|
It feels like y'all are just finding ways to make socialism sound like it's supposed to be this exciting high-stakes millenarian turnaround in order to assign artificial meaningfulness to the debate. But socialism is simple and boring. It's downright anti-excitement, mainly alleviating stressful uncertainties and providing people that bit more control over their lives. Things are going to stay the same much more so than they are going to change, people themselves would still be greedy and shortsighted assholes and so on. The thing is, under capitalism the greed of 80-90% of the people counts for next to nothing. They can't accumulate much, no matter how greedy and self-serving they are as people. They don't become captains of industry, they work menial jobs for little pay until their health fails like everyone else does, both the saints and the sinners. People's individual vices or "human nature" have never ever decided what society looks like. The question that decides everything is: how do people have to be organized in order to outproduce and militarily defeat the dominant mode of production and social organization? A successful socialist society can only be organized along those lines: it has to take what works in capitalist society and replace what doesn't with something more effective. It cannot start out as a nice society of nice people at all, it's necessarily going to be a rather harsh society marked by a generational trauma about the preceding violent and chaotic times. Ultimately, the ability to force others to do as you do is all that really matters. Marxism just predicts that at this point in history, no one could materially defeat a society where industrial workers are the ones forcing their will on everyone else. It doesn't imagine those workers' better nature to be in charge at all, it predicts their naked self-interest and hatred and vices and fears to lead them to force everyone to build and join classless societies.
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 20:25
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 00:03 |
|
|
The Oldest Man posted:You're not a capitalist unless you own things for a living. I'll say that again: if you do labor either directly for others (via painting houses, busking, shoeing horses, sucking dicks, or designing websites), or you draw a wage from somewhere, you're not a capitalist. No matter how much money you have, if you are not capable of supporting and growing your livelihood without your own labor, you are not a capitalist because you are not living off of the value stolen via the capital wealth siphon. And as such, you are not really able to benefit from the run-away snowball effect of capital accumulation. The worker and capitalist are not people, they are social roles, and the same person can occupy both. The people who meaningfully occupy both roles at the same time constitute a capitalist middle class that do make a meaningful amount of money off of other people's labor even if there's no positive feedback loop over the accumulation. Those bribes you mention aren't just some form of extra-economic "corruption", they're a dividend on capital. The capitalist middle class literally lives on those dividends just as it lives on the compensation for its own labor, so telling it to refuse those dividends and wholeheartedly join the workers is naive at best, and doesn't work in any case. This middle class's interests are threatened by both the workers and the capitalists depending on their demands against the other, so it has an interest in doing two things: it tries to conciliate between the two sides in order to produce a peace that benefits them, and it shamelessly sucks up to the more powerful side, which in capitalist society are the capitalists. Mao basically had it right when he said what the only way to consistently win over the middle classes to the workers' side is to defeat and humiliate the enemy so badly that the middle classes totally lose faith in its ability to keep ruling.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 21:42
|
|
|
Larry Parrish posted:the short answer is why third world maoism is not actually a meme ideology; while typically incoherent angry rhetoric, it's a direct reaction to people have been poo poo on by Dole Fruit or Exxon etc for generations The meme ideology is maoism - third worldism, which is a tendency developed and subscribed to mainly in first world countries. That tendency's main thrust is that socialist praxis should be supporting third world movements through donations, advocacy, domestic terrorism etc. Third world maoism, of people who have been poo poo on by Dole Fruit or Exxon etc for generations, is just maoism.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2020 09:26
|
|
|
Mismanagement is kind of a constant in society, I would ask what were the differences that produced the difference in severity. China was under a harsh economic blockade (though not nearly as harsh as the Soviet Union had used to be in) which made it very hard for it to import large amounts of food or stop exporting set amounts of it without getting into high interest debt or default on their payments and trigger nasty conditions in their agreements. See, they had already taken lots of debt for economic development purposes, because development required buying expensive foreign designs and that required acquiring foreign currencies quickly. Mortality rates had plummeted and people were making kids as you would expect coming from an era of war, so the population was full of kids and elderly that used to not be there. The peasant methods hadn't increased the productivity of the land much, so the amount of surplus grain was being reduced quickly. At the same time, the peasants were dirt poor and typically had enough food, so like in third world peasant countries generally, there had been little market incentive for private traders (which existed!) to establish a robust nationwide market that would move things around over long distances and at reasonable prices. Some big differences from a regular third world economy though were that traders couldn't go around price gouging and peasants couldn't sell their lands or enter other onerous contracts, which is typically the way peasants whose crops have failed acquire enough money to buy enough price gouged food to feed their family for a bit longer. For food security, the state had invested in a system of localities pooling resources and distributing food to those in trouble. This worked great for elders, disabled and sick people, orphans etc, as partially evidenced by the massive reduction in mortality, but failed against calamities that would engulf whole localities at once. But the system had worked so well that there had been little pressure to develop a dynamic and high-throughput national scale redistribution system. It's not an easy problem to solve, especially in a land with limited communication infrastructure and so on. The stories told to us about the famines in China pick out these "inscrutable Chinese, who would ever do that!" factors like the sparrows and backyard pig iron, instead of facing the fact that the main difference between China and e.g. India at this point in history was not level of mismanagement (I'd say the Chinese were better generally, but the rapid collectivization had eroded that through novelty), but that in India the peasant was free to firesale their lands and freedoms, ruining their life in order to save it, while in China they were not. State and foreign aid doesn't usually count for that much in large-scale famines, China utilized them basically just as well as other countries did.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2020 10:12
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:While I agree that the mode of production necessitates some things, like cops, social classes etc, I also think that hierarchies can just be self sustaining, that they have their own inertia, especially in a world where they are so prevalent because people grow up believing them to be good and reproduce that belief. It's visible in poo poo like racism, sexism, homophobia etc, the establishment of hierarchies of ways of being just for the sake of it. Sure they might be used by capitalists to uphold their position, but there are a lot of people who just genuinely think they're good, who genuinely believe in them, and I think that the fight against that sort of thing is pretty much a separate thing from the fight to change the mode of production in society. I think that because those things can be used as weapons for the capitalist class that fighting them is very useful to the fight to change the mode of production but I also think that it is entirely possible for people and societies that are committed to changing the mode of production to just... not care about fixing those things or even to uphold them. The idea that all injustice is rooted in production is just... bizzare? There are clearly self sustaining forms of hierarchy that have bugger all to do with production and can serve as an axis along which to reproduce classes if you somehow removed the current ones. Historical materialism doesn't claim that production determines everything about society, it claims that it sets the hard limits around what a society can be like. The hierarchical organization of various institutions is part of those hard limits. Material power to influence people rules, the ability to do the most with the least is what counts. For instance, to defeat racism for good, a non-racist society has to be considerably better able to utilize its resources than a racist one. And even though hierarchies *seek* to sustain themselves, once a non-racist society is considerably better able to utilize its resources, there's rather little a racist ruling hierarchy somewhere else can do to hold onto its power long-term. But between those two points, there's a long period when the two kinds of society will be evenly enough matched that both have trouble knocking each other out, and the fight can still go either way. Moreover, in the middle of a struggle to change society, a progressive movement is forced to rely on socially backward structures while they still haven't figured out progressive alternatives that are more effective as well. For one, society is going to rely on a vertical military hierarchy where all sorts of privileged elements are going to rise to the top because they had better opportunities to become effective leaders. This has historically been true of both revolutionary societies and reformist progressive societies. So there's also a struggle to defend social progress against those backward forms of organization over the long term, because it takes time to render them unnecessary and discardable. And as long as the two sides are materially evenly matched, the fight within a society can go either way as well. In conclusion, there are no two separate struggles, they're one interconnected struggle: the struggle to render all these hierarchical forms of organization into outdated technology that can't materially compete against the new free, nonhierarchical forms of organization. It's not possible to make it by just focusing on one half or the other, either the forces of production or the relationships between people. If the forces of production are evolved in a way that doesn't require organizing the people in a different way, they're just as useful to the backward social forms than the progressive ones, and the fight continues. If the relations between people are evolved in a way that doesn't evolve the forces of production, the people haven't gained any additional power to defeat the backward social forms for good. You either win both struggles or you win neither. But the struggle over production is fundamental, because it determines whether all other victories can be taken away in an instant or not.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2020 13:49
|
|
|
Disnesquick posted:Assuming you meant tenable there. I dunno about what exactly you're referring to by "hierarchical communism", but the highly developed forms don't expect to "tame" hierarchy or ensure that individuals don't exploit their positions for personal gain or that hierarchy over the economy doesn't reproduce class or capitalist relations. It's the opposite, really. They expect to produce a situation where those individuals can't organize among themselves to seriously betray society without destroying themselves in the process. Basically, the revolution isn't over as long as they exist. They just can't be gotten rid of with force because they're historically necessary. They have to be made unnecessary first. People don't found socialist societies on capitalist relationships and then attempt to reign in the capitalist institutions because they're dumb or opportunist, they do it because those are the cards they've been dealt. Capitalist technology isn't designed to allow workers to self-manage it, it only lets workers be the ones to give political and board-of-director style direction to economic development. The ability to self-manage has to be built up from first principles so that management isn't some special thing only a select educated few can do. The understanding of that was already in at least Engels's writings. Anarchists feuded with him & Marx for a reason: they were in favor of letting actual industrial capitalists initially keep their private enterprises and so on, while the workers would gradually learn to take over more and more of the everyday functions of enterprise.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2020 18:04
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:I don't think it's true that you can trace a gradual accumulation of power in the state bureaucracy's hands from, idk, 1927 to 1989 or whatever. What made soviet administrators more powerful under Kruschev than under Stalin, or under Brezhnev than under Kruschev? Certainly many if not all of them might have wanted to become billionaires who owned everything the entire time, but, to paraphrase uncop from another thread, they can't all do that and each one's personal quality of life depends on their preventing their peers from defecting and becoming billionaires. So what was so different about 1992 as opposed to 1950 or 1970? Not some sort of critical mass tipping point of accumulated bureaucratic privilege, but shifts in the global balance of economic power such that the Soviet state was in a weak position in terms of international trade flows and was willing to do make risky, desperate changes to its own internal functioning. It wasn't a strengthening but a weakening of the USSR that allowed capitalism to metastasize. Since you're paraphrasing me, I wanna fill in my thoughts. I agree with the gist of this, but I'd add that preventing one's peers from becoming billionaires is only the best srtategy for a middling bureaucrat if they can't ride on such a billionaire's coattails. As the economy developed more and more private space for bureaucrats to develop their fortunes, starting from the Stalin constitution, taking a leap with the Khrushchev and Brezhnev era emulation of capitalist competition, and hyper-accelerating with Gorbachev's reforms, coattail-riding became more and more realistic as a strategy. You know how bureaucrats were eventually the ones selling the USSR out and engaging in a massive free-for-all to plunder it. They always contained a pro-capitalist fifth column (who Stalin mistook for foreign agents and his "successors" made peace with), and they were allowed to make themselves so necessary to the economy that they could win demand after demand decade by decade. IMO this internal pull toward capitalist-style institutions was the fundamental force and USSR's economic troubles were an external factor, much like how neoliberal elites in the west used economic crises to paralyze their competition and accelerate the implementation of their policies. Pentecoastal Elites posted:Like, what we're doing here in this thread is mostly masturbatory, because it's fun to talk about this stuff, but it's not very useful beyond the broad strokes -- what is your relationship to your labor, the product of your labor, and the profit your boss takes. How does that inform our current situation? What can we do about it? What does a world look like where that is changed for the better? All stuff anyone can easily grasp in like a ten minute overview of Marx's writing. Who gives a poo poo about "the wider field"? Who gives a poo poo about knowing all of the literature? Who in the world could possibly, ever, give a single poo poo about academic debates so far removed from actual lived reality that they're only relevant or interesting to other academics? If "correct thought" and best practice lie somewhere deep inside thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of pages in university reading lists it's totally worthless. The ideas are useless for anything other than academic fart-huffing because they require so much investment and can't be communicated easily. Yes! Well-read people aren't some "acolytes" that should be begged to give out their learned wisdom. If the dead word they have read has the potential to live, it won't live unless they translate it into something communicable and useful. And after that, there's the question of who they translate it to serve. The natural tendency of the academia-poisoned person is to become an exemplary servant of themselves and some rich patron, while jealously safeguarding their special position from the hoi polloi. Of course, this thread would need to be oriented toward a purpose to have potential to be less masturbatory. Disnesquick posted:My main focus here is where theory can inform praxis. I honestly couldn't give a crap about the literature except where it can raise useful insights around how best to avoid power concentrating and collapsing the interesting cooperative projects I'm currently engaged in or will be over the next five years. Having praxis now, imo, is much more important than a hundred theoretical discussions in a book that nobody will ever read. Being able to actually run social experiments with different organizational forms, even if only on a small scale, seems an absolutely vital step in making the "science" part of "social science" a reality. What is the actual honest purpose of your cooperative projects? If you just need theory of minimal hierarchy cooperative management, that's business theory, not socialist theory. Cooperatives can be part of a socialist praxis, but they're not socialist praxis in itself and can be ran perfectly well without engaging with socialism at all. Socialist theory is ultimately about how to stitch together all these regular human efforts into an organized collective effort that can produce a new society. The theory serves people who want to personally live life in a way that isn't possible under capitalism and would subordinate themselves to a collective struggle to make it possible. It's only useful to cooperatives whose members want to subordinate themselves to the needs of a larger struggle. If you're interested in cooperatives because of socialist goals, the main use of the theory for you is to explain the conditions that are required for a co-op to be a force to advance socialism, and strategies of linking up with others with the same goal. As a possibly helpful aside, I've recently been inspired by this concept of what i could call a support mutual aid cooperative: a cooperative that links up local mutual aid efforts by providing services that they all need. That's socialist theory put to action: dividing labor so that everyone is serving someone they know how to serve and want to serve, in a way they know how to. Locals having their ear to the ground and figuring out how to meet people's concrete goals with the least amount of resources, and others listening to all those local efforts and figuring out what could be acquired in bulk to provide it more efficiently. But it's work that takes an entirely different attitude from either "business" or "charity".
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2020 14:38
|
|
|
Sharks Eat Bear posted:Is this another description for a materialist dialectic? I've always had a hard time wrapping my head around Hegelian dialectics but this seems much more intuitive to me Praxis as CYBEReris explained it is a dialectic but not a materialist one. The thing about materialist dialectics is that the tendential direction of the flow goes from the real world toward the world of consciousness (or alternatively, consciousness and thought aren't involved at all in the dialectic). The explicitly materialist take on praxis is that the process of social practice produces new thought, which is then applied back to alter social practice. But the word "praxis" is more commonly used to talk of an opposite flow that marxists would call idealist: that the process of thought produces new social practice and that feeds back to improve ideas and theory. The tendential direction of the flow, or which side of the dialectic is principal, is concretely about which side develops more organically and self-reliantly and which side develops in leaps in response to changes in the other. Generally speaking, it's very rare for new thought to cause sweeping changes in how things are actually done, and much more common for new social practice to force sweeping changes in how people think. You can think of how science reacts to whenever it expands to new experimental areas where their old theories don't produce correct forecasts anymore. They can completely overturn their models and replace them with new ones from first principles. But whenever science discovers revolutionary new practical possibilities like nuclear power, flight or gene manipulation, they are usually applied as iterative improvements to how things were already done: e.g. a step in the old social practice is replaced with a machine that enables people to do the same thing in a new and improved way. uncop fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Nov 20, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2020 07:29
|
|
|
Crumbskull posted:Damm, that makes a lot of sense. Whose insight is this? The insight seems to have originated in Marx’s and Engels’s interactions sometime in the 1840’s, when they were polemicising against the Young Hegelians about hegelianism and materialism. As far as I understand, the realization was the basis of their leap from philosophy and enlightened newspapers to mass politics, political economy, military theory and science more generally. But they never wrote their thoughts down quite that clearly, so it’s always been a matter of interpretation and a point of contention. Both academics and socialist bureaucrats seem to find it more natural to see the world as if their thought was the steward of social practice, so it doesn’t really end up written in many texts with clarity.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2020 09:37
|
|
|
Sharks Eat Bear posted:Yeah wow that’s a great write up, thanks much There are two kinds of class struggle, two kinds of class consciousness and two kinds of class. I could call them economic and historic. For instance, there is the mass of exploited wage laborers, they're the proletariat in the economistic sense. They struggle for compensation against their bosses, and spontaneously organise into union struggle. Union struggle produces what Lenin called "trade union consciousness": the worker conceives themselves as what the ruling class tells them what they are: some chumps unfit to rule, dependent on captains of industry for their lifestyles, but deserving of fair treatment in exchange for loyalty to liberal society. The historic proletariat are workers that conceive themselves as a class with a historic mission, and are organised in active political struggle against the whole wage system, with the aim of raising the economic proletariat to rule. People have to be pulled from the economic proletariat into the historic proletariat one by one by engaging them in political struggle. Marx identified the problem of class consciousness, but didn't live long enough to discover great answers. The International is a major part of socialist history, but it held basically no influence in the Paris Commune, which was the crowning example of historic proletarian class consciousness of the time. The class consciousness seen within the Paris commune had been raised by a national defense struggle that presented workers as heroic and the ruling classes as weak and traitorous. Engels, Kautsky and others responded to the failure with a new type of party that linked a unified marxist core with workers' organisations from unions to sports clubs. This was vanguardism as per Karl Kautsky, a vanguard leading a mass party. The task of the vanguard was to pull workers from all walks of life into political struggles, and get as many on the streets as possible. Lenin took Kautsky's formulation and adapted it to conditions of illegality. Members had to be 100% in or out, so Lenin's party couldn't include the masses and many called it a vanguard party. To complicate things, the CPSU and CCP and so on inevitably became mass parties after taking power; I'll lump those in with Kautsky to keep things shorter despite the inaccuracies. Since WW2, communists also paid close attention to the effect of wars of national defense on class consciousness. Many looked to Mao for strategy and assigned the vanguard party the task of raising an army. Armed class war was to be the primary form of political struggle that this vanguard would seek to pull workers into. So, there are three main vanguard conceptions that MLs disagree about. Is a Lenin-style vanguard the correct one for capitalist conditions, a Mao-style one the correct on for semi-feudal conditions and a Kautsky-style one best for socialist conditions? It feels like the standard answer of the kind of ML that likes the idea of everyone having been right. Softer, typically reformist MLs consider Kautsky-style to be superior in all legal conditions. MLMs say that a Mao-style one is best for all non-socialist conditions and disagree when it comes to socialism. And I'll also mention the Peruvians because they're relevant to the last question: they argue that the Mao-style vanguard is the correct one for all conditions up until full communism. The Peruvians are the most prominent example I know of when it comes to emulating successful ruling class indoctrination institutions. They set up their own schools and cultural events everywhere they went and basically utilized education, sermons, singing, parades and so on to instill a communist-nationalist ethos on the people. As far as I understand, they also emulated church in how participation should be voluntary in theory but required in practice for anyone who wants to present as a respectable member of society. I believe one thing the Peruvians were certainly right about is that *if* a movement should engage in that kind of practice on a mass scale, they first have to engage in warfare and forcefully integrate or drive out competing institutions. I think Islam in Europe is a good enough illustration of how hard it is to legalistically bring new cultural institutions into a country that finds them threatening and erects all sorts of bureaucratic barriers. All those oil dollars, established methods and talented organisers get surprisingly little done for how hard they're to acquire.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2020 18:29
|
|
|
The Oldest Man posted:I'm not that familiar with Peru. Are you talking about this movement? Shining path, from the 1970's to the 1990's. They pioneered their ideas before the armed struggle phase by being associated with the official education system and using that authority to inconspicuously pioneer education programs and so on in the undeveloped countryside. Guzman was a prof of philosophy in the local university, hired his comrades, and basically used state resources to finance undermining its influence. Then in the armed struggle phase, starting from the early 1980's, they set up their pioneered education and cultural institutions as *the* institutions wherever they managed to drive the state forces out. And they actually made the state abandon a large chunk of Peruvian territory at their height. I haven't read much about the specifics, because the wounds over that civil war are still open and it's hard to find anything in English that isn't written in the form of some kind of cold war -esque cautionary tale or unreserved praise from followers. Based on watching "The People of the Shining Path" and hearing historical anecdotes though, it seems like their indoctrination institutions were on par with like medieval Catholic Church or the US school and sports institutions. It's alternatively described as cultish because it looks really weird to an outsider, but cults usually mean groups that need to prey on specific kinds of vulnerable people to grow. uncop fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Nov 20, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2020 20:05
|
|
|
I didn't bring up them because they were supposed to be generally exemplary or anything though, I brought them up because they were a great example of specifically learning from successful *indoctrination* institutions and setting up some of their own, because that was the question. I think arguments that they were bad are arguments that speak in their favor in this specific case. It just enhances my comparison of them to "the medieval Catholic church". I just complained that I haven't heard of anyone writing in English about what exactly they did to so quickly turn so many adult people to this basically religious communist worldview. If you had someone write an anti-fascist book about Hitler-Jugend or an evangelical protestant book about Mormons, they probably wouldn't be very good at examining what made those institutions work either. (Or conversely, a Mormon book about Mormons etc.) uncop fucked around with this message at 10:40 on Nov 21, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2020 10:25
|
|
|
PCP didn’t have the concrete ability to rule through brainwashing or terror. They were a rather small bunch and relied on the people around them to get large scale programs implemented. On the contrary, it’s fairly clear that their downfall began from losing touch with certain populations and trying to fall back on terror. There is a large difference between the capabilities of an established state that has countless bureaucrats and can hold a violence monopoly over a geographic area, and a fledgling guerrilla army with loyalist councils whose membership had to be kept secret because the army could roll in at any time. The secret of PCP’s decade-long success in armed struggle were methods that got regular people to bring each other on board. Again, think of how spreading mass religions do it: they use the sword to clear the way, but the way they actually get people to convert en masse is to set up institutions that many of them genuinely prefer to join, and which motivate them to convert each other. Whenever PCP failed at that process, they didn’t gain a strong foothold into an area and lost it as soon as their guerrillas had to leave. And it rarely took long before they had to. This discussion is pretty risky at this point, so let me be explicit that I don’t deny historical atrocities. Referring to them in this case just happens to be a thought-terminating cliche with no logical weight to it. I don’t think anyone can get very far with socialism if they fear admitting that they support learning from people who did seriously dubious things. The French guillotinings, Haitian massacres, Russian civil war massacres etc. weren’t actually good somehow, they were evils that cleared the path toward somewhere better. They weren’t even necessary to progress, it was progress itself that was necessary and movements couldn’t figure how to clear the path otherwise. And sometimes behind the obstacle is a dead end and the evils were for nothing. But the techniques developed to clear obstacles are still useful if the same ones are also found on the correct path.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 22, 2020 02:31
|
|
|
dex_sda posted:the funny thing about that is that because it's just 'free' without any ideology attached to it, there is a tendency for people to draw the wrong conclusions. There's a reason IT people are often either libertarian or radical left - either they've seen only the superficial 'freedom', or they've realised the way the IT community operates like a mutual aid/sharing community. No, it does have an ideology attached to it, ideology lies precisely in the systematic wrong conclusions. IT people lean libertarian because open source does not operate like a mutual aid community at all, it operates very much like the libertarian ideal of charity. (I include left-libertarians who can't tell the difference in the libertarian ideologue category.) Capital makes money, swoops in to set up some charities, people freely pitch in to whoever they like with no desire to learn to know them or their needs, and everything seemingly works out great: people who can't buy things have an abundance of free substitutes to work with. People have these pet projects they'd like to do and get some pats on the back for doing it, so they start contributing to them and toss the results on the internet. They are 100% alienated from the recipients of the product and highly alienated from the other contributors. They have little idea how useful what they're making is in the big picture, and they don't care, because they're doing it to engage themselves intellectually and/or toot their own horn. Most of the people who don't go unnoticed end up serving capital, because corporations understand the dynamics of the ecosystem and chip in strategically so that as much of the socially recognised open source work as possible is tied to serving their ecosystems at the expense of everyone else. The free software people are less ideological and more aware of the realities. They understand that a mutual aid system only works if people who take from it are forced to contribute back to it, and they try to organize collectively to serve some kind of real person with real tasks. The neglected desktop side of the Linux ecosystem is a good example: people try to coordinate so that stuff people need that doesn't exist yet gets made. They overcome alienation by engaging each other as users of these programs as well as the developers, and manage to engage in actual mutual aid. But the desktop side suffers from extreme neglect compared to the capital-serving server side Linux, which reflects how the mutual aid/sharing economy in general is very small compared to the extension of capitalist economy, and just keeps shrinking comparatively.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 25, 2020 14:42
|
|
|
Sharks Eat Bear posted:Did Marx acknowledge the history of religion pre-dating capitalism? I assume he would say that religion has the same ultimate control/placating effect across a spectrum of exploitative socieconomic arrangements, and isn’t unique to capitalism? Yes. For instance, Marx acknowledged how religion was the main form of ideology in feudal society (back when the Pope was well above kings in stature and power). While the hierarchical command and exploitation aspect of religion only really comes in with class society, the soothing and drugging effect is presumably why people form religions without any (class) coercion as well. Essentially, for the duration that religion has existed, it has done so because it's been socially necessary, and can only be swept away once it has become unnecessary. The war on drugs is a good example of what happens when someone tries to fight against social necessity and win by doing it really hard. quote:Isn’t this confusing materialism as a historical dialectic with materialism as a basis for values/ethics? Seems like a classic is-to-ought naturalistic fallacy; historical materialism tells us why things are what they are better than idealism, but it alone doesn’t tell us how things should be. Dialectical materialism doesn't try to derive "ought" from "is". It treats oughts as a given, something that don't need to be derived because they already are. They're concrete social impulses that can be discovered by studying people's moral demands. So far as people disagree on oughts and struggle over them, they can either come to an agreement and unite, or the strongest team can subordinate the rest. Marx makes moral judgments because he's human and doesn't believe in impartiality as a precondition for making scientific claims, but he doesn't consider his judgments to carry any scientific weight unless others agree and force that morality on society. And Cpt_Obvious is right: religion isn't the words on the pages of the books that religious people read, it's the actual social organisation of religious people, which in turn is the outcome of struggles between religious people. Religions pretend to be unchangeable atemporal truths, but in practice they are anything but. On the other hand, there's a point where religious practice drifts so far from religious writings that a new kind of faith needs to be established. There is also a point when faith and rituals stop being religious at all. All sincerely held morality is a matter of faith, and social practice is the impartial judge of all faiths. Policies either work out or they don't, and who they work out for is critical. For what it's worth, I disagree that faith could ever be subordinated to science. Science is the antithesis of faith, it makes profane evidence into a sword that attempts to savagely execute everything that people find sacred, and break up established communities. When scientific claims enter popular consciousness, they enter the realm of faith. They need to duke it out against established faith-based claims as equals, and victory only integrates them into the dominant faith without making that faith more scientific in principle. I think a directly science-based society requires a radical social dynamism that overcomes the need for the stability that faith-based communities provide, and mass science that most people seriously participate in at some point of their lives. uncop fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Nov 28, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2020 15:12
|
|
|
Sharks Eat Bear posted:Thanks, this is helpful. To push on this idea of when religion can be swept away once it's become unnecessary -- is there any consideration to the idea that for many people, spiritual needs are inextricable from material needs? Spirituality is its own thing, religion is organised. The claim that religion would become unnecessary and disappear isn't really a claim that it'd be gone without a trace, it'd just disappear as an external historical force that compels people to do things. Traces of old religious beliefs might persist in all sorts of small-scale spiritual practice, and that's just personal freedom. quote:I'm not sure how to square your first two sentences -- your second sentence reads to me as a more detailed way of how to derive ought from is. It also sounds like you're suggesting that Marx views moral judgments as a type of scientific claim (even if he doesn't believe his own moral judgments are scientifically special, per se)? Maybe I'm being dense here, is the nuance that Marx is basically unconcerned with the concept of morality insofar as it's fundamentally based in idealism, and that the concept of "ought" is just an imaginary tool for persuading others to unite so you don't get crushed by the guy with the really big stick? It's not a derivation - the oughts exist directly. Everyone has opinions on what ought to be, and you can just go ask them. That's the form oughts exist in. The oughts in individuals' minds aren't truly derivations either, they exist regardless of whether that person has engaged in any sort of deep philosophical thinking about them. They just need to eat, they need to sleep, they need to do things. If they can't, they will struggle for the ability. So they will unite around certain demands even with no one trying to philosophically derive anything from reality and tell them why they should do what they do. Their ape brains just tell them that something is wrong, that it's not as it ought to be. I'd describe the process of Marx's science like this: 1) Marx studies society to learn what different kinds of people think ought to be. 2) He picks out who he thinks could (or should, but he doesn't admit this kind of unscientific favoritism) win the battle of oughts, and studies society to learn how they might be able to do it. 3) He writes texts illustrating his discoveries and peppers them with moral statements that should appeal to the people he studied in service of, in hopes that they bite and use the texts in practice. quote:I find this to be a shallow analysis of religion, and a bit of a false dichotomy. Religion is both the words on the pages and the actual social organization of religious people, and these dynamics both depend on and shape each other. Religion can/does entail making up atemporal Truth, but I think it's a inadequate reduction to say that ultimately this is what religion is about, even textually. Here, you are assuming an "either-or" way of thinking, and of course the things I said don't make sense looked at that way. AndIf reality was either-or, social struggles would cleanly end with one winner and one truth. But it's not "sometimes-sometimes" either, there's a structure and an objective pull toward certain types of consequences.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2020 21:07
|
|
|
Libertarianism is an ideal that people pay lip service to in abstract but which can only be failed in practice. Anyone who isn't failing the ideal yet simply hasn't been tested thoroughly enough. Conscious libertarians are people who voluntarily abstain from exercising the kind of social power that would expose them. What exposes them is that 99% of them support giving powers to people who do utilize social power in an "authoritarian" manner. For instance, everyone who would support state-enforced mask mandates or lockdowns in response to covid, and the vast majority of people who vote. Authoritarianism is a word people selectively use for calling out failure to adhere to the ideal. Pejoratives don't have coherent meanings because they aren't coined with that in mind. There are no conscious authoritarians in the sense of "opposed to liberty", they're all in favor of ruthlessly utilizing social power to win or uphold liberty for some section of society at the expense of another. Libertarianism of both the left wing and right wing variants are based on a negative conception of liberty, it's something people have until it's taken away. The struggle for libertarianism is conceived as passive self-defense against supposed opponents of liberty: mainly individual for right-wingers and mainly collective for left-wingers. "Authoritarianisms" are based on positive conceptions of liberty: it's ability to concretely exercise power. Right-wing variants conceive liberty as a zero-sum game of sorts: people gain new powers by subjecting others, and when it comes to maximizing liberty in society, they ask who should subject whom and in which ways. Left-wing variants believe that in a conceptual state of maximum liberty no one is subjected to another person, but they have a blasé or even enthusiastic attitude toward taking freedoms from people if it means winning greater freedom overall for them. Socialists on the internet who accept the "authoritarian" label have eaten from the same trashcan that liberals in general have, and accepted the negative conception of liberty as common sense. But in doing so, they propagate the liberal distortion that conceives real practicing socialists as opponents of liberty and the only libertarian socialists as ones who didn't wield the kind of power that would have exposed them as actually "authoritarian". No, even Stalin did what he did because he loved freedom. The real consequences are debatable, but he genuinely believed that everything he did was to *increase* the overall freedom in society, by developing the concrete powers of the vast majority of the population. uncop fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Dec 8, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2020 17:11
|
|
|
Cpt_Obvious posted:Just want to say, this whole post is interesting. It's not black and white, I'm talking mainly this and mainly that. The proof that libertarianism has a mainly negative conception of freedom is that it has a hard time conceiving of cases where one can win greater freedom by taking some freedoms away. The baseline assumption is that if a freedom is taken away, that's bad and the people who did it are immoral.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2020 17:25
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:I suppose it depends whether you see that as the point or the method, conceptually. Freedom from doesn't work like that, it means freedom from social impositions. You can't conceive freedom from sickness unless you conceive germs and human cells as social actors on par with people. Freedom to refers to concrete powers like staying healthy. And as is, concrete powers tend to involve interfering with others: there's a huge interconnected ball of complex issues to untangle before people could gain the power to stay healthy without the power to decide things for others.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2020 17:52
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Eh? I can conceive freedom from all sorts of natural impositions? That's primarily how I conceive natural impositions actually. If you insist on that, then you aren't in dialogue with Cpt_Obvious but talking past them, because you're twisting their words to mean something else than what they did. These are standard terms with established meanings.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2020 18:07
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:That seems like a strangely arbitrary distinction to make unless you believe in the concept of free will. Which I grant you would appear like an odd thing not to believe in in a discussion about freedom but I don't personally find it to be an obstacle. It is exactly a relic, philosophy is a collection of relics from times when there were grounds to hold different assumptions. But we were talking about that relic because it's one of the base assumptions that contemporary liberal and libertarian political philosophies as well as the whole bourgeois ideology are based on. Bourgeois society gives negative freedom a far greater consideration than positive freedom, and treats people who do the opposite as enemies of freedom who forfeit their right to freedom in this popperian manner. Just as there can't be tolerance toward intolerance, there can't be freedom from interference for those who interfere. That ideological preferential treatment is a hidden precondition of countless common sense opinions that everyone holds, including you and me.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2020 19:07
|
|
|
Aruan posted:No, not all history is the history of class struggle. You can argue that all history is the history of struggle, but the reasons for that struggle are often not about resources, or, if they are, are not about resources in the context of the specific discussion about economic classes we're having here. Trying to define and understand the three "estates" of feudal Europe through contemporary terminology informed by modern economic theory isn't particularly useful - and why Marxist historiography of pre-modern societies is problematic. I agree with the part about down-and-dirty anthropological science being necessary to understand the past. But the claim that all history is the history of class struggles isn't just a claim about the nature of history, it's also a definition of the word. Anthropological findings about surprisingly viable horizontally organized societies don't threaten the claim, because such societies are defined to be outside history, merely interacting with historical societies. The definition is inherently sensible, because any such societies have been effectively erased from history, and that's why anthropology has had to rediscover them the hard way. Of course, such a claim is *problematic*. For one, it's useless for reasoning about times and places where societies whose development is not governed by class struggles have a prominent role. But to be less problematic, an alternative claim needs to have greater explanatory power. People who claim that there are no scientifically meaningful patterns in history only have an advantage over people whose forecasts have results that are worse than random. And I think you're being willfully dense when you try to present medieval europe as such a time and place. Estates are how medieval society presented itself in thought (self-written history etc.) and don't really say much about medieval class.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2020 19:49
|
|
|
Aegis posted:That kind of begs the question, though. If there is, in fact, no single, unified explanation of conflict (and I will go ahead and posit that there isn't--even if we limit it to "historical" societies, as somebody suggested above) then you won't be avoiding anything. Marxisfs indeed do not propose a single unified explanation to conflict. I think it should be obvious from how conflict is far older than class. "All history is the history of class struggles" originates from a political manifesto, not a research paper. It's like if I declared: "All things that are thrown up, must come down." Strictly speaking, it's a plainly false claim. But what I'd really be saying is that if something that's thrown up doesn't come down, that's a special occasion. When it comes to history, if some king starts a war for libidinal or whatever conceivable non-class reasons, marxism claims that it should be a safe assumption that class interests are still working behind the scenes to take the reins of history and begin directing the war over the long term. It doesn't try to claim that the non-class factors weren't real or couldn't have the power to overcome class interests for a limited time. The gravity-equivalent that pushes history to be the history of class struggles is that societies that fail to follow class interests get swallowed up by societies that do. Starting a war because of sentimentality forecasts downfall, starting a war because it would increase the economic might of the ruling class compared ruling classes of rival countries forecasts success.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2020 21:28
|
|
|
Sharks Eat Bear posted:What does it mean to be "opposed to ideological struggle" such that it's specific to liberals but apparently not Marxists or leftists? The context of the Mao quote in question is that he's critiquing specifically leftists and marxists. It's about internal ideological struggle, challenging oneself to go to follow one's ideology to its logical conclusion. He's calling out leftists who insist on stopping within their comfort zone, saying they are applying liberal individualism to themselves. Their reasoning to stop short was expressed alternately in terms of rigid marxist dogma (e.g. "The working class is the main force of the revolution", meaning "I don't want to move to the countryside to organize") and in terms of picking and choosing which parts of marxism they support ("I support union struggle, but condemn armed struggle", meaning "I don't want you to make this work more dangerous for me"). How it relates to the discussion is that people who treat marxism as one tool in a toolbox, or split it up like "marxist economics", "marxist historiography", "marxist philosophy" etc. are not doing any better than every liberal who sees some value in marxism can. He's saying to judge people by how they act rather than how they speak, and be suspicious when they talk like leftists to justify acting like any liberal sympathizer could.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2020 22:49
|
|
|
It’s no surprise that a bunch of people have completely fallen in love with ”Combat Liberalism” when the internet is a mire of people inventing woker and woker justifications for why they shouldn’t do something. Social media leftists make 1000 posts about not doing something for every one about doing something outside liberal convention. And the greatest achievement is to explain how people who are doing the thing are worse people than you because of that.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2020 23:11
|
|
|
Aruan posted:Here's the challenge though: what does "doing something" even mean in 2020 - particularly when I'm concerned that doing "something" is actually (i.e. a works co-op) strengthens capitalism because it provides an outlet for organizing spirit while also effectively providing a band aid for the inequities under a capitalist system. There is no armed struggle (or really any struggle) in the United States, there is no organized worker's movement. I forgot who wrote this, but I read a very grim, but fairly funny, critique which argued that the only praxis left is theorizing about what could be done. I also feel that the natural ideological conclusion here is accelerationism, not activism, and certainly not trying to improve people's material conditions. Your grim attitude is borne out of what Mark Fisher called "capitalist realism": a desire to "be realistic" on the terms that today's liberal ideology sets, and shut one's eyes to the potentials of what is already happening. When you say there is really no struggle in the United States in a period of historic upheaval, that's what you're doing. You don't really think there's no struggle, you think the people who are struggling are being so unrealistic that they don't warrant consideration. But really, even the most hardened third-worldist's ideology points out a way forward: moving elsewhere and naturalizing into their society. Accelerationism also would have an activism of its own if it was a honest ideology rather than an excuse to stay comfy. What is modern China if not the world's largest accelerationist experiment? "Doing something" means not being afraid to believe in things, not being afraid of looking foolish, not being afraid of hardship, and most importantly, *respecting people who have conquered such fears and seeking their mentorship*. The people who say thaf the only praxis left is theorizing actually harbor a deep disrespect for the mental capacities of the rest of the world. There are millions and millions of acting socialists around the world, each having achieved their own definition of serious success in TYOOL 2020 (Rojava, China, Bolivia, Venezuela, the 50 year long insurgency in the Philippines, a 250 million person general strike in India, unionizing this or that job, small but growing insurgent mass work projects in the USA...), but what if they're all idiots embarrassing themselves? What if there's nothing out there to do that isn't just an embarrassment? What if I'm the only sensible socialist in the world, and correct praxis is what doesn't make me feel embarrassed or inconvenienced? All in all, it's about learning from people whose attitudes and real accomplishments you can believe in, and following their example. If you can't muster belief in anyone, that's on you. If you stop at wearing them as an aesthetic instead of going through with the hard work of following their example, that's on you. Of course not everyone is right and millions of people actually are embarrassing themselves, but the right to denounce others' efforts is reserved for those who are walking the walk. uncop fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Dec 9, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Dec 9, 2020 07:48
|
|
|
Beefeater1980 posted:E: Re Combat Liberalism specifically, remember that at the time of writing it Mao’s not a theorist he is a practical man in the middle of a life or death fight who is very focused on the exercise of power. He’s not really writing a critique of liberalism, he’s laying the groundwork to discredit rivals who are also communists, as part of ensuing he has absolute control of the Party. It's actually Mao in his widely recognized highest theoretical phase, when he was using a lull in combat activity and the weakness of his rivals to take some time to seriously stake out his theoretical line. He had little to do besides read and write for a few years, unlike later when he was either fighting or trying to rule a country. He's been a disfavored rebellious figure in the party for about a decade, and his Soviet-supported rivals had finally hosed up so badly that he got a chance to dig himself out of the hole he had been in. He was nowhere near control of the party, he was the political leader of the military unit in control of the main area still under CCP control, and had recently been accepted back into the core party leadership due to the practical results of his unorthodox methods. He did gain his first major rabid supporters in this period though, like Lin Biao, who IIRC coined the phrase "Mao Zedong Thought". And it's a misrepresentation to claim that Mao wasn't speaking about liberals or liberal attitudes: the communists had been working within the liberal movement under the advice of the Soviet Union, had struggled not to get subsumed in it, and due to Japanese aggression were in talks about fighting as an attachment to the liberal forces again. The communists were recruiting from liberals and ex-liberals, so the party naturally always had a nationalist socdem layer represented by figures like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Besides, Mao never "ensured" "absolute control". The 1935-1940 phase was when he finally staked out a claim to being a central leader of a revolution, 1949-1962 he struggled to take control of the political direction of the country and fell with the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward, and 1966-1976 he made a comeback to retake control of the political direction. But he did not have a mindset of eliminating (many) political rivals, and the huge oscillations in Chinese policy during the revolutionary decades were due to active struggle between political lines within a heterogenous party.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2020 08:28
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:would the heterogeneity of the CPC support the idea that a "one-party state" is still capable of presenting a diversity of tendencies, groups, and policies? I think it does, but the representation of different interests tends to be covert, and the more interests the party represents, the more watered down it becomes and the more false its unity becomes. I consider the experiment with party governance to mostly have produced an example of what not to do. I think both ortho ML and trots produce false answers because they start from the wrong premises. They fail to produce a clear differentiation between state and government like Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao, and consequently the MLs argue that the party has to govern so as to have a proper party-state, while your trots argue for compromising the party-state in order to produce more dynamic governance. The state is about violence, which class (or classes) get to rule over the others by force, and which need to submit to the rules set for them. The state form of USA, Norway, Brazil, Nazi Germany etc. is/was bourgeois dictatorship: the bourgeoisie set up constitutions that everyone must follow, alongside a violence machine whose purpose is to take over if 1) the rules are being broken by the wrong people, or 2) someone threatens to change the rules in a way that's technically legal but undesirable to the bourgeoisie. Liberal democratic government is bourgeois dictatorship in a hands-off form, while in fascist and military-dictatorial government, the bourgeois dictatorship directly takes over governance. The USSR and PRC were/are analogous to military dictatorship/fascism with the difference that the military and ruling party attempted to be of the proletariat and peasantry instead of the bourgeoisie. That's why once the CCP determines the USSR to have turned capitalist under Brezhnev, they immediately accused it of being a fascist country. My point is that the questions of how the proletarian dictatorship should be secured and how it should be governed are separate questions. There's no inherent issue with letting various class interests talk it out on the governmental side as long as the dictatorship steps in before things get hairy. So preserving the integrity of the dictatorship is the core issue, and sharply contradicts ML and trot goals of putting the dictatorship in position to govern. I don't think having the dictatorship govern is wrong per se, but it's an emergency measure that doesn't last in the long term. In order to defend the Party, the masses have to govern, and they will form separate organisations either openly or in secret as long as the system makes that advantageous to them. But those democratic organisations, even if they were called political parties, would not be not like the Party that stands above the law the same way as police and military stand above the law under bourgeois dictatorship. They tie their own hands enough to preserve the fiction that they also play by the rules, but they can undo that anytime. Bourgeois or petty-bourgeois political parties, if they did exist, would be in a position like parliamentary communist parties under capitalism: were they to win, they'd just get illegally crushed by the Party and the rules would be changed so that they couldn't win the same way anymore. Beefeater1980 posted:I think this depends on what one means by “liberals”: Deng and Liu Shaoqi were still communists and Mao’s concern with them was IMO less to do with their theoretical differences and more to do with the very specific question of who should now be running the Party. That is, I have always believed he didn’t write Combat Liberalism mainly as part of developing his theoretical base but because it was a useful angle of attack against specific people at a time when his position was not secure: the practical concern is driving the theory not the other way round. It's "Combat Liberalism", not "Combat Liberals". The premise is that most communists, no matter how communist they are, are also liberal to a greater or smaller extent, because their starting point was a liberal worldview, and the extent is revealed through their everyday actions. So far I have never talked with a communist that didn't also have a meaningfully prominent liberal side to them. Of course it was a useful angle of attack and he wrote it as a disguised polemic, but that doesn't mean the argument is somehow disingenuous or otherwise dishonest. Mao never presented himself as "pure" either, and he actively discouraged attempts to stay free of liberal influences. He believed in taking non-communist good ideas and making them communist, but opposed taking them without making them communist as Deng's "black cat, white cat" quote argued in favor of. Simply, if you put professed communists in charge of liberal policy, like in France and India and so on, you put their liberal side in charge and they end up doing the work of the bourgeoisie. Immediate practical concern has always driven marxist theory.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2020 12:09
|
|
|
I'm gonna side with Ferrinus on the union question. Cop unions are unions, unions just have ~class character~ like anything else. There is proletarian labor power, middle class labor power and even bourgeois labor power. Trade unions are ultimately cartels over the sale of specific concrete forms of labor, and in advanced capitalist society many kinds of differently positioned concrete people sell labor power as part of what they do for a living. The proletariat are people who have nothing to sell for immediate living income besides labor power, they're forced to take the best offer for employment. Only the unions of the proletariat are proletarian, and a sufficiently successful&atomized union can even lift a trade that used to be proletarian, above the proletariat, and transform its own class character. Cpt_Obvious posted:Ok, so a union is a collective power structure used to aid productive workers to retain the maximum amount of surplus value from their labor. Cops aren't productive workers, therefore they have no surplus value to fight for. They can use the same tactic as unions and be built for similar purposes as a union (wages, hours, etc.), but they by definition cannot be unions. This line of argumentation is wrong in a harmful manner, because probably the majority of the proletariat in first world countries today work in unproductive sectors. Amazon, Wal-Mart, food delivery, telemarketing, cleaning, tourism, the list goes on. The basis for their class status isn't their concrete labor, it's their position within the system in general. They work lovely jobs because they need to sell labor power in order to live, and so they have to take what's on offer without being picky. The decision about whether people are hired for productive or unproductive labor is on capital. Kanine posted:believing we can simply take the same structures and then reform them/wield them in a just manner (instead of you know, those structures themselves being the problem) is literally how liberals think/act and its insane to me that authcoms have gotten away with pulling this scam over on people for the last century It's not that we can simply do that and things are just that easy somehow. It's that we have to use the most effective methods available to us, and if no one has developed and demonstrated more just methods that are also practically superior yet, tough luck. Capitalism is in charge right now because of 1) being a functionally superior form of organization to almost anything out there, and 2) because in the real world, moral virtuousness counts for rather little when it comes to success. Liberals have this martyr complex that ohh, if you can't stand morally above your oppressors, the only moral thing to do is stay a slave and act with a crab mentality toward those who genuinely rebel. That's by far the bigger scam.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 22, 2020 22:16
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Overthrowing monarchs is not the sole purview of communist revolutions, however, and nor is it something that every country has bothered to do, and many of them have still managed to achieve significant improvements in quality of life for their citizens, through a combination of capitalist industrialization and various left wing efforts to rein in the excesses of it, the combination of which is what I am glibly calling social democracy. This does not suggest that that all happened "by itself" or whatever, it suggests that there are multiple historical processes that can produce the result of a capitalist economy with better quality of life than has hitherto been seen on earth. It's not like if you don't overthrow the tsar at the exact time and in the exact manner of the russian revolution then you end up in 2020 with 100 years of societal stasis? It again, may well be that revolutions are the fastest way to achieve industrialization and a comparable type of society with similar systems for providing for the needs of the citizenry but that, again, is not particularly useful to me, now. The question is "where do we go from here?" and I don't see much to suggest that there is a vast difference between where former soviet societies, china, and the west are at as far as being in thrall to capitalists. I want to know what you mean by "particular model", because of course what has been done in the past was historically contingent and wouldn't wholly make sense anymore. Countries can't really get away long term with not doing things at least as well as previously. The whole discipline&terror stuff is relative, It's not really like socialists would take a society that doesn't execute people for crimes and re-establish executions, or a society that has a rehabilitative approach to justice and replace that with some forced labor prison camp thing. On the other hand, there's this question of general principles. The vanguard couldn't be the same in a country where everyone is educated, but that's not enough to argue that it's outmoded. Of course I do agree that in today's advanced societies, it's not necessary to establish a structure where a vanguard tries to herd some kind of oppositional bureaucracy mainly made up of the executives of the previous society. If the bureaucrats' responsibilities can be filled by actual allies, then vanguard wouldn't need to take over that direct commanding position over the system. Historical decisions to put the vanguard in command of society were based on the idea that the system initially established by them, left to run on its own, would have a counterrevolutionary character. Vanguard are moral leaders raised to that position through self-sacrifice to beat unlikely odds, not the smartest and most capable people in society. But yeah, all the anarchists you see out there doing that sort of thing are (potential) vanguard too (and much more so than the "vanguardists" of PSL and so on), they just set this limit on themselves that they must always lead by example, without ever relying on direct command. But in practice, that hasn't really been helpful in connecting a vanguard to the masses. Reasonably successful anarchist-influenced movements practice command-style vanguardism on the struggle against the enemy side of things, and the people thank them for it, as it makes them accountable to known policy. Reliable, in a word. Someone who joins struggle orgs, especially the military, subjects themselves to punishment for insubordination.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 23, 2020 07:15
|
|
|
double nine posted:a question about capitalism and its history: every example of capitalism and the commodification of labour that I've found compares it to feudalism, but even in feudalism there were cities. Granted the vast majority of people were peasants, but how was production organised within cities anno 1500 that is so fundamentally different from today? In feudal cities, private enterprise was mostly very small scale: individual craftspeople and small collectives. Guilds acted as the main anti-market force: they rather successfully monopolised specific crafts within a city, and basically set the price of labor. When there were a lot of potential workers, they muscled most out of the market so that pay wouldn't be lowered. When there were few, they muscled out people trying to raise their prices. Nepotist favoritism caused many crafts to become largely hereditary, because masters would give the limited positions to people they knew. Basically, the labor market was suppressed both in terms of pay and in terms of freedom to work. The urban bourgeoisie rose partially from guildmasters, and as the scale of manufacture grew, the guilds went from institutions for the old to fleece the young on the basis of paternalistic privileges into institutions for the pre-industrial bourgeoisie to fleece their manufacturers: strike-breaking institutions that could threaten to shut out workers from work entirely, anti-competition institutions that could shut out external bourgeoisie etc. In the 18th century and onward, the industrial bourgeoisie (whose business was deskilling crafts using machinery) defeated what was left of the old manufacturing bourgeoisie, grew powerful enough to break the guild monopolies, and established laissez faire labor markets. They commodified labor power by breaking down the stratification of laborers into protected crafts and ranks. They made them interchangeable, freely fireable and hireable by anyone who had the money to.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 24, 2020 11:03
|
|
|
NovemberMike posted:I feel like this is basically the Marxist vs marxist question (well, this and "do I believe in dalectics") . You've split everything into superstructure vs base and you're asserting primacy of the base, but the question is how strong is the dominance of the base. 100% is obviously absurd, but if you can pin it very high then you've got an interesting theory. My experience is that after a few criticisms it gets bargained down to something similar to "the base exerts a strong influence on the superstructure" which is pretty obvious and uninteresting. Trying to understand the relationship between base and superstructure through this sort of "domination" concept falls into the same trap as people who conceived evolution as a process to develop more complex, or "higher" lifeforms from less complex or "lower" lifeforms. What evolution actually does is throw poo poo at the wall and see what sticks. What sticks is a statistical event based on adaptation to the environment. The base is the equivalent of the environment to superstructural developments. And the superstructure feeds back on the base much like the development of life has changed natural environments. The materialist viewpoint asserts that it's 100% impossible for e.g. an ideology that believes people should subsist on sunlight to proliferate, no matter how many people believed that or how charismatic the proponents were, because the believers would cause a society that listened to them to outright fail. And conversely, that any ideology that does successfully proliferate must have been well adapted to the material conditions that it emerged in. Basically, whenever there's something seemingly idiotic that most people have believed for a long time, an idealist would call it to be replaced with beliefs that make more sense in the abstract. A materialist would investigate what sort of positive social/economic adaptation those beliefs represent, and how material conditions would have to change for them to cease to be beneficial. For materialists, to be wrong in the right way is more weighty than to be right in the wrong way.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 26, 2020 16:09
|
|
|
NovemberMike posted:I think you might be thinking of the wrong definition of "dominates". I'm not speaking in a political sense, I'm talking about the mathematics of growth. If you have a graph defined by two functions, one of which shows constant growth and one which shows a sinusoidal pattern (so y = x + sin(x)) then the long term growth of the sinusoidal component is zero so you can model the long term growth using only the dominant component (y=x). If the base is dominant in this sense then you get to say interesting things like "Capitalism will inevitably fall and give way to Communism because of the fundamental contradictions". If it doesn't dominate then you're stuck saying things like "people that don't eat will die" that pretty much everyone already agreed on without historical materialism. Nah, I understood what you meant, and my point was that trying to interpret the base and superstructure as simple numerical variables erases the actual theory. When you said: "...how strong is the dominance of the base. 100% is obviously absurd, but if you can pin it very high then you've got an interesting theory." it just sounded weird to me, because I can't see how you'd quantify this stuff in a manner that would allow you to come up with these percentages. We can pick out specific quantifiable phenomena and see how they interact, but we can't quantify "base" or "superstructure" altogether. The reason I brought up the details is to illustrate why IMO the correct question to ask isn't "how strongly does the base dominate the superstructure" but "how much can superstructural phenomena alter constraints set by the base that would imply them to be unviable" and "how much can basal phenomena alter constraints set by the superstructure that would imply them to be unviable". In other words: if a new social practice emerges that a society is ideologically against, how effectively can it affect ideology to condone the practice instead? If a new ideological practice emerges that is against society's material interests, how effectively can it affect social practice so that the material interests would be in line with it instead?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 26, 2020 22:03
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 00:03 |
|
|
NovemberMike posted:You've just thrown away most of dialectical materialism in favor of masturbation then. The whole point is that it's capable of making strong predictions about the future, that's the whole thing about the contradictions in capitalism inevitably leading to its collapse. That's a prediction that you can make because you have identified a contradiction in the base that will be the antithesis to capitalism. If you pull back and just say that the base and superstructure are two things with no special relationship and you've just identified them so you can talk about them then you lose the predictive parts of historical materialism and you start just saying obvious things. It's you who's talking about contradiction seemingly without having done much work trying to wrap your head around what it means. I'm telling you, seemingly-pinpoint predictions like communism coming after capitalism are produced by logical process of elimination based on constraints, as well as sufficiently vague definition of outcomes. First, we claim that capitalism can never change in a way that'd allow it to work long term. Then, we claim that capitalism has produced only one rising class that could take power over society. Finally, we define communism in a vague way that basically boils down to classlessness and planned production, basically designating it as the only way the proletariat could generalize its class power. Dialectical materialism outlines a structure and epistemology for scientific use, it's not some kind of magic that can do things that philosophy in general can't do. Marx made predictions based on science, and the science was based on decades of study of the actual concrete phenomena at hand. The role of dialectics was to give Marx pointers on what to study: which potential approaches to discard, where to look for clues. Accusing me of having thrown it away, because I'm actually explaining what the speficied structure is like in order to illustrate how to scientifically utilize it, looks confused at best. Dialectical materialism does not provide a direct escape from the fate of being restricted to either saying obvious things or spewing mystical bullshit. It actually claims that it's impossible to become able to say novel and interesting things without quitting the philosophizing and engaging in hands-on practice from a novel direction. So, alas, I'm forced to say obvious things about stuff I don't actually know like the back of my hand, because the alternative would be to say things that are wrong and misleading.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2020 10:34
|
|