Thanks phonicjoy. The lack of focus on Maduro's authoritarianism and the long term issues of the populace was why I figured it was fishy.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
i'm a newbie here
https://twitter.com/ClaraSorrenti/status/1093183116544561152
is this bad praxis or am i ok for feeling annoyed at the "go to a library" guy
https://twitter.com/ClaraSorrenti/status/1093183116544561152
is this bad praxis or am i ok for feeling annoyed at the "go to a library" guy
You're absolutely OK. Sometimes people don't have the time or the energy to diverge into a billion bullshit things they DON'T care about to actually understand the thing they DO give a shit about-- and if what you want is a revolution instead of a special super secret club, you go to the mountain, you don't make the mountain come to you.
And honestly, as someone whose knowledge-base is self-compiled rather than academic in origin, my language is messy. It's imprecise. I misuse jargon frequently. I won't act like that's fine-- on the contrary, that's why I hate when people who brag about being self-taught or demand that others teach themselves act condescendingly to others. Leaving aside issues of people learning differently and issues of people having time for all that shit, it's hard to enforce rigor while self-teaching. Not just because it requires self-discipline and an associated additional energy expenditure, but because you don't necessarily know what you don't know, where you were spotty, what fields you're missing out on. The same is true of actual academics as well, but they tend to have resources and exist in a culture that facilitates and promotes that rigor. We don't have the same advantages.
If you want a revolution, making things approachable without dialing down the complexity is essential. Democratizing the language, rather than dwelling purely in simplification, is necessary. At least, that's my take.
Meaningful change towards the left is only going to happen when being bookish on socialism and Marxism isn't a prerequisite to understanding the benefits it would bring to workers and general quality of life in society at large. When the benefits can be easily grasped and imagined with the help of eloquent and succinct leftist politicians and activists, more people will start spreading the word in a similar fashion. "The 1%" is an example of a concept that's easy to grasp and talk about. The OP is spot on really.
Basically, library person is annoying and what they said is annoying
Yes. This your standard liberal bad "praxis" of thinking the working class are stupid, need to be advertised to properly, and need to be taught what constitutes being "working class".
The working class doesn't "learn theory" from some intelligentsia academic. The working class practices what the intelligentsia attempt to distill into a legible "theory". They'll never be at the forefront of a movement. They're not part of the working class and their only relation to it is to observe, record, and interpret what has happened.
Last edited:
Michael Roberts did a blog post on it today that seems like a good analysis. His basic point is that funding it would require either huge changes to tax levels (by American standards) or a 'restructuring of the economy' to increase growth and generate more revenue. Aka nationalise aka state capitalism (though Roberts considers it socialism, I'm sure people here wouldn't). Whereas it seems based on the economists supporting AOC and also some of her past comments, she subscribes to Modern Monetary Theory, which Roberts actually just spent some posts debunking.
So yeah, all the goals in the GND are great, and would be a massive step in the 'struggle to survive under capitalism' as House puts it, but hopefully between now and some future day when it becomes politically possible to actually win a vote on, AOC will have changed her economic perspective.
Just print the money and pay for all that shit. Why is doing that not possible?
Can you link this? I actually just saw an MMT video from some owl youtube channel yesterday and it felt like it made sense but I want to keep abreast of rebuttals.
The video in question.
I don't actually get how MMT is substantively different from keynesianism or the phillips curve
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com
This takes you to the blog. The first post you see should be the GND post, the three preceding ones are the series on MMT.
The TLDR on MMT is that their theory of money goes against the laws of value in capitalism as analysed by Marx. You can print all the money you like, that won't change the actual amount of value in the economy, so all that extra money will just mean each individual unit (dollar, euro etc) is worth less. Aka inflation. So MMT policy will lead to massive inflation if pursued to the extant most MMT people want it to be.
Roberts explains much better than me obviously.
Edit: Yeah I watched that video and yikes there is a lot of total nonsense. I actually found MMT a few years ago and believed it myself until not too long ago. Funny how silly it seems once you've had its flaws explained.
This takes you to the blog. The first post you see should be the GND post, the three preceding ones are the series on MMT.
The TLDR on MMT is that their theory of money goes against the laws of value in capitalism as analysed by Marx. You can print all the money you like, that won't change the actual amount of value in the economy, so all that extra money will just mean each individual unit (dollar, euro etc) is worth less. Aka inflation. So MMT policy will lead to massive inflation if pursued to the extant most MMT people want it to be.
Roberts explains much better than me obviously.
Edit: Yeah I watched that video and yikes there is a lot of total nonsense. I actually found MMT a few years ago and believed it myself until not too long ago. Funny how silly it seems once you've had its flaws explained.
Last edited:
Trotskyism was a mistake. Trotskyist groups are holding back the left with their orthodox Marxist crap.
Zizek is a bro though.
OP
OP
The theatre lot reminded me of some of the people I knew at Uni, some theatre practitioners are really awesome, but some really have their head up their ass. Always trying to make something sound deeper than it is. It's ok to make something cus you just think it looks/sounds cool y'know. No need to hamfist an allegory to Marx into it.
So why did QE done by the FED not cause this massive inflation?
Hey guys, after getting banned thrice for arguing with people on PoliGAF, I've come here to 1. be a better socialist and 2. talk shop and not get jumped. (Also i consistently forget this sub-board exists)
One thing that I've never really read into were the differences btwn Leninism, Trotskyism, and Stalinism. As I understand, they're all different interpretations of Marxism, but I never got a very good description of what makes them different or why they're so divisive within socialist circles. Anyone have a good video, post, sarcastic venn diagram that could explain the differences?
One thing that I've never really read into were the differences btwn Leninism, Trotskyism, and Stalinism. As I understand, they're all different interpretations of Marxism, but I never got a very good description of what makes them different or why they're so divisive within socialist circles. Anyone have a good video, post, sarcastic venn diagram that could explain the differences?
Last edited:
The idea of Capital as a global power, worker's intransigence, the exportation of the Revolution, opposition to bourgeois political theater, "true choice", State Capitalism, the theory of the Party and the Party in opposition to the State.
The Party is the State and State Capitalism is Actually Socialism.
Zizek has some quality essays on Lenin:
http://monumenttotransformation.org...seize-the-day-lenins-legacy-slavoj-zizek.html
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm
Well I'm no expert, but some factors I can think of would be that the actual amount of money created through QE wasn't as high as would be the case to fund a GND, banks and businesses have mostly hoarded the money they received rather than putting it into economic circulation, and we in the advanced economies are still in a period of stagnation where capital refuses to invest. So there's a lag time. And QE was a reaction to a recession that itself was causing deflation.
The main factor really is scale.
OP
OP
The interesting thing about all three of them is that they are descriptive terms developed after the fact - Lenin did not refer to himself as a Leninist but saw his program as Marxism in action. Stalin and Trotsky both considered themselves Leninists, with the terms Stalinism and Trotskyism being developed to attack each other!
So let's start with Leninism. While Marx was concerned with an analysis of capitalism and believed that its internal contradictions would lead to a revolution, the result of which could be socialism, he didn't like getting into the weeds to figure out how exactly that would happen or what socialist society would look like. That's because he knew it's impossible to lay out a step by step perfect program for revolution - revolution happens because of existing material condition at a given time and the result will follow accordingly.
Lenin wanted to figure out how to actually win a successful revolution and hold state power. He saw the failure of the Paris Commune and wanted to overcome it. Lenin differed from other Marxists of the time in that he was ardent that revolution could be won and socialism could be achieved in Russia, whereas others - following Marx's belief that revolution would break out in the most advanced capitalist states first due to the class struggle being most acute there - believed Russia had to first undergo and complete a bourgeois revolution. This led to a split between two factions of the Russian Social Democratic Party, the Mensheviks under Julius Martov and the Bolsheviks under Lenin. The Mensheviks wanted to help bring about a liberal democratic state and work within it, while the Bolsheviks wanted to overthrow the state and put the workers in power directly from the start.
Lenin's idea was to use a vanguard party, formed from the most class conscious elements of the proletariat, to guide the working class in revolution, believing that leaving the job to unions was insufficient because they could not ideologically progress beyond working within capitalism. The party would seize state power and hand it over to the soviets, workers councils, and then act as an agitating force within the soviets to further the revolution. Lenin knew that Russia was too backwards to successfully jump straight to socialism but he believed that they could lock the country down and spread the revolution to western Europe, and that once Germany went red they'd link up and the world revolution would be born. His goal was to use the power of the dictatorship of the proletariat to smash the capitalists and reactionaries while dismantling the bourgeois state apparatus.
Things didn't work out that way. To hold onto power and prevent the revolution from collapsing, the Bolsheviks more and more centralized power, banning other parties and "factionalism" due to the civil war. They carried out huge grain seizures under "war communism" to feed the troops and urban workers, contributing to famine. The revolution in Germany failed, leaving the Bolsheviks holding the bag, and with the country in ruins they were forced to implement the New Economic Policy, which is state capitalism, to rebuild the forces of production before they could even get to trying to institute socialism. So despite his goals Lenin ended up the head of a state capitalist party dictatorship.
Once he died, the question shifted from "how do we win?" to "what now?". Socialism had not been achieved but nobody wanted to stick with the NEP forever. Trotsky and Stalin emerged as the two most prominent figures with contrasting ideas. Both leaned hard into claiming they were Lenin's ideological descendants and that the other was a traitor.
Trotsky, in short, believed that the revolution was incomplete and that Russia had to be used as a staging ground to destabilize the rest of Europe. He wanted to militarize the proletariat, using the party's control to rapidly reshape and industrialize the USSR with the workers being given specific tasks, quotas, functions etc. to build up their productive and armed forces, which would require the collectivization of agriculture. He believed the USSR should then use its strength to protect itself while fomenting class war elsewhere.
Stalin initially opposed this. He said that to do so would be suicide because the USSR would be triggering a new world war, and that while Marx believed socialism had to first occur in the most advanced capitalist states, a core tenant of Marxism and Leninism (which Stalin merged and renamed Marxism-Leninism, which was really just a term used to further his own goals) was to be non-dogmaric and adhere to reality. The reality, in his view, was that they needed to continue the NEP for the time being. He worked with Bukharin to box in Trotsky and get him expelled from the party. Ironically, despite Trotsky's positions sounding authoritarian, this led to Trotsky being a defender of democracy within the party, since he was getting censored by Stalin. And then once Stalin purged Trotsky, he more or less adopted his ideas anyway, while referring to "Trotskyites" as a secretive bloc of terrorists who wanted to overthrow him and bring down the USSR. Which to be fair was....kind of true, but also not bad?
Once safely in power, Stalin enshrined his new policy of Socialism in One Country, claiming that socialism could indeed be built in Russia by...collectivizing agriculture and rapid industrialization of the productive forces with the party as the directing agent. This led to the massive bureaucratization of Russia as the party took on the function of owner and manager of the means of production, using simple input/output tables to try and produce heavy industry and to a lesser extent consumer goods without relying on market forces beyond distribution. This also, in turn, caused huge disruptions in agriculture that led again to famine and the Holodomor. And as Stalin cracked down on dissidents and increased his power, it also led to the personality cult and the Great Purge.
So, in short, both Stalinism and Trotskyism wanted to grapple with how to grow socialism out of the state that Lenin had left behind. Both wanted to use agricultural collectivization and industrialization under the party's direction, but Stalin wanted to focus on securing Russia (under him) while Trotsky wanted to spread revolution outwards. Trotsky obviously became an extreme critic of Stalin, both during his time in Russia and especially after his exile, and began calling for political revolution in the USSR to overthrow Stalin and reinstate central democracy (democracy within the party).
Well, as far as I can find on the internet, the QE was over 3 trillion dollars, the GND as said by the conservative mouthpieces is between 2--3 trillion dollars. So, I dunno. America has unlimited money to bomb brown people and bailout billionaires, but saving humanity future in planet earth is apparently too expensive for the smart policy wonks in DC.
I mean, fair enough. I'm only putting forward the analysis of Roberts. Your figures would indicate that the GND at least can be funded by money printing. And regardless, reductions in military spending and a wealth tax would cover a lot of it.
Tho btw, if DC policy wonks was referring to Roberts, I'd say that descriptor hardly applies to him.
Lol. Not anyone in specific. Just addressing the mainstream liberal response.
I haven't read all three parts of the MMT series yet.
If I had to guess, going from my other economics readings, inflation from currency printing is caused specifically by when the amount of money in circulation stops being proportional to the total amount of valuable assets in an economy. Let me try to illustrate with an example.
There are two people, person A with a potato and person B with $1. A is willing to sell the potato to B for $1, so we say the market price of a potato is $1. Now, the government, in order to stimulate the economy, dumps $1 million into this two man economy, evenly divided. Although person A and person B are now wealthier, there's still one potato between them, and person A would not gain much by selling the potato for the old price of $1 and jacks it up to $1,000,000. So we see that adding $1 million into an economy does not create $1 million worth of "value", which is actually in the number of potatoes. This is the "Zimbabwe" inflation effect a lot of people fearmonger about.
Let's go through it again but a little different. Person A has 1 trillion potatoes. Persons B through Z each have $1. A derives little utility from having all 1 trillion potatoes and they know no one else can afford more than $1 so they sell potatoes for $1, this becomes the market price again. The government injects $1 million into the now 26-man economy, evenly divided. A is wealthier now but they still don't have much utility for a trillion potatoes, but the total amount of currency in this economy went up so they jack up the price to, say, $10. B through Z can afford this and want potatoes so they happily fork over the money. This creates market activity. There was still inflation but not as bad as in the first example.
All this is to say the amount of inflation a government invites by printing money is dependent on how much total non-fiat value exists among all assets in an economy. If an economy can "absorb" $1m, then the government can safely inject $1m into the economy without worrying about runaway inflation (there will still be inflation but as long as the market runs this is not that important). However you can't print "value" into existence and this remains the downfall for multiple ill-conceived money printing initiatives we've all heard about from developing nations.
This passage is particularly succinct about MMT/Marx/Keynes:
I believe Robert's chief criticism of MMT-thought is that it ignores the social relations within capitalism as laid out by Marx and tries to sidestep the problem of exploitation of labor and surplus value and so on by saying "money starts and ends at the state". This is congruous with other liberal schools who think capitalism just needs to be reformed and not overturned and that the real problem (vis booms/bubbles/depression/crashes) is elsewhere (spending, saving, regulations, taxes, whatever).
However it's popularity among segments of the left is precisely due to its insistence that the state can just spend employment and jobs into existence (which I believe it can, it just won't go as swimmingly as MMT proponents think). It sidesteps the whole "how do we pay for it" problem by saying "we just do, then we tax it back, presto".
What I described in my scenario, Roberts refers to as "slack" which I believe is the official term for the un-assesed value within an economy that lets it absorb money printing without runaway inflation.
If I had to guess, going from my other economics readings, inflation from currency printing is caused specifically by when the amount of money in circulation stops being proportional to the total amount of valuable assets in an economy. Let me try to illustrate with an example.
There are two people, person A with a potato and person B with $1. A is willing to sell the potato to B for $1, so we say the market price of a potato is $1. Now, the government, in order to stimulate the economy, dumps $1 million into this two man economy, evenly divided. Although person A and person B are now wealthier, there's still one potato between them, and person A would not gain much by selling the potato for the old price of $1 and jacks it up to $1,000,000. So we see that adding $1 million into an economy does not create $1 million worth of "value", which is actually in the number of potatoes. This is the "Zimbabwe" inflation effect a lot of people fearmonger about.
Let's go through it again but a little different. Person A has 1 trillion potatoes. Persons B through Z each have $1. A derives little utility from having all 1 trillion potatoes and they know no one else can afford more than $1 so they sell potatoes for $1, this becomes the market price again. The government injects $1 million into the now 26-man economy, evenly divided. A is wealthier now but they still don't have much utility for a trillion potatoes, but the total amount of currency in this economy went up so they jack up the price to, say, $10. B through Z can afford this and want potatoes so they happily fork over the money. This creates market activity. There was still inflation but not as bad as in the first example.
All this is to say the amount of inflation a government invites by printing money is dependent on how much total non-fiat value exists among all assets in an economy. If an economy can "absorb" $1m, then the government can safely inject $1m into the economy without worrying about runaway inflation (there will still be inflation but as long as the market runs this is not that important). However you can't print "value" into existence and this remains the downfall for multiple ill-conceived money printing initiatives we've all heard about from developing nations.
This passage is particularly succinct about MMT/Marx/Keynes:
I believe Robert's chief criticism of MMT-thought is that it ignores the social relations within capitalism as laid out by Marx and tries to sidestep the problem of exploitation of labor and surplus value and so on by saying "money starts and ends at the state". This is congruous with other liberal schools who think capitalism just needs to be reformed and not overturned and that the real problem (vis booms/bubbles/depression/crashes) is elsewhere (spending, saving, regulations, taxes, whatever).
However it's popularity among segments of the left is precisely due to its insistence that the state can just spend employment and jobs into existence (which I believe it can, it just won't go as swimmingly as MMT proponents think). It sidesteps the whole "how do we pay for it" problem by saying "we just do, then we tax it back, presto".
What I described in my scenario, Roberts refers to as "slack" which I believe is the official term for the un-assesed value within an economy that lets it absorb money printing without runaway inflation.
Last edited:
For what it's worth I support the GND entirely and if we need to use some voodoo economics to justify the spending in the event that the military industrial complex is too strong to fight against (for people who think we should reshuffle spending instead of adding to the deficit which is a fine option) we absolutely should. As the bailouts showed, our economy can take injections of one or two trillion without breaking stuff and I'd rather see those trillions in the hands of workers than bankers.
But Roberts provides a convincing rebuttal to MMT as a long term policy, so while I support its tactical usage now, I do not support making it the Reaganomics of our generation.
But Roberts provides a convincing rebuttal to MMT as a long term policy, so while I support its tactical usage now, I do not support making it the Reaganomics of our generation.
Yeah this is basically what I was getting at. In the long term, MMT cannot substitute for the class struggle required to reappropriate the products of production for labour rather than capital.
I think it helps to further expose the need to accomplish that instead of presenting itself as a substitute.
This is basically how I see universal basic income, too.
OP
OP
love to toe lines drawn by the right wing islamophobes and racists when engaging in my online outrage quibbles
OP
OP
Maduro wrote an open letter through PSL and it's pretty much what you'd expect but I'm posting it here anyway since it's news.
https://www.liberationnews.org/an-open-letter-to-the-american-people-from-president-nicolas-maduro/
https://www.liberationnews.org/an-open-letter-to-the-american-people-from-president-nicolas-maduro/
Looking for some reading recommendations about US socialist histories again - I recently read the pretty insane write-up on the life (and death) of Lyndon LaRouche, and one section that stood out for me - because I wasn't really aware of it - was this:
Is there any readings on this period of US socialism you'd recommend - from Internet sources it is very hard to get an idea on the scale of this operation..
Is there any readings on this period of US socialism you'd recommend - from Internet sources it is very hard to get an idea on the scale of this operation..
OP
OP
Missed this earlier this month but white supremacists were going to rally at Stone Mountain and cancelled when Antifa and leftist militia groups threatened to show up. So the leftists still showed up and got free press.
http://news2share.com/start/2019/02...in-stone-mountain-neo-confederates-dont-show/
http://news2share.com/start/2019/02...in-stone-mountain-neo-confederates-dont-show/