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This is a thread for those who want to discuss Leftist theory and write long screeds. This OP will function as a kind of introduction to these theories so that everyone can have a base of understanding for discussion. It's going to need a lot of help: If you want to contribute and we'll add you to the OP Baka-nin posted:Over the years I've been building an archive of texts on labour history, revolutions, theory and criticism. Currently there's about a 1000 entries (that are ok to share around) including essays, blogs, translations, comic books, art, audio tapes, documentaries and films. There's a lot there and I'd hate for a hard drive crash to take everything, and its good to share, so here's a couple of ways to access them. Hopefully the OP turns into a collection of explanations and essays by posters, and I will continue to expand it with contributions from myself and others. Let's start: Part 1 (skip part 1 if you don't like navel-gazing): Socialism Is Not When the Government Runs All the Factories So what the gently caress is Marxism? Well, the best way to explain it as a lens for viewing the world. Marxism is a way to understand and explain the things that go on around us, just like Liberalism. Liberalism explains the world as a bunch of individuals running all over the place acting selfishly upon their logic and reason. For example, let's say that you find a pile of gold. Liberalism declares the the finder will keep all the gold for himself, and trade away some of the rest for goods and services. You are using your logic and reason to better yourself. So, Liberalism focuses on individual liberties and attempts to predict the outcome of events based on reason. Reason is the yardstick by which Liberalism measures the world because a yardstick must be impartial. You can't use a measuring stick if it keeps changing, so you try to explain everything assuming that reason remains impartial. This is called Rationalism, and this is where Liberalism fails. The problem is, humans are not only rational. They are also emotional, delusional, what have you. The greatest proof that we are not all logic beep-borp computers is that we do not all agree on anything. Not even pizza toppings, and especially not our president (Seriously, you cannot explain Trump as a product of rational choices because even racism is irrational). So, Marxism discards with the metric of reason and theoretical explanations. If humans don't necessarily abide by reason alone, we need to look at the material conditions to explain the actions of individuals. By examining the world that people inhabit, we can understand why they do the things they do. This is called Materialism Say there is a riot and we use Materialism to ask "Why is everyone rioting?" Well, we must look to their material conditions: How much food do they have? Are they in danger? Are they sick? We may learn that they are rioting because they are hungry, or scared, or what have you. It's not necessarily a rational conclusion. Scared or hungry people aren't necessarily acting rationally, they are hungry or scared. But we can learn their motivations because we understand the material world and how they interact in it. Material conditions include technology, resources, violence, and especially the relationships between people. And when we use Materialism to analyze Rationalism we find that while Rationalism is sufficient to explain why individual people do what they do, it does a very poor job of explaining the way people interact with each other. So, to back up a bit, let's remind ourselves of Rationalism and use it to measure a very complicated individual: a Police officer. Rationalism predicts that the Police officer's job is to serve and protect, and he will act rationally towards that goal because it selfishly gets him paid. And if we look at a rich white person, the officer certainly protects and serves rich white people. Even Materialism would provide that he protects the wealthy. However, what about a poor minority? Does the officer treat a poor Black person the same way he treats a rich white person? Well, Rationalism says that his job is to serve and protect, so therefore he must serve and protect the poor Black person the same way he serves and protects the poor white person. But let's be real: Here on the Prime Material Plane, the police doesn't treat everyone equally (to put it mildly). The officer oppresses and perhaps even kills the poor Black person. So we see with Materialism, who you are in relation to the officer changes how the officer will treat you. And that is what Materialism is so good at analyzing: the way that humans interact with other humans. And that's what Marxism really is: It's looking at the way people interact with each other by looking at the material conditions surrounding them. The Police officer treats different people differently based on their wealth, skin color, and even gender, all real world realities. These are not theoretical constructs like "pride", "duty", or "logic". And that's Marxism: A way to analyze the relationships that people have with each other by looking at the material conditions of the world. This way, we can pull apart incredibly complex systems and look at how the they function. And the big complex system that Marxism analyzes is Capitalism Part 2 WTF is Capitalism to a Socialist? Capitalism is basically a bunch of wealthy business owners (bosses) paying employees in exchange for labor. So, you go do your work and at the end of the week your boss hands a a check to pay you for all the work you did. This is called the wage-labor relationship. Wages are exchanged for labor; money is paid for work. And it is also this relationship that defines the classes: workers sells their labor to bosses bosses profit off of the labor of the worker. So, let's say there's a factory that makes, I dunno, ladders. Every day the workers uses the boss's tools (hammers, nails, glue, machinery) to make ladders and the boss pays them for their efforts. The ladders themselves belong to the boss, and he sells them at a markup for a profit. This is the basic structure of a Capitalist enterprise, a very simple blue-print for the wage-labor relationship. The problem with this relationship is that it puts the worker and the business owner (boss) directly at odds with each other. Everything that the worker wants hurts the boss, and everything that the boss wants hurts the worker. For example the worker wants: Higher wages, which come directly out of the boss's pocket. A safe workplace which will slow down the ladder assembly line and mean less profits for the boss. Benefit packages which the boss has to pay for. Breaks and paid vacation time which is basically throwing money down a garbage chute for the boss. Meanwhile, the boss wants: Lower labor costs which means rock bottom wages and a small workforce. Constant and quick production lines which are both hazardous and exhausting for the worker. Complete control over the employee schedules which means workers having as few days off as possible. 0 benefits for the worker, as those are unnecessary expenses that only detract from the profit margin. So the end result are two groups of individuals who are actively working to screw each other over, two Classes locked forever in a Struggle over work, money, and time. This is because 99% of their desires are oppositional. This relationship between the Bosses and the Workers is called Class Struggle. So, how do we handle this literal conflict of interests? Marxism looks for a way to break out of that adversarial relationship, and it concludes that Workers should be their own Bosses by owning the businesses in which they work. That's what most people mean by (little s) socialism the economic system. Workers decide their own wages, make their own schedules, and own all the products as well as the the tools to make them. There's no rear end in a top hat on Wall Street to skim off the top and cut their pay. Everyone who works at the ladder factory owns an equal share of the factory. This is what socialism concludes, and the government has absolutely nothing to do with it. Lastly, you may notice a particular pattern from the boss's demands: Lowest possible wages, constant labor pool, no benefits, complete control over the worker. You may recognize these traits in the foundational American labor source: Slavery. In short, the slave is the ideal worker for the boss. They're cheap, have no rights to complain, can be forced to work in hazardous and uncomfortable work environments, has to work every Saturday, etc. So, the boss will do everything in his power to make the worker more like a slave. And, frankly, the bosses seem to be winning. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Nov 16, 2020 |
# ? Nov 5, 2020 04:17 |
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Here's a great essay by Falstaff explaining the difference between socialism, communism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat Falstaff posted:Alright, I hope I'm not annoying too many people with a wall of text, but here goes... Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Marxist reading list!Loveshaft posted:I just reread The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Short Course) for the first time in a decade, and I forgot how great and essential it is to Marxism. I would rank it up there after The Communist Manifesto & Anti-Duhring for beginners looking to understand socialism. It has a compilation of the best writings of Lenin throughout along with Stalin’s infamous essay Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Baka-nin posted:Over the years I've been building an archive of texts on labour history, revolutions, theory and criticism. Currently there's about a 1000 entries (that are ok to share around) including essays, blogs, translations, comic books, art, audio tapes, documentaries and films. There's a lot there and I'd hate for a hard drive crash to take everything, and its good to share, so here's a couple of ways to access them. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 02:23 on Dec 10, 2020 |
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Reserved
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Reserved
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Looking forward to some good discussions here.
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 04:41 |
Does anyone else find it ironic that a thread about socialism starts with three posters claiming personal ownership of slots to respond in?
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 04:44 |
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Does anyone else find it ironic that a thread about socialism starts with three posters claiming personal ownership of slots to respond in? It is communal, bruh.
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 04:46 |
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Does anyone else find it ironic that a thread about socialism starts with three posters claiming personal ownership of slots to respond in? If you’d like to write a post I can put it in my slot. We can call it a post-share.
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 04:46 |
Ruggan posted:If you’d like to write a post I can put it in my slot. We can call it a post-share. No thank you, but well played.
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 04:47 |
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Thank you so much for posting this! I was a libertarian shitbird up until Trump's election shook me out of it, and while I've learned a lot about socialism over the years, I've had a hard time explaining it to other people. So I'll probably have a lot of questions ITT. What's a good starting place for reading about it?
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 04:49 |
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Fister Roboto posted:Thank you so much for posting this! I was a libertarian shitbird up until Trump's election shook me out of it, and while I've learned a lot about socialism over the years, I've had a hard time explaining it to other people. So I'll probably have a lot of questions ITT. Well, that depends on what you want to learn about it. What are you curious about specifically? That is, do you want to know more about the theoretical angle, or a kind of "what does all this mean to me? What should I do about it?" angle.
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 04:53 |
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Cpt_Obvious posted:So, how do we handle this literal conflict of interests? Socialism look for a way to break out of that adversarial relationship, and it concludes that Workers should be their own Bosses by owning the businesses in which they work. That's what most people mean by (little s) socialism the economic system. Workers decide their own wages, make their own schedules, and own all the products as well as the the tools to make them. There's no rear end in a top hat on Wall Street to skim off the top and cut their pay. Everyone who works at the ladder factory owns an equal share of the factory. This is what socialism concludes, and the government has absolutely nothing to do with it. Not all factories make equal profit, have equal needs for workers, or have similar skill requirements. If wages are distributed equally among workers, you solve the problem of unequal pay at a local level. But the problem of more/less desirable jobs still exist and thereby some significant inequality. How does socialism suggest to resolve this issue?
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 04:58 |
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I find it interesting that you zoom in specifically for these first posts on the relationship between boss and worker. I'm in an interesting position as I work in education which is simultaneously egalitarian career but also fundamentally rooted in capitalism within the US. The notion of the bosses becomes more abstracted although I'd argue it's abstracted. Anyway, I'm currently looking at becoming a school administrator and am studying Professional Learning Communities at the moment. One of the principles of them that I really have been digging is that of Reciprocal Accountability. The premise is that strong supervisors--separate from a boss as ideally a school Principal doesn't actually own anything, and ideally schools should not be seen in terms of production--delegate ownership and responsibility of the school amongst the staff. The catch is that the supervisor's job is then to ensure that everyone has the tools and training available to flourish with these responsibilities. The manager is constantly developing and serving the needs of the staff to meet the needs of the school. So, you find yourself in a cycle where the supervisor benefits from responsibilities being distributed while the staff benefits from these responsibilities by learning new skills and honing old ones. It's an idea I've really interested in because I think it is really transferable outside of education. I think the question of having truly socialized workplaces gets confusing to people used to thinking in terms of hierarchy. I think the boss explanation often isn't as simple for people because most people don't interact with their actual "boss," rather a supervisor or manager who is taking on the interests of the boss. The hierarchy is structured in many layers of people on the bottom serving those above them and ultimately the bosses at the top. I think because people don't actually interact with their "boss," but are often used to sort of mini-tyrants working on the boss's behalf, the idea of a manager being an rear end in a top hat just seems like the way of the world. Of course, it's an illusion. Taking your ladder metaphor, if the boss has multiple ladder factories with managers at all the factories, each manager superficially seems like their job is to build more ladders, but their actual job is representing the needs of the boss. The manufacturing of ladders is secondary. Reciprocal Accountability leaves room for a supervisor or managerial role, but it imagines the manager serving the worker as much as visa versa, and ideally more so. It pushes the manager to always ask and question what are the needs of the workers to meet the goals they are being asked to do. It works more cleanly in education because education is ideally founded in virtue rather than profit or production. But I think it's a framework that has definitely pushed my thinking on how to not be an rear end once I'm in a manager position, and I feel like it fills in some of the blanks of how a democratized workplace operates on daily basis. It's an idea that I felt was neat and thought I might throw it out there.
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Reserved. I'm not going to use this space but I'm not giving it back either. Let this be your first lesson in how capitalism works.
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Well, that depends on what you want to learn about it. What are you curious about specifically? That is, do you want to know more about the theoretical angle, or a kind of "what does all this mean to me? What should I do about it?" angle. Yeah definitely the theory behind it. Basically your OP but more in depth.
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Ruggan posted:Not all factories make equal profit, have equal needs for workers, or have similar skill requirements. If wages are distributed equally among workers, you solve the problem of unequal pay at a local level. But the problem of more/less desirable jobs still exist and thereby some significant inequality. Great question! So, let's look at a hospital. You have doctors, and you have janitors. Some people may say that you need to pay the doctors more than the janitors because of schooling costs, expertise, w/e. And Socialism can make room for that. There's no reason why the doctor's should be disallowed from making more money, however the decision as to how much pay each worker recieves is based on what the workers decide. That is, if you're gonna pay the janitor less money, then the janitor still owns an equal share of the business and gets input into his own wages. He basically gets the same vote as the doctor does when it comes to deciding how much wages everyone receives, he just may get less pay at the end of the week. Or, just everyone deserves the same pay always. The point is, the workers decide it, not some rear end in a top hat on wall street.
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 05:02 |
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I don't like the term "boss" because it originated from Dutch and was supposed to mean "master", i.e. slavery/serfdom/servitude. Nowadays it is no longer relevant for legal jobs in US or other first world economies, and the term manager should be used instead imo. A key difference is that managers don't have the ability to fire the employees they manage (unless it is a small business situation where the manager is also the chief executive). This means that in modern first world economies there should be no personal strife between an employee and their manager (with the small business exception of course). If the employee has a problem with the manager they can talk with HR or executives to resolve the matter, or just refuse to do what their manager asks, and then talk to the executives/HR if the manager contacts them asking them to fire you.
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 05:02 |
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This isn’t a long screed, but I’m more and more convinced of Piketty’s “Brahmin left, Merchant Right” hypotheses, and I don’t think the broader left has really grappled enough with what that being true means, both in terms of theories of politics and just actual concrete strategies for power.
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 05:03 |
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Great question! What if 51% of the workers vote to give themselves 100% of the wages and nothing to the other 49%?
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 05:04 |
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Timeless Appeal posted:I find it interesting that you zoom in specifically for these first posts on the relationship between boss and worker. I'm in an interesting position as I work in education which is simultaneously egalitarian career but also fundamentally rooted in capitalism within the US. The notion of the bosses becomes more abstracted although I'd argue it's abstracted. This is all an interesting idea, and I like it a lot. However, we can't leave out hire and fire power. The workers should be in charge of who hires and fires, not a supervisor unless there is some sort of election to decide on who should in charge of hiring and firing, a sort of elected Republic of supervisors.
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 05:05 |
Does socialism only have room for people who agree with / are cooperative with the drive to produce economic growth? Or, in a larger sense, people interested in cooperation of any kind? What about people who are anti-growth, for example anti-natalists or monkeywrenchers? What about people who are uncooperative or misanthropic by nature? Does one have to be a team player to have a place in a socialist system? Or is there room for the antisocial socialist?
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human garbage bag posted:What if 51% of the workers vote to give themselves 100% of the wages and nothing to the other 49%? The other 49% strike and nobody gets nothing.
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human garbage bag posted:
Are these frictionless spherical managers and employees? Managers can not only fire employees (by creating a paper trail of bad reviews), they can also just make their lives a living hell by denying them advancement and giving them the worst tasks/shifts available and denying them all of the perks.
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 05:09 |
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Does socialism only have room for people who agree with / are cooperative with the drive to produce economic growth? Or, in a larger sense, people interested in cooperation of any kind? What about people who are anti-growth, for example anti-natalists or monkeywrenchers? What about people who are uncooperative or misanthropic by nature? Does one have to be a team player to have a place in a socialist system? Or is there room for the antisocial socialist? Does any society have room for anti-social behavior? Socialism views cops as assholes who violently oppress the workers to protect the property of the wealthy. This was also Adam Smith's view. Instead, socialism would focus on why a person became anti-social and try to fix those problems directly. So, therapists and economic support instead of cops.
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human garbage bag posted:What if 51% of the workers vote to give themselves 100% of the wages and nothing to the other 49%? This. Or the 99 doctors agree to pay the janitor a pittance and the janitor has no real say - but they can’t get any other job in the area. This method doesn’t seem to help minority disenfranchised groups. Also, what about the fact that there will still be people working at a grocery store making a barely live-able wage while others working at the gizmo factory making lots of money because of high gizmo sales. The grocery store employees are still way poorer than the factory employees.
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Ruggan posted:This. Or the 99 doctors agree to pay the janitor a pittance and the janitor has no real say - but they can’t get any other job in the area. This method doesn’t seem to help minority disenfranchised groups. It's not a perfect system. There are holes. However: Consider that how this exact same problem would function under Capitalism. It wouldn't take 99 doctors, it would take 1 spoiled little bitch baby who owns more of the company than anyone else. And the people who make the money while everyone else eats poo poo is not some anomaly or problem, it is the actual goal!
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The Oldest Man posted:Are these frictionless spherical managers and employees? Managers can not only fire employees (by creating a paper trail of bad reviews), they can also just make their lives a living hell by denying them advancement and giving them the worst tasks/shifts available and denying them all of the perks. The employee can also talk to HR/executives and leave a bad review for the manager. In fact many companies do send out anonymous surveys to their employees asking them questions about their manager, similar to professor reviews in college.
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 05:16 |
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human garbage bag posted:The employee can also talk to HR/executives and leave a bad review for the manager. In fact many companies do send out anonymous surveys to their employees asking them questions about their manager, similar to professor reviews in college. And a lot of workers get punished for filling them out honestly.
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 05:17 |
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Fister Roboto posted:Yeah definitely the theory behind it. Basically your OP but more in depth. Richard Wolff is a loving awesome Marxist economist, one of the few in the United States. Here's him explaining Labor theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0ClwYFUHXU
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Cpt_Obvious posted:And a lot of workers get punished for filling them out honestly. It doesn't make sense for company executives to encourage abusive managers because that would lower the productivity of the employees, and hence the amount of labor that can be exploited.
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 05:21 |
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Cpt_Obvious posted:It's not a perfect system. There are holes. Sure. That’s fair. But with that answer I still see people clustering into socio-economic classes and there still being quite a few people in an awful position. People taking advantage of their wealth, skills, knowledge to hold a position of power. I guess a broader question, then. In your opinion, what problems specifically is Socialism intended to solve? And just as importantly, what isn’t it intended to solve?
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 05:23 |
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human garbage bag posted:It doesn't make sense for company executives to encourage abusive managers because that would lower the productivity of the employees, and hence the amount of labor that can be exploited. 2. People don't act rationally.
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Ruggan posted:Sure. That’s fair. But with that answer I still see people clustering into socio-economic classes and there still being quite a few people in an awful position. People taking advantage of their wealth, skills, knowledge to hold a position of power. It is very specifically intended to solve and end Class Struggle. And it is incapable of solving whatever problems are inevitably created by Socialism.
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Richard Wolff is a loving awesome Marxist economist, one of the few in the United States. Here's him explaining Labor theory: Yeah I've listened to a few of his lectures on youtube. Would something written by him be a good start?
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 05:26 |
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Fister Roboto posted:Yeah I've listened to a few of his lectures on youtube. Would something written by him be a good start? He has multiple books, including Understanding Socialism https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Socialism-Richard-D-Wolff/dp/0578227347
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 05:27 |
Cpt_Obvious posted:Does any society have room for anti-social behavior? Oh yeah, I'd say most societies have room for anti-social behavior, because there are lots of antisocial people who still live in those societies. I don't think it's unreasonable at all to suggest that a significant percentage of humanity just wants to be left alone. Treating that as some kind of sickness to be cured, that's the kind of scary stuff I hear people say about socialism, and I don't want to believe it because those people believe all kinds of wacky conspiracy nonsense. But if you're telling me the society's goals will engulf my own if mine are too selfish, that brings up questions of enforcement that lead scary places, and I'm left wondering if there's some truth to the classic suburbanite fears. Forgive the extreme example but really it does come down to this: can I be utterly self-absorbed on the fringes of a socialist society? If not, I don't see the majority of human beings meshing well with it. The percentage of humankind that isn't at least partially self-absorbed is so, so tiny.
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 05:27 |
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Thanks for making this thread. Here's an article I want to share: it's one of the best long form essays on (racial) capitalism I've read recently: https://aeon.co/essays/on-liberty-security-and-our-system-of-racial-capitalism
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Cpt_Obvious posted:He has multiple books, including Understanding Socialism Outstanding, thank you.
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Ruggan posted:This. Or the 99 doctors agree to pay the janitor a pittance and the janitor has no real say - but they can’t get any other job in the area. This method doesn’t seem to help minority disenfranchised groups. Depends on what type of political organization underpins your socialism. If it's a vanguard party-state, they will probably mandate that everyone makes certain amounts determined by a central planning organization (or draws a certain number of goods vouchers, or whatever) and they send the cops or paramilitaries to gently caress you up if you try to horde. If it's more like a syndicalist union federation, then the grocery store federation gets together with the other point-of-sale federated unions and freezes out the gizmo factory's distribution channels until they get an agreed cut of those proceeds. But overall, the answer you're looking for to "what happens if group x tries to use local advantage to gently caress over group y" in a more syndicalist type of political economy is "general strike". An injury to one is an injury to all after all.
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# ? Nov 5, 2020 05:28 |