(Thread IKs:
dead gay comedy forums)
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looking at capital, that seems a long standing tradition. half the book is arguing against vacuous formulations of value that circle around and call one of their initial components the end result of value production. I'm inclined to believe truth and justice are joined at the hip. you can't take a veridical objective look at what is and what came before it and find a justification for explotation, so explotative systems need to throw out sound reasoning or true premises, they need be dumb, crazy or both to be coherent. locke, for example, is not empty, there's a lot of cogent argumentation, but since it's there to legitimize evil it falls apart if your standpoint for analysis is well, maybe genociding and enslaving people for profitis nota moral aimor outcome
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Dec 2, 2023 18:49
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| # ? May 30, 2024 01:02 |
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dialectics rules because it lets you constantly shift your weight from foot to foot and dance circles around anyone else in an argument. capital? it's actually labor. nonviolence? it's violent. democracy? it's dictatorship. losers? they're winning. every apparent contradiction can be turned through psychic judo into a piece of evidence in your favor. and the best part is that while it sounds like i'm being sophistic and facetious here that actually makes me all the more deadly serious
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Dec 2, 2023 19:27
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Mr Shiny Pants posted:I like the world to make sense (in an "able to explain why things happen" kinda way), Marxism is the only theory I've come across that is able to explain certain phenomena in a way that seems logical and that makes sense to me. This is a big one for me, too. I think this is something that we have in common with people believing in conspiracy theories (not the actual conspiracies that do exist sometimes, but the kooky poo poo). And one of the main things separating us is that I am fully willing to believe most organizations are dysfunctional as hell and thus incompetence can be the cause of a lot of poo poo and also and even more importantly no grand, explicit conspiracy is required to effect an outcome when shared class interest for that outcome exists. Orange Devil has issued a correction as of 20:28 on Dec 2, 2023 |
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Dec 2, 2023 20:22
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Orange Devil posted:when shared class interest for that outcome exists. This. Problem is most people don't think it exists, and you sound like some nut when talking about "them". Another thing that I really like is that Marx and Lenin were optimists. Marx's view on humanity is a really wonderful one, reading about how doing "work" is actually a really deep emotional thing that you should treat with great respect fills me with joy. I mean that in the most non-hokey way possible. His stuff on alienation is just so on the ball and makes perfect sense when looking at the world we are currently living in. I don't know, you just read something and it clicks on a intuitive/deep level because it makes sense in the context of your own lived experience but until you've read it you can't quite put it into words/thoughts.
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Dec 2, 2023 21:01
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I think to be a communist compared to a liberal is fundamentally to be an optimist. A liberal can look at the world as it is, and perhaps even especially how it was in the 90s when history ended, and conclude "well, this is it, the best of all possible worlds, can't get better". You can show them a lot of poo poo that is objectively hosed and get them to agree on that but if you propose any fundamental change they're always going to tell you that that would make things worse, somehow. A communist looks at the same world with all the same poo poo that is hosed, and usually perceives a hell of a lot more things as being hosed up to boot, and concludes "we can do better than this". And to be completely honest, when I think we can do better, I always have this nagging doubt in my mind that maybe I am wrong about that. Maybe humans fundamentally are too hosed up to live harmoniously with our environment and eachother. But that's a useless thought, because either its true and then nothing matters anyway, or its not and we're right back at communism.
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Dec 2, 2023 21:09
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Ferrinus posted:dialectics rules because it lets you constantly shift your weight from foot to foot and dance circles around anyone else in an argument. capital? it's actually labor. nonviolence? it's violent. democracy? it's dictatorship. losers? they're winning. every apparent contradiction can be turned through psychic judo into a piece of evidence in your favor. and the best part is that while it sounds like i'm being sophistic and facetious here that actually makes me all the more deadly serious George Orwell got so loving pissed about this he wrote a whole book
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Dec 2, 2023 21:09
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Orange Devil posted:I think to be a communist compared to a liberal is fundamentally to be an optimist. to me, socialism is a necessary but not sufficient condition to prevent civilisational collapse i'm actually deeply conservative by temperament lol
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Dec 2, 2023 21:28
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Orange Devil posted:This is a big one for me, too. I know multiple commies I organize with who's first exposure to political understandings outside of liberalism was getting into 9/11 conspiracy theories lol . Hell I guess as a teen I was also into JFK conspiracies. Must be responding to a void underneath liberal understandings of history as just a series of events with moral characters at the helm. I assume people have written about this w/ more depth and clarity
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Dec 2, 2023 21:40
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i got into socialism when bernie sanders created it in 2016
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Dec 2, 2023 21:49
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AnimeIsTrash posted:i got into socialism when bernie sanders created it in 2016 Lol
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Dec 2, 2023 21:52
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AnimeIsTrash posted:i got into socialism when bernie sanders created it in 2016
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Dec 2, 2023 21:54
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AnimeIsTrash posted:i got into socialism when bernie sanders created it in 2016
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Dec 2, 2023 22:46
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In Training posted:I know multiple commies I organize with who's first exposure to political understandings outside of liberalism was getting into 9/11 conspiracy theories lol . Hell I guess as a teen I was also into JFK conspiracies. Must be responding to a void underneath liberal understandings of history as just a series of events with moral characters at the helm. I assume people have written about this w/ more depth and clarity a close friend and comrade of mine was a conspiracy theorist as a teen. grasping for some kind of truth in the face of a plainly stupid status quo is a good impulse and i think where it gets you basically turns on whether you accept Race as the ultimate explanation for why history happens or not
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Dec 2, 2023 23:13
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i played red alert 1 and it was immediately clear who was cool and good. the rest is history.
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Dec 2, 2023 23:36
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V. Illych L. posted:to me, socialism is a necessary but not sufficient condition to prevent civilisational collapse Yeah same tbh, but even if socialism will not cure all ills and usher in a utopia at least it'll be a better way of running a society
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Dec 2, 2023 23:42
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conspiracy theories are really fun and interesting from a distance. I used to beg my mom or dad for weekly world news at the supermarket register. but I always appreciated them in the same way I did the X Files or Lord of the Rings, I never thought any of it was real. I didn’t realize anyone thought that stuff was real until I was in high school
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Dec 2, 2023 23:48
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cia killed kennedy, at the very least both bush and fdr knew well ahead of time that their country was going to be attacked, the labor theory of value is absolutely true ergo all of us are constantly being robbed by the rich. kinda hard to get down on conspiracy when there's so much of it around
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Dec 2, 2023 23:53
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What's different about, or what's happening to, the folks that 'research' conspiracy and end up on the other side? Q, (((Jews))), etc. Ideology *sniff* ?
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Dec 3, 2023 00:29
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indigi posted:conspiracy theories are really fun and interesting from a distance. I used to beg my mom or dad for weekly world news at the supermarket register. but I always appreciated them in the same way I did the X Files or Lord of the Rings, I never thought any of it was real. I didn’t realize anyone thought that stuff was real until I was in high school The paranoid condition (in its real psychopathological sense) is terribly, terribly awful -- the mind cannot stop producing meaning, it must connect and signify everything and as such, it is an antidialectical condition -- it cannot handle contradiction, paradox or limitation. To the surprise of absolutely nobody around here, this is a huge part of why it is incredibly drawn to fascism.
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Dec 3, 2023 00:34
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StashAugustine posted:Yeah same tbh, but even if socialism will not cure all ills and usher in a utopia at least it'll be a better way of running a society i even think that this remains to be properly determined. what i do know deep in my bones and despite earnest attempts to convince myself of the contrary, is that capitalism is entirely inimical to advanced society in the medium-long term
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Dec 3, 2023 00:35
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Hey hopefully this is the right thread for this but there's a half formed idea in my head that I'm wondering if there's any good books to read about. Basically I've been thinking about the history of economic / production change, as in slavery to serfdom, feudalism to capitalism, and capitalism to whatever may happen next. I recently heard someone say that fight to move away from use of fossil fuels can in some ways be compared to the fight to end the use of slavery, in that both are fights to change an energy source of production and labor that a society uses. I have not read Marx but my understanding is that when he wrote about the modes of production evolving thru history, he connected that not to just class struggle but also to the forces of production, or technology, evolving as well. So for example merchant guilds and feudal manufacturing did not give way to capitalism just because of culture or class, the advancement of energy production was also necessary for capital to scale. Like I don't think it's a coincidence that capitalism and the industrial revolution also began with the adoption of coal and then oil. I know it's not actually that simple and history is littered with examples like the cotton gin leading to expanded slavery in the American south, and that there is still slavery today, but like as said this is half formed and I'm thinking in pretty broad strokes right now. But it seems to me that we can say the amount of energy available to a society shapes the mode of production. So maybe this is all in Capital, and the answer is just "read Capital", but Marx was not alive for the age of oil and climate change. And the second part of what I'm thinking is that, at least if we're ruling out complete climate apocalypse, we're basically at the beginning of a new phase shift in the source (and probably amount) of energy available to society. Fossil fuels were a historically unprecedented dense and powerful source of energy on demand. Future energy, whether it's renewables or whatever else, simply can not match what that energy density and the power it provided (i am assuming there is not some 11th hour widespread adoption of nuclear, because so far there is nothing to indicate that will happen). Knowing what we know about history, that should give us some clues as to what the structure of class, labor, and production may look like in a post fossil fuel future. I figure there has to be a book by a smart person exploring some of this stuff, but have no idea where to start
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Dec 3, 2023 01:53
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just a small response to your post but marx & engels did actually write about climate change.and the necessity for a communist industrial society to coexist with the natural bounty of the earth
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Dec 3, 2023 02:16
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fossil capital is an interesting read that touches on many of those topics and more.
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Dec 3, 2023 02:17
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thalweg posted:Hey hopefully this is the right thread for this but there's a half formed idea in my head that I'm wondering if there's any good books to read about. Basically I've been thinking about the history of economic / production change, as in slavery to serfdom, feudalism to capitalism, and capitalism to whatever may happen next. I recently heard someone say that fight to move away from use of fossil fuels can in some ways be compared to the fight to end the use of slavery, in that both are fights to change an energy source of production and labor that a society uses. I have not read Marx but my understanding is that when he wrote about the modes of production evolving thru history, he connected that not to just class struggle but also to the forces of production, or technology, evolving as well. So for example merchant guilds and feudal manufacturing did not give way to capitalism just because of culture or class, the advancement of energy production was also necessary for capital to scale. Like I don't think it's a coincidence that capitalism and the industrial revolution also began with the adoption of coal and then oil. I know it's not actually that simple and history is littered with examples like the cotton gin leading to expanded slavery in the American south, and that there is still slavery today, but like as said this is half formed and I'm thinking in pretty broad strokes right now. But it seems to me that we can say the amount of energy available to a society shapes the mode of production. a lot of people don’t like him but i posted about it after reading the book, but “how the world works” by marxist economist paul cockshott spends a fair bit of time talking about the energy transition stuff you’re touching on and what future energy shifts might lead to socialism (he thinks fusion power could help), and the end of the book is making predictions about future class society and production relations
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Dec 3, 2023 02:20
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AnimeIsTrash posted:i got into socialism when bernie sanders created it in 2016
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Dec 3, 2023 02:41
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Bald Stalin posted:What's different about, or what's happening to, the folks that 'research' conspiracy and end up on the other side? Q, (((Jews))), etc. it actually is ideology, but i think the specific ideology is Race, which is to say the belief that people are divided into ineluctable kinds and the differences in those kinds proving out are what's responsible for history at large, like who colonized whom, who's rich and who's poor, and so on. a lot of seemingly-natural distinctions drawn between types of people in the contemporary world, like smart vs. stupid or lazy vs. diligent or good vs. evil are just ways of talking about race at one remove racist ideology is fundamentally metaphysical, concerned with internal essences as opposed to contraposed forces. mao's On Contradiction is a great piece of writing discussing the metaphysical vs. dialectical worldviews and the various mistakes the former leads to, although he doesn't discuss race specifically. but Q, lizardmen, whatever all come down to jews using black people to sabotage white people. why are they doing this? well, that's just what they do, inherently, because they're jews, and we all know about the blacks and so on this in turn is connected to a lot of theoretical mistakes people make about institutions and "authoritarianism" where they assign responsibility for historical events to a small cabal of hidden conspirators rather than the masses, assume that a union or organization or state can somehow develop its own will that proceeds to oppress people rather than growing or decaying in response to material forces, etc
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Dec 3, 2023 07:13
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small cabal of conspirators describes capitalists pretty well. I guess the hidden part doesn't really apply because they meet in davos and the bohemian grove to scheme in fairly overt ways
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Dec 3, 2023 08:28
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The Voice of Labor posted:small cabal of conspirators describes capitalists pretty well. I guess the hidden part doesn't really apply because they meet in davos and the bohemian grove to scheme in fairly overt ways also they in fact fight each other fiercely and can't plan more than a financial quarter ahead without getting usurped and ousted by someone more short-sightedly rapacious
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Dec 3, 2023 08:40
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Ferrinus posted:it actually is ideology, but i think the specific ideology is Race, which is to say the belief that people are divided into ineluctable kinds and the differences in those kinds proving out are what's responsible for history at large, like who colonized whom, who's rich and who's poor, and so on. a lot of seemingly-natural distinctions drawn between types of people in the contemporary world, like smart vs. stupid or lazy vs. diligent or good vs. evil are just ways of talking about race at one remove I agree with this but I also think there's a critical thinking component involved too. you can read actual transcripts of government officials and their correspondences and reasonably conclude something fishy is going on like with JFK. or you can read random rear end screeds on websites about the reverse vampires controlling everything from their earth's core lair and believe those. the conspiratorial mind sees that things are hosed but believes all of what they read while the critical mind is able to hold views against the mainstream but have reasonable actual evidence to back it up
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Dec 3, 2023 14:34
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I don't think racism is the tipping component. there's no jewish conspiracy behind a flat earth, just a failing of reasoning or inadequate or contested evidence. kant was the smartest guy in the room by far and he did some incredibly racist anthropological lectures, not because he was crazy and stupid, but because his only information on african people were fantastical bullshit stories that were coming back up the colonial pipeline. our ability to craft a theory or maintain it is pretty fragile, in kants case there wasn't a defect in the mans reasoning on the evidence provided, there was a failing off the evidence and a failing in the reasoning behind accepting the faulty evidence as veridical
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Dec 3, 2023 18:40
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Nixon was also a smart boy who got As on all his tests, which is why, as US President, he believed that the Ancient Greek civilization collapsed as a result of being too gay, because that's what he was taught in school when he was twelve.
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Dec 3, 2023 19:01
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kant was on qualitatively different intellectual plane than tricky dick, but go ahead and disparage the foundation that hegel and subsequently marx were coming from
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Dec 3, 2023 19:53
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The Voice of Labor posted:I don't think racism is the tipping component. there's no jewish conspiracy behind a flat earth, just a failing of reasoning or inadequate or contested evidence. 
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Dec 3, 2023 19:55
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Marx cut off Hegels balls. they fell into the sea and became Lenin and Stalin.
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Dec 3, 2023 19:59
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mawarannahr posted:Marx cut off Hegels balls. they fell into the sea and became Lenin and Stalin.
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Dec 3, 2023 20:00
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cspam historical materialism* *contains no history or materialism
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Dec 3, 2023 20:18
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nah i thing tvol's point here is reasonable - individual rationality generally isn't the problem, structures shaping public knowledge are
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Dec 3, 2023 21:15
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The Voice of Labor posted:cspam historical materialism* but tahts not really the ponit youre making you can just say that he benefited from white uspremacy so there was no reason for him to quesiton things like "nonwhites have smaller brains" or whatever the gently caress euros believe about the world
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Dec 3, 2023 23:54
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The Voice of Labor posted:cspam historical materialism* play with your legos about it
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Dec 3, 2023 23:55
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tristeham posted:play with your legos about it devastating
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Dec 4, 2023 00:01
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