(Thread IKs:
dead gay comedy forums)
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tokin opposition posted:Yeah peace *takes hit out of Lenin bong* weed this weed that just weed some lenin
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Feb 18, 2022 20:47
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| # ? May 25, 2024 22:59 |
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I can't weed I have ADHD (Acute Darklung Hacking Disease)
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Feb 18, 2022 20:48
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https://twitter.com/JoeyShabadoo_/status/1494893908966264836
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Feb 21, 2022 05:47
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Feb 21, 2022 06:26
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if you fail the dc40 will save the hobgoblin converts you to communism
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Feb 21, 2022 06:30
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Can I be friends with the hobgoblin
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Feb 21, 2022 07:11
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https://twitter.com/RevStatus/status/1495193998532689920?s=20&t=Oqinzkr9IiYH5LGH7iFBXA
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Feb 21, 2022 09:29
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Ok Marxisms thread, I've got something to bounce off you. Please crit this concept: What if, someone with the purchasing power of a small business owner (i.e able to buy and sell local business on the scale of cafes etc) were to buy a business, come in and sit down with the employees, and essentially discuss with them how best to democratise that business, using their working knowledge of the day-to-day running - then go through a transition period, during which the buyer draws a salary sufficient only to reimburse themselves for the initial purchase, while reorganising the workplace into a syndicalist model and training the employees in horizontal organising - after which, the business is turned over completely to the workers and the buyer moves on to the next place? Then the cafe's, (or whatever)'s profits go entirely into the workers' hands and they can choose how much to pay themselves or how much to put back into the business. Without the managerial bloat this would ideally create better-paying and more stable employment. There could also be a community pot, which one or more of these democratised businesses can pay into completely voluntarily, which could then create a growing source of funding to be voted on by all contributors and possibly used to target and buy out more local establishments, or to buy local buildings back from developers to build community centres, etc. What do you think, workable or not?
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Feb 21, 2022 14:44
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The first thing to keep in mind is that any kind of worker-owned/syndicalist business, as it exists within a sea of capitalism, can be forced to exploit its own workers as it strives to compete with (traditionally) capitalist firms. And such syndicalist firms can still fail in the marketplace for perfectly "normal" capitalist reasons that don't really have anything to do with the fact that they're worker-owned. Having said that, assuming that this Benevolent Syndicate Creator can manage to keep doing this without ever drawing a business that hits enough of a rough patch that it can't compensate them for the buy-out, such that he can keep rolling one buy-out into the next, if this ever catches on widely enough, you're going to run into a wall of a capitalist that's going to literally or financially firebomb your plans. When I say this, I don't mean that therefore it's not worth doing for someone otherwise in a position to do so, nor do I mean that it's not relief for however long the gravy train lasts, but it's not a long-term solution. Though maybe you weren't looking for that.
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Feb 21, 2022 14:53
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Its essentially a nice idea, but for it to work it would require a lot of poo poo to come together without a hitch. You could do everything right and still fail. To be able to afford to be Mr. Syndicalism Spreader and therefore not ruin yourself if it goes wrong would necessitate the kind of capital which is only available to the ruling class and a handful of noveau riche software types. You could very effectively setup syndicalist coffee shops but if you are in any way successful you'll have a starbucks opening up across the street and they don't need to make money for the 4 or 5 years that it strangles you. Basically the game is rigged and setting up a capitalist enterprise is most safely done by getting in and making money until you start to see a decline and then fireselling all the assets and starting over again with something else. Its like being a professional poker player, you go in with X capital and hope to grow it by X% before getting out. You don't need to get the pot but if you turned a profit you've won. That how business works and the human element is disposable. It is because of this that communities cannot thrive under late capitalism. The only way to make money doing it is by taking from your employees, so the idea of a long term sustainable worker owned business is on paper a great idea. But there are many, many reasons we so seldom see it in practice.
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Feb 21, 2022 15:12
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Yes, these seem like reasonable insights, the venture would for sure have to be kept under wraps as long as possible to delay any malicious reaction of the type you mentioned. And yeah you're right, it's not with a hope to make some kind of utopian lasting change, it would just be about creating *some* kind of local material force and example to point to, that is acting in opposition to the current trends, for however long it ends up being sustainable. If it turned into a self-sustaining thing with enough disposable cash in the collective pot to resist threats (of "normal" capitalist reasons as well as malice) that would be a significant bonus but you can't plan for that really.
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Feb 21, 2022 15:13
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Danann posted:never read animal farm but holy poo poo what a vile piece of anticommunism propaganda that orwell published  That Red Sails site with the Animal Farm review has another good article on Orwell more broadly.
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Feb 21, 2022 15:27
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There's also a lot pulling at the benevolent capitalist to not continue to be benevolent. Needing an intermediate state capitalist phase in which the collective workers as a whole, rather than just those of one site, place themselves as the "owners" and reinvest those "profits", has historically been necessary to fund the fallout from failed attempts, socialization on an increased scale, and the development of associated sectors to not be at the whims of less polite capital, even for successful revolutions. And while a rainy day fund of this sort is eminently justifiable it's hard enough to keep said rainy day fund from being tapped to fund manager salaries even when there's a self-examining party whose decisions have the force of law keeping watch over it. Conversely, if they're well and truly out once things stabilize, their ability to do this stops where it began, barely managing the cafe where a factory's workers get lunch but never touching the factory. And even without hostile actions from other capitalists, you're left with the likelihood that the worker-controlled enterprise sans ideological leadership will desocialize itself '90s Russia style, whether through a clique reestablishing themselves as managers or through a mutual decision to cash out which benefits all the current workers handsomely but transfers the actual capital of the enterprise back to capitalist control. Mandoric has issued a correction as of 15:41 on Feb 21, 2022 |
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Feb 21, 2022 15:35
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Mandoric posted:....sans ideological leadership... I guess, the idea would be, for the workers to nominate someone among themselves for ideological training, an on-the-ground representative they already know and trust who ceases/reduces their daily duties temporarily to spend some time learning about the good stuff, then bring that back to the workplace and keep it going, the continually voted-on representative of each business would then form the basis of a higher level committee if more businesses join the syndicate. It wouldn't be about the buyer(s) doing a one-and-done then boosting, they'd still be around and contactable and working on the next thing + putting the larger network together, tho not drawing a salary from that business any more. And if the workers do decide to cash out, that'd be perfectly fine, it's their call to do so.
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Feb 21, 2022 15:47
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It would work a lot better if the benevolent capitalist character stayed in one place and directed a larger effort, but you would straight up catch a bullet.
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Feb 21, 2022 15:58
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Cookie Cutter posted:I guess, the idea would be, for the workers to nominate someone among themselves for ideological training, an on-the-ground representative they already know and trust who ceases/reduces their daily duties temporarily to spend some time learning about the good stuff, then bring that back to the workplace and keep it going, the continually voted-on representative of each business would then form the basis of a higher level committee if more businesses join the syndicate. It wouldn't be about the buyer(s) doing a one-and-done then boosting, they'd still be around and contactable and working on the next thing + putting the larger network together, tho not drawing a salary from that business any more. And if the workers do decide to cash out, that'd be perfectly fine, it's their call to do so. The question is what reason they'll have to keep it going, given the concrete example of hundreds of thousands of men and women like that in the former USSR realizing that it also left them in a position to sell the enterprise to themselves while explaining how it was for everyone's good once a party-lead government left the stage. If the protagonist you're envisioning doesn't retain actual power rather than an advisory role, the situation looks much like that in Russia in 1992; if he or she does without truly revolutionary aims which would require absorbing all the profit to scale up, it's nothing more than ~responsible capitalism~ in the style of Costco that still uses prison labor or Hy-Vee who are currently on a crash program to beef up armed private security in anticipation of upcoming food instability, a few pennies to create the sort of labor aristocracy that loyally enforces the interests of capital. The ability to cash out also severely limits what positive impact such a program could have. At that point, you're not ensuring worker control for their collective good, you're just minting fresh capitalists who turn around to exploit other workers.
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Feb 21, 2022 16:09
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Gotcha, so it would actually be better for it to be an explicit attempt at forming a revolutionary parallel structure with checks and supervision in place to guide it, rather than obscuring the ideology and just being a worker-friendly business model. I guess that also reduces the time it would take for the organisers to start having unfortunate accidents.
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Feb 21, 2022 16:17
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Capitalism consumes all. It really does operate on a gambling logic.
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Feb 21, 2022 16:31
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A decisive moment in the crippling of Yugoslavia's socialist self-management was the transition from collective ownership of the collective property - you own the factory you work in, but only collectively, there is no individual share to cash out with - (with the state/party having a say in how things were run to a degree, though how much exactly depending on the industry itself) to individual ownership of the collective property, comparable to holding shares in a company, transition to the sort of system you're talking about. Despite still being within a socialist system, the poo poo it caused is what I would call, while being extremely polite, an utter, complete, and unmitigated disaster. Under a capitalist system, you're basically facing either being disrupted and destroyed by market forces and the hostility of the legal system to the kind of enterprise you'd be trying to maintain - or turn into an equivalent of an utterly harmless vegan coop restaurant.
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Feb 21, 2022 16:34
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Cookie Cutter posted:Gotcha, so it would actually be better for it to be an explicit attempt at forming a revolutionary parallel structure with checks and supervision in place to guide it, rather than obscuring the ideology and just being a worker-friendly business model. I guess that also reduces the time it would take for the organisers to start having unfortunate accidents. Yeah. Syndicalism doesn't particularly deal with the class conflict between those who own machines, who won the previous class conflict against those who administered the fruits of nature, and those who operate them; it simply seeks to transform small groups of operators into owners, maintaining class relations but putting them on the favored side. It's kind of a mirror of Jeffersonian democracy, which saw the incipient conflict between the then-favored administrators of the fruits of nature and those who built machines and attempted to solve it by giving everyone (who met the bar to be a historical subject rather than object--women and minorities need not apply) the opportunity to administer the fruits of nature. The goal, the hope, is to remove all classes and thus all class conflict by removing legally-enforced privilege, which can't be done by simply declaring particular individuals now also privileged any more than land grants preserved agriculturalism against industrialization, or selling titles and knighting individual soldiers preserved monarchy against liberalism. But also if you do this while being sufficiently white, rich, and connected to not be "shot by a rival local kingpin", your plane will crash one day and nice men in suits will be along to conclude that the pilot had a heart attack. Mandoric has issued a correction as of 17:49 on Feb 21, 2022 |
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Feb 21, 2022 17:38
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https://twitter.com/peoplesdispatch/status/1495805767194066944?s=20&t=w0HPqwtmjK0yPS0VRo91ug
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Feb 21, 2022 18:41
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I just don't understand why any great number of "benevolent capitalists" would even do that. There's no reasonable way anyone could expect them to willingly give up their power and influence out of the goodness of their hearts.
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Feb 21, 2022 20:54
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DirtyRobot posted:That Red Sails site with the Animal Farm review has another good article on Orwell more broadly. I'd known most of this before, this part was news to me: quote:George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, was also a rapist:
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Feb 21, 2022 21:10
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Probably the least surprising reveal about a "beloved" author.
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Feb 21, 2022 21:12
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this is why you can never trust the pseudonymous famous
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Feb 21, 2022 21:29
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I'm trying to figure out how we get the control of the Means of Production to Pokemon Go to the proles
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Feb 21, 2022 22:02
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mark immune posted:I'm trying to figure out how we get the control of the Means of Production to Pokemon Go to the proles what do you mean joe biden, proletarian hero, is president. i hear he's further left than fdr ????????
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Feb 21, 2022 22:06
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I'm currently reading "Fossil Capital" by Andreas Malm, and by Chapter 6 it's finally kicked into crack-ping territory Malm goes into a deep, deep dive into the origins of the English Industrial Revolution and its relationship with the burning of coal in steam engines as the thing that really kicks everything off - by giving humanity the ability to consume and expend solar energy that was captured in the past, instead of just the solar energy of the right-now, exponential growth becomes possible in Chapter 5, he lays out a very specific timeline: water-wheels were still powering the majority of cotton mills in England by 1825, but just ten years later, steam engines would have taken over. first, he explains that the shift could not have been because all of the rivers and streams and waterfalls had been tapped - there was still a lot of water power potential left on the table even by the height of the use of water-mills then, he explains that the shift could not have been because of capital investment costs: steam engines were more expensive in the long-run than water mills, with perhaps water mills only requiring a larger up-front capital investment then, he explains that the shift could not have been because of fuel costs, either: water is "free", but even if we assume that the fuel cost for running a water-mill is based on the land rent you have to pay, it was still cheaper, per horsepower over time, than however much it would have cost in coal (and he does note that a lot of the cost in coal came from wages/labor costs for the miners) and Chapter 5 ends on a big question mark, but then you get to Chapter 6, and he tells the story of Robert Thom, who built the Rothesay Mills, which was one of the most well-designed and successful watermills of the era Thom is tapped to work his hydraulic wonders on the village of Greenock, and despite a rough patch during the Panic of 1825, he manages to launch a series of aqueducts and sluices and reservoirs and the region is also transformed into a mostly successful model of water power, even under harsh terrain conditions Thom is tapped once more, this time by Lancashire and their desire to transform the River Irwell into a similar powerhouse of water-powered cotton mills and now I will start excerpting straight from the book: quote:This reveille set off a spate of schemes for reservoirs à la Thom across Lancashire and the neighbouring counties, holding out the promise of a massive expansion of the power supply to local industry. But the plans of greatest potential were aborted. Instead of a hydraulic renaissance, the 1830s saw a sharp turn towards steam: two routes were open and British capital chose one. Why not the bargains of Thom? Recovering the historical dynamic of the transition requires an exploration of the path not taken; as economic historian Maxine Berg has pointed out, there has been a palpable lack of interest in the ‘alternative paths which were, for some reason, blocked off’ during the early phases of industrialisation.22 This is one of them. and this is where the story takes a turn to the conspiratorial (though more from my own personal interpretation - perhaps not the author's intent) could it be that the reason why there was a deliberate turn away from water power and towards steam, was because setting up these systems of waterways: * would have caused profits to have been distributed collectively * would have required government intervention/participation * would have democratized the process of administering the waterways and then he gets to another such waterway bill: quote:A bill for the Saddleworth reservoirs arrived in Parliament in February 1837, immediately faced resistance from several groups of petitioners and was duly referred to a select committee. Post-fire, the proceedings survive. Thomas Ashworth pointed to a feast of benefits. Presenting elaborate computations, he sought to demonstrate the lucrative savings awaiting manufacturers when they no longer needed to burn coal, leading the chairman to ask, and so I'm left with the conclusion that question left hanging in Chapter 5, is answered by the implications of Chapter 6: Britain moved to coal-powered steam engines not because of a lack of water, not because steam engines were cheaper, and not because coal as a fuel was cheaper, but because waterworks were fundamentally incompatible with the notion of private property. gradenko_2000 has issued a correction as of 10:48 on Feb 22, 2022 |
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Feb 22, 2022 10:27
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That's really fascinating and your hypothesis seems plausible. At least as part of the explanation if nothing else. I actually saw some of the Greenock reservoirs in person a couple years ago while on a hike but had no idea that they were intended for water power as an alternative to steam. Makes a lot of sense actually
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Feb 22, 2022 10:46
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I hardly get the impression that there's a conspiratorial angle there, so much as the rational self-interest of capitalists. For there to really be a conspiracy, you'd need all of the emerging industrial bourgeois to coordinate against water power rather than them all naturally pursuing coal power for their own pursuit of profit. It's no more conspiratorial than Marx's theses on capitalist behavior, anyway.
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Feb 22, 2022 14:36
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:I hardly get the impression that there's a conspiratorial angle there, so much as the rational self-interest of capitalists. For there to really be a conspiracy, you'd need all of the emerging industrial bourgeois to coordinate against water power rather than them all naturally pursuing coal power for their own pursuit of profit. It's no more conspiratorial than Marx's theses on capitalist behavior, anyway. exactly, it's not conspiratorial when it is material circumstances directing it one of the most difficult aspects of marxist thought is to realize the how psychological/sociological discourse and action emerge from those circumstances: it's the elaboration on the matter that Smith lacked and shied away from when he said that "each member in society acting as if guided by an invisible hand" in terms of economy. This happens because we are so inured to the idea of economic rationality in capitalism that we do not happen to see the tremendous irrationality that permeates so many decisions. Hydraulic power would've been better in terms of production and wealth generation, but being a natural monopoly, central planning and coordination are necessary to provide access to greater potentials of use, which for further effect also naturally lean into socialized gain (no use doing all this work to provide the benefit for only two or three guys). That socialized gain would quite possibly be far greater than the alternative, but ultimately is too limiting in terms of profit because the capitalist instinctively understands he cannot sequester greater profit from this arrangement through expansion; no matter how many mills he owes along the river, everybody must have access to the hydraulic power provided. The only way to turn the table here would be for him to make it a private monopoly, but such works are always matters of state because the costs are utterly unbearable to capitalists (even though the profits would be far greater). also lol at this being an incredibly pertinent example of what I was talking about dead gay comedy forums posted:While capitalism has generated far more value in absolute terms, it doesn't build wealth in aggregate with society as other modes have done in the past. Capitalists do not build Samarkand, or the brilliant irrigation systems in Central Asia; they build Manchester.
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Feb 22, 2022 15:40
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I suppose "conspiracy" might have been the wrong word, but I agree with the two posts above this one.
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Feb 22, 2022 15:51
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gradenko_2000 posted:I suppose "conspiracy" might have been the wrong word, but I agree with the two posts above this one. nah it's cool, I think it works really well to describe the sentiment. Personally, I just like to elaborate upon it because I feel it really helps to develop the thought; there's a good many of supposedly leftist authors in many fields that fumble great takes when they leave things like that. That chapter by Andreas Malm is a solid one but saying things like "miscarried in the dark" is just botching their own analysis. IMHO, especially for the purposes of this thread, it's important to take note of those things because it makes the beast much more awful than what it actually is. (Of course, it might be the case the conclusion of the whole book goes exactly that way, "hey it's just capitalism", which sure, great)
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Feb 22, 2022 16:10
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I've generally taken to referring to this as a "net effect" because Americans are allergic to class talk and treat it as conspiratiorial One of the huge problems of liberalism and trying to explain the problems of net effects is that everyone is propagandized to worry about individual intent rather than result.
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Feb 22, 2022 16:17
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Truga posted:Animal Farm is a deeply reactionary book, displaying aristocratic condescension against the people, a book in which the working class appear as imbeciles. I'm sorry but maybe he's a bit right in that
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Feb 23, 2022 05:29
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Doctor Jeep posted:I'm sorry but maybe he's a bit right in that When "leftists" think that the masses are unthinking dullards who don't understand their own self-interests, it's probably because they're insufferable pricks who don't understand how to communicate.
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Feb 23, 2022 05:32
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:When "leftists" think that the masses are unthinking dullards who don't understand their own self-interests, it's probably because they're insufferable pricks who don't understand how to communicate. look, it's tough to kill an elephant
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Feb 23, 2022 05:33
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:When "leftists" think that the masses are unthinking dullards who don't understand their own self-interests, it's probably because they're insufferable pricks who don't understand how to communicate. they're not immutably so, but you have to admit that the last 40-something years are a blackpill experience, at least in the west
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Feb 23, 2022 05:34
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Doctor Jeep posted:they're not immutably so, but you have to admit that the last 40-something years are a blackpill experience, at least in the west Imo the masses disassociating themselves from politics and losing faith in the current system is evidence that they are smart enough.
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Feb 23, 2022 05:35
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| # ? May 25, 2024 22:59 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:and so I'm left with the conclusion that question left hanging in Chapter 5, is answered by the implications of Chapter 6: Britain moved to coal-powered steam engines not because of a lack of water, not because steam engines were cheaper, and not because coal as a fuel was cheaper, but because waterworks were fundamentally incompatible with the notion of private property. somewhere out there is a communist hydropunk world with trains and minimally utilized fossil fuels
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Feb 23, 2022 05:37
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