(Thread IKs:
dead gay comedy forums)
|
the proletariat is the class that can and will lead the revolution. however, if they want to give trump or biden or any bourgeois politician big wet smooches then as a class they have not achieved the revolutionary consciousness necessary to accomplish that revolution
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2023 20:30
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 27, 2024 14:10 |
|
|
what about members of congress whose primary income is their congressional salary, are they proletarians
|
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2023 21:46
|
|
|
DrSunshine posted:what about members of congress whose primary income is their congressional salary, are they proletarians Yes, and they're secret Maoist agents waiting for the activation signal from Beijing.
|
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2023 22:02
|
|
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:oppressing the proletariat is not a real job first of all, we seem to be adding extra conditions besides "sells labor-power for a wage owing to a lack of means of production" here, so it seems that being in or out of the proletariat is not so simple as putting bread on your table in one way or another second, "real job" opens up a big can of worms because there's lots of labor that is not formally productive, such as financial bookkeeping or governmental administration. but the people who do it still get paid in wages and indeed frequently form unions and strike and suchlike, and while they defray costs rather than create surplus value as such the math underlying their exploitation is still a matter of v in, v+s out so excluding them from the proletariat on the basis of "real" jobs does not seem tenable finally, if oppressing the proletariat can denude or completely invalidate a person or institution's claim to being part of the proletariat, shouldn't racism or sexism count against them exactly the same way, since those are social practices that magnify worker oppression and reify capitalism? i don't think (or at least don't know whether) you disagree with me on any of these but tvol is another story Ferrinus has issued a correction as of 01:03 on Dec 14, 2023 |
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2023 00:58
|
|
|
Day r class traitors
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2023 01:03
|
|
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:oppressing the proletariat is not a real job eh, its a living
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2023 01:08
|
|
|
fart simpson posted:eh, its a living are you a cop? you have to tell me
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2023 01:16
|
|
|
Actually even China has cops right? So it isn't like the concept of law enforcement is incompatible with Marxism, it's just that they end up being captured by whatever economic system they're in and acting either to just generally protect their current way of doing things, beyond infiltration by the right wing to compromise a socialist state.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2023 01:34
|
|
|
'All cops are bad under capitalism' is just too wordy
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2023 01:41
|
|
|
Imagine cops under capitalism being fully class conscious and doing the job anyway.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2023 02:49
|
|
|
I mean they do have some of the most powerful unions so…
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2023 02:50
|
|
|
cop unions are funny and instructive to study because like, a lot of the insane privileges cops get like getting to hear any testimony people are going to levy against them before trial even starts is a perk cop unions won for cops INSTEAD of pay raises. there are lots of structural parallels between cops and postmen or cops and steelworkers or w/e. so actually teasing out how cops relate to the proletariat and the struggle for socialism needs to look at things besides property ownership, rate of surplus value, etc
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2023 05:34
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:first of all, we seem to be adding extra conditions besides "sells labor-power for a wage owing to a lack of means of production" here, so it seems that being in or out of the proletariat is not so simple as putting bread on your table in one way or another i'm not being serious in a theory sense, gently caress the pigs though
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2023 05:48
|
|
|
Wouldn't cops be labour aristocracy?
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2023 07:11
|
|
|
Fish of hemp posted:Wouldn't cops be labour aristocracy? whats your reasoning here?
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2023 07:15
|
|
|
My thought is that cops in a capitalist society are not proletariat because they place themselves directly in opposition to the proletariat by becoming enforcers for the bourgeoisie. They sell their labor, but they are not members of the labor class because their labor is the work of suppressing the labor class.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2023 08:17
|
|
|
sounds like your looking for the phrase "class traitors"
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2023 08:22
|
|
|
fart simpson posted:whats your reasoning here? They sell their labour to capital, but they have special relation with capital which provides them perks and priviledges that normal proletariat doesn't have.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2023 08:48
|
|
|
cops are state-sponsored lumpenprole bandits
|
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2023 08:58
|
|
|
Fish of hemp posted:Wouldn't cops be labour aristocracy? stumblebum posted:cops are state-sponsored lumpenprole bandits synthesis: lumpen aristocrats
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2023 09:06
|
|
|
i feel like i've posted this before, but i think cops are most easily analogized to managers, even low-level ones whose wages barely exceed those of their reports and who serve at the beck and call of corporate overlords. even if they're paid by the hour and live as lovely a life as you do, your manager does not have the same interests you do, because you succeed by generating as little surplus-value as possible while they win by coaxing as much surplus-value as possible out of you. your manager's star only rises, and they only receive rewards, insofar as they can expedite your exploitation. so in fact it turns out that being a proletarian, or being an ally to the proletarian cause, or being an ally to the socialist cause, or whatever, does not straightforwardly hinge on the manner in which you get paid but which class's interests are advanced when you pursue your own, and how by proportion, because of where its ranks were drawn from and the relative levels of development of the warring countries, the soviet army probably contained more peasants than proletarians as compared to the nazi army, but only one of those armies served the proletarian cause
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2023 08:38
|
|
|
Cops are just HR but for your house.
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 00:40
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:first of all, we seem to be adding extra conditions besides "sells labor-power for a wage owing to a lack of means of production" here, so it seems that being in or out of the proletariat is not so simple as putting bread on your table in one way or another if you want to call a racist a bad person, that's fine, but that doesn't exclude them from membership in their economic class. your judgement on the value that they produce doesn't matter either, an hour's labor is an hour's labor. it doesn't matter what it is or who it's for, otherwise socialism is impossible and you'll always have hierarchy and stratification because you're going off the assumption that one person's time is inherently more valuable than another's. I think we're on agreement on that point with the exception that being a class traitor doesn't exclude someone from the class they're betraying. you need a different description for that relationship because that is a different relationship than the class traitor has with capital. cops and managers are still wage laborers. more broadly, barack obama and clarence thomas are still black
|
|
#
?
Dec 17, 2023 21:56
|
|
|
Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:lumpenproles are just the lower classes who lack class consciousness. Marx included demobilized soldiers and prostitutes, which have been controversial, for different reasons, since the cultural turn. Both are parasitic on the existing socioeconomic order, but saying a group is parasitic hurts people’s feelings, so “sex work is real work”, even if it’s not, and comrade anarchist troops were welcomed with open arms until the Ukraine War, or Syria, when to everyone’s surprise they adopted the State Dept position immediately.
|
|
#
?
Dec 17, 2023 22:09
|
|
|
Frosted Flake posted:Marx included demobilized soldiers and prostitutes, which have been controversial, for different reasons, since the cultural turn. Both are parasitic on the existing socioeconomic order, but saying a group is parasitic hurts people’s feelings, so “sex work is real work”, even if it’s not, and comrade anarchist troops were welcomed with open arms until the Ukraine War, or Syria, when to everyone’s surprise they adopted the State Dept position immediately. does Marx call those people "parasites"? i don't recall. when he talks about parasites, he is most often talking about landowners and capitalists, the former for extracting rent, the latter for extracting surplus value. i don't know about soldiers on the dole, but prostitutes are better described as "unproductive labor." they are in the same category as opera singers, according to Marx's reading of Adam Smith in theories of surplus value. this is also you if you build your own set of deck chairs in your garage. no surplus value was generated, because no worker created it by being paid less than the value of the thing. the (self-employed) prostitute likewise take the money and gives the service - no surplus value. it is unproductive labor because it does not produce surplus value. to smith, this is simply wasteful. people with money ought to put their money into industry where value is generated, not wasting it on personal indulgence. there is a difference here. Marx finds a parasitic drain on society inherent within the industry that Smith wants people to invest in, and Smith does not. Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 has issued a correction as of 23:05 on Dec 17, 2023 |
|
#
?
Dec 17, 2023 22:36
|
|
|
Sex work is unproductive labor because the TurboJerkatron5000 can produce four hundred orgasms an hour with minimal tooling costs.
|
|
#
?
Dec 17, 2023 22:48
|
|
|
Frosted Flake posted:Marx included demobilized soldiers and prostitutes, which have been controversial, for different reasons, since the cultural turn. Both are parasitic on the existing socioeconomic order, but saying a group is parasitic hurts people’s feelings, so “sex work is real work”, even if it’s not, and comrade anarchist troops were welcomed with open arms until the Ukraine War, or Syria, when to everyone’s surprise they adopted the State Dept position immediately. how's a sex worker a parasite? trying to grasp the reasoning here I'm (still) dumb as hell and poorly read, but my understanding is that marx and engels both viewed sex workers more as victims (if not at least side effects) of the capitalist system rather than exploiters of it, closer to what Fat-Lip said re: them being unproductive labor but labor nonetheless
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2023 04:27
|
|
|
The fundamental marxist line of labor thought would consider sex work to be parasitic of the value produced by the productive labor of like a guy who grows food or makes linen coats or whatever. Sex workers don't actually produce anything, which means that their labor can be withheld without affecting the capitalist system overall. That's the fundamental idea of lumpenproletariat, but I don't think most people find it a very useful or workable portion of marx's original writing and I don't think it sees a lot of use in modern marxist discussion outside of people who are maybe a bit too into dogmatic thinking to ever really be practical. In modern reality we consider service work, including sex work, to be legitimate work because a lot of it enriches and assists with the human experience in ways that don't need to be eliminated by a socialist revolution, but a dogmatic approach would generally think of that kind of thing as parasitic. It's good to understand dogmatism (and revisionism) when you're thinking through social and political practicalities and economic factors in real life outside of strict production economics, because if you don't keep good track of where the ideas of marxist economics come from then you'll have a harder time understanding the practical reasons for your beliefs and you'll be more likely to fall back on liberal moralizing rather than scientific dialectic thought.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2023 04:39
|
|
|
Nevil Maskelyne posted:The fundamental marxist line of labor thought would consider sex work to be parasitic of the value produced by the productive labor of like a guy who grows food or makes linen coats or whatever. Sex workers don't actually produce anything, which means that their labor can be withheld without affecting the capitalist system overall. That's the fundamental idea of lumpenproletariat, but I don't think most people find it a very useful or workable portion of marx's original writing and I don't think it sees a lot of use in modern marxist discussion outside of people who are maybe a bit too into dogmatic thinking to ever really be practical. Thank you for jumping in so quickly. Like I said, a problem is that it sounds pejorative, so does the term lumpen, so does describing their function and characteristics. It doesn't mean prostitutes aren't people it just means they aren't part of a working class coalition.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2023 04:45
|
|
|
Yeah ultimately the role of the lumpen depends on the ability of the revolutionary vanguard to actually organize them and offer them a better way out from the troubles of class struggle than the capitalists do. They can be reactionary or revolutionary (Stalin worked with bank robbers, but genocidal death squads hired by the capitalists are often recruited from the lumpen as well), and it's up to the historical circumstances and vanguard of the time to figure out the best way to get them on board with making a positive change in the world. This is obviously where Leninism advances from Marxism, because the mathematics and equations and logical underpinning of Marx are not enough to enact revolution on their own, you have to move into actual organization, provocation, and combat against the ruling class when you've proven to the working class that their only way to a better future is through socialism. The working class spends most of their time working, go figure, and they're always going to be vulnerable to violent suppression from the ruling class without an organizing force in the form of the vanguard party. Nevil Maskelyne has issued a correction as of 05:00 on Dec 18, 2023 |
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2023 04:50
|
|
|
a lot of service work is the commodification of work that is necessary to reproduce labor power
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2023 04:51
|
|
|
Atrocious Joe posted:a lot of service work is the commodification of work that is necessary to reproduce labor power That's become more and more true in the century and a half since Marx was alive, and it's good to remember that the commodification of like everything in the world along with the technological advancements that allow so much more to be possible (along with so many more ways to exploit and abuse the working class) have put us in a meaningfully different material circumstance than those of past centuries under capitalism. As much as it would be easier to go back to the 1850s and work from the simpler conditions they were under, that's not an option for someone living in the current material world. The fundamentals remain strikingly true however, and it's why Capital is still required reading for anyone who actually wants to understand what capitalism is how to deal with it.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2023 04:58
|
|
|
the specific jobs marx enumerated when complaining about the lumpenproletariat are imo irrelevant. what mattered was that that capitalism had deemed certain people as surplus to its needs and their economic marginalization provided easy opportunities for reactionaries to buy them off. which is why you see marx mentioning them in connection with the Mobile/National Guards that were a make-work program for the unemployed of Paris and were crucial for the establishment of the bourgeois second republic and crushing the workers in the revolution of 1848. they're next seen being bought off by louis napoleon's society of december 10 and used as street roughs to beat up anyone against him or the 1851 coup.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2023 05:08
|
|
|
Nevil Maskelyne posted:The fundamental marxist line of labor thought would consider sex work to be parasitic of the value produced by the productive labor of like a guy who grows food or makes linen coats or whatever. Sex workers don't actually produce anything, which means that their labor can be withheld without affecting the capitalist system overall. Nevil Maskelyne posted:That's become more and more true in the century and a half since Marx was alive, and it's good to remember that the commodification of like everything in the world along with the technological advancements that allow so much more to be possible (along with so many more ways to exploit and abuse the working class) have put us in a meaningfully different material circumstance than those of past centuries under capitalism. what are some passages you'd cite in defense of either of these points? whether you're producing a service (cleaning carpets for a fee) or a good (some black-box abstract device that, when you press a button, will clean a carpet once), you're still participating in commodity exchange. you can think of them as equivalent "objects" (of the same social form) that differ only in where and how they have to be used relative to the point of exchange, differences of storage demands, etc. but that distinction doesn't detract in any categorical way; types of food that spoil faster don't belong any less to the category of "food" than the kinds that keep well. the focus on social forms is something that should inoculate us from naive ideas that capitalism has changed in some fundamental way by technology alone. capital still calls the tune. moreover, technical change is a presupposition of Capital, and volume 1's longest chapter discusses it at length. "Marx Didn't Consider Technical Change" — not what you're necessarily arguing, here, but visibly adjacent — seems like wondering why that Darwin guy didn't talk about natural selection. Aeolius has issued a correction as of 07:26 on Dec 18, 2023 |
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2023 07:10
|
|
|
but what if he didnt consider it. wouldnt that be weird
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2023 07:24
|
|
|
Don't remember anything particularly about sex work, but Marx was very concerned with avoiding double counting of surplus value. So a clerk who did the bookkeeping wouldn't be counted as adding to surplus value, despite potentially being exploited to the same degree as the guy screwing the widgets together, but it could be still necessary work under a given system of social production. I'm still not sure how useful that distinction is in practice, but it's there.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2023 09:45
|
|
|
Also keep in mind that being "productive" in a Marxist sense is merely descriptive. It's an accounting question and not a normative thing. "Productive" work produces surplus value, that's all. So, say you're a cashier and merely circulate money-forms of capital without producing any surplus. That doesn't mean you're a blight on the system or that you're not being exploited, it just means your work doesn't produce surplus value. There are countless forms of "unproductive" work that are essential to society, and actually existing socialist countries have put a high premium on them throughout socialist construction - doctors, nurses, teachers, etc. e: what genericnick said basically MeatwadIsGod has issued a correction as of 10:38 on Dec 18, 2023 |
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2023 10:34
|
|
|
Atrocious Joe posted:a lot of service work is the commodification of work that is necessary to reproduce labor power yep and what's left to the household isn't paid at all, such as raising and literally producing children
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2023 12:26
|
|
|
While reading the last page concerning lumpens, etc., I feel like a vocab change is necessary to describe labor that doesn't produce surplus value. I had a reflexive pushback when service work was called "unproductive," and I bet uninformed folk may have the same response since most of our jobs now would fall into the unproductive labor category. I kinda feel like this holds true for all of Capital, that a modernization of its vocab to more accurately define the phenomenon it describes could help reach a wider audience more effectively.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2023 13:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 27, 2024 14:10 |
|
|
mycomancy posted:While reading the last page concerning lumpens, etc., I feel like a vocab change is necessary to describe labor that doesn't produce surplus value. I had a reflexive pushback when service work was called "unproductive," and I bet uninformed folk may have the same response since most of our jobs now would fall into the unproductive labor category. I kinda feel like this holds true for all of Capital, that a modernization of its vocab to more accurately define the phenomenon it describes could help reach a wider audience more effectively. yeah, the problem is the community that would have done that was p. throughly destroyed or coopted in the language we're using. so itt people are doing the terminology equivalent of archeology instead of using whatever would have developed naturually, e.g. we don't teach logic in ancient greek
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2023 13:41
|
|