There is a spectrum haunting C-SPAM. I, on the contrary,

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DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

gradenko_2000 posted:

transitioning from a "reserve army of the unemployed" to a "reserve army of the employed" is precisely the point.

Speaking of this: does anyone have in-depth sources about the ways in which a jobs program vs. UBI would affect (either in theory or in specific historical circumstances) capital's reliance on a surplus army of labour?

# ¿ Jan 3, 2021 17:00

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 15:17

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

gradenko_2000 posted:

My reference for this discussion has been Hyman Minsky's "Ending Poverty: Jobs, Not Welfare"

thanks

# ¿ Jan 3, 2021 17:39

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Cpt_Obvious posted:

Doesn't this create more vulnerabilities than it solves? If factories/stores don't have a healthy store of goods to process/sell, than any strike holds up every single link in further down the supply chain.

mawarannahr posted:

on the other hand, isn't it so tied up with labor arbitrage that it allows many companies to employ fewer workers with reduced organizing ability?

indeed capitalism is a land of contradiction

fwiw, David Harvey explicitly mentions just-in-time manufacturing in discussing chapter 14 (division of labour and manufacture) of Capital vol 1.

In Capital this is the chapter right after the idea of "collective labour" and so there are implications in terms of how it's the capitalist(s) that organize and control that collective labour. Inside their own factory, they have central planning, but outside, they're subject to the demands of market logic, which is sorta relevant to what Homeless Friend was referring to, and relates to modern arguments about the potential for central planning given modern technology relative to what the Soviets were using in, like, 1930 or whatever (c.f. that People's Republic of Walmart book).

In terms of just-in-time, for the capitalist, there are disadvantages (the potential for strikes) but also advantages (aside from the efficiencies in squeezingout the surplus value: workers are more and more unskilled, so they're more and more alienated from their labour � psychologically in terms of doing repetitive bullshit, and also in terms of the power relation of having to sell that labour power in a marketplace).

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqEKLuPCgZ0&t=4077s

Book:

quote:

This plainly constitutes a barrier to the progress of capitalist production, and as I have already argued, capital doesn�t like barriers and perpetually seeks to overcome them. The difficulty in this case is that

every partial process undergone by the product must be capable of being done by hand, and of forming a separate handicraft. It is precisely because the skill of the craftsman thus continues to be the foundation of the production process that every worker becomes exclusively assigned to a partial function and that his labour-power becomes transformed into the life-long organ of this partial function.

The result is that workers, instead of having the freedom to move from one activity to another, are increasingly locked into a particular skill, a particular handicraft, the use of a particular set of specialized tools. �A worker who performs the same simple operation for the whole of his life converts his body into the automatic, one-sided implement of that operation� (458). Is the worker in control of the tool or is the tool in control of the worker? Marx suggests that the social imprisonment of workers in a particular specialization within the division of labor puts them in a position of being so connected to their specialized tools that they lose their freedom. This has not always been so.

[...]

Marx points out that by not losing any time, you gain in productivity. By rationalizing the way in which space is organized, you can save on movement costs. So the whole space-time structure becomes an organizational question for how capitalism works. This was the big innovation that the Japanese introduced into the labor process in the 1970s with just-in-time production, the tight scheduling of flows of goods in space and time such that you had almost no inventory anywhere in the system. This was the innovation which gave the Japanese car industry its competitive advantage over all others during the 1980s, and the Japanese raked in the ephemeral form of relative surplus-value until everyone else caught up. The downside of this system is that it is vulnerable to disruption. If one link in the spatiotemporal chain is stopped by, for example, a strike, then everything has to close down because there is no inventory.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2021 17:33

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

GalacticAcid posted:

where does the term �the immortal science� come from

The "science" idea is probably Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Rev Left Radio has an episode on what makes Marxism scientific.

This is the earliest (late 40's) I can find for specifically "immortal" science of Marxism or Marxism-Leninism. It wouldn't surprise me if there are earlier mentions in Pravda or something.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2021 18:50

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

gradenko_2000 posted:

The more I read about George Orwell the more my distaste for him grows.

Also, welcome back Larry

lol

it's funny that George Orwell is a socialist because he is the world's worst socialist.

edit:

strange feelings re Daisy posted:

During his tenure at BBC he was investigated and surveilled by MI5 without his knowledge. You couldn't work for BBC without MI5 approval, and this was a secret for decades. His investigator concluded that he should be left alone because he was socialist in name only lmao. That paid dividends when Orwell wrote up a list of suspected socialists and ruined their career opportunities.

Related fun fact: MI5 vetting of BBC staff started in like the 1930's and never ended. They were shamed into reducing the program in the 1980's when The Observer exposed them but it never stopped.

this is a m�bius strip of irony

DirtyRobot fucked around with this message at 13:44 on Apr 20, 2021

# ¿ Apr 20, 2021 13:42

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

AnimeIsTrash posted:

Can marxism explain this?

the bourgeoisie are pedophiles, op

# ¿ May 7, 2021 18:28

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Ferrinus posted:

althusser once said that there is no such thing as a socialist mode of production, because socialism is a time of struggle in which capitalism is displaced and suppressed.

I don't understand why this makes it different from, say, capitalism as a mode of production that is actually a transitory state between a previous mode and a future one.

Here, for example,

Ferrinus posted:

the key is that it's a struggle during which capitalism is displaced and suppressed, by whatever means.

...you could say the same about capitalism re: feudalism. Displacement of past forms "by whatever means" = All that is solid, etc.

Is it the struggle thing? As in, socialism is post-class consciousness and therefore the transition and constant state of flux is a result of struggle and this is somehow different?

# ¿ May 11, 2021 14:19

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

e-dt posted:

ive been reading Bertell Ollman's book Dance of the Dialectic, it is very interesting, and has definitely helped me think about the world in a more consistent and correct way. i recommend it, to everyone.

some plague rats posted:

I feel like I'm being trolled because I read through that excerpt three times and it's absolute gibberish

It's just a way of saying that when you look at a "thing" you're always failing to understand the thing because you can't really separate or abstract it out from the larger processes of which it is a part. Dialectics looks at particular thing ⤍ universal ⤍ return to particular thing with new understanding of why that particular thing appears the way it does.

The 3-part movement of thesis ⤍ antithesis ⤍ synthesis is a lovely translation (as Ollman points out at one point, I think) but that movement can be rewritten in a number of ways:

Surface appearance ⤍ hidden essence ⤍ truth behind the surface appearance
Particular ⤍ universal ⤍ new understanding of the particular
Thing ⤍ contradiction* ⤍ new understanding of the thing
Thing ⤍ negation ⤍ negation of the negation (i.e., return to the initial thing)

* The contradiction, even the "internal" contradiction, is a result of a thing existing within a larger structure, process or set of relations etc.

In Capital, the move is to look at the particular thing, the commodity, and say, "Boy howdie this sure is a weird thing that seems to appear to be this, but actually..." and then we move from there to the commodity's relations with a bunch of other stuff (i.e., the universal, or "capitalism") which gives us a new understanding of the particular thing (i.e., the commodity as relations between people, not things). This is why David Harvey, in his lectures, compares Marx's style or structure in volume 1 to the peeling back of an onion almost starting at the centre. It's also why Harvey tells you to pay attention to all the times Marx uses words like "seems" and "appears as," because those are never accidental. The dialectic is about figuring out why those things "seem" or "appear" to be one thing, when actually there's all this other stuff going on when you look at the bigger picture.

I like Ollman's example/explanation of the myth of Cacus that Marx uses, after Martin Luther. Guy steals goats and makes them walk backwards into a cave. If you come and just look at the footprints in isolation, you completely misunderstand what's happening and think the cave is the source of the goats. Likewise, capitalists (or usurers, for Luther) think they are the"source" of value, when it's actually the opposite: they're the ones sucking it all up, like loving vampires.

Anyway, the particular/universal/return to the particular movement idea can be applied to the current discussion:

V. Illych L. posted:

if you're from any NATO-allied country and are extremely concerned about stuff going on in non-NATO-allied countries you have better things to do, basically

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

It's not just pointless it's actively assisting the propaganda aims of the US State department.

In a sense, if you're in the US or a NATO country, then in order to understand the propaganda you're seeing at home (particular), you need to understand what's going on elsewhere (Xinjiang, for example). This doesn't mean you now spend all your time on Xinjiang and ignore what's happening at home. That's still your focus: you return to that initial, particular appearance: the propaganda you're seeing here, at home (about which you theoretically have a new understanding). And you focus on establishing a worker's state here. But in order to do that � in order to understand what's going on "at home" � you need to be aware of what's going on elsewhere in the world and how your individual country exists within a larger set of relations blah blah. Saying, "Oh Xinjiang that's not my country I don't think about that..." is anti-dialectical and serving the interests of capital.

# ¿ May 14, 2021 15:30

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

gradenko_2000 posted:

# ¿ May 14, 2021 21:34

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Brain Candy posted:

it's fine to be concerned about the universal intellectually, but there's also the other part where you want to change things

you really can't have much of a power relation to 'over there' except through the medium of capitalist state power while capitalist state power controls your society. if you think operating within its confines will result in anything good you are an idiot

Just to be clear, my claim is that if you're in the US, you fight US propaganda. I'm just saying that in order to do so, you have to have some sense of what's actually going on beyond your immediate sphere. Like you need to be able to say, "No, sorry, gently caress off, your framing is wrong because X, Y Z and..." and defend really existing socialisms, not pull a Chomsky and critique US imperialism but then at the same time oops, you're repeating state department talking points about "communist thugs" and "authoritarianism" every chance you get.

# ¿ May 14, 2021 21:44

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 15:17

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

some plague rats posted:

I just want to get paid and have some fuckin healthcare! I will not read a novel by some nerd whose adherents have accomplished jack poo poo in living memory. I don't need a philosophy degree to get that unionizing makes life better for everyone

I can't find it now (maybe someone else can?), but there's a speech or Q&A thing by Stalin that's basically chiding members of the party for talking too much theory to workers when, in reality, if you go up to any normal worker and say, "hey so uh... how come your boss sits around like an rear end in a top hat but then gets paid more than you? isn't that hosed?" they'll get it. It's still theory, but without specialized vocabulary that'll just alienate them.

I do agree with ferrinus that it's wrong to say Marx's "adherents have accomplished jack poo poo in living memory." I think they've accomplished a lot � just not in the US � and that there are lessons to be learned from them. The idea that they haven't is propaganda because if you think they haven't accomplished anything, then you won't learn any of those lessons. In fact, I'd argue that the "accomplish[ing of] jack poo poo" in places like the US is due, in large part, to moving away from Marx. A lot of "academic" marxism (the kind for which you need a philosophy degree) is just liberalism and so yeah, it's ineffective. Like, yeah, Marxism can be complicated and there's plenty I don't get, but a lot of the basics are not rocket science. Marx himself tried to write Capital so that it could be read and discussed by workers. And it is. If you join a relevant party, you'll find plenty of workers talking "theory" and doing so with less bullshit than some grad school seminar. But they'll also be trying to apply it to actual organizing. And, as you say, at the end of the day, it's often just stuff like building a union � or, a wild idea, building solidarity across unions � and not being sidetracked by bullshit.

Tiler Kiwi posted:

Surface appearance ⤍ hidden essence ⤍ truth behind the surface appearance
then becomes
Machine that goes ping ⤍ code that does a lot of fucky things without telling you ⤍ Machine mails your porn to all your peers and goes Ping

Surface appearance: my finger clicks the button and I think that's the source of what makes the computer go ping

Hidden essence: actually, the only way that's possible is there's all this underlying code created by some jerkoffs in silicon valley.

Truth behind the surface appearance: all those jerkoffs in silicon valley are funded by harvesting my data whenever my finger clicks the button that makes the computer go ping; that's why they write the code the way they do.

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# ¿ May 15, 2021 15:56

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > There is a spectrum haunting C-SPAM. I, on the contrary,