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My understanding is that conservatism arose out of a desire to maintain a de factor hierarchical society when all the de jure aristocrats were getting guillotined. "Some people are better than others" seems to be the unifying thread, but that can manifest in a lot of different ways. Anything from nazi-ism to objectivism to a strain of conservatism whose name I forget that was apparently popular in the UK in the early 20th century that wholeheartedly believed in noblesse oblige. e: I know nothing about this last one besides that it was apparently popular in Tolkien's youth and unpopular by his death, and that his works make a lot more sense viewed through the lens of those politics cheetah7071 has issued a correction as of 01:28 on Jun 14, 2020 |
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Jun 14, 2020 01:11
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Atrocious Joe on the American left and its engagement with agriculture: I asked about what was the issue with the occupation zone gardening being cringe (or something like that), a good general take came from it. Copied from the podcasts thread. dead gay comedy forums posted:Cuba saved itself single-handedly by everyone agreeing into doing urban gardening and agriculture after the USSR kicked the bucket, and African as well Latin American socialist militancy are also quite Very loving Serious about it too, emphasizing teaching to work the land to a very high degree, particularly to help poor farmers make their plots viable with their limited resources Atrocious Joe posted:yeah I'm mostly describing US protests.
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Jun 14, 2020 03:08
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Conservatism is always relative. In the strictest sense, the Democratic Party is the current conservative party in the US, with a policy lineage going back to Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal and FDR's New Deal, and a general Elightenment Era foundation of reason, empiricism, science, and updated Liberal economic policies. Marxists spit venom at them the most because these are the guys putting the most effort to keep the wheels on capitalism, and largely using a similar philosophical toolbox to do it. A materialist metaphysics and teleology and economics as a science. The Republicans are a grab bag right now. There are Ur-Facsists, trying to cobble together a nationalist myth to get people to rally around. This is where the Tea Party and MAGA pull from. Trying to create an idealized America of the past that never existed. There are nihilist kleptocrats, who just see it all as power grabs to enrich their patrons. The Dick Cheney and Mitch McConnell faction, and their supporters who will nakedly support them to get tax cuts, no bid contracts, and then project these same things onto the Democrats. And at least out west, there are ultra conservative types who legitimately want a Jeffersonian style super limited government, borderline SovCit guys like the Bundy family. The voter base in general is the remnants of Reagan's old coalition of defence hawks, budget hawks, and evangelical Christians. However, the defense hawks lost their rudder with the end of the Cold War. The budget hawks were half racist and all rubes of the kleptocrats. And the evangelical Christians were also half racist, and have been losing the culture war on all fronts. Really, all that is left are racist nationalists and nihilist kleptocrats, but it is hard to tease that out of polling because the polling companies are still trying to sort people into the same boxes from the 1980's. Go look up Frank Luntz, and you can find videos of him breaking down in existential crisis because the conservative focus groups he has been putting together for decades have all gone insane. To sum it up, in the American context, it makes way more sense to treat Democrats as the conservatives trying to maintain a century old social order, and the Republicans as the ones trying to create a new order with new rules that aren't grounded in the past. They may claim to be pulling from the past, but it is all made up poo poo that just sounds good. It might be debated that conservatism extends back to the premodern, but the US doesn't have much of a premodern tradition to call on. It would be interesting to see a non Amricans take on a conservative project that really wants to bring back aristocracy and divination.
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Jun 14, 2020 03:25
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What did MLK have to say about rioting? The quotes I've read are "Rioting is the language of the unheard", and "I'm absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt". Did he talk about them more?
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Jun 14, 2020 08:40
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cheetah7071 posted:another baby question: Like you expect, you're looking at two different "wealths" that are being destroyed. Warfare destroys real stuff, and only reduces the monetary value of people's wealth in proportion to the real destruction. The enemy prefers to target concentrations of industry - the most concentrated industrial capital - over dispersed smaller industry that is far harder to hit. Warfare also shifts production from means of production toward means of consumption and destruction so that overall in the long term there will be less stuff for money to buy and some similarities to a simple inflationary economy. Inflationary monetary regimes destroy no real stuff, they just pull out enough money that the amount of money buying things also increases in proportion to the amount of goods it's used to buy. After a war, it's pretty much guaranteed that those with means of production and capacity to produce means of production will flourish, because real stuff is what's going to count and it's a seller's market. In an inflationary monetary regime, capacity to produce is instead devalued in relation to capacity to simply get your hands on the money that's being pulled out of a hat. If the money goes from people who have a lot of capital to people who don't, it counteracts the tendency toward monopolization. If the money goes the opposite direction, it accelerates the tendency. There's no inherent equalizing tendency to this kind of inflation at all, only the opposite. For one, money buys political power which buys more of the created money. Also, it's harder to make money off of producing useful stuff when the market is already full of goods, so investing in compounding wealth becomes more attractive, and that's a market people can only enter strictly in proportion to the wealth and insider connections they already hold. The argument you're referring to also has a less mentioned side that used to be more central when it wasn't professional suicide for an academic to argue based on a labor theory of value. The reason I mentioned the difference in encouraging the production of means of production is that if productive labor is the basis of capitalist wealth, then the growth of the global capitalist economy is capped by how much productive labor it employs. If production is what makes money for capitalists, then there will be a lot of growth to share in. If making money through production is hard, then there will be less growth to share in and the wealth of the richest has to be increased by taking from the rest. So provided their wealth grows at the same rate in both the post-war scenario and the no-war scenario, capital concentrates faster in the no-war scenario.
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Jun 14, 2020 13:25
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cheetah7071 posted:My understanding is that conservatism arose out of a desire to maintain a de factor hierarchical society when all the de jure aristocrats were getting guillotined. "Some people are better than others" seems to be the unifying thread, but that can manifest in a lot of different ways. Anything from nazi-ism to objectivism to a strain of conservatism whose name I forget that was apparently popular in the UK in the early 20th century that wholeheartedly believed in noblesse oblige. You're probably talking about the distributists, who were a primarily Catholic political movement that diagnosed a lot of the same problems as the socialists but were repulsed by their tendency towards atheism and rejection of all private ownership of productive property and thus argued the problem was modern industrialism along with concentration of power, and the solution was radical decentralization of capital along with some emphasis on worker cooperatives. The ideas have a bit of influence with some Christian social democrats in Europe and the more lefty Catholic Worker movement in the US, but they pretty much petered out as a serious political force by the middle part of the 20th century.
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Jun 14, 2020 16:07
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BULBASAUR posted:I know this isn't strictly socialist education, but would somebody be willing to do an effort post breaking down right/conservative ideologies? I'm at a point where I understand most of the subdivisions of the left, but honestly I know very little about the other side. Oh, it is very much within the purview of socialist education. Conservatism is the strongest form of ideological thought, after all. What does that mean, though? Conservative thinking, when considered only through ideology, is rather hollow. Its theoretical substance is very poor, because it has no need for active intellectual development. Which is very appropriate when one understands conservatism as the ideology of tradition, of business as usual, of keeping things as they are. It is right in the name, after all. As such, the heavy groundwork of conservative ideology comes from European guys who were more interested in the political philosophy of why the divine right of kings is good than political theory in a more modern sense (like marxism!). In the great ancient D&D that was 17th-to-late-18th Europe in that regard, the emerging form of liberalism challenged all that by invoking Reason as their flag, and thus establishing theories on why conservatives are wrong and more reasonable, enlightened forms of organizing society had to be considered. However, liberalism came out with a factory defect, because even back then they did not get that conservatives would go "lol so what" with their very reasonable posting skills and musket fire them to death if they got too annoying. But, those ideas were very encouraging to a class that was rising in power and wealth: great merchants and burghers, the proto-capitalists. Liberalism granted them legitimacy and recognition apart and separate from an aristocratic condition, and aristocrats were relying more and more on these guys because they had the money after all. And this is where gets interesting. Conservative "ideology" emerges as such because of the 19th century, the historical "CSPAM before CSPAM" period. A very novel thing happened here. Conservative values started to reproduce liberalism. Aristocrats began arguing for low tariffs and free markets, people with peerages defending the American revolution, a true "what the gently caress" from liberals ensued. Why? It is simple, when one looks through the lens of historical materialism: capitalism had advanced and developed enough that common sense thinking moved away from feudal and aristocratic modes to liberal; the material relations had been dramatically shifted through decades and decades of gradual transformation towards this point. Even though there were still many liberal matters to be disputed, fought upon and settled, once the French Revolution was done for, much of what constitutes the basic principles of liberalism had been made into conservative thought. Hell, what better example than that than Napoleon? It is the strongest form of ideological thought because it merely reproduces what the material relations of society determine to be the most conventional and "default" modes of thinking. It is inertia, the status quo, things as they have always been, but not really, for it accommodates transformation quite readily in the interest of the wealthy and powerful. And as such, through the mutative properties peculiar to conservatism, in order to defend itself when societies requires changes against their interests, it spawns some nasty fuckery. Say hello to reactionaries and fascists. There is where you have to go to see the fully unmasked leviathan of capital, for the ultimate failure of conservative thought is the fact that its ethical and moral judgements are pure hypocrisy in the face of change: when going left would be better for the status quo, for the social inertia, for the overall maintenance of an order positive to the wealthy and powerful, they would rather not conserve and force transformations from the right than conceding ground. For the sake of capital, any societal institution that must be burned to the ground for its benefit shall burn. Or, to put it more succinctly, just consider the republicans who want the standing army against its own constituents and laws.
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Jun 14, 2020 18:02
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Epic High Five posted:Marxism and more specifically historical materialism is one of those things that people just straight up need to understand, even if they don't agree with it. The biggest example of this that isn't obvious real world stuff is in literature. Like, authors who understand but do not agree with historical materialism are still able to make coherent and compelling worlds. People who reject it make incoherent and unexpliable ones. Dune versus Heinlein/Harry potter. i.e. https://electricliterature.com/against-worldbuilding/ vs https://www.wired.com/story/nk-jemisin-how-to-write-science-fiction-wired25/
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Jun 14, 2020 18:06
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StashAugustine posted:You're probably talking about the distributists, who were a primarily Catholic political movement that diagnosed a lot of the same problems as the socialists but were repulsed by their tendency towards atheism and rejection of all private ownership of productive property and thus argued the problem was modern industrialism along with concentration of power, and the solution was radical decentralization of capital along with some emphasis on worker cooperatives. The ideas have a bit of influence with some Christian social democrats in Europe and the more lefty Catholic Worker movement in the US, but they pretty much petered out as a serious political force by the middle part of the 20th century. There's also the Social Credit movement that emerged at the turn of the 20th century that recognized the inequality between production and consumers, and wanted to redistribute credit so that everyone could afford to buy poo poo and end the cyclical nature of capitalism. It saw a fair amount of success in electoral politics up until the 1970s throughout the Anglosphere, although in practice every Social Credit Party was pretty much rebranded social conservatism and abandoned any notion of redressing the inability of people to access credit (as it turns out neoliberalism would fix this problem and gift us the glorious system we have today). The only exception was in Alberta, Canada where the SoCreds actually tried to implement some policy during the 1930s when the province was absolutely crushed by the Great Depression.
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Jun 14, 2020 18:12
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in which we see a dumbass motherfucker invoking García Márquez in order to be "against worldbuilding" quote:García Márquez was a "committed leftist" throughout his life, adhering to socialist beliefs.[36] In 1991 he published Changing the History of Africa, an admiring study of Cuban activities in the Angolan Civil War and the larger South African Border War. García Márquez maintained a close but "nuanced" friendship with Fidel Castro, praising the achievements of the Cuban Revolution but criticizing aspects of governance and working to "soften [the] roughest edges" of the country.[37] García Márquez's political and ideological views were shaped by his grandfather's stories.[24] In an interview, García Márquez told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, "my grandfather the Colonel was a Liberal. My political ideas probably came from him to begin with because, instead of telling me fairy tales when I was young, he would regale me with horrifying accounts of the last civil war that free-thinkers and anti-clerics waged against the Conservative government."[17][38] This influenced his political views and his literary technique so that "in the same way that his writing career initially took shape in conscious opposition to the Colombian literary status quo, García Márquez's socialist and anti-imperialist views are in principled opposition to the global status quo dominated by the United States."[39] García Márquez didn't do "worldbuilding" because he had no need for such as he was informed by a substantiated view of history and was dealing with our own world, and because of that, the magical and unexpected in literature become much more beautiful, poignant and poetic as result but for someone as the author of that article, early 20th century Colombia must be something out of science fiction
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Jun 14, 2020 18:39
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uncop posted:Like you expect, you're looking at two different "wealths" that are being destroyed. Warfare destroys real stuff, and only reduces the monetary value of people's wealth in proportion to the real destruction. The enemy prefers to target concentrations of industry - the most concentrated industrial capital - over dispersed smaller industry that is far harder to hit. Warfare also shifts production from means of production toward means of consumption and destruction so that overall in the long term there will be less stuff for money to buy and some similarities to a simple inflationary economy. took me two reads to understand this but I get it. thanks for answering
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Jun 15, 2020 05:20
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dead gay comedy forums posted:in which we see a dumbass motherfucker invoking García Márquez in order to be "against worldbuilding" It's generally a red flag when someone is writing an article about fantasy fiction and the only 3 books they reference are Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and 100 Years of Solitude.
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Jun 15, 2020 07:52
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what does modern maoism look like? what would it look like in the united states?
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Jun 15, 2020 08:54
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err posted:what does modern maoism look like? what would it look like in the united states? I'd actually like some clarification on Maoism in general, if that can be attached to the response to this question.
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Jun 15, 2020 22:30
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What's the deal with dialectics and why are they important?
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Jun 15, 2020 22:33
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Same, but dianetics
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Jun 15, 2020 22:44
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SniperWoreConverse posted:Same, but dianetics You're probably being facetious but this is a genuinely interesting subject and I have some knowledge. Dianetics is basically Freud 101 with a lie detector. To put it simply, Dianetics says that our bad memories are Engrams; mental trauma for lack of a better term. The idea of Dianetics is confronting that trauma, reliving it and using your current mental faculties and awareness to find catharsis with it and moving forward. This is basic psychotherapy and it's a major reason why Hubbard's attempts for recognition by Psychiatric institutions was denied. He wasn't discovering anything new he just came at it with no education. A big thing to understand about Dianetics in its original form is that it has nothing to do with Scientology in itself; in fact from the Scientologists I've spoken with, the Dianetics portion of the cult actually works pretty well; you feel more confident with yourself and your capabilities because you have self-awareness. Once you get into the OT levels that's when the crazy really starts. (To be clear Scientology is completely insane and everything good about Dianetics is a bug, not a feature) Until you reach OT3 the whole Xenu myth is a non-entity and those who have obtained OT3 and higher are warned that if someone hasn't reached that level they are not mentally or physically capable of being exposed to it and could DIE. It's why you don't see higher level Scientologists talking about it; they genuinely think they're protecting you.
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Jun 15, 2020 23:06
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Richard Wolff breaks it all down in very simple to understand terms here: https://twitter.com/BlackSocialists/status/1005965076879302656 Maybe useful for sharing with people who are curious but haven't quite broken in to the theory side? Here's an uncut, non-twitter version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFEzJovH2yo
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Jun 16, 2020 01:52
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err posted:what does modern maoism look like? what would it look like in the united states? 
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Jun 16, 2020 02:02
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I am completely destroyed tonight to properly work a good enough effortpost but Maoism was the first one of the communist lines I was sketching up before this thread soon
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Jun 16, 2020 02:19
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cheetah7071 posted:another baby question: Marx's theory of Capital's tendency towards crisis was based in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall due to contradictions within capital, such as between the class interests of labor and capital, between the laborer as producer and as consumer, between the interests of individual capitalists and the interests of capitalists as a class, etc. To give one example, imagine we are midway through a boom in profits. Capitalists are forced by competition, capital's policeman, to wring more and more surplus-value out of the production process by squeezing laborers' wages and/or investing in technological change. This isn't just happening at one firm, but in thousands or millions across the country. They're all ramping up production, taking out new loans, writing down projections of future profits, and garnering new investments based on those lofty projections. They're all assuming that the surplus values embodied in their commodities will be realized- that the products will be sold at their projected prices. But at some point in the boom, it becomes clear that these millions of private firms all ramping up production without coordination with each other or a form of central planning will produce a mass of commodities far larger than what can possibly be realized (sold on the market)- especially if capital's drive for profit via wage suppression has simultaneously suppressed consumer effective demand. This is an over accumulation crisis. (A recent example of this: the U.S. shale boom and bust) So now commodities that capitalists thought would be flying off the shelves are struggling to be sold, and the rate of profit begins to fall. This begins a downward spiral that can only be resolved through a structural adjustment to the composition of the economy (or through the overthrow of capitalism!). Loans stop being paid back, investments that were written down at $X value and that were later borrowed against turn out to be worthless- throughout the economy value is actively being destroyed, especially unproductive investments and fictitious capital- "money that is thrown into circulation without any material basis in commodities or productive activity." Firms are forced to restructure, small capitals go out of business, and most importantly laborers are laid off en masse, disciplining the class struggle and forcing wages down. Thus by destroying unproductive values, forcing structural adjustment/rationalization of the production process, and devaluing labor power, these crises can once again produce the preconditions for another round of profitable accumulation- provided they aren't so destructive in the process that the entire system gets toppled. Overaccumulation crises results in surpluses: surplus commodities that can't be sold at their supposed value, surplus labor looking for work, surplus land lying fallow, and surplus capital that cannot find an outlet for profitable investment. The devaluation I outlined above-destruction of values throughout the economy- is the nearest the system has to a self-correcting mechanisms. But because it's almost never in individual capitalists' interests for a recession to hit (although it is needed for the reproduction of their class), as you indicate there are a whole load of ways capital has found for, as David Harvey puts it, not resolving its crises, but rather moving them around. One is the 'spatial fix', where capitalists switch their investments from production to something like land development. Another, as you mention, is to channel these surpluses into military production, and then periodically start some dumb war to dispose of the surplus weaponry. Inflationary schemes are another way that, at least in the Marxist way of looking at things, capital displaces or changes the appearance of a crisis while not resolving its root causes- which for Marx are always to be found in the production system, leading him to accuse socialists of his day who were interested in a monetary fix of peddling "economic quack remedies." So, the government prints a bunch of extra money to buy up all the surplus commodities at their supposed values. "Nothing is changed with respect to [the unprofitable conditions of the production process] by the creation of extra money in the sphere of exchange. The printing of money cannot cure the problem. Indeed, the distortion of price signals makes the disequilibrium worse... the result, however, is that the devaluation of commodities can be converted into devaluation of money through inflation... The transformation of devaluation into inflation simultaneously entails the centralization and socialization of the devaluation process that accompanies accumulation." So, what happens to wealth/value during inflation, and has the ability of central banks to shift devaluation into inflationary crises made the task of 21st century socialists more difficult? I've been quoting liberally here from Harvey's The Limits to Capital so I'll give him the last word on this: david harvey posted:The conversion of devaluation into inflation appears to have both positive and negative effects from the standpoint of capital. On the one hand, it can ease the pressure of direct forms of conflict over wages [QUEER FRASIER NOTE: by forcing labor into a new two-front fight for 'real wage' increases] and even reduce the size of the industrial reserve army needed to equilibriate the wage rate. It also socializes the costs of devaluation across all classes behind the shield of fiscal and monetary policy carried out by the state. On the other hand, it prompts the formation of class alliances directed towards assuming state power. Inflation defuses conflict by broadening it and refocusing it on the state. QUEER FRASIER has issued a correction as of 03:22 on Jun 16, 2020 |
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Jun 16, 2020 03:15
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QUEER FRASIER posted:inflation stuff Thank you for the very informative post As I've posted a bit about in other threads, I very recently crack pinged from a position of "the status quo can be regulated by a sufficiently energetic government into an acceptable society" to "the status quo is fundamentally rotten and revolution of some form is needed". I didn't really know what form of radical I wanted to be and was spending all my mental energy on the current protests, but I tonight found a bit of time to begin my intended tour of leftist thought, starting off with the Communist Manifesto, and I took notes on questions that came up--a few things I straight up didn't understand, and a lot of questions about how the theory presented here needs (or doesn't need) to be reinterpreted or revised with the added benefit of seeing another 150 years of history to learn from. I was pleasantly surprised to see one of my questions answered before I even wrote my post asking it. I didn't understand what Marx meant when he said that capitalist crises were caused by over-production, which you explained very succinctly and clearly. Thank you! I have a lot of questions and don't really expect any individual reply to answer all of them. I expect a handful of them to just end up forgotten as the thread rolls along because that's just how conversations on forums tend to go. A lot of these questions are along similar lines as each other and I expect that sometimes the best answer may just be "hey read this book it goes into a lot of detail on a lot of this", which is fine with me since my intention, as I said, is to do a literary tour of leftist thought to settle my own thoughts on what manner of leftism I want to subscribe to. Without further ado: 1) Marx describes a reality where the proletariat is increasingly exploited, until eventually people reach a point where the uncertainty of revolution is preferable to certain squalor in the status quo. Simultaneously, the increasing centralization and industrialization of the economy gives workers the tools necessary to enact that revolution. To hear Marx tell it, the inevitable tipping point was just around the corner. But it's been 150 years and while a number of countries have had communist revolutions, it's far from universal. And, more to the point, while I'm not an expert at 20th century history, I'm not convinced the pattern he described even played out as he envisioned--in other words, the self-destructive nature of capital was quelled a bit before the entire system collapsed. This sort of breaks into a few sub-questions. a) The hard-fought and hard-won victories of labor unions and other activists in the first half of the 20th century enshrined in society a ban on many of the worst exploitations capital is capable of (at least in the developed world; more on that in sub-question c). Basically, it seems like the opposing classes came to a compromise--the bourgeoisie agreed to not make things too terrible, and in exchange, the proletariat agreed to stop trying to tear everything down. Obviously, recent decades have seen this peace treaty start to crumble. Is this an accurate reading? b) Marx describes a process where the proletariat becomes increasingly capable of organization at the same time that the usefulness of organization reaches its peak. However, I'm not sure he accounted for (at least in the Manifesto) the staggeringly powerful effect of propaganda--both explicit, e.g. in corporate anti-union stuff, and implicit, e.g. in mass media providing a single liberal viewpoint and acting like the entire realm of sensible political thought belongs within that narrow band. Social media might potentially counteract that, but simultaneously allows for a resurgence in the worst impulses of the right (who unfortunately seem to have a much easier time communicating their explanation for why things suck than the left does). Is this an accurate read? Does this call into question the inevitability of proletarian class unity that Marx seems certain of? c) In the west, the burdens of capitalism seem to have been largely outsourced to the developing world. This form of imperialism allows the home country to enjoy enough prosperity that it can keep the proletariat (or at least, enough of it) happy enough to not risk everything, while simultaneously having the resources of enough exploited parts of the world to keep them all downtrodden enough that they simply don't have the resources to fight back. Is this an accurate read? Is this pattern indefinitely sustainable, or does it just delay the process Marx describes? 2) Can someone explain what Marx has against immigrants. In his list of specific actions to take to begin the approach to communism, he lists "Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels." 3) Speaking of those specific actions, the way he lays them out, it's sort of like a roadmap to communism. We've had a number of countries try to follow that roadmap at this point, and none of them really reached the endpoint he envisioned (yet, at least). Some of them (Russia) even went backwards into full capitalism. Have any later thinkers revised this roadmap to take into account the lessons learned by the actual 20th century attempts to follow Marx's? On a sidenote, I often hear it said that the reason they failed (or haven't fully succeeded yet, depending on your viewpoint) was because foreign Bourgeoisie (primarily in the USA) worked so hard to ensure they failed. Are there any alternate roadmaps that attempt to sidestep the need to foment simultaneous worldwide revolution? If you need to convince the entire world of your plan before it works, it's not particularly likely to succeed (see also, climate change). 4) Several elements of Marx's roadmap (de-urbanization and the increased utilization of land) are in direct conflict with the ecological necessities of our current climate crises. How can it be adapted to account for our modern ecological situation? 5) The sort of final goal of communism it seems, at least in the Manifesto, is the complete abolition of class distinctions and thus a new equilibrium state for society. How is the future re-emergence of class to be prevented in such a society? The way Marx describes it, it sort of feels like it falls into the same end of history trap that liberalism does--just that the end of history is after the revolution, instead of now. This is one question I'm sure is answered in much more detail in his other writings.
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Jun 16, 2020 05:28
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I'm tired so some one else can get most of that but on point 2, well first he said "emigrant" which is the opposite of "immigrant" and its based on the experience of the French Revolution where a bunch of nobles fled the country and fought for the other side, Marx is advocating taking a hard line against similar defectors
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Jun 16, 2020 05:33
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StashAugustine posted:I'm tired so some one else can get most of that but on point 2, well first he said "emigrant" which is the opposite of "immigrant" and its based on the experience of the French Revolution where a bunch of nobles fled the country and fought for the other side, Marx is advocating taking a hard line against similar defectors today I learned a new word
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Jun 16, 2020 05:35
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cheetah7071 posted:My understanding is that conservatism arose out of a desire to maintain a de factor hierarchical society when all the de jure aristocrats were getting guillotined. "Some people are better than others" seems to be the unifying thread, but that can manifest in a lot of different ways. Anything from nazi-ism to objectivism to a strain of conservatism whose name I forget that was apparently popular in the UK in the early 20th century that wholeheartedly believed in noblesse oblige. It depends. Early continental conservatism up until around 1830-1848 was absolutely a counter-revolutionary movement that sought to restore, as much as possible, the pre-revolutionary status quo. This was obviously impossible, because the Revolution itself was an attempt to resolve the disjuncture between the political economy of the world system (mercantile capitalism) and the political order (absolutist feudalism). But Metternich and guys like him absolutely believed that liberalism was not only dangerous but wrong and irrational. Eventually, yeah, they gave up and more or less were absorbed by the new status quo liberalism and became a wing which more or less sought to recreate de facto hierarchies, undermine the left wing of liberalism, and make sure to go after those socialists. Fascism is basically this right-wing of centrist liberalism rearing its ugly head but imitating the form and aesthetics of mass-political left-liberalism and socialism. KaptainKrunk has issued a correction as of 06:01 on Jun 16, 2020 |
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Jun 16, 2020 05:58
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This thread is the best thread and I'm grateful for all of your contributions.
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Jun 16, 2020 06:44
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cheetah7071 posted:Thank you for the very informative post You actually have it pretty right, first of all. Seeing the growing revolutionary sentiment, the exploiters hid behind allowing regulations, propaganda and imperialism. However, this only slows down the process. There is an inherent contradiction in capitalism: the capitalist parasite needs surplus to continue exploitation, but the rate of profit tends to fall with time. Eventually, hardcore exploitation must resume, and indeed in the world the wages stagnate while productivity grows faster. With this comes increasing revolutionary sentiment. It's not an accident people are crackpinging more and more. quote:3) Speaking of those specific actions, the way he lays them out, it's sort of like a roadmap to communism. We've had a number of countries try to follow that roadmap at this point, and none of them really reached the endpoint he envisioned (yet, at least). Some of them (Russia) even went backwards into full capitalism. Have any later thinkers revised this roadmap to take into account the lessons learned by the actual 20th century attempts to follow Marx's? On a sidenote, I often hear it said that the reason they failed (or haven't fully succeeded yet, depending on your viewpoint) was because foreign Bourgeoisie (primarily in the USA) worked so hard to ensure they failed. Are there any alternate roadmaps that attempt to sidestep the need to foment simultaneous worldwide revolution? If you need to convince the entire world of your plan before it works, it's not particularly likely to succeed (see also, climate change). Modern anarchists are usually rooted in anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-communism. quote:5) The sort of final goal of communism it seems, at least in the Manifesto, is the complete abolition of class distinctions and thus a new equilibrium state for society. How is the future re-emergence of class to be prevented in such a society? Anarchists think that's a pipe dream because the State will just become the new oppressors - why would they recede from their position of power which naturally attracts opportunists? Hence, they start from bottom up, but the idea is the same: empower people and remove the advantage the exploiters have (private property, capital, possibility to have wage labor; but also the removal of the very concept of a professional leader) and it becomes untenable to become the exploiter. dex_sda has issued a correction as of 08:33 on Jun 16, 2020 |
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Jun 16, 2020 08:25
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Thanks for your answers. I'll read The Conquest of Bread next, then, to get a complimentary viewpoint. Doesn't look like it's all that long.
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Jun 16, 2020 08:44
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cheetah7071 posted:Thanks for your answers. I'll read The Conquest of Bread next, then, to get a complimentary viewpoint. Doesn't look like it's all that long. It's not, but it does assume some familiarity with Marx and the Communist Manifesto. What you got from this thread and reading the Manifesto is probably enough.
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Jun 16, 2020 09:19
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net work error posted:What's the deal with dialectics and why are they important? In the broadest sense, a dialectic is just a debate between 2 opposing ideas. It has been a staple of Western philosophy since Socrates and Plato. Later Enightenment Era philosophers took a modern approach to it and tried to categorize and systematize it. So you get stricter terms like the classic "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" or "abstract, negative, concrete". Hegel took this concept to the point of being metaphysical, as a demonstration of change and flux being the fundamental state of reality. That as soon as you reach a state of affairs, contradiction will arise and will force a change to a new state of affairs. Something to keep in mind is that, until Marx, pretty much everyone dealing in dialectics used it as a way of hashing out ideas, and all had a foot planted in the Idealist end of things. It only made sense in the realm of souls, spirit, and free will. Marx tried to merge it with materialism and a science of history, and I don't think the results are as spectacular as fans of Marx like to claim. dex_sda posted:Depends on your flavor of socialism. The Marxist thinkers like Marx and Engels and later Lenin have envisioned that the Party would educate and guide the populace towards classlessness. With no exploiters to be found and workers educated to what exploitation is, the capitalist has no space to return. Then, the State could recede and disappear, to achieve a fully egalitarian society. Anarchists can even argue this using dialectics. An end goal final state of the dialectic process is arbitrary. The USSR never got past classes. Probably never would have, because even if the Party members saw their position as transitory, they were already setting up intellectuals in separate housing with separate privileges. No reason why Hegel's perpetual change wouldn't just keep finding new exploiters and new modes of exploitation. In the grand scheme though, dialectics is like formal logic. It is a tool, and can be used or abused, and isn't always the right tool for the job. Marxists like it because it justifies all past revolutions, and justifies their future revolution. But that was the same for all the Idealists who used it before them, and for many later thinkers who argued that the moment forn Marx is past, and a new dialectic is taking place. Overall, it is useful to understand it in a broad sense because it of its place in the Western philosophical and rhetorical tradition.
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Jun 16, 2020 10:28
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Dialectics are an excellent tool to find inherent instabilities and begin analysing them in complex systems: when you think about it, capitalism can be argued for hours but the moment you reduce it to dialectics and find contradictions, the inherent failure of capitalism is plainly visible. Then, you can use what you found as a sort of Ansatz and analyse the situation more deeply, with your findings from dialectics in mind. However, I agree they can cloud your analysis if you consider them the end goal. Indeed anarchism does begin in applying dialectics to the idea of a communist state, but I will point out the ML people are aware of the contradictions, they just don't think anarchism can resolve them favorably in a realistic timeframe while anarchists obviously do. dex_sda has issued a correction as of 11:26 on Jun 16, 2020 |
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Jun 16, 2020 11:24
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Can someone give me a summary as to why the current regime in China is "bad" I'm aware of the sweatshops and such - just wondering how it got there and what went wrong
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Jun 16, 2020 17:45
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dex_sda posted:Dialectics are an excellent tool to find inherent instabilities and begin analysing them in complex systems: It definitely is, but it does require a pretty solid foundation to do it well. The "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" formula is enough to let the average goon know they are being presented with a dialectic. But people who really weild it well were usually philosphy professors. Or, in Marx's case, some one who practically lived inside a library. At the extreme, it takes a ton of assumptions about the state of reality going back to Aristotle. And it can be like taking logic to the extreme, in that one can get frustrated because the world doesn't always behave logically. MorrisBae posted:Can someone give me a summary as to why the current regime in China is "bad" My take is that it is the logical conclusion of a strict adherence to science and materialism. It isn't all bad. China brought electricity and running water to a billion people in a matter of a few decades. That is an unprecedented rate of development. But it is development in terms of material conditions. And that sort of narrow view was behind many of the atrocities of famous right wing governments. Even in the context of the "speed run capitalism" arguement, they are now well into the "exploit Africa" and "put ethnic minorities in camps" stage. As so many other Modern countries have done, so has China, and these things are features, rather than anomalies, of the Modern Era. Racism becomes a science, and solutions can be engineered. Happiness can't be quantified, but factory production can, so maximize production. If China is doing a speed run effort, it will be interesting to see if they find a solution to this sooner rather than later. The UK, France, and the US haven't yet, and are in a late stage Capitalism rut that would be loving disastrous if a country the size of China fell into. Imagine reaching a "colonialism turned inward" stage, but directed at 1.3 billion people.
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Jun 16, 2020 20:16
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Beowulfs_Ghost posted:It definitely is, but it does require a pretty solid foundation to do it well. The "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" formula is enough to let the average goon know they are being presented with a dialectic. But people who really weild it well were usually philosphy professors. Or, in Marx's case, some one who practically lived inside a library. 
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Jun 16, 2020 20:39
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The Chinese state seems to continue to believe in its own legitimacy, if it starts into endless austerity then we'll know it's hosed too.
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Jun 16, 2020 22:31
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I think one thing that’s important to remember about the failures or shortcomings of socialism/communism in the ussr and china is that generally, a mode of production takes a few tries to be successfully toppled. It’s something I’m only now reading a lot more about, but the bourgeoisie took centuries in most places to replace feudalism with capitalism, and there were many aborted attempts that led to monarchist restorations. That’s not to say that communism is right around the corner, only that movements need time to grow and mature and learn from struggles and shortcomings. In this vein, in my understanding of Chinese history, a lot of China’s capitalistic nature goes back to an aborted attempt to learn from and correct for the shortcomings of the soviet union: Mao and his followers were really eager to avoid the mistakes of the USSR in not sufficiently eradicating bourgeois ways of thinking and allowing the formation of a bureaucrat class that was essentially exploiting soviet workers. This led Mao to call for the great proletarian cultural revolution, where he mobilized the masses to attack the bourgeois elements of the party structure that were threatening to take China down the capitalist road. BUT, in the chaos that ensued, Mao found himself caught in a contradiction between his revolutionary impulse to unleash the masses, and the danger the masses posed to the very state and party apparatuses he’d helped build and that, at least nominally, protected the country from external threats like the ussr, usa, and taiwan. Mao essentially acquiesced to the right wing of the party. After his death the left wing leaders (gang of four) are put on show trial, the right wing (Deng) coalesces their power and initiates market reforms, slowly starts dismantling social protections, genuine communists and labor activists are increasingly oppressed, capitalism speedrun, imperialism in Africa, and so on and so forth
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Jun 17, 2020 05:06
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Beowulfs_Ghost posted:magine reaching a "colonialism turned inward" stage, but directed at 1.3 billion people. What do you mean by that, because my first thought for what that could mean would be what's going on with the Uighurs.
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Jun 17, 2020 09:15
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Something that gets to me is that Parenti's justification for Chinese control of Tibet sounds very much like imperialist apologia. He argues that the Chinese got rid of feudalism in Tibet, yet this is the same line of thinking that justified the British conquest of India (Sati abolition) or the Spanish conquest of Mexico (abolishing human sacrifice). I always understood anti-imperialism to mean that you let societies exist, warts and all, and allow them to solve their own problems.
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Jun 17, 2020 10:39
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Cuntellectual posted:What do you mean by that, because my first thought for what that could mean would be what's going on with the Uighurs. I believe it's a rephrase of this: Michael Novick posted:In general, fascism can best be understood as bringing the methods of imperial rule in the colonies into the metropole.
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Jun 17, 2020 11:20
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Great thread. I've got a couple of questions and observations that hopefully will add a different perspective. I don't understand how anyone can defend axioms like "the free market is more efficient" etc. when a look at the stock market for 5 loving seconds disproves it. It's also continuously amazes me how staggeringly bad capitalism is at being capitalism. Like, major corporations do all they can to exploit workers, and most of them still fundamentally fail at actually operating at a profit for any length of time without government subsidies/breaking all sorts of laws. Contrasted to family-owned firms that last for many generations, big capital falls on it's face at the drop of a hat, and even some of the most prosperous big capital firms in the world have a really terrible revenue to profit ratio. That's been my main way of educating my wife, who grew up super indoctrinated to American capitalism, and now is fairly radical - pointing out how bad capitalism is at the one thing it subordinates everything to. And how worker exploitation is ideological, rather than profitable, because companies that are better for workers prosper far more over the long term. Another observation is about the quality of goods and housing. My perspective is informed by growing up in Poland after the transition to capitalism - but with old stuff very much still present. Now, it is undeniable that the average quality of life has improved (probably due to better access to resources and world markets), though let's not forget that homelessness and poverty came with the "average" improving. The difference between things manufactured before the transition and now is shocking. There are so many things I grew up with that looked ugly, but functioned reliably forever. My family has a fridge that's older than me, and it's not great, but it works. The house I grew up in had a boiler manufactured in the 80s. Aside from not looking "modern", it worked perfectly fine when they sold the property 3 years ago. Contrast to all the rental apartments I've stayed in over the years, many of which talk about having a new boiler because the old one broke, or having issues every month or so. Something so simple as a (geometry) compass - all the way through primary school I used an East German one that my parents had, and really, I've not seen a better set - to match the quality you'd probably have to spend a pretty drat large chunk of change on professional architects' drafting tools. Everyone criticizes communism for housing conditions, families crammed into small apartments etc... but having been a real estate agent has given me a very different perspective. While certainly full of flaws, somewhat difficult to renovate and outmoded, the average communist era apartment is considerably bigger than what young people can afford now, and considerably sturdier than anything newly built. They also tend to come with wooden flooring, which back then was considered cheap and now is considered a more luxury feature. And the apartment I grew up in is triple the size of what I could afford with a decent salary and was literally free on the condition my parents renovate it to be livable. Transition to capitalism also resulted in destruction of a lot of craft and industry. Profitable factories got sold off to corrupt people for symbolic sums, then rapidly dismantled for quick money. Poland used to be a very respected textile producer, with Polish wool being appreciated even in British tailoring during the Cold War. Now there's hardly anything of the sort. In fact, the dumbest story I know is that there was a textile I forgot the name of, that was unique to a specialized producer and very prized for its characteristics in tailoring. Some sort of variation on seersucker, only made by a specialized factory. There's historical evidence of it being appreciated internationally... but after the transition, the factory was dismantled and existing stocks were destroyed because they were "too communist". So, the actual institutional knowledge on how to make it was lost. So, after the ramble, here's my question. My economics professors were actually very even handed in describing the flaws and merits of both market and centrally planned economies, not implying the superiority of one over the other - ironically, at a fairly high end private business school. They very much boiled it down to: in capitalism, your national bottleneck is money, while in centrally planned economies your bottleneck is raw material supply and factory capacity. In capitalism, with money you can buy resources and build factories; in centrally planned economies, you can do more or less whatever you want but can't easily obtain raw material from outside your borders since you need lots of money for that. Would you consider this to be accurate? Is this the heart of the issue of poverty in a lot of centrally planned economies? That you can allocate your resources more efficiently, but especially with embargoes you're very restricted in the total amount and variety of resources you have access to? Is a lot of the perception down to poverty being more visible, spread around everyone, rather than "hidden" within the underclass - as in, there is a lack of goods in stores because most can afford them, versus a surplus but one available only to the comfortable or rich? If that's the case, do any of the major thinkers talk about ways of managing/mitigating that? How do you sustain yourself as a country if your access to resources is so restricted by a hostile world? Is the sustainability of a socialist/communist nation dependent on the existence of friendly socialist/communist nations with different resources for trade?
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Jun 17, 2020 12:30
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