quote:

The features of Trotskyism which appear in this book (partly thanks to very candid description by [Chinese Trotskyist Wang Fan-hsi]) are dogmatism, heavy emphasis on ideology as against practical action, and factionalism. For example, after a formal Trotskyist Chinese Communist party was founded in 1931, it immediately broke into four sub-parties, each with hardly a hundred members, and despite a short period of “unification”, done at Trotsky’s insistence, the factions continued to exist. This made Trotskyists almost entirely irrelevant in the great struggle that opposed the Japanese, KMT and CCP. Wang mentions that other than for two small units, Trotskyists never managed to field any military force against the Japanese. Trotskyist activity during the war against Japan consisted in translations of Marxist classics and their distribution to Shanghai’s workers. It does not take much imagination to see that Shanghai’s workers might not have been in 1941 extremely keen to spend their time reading Plekhanov and Trotsky. The total failure of Trotskyist parties, frankly analyzed by Wang in the last section of the book, is rooted in that sterile intellectualism.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

LTV doesn't discount nature as a source of value, and since aging is a natural process then it's nature adding value to the wine over time.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Okay, I tried to stick with it for a few more pages, but [Ellman] doesn't even believe that a planned economy is possible. I give up. Finding something else to read.

mila kunis posted:

any good books that are like, capital updated for the 21st century (pls no piketty) that summarize and build on marx's stuff but with modern references and a century's worth of learning/experiences to draw on

someone recommended kliman's "reclaiming marx's capital", any others?

Red and Black posted:

I do wish he would have said more about imperialism and colonialism though

Judge Dredd Scott posted:

are there any english language books about the soviet legal system?? or the PRC one, even

about any era would be fine. i just realized i have no idea what an attempt at what 'socialist law' would really look like and want to attempt to fill that gap at least a little

quote:

The leaders of the Western world were able to maintain themselves and their legal orders. But to do so, they could not run in place. They parried Lenin’s thrusts to blunt the impact in their realms of his biting critique of their rule. A dialectic developed between the Soviet Union and the West. In its efforts to counter the Soviet Union, the West absorbed many of the ideas it found threatening.

As Western leaders adjusted their policies, they changed the legal systems of their countries. The change did not come overnight or in a single package of new laws. Nor did it come at the same pace everywhere in the Western world. But come it did, and with a force that would render Western law by the turn of the twenty-first century lightyears different from Western law at the turn of the twentieth. Western law did not disappear, but it did not remain the same.

...

I was launched into the study of law in the Soviet Union by the satellite (Sputnik) that was launched by the Soviet Union in 1957.The American government determined it must know more about the Soviet threat, a task that was complicated by the fact that American scholars had little access to Soviet society. The U.S. Congress passed the National Defense Education Act. Efforts were to be made in higher education to understand the USSR and to counteract the Soviet threat. President Dwight Eisenhower negotiated a treaty with the Soviet Union for the exchange of scholars. The Soviet government sought access to the West, and the West sought access to the Soviet Union. Each calculated that it would gain more than it would lose.

I was part of this high-stakes chess match. My base of operation was just up the hill from the Kremlin, the center of Soviet political power. Leonid Brezhnev had assumed control, and the Cold War showed no signs of abating. I gained an opportunity to observe, albeit within limits, the society whose confrontation with the West was the defining circumstance of an era.

What was striking to a young scholar about the concepts promoted in Soviet legal and political philosophy was precisely the challenge they posed to the West. Everything I had previously been told was good was evil. The free market was bad. Only an organized economy could serve social needs. The rule of law, seen in the West as the basis of social order, was only a stop-gap approach to the proper regulation of life in society. Instead, life should be organized so that law is not needed. Rather than punishing individuals who violate rules, society should reorganize itself to eliminate the urge to bad conduct.

...

At the level of international politics, statesmen too were examining the Soviet ideas and reacting to them. Their reaction forms the subject of this book. In that reaction may be found a key to what differentiates Western law of today from Western law as it stood when Lenin sat for the St. Petersburg law examination in 1891.

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/Vorkuta_CLC/status/1458724512938217475?t=S2Raf4web6Wr9a3GsqR_Aw&s=19

Kindest Forums User posted:

Or did he not forgot and is a social fascist and believes imperialism is good as long as it increases the condition of your native workers, and his critique of financial imperialism only exists because it diverts less and less surplus value from the periphery to the Metropole workers.

V. Illych L. posted:

there's been a fair amount of very astute japanese marxist theoreticians through the years who get very little attention in the west.

gradenko_2000 posted:

the tendency for the rate of profit to fall is a tendency. the fact that it does not fall all the time does not disprove the theory

Piketty is an idiot

croup coughfield posted:

also, we should spent the rest of our time bitching about other tendencies

my dad posted:

it explicitly refers to a revolutionary collective, it's not lifestyle tips.

animist posted:

This is sorta ahistorical. Abstract credit systems were invented thousands of years before metal currency, e.g. in Sumeria and Egypt.

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

His argument is a logical one, not historical. I think it's fair to say that it's simply wrong

Sunny Side Up posted:

Yeah Graeber is good! Although it’s been years since I read him. I am curious about this Kuruma guy’s take—-I don’t anticipate something as anthropological, but instead a focus on what confused one guy in my last Capital reading group, like “why gold?!?!”

Falstaff posted:

Bitcoin is a commodity, but not a commodity like a phone or a video game. It's a commodity along the line of fiat money - an attempt to build a new super-commodity. And in that role, it's exceptionally bad at performing the most basic functions of money.

Falstaff posted:

Would you care to summarize this argument? I'm not familiar with it.

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

A quick and dirty summary.

It's the anthropological, bronze age palaces and temples argument again. The origins of money, insofar as we know it and use it, arises from accounts kept by the temples in the bronze age. The priesthood kept the calendar (which told everyone when to plant), established the systems of measurement, managed the production of ale (potable beverages, very important), and managed the production of precious metals to verify their purity for the purpose of trade with other city states. The temple answers more or less to the palace.

You're a farmer, you need ale. During the planting season, you get your ale from the alehouse. The alehouse is run by the temples. You don't have money. You have wheat that is growing. You run up a tab. Come harvest, the temple takes its cut out of what was produced at threshing time.

The next step: instead of keeping ledgers, mint a coinage that is symbolic of your credit with the temple. The palace and temples create this currency, spend it into the populace (maybe they're buying excess grain for their own granaries). And voila, you can use it to pay the state what you owe. It has value because you can use it to pay, in so many words, Taxes.

And because it can be used to pay Taxes, individuals will trade it amongst themselves in the market. It becomes the commodity of universal exchange.

unwantedplatypus posted:

Fiat money is still a representation of crystallized labor time, and is still produced for its use as exchange value.

Andrew Kliman, Reclaiming Marx's 'Capital' posted:

To measure value and price in the same units, a conversion factor is needed. Marx frequently employed such a factor ... but did not give it a name. In recent years ... the term monetary expression of labor-time (MELT) has become popular. If each hour of socially necessary labor adds $60 of new value ... the MELT is $60/hr. Multiplying labor-time by the MELT, we get dollar figures; dividing dollar figures by the MELT, we get labor-time figures.

unwantedplatypus posted:

If gold coins were used as money, but not raw gold; would that be a commodity?

unwantedplatypus posted:

Don't commodities also depend on state legitimacy and the threat of violence?

Falstaff posted:

c rises = crises

Sunny Side Up posted:

Thanks to Prolekult channel on YT I’m picking up Biography of a Blunder by Edara because apparently it has a course correction on this Althusser stuff

Sunny Side Up posted:

Tell me more??? I’m excited to read it.

tristeham posted:

http://www.pssp.org/bbs/data/document/1/Losurdo___Critique_of_Totalitarianism_%282004%29.pdf

mawarannahr posted:

Sunny Side Up posted:

The Edara book finally arrived! I’m super excited.

exmarx posted:

walter benjamin ftw

vyelkin posted:

Trotsky's whole thing after he got exiled from the USSR was that the USSR wasn't true socialism because it compromised to survive. Ever since then Trotskyists have carried on this quest by insisting that nothing is ever true socialism and therefore it's actually fine when left-wing movements and governments are destroyed.

Aeolius posted:

this thing right here:

quote:

The features of Trotskyism which appear in this book (partly thanks to very candid description by [Chinese Trotskyist Wang Fan-hsi]) are dogmatism, heavy emphasis on ideology as against practical action, and factionalism. For example, after a formal Trotskyist Chinese Communist party was founded in 1931, it immediately broke into four sub-parties, each with hardly a hundred members, and despite a short period of “unification”, done at Trotsky’s insistence, the factions continued to exist. This made Trotskyists almost entirely irrelevant in the great struggle that opposed the Japanese, KMT and CCP. Wang mentions that other than for two small units, Trotskyists never managed to field any military force against the Japanese. Trotskyist activity during the war against Japan consisted in translations of Marxist classics and their distribution to Shanghai’s workers. It does not take much imagination to see that Shanghai’s workers might not have been in 1941 extremely keen to spend their time reading Plekhanov and Trotsky. The total failure of Trotskyist parties, frankly analyzed by Wang in the last section of the book, is rooted in that sterile intellectualism.

Helen Yaffe, Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution posted:

Within Cuba, debate and comparative experimentation had been encouraged. But outside Cuba, Guevara’s critical analysis had led to accusations that he was variously a revisionist, a Trotskyist and a Maoist, name-calling which he regarded as dangerous politicking, machinations aimed to disrupt the tenuous fraternity of socialist countries and censure debate. One of the most annoying sources of these accusations was from Trotskyists who tried to compare his analysis with Trotsky’s criticisms. Distancing himself from Trotskyism, Guevara said:

quote:

There are some useful things that can be taken from Trotsky’s ideas. I believe that the fundamental things which Trotsky based himself on were erroneous, and that his later behaviour was wrong and even obscure in the final period. The Troskyists have contributed nothing to the revolutionary movement anywhere and where they did most, which was in Peru, they ultimately failed because their methods were bad. That comrade Hugo Blanco, personally a man of great sacrifice, based (his position) on a set of erroneous ideas and will necessarily fail.

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

yeah i'd put the PSL somewhere else.

quote:

What Trotskyism Means

An idealist definition of a “trotskyist” would focus on whether or not an individual or group like Leon Trotsky, read his work with respect and sided with Trotsky over Stalin in the 1920’s and 1930’s. A materialist definition of a “trotkyist” on the other hand would ask rather whether or not a group acted essentially like Trotsky acted and if its strategy was essentially like that of Trotsky, i.e., was objectively “Trotskyite”. Taking a materialist approach one would be considered a trotskyist if one acting like Trotsky even if one liked Stalin and hated Trotsky, while conversely one would not be considered a trotskyist if one did not acted like Trotsky and have a strategy like that of Trotsky, even if one liked Trotsky, read his works, etc. In Examining various groups and currents we must be very careful to always use a materialist definition, and not be confused by verbal disclaimers, genealogies or posters on people’s walls.

The essence of what the Marxist-Leninist tradition including Stalin, Mao, Fidel and Ho Chi Minh have meant by “trotskyism” is a left-adventurist and dogmatic analysis which condemns all existing socialist countries and people’s democracies as not really socialist, being run by bureaucrats or perhaps state capitalists acting against the interests of the working people, and which likewise condemns all massive popular, progressive, or Communist led movements as being insufficiently revolutionary or in the process of selling out the masses in the interests of a bureaucracy, either local or located in the USSR, China, etc. Trotskyism differs from the anarchists who make similar claims about all progressive and socialist movements and regimes by claiming adherence to the principles of Leninism, endorsing the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and organizing themselves more or less according to Leninist principles. This is the essence of trotskyism and the sole criteria by which a group or current should be categorized as “trotskyist.” Applying this criteria to groups like the Progressive Labor Party in the U.S. which condemn China, the USSR, Cuba and ail progressive and socialist regimes as well as the CPUSA, RCP, CL, SWP and all other groups in the U.S., all progressive, socialist or national liberation movements in Third World countries, and all progressive and Communist lead movements in the advanced capitalist countries, as selling out the masses, tools of the Soviet or Chinese bureaucracies etc., are pure trotskyist groups. PLP sees itself as the only truly revolutionary group in the world. On the other hand a splinter group from the Socialist Workers Party (the main Trotskyist group in the U.S.), the Workers World Party and its youth group Youth Against War and Fascism, gives basic support to Third World national liberation movements and socialist regimes such as those of the Cubans, Vietnamese, Angolans, etc., and (at least at last look) considered China and other socialist countries to be socialist. Thus in spite of their positive attitude about Leon Trotsky they can not be considered to be “trotskyists.”

A secondary but central characteristic of “trotskyism” is its historical position on the role of the working class, national bourgeoisies and nationalism in general in the revolutionary struggle, especially in Third World countries, but also in Third World communities in the advanced capitalist countries. Trotsky’s position, generally adopted by trotskyist groups is that the working class is the principle revolutionary force in Third World countries as well as in the advanced countries and that both nationalism and the national bourgeoisie are necessarily reactionary forces. The position developed by the Comintern in the 1920’s and endorsed by both Soviet and Chinese Communists is that nationalism is often a progressive force in Third World countries and should be utilized to mobilize the masses of people to get rid of imperialism and begin a popular democratic (“new democratic”) revolution and further that the local capitalists who are oppressed by foreign imperialism can be allied with (but with the working class and peasantry playing the leading role in this alliance) in getting rid of imperialism. Once again the position of the PLP is identical to the classical trotskyist position on this question, while that of the WWP-YAWF is in conflict.

In general “trotskyism” is characterized by a dogmatic or rationalist theory of knowledge, inflexibility in strategy and tactics, hyper sectarianism in relations to other groups and overbearingness in their style of work. Rather than developing their theory and strategy through the dialectic of theory and practice in the manner described so well by Mao-Tse-tung’s On Practice, trotskyists read Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin as a monk would read the Bible (as sacred dogma) then use it to criticize the inadequacies in the world, specifically the imperfect nature of various socialist countries and movements and the backwardness of the peasants, workers, and other progressive forces which do not live up to what they think Marx, Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin said about them. If countries and movements and classes do not live up to the ideal standards of Trotsky than so much the worse for them.

Trotskyists almost never learn from practice, their strategies and tactics almost never change as a result of trial and error and sum up. Instead changes in their positions occur through intellectualist dogmatic debate of the order of who is really loyal to the true Fourth International (or to the Third), who really has the correct interpretation of what Leon Trotsky (or Stalin) really really meant. Because of the rationalism of their theory of knowledge and the corresponding lack of and often distain for practice trotskyist groups constantly split into ever smaller groups all of which maintain hostile relations with all other trotskyist groups. The idea that correct thought, rather than current practice, will decide the issues dividing them is pervasive. Trotskyites often focus most of their energy on fighting each other rather than on actually organizing the working class. Because of their frequent obsession with ideological conversion, rather than with, mass struggles, trotskyists are often most overbearing in their attempts to badger people into endorsing their various lines. Out of fairness it must be noted that not all trotskyists groups share equally in this later categorizations, and hence that they are not defining characteristics of trotskyism. For example, the Socialist Workers Party works in many mass struggles (although some would argue only in order to recruit members) and the International Socialists seem to be rooted in the working class (if only because many of their former student members have taken factory jobs). The most prominent examples of pure trotskyist groups in the U.S. are the Spartacus League and the Progressive Labor Party.

sube posted:

Marx in a letter recommends reading the chapters "Working Day", "Co-operation", "The Division of Labour and Machinery" and "Primitive Accumulation" first as they are readable and give context. I did that and found it quite good advice, afterwards I read it from the beginning again. I think reading it unabridged is the best.

PiratePrentice posted:

We all know that the reason MLs are outnumbered 50 to 1 by anarchists in The West is that the MLs got violently exterminated in the latter half of the twentieth century

mila kunis posted:

i think we've had this discussion before, and this is my favourite post on it https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3967822&pagenumber=204&perpage=40#post525459061

if you want socialism to win and believe that masses of people reading stuff is important to it in some way than that stuff should be more readable, accessible and relevant than a 150+ year old book that is notorious for people bouncing off it.

quote:

MC: What would have happened if Einstein fell under a tram in 1900? What difference would it have made, for how long?

Me: Not a lot, Poincaré was almost there and others were working on the various problems. I’d guess at most a ten-year delay

MC: So are there any true examples of ‘great men’ or is science all over-determined?

My instantaneous response to Mathew’s last comment was yes there are great men in the history of science and Einstein was certainly one of them but not in the sense that people usually mean when they use the term.

quote:

I think this brief analysis that the work of these ‘great men’, Einstein, Galileo and Newton, was to a large extent over-determined that is dictated by the scientific evolution of their respective times and their finding solutions to those problems, solutions that others also found contemporaneously, does not qualify them as special, as ‘great men’.

Having said all of that I would be insane to deny that all three of these physicists are, with right, regarded as special, as great men, so what is the solution to this seeming paradox?

I think the answer lies not in the fact that they solved the problems that they solved but in the breadth and quality of their work. Each of them did not just solve one major problem but a whole series of them and their solutions were of a quality and depth unequalled by others also offering solutions. This can be illustrated by looking at Hooke and Newton on gravity. Hooke got there first and there are good grounds for believing that his work laid the foundations for Newton’s. However whereas Hooke’s contribution consist of a brief series of well founded speculations, Newton built with his Principia a vast mathematical edifice that went on to dominate physics for two hundred years. Put simply it is not the originality or uniqueness of their work but the quality and depth of it that makes these researchers great men.

namesake posted:

This is not really relevant though? We know the tradition we're following, that's respect enough for the work they did but we need to work with the living and that means showing a modern day relevance to those who aren't convinced. Getting people to go 'wow your analysis is really good, who inspired you?' is the point but there will always be a lot of contemporary production going on to get people to that point.

mawarannahr posted:

bruh

PopZeus posted:

how do non-Labor Theory Value proponents claim profit is generated? is it only a function of price/supply/demand to them?

John Eatwell posted:

The neo-classical theory of value is incapable of answering the challenge posed by Smith: the determination of natural prices and the associated rate of profit. The fundamental difficulty is that the natural (long-run normal) prices of reproducible means of production must satisfy two conditions at the same time: they must clear the markets for the endowment of reproducible goods, and must be equal to the (unique set of) prices associated with the reproduction of those goods.

In the determination of normal prices in an economy with reproducible means of production, the term ‘cost of production’ has no meaning. The concept of cost of production is valid in an economy in which goods are defined by their physical essence and their location in time, when ‘discounted’ prices are determined without reference to a rate of interest. But the interpretation of such prices as ‘embodying’ a general rate of interest lacks any coherent foundation, as was made clear by Malinvaud (1965, p. 233):

quote:

…. the relationships studied here are meaningful only under precise normalisation rules for undiscounted prices. Only discounted prices are determined by competitive equilibrium, or by the price system associated with an optimum. In the absence of a normalisation rule the interest rates are not defined and can assume any value greater than −1.

There is no neo-classical theory of the rate of profit.

namesake posted:

make sure both original and decent modernisations are available and neither are seen as of less value