[Marx] I put on my anti-coat and wizard hat

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [Marx] I put on my anti-coat and wizard hat

(Thread IKs: dead gay comedy forums)

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

AnimeIsTrash posted:

they also complain about democracy not being able to exist with communism, like what is more democratic than the workers controlling their own means of production? lol

technically the historical definition of democracy, which is to say decentralized slaver/rentier oligarchy, is genuinely incompatible with communism

# ¿ Jul 30, 2023 03:43

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 13:09

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

totality posted:

I think AES is not marxist, but it's nonetheless the revolutionary world-historical outcome of marxism...

what is marxism?

# ¿ Jul 30, 2023 16:43

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

totality posted:

CPC's commitment to AES ("Chinese characteristics") wasn't revising marxism, it was a genuine dialectical breakthrough ...

revising marxism through dialectics is exactly marxism. opposing capital through organized material means guided by marxist principles and goals is marxism. do you think that there is a pure pool of marxist energy in the fey realm that simply can not be touched by flesh so long as a single cent of capital remains to lock its portal?

# ¿ Jul 30, 2023 16:53

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

"I think Actually-Existing Capitalism is not bourgeoisie, but it's nonetheless the revolutionary world-historical outcome of bourgeois class interests ..."
- One Who Knows Words

# ¿ Jul 30, 2023 16:57

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

i'm much better at scolding liberals for thinking they have graduated kindergarten-level marxism, as kindergarten-level marxism is where my familiarity lies, but i think there's a generic, if somewhat tautological marxist explanation for why "bourgeoisie exist therefore not socialism/communism" is not a useful critique. would love for post-kindergarten marxists to correct me where necessary.

industrial society ultimately is always monopolized by the contradictions between proletariat and bourgeoisie class interests. there is no existing arrangement of industrial society that does not have these classes monopolize how that society is defined. capitalist society is not one where the bourgeoisie have abolished the proletariat, it can't be, because the bourgeoisie's existence is defined by and relies upon the proletariat to exploit production from. socialist society is not one where the proletariat have abolished the bourgeoisie, it can't be, because the proletariat's existence is defined and relies upon the bourgeoisie to exploit the particular products of their labor and convert it into capital (i.e. convert chairs from the chair factory into universally-transactional value tokens that can be used to pay for the further development of any/all modes of production). communist society is where neither the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie exist, because communist society is definitionally a society without class or the state.

building communism is not metaphorical, it requires great development of the productive forces, such that even if society must be dominated by proletarian class interests, it will still rely on the function of the bourgeoisie to greatly develop the productive forces. even if society were to commit to the usual left communist solution of "all ownership is divided between worker co-ops and democratic state control so that there are no more bourgeois individuals" you would still wind up with all the inherent pressures of industrial society seeking to produce capital causing said co-ops and/or state to organically reproduce bourgeois class interests anyways. also why there needs to be a consistent, ideologically-militant communist vanguard to actually steer industrial society towards communism. because industrial society in its organic, self-serving state only "cares" about which class is dominant between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, not in the abolition of that class dynamic.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2023 03:19

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

Bald Stalin posted:

why is the bourgeoisie required to develop productive forces?

how does one pay for new materials, goods, and research into new techniques and technology in industrial society? by bartering hammers for electrical service? society, under scarcity, needs to exploit surplus value from laborers in an organized fashion to redirect that surplus towards broader social upkeep and security. under industrial society, the proletariat produces surplus value, and the bourgeoisie extracts surplus value from the proletariat. unless you think that everybody should be forced to barter their 1/1000th of the factory's products on their own, you need to convert proletarian-produced surplus into capital, which is the function of the bourgeoisie, and in particular if you wish to outcompete and replace bourgeois dictatorships you have to be able to reinvest that capital into growth to outpace them

Bald Stalin posted:

Why would democratically run factories running within a DotP necessarily become bourgeois?? Idgi.

they never stopped being (or rather, containing the interests of the) bourgeoisie op; dominance of the proletariat is not the immediate extinction of the bourgeoisie. the extinction of the bourgeoisie will only occur as a simultaneous development of the extinction of the proletariat and the end of industrial capitalism, which is definitionally not a dictatorship of the proletariat (because they dont exist anymore)

# ¿ Aug 2, 2023 04:26

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

for the record i actually disagree with everybody who talks about keeping the bourgeoisie around for practical purposes as if it were some liberated choice that marxist politics makes. it doesnt matter how useful the vanguard thinks that the existence of the bourgeoisie may or may not be, under industrial economics the existence of the bourgeoisie is axiomatic and must be accepted in the present in order to move forward towards its abolition

# ¿ Aug 2, 2023 04:32

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

does anyone know if there's been any writing on exploring the possibility that first-worlders' conception of political ideology as actually being reflective of their own commodity fetishism? specifically, the phenomenon of first-world leftists insisting that real communism is an instant and total transformation into its ideal end-state being an expectation from said leftists that a political ideology should arrive from the ideology store as a fully functional, constructed, and contained commodity?

# ¿ Aug 5, 2023 02:21

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

sorry i dont read anarchist literature

# ¿ Aug 5, 2023 02:31

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

i thought i remembered hearing that the soviets coined and adopted "state capitalism" as a term for the ussr's economic policy? and state capitalism sounds like it means that the state acts as a central capitalist instead of having decentralized/dispersed capitalist individuals and firms ala dengism?

# ¿ Aug 16, 2023 02:36

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

*hip-hop music sting*
"This is where my work was stolen, Parappa."
"This is where your work was stolen, oops oops!"

# ¿ Aug 21, 2023 22:10

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

Maximo Roboto posted:

https://twitter.com/szabadsag1956/status/1703257878184833241?s=46

like every single common western misconception about marxism, socialism, and communism all summed up in two paragraphs. i wonder if there's any connection :thunk:

# ¿ Sep 17, 2023 14:40

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

proletariat is just a fancy word for working class, of which there has always been only one. conflating "state" and "government", as if the HRE and imperial germany were both the same kind of goverment. cia calling anybody else the most repressive [thing] in history. advancing marxism is actually degenerating its purity of essence with false and profane material reality.

just an absolute blowout on the bingo card of western "leftists"

# ¿ Sep 17, 2023 14:45

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

Ferrinus posted:

not quite: there has always been a working class, but there has NOT always been a proletariat. the working class was composed of slaves or peasants in past eras and both slaves and peasants have been contemporary with proletarians. stalin writes a bit in Dialectical and Historical Materialism about why the bolsheviks chose to support and organize the smaller russian proletariat rather than the much larger russian peasantry, for instance

the bitcoin of weed posted:

proletarian is french for propertyless. it specifically means a working class that has been enclosed and dispossessed of land and commons and forced to work for necessities, which is a very different power dynamic and mode of coercion than the peasantry faced

# ¿ Sep 17, 2023 20:05

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

my post's first section consists of wrong/inaccurate/simplified statements, ones which i do not believe to be true. when i said that "proletariat is just fancy for worker" i was being facetious. i had hoped that putting one obviously facetious and false statement in a list with other obviously facetious and false statements would indicate that i was not being sincere

EDIT: unless people are jsut using it as an excuse to explain the point in which case im overly dumb and insufficiently gay

# ¿ Sep 17, 2023 20:12

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

Ferrinus posted:

that's my bad, i was posting in a rush on transit and the old instincts kicked in without my looking closely at the middle of your post

we all make mistakes in the heat of passion jimbo. and besides i personally didnt actually know the deeper etymological/historical roots of "proletariat" anyways (i only really knew its modern-most marxist definition) so the content was still Worth

# ¿ Sep 17, 2023 20:40

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

trying to meaningfully differentiate anarchist labels is a dead-end because anarchism is not a real ideology with a real history of material power. they are all perfectly indistinguishable and also at the same time perfectly bespoke to each individual anarchist, offering little to no material for solid distinctions

# ¿ Oct 14, 2023 18:36

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

"anarchist" in its original meaning was literally identical to the current term "anarcho-communist" i.e. achieve communist society without transitioning through the proletarian-dictated state. the only reason there's a distinction now is because "anarchist" means everything from fascism to libertarian capitalism to anti-marxist communism to all sorts of extraordinarily abstract and thoughtless ideas about ideology that people mistake for real ideology. the only time in history that an actual anarchist movement rose to prominence was in the spanish civil war, where they depended on actual marxists to carry them and also they lost anyways. and now, since there has been no relevant movement since, everybody is perfectly free to invent their own entirely self-contained and forever un-implementable fantasy and call it "anarcho-[bullshit]" because there is no history or authority to determine any kind of consistency or coherence

EDIT: if you want to try and distinguish between anarchists that can be saved and those that cant, the only generalized criteria is (objective, material) class. working-class anarchists will typically fall in line behind the leninists in the final hours whereas privileged classes of anarchists will typically side with one reactionary group or another

stumblebum has issued a correction as of 01:31 on Oct 15, 2023

# ¿ Oct 15, 2023 01:24

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

on another note, what the gently caress is the deal with the lumpenproletariat? like its a term that seems to come up nearly as much as classes that i do have a grasp on (prole, bourge, peti-boos, labor aristos, peasant, literal aristos) but i keep not gleaning what their actual definition is. more specifically, i get the feeling that its a label that somehow includes both precariat and labor aristocracy? like subsidized imperial-core non-proletarian workers are the same class as a hobo getting beaten by cops on the street?? that doesnt seem right, and i'd like to know whether/how im wrong on that impression

# ¿ Oct 15, 2023 15:59

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

dead gay comedy forums posted:

good post. and everything you said is stuff i more or less heard bits of before, and it sounds like the seeming contradictory nature of the lumpen is normal? that was the main thing that was confusing me, the way that the lumpen kept being described as inherently counter-revolutionary and elsewhere also claimed to be important to mao's organization. it seems as if they are similar to the peti-bourg in the sense that they can move with or against proletarian interests depending on particular context?

# ¿ Oct 15, 2023 18:43

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

a small conjecture i want to throw out there:

if industrial society is defined by the conflicting relationship between proletariat and bourgeoisie classes, then these class have to maintain extreme consistency between contexts in order to continue to facilitate the continuous and standardized production and movement of capital. "proletariat" and "bourgeoisie" do not have much flexibility in their definitions and interests under industrialism. conversely, "third classes" (i.e. not proletariat or bourgeoisie) have far less pressure to maintain standardization because they are not the load-bearing pillars of industrialism. "third classes" have much more flexibility in their definitions and interests under industrialism. this is a significant reason why we have these issues with making consistent definitions of classes with inconsistent or at least heavily context-dependent interests

is there something here?

# ¿ Oct 16, 2023 17:40

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

would it be accurate to suggest that fictitious capital could instead be described as speculative capital i.e. that it is the commodification of a guarantee of future capital growth?

# ¿ Oct 19, 2023 18:43

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

Ferrinus posted:

i think it's "fictitious" capital because what happens is, capitalists assume that capital itself just contains the magic ability to continuously generate money via interest, and so that any source of money is, in fact, some capital

so, if the interest rate is 5%, a government bond that entitles its holder to an annual $10 must in fact be a $200 dollar capital, saleable for that much money by one capitalist to another, even if the original thing the government traded that bond for no longer exists

hmmm, i think i'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the distinction because this sounds like how capital behaves normally in a modern financialized western economy. let me see if an example could help;

two economists are walking down the street, when one of them spots an old dog turd baking on the sidewalk. they turn to the other economist and say "i'll pay you $200 to take a bite of that dog turd". the other economist takes a bite and nearly throws up before turning back to the first economist and says "okay pal, your turn, if you eat this dried-up old dog turd i'll pay you $200", which the first economist does happily out of self interest, despite actually puking. after their mutual gagging and spitting subsides, the first economist says "why did we do that? we accomplished nothing and made no money!", to which the second economist says "what do you mean? we just increased the gdp by $400!".

in this scenario, would the $400 growth in national gdp be considered fictitious capital? or would that $400 need to be packaged up in general dog-turd-eating securities?

# ¿ Oct 21, 2023 23:36

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

i remember once reading, most likely here in c-spam, that the golden age of piracy was an essential development of modern capital, wherein the pirates themselves served the purpose of redirecting financial wealth (gold) from where it was less efficient at generating more capital (spanish noble estates) towards more efficient capital generation (guilds, colonization companies, stock markets). if this idea is relevant, could it be generalized further into saying that the value of middlemen is to confirm whether or not a commodity is on its most profitable trajectory, and even to take extraordinary measures (theft, more or less) to redirect it to where it can generate more capital than its original intended trajectory?

and as long as im throwing out concepts i barely understand, how about a systems theory wording where middlemen are the sensory organs of capital, and their inserting of fingers into distribution chains is the means by which capital perceives the vectors of its commodities and the firms that profit off them in order to make necessary predictions and adjustments?

# ¿ Nov 9, 2023 17:09

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

Mushika posted:

So where is the line? Where do I address my self-criticism, and where does self deprecating humor devolve into indulging in the reverse?

material consequences; lots of us here are in a deindustrialized imperial core that alienates us from material consequences all the time so it may be hard to evaluate in that way. remember that this document was specifically for and about leadership in a significant political movement, and so they were necessarily empowered to make decisions that had appreciable and observable consequences to form criticisms of

# ¿ Nov 29, 2023 17:09

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

woke operator posted:

im the only marxist here

being a marxist is easy, you just have to believe that good things can happen to people when theyre nice to each other and share

# ¿ Dec 4, 2023 22:02

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

i know it's been mentioned itt fairly recently, but i cant find it; which english translation of Kapital do people recommend?

# ¿ Dec 11, 2023 19:09

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

fart simpson posted:

lol owned

-Das Kapital, Vol. I

# ¿ Dec 12, 2023 14:13

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

cops are state-sponsored lumpenprole bandits

# ¿ Dec 14, 2023 08:58

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

dead gay comedy forums posted:

my goon I literally do socialist education in a third world country as a volunteer

dead gay comedy forums posted:

two weeks ago a 68 years old woman that only had the most basic education here and worked pretty much almost all of her life as a domestic servant was raising questions about Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky with far more insightful critique than any such �but actually�� posting

in english?

# ¿ Dec 19, 2023 02:33

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

dead gay comedy forums posted:

I am brazilian op

# ¿ Dec 19, 2023 03:15

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

has there been any good marxist hypotheses on the particular nature of human society's first class conflict? im under the sourceless impression that it was forager-cultivator vs pillager-rancher, but im not sure if im just projecting the agrarian-pastoralist conflict back in time inappropriately. if there's no good info on a first/original class conflict, what would be the oldest class conflict(s) that had been identified and described by marxist history?

# ¿ Mar 22, 2024 17:04

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

gradenko_2000 posted:

...
What I'd like to talk about is: is it correct to say that the value required for a worker to reproduce their labor, is variable from worker to worker?

like, it costs so-and-so amount of money for a worker to feed themselves for a day, to cover the fractional cost of their monthly rent, to cover the depreciation of their clothing, to cover the cost of their commute to the workplace and back, and so on.

That amount isn't the same across any two workers, right? I mean, we can average it out, sure, but someone who lives closer to the workplace, someone who has two kids over none, someone who splits the rent with two roommates, someone who lives in a two-income household, and so on, means there's variance?

I'm not saying it necessarily matters, big picture, that the answer to that question is "yes", I'm just trying to check if it is.

i think it matters in terms of understanding how to differentiate between marxist egalitarian values ("from each according to their ability, to each according to their need") and bourgeois equality ("one toothbrush per slum"), and subsequently where liberal/socdem/anarchist "criticism" of communism as coming to force everybody into the exact same life with the exact same (minimal) stuff is actually a projection from liberal ideology itself

EDIT: to clarify, specifically that the natural distinction between workers needs to be utterly smudged and leveled out by bourgeois forces for the sake of extractive efficiency, and thus they end up being the ones who need their version of equality to drop all human standards of living to a universal barest minimum

# ¿ Apr 5, 2024 11:32

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

that's basically the difference between proletarian dictatorship and marxist communism right? that the proletarian class interests are definitionally contained fully within the relations of industrial economics while communism and communist organizations are capable of generating an actual meta-historical perspective that can perceive and operate on industrialist society from a relatively external vantage point? it's not as if the bourgeoisie dont form coalitions with other non-bourgeois classes for the sake of developing and perpetuating capitalism

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 19:02

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

dead gay comedy forums posted:

i'm suggesting that trotsky and his ilk would technically be correct that the peasantry are incapable of non-subjugated cooperation with proletarian rule (where peasant =/= rural proletariat) if one assumes that the proletarian dictatorship would be established without communist ideology. organizing proletarian rule via communism, on the other hand, allows for a contextualization that can lead the peasantry to purposefully develop material conditions towards their own class extinction on the bases that a.) their proletarianization is a material inevitability under globalizing industrial economics, b.) it is better to be proletarianized in a society where the proletariat are dominant instead of subjugated, and c.) accepts proletarianization (with its disruptions and hardships) as necessary towards developing classless society (which would involve the extinction of the peasantry anyways)

or rather, i'm asking if i'm conceptualizing this difference correctly, since i consider myself essentially illiterate in marxism

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 20:06

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

been noticing a lot of people in cspam lately confused as to why western society isnt choosing to rationally uphold universal common interests for the sake of social stability and prosperity like a good meritocracy is supposed to

on an unrelated note, bump

# ¿ May 3, 2024 19:22

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 13:09

stumblebum: May 8, 2022; no, what you want to do is get somebody mad enough to give you a red title you're proud of

what determines whether or not capitalists, as individuals, as firms, as nations, as conglomerates, are willing or able to engage with capitalism as capitalism, and not merely reacting towards perceived trends in profitability which then emerge as aggregate behaviors of capital? because it feeeeeeeeels like maybe there are meaningful differences between contemporary capitalists' commitment to fully unshackled individual reactionary profitability-seeking behaviors and old-fashioned national bourgeoisie's ability to be directed and organized towards nation-level stability of class rule (relatively, bearing in mind that market crises provoking short-sighted crisis-exacerbating political reactions are nothing new)

would the time- and place-specific composition of third classes be important determinants of particular capitalists' decision-making calculus? does relative prominence of imperially-subsidized classes impose a greater demand on that empire's bourgeoisie to commit to imperial stability as a cost of doing business with/around/through those non-proletarian classes and the potential frontiers of exploitation they might enable? wouldnt this cost on doing business simultaneously be in contradiction with capital's need to maximize profitable exploitation universally, necessitating the liquidation of these third classes, and by extension the attachments that capitalists have to imperial systems of stabilization? or is it all extremely generic and universal, and we can just say that increasing levels of capitalist economic development create increasing intensities of market crises, which produce more localized reactionary decision-making from individual capitalists as those capitalists try to stay on top of stormier waters?

# ¿ May 4, 2024 16:14

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