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uncop posted: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. I really like how you put this. I don't think it's useless per se to discuss how various human foibles might play out in a socialist society but it's always important to root one's analysis in relations of mass power rather than relations of personal preference.
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Nov 6, 2020 07:00
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There is a sense in which "consent of the governed" is a valid claim even when made by the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, because the working class always outnumbers the ruling class (until they become one and the same, and maybe not even then depending on how you count the peasantry) and there is always some sense in which a critical mass of cashiers, truck drivers, fruit pickers, office drones, etc. are willing to get up in the morning and go do their lovely jobs because as much as it sucks they think it's better than the alternative. Even a government as insanely predatory and dysfunctional as that of the USA has enough passive and/or active support by segments of the middle and working classes that it'd be wrong to describe it as purely run by intimidation or something. Of course, the bargain all those proles and petit-bourgeoisie are making is made in the context of repressive forces which might be brought to bear against them in addition to the ability to nibble on trickling-down imperial spoils or whatever. Basically I don't think "legitimate" is really a useful word to use when describing governments. A regime is either able to hold onto power or it isn't, and that ability flows in part from the "consent" of the governed, but consent to be governed is, itself is always given within the constraints of existing material conditions rather than from some kind of abstract judgment on how fair the language in the latest edition of the constitution sounds.
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Nov 6, 2020 19:25
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The Oldest Man posted:This issue also applies interpersonally under capitalism. How do you know a romantic relationship is legitimate, consent-based, and not based on intimidation and coercion? If the woman is the chattel property of the man, your modern American liberal would say that's obviously illegitimate. If she's his corporate subordinate, they'd probably still say that but less emphatically. If she's simply unable to materially support herself and her children in our hosed system so she stays with a man who is cruel to her, what would they say then? What if it was emotional cruelty but never physical? What if there was no explicit cruelty at all but he simply does none of the housework even though she works as many hours as he does for wages and she grinds her teeth and lives with that? This is a great point, and it's always worth nothing the way that capitalism filters down into our interpersonal relationships to both poison them by degrees and generate feedback loops such that not living under capitalism becomes harder and harder to imagine or pursue.
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Nov 6, 2020 20:10
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Falstaff posted:I need to talk about mud pies now. I don't want to, but I'm going to, because it helps illustrate another element of abstract labour. This is also why, if you just trip over a huge gold nugget in your backyard, that gold nugget isn't suddenly worthless because it only took you 0.3 seconds of labor to find it. The average socially-necessary labor time required to produce a gold nugget, calculated across all humans who are in the process of looking for gold - people assaying land, panning river water, digging mines, all that stuff - is enormous. If you took all the time humans have spent looking for gold and divided it by all the gold ever mined you'd get an enormous number of man-hours per ounce. This is why gold (and diamonds, and whatever) is "valuable" - literally because it's rare and hard to get. Gold's various use-values, which include things like filling cavities, conducting electricity, and looking pretty when you wear it, have nothing to do with gold's value (or, downstream from value, its exchange value, or, further downstream, its price). In a world in which gold was as common as sand, it'd be worth no more than sand was worth, even though it'd remain just as malleable, lustrous, and conductive.
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Nov 7, 2020 18:07
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enki42 posted:Aren't diamonds actually a counter to this theory? Diamonds are largely valuable due to artificial scarcity, due to DeBeers' monopoly and control of the supply, rather than genuine rarity or the effort required to mine them. Or is this theory supposed to be more of a prescriptive theory than a descriptive? (i.e. goods should be valued like this vs. goods are valued like this). Diamonds are actually the example Marx himself uses - he points out that if some process was developed to quickly and cheaply compress coal into diamonds, the value of diamonds would plummet to be only slightly higher than that of coal. It's important to note that a commodity's value, that is, the average socially-necessary abstract labor time required to procure and/or produce it, is the center of gravity around which its exchange value (how much of some other commodity you can trade it for) and its price (how much of the specific, historically contingent money-commodity you can trade it for) fluctuate. Things often sell for more or less than their value should imply because of various practical on-the-ground factors like canny salesmanship, desperation on the buyer's part, or, as you say, artificial scarcity maintained by cartels. Still, that artificial scarcity is only going to be driving a high price even higher, because even if all mankind were united under one banner, it would be much harder to get your hands on a diamond than on a brick of charcoal, so the value of a diamond is naturally going to be high. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 19:27
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Falstaff posted:I really like the way you put it here. Not me, because I forgot the word "fluctuate"! Also I'm pretty sure "center of gravity" is Marx's own phrasing, I just find it really helpful to repeat. The farther you get from value the sillier things can get, incidentally. Marx points out somewhere early in Capital that lots of things with no value might nevertheless acquire prices within human society - for instance, some unworked land, or someone's silence.
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Nov 7, 2020 19:32
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Falstaff posted:Even unworked land, before it can be sold as a commodity, needs to be surveyed and mapped out by someone who knows how to do those things. Yeah, that's what always struck me about Marx using that as an example - labor does go in to finding arable land or rich veins of ore or whatever, so it didn't seem quite right to use them as examples of things with no value. Still, I understand what he's getting at - if we just happen to have arable land right in our backyard, already, that's as "valueless" to us as the air we're breathing.
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Nov 7, 2020 19:44
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Serf posted:isn't just determining that land is arable a form of labor, though? when i start looking for places to plant stuff i call the university and they send down a grad student to collect soil samples and i get back a report of all the findings and a judgement on what the soil is good for. now that's a free service but at some point my taxes ended up paying for it in some way, and labor was performed at every step of the process, right? Yeah, all that stuff's labor and should be creating value somewhere, although when you get into products like information or computer code you end up with funny-looking relationships between the labor that goes into creating means of production and then the value that those means actually pass on to commodities made with them. I guess I'd defend Marx's example in this way: what you might end up paying for a license to develop that unworked land isn't just the wages of the agronomists and surveyors you sent out to check if it was usable (or those wages plus or minus a percentage based on negotiating ability, cartelization, etc). You'll be charged a premium for the land itself, even if no one's worked on it. Hell, you might pay for land that you know nothing about, because you've got a hunch that it'll be valuable in the future and are willing to gamble! That's an example of prices arising from social relations other than "someone did work to make this usable".
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Nov 7, 2020 20:06
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I reread the prefaces to Capital recently and was struck by the fact that the big distinction Engels drew between Marx and the liberal economists of the time was just that Marx understood capitalism itself as a transitory phenomenon with physical causes and effects rather than some kind of underlying cosmic constant.
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Nov 7, 2020 21:14
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I've been going back through the beginning of Capital recently so I could probably write up a primer on the labor theory of value, or the "law of value" as Marx called it. I'd just do it as some definitions: Commodity: A commodity is something that satisfies a need or want and that's produced for exchange. It didn't matter to Marx whether it was a luxury or life necessity, whether it was immediately consumed or worn down through repeated use, etc. Commodities have both use-value and exchange value. Use-Value: A use-value is something's ability to satisfy a need or want. Lots of things have lots of different use-values, not just commodities. One use-value of air, for instance, is to be breathed in such that it keeps you alive. A hat's main use-value is that it keeps your head warm, although it can also enhance your appearance or signify your rank. Gold has a few different use-values, like looking pretty, conducting electricity, or filling cavities. An important point about use-values is that they're largely incommensurable; you can't freely trade them for each other. Obviously, both a slice of pizza and a hot dog might be used to sate your hunger, but you can't choose between sating your hunger with a sandwich and slaking your thirst with some water. No matter how much gold you have, you still need to breathe, etc. Exchange Value: A commodity's exchange value is how much of some other commodity it can trade for in the public market. So, a bottle of beer might trade for one hat, or two toothbrushes, or three eggs, or a fraction of an ounce of gold. Unlike use-values, exchange values are commensurable; so long as there's some kind of community of traders, you can just keep trading and trading and trading, turning one thing into another and into another. You're more likely to be trading them for a specific commodity that's come to be used as money (like gold or silver) than bartering them for each other, but in principle anything can be traded for anything else so long as supplies exist. Depending on how good you are at haggling, you might be able to hawk your hat for four eggs rather than three, but there are still basically stable ratios determining how many of commodity X trade for how many of commodity Y. An important thing to understand is that exchange value has nothing to do with use-value (except that something has to have some use-value, any at all, to be up for exchange in the first place; no one's going to buy your mud pie under most circumstances). That is to say, a sandwich - which keeps you alive, because you're a living being that needs to eat - is clearly infinitely more important to you than a lump of gold, which doesn't really do anything. And yet, you might need an entire wagon of sandwiches to get someone to part with their lump of gold. What gives? How are we figuring out how much of one thing should trade for another? Well... Value: Value, according to Marx (but also, like, Ricardo and other liberal economists, although Marx took it farther) is the average socially-necessary labor time required to produce something. To make that determination, we're assuming that all labor can be expressed as a function of generic, unskilled labor (an hour's work by a doctor or chef can't be replicated by an hour's work by someone with no training, but the doctor and chef themselves went through so-and-so hours of labor to acquire their skills, and so we can just treat their labor as regular labor with a combo multiplier) , and also bearing in mind what kind of labor is necessary in the context of a given level of social and scientific development (so it's easier to make bolts of cloth once we've invented power looms). Does this mean that a commodity's value decreases if, thanks to technological innovation, making that commodity gets easier? Yes! Does this mean that a commodity's value increases if, due to shortages, that commodity becomes rarer and harder to find or make? Also yes! Something's value changes with historical context. Imagine what you could get for your smartphone if you time traveled with it back into the '50s, for instance. Exchange value is downstream from value; the reason one thing trades for more than another thing is not because the first thing is more useful, but because the first thing is harder to make or get. You can just breathe in air wherever you are (for now...), which is why air "has no value" - it'd be ridiculous if someone tried to sell you a gulp of fresh air (for now...). But you do need to go to some trouble to make a sandwich, so it's not crazy for someone to try to sell you a sandwich. And gold is quite rare - if you want a gold nugget, you need to go to a load of trouble surveying, assaying, panning, mining, whatever; even if you were lucky enough to just trip over a gold nugget in your back yard, the average socially-necessary labor time required to produce a gold nugget, calculated across all human beings currently searching for gold, is still vast. So, putting it all together, Marx's law of value begins with the understanding that things trade for each other based on how hard they are to make or get, not based on what kind of good they'll do you.
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Nov 10, 2020 23:38
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Beefeater1980 posted:I don’t know, the implication of the materialist analysis of history to me seems to be that it can’t really be accelerated. Once material conditions compel the collapse of the capitalist mode of production, it will be abandoned. If material conditions don’t compel it (for example if enough people can be given an acceptable enough life through accommodation with capital) then the change won’t happen. The system has to collapse under its own weight. I haven't read Vol. 3, but I think this is linked to something we brought up earlier - things can have use-value without having value, and, once you've got a full-fledged capitalist society going that's trading a specific money-commodity around, things can have prices without having value (or, as in your example, one thing's price can be higher than another's even if they contain the same amount of crystallized human labor). So, the two houses are of equal value, but for contingent social and physical reasons they are not of equal price. However, if one of them was much more labor-intensive to create than the other, you'd expect its price to be concomitantly higher, because price and exchange value flow from/gravitate towards value even if they don't perfectly mirror it at all times.
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Nov 11, 2020 03:17
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Cpt_Obvious posted:One of the best parts of Marxism is that it is, in fact, falsifiable. For example, the existence of an anarcho-capitalist state would disprove Marxism, because Marxism posits that the state creates the necessary oppression that capitalism needs. Or, hell, just a liberal state successfully resolving the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and proletariat such that class conflict ceases and there's no slide towards fascism.
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Nov 11, 2020 20:04
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Disnesquick posted:I'm going to be overly pedantic at this point and say that this component of Marxist thought is the scientific bit and not the ideological component. Basically, the difference between the Manifesto and Capital. I don't think there's actually much daylight between the Manifesto and Capital. Manifesto just lays out a prediction which Capital lays out the historical basis for. But it's not just a matter of, workers should revolt because it'd be better that way. It's a matter of, the center cannot hold, capitalism cannot sustain itself indefinitely, and the most likely thing to follow it is socialism. (Of course, nowadays, we can append "or total human extinction from climate collapse" to that claim)
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Nov 11, 2020 21:15
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Disnesquick posted:I am genuinely interested in your line of thinking on this point. My general position in life is that ideology is, in general, axiomatic, and science is deductive. I think the manifesto is a call to arms, whereas Capital is a more phlegmatic dissection of long-term forces. Well, except for the final line ("Working men of all countries, unite!") the manifesto isn't really an exhortation to action or attempt at persuasion. It lays out why capitalism is already doomed, why all the individual rights that liberals fear the communists will take away are already gone, and so forth. "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." I'd call the Manifesto a series of predictions about the way history is going to unfold given the conditions on the ground. What are those conditions on the ground? Well, the Manifesto itself actually goes into some detail about wages and the means of production and the role of the state in mediating class conflict, just not into sprawling, exhaustive detail because it's meant to be light and snappy. Capital goes into much, much more depth when it comes to the complex organ systems pumping away beneath liberal democracy's skin, but basically comes to the same conclusion as the Manifesto, namely that capitalism is founded on violence and exploitation and is shaking itself to pieces. And while the start is pretty dry (though by no means humorless), Marx actually gets pretty worked towards the middle and end when he's talking about minting children's blood into coin and histories written in blood and fire and so on. To take a different tack, I once met someone who blinked at me in confusion when I told them that their beloved Jordan Peterson was a right-wing ideologue. They told me, he's not right wing at all! He's just making neutral observations about history and society! And, of course, you and I can say the same thing about Marx, and there's a sense in which we'd be right, but while Peterson calmly and dispassionately observes that the feminine principle will destroy society unless suppressed by the patriarchy, Marx calmly and dispassionately observes that capitalism is going to kill us all unless we kill it first.
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Nov 12, 2020 01:59
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A lot of people treat historically-existing socialist regimes as if the people living there had never heard of voting or something. They'll be like "well in a good socialist society there'd be bottom-up decision making and recallable officials and so on" when in fact this is exactly what went on: https://drive.google.com/file/d/174Y2CYVVaMumINW1ApKRO5DiC7JOyCI8/view The above link is one I've posted in C-SPAM a bunch of times but will never stop slinging around, because it's a really interesting historical document: a narrative of life in the Soviet Union by a British national who'd been visiting there for a few years, before the Cold War had gotten properly spun up such that there was a need for negative propaganda. Instead, since the USSR and UK were allies in ongoing second world war, they were trying to cast the Soviets in a good light such that citizens of the UK could develop some understanding of who it was they were working with. In particular I like the details in there about the creation of the famous Five Year Plans - the Supreme Soviet would draft one, then pass it down to subsidiary soviets, which would pass it down further, and further, and so on, and only once the plan had reached the capillaries and been annotated with criticisms, requirements, etc by all and sundry would it get passed back up to the heart to get revised and finally implemented.
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Nov 12, 2020 02:11
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For me, things like COVID really highlight the weird way people talk about concepts like "authoritarianism", "accountability", etc. China took what you'd classically call authoritarian measures to contain the virus, mandating strict lockdowns, forcing people to stay home, etc. An ELZN-wide mandate against inter-village travel could easily receive the same criticism, and I could imagine that, if the West started to view the Zapatistas as a real threat, you'd suddenly start hearing a lot about the tyrannical, top-down control of the populace as enacted by Subcomandante Marcos on the word of just a few elitist doctors or whatever. On the other hand, the US basically did gently caress all, thereby preserving its citizenry's individual liberties to go out whenever and wherever they want, wearing whatever they want. The thing is, the end result is that Chinese citizens have their personal freedoms curtailed far less by the novel coronavirus than US citizens do. In fact, the clear takeaway is that the Chinese government is actually much more accountable to its people (at least on this one issue) than the US government is, because they felt the need to mobilize resources to keep people alive and healthy on a scale that we simply did not and may never. Is it more cruel, aloof, and hierarchical to impose a lockdown and save the populace or to do nothing and let the populace be riven by disease?
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Nov 12, 2020 23:37
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Anarchist federations are necessarily going to need centralized decision-making and defense systems in order to defend against threats both internal and external, and, for simply having those systems, they'll forever be painted as evil totalitarians who are suppressing real socialism because of their cravings for power. Once somebody discovers lithium reserves in Chiapas, the ELZN's high esteem for notorious authoritarian Che Guevara is going to become a lot more important to western leftist discourse.
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Nov 13, 2020 00:05
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OwlFancier posted:I would be more worried, honestly, that centralizing in response to existential threats would destroy what they have built anyway. You don't need to win the fight to destroy a culture with war. The Zapatistas owe too much to the various indigenous communities they're composed of not to centralize to whatever extent is necessary to resist invasion or sabotage. In fact, I trust that they've already done so - they have an actual army, after all, and some way of actually enforcing their anti-COVID dictates against moving around from village to village. They draw from the Marxist-Leninist tradition as well as from anarchism! Like I posted earlier, I think a lot of leftists discount or don't realize the extent to which really-existing socialist states, including the notorious USSR and communist China, were and are already decentralized, democratic, and bottom-up to whatever extent they could afford to be. If you'd rather that your socialist project dies a noble death than struggles to a pyrrhic victory, you're not actually carrying out a serious socialist project. It is our duty to win.
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Nov 13, 2020 00:21
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OwlFancier posted:No I know that, people will resist, when I say I hope it doesn't go that way I mean I hope that it doesn't destroy the good things that they have built. It is very easy to throw that out in the name of expediency in the face of an existential threat. And that's not wrong either, certainly not in the sense you could blame anyone for doing it when faced with annihilation. It might even be necessary, but it can still mean that you can end up with a much shittier society at the other end, one that goes on to repeat many of the wrongs it fought against. I share all these concerns, but as a famous political theorist once said, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time. "What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges."
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Nov 13, 2020 00:37
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Cpt_Obvious posted:You should watch this video about it by a Vietnamese citizen: This is the kind of thing I'm gesturing at above. The socialists leading Vietnam had and still have a responsibility to the working and peasant classes that they're leading, which contain of plenty of, like, regular guys and gals who just happen to appreciate what the socialists have accomplished so far rather than being 100% cadres of die-hard Marxists. Technically, even after the USSR collapsed, they could have told the IMF to gently caress off and opted for total autarky, and maybe it would have allowed them to achieve their current standard of living in merely one or two or five extra decades, but that's a lot of extra misery you're multiplying across a whole lot of human life-years. Does it suck to have to liberalize to partake in the world market? Absolutely, it's horrible. Was there a better choice? I'm not sure I can envision one. Geopolitical circumstances didn't have to shake out that way, but they did, and at that point all you can do is make the best play with the cards you've been dealt. If a car's barreling down the road at you, you might have to leap to your right and fall in a ditch, or leap to your left and fall in a puddle, but you don't have the option to simply hold out a hand and will the car to a halt as much as it would look really cool.
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Nov 13, 2020 00:54
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Aruan posted:Yes I understand Marx's theory of why capitalism will inevitably collapse, but that doesn't seem to conform the reality in which we live, in which capitalist systems are stronger than ever. I am skeptical if climate change will be a fatal shock to the system if a pandemic which has killed hundreds of thousands and put one third of people out fo work has inspired more anger against restrictions than against the system which allowed people to die in the first place. Instead, I think its far more likely that the end effect of climate change on capitalist system is a return to earlier colonialism-style exploitation where the western nations are willing to cannibalize the other continents for their resources to maintain standards of living. IIRC Kliman and others argue that Marx doesn't quite say that the falling rate of profit will necessarily cause capitalism to collapse, but rather that the falling rate of profit will necessarily cause cyclical crises and increases in misery and inequality such that a proletarian revolution will become increasingly easy/necessary to carry out.
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Nov 13, 2020 01:52
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Similarly, if you were to warp me back to the middle ages of some parallel timeline, I could confidently predict that feudalism will collapse and be supplanted by some more powerful mode of production, but I couldn't tell you whether that was going to happen tomorrow or in several hundred years, and in any case it'd have to be something that the rising bourgeoisie did on purpose rather than something that just happened unbidden due to unthinking geological processes.
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Nov 13, 2020 03:52
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Nov 13, 2020 09:48
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Any discussion of anarchism vs. Marxism is necessarily going to be about means of defeating capitalism, carrying out a revolution, defending a revolution, and generally supporting the transition to a classless society, because it's actually a common point between both ideologies that in a classless society no repressive apparatus is needed and people can be counted on to cooperate in transparent, democratic ways without being forced to. I actually agree with mila kunis that if an anarchist is like "well of course you might need various centralized, coercive institutions like an army in the short term..." then they're just a bog-standard communist. What I usually see in disagreements between anarchists/leftcoms/whatever and more orthodox Marxists or MLs is the claim by the former that even establishing a worker's state (or a worker's "state" which doesn't call itself a state but still has an army, people who'll come to your door and requisition some of your grain, etc) is a bad idea and inherently failure-prone because power just begets more power, anyone in any position of leadership or even strong administrative influence will necessarily become corrupt and counterrevolutionary, and so on. It seems like we don't actually have any of those people in this thread?
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Nov 13, 2020 19:10
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Well, in that case, mila kunis isn't punching at shadows but instead talking about a really-existing rift in left wing theory. Of course, a lot of this comes down to historical questions about if and to what extent various really-existing institutions were democratic, bottom-up, subject to recall, etc. People often assume that the governments of the USSR, Cuba, etc. were just cabals of unaccountable autocrats that made no real allowance for the masses of citizenry to have their say, in which case they are examples that The State will always betray you and you must never attempt to create one in the course of having a revolution. But if, in fact, such things as the Soviet constitution were being followed more or less faithfully, if communist leaders were subject to recall and just had so much legitimate popular support that it didn't happen at the top level, then anarchists need to reckon with the fact that the things they propose as antidotes or alternatives to statism were actually already happening on the ground and that they've either got skewed perceptions of actually-existing socialism or that there's no social engineering magic bullet that will let you defeat capitalism while also never subjecting anyone to coercion via a centralized power structure. Or both!
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Nov 13, 2020 19:37
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OwlFancier posted:Donald trump also had sufficient support to complete a term in office, that you can construct a political system to manufacture support for any rear end in a top hat you like isn't saying much. Sure, but this itself is an important point to make. Donald Trump isn't an unaccountable tyrant ruling us from on high. He had a legitimate base of support, not just among the hyper-rich, that swept him into power and kept him there. I don't think that base is so strong as to, say, allow him to seize indefinite control of the state apparatus via coup, but he really is a reflection of what many American people wanted and still want and, rather than being an example of how states corrupt and subvert the people in charge, is an example of how states respond to the will of the people. Of course, ours is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and will never produce a ruling executive that in any way threatens that dictatorship, but within the bounds of the prevailing mode of production Trump represents neither an accident nor the machinations of some kind of unaccountable, self-sustaining bureaucracy that has totally insulated itself from the people's will. In the same way, I think it's wrongheaded to imagine that the governments of China, Vietnam, etc did what they did because of the bare fact of being state governments. The state is a terrain of struggle, it's not an actor in and of itself, and state institutions do things because of how conflicting class interests resolve and synthesize, not because they have a bottomless appetite for power for power's sake. That is to say... The Oldest Man posted:I think Marxist-Leninists are on to something but their states do not achieve "escape velocity" to the intended end-state of a stateless, classless society (for a variety of reasons including external ones like capitalist encirclement), eventually the revolutionary fervor dies back and the progress of socialism begins to slow, stall, or reverse, and that problem remains fundamentally unsolved in my opinion. ...obviously no one has achieved communism as yet. But is this because creating a worker's state inherently retards the progress towards communism? What if, instead, creating a worker's state is the only thing that's even gotten us this far? Luna Oi's "is Vietnam socialist?" video was linked earlier in this thread, and I think she makes a persuasive case that Vietnam liberalized and opened up its market not because the ruling communist party had become so insulated from the needs of the people that it felt safe to nakedly pursue its own advantage, but precisely because the ruling communist party was accountable to the people and had to take its best option for building up productive forces and increasing the standard of living rather than idealistically condemning the citizenry to extended privation.
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Nov 13, 2020 20:12
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OwlFancier posted:As to how you might fight wars, well, decentralized militaries are a thing. They are historically a surprisingly effective thing, being able to exact heavy costs on centralized, hierarchical militaries operating overseas and backed by major world powers. Conquest is surprisingly difficult to do, few places have achieved it in the last hundred years or so, a lot more have eaten poo poo trying it. Uh, are they? I don't know much military history so feel free to give examples, but the way you write here makes me think first and foremost of Maoist and Viet Cong guerillas, and while those military forces were certainly, like, sneaky and spatially distributed, I'm pretty sure they had centralized command-and-control infrastructure same as the bourgeois forces they were up against.
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Nov 13, 2020 20:15
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VictualSquid posted:The SU had a decentralized military before trotzky's reforms. The first french republic had a decentralized military before it reformed. Many revolutions try it. You could also get together with your fellow workers and fire your manager in the Soviet Union, but anarchists never seem to call that a "decentralized" system and frankly neither would I. There's still a clear chain of command, it's just subject to some kind of democracy... like many modern chains of command, even sometimes under capitalism. OwlFancier posted:I was thinking perhaps more the afghan-soviet war with the various mujahideen groups fighting semi-independently of one another albeit under a unified front, and while the war was obviously horrifically costly for Afghanistan they did eventually manage to make the soviet occupation untenable, which is pretty impressive given the disparity in power and equipment, even with outside materiel assistance. I mean, Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation also received significant material support from places with highly centralized militaries and modes of production. This stuff about the military becoming an interest group in and of itself is sort of the anarchist suspicion of the state in microcosm. Setting aside the question of whether it's technically correct to call members of the military a "class" the same way you might call the peasantry a "class", I think it elides questions of why people join the military, who actually materially supports the military, and why the military does what it does. Institutions don't just grow and accumulate power for no reason, and institutions don't exist separately from the social classes that give rise to those institutions and that mediate their conflicts through those institutions. The Oldest Man posted:There are enough examples of non-state organization that have produced effective results of resistance to militarized liberal capitalism (or outright fascism) that I think saying "only thing" is reductive. It's a common and relatively effective method of resistance, with its own problems. Like what? People like to bring up the ELZN and Rojava here, but those are both formed in whole or part by MLs, have their own internal defense mechanisms and repressive infrastructure, and certainly in Rojava's case have made questionable bargains with the west for the sake of their own survival. This isn't to criticize them as bad or something, far from it - it just seems that all the same left-com critiques of classical socialist states could be applied to these institutions just as easily. quote:One of the perverse mechanisms of hierarchical decision-making systems is that the most idealistic people at the top are equally as capable of making decisions that move the overall group away from its collective goals out of their own belief that they are making the hard choices on behalf of everyone else. IE, is Vietnam ever going to be able to back out of liberalizing and capitalism now? The point I'm making here is that a group of people can choose to endure hardship and collectively sacrifice for a common goal, but an idealistic, compassionate leader in a hierarchy will not choose to inflict hardship on his people - he will sacrifice their shared ideals first, because he believes he can take personal responsibility for the destruction or debasement of the shared vision and absolve his people of the decision to do that. So even good leaders can and will destroy what the people they represent are trying to build and preserve, even if the people as a whole might choose a different way if the choice was everyone's. Obviously I am not doing the wrecker move here of smugly pointing out that capitalism still exists so why communism, because the improvements to the lot of (particularly) colonial people brought about by communism are relatively undeniable from my perspective, but the path beyond the worker state seems to me to be unreachable by the worker state apparatus. Okay, but is liberalizing a sacrifice of the Vietnamese people's shared ideals, such that the leaders must have been choosing to do this on behalf of people who wouldn't have been willing to do it themselves? Or was it a democratic decision with support by a majority who had a clear-eyed understanding of what they were choosing between and what risks either path entailed? I think all this comes down to an idealized picture of administrative, decision-making structures (whether formally part of a state or just effectively part of a state) as somehow operating independently of the classes that give rise to them, rather than being syntheses of the classes that give rise to them. I keep seeing the state (or subsidiary state structures, like the army) get, in effect, anthropomorphized, where it takes on a life of its own and starts betraying its masters... but that's not the only explanation for what we see states do in response to their conditions.
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Nov 13, 2020 21:03
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dex_sda posted:Anarchists typically refer to things as 'centralized' when power/decision making is the part that's centralised in some group. For instance, EZLN has a planned economy and organisational structures to enforce it, but since every coop (and ultimately every worker) has a say in this planning and how it is enforced it is not centrally planned, but cooperatively, democratically planned. Contrast with Stalin's USSR where even though some people other than Stalin had a say what the plan was gonna be, it was ultimately a limited group that did not take into account the average worker's voice, and it unilaterally wielded power to enforce the plan. But this isn't true. The five year plans were, themselves, democratically assembled with lots of participation and buy-in from single collective farms or villages or whatever. There are obviously technical limitations, guesswork, and time lag involved here, but why wouldn't they be? The USSR could only carry out its plans insofar as it had mass buy-in from its people. quote:They're also formed in whole or part by anarchists. What matters is their praxis is overwhelmingly anarchist and radically democratic in conception. You are correct that there are elements of ML in the praxis, but the differences in the way for example defense mechanisms are organised there vs what they historically looked like in ML states are not mere nuance. I will mention these two projects, by the way, is why I think a mostly-anarchist fusion with ML is the realistic way to go. The thing is, that's also true of "regular" socialist states. As much as we might wish otherwise, you don't actually get socialist (here "socialist" encompasses the entire range of left-wing thought from anarchism to communism) states in which everyone's a socialist. Socialist revolutions are carried out by masses that are led by socialists but actually contain people of almost every ideological persuasion who've had it up to here with the status quo and are willing to trust the socialists because of pre-existing relationships or precedent. Anarchists (as well as liberals, as well as wishes-they-didn't-have-to-care-about-this-crap "apolitical" Joes Schmoe) helped carry out the Russian Revolution and build the USSR, even though later on many of them were suppressed or marginalized such as in the Kronstadt uprising. And events like Kronstadt, or the dissolution of the factory committees, or all the other tough decisions the Bolsheviks had to make were all messy and regrettable and less than ideal, but were outcomes of difficult circumstances and external pressures rather than the creeping influence of some demon called "the state". To put this another way, and to echo someone else in this thread, there were reasons that Lenin was (ultimately wrongly) called an anarchist, and the Soviet and Chinese and other revolutionary projects were also radically democratic in conception and execution. Nevertheless, historical contingency meant that those projects were caught on the horns of difficult decisions arising from the general fact that no revolutionary coalition actually comes out the other end of that revolution intact, and the same is true or going to be true for the ELZN or Rojava or whatever else. In the course of coordinating their own growth and self-defense, they're going to have to repress or even expel well-meaning people who simply don't agree with the way things are going, and the fact that they had to do that is going to be used as proof that they've been corrupted by hierarchy or whatever.
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Nov 13, 2020 22:44
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dex_sda posted:This is the thing often said by MLs to rebuff the critiques, but the proof is in the historical pudding: I'm not saying power wasn't centralised. I'm saying it was democratic. Soviet citizens deliberated and voted same as we do (indeed, much more meaningfully than we do) and decisions made by central authorities flowed from popular support and indeed couldn't have been carried out without that support. You can't actually make people collectivize their farms with main force. There literally aren't enough soldiers per peasant. Putting aside the fact "mass movements by workers" have often been straight up CIA plots, you're discounting the most massive workers' movement on the field, which was the Soviet state itself. Like, okay, Kronstadt wasn't a machination of the US state department, and even Solidarity didn't start out as one. But, you know, a lot of other workers, certainly those who had volunteered to march in the Red Army, sharply disagreed with the tack the Kronstadt sailors were taking, which is why they suppressed them with brutal violence. The entire rest of the union needed a Baltic seaport and didn't appreciate that seaport being held hostage. If Kronstadt had genuinely represented a mass movement it might have earned more support across the wider USSR, such that the popular will wouldn't have allowed its suppression and actually forced the Bolshevik government to the negotiating table, but it wasn't that massive, and so it didn't get that much support, and so it ate poo poo. I don't think it's good that it ate poo poo; Kronstadt was a tragedy. But I also don't think the Bolshevik government made the wrong choice, because the needs of everyone else in the Union outweighed the ideological convictions of a specific political faction based in one specific city. Purges, too, weren't actually unilateral. The Bolsheviks were a fractious lot and a lot of people had a lot of ongoing disagreements, including pretty vituperative ones with Stalin himself, without getting summarily fired and/or shot. And the (perceived...?) need for those purges came as a consequence to the Bolsheviks arguably being too democratic - letting too many new people into the party too quickly and with too little oversight, such that the ranks were now swelled with newbies that the old guard didn't know well or have a good handle on how to deal with. As above, these represented a fuckup and a huge tragedy, but they weren't the result of "centralization" - they were a probably-unavoidable growing pain in a federation which, in fact, had been attempting to act as democratically as it could. To echo myself from above, when I say "regrettable" I don't mean "incorrect". I think it's a general fact of revolution that the coalition that carries out a revolution will never be exactly the same one that defends it afterwards, and there'll inevitably be rifts and power struggles between people who agree that the Tsar had to go but who fervently disagree whether grain should be getting sold on the free market. These power struggles aren't the fault or the cause of centralized decision-making, and are going to be resolved in messy and tragic ways pretty much whichever way you go.
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Nov 13, 2020 23:19
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dex_sda posted:I think in many ways we're arguing past each other because of a different perspective on concepts. Most people don't rise up against neoliberal states because to some extent those states do serve their interests, make their lives comfortable, and respond in some way to the popular will. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie isn't negotiable, obviously, but a preponderance of citizens of the first world do get a trickle of imperial spoils and also get to participate in the exploitation and repression of the most marginalized. Americans aren't hopelessly in thrall to centralized power of the evil dictator Donald Trump; Donald Trump is simply within their range of tolerance (though that range is slipping, especially with the horribly botched COVID response). Even though living in this context condemns most people to selling their labor-power day by day to a dictatorial boss just to be able to survive, that is actually not bad enough on its own that they're willing to withdraw their consent from the government en masse. I just don't think this thing called "power consolidation" (or "centralization" or whatever) is legibly to blame for the strife and violence which will necessary accompany any revolution, either immediately or in the aftermath. To say it is is to discount the judgment and agency of countless socialist citizens and revolutionaries, none of whom were foreign to concerns about democracy, bottom-up accountability, and similar.
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Nov 13, 2020 23:46
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dex_sda posted:That's fine, and I will point out I'm not even disagreeing on the matter of revolution. Even the EZLN revolution that I am a huge fan of started off with some consolidated power and an ML leader. But my point is that where I think USSR failed and EZLN is so far succeeding is that the grip on power has relaxed very quickly after the revolution and was replaced with radical participative democracy. Hell, on a larger timescale this relaxation is starting to apply to Cuba, and it outlasted USSR! By comparison, USSR's power only consolidated with Stalin and thereafter often ended up aimed at it's constituents even if they were asking for more socialism and in the 80s, this led to internal strife that was exploited by external agents. What does "USSR's power only consolidated with Stalin" mean, exactly? Did Stalin have more personal authority than Lenin, and then Kruschev more personal authority than Stalin, or whatever? There was a lot of political maneuvering in the 20s and 30s in which Stalin's faction got its way over Zinoviev's and then Bukharin's, for instance, but I'm pretty sure this was an instance of a greater proportion of the party being won over to Stalin's side rather than Stalin pulling a series of Emperor Palpatine maneuvers where he votes himself more and more powers and is suddenly arch-president for life rather than a humble secretary. In general, I'm skeptical of your measurement of how tight or relaxed some person or institution's grip on "power" is, and therefore how centralized or consolidated or whatever a given socialist society actually is. If the ELZN's grip on power is so relaxed, how can they enforce a COVID lockdown that prevents citizens from traveling between regions? Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Nov 14, 2020 |
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Nov 14, 2020 00:59
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dex_sda posted:Stuff like the NKVD gaining power etc. You could argue that was more Beria but I mean Stalin and his inner circle. This is very loose language. What does it mean to "gain power" here? If the NKVD just increased its numbers on the order of Stalin, or Beria, or whatever, then that means that guy already had the authority to rally or draw down the NKVD and was just choosing to use it in one direction or another - the capacity existed regardless. Certainly Beria, the individual mortal, gained power when he ascended to head of the NKVD, but at the very same instant the previous occupier of that position lost that very same power, so how was power being consolidated or centralized further than from the NKVD's inception? quote:By... individual regions agreeing to it? If someone decides that he's just got to go visit his mate in the next town and that this lockdown isn't that big a deal and anyway he knows he's not sick, as inevitably happens in any lockdown situation, he will have to be intercepted and stopped, perhaps by main force if he just refuses to take the injunction to stay put seriously. If for whatever reason local authorities are not enough to stop him (maybe lots of people are having an illicit party and can't easily be cowed by just a couple guys, then greater and greater assemblages of force from more regions are going to have to be assembled in order to make sure everyone stays put. There's an order handed down from on high (maybe you'd prefer to say that it's handed out from the center?), and that order needs to be enforced because it's literally a matter of life or death. That order was democratically deliberated on by representatives from across the region before being promulgated, sure! But so were lots of plans, orders, etc in other socialist societies. Now the decision is made, and power in the ELZN will be centralized/consolidated/increased/whatever other scary word to whatever extent is necessary to give that decision weight.
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Nov 14, 2020 02:19
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Don't need a centrally wielded stick when individual regions agree to work together.
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Disnesquick posted:What you're describing here is effectively one region deciding to invade another with sufficient force to overwhelm the defence force of that region. So yeah, if an invasion happens then multiple allied regions can assemble enough force together to repel this extreme coercive behavior. Thatbdoeant require the formation of a hierarchy or a permanent Central command, it just required cooperation and solidarity under the principle that a threat to one is a threat to all. The hierarchy and central command already exist. They're the institution that assembled, decided on the no-travel-between-villages rule in the first place, proclaimed that rule territory wide, and serve as the last resort if that rule is broken. Did literally every citizen cast a vote determining whether to enforce a lockdown and moratorium on inter-region travel? No, a few experts consulted with an assembly. Was the decision a democratic and wholly legitimate one? Yes. Will it be enforced by coercive means, as communities marshal and consolidate enough force to block any violation (a couple guys for one straggler, an entire village for an illicit party, etc)? Also yes.
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Nov 14, 2020 06:06
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witchy posted:The "Lenin's testament" you're talking about is mostly likely a fake (per Kotkin). The other stuff Ferrinus is claiming is off though, as Stalin definitely did leverage his position as party secretary and close confidant of Lenin to consolidate power even before his formal ascension to leader of the USSR. Characterizing the succession as an open referendum ignores that it was pretty much a factional struggle among the elite central committee. The other thing about the NKVD remaining stagnant also has me scratching my head when it was disbanded in 1930 and then reconstituted wholesale in 1934 with the OGPU rolled into it to boot. What I mean is that power flowed back and forth between different people and factions but didn't consolidate in the sense that at one point it rested with the people but then after that point it rested with a minority of those people, or one person, or whatever. The NKVD is a good example - the Soviets straight dissolved the institution of the police upon the successful revolution, then basically created their own not-technically-police in order to deal with crime, then disbanded and reconstituted them again, etc. But the decisive power is not the day-to-day existence of a man with the formal title of NKVD head, the decisive power here is the power to form or disband an NKVD at all. Bureaucratic and interpersonal maneuvers involving trading on existing reputation and backroom dealing and so forth can change the specific day-to-day things that power does, but the source of that power is the Soviet people. It was "consolidated" all along. On the other hand, it was also "decentralized" and "democratic" all along because of the federated structure of the soviet state, the way that "higher" soviets were composed of representatives from "lower" soviets, and so on. A commonly-referenced Marxist concept is "commodity fetishism", referring to the way that people attribute power and vitality to commodities themselves because they don't realize that those commodities only have value as products of human labor. I think a lot of people are guilty of what you might call "institution fetishism", such that the effects, positive or negative, of class conflict expressing itself through this or that institution are blamed instead on the institution themselves. Like, if there simply hadn't been a central committee then all the bad things wouldn't have happened or at least would have happened with less severity. But that central committee merely reflects power; it doesn't create it.
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Nov 14, 2020 20:49
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OwlFancier posted:But that critique applies just as well to our current society, and begs the question of why change anything at all? The thing to change, of course, is which class is enforcing a dictatorship, not the specific outward form of that class dictatorship. Injustice doesn't actually flow from hierarchy (formal or informal), it flows from the dictates of the existing mode of production.
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Nov 14, 2020 20:58
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OwlFancier posted:I feel like that collapses if you think there are literally any other factors involved in society than production. And also if you believe in literally any concept of institutional or social inertia. Institutional and social inertia are real but they're not decisive. Like, there's also such things as institutional and social decay, or simply cultural drift. What decides if an institution will stagnate, strengthen, mutate, or crumble? Not some inborn, essential power of institutions as institutions but the social forces that actually give rise to those institutions and which those institutions mediate in turn. Marx and Lenin predicted that institutions of state repression would naturally decay as their actual source - class conflict - became less pressing. We should definitely expect the obverse to be true: the sharper class conflict, the more prominent and resource-rich those institutions will become. But we shouldn't put the cart before the horse.
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Nov 14, 2020 21:17
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Disnesquick posted:I would strongly disagree here and make the case that injustice does actually flow from hierarchy, whatever the means of production. I would evidence this with the case of Yugoslavian self-management giving rise to a beaurocratic class. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that hierarchical relationships are predisposed to the emergence of class, and therefore class conflict. Okay, wait. Putting aside for a moment the specific foibles of Yugoslavian "market socialism", you're telling me that self-management gave rise to a bureaucracy. Isn't that an example of hierarchy springing from some existing relation of production, rather than hierarchy coming first and causing problems in and of itself? In general I'm not really sure about your verbiage and bedrock assumptions here, because a bureaucracy isn't the same thing as a class in Marxist terms and class itself originating from hierarchy rather than the two being sides of the same coin doesn't really track with those ideas as I understand them.
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Nov 14, 2020 23:02
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Disnesquick posted:I think you're focussing too much on the term beaurocracy here. The fundamental point is that allowing hierarchy to creep into what should be a post-class mode of production will have the innevitable result of class reproduction. The hierarchy does come first, even when it's just a whiff. Can you explain where you think hierarchy comes from and what it does in this formulation? Maybe give an example? It's not like pre-, currently-, or post-socialist Yugoslavia was a classless society.
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Nov 15, 2020 03:00
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 05:47 |
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Everything contains contradictions, and the interplay of those contradictions against each other and the surrounding context governs each thing's ongoing transformation. Any institution, hierarchical or otherwise, contains a self-sustaining tendency. However, it also contains an opposite tendency to decay and attenuate. Many hierarchies have loosened or outright dissolved because the conditions that create and strengthen them have vanished. For instance, fewer people affiliate themselves with organized religion now than twenty or fifty or a hundred years ago, despite the fact that organized religion is a largely hierarchical institution with very powerful ideological and material incentives to sustain and increase its power (and which is often useful to capital). Under capitalism, much that is solid melts into air! It's not actually philosophically tenuous to be against "hierarchy" generally because you just end up playing word games. Whether something is hierarchical or centralized or coercive or whatever is basically a matter of diction. Any kind of artifice or decision-making on a medium to large scale will necessarily involve feats of task delegation and division of labor that will be painted as hierarchical, authoritarian, or whatever by someone who's already decided that they're your enemy for other reasons. Separately, political engagement is a limited resource. People with lives to lead and mouths to feed don't actually have huge reserves of time and psychic energy with which to adjudicate questions of governance, and it's an imposition (though often a small one) on their lives to get them to weigh in on political questions. Often that imposition needs to be made because the questions are both important and impossible to answer without public buy-in. Nevertheless, the term "public servant" exists for a reason - it's the mayor's job to take care of a bunch of crap I don't want to deal with! In my leftist organizing, I avoid actual leadership positions like the plague because they involve a ton of social and administrative work I don't want to deal with; I much prefer to help with art or copyediting or whatever. Does this mean that the people who do take up leadership roles are slowly metastasizing into a political "class" with power over me? No! A class is a group of people with a distinct relationship to the means of production, not just, like... some guys with similar jobs. Like, do you think politicians in America are a distinct class? Do you think the power of a Trump, Obama, or Bush is somehow distinct from the power of an Amazon or a Lockheed Martin? To imagine that liberal democracies are the way they are because of voter complacency and depoliticization isn't materialist. Complacency and depoliticization are the result, not the cause, of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. They need to be actively manufactured by such institutions as the police and the media. They don't creep in and corrupt things that would have been good otherwise.
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Nov 15, 2020 06:24
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