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Yadoppsi posted:Helsing, or anyone else. Can you expand on this? What did Lincoln and Marx talk about? What did Marx think about Lincoln? about the American Civil War?
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Feb 10, 2016 13:01
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Cingulate posted:The Worker's Something Something wrote a congratulatory note to Lincoln about his election and his stance on slavery. Lincoln's London ambassador responded with a careful thank you. Here's a link to the documents in question.
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Feb 10, 2016 13:50
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Helsing posted:Plenty of other Marxist or Marxian groups or individuals will claim that Leninism is a perversion of Marxism and not just a development of Marx's thought. Claiming that no one disputes the validity of Lenin's interpretation is disingenuous. Hell, there was a famous Rosa Luxemburg pamphlet that was often translated into English under the title "Leninism or Marxism" in which she directly attacks Lenin's plan for organizing the party along heavily centralist lines. leninist doctrine is not uncontroversial and never has been, even in marxist circles. what is uncontroversial is that leninism is a form of marxism claiming that the terms are directly synonymous would also be wrong, of course
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Feb 10, 2016 15:07
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Nosfereefer posted:Point being, capitalist societies can easily exploit all easily available resources, cause it's own collapse and leaving scraps left for the future Though the collapse of capitalism is inevitable, Communism, as many have learned to their enormous horror, is not inevitable. Best summed up by Luxemburg - "Socialism or Barbarism."
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Feb 10, 2016 15:55
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Who was Rosa Luxemburg and why was she important?
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Feb 10, 2016 17:55
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Would someone tackle Lenin and the Russian Revolution?
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Feb 10, 2016 17:56
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site posted:Who was Rosa Luxemburg and why was she important? Rosa Luxemburg was one of the foremost Marxist theoreticians of the "second generation", i.e. the people who dominated the tendency after the deaths of Marx and Engels themselves. She was a polish-german jew, one of the founders of the Spartakistbund which was the predecessor to the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, and was killed by proto-fascist militia in Berlin during a failed revolution in the aftermath of WW1. She is a lot more, uh, "liberal" and "humanistic" than Lenin, who is her main competitor in popularity these days (she's having a bit of a resurgence at the moment), and was arguably closer to the anarchist tendency than him. The most obvious theoretical difference is one of pragmatism - where Lenin's whole schtick is having an elite of trained revolutionaries forming a vanguard party and sort of focussing the revolutionary moment, Luxemburg's emphasis is on revolution as a basically organic process, with leadership arising from the mass movement rather than building the movement from the dedicated core. Interestingly, one can see a lot of how they worked in their ideologies - Lenin's activities were almost entirely clandestine, his party funded by bank robberies and extortion and his activists in constant fear of physical harm and incarceration, where Luxemburg could organise and agitate relatively freely until the Great War. It is also illuminating to consider that Lenin actually managed to seize power where Luxemburg failed, though many will argue (as she herself did before joining it anyway) that the situation in Germany was not fully ready for a revolution, and that any attempt at such was enormously risky. So she's both a martyr and an intellectual. In general, her politics are often more "pure" than Lenin's, and her position on the national question is probably the most illuminating theoretical difference between the two - where Lenin was staunchly in favour of solidarity between sovereign nations, Luxemburg was in favour of the wholesale abolition of national community as soon as possible. Incidentally, that failed revolution is also one of the big factors in the mutual animosity between social-democrats and communists in interwar Germany. The SPD, having first voted to fund the war, effectively seized power in its aftermath, and restored order by giving Freikorps militias a fairly free reign to quash the communist uprisings - the deaths of Luxemburg and her main political ally, Karl Liebknecht, were thus directly sanctioned by the SPD. Much of the leadership of the two parties in the final days of the Weimar Republic was made up of survivors of that period of conflict, and the two parties thus trusted each other no farther than they could throw them.
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Feb 10, 2016 21:16
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Thank you!
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Feb 10, 2016 21:38
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site posted:Would someone tackle Lenin and the Russian Revolution? I'm going to give a very condensed version: The Russian Revolution was a long thing coming. First, Russia is huge and consequently has a huge ethnic diversity. Russia was one of the last of the dynasties to slowly crawl its way into a parliamentary reformation. Tsar Nicholas II was just another in a long line of monarchs (such as his predecessor Alexander III who succeeded the just assassinated Alexander II) who dragged his feet. WW1 set the perfect climate for an upheaval in the country, mainly because Tsar Nicholas II took personal charge of the war effort when it started going very badly and then was forced to abdicate when his army stopped taking orders from him after the February Revolution. Lenin was in Switzerland at the time, and the communists in Russia has a shaky relationship with the social democrats, democratic socialists, and liberals that made up the Dumas. Germany's Foreign Secretary Zimmerman, in another one of his zany plans to bring x country out of the war, decided to facilitate Lenin returning to Russia. Because the Provisional Government (that replaced the constitutional monarchy) was insane and wanted to continue to fighting in WW1, he was an instant hit. Also, Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian is an awesome book.
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Feb 10, 2016 22:47
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Dead Cosmonaut posted:I'm going to give a very condensed version: Thanks. Lenin is still pretty far down in the tab list 
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Feb 11, 2016 00:26
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So for some reason I was under the impression that Lenin was a good guy, but it turns out he might be really bad?
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Feb 11, 2016 07:12
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site posted:So for some reason I was under the impression that Lenin was a good guy, but it turns out he might be really bad? It's really hard to point fingers when you die halfway through your major political and economic reforms while being locked into a civil war with miserable douchebags like the Whites. Also, another great vid on Crisis Theory in context of Marxism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e8rt8RGjCM
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Feb 11, 2016 07:15
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Well, I mean stuff like violent crackdowns and this red terror thing and cheka and gulag and it sounds like there my have been some foreign policy mistakes and really banking on a euro revolution that didn't end up happening. This is just initial reading though.
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Feb 11, 2016 07:27
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How do the gulags compare to the modern us prison and criminal justice system?
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Feb 11, 2016 07:40
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A well reasoned and totally relevant critique.
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Feb 11, 2016 08:02
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:Though the collapse of capitalism is inevitable, Communism, as many have learned to their enormous horror, is not inevitable. Best summed up by Luxemburg - "Socialism or Barbarism." This is correct, and also why Marx called communism a historical necessity, not a historical inevitability. Many early Marxists/Commies/Bolsheviks seemed to assume that they could just change the relations of production and society would just inevitably roll forward from there. This is part of the way that leftism has intersected with latent religious tendencies - historical inevitability takes the place of God and you've got yourself a recipe for atrocity in the name of the glorious future. Marx himself would have had none of that poo poo. Definitions are good. This is what I've been able to hammer down for my own understanding after years of studying and thinking about this poo poo independently. 'Marxism' at its core is best described as a method of investigating the material relationships between social phenomena. I would hesitate to label the method specifically dialectical, both because dialectics is a subject of much contention and because Hegel argues at length that the dialectic isn't a method at all, it's the immanent movement of consciousness observing itself. Dialectical materialism is then the application of dialectical thinking to social phenomena through a materialist framework (I'm going to ignore Engels' attempts to frame the natural sciences through a dialectical apparatus, as there be dialectical dragons). Marx's conceptual apparatus then becomes the initial results of this particular heuristic, subject to further revision and never, ever considered complete or final knowledge. I'm pretty convinced that reliable knowledge of the totality is not a thing we have access too, and to believe otherwise is to start hurtling down the slope towards dogma. A sufficiently materialist dialectical perspective should insist that such a thing as absolute, unbiased knowledge of the totality is itself a contradiction - time never stops and the totality is never complete - while simultaneously realizing that we must forever strive to deepen our understanding without there being any realizable end to that pursuit. Marx couldn't finish Das Kapital because it is a book that will never be finished until humankind itself is finished. But of course, historically we've had 100+ years of people taking Marx's writ as some kind of blueprint for a new society or a bible of revolutionary prescience or a revelation of the laws of history, which it explicitly isn't. Sartre wrote a lot about the tendency of theory to degenerate into dogma through social practice, and he's dead on. You could map the theoretical divergences among 20c leftist thinkers onto that of Protestant reformist sects in the 16c and it would probably be a pretty drat good pattern match. Because of the way that Marx's initial findings became institutionalized dogma for much of the 20c, people tend to use the term 'Marxist' to designate a collection of beliefs about the world, something that (again) Marx would have been pretty pissed off by. Lots of Marx's ideas have already been mentioned, but I'd like to give a particular shout out to the insight that there are no fundamental, transhistorical laws of economics - economics itself is just a product of historically contingent social formations. Just considering the implications of that gives you serious leverage for questioning the assumptions of the society around you. 'Socialism' then is the idea that ownership of the means of production should be distributed more evenly in order to ensure that more people have better access to the social product. Socialists want economics to be democratic, rather the plutocratic shell game we've currently got running. 'Anarchism' I know less about, but as far as I can tell the syndicalist vision of a whole bunch of cooperative trade unions with no central authority and Marx's idea of the possibility of a stateless, classless society are pretty compatible in broad strokes. 'Communism' is a tougher one,. It refers to the ideology related to and intertwined with socialism, and to the historical clusterfucks that have occurred when lofty theory met nitty gritty praxis, and to the few countries that still officially lay claim to the title. The basic idea is that of a step beyond socialism where the means of production is collectively, democratically owned. Once we've planned out the production and distribution of the necessities of life, everyone will have the time and freedom to fulfill their full potential as individuals, rather than spending the bulk of their lives generating landfill fodder and surplus value for the overclass in exchange for electronic pacification and a 2 day weekend. Among the more utopian predictions associated with this idea is that class will disappear as the ultimate social determinant, technology will accelerate and art will proliferate as many more people will be able to spend their time learning and philosophizing and arting and sciencing, profit as a legitimate social pursuit will be banished into the history books, the state will wither away, war will end blah blah blah. Early leftists thought that this wouldn't be that hard, and that communism would be simpler, more transparent, more productive, and pretty much just easier and better than capitalism in every way. They were wrong. Central planning is at best extremely difficult (the official neoliberal economist line is that it's impossible) and fraught with dangers and conflicts. It would require a legion of industrialists cooperating trans-nationally and an intricate system of checks and balances. It would require extensive experimentation and testing in a variety of cultures and situations. It would have to be an officially recognized and accepted scientific endeavor in modern culture, and currently it's a scary fringe idea associated with mass famines, cult leaders, totalitarianism and class purges. It would have to be done in fully industrialized nations, rather than in some agrarian backwater already decimated by war. It would have to solve the problem of the central computer assuming too much power, and would have to find some way of decentralizing itself enough so that local planners would be able to make their own decisions and interact democratically. It would require a significant portion of the earth's population to agree to cooperate in a large scale project that is inherently experimental, could easily fail spectacularly many times before working and would most likely never be entirely perfected. It would have to be undertaken with full, guaranteed freedom of speech in an open society with an army of independent journalists analyzing the system for flaws and corruption. There would have to be enough of a shock to our current system that the ruling class would want take an active role in reforming its own social relations. It would require new motivational methods and democratic decision making practices. It would have to be flexible enough to regenerate itself and strong enough to withstand assaults from both human and ecological forces. But most of all it would require people to approach the question of the social organization of production scientifically rather than ideologically, and experimental social organization is anathema to the current global ideological apparatus. None of these things have ever occurred in all of recorded history as far as I know, so I don't find it all that useful to compare the big failed 20c revolutions to the situation we're in now. The tools necessary for some kind of communist/socialist/syndicalist society now actually exist (Walmart et al. are already massive centrally planned trans-national logistical mechanisms without internal commodity exchange, all you gotta do is give everyone who works there a vote, a share, and a living wage) but the ideological shift necessary for advanced nations to actually consider attempting something like socialism on an even larger scale is currently unfathomable. Worldwide organized prole revolution is as hilariously unlikely as it always has been. We finally have the tools, but there's never been a blueprint for getting there, and Capital has been utterly transcendent since it began to go digital in the early 70's. I've heard it said that the easiest way to get to communism would be to fly to a planet where they already have it, and I tend to agree. Or, as Badiou poetically puts it: 'we will have communism when everyone is a philosopher'. Oh, you adorable little French theorists.  NNick posted:I can't speak much about Derrida, but Foucault's work is only loosely related to Hegel and Marx. It is much more closely aligned with Nietzsche. Yeah, there are two broad trends in continental crit theory - there's the Hegel/Marx/Frankfurt School lineage, and then the Spinoza/Nietzsche/Foucault/Deleuze current. It's kind of impossible to sum them all up, but I'll give it a shot. Hegel creates an entirely new kind of logic usually called Hegelian dialectics (to distinguish it from Platonic, Buddhist, and Marxist dialectics). The idea is that instead of building a logical system that avoids contradictions, you use the contradictions as a starting point and go from there. Hegel claims that there's an inner necessity to his logic that makes it work itself out without any external interference, but he frames it all in a whole bunch of mystical idealism - the universe is a thought in the mind of God and the dialectic is sort of a reflection of God's thinking, and thus the final synthesis of all the contradictions would be 'absolute knowledge of the totality' - ie; a God's eye view, an Archimedean Point. A famous example of dialectical thinking is known as the Master/Slave dialectic, where Hegel analyzes the ways in which masters and slaves determine and shape one other's subjectivity. The slave becomes a more fully realized human being than the master because he must learn to control his own internal reality while being subject to the whims of another. The master is taken care of by the slave, and he becomes dependent and stunted because of his dependence. The conflict between the two 'opposites' generates it's own emergent processes. The slave's internal development is the birthplace of the dialectic, and for Hegel, ideas are the determinant factor of reality. Marx takes the dialectic and 'flips it on its head', positioning it in a materialist framework and using it as a heuristic for examining the material and historical conditions of social formations. Das Kapital is the result of 40 years of Marx burrowing through the ramshackle economic data of his time and fitting it all into a Hegelian framework without any of the idealist assumptions. For Marx, social classes arise out of the process of exchange, matter is the determinant feature of reality, Capital owns your rear end, and the Master/Slave dialectic writ large becomes the fulcrum of history: the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkeimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, etc) continued to use dialectical reasoning, but they rejected the idea of there being a final synthesis of 'Absolute Knowledge', preferring to keep their dialectical formations moving in never-ending negative spirals. Marx-Hegel-Frankfurt style thought was all the rage in intellectual circles (at least outside of positivist/analytic world) up until the mid 20c, when the cracks in the Stalinist edifice were starting to become undeniable. Nietzsche was almost totally ignored during his lifetime and then his poo poo got all wound up in the Nazi thing, but in the 50s and 60s a bunch of new philosophers began to refurbish him for the new post-war world. He was fundamentally opposed to the dialectic, and his historical analysis isn't centered on material relations but on the genesis of various kinds of morality. He takes the master/slave dialectic and psychologizes it - the master isn't a stunted fool because the slave does everything for him, the master is a more fully evolved being who asserts his difference on the world and enjoys it. The image of the childlike, immature master that one sees through the dialectical lens is just a reflection of the slave's own inability to take control of his destiny. Nietzsche calls the dialectic a spider, a mental virus born of 'slave morality', pity and ressentiment, worthy only of contempt. He traces this attitude all the way back to the early Christians, and contrasts it negatively with the 'will-to-power' attitude of the Greeks. For Nietzsche, power is the determinant feature of reality and it is always already there. The Ubermensch is the one who understands this, embraces his power and makes the world bend to his will. The poststructuralists and postmodernists use Nietzsche as an ally to rally against the dialectic and create a new, radically pluralistic epistemology in its place. For Foucault, all knowledge is socially determined, and much of what we think we know is actually just a reflection of our relation to the fundamental power structure in society. (10 points if you can spot the contradiction in that statement!) I'm not really sure where he stands politically, I haven't gotten to a lot of his stuff yet. I know he generally supported his leftist friends, but he also publicly despised Marxism and refused to comment on any ideal formation for a society. The really big difference between Foucault and Marx is that Foucault isn't trying to synthesize everything into one big conceptual apparatus the way Marx tried to do. He's performing the same kind of psychological genealogies that Nietzsche invented on a broader array of subjects. Levinas goes after the notion of 'totality' and argues that it's pretty much a straight line from there to the totalitarianism of Stalin. Deleuze takes aim at the dualistic and negative character of the dialectic, asserting that the world is a multiplicity of positive forces and processes that resist reduction into two opposed sides. For Deleuze, the fundamental characteristic of reality is difference-in-itself - flux is primary and any perceived consistency or identity is a projection onto a reality that is different to itself moment to moment. Deleuze maintains a commitment to grand social change, but along fundamentally anarchist lines. One of his key concepts is 'the rhizome', a radically non-hierarchical network as a blueprint for social organization. Derriduhhhhhmmm I don't really know where to put him. He takes a lot of shots at Hegel but to me deconstruction still seems very much like a dialectical process in reverse. Derrida uses dualisms to tear texts apart to show that they contain and even affirm the arguments that they oppose on the surface, and that there are fundamental 'undeconstructibles' like 'Justice' that can be found under all the verbiage. He does this by spraying clouds of verbiage all over dozens of books, and sees no problem with this because our entire reality is a linguistic construct anyways. Deconstruction seems to be popularly understood as this kind of negative nihilistic movement, but for me it's more about clearing the forest away so you can see the trees again. I have no idea what Derrida's political positions on anything are. So yeah, this is all tip of the iceberg stuff obviously. Ontologically and epistemologically, the Hegel/Marx side is all about unity and synthesis, order out of chaos, and the search for absolute truth. The Nietzschians are all about pluralism, diversity and radical alterity, the social construction of human knowledge and the impossibility of absolutes. In my experience Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida are far more popular and influential than Hegel or Marx nowadays, and all of them seem pretty massively overshadowed by analytic philosophy, a kind of fuzzy default nominalistic realism, and of course, Darwinian biological determinism. This is all my layman's interpretations though, and I've found that with these guys going to the core texts is pretty necessary. Otherwise, you're always just getting someone else's lovely interpretation instead of struggling to make up your own lovely interpretation. But it's a lifetime of reading for anybody and these fuckers aren't exactly amenable to speed reading. Much like this post... Stanford's Philosophical Encyclopedia is way, way better than wikipedia for good summations of the phalanx of dead white European idea guys. Marx is a special case as he's not exactly interpreted sympathetically all that much anymore, to put it mildly. You're gonna want to go to marxists.org for him. There is not and never will be a good summation of Hegel. You have to read him directly. Do not read Hegel directly. emTme3 fucked around with this message at 09:05 on Feb 11, 2016 |
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Feb 11, 2016 08:06
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Hi. I made the old Marxism thread that got gassed. I've actually read Capital Vol I so I guess I'll pitch in with a very short summary of it. Okay, here is Babby's First Capital: 1) first thing to note is that Capital is Marx's main work, and it is about capitalism, not communism. It's an analysis of capitalism. People say it is hard to read but Vol I is NOT hard once you get over the hurdle of the first few chapters. Marx tends to repeat and reiterate concepts in several ways. There is even an alternate version of chapter 1 in the back. Once you finish you go back to the first few chapters and you're like drat this poo poo is easy now, what was my problem? (The problem is that he talks about linen for a thousand years - I know.) 2) A commodity is an item for sale. A commodity's price is related to the amount of socially necessary labour time that went into it. Marx has very long explanations about why this is so, but I won't go into them now. For now we will assume that nothing else (e.g. scarcity, overproduction) affects the price, and that all labourers work to the same degree of efficiency. Therefore if one hour of labour is worth £1, an item that took ten hours to produce is priced at £10. This is only SOCIALLY NECESSARY labour time, so if the average time to make a chair is 5 hours and you take 10 then too bad, you can't charge twice the price. If you're wondering about the pricing of the hour of labour, this was back when it related to how much precious metal you could get in that hour, don't worry about it right now. 3) If you're a labourer, you're not selling your labour time. You are selling your ABILITY to labour for that period of time. To illustrate: you work eight hours a day. A labour hour is priced at £1. Let's say that you require £4 worth of food, heating, housing, etc minimum per day to survive and continue to be able to do that eight hours work the next day. Your employer, obviously, is motivated to pay you the least amount he or she can without you, like, dying, that is, £4. 4) Your employer pockets the other £4. That's the profit. Marx would say your rate of exploitation is 100% here as your employer gets the same amount as you got. Therefore, all profit comes from human labour. In and of itself you might be thinking this sounds somewhat immoral, and the word 'exploitation' doesn't help. A lot of people get very hung up on all this and come to the conclusion that Marx hates capitalism because he thinks this worker/employer relationship is unfair, exploitative, immoral, and ought to be abolished. Well, kiiiiind of, that's a thing that plays into it in that I'd say he clearly thinks capitalism results in some immiseration of workers, but that's not the whole argument. 5) Marx then goes on to talk about the length of the working day, proportional profit and pay (including argument about things you hear often, like, "if employees demand more pay, employers will just put prices up!"), and the proportion of machinery vs human labour. This last is important to us now. The gist is that since profit is derived from human labour, profit on aggregate will fall as machinery gains a higher proportion, even though in the short term it boosts profits for individual companies. Eventually this leads to a crash where machinery is devalued in order to keep the system going. 6) What it comes down to is that Marx is also interested in the recurrent crises and crashes, and eventual collapse, that he thinks will come about because of internal contradictions in capitalism, in contrast to the assumption of ever-growing profit and accumulation that capitalism relies on to keep functioning. Also in the ways that capitalists will try and act against these tendencies by various methods like cutting wages, creating increasingly unnecessary new markets/products, colonialism, blah blah. 7) There is a ton of interesting stuff in Vol I that I have not even begun to cover here. The notion of 'vampire capital', arguments against austerity (“There can be no greater error than in supposing that capital is increased by non-consumption"), a very interesting look at child labour and the state of labourers at the time (“It is not too much to say that life in parts of London and Newcastle is infernal”), discussion of the suppression of wages by keeping a reserve army of labourers, and all sorts of literary allusions and scathing sarcasm. I will fight anyone who says Capital I is boring. The other volumes discuss a lot of things that people frequently say Marx never considered, like merchants, banking, losing the gold standard and so on. However, these are much dryer... because he died and they're essentially just collated notes with none of the fun parts. Lenin is also a very fun writer, extremely cutting and resoundingly concrete, so that reading something like What Is To Be Done is still entertaining even though it's largely about obscure Russian revolutionary newspapers. I think Lenin's personality comes through quite strongly there, so maybe give it a skim if you're interested in him. On the other hand imo Trotsky and Stalin are bores, I don't know about Luxembourg.
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Feb 11, 2016 12:56
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site posted:So for some reason I was under the impression that Lenin was a good guy, but it turns out he might be really bad? lenin was a complicated person he was enormously intelligent, very moral in his way and totally dedicated to his cause. so, when the revolution came to Russia, he saw an opportunity to claim that revolution for communism. the red terror, the cheka, all of that were means to ending the civil war and stamping out resistance as quickly as possible - and then, once the bolshevik position was more-or-less secure, he got a stroke and eventually died. he was not in any sense a humanist, though - he was entirely open about the costs involved in pursuing his programme and the means thus used, and he had reconciled himself with that. there's an illuminating quote where he writes about really liking some piece of music and forcibly repressing that, because it was a softness that one could not afford as a revolutionary. in his theory, the russian revolution would only have been the first in a series that would rock the world and eventually totally marginalise capitalism. the problem of industrialisation under socialism was a known theoretical issue, and the only real solution anyone had offered was "well get your comrades abroad to help you". this view was shaped by lenin's theory of imperialism, which is really required reading to understand much of anything of his geopolitical ideology the best way to view lenin, imo, is as a greek tragic hero-type. a great man, in many ways, but one who ended up blind and suffering, and rendered physically unable to do what he knew he had to in the end. he knew exactly why the compromises he was making were dangerous (he wrote about many of them more-or-less specifically in State and Revolution), and was presumably intending to go through a period of reform once the civil war was done to reinstate the socialist-democratic controls he had laid out in that book. even during the civil war he was anxious, in many ways, to keep an ear to the ground and make sure that the proletariat were heard (see Left-wing communism: an infantile disease where he rationalises a lot of the stuff he does while trying to secure the revolution).
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Feb 11, 2016 18:01
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site posted:Well, I mean stuff like violent crackdowns and this red terror thing and cheka and gulag and it sounds like there my have been some foreign policy mistakes and really banking on a euro revolution that didn't end up happening. There was this minor matter of a Civil war going on, it's a bit much to say a guy is "really bad" for, you know, not letting monarchist armies and about fourteen different foreign invading armies (Including Russia's WW1 allies!) murder the poo poo out of everyone. OwlFancier posted:Horselord I simply don't agree with you. I also don't necessarily agree with everything Marx or Engels or anyone else says on the matter. I most specifically disagree with the notion that you can seize power by military force, try to indoctrinate as many people as you can into your ideology, and have that be sustainable. I don't suggest that a democratic revolution is at all likely to happen, much as I like the idea of communism I don't see it as being a thing that is ever likely to happen and I don't see any evidence to suggest it would be stable if it did. I'm not giving you a viable alternative, I'm telling you why your suggestion is flawed. I don't have a viable alternative and I don't see why what marx described necessarily has to be one. No. Stop. You are talking as if you are a professor when you're actually in nursery. Stop this. Your entire conception of revolution is wrong. You seem to think marxist revolutionary process is: 1. Decide you want to be in charge. 2. Do a war, using your loyal army which has materialized out of thin air, and not been recruited from the masses. You certainly didn't build a mass support base through education and agitation or anything. 3. tell everyone to believe in your ideas at gunpoint, because until you shot the King, nobody in your country did yet. 4. no step four. This tells me that you're either ignorant or deliberately dishonest, because this doesn't fit the pattern of any revolution that has ever happened. Not the USSR, Not china, not anywhere. OwlFancier posted:I simply don't see how you can hope to initiate global societal change by seizing power in one country and using the apparatus of the state to compel people to follow an ideology. I didn't think of that, We better pack it all in, then. Nevermind. That's sarcasm, by the way. First you started by implying weird totalitarian cold war stereotype poo poo, the real sinister "I hope you are not dissenting, comrade, I wouldn't like to see you liquidated" poo poo. And then you ask a bunch of questions as if you think Lenin himself would be stumped by them. This sort of behaviour is why I tell you to wind your neck in. I will not even bother to answer them. If you really cared for the answers, you'd maybe once have googled something like "how does Class struggle continue under socialism", or "How did communism spread internationally" or, for beginners, "how do communists perform political education". OwlFancier posted:In the event that the world becomes such that people everywhere want a change enough, then there will be nothing anyone can do to stop a revolution. I expect it will be bloody regardless because things usually are, but it will be democratic. There won't be a need for anyone to enforce an ideology because a new one will emerge because of the conditions we find ourselves in. I'm not a pacifist, if anything I rather like violence, I'm just conscious that it so very rarely does any good. Violence is something everyone can do and allows them to project a disproportionate amount of influence, so it's always tempting to try to use it to effect a change you believe to be right. But it can't truly change society, it doesn't create lasting change. So I have no problem with a violent democratic revolution. Peaceful would be nice but I doubt we'll have the option. Violent resistance to Capital's attempts to deny people the right to self-determine is something I am completely and 100% fine with. What I have issue with is when you need to use force and fear to try to enforce ideological purity against a majority of opposition, because you won't succeed. You keep talking about how revolutions must be democratic. This implies that you think a revolution could exist which is not democratic. This is nonsense. A revolution is a democratic act by definition. It is the most direct kind of democracy possible, it is direct political action of the whole people, with the victory going to the largest, most competent movement among them. That you can even suggest that a non-democratic revolution is anything other than an oxymoron just further betrays your bourgeois, liberal understanding of the world. Forget that mass line, serve the people nonsense, the OwlFancier Revolution can only happen after the Vanguard Party wins the general election. Obviously. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Feb 11, 2016 |
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Feb 11, 2016 19:30
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HorseLord posted:There was this minor matter of a Civil war going on, it's a bit much to say a guy is "really bad" for, you know, not letting monarchist armies and about fourteen different foreign invading armies (Including Russia's WW1 allies!) murder the poo poo out of everyone. What are your opinions on Stalin?
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Feb 11, 2016 20:00
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site posted:What are your opinions on Stalin?
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Feb 11, 2016 20:05
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site posted:What are your opinions on Stalin? I'm not fond of the direction soviet foreign policy took, there was too much pressure on the Communist parties of the imperialist countries at certain times to appease those countries, which meant they ended up taking obviously incorrect lines. When the USSR was trying to delay war with Germany, they were told to advocate the idea that it would just be another imperialist, regressive war. Then when Germany invaded, they immediately changed their official lines to support for an antifascist, progressive war. This sort of thing culminated postwar, when the USSR was keen to keep on the good side of it's wartime allies. The communist parties of those countries adopted the line that they weren't in revolutionary times, and that dictatorship of the proletariat could be attained purely through the ballot box. Considering what postwar Europe was actually like on the ground, the idea that it wasn't a potent time for revolution is ridiculous. Now these things were obviously good for the USSR. But they destroyed western european communist parties. The CPGB went from a revolutionary organization which served the people into the unpaid cheerleader squad of the Labour Party.
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Feb 11, 2016 20:17
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It's funny how you managed to type all those words and yet not answer the question at all.
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Feb 11, 2016 20:23
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site posted:It's funny how you managed to type all those words and yet not answer the question at all. I did answer the question. I gave you my criticism of what I think is the most important Stalin leadership thing to a Communist living outside of the USSR. If you're asking me about his qualities as an individual, I can say I think he made a very good writer. He gets his points across well, in a conversational sort of tone that's easy to read. In what film footage I've seen of him he looked pretty easy going in public. I've obviously never met him, and I don't buy into Great Man ideas about history, so I don't attribute much more to him than that.
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Feb 11, 2016 20:28
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Feb 11, 2016 20:46
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I see what this reaction means. "You defended Lenin! I will now bait you into defending Stalin, who due to the ancient magics baked in to the universe at the first dawn, is objectively Satan himself. The power of these magics is so strong that anyone who would defend Stalin automatically and retroactively becomes wrong about everything, to the degree that reality itself warps around that person when they perform mathmatics. When this magic takes effect, I can then disregard any challenge to my preconceptions of Lenin, or really anything else." But that backfired, because the only important thing I said on the guy was a Criticism. But it wasn't the criticism you'd feel comfortable with, so all you can do is : ughh : . gj there anime avatar. Really what was the point in opening a thread where you ask to be educated on a subject, yet set up artificial barriers on what you will consider? You really gonna be like "I don't know a drat thing about this subject, so I'll ask. But this one detail of it? I'm the real expert and the people I asked don't know poo poo." It's like bringing your broke down car to a mechanic then sassing him when he tells you the headlights don't run on gas. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Feb 11, 2016 |
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Feb 11, 2016 20:49
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The death of millions is just a statistic.
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Feb 11, 2016 20:49
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Cingulate posted:The death of millions is just a statistic. The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion: You Are Racist > Teach Me About Marilyn Manson
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Feb 11, 2016 20:51
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OP:Horselord's posts are all you need to know about marxism.
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Feb 11, 2016 20:52
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HorseLord posted:I'm not fond of the direction soviet foreign policy took, there was too much pressure on the Communist parties of the imperialist countries at certain times to appease those countries, which meant they ended up taking obviously incorrect lines. When the USSR was trying to delay war with Germany, they were told to advocate the idea that it would just be another imperialist, regressive war. Then when Germany invaded, they immediately changed their official lines to support for an antifascist, progressive war. im the edit horselord made an hour later completely rewriting his post after he was persecuted for liking stalin with an emoticon site fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Feb 11, 2016 |
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Feb 11, 2016 23:01
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I'm not the OP, but I'd like to hear more about democratic socialism and/or social democracy.
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Feb 11, 2016 23:06
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site posted:So for some reason I was under the impression that Lenin was a good guy, but it turns out he might be really bad? yeah the best you can really say about the Bolsheviks is that they were the only ones vicious and brutal enough to survive
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Feb 11, 2016 23:11
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im getting to your posts, splifyphus, prism, and vil don't worry
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Feb 11, 2016 23:20
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Nolanar posted:I'm not the OP, but I'd like to hear more about democratic socialism and/or social democracy. Social democracy: When the major European labor/socialist parties realized that revolution and continental philosophy-tinged totalitarianism was a bad plus impractical idea they settled for welfarism and moderate reforms within the capitalist system. Not sure where/when this phrase was coined but the post-war labor parties is what it generally refers to Democratic socialism: I think mostly used by former Communist parties now competing in democratic elections to reassure people that they've changed, they swear
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Feb 11, 2016 23:31
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This is a really interesting thread. If anyone wants to, I'd love to hear an analysis on what "property is theft" actually means.
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Feb 11, 2016 23:33
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il_cornuto posted:This is a really interesting thread. If anyone wants to, I'd love to hear an analysis on what "property is theft" actually means. See the libertarian thread. Here's one called Why Should We Care About Property Rights? site fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Feb 11, 2016 |
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Feb 11, 2016 23:35
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site posted:See the libertarian thread. Not that kind of libertarian
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Feb 12, 2016 00:12
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il_cornuto posted:This is a really interesting thread. If anyone wants to, I'd love to hear an analysis on what "property is theft" actually means. According to Marxist analysis, the capitalist class is essentially in the business of appropriating surplus. Simple example: the owner of a coal mine pays a miner $10 per unit of coal they mine, but coal sells for, say, $15/unit. So there's $5 of labor value that the worker is putting in and not getting back. So, if you're systematically being paid less than your labor is worth, there's a sense in which that labor is 'stolen' from you, hence, theft. Additionally, Marxists like to distinguish 'property' from something like 'possession.' This is the same as the distinction you might have heard people make between private and personal property. The former is stuff that you rent out to workers to generate profit, whereas the latter is something like the furniture in your home - stuff you use, but not to generate a profit. We're only interested in the former category here. Okay, so the reason that the capitalist class is able to appropriate surplus value is because they own the capital. If the coal mine wasn't the sole property of its owner, then the workers would have no reason to give up their surplus to him. So it's private ownership of capital (read: property) that is the necessary and sufficient condition for that appropriation (read: theft). Hence the slogan.
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Feb 12, 2016 00:16
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icantfindaname posted:Not that kind of libertarian lol
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Feb 12, 2016 00:16
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Property is theft is an anarchist thing, it doesn't mean anything to a Marxist imo and Marx thought Proudhon was kind of a chump.
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Feb 12, 2016 00:29
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