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Pener Kropoopkin posted:The impression I'm getting here is that Jewel Repetition believes socialism is incompatible with pizza. Someone said something to the effect of, "The food industry loads food up with sugar, fat, and salt at way unhealthy levels because that poo poo is literally addictive to our monkey brains when calibrated correctly and sells like crazy, so without a profit motive in food distribution there'd be more healthy food because this would not happen," and somehow this got interpreted as, "when we have banned the sale of Hot Pockets and anything that tastes like licorice, we will have achieved 60% of socialism, comrades!"
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Jan 27, 2016 00:07
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Jewel Repetition posted:Someone went farther than that, pretty much saying we're too stupid to choose what food we eat, and we eat too good of food while other people are starving etc. It was pretty easy to see where it was going. I don't quite remember anyone saying that "we're too stupid to choose what food we eat," but I remember someone pointing out to you that your choices are already limited to what is available on the market, which wasn't meant to imply that there are few choices on the market but that the economic system in place already "chooses for you" what is available to eat. Given this, it makes little sense to complain that a different economic system would offer different but limited choices. And I thought it was easy to see where this was going, too, but I didn't see it inevitably going to anti-junk-food dictats outlawing ice cream or whatever, so 
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Jan 27, 2016 14:22
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Jewel Repetition posted:Pretty much everything is on the market. That's not a real comparison. Much like this is not a real counterpoint.
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Jan 28, 2016 02:42
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Hillary Clinton posted:*In Homer Simpson voice* Boy, leftism is good. But if I went really far to the left, it'd be even better!
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Jan 28, 2016 02:45
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Jewel Repetition posted:I'm being intellectually honest. You saying someone needs to read Marx before they can criticize communism is exactly the same as a white nationalist saying someone needs to read Mein Kampf before casting any stones. Is that comparison unfair somehow? Actually, it's completely fair in that both are entirely correct. But the best way to argue with white nationalists is not to, because their agenda is odious and they don't deserve a hearing. By actually discussing this with communists, though, you have decided that communist ideas deserve a hearing. In which case you should have some degree of familiarity with their foundational texts so you don't waste time arguing with cliches and raising points that have long been addressed (whether adequately or not). Generally, comparisons between Nazis and communists have always seemed a bit strange to me because I've never heard of anyone saying "Nazism sounds good on paper, but..." GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Jan 28, 2016 |
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Jan 28, 2016 13:50
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Jewel Repetition posted:Actually, I have argued with white supremacists, just like I'm arguing with communists here. Well, good for you. If you're willing to give them a hearing in good faith then it's entirely fair for them to ask you to familiarize yourself with the "major works" which establish their ideology.
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Jan 29, 2016 01:30
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"Workers of all lands, organize along national lines to protect your jobs from foreigners!" doesn't quite have the same ring tbh.
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Feb 10, 2016 20:34
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"It's not my problem" is basically "gently caress you, got mine" and is at the heart of nearly all bad politics. Like, just restricting the scope of analysis to US domestic policy, the primary rhetorical obstacle to things like universal healthcare and tuition-free public college and welfare generally is the sentiment that other peoples' misfortunes and disadvantages "aren't my problem."
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Feb 11, 2016 22:06
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ayy yo, i need some homework explained, this the right place??
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Feb 15, 2016 20:49
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zeal posted:if it's history i can help you out nah i'm good for that
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Feb 15, 2016 21:12
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Feb 15, 2016 21:12
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much like marxism 
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Feb 18, 2016 22:10
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lol
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Feb 22, 2016 20:29
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A possible answer is that there are two ways of dealing with labor-saving automation: save money on payroll by firing workers, or reduce working hours without reducing compensation. A worker-controlled economy is more likely to pursue the latter strategy than a capitalist economy. Those reduced hours may still be spent on alienated labor, but the rest of your time, of which you now have more, does not have to be.
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Feb 27, 2016 06:09
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Top City Homo posted:Big Bill Haywood for example distilled pages of dense theory for the proles in a very simple way: This communicates something very different now than what Haywood intended.
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Feb 28, 2016 09:40
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Top City Homo posted:what does it communicate? Like, at this point, it's basically a Republican Party talking point against all welfare. Probably the most basic formulation of "lazy (probably black) moochers getting my money" idea.
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Feb 28, 2016 18:00
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Top City Homo posted:That's why it has to be connected to the labor source of all wealth theory against capital Right, but that seems like a much more complicated step. I dunno, I saw you talk about it in your post but after Haywood's quote so I wasn't clear on the rhetorical order of operations. Like, succinctly communicating why the actual bums are people who could work but make money by owning things, not people who could work but can't make money for a capitalist by doing so and thus don't, seems like the really crucial first step.
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Feb 28, 2016 18:57
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Kinda feel like HorseLord's approach might be more viable from a position of strength rather than... well... you know.
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Mar 1, 2016 15:56
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One thing that I am sure someone will tell me I am wrong about that may be of interest: the "opiate of the masses" phrase is rather misunderstood. The easy knee-jerk interpretation is that it's about how religion deludes people and keeps them pacified and therefore must be overthrown, etc. But that doesn't seem especially true to the source. Let's look at it in full:quote:The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. The element of religion as a repressive delusion is there, but the overall point is a bit more complex and nuanced. First, this comes from "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right." Marx took Hegel's dialectic, which was a spiritual and idealistic concept, and turned it upside down, making it not about ideas so much as material forces in reality. So that first paragraph seems to heavily reference this idea: religion is in the same realm as the idealistic, spiritual, the "inverted consciousness." (Honestly I'm a little fuzzy on this part.) Second, look at the buildup in the second paragraph. This expresses a certain sympathetic appreciation for why religion is something people turn to: life under capitalism loving sucks, and religion eases the pain. We forget, now that opiates are a controlled substance and associated with recreational drug use, that they were stock-standard painkillers then. Religion as an "opium" is not so much something that clouds judgement as something that dulls pain. The last paragraph brings this together: overthrowing religion to effect a political transformation is all backwards. Religion as we know it will go away when it's no longer needed, i.e., when things don't suck anymore. Critique of religion can be a useful tactic in education though. To me this says that abolition of religion, etc. isn't really a priority agenda item, it's just something that he expected to happen in the course of things, just as you stop needing painkillers when the injury heals. Honestly I think I could be pretty wrong about this because what comes after just goes over my head, but the immediate gist seems to be that opposition to religion is criticism of religious ideas as agitation to action, not a program for enforcing atheism. Which leads me to suspect that anti-religious activity in historical communist revolutions has had more to do with institutional power than eradicating a belief. Or, maybe eradicating a belief was seen as just as good, idk. The upshot for me is that there's no inherent reason why communist revolution would require abolition of freedom of religion and imposition of atheism. What it sounds like it might entail is a whole lot of militant internet atheist smugfarting so that's reason enough to oppose communism imho.
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Mar 5, 2016 05:55
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Dreddout posted:This is along the lines I was thinking on, but I doubt religion will completely go away. We might be more skeptical now, but "spiritual not religious" people still outnumber atheists. Call it a "god gene" or whatever, but I think that many humans will always believe in some spiritual system. Regardless of what a secular government wants. I'm not really invested in religion going away tbh. Mostly what I was trying to do was give some insight into what far leftist anti-religiosity might be about in historical context with one of the big deal Marx quotes that gets trotted out without any nuanced understanding. Whenever I said "religion" in that post, I kinda wanted to say "religion as we know it." Marx was big on the idea that a lot of how actual culture operates conforms to material conditions (relations of production specifically, and the power dynamics that arise from them) and the underlying theme there is that religion as he knew it was something people needed in a world that hurt them, and religion would probably be at least very different (if not absent) in a less painful world. Ultimately, it's not important to cleave to the Word of Marx exactly, more that his stance on religion was informed by contingency, as is almost everything in Marxism. Nothing he wrote was supposed to be a final word, everything could have to be revised if conditions changed. Which is why, in Russia of the early 20th century, a particular religious policy that we don't like seemed to make sense at the time. I'm not really vouching for that policy. Mostly what I think matters is that any kind of opposition to religion has to be calibrated for the actual goal of systemically changing material conditions for the better. I don't think it's historically viable that religion will always be an enemy to that. GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Mar 5, 2016 |
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Mar 5, 2016 15:52
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GunnerJ posted:Mostly what I think matters is that any kind of opposition to religion has to be calibrated for the actual goal of systemically changing material conditions for the better. I don't think it's historically viable that religion will always be an enemy to that. On that note, Rudatron does have a point about religions as institutions and the material basis for their existence. What I'm doing is a bit too "idealist" in that sense, thinking about religion as an abstract set of beliefs even as I'm pointing out that what matters is institutional power. But it's also worth noting that religion as an institution has its own internal power dynamics. While you might never be able to convince the "institution" that you're not a threat, because you are a threat to its financial backing, I don't think it's true at all religious people are a "lost cause." I'm a big French Revolution nerd so this is what I always reach for in trying to understand these kinds of things, which has its flaws, but here I go anyway. The Gallican Church as the First Estate of the Realm was technically one of the "privileged orders" along with the aristocracy. Its upper echelons had aristocratic backgrounds. But its rank-and-file were commoners, and worked with commoners closely, and share their concerns. Thus, there was a lot of clerical support for the Third Estate. Hell, the guy who wrote What is the Third Estate? was a priest from a commoner background. The elite in charge of the church had an interest in protecting the established order of things, but this was not shared throughout the entire structure of the organization and defection from the First Estate (and the Second as well) was an important part of what made the early phases of the French Revolution. The French Revolution also has a number of examples of how revolutionary activity can go horribly awry when dealing with religion and why it's actually really drat hard to try and figure out what the best course of action in your circumstances is. So, one thing that caused endless trouble was the Civil Constitution of the Clergy which, among other things, effectively made priests into civil servants and required all priests to swear loyalty to the French government. The thing is that there wasn't really anything that radical about this when you keep in mind that the Gallican Church had been intertwined with the government in the Ancien Régime for basically ever, and jockeying for local jurisdiction over Church hierarchy between the king and the Pope had been a regular feature of French politics. But this move got the Pope's negative attention more than even seizing all Church property. He said that any priests who swore loyalty to the French government were excommunicated. This created a huge rift between "juring" priests who swore it and "recalcitrant" priests who did not, and persecution of both by the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements. With hindsight, we might say that it would have been better to not bother with this but it seemed like a logical extension of existing policy. Arguably, being even more revolutionary in the sense of making an absolute separation of church and state would have been a better move but who knows. Since I'm prattling on about this already, here's another one that seems relevant to what we're talking about : the Cult of the Supreme Being. There's a bullshit narrative about how this was Robespierre trying to make himself the pope of some new deist religion but that wasn't the point. On religion, you'd probably like Robespierre, Dreddout. He was really opposed to the persecution of Christians. What he wanted was a sort of "baseline" civil religion that could encompass all the tendencies in belief in France. "Supreme Being" was actually already a very common phrase meaning "God" and "cult" just meant a religious organization. So, it was a deist religion, sure, but as something he expected everyone to sign up for (and it actually was pretty popular, in no small part because he didn't really "invent" it so much as adapt an existing movement), it was also pretty nonthreatening. Its only tenets were "God exists" and "the soul is immortal." There's nothing about that a devout Catholic would object to, and Catholic worship would be completely compatible with this baseline doctrine it in theory. Additionally, Robespierre hoped that setting it up would show the world that the French Revolution was not against religion. You can say that how this turned out is a proof that there's nothing radicals can do to convince the pious that the revolution is on their side, but honestly, it was a pretty desperate move and a lot of bad blood had drenched the fields of France over the Civil Constitution at that point. What's more, pushing for the Cult of the Supreme Being alienated some of Robespierre's allies who were fervent atheists and played a role in his downfall.
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Mar 5, 2016 16:21
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lol:The Saurus posted:Wow Sanders actually had a very good day, one landslid and a solid win. The Saurus posted:You'd be dumb too if you were descended from ex-slaves and one of poorest, most oppressed groups in one of the shittiest parts of the country. GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Mar 6, 2016 |
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Mar 6, 2016 07:11
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rudatron posted:But enough about Saurus, like, OK in general, but i just wanna point out that in 2 hours ppl are going to have to check his rap sheet for his most recent probation reason
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Mar 6, 2016 16:27
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The Saurus posted:China has incredibly levels of pollution that cause severe damage to its populace and they force people to pay for their own healthcare. They evict tenants and destroy houses with no compensation that have been lived in for generations in order to build hotels for western businessmen and native oligarchs. hey at least they're ~homogeneous~ right? er, does that still count if they're inscrutable orientals? not sure how this works
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Mar 6, 2016 19:25
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hey yall i haven't read this and idk if there's an institutional access wall because i'm on campus, but this seems like it's relevant to some peoples' interests! http://daily.jstor.org/communist-party-of-china/
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Mar 7, 2016 20:45
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The Saurus posted:Donald J. Trump, the moderate Republican candidate for President OK, good troll.
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Mar 12, 2016 20:32
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HorseLord posted:okay you can do uh, whatever it is you think you're doing This is a pretty decent explanation for the outcome of the American Revolution.
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Mar 27, 2016 14:26
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gotta say this thread's gotten a million times better now that i no longer read Jewel Repetition's posts in my headcanon papyrus voice
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Mar 28, 2016 02:15
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uh you're totally reading them. no one believes you.
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Mar 28, 2016 02:31
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hemophilia posted:You're being dismissive hemophilia posted:Why are so many socialists dogmatic and treat this poo poo as doctrine akin to the way a holy man reveres his holy books?
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Jun 19, 2016 15:14
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Epic user name/post content combo.
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Jun 20, 2016 03:44
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Wikkheiser posted:I thought he did, though. The Communist Manifesto? The Manifesto contains ten planks of a platform for the political party for which he wrote it. It's not so much a blueprint for socialism so much as a list of things a communist party in power could immediately work towards. This is clear from context, as immediately before this list it says: quote:The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. "Seize the means of production and put it under the control of the worker's state" is kind of like the "lol my thesis" version of a plan for Marxian socialism. After that he comes out and says that this isn't something that happens overnight, but will require numerous individual steps which will vary in nature by the nation in which the revolution occurs. The ten points are offered as an example of the first few steps. A lot of the zanier points probably made a lot more sense in 1848 than now. What's worth noting are some of the implicit assumptions behind the more familiar ones. For example, a progressive income tax presupposes income inequality. Confiscation of the property of "emigrants and rebels" as an explicit suggestion indicates that those who neither rebel nor emigrate won't have all their property seized, which is also implicit in provisions for the seizure of specific kinds of property or property rights (i.e., rent collection, infrastructure, credit). None of them recommend the seizure of the means of production. The closest is point 7, which is about increasing the scope of state-owned industries and factories. The real tip-off, though, is that point 10 ends with "etc. etc." This is not a blueprint in any fashion, it's a list of suggested policy measures for immediate adoption once the party is in power.
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Jun 22, 2016 14:24
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Classic Comrade posted:as someone who's finally trying to take the time to officially learn all this poo poo, this makes a lot of the things i was confused about click. ...which probably sounds stupid and probably should have been obvious to me but oh well at least it makes sense to me now. A lot of this stuff seems obvious in hindsight, but can be obtuse at first glance, especially when you're dealing with historical works. For example: one of the biggest challenges people seem to have in evaluating the Communist Manifesto is a tendency to interpret it through the lens of what they know about 20th century Communism. If they've never really studied the history of this stuff before, that's probably the the most familiar point of reference for what "Communism" is and so makes the most sense to interpret everything in light of it. But this results in thinking about the subject "out of order," trying to understand an idea by later elaborations on it rather than the original expression of it in context. They have some vague idea of a sweeping utopian project that had a whole lot of detailed plans about reforming every aspect of society (in other words, a mix of stereotypes and reality), and they look at this thing, which was a call to immediate action addressed to a contemporary audience that already basically agreed with it in principle, and start asking about why it doesn't take a whole bunch of things into account. These things are usually either points of theory or asking about how communism as laid out in the Manifesto would deal with certain problems. In both cases, they're drawing on their limited knowledge of 20th century Communism in theory and practice, but the Manifesto wasn't primarily a work of theory and didn't set out to address issues that would only become apparent 100 years later. It's really very difficult for people to forget about all the stuff that they know happened later and understand a work in its context. Basically all I'm saying here, anyway, is don't beat yourself up about it. It isn't necessarily obvious. Glad I could help, assuming I didn't actually gently caress up my interpretation royally.
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Jun 23, 2016 02:32
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Reminder:quote:lol:
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Aug 16, 2016 17:09
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tsa posted:The bernout thread was filled with thinly or not at all veiled racism against black people in the south. Oh, well in that case, nevermind.
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Aug 16, 2016 17:18
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The Saurus posted:So there's a problem with stating the obvious fact that Southern Blacks have been used as slaves and oppressed like gently caress for generations, and that means they aren't as socially or politically aware about their conditions? 
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Aug 16, 2016 23:12
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Dead Cosmonaut posted:Both of them are New-New Deal styled Democrats, and FDR had no qualms about destroying the labour movement's greatest weapon: going on strikes. 1. FDR opposed strike actions. 2. Sanders and Warren have politics similar to FDR. 3. Therefore, Sanders and Warren oppose strikes and can be fairly called "anti-union." Hm.
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Aug 31, 2016 13:27
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Typo posted:The black market you are talking about is a subset of of the consumer goods market, i.e flowers. Even the paper you linked estimated its worth at 5-90 billion out of an economy which had a gdp of ~1.5 trillion in the 1980s. The problem is that this is a fairly small part of the actual economy and doesn't include poo poo like apartments or even medical care because those were state owned and you needed blat with the bureaucrat in charge to get the state to assign you a non-lovely apartment or move your mother to a better hospital. It might have led the average Russian to figure out how to deal with buying consumer goods post-1991 but it doesn't prepare them to deal with the capital or labor markets. idk, understanding the importance of connections and "who you know" seems pretty useful on a job hunt.
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Sep 2, 2016 02:44
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Typo posted:Yes, granted though it's actually less important today than it was 15 years ago because the internet made information a lot more freely available OK but I mean, if we're following a chain of logic that goes "Russians learned from living under socialism how to get what they needed by making the right connections with the right people and were therefore unequipped to navigate a market economy in the 1990s," this whole thing starts to look suspicious when you consider the labor market especially. Knowing the right people is still really really useful whether they right person is a bureaucrat who can get your mom in a better hospital or an employer who can enable you to get your mom in a better hospital. Not having had to look for a job doesn't seem like it would obscure the key insight of "know people who can get you want you need" whether that's a job or something else. I mean unless they were literally too loving dumb to understand the concept of "this person will give you money for work if you convince him" due to this being a completely esoteric mental task compared to "this person will give you things you want or need if you can convince him."
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Sep 2, 2016 02:53
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Typo posted:This is actually a pretty good question: if connections and networking is advantageous in a capitalist labor market, shouldn't it make transition to a capitalist labor market easier? I'm not even asking that question because it doesn't have to make it easier. The claim I'm dealing with is that reliance on connections and networking supposedly makes it harder. quote:The answer is that maybe, Ceteris Paribus, it does. But the Soviet labor market looked very different from a capitalist one. Each soviet firms were incentivized to hire as much as possible, even if there was nothing for the hires to do. And there was no bottom line because the state will always bail out state owned bureaus through transfer of wealth from productive sectors. The result is a massive misallocation of labor in which labor went to sectors which didn't need them and denied them to sectors which did need them, thus the proverb "they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work": because firms hired people they didn't need, overall productivity dropped. Maybe experience with networking helped some, but it would be overshadow by a larger change. This is a disorienting shift in the argument, and it's not the first. I'm actually having a little trouble following your point now, so I'll recap the argument as I've seen you present it so that maybe you can help me straighten it out. The basic form of the argument is that former citizens of the USSR were simply unprepared for the change to a market economy and the use of money. Initially, this is because they legally weren't allowed to have markets mediated by money. This is, as you put it, "the baggage the Communist model of development." Rather, you initially said, they relied on "a state bureaucracy assigning" goods and services rather than a market. Thus, the troubles a newly-capitalist Russia faced in the 90s "was partially a function of" this ingrained ignorance. I quoted that, by the way, to point out that it's kind of an uninteresting claim because the bar it sets is low enough that the part it played could be so small as to be insignificant. Once someone mentioned black markets and the actual existence of money in the USSR, an interesting new development in the nature of the argument occurred. At that point, you had to acknowledge that markets mediated by money existed in spite of legal prohibitions against them. The transformation is that while citizens of the USSR did have money and markets, money wasn't as important as "connections with the right people and quid-pro-quos which left people awfully unprepared to deal with a system where private ownership and monetary exchanges were meaningful and prices adjusted." This is interesting for a subtle reason: initially, they relied on a state bureaucracy to "assign" goods and services. To me, this implies a general passivity to the working out of a central plan. That's a very different picture from the active and illicit leveraging of connections with politically powerful people to make things happen. (Incidentally, this is starting to sound like a very important skill for entrepreneurs in a capitalist economy with any kind of government to lobby for advantages.) My point is basically that this claim about the practice of getting what you need through connections doesn't have anything like the impact of the original formulation of the argument, which was that since citizens of the USSR were not allowed to participate in money-mediated markets and relied on central planning, they weren't prepared for capitalism. But once you granted that there were markets with money, in which you also admit citizens of the USSR may have learned "to figure out how to deal with buying everyday consumer goods," it was necessary to change passive drones in a central planning machine into canny favor-brokers and networkers, which is supposedly not helpful in the labor market. Which is absurd. These are in fact pretty goddamn transferable skills to job hunting. So now you're shaking things up again, asking about whether these skills should make a transition easier, which is irrelevant because the original contention was about factors that made the transition harder, and also suggesting (unless I'm misunderstanding you) that the nature of work in the USSR made Russians lovely employers/managers. But this has nothing to do with whether favor trading on a black market made Russians lovely job-hunters and shoppers or whether reliance on central planning and a lack of experience with money-mediated markets did the same. So I'm really not sure where you're going with this. Is there a definite claim or just a vague idea that communism conditioned people in any number of ways that made them poor economic actors in capitalism? Because it's not that this is implausible so much as that it looks to me less like some baggage of a particular system than a specific manifestation of a general pattern: sudden, large-scale changes in the socioeconomic structure of society are difficult to manage in ways that are beneficial to those experiencing them (a claim that applies also to, say, a socialist revolution). Also, how big a part does this chimera have to play in the transition function before we can dismiss any other factor?
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Sep 2, 2016 05:03
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