Horselord posted:Parenti posted:"no, no, you misunderstand, when i said jews are worth the same as rats i meant it in a nice way"
You can just calmly argue the point you know. That there is a connection between one's view of non-human nature and of other humans is undeniable. The problem with that specific argument lies in treating the motivation behind racism and killing animals as interchangeable, which can easily be made to support racism. For one thing it's highly debatable to say the least, whether racists "believe" the targets of their racism are the same as animals despite treating them akin to or even worse than how they treat animals. The available evidence shows otherwise - racists of whatever flavour as well as their victims do not really think of each other as being so different that the same moral considerations do not apply. Rather the actual motivations of racists/misogynists/etc make them ignore the similarities between human beings.
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:Your posts in this thread are indefensibly bad, I gave you a lay-up just there with my jovially stated quite reasonable objection to the whole animal-holocaust thing and you grabbed the ball, stabbed it, starting screaming and pissed yourself.
k
vimingok posted:For one thing it's highly debatable to say the least, whether racists "believe" the targets of their racism are the same as animals despite treating them akin to or even worse than how they treat animals. The available evidence shows otherwise - racists of whatever flavour as well as their victims do not really think of each other as being so different that the same moral considerations do not apply. Rather the actual motivations of racists/misogynists/etc make them ignore the similarities between human beings.
For fascists the purpose of dehumanizing rhetoric is to be an excuse for atrocities and a way of getting people in the mood to commit them. actually believing what you're saying isn't necessary for that to work.
it shouldn't be very difficult to understand that if your argument for the animals is the same nazi rhetoric, that you've provided a great opportunity for nazis to go "yes! That's exactly what I said!" and then go on their usual indoctrination spiel.
when that sort of thing happens do you really think going "no I meant to raise animals up not lower minorities" is going to hold up? they're not vampires, they don't need permission to enter through the massive set of double doors you left open
That would be something nobody could find any fault with, and unlike "animal liberation" doesn't need you to to make or defend insulting and dangerous comparisons that are otherwise only made by nazis.
it also doesn't have the contradiction of "animal liberation" where you want to treat animals as deserving to be treated fairly as people are, but also think you have the right to decide what they want, and to demand it on their behalf. That's pretty paternalistic, and I think that it's clear that animal liberation isn't about equality between creatures, it's all about the feelings of its adherents.
Edited by marimite ()
tears posted:
tears posted:
recommend 100%
pogfan1996 posted:Horselord is a great advocate for animal liberation on rhizzone by virtue of being so incompetently against it
https://foreignlanguages.press/
Like Ho Chi Minh! Like Che Guevara! is the culmination of a lifetime of research and writing about the Ethiopian communist movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Ian Scott Horst’s magnum opus is an historical treasure trove of first hand accounts and narratives from the actors themselves documenting the heady, complicated and ultimately tragic events of one of the world’s least understood Maoist revolutions.
Critiquing Brahmanism – A Collection of Essays was written by K. Murali (Ajith) during the time he spent imprisoned in Yerwada Central Prison in Maharashtra India. Born out of the necessity to understand, confront and counter Brahmanism, Ajith lays bare Brahmanism’s continued role as an ideological linchpin of the Indian ruling class in trying to beat back India’s oppressed masses from seizing and controlling their own destiny. While India’s class, caste structures and religion are specific to its conditions, Critiquing Brahmanism is also of great relevance to understanding the role of idealism in the suppression of the toiling masses.
this was kind of amusing though:
Some of these fronts had an actual existence; for others, even their existence was
phoney. On one occasion, the CIA Officer who had created the non-existent
"Ecuadorean Anti-Communist Front" was surprised to read in his morning paper that a
real organization with that name had been founded. He changed the name of his
organization to "Ecuadorean Anti-Communist Action".
Wooing the working class came in for special emphasis. An alphabet-soup of
labor organizations, sometimes hardly more than names on stationery, were created,
altered, combined, liquidated, and new ones created again, in an almost frenzied attempt
to find the right combination to compete with existing left-oriented unions and take
national leadership away from them. Union leaders were invited to attend various
classes conducted by the CIA in Ecuador or in the United States, all expenses paid, in
order to impart to them the dangers of communism to the union movement and to select
potential agents.
This effort was not without its irony either. CIA agents would sometimes
jealously vie with each other for the best positions in these CIA-created labor
organizations; and at times Ecuadorean organizations would meet in "international
conferences" with CIA labor fronts from other countries, with almost all of the
participants blissfully unaware of who was who or what was what.
tears posted:
i want to hear about the problems
lo posted:i want to hear about the problems
lots of things you might think about if you were redesigning communist education from the ground up:
the overarching problem is how to develop communist youth in a time of economic hardship. makarenko touches on many of the issues which he delt with during his years as an educator: how much responsibility to give the children, how to inculcate a communal spirit, how to deal with educational authorities who thought you were over-militarising the children. how to develop collective and individual discipline. how to develop pride in a job well done. how to reward and how to punish. how to give the children aims worth striving for that give them hope for the future. how to teach them to love. how to make the school profitable. how to balance the academic schooling with communal work in farming and factory. how to pay or not pay the children for their work. how to develop regime and tradition. how to deal with theft. what do about relationships between students. how to balance the needs of the commune with the needs of the individual. what makes a good teacher. how to talk to children. how to give orders. how to set a good example.
Increasing deficits by putting upward pressure on the rate of interest could well shorten or at least weaken, if not pull the rug from under, any recovery from the COVID-19 depression. Alternately, if the Fed resumes the creation of still more dollars to counteract the upward pressure that the federal government deficits are putting on interest rates — the course most consistently advocated by the supporters of Modern Monetary Theory — the incipient run on the U.S. dollar into gold will intensify, pushing the U.S. and world capitalist economy sooner rather than later into a “Greater Depression”-breeding stagflation.
Either stop the monetary expansion/stimulus and instigate a financial crisis with rising interest rates, or don't and fall into a stagflationary crisis that can only be resolved by another Volcker Shock on top of mountains of debt. The center of the world capitalist economy is on a knife edge heading into a period where there probably won't be a clear president-elect in the transition period on top of brewing Troubles. what's the prognosis doc
the MMT camp doesn't argue that the Fed should do much of anything other than park the funds rate at 0 and leave it there forever while passively accommodating the demand for bonds. iirc they also deny that there's a hydraulic relation between deficits and interest rates; the deficit is just an accounting residual that's been elevated by rhetoric to boogeyman status.
either way, when they talk about money creation, they're talking fiscal policy
(at least if i'm remembering my readings from a decade or so ago)
Also the "vegans can't get swole" "veganism is expensive" stuff is just foolishness
swampman posted:Also the "vegans can't get swole" "veganism is expensive" stuff is just foolishness
Sure but it's important not to handwave all issues and concerns away like this either. Theoretically it's possible for everyone on earth to have a nutritionally complete vegan diet but what does this look like in terms of changes to food production and logistics? What about culture? These are not small questions and a disciplined communist, as you put it, needs to think about these things too, or risk settling for what amounts to lifestyle activism.
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:swampman posted:Also the "vegans can't get swole" "veganism is expensive" stuff is just foolishness
Sure but it's important not to handwave all issues and concerns away like this either. Theoretically it's possible for everyone on earth to have a nutritionally complete vegan diet but what does this look like in terms of changes to food production and logistics? What about culture? These are not small questions and a disciplined communist, as you put it, needs to think about these things too, or risk settling for what amounts to lifestyle activism.
With this, I think it is useful to look at the experiences of Russia and China. Before those revolutions, there was a lot of discussion on what a future socialist society would look like, and in many cases those people were projecting the contradictions of contemporary society into the future. The most critical contradictions weren't necessarily the leftover contradictions of the previous economic order, but new contradictions that popped up as a result of radical economic and social restructuring.
There is plenty of critical work to be done underneath our current economic and social order with our current conditions when it comes to animal liberation and building the foundation to eliminate speciesism. One of the simplest and most straightforward is to stop seeing non-human animals as a luxury calorie source, there are 3 billion animals killed every day to be eaten, that's one of the most direct and most evident dominoes to push over. The socialist equivalent is "how are you going to incentivize people to go into harder professions after the abolition of the money system under communism", it's a definitely a valuable question but it's not a defining question of our activism since it is so far in the future and under completely different social and economic relations.
Edited by pogfan1996 ()
With this, I think it is useful to look at the experiences of Russia and China. Before those revolutions, there was a lot of discussion on what a future socialist society would look like, and in many cases those people were projecting the contradictions of the current society into the future. The most critical contradictions weren't necessary the leftover contradictions of the previous economic order, but new contradictions that popped up as a result of radical economic and social restructuring.
Not to derail the veganism debate, but can you cite an example of this? It's an interesting point that I would like to look into.
Belphegor posted:With this, I think it is useful to look at the experiences of Russia and China. Before those revolutions, there was a lot of discussion on what a future socialist society would look like, and in many cases those people were projecting the contradictions of the current society into the future. The most critical contradictions weren't necessary the leftover contradictions of the previous economic order, but new contradictions that popped up as a result of radical economic and social restructuring.
Not to derail the veganism debate, but can you cite an example of this? It's an interesting point that I would like to look into.
The first thing that jumps to my mind is Robert Owen, this essay in particular goes over how he would construct society.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/owen/ch03.htm
There is a heavy focus on rationality and education as a means to stopping war and improving the lives of people, which aligns well with the British justifications for colonialism in that era.
pogfan1996 posted:The socialist equivalent is "how are you going to incentivize people to go into harder professions after the abolition of the money system under communism", it's a definitely a valuable question but it's not a defining question of our activism since it is so far in the future and under completely different social and economic relations.
To be clear I don't raise the question as a gotcha, and it's obviously solvable, but I think it's far more concrete a problem than the comparison you make here, and I raise it because I think it's important to acknowledge rather than treating universal veganism as a fait accompli with the details to be worked out later.
the radical animal liberation view is that boycotting animal products is the bare minimum first step as part of your praxis, the liberal view is that the boycott is the end goal
pogfan1996 posted:it seems to me that parasitism is exponentially exacerbated by speciesism and the consumption of animals
If I understand you correctly, the first step in Marxist-anti-imperialist-anti-speciesist praxis is making your food consumption align with those positions. That being the case, meat is not a meaningful category for what to avoid eating considering the historical and present role of tropical landmasses and areas of white settlement in the development of capitalist agriculture. England's (and likely other European countries') agricultural revolution was a failure, the colonies incl Ireland were balancing the decline in net per capita foodgrain output during precisely the years which are considered to be the peak of enclosures and the alleged accompanying productivity rise.
The problem did not arise from the prevailing Corn Laws alone, which restricted the import of cheaper corn (wheat) from abroad. The basic problem arose because output growth was so very slow despite all capitalist enclosures that it fell below the accelerating population growth rate. The Corn Laws simply aggravated further the basic problem of inflation in food prices owing to domestic supply shortage, by not allowing duty-free imports until domestic prices reached a very high level. The most important political economy issue for 50 years in Britain was the agitation for cheaper bread, and hence for free imports of cheaper foreign corn, an agitation which united the manufacturers and fledgling working class. David Ricardo’s ‘Essay on the Influence of a low price of Corn on the Profits of Stock’ (1815) argued for free corn imports even while maintaining silence on the raising of tariffs against imports of Asian textiles. This prolonged agitation itself is a telling indictment of the failure of ‘agricultural revolution’ to provide its wage goods requirements.
In 1988 I wrote a paper titled ‘Was there an agricultural revolution in England?’ in which I presented the argument given above and made detailed calculations which are summarized in Appendix Table 1, showing a one-eighth to nearly one-fifth decline in per capita corn output depending on the population series adopted.2 More recently a similar conclusion has been reached by a number of economic historians researching agricultural growth in Britain, and a debate has taken place between them and the upholders of the earlier standard view of successful agricultural revolution (Overton 1996a, 1996b, Allen 1998, 1999, Brunt 1999, Afton, Beckett and Turner 2001). Table 2 shows their calculations of output, which when divided by population corroborate my earlier finding of a decline in per capita output by one-fifth between 1700 and 1820. While per worker output within agriculture did rise, it did not rise enough to maintain at least the same per head output for the population, thus violating the essential condition of success in meeting wage good needs.
The reason industrialization could proceed without being hampered by agricultural failure, lay in colonial imports which did not have to be paid for by Britain in the sense that these imports created no external liability for the British economy since local producers were ‘paid’ out of taxes they themselves contributed to the state. In India the colonial state guided and operated from Britain, extracted taxes from peasants and artisans, and used a portion of tax revenues to purchase their products including exported crops like wheat. Even when wheat was purchased from temperate lands like the European Continent and USA, in the earlier period – the 18th century- direct re-exports of tropical colonial goods paid for a large part of these imports. Later from the 19th century onwards, the exchange earnings of colonies which exported to these lands were appropriated and used to pay for a large part of temperate imports into the metropolis through a continuation of the so-called multilateral payments system (Saul 1960), which in essence functioned on the basis of colonial transfers. The exact mechanism of colonial exploitation and appropriation of foreign exchange earnings has been discussed elsewhere (Patnaik 1986, 2006). There is little doubt that other European countries would show a similar failure of their agricultural revolution and a similar dependence on their colonies, particularly the Netherlands which controlled Java and which had even larger dependence on re-exports of tropical goods to pay for its temperate imports, than did Britain (Maddison 2006).
Interestingly in Japan too we find that early industrial transition was marked by domestic rice shortages, and only the deliberate extraction of rising tax-financed rice imports from its colonies, Korea and Taiwan, permitted it to maintain about the same level of availability for its population by the 1930s as in the 1870s ( Penrose 1940, Hayami and Ruttan 1971). Per head consumption of rice and average calorie intake fell substantially in Japan’s colonies (Grabowski 1986).
https://www.networkideas.org/ideasact/dec11/pdf/Utsa%20_Patnaik.pdf
the argument isn't particularly relevant anyway because pogfan clearly doesn't believe that such a shift is in any sense sufficient
livestock cultivation requires an extremely inefficient use of arable land and caloric inputs that demand a far greater intensification of agricultural production than simply the demands of direct human consumption without the intermediary of material inputs in livestock cultivation