ArfJason posted:

smarxist posted:

for reading i recommend just reading The Man Himself, Marx is so fun, he's really witty and sarcastic at times, but sincere and he gets so passionate and disgusted with humanity, especially when he's writing on the capitalists and the immiseration of mankind

Raskolnikov38 posted:

when flavius gets demodded do they add his star to the wall in the lobby?

bagual posted:

re: legalization i think uruguay's system is the best attempt at a non-market solution, the state has weed farms for the medicinal weed that goes to pharmacies and serves (actual) medical use, and recreational users can form non-commercial growing associations to stock their stashes but are barred from commercial activity, of course a lot of grow club product ends up being sold under the table anyway but it's not publicly available and the state goes after anyone being too obvious

idk how that would translate to other drugs but i think it's better than what's in place in the netherlands or the US

bagual posted:

uruguay is pretty loving dope, they got the gay marriage weed abortion trifecta speedrun record in south america thanks to marxist ex-guerillas managing to get elected on a popular front in the 2000's

if you wanna learn more about repression and struggle in latin america this is a pro watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y97o1phiyRY

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

I got my first free Epoch Times last week. The two cover stories were about vaccine skepticism and the need to do something about organ trafficking.

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/AshleyRParker/s...ingawful.com%2F

yr new gurlfrand! posted:

what about sponsored ads from the liberal press

Raskolnikov38 posted:

I dunno conclusively proving that electoral reformism is a dead end is useful at least. granted it was fairly obvious but it’s nice to have experimental proof

Raskolnikov38 posted:

fighting capitalism in the arena of its dictatorship seems like a profound waste of time if even those that wouldn’t threaten its power like Bernie and corbs got capitalist death rays turned on them

vyelkin posted:

in short, there was never any real doubt. The American Jewish press reported on the Holocaust as it happened, mostly accurately, and the mainstream press corroborated their reporting with its own periodic articles describing the same events. People knew that the Nazis were exterminating European Jews long before the death camps were liberated. They knew as it was happening, sometimes just days after it happened, even halfway round the world.

mycomancy posted:

So I can't find the post in order to quote it, but someone posted recently how the early 19th century capitalists were super pissed that Marx named and categorized the demon they were releasing into the world and how said capitalists were attempting some sort of civic religion?

Is this backed by any facts/observations or is it just Something Awful Marxblather?

mycomancy posted:

Right on, if you do get around to it it'd be much appreciated. Your comment really hit a weird spot in my head, like when I talk to "normal" people about how our society is structured it does feel like I'm talking to an adherent of a strict orthodox religion. If early classical economists got pissy that some loving materialist pissed all over their beautiful philosophy/dogma, well then that's literally the natural philosophers vs. empirical scientists but for money isn't it wot?

Epic High Five posted:

I think a lot at the time was they loathed Marx for putting a name to capitalism and explaining its history and creating an analytical tool that can be used to demystify it, as the goal had been to make it a civic religion that's just sort of something nobody even thinks to consider an alternative to (they did this eventually). They hated Smith and Ricardo not just because Marx respected and agreed with them on some stuff, but also because they were basically Maoists when it came to rent seekers and landlords, so for the post-industrial financialization phase of the whole thing they had to go and were replaced by a bunch of lunatics and cranks until the Austrians and Chicago School captured enough institutions of press and finance to start manufacturing legitimacy more broadly

vyelkin posted:

the best part of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is when Piketty says that he started out as a normal economist doing theory stuff and actual circles of economists loved his theory stuff and he was a rising star in the field of academic economics and then he had a moment of realization that everything he had spent his career working on was bullshit disconnected from the real world and the entire field of mainstream economics is intellectually bankrupt

indigi posted:

lately I’ve seen multiple indigenous writers/commentators saying stuff to the effect of “actually Marx studied indigenous American culture and just wrote down what he found, indigenous people had been living in socialist societies for years, Marxism is just another thing white men stole from indigenous people” and I do not know what to make of it.

it feels misguided to me since (afaik) Marxism was born out of an analysis of industrial economies/finance capitalism and I doubt indigenous people were writing much about those topics

anyone else seen this? what’s the deal

dead gay comedy forums posted:

the loving fucker just went and finally said the thing

jesus christ he just went and blurted it out

I have his book and the thing that really came out to me is that, aside from having a massive chunk of contemporary, post-50s national accounting innovations that validated a lot of 19th century political economy (besides our german boys), is that there wasn't anything new there. the book itself is rather thin, like a little more than a hundred pages, and the rest of it is just reams of data and methodology

so I went to annoy a younger professor, a cool guy who was teaching "contemporary economic thought", the last discipline of the political economy section (or "heterodox economics" if you are with the mainstream crowd) of my uni's curriculum, because I didn't understand why this guy was getting raves and all (this was nine years ago, I am an idiot now but I was far worse). Prof helpfully explains to me that the guy did a marxism while completely oblivious to it, and since Marx didn't have R, he gets to show mainstream economics a point that Marx argued without any of the luggage. I asked him if it was that bad and he says, "if you are in the academic spotlight of mainstream economics with a PhD, you literally cannot be marxist at that point. Nobody can get there being one"

what piketty quickly realized is that he was being promoted by an outsider crowd and for someone featured in the economist magazine, he was canny enough to not say anything. While being boosted in the Guardian, Libération, etc etc for its critique of capitalism (and thus some association with Marx), he goes "well it's interesting hahaha amirite but my work is more empirical!". Then motherfucking Yanis Varoufakis just loving goes and tear him a new rear end in a top hat, just chews him out. piketty quickly goes out of his way to say how not-Marxist and innovating and completely different and superior his work is than Marx lmao

quote:

Taking students further from capital as ‘produced means of production’ to Karl Marx’s idea that capital is, besides steam engines and harvesters, a ‘social relation’ between people, requires a degree of deprogramming that most lecturers have no time to effect.

quote:

Reading Capital in the Twenty-First Century reminded me of how the cause of egalitarianism is often undermined by its most famous, mainstream proponents. John Rawls, despite the elegance and sophistication of his ‘veil of ignorance’, did untold damage to the egalitarian ‘cause’ by offering a static theory of justice that crumbled the moment a talented libertarian took a shot at it. Professor Piketty’s book will, I am convinced, prove even easier prey for today’s, or tomorrow’s, equivalent of Robert Nozick. And when this happens, the multitude that are now celebrating Capital in the Twenty-First Century as a staunch ally in the war against inequality will run for cover.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I was reading Marc Levinson's "The Box"

Ardennes posted:

The big issue with the Brezhnev period wasn't that society suddenly stopped progressing, but generally, economic growth dropped off. Some of this was simply due to the fact that the Soviets had achieved the "low hanging fruits" of industrialization (it produce a massive amount of coal/steel/oil etc) but a move to a full consumer economy was complicated by a number of fairly obvious factors. One is simply technological, that while the Soviets had a boost in technological development through reserve-engineering/bootstrap development during the 1950s, by the 1970s they simply started to be swamped out by Western R&D investment.

Another is simply that the Soviets were greatly restricted from most international trade, and that the Eastern bloc on its own simply wasn't large or dynamic enough to be competitive on the same level.

In addition, military spending was starting to bite, arguably necessary considering Western resources, but it still needs to be remarked on.

In some ways, the energy crisis of the 1970s only moderately delayed larger issues the Soviets were facing, but by the mid-1980s, they had clearly run out of time.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

It's not even wrong.

vyelkin posted:

Pipes is the one who never let facts get in the way of anticommunism and thought every historian younger than him was corrupted by Marxism because they had done archival research, so he published entire books that never bothered to cite any of the growing volumes of research that conclusively disproved his own ideas. These days Pipes is no longer with us but his son keeps the tradition going by never letting facts get in the way of Islamophobia.

AnimeIsTrash posted:

There are a good deal of people who's idea of leftism is just them owning a small farm somewhere in the middle of bumfuck nowhere.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

i thought you were just quoting something from DnD or reddit. it reads word for word the kind of poo poo American leftists say about our elections.

vyelkin posted:

Zodium posted:

AnimeIsTrash posted:

https://twitter.com/BlakkBile/status/1489307592392331266?cxt=HHwWhMCy3arXiqspAAAA

dead gay comedy forums posted:

gradenko if you are enjoying that one, Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation is going to be one hell of a read, you gonna love it

in fact that book is quite the loving answer to "humans are naturally assholes"

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

there were a lot of communists in those days who were high school dropouts turned traveling hat salesmen who could get away with wearing cheap suits because that's what everybody wore then. the difference between then and now is that the old guys also read 12-14 history books per year while we have the opposite problem today

StashAugustine posted:

yeah i really dont think this is part of some strategem of even a section of the bourgeois ruling class, i think its just the dog finally catching the car

CoolCab posted:

my most pointed critique is often that the person who has a hugely negative reaction to any given socialist leader would have probably also hated trotsky or whoever else if they'd heard of them, which limits somewhat how much progress you can move forward if you want to idolize people who actually did things rather than people who write good. even then people still routinely blame marx himself for all the victims of communism (of the memorial fund i mean) loving somehow and afaik all he did was drink and argue.

In Training posted:

been thinking about the pending rail labor action and wondering when the last time there was a single time where US labor flexed this kind of muscle. obviously it's not happening yet, just curious if there's been a period in the last 50 odd years where there was a national shutdown of such a fundamental industry. have american oil workers ever walked out? a coast-to-coast postal service strike? Air Traffic Controllers is the obvious touch stone but I just cant see the biden admin having such a hardline response. If a democratic president pulls a Reagan the party's entire faux labor relationship would go up in ash overnight, membership of every AFL-CIO affiliate would tune out of the political arena at best and start to oust their union leadership at worst.