(Thread IKs:
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Kaedric posted:eh? Is the taliban the 'proletariat'? Seems sus what do you find suspicious about that
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Aug 23, 2021 17:58
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croup coughfield posted:what do you find suspicious about that they're brown. can't be trusted.
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Aug 23, 2021 18:00
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The rank and file of the taliban are arguably working class but I'm reasonably sure the hierarchy and any sympathetic financiers, as I imagine some Afghani businesses must have thrown in their lot when they knew which way the wind was blowing, are not
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Aug 23, 2021 18:03
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https://twitter.com/ProletariatRis1/status/1429850948982087700?s=19 https://twitter.com/ProletariatRis1/status/1429850951939022850?s=19 https://twitter.com/ProletariatRis1/status/1429851093836570631?s=19
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Aug 23, 2021 18:05
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American leftists are all cringe in this exact way.
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Aug 23, 2021 18:08
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it's like 90% of all american socialist output is just coming up with completely unnecessary and ineffective alternatives to leninism
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Aug 23, 2021 18:22
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The workers do everything has never made sense anyway. I've seen a few books about Marxism have a similar explanation where workers are supposed to control everything democratically yet there is also a strong central govt directing all these communal businesses for production. It can't be both across the same production spheres, right ?
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Aug 23, 2021 18:22
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that’s kind of a vast oversimplification of Wolff imo but I have no time to respond
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Aug 23, 2021 18:30
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gradenko_2000 posted:https://twitter.com/ProletariatRis1/status/1429850948982087700?s=19 Sigh. When Wolff called Huey Long a fascist I knew something was off. Just another reminder that western Marxist public intellectuals are gonna be severely hemmed in wrt the analysis they're allowed to have if they wanna reach any degree of prominence. Seems like if you're publicly pro-Lenin, Stalin, or Mao you're immediately ostracized in academia so this is what we're left with. David Harvey, for as good as he can be on Marx, is pigeonholed this same way either intentionally or unintentionally
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Aug 23, 2021 18:38
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:American leftists are all cringe in this exact way. please explain it to me like i'm a stupid baby soaked in ideology for all of my life
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Aug 23, 2021 18:49
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wolff's class analysis is the only convincing analysis i've seen of marxism that doesn't conflate class with power or ownership, i really recommend reading it yourself instead of clippings from a college newspaper. while resnick and wolff reject aspects of lenin's econonic determism i'd feel comfortable calling them leninists and they would also. knowledge and class is a good start that lays out their epistemological method. mawarannahr has issued a correction as of 19:11 on Aug 23, 2021 |
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Aug 23, 2021 18:55
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Sylink posted:The workers do everything has never made sense anyway. I've seen a few books about Marxism have a similar explanation where workers are supposed to control everything democratically yet there is also a strong central govt directing all these communal businesses for production. a big part of the animating potential of marxism is that it identifies a progessive/revolutionary subject in an actual, roughly identifiable group of people. the dictatorship of the proletariat means the primacy of this revolutionary subject and its ability to impose its collective will (by necessity its own abolition) on society without maneuvering between bourgeois, peasant, petit-bourgeois, lumpenproletarian etc interests. leninism first and maoism in particular somewhat modified this picture by including the landless peasantry as a revolutionary subject, effectively noting that one could exploit the center/periphery dimension in less proletarianised economies, and lenin (and mao!) extent this to the analysis of imperialism and thus the strategy of revolution from the global economic periphery. marx's schema has been remarkably apt in many ways; in much of the West, the proletariat has effectively self-abolished, though it's done so under the context of bourgeois economic imperialism in the form of social democracy and globalisation. maoism and its focus on the peasantry leads to a somewhat less progressive (in the social sense, i.e. much less chill with women and sexual minorities etc) revolutionary movement mostly interested in land reform, but the small peasants also desperately desire their own abolition as a class and it must be noted that a great deal of the PRC's legitimacy remains in its ability to serve this purpose. the point being, under communism the class struggle, and thus the serious conflict-generating arrangement of society, will be resolved and the great forces of history basically reconciled. of course, decisions must still be made collectively - humans would in all likelihood reach the limits of the planet's sustainability regardless of communism or no - but the basic cross-purpose system of exploitation and conflict would not be around, because the proletarian interest is necessarily progressive and the institutions of the proletariat collectively wield all meaningful power in the socialist society.
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Aug 23, 2021 19:09
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a huge amount of "progressive" politics is about finding out who the new progressive subject is, and it's almost inevitably something self-defeating like a quasi-christian conception of the humblest members of society or triangulating exactly which identity groups are most oppressed and can thus form an adequate progressive subject. oppression olympics becomes a very serious, critically important activity in this context.
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Aug 23, 2021 19:13
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the vocabulary and concepts they use to specify capitalism is a little different than what most would consider so it’s pretty open to misinterpretation but they do trace it all back to Marx. it’s just stupid to look at some lines here and there on Twitter by people who have been democratic socialists for two years or some poo poo. they are gadflies who have thrived on this attention but they were among like five people doing any study of Marxism in America for decades. you have them and sweezy and … who else?
mawarannahr has issued a correction as of 19:16 on Aug 23, 2021 |
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Aug 23, 2021 19:14
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Sylink posted:The workers do everything has never made sense anyway. I've seen a few books about Marxism have a similar explanation where workers are supposed to control everything democratically yet there is also a strong central govt directing all these communal businesses for production. It is and it has to be to actually get to a socialist mode of production and that's the tension that drives socialism into communism. If you completely remove either of them from production then you either get syndicalism (as workers organise themselves in their units of production and produce under systems of competition) or some form of oppressive mode of production (as the isolated central organisation creates its own production goals independent of the workers yet requires them to fulfill them). 'Socialism' is the society which (roughly) strikes the balance between the two oppositional demands of the sub collectives of workers fully determining the specifics of their production (ending alienation) and the society as one big collective performing the necessary productive, distributive and defensive actions to reproduce itself. Workers must be free to be able to examine and change at least some of their working practices collectively as that reveals the hard limits of their productive powers to themselves and they must also be able to meaningfully challenge the state with their desires, both from their workplace output but also democratically, as they use their knowledge of the limitations imposed by the physical realities of work and their desires for improvement to shape the developmental path of socialist society together.
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Aug 23, 2021 20:15
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Wolff is really big on the co-op as an organizational structure but loving hates markets so it's pretty rich to categorize that as his definition of communism. I've seen people criticize him from the opposite direction because he says positive things about central planning.
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Aug 23, 2021 20:35
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Brain Candy posted:please explain it to me like i'm a stupid baby soaked in ideology for all of my life Making broad conclusions based on snippets and half-understood clippings from decades ago. An assumption that you definitely know what you're talking about because you just decided to stop being a liberal last month. Like, the main thrust of that article is that their conclusion was the Soviet Union was state capitalist and not communist - which Lenin would have agreed with. The Soviets knew what they were doing in an effort to construct socialism. Wolff's constant agitation for co-ops is naive and probably a waste of time, but you can't fault him on his analysis of capitalism or his Marxism.
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Aug 23, 2021 21:57
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Sylink posted:It can't be both across the same production spheres, right ? the way I personally see it, a socialist economy fundamentally requires a planned economy to truly develop as such, and to have a properly planned economy there must be centralized decision systems that, as consequence, allow for true workers' ownership of the means of production in terms of economic organization, under such a system, the workers of a bakery can determine their organization however they want - that's collective ownership being democratically executed. In exchange, they trust the state to determine allocation, which means that they use the prices that the theoreticians and planners give it to them. so, in practical terms, collective ownership in that sense means internal control. the state takes over the large-scale planning and organization, as well as the management of connective tissue of the economy. The bakers have the final say on their own production, and that's it
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Aug 23, 2021 22:27
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any opposition to the decadent excesses of the bourgeoisie that is not explicitly marxist will become explicitly reactionary taliban is just another example
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Aug 23, 2021 22:43
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Making broad conclusions based on snippets and half-understood clippings from decades ago. An assumption that you definitely know what you're talking about because you just decided to stop being a liberal last month. thanks, i appreciate it Pener Kropoopkin posted:Like, the main thrust of that article is that their conclusion was the Soviet Union was state capitalist and not communist - which Lenin would have agreed with. The Soviets knew what they were doing in an effort to construct socialism. yeah this in particular seems obvious? you don't exactly get to pick your final form when lurching from a civil war to a world war to a cold war starting with a peasant society. and they failed to our collective misery. and now china is trying to ride the same tiger with less external pressure, hopefully having gotten the West to sell them the rope is this all about babies who don't think it needs to be built? the same original teleological stupidity?
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Aug 23, 2021 22:44
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gradenko_2000 posted:Okay, I tried to stick with it for a few more pages, but [Ellman] doesn't even believe that a planned economy is possible. I give up. Finding something else to read. after Davies & Wheatcroft released The Years of Hunger and the "famine was genocide" narrative had basically nothing credible left to recommend it (D&W even got Conquest to admit that it probably wasn't intentional), along comes ellman's paper, whose case goes roughly: "sure, there's no directive anywhere ordering anyone to starve anyone, and sure, stalin was vocally decrying kulak saboteurs who were using hunger as a weapon, but have you considered that maybe he was doing a 'stop-hitting-yourself' and attributing to them what he definitely wanted to do, and then saying the opposite, and therefore should be read as meaning the opposite of what he says?" basically, he was concern trolling. gaslight, gatekeep, gulag anyway, point is, yeah, wouldn't be surprised if that character has some firm commitments that would compel him to a less-than-charitable take on a planned economy
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Aug 23, 2021 23:34
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Wolff also says that there are multiple definitions of socialism based on who you talk to and that state capitalism is one of them. It's wishy-washy and you can argue with it but he certainly doesn't think co-ops wouldn't have problems with the imperatives of market logic.
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Aug 23, 2021 23:57
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Is there really a difference between saying that the Taliban represent the Afghan proletarian struggle against American imperialism and that Syrian rebels represent the Syrian proletarian struggle against Russian imperialism (this is actually an analysis I've seen some dumb Trotskyists make)? I can't see it. Seems like the best you can hope for in either war is lesser evilism on par with voting blue no matter who
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Aug 24, 2021 00:09
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Yossarian-22 posted:Is there really a difference between saying that the Taliban represent the Afghan proletarian struggle against American imperialism and that Syrian rebels represent the Syrian proletarian struggle against Russian imperialism (this is actually an analysis I've seen some dumb Trotskyists make)? I can't see it. Seems like the best you can hope for in either war is lesser evilism on par with voting blue no matter who as long as I don't ever have to relate any of this my local circumstances hell yeah I'm the most marxist person in this chat room
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Aug 24, 2021 00:14
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A lot of the left Twitterati either forget or choose to ignore that Marx was pretty clear in his thinking that there would be a transitory state as a society moves away from capitalism and toward socialism; it's not like you can just flip a switch and achieve socialism overnight, because it requires such a radical transformation of what was there before. As pointed out, Lenin would be the first to admit that the USSR had not achieved socialism - and wrote such explicitly shortly before his death. They called themselves socialists because that was their aspiration, not because they'd achieved it. That said, I have a love-hate relationship with Wolff; his own definition of socialism seems to be far more expansive than I feel is justified. I'm not sure I'm being fair to him in saying that, though, and one of these days I should really get around to reading the couple of books of his I've had collecting dust on my end table. If I did I might feel a bit more charitable toward his interpretations of things.
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Aug 24, 2021 00:17
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I think Wolff has just been speaking obscurantist academy Marxism too long. He gets real hornt up anytime a guest comes on and speaks clearly and plainly.
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Aug 24, 2021 00:19
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Hey, so quick dumb question as someone not well-read on theory, "unproductive" labor is called that because it doesn't create any new value, right? Stuff like bookkeeping, administrative work, stuff like that right? It can facilitate and enable productive work but it does not, in itself, add any value in the way that someone building a table does. That about right?
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Aug 24, 2021 01:03
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wolff claiming that the USSR became state capitalist specifically when the stalin government collectivized the farms does not make sense to me. certainly they were "state capitalists" in the sense lenin meant the term while the NEP ran, but once the NEP ended and the five year plans started to determine production (rather than just guide the management of capitalist profits as they do in modern day china) the "state capitalist" appellation doesn't make sensechristmas boots posted:Hey, so quick dumb question as someone not well-read on theory, "unproductive" labor is called that because it doesn't create any new value, right? Stuff like bookkeeping, administrative work, stuff like that right? It can facilitate and enable productive work but it does not, in itself, add any value in the way that someone building a table does. That about right? i think marx used "productive" in a somewhat ironic way, noting that under the capitalist mode of production only work which contributes to private profits is productive. so, an administrator or logistician in an industrialist's factory is indeed doing "productive" labor (because the machines could not run with their maximum efficiency without that administration, and that administration costs mental and physical energy to execute, etc) while an administrator or logistician in the army or government bureaucracy is not "productive" separately i have seen marxists distinguish between productive labor and service labor, both of which generate value and therefore can contribute to profits but only one of which generates commodities that outlast the labor
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Aug 24, 2021 01:59
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There's also subsistence labor which does produce something (ie it keeps the farmer alive) but is unproductive from the standpoint of the market
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Aug 24, 2021 02:09
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Ferrinus posted:wolff claiming that the USSR became state capitalist specifically when the stalin government collectivized the farms does not make sense to me. certainly they were "state capitalists" in the sense lenin meant the term while the NEP ran, but once the NEP ended and the five year plans started to determine production (rather than just guide the management of capitalist profits as they do in modern day china) the "state capitalist" appellation doesn't make sense Yeah, that's a very strange place to draw that line.
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Aug 24, 2021 02:13
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either 'state capitalism' is a dumbass phrase only used by the dumbest maoists and anarchists, and anyone who uses it should be mocked OR state capitalism is actually fine and just describes a particular level of socialist development. honestly idk i could go either way
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Aug 24, 2021 02:17
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F Stop Fitzgerald posted:either 'state capitalism' is a dumbass phrase only used by the dumbest maoists and anarchists, and anyone who uses it should be mocked OR state capitalism is actually fine and just describes a particular level of socialist development. honestly idk i could go either way it does both these things because it has at least two meanings lenin's: when capitalism operates under strong state control (he described the germans as having this as well as the NEP-era soviet union, so this is not unique to socialist development but clearly, in his mind, compatible with it) various leftcoms': when the state gets to decide what happens with collective social surplus and whether/how much of that surplus to reinvest into the means of production... as though it were a single gigantic capitalist employing everyone simultaneously!!
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Aug 24, 2021 02:22
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Marx wrote a draft final chapter for vol 1 of Capital that deals with productive labor in a bit more detail. From the standpoint of capitalist production, "productive" labor is labor which produces surplus value. There are times in vol 1 when Marx looks at, say, a single factory or production process from a distant enough vantage point to say all these individual workers doing some small but necessary step in the process are, in aggregate, one "total" worker. In this draft chapter he makes allowances for what you'd consider white-collar work in the production process - engineering, management, etc. - as productive labor. Since engineers, managers, etc. are necessary for developing new machines, techniques, etc. for the production of surplus value, it's insignificant to the capitalist whether they're doing manual or mental labor - from the "total worker" standpoint of the factory as a whole everybody's producing surplus value.
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Aug 24, 2021 02:28
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Lenin recognized that Russia would have to go through a capitalist phase before becoming socialist given its backwards stage of development, but he was at the vanguard of a system presided over by soviets of workers and soldiers committees. Essentially, he believed that workers could lead a state capitalist regime and transition effortlessly to a socialist mode of production provided that the revolution spread West to Germany and the more advanced states of Europe. It was only during and after the civil war that all control of the country was essentially transferred entirely upwards from a system of accountable soviets to the party bureaucracy. Essentially, the country was either always state-capitalist (according to anarchists), state capitalist after the civil war (according to leftcoms) some lesser socialism after Stalin took power (according to Trotskyists), or after Khrushchev took power (according to some Maoists and "anti-revisionist" Leninists). It's hilarious how much bickering various Trotskyists did in trying to define the Soviet Union. There were those who insisted that it was "bureaucratic collectivist," those who asserted that the Soviet bloc were full of "degenerated/deformed workers' states" still worth defending from the West, and Tony Cliff's label of state-capitalist. The vice president of Yugoslavia developed his own theory of a "new class" existing in Soviet bloc states as well.
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Aug 24, 2021 02:32
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Here's what Richard Wolff had to say on the topic last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Tbf2bpgs-E I'm on my phone so the relevant time stamp is at 8 mins.
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Aug 24, 2021 02:37
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croup coughfield posted:what do you find suspicious about that In Training posted:they're brown. can't be trusted. Mr. Lobe posted:The rank and file of the taliban are arguably working class but I'm reasonably sure the hierarchy and any sympathetic financiers, as I imagine some Afghani businesses must have thrown in their lot when they knew which way the wind was blowing, are not I'll forgive the attempt to paint with a racist brush because I wasn't clear and there's many hot takes flying around currently. While there is practically zero doubt in my mind that any individual taliban soldier is literally a member of the 'proletariat', this means as much as saying that any individual american soldier is too. Far as I can tell, while yes they were getting rid of the imperialist dogs as is right and good, I don't think their struggle has anything to do with class beyond that. It's just replacing the folks at the top with another set of bourgeoisie, far as I can tell.
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Aug 24, 2021 02:54
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as comrade stalin wrote, even a bourgeois national liberation struggle is revolutionary when it weakens western empire
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Aug 24, 2021 03:16
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lots of leftist debates could be avoided if everyone would just stop being babies, get over themselves, and read Stalin
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Aug 24, 2021 03:31
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F Stop Fitzgerald posted:lots of leftist debates could be avoided if everyone would just stop being babies, get over themselves, and read Stalin
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Aug 24, 2021 03:33
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Okay, now this is epic
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Aug 24, 2021 04:37
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