toyotathon posted:
although it is deducted from the present real object, the virtual object differs from it in kind: not only does it lack something in relation to the real object from which it is subtracted, it lacks something in itself
toyotathon posted:sometimes state-lumpen wages are in fact lumpenism in disguise. prior methods of lumpenism, like highwaymen, or piracy/navies, are re-routed by the bourgeoisie for pro-social purposes. it's routed thru their banks and returned to them as a wage, but to collect traffic tickets there has to be an escalating series of violent threats all the way to car theft and jail time.
Maybe a good definition of lumpen would be, "wage laborers producing less than is needed to support their own livelihoods" with the understanding that their assignation to (non)productive roles isn't a matter of individual choice but the extreme devaluation of labor in the chaos of stagnating capitalism.
i definitely don't think that the sex worker steals from the john, and i'm disconnected from that world but i'd guess neither he nor she think that either. for whatever that's worth. it's just an illegal transaction, she isn't robbing him. and i'm not saying you ascribe to this, but it's one rationale of how prostitution is lumpen: if one believes that sex belongs to fathers, that's the only way that sex work could be a theft, that she's selling sometimes that was her dad's to sell.
I think we have to ignore the "transaction" when considering sex work. Thanks to centuries of objectification we have this tendency to imagine prostitutes out there choosing to rent out their body, bartering, getting the Glengarry leads, when most have as much economic control as a manager at McDonald's. Maybe they can turn away the obviously dangerous men and set certain standards like "no shoes, no service" or "I use condoms" but the bigger issues like, "where can I operate, how much can I charge, can I only fuck men I enjoy being around," aren't set by individuals. When I say "theft" I mean more like parasitic, off a vein of exploitation. Police feed off the big fat artery of robbing and displacing minority communities, while sex workers feed off all the capillaries of gender oppression that trickle bloody super-wages to individual men.
i want to talk about it but not have an internet debate?? i get that i come off like i do, but i don't... maybe i'm just gonna think thru it more solo and that's cool too... thx swampmensch for the thoughts...
I'm not trying to debate you, nothing you've said has been wrong or dumb, but note that I've pre emptively activated the paragraph-by-paragraph rebuttal format in case I do scent a fleck of ad hominem attacks
swampman posted:we have this tendency to imagine prostitutes out there choosing to rent out their body, bartering, getting the Glengarry leads,
i didn't actually imagine this but now i am and it's pretty funny thanks
Spatial_Reasoning posted:The discussion in this thread has convinced me to finally pick up sakai
use the legs!
cars posted:i’ve been trying to find translated or translatable writings of Stučka for like 15 years that weren’t just dubious paraphrases from CIA/Trot/ultra-left books,
if you have any luck please share. thank.
On the other hand, legal theory & jurisprudence within the USSR and the Warsaw Pact shaped not just that part of the world directly for 80 years (as well as much of the rest of it through allied states) it also shaped and continues to shape the former USSR, the former Warsaw Pact and much of the post-colonial world through its legal and material artifacts... and yet, for a lot of it, you're lucky if you're able to find it published recently in the original language in which it was written, even though much of it, even the older stuff condemned by different governments in those countries, was apparently readily available in the early 1990s.
Normally, I might think it's a little dramatic to say this is because taking the socialist stuff seriously poses too much of a threat to bourgeois goals for the academy, so systems of ideology pushed it into disappearance through edging out & discrediting those who tried to study it and who might have given the academy reason to preserve it. But comparing the poverty of access to the necessary sources to the sea of ink spilled on condemning the Soviet Union's legal system and those of allied states in Europe, let alone those of resource-rich post-colonial countries, it's pretty convenient that most of the supposed scholarship on the topic now takes place on the far end of a game of Telephone.
toyotathon posted:i've been trying to look up shit on marxist theory of law and i found this https://www.marxists.org/archive/pashukanis/1932/xx/state.htm but was wonderin if ppl maybe knew of other resources. that one is basically about the "what but not why" of positivist bourgeois legal theory, and an outline of new law under DotP. the law is the connective tissue between state-lumpen and the ruling class, the class which reproduces the social order thru ideology. state-lumpen get access to rich bourgeois institutions, whole bank accts instead of just wallet cash expropriations, by carrying out lumpen activity in accordance w/ law, to help the ruling class reproduce the social system. that pays better than normal direct lumpen parasitism. although the parasitism might look similar in form (car theft w/ tow trucks instead of hotwiring, slave-catching for prisons instead of plantations) but not necessarily target... wonderin if people could point me some place productive... ty
check out Punishment and Social Structure by Rusche and Kirchheimer I've heard Marxism and Criminology: A History of Criminal Selectivity by Valeria Vegh Weis is an updated version but I haven't read it.
I would stay far away from anything contemporary and theoretical, it usually falls into one of 4 schools: trots (this is how Pashukanis is used today, with the early theory of the withering away of the law used to disparage socialism and his later work being done under coercion and therefore safely ignored); liberals (most "socialists" are this and argue that socialism should preserve liberal human rights and rule of law but make them better); postmodern liberals ("critical jurisprudence" and basically all the famous postmodern philosophers have the same theory of law which is anti-communist); and pseudo-fascists (follows of Schmitt and Heidegger like Agamben, Ranciere, Mbembe, and Zizek). They are all junk. You can also check out Soviet theory like Vyshinsky and of course the empirical studies of the USSR, China, and Cuba which you can derive your own theory from based on the scattered comments by Marx and Engels as well as the comments by Lenin after the revolution. I would imagine the commentaries on the lumpen you can find would be inferior versions of Sakai.
I had another thought about the list above that includes professions like "porter" and "knife grinder"... a lot of these jobs are about offering services to the bourgeoisie, and maybe they do or don't pay a living wage, but they also represent a kind of hard headed entrepreneur mindset that is another deal with the capitalist devil. Like you see in NYC pretty often, one food cart vendor will grab some rebar and crumble a rival's vertebrae over a bit of turf - doing the bloody work of enclosing public space, making everyone afraid to organize beyond their family or local racial group. You hear stories about how hard "my grand dad the knife grinder" worked to pay for their son's education. Well since it's not hard to start up as a knife grinder, it probably only paid a living wage because other knife grinders were discouraged from working grand dad's route. Maybe the only "parasitism" in some of these jobs is the small reproduction of class antagonisms. Bail bondsppl... definitely lumpen.
Edited by swampman ()
contemporary accounts claim that the cats knew which cats'-meat man was theirs and would ignore any others coming down the same streets, which suggests to me that they wouldn't even need rebar.
in retrospect this seems like an obvious scam in which your cat eats a bunch of random meat that was collected from the back of a butcher shop and then every once in a while the man says "oi you owe me two shillings" or something but, heartwarmingly, i didn't come across any negative portrayals of the cats'-meat man, so i choose to believe only good things about them.
5/5 wtfatcats
stegosaurus posted:Settlers and bromma’s ‘worker elite’ are sort of like that. It’d be cool to read about the different labor aristocracies in different revolutionary situations. Like what do Filipino electricians think of the NPA (assuming electricians there are like they are here)
Well, I don't know any electricians in the Philippines and I don't know if the profession is like it is in the US. But in general many of the old and existing trade unions are relatively very reactionary and likely to be aligned with the very counterrev Liberal Party. Most of the militant worker organizing sparking the wave of strikes going on right now is of the second tier of non-unionized contractual workers, many of whom are in workplaces with an already-unionized layer of better paid, regularized employees who basically never support the demands of the contractuals, and often actively fight against them. And as far as the NPA, the militant contractual workers would sometimes go to the countryside of their own volition to join the NPA after becoming politicized in their workplace, or at least passively support the armed struggle.
I don't know if that's what a labor aristocracy is but in any case the existing traditional labor movement is very much bought off by the ruling class since at least the end of WW2. Worth noting the industrial working class is already very small in the Philippines (<15% of the population), with most people (up to 75%) being either direct land tenants or semi-feudal agricultural wage workers. In the feudal economy, rich peasants pretty much fulfill the same role as a labor aristocracy.
Edited by mediumpig ()
And physics, what about that most theoretical of the capitalist sciences? Which in the Western tradition started with the ancient slave owning Greek philosophers many, many centuries ago.
It's symptomatic of its theoretical uncertainty that at a July 1999 conference on quantum physics at Cambridge University, a poll of the physicists on whether the present theory of quantum mechanics was true or not, found little support for it as is. Only four physicists supported the standard, completely dominant theory of quantum mechanics as presently taught at universities. Thirty physicists there would have agreed with the standard theory only if the additional theory, straight from science fiction novels, of an infinite number of parallel universes was attached to it. The great majority, fifty physicists, simply expressed doubts or serious uncertainty about today’s accepted theory as scientific explanation. Noble prize-winning theoretical physicist Gerard t'Hooft said present quantum theory is “inaccurate.” In the words of prominent British physicist Sir Roger Penrose, “present-day quantum mechanics is fundamentally incomplete.” Relatively speaking, that was, an endorsement, which shows you something.5
This is only in keeping with scientific tradition, since the whole history of Western physics has been of theories one after another held up and then discarded, superseded or just tossed in the dumpster. And yet, no one doubts that their incomplete, uncertain physics is a “science.” Our record of theoretical thinking in our short beginning is if anything much better than theirs.
as i always knew, marxism has too many stones cant hatch into chickens and not enough consideration of how things like bose-einstein condensates provide evidence for differences in the particularities of internal contradictions being what distinguish one thing from another; it seems it is up to me to write the book about the universality and particularity of contradiction as well as the other "laws of dialectics" in the "hard" sciences in blowhard marx to mao speak; typical, thats exactly what i wanted to do back at the very beginning; well well well, i guess things really do move in spirals
“Marx and Engels, as they grew out of Feuerbach and matured in the fight against the bunglers, naturally paid most attention to crowning the structure of philosophical materialism, that is, not to the materialist epistemology but to the materialist conception of history. That is why Marx and Engels laid the emphasis in their works rather on dialectical materialism than on dialectical materialism, why they insisted rather on historical materialism than on historical materialism. Our would-be Marxist Machians approached Marxism in an entirely different historical period, at a time when bourgeois philosophers were particularly specialising in epistemology, and, having assimilated in a one-sided and mutilated form certain of the component parts of dialectics (relativism, for instance), directed their attention chiefly to a defence or restoration of idealism below and not of idealism above. At any rate, positivism in general, and Machism in particular, have been much more concerned with subtly falsifying epistemology, assuming the guise of materialism and concealing their idealism under a pseudo-materialist terminology, and have paid comparatively little attention to the philosophy of history. Our Machians did not understand Marxism because they happened to approach it from the other side, so to speak, and they have assimilated—and at times not so much assimilated as learnt by rote—Marx’s economic and historical theory, without clearly apprehending its foundation, viz., philosophical materialism.”
i.e. the whole thing is a focus on asserting materialism at a time of rupture in scientific discovery, specifically physics; and yet what do we find now, in physics theories outside of the standard model, the same old idealism, resurgent once again; its not empiricism to request experimental proof as a requirement for asserting 26 additional dimensions or whatever stephen hawkwind's theory ended up being; because if experimental proof is no longer a requirement ive got lots to say about how i once met the three witches who weave the tapestry of reality
sciences of resistance
Women have reletive to men today much, much less science than the communities of women did before Man's class society. Once most of the availible technology was manifest in textiles, pottery, horticulture, medecine and other women's terrain. women were once the artists, technicians and scientists of the the human race. today, patriarchy has whole developed sciences of theit own, an overall male system of knowledge that gets things done the way they want it. However lumbering, & messed up it is, it works for them, this "B-52 science." The patriarchy says that our only ambition can be to join these sciences men have made for themselves and their world.
we are at the first stage of rediscovering and developing women's sciences in the modern context. there is no doubt that in say, the year 1492 that much of womens sssssSssscience in one part of the world or another was superior to the $$cience of patriarchal euro-capitalism. butthey systematically blocked off the development of those earlier womens sciences by destroying the ecconomy and culture they grew out of. at the same time, euro-capitalism looted women's sciences around the world to enrich men's sciences.
It is wrong to mistake the products of science for science itself.
and then she goes off on one about alchemy, which is understandable since thats what everyone does at this point; its become a shibbolethic point of mens science over hundreds of years that you must reference alchemy juxtapositioned against their science to demonstrate the superiority of the man science, so im not supprised she uses the example, but turned around.
of course if she'd had access to 2019's internet in the 80s she would have discovered that the first alchemist was a woman in ≤C1st AD, maria prophitessima, who's name still lives on in the bain-marie, a bunch of chemical equipment she invented which we still use and a couple of dank early dialectics sayings "Join the male and the female, and you will find what is sought," they do say the universe started with a big bang, ha ha ha; and "One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth." which owns once you get it ;). fragments of womens sciences are preserved all across ancient literature if you know where to look and dont read them like a man who thinks alchemy was like literally about idiots who thought they could transform lead into gold (it was about taking a walk up into the hills to gether the magical "green lion", but shhhhh dont tell anyone, thats secret knowledge)
Aros the Philosopher had a meeting with Mary the Prophetess the Sister of Moyses, and approaching to her, he paid her respect and said unto her. O Prophetess, I have truly heard many say of you that you whiten the Stone in one day.
*Mary hits bong*, Yea, Aros, *breathing smoke in aros' face* even in a part of one day.