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

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Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

The Voice of Labor posted:

there is and there has been. not throughout all of history, but throughout its capitalist epoch. do you sell your labor for wages or do you live on the labor of others? there's a little bit of gray area for small business tyrants and retirees and students and other children but that's what it comes down to. you can ignore the law of the excluded middle, but not when you're the one giving the definition of what the thing is

you are still confusing the difference between a metaphysical essence and a working definition. take the word "three". if i put two stones beside each other, and then add another one, i can say that i've now assembled three stones. then i put another stone down and while it remains true that i have three stones in one sense, i also have four stones in another sense, but then if we remove two i haven't got three any more, and we can go on like this. these are all true and clear-cut statements and there's no real dispute over what "three" means (although astute readers will already be asking questions about the divisions between stones, what counts as a single stone in the first place, etc...). but there is no essence of "three". those weren't special stones i found that were possessed by the spirit of three-ness that had been yearning for all of history to be arranged into a group of three and which i betrayed by adding a fourth stone. they're just stones.

likewise, having to sell your wages to live is an accident of history. the same person can become or cease to be a proletarian at multiple times in their life through no effort or fault of their own. there is no eternal proletarian

# ? Dec 5, 2023 16:46

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# ? Jun 8, 2024 01:40

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

What if I'm prolier than thou though?

# ? Dec 5, 2023 16:51

Atrocious Joe: Sep 2, 2011

HiroProtagonist posted:

Financialized capital. What imperialism is based on.

finance capital may operate on the international scale, but conflating it with an "international bourgeoisie" is just confusing. Finance capital is still based in specific countries, the imperialist countries.

even prior to the rise of finance capital, the development of capitalism in Europe was international. Marx points out how even the transition from money capital to industrial capital required global pillaging.

quote:

The money capital formed by means of usury and commerce was prevented from turning into industrial capital, in the country by the feudal constitution, in the towns by the guild organisation. These fetters vanished with the dissolution of feudal society, with the expropriation and partial eviction of the country population. The new manufactures were established at sea-ports, or at inland points beyond the control of the old municipalities and their guilds. Hence in England an embittered struggle of the corporate towns against these new industrial nurseries.

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England�s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China, &c.

The different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm

now if we look at Lenin in Imperialism we see him laying out the transition from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism and the global system of imperialism. again, for Lenin the whole point of the pamphlet is explaining how WW1 was a result of imperialism, and that any socialist revolution would need to confront and vanquish imperialism.

quote:

III. FINANCE CAPITAL AND THE FINANCIAL OLIGARCHY

�A steadily increasing proportion of capital in industry,� writes Hilferding, �ceases to belong to the industrialists who employ it. They obtain the use of it only through the medium of the banks which, in relation to them, represent the owners of the capital. On the other hand, the bank is forced to sink an increasing share of its funds in industry. Thus, to an ever greater degree the banker is being transformed into an industrial capitalist. This bank capital, i.e., capital in money form, which is thus actually transformed into industrial capital, I call �finance capital�.� �Finance capital is capital controlled by banks and employed by industrialists.�[1]

This definition is incomplete insofar as it is silent on one extremely important fact�on the increase of concentration of production and of capital to such an extent that concentration is leading, and has led, to monopoly. But throughout the whole of his work, and particularly in the two chapters preceding the one from which this definition is taken, Hilferding stresses the part played by capitalist monopolies.

The concentration of production; the monopolies arising therefrom; the merging or coalescence of the banks with industry�such is the history of the rise of finance capital and such is the content of that concept.
...
It is characteristic of capitalism in general that the ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all who are directly concerned in the management of capital. Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital, is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions. The supremacy of finance capital over all other forms of capital means the predominance of the rentier and of the financial oligarchy; it means that a small number of financially �powerful� states stand out among all the rest. The extent to which this process is going on may be judged from the statistics on emissions, i.e., the issue of all kinds of securities.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch03.htm

capitalism and imperialism are not going to wither away on their own no matter their internal contradictions.

The imperialist power structure is going to have be smashed somehow. it's not possible for communist countries to just "stay out of the active line of fire" because they currently are the targets of imperialist aggression and will face more attacks as imperialism continues to break down.

# ? Dec 5, 2023 19:12

Kaedric: Sep 5, 2000

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

I'm a big dum-dum so I don't really understand. I've looked at dialectics but I don't really get how it could be applied like above. Where do I learn more?

# ? Dec 6, 2023 05:17

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Kaedric posted:

I'm a big dum-dum so I don't really understand. I've looked at dialectics but I don't really get how it could be applied like above. Where do I learn more?

i'm also a big dum dum and i don't know about argument judo and i struggle with dialectics myself. dialectical materialist analysis examines the push and pull of difference forces (mostly classes) in society that lead to conradictory outcomes. but i think people, even non marxists and anti communists, automatically apply dialectical materialism without realizing it in simple cases. . here's a contradiction that most people can easily grasp: the majority of the democratic party base supports single payer healthcare, yet democrats refuse to implement it. what the heck's going on??

most people would instantly intuit that its industry lobbying. in marxist analysis, you have two opposing classes for and against - workers, who are for it, and capital (in this case healthcare/insurance industry) who are against. capital in general has institutional capture and control of the political system, and public opinion is channeled into political parties that act in the interests of capital, not its theoretical constituents/voters. individual politicians are rewarded with plush jobs and lots of money and connections for family and friends and themselves out of office/in retirement. they answer to capital, and therefore will not implement single payer healthcare. in this case "democracy" == the dictatorship of capital

a friend of mine jokingly referred to dialectical/historical materialism as "follow da money!!" and i think that tracks

mila kunis has issued a correction as of 06:21 on Dec 6, 2023

# ? Dec 6, 2023 06:18

Aeolius: Jul 16, 2003; Simon Templeman Fanclub

dialectical thinking can be deceptively simple, depending on how thoroughly you're looking to systematize it. unity of opposites, quantitative changes becoming qualitative changes, negation of negation, relative vs absolute, everything considered in its relation to everything else and likewise to its own internal changes and development, etc. � all of these notions individually are not too hard to grasp or explain, but the concept that it all fits together into a single broad method of inquiry that roughly tracks the patterns of reality itself is less immediately obvious to the layman. And then you also can twist it inside out and start considering, e.g., the social context under which inquiry itself proceeds, including those using said method. It's, as Marx described it, a "guiding thread," rather than a ready-made set of answers.

hell, you may even think, "well those are all pretty normal ways of thinking, right? I know i've considered things using one or more of them." and yes, exactly, that's true! But sometimes the things that are extremely fundamental, constitutive of our modes of thought, etc., can be surprisingly tricky to convey. as someone put it a long time ago:

Augustine of Hippo, Confessions XI posted:

For what is time? Who could find any quick or easy answer to that? Who could even grasp it in his thought clearly enough to put the matter into words? Yet is there anything to which we refer in conversation with more familiarity, any matter of more common experience, than time? And we know perfectly well what we mean when we speak of it, and understand just as well when we hear someone else refer to it. What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks me, I do not know.

Aeolius has issued a correction as of 07:01 on Dec 6, 2023

# ? Dec 6, 2023 06:59

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

mila kunis posted:

a friend of mine jokingly referred to dialectical/historical materialism as "follow da money!!" and i think that tracks

In a liberal society with no significant opposition (like say, an organized guerilla or whatever), yes. Kinda.

As long as money is the only important thing, it's going to be the only thing you need to analyze. Ofcourse you can argue whether money is ever truly the only important thing, even in a liberal society.

If you're going to try to analyze a society like modern day China in this way though, you are definitely going to fail.

# ? Dec 6, 2023 12:20

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/12/abc.htm

Leon Trotsky, ABC of Materialist Dialectics posted:

Dialectic is neither fiction nor mysticism, but a science of the forms of our thinking insofar as it is not limited to the daily problems of life but attempts to arrive at an understanding of more complicated and drawn-out processes. The dialectic and formal logic bear a relationship similar to that between higher and lower mathematics.

I will here attempt to sketch the substance of the problem in a very concrete form. The Aristotelian logic of the simple syllogism starts from the proposition that �A� is equal to �A�. This postulate is accepted as an axiom for a multitude of practical human actions and elementary generalisations. But in reality �A� is not equal to �A�. This is easy to prove if we observe these two letters under a lens�they are quite different from each other. But, one can object, the question is not of the size or the form of the letters, since they are only symbols for equal quantities, for instance, a pound of sugar. The objection is beside the point; in reality a pound of sugar is never equal to a pound of sugar�a more delicate scale always discloses a difference. Again one can object: but a pound of sugar is equal to itself. Neither is this true�all bodies change uninterruptedly in size, weight, colour, etc. They are never equal to themselves. A sophist will respond that a pound of sugar is equal to itself �at any given moment�.

Aside from the extremely dubious practical value of this �axiom�, it does not withstand theoretical criticism either. How should we really conceive the word �moment�? If it is an infinitesimal interval of time, then a pound of sugar is subjected during the course of that �moment� to inevitable changes. Or is the �moment� a purely mathematical abstraction, that is, a zero of time? But everything exists in time; and existence itself is an uninterrupted process of transformation; time is consequently a fundamental element of existence. Thus the axiom �A� is equal to �A� signifies that a thing is equal to itself if it does not change, that is, if it does not exist.

Late Trotsky's grumbling and gnashing aside, it's a fairly good introductory explanation.

# ? Dec 6, 2023 16:13

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Kaedric posted:

I'm a big dum-dum so I don't really understand. I've looked at dialectics but I don't really get how it could be applied like above. Where do I learn more?

stalin's rundown on dialectics is very clear and straightforward (as is all his writing, really, he's great at laying stuff out systematically) but my favorite treatise on the subject is probably still mao's On Contradiction

but what i mean is that, once you're used to noticing that everything is also its opposite (or at the very least co-constituitive with and dependent on its opposite) you can "yes, and..." almost any objection to make what you're saying stronger and more complete. for instance, you say something bad about a democrat, and you hear back, well what about how bad the republicans are. and you can be like yes, precisely, the democrats basically are the republicans, they symbiotically sustain each other, every democratic victory just feeds potential energy to a republican down the line and vice versa, every defense you attempt to raise only solidifies my analysis

# ? Dec 6, 2023 16:26

Centrist Committee: Aug 6, 2019

�yes, and� is such a ftw organizing strategy. it�s good for theory/debate as just mentioned but it�s also good for actually doing poo poo. nothing shuts down the flow of organizing work than a person who can�t improvise and insists on either correcting what someone else is saying or trying to control a process. there�s a time and place for debate and contradiction but most of time yes and is the way to go imo

# ? Dec 6, 2023 16:52

Mushika: Dec 22, 2010

I just want to say thank you to all of you putting in effort to your posts in this thread. It's been very helpful.

# ? Dec 7, 2023 01:59

Kaedric: Sep 5, 2000

Ferrinus posted:

stalin's rundown on dialectics is very clear and straightforward (as is all his writing, really, he's great at laying stuff out systematically) but my favorite treatise on the subject is probably still mao's On Contradiction

but what i mean is that, once you're used to noticing that everything is also its opposite (or at the very least co-constituitive with and dependent on its opposite) you can "yes, and..." almost any objection to make what you're saying stronger and more complete. for instance, you say something bad about a democrat, and you hear back, well what about how bad the republicans are. and you can be like yes, precisely, the democrats basically are the republicans, they symbiotically sustain each other, every democratic victory just feeds potential energy to a republican down the line and vice versa, every defense you attempt to raise only solidifies my analysis

Does anyone have a good suggestion on a particular selection of works by Mao and Stalin? I enjoy physical copies of the books, but the revolutions version of On Contradiction has an intro by Zizek which is an instant turnoff for me, I'm not sure if the translation is faithful even.

# ? Dec 8, 2023 10:55

Acelerion: May 3, 2005

I have a question thats been rolling around my head for a while and Im interested if there are any marxist writings or analysis on the subject. My shallow research has not turned much up.

It starts with a very simple observation: People that have the desire and capability to obtain and hold positions of power are about the last ones that should be trusted with that responsibility. From local to national government positions, corporate hierarchies, police forces, et cetera, the personality traits that are rewarded suck. Greed, desire to hold power and authority over others, lack of remorse for who you have to step on to climb the ladder, and the cunning to fight off would be challengers. Its no surprise that universally; positions of power are held by people that are primarily interested in self enrichment at the expense of the people they hold power over. Worse still, democratic institutions have proven just as susceptible to this as any other mechanism to choose who gets to be in charge.

To tie this into marxism, we are still talking about a socialist state, workers councils, co-ops, and so on - does not matter the flavor. The question of deciding who is in change is relevant everywhere and self serving leadership is destructive no matter where it resides. A classless society cannot allow itself to be split into those with power and those without.

Sortition seems like an obvious proposal, but definitely has its own downsides. Is there any thought on how marixst organization or government power structures could protect against this kind of thing?

# ? Dec 8, 2023 14:12

Nevil Maskelyne: Nov 11, 2023; by Fluffdaddy

It kinda seems like you're starting from a goofy liberal standpoint in the first place. Capitalist leaders are greedy white supremacist monsters because that's what the system is for. To claim that all leadership is the same as capitalist ruling class members just reads like self-aggrandizing liberalism to me, as well as buying into the weird nonsense propaganda that capitalist states indulge in about every socialist state being a dictatorship run for the personal pleasure of whatever single person the capitalists think they can convince everyone is worse than hitler.

e: hell, calling liberal capitalist states "democratic institutions" is so wildly out of pocket just by itself that I feel like it's not possible to use that phrase if you've read Lenin and have any kind of materalist understanding of real-world politics.

Nevil Maskelyne has issued a correction as of 14:24 on Dec 8, 2023

# ? Dec 8, 2023 14:18

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3: Nov 15, 2003

Human nature isn't real, dog.

# ? Dec 8, 2023 14:46

Nevil Maskelyne: Nov 11, 2023; by Fluffdaddy

That too, humanism as a concept is wildly inappropriate for actually understanding the way people have acted throughout history and in the current moment. Structuralism based on the foundational biological needs of humanity (like food) will serve you much better basically always.

# ? Dec 8, 2023 14:51

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

Human nature isn't real, dog.

Cannot emphasize this enough. Once humans became beings of language (or inscribed with language if you prefer the psychoanalytic take), "natural" became a whole different thing for us.

Different material relations produce different social relations. For example, some stuff like mass state-driven housing construction and public ownership of that housing causes a tremendous bugfuck in the heads of many people today, who simply can't conceive, "wait so are you telling me there was a large supply of housing that people didn't have to pay anything or if they paid it was a very small, almost nominal value lol bullshit"; yet this was a historical fact not too long ago and still is in some places. Such things were considered unnatural by some; Marxist critique slagged back by addressing that with "mfer ownership doesn't exist in nature"

# ? Dec 8, 2023 15:24

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Cannot emphasize this enough. Once humans became beings of language (or inscribed with language if you prefer the psychoanalytic take), "natural" became a whole different thing for us.

there's no such thing as human nature because the foundation of all behavior, for all life, is perception. need to get off freud and on gibson.

# ? Dec 8, 2023 15:33

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

Zodium posted:

there's no such thing as human nature because the foundation of all behavior, for all life, is perception. need to get off freud and on gibson.

you gotta elaborate on that "all life" there chief

# ? Dec 8, 2023 15:35

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3: Nov 15, 2003

do not post SMAC quotes in the marxism thread

# ? Dec 8, 2023 15:58

Aeolius: Jul 16, 2003; Simon Templeman Fanclub

Acelerion posted:

People that have the desire and capability to obtain and hold positions of power are about the last ones that should be trusted with that responsibility. ... Is there any thought on how marixst organization or government power structures could protect against this kind of thing?

All the stuff everyone's said about human nature is right, but if we're just talking about the question of accountability in the transitional frame, we could do worse than to consider China. I was reading something a while ago on China's method of political meritocracy, whereby the party basically has gigantic tables where they evaluate leaders' effectiveness according to dozens of parameters gauging how well they see to their constituency, achieve results, etc. On the basis of this, municipal leaders might be selected for consideration as candidates to move up to leading a city, from city to region, and onward.

This is not to say that China hasn't had to undertake campaigns against corruption in government, but I'll say at the very least it sounds like a better starting point for leadership selection than "whichever wealthy demagogue has the most forceful tv persona and/or employs the better slogan-writers" � in fact, as you may already intuit, the phrase "people who have the desire and capability to obtain and hold positions of power" can be reasonably expected to describe a different set of people under the latter case than the former.

In the USA we tend to think of the vote as the sole act of politics, like politics is something you do once every 4-6 years in fire-and-forget fashion. The Chinese system has fewer levels of political office that involve direct public vote (generally the lowest rungs that then elect the next one, and so on). But on the flipside, once a mayor gets into office, it seems like the job from there is basically a constant process of public consultation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEM903DsC5U

(I'm only like a quarter of the way through this doc, myself; maybe all the lobbyists are hiding in the back half, idk.)

So I guess this is really just another way to say what others have said about the dangers of universalizing our own narrow experience of politics.

Aeolius has issued a correction as of 17:30 on Dec 8, 2023

# ? Dec 8, 2023 17:27

Centrist Committee: Aug 6, 2019

Acelerion posted:

I have a question thats been rolling around my head for a while and Im interested if there are any marxist writings or analysis on the subject. My shallow research has not turned much up.

It starts with a very simple observation: People that have the desire and capability to obtain and hold positions of power are about the last ones that should be trusted with that responsibility. From local to national government positions, corporate hierarchies, police forces, et cetera, the personality traits that are rewarded suck. Greed, desire to hold power and authority over others, lack of remorse for who you have to step on to climb the ladder, and the cunning to fight off would be challengers. Its no surprise that universally; positions of power are held by people that are primarily interested in self enrichment at the expense of the people they hold power over. Worse still, democratic institutions have proven just as susceptible to this as any other mechanism to choose who gets to be in charge.

To tie this into marxism, we are still talking about a socialist state, workers councils, co-ops, and so on - does not matter the flavor. The question of deciding who is in change is relevant everywhere and self serving leadership is destructive no matter where it resides. A classless society cannot allow itself to be split into those with power and those without.

Sortition seems like an obvious proposal, but definitely has its own downsides. Is there any thought on how marixst organization or government power structures could protect against this kind of thing?

critique of the gotha programme gets thrown out in convos like this, what comes to mind for me from that is limiting compensation to the average worker�s wage and right of recall. basically changing the incentives while also building the new communist human that others are talking about

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index.htm

# ? Dec 8, 2023 17:45

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

Zodium posted:

there's no such thing as human nature because the foundation of all behavior, for all life, is perception. need to get off freud and on gibson.

this sounds suspiciously like idealism to me

# ? Dec 8, 2023 18:54

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Kaedric posted:

Does anyone have a good suggestion on a particular selection of works by Mao and Stalin? I enjoy physical copies of the books, but the revolutions version of On Contradiction has an intro by Zizek which is an instant turnoff for me, I'm not sure if the translation is faithful even.

i just use marxists.org, whose translations i assume are fine. my favorite stalin stuff, all on that site, includes:

his interview with h.g. wells (pretty short and very readable and acts as an incredible liberalism vs. marxism primer, i recommend it to anyone who can get over the names)

historical and dialectical materialism

marxism and the national question

and, of course, foundations of leninism

======

the mao classics definitely include combat liberalism, on contradiction, and oppose book worship, but i think it's also worth taking a look at On New Democracy, in which he lays out the way he wants to use all china's classes (bourgeoisie included) to oppose imperialism

# ? Dec 8, 2023 20:57

Phigs: Jan 23, 2019

I have a question of definition.

A few days ago I mentioned the spiritual aspects of communism in the Ukraine war thread and it caused confusion because I was being dumb and didn't actually mean the usual meaning of spirituality. What I actually meant was akin to the higher tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, aka those aspects of fulfillment that are not material, or "physiological" as Maslow coins it. Yesterday I read Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and there's a passage in it that basically summarizes what I mean so I know it is an idea already in communist literature:

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific posted:

The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day-by-day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties � this possibility is now, for the first time, here, but it is here.

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then, for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social organization. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man's own social organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have, hitherto, governed history, pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own history � only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

So, is there a word for this that doesn't carry the baggage of spirituality? How do I talk about it without confusing people with my dumb word choices?

# ? Dec 10, 2023 04:03

tristeham: Jul 31, 2022

Zodium posted:

there's no such thing as human nature because the foundation of all behavior, for all life, is perception. need to get off freud and on gibson.

perceive this bitch

🖕

# ? Dec 10, 2023 11:23

fart simpson: Jul 2, 2005; DEATH TO AMERICA

tristeham posted:

perceive this bitch

🖕

# ? Dec 10, 2023 11:29

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

Phigs posted:

I have a question of definition.

A few days ago I mentioned the spiritual aspects of communism in the Ukraine war thread and it caused confusion because I was being dumb and didn't actually mean the usual meaning of spirituality. What I actually meant was akin to the higher tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, aka those aspects of fulfillment that are not material, or "physiological" as Maslow coins it. Yesterday I read Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and there's a passage in it that basically summarizes what I mean so I know it is an idea already in communist literature:

So, is there a word for this that doesn't carry the baggage of spirituality? How do I talk about it without confusing people with my dumb word choices?

there's a pretty strong marxian or semi-marxian tradition of existentialism which more or less directly addresses this kind of stuff. you can read basically any of sartre's more popular essays on the matter of being-in-the-world as a primer here, though i would recommend something from after 1945. i have not read it myself, but i have been told that critique of dialectical reason is a good text for the relationship between existentialism and marxism

# ? Dec 10, 2023 13:22

mawarannahr: May 21, 2019

Zodium posted:

there's no such thing as human nature because the foundation of all behavior, for all life, is perception. need to get off freud and on gibson.

can something with no perception exhibit behavior? is a virus alive? does it have behavior?

# ? Dec 10, 2023 17:24

Doc Hawkins: Jun 15, 2010; Dashing? But I'm not even moving!

Phigs posted:

I have a question of definition.

A few days ago I mentioned the spiritual aspects of communism in the Ukraine war thread and it caused confusion because I was being dumb and didn't actually mean the usual meaning of spirituality. What I actually meant was akin to the higher tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, aka those aspects of fulfillment that are not material, or "physiological" as Maslow coins it. Yesterday I read Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and there's a passage in it that basically summarizes what I mean so I know it is an idea already in communist literature:

So, is there a word for this that doesn't carry the baggage of spirituality? How do I talk about it without confusing people with my dumb word choices?

this seems like humanism to me. but the question is how would it come across to lther people.

i mean, you mention maslow, isn't the "highest" need in his hierarchy labeled "self-actualization", or "fulfillment"? does that work? (it sounds a bit individualistic to me)

# ? Dec 10, 2023 17:36

ikanreed: Sep 25, 2009; I honestly I have no idea who cannibal[SIC] is and I do not know why I should know.

syq dude, just syq!

Doc Hawkins posted:

this seems like humanism to me. but the question is how would it come across to lther people.

i mean, you mention maslow, isn't the "highest" need in his hierarchy labeled "self-actualization", or "fulfillment"? does that work? (it sounds a bit individualistic to me)

People here love to say that Maslow was an OP, injecting capitalism without evidence on top of a theory that otherwise implies socialism as the ideal way to structure society.

# ? Dec 10, 2023 23:23

ikanreed: Sep 25, 2009; I honestly I have no idea who cannibal[SIC] is and I do not know why I should know.

syq dude, just syq!

Not me, though. I think it was a great theory for making a neopets clone based on.

# ? Dec 10, 2023 23:24

mawarannahr: May 21, 2019

lol at this old post

Tempora Mutantur posted:

alright I know it's a couple days late, but I'm posting bonus meltdown-mays so skip this poo poo if you don't wanna hear it:

this poo poo blew my mind since when I first read it I was like "yeah, yeah this all checks out" not realizing that this sack of poo poo was misrepresenting socialism as somehow incapable of enabling self-actualization when socialism is literally the only known social experiment that enables this for everyone as much as possible instead of only the rich/lucky. "you can't reach the top of the pyramid without the freedom of capitalism! da commies RESTRICT your ability to find your true self!" is such a perverse loving lie.

clearly the system that says you WILL be homeless if you can't find a job or a specific person or group willing to pay for you (who you have to find and convince on your own through ~whatever means necessary~) and has the widely-accepted purpose of "maximize profit even at the cost of human suffering" is way better at enabling the bullshit concept of "self-actualization" than that OTHER system

that filthy socialism. with its social contract that you get: a modest home to share with your family; actually-affordable necessities; a stated and shared goal to progress humanity through understanding how things physically work, sharing that knowledge, and doing our best with what we have available, all for the horrible cost of: working a job doing something that at least actually mattered, with people from your area, maybe even legitimate friends you've known for a long time since you've had a stable area to grow up in.

some horrible, meaningful job like cleaning, or cooking, or assembling something in a factory or learning a subject that mattered to you like math and actually applying it in civil engineering projects, maybe working with other architects and engineers planning a beautiful walkable city that enables streamlined logistical support to keep the area well-supplied from regional distribution centers.

like, look at this ugly piece of poo poo from the 1970s in Estonia, who would want to live there and be able to get around without a car:

ugh, and to take that kind of urban planning, combined with what we've learned about engineering, transportation, logistics, and generally everything else we've learned in the 50 years since that original layout was made? fuckin impossible. it's so good that capitalism strangled that poo poo in the cradle. shareholders of the automobile and oil industries are VERY important people, far more than you or I. they obviously know best, which we can all see is plainly obvious today, everywhere you look, even in nature itself. they're expert engineers who know how stuff works, I mean, Elon is going to get us to mars!!

god how could you want any of that commie bullshit, instead of reaching self-actualization under capitalism where you can be something like an insurance adjuster? you know, assigning made-up numbers about how much money someone gets to rebuild their life after a catastrophe, instead of giving them the actual necessities they just lost, because that would be the ~~human~~ dumbassed sucker-parasite-commie-bitch thing to do.

...so yeah, gently caress maslow. gorgeous attack meme though. takes a brief explanation of his buttplug-pyramid to get started, but really burrows into your brain because it reaches its false conclusion so intuitively. requires a whole shitload of effort to deprogram, too. plus, literally gets all the focus over other schools of thought through media reinforcement. super cool dude, hope to piss on his grave one day, right after Rand's.

luck is definitely OP (at best it can result in dropping out of a Capital vagina at start, at worst it somewhat mitigates falling out of the many Labor ones) but charisma is probably the biggest dump stat in the current meta for non-Evil characters. Empathy/Sympathy are dead ends for all classes vs someone who is willing and able to do something for others. yeah technically that can still be empathy under some circumstances, but you can still help people while being an unlikable rear end in a top hat, and being a really likeable but useless person is universally reviled no matter what people say (unless you're determined to commit to Liberal, but that's such a loving worthless background to stick with). similarly, the Looking Good perk that high CHA unlocks just doesn't carry the same level of impact as in previous metas; it definitely helps, but it's more of a win-more perk right now if you don't have other stats/perks to back it up.

INT is still super useful, like you don't need much and can still take the Marxist Thought perks, which will unlock the Parse Reality ability to establish your own immediate survival needs before you decide what class you want to commit to (Labor, Capital, or Labor-Traitor, since Capital-Traitor is prestige-only so you really gotta plan your playthrough if that's your goal, which INT helps with a ton)

somewhat to your point, you can definitely do low-int high-charisma playthroughs and make them work but they still rely heavily on luck since luck is so OP. med/high CHA, low/no INT, med to high luck is probably the #1 way to be a useless middle manager (or to be a bootlicker for other low-tier Capital players) but the constant passive psychic self-damage-over-time of those playstyles really hurt if your INT is anywhere near decent since its negative effects scale with how high your INT (this is if you don't have the Evil alignment which automatically thrives on any psychic damage you inflict or take; Evil is far and away the real OP alignment, it's loving insane the perks it grants if you just really commit and never ever try to regain Good alignment, since that's one of the many many hidden triggers for the dreaded Chronic PTSD debuff which i mean, has so many loving causes it's insane what these stupid loving devs were thinking, like no one is hardcore enough to want to deal with all this poo poo).

CHA is really useful for evil playthroughs (except of course Cop playthroughs since they carry such a high int and cha penalty in exchange for automatic and amplified Evil perks) but ultimately worthless for good playthroughs, counter-intuitive as that may seem. like really high CHA, with good alignment? you absolutely need insanely high luck to somehow dodge the Hampton effect if you aren't going to just give in and go full Atwater for the switch to Evil/Indifferent (same alignments, really).

it's all these undocumented stat/perk/alignment effects and the completely absent UI (lazy loving devs, amirite) that causes all these low/no int high-luck dipshits saying things like "voting can effect real change" because the UI doesn't tell them how they're actually Indifferent or Evil while they think they're actually Good. they don't understand how OP luck is, like lol yeah voting for Obama really helped Flint and Newark get the lead out of their water, yup. voting DEFINITELY helped get reparations back on the table after Johnson gutted everything once Lincoln was peacefully voted out of office, and voting in 2000 DEFINITELY helped prevent the iraq war later on, oh yeah. totally real things that happened and all prove how effective voting is, among countless other examples of voting totally working. like men totally voted to give women the right to vote! that's how it happened! just everyday dudes on the street voting.

loving idiot scrubs. just total noobs acting like they know poo poo about gently caress. it's kind of funny if it wasn't so sad but ah well, can't fault people for just wanting to play the game and not be beaten over the head with ~optimal plays~ no matter how easy it is to just spend a couple points and pick up the starting Manifesto perk of Marxist Thought. they all act like "that's too much to think about, just focus on harm reduction" but it's like, you loving idiots, the Marxist perks literally get more powerful the more players take even a single point in the tree. it is *THE* most OP perk tree in the game, literally amplifying your own perks in the tree every time someone else invests in the tree until a critical mass is reached and ALL your perks from every tree get a bonus from Freedom from Wage Slavery, a unique perk that requires the playerbase to collectively unlock.

whatever. it's like when you have pubs who don't understand how striking together can mean victory while doing nothing/acting separately causes a loss.

I guess I can't really talk, being high-luck labor myself and doing nothing but the daily mission grind to meet my family's survival upkeep rather than actually helping effect change beyond the most token efforts at gaining local rep, which is still pitifully low. rep grinds suck rear end but Local Networker and Known Quantity In Your Community perks are worth it imo even if I just chase them casually.

look, I've had some poo poo going on and these idiotic walls of text are super cathartic for me because yeah, someone called it, I like workshopping rants to cope with the very real, very rapid decline of *gestures everywhere* combined with the readily-available livestreaming/reporting of a lot of the worst of it. fuckin put me on ignore me if need be, or if this is somehow annoying enough for a probe then whatever I could probably use the break; just don't be a bad-faith piece of poo poo like Some Plague Rats about it. still irks me that they called me an anti-natalist for a post where I lament that we collectively shrug at our leaders abdicating their most basic responsibilities while reaping insane rewards for themselves at our collective expense, such as (by no means the only example) not holding the people accountable for running a company that literally infected babies with disease because it was cheaper than not, a thing that was very recently as in within the last six months of this writing in multiple media outlets before being memoryholed like every other daily atrocity, which I explicitly linked to in the loving thing they shat on, presumably because Some Plague Rats enjoys seeing babies infected with disease which just saying does match their username gently caress you if you're still lurking this thread, btw; alternatively, thank you if you really do local work as you described, that's actually really cool and insanely high effort on top of maintaining your own life and I can obviously understand being so distracted by RL poo poo that my point was lost in translation, especially since I struggle to employ the non-existent concept of irony/am unfortunately pretty loving dumb as you called out, you stupid gently caress

as for these posts, gently caress me I edited all that so fuckin much and it still ended up with so many run-on streams-of-consciousness because I didn't gut enough dumb tangents and committed to WAY too many stupid edgy sarcasm bits, plus I tried and failed to find some links for some other poo poo I wanted to weave in instead of paring it down; whatever, I clearly preach -ist thought

# ? Dec 10, 2023 23:30

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

im happy for them, i assume

# ? Dec 11, 2023 02:01

Phigs: Jan 23, 2019

Doc Hawkins posted:

this seems like humanism to me. but the question is how would it come across to lther people.

i mean, you mention maslow, isn't the "highest" need in his hierarchy labeled "self-actualization", or "fulfillment"? does that work? (it sounds a bit individualistic to me)

I honestly haven't paid too much attention to the hierarchy itself, just the basic concept. Taking a closer look I'd say it's at the very least too granular for my purposes, just need the concept that people have non-material needs but that material needs are an all-consuming concern if they are not met. Which makes it not an ideal thing to reference!

I guess it's probably best just to use a phrase like "the non-material benefits of communism like..." instead of trying to summarize it in one word.

fake edit: ^^ Yeah I can see what that post is saying about Maslow, particularly the "really burrows into your brain because it reaches its false conclusion so intuitively". The parts of Maslow I give a poo poo about are very intuitive. Luckily I just never bothered to dive into the rest of what he was saying.

# ? Dec 11, 2023 02:08

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

a phrase i like is that the establishment of socialism, not even necessarily communism, is not the end but rather the start of history because it will allow us to stop thrashing around in the grip of azathoth and actually make some grown-up decisions for ourselves as a species for loving once

# ? Dec 11, 2023 07:02

fart simpson: Jul 2, 2005; DEATH TO AMERICA

i thought he already stepped down

# ? Dec 11, 2023 07:06

Kreeblah: May 17, 2004; INSERT QUACK TO CONTINUE; Taco Defender

I just started reading Capital today, and gently caress does Marx love to repeat himself. I swear this thing reads like he was getting paid by the column inch or something.

I'll get through it, but this is gonna be a bit more of a slog than I expected.

# ? Dec 11, 2023 09:49

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

Phigs posted:

I have a question of definition.

A few days ago I mentioned the spiritual aspects of communism in the Ukraine war thread and it caused confusion because I was being dumb and didn't actually mean the usual meaning of spirituality. What I actually meant was akin to the higher tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, aka those aspects of fulfillment that are not material, or "physiological" as Maslow coins it. Yesterday I read Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and there's a passage in it that basically summarizes what I mean so I know it is an idea already in communist literature:

So, is there a word for this that doesn't carry the baggage of spirituality? How do I talk about it without confusing people with my dumb word choices?

Do you not just mean psychological needs? Or if you want to get into analytic theory, you could talk about relational/attachment/selfobject needs.

# ? Dec 11, 2023 09:51

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# ? Jun 8, 2024 01:40

fart simpson: Jul 2, 2005; DEATH TO AMERICA

Kreeblah posted:

I just started reading Capital today, and gently caress does Marx love to repeat himself. I swear this thing reads like he was getting paid by the column inch or something.

I'll get through it, but this is gonna be a bit more of a slog than I expected.

hes building up to the good parts

# ? Dec 11, 2023 10:00

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