aerdil posted:

i mean it's accurate that a larger global reserve army of labor drives down wages, and modern imperialist capitalism takes advantage of this through outsourcing, but blaming the third world for a population growth that allows foreign capital to take advantage of it more is pretty much blaming the victim. additionally, it's anti-socialist to be in favor of immigration controls as they in large part also keep wages down by trapping highly productive and skilled laborers in national labor markets with less worker rights in the third world which are then super-exploited by first-world capital.

sorry but it's national-socialist now, which means we want high tariffs and strict immigration controls.

aerdil posted:

i mean it's accurate that a larger global reserve army of labor drives down wages, and modern imperialist capitalism takes advantage of this through outsourcing, but blaming the third world for a population growth that allows foreign capital to take advantage of it more is pretty much blaming the victim. additionally, it's anti-socialist to be in favor of immigration controls as they in large part also keep wages down by trapping highly productive and skilled laborers in national labor markets with less worker rights in the third world which are then super-exploited by first-world capital.

actually the victims are the impoverished helpless slaves third world parents pump out without their consent by the hundreds of thousands daily in an attempt to extend their creators' own wretched and pointless existences, and who if they are lucky have nothing more to look forward to than the opportunity to exist long enough to perpetuate the cycle of creation-abuse

aerdil posted:

i mean it's accurate that a larger global reserve army of labor drives down wages, and modern imperialist capitalism takes advantage of this through outsourcing, but blaming the third world for a population growth that allows foreign capital to take advantage of it more is pretty much blaming the victim. additionally, it's anti-socialist to be in favor of immigration controls as they in large part also keep wages down by trapping highly productive and skilled laborers in national labor markets with less worker rights in the third world which are then super-exploited by first-world capital.

The free labor mobility is *designed* to create a downward-levelling effect, especially after Eurocrats allowed free movement from the impoverished remnants of the Soviet bloc in 1989, the first time since WWII that a real reserve army had been created in many countries, with a very real downward pressure on wages, unionization etc. The apologetics (from liberals and leftists in denial) for a free labor market are just an opening-up for creating a reserve army; in the 1960s and 70s the stagnation of capitalism had just begun and the small amount of immigrants could easily be handled by the unions' integrative policies.

Actually the true turning point was not 1989, but much later, when the crisis really hit. Since 2001, the number of Poles in Norway alone is ten times more, from around 8000 to 80000, Lithuanians from 1000 to 28000. This is people in the workforce, i.e. able to work, but not necessarily employed. And there are many more – on short-term stays that the statistical system doesn't register.

But it's not just internal EU immigration, but the asylum seekers that were/are most contested. And which country has been the most consistently liberal regarding asylum seekers? Sweden, which boasted Scandinavia's strongest unions... unions which are now very severely weakened! Control over the labor supply is key to have strong unions.

The unions need control over the supply of labor, and there are several ways to do that: work permission systems are well-established and would in today's context be progressive. Doing nothing means giving right-wing populism a walk in the park politically.

No campaigns from anti-racists will get support among the most hard-hit layers of the working class, it will be seen as what it is: middle-class moralism. They correctly perceive that you are in denial about and don't do anything about the creation of a reserve army just to preserve the sanctimonious purity of your leftism – this kind of anti-nationalism, anti-racism makes you feel good and a righteous voice for the wretched of the Earth against the evil white labor aristocracy, but it is not politically efficient.

The ruling elites, who in the old times needed racism in order to legitimize their colonies, now have turned so pro-multiculturalism that it's a privilege of some segments of the working class to be racist.

So, as far as I'm concerned, protectionism is the (lesser evil) answer to these quandaries and an anti-labor construction like the EU, which hides behind progressive posturing and heartwarming internationalism but really only stands for depreciation of wages and social spending, should be abolished.

Cheers.

Edited by COINTELBRO (July 28, 2015 02:44:39)

aerdil posted:

i mean it's accurate that a larger global reserve army of labor drives down wages, and modern imperialist capitalism takes advantage of this through outsourcing, but blaming the third world for a population growth that allows foreign capital to take advantage of it more is pretty much blaming the victim. additionally, it's anti-socialist to be in favor of immigration controls as they in large part also keep wages down by trapping highly productive and skilled laborers in national labor markets with less worker rights in the third world which are then super-exploited by first-world capital.

i was mostly thinking about the cartoonish racism

xipe posted:

what do you mean, the EU never allowed immigration of the former USSR - people from Poland & the other 9 accession states still dont have migration rights despite their countries being EU members for over a decade & free movement being a supposed 'founding principle' of the eu project

people can freely move within the schengen area which includes everything except bulgaria and romania iirc. i dunno about work permits and as for participating in social programs haaahahaha

xipe posted:

also surely women entering the labour force was a bigger influx than migrants

yeah

xipe posted:

how about a 30 hour work week rather than 'control of the supply of labour' as a better goal for unions to aim for?

hard to see the appeal when hourly wages are shit

NoFreeWill posted:

aerdil posted:

i mean it's accurate that a larger global reserve army of labor drives down wages, and modern imperialist capitalism takes advantage of this through outsourcing, but blaming the third world for a population growth that allows foreign capital to take advantage of it more is pretty much blaming the victim. additionally, it's anti-socialist to be in favor of immigration controls as they in large part also keep wages down by trapping highly productive and skilled laborers in national labor markets with less worker rights in the third world which are then super-exploited by first-world capital.

sorry but it's national-socialist now, which means we want high tariffs and strict immigration controls.

The Sanders Plan

aerdil posted:

i mean it's accurate that a larger global reserve army of labor drives down wages, and modern imperialist capitalism takes advantage of this through outsourcing, but blaming the third world for a population growth that allows foreign capital to take advantage of it more is pretty much blaming the victim. additionally, it's anti-socialist to be in favor of immigration controls as they in large part also keep wages down by trapping highly productive and skilled laborers in national labor markets with less worker rights in the third world which are then super-exploited by first-world capital.

What is this blame? Im talking about stopping the physical process itself.

orchestra_hit posted:

how do you obtain somebodys consent to be given birth to?

Ayahuasca

Superabound posted:

oh, and for everyone who keeps bringing up the Gates Foundation, youre actually making my point for me. I dont know where youre getting this idea that it is somehow working to shrink third world labor pools, because they are currently running a massive global childhood immunization campaign (using old, discontinued, and in some cases outright banned-in-the-West vaccine overstock) that does, and is specifically intended to do, the exact opposite

so you mean the stuff that sterilizes women and kills children is going to make the labor pool grow? Or?

Crow posted:

No amount of vaccines will cure your daughter from having a shitty father

why so personal crowbro.

marimite posted:

RedMaistre posted:

That so many socialists have advocated for it only goes to show how much of leftist politics (particularly in the metropoles) is determined by the habits of bourgeois ideology, the ambition for prestige and position found in certain subgroups within the petite bourgeois castes, and the influence of outright reactionaries like Nietzsche, not by the interests of the masses in general or the weakest elements thereof.

First, Nietzsche is certainly typical of petite bourgeois philosophy, and I don't deny that Nietzsche and other petite bourgeois philosophers are used by fascists towards their own ends, but to associate his actual philosophy with eugenics doesn't make any sense. His denunciations (perhaps only second to his denunciations of anti-semites) against nationalists and "racial purists", his denunciations of not only Social Darwinism but Darwinism in general, his advocacy for the acceleration of the dissolution of nations into a greater European culture, his hatred of the bourgeoisie... All of these are in direct contradiction. The only possible connections that exist are due to deliberate misreadings. One is the concept of the ubermensch. The Ubermensch is not a superhuman that is breed, it is a form of life created by an artist. It is morphology against Darwinism. Similarly, the will to power is not about power accumulation, but about a will to create and give. There is an element of aggression, but as a dissipation of forces. Nietzsche does not advocate for master morality against slave morality, but rather describes how the struggle between these two (in the recurring symbolism of the snake and the eagle, neither with priority) represents the triumph of the charm of culture over our baser instincts. This does result in an order of rank, but of a spiritual kind among artists.

Of course Nietzsche certainly has problems that are typical of petite bourgeois philosophy and allow for misreadings by fascists. Part of it is a utopian atittude (not denying the denunciations of utopia, but I think these are in the name of a utopia of constant self-overcoming and creation against a stable concept that is seen as limiting), part of it is a romanticization of the premodern, part of it is a general hatred of politics and the division of labor. Same as can be said of many others: Heidegger, Foucault, Bataille, Deleuze, Arendt. On the other hand, none of these people are actually fascist in essence. That is because fascism is not fundamentally a movement of the petite bourgeoisie, or of the labor aristocracy in embryo. These are certainly parts, but fundamentally fascism is a movement of the bourgeoisie as an entire class, with its main representatives being the most important. It makes no sense for Leninists to claim the necessity of working with petite bourgeois elements while in the same breath denouncing all petite bourgeois philosophy as fascist. I think this even applies to Heidegger. Not only was Heidegger's philosophy rejected by the Nazis themselves, but the trajectory of his thought from the late 30s onwards was a clear attempt to rectify what he saw as a mistake. Of course this was incomplete because Heidegger was a coward and a narcissist, leading him to never apologize for his Nazism (despite privately admitting it was a mistake). But still, what kind of fascist lectures on Antigone in fuggen 1942? The point is that the case is ambiguous as fuck, and with a proper dialectical investigation perhaps something can be salvaged, as is the case with petty bourgeois "Beautiful Soul" - ism in general.

And there really are ways these philosophers can be salvaged for the purpose of the oppressed. For example, Heidegger's rejection of the correspondence theory of truth in favor of truth being a direct disclosure and concealment played out in our dealings with the world. Everyone has direct access to the truth but no one is 100% right, and interpretation is endless task of taking responsibility for one's own viewpoint. In relation to the man himself the theory is pretty damn ironic, but I think it's easy to see how such a theory can help facilitate democratic discourse and disrupt positivism. Or with Nietzsche, Nietzsche was really great at pointing out all the ways morality is dishonestly used to shut down discourse. Seems like another great tool for democracy. And both emphasized the way that art can help us see how the world can be different in a way irreducible to other ways of thinking. A bit utopian sure, but it's nice.

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner on this post--

1. I think it entirely appropriate to link Nietzsche with eugenics, because Nietzsche himself is very open with his non-metaphorical interest in culling the weak and breeding the strong.

This is the problem as he sees it:
The earth is full of the superfluous; life is marred by the all-too-many.
From Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Let us face facts: the people have triumphed -- or the slaves, the mob, the herd, whatever you wish to call them -- and if the Jews brought it about, then no nation ever had a more universal mission on earth. The lords are a thing of the past, and the ethics of the common man is completely triumphant. I don't deny that this triumph might be looked upon as a kind of blood poisoning since it has resulted in a mingling of the races

From The Genealogy of Morals

And here is the solution to the problem he proposes:

From The Will to Power

From now on there will be more favorable preconditions for more comprehensive forms of dominion, whose like has never yet existed. And even this is not the most important thing; the possibility has been established for the production of international racial unions whose task will be to rear a master race, the future "masters of the earth"; a new, tremendous aristocracy, based on the severest self-legislation, in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants will be made to endure for millennia -- a higher kind of man who, thanks to their superiority in will, knowledge, riches, and influence, employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth, so as to work as artists upon "man" himself. Enough: the time is coming when politics will have a different meaning.

From The Notebooks:

First Basic Law: no consideration for numbers: the masses. The suffering and unhappy concern us little—only the first and most successful exemplars, so that they don’t get short shrift out of consideration for the ill bred ones (i.e. the masses). Destruction of the ill bred--to this aim one must emancipate oneself from previous morality....

***

The decision. There will have to be countless sacrifices. An experiment

***

I want wars, in which the vital and courageous drive out the others-you ought to expel them, shower them with every manner of contempt, or lock them up in insane asylums, drive them to despair

Not sure why a thinker who everyone claims is notable for bringing the body, society, and history to the foreground in his philosophy and for dismissing all airy metaphysical abstractions should assumed to be merely poetic when he talks like this--that didn't actually mean breeding, expulsion, locking up, destruction. Particularly since task at hand, as he sees it, is confronting very physical facts-the sheer numbers of the masses, and their state of "race poisoning."

Or as an exercise in apologetics called “What Nietzsche really said” explains:

Yes, Nietzsche favored breeding a race that was more intelligent, free thinking, creative, and less resentful than the folks he saw all around him, but he had few practical ideas about how this would be implemented. Being childless, he obviously did not engage in in the practice himself


2. He condemned Darwinism for not being "Social Darwinist" enough: In other words, for being too democratic:
Again, from the Notebooks:

What surprises me most when surveying the great destinies of man is always seeing before me the opposite of what Darwin and his school see or want to see today: selection in favor of the stronger, in favor of those who have come off better, the progress of the species. The very opposite is quite palpably the case: the elimination of the strokes of luck, the uselessness of the better-constituted types, the inevitable domination achieved by the average, even below-average types

This is not a point in his favor.

3.He despised anti-Semites because they were vulgar and populist, not because he particularly loved Judaism--on the contrary. And when he does compliment Jews, it was because they allegedly kept aristocratic, tribal manners even as the rest of Europe disintegrated in the mass society gutter.

Otherwise his judgement against them is summed up by a passage in the Genealogy of Morals:

In connection with that huge and immeasurably disastrous initiative which the Jews launched with this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I recall the sentence I wrote at another time (in Beyond Good and Evil, section 195)—namely, that with the Jews the slave rebellion in morality begins: that rebellion which has a two-thousand-year-old history behind it and which we nowadays no longer notice because it—has triumphed…

4. One should not exaggerate Nietzsche’s cosmopolitanism—he thought the French and Italians clever, but like Goethe, though in a predictably less refined way, he believed Germans should only soak in the sun of the Catholic nations in order to aid their return journey to the spiritual profundity and Protestant seriousness of the homeland. Hence his crude son-of-a-Lutheran-minister rage against Wagner for being allegedly corrupted by Popery when writing Parsifal:
Is this still German?
Out of a German heart, this sultry screeching?
German, this priestly affectation,
This incense-perfumed sensual preaching?
A German body, this self-laceration
German, this halting, plunging, reeling
This so uncertain bim-bim pealing?
This nunish, ogling Ave leavening,
This whole falsely ecstatic heaven overheavening
--Is this still German?
You still stand in the gate perplexed?
What you hear is Rome—
Rome’s faith without text”

And, as the case of the contemporary EU shows, there is nothing intrinsically anti-racist about Pan-Europeonism.

On top of this, in the context of 19th century Europe, opposition to nationalism and opposition to democracy as such went hand in hand. And in fact, Nietzsche makes clear that he sees the two as part of the same baleful tendency--The nation is bad because it is another petty idol of the mob that weighs down the natural elites, not because it distracts them from class interests or other forms of broader human solidarity.

5. Nietzsche vacillates between a one sided praise of master morality and another register in which slave morality is sublated in the interests of repeating the values of the archaic aristocracy at a higher level of social development. Its an inversion of the dialectic in Hegel where the master becomes the occasion for the bondmen's self-knowledge and ultimate triumph.

If we are talking about profound 19th century meditations on the interplay between "master morality" and "slave morality", the French writers that were Nietzsche's guilty pleasures--Dumas, Sainte-Beuve, Stendhal-- are much more subtle and considerably less misanthropic.

6. Didn't say Nietzsche himself was fascist--he existed before that moment--but many of the appropriations of him have been (as you would no doubt agree)

7. Finally: I would not deny that Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc can be used for good purposes--for those of good will, there is always something that can be recovered from any human perspective.

So, to pick one of my preferred hobby horses: Ezra Pound was a rabid anti-Semite who elected to collaborate with the Italian fascist government during WWII, which was the culmination of years of providing free positive press for the Axis powers. Anyone who denies that those commitments shaped his texts is being disingenuous. But at the same time, one finds in his poetry a profound and wide ranging sympathy that extends from soldiers dying in the mud of Flanders to the indebted, starving farmers of India, and which corresponds to a robustly populist insistence that social institutions exist for the people, not vise versa (contrast this with Nietzsche's position...). Further, one would be hard pressed to find a modern poet that is filled with such an exuberant energy by talk of debt, currency, commerce, agronomy, and the legal minutiae that are the mundane foundations of social transformation.

But in order to arrive at a point at which a hermeneutics of suspicion can be overcome in a hermeneutics of faith, we have to be honest about what the texts actually say. And, unlike in the case of Pound (who no one pretends to be a world-historical philosopher) too many discussion about Heidegger and especially of Nietzsche start from a profoundly dishonest position regarding the content of their works.

Edited by RedMaistre (July 30, 2015 03:37:18)