feudalism. Does Capitalism need an exponentially rising rate of production to come about? How does production tie into this?
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 19:30
|
|
|
capitalism was able to burst out of feudalism's chest in a shower of gore because it was more productive than feudalism, and it was more productive because under capitalism there's a constant, inescapable, sink-or-swim incentive to make More Stuff, Faster which doesn't exist under feudalism. your feudal lord's desire to exploit you is limited by the walls of his stomach, but there is no amount of profit that is "enough" for your boss. in fact in many ways a capitalist has to be less decadent and more disciplined than a king or queen, because past a certain point all a monarch can do with wealth is hoard it or spend it on luxuries, while a capitalist can (and must) constantly reinvest surplus into the means of production to buy more land, build more factories on that land, upgrade the machines in those factories to make them more efficient, etc this has immense negative effects on the environment and on the health and livelihood of many people but it also contributes to scientific advancement, military power, and even in some ways to the net standard of living. "greed" should not be understood as the engine driving capitalism, although obviously capitalism encourages greed in a way that feudalism doesn't i'm on a red sails kick so it might help you to read this to see what i'm getting at: https://redsails.org/why-marxism/ quote:Capitalism brought with it an unprecedented expansion in social mobility, both upward and downward. The waning of aristocratic mores led to celebration, but it was short-lived. It soon became clear that these new capitalists were something akin to kings, even those of humble origins. And despite a lot of rhetoric about the freedom and equality of the laborer, capitalists routinely used force to discipline the working poor. Thus philosophers and clergymen of the time began to formulate criticisms of capitalism: it’s heartless, it’s exploitative, it tends towards monopoly, it rewards greed, and so forth.
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 19:40
|
|
|
I like the idea that the economy is a meta-intelligence, an actor without agency
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 20:00
|
|
|
indigi posted:I like the idea that the economy is a meta-intelligence, an actor without agency To begin with, we're not what you'd call, human. Over the past two hundred years a kind of consciousness formed layer by layer in the crucible of the New York Stock Exchange. It's not unlike the way life started in the oceans four billion years ago. The NYSE was our primordial soup, a base of evolution. We are formless. We are the very discipline and morality that Americans invoke so often. How can anyone hope to eliminate us? As long as this nation exists, so will we.
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 20:03
|
|
|
indigi posted:I like the idea that the economy is a meta-intelligence, an actor without agency It's like I've been saying and these loving PHILISTINES refuse to listen, capital is, in both the literal and figurative terms, Moloch. It's the idiot-god that controls all human affairs with its unblinking, unwitnessing eye and whom even the most powerful capitalists merely serve
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 20:06
|
|
|
. . .
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 20:10
|
|
|
yeah heres another idea, what do you think happen if we DONT treat capitalism as an antigod, dispensing miseries upon mankind for its own entertainment?
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 20:14
|
|
|
the demiurge is the combination of all collective human actions that create an all-encompassing force of creation, destruction, and suffering. moloch is the system of gears grinding humans into bone dust and gristle, sucking out their souls. this of course can be entirely material but i like the poetry of spiritual metaphor regardless. from some objective point of view these are just material forces playing out, all incumbent on every previous action. im not objective, though
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 20:17
|
|
|
brotha from anatha posted:yeah heres another idea, what do you think happen if we DONT treat capitalism as an antigod, dispensing miseries upon mankind for its own entertainment? it doesn’t get any entertainment from it, it’s just a program executing its code. the code has to be changed
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 21:12
|
|
|
this is why terminator's skynet, the matrix's the matrix, man of steel's krypton, etc, are all grasping towards the idea of a final, ascendant capital that has dispensed with its need for people as such
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 21:15
|
|
|
well I’d argue that the various non-human intelligences that inhabit the Matrix count as “people” in a philosophical sense but I probably agree with the overall metaphor
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 21:18
|
|
|
yeah in those cases the ai(s) stand in for the emergent drives and logic of capital's self-reproduction. for science fiction in which ais are regular old people see Star Wars (1977)
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 21:20
|
|
|
the biggest bummer about the sequels is that the Waichowskis clearly didn’t understand the themes of their own story (perhaps because it was largely stolen lol). it’s kind of why I’m so excited to see what the hell Lana did with 4
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 21:24
|
|
|
there's a lot of stuff going on in the matrix, some of which really is bog standard the lizardmen are stealing our vital fluids libertarianism, so it takes some work to pull a liberatory narrative out of the films. that said i appreciate that the wachowskis themselves understood that insofar as there were machine intelligences concerned with their own self-defense etc they ultimately had to be treated as characters with their own incentives and decision-making processes rather than faceless demons. insofar as the matrix = capital specifically metaphor holds, then even sympathetic machine intelligences should be slaves to the dictates of the system even if they personally have more power and agency
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 21:35
|
|
|
For real, we're past the point this would be a worthy photoshop phriday: rebrand/remarket communist literature for chuds they'll love the bits about political power flowing from the barrel of a gun, and that rich fatcats and modern art are bad actually
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 21:38
|
|
|
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun - Wayne Robert LaPierre, Jr
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 22:02
|
|
|
Comrade Koba posted:having way too much fun with this now
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 22:30
|
|
|
some good suggestions upthread, gonna try to crank out a couple more this weekendchairface posted:For real, we're past the point this would be a worthy photoshop phriday: rebrand/remarket communist literature for chuds photoshop phriday: cspam edition would be cool, just keep it out of GBS.
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 23:06
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:insofar as the matrix = capital specifically metaphor holds, then even sympathetic machine intelligences should be slaves to the dictates of the system even if they personally have more power and agency so Seraph is Bernie Sanders
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2021 23:23
|
|
|
indigi posted:so Seraph is Bernie Sanders Eh, one of the robots that is program to disconnect Neo from his pod.
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2021 00:18
|
|
|
lol poor Bernie
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2021 01:44
|
|
|
Malenkov, by executing Beria, was the original Q
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2021 04:32
|
|
|
GalacticAcid posted:making stalin’s “the tasks of business executives” look like a lovely business bestseller would b funny  edit: went more for the "lovely economics textbook" look for some reason, lol Comrade Koba fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Apr 10, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2021 19:11
|
|
|
this one's good
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2021 19:12
|
|
|
lmfao thank you my friend. that is exceptional
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2021 19:12
|
|
|
i'm using a textbook nearly identical to that for keeping my pc off the carpet
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2021 19:14
|
|
|
Comrade Koba posted:
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2021 19:57
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 25, 2024 10:50 |
|
|
Do State and Revolution but have pictures of Ammon Bundy
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2021 20:33
|
|
