Socialism |OT| The Dawn of a Red Era

Sibylus · Jul 9, 2019

Sou Da said:
Y'all do Corporate marxism here?

I've difficulty navigating all the jargon, but are you talking something like syndical communism/council communism?

Sou Da · Jul 9, 2019

samoyed said:
What is this? We guffawed at this for a few minutes.

The california ideology.

Deffers · Jul 9, 2019

whiskeystrike said:
All those political quizzes put me pretty far left but I'm uncomfortable about joining the internet fray however anarcho-syndicalism sounds really cool.

Anarchism in general doesn't get enough love! It's not as much fare for edgy teenagers as people might lead you to believe. It draws heavily from Marxist analysis but typically reaches rather different solutions.

Deleted member 25600 · Jul 9, 2019

Deffers said:
Anarchism in general doesn't get enough love! It's not as much fare for edgy teenagers as people might lead you to believe. It draws heavily from Marxist analysis but typically reaches rather different solutions.

Unless we're talking about anarch-capitalism. The kind of nutters who think privatising police would be a good idea and not at all end up like Robocops dystopian future.

Fuck those guys.

Deffers · Jul 9, 2019

DrSlek said:
Unless we're talking about anarch-capitalism. The kind of nutters who think privatising police would be a good idea and not at all end up like Robocops dystopian future.

Fuck those guys.

Ancaps aren't anarchists. They're fascists-- just the kind that get to keep their wealth and have their kids tell us how hard it is to be an heir to wealth. That's the secret!

samoyed · Jul 9, 2019

Sou Da said:
The california ideology.

I'm aware of The Californian Ideology but I have not actually read it. I've been meaning to get around to it and now is a good a time as any.

The Californian Ideology - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

In the essay, Barbrook and Cameron argue that the rise of networking technologies in Silicon Valley in the 1990s was linked to American neoliberalism and a paradoxical hybridization of beliefs from the political left and right in the form of hopeful technological determinism.

It's a critique of neoliberal tech culture from 1990s that would go on to form the bedrock of Silicon Valley and tech culture we know today.

It is a real academic term but that poster seems a bit confused and angry for no discernible reason.

Sou Da · Jul 9, 2019

samoyed said:
It is a real academic term but that poster seems a bit confused and angry for no discernible reason.

For the record that's from a thread I was browsing out of curious about what anti-corporatism on 4chan looks like nowadays, bit sad that the prevalent narrative is "there are good and bad companies and the only reason there are bad ones is because they're run by insidious secret Jews that are diverting all of their energy into destroying white people". I used to remember /g/ being better about this.

samoyed · Jul 9, 2019

Sou Da said:
"there are good and bad companies and the only reason there are bad ones is because they're run by insidious secret Jews that are diverting all of their energy into destroying white people".

I see. The way that poster said "corporate marxism" smacks of "cultural marxism" where marxism is a stand in for "shit I don't like but don't have the words to describe".

The sad thing is these anti-corporate types rarely take the final step to ask "what if all these bad things came from capitalism and capitalism was bad all along". The ones that do end up here or in other left communities like this one. A lot of people start from the axiomatic "capitalism is good", then contort their world view to support that axiom.

They should take some cues from Stallman. (Italicized is interviewer).

We need to encourage the spirit of cooperation, by respecting other people's freedom to cooperate and not advancing schemes to divide and dominate them.

This takes us to a point that is quite important and that I am hoping you can clarify for our readers. The term you prefer for your ethic is "free software," where the word "free" means freedom from constraints and not free to take. But the term that more and more people are using is "Open Source," a term of quite recent vintage (1998), and, from your perspective, filled with significant problems. Of the two, free software is a term that implies an ethic of living and holds out the promise of a more just society; the other, "open source," does not. Is that a fair statement? Would you address that issue, and clarify the distinctions for our readers?

That is exactly right. Someone once said it this way: open source is a development methodology; free software is a political philosophy (or a social movement).

The open source movement focuses on convincing business that it can profit by respecting the users' freedom to share and change software. We in the free software movement appreciate those efforts, but we believe that there is a more important issue at stake: all programmers [owe] an ethical obligation to respect those freedoms for other people. Profit is not wrong in itself, but it can't justify mistreating other people.

Along these lines, there has been considerable confusion over how to name your idea of an ethical society. Mistakenly, many would assert that you are suggesting a communism.

Anyone who criticizes certain business practices can expect to be called "communist" from time to time. This is a way of changing the subject and evading the issue. If people believe the charges, they don't listen to what the critics really say. (It is much easier to attack communism than to attack the views of the free software movement.)

Pekka Himanen, in his recent work, the Hacker Ethic, has rightly countered these claims. I would go further: that what you suggest is close to what political theorists such as Amitai Etzioni would describe as a communitarianism (see, for instance, https://communitariannetwork.org/about). And communitarianism is by no means hostile to the market economy that most people associate with capitalism. Quite the opposite. Would you speak to what could be called the politics of your ethical system?

There is a place in life for business, but business should not be allowed dominate everyone's life. The original idea of democracy was to give the many a way to check the power of the wealthy few.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/luispo-rms-interview.en.html

I don't think Stallman himself identifies as communist but his life's work carries a lot of communistic philosophy with regards to sharing, cooperation, ethics, and non-exclusivity.

Deleted member 19066 · Jul 9, 2019

umop 3pisdn said:
I'm somewhat of a committed Theravadin, so my recommendations will reflect that bias, but if Buddhism is something that you wish to study of and by your own accord (as I mostly have), then a more Theravadin approach is arguably the best (perhaps only) route to take. Zen might be okay, too, but it's typically quite meditation heavy (Zen is the 'Japanification' of Chan which in turn is the 'Sinologization' of jhana which is the Pali term for essentially a virtuous meditative trance), which is fine, but I also find that its conceptual framework is a little too free-flowing given the subject matter for me to make very good heads of on my own. And most of Mahayana or Chinese Buddhism has a skillful means doctrine, which means that many of the concepts in texts are actually purely pedagogical (they're proximate or analogical to the truth, essentially) which means that you're effectively learning it under a teacher who can illuminate the esoteric to the student and keep them centered on the path.

But the 'OG' suttas don't have quite that same distinction, and are canon for every Buddhist (even if they think there's some later revealed doctrine that points the way more effectively), so everyone benefits from reading the sutta pitaka. It also seems to retain a lot more clarifying etymology when kept in that Indo-European language (Pali or Sanskrit) versus being translated into Chinese. At least maintaining a connection to that text seems more precise for inventorying and naming a bunch of novel or newly articulated skillful or unskillful mental states/emotions, mental factors or capacities, components of the human person as aggregate of name and form ('mind and matter'), penetrating realizations, etc (b/c compound words that have their word order or grammatical function expressed in their form). So for an individual studying this stuff, I think it's easiest to get a grip on philosophically, because if you want to you can google this one specific 30-letter long word and get specific and narrow use cases that can be really useful for learning the extension of a particular concept or subject. But I suspect the schools of Buddhism thing might very well boil down to taste or some kind of individual praxis, so ymmv.

Bhikku Bodhi is well lauded as a scholar monk, and for good reason. I also like Bhante Punnaji a lot (and Sri Lankan Buddhism in general, perhaps because it's the most orthodox or I find it has a good balance between scholasticism and jhana/meditation focus). I also can't recommend Piya Tan's The Sutta Discovery Series enough, and it's incredible how often I've turned to him as a secondary source in developing an understanding of some more obscure subject or framework. And as for where to start start, admittedly it's been a while since I started studying Buddhism, so I sort of forget what it's like to start with it, but I think Bhikku Thanissaro's website gives a pretty good primer:

https://accesstoinsight.org/begin.html

Others mentioned:

http://buddhanet.net/audio-lectures.htm
http://buddhistmahavihara.org/admin/uploads/ariyamaggabhavana.pdf
http://www.themindingcentre.org/dharmafarer/piyatan/sutta-talks

Also, if you have any specific questions, I can do my best to answer them.

This kind of stuff is exactly what I was looking for, thank you. And this may help motivate me to read a bit further into the Shōbōgenzō, instead of just reading about it. I last left off a chapter or two after Dōgen tells the monks how to properly wipe their asses. :P

MeaningOfKarma · Jul 10, 2019

Was reading the Chapo subreddit because I was bored and I read a comment which carefully explained how the mass killings of millions of landlords in China during the Revolution was actually"classicide" and not genocide except for sometimes when it was but not always, and ending with the totally reasonable and relevant conclusion that it resulted in the closest thing to equity that you could possibly hope for in terms of land distribution

Tankies are lovely people

House_Of_Lightning · Jul 10, 2019

Feudal China was brutal, and the landed political class was notorious for creative and torturous punishments for even minor crimes. The Qing era ruling class were widely reviled and the vast majority of the population existed under what was basically subsistence living. The landed class that remained at the beginning of the PRC were either the remains of that political system or those that benefited greatly from it.

I would not necessarily call it classicide or genocide. It was not the State itself that moved against the landlords and former power holders but the people themselves.

Deleted member 14459 · Jul 10, 2019

whiskeystrike said:
Some new twentyfirst century one from a French guy and I wanted to be more than a brocialist

Piketty is a fine read for socialists, the data is really important and can be used together with most socialist framings - it's an empirical work and should be treated as such.

one of the main problems is imo in the name "Capital" because it alludes so closely to Marx. Yet Piketty's notion of capital is *very* different from Marx (the book would be better served under the name "Wealth") and is missing some key insights about how capital works - the relationship to class power being case of point. To get a marxist perspective on Piketty you can read through this, which summarizes its strengths and weaknesses well: https://monthlyreview.org/2014/11/01/piketty-and-the-crisis-of-neoclassical-economics/

samoyed · Jul 10, 2019

Another review of Piketty by everyone's favorite Marxist economics blogger: https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1013/unpicking-piketty/

The title is a clear allusion to Karl Marx's Capital, published in 1867. Piketty seems to suggest that he is updating (and indeed correcting) Marx's analysis of 19th century capitalism for the 21st century. But Piketty is no Marxist.

He was brought up in Clichy, a mainly working class district of Paris. His parents were both militant members of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers' Struggle) - a Trotskyist party, which still has a significant following in France. On a trip with a close friend to Romania in early 1990, after the collapse of the Soviet empire, he had a revelation: "This sort of vaccinated me for life against lazy, anti-capitalist rhetoric, because when you see these empty shops, you see these people queuing for nothing in the street," he said, "it became clear to me that we need private property and market institutions, not just for economic efficiency, but for personal freedom."5 Piketty rejected what he saw as Marxism and opted for social reform. Indeed, he was an adviser to the Blairite, Ségolène Royal, when she was the Socialist Party candidate in the 2007 presidential elections.

There is little or nothing in Piketty's book about booms and slumps, or about the great depression, the great recession or other recessions, except the comment that the great recession was a "financial panic" (as claimed by Ben Bernanke) and was not as bad as the great depression because of the intervention of the central banks and the state. There is nothing about the waste of production, jobs and incomes caused by recurrent crises in the capitalist mode of production.

Instead, Piketty adopts the usual neoclassical explanation that these events, like wars, were exogenous "shocks" to the long-term expansion of productivity and economic growth under capitalism (p170). Crises are just short-term shocks and we can revert to his fundamental law instead, "as it allows us to understand the potential equilibrium level toward which the capital income ratio tends in the long run when the effects of shocks and crises have dissipated". Keynes might retort: 'We are all dead in the long run.'

As a result, Piketty has no theory of crises in capitalism and assumes they are passing phenomena. So his policy prescriptions for a better world are confined to progressive taxation and a global wealth tax to 'correct' capitalist inequality. Yet Piketty recognises that it is utopian to expect the wealthy (who control governments) to agree to a reduction in their own wealth in order to save capitalism from future social upheaval. He never thinks of suggesting another way to achieve a reduction in inequality: namely, to raise wage income share through labour struggles and to free trade unions from the shackles of labour legislation.

And he does not raise more radical policies to take over the banks and large companies, stop the payment of grotesque salaries to top executives and end the risk-taking scams that have brought economies to their knees. For Piketty - in true social democratic fashion - the replacement of the capitalist mode of production is not necessary.

I will read that one Rupetta. Capital in the 21st Century is a good collection of data. Its ideology is apologetic for capitalism and basically reformist. Not that reform is bad, but it cannot be the end destination.

anthro · Jul 10, 2019

Was the reading thread abandoned?

Pekola · Jul 10, 2019

anthro said:
Was the reading thread abandoned?

Samoyed and me are supposed to be going through this book.

It seems like Eylos is reading it, too? I'll definitely read it to come back here in a few days and discuss it.

Sibylus · Jul 10, 2019

Pekola said:
Samoyed and me are supposed to be going through this book.

It seems like Eylos is reading it, too? I'll definitely read it to come back here in a few days and discuss it.

I'd like to join this also.

Pekola · Jul 10, 2019

Sibylus said:
I'd like to join this also.

Good! Then within a few days, maybe next week I'll give you all the actual date to start discussing it (because I'm still not sure how many people are reading).

Deffers · Jul 10, 2019

I decided to make a thread about that political sextant quiz we all took a few weeks/months back. If anybody new is interested in taking it, or if anybody old is interesting in reposting their results, it might be a neat place to get some... interesting political discussions going, what say you all?

House_Of_Lightning · Jul 10, 2019

Keep in mind that Origin of the Family's premise of the mother-line, while very interesting and probably true, is unknown to actually be true. At least universally.

Pekola · Jul 10, 2019

Deffers said:
I decided to make a thread about that political sextant quiz we all took a few weeks/months back. If anybody new is interested in taking it, or if anybody old is interesting in reposting their results, it might be a neat place to get some... interesting political discussions going, what say you all?

Here's mine:

Your top ideologies are:
Classical Marxism 88%
Deep ecology 83%
Marxism-Leninism 83%
Marxist feminism 88%

Your worst ideologies are:
Fusionism -64%
Paleoconservatism -80%
Pancasila -62%

I'm not following the worst ideologies part. Does it mean the ones I'm diametrically opposed to?

Also, that site is NOT secure. I clicked on the more info link and it just showed me porn.

Deffers · Jul 10, 2019

Pekola said:
Here's mine:

I'm not following the worst ideologies part. Does it mean the ones I'm diametrically opposed to?

Also, that site is NOT secure. I clicked on the more info link and it just showed me porn.

Well, shit. Um, no idea what to do about that.

And worst ideologies are the ones you're most opposed to. Looks like you hate two kinds of American conservatism and one kind of Indonesian fascism.

EDIT: Also, I don't have this problem! So I double have no clue what to do. I have no idea what's causing you to see porn on any of their links.

House_Of_Lightning · Jul 10, 2019

Pekola said:
Here's mine:

Ooof

Not a good look.

Deffers · Jul 10, 2019

House_Of_Lightning said:
Ooof

Not a good look.

Since Pekola's new to this, you might want to explain. Specifically, the ML tag is always of concern (though seemingly fucky on Political Sextant, since I just encountered someone who got that, anarchafeminism, and fucking Third Way politics at once). Maybe Deep Ecology? Though that honestly may just be on the choice of book given for further reading.

Sibylus · Jul 10, 2019

House_Of_Lightning said:
Keep in mind that Origin of the Family's premise of the mother-line, while very interesting and probably true, is unknown to actually be true. At least universally.

Good to know, thank you.

whiskeystrike · Jul 10, 2019

Pekola said:
Samoyed and me are supposed to be going through this book.

It seems like Eylos is reading it, too? I'll definitely read it to come back here in a few days and discuss it.

I'm reading it slowly but surely. I'll be lagging a bit on the conversation and I'm not as expressive as some of you but I'll post my thoughts when I make significant progress.

Also, I hate reading off my phone/computer.

Shy · Jul 10, 2019

Repost, of a repost.
----------------------
I got.

Your top ideologies are:
Classical Marxism 100%
Collectivist anarchism 70%
Marxist feminism 100%

Your worst ideologies are:
Anarcho-capitalism -80%
Paleoconservatism -90%
Paleolibertarianism -75%

Hmmmm. I didn't like some of the answers i gave.

House_Of_Lightning · Jul 10, 2019

OTOH, I'm perfectly fine with mine. If you could describe a "shrug" in political terms, they would be the following:

Your top ideologies are:

Civic nationalism 38%
Minarchism 17%
Green libertarianism 17%
Queer anarchism 30%

Your worst ideologies are:

Compassionate conservatism -83%
Paleoconservatism -70%
Three Principles of the People -67%

samoyed · Jul 10, 2019

The Mad Hatter logic of neoclassical economics can actually be used to demonstrate that in perfectly competitive markets there can be no wage and salary inequality at all! Consider a woman making a career decision. Assume, as does the neoclassical economist, that she has complete knowledge of the wages and benefits associated with every occupation she is considering entering. She also knows the costs of the education and training necessary for employment in each occupation, as well as the income she will lose by not working while she is getting this schooling and training. Any particular negative aspects of an occupation, such as physical danger, are also known, as are their costs. What should she do? She will weigh the benefits against the costs of each occupation and pick the one for which the net benefits are highest.

Implicit in this scenario is a wage for each occupation that at least covers the cost of entering it. Competition in the marketplace will, in fact, make the wage just equal to the entry cost. An occupation with a wage higher than the entry cost will attract new applicants; this will put downward pressure on the wage and upward pressure on the costs (as more people demand schooling and training); and eventually, the above average wage-cost difference will disappear. Remarkably, this theory shows that, while some workers earn higher wages than others, these higher wages simply reflect higher entry costs. A doctor is therefore not really better off than a motel room cleaner; in terms of wages minus costs, they are in exactly the same position. Voilà! At least as far as labor income is concerned, there can be no inequality.

https://monthlyreview.org/2014/11/01/piketty-and-the-crisis-of-neoclassical-economics/

😂

House_Of_Lightning · Jul 10, 2019

If only Project Cybersyn hadn't been killed off in its infancy.

Pekola · Jul 10, 2019

House_Of_Lightning said:
Ooof

Not a good look.

I don't know what your shtick is, but this is rude and I will ask you to stop.

whiskeystrike · Jul 10, 2019

Best -

Anarcho-syndicalism: 92%
Green-syndicalism: 92%
Communalism: 93%

Worst -

Fusionism: -71%
Paleoconservatism: -80%
Pancasila: -50%

Deleted member 721 · Jul 10, 2019

How would you guys Deal with a pension reform that will fuck you and your family? I'm fucked, fuck all neo-liberals and pseudo leftists, fuck eveyone in favor of that, fuck Brazil politicians, fuck libertarians.

samoyed · Jul 10, 2019

I have not actually started Origins of Family yet. I keep putting new stuff on the pile of things to read/watch.

House_Of_Lightning · Jul 10, 2019

Eylos said:
How would you guys Deal with a pension reform that will fuck you and your family? I'm fucked, fuck all neo-liberals and pseudo leftists, fuck eveyone in favor of that, fuck Brazil politicians, fuck libertarians.

The one rich person in my life died a few years back and an aunt managed to screw me out of a relieving amount of money.

"Well my life as I live it today hasn't changed one way or the other". And that was the truth then and now.

whiskeystrike · Jul 10, 2019

My biggest gripe with those quizzes is that I essentially do nothing in real life that represents what my views supposedly are. I just keep on going, trying to get school done so I can jump into computer science and make enough money so that my mom doesn't have to worry.

Pekola · Jul 10, 2019

whiskeystrike said:
My biggest gripe with those quizzes is that I essentially do nothing in real life that represents what my views supposedly are. I just keep on going, trying to get school done so I can jump into computer science and make enough money so that my mom doesn't have to worry.

Well...what do you want to do, exactly?

whiskeystrike · Jul 10, 2019

Pekola said:
Well...what do you want to do, exactly?

I don't know. I just want to provide for my family and live an okay life.

House_Of_Lightning · Jul 10, 2019

Pekola said:
I don't know what your shtick is

Telling Marxist Leninist's that they look bad.

whiskeystrike said:
is that I essentially do nothing in real life

If it makes you feel any better, this is practically everyone else.

samoyed · Jul 10, 2019

You shouldn't feel bad about just trying to survive, capitalism did a number on our generation and it's not as easy to go out to Woodstock now as it was in the 70s.

Being ground to a smooth paste under the boots of capitalism is not a personal failing.

Deleted member 19066 · Jul 10, 2019

Pekola said:
I don't know what your shtick is, but this is rude and I will ask you to stop.

Stick around, we'll beat the vanguardism out of you with ~~ceaseless passive aggressive criticism~~ dialectics.

whiskeystrike said:
I don't know. I just want to provide for my family and live an okay life.

As noble a goal as any.

Deffers · Jul 10, 2019

Pekola said:
I don't know what your shtick is, but this is rude and I will ask you to stop.

His schtick is providing genuine insight in a way that's extremely grating and makes you feel bad, especially if you're new to here or to socialist tendencies in general. He *probably* should have led with explaining that there's a particular question that links you up with vanguardist socialist tendencies (namely the one that was about an intellectual group leading the revolution) and then challenged you on why you thought that since you're pretty new to the thread, but he didn't do that.

He was nicer to me when I brought up worker co-ops near the beginning of my time on this thread, and genuinely insightful past a certain point of discussion, but it was still a relatively unpleasant way to be challenged on those concepts.

Pekola · Jul 10, 2019

House_Of_Lightning said:
Telling Marxist Leninist's that they look bad.

You've really got the wrong one.

This whole quirky deal you've got going for you? Not me. So stop.

Sibylus · Jul 10, 2019

Classical Marxism 100%
Collectivist Anarchism 100%
Anarcha-feminism 100%
Fourierism 100%
Marxist Feminism 100%

Fusionism -86%
Paleoconservatism -100%
Caliphate -90%

AFAIK fairly similar to the last time I took one of these. No idea how Caliphate keeps coming up as one of my three most-detested, lol.

Shy · Jul 10, 2019

Sibylus said:
AFAIK fairly similar to the last time I took one of these.

You should of did why i did. And just repost my old post. LMAO.

Sibylus · Jul 10, 2019

Shy said:
You should of did why i did. And just repost my old post. LMAO.

Changes can be interesting, and the inverse too! One more point on the napkin graph.

Shy · Jul 10, 2019

Sibylus said:
Changes can be interesting, and the inverse too! One more point on the napkin graph.

Ahh. I was just too lazy to take it again. LMAO.

Deleted member 25600 · Jul 10, 2019

I'm happy with this result.

100% - Classical Marxism
100% - Anarcha-Feminism
100% - Guild Socialism
100% - Fourierism
100% - Marxist Feminism

Fusionism -57%
Paleoconservatism -100%
Paleolibertarianism -50%
Caliphate -50%

samoyed · Jul 10, 2019

Your top ideologies are:
Classical Marxism 88%
Anarcha-feminism 100%
Fourierism 88%
Marxist feminism 100%

Your worst ideologies are:
Classical liberalism -80%
Fusionism -79%
Paleoconservatism -80%

What I was the last time I took this:

Your top ideologies are:
Anarcho-communism 93%
Anarcho-syndicalism 92%
Green syndicalism 92%
Fourierism 100%

Your worst ideologies are:
Classical liberalism -80%
Fusionism -93%
Paleoconservatism -100%

I guess I became a little less utopian since then.

Scottt · Jul 11, 2019

Your top ideologies are:
Anarcho-communism 100%
Classical Marxism 100%
Anarcha-feminism 100%
Insurrectionary anarchism 100%
Communalism 100%
Synthesis anarchism 100%
Neozapatismo 100%
Marxist feminism 100%

Your worst ideologies are:
Fusionism -86%
Paleoconservatism -100%
Caliphate -90%

Deffers · Jul 11, 2019

Scottt said:
Your top ideologies are:
Anarcho-communism 100%
Classical Marxism 100%
Anarcha-feminism 100%
Insurrectionary anarchism 100%
Communalism 100%
Synthesis anarchism 100%
Neozapatismo 100%
Marxist feminism 100%

Your worst ideologies are:
Fusionism -86%
Paleoconservatism -100%
Caliphate -90%

Well, I can at least vouch for the "More Information" links for THOSE ideologies. They're either Wikipedia links or actual anarchist writing by actual anarchists. Those are also ideologies that are all worth researching, in my experience.

In the main thread, however, I've had some sobering developments. I've gone through the entire list of "More Information" links and my ultimate conclusion is... it's bad. Irresponsibly bad, in fact. I wonder if I should ask a mod to close my thread, or if my thorough editorializing of the links is actually good enough.

Socialism |OT| The Dawn of a Red Era

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