3 posted:

omelas is a story about how liberals cannot conceive of a society without insidious evil

3 posted:

omelas is a story about how liberals cannot conceive of a perfect society without there having to be some kind of insidious hidden evil driving it, the narrator literally makes up the child torture on the spot to make a point about the readers' inability to believe in a utopia without a hidden cost and ends the story with a smug "now do you believe me?"

i'm so goddamn tired of people just taking the surface level reading of that story, star trek strange new worlds season 1 did this without irony and it was one of the worst episodes in that season

The Voice of Labor posted:

lol, prison labor has an almost 100% rate of exploitation. we can't even conceive of our shitbag dystopian society without an insidious evil driving it. what are you getting mad about?

The Voice of Labor posted:

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

dead gay comedy forums posted:

yeah tbqh I don’t see the point of omelas being referenced here, you don’t need a literary device or analogy to talk about something that this thread in particular already elaborates at length?

crepeface posted:

they currently print dollar bills out of thin air that they trade for goods.

The Voice of Labor posted:

the topic of discussion was whether denizens of the metropol benefit from colonial exploitation. the point was raised, "well, what about the denizens of the metropol who are also victims of colonial explotation?". this point was object to, by an australian, on the grounds of "why you gotta bring race into this, bro?"

I think taking a closer look at the constitution of the alleged benefiting class, or at least keeping it in mind, is warranted. especially as the analogy between the omelas child and indigenous and black americans is a pretty solid one

Cpt_Obvious posted:

It's worse than that.

Those dollars are "created" doubly as 0 interest loans to banks and corporations owned by banks, as well as debt sold to those very same banks with interest. They essentially use the Fed to loan dollars to themselves and make the taxpayers pay the interest.

And all this is only possible because finance runs the Fed. It is the final form of monopolization, a way for a fully centralized "planned" economy from the top down that can solve the contradictions of market economics forcing profits downwards through competition. Capitalists don't really have to compete anymore because Potato seller A and Potato seller B are both owned by the same set of banks.

That's what I took out of the finance capital chapter of imperialism anyway.

The Voice of Labor posted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas

if you're asking whether the village benefits from the child being tortured, the child is a part of the village. it's a question on how your hedonistic calculus is performed

tristeham posted:

be grateful they aren't using the medium of lego

3 posted:

omelas is a story about how liberals cannot conceive of a perfect society without there having to be some kind of insidious hidden evil driving it, the narrator literally makes up the child torture on the spot to make a point about the readers' inability to believe in a utopia without a hidden cost and ends the story with a smug "now do you believe me?

quote:

Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

The Voice of Labor posted:

I think taking a closer look at the constitution of the alleged benefiting class, or at least keeping it in mind, is warranted. especially as the analogy between the omelas child and indigenous and black americans is a pretty solid one

Civilized Fishbot posted:

A story can raise multiple ideas, and ask multiple questions, that's why it's a story and not a statement. "What can and should be done by people who live in a society that demands others suffer" is definitely one of the questions asked by this story

quote:

2. The Socialist Revolution and the Struggle for Democracy

The socialist revolution is not one single act, not one single battle on a single front; but a whole epoch of intensified class conflicts, a long series of battles on all fronts, i.e., battles around all the problems of economics and politics, which can culminate only in the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It would be a fundamental mistake to suppose that the struggle for democracy can divert the proletariat from the socialist revolution, or obscure, or overshadow it, etc. On the contrary, just as socialism cannot be victorious unless it introduces complete democracy, so the proletariat will be unable to prepare for victory over the bourgeoisie unless it wages a many-sided, consistent and revolutionary struggle for democracy.

If would be no less mistaken to delete any of the points of the democratic programme, for example, the point of self-determination of nations, on the ground that it is “infeasible,” or that it is “illusory” under imperialism. The assertion that the right of nations to self-determination cannot be achieved within the framework of capitalism may be understood either in its absolute, economic sense, or in the conventional, political sense.

...

In the second case, this assertion is incomplete and inaccurate, for not only the right of nations to self-determination, but all the fundamental demands of political democracy are “possible of achievement” under imperialism, only in an incomplete, in a mutilated form and as a rare exception (for example, the secession of Norway from Sweden in 1905). The demand for the immediate liberation of the colonies, as advanced by all revolutionary Social-Democrats, is also “impossible of achievement” under capitalism without a series of revolutions. This does not imply, however, that Social Democracy must refrain from conducting an immediate and most determined struggle for all these demands—to refrain would merely be to the advantage of the bourgeoisie and reaction. On the contrary, it implies that it is necessary to formulate and put forward all these demands, not in a reformist, but in a revolutionary way; not by keeping within the framework of bourgeois legality, but by breaking through it; not by confining oneself to parliamentary speeches and verbal protests, but by drawing the masses into real action, by widening and fomenting the struggle for every kind of fundamental, democratic demand, right up to and including the direct onslaught of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, i.e., to the socialist revolution, which will expropriate the bourgeoisie. The socialist revolution may break out not only in consequence of a great strike, a street demonstration, a hunger riot, a mutiny in the forces, or a colonial rebellion, but also in consequence of any political crisis, like the Dreyfus affair,[4] the Zabern incident,[5] or in connection with a referendum on the secession of an oppressed nation, etc.

The intensification of national oppression under imperialism makes it necessary for Social-Democracy not to renounce what the bourgeoisie describes as the “utopian” struggle for the freedom of nations to secede, but, on the contrary, to take more advantage than ever before of conflicts arising also on this ground for the purpose of rousing mass action and revolutionary attacks upon the bourgeoisie.

...

First, the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe and the United States of America. In these countries the bourgeois, progressive, national movements came to an end long ago. Every one of these “great” nations oppresses other nations in the colonies and within its own country. The tasks of the proletariat of these ruling nations are the same as those of the proletariat in England in the nineteenth century in relation to Ireland.

quote:

Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. “If this goes on, this is what will happen.” A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.

This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as “escapist,” but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because “it’s so depressing.”

Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.

Fortunately, though extrapolation is an element in science fiction, it isn’t the name of the game by any means. It is far too rationalist and simplistic to satisfy the imaginative mind, whether the writer’s or the reader’s. Variables are the spice of life.

This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let’s say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let’s say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the Second World War; let’s say this or that is such and so, and see what happens. . . . In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.

The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future—indeed Schrödinger’s most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the “future,” on the quantum level, cannot be predicted—but to describe reality, the present world.

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets), and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.

The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like—what’s going on—what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

“The truth against the world!”—Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That’s the truth!

They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies. They may describe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which really was fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of a personality, which is described in real textbooks of psychology, and so on. This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalizable region, the author’s mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?

But our society, being troubled and bewildered, seeking guidance, sometimes puts an entirely mistaken trust in its artists, using them as prophets and futurologists.

I do not say that artists cannot be seers, inspired: that the awen cannot come upon them, and the god speak through them. Who would be an artist if they did not believe that that happens? If they did not know it happens, because they have felt the god within them use their tongue, their hands? Maybe only once, once in their lives. But once is enough.

Nor would I say that the artist alone is so burdened and so privileged. The scientist is another who prepares, who makes ready, working day and night, sleeping and awake, for inspiration. As Pythagoras knew, the god may speak in the forms of geometry as well as in the shapes of dreams; in the harmony of pure thought as well as in the harmony of sounds; in numbers as well as in words.

But it is words that make the trouble and confusion. We are asked now to consider words as useful in only one way: as signs. Our philosophers, some of them, would have us agree that a word (sentence, statement) has value only in so far as it has one single meaning, points to one fact that is comprehensible to the rational intellect, logically sound, and—ideally—quantifiable.

Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number—Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don’t look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios, every now and then.

I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

Oh, it’s lovely to be invited to participate in Futurological Congresses where Systems Science displays its grand apocalyptic graphs, to be asked to tell the newspapers what America will be like in 2001, and all that, but it’s a terrible mistake. I write science fiction, and science fiction isn’t about the future. I don’t know any more about the future than you do, and very likely less.

This book is not about the future. Yes, it begins by announcing that it’s set in the “Ekumenical Year 1490–97,” but surely you don’t believe that?

Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find—if it’s a good novel—that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage. (They also have a sound—a fact the linguistic positivists take no interest in. A sentence or paragraph is like a chord or harmonic sequence in music: its meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than by the attentive intellect.)

All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life—science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination.

Atrocious Joe posted:

the question of "do workers in the US benefit from imperialism" matters because it can help determine if a revolution can occur in the US, as any actual socialist revolution must dismantle imperialism

dead gay comedy forums posted:

also merry christmas ya filthy animals

Uncle Wemus posted:

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Yeah, I mean, this is a statistic factual. But to take in terms that matter to people, the benefits of imperialism are always tangential and incidental wrt the working class. It's benefits happen in spillovers - if the class holds global control a significant market share of oil production and distribution, cheaper domestic prices happen also because other capitalists want the advantages, etc

I chose that example because, imho, neoliberalism hosed up even that basic logic through its leap to financial capitalism as the dominant form. I have this "guess" (I haven't read anything specifically about this idea so I think that "hypothesis" would be way too much lmao) that once neoliberalism rolled in, the benefits of imperialism in the aggregate started to diminish accordingly and had an expiry date stamped on them. Like, without material demand to make use of the material spoil, those tangential and incidental benefits start to evaporate pretty quickly - the dictators and juntas don't put the minerals into the cargo ships to be processed in the USA. The ship was built in South Korea by a LLC that handles its main business address in the Cayman and flies a flag of Panama; this ship will deliver the minerals to metalworks in Latin America and Asia, which will process them. These sheets of various metals will be worked in the General Motors plants of San Luís de Potosí in Mexico and Qingdao in China; the latter sends vehicles under the all-American brands of Chevrolet and Buick to be consumed in the USA.

Think of all material economic activity that doesn't happen in the United States as a consequence of that. Imperialism follows the form; under industrial capitalism, verticalization and integration are critical to amplify benefits of scale (and thus produce more value). It wants to centralize the activity domestically - it oppresses others to acquire raw materials in a brutal systematic manner that provides a bonus domestic surplus gain that allows for both profits and wages to increase.

Under financial capitalism, the domestic surplus gain is reverted to financial form: credit. Like wages in industrial capitalism also helped form a base of consumption of its own activity, credit in finance works similarly, but far more negatively to the working class because credit is debt, after all. This is where it all comes together for the USA: there are material effects that still exist (especially in terms of power established in things such as the dollar and the exorbitant privilege) and provides with much greater purchasing power parity than almost every other case around the world, but at the same time, the historical collapse in the lack of gains of real income, loss of productive activity and financialization meant an American working class bound to be poorer in income and catastrophically far more in debt in its average to the point that there's no imperial dividend able to compensate for that in its spillover

Marx to Engels, 1861 posted:

...in the meantime, may I wish you in advance every happiness for the new year. If it’s anything like the old one, I for my part, would sooner consign it to the devil.

mawarannahr posted:

bump

386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:

edit: nevermind, posting in the China thread

rodbeard posted:

Bitch

crepeface posted:

the whole discussion was prompted by the post in the israel/palestine thread where someone posted a tweet about how the proletariat in the metropole signs off on imperialism because of cheap burger.

ardennes said they'd better off if they actually did substitute import substitution industrialization which i thought was stupid because duhhh, if the US was more centrally planned and industrialized and used its resources for the benefit of its people and they did a socialism and it wasn't the great satan the people would be better off but then it wouldn't be doing imperialism in the first fuckin' place.

i agree that that BIPOC would likely form the core of the vanguard of any revolutionary action but we were still trying to get past that first step.

386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:

fair enough. original question:

Sorry if this has already been answered, but is there a short read anywhere that crisply summarizes where Marxist ideas fit (if anywhere) in Chinese state's planning and actions? I realize that this must be a very naive question.

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/bidetmarxman/status/1485766660166324225

Wait there are socialists in China still?

386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:

Sorry if this has already been answered, but is there a short read anywhere that crisply summarizes where Marxist ideas fit (if anywhere) in Chinese state's planning and actions? I realize that this must be a very naive question.

crepeface posted:

i agree that that BIPOC would likely form the core of the vanguard of any revolutionary action but we were still trying to get past that first step.

Ardennes posted:

Also, racializing a revolution is a completely terrible idea.

Ardennes posted:

The point was in terms of raw resources and infrastructure, average Americans don’t need imperialism for a quality of life even in comparison to other first world countries. It isn’t even a socialism thing, it is to understand that in particularly the case of the US that imperialism is irrelevant on a material level to their quality of life just because those resources and agricultural products are sitting beside them.