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Red Orchestra 1 was a masterpiece. Shame they messed up the sequel.
Many fond memories of Red Orchestra- it's probably the most intense game of its kind.
Love Company of Heroes 2 mechanically, but I haven't touched the singleplayer other than a mission or two. Have heard it trades in a lot of clichés and Hollywood staples, which is a shame given how much the units and world feel alive.
Love Company of Heroes 2 mechanically, but I haven't touched the singleplayer other than a mission or two. Have heard it trades in a lot of clichés and Hollywood staples, which is a shame given how much the units and world feel alive.
Red Orchestra is a multiplayer series though, right? I was thinking more along the lines of a good single player game. Something narrative focused or systems-based that isn't completely parodic like Tropico or facile like Civ. I'll look into World at War, though!
Darkest Hour has good campaigns for communist country playing. Mexican Revolution, Spanish Civil War, Russian front ww2, Chinese Civil War & Sino-Japanese war.
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Have a reminder of the awful retire-less future we in the US all have ahead of us:
www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/business/economy/i-hope-i-can-quit-working-in-a-few-years-a-preview-of-the-us-without-pensions/2017/12/22/5cc9fdf6-cf09-11e7-81bc-c55a220c8cbe_story.html
It came as a real jolt to me when my father, who is retiring in a few days, told me he didn't think he had enough saved up, considering he has always been fiscally prudent.
www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/business/economy/i-hope-i-can-quit-working-in-a-few-years-a-preview-of-the-us-without-pensions/2017/12/22/5cc9fdf6-cf09-11e7-81bc-c55a220c8cbe_story.html
It came as a real jolt to me when my father, who is retiring in a few days, told me he didn't think he had enough saved up, considering he has always been fiscally prudent.
I didn't mean to come across as being sort of whataboutist in the Cenk thread about Sanders and leftism in the US, by the way. I actually do think that abolition of profit seeking rentiers, or at the very least aggressive public acquisition of rentable property with the aim of transferring profits on rent into public works, is far from unthinkable as an actual political goal. The only thing that keeps me from advocating for it more aggressively is that I admit I haven't found a satisfying framework for how we avoid the problems that historically can come along with this, but it is a bit weird to me that its not...discussed more? Floated as a possible priority? A thing on people's radar?
Land Value Taxes aren't really something that gets a lot of airtime but do have support from a very broad section of the political spectrum, for different reasons of course. Kind of like UBI I guess. Theoretically a LVT to fund a UBI plan is something you could get support for from across the spectrum.
Well yeah, I do have an interest in finding what we can do with current structures of power.
Here's the piece I think you wanted: https://agenda-blog.com/2017/07/03/...beralism-and-the-white-working-class/#more-42
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Sorry but this article uses the term neoliberal seriously and therefore must be nonsense.
teehee
It takes it seriously in the way you take a shooting target seriously :-)
Most of 20th century American history can be understood as an effort to avoid this very occurrence.
I actually don't think there are any major historical problems with increasing publicly owned wealth. There are some problems with fascist personality cults but it turns out you can have those and libertarianism at the same time.
I'm going to kick myself when someone says what that craft is... Salyut? (I was the biggest space nerd as a lil gal)
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No idea!
Notice all the RED in the promotional materials?
The issue is competing in a zero sum economy and the various power structures that all have their own subjective idea on how that economy and Capital is best managed.
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Article on the Polish workers' strikes of 1970 from a Trotskyist perspective. Thought it was worth a read.
https://www.marxist.com/december-1970-the-stalinist-massacre-of-polish-workers.htm
https://www.marxist.com/december-1970-the-stalinist-massacre-of-polish-workers.htm
Doug Hennwood, who is generally just a great financial reporter, wrote a really good and approachable piece about bitcoin: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/12/bitcoin-price-crypto-currency-explainer
Good article. I've noted some leftists who support bitcoin, though they seem few, out of a misplaced suspicion of central banking and fiat money. I'm not sure if this is derivative of the 2008 financial crises or what seems to be the crossover between an earlier, youthful libertarianism that morphed into leftism.
How is it misplaced? Such a concentration of power deserves suspicion.
Doug Hennwood and the Robert Prechter (in a really long article I can't find right now) basically explain why. It's been a right wing project for a long time, and when we did have decentralized currencies in the free banking era, it was a complete disaster.
Edit: I was thinking of this article by Kai Stinchcomb: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
That article is similar to every other Trot interpretation. No acknowledgement that Stalinism wasn't Socialism. They can't acknowledge that it isn't Socialism because of the similarities between the two: that of Social Democracy implementation.
A political revolution, the exchange for one illegitimate bureaucracy for another. The article itself states that the worker's were fine with bureaucratic control as long as the Stalinist bureaucracy got it's rent seeking behavior under control.
Wages, bourgeois voting rituals, better management of the economy, a professional political "class"... Tenets of Bourgeois Capitalism. The economic framework of Poland under centralization and Stalinism isn't much different than the economic framework of today. Ultimately, if there was no Capitalism to return to, then why did the worker's movement in Poland result in full Capitalist "restoration"?
There was no social character or social revolution to the Polish revolution or the East German or Hungarian uprising. They were acts by the workers to rid themselves of redundant and outdated Stalinist bureaucracy. While this would definitely be a step needed to advance towards a Socialist program, it in itself is neither Socialist or Otherwise.
The article does depict the expression of natural democracy but does not acknowledge it.
A political revolution, the exchange for one illegitimate bureaucracy for another. The article itself states that the worker's were fine with bureaucratic control as long as the Stalinist bureaucracy got it's rent seeking behavior under control.
Wages, bourgeois voting rituals, better management of the economy, a professional political "class"... Tenets of Bourgeois Capitalism. The economic framework of Poland under centralization and Stalinism isn't much different than the economic framework of today. Ultimately, if there was no Capitalism to return to, then why did the worker's movement in Poland result in full Capitalist "restoration"?
There was no social character or social revolution to the Polish revolution or the East German or Hungarian uprising. They were acts by the workers to rid themselves of redundant and outdated Stalinist bureaucracy. While this would definitely be a step needed to advance towards a Socialist program, it in itself is neither Socialist or Otherwise.
The article does depict the expression of natural democracy but does not acknowledge it.
Well, I'd agree concentrated power deserves suspicion, but in the context of bitcoin as a solution, just taking it as a question of "does bitcoin solve concentration of power" (financial, monetary?) I think it is one of the most counter intuitive approaches for a leftist to take in attacking the banking system. As it is right now, the federal reserve system and money markets are controlled by the federal government. The Fed can be somewhat distant from our democratic process, meant to be somewhat insulated from the Treasury so it doesn't spend frivolously, which are all issues of course. But in practice the Treasury can always fulfill its budget in concert with the Fed, and so our fiscal policy is decided "democratically". Furthermore, the Fed in concert with the Treasury controls the money supply to meet fiscal policy with monetary policy for a macroeconomic strategy. This means that the Treasury and Fed can always act to the benefit of the public trust "democratically".
If bitcoin were to, through an unlikely act of political will, become a lawful payment for any debts and taxes in the United States, this would render the power over the United States fiscal policy directly into the hands of any of the largest bitcoin holders who also happen to be interested in serving as creditors to the government. As long as the United States runs a defecit in that scenario (which is likely), they'd be in a position similar to developing countries under the thumb of the IMF, or unfortunate Eurozone countries like Greece forced into austerity to prove their credit worthiness. As it is right now, the Treasury can always pay debts in dollars that it effectively can issue at will through the Fed. It can't print bitcoins, and so bitcoin creditors could tell the Treasury that if it doesn't want to default it has to cut pesky public education spending, public pensions, public salaries, maybe we have been too eager to maintain our infrastructure at the expense of our interest payments, maybe our workers haven't had high enough bitcoin taxes, etc.
Which is where "misplaced" comes in. I don't think it is bad to be suspicious of the central bank exactly. But in the context of bitcoin as a solution it is strange to spite bank power and simultaneously want to remove a significant amount of what little democratic control we have over the market.
As I alluded to before, one of the biggest dangers of decentralization though is that it makes it much easier for bad actors to obfuscate their activity. This is reasonably true for currency from what we've seen and what we are seeing, and its why I'm not enthusiastic about decentralization of all power structures as a cure-all
And ultimately it is a finite resource. Capitalism doesn't care how value is expressed, it only requires value. Finally, with bitcoin being a finite resource, it can and will be concentrated and monopolized as Capital because that's what Capitalism does.
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Isn't it a tenet of Trotskyist belief in the "degenerated/deformed workers' states" that it's not actually socialist but some kind of weird transitional mishmash?
Yes, but a "transitional" society is still either a capitalist/socialist society. But ultimately, "Stalinism" is just Social Democracy aka Welfarism but with an "unelected" bureaucracy. Trotskyism has no qualms with the State Capitalist nature of Stalinism, only the unelected nature of the bureaucracy.
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I suppose that's true!
Anyway, while committing revolutionary sabotage/being lazy at work I stumbled upon these two articles that I found interesting. The first is basically just a break down of Marxist thougt about value/exchange value/use value which I think could be helpful for people who might find reading through Marx to be a slog. Nothing really needs to be quoted from here, but I did like how this part lays out very obviously why Marx was fixated on value so much, which can otherwise be boring:
https://libcom.org/library/use-value-exchange-value-value
The other one was a brief criticism of marginalize, though I actually think the point raised in the first half about marginalize potentially being useful for attack from the left is more interesting than the rest, which is sort of standard anti-marginalism, so I'll just quote that part here
http://www.fixingtheeconomists.word...robinsons-critique-of-marginal-utility-theory
One thing I've never been entirely clear on: do marginalists get that Marx isn't referring to price and value as the same thing? When I've read marginalist critiques of LTV it often seems like some of the big problems they have with it (and I certainly don't think it's perfect) stem from this misunderstanding. Maybe that's just a more vulgar kind of marginalist critique.
So this piece accidentally, I think, actually makes a decent case for why I dislike the specific, utter-classic Marx Labor Theory of Value. That excerpt you posted especially. The first half of the piece, examining the relationships between use value and exchange value, is a great primer on those basics, and I do not disagree with the importance of labor in value. But also the labor theory of value does read as something that was crafted backwards, from an objective of establishing the ultimate primacy of labor for a political end.
I actually think that it may be a factor in how many people bounce off of Capital in the first couple of chapters, because the LTV seems so out of alignment with the actual experience almost everyone has making exchanges, and allows you to construct absurd hypotheticals such as two fishermen (okay okay two groups of fishermen, two villages of fishermen, whatever group size is required to produce useful averages) who invest equal time in catching equal loads of fish that are therefore equally valuable even if one load of fish is foul tasting. And I'm not talking about price here, you describe this scenario to anyone and unless they've been specifically primed with the LTV no-one will find "equal value" in both hauls
Marx tries to dodge around this a bit by clarifying that he's only talking about "useful" labor but the idea that labor falls cleanly into two buckets of useful and useless is, well, ridiculous on its face. Useful to whom? Everyone? It exists on a scale, and as soon as you acknowledge that then you've introduced our old friend use value back in as a major part of the equation
And what I find frustrating is that I don't think you actually need any of this in order for the most scathing early argument of Capital, that all capitalist-labor relations are fundamentally and intrinsically based on siphoning off excess value, to work.
Also, I sort of get what they're saying here, but if you tilt your head this really reads as a weird argument against specialization of labor and in favor of tiny labor-ecosystems
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I don't have a ton to say about this, other than that I would be curious to know what economic model (either) author does feel meets their standards for practical analytic utility. This is not really a defense of marginal value as some theory of truth, so much as it is a lack of exposure to evidence that models like the LTV themselves can "be applied to empirical material" in a way that yields more useful results than marginal value analysis currently does
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I don't think that's the case though. The LTV in non-Marxist forms had already been around long before Marx. He didn't create that idea that value came from labor, he just tried to explain how it functioned under capitalism and what the effects of that were.
I think Marx would disagree, since he would say surplus value can only exist in the first place because labor creates value!
I don't...really think it does. It just requires market value (although any comprehensive analysis that just depends on market value is woefully inadequate, of course). Capital owners just need to both know (or act with the confidence of knowledge) the market value of labor product and also successfully obfuscate that value from their workers so as to make it difficult to understand how much surplus is actual profit surplus. If you consider a fast food worker, they have no idea what portion of the surplus revenue beyond their wage is spent on maintenance of capital resources and purchase of necessary commodities, and therefore "fair", (buying and repairing machines, paying electric bills, buying hamburgers and french fries daily, etc) and how much is passed on to their employer as profit.
This obfuscation is maintained because the barriers to capital acquisition (and the dangers of risk taking due to restricted access to housing, food and healthcare) mean that almost no-one can just quit and open a hamburger stand themselves and learn the actual market value of their hamburger-making labor
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Right, but again we're talking about prices and specific costs here when Marx doesn't equate price with value. That's the big issue that leads to the transformation problem. Marx would be insistent that none of those other things arise without labor creating "value" in the commodity in the first place. I really think we need a better word for the Marxist concept of value though since it's both a.) very opaque and b.) easily confused with exchange value.
I think there is a problem that the labor value described doesn't really map to how anyone uses the word value either conceptually or practically, and I think that that's why I find the original LTV in Capital to be sort of politically manipulative; because he is trying to imbue this concept into the pre-existing notion of value in order to make a point about labor that I don't think I entirely agree with and that I think isn't as rigorous as other parts of his own work. Again, the moment you distinguish between "useful" and "useless" labor so as to avoid fallacies like "shoveling dirt from one side of a field to another creates value" then you're implicitly acknowledging that the value of different forms of labor is highly contextual and I just don't think that this is actually a problem of how one converts "pure" labor value into heterogeneous market values
Or, to put it more simply I guess, even if we avoid capitalistic market systems I don't know how how we avoid the problem of transformation being tied so fundamentally to labor to the point where its very difficult to find utility in pulling them apart unless literally all commodities are post scarcity or every person/family unit is a self sufficient unit for all needs. I don't see where the pre-transformation LTV maps onto a thing people are likely to be able to experience, even under communism.
EDIT: And like, I'm trying not to seem like I'm ideologically against this model because I'm reasonably certain that I'm not (although I may be) but I feel like I can trace lines of influence from this through to some of the ways in which socialism and communism have struggled to find genuine implementations over the last century and a half
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I heard good things about these books:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0851245455/?tag=era0f0-20
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Capitalist-Realism-There-Alternative-Books/dp/1846943175
Which one i should read First?(read: which you liked?)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0851245455/?tag=era0f0-20
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Capitalist-Realism-There-Alternative-Books/dp/1846943175
Which one i should read First?(read: which you liked?)
Never read the former, but the latter is rooted in Gramsci/Marcuse/Frankfurt School and, as a supposed Marxist work, is flawed.
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Oh, I wouldn't say it's just lines so much as channels. Every theory needs to be critiqued and I don't think Marx himself would be happy with people who cling dogmatically to everything he said since his own ideas evolved over time.
What is the Socialist position on Universal Basic Income? Is there one?
I have read through a few Leftist sites and it seems like people writing articles disagreed with Basic Income. One calling it "fundamentally right wing and reactionary".
What do you think of Basic Income?
I have read through a few Leftist sites and it seems like people writing articles disagreed with Basic Income. One calling it "fundamentally right wing and reactionary".
What do you think of Basic Income?
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You have to understand that the reason socialists may be apprehensive about UBI is because of the way it is being pitched, which is basically a replacement for welfare programs within the confines of a capitalist socio-economic system. The capitalist class still retains control of the means of production, but they strike the compromise of doling out a basic income to everyone else so that they do not starve once automation has superseded human labor and thus they are able to buy products that keep the capitalists' businesses going. At the same time we would likely see a push from the right to do away with XYZ programs because "Why do we need these when we are already giving people free money?!"
UBI as part of a strong welfare state is a necessity for a well functioning liberal state to continue in the future. But the liberal state is an impediment to socialist democracy anyway, and socialists seek in the end not just redistribute wealth held by the rich but to completely change the foundation of how our society and economy function by democratizing control over the means of production. Cut out the middle man, give power to the people, and let them distribute the wealth they create as they see fit.
My view. Thats reformism and assistencialism, thats not the end goal, but it's good to have while we live in capitalism i think.
It is maybe the perfect example of the problem we face where we have to balance the very real material benefits, including lives it will both save and change, against the real possibility that it is "enough" for many people to continue to tolerate exploitation.
Or: the alternative to reformism often feels like accelerationism. And while I have my opinions about that (accelerationism has a bad track record historically) I understand why reforming existing systems will ultimately be insufficient.
I just don't know how we get from here to there
Or: the alternative to reformism often feels like accelerationism. And while I have my opinions about that (accelerationism has a bad track record historically) I understand why reforming existing systems will ultimately be insufficient.
I just don't know how we get from here to there
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I don't have a problem with the struggles within the Capitalist frame work.
I have a problem when people try and make reformist Capitalism the same thing as Socialism.
I doubt a UBI has meaningful positive change or any change one way or the other for the conditions of the working class.
I have a problem when people try and make reformist Capitalism the same thing as Socialism.
I doubt a UBI has meaningful positive change or any change one way or the other for the conditions of the working class.