The Voice of Labor posted:

what have I ever been wrong about? I mean, like, relevant to the thread

Falstaff posted:

vyelkin posted:

because of the modern trend to commodify the environment so that capitalism can assess its value. I feel like periodically I see some article about how some government or other hired an expensive consulting firm to appraise the monetary value of some environmental item: a forest, a river, a national park, etc. It always rubs me the wrong way because these are items that have intrinsic value that is not tied to money, but capitalism can only understand that value by assessing the exchange value of the environment: how much would someone have to pay them for it to be worthwhile to clearcut this forest or pollute this river or drill for oil in the middle of this national park. In that paradigm the use value of a clean environment is meaningless unless the people making decisions about it can be quantified through its exchange value by figuring out the cost-benefit analysis of destroying that environment in the pursuit of profit.

AnimeIsTrash posted:

I know breadtube is uncouth but I thought this was a really good video. The creator is going to do a series on the failed German revolution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B-EWxPyIf4

crepeface posted:

cck philosophy rules, very funny that that zero books publisher guy talked poo poo about him on cumtown

he is NOT breadtube, he has not been on camera doing embarrassing 10 minute theatre kid sketches with costumes and lighting

MLSM posted:

Marxism—Nietzscheanism

Comrade Koba posted:

The Gay Immortal Science

gradenko_2000 posted:

if we say, okay, what Gorbachev did didn't work out, but the "Stalinism" of the post-Khrushchev, run-by-Brezhnev era wasn't all that great either, you'd find yourself in a situation where the country already has industrialized, but now it needs/wants consumer goods and a way to keep growing the economy in a way that doesn't too heavily rely on the top-down management of GOSPLAN and various methods of central planning

[I would argue that it could have worked, as scholarship suggests the USSR's production methods weren't that much less efficient than Western firms, but for the sake of argument, let's say it wouldn't have]

if you were going to try and forge a "middle-path" that doesn't blow up the economy in about five seconds because suddenly you end production quotas and end state-granted monopolies and you force firms to sink-or-swim in a market economy...

... you might do something like establishing zones wherein foreign investment is allowed, and firms have a freer hand in running their day-to-day operations and determining their production output for profit. You'd keep large parts of the economy still collectivized and state-run, with an eye towards ensuring that all critical goods are still being fulfilled and avoiding inflation. Liberalization would be kept firmly under the whip-hand of the state, able to be withdrawn at a moment's notice.

and where does that lead you?

back to Deng

quote:

In looking at the closure of this organization, though it was not always predestined to remain this way, it was composed mostly of petty bourgeois students and youth and because of that economic position the ideas of the petty bourgeoisie came through. It was likewise initiated and lead by two lumpen individuals wearing Marxist garb who brought with them wannabe gangster ideas as well – using physical beatdowns as “reformation”, screaming obscenities at people while calling it criticism, promoting a hyper-centralist and opaque structure, elevating petty disputes to political struggle and engaging in ill-discipline when it came to personal matters, and having a general antisocial disposition. People who previously had meant well were turned into the same types as their leaders. Though this class orientation and composition was the starting point, there were militant and proletarian elements brought in who fought for the correct application of theory and towards building a genuine workers’ Party, and the political leadership of Dallas had always struggled with this line, but ultimately these elements were unable to be coherent enough to salvage the organization.

There would be a focus in activism on what the postmodern left was fixated with, treating contradictions among the people as contradictions between the people and the enemy. This included using extreme violence against male chauvinists regardless of whether were rapists, womanizers, cheaters, etc. and then declaring one to be virtuous compared to other left organizations, defending certain cultural outposts in a neighborhood even as workers looked on with indifference, and tailing after and focusing on whatever issue naive students on campus are most angry about at a given moment. Functionally, these campaigns were enacted by clandestine organizations that were more like anarchist affinity groups than anything that resembled a Communist Party embryo. There was an attempt to move away from this, to remold minds and refocus energy on organizing workers, but it largely came too late, and the organization was so profoundly unable to listen to the ideas of the workers - it’s politics the reflection of its initiating leaders - that it was unlikely the changes that needed to be made could be done.

It is hard to not look at the Red Guards-Committee continuity and think of how they bastardized the concept of criticism-self-criticism and transformation, substituting it for the sort of ‘cancel culture’ of the petty bourgeois student-left, integrating a punitive psychology that focuses on the punishment and purging of individuals to symbolically substitute for the ideological preparation that Party reconstitution requires. Its leaders criticized postmodernism for its tendency towards self-destruction and antagonistic denunciation of the relatively privileged, while promoting methods that made optics more important than substance, that considered engagement with others as endorsement, and association as complicity. Conversations and protracted discussion weren’t seen as possible methods of changing people – bad ideas always need to be bureaucratically, if not violently, deplatformed. To them, these problematic views and acts flow from malice or monstrosity and not just from mere error, people can be reduced to their worst action or idea, and the passage of time or lessons learned from that action are irrelevant. Individuals, and the masses as a whole, are complicated and contradictory, but from this viewpoint, people and things had to be flattened into one rather than divided by two.

croup coughfield posted:

The Voice of Labor posted:

the other people who get mad about about that are anarchists when I try to explain to them that ubi is a bad idea and that work is good and necessary and that in a better world they would be working more so that people in the global south could work less

croup coughfield posted:

im not surprised you meet resistance if you approach (and present) wealth and labor inequality in those terms. ubi is am ineffective solution to wealth inequality because it still leaves the means of prodction and control of workers' lives in the hands of the bourgeoisie, to be wielded however they see fit once the heat dies down. as far as working more so the global south can work less, i dont know what you're talking about. you're gonna have to walk me through it

croup coughfield posted:

im not surprised you meet resistance if you approach (and present) wealth and labor inequality in those terms. ubi is am ineffective solution to wealth inequality because it still leaves the means of prodction and control of workers' lives in the hands of the bourgeoisie, to be wielded however they see fit once the heat dies down. as far as working more so the global south can work less, i dont know what you're talking about. you're gonna have to walk me through it

War and Pieces posted:

Even a jobless person in the imperial core can survive (definitely not thrive) easier than a working person in the periphery because of access to cheap products made in sweat shops. Multiply that by a thousand for anyone who actually gets PTO

The Voice of Labor posted:

re: working more. if the goal is international communism, it's a fair assumption that standards of living need to be the same across the globe. even without the waste of supporting a parasite class and producing luxuries to indulge their whims, there's still not enough surplus and what there is is unevenly distributed. fixing the dearth and disparity would require people who touch computers for a paycheck and do 1 hour of productive labor and browse the forums and twitter for 7 hours during a work day to be reforesting and building roads and schools and hospitals and producing garments and growing food and not spending 7 hours of the working day on the forums and twitter

The Voice of Labor posted:

re: working more. if the goal is international communism, it's a fair assumption that standards of living need to be the same across the globe. even without the waste of supporting a parasite class and producing luxuries to indulge their whims, there's still not enough surplus and what there is is unevenly distributed. fixing the dearth and disparity would require people who touch computers for a paycheck and do 1 hour of productive labor and browse the forums and twitter for 7 hours during a work day to be reforesting and building roads and schools and hospitals and producing garments and growing food and not spending 7 hours of the working day on the forums and twitter

croup coughfield posted:

who are these computer guys you're so mad at. that is not the bulk of the working class in america.

Ferrinus posted:

It's important to note that a commodity's value, that is, the average socially-necessary abstract labor time required to procure and/or produce it, is the center of gravity around which its exchange value (how much of some other commodity you can trade it for) and its price (how much of the specific, historically contingent money-commodity you can trade it for) fluctuate. Things often sell for more or less than their value should imply because of various practical on-the-ground factors like canny salesmanship, desperation on the buyer's part, or, as you say, artificial scarcity maintained by cartels.

Still, that artificial scarcity is only going to be driving a high price even higher, because even if all mankind were united under one banner, it would be much harder to get your hands on a diamond than on a brick of charcoal, so the value of a diamond is naturally going to be high.

Marx posted:

It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was.

Marx posted:

Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange. In other words, the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers.

Ben Jonson in The Alchemist posted:

Riches – the dumb god that giv’st all men tongues, that can’st do naught, and yet mak’st men do all things.

The Voice of Labor posted:

I'm not real sure if any tact would work. for the geographically specific example a $500 monthly stipend would, ceteris paribus, be totally consumed by regular rent increases in around 5 years. like, there's a built in sunset clause for when the heat dies down

re: working more. if the goal is international communism, it's a fair assumption that standards of living need to be the same across the globe. even without the waste of supporting a parasite class and producing luxuries to indulge their whims, there's still not enough surplus and what there is is unevenly distributed. fixing the dearth and disparity would require people who touch computers for a paycheck and do 1 hour of productive labor and browse the forums and twitter for 7 hours during a work day to be reforesting and building roads and schools and hospitals and producing garments and growing food and not spending 7 hours of the working day on the forums and twitter

AnimeIsTrash posted:

You can just say that socialism (to you) means you have your own farm in the middle of bumfuck nowhere.

Falstaff posted:

Trash Ops posted:

posting walls of text where you quote ferrinus and throwing in a goon classic where you had the fetish comic panel totally ready not for any other reason than this joke really aint it lol

Trash Ops posted:

in this post i will explore lenins state and rev and relate it to later decolonialist thought but also here is a anime girl with her feet carefully drawn with a lil humor loosely tied to class oppression

Falstaff posted:

So I gather there are two issues here. The first is that I quoted Ferrinus in my last post. Have to say, not really understanding this objection. Was anything quoted there inaccurate? If so, please point it out. But the last time I did this, Ferrinus made what I felt was an important clarification, and I wanted to both include the clarification and give it proper attribution.

As for the images, I mentioned I'm a teacher. The fact is that humour can be a great teaching tool. It can make the reader relax and make otherwise dry text more approachable. But if the images I'm using for humour are too cringey and folks would rather I leave them out because skipping over them is too distracting or whatever, I suppose that's easy enough for me to do.

Ferrinus posted:

i think it was lenin who formulated socialism as "he who does not work, neither shall he eat." this sounds harsh until you remember that A) it was not expressing the intention to let children or disabled people starve, those still get taken care of by some kind of welfare state and B) under capitalism, there is in fact a class of people who eat without working but also without any kind of collective societal charity: the bourgeoisie. this is to say that i would expect that as much or more work gets done under socialism, not less, contra the life of leisure a UBI might seem to promise

however, under capitalism, the unemployed are part of the working class, and the bigger and more immiserated the unemployed are, the more leverage capitalists have over those workers who are currently being allowed to work. so demanding expanded welfare all the way up to a UBI is fair game and i think a good strategy under capitalist conditions, it's just not the one weird trick that will get you socialism

Communist Thoughts posted:

Everyone should eat the rich imo

Communist Thoughts posted:

Everyone should eat imo

War and Pieces posted:

Everyone should work too

Communist Thoughts posted:

Now this I can't get behind

Falstaff posted:

* Historically, gold was the commonly-accepted super-commodity used as money. With the gold standard, it was no longer that a coat was worth 20 metres of linen which was worth 15 kg of tea, but that $20 could be exchanged for your choice of one coat, 20 metres of linen, or 15 kg of tea.