mustang posted:

youll notice marx at no point talks about "smashing capitalism", his focus is entirely on removing political power from the bourgeoisie. hotheaded young virgins like mustang miss this

How is personal restraint for voluntary, religious reasons "hotheaded"? I don't appreciate your slights. Your post is a total non sequiteur by the way, he literally states that liberal worker's rights movements advocating measures short of complete communism "want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible".

they're not "liberal worker's rights movements" though, they're democratic petty bourgeois - again, the class status here is key, and your elision of this into a much less historically specific category says a lot about your grasp on marx's critique.

elsewhere in the same piece:

"If the workers are to be able to forcibly oppose the democratic petty bourgeois it is essential above all for them to be independently organized and centralized in clubs."

do we have this now? is this not actually the task we should be broadly attending to, instead of trying to smash all "safety nets" and protections that have been fought for with the blood of workers, in order to incite some crazed sorelian Final Orgy Of Communism?

and again - the focus here is entirely on having the workers themselves in the strongest possible position for a political fight.

roseweird posted:

ChairmanMao posted:

she was a pretty bad lay in general

like really what is this shit

bad lays are really annoying

babyfinland posted:

roseweird posted:

ChairmanMao posted:

she was a pretty bad lay in general

like really what is this shit

bad lays are really annoying

"meant" in what sense? i somehow doubt this is the conscious aim of.... anyone involved at all. how is "depopulating the third world" "creating new markets for capitalist exploitation"? you're just plugging together buzzwords you half-remember into arguments without evidence or sense. bill gates sucks but not because he's handing out condoms in africa or whatever. it's more complex than that.

You're the one putting forth incoherent dawdling. Depopulation and capitalist development are explicit liberal policies, see for example the Kissinger documents.

in any case, given the bourgeoisie is so dependent at this point on the distributive function of the state, the only way things could be changed to destroy their power in that respect would be through.... proletarian dictatorship. in which case you might as well actually try to build socialism.

How does this follow at all? You just admitted that the capitalist class would be utterly helpless without the redistributive state. Eliminating welfare would greatly speed the coming of the proletarian dictatorship.

wasted posted:

babyfinland posted:

roseweird posted:

ChairmanMao posted:

she was a pretty bad lay in general

like really what is this shit

bad lays are really annoying

well lucky for me i only have to fuck myself several times a day

tpaine posted:

babyfinland posted:

roseweird posted:

ChairmanMao posted:

she was a pretty bad lay in general

like really what is this shit

bad lays are really annoying

they were probably just expired or maybe the bag was punctured

my thoughts exactly but they were still warm and didnt leak when i hung them out the window

mustang posted:

And given that most working class people are against social reform and the current incarnation of Marxism, that just shows how out of touch your revolutionary practice is with reality.

no, it shows that a combination of bourgeois state pushback of various kinds against militant leftist movements worldwide (costing millions and millions of lives since 1960) and changes in the distribution and means of production have done very well to both derange the proletariat as a class-in-itself (in some sense "scattering it to the wind") and derange it as a class-for-itself, as both movements in capitalist countries and countries where proletarian power is already in some way established were smashed. there is a lot of work to be done! stop being so lazy.

mustang posted:

Yes, the petty-bourgeois (the modern equivalent being limousine liberals) versus the anti-reform workers and peasants.

what? can you explain what a class is and why "limousine liberals" are one

what? can you explain what a class is and why "limousine liberals" are one

The petty bourgeois academics and so forth simply aim to reform capitalism, which is why First World Marxism is in such shambles.

no, it shows that a combination of bourgeois state pushback of various kinds against militant leftist movements worldwide (costing millions and millions of lives since 1960) and changes in the distribution and means of production have done very well to both derange the proletariat as a class-in-itself (in some sense "scattering it to the wind") and derange it as a class-for-itself, as both movements in capitalist countries and countries where proletarian power is already in some way established were smashed. there is a lot of work to be done! stop being so lazy.

You're evading argument again. No revolution has ever been helped by social-democratic reform. All of the successful ones- 1917, 1949, etc.- took place in conditions of high exploitation. Calling Obama a Kenyan is a supremely revolutionary act because it implies recognition of the false consciousness associated with liberal reform.

roseweird posted:

babyfinland posted:

there should be some kind of early warning system for bad lays, like if she insists on paying for everything that should be the code for keep your expectations low

go gay babyfinland

0:58

mustang posted:

The petty bourgeois academics and so forth simply aim to reform capitalism, which is why First World Marxism is in such shambles.

no, you've just told me what you mean by "limousine liberals" here. can you please explain what a class is as you understand it, and how limousine liberals constitute one (or a portion of one), in a similar manner to marx's "democratic petty bourgeoisie"

You're evading argument again. No revolution has ever been helped by social-democratic reform. All of the successful ones- 1917, 1949, etc.- took place in conditions of high exploitation.

actually neither of those revolutions took place in conditions of high exploitation. you're employing a moralistic concept of exploitation here. russia in 1917 was truly semi-feudal, so the rate of exploitation was actually relatively low (but so was productivity). the same is even more true of china in 1949, which was not only similarly impoverished to russia in 1917 but had just undergone decades of civil war and imperialist invasion. exploitation has nothing to do with it. organisation and an understanding of the conditions as they exist ed (and a good bit of luck) had everything to do with it. but organisation probably most of all, especially in the case of china.

daddyholes posted:

jools posted:

youll notice marx at no point talks about "smashing capitalism", his focus is entirely on removing political power from the bourgeoisie. hotheaded young virgins like mustang miss this

and Stalin said the same afaik: transition from capitalism, smash the bourgeois apparatus. from what i remember from my youth Trot street protest groups seem to absolutely love "smash capitalism"

yeah, i think this is because these organisations are honestly pretty academicised in various ways at this point. i get the impression they see the world a bit like plato's cave, certain in the knowledge that what they actually see and experience are mere shadows cast by the brilliance of the abstract Capitalist Concept

1. That’s a lie; 2. Even if that were true, that analysis is bollocks.

Congratulations, you have posted something which does not actually raise any questions but instead goes on about Communists being fascists without any material analysis of what either is.

And aside from all that, all the article really does is state a fact, a fact that we are well aware of and spend our time actually analysising in a Marxist framework. The article does not analyse it in any framework, it just states it and rubbishes Communism at the same time. Absolutely useless.

Here’s a criticism: you are full of shit. Fuck you, fuck off.

Okay fine. I guess this writer and I aren’t going to find any common ground soon.


Bridging the gap between antistatist and statist communism

Still, I think antistatist communists can work with communists who are infected with Keynesian fascist ideology and who employ this fascist ideology in place of labor theory. But we need some serious ground rules.

To illustrate these ground rules, I want to cite the writings of the autonomist Marxist, Franco Berardi, who, in 2009, made an attempt to analyze the present crisis in an article, “Communism is back but we should call it the therapy of singularisation”

In section 1 of his article, Berardi argues this time is different — capitalism is headed toward collapse:

Economists and politicians are worried: they call it crisis and they hope it is going to unfold like the numerous previous crisis that stormed the Economy in the past century and then passed away, leaving Capitalism stronger. I think this time it is different. This is not a crisis, but the symptom of the incompatibility of the potency of productive forces (cognitive labour in the global network) and the paradigm of growth. This is not a crisis but the final collapse of a system that has lasted for five hundred years.

Look at the landscape: the world’s great powers are trying to rescue financial institutions. But the financial collapse has affected the industrial system, the demand is falling, jobs are lost by the millions. In order to rescue the banks the State is taking money from the taxpayers of tomorrow, and this means that the demand is going to fall further in the next years. Family spending is plummeting, and consequently much industrial production is going to be dismissed. It’s not going to last just one or two years, this time is forever.

This is a pretty bold statement, written during the darkest days of the financial collapse when it looked like capitalism would just wink out over night. But is it labor theory or Keynesian fascist state economic theory? Berardi argues the financial crisis has affected the industrial system, demand is falling, and millions of jobs are disappearing.

I want to call attention to the Keynesian/monetarist sequence of events here. According to Berardi, financial collapse leads to industrial crisis, not the other way around. Is this labor theory? No. It is the argument of the monetarists, like Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve, who believes all crises of this sort begin with a contraction of the supply of money due to a financial crisis.

Of course not one bourgeois economist has ever been able to establish depressions are caused by financial crises. In fact when Bernanke tried himself to establish this sequence of crisis he was unable to show any demonstration of it in the historical empirical data covering the Great Depression. According to labor theory, financial crises are produced by industrial overproduction, not the reverse.

What does the term ‘demand’ mean? This term has no place in a Marxist analysis — it is a fascist term, not Marxism. Further Berardi argues, “In order to rescue the banks the State is taking money from the taxpayers of tomorrow” How can you take money from people who do not exist? This is some sort of autonomist poetry, right? Berardi actually means the fascist state is borrowing money from the banks to bailout the banks.

Next Berardi tells us family spending is plummeting”. He is, of course only talking about working class families here. So his argument is directed at the working class. This, he tells us will results in further fall in economic activity. Thus he is making the argument that falling family spending is causing industrial overproduction. In fact, it is industrial overproduction that produces both a mass of idled capital and unemployed workers.

Why is this important to understand?

Because many Marxists infected with Keynesian ideology believe this crisis can be fixed by taxing capital and paying the workers more. The opposite is the case: wages, no matter high or low is the problem. The working class does not need any wages at all. Wages serve only to keep them in slavery. The working class can do just fine without any wages, but capitalism would disappear.

Keynesian economic logic and communism

Nevertheless, despite the terrible flaws in argument like this one, I must be frank: the Keynesian argument is very difficult to combat among communists. It invades so much of Marxist and anarchist analysis because it appears to make perfect sense at some superficial level. It seems logical that capitalist crises can be addressed simply by taking profits from the capitalists class and handing it out to the working class as wages. And, on some level, this fascist idea is absolutely correct, although it does not reflect the way capitalism works.

But really, who the fuck cares if taxing the rich to feed the working class works for this disgusting mode of production? What works for the capitalist class is hardly a standard we should use to evaluate what we fight and die for? If your aim is to keep capitalism working, Keynesian redistribution won’t work. If, however, your aim is to end poverty, the capitalist class have all the wealth in society and if we are going to end poverty we need to go get it from them.

So, what are you going to do? Stand there saying “We can’t end poverty, because capitalism doesn’t work that way?” Who really cares that ‘capitalism doesn’t work that way’? Poverty has to be ended somehow.

I think this is without a doubt the most powerful argument in favor of Keynesian inspired redistribution of profits — we don’t care what works for capitalism, we just want to end the poverty of the working class.

That impulse has to be captured somehow by communist who favor of abolition of both labor and the state.

You can explain to communists infected by Keynesian ideas — like Richard Wolff or Noam Chomsky — why redistribution doesn’t work, but they will not hear you. When you say the state has to be abolished, they will treat you as if you are part of some neoliberal globalist anarcho-capitalist political movement. If you say we should not be fighting for euro-zone nation states, but instead let them die? They will ask, “But who will build the roads and hand out unemployment checks and food stamps?”

What’s more important, the problem is not so much the Wolffs and Chomskys as it is everyday folks who are no less under this illusion than those two imbeciles. Keynesian state redistribution makes sense not because people are literate in the political-economy of capital, but because they are ignorant of how capitalism works. They think it works just like it appears to work on the surface — and this false appearance even confounds people who should know better.

The essence of the Keynesian argument that infects communism is that the profits of capital must be redistributed in the form of wages. This obviously violates the logic of capitalism itself, which folks like Wolff and Chomsky ignore. So when capital responds negatively to such measures, they don’t understand why this happens.

However the fact that capitalism doesn’t work the way these folks thinks it does is not my beef with them — I am all for violating the way capitalism works. Here is my concern: If you are going to violate the way capitalism works, shouldn’t you do it in a way capital can’t fight back?

The defect of the Keynesian argument

So far as I can tell, Keynesian inspired redistribution of profits suffers from three defects:

Capital can pass along wage increases into prices;
The capitalist class can move its capital anywhere in the world market; and,
The lobbyists for the capitalist class can subvert state efforts to regulate it.
Any alternative offered by antistatist communists to the Keynesian infection of communism has to be able to show we can indeed violate the laws of capitalism in a way those three things can’t happen. This is the Holy Grail of antistatist communism — a way to violate the laws of capital in a way capital can’t fight back.

I think this begins with the realization that the profits the underconsumptionists want to redistribute to the working class is nothing more than the surplus value produced the working class. Moreover the state has its own interests in in the production of surplus value, since the largest portion of the surplus value produced by the working class ends up as state spending. This is a deficit in Keynesian thinking: Since they treat the state as outside society, they don’t even realize the state is by far the largest consumer of surplus value.

The state is not, by any means, a neutral arbiter between classes — it is a consumer of a mass surplus value amounting to fifty percent of the total economy of the United States.

The danger is that the profits the state takes from the capitalist class just gets ‘redistributed’ to the state itself in the form of even more spending. Our goal is not to redistribute surplus value from the capitalist class to the state but from capital to the working class.

And here is another problem: as a consumer of surplus value, the state wastes far more capital unproductively than even the capitalist class — think national security expenditures.

So if we wanted to go after the largest pot of surplus value in the economy, the state is the most important target with control of a mass of surplus value equal to fifty percent of the total economy. Of this mass of surplus value, at least a trillion dollars of spending could be lopped off from just national security spending alone.

Let’s ignore all of the ways the state wastes capital and focus just on the Defense Department. Spending on the national security apparatus of the United States amounts to about $150 per week for every worker in this country. Since national defense makes absolutely no contribution to the consumption of society but only robs it of productive resources, many people do not realize this spending is a pure profit subsidy handed to the capitalist class via defense spending. Workers spend all their time engaged in work that can never be compensated by any of the output they produce.

Which means, if all defense labor was ended tomorrow, there would be absolutely no change in the consumption power or material standard of living of the working class. Further, the resources now consumed unproductively in defense related labor, which produces nothing, could be redirected to productive employment. This would result in a double bump to consumption — no more waste of resources, and additional capital freed up for productive employment.

Let’s compare this spending to all other industrial and agricultural production in the economy: With 2.13 million active duty service personnel and civilian support work force, the Defense Department labor force is three time the total labor force in agriculture. The defense department is by itself the single largest employer of labor power on the planet.

And every single person employed by this department produces nothing. All the personnel of this department have to be fed, clothed, housed, their children educated, their medical care provided for, and their retirement seen to — and they contribute absolutely nothing to this labor.

This does not include those directly and indirectly employed in the production for the department and contractors and service providers. It is estimated that in 2011, 4 million people were employed in defense related industries beyond those directly employed by the defense department itself. And these figures just include skilled labor — it does not include janitors and secretaries and various ancillary personnel employed by those enterprises.

This gives us an total employment by the defense department of more than 7 million workers — none of whom produce anything of value. So it is reasonable to ask how this pot of surplus value is not included as the first and most important mass of surplus to be redistributed. Why would communists even talk about taxing the one percent before you talked about this massive pot of waste?

The pot of surplus value is far larger than corporate profits

The first criticism to be made against the argument of communists infected by Keynesianism is that their scope of the surplus value to be redistributed is far too narrow. Since we are talking about surplus value — and not simply the much smaller pot of corporate profits — there is far more than people think.

This redistribution of surplus value in the form of defense spending would directly encroach exclusively on profits, since none of the capital deployed in this area produces any wages goods. The only thing that could be affected are the profits of defense related industries. No wage goods in the rest of the economy would be affected and, therefore, there would be no affect on the living standards of workers.

And guess what? The capitalists cannot evade this redistribution of their wealth. Where are these defense industries going to relocate? To where can they export their now useless capital? How can they raise their prices to offset the shift in wage goods? They can’t pass along this redistribution by raising their prices, because there is no one to buy their useless death machines. They can’t relocate their industries to any other country and export back into the US because the defense department is now gone. And they can’t subvert the state to evade regulation, because they have nothing left to be regulated.

However, there is a huge downside to this attempt to turn the profits of the capitalist class into wages for the working class: at least 7 million workers, many highly skilled, would now be unemployed because the Defense Department and its reinue of dependent industries have been shut down.

This, I admit, is a huge problem that will not simply go away and it only adds to the problem we now face of to another 20 million workers already jobless. That is 27 million workers without jobs, almost 20 percent of the labor force. In the middle of what some call the worst crisis since the Great Depression. So what do you do?

Simple: You reduce hours of labor by one day to a four day work week. Problem solved. The profits of the defense-industrial complex is converted directly into free time for the mass of society. And there is no way capital can evade this redistribution by any means at its disposal. Moreover, you have now released millions of highly skilled workers to engage in productive employment of their skills, which ends the brain drain on the economy produced by unproductive dead end defense employment.

Our Keynesian infected communists get their redistribution, while antistatist communists get to deliver a blow against the fascist state. And that is a real win-win for both sides.

Would this work as a political platform? Who knows. It is a very complicated argument to make in the form of a soundbite that seems to be necessary in politics today. But communists could approach this another way that might appeal to the working class and would still accomplish all that both camps want.

If, instead of focusing on why defense spending is completely unproductive and needs to go, we just focused on cutting the work week to four or even three days, our argument might receive a better reception.

And when the capitalist class raise objections to reducing hours of labor or why such a reduction is a utopian dream, our response to their whining could be, “Cut the fucking defense department.” If the capitalist are so fucking concerned about the effect reduced hours of labor will have on their capital, they can sacrifice the defense sector, since it does not produce anything of value to anyone, nor add to the consumption power of the working class.

So if our underconsumptionist communist brethren and sistren are so fucking concerned about Keynesian inspired redistribution, why not just start with reducing hours of labor. Once we cut hours of labor, the social product of labor will redistribute itself.

Author: Jehu Eaves
Visit Jehu's Website - Email Jehu
I am a "marxist-in-recovery", which is to say, I am someone trying to recover for myself the essential humanist thought of Karl Marx. I understand his writings as a radical, critical, and determined opposition to all forms of social coercion and "laws" of society, including, but not limited to, Labor, Property and the State -- a decidedly negative critique of present society that offers no vision of what replaces it. My somewhat awkward musings on this can be found at therealmovement.wordpress.com. I am also on Twitter @damn_jehu

roseweird posted:

mustang posted:

a group of people with aligned interests

no

Jools is essentially giving me the same hoopla I've gotten on Mises.org, taking arguments off on some semantic derail to distract from the anti-scientific basis of his argument.

The actual transnational capitalists- Bill Gates, George Soros, Warren Buffet- almost unanimously advocate a specific, capitalism-preserving ideology centered on the welfare state and social liberalism. All your arguments in favor of social reform just play into their hands.

mustang posted:

Exactly, it does nothing to undermine capitalism- rather, it creates a perceived justification for it.

It's no surprise that Buffet, Gates, and Soros are all liberals.


Then I'm glad you've never read a Gates Foundation statement, because economic development (read: globalizing capitalist imperialism) is their major objective. Lower fertility rates an important way to achieve this.

mmmmm so what? we've already established that capitalism isn't a Force Of Evil, but a mode of production (a set of historical laws of motion), and that the actual actors in all of this are the bourgeoisie. without this vitiating view of the world and humanity and culture, then the idea that an action of the bourgeoisie might at worst be a bit bad, or neutral, or kind of better than nothing happening at all (i guess) makes much more sense, and you start concentrating on things that matter like imperialist war and police militarisation and so on and so forth - the things that would actually get in the way of proletarian power seizure, not condoms.

sure critique it but it's not really the biggest issue. anyway you should probably read some better criticisms of the gates foundation because they mostly focus on the way they distort healthcare provision around a few "blockbuster" diseases - note this crit isn't "they give out contraceptio which is bad because reproductive choice is bad because henry kissinger said we should depopulate the third world 40 years ago", it's based on, uh, what the people at the receiving end see as the problem.