|
Ferrinus posted:cars are a bourgeois construct i tell myself as i wander into traffic Walkkking is a bourgeois construct, once you start respecting it the revolution is already over.
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 19:24
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 7, 2024 23:54 |
|
|
Cerebral Bore posted:if you have a way to magic away all other bourgeois states and their money and armies then do tell nuke them? i think thats how they did it in star trek
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 19:27
|
|
|
Trying to figure out why a state, which is uniquely capable and suited to the task of coordinating and running everyone's lives after the revolution, will just choose to stop doing that at some point.
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 19:57
|
|
|
Lots of people haven't read lenin, and it shows.
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 20:01
|
|
|
The state that withers away is the oppressive tool of class dominance over another class because those class antagonisms no longer exist because the classes no longer exist, there'll still most likely be departments of people going around inspecting environmental conditions empowered to shut down excessive polluters and people checking on educational standards and things.
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 20:04
|
|
|
Lenin got cucked out of his revolution by Stalin so who cares
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 20:08
|
|
|
Kaedric posted:Trying to figure out why a state, which is uniquely capable and suited to the task of coordinating and running everyone's lives after the revolution, will just choose to stop doing that at some point. "the state" isn't a malevolent and independently-acting genius loci that manifests out of sinful thoughts, it's a tool made and used by people. states (or other institutions) don't choose to do things, classes do
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 20:12
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:"the state" isn't a malevolent and independently-acting genius loci that manifests out of sinful thoughts, it's a tool made and used by people. states (or other institutions) don't choose to do things, classes do wrong a state is self perpetuating once established. thats the first priority of a state, self preservation
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 20:15
|
|
|
Rutibex posted:wrong a state is self perpetuating once established. thats the first priority of a state, self preservation all institutions have a tendency towards self-perpetuation. however, all institutions also have a tendency towards erosion and decay. what determines whether an institution waxes or wanes in power is the balance of class forces behind that institution, because in the final analysis an institution is a prop and not an actor on the stage of history. for an easy example, consider the catholic church, which is extremely entrenched, hierarchical, rich, self-perpetuating, etc, but despite all its efforts is losing power and influence because it's a relic of a past mode of production which was governed by different classes that had different needs
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 20:19
|
|
|
Rutibex posted:wrong a state is self perpetuating once established. thats the first priority of a state, self preservation no, the first priority of a state is to wield power of behalf of the ruling class. self-preservation is obviously a high priority by necessity to achieve this, but it's not the goal itself also plenty of states have chosen to abolish or fundamentally reconstruct themselves instead of fighting to the bitter end once their political position became untenable which p much disproves your claim
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 20:33
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:all institutions have a tendency towards self-perpetuation. however, all institutions also have a tendency towards erosion and decay. what determines whether an institution waxes or wanes in power is the balance of class forces behind that institution, because in the final analysis an institution is a prop and not an actor on the stage of history. yeah i suppose that makes sense. this concept kind of reminds me of Snowcrash, where the "US government" is a tiny organization the size of a small company but still pretends it runs everything
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 20:40
|
|
|
Rutibex posted:yeah i suppose that makes sense. this concept kind of reminds me of Snowcrash, where the "US government" is a tiny organization the size of a small company but still pretends it runs everything i'm actually skeptical of the ability of private actors to full-on replace formal government under capitalism because i think there's a particular prestige and legitimacy which cops need to be able to do their jobs smoothly that straightforward corporate mercs lack, but that's the kind of thing i'm talking about in principle and i guess certain cultural and organizational changes could allow us to drift in that direction. separately it's not wrong to worry about ossification or corruption in state institutions in general, since in the first place they represent straight-up inefficiency (though to an extent unavoidable) and to the extent that the actual people administrating a state damage their own legitimacy and ignore the popular will, they make that state easier to erode or supplant by something else. it is actually important to observe and deliberate and set forth good governing strategy etc and it's as possible for a worker's state to gently caress that up as a bourgeois state. but, i don't believe the state is either inherently suspect by dint of being a state, or, for that matter, at all optional - lenin called the state "a product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms", which is to say it is something that necessarily arises from the fact of there being multiple classes who struggle over power, such that the only way you can rid yourself of it is by ridding yourself of class distinctions first
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 20:59
|
|
|
Folks talking about 'points on the board' for communism, but what exactly went wrong with the worker's states that they enacted? Sincere question, trying to understand.
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 21:25
|
|
|
Top City Homo posted:The contradiction is that in order to create a classless starless society or whatever you have to build a powerful state first. The most powerful state in the world No, you don't. The idea isn't that you get all the socialists together and the capitalists together and have a big battle with tanks and guns and if the socialists win you get communism. What you need is the proletariat to seize the means of production. You need to change the class relationship of power at the point power is wielded and as the ruling class is destroyed the working class becomes the only class. A "powerful state" or the "most powerful state" are meaningless concepts when the state is not something used to maintain a class relationship. Who does your state attack? Who does it repress? You're all the same people with the exact same relationship to "the state", a concept that is useless to a post-capital subject. This isn't to say that the path from capitalism to communism has been or will be bloodless (obviously not), or that the transition will never involve some sort of formal military conflict somewhere, but the idea that you become socialists then get a bunch of nukes and police to make a kick rear end state that can beat the other states isn't the case.
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 21:32
|
|
|
Kaedric posted:Folks talking about 'points on the board' for communism, but what exactly went wrong with the worker's states that they enacted? It's pointing the discussion away from long winded debates about legacy or whatever that boil down to terror at the notion of a state doing by democratic protocol what some feel is best carried out by a group of people quietly abducting someone deemed unsuitable and dragging them into the woods, never to be seen again. The "points on the board" is a good way to point out that they're the only ones who haven't had everything strangled in the cradle and whose examples of success do not associate with them. "What went wrong" is a highly subjective thing because what people consider to have "gone wrong" is a wildly variant and ideologically driven question. As a general rule you can assume "having to defend itself from international capitalism or perish" which is convenient because any socialist state that manages it is instantly condemned for the actions necessary to do so
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 21:35
|
|
|
Epic High Five posted:As a general rule you can assume "having to defend itself from international capitalism or perish" which is convenient because any socialist state that manages it is instantly condemned for the actions necessary to do so the needs of self preservation ends up influencing the conduct of the state, then?
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 21:42
|
|
|
Tiler Kiwi posted:the needs of self preservation ends up influencing the conduct of the state, then? this is trivially true for literally every state to have ever existed, yes.
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 21:44
|
|
|
Tiler Kiwi posted:the needs of self preservation ends up influencing the conduct of the state, then? that would be one of the conclusions of a materialist analysis, yes, and it was, with things like the dictatorship of the proletariat proposed and deployed as a means of balancing the twin promises of "we will not stand by as you all get slaughtered by capitalist mercenaries" and "we are building communism now". What's the alternative? Declare that you don't think borders are real as One Weird Trick to stop the international characteristics of capital from ripping the heart out of your project and turning every member of the new socialist state into slaves? Enact a praxis that couldn't keep liberals and cops from turning a one block AZ into a capitalist theme park? What's the non-ML solution that doesn't boil down to humbly requesting everybody who just went through incredible struggle lay down and die because reactionary forces are unconvinced by honorable observances of largely made up doctrines? It's probably worth mentioning that all of this is predicted and solutions laid out in State and Rev, none of this stuff is any kind of shocking contradiction ashamedly buried until now Cerebral Bore posted:this is trivially true for literally every state to have ever existed, yes. It's true for all organized structures, it's not like even the most pincipled anarchist commune is going to let a rapist keep doing their thing, but how does one deal with that without a structure that can resist the rapist in question refusing to recognize the authority and monopoly on violence of the majority who believe their freedom of personal autonomy is no longer a valid standing?
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 21:51
|
|
|
Kaedric posted:Folks talking about 'points on the board' for communism, but what exactly went wrong with the worker's states that they enacted? well in the case of the ussr i would say that leadership after stalin made various compromises with liberalism that they didn't strictly have to, but ultimately what took them down was a lack of comity with china and the balance of global trade. when the saudis are loving up your oil business and it's your 1/3rd of the globe vs. their 2/3rd of the globe even playing your hand perfectly might not prevent you from losing on the other hand there's less i would point to "going wrong" with such workers' states as cuba, vietnam, the dprk, and of course the people's republic of china. vietnam had to make a devil's deal with the IMF once the ussr was no longer able to support them and it really seemed for a while like china had just thrown up his hands and gone capitalist but things are looking very different right now
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 21:54
|
|
|
its not really a gotcha point, its just the observation that there's not much disagreement on that point at all e: some of it is a language thing too, since there have been alternatives to a State, as in, a modern nation state. if you define State as basically any hierarchical org or org with monopoly on force or organ of class or what have you then its gonna be a lot different of a meaning. tho in either case saying "every other alternative to the state, has lost to the state" is still true Tiler Kiwi has issued a correction as of 22:00 on Jul 1, 2021 |
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 21:56
|
|
|
Tiler Kiwi posted:its not really a gotcha point, its just the observation that there's not much disagreement on that point at all I really meant it as a broad sort of gotcha critique because it comes up a lot, when in fact it's something every flavor of leftism needs to acknowledge and seek to mitigate. How do you keep the people you have undertaken this project with from being broken and destroyed when the breakers and destroyers come knocking? The fall of the USSR represented the single biggest drop in life expectancies outside of wartime in modern history, what is it worth to stop something like that from happening.
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 22:01
|
|
|
i strongly recommend reading chapter 1 of lenin's "State and Revolution", at least sections 1 through 3, for a comprehensive view on what the state is and isn't https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm it's not that long
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 22:02
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:
Can you go into more detail on this? What has changed, exactly? I look at China and see capitalism and no worker's state, but I also have sort of given up in despair and stopped looking into these things deeply so if something switched around I would be very happy to know about it.
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 22:24
|
|
|
Kaedric posted:Can you go into more detail on this? What has changed, exactly? I look at China and see capitalism and no worker's state, but I also have sort of given up in despair and stopped looking into these things deeply so if something switched around I would be very happy to know about it. xi's tenure as chairman/president has seen much stricter discipline exerted against capital both foreign and domestic as well as much more aggressive channeling of the national product towards the public good, such as through infrastructural expansion and poverty reduction. the cpc looks like it's managed to stay on the razor's edge of coaxing in foreign capital without being taken over by it, something the ussr couldn't do
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 22:33
|
|
|
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSukuaMHzy4 here is nathan "jackoff for the cia" robinson debating glen greenwald i can see him compiling lists of known communists as we speak
|
|
#
?
Jul 2, 2021 20:19
|
|
|
Rutibex posted:yeah but lenins plan failed too it just took him longer than an anarchist it was wildly successful. Almost 2 billion people live under a Marxist Leninist system today.
|
|
#
?
Jul 2, 2021 20:25
|
|
|
Top City Homo posted:it was wildly successful. Almost 2 billion people live under a Marxist Leninist system today. The overwhelming majority of communists are non-white so it is a failed ideology. If it was so popular and successful, why isnt it as popular in the imperial core as it is in the imperial periphery?!
|
|
#
?
Jul 2, 2021 20:47
|
|
|
Top City Homo posted:it was wildly successful. Almost 2 billion people live under a Marxist Leninist system today. i suppose thats fair. not in russia though
|
|
#
?
Jul 2, 2021 21:17
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:xi's tenure as chairman/president has seen much stricter discipline exerted against capital both foreign and domestic as well as much more aggressive channeling of the national product towards the public good, such as through infrastructural expansion and poverty reduction. the cpc looks like it's managed to stay on the razor's edge of coaxing in foreign capital without being taken over by it, something the ussr couldn't do I feel like Xi is still just a more socially democratic Dengist. An improvement to be sure but still largely capitalist. Still like Hugo Chavez, a genuine believer in socialism even if the superstructure isn't such
|
|
#
?
Jul 2, 2021 22:45
|
|
|
Yossarian-22 posted:I feel like Xi is still just a more socially democratic Dengist. An improvement to be sure but still largely capitalist. Still like Hugo Chavez, a genuine believer in socialism even if the superstructure isn't such this presumes that "dengist" means "capitalist", but at this point it's pretty easy to see the utility of foreign capital to domestic socialist construction. it's slow and difficult but clearly not nonsensical or fruitless
|
|
#
?
Jul 2, 2021 22:48
|
|
|
Isn't gradual socialist construction via domestic capitalism essentially what Karl Kautsky and the soc dems advocated in Germany?
|
|
#
?
Jul 2, 2021 22:57
|
|
|
kautsky glossed over in theory and rejected in practice the actual necessities of violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, in particular objecting to basically everything the bolsheviks ever did to seize or stay in power. china really did prosecute and win its revolution, and it's plain to see that the cpc holds the decisive power in chinese society to this day
|
|
#
?
Jul 2, 2021 23:06
|
|
|
The fact that Kautsky had different thoughts in his head than Xi is idealistic analysis, not materialist. I'm not convinced that Xi is leading anything other than a one party socially democratic state that as of yet lacks dictatorship the proletariat
|
|
#
?
Jul 2, 2021 23:14
|
|
|
uhh, kautsky manifestly did different things (which is to say, nothing at all) contra chinese leaders from mao to deng to xi, all of whom either carried out a revolution that put communists in power or developed productive forces that kept communists in power. the bait and switch you tried to do there is really weird, going in the space of two posts from caring about what kautky advocated to suddenly not caring about kautsky's thoughts. if you're such a principled materialist that you refuse to pay attention to what people write or say, why bring it up in the first place? i've written myself that in practical terms china is a social democracy right now - capitalist production happens in order to generate profits, then those profits get channeled into public infrastructure. however, if we're materialists, we should recognize that public infrastructure and productive capacity are enormously important, and that socialist governments have often prioritized developing their economies over reorganizing those economies where necessary (first seen in lenin's NEP) Ferrinus has issued a correction as of 02:09 on Jul 3, 2021 |
|
#
?
Jul 2, 2021 23:36
|
|
|
Rutibex posted:its not sharing if it's all owned in the name of the communist central committee ruled by a handful of top men who know better what to do with it than me. thats no different that what we have now. i was obviously joking. but i dont understand what you specifically have to be consulted about. Please add to the issues you want to be consulted on trash pickup sewer and road maintenance environmental reclamation truck schedules train schedules architectural design and city planning social housing material planning bike lane infrastructure pedestrian infrastructure the monetary system farming supply chain logistics the configuration of goods on in the grocery [/quote] i don't want a worthless vote that will be drowned out by the desires of the majority, i want control of my own sustenance and i want to engage with other people voluntarily[/quote] this sounds like ayn rand? maybe clear this up a bit quote:that's fair i'm willing to endure hardships for the peoples war. but once thats done there are no further excuses. if you put me on a collective farm and say its for the good of future generations i will cry foul dont worry about revolution, just live your life and when the revolution happens you wont even know about it because it will be livestreamed somewhere but you are just living it up and your children if you care for such things, will one day wake up living it up and communism will be there like a thief in the night
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2021 00:14
|
|
|
Top City Homo posted:dont worry about revolution, just live your life and when the revolution happens you wont even know about it because it will be livestreamed somewhere but you are just living it up i'm sorry i thought this was the anarchism thread not the wizardry thread
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2021 00:17
|
|
|
Rutibex posted:national borders are a bourgeoisie construct. once you start respecting them the revolution is already over. national borders are actually real and people have a culture, nationality and roots with where they live and work rootless cosmopolitanism is the ideology of Mitt Romney
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2021 00:18
|
|
|
Top City Homo posted:i was obviously joking. but i dont understand what you specifically have to be consulted about. i want to control the products of my labor
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2021 00:19
|
|
|
Top City Homo posted:national borders are actually real and people have a culture, nationality and roots with where they live and work who loving cares they are all proletarians so they all have the same enemy
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2021 00:21
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 7, 2024 23:54 |
|
|
Rutibex posted:i'm sorry i thought this was the anarchism thread not the wizardry thread you are a beautiful soul with an unhappy consciousness don't get involved with revolutions
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2021 00:22
|
|