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forkboy84 posted:Some bellends setting off fireworks that sound like WWI artillery shells being fired at midnight is so cool. No joke I was in front of the London Eye and it was like being in a war zone with the smoke, noise and ash raining from the sky. Not bad although the crowd got increasingly pushy and overbearing towards midnight.
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Jan 1, 2020 13:53
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radmonger posted:Pensioners are not working class; they are net purchasers of labour whose interests are served by falling wages. They can longer be reached by any political message the Labour Party can credibly send. I mean my old CLP was mostly pensioners because they have a lot more free time to campaign but sure. It raises an interesting question re why guillotining the capitalists isn't a great platform: those capitalists might be your mum, your grandad, or any other retired person, and "we're gonna guillotine your mum" isn't a great platform for winning elections on. This is a particular feature of late neoliberal capitalism, and it makes it hard to condemn capital without implicating your own support base, in a way that for Marx, Mao, or Lenin would not have been an issue. If we're looking at building parallel structures we need an analysis of how you do that in 21st century Britain.
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Jan 2, 2020 12:03
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Renaissance Robot posted:Capitalists are free to stop being capitalists whenever they feel like it, and thereby escape the guillotine. If by 'capitalists' you mean 'anyone with a private pension', then sure we can force pensioners back into work, but that doesn't seem very left wing. Under the Marxist definition the majority of pensioners in the UK are in fact capitalists. This is because of the proliferation of workplace and private pension plans under neoliberalism, and it makes most people complicit in the system. The question is how you go about building support for abolishing those capital formations when most people have an older relative whose livelihood depends on the same capital formations. Neoliberalism is basically holding pensioners hostage against workers. Raising the state pension significantly would be a good start but you kind of need to be in power for that and the issue is that it doesn't help the olds who already have private pensions, but does expand the state, which the same pensioners oppose. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Jan 2, 2020 |
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Jan 2, 2020 14:51
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Pensions usually transfer their wealth to government bonds (gilts?) as retirement age approaches, right? For stability of the investment? Main issue is that gilts, while very stable, tend to underperform inflation, which means that pension funds would lose value exponentially rather than gaining it (due to capital markets) like they do at the moment. This would probably mean reducing the value of pensions or raising the age people can take them at for this to be in any way sustainable. This could be mitigated if the state itself held a lot of productive capacity like e.g. mass nationalisation of industries or a sovereign wealth fund could allow for. Basically pensions are such a massive thing that their success or failure is always going to be tied to the wealth of the nation somehow, so I'm not sure how you make pensions closer to the state without having to institute full communism in advance.
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Jan 2, 2020 15:09
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thespaceinvader posted:The chances of anyone's mother or grandmother being a capitalist are pretty drat low; being a capitalist isn't just owning a property in which you live, it's owning tens or hundreds of millions of pounds plus in assets; it's being able to leverage those assets to control people. In the sense of "does not work, relies on extraction of surplus value from labour for income", pensioners are capitalists. You're confusing this with the popular use of "capitalist" to mean big bad haute bourgeois billionaires, but by Marx's definition most pensioners are something like petit bourgeois. It might not chime culturally, but in a material sense most pensioners rely on capital markets for their income. Their class interests are aligned with hedge fund managers and financiers more than those of workers. Now am I saying Agnes down the road should be put up against the wall? No. But if we don't understand what makes pensioners vote Tory so consistently we have no hope of reversing that trend.
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Jan 2, 2020 16:01
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gh0stpinballa posted:are babies capitalist. was boss baby a documentary. Well if reproductive labour counts babies do extract the milk from the teat of workers and grow fat off the spoils...
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Jan 2, 2020 16:10
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thespaceinvader posted:I honestly don't think it's as clear cut as this. I don’t mean all pensioners but specifically most pensioners in the UK, where most people hold private or workplace pensions which are not the same as National Insurance, and are, in fact, forms of capital ownership (funds invested in a portfolio managed by the pension trust) . Besides my intention's not really to identify wall fodder but to look at why pensioners in particular vote with capitalist class interests. For most of those other categories (other than children, who can't own capital and so aren't capitalists unless you're being facetious) the arrangement is either voluntary (spouses where one partner works and the other looks after children) or state funded, so capital doesn't come into it. Pension funds are tied directly to capital markets and most pensioners in the UK have this type of pension in addition to the less problematic national insurance.
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Jan 2, 2020 16:28
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thespaceinvader posted:A better one is 'someone who owns and leverages significant amounts of the means of production, typically for their own person/corporate gain'. I disagree, because the reason Marx talks about the capitalist and proletarian classes in Das Kapital is to look at the economic system of capitalism. In Marx's day, absent the social democratic measures we have now, it was easy to separate the two classes. But that separation is not about having a small capitalist class against a mass of workers, it's about identifying the conflict between the classes. Our current system is one in which capital ownership is no longer confined to a small elite but rather interpenetrates all of society. In many cases, people can have features of the capital owning class and the working class (I have previously argued this is what defines the middle class), and therefore the conflict between classes is one of competing interests under late capitalism, and a major building block of any revolution under late capitalism must be identifying and reforming the capitalist within ourselves. For the purpose of actually understanding how material interests influence the way people think it's no longer useful to restrict "capitalist" to a small and easy to hate elite: we have to identify and purge our own inner capitalists. Capital ownership, ownership of the means of production, is what makes you a capitalist, and the definition I used above is just shorthand for that. E: Just realised I'm echoing the Marquis de Sade as written in Marat/Sade, which is an awesome play which everyone should watch the recording of (it used to be easy to find on YouTube). Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Jan 2, 2020 |
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Jan 2, 2020 16:59
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thespaceinvader posted:By this logic we're basically all hosed though, since the amount of work, both emotional, mental, and physiccal, that it takes to divorce oneself from capitalism entirely, or hell even slightly, is next to impossible for most people. And this is the purpose of building parallel structures, both ideological and material, which can serve the purposes of reforming minds, providing material support to comrades, and establishing communities. If you need the first wave of activists to break away from the normal structures of capitalism to achieve that, it's a high price, but in the long run the better the parallel structures get the less hardcore people will need to be to get involved. I think this is what Maoist training camps are meant to achieve although the most famous Anglo attempt (Jonestown) didn't shake out too well.
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Jan 2, 2020 17:16
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OwlFancier posted:Wait jim jones was a maoist??? Yeah his whole project was combining maoism and evangelical Christianity as far as I'm aware
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Jan 2, 2020 17:21
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thespaceinvader posted:How do you build parallel material structures when the only sources of material are capitlism? There's a few different models, ranging from the unionist tactic of asking for donations from a community to Stalin's preferred method of robbing banks ("expropriation of funds for the proletariat"). The Black Panthers did a good line in voluntary community support until the FBI smashed them down. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Jan 2, 2020 |
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Jan 2, 2020 17:24
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thespaceinvader posted:Of all of these, the only one that actually comes outside the system of capitalism is robbing banks though. I mean this is where any project that aims to change how stuff works has a contradiction. You have to get the materials from somewhere, and in a capitalist system that will obviously have some relationship to capital. That doesn't mean what you build has to be a capitalist project. Otherwise the USSR selling gas to the West would make it non-Communist. On Maoism and Jim Jones: I think these are quotes from him? https://youtu.be/MWBjwgxEawo
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Jan 2, 2020 17:34
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thespaceinvader posted:This is precisely the point I'm making, I'm not sure why that's three times in the last couple of pages you've made that argument to me, instead of the person with whom I'm arguing, who actually seems (to me at least) to espouse the position that capitalists are anyone who benefits from capitalism in any way. I said capitalists are anyone who owns value producing capital. That's not the same as "everyone" and it's obviously a sliding scale. For example, I hold a few thousand pounds worth of pensions, so to that extent I am a capitalist. This basically has no impact on my life. If my main source of income was capital performance and I held half a million quid worth of investments I'd be a lot more concerned with what the markets were up to. But yes, in both cases I'm a capitalist; that's the whole point I was making about how 21st century British capitalism differs from the conditions that Marx / Lenin / Mao were analysing, where the underclass had literally no capital. I said that because of social democracy and then neoliberalism, in the UK right now capital ownership is an intimate part of people's lives. This is not the case in, say, rural India. The material conditions differ across time and space. This is why Mao and Lenin wrote stuff to start with: to look at how Marxist thought could be applied to the specific conditions of their time and place for workers.
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Jan 2, 2020 17:47
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Guavanaut posted:Even they drew a line between the underclass and the proletariat though, and one of the huge divisions between Marxism/Leninism/Maoism is whether the lumpen would be revolutionary, reactionary, or idiot dead weight. In the 19th century even without the social democracy it wasn't unusual for working class people to try to own more than one slum house as a bulwark against destitution, and then end up losing them in generational cycles. Yeah I think I am presently leaning Maoist without ever having read Mao, so there's that. The old woman in that case is surely a capitalist, but she's also not really wall fodder. I don't think Marx really addresses capital ownership on the micro scale, and obviously it became a big deal for kulaks and peasant landowners in Russia and China, so this seems like an area where you could get a rich seam of theory and practice. To be honest these kinds of people if they were properly mobilised would be valuable allies in building leftism: former proletarians who own capital but aren't committed capitalists can have both the class consciousness and the resources to be really helpful to people trying to set up parallel structures. They're rare but they exist. E: Come to think of it, they're probably similar types to the pensioners in my CLP who started this whole discussion off. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Jan 2, 2020 |
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Jan 2, 2020 18:27
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Yeah there's definitely something about the kind of person to lead a militant uprising not being the best person to actually govern after that uprising's successful. Washington possibly being an exception, but then he didn't want to govern in the first place.
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Jan 2, 2020 18:37
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Purple Prince seems to be making a distinction between capital and money which you're not. Someone living off accumulated money (or a state pension) is not living off capital, someone living off the money generated by currently owned capital is. The former might still have their interests align with the capitalist class though, since inflation is generally a detriment to both, unless the state will step in to maintain their position. Which means not just keeping the state pension in line with inflation, but their actual wealth. Yes to both. It's important to update our analysis of capitalism with the times, especially because the whole reason Thatcherism worked is that it gave a much larger section of the population a closer relationship to capital than before.
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Jan 2, 2020 18:58
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thespaceinvader posted:In practice, it doesn't loving matter that a pensioner's pension comes out of the dividends of a capitalist's investment, it matters that the other dividends of the capitalist's investment persuaded the pensioner to vote for the toff who's going to sell the NHS the pensioner needs to not die of flu next winter.. It surely does matter when it's legal for your pension fund to send you letters saying things like "IF CORBYN WINS KISS YOUR PENSION GOODBYE". This may or may not be true and it would depend on how financially literate the pensioner is but either way, once you discount the influence of material factors on people's views you are no longer doing a Marxist analysis.
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Jan 2, 2020 19:21
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Azza Bamboo posted:Why not just cut out the pension fund part and make it illegal for anyone not socialist to propagandise? May as well get to the point rather than trying to police industry's communications separately. I did say we were using the Maoist method 
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Jan 2, 2020 19:37
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thespaceinvader posted:A war that there's no way to win, and that can just be turned into another foreverwar? We have always been at war with
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Jan 3, 2020 09:21
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Crispchat warning: the Pringles Rice Fusion flavours are disturbing. Not because they're bad but because they taste exactly like the foods they're replicating.
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Jan 3, 2020 12:41
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https://twitter.com/derekedwardsgb/status/1212830830898356224 Direct action starts here people
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Jan 4, 2020 13:22
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Comrade Fakename posted:Perhaps Johnson’s longest lasting legacy will be his creation of a British diaspora. Yeah BORIS consolidated my decision to emigrate long term, why do you ask?
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Jan 6, 2020 13:28
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On drug chat, I've been reading about the opium wars. The UK got a ton of Chinese people hooked on opium then declared war when the Qing government had the temerity to try to stop us pushing drugs on them. And now our drug policy is one of the more draconian in the West. Just... what ?
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Jan 7, 2020 00:11
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OwlFancier posted:To be clear the bolded bit is the guy from the spectator, and she appears to be making the point that immigrant families push their kids to do well in education (which she thinks is good) a lot more than native british families do I'm quoting someone I used to know very well but won't say who it is: "Of course we work harder than white people, it's the only way to succeed in this racist country."
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Jan 7, 2020 02:22
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Gonzo McFee posted:https://twitter.com/ITVNewsPolitics/status/1213217379519516674?s=19 New non-pacifist Generallisimo Corbyn looking tight. When's the first barricade going up?
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Jan 7, 2020 10:52
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One of the first things you see as you walk away from Coventry Cathedral to the city centre is a large Nandos. The Bishop definitely pops out for a cheeky Nandos.
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Jan 7, 2020 13:50
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So I enjoyed some of the conversations on praxis so much that I wrote a simple web scraper over the weekend to collect them in a simplified format for storage / searching in something like Evernote or a document database. If people would be interested I can package this stuff up as a web app for y'all. E: Might also be of interest to those of you who've got a statistical bent and want to analyse stuff like who the most prolific poster in this thread is. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Jan 8, 2020 |
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Jan 8, 2020 00:25
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Say whatever you like about Thatcherism, at least it's a loving ethos man
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Jan 8, 2020 10:40
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At uni I lived with Erasmus students for my final two years. It was great meeting people from around Europe and listening to their different stories and world views. Also they all agreed British food is crap. But nope, isolationism is better. So long for this hell country, I doubt I'm coming back.
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Jan 8, 2020 21:07
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Pretty sure maturity is a function of how much effort you put into understanding yourself and your relationship to other people and the world, not time.
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Jan 9, 2020 13:10
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Tesseraction posted:*pushes your head into the toilet bowl* lmao The sage often appears as a trickster
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Jan 9, 2020 14:03
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Coohoolin posted:Never liked Barry Gardiner that much, no real reason except gut feeling. Interesting to find out he backed the Iraq war and absolutely loving adores Modi. He used to be my MP. Decent enough guy but pretty eccentric: he used to come and give talks to the CLP which were clearly memorised speeches that he recycled for any constituency based events that week. He had a reputation locally as being eccentric but basically the Teflon Man in terms of people digging dirt on him.
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Jan 9, 2020 21:01
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E: Ill-conceived post
Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Jan 9, 2020 |
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Jan 9, 2020 23:32
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baka kaba posted:Apparently this comes up a lot anyway, some technical consultant was posting about being in meetings with these people and instead of talking about the thing the meeting's about they were spending all their time asking about technology to protect themselves and schemes to keep them isolated from the angry hordes It's Douglas Rushkoff, who's become more and more of a grumpy old man since writing about how awesome the anarchist green internet would be in the 90s and not seeing that happen.
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Jan 10, 2020 16:40
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Judge Tesla posted:I'm pretty positive that if Brenda dissolved parliament and declared herself an absolute monarch then a large portion of the country would be overjoyed for it. Better or worse than Boris? I can see a decent coalition for this between the Nationalists and the FBPE lot
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Jan 10, 2020 17:35
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thespaceinvader posted:Hahahahah of loving course this is what Prevent is loving about with when we have far right groups who have literally managed to loving murder MPs. To be fair, if you read the full document it's mainly right wing extremist groups that are listed. PREVENT is still an overwhelming failure as a program though, because the people who it needs to engage with (teachers etc) totally distrust it, for fairly justified reasons. Even under a leftist government this kind of program would get side-eye in a democracy, but given the current Tory party openly flirts with the hard right and the typical bias of police officers, it's no surprise that the program's interpreted as targeting Muslims over all others.
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Jan 10, 2020 18:18
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Went to the shop. Wall to wall Harry and Meghan. Should Corbyn take the opportunity of this distraction to announce he's standing? Iirc current leader doesn't need nominations. He doesn't want to and he said he would step down already, this is a terrible idea
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Jan 10, 2020 19:17
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:So my wife accidentally bought a ticket for a gig that was for last year; they were still selling tickets even though the gig already happened. Easiest thing might be to go directly to your card issuer and get them to refund you since this is probably a protected purchase and dealing with the company will be a real pain. The card issuer might want some proof that the company was at fault though so worth making at least some token efforts to contact them.
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Jan 12, 2020 10:52
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Jippa posted:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51077897 Almost like breaking international law by drone striking the Chief of General Staff of a country might provoke that country to break international law to send a message in return.
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Jan 12, 2020 13:20
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As a philosophy student I once tried reading Roger Scruton. All I remember is some pretentious nonsense about how Western Aesthetic Values are inherently superior to other cultures. There seems to be something about Conservative philosophers which makes them love aesthetics and also make no sense to anyone outside their weird bubble. I think it might be racism.
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Jan 13, 2020 12:03
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