[Marx] I put on my anti-coat and wizard hat

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Mechafunkzilla: Sep 11, 2006; If you want a vision of the future...

okay so it's bullshit psychology, and also computers

# ? Apr 29, 2023 19:08

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# ? May 24, 2024 06:23

tristeham: Jul 31, 2022

Mechafunkzilla posted:

so it's just computers

just replace cybernetics by "feedback loop" it's the exact same thing

# ? Apr 29, 2023 19:11

mawarannahr: May 21, 2019

Mechafunkzilla posted:

okay so it's bullshit psychology, and also computers

it's more thinking of things as though they were robots/computers, imo

# ? Apr 29, 2023 19:11

the bitcoin of weed: Nov 1, 2014

cybernetics is a weird term for it considering the modern understanding of the term (=robot arms, mostly) but it makes sense to conceive of the new social order enabled by the automation/mechanization of information, as an extension of the industrial social order enabled by the automation and mechanization of production

# ? Apr 29, 2023 19:18

Cuttlefush: Jan 15, 2014; gotta have my purp

well take that up with the guys in the '50s who coined the term and whoever started popularizing it as a stand in for robotics after that. the original definition is that one.

again, if you do want to know what the gently caress it is, read the first parts of "Key Features of Cybernetics", which is translated part way down in https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/10/soviet-cybernetics-an-introduction/. The original Russian is https://www.computer-museum.ru/books/cybernetics.htm. Machine translation at https://www-computer--museum-ru.translate.goog/books/cybernetics.htm?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp.

or just go with tristeham because feedback loop is fine if you don't actually want to read about it (which is fine)

# ? Apr 29, 2023 19:26

croup coughfield: Apr 8, 2020; Can't post for 74 days!

in my limited understanding, cybernetics uses programmer brain to model society. so institutions and organizations and what-have-you aren't discrete entities so much as active processes. these systems interact through exchanging (or withholding) signals and resources, impacting each other at every point of interaction. each system is also composed of multiple smaller systems, doing the same thing, and they have component systems of their own, and so on. these systems have rigid structures that limit what it can do and how it can do it, and require resources to do what it can.

by understanding all of these flows and interactions and signals, the thinking goes, you can make reliable predictions of systemic behavior. you can then formulate and introduce new processes that affect multiple systems in some preferred way, changing the overall balance of resource distribution to something more self-sustaining.

its of interest to me because it dovetails very nicely with historical materialism and, in turn, mechanism. a deeper but more formal investigation of the philosophy imo and something marx would be into, perhaps annoyingly so.

# ? Apr 29, 2023 21:36

mawarannahr: May 21, 2019

croup coughfield posted:

its of interest to me because it dovetails very nicely with historical materialism and, in turn, mechanism. a deeper but more formal investigation of the philosophy imo and something marx would be into, perhaps annoyingly so.

that reminds me of this quote I saved yesterday. maybe it was Xaris who posted it.

quote:

Proletarianisation is a concept that captures a noetic process, denoting a generalised loss of knowledge of the subject, our gradual becoming stupid. Stiegler...starts to develop the concept more rigorously, resulting in a tripartite division of proletarianisation into the loss of savoir-faire, savoir-vivre and savoir-th�oriser... In a Heideggerian vein, savoir-faire denotes more practical knowledge; savoir-vivre corresponds to a certain know-how of living together, which he primarily explores in psychoanalytic terms; savoir-th�oriser is quite literally a capacity for theoretical thinking. The loss of these three forms of savoir rests upon a historical distinction between three different economic eras, namely, that of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, twentieth-century Fordist consumerism and our current economic paradigm. This does not mean that each loss of savoir is mutually exclusive, corresponding to a specific and unique economic epoch. They are in fact cumulative, and Stiegler argues that we are witnessing the loss of all three forms of knowledge today.

In this periodisation of capitalism, whereas labour in the nineteenth century is primarily considered to be characterised by the loss of artisanal skills, labour in the twenty-first century is seen to cause a loss of cognitive capacities. Stiegler holds that this damage does not only affect workers but everyone, as big data and the crowd sourcing economy replace the producer by the consumer. In 1993, with the introduction to the public of the World Wide Web, our milieu was transformed into a digital one, a milieu of absolute automation, the automation not simply of practical knowledge but also of decision-making. We are now all becoming part of the machine, as artificial organs causing �a complete cerebral desertification�.

No one escapes proletarianisation in the digital age, not even the likes of Alan Greenspan, the former Chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, who would have been made redundant by finance algorithms. Stiegler therefore speaks of an age of generalised proletarianisation characterised by the automation of everyone�s knowledge, resulting from the material automation of both physical and cognitive tasks.

# ? Apr 29, 2023 21:40

Cuttlefush: Jan 15, 2014; gotta have my purp

croup coughfield posted:

in my limited understanding, cybernetics uses programmer brain to model society. so institutions and organizations and what-have-you aren't discrete entities so much as active processes. these systems interact through exchanging (or withholding) signals and resources, impacting each other at every point of interaction. each system is also composed of multiple smaller systems, doing the same thing, and they have component systems of their own, and so on. these systems have rigid structures that limit what it can do and how it can do it, and require resources to do what it can.

by understanding all of these flows and interactions and signals, the thinking goes, you can make reliable predictions of systemic behavior. you can then formulate and introduce new processes that affect multiple systems in some preferred way, changing the overall balance of resource distribution to something more self-sustaining.

its of interest to me because it dovetails very nicely with historical materialism and, in turn, mechanism. a deeper but more formal investigation of the philosophy imo and something marx would be into, perhaps annoyingly so.

cybernetics isn't necessarily programmer brain - i'd say it predates it. like all things it can be used by programmer brain which leads to garbage. the paper i keep harping on i think has a good warning about that:

Key Features of Cybernetics translated in https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/10/soviet-cybernetics-an-introduction/ posted:

Finally, Wiener is very cautious about the possibility of applying cybernetics to the study of social phenomena, arguing that although a number of social phenomena and processes can be studied and explained in terms of information theory, human society, apart from statistical factors, has other forces at work which cannot be mathematically analysed, and periods of society in which there is a relative stability of conditions necessary to apply statistical research methods are too short and rare.

It should be noted that Wiener�s Cybernetics contains a sharp criticism of capitalist society, although the author does not indicate a way out of the contradictions of capitalism and does not recognize a social revolution.

Foreign reactionary philosophers and writers seek to exploit cybernetics, like any new scientific trend, for their own class interests. By strenuously publicizing and often exaggerating the statements of individual cybernetic scientists about the achievements and prospects of automation, reactionary journalists and writers are carrying out the direct order of the capitalists to indoctrinate the ordinary people into thinking that they are inferior, that ordinary workers can be replaced by mechanical robots and thereby seek to belittle the activity of the working masses in the struggle against capitalist exploitation.

We must decisively expose this manifestation of a hostile ideology. Automation in a socialist society serves to make human labor easier and more productive.

We must also fight against the vulgarization of the analogy method in the study of higher nervous activity by rejecting simplistic, mechanistic interpretations of these questions and by carefully studying the limits of applicability of electronic and mechanical models and diagrams to represent thought processes.

it's a good paper in part because it shows how it was introduced and accepted for a while as something potentially useful. i don't think the introduction of cybernetics in the ussr led to a lot of programmer brain behavior that it did in the west precisely because that bolded warning was largely heeded. agree on the dovetailing though. also that marx would have gone insane off of it probably.

Cuttlefush has issued a correction as of 21:56 on Apr 29, 2023

# ? Apr 29, 2023 21:54

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

Marxist cybernetics != cybernetics

Today it is basically �Marxist Applied Computer Science�. It�s lit af because these monumentally glorious nerds come up and basically destroy any single argument about how socialism is impossible and then one goes �give me nationalization and central command of walmart and amazon and I shall deliver a gigantic leap in the standard of living�

# ? Apr 29, 2023 21:59

Cuttlefush: Jan 15, 2014; gotta have my purp

are there more translated articles out there or am I missing like the marxist cybernetics repository? I know there are a shitload of russian papers on it but i am not coming up with translations. where all the aksel berg papers at

# ? Apr 29, 2023 22:08

croup coughfield: Apr 8, 2020; Can't post for 74 days!

you cannot separate social and economic phenomena imho

# ? Apr 29, 2023 23:57

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

croup coughfield posted:

you cannot separate social and economic phenomena imho

exactly, which is why imho it�s pretty cool seeing these guys putting the cart behind the horse - computers enter in service of sociology, history, geography, political economy etc

# ? Apr 30, 2023 00:05

Cuttlefush: Jan 15, 2014; gotta have my purp

croup coughfield posted:

you cannot separate social and economic phenomena imho

i mean no, social phenomena depend on material conditions and you can't separate them in that sense, but you can model and derive laws for economic facets in ways you generally can't/shouldn't for other social phenomena that is informed by that. i don't know if I'm explaining what I'm thinking very well here.

https://rauterberg.employee.id.tue.nl/lecturenotes/DDM110%20CAS/Wiener-1948%20Cybernetics.pdf page 155 on is where Wiener talks about it. It looks to me like an argument against the programmer brained tendency to oversimplify and essentialize complex social topics with modeling.

i'm just taking this as a warning to not do oversimplified programmer brained poo poo or go full malthus with it.

# ? Apr 30, 2023 01:04

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

cybernetics is interesting because it's conceptually similar to systems theory and dialectics, i.e. the world is extremely complex, and it's important to understand the dynamics of how it works if you're going to try change it.

seems like it's mostly useful at a process level (what's the best way of managing supply chains) than a societal level though.

# ? Apr 30, 2023 02:52

Sunny Side Up: Jun 22, 2004; Mayoist Third Condimentist

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Marxist cybernetics != cybernetics

Today it is basically �Marxist Applied Computer Science�. It�s lit af because these monumentally glorious nerds come up and basically destroy any single argument about how socialism is impossible and then one goes �give me nationalization and central command of walmart and amazon and I shall deliver a gigantic leap in the standard of living�

My understanding is exactly this�-People�s Republic of Walmart/Amazon/etc sort of poo poo. It�s also what airlines do with optimizing whether to load a full load or just enough at the departure or arrival airport (due to price differences between markets). Except turned toward political-economic goals (ecological sustainability, eliminating hunger/houselessness/etc).

It�s not �computers� it�s actually just �spreadsheets� hahahaha

Well spreadsheets are enough for a single market, maybe linear programming models for more complex scenarios but you definitely need process modeling software for big picture poo poo. Very easy and common nowadays tho.

Sunny Side Up has issued a correction as of 04:02 on Apr 30, 2023

# ? Apr 30, 2023 03:59

Osv18: Jul 23, 2022; by vyelkin

oscarthewilde posted:

it's essentialistic in the sense that material conditions are the fundamentally defining and determining forces. individual subjects are determined by/cannot exist independently of these forces and can thus be reduced to their economic subjectivity. The notion of Gattungswesen allows for a mediated, conditional subjectivity that nevertheless subsumes individual queerness or alterity under the broad concept of material conditions and the base/superstructure relation. If we're talking true, diehard marxists the possibility of neurodivergency would eventually be reducible to material conditions derived from the capitalist mode of production - with the implication they would not exist under communism.

this is p undialectical comrade.

what you're refering to as neurodivergence is, within capitalist relations and conditions, failure or refusal or incapacity to adapt to those conditions and relations.

neurodivergence would be the norm under communism because (ideally) there would be no more coercive social relations to conform to/diverge from. everybody would be free to be their own unique crazy.

that being said hopefully people would also be less damaged and traumatized so maybe we'd get better kinds of crazy.

# ? Apr 30, 2023 11:33

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

AnimeIsTrash posted:

You mention cybernetics a lot in your posts. Could you talk a little about what it means in the context of marxism?

cybernetics is a formal way of understanding the world in terms of circular causality, systems, feedback loops, couplings, and the interactions and interdependencies between them across scales. for many purposes, it's fine to say it's basically feedback loops. for example, M-C-M' is a positive feedback loop where money is turned into more money through dependency of the worker on the owner, which is then turned into even more money, etc., and the runaway accumulation of capital from that process produces higher-order scales, e.g., the imperialism stage, which in turn produces new feedback loops, interactions, dependencies, etc.

when you commit to materialism and start applying cybernetics to observable human behavior and socioeconomic systems, you end up with something that's very similar to marxism, dialectics, historical materialism, etc. that's how I ended up deciding I wanted to understand marxism to begin with: I noticed that extending ecological psychology into collective and especially economic behavior kept making me go "hang on, the way this all fits together conceptually sounds an awful lot like what those socialists are always going on about. maybe it isn't obsolete and irrelevant?"

some of the good posts other people made on how cybernetics relates to marxism covered other aspects well:

Cuttlefush posted:

'cybernetic capitalism' i use as a shorthand for capitalism's build up of feedbacks and now literally constructed algorithms that have some control over information and markets. the speedtrading stock market bots, social media, search engines, the algorithmic nature of what information people can get. commodification of information, communication, enclosing some of the last commons (like old internet)

i don't really think that's meaningfully important from a marxist perspective in the sense that it shouldn't change how someone reads Capital or Imperialism or anything. also i think almost all of the english language writing on 'cybernetic capitalism' smell like bullshit.

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Marxist cybernetics != cybernetics

Today it is basically �Marxist Applied Computer Science�. It�s lit af because these monumentally glorious nerds come up and basically destroy any single argument about how socialism is impossible and then one goes �give me nationalization and central command of walmart and amazon and I shall deliver a gigantic leap in the standard of living�

to quote mary cate batheson: "The tragedy of the cybernetic revolution, which had two phases, the computer science side and the systems theory side, has been the neglect of the systems theory side of it. We chose marketable gadgets in preference to a deeper understanding of the world we live in."

we didn't, of course, choose that. capitalists directed the flow of resources that way because exclusively developing the computer science side produces cybernetic capitalism, while including the systems side produces cybernetic marxism. or, maybe more accurately, cybernetic socialism. it's a description of how capitalism has used the aspects of cybernetics that facilitate its reproduction to build up the ecosystem we live in today since ww2, which it did and does by directing the flow of information and resources to control behavioral niches, i.e., the set of relations between animal and environment that physically defines opportunities for action.

like cuttlefush said, it shouldn't change how someone reads Capital or Imperialism, because it's marxism that answers "why cybernetics?" rather than cybernetics that answers "why marxism?"

croup coughfield posted:

in my limited understanding, cybernetics uses programmer brain to model society. so institutions and organizations and what-have-you aren't discrete entities so much as active processes. these systems interact through exchanging (or withholding) signals and resources, impacting each other at every point of interaction. each system is also composed of multiple smaller systems, doing the same thing, and they have component systems of their own, and so on. these systems have rigid structures that limit what it can do and how it can do it, and require resources to do what it can.

by understanding all of these flows and interactions and signals, the thinking goes, you can make reliable predictions of systemic behavior. you can then formulate and introduce new processes that affect multiple systems in some preferred way, changing the overall balance of resource distribution to something more self-sustaining.

its of interest to me because it dovetails very nicely with historical materialism and, in turn, mechanism. a deeper but more formal investigation of the philosophy imo and something marx would be into, perhaps annoyingly so.

beautifully put, except i think programmer brain is what you get when you focus on the computer science side. that's how you get nick land talking about capital as a machinic superintelligence or superorganism rather than an ecosystem, unless you mean that modeling society in this way is intrinsically programmer brain, in which case, fair enough. i'm not really a programmer, and more coming at it as a set of abstract analytical techniques, so I guess I just bristle a little at the characterization.

it dovetails so nicely, i often find myself thinking about what marx would have made of cybernetics. i like to think he would have been into it to an annoying degree.

exmarx posted:

cybernetics is interesting because it's conceptually similar to systems theory and dialectics, i.e. the world is extremely complex, and it's important to understand the dynamics of how it works if you're going to try change it.

seems like it's mostly useful at a process level (what's the best way of managing supply chains) than a societal level though.

there is a deep connection between the process scale and society scale, though. how supply chains processes are managed, and for what they are managed, affects how the society-system evolves. capitalism manages supply chains for the reproduction of capitalist relations. we can use the cybernetic perspective to help understand how it does that, how to manage them for the production of communist relations, and how to predict what will need to be controlled and satisfied for the process to succeed.

mawarannahr posted:

no not really. i heard about cybernetics before but didn't really learn about it until encountering it studying psychology. in particular I encountered it in the context of personality research with the "cybernetic big five theory":

I don't follow this stuff closely anymore but the paper has a nice overview of how cybernetics can be used to study things that aren't computers:

and here's how they explain the cybernetic functions of the personality characteristics they measured:

this may not be the best way to study human personality but it could be an example of how if you conceive of a thing like a computer you can try to reason about it in such a manner.

tbh i hate this, and i think stuff like this is why people don't like cybernetics. it's just taking personality as something that needs to be explained a priori and shoehorning the big five construct into a cybernetic framework, but you don't need the big five construct in the first place if you're taking a cybernetic perspective. it's pretty much exactly what I was trying to do with memory like ten years ago when I wanted representational and non-representational models of memory to peacefully co-exist. the cybernetic perspective only makes sense for wholly materialist approaches to behavior. flush the rest down a toilet.

Osv18 posted:

what you're refering to as neurodivergence is, within capitalist relations and conditions, failure or refusal or incapacity to adapt to those conditions and relations.

this is nicely put. i've been (weakly) taking a similar position in relation to capitalism's control of behavioral niches without properly developing the thought.

# ? Apr 30, 2023 12:56

Brain Candy: May 18, 2006

Zodium posted:

it dovetails so nicely, i often find myself thinking about what marx would have made of cybernetics. i like to think he would have been into it to an annoying degree.

possibly. it's always been striking to me that from a slightly different perspective, that capitialism can be seen as using one variable for a steepest ascent algorithim on a multivariate problem. you get the rapid growth from this, but also the ease with which it becomes stuck in local maxima. how it is both very powerful and very stupid, why it is fundamentally unstable

i believe its entirely possible to prove mathematically as long term stupid and i think this is the shape marx saw

# ? Apr 30, 2023 13:16

Sunny Side Up: Jun 22, 2004; Mayoist Third Condimentist

Cuttlefush posted:

cybernetics isn't necessarily programmer brain - i'd say it predates it. like all things it can be used by programmer brain which leads to garbage. the paper i keep harping on i think has a good warning about that:

it's a good paper in part because it shows how it was introduced and accepted for a while as something potentially useful. i don't think the introduction of cybernetics in the ussr led to a lot of programmer brain behavior that it did in the west precisely because that bolded warning was largely heeded. agree on the dovetailing though. also that marx would have gone insane off of it probably.

I got halfway through the biographical portion of cosmonaut article and it was too blatantly caricaturing the USSR to continue. Hopefully the part on the cybernetics side is better.

# ? Apr 30, 2023 16:25

Cuttlefush: Jan 15, 2014; gotta have my purp

Sunny Side Up posted:

I got halfway through the biographical portion of cosmonaut article and it was too blatantly caricaturing the USSR to continue. Hopefully the part on the cybernetics side is better.

Yeah it's just the translated article and that's most of the length. Unfortunately the only real outlines of the history I've found in English are like that or literal us dod poo poo.

# ? May 1, 2023 12:41

Sunny Side Up: Jun 22, 2004; Mayoist Third Condimentist

Cuttlefush posted:

Yeah it's just the translated article and that's most of the length. Unfortunately the only real outlines of the history I've found in English are like that or literal us dod poo poo.

Been down this rabbit hole before. Actually last night lol. Was looking for more background on this guy Lysenko that came up in The Panda�s Thumb by SJ Gould. Like, even Marx & Engels were enamored of Darwin, so what encouraged the USSR toward Lamarckism? Except they also really did essentially eliminate historically frequent and bad famine and also tremendously increased arable land. Enshrouded history? Or I just don�t know where to look.

# ? May 1, 2023 12:58

StashAugustine: Mar 24, 2013; Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

Sunny Side Up posted:

Been down this rabbit hole before. Actually last night lol. Was looking for more background on this guy Lysenko that came up in The Panda’s Thumb by SJ Gould. Like, even Marx & Engels were enamored of Darwin, so what encouraged the USSR toward Lamarckism? Except they also really did essentially eliminate historically frequent and bad famine and also tremendously increased arable land. Enshrouded history? Or I just don’t know where to look.

The cooption of Darwinism by eugenic reactionaries, notably the Nazis, did discourage its adoption in the USSR

# ? May 1, 2023 13:34

CGI Stardust: Nov 7, 2010; Brexit is but a door,
election time is but a window.

I'll be back

Sunny Side Up posted:

Been down this rabbit hole before. Actually last night lol. Was looking for more background on this guy Lysenko that came up in The Panda�s Thumb by SJ Gould. Like, even Marx & Engels were enamored of Darwin, so what encouraged the USSR toward Lamarckism? Except they also really did essentially eliminate historically frequent and bad famine and also tremendously increased arable land. Enshrouded history? Or I just don�t know where to look.

it's been a while since i read these books, but:

Helena Sheehan's Marxism and the Philosophy of Science has a section on it if you don't mind a slog

quote:

In the 1920s, the debate was focused on the conflicting claims of genetics, as elaborated by such scientists as Mendel and Morgan, and Lamarckism, which was experiencing something of a resurgence. At first, many Soviet biologists were favorably disposed towards both; they discerned in genetics the material basis of individual heredity, but they believed that it was inadequate in explaining the evolution of the species or the influence of the environment in the process of evolution. Lamarckism was viewed sympathetically as answering these supposed inadequacies.

related, the conflict between geneticists and Lysenkoists also comes up in Slava Gerovitch's From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A history of Soviet cybernetics

quote:

By adopting the language of cybernetics, Soviet scientists effectively got rid of a whole set of categories and principles characteristic of the dominant scientific and philosophical discourse. By reducing physiological and biological phenomena to their computer models, Soviet cyberneticians were able to eliminate Pavlovian and Lysenkoist dogmas as �not amenable to formalization.� As with Ockham�s Razor, they cut off the �superfluous� concepts. Under the banner of clarification and formalization of scientific concepts, they introduced an entirely new conceptual framework. The cybernetic models of communication as information exchange, of human behavior as a feedback mechanism, and of the human brain as an analog to computer, however simplistic, supplanted yet more simplistic ideas advanced by the orthodox Pavlovians in physiology and the Lysenkoites in biology.

goes a bit heavy into the politicking and personalities behind Soviet cybernetics and not enough into the juicy cybernetic details, but can't have it all i guess

# ? May 1, 2023 17:53

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

it's worth noting that some of lysenko's theories have been seeing something of a renewed interest with the rise of the omics era, at least according to a grass guy i know. the issue is that lysenko's work was somewhat over-interpreted in the highly charged world of soviet agricultural science and that they just completely lacked a good theoretical framework for explaining his observations, so things went a bit off the rails in ways which were highly useful as anti-communist propaganda. basically what seems to have happened is that lysenko had some seriously counter-paradigmatic observations and that those were interpreted in lamarckian terms because that was the framework available to people, and this combined with the very high stakes and the whole project of soviet modernism made for a somewhat grim spin on things.

lysenko himself seems to have been a talented and hard-working but rather narrow researcher who didn't have the cultural capital to really manage the incredibly exposed position in which he suddenly found himself. he might've falsified stuff or he might not. at any rate he had many ambitious experiments fail, but this is not really unusual.

interestingly his, for lack of a better word, rehabilitation has been pushed largely by a newly confident chinese academia. i don't know grasses, vernalisation or graft hybridisation well enough to know if what they're positing is credible, but this revisionist view of lysenko is being discussed by perfectly sane people working in the field so it is likely not pure nonsense.

# ? May 1, 2023 23:25

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

rejecting mendelian genetics is deeply weird even in the context of the day, though (mendel himself almost certainly fudged his data a little, but his experiments are straightforwardly reproducible and will give the same conclusion mendel drew). one must, however, remember that this is before anyone has any real idea of what a gene is supposed to be. the great geneticists are all about the same age as lysenko and operating under entirely different circumstances. so, lysenko's coming up in a world where the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory really hasn't happened yet and has a bunch of apparently anti-mendelian observations in a world where mendelian genetics have a very strong eugenicist and racialist flavour to them, making them politically suspect. finer minds than lysenko have screwed up under similar circumstances with much less at stake (lord kelvin being a notable example)

V. Illych L. has issued a correction as of 23:42 on May 1, 2023

# ? May 1, 2023 23:39

In Training: Jun 28, 2008

SorePotato posted:

Income is the biggest indicator of class in the US

I'm just catching up on like 10 pages of this thread and will continue to see where this discussion goes but I think assets and debt would be better. Homeownership vs rent burden etc. Wages in the imperial core seem way out of whack compared to the rest.of the world but land prices and ground rent seeking are so absurd in the US (and regionally variable) that pure income might be misleading. Not a bad place to start thougb

# ? May 2, 2023 00:48

croup coughfield: Apr 8, 2020; Can't post for 74 days!

its the person's relation to the means of production it has nothing to do with anything else :negative:

# ? May 2, 2023 00:49

croup coughfield: Apr 8, 2020; Can't post for 74 days!

if you make 250k a year from writing nonsense articles for wsj and thats your only source of income you are a working class person. if you invest it and now you make 250k from your ownership in other firms, plus write those articles for another 250k, you are a bourgeois person with a lucrative hobby.

# ? May 2, 2023 00:53

In Training: Jun 28, 2008

croup coughfield posted:

if you make 250k a year from writing nonsense articles for wsj and thats your only source of income you are a working class person. if you invest it and now you make 250k from your ownership in other firms, plus write those articles for another 250k, you are a bourgeois person with a lucrative hobby.

writing articles for the wsj is a different relationship to production than idk working at a munitions factory. Even if neither has an investment portfolio and both jobs exist to benefit the imperial project. Or would you disagree with that.

# ? May 2, 2023 01:18

Al!: Apr 2, 2010

it is not bourgeois to collect a paycheck in exchange for your labor as your only income no matter how stupid worthless or evil that labor is, by definition

# ? May 2, 2023 01:25

Brain Candy: May 18, 2006

croup coughfield posted:

if you make 250k a year from writing nonsense articles for wsj and thats your only source of income you are a working class person. if you invest it and now you make 250k from your ownership in other firms, plus write those articles for another 250k, you are a bourgeois person with a lucrative hobby.

right what are you though if you currently must work but will be able to retire and live off of financial instruments that are designed to self-destruct? it's like if people have bourgeois eggs inside of them that hatch and make them move to florida

# ? May 2, 2023 01:29

In Training: Jun 28, 2008

that makes sense, ty.

croup has brought up a couple times now the limitations on money for the development of socialist&communist parties that created parallel social institutions to challenge capital...how historically did this happen in nations w/ successful revolutions anyway.

# ? May 2, 2023 01:29

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

The question is whether you work for your money or your money works for you. If you're selling your labour to collect a wage and somebody else is paying you that wage and then profiting off the surplus value of your labour, you're the proletariat and they're the bourgeoisie.

"Means of production" is a 19th-century term for basically "owning the thing that means the firm can turn a profit," these days that could be physical things like the machinery in a factory or railroad tracks as it was in Marx's time, but it could also be an app or the WSJ printing presses or the electronic 1s and 0s representing money held by a venture capital firm that invests in other people's apps and printing presses, or a million other ways that firms make money in the modern capitalist economy.

# ? May 2, 2023 01:30

genericnick: Dec 26, 2012

Al! posted:

it is not bourgeois to collect a paycheck in exchange for your labor as your only income no matter how stupid worthless or evil that labor is, by definition

Not 100% on this. Are NYT oped writers really payed for their labor or is the relationship more akin to a minor second cousin of the house of Winsor getting a stipend?

# ? May 2, 2023 01:32

In Training: Jun 28, 2008

genericnick posted:

Not 100% on this. Are NYT oped writers really payed for their labor or is the relationship more akin to a minor second cousin of the house of Winsor getting a stipend?

well nepotism of that kind would mean the labor was basically unnecessary, since they presumably already have passive income in the form of family wealth & investments. so they act as a willing mouthpiece for the ruling class instead of becoming a class traitor and giving me $10,000,000 to establish the US Marxist Class Analysis Institute

# ? May 2, 2023 01:38

the bitcoin of weed: Nov 1, 2014

genericnick posted:

Not 100% on this. Are NYT oped writers really payed for their labor or is the relationship more akin to a minor second cousin of the house of Winsor getting a stipend?

it's an interesting question on account of a big Old Money thing is to get your kid a post at some nonprofit where they attend banquets and fundraisers as a celebrity in exchange for a bloated paycheck (see: clinton, chelsea; biden, hunter) and I feel like that's a fundamentally different relationship than actually being expected to provide some form of labor for a paycheck. I'm not sure there's a term for this particular social class in modern capitalism but it comes across as more of a minor nobility role

# ? May 2, 2023 01:46

Al!: Apr 2, 2010

genericnick posted:

Not 100% on this. Are NYT oped writers really payed for their labor or is the relationship more akin to a minor second cousin of the house of Winsor getting a stipend?

some people just want to watch the world burn.........

# ? May 2, 2023 01:48

Al!: Apr 2, 2010

In Training posted:

well nepotism of that kind would mean the labor was basically unnecessary, since they presumably already have passive income in the form of family wealth & investments. so they act as a willing mouthpiece for the ruling class instead of becoming a class traitor and giving me $10,000,000 to establish the US Marxist Class Analysis Institute

but this i feel is a good answer. i actually went back in and ninja edited "only source of income" in that post for this situation

# ? May 2, 2023 01:49

mawarannahr: May 21, 2019

croup coughfield posted:

its the person's relation to the means of production it has nothing to do with anything else

my understanding is it may be more precise to say for capitalism it's the relation to the appropriation of surplus labor in the form of surplus value. the precision is important because the owner of the MoP and the appropriator need not be the same, and MoPs have existed practically forever (and so has separation of the direct producer from the MoP, which is necessary)

# ? May 2, 2023 01:53

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# ? May 24, 2024 06:23

croup coughfield: Apr 8, 2020; Can't post for 74 days!

if you're the scion of a wealthy family but they aren't and more importantly won't pay your bills so you have to work to survive, you are working class. if there's also a fat trust waiting for you when you turn 35 or complete a brewsters millions type quest youre still working class now but are upwardly mobile.

401ks and retirement investments are tricky in this context, and that's the point - to keep you invested ( :razz:

) in the system. I think the question is ultimately just counting angels on the head of a pin. while yes you used money to buy commodities (investment vehicles) with the specific intent of selling them later for money (which is the bourgeois relation to commodity production), working class people do that all the time in other contexts and the purpose is always to later use that money to buy more commodities for their own consumption. for the bourgeoisie, their end goal is the money itself, not what you can buy with it.

# ? May 2, 2023 01:56

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