Marxist thought

  On 4/18/2021 at 9:40 PM, Cryptowen said:

yeah this. marx did one of the most thorough examinations of capitalist society of all time, and it's a testament to his work how much of it holds up today. but it is still a body of work from the mid 19th century, so if your goal is to really get familiar with the nitty gritty of economics it'd be silly to limit yourself to marx or his disciples (just like imo it would be silly to totally ignore him). my frustration with some communists (and obviously you could apply this to most kinds of political ideologue) is when they engage in vague utopianism, spinning yarns about the perfect society that's going to emerge after the fall of the capitalist engine (especially if they suggest that china is going to spearhead this effort). to me it's the societal equivalent of when a guy talks about all the stuff he'll accomplish once he "gets his shit together", but nothing ever changes in his day to day life.

As stated in previous threads I'm certainly open to socialism as a societal model but I harbour no illusions about it being the ultimate solution to humanity's woes

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marx was explicitly anti-utopian.  communism isn't about solving all of humanity's problems.  it's about feeding poor people, getting everyone housing, and creating a system where people control their own lives including the work they do.  its not about solving all mental illnesses, diseases, interpersonal relationships issues, abolishing all violence, or anything else in that vein, though all of these things are clearly made worse by capitalism presently

  On 4/18/2021 at 10:58 PM, cyanobacteria said:

its not about solving all mental illnesses, diseases, interpersonal relationships issues, abolishing all violence, or anything else in that vein...

that's the job of Scientology!

regarding what will happen if/when capitalism crashes i think it's far more likely we'll have a Snowcrash type of USA... depending on how well other nations survive this collapse and what influence they have on events. 

  On 4/18/2021 at 11:19 PM, ignatius said:

that's the job of Scientology!

regarding what will happen if/when capitalism crashes i think it's far more likely we'll have a Snowcrash type of USA... depending on how well other nations survive this collapse and what influence they have on events. 

whats that mean

edit:

""""The story opens in Los Angeles in the 21st century, an unspecified number of years after a worldwide economic collapse. Los Angeles is no longer part of the United States, since the federal government has ceded most of its power and territory to private organizations and entrepreneurs.^[4]Franchising, individual sovereignty, and private vehicles reign supreme. Mercenary armies compete for national defense contracts while private security guards preserve the peace in sovereign, gated housing developments. Highway companies compete to attract drivers to their roads and all mail delivery is by hired courier. The remnants of government maintain authority only in isolated compounds where they do tedious make-work that is, by and large, irrelevant to the society around them.

Much of the world's territory has been carved up into sovereign enclaves, each run by its own big business franchise (such as "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong", or the corporatized American Mafia), or various residential burbclaves — quasi-sovereign gated communities.

This arrangement resembles anarcho-capitalism""""

oh, in that case we are already here.  anarcho-capitalism doesn't make sense since capitalism wants and needs a state to oppress the workforce.  anarcho-capitalism is just capitalism with a more explicitly visible anarchy of the market.  I disagree though I think when the US collapses it will go the Nazi Germany direction unironically and start applying the imperialism and fascism it already applies abroad on its own population

It means a science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson's novels, it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics and philosophy.

Stephenson explained the title of the novel in his 1999 essay "In the Beginning... Was the Command Line" as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Macintosh computer. Stephenson wrote about the Macintosh that "When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a 'snow crash' ". Stephenson has also mentioned that Julian Jaynes' book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was one of the main influences on Snow Crash.[1]

The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. According to characters in the book, the goddess Asherah is the personification of a linguistic virus, similar to a computer virus. The god Enki created a counter-program which he called a nam-shub that caused all of humanity to speak different languages as a protection against Asherah (a re-interpretation of the ancient Near Eastern story of the Tower of Babel).

Snow Crash was nominated for both the British Science Fiction Award in 1993, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1994.[2][3]

...iirc

  On 4/18/2021 at 11:21 PM, cyanobacteria said:

whats that mean

edit:

""""The story opens in Los Angeles in the 21st century, an unspecified number of years after a worldwide economic collapse. Los Angeles is no longer part of the United States, since the federal government has ceded most of its power and territory to private organizations and entrepreneurs.^[4]Franchising, individual sovereignty, and private vehicles reign supreme. Mercenary armies compete for national defense contracts while private security guards preserve the peace in sovereign, gated housing developments. Highway companies compete to attract drivers to their roads and all mail delivery is by hired courier. The remnants of government maintain authority only in isolated compounds where they do tedious make-work that is, by and large, irrelevant to the society around them.

Much of the world's territory has been carved up into sovereign enclaves, each run by its own big business franchise (such as "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong", or the corporatized American Mafia), or various residential burbclaves — quasi-sovereign gated communities.

This arrangement resembles anarcho-capitalism""""

oh, in that case we are already here.  anarcho-capitalism doesn't make sense since capitalism wants and needs a state to oppress the workforce.  anarcho-capitalism is just capitalism with a more explicitly visible anarchy of the market.  I disagree though I think when the US collapses it will go the Nazi Germany direction unironically and start applying the imperialism and fascism it already applies abroad on its own population

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it's a fun book.   

  On 4/18/2021 at 11:21 PM, cyanobacteria said:

I disagree though I think when the US collapses it will go the Nazi Germany direction unironically and start applying the imperialism and fascism it already applies abroad on its own population

yeah.. i mean.. that could certainly be part of it but i'm guessing there would be a kind of civil war over it since the federal gov't will likely be in shambles... but it's all just speculation. 

we could just go straight to Idiocracy and line up for hand jobs at star bucks. 

https://qz.com/1269525/capitalism-is-unfolding-exactly-as-karl-marx-predicted/

and finally my first battle for the complete ideological dominance of genban has begun.  not only has marxism become the dominant mode of political discussion, but the very moderators of the website itself have created special places for the discussion of marxism.  soon will be the WATMM vanguard party

  On 4/19/2021 at 4:18 AM, logakght said:

https://qz.com/1269525/capitalism-is-unfolding-exactly-as-karl-marx-predicted/

>HUD [US department of housing and urban development] estimates there are roughly half a million homeless people in the United States on any given night, in a country that is estimated to have roughly 18 million empty homes in it

imagine defending capitalism

  On 4/19/2021 at 1:56 AM, Cryptowen said:

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i don't get it. pls explain

I don't have faith in the preservation of a system that exists as a stagnant entity without entering a state of expansion.  A Marxist society would somehow have to maintain an equilibrium that we have yet to see in any civilization ever.  Where capital exists, it wants to expand, and capital is a greater force than any individual or group of individuals.  To escape capitalism is to retreat into a hypothetical "pre-capitalism," where escape is strictly prohibited.  I'll add to this later.

  On 4/19/2021 at 11:59 AM, brian trageskin said:

i don't get it. pls explain

You're welcome.

  On 4/19/2021 at 4:18 AM, logakght said:

https://qz.com/1269525/capitalism-is-unfolding-exactly-as-karl-marx-predicted/

I'd love to read the article, but apparently the capitalists over at qz have exploited the labour of the author and are selling her words for surplus value.

  On 4/19/2021 at 11:59 AM, brian trageskin said:

i don't get it. pls explain

its a reference to this monstrosity

  On 4/19/2021 at 3:15 PM, milkface said:

its a reference to this monstrosity

 

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ok. 

very disappointing joke then. i'm out

It wasn't until fairly recently I firmly concluded, personally, that capitalism needs to end in order for humanity to progress. I don't think it will quite be gone the way of feudalism before I die but I think the seeds of it collapsing and being replaced are planted. This era we're in is clearly a messy and unprecedented transition stage with the post-cold war and pre-9/11 90s as a weird intermission of sorts. Neoliberalism has given us progressive changes in many social and cultural ways while simultaneously gutting what already fragile systematic stability most democracies previously had. 

I have my issues with ML via vanguardism but I don't harp on them often because that tends to come off less as pushing back on tankies and more as feeding into liberal and right-wing misconceptions of socialism and leftism. I don't envision utopias any time soon but I do think there can be a manner in which cities and urban areas have top down centralized socialism to implement and maintain things like public transportation and energy while allowing more rural and remote areas to operate as more anarcho-communist entities. Automation should be freeing up populations and not accelerating impoverishment and wealth divides. There will always be extremism and regressive elements to mitigate but I do think if we pivot from this band-aid duct tape manner of government we have now it to one of robust socialism it would temper most reactionary populist tendencies. 

Left-libertarianism does currently exist in pockets of the world - Rojava and Chiapas specifically. Cuba has managed to be fairly robust despite perpetual embargos and intervention attempts and the typical authoritarian leanings and pitfalls of any beleaguered country attempting stalled out communist revolution. The other ML countries that haven't fallen pivoted to state guided capitalism. Democratic socialism is good achievable patch in the U.S. but part of me wonders if it's more likely this country will dissolve in balkanization before that ever occurs. Something is going to give here though at some point. 

My reading of actual theory versus skimming wikipedia, keeping up with leftists outlets (Jacobin, Zero Books) is pretty minimal. Slowly trying to remedy that - I started reading The Conquest of Bread last week.

Most people who envision a well functioning and equitable Marxist system in first world countries seem to overlook the fact that our civilization is standing on top of an invisible colonial empire that has allowed us to progress in a relatively peaceful and stable world.  A socialized, quasi-Nordic America would not be an ideal Marxist society or anything like it because such a system is still focused on magnetizing capital toward the metropolitan societies from the obfuscated archipelago of alien entities.  I believe Marxism would demand us to focus on self-sufficiency first before we spend our time figuring out public health care and other such issues.  The problem is that an entirely self-sustaining America is looking less tangible with each farm that gets excavated for building projects or converted to wasteland by relentless agricultural practices.  The alternative would be an outward ejection of capital into America's concubines by marriage, which we all know is never going to happen.

  On 4/19/2021 at 12:20 PM, drillkicker said:

I don't have faith in the preservation of a system that exists as a stagnant entity without entering a state of expansion.  A Marxist society would somehow have to maintain an equilibrium that we have yet to see in any civilization ever.  Where capital exists, it wants to expand, and capital is a greater force than any individual or group of individuals.  To escape capitalism is to retreat into a hypothetical "pre-capitalism," where escape is strictly prohibited.  I'll add to this later.

the desire of capital to expand exists only when it is private capital attempting to be used for the purposes of extracting surplus value from the labor of workers.  if private property over capital is eliminated through communism this concept is no longer relevant or even makes sense conceptually.  if the people need more water, labor will be invested into water infrastructure.  the capitals are not private anymore and do not have minds of their own implemented through markets and shareholder profit desires.  "pre-capitalism" is not a concept that makes sense given that capitalism can develop from multiple different modes of production and thus a pre-capitalist mode of production can take many forms

  On 4/19/2021 at 5:02 PM, joshuatxuk said:

It wasn't until fairly recently I firmly concluded, personally, that capitalism needs to end in order for humanity to progress. I don't think it will quite be gone the way of feudalism before I die but I think the seeds of it collapsing and being replaced are planted. This era we're in is clearly a messy and unprecedented transition stage with the post-cold war and pre-9/11 90s as a weird intermission of sorts. Neoliberalism has given us progressive changes in many social and cultural ways while simultaneously gutting what already fragile systematic stability most democracies previously had. 

I have my issues with ML via vanguardism but I don't harp on them often because that tends to come off less as pushing back on tankies and more as feeding into liberal and right-wing misconceptions of socialism and leftism. I don't envision utopias any time soon but I do think there can be a manner in which cities and urban areas have top down centralized socialism to implement and maintain things like public transportation and energy while allowing more rural and remote areas to operate as more anarcho-communist entities. Automation should be freeing up populations and not accelerating impoverishment and wealth divides. There will always be extremism and regressive elements to mitigate but I do think if we pivot from this band-aid duct tape manner of government we have now it to one of robust socialism it would temper most reactionary populist tendencies. 

Left-libertarianism does currently exist in pockets of the world - Rojava and Chiapas specifically. Cuba has managed to be fairly robust despite perpetual embargos and intervention attempts and the typical authoritarian leanings and pitfalls of any beleaguered country attempting stalled out communist revolution. The other ML countries that haven't fallen pivoted to state guided capitalism. Democratic socialism is good achievable patch in the U.S. but part of me wonders if it's more likely this country will dissolve in balkanization before that ever occurs. Something is going to give here though at some point. 

My reading of actual theory versus skimming wikipedia, keeping up with leftists outlets (Jacobin, Zero Books) is pretty minimal. Slowly trying to remedy that - I started reading The Conquest of Bread last week.

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i agree with all of this however it's important to not let the agrarian ancom idea go too far if they become reactionary and oppose collectivization needed to feed the masses of the population.  small scale ancom is fine, creation of large territories is not

jacobin is an op

https://twitter.com/benjaminnorton/status/1253737158764044289

conquest of bread is good and inspiring from a communist perspective but pretty light on actual theory

  On 4/20/2021 at 1:27 AM, cyanobacteria said:

if the people need more water, labor will be invested into water infrastructure.

These would presumably be specialists in water infrastructure?

  On 4/20/2021 at 4:33 AM, chenGOD said:

These would presumably be specialists in water infrastructure?

is this a question?

  On 4/20/2021 at 5:10 AM, cyanobacteria said:

  On 4/20/2021 at 4:33 AM, chenGOD said:

These would presumably be specialists in water infrastructure?

is this a question?

Yes.