[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

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DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Quotey posted:

What is meant by scientific Marxism?

Someone can correct me or clarify this, but my TL;DR reading of the idea is that it is Marxism that avoids idealism or utopianism and, instead, uses a materialist outlook and actually learns from the past so that it can calibrate its strategies accordingly with self-criticism.

The idea is interwoven with dialectics, but I struggle to articulate the relationship between without just pointing to people like Fourier and saying "he was utopian because he obviously didn't use dialectics" (because he jumped straight to what a cool socialist utopia would be like without wrestling with how to get there[1]). But "scientific" would be on the side of dialectical materialism, pragmatics, etc., all of which would be opposed to utopianism, idealism, anarchism, etc. So in a country that's obviously not on the edge of revolution, a Marxist might look at an organization trying to skip straight to revolution and say, "You're a moron. Do the work." Then again, it might mean making alliances with non-Marxist organizations or even bourgeois institutions if that's worked in the past (which, it has).

Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific goes into this, but I almost feel like Lenin's Left-Wing Communism might give a better sense of this "learn from the past" orientation I'm talking about.

The Rev Left Radio podcast also has an episode on it. The main takeaway is whether or not Marxism can be falsified, in the exact same sense Karl Popper talks about. So e.g., if liberal democracy somehow mediates class conflict out of existence, or capitalism gets rid of imperialism or fascism without capitalism being challenged in any way, both of those would falsify some of the claims of Marxism. I guess that's sort of a more macro take on the idea, relative to the "learning from the past" idea I mentioned above, which is more micro for individual strategies/tactics.

[1] this is from the last thread's discussion of dialectics:

splifyphus posted:

in the simplest possible terms [in dialectics]- we're including the subjective perspective on the objective in our assessment of the objective, and we're trying to do this without becoming idealists for whom everything is a subjective projection.

In the Fourier example above, it's anti-dialectical and utopian to jump to socialism without wrestling with or accounting for your present subjective perspective (i.e., you're "in" capitalism, so you have to figure out how to use capital's own contradictions to get to something else). As above, acknowledging that you're "in" capitalism might mean working with the tools and contradictions capitalism affords you (i.e., occasionally working with bourgeois institutions who, in other contexts, would be your enemy).

# ¿ May 16, 2021 15:01

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 23:31

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Josh Christ posted:

Its really cool and good that a mod moved the old thread to FYAD so that posters can just be chainprobed forever.

I haven�t been banned or probed in 17 years and now I�m getting probed every day on one of my effort posts in that thread lmao

# ¿ May 17, 2021 22:36

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Larry Parrish posted:

It's really funny that Flavius has once again proved why I find the rules they keep adding so objectionable. You're telling us you guys are trying to fight ableism and toxic language, and you don't even know what words are ableist. Are you loving serious with this poo poo lol.

this is a forum where one of the ideas is to appoint another "idiot king" so that the "idiot king" can get rid of ableist language. Presumably, they would do this without drawing attention to their status as an "idiot king"

# ¿ May 18, 2021 14:58

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

I'm not smarxists but what smarxist describes is a big part of Marx's Capital vol 1. You can pair that with David Harvey's Companion to Marx's Capital, either in book or free podcast form. There are audiobook versions of the Marx, too.

The less you enjoy Capital, the more you can lean on the Harvey, but the first volume of Capital is really fun once you kinda get past the first few chapters and you get into it and notice what a troll Marx is. (I find volumes 2 and 3 much much more difficult.) The Harvey is useful for (a) providing some of the background context, and (b) then linking things to the present like smarxist did in their post.

be careful with summaries lol

although here is a giant one page summary from a communist

https://twitter.com/TomFrome/status/1287973768049065984?s=20

# ¿ May 18, 2021 16:27

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

indigi posted:

can you just listen to Harvey without reading capital. I don�t want to read capital

Yeah, probably.

There are other podcasts that do overviews with framing themselves as a "companion" like the Harvey does:

The Fundamentals of Marxism: Intro to Political Economy

The Fundamentals of Marxism: Dialectics, Historical Materialism, and Class Struggle

# ¿ May 18, 2021 16:41

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Here are some of the cool things about Harvey imo:

He actually gives you a sense of why Capital vol 1 is actually stylistically good. Why Marx starts with the commodity and spreads outwards from there, why he uses references to vampires and stuff, why he might repeat himself in the latter chapters, etc. Harvey actually makes you want to read the original and appreciate how Marx deals with some of the communication challenges of what he's trying to say and how Marx knows he might be willfully misunderstood by an unsympathetic reader (i.e., traditional bourgeois economy).

Harvey is into geography so he's really into anything that has implications for the organization and logistics of space. A lot of capital is about "time" (the working day, etc.), but it's useful to put some emphasis on the geography, too. The book has both, but I feel like I'd miss more of the geography or "space" stuff reading it on my own, but space is really really important for its implications for imperialism.

As above, Harvey obviously gives more recent examples of what Marx is talking about, but he also gives examples from "in between" the 1880s and today, like how/why Henry Ford was so obsessed with regulating the lives of his workers.

# ¿ May 18, 2021 17:21

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

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

read the manifesto

then check out the economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844

to anyone on the fence about just reading the original marx, if you can get an ebook version a fun thing to do is ctrl-f for "bentham" (insipid, pedantic), "malthus" (that master in plagiarism), "john stuart" or "bourgeois"

Here's bentham:

quote:

Classical economy always loved to conceive social capital as a fixed magnitude of a fixed degree of efficiency. But this prejudice was first established as a dogma by the arch-Philistine, Jeremy Bentham, that insipid, pedantic, leather- tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence of the 19th century.49 Bentham is among philosophers what Martin Tupper is among poets. Both could only have been manufactured in England.

quote:

Bentham is a purely English phenomenon. Not even excepting our philosopher, Christian Wolff, in no time and in no country has the most homespun commonplace ever strutted about in so self-satisfied a way. The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it. With the driest naiveté he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man. Whatever is useful to this queer normal man, and to his world, is absolutely useful. This yard-measure, then, he applies to past, present, and future. The Christian religion, e.g., is �useful,� �because it forbids in the name of religion the same faults that the penal code condemns in the name of the law.� Artistic criticism is �harmful,� because it disturbs worthy people in their enjoyment of Martin Tupper, etc. With such rubbish has the brave fellow, with his motto, �nuila dies sine line!,� piled up mountains of books. Had I the courage of my friend, Heinrich Heine, I should call Mr. Jeremy a genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity.

- - -

Also, his ongoing takedown on the bourgeois "abstinence" justification ("I deserve all my money because I abstain from spending it and invest in blah blah") is good:

- - -

There are some gems in the quotations from the factory inspectors. The editions I've seen make them horrible giant blocks of paragraphs, even though they're really back 'n forth interviews. So you're tempted to just skim over them, but they're really good.

But... hold on, wouldn't this be expensive??

Context: the bourgeois examiner doesn't understand why mine-owners appointing their own engineers (who can be fired if they say the wrong thing) to do the inspections might, I dunno, create a conflict of interest:

# ¿ May 18, 2021 18:21

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

For reading Capital, I recommend the Harvey because it explicitly addresses some of the stuff being talked about.

Lyon posted:

how is this different from supply and demand?

edit: I haven�t read Marx directly, is there a �best� starting point/order or do I just jump right in to capital?

it is supply and demand. Marx is just less interested in that side of things. For the sake of argument he's saying "Yeah okay that stuff fluctuates, but I think that's actually a distraction; for now let's pretend they're in equilibrium so that we can figure out what's going on."

Here's David Harvey:

quote:

But in order to be of value, the commodity has to be useful. On this link back between value and use-value, we will see all kinds of issues arising around supply and demand. If the supply is too great, the exchange-value will go down; if the supply is too little, the exchange-value will go up�so there is an element here of supply and demand involved in the �accidental and relative� aspects of exchange-value. But behind these fluctuations, the value can remain constant (provided all the other forces that determine value, such as productivity, do too). Marx is not terribly interested in the supply and demand relation. He wants to know how to interpret commodity-exchange ratios between, say, shirts and shoes, when supply and demand are in equilibrium. We then need a different kind of analysis which points to value as congealed elements of this social substance called socially necessary labor-time. We have, without noticing it, tacitly abstracted from supply and demand conditions in the market in order to talk about commodity-values (with supply and demand in equilibrium) as socially necessary labor-time.

Marx is building on Ricardo and Smith�not just throwing them out entirely. Part of his method is take previous writers on their own terms and argue that even from their own perspective, they're missing out on important stuff. Both Ricardo and Smith talked about "labor"-time but Marx adds in socially necessary labor time and that's what leads us to this surplus value thing�the big elephant in the room that previous economists missed because they were caught up in the transient supply/demand fluctuations of exchange value. Where's that surplus value going? It's being sucked up by capitalists/vampires who, in turn, are claiming to be the source of value.

DirtyRobot has issued a correction as of 14:26 on May 24, 2021

# ¿ May 24, 2021 14:24

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

dead gay comedy forums posted:

this reminds me how every now and then some economics grad who is too clever for their own good (especially if they have some knack with math) stumbles into solving some postulate of mainstream economics

one mathy guy back at my uni figured out in a "huh" moment that the pareto optimum (the closest to ideal degree of something) for the distribution of goods and services to a society is impossible through free markets, as monopolization sets price fixing to preserve profitability

then he went to figure out how to fix that (through a math model) and realized that market deviancies and failures are features not bugs because any and all solutions had to out the "free" from market

the department did not accept his paperwork and refused to renew his scholarship lmao

for every Richard Wolff there's like a thousand of these lmao

# ¿ May 24, 2021 17:56

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Moon Shrimp posted:

Surplus value comes from the fact that the capitalist is paying for the value of labor power (an amount equal to the goods/services needed to maintain a worker at a socially acceptable level) rather than paying them a value equal to the labor they provide. I think Harvey tends to make things more confusing than just reading Capital yourself.

I think the stuff I posted is important for understanding commodity fetishism and why capitalists think they�re producing value rather than stealing it

for example:

comedyblissoption posted:

the liberal answer is that the work and genius involved in organizing production and bringing it to market is paid for and evaluated fairly by the market in the profit and is separate from the fairly priced labor involved

another way to frame this is to say that the bourgeois answer is that �capital� is the source of value, and this capital comes from what the capitalist has saved up through their hard work. this is why Marx is always making fun of the �abstinence� of the capitalist. bourgeois thinkers believe they�re the ones making value happen with their saved up capital + amazing personal genius and investing�. but they�re actually just stealing the surplus

# ¿ May 24, 2021 19:56

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Moon Shrimp posted:

I don't want to pick on you, but the capitalist doesn't merely steal surplus value, they must also compete with other capitalists for a share of the market. This puts pressure on them to squeeze as much work as possible out of their employees and to develop more efficient technology and methods so they can lower their prices under their competitors. I'm not saying this just to be pedantic; it's important to realize that even if the workers owned the business themselves they would have to contend with these same pressures and hence exploit themselves (something that Richard Wolff doesn't talk about very often for some mysterious reason).

I don�t feel picked on at all but I�m not entirely sure what the source of the difference is. What you�ve posted doesn�t seem at odds with what I�ve posted except maybe in terms of emphasis/importance.

# ¿ May 24, 2021 21:55

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Moon Shrimp posted:

They're not at odds, I was picking on you by annoyingly clarifying points rather than disagreeing.

ah okay. no worries

# ¿ May 24, 2021 22:32

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Oolb posted:

but doctor, I am Jeff Bezos!

# ¿ May 25, 2021 01:36

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Truga posted:

Pluto has at least one death :colbert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODAz9CCStR8

stealth edit: "arnold kills himself magic school bus" is the only good SEO I've ever seen

# ¿ May 26, 2021 13:39

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

In a move of incredible synthesis of this thread's current discussions, I present:

An interview with Grover Furr by a self-described, proudly "tankie," Marxist-Leninist podcast that totally dissolved in an explosion of drama because one of the hosts wanted to open a communist brewery or some poo poo.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2021 13:26

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Centrist Committee posted:

in Capital Marx makes the distinction between manufacture, which is really just collecting a bunch of artisans using tools under one roof and either working them in parallel or breaking down their tasks in sequence, and industry which is when machines replace the human manipulation of tools and workers just mindlessly operate the machines. it�s one of those two step transformations that I can�t quite intuitively wrap my head around

I also struggle to articulate much regarding this and this post is mostly me trying to do that for my own understanding, but I think one of the distinctions is that there's a degree of legitimate cooperation and organization � i.e., things that could be cool and good in some other context � involved in "collecting a bunch of artisans using tools under one roof and either working them in parallel or breaking down their tasks in sequence." But the more you introduce machines, the more you get alienation in the sorta two interrelated ways Marx uses the term: on a down-to-earth level, the work is even shittier and "more alienating," obviously, but also you're robbed of more political power because now you rely even more on the rear end in a top hat who owns the factory (despite the fact that it's what you're doing with those machines that's giving him political power over you).

I say above those things could be cool and good but part of the point is that under capitalism lol whoops* it's just that one leads to the other:

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

the accumulation of profit from mass production in the manufactory [is] used to invest in industrial capital, therefore cutting out artisans entirely and transforming the labor on the factory floor from skilled craftsmanship into mechanistic labor.

* (there is no "whoops")

# ¿ Jul 20, 2021 14:58

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Stringent posted:

Great, so we're back to promoting a conspiracy theory of government requiring the coordination of entire branches rather than the even remote possibility that different constituencies and legislators have different interests or political calculi. The Democrats are not a monolith. "Capital" is not a monolith.

the theory doesn't require that and even if it did: yes *sometimes* that happens!

# ¿ Sep 23, 2021 14:29

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

https://twitter.com/viktor_revmir/status/1450457690833051657?s=21

# ¿ Oct 20, 2021 15:28

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://www.gotoquiz.com/what_kind_of_socialist_or_communist_are_you

yeah yeah everyone ITT is already on watch lists etc

# ¿ Nov 25, 2021 16:35

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

The Voice of Labor posted:

all this talk about reading capital got me to pull my copy off the shelf. now I am too tired from work to sit and read it. is this a contradiction?

the initial contradiction is the current system of work being so lovely that you�re motivated to pick up a book that�s explicitly about understanding the shittiness of the current system.

However, the shittiness of that system then making you too tired to actually read that book is capitalisms amazing and dynamic ability to deal with such contradictions.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2021 01:31

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

bi crimes posted:

how would one characterize the model of governance of the current Chinese state? ive read a lot of takes on this but it often seems to have an anarchist (liberal) bias. it generally seems hard to find decent analysis in English about post Mao China

This is definitely not written by a lib or an anarchist: https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

# ¿ Jan 1, 2022 20:11

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Raskolnikov38 posted:

having not read the book but the wikipedia article on the book i'm going to take issues with what this guy terms a bullshit job

everything i've bolded hardly qualifies as a bullshit job. the rest is middle manager bullshit that would be severely curtailed under socialism and gradually evaporate as workers management developed

Going from memory, there are two relevant aspects to Graeber's approach that result in those inclusions:

1. He's going by workers' subjective assessments, so if a worker thinks their job is bullshit, he counts it as bullshit.

2. "Bullshit" includes things that are necessary under capitalism but which are cleaning up someone else's mess. (The duct tapers to which Southpaugh alludes.) The "someone else" is usually someone higher up in the company org chart.

IMO both those points make more sense in combination. There's always a degree to which any organization in any mode of production will need people to clean up inefficiencies, but under capitalism there's a lot more of that, and individual workers are best positioned to determine whether they're actually doing reasonable, necessary clean-up, or they're just covering up for obvious and redundant bullshit that could easily be eliminated, if only someone in a position of actual power could see the inefficiency. They can't. I don't want to defend everything about Graeber's approach because I haven't thought enough about it, but that seems generally correct to me.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

The point is, you have to treat workers respectfully to get service under socialism - whereas in a marketized society it's the other way around where you can demand service and compel workers to bow & scrape for your money.

I agree.

To tie this to the "bullshit" jobs thing: in the case of a receptionist (or really any customer-facing worker) under socialism that would still ostensibly be a necessary job. The problem is that under capitalism their job is largely dealing with customers being mad because of stupid poo poo the bosses are doing. The bosses are never aware of that, precisely because the job of the receptionist has become to shield them from their own bullshit. I think anyone who's done almost any customer-facing admin work inside a company that has a sales team (who are all incentivized to make absurd over-the-moon promises that are not based in reality) has had to deal with this. It's the admin or receptionist who has to deal with the consequences of reality. They can see the bullshit. The sales team working on commission is incentivized to ignore it.

Anyway, once you think about what the jobs entail and what their real role is within the larger organization, I think you can make the argument that "receptionist" under capitalism and "receptionist" under socialism are effectively different jobs. One is bullshit, the other isn't.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2022 16:26

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Danann posted:

never read animal farm but holy poo poo what a vile piece of anticommunism propaganda that orwell published

makes me glad to have only experienced it secondhand at most

...and it still wasn't anti-communist enough for the CIA!

That Red Sails site with the Animal Farm review has another good article on Orwell more broadly.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2022 15:27

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/halomancer1/status/1523103857990979584

Hmm

# ¿ May 10, 2022 01:22

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

evilpicard posted:

Not a loving chance is McDonald's COS 11% where are these numbers coming from

the analysis is missing a bunch of fixed capital costs which is why a bunch of pea brain conservatives are in the quote tweets inadvertently agreeing to Marx's major premises (it's just that actually the rate of exploitation and the production of surplus is less than the OP said so it's fine actually)

# ¿ Jun 16, 2022 16:21

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

droll posted:

Who is trump though

[liberalishly]: wow makes u think

# ¿ Jun 17, 2022 19:22

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Mike Davis' hatred was loving pure and I can give no higher compliment.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2022 18:45

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Cheston posted:

Is there a good companion for Capital vol. 1? Like an online course or another book?

agreed that Harvey�s companion is good imo. You sorta get a feel for his biases/quirks as you start noticing that like every anecdote or example is always in some way about geography. (I don�t mean that as a bad thing. it lets you calibrate accordingly.)

I also like William Clare Roberts� Marx�s Inferno, even tho it�s not billed as a �companion� per se. I think it�s come up in this thread before?

# ¿ Jul 12, 2022 02:36

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Dreylad posted:

I know people say the Manifesto has issues and Capital is where it's at but drat if " oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." doesn't stick in my brain like nothing else

yeah opening line about the frightful hobgoblin stalking through Europe is 🔥 imo

# ¿ Aug 11, 2022 01:24

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 23:31

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Domenic Losurdo has a good article about it: Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism. A pdf is not too hard to find

I also seem to recall a decent article in New Left Review or its blog about some of this. it mentions Pinochet specifically. Here it is: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/rule-by-target seems to be reviewing a book I should probably get around to reading

# ¿ Nov 3, 2022 02:33

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