Controversial General Political Discussion

NAMELESS

NAMELESS

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#48,321
#48,321
Daniel said:
There's been news of the Chinese government using the prison population as labor to peel garlic until the nails of some of those prisoners fall off, truly a sight to behold from a government that censors and keeps things under wraps...that's what real slave labor is like.

Then somehow we're talking about climate change and then someone here mentioned working in a factory in slave like conditions...and somehow the migrants that received those jobs (such as factory workers, clerks, general blue collar work) see them as opportunities for a better life, not a lock on their freedom.

The reality of life for the vast majority is that they need to work in order to make a living. Sure, the work may be grinding from time to time but the things that are valuable are never going to be just handed out to you, only purchased.

A problem occurs when the price of basic human needs in the modern age start vastly exceeding the price of an average person's income, however.
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All thnx to inflation create by big daddy governments and central banks.
 
Daniel

Daniel

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#48,323
#48,323
NAMELESS said:
All thnx to inflation create by big daddy governments and central banks.
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I don't want to start pointing fingers for all of the problems of inflation on big daddy government/central banks here...but when inflation goes up, price of goods are forced to go up, and this ultimately forces businesses to cut costs by laying workers off (but also increasing the wages of its workers, but this is less common) so that those businesses can still make a profit in the end.

I'd rather be working to sustain a basic living VS being unemployed and risking homelessness, a state worse than a disability because those people get no more opportunities to turn their life around + a significant percentage of them end up turning to illicit substances to cope with the pain (+ no government handouts either).
 
Owl Ki

Owl Ki

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#48,324
#48,324
Bisoromi Bear said:
Scottish independence when?
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It's over. The dream is dead.

Alex Salmond passed away aged 69 today. A once in a lifetime politician that nearly achieved Scottish Independence. The only politician that could achieve independence. Betrayed by those he passed the torch to, he tried to keep the embers of independence alive right to the very end. His greatest mistake was misjudging those around him, unable to see them for the petty parasites that they were.

The sun has set in Alba for she has lost her greatest son in living memory today.

Rest In Peace Alex Salmond. Rest In Peace Scottish Independence.

It was nice while it lasted. It was nice to have had something that felt worthwhile to believe in.
 
NAMELESS

NAMELESS

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#48,325
#48,325
Daniel said:
I don't want to start pointing fingers for all of the problems of inflation on big daddy government/central banks here...but when inflation goes up, price of goods are forced to go up, and this ultimately forces businesses to cut costs by laying workers off (but also increasing the wages of its workers, but this is less common) so that those businesses can still make a profit in the end.

I'd rather be working to sustain a basic living VS being unemployed and risking homelessness, a state worse than a disability because those people get no more opportunities to turn their life around + a significant percentage of them end up turning to illicit substances to cope with the pain (+ no government handouts either).
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All i was saying is that this entire mess is created by govs. Welfare state is a scheme to buy votes. People like that will never vote against the hand that feeds them.
 
Logiko

Logiko

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#48,328
#48,328
Wait, music is political now ?



It is.



Blax Blah said:
Oh alrighty, dengism reffers to the reforms that Deng Xiaoping made in the CCP after Mao's passing away, so people who support modern day China are dengists,

Personally I lean almost entirely towards anarcho-communism when it comes to socialism, but that's not to say that I support socialism, I don't think I have learned enough political theory to decide what to support yet, but it is to say that I preffer anarcho-communism out of all proposed roads to socialism,

Would you like me to recommend some vixeos you can check out about these topics?,
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Interesting. Yes why not, go ahead !


Blax Blah said:
And also maybe you can add some youtube channels to the leftist library too, and the anarchist lobrary website, the libcom website, and the mises institute website, the mises institute isn't leftist but you could add it just to give more context about economics and right-wing political theory,
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I would love to.. Sadly, I've punched the wall of the character limitations. I had to squeeze every link to fit in and even then I had to delete a lot of things.

I'll try to see with the staff if there is not something that I can be done to extend it. If not, I will have to make a big selection or maybe create a secondary library. Perhaps divide it term of radicality ? I don't know, I will see.

It's a lot of work.


Blax Blah said:
Edit: Also about what you said of being both an anarchist and a marxist, that I don't think you can be, in the traditional way of using the word marxist, because marxism sees a state as the way to communism, which anarchism sees building up worker democracy and prefiguring a communist society, building the new in the shell of the old, then doing a revolution and then living statelessly with that worker self-management, as the way to communism, at least anarcho-communism does, but a lot of anarchists also agree on a lot with Marx, and with other marxists, and also with some parts of maoism, although with maoism it seen like the character of the state was the reason that those transformstions of society couldn't take place, same with leninism and with marxism, and Zoe Baker is a popular anarcho-communist youtuber who talks a lot about Marx too, and she actually spoke about why the idea of socialism being a period of transition to communism is a leninist invention, and not Marx's intention in his writings, she wrote it as both an article and a video, if you would like to check it out, here is this article:

https://anarchozoe.com/2018/05/03/maoist-rebel-news-does-not-understand-marx/
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Very interesting. When I'm talking about Marxist, I'm talking more about the philosophy and vision of the world rather than the way it is meant to structure the society. But you are right, it's not really the same thing.

Now, help me understand because I'm not a native English speaker and this video was an hardcore one.

I didn't understand how they defined "Socialism" in "socialism as a period of transition". I had the understanding that Socialism was what Marx called the final stage of the communist society. But it seems like I was wrong on that.


Blax Blah said:
It has to do with what I mentioned of building the new in the shell of the old, and prefiguring what you want to see in society,

If you would like to see an anarchist answer to Engels' writing On Authority, meant to be a response to anarchists' objection to the use of unjustified authority, reffering to political authority, here are two videos of it:
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Lmao. Do you want me to speed run my radicalization ?
JK. I'll check that.


Blax Blah said:
You can find Engels' writing here if you want to read it as you watch the video:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
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Wow. This is high end leftist topics that I'm currently preventing myself from diving too much into. I want to make sure I have a strong base as a radical leftist first before going deeper either toward communism or anarchism or a bit of both.

So I'm slowing down at the moment since I radicalized really fast until this point, but I will definitely check that.

I want to be sure I'm choosing the right pokemon for me if you prefer :blobevil:


Blax Blah said:
And here is a writing by Petr Kropotkin about the usual anarcho-communist perspective on authority:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-are-we-good-enough
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I'm quoting to be sure I find that back later.

#Radicalization

This last video about Philosophy on the other hand is fundamental. I'll try to prioritize its placing in the leftist theory as an entry on the conflict between materialism and idealism that is explained in other videos.

Thanks you VERY MUCH for those ressources. You helped me a lot here.
 
Blax Blah

Blax Blah

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#48,330
#48,330
Logiko said:
Wait, music is political now ?



It is.


Very interesting. When I'm talking about Marxist, I'm talking more about the philosophy and vision of the world rather than the way it is meant to structure the society. But you are right, it's not really the same thing.

Now, help me understand because I'm not a native English speaker and this video was an hardcore one.

I didn't understand how they defined "Socialism" in "socialism as a period of transition". I had the understanding that Socialism was what Marx called the final stage of the communist society. But it seems like I was wrong on that.
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The idea of Zoe Baker's writing is that, the idea of socialism being a transitory period between capitalism and communism, is something that isn't found in Marx's writings, only in Lenin's writings, and in the writings on those who went on with marxism-leninism,

Here is a link to the article, and a link to the video, for those who would like to read or see their arguments:

Article: https://anarchozoe.com/2018/05/03/maoist-rebel-news-does-not-understand-marx/

And here is the video:

I will try to put some things here that explain part of their argument, to get an idea of it,

This is a quote of Zoe's article:
Maoist Rebel New’s view can be summarized as follows: Muke is wrong to think that Marx does not distinguish between socialism and communism because if communism is a stateless society and if Marx advocates a revolutionary state during the transition from capitalism to communism then there must be a mode of production in-between capitalism and communism which has a state. A mode of production cannot after all simultaneously be stateless and have a state. The mode of production which contains the dictatorship of the proletariat is socialism. Given this, Marx holds that the achievement of communism is a three step process during which society transitions from the capitalist mode of production to the socialist mode of production and from the socialist mode of production to the communist mode of production.


In arguing this Maoist Rebel News is operating on the false assumption that the only way to conceptualize the transition from capitalism to fully fledged communism is through the notion of an intermediary mode of production called socialism. Marx himself, as Muke correctly pointed out, did not distinguish between socialism and communism. Marx instead held that there was a single mode of production – communism – at two different moments of its development: communism during its phase of becoming, when it is arising out of capitalism and contains the dictatorship of the proletariat, and communism during its phase of being, when it is stateless. To explain what this means I will have to explain a) how Marx thinks about society, b) what Marx thought about the transition from feudalism to capitalism and c) what Marx thought about the transition from capitalism to communism. I shall discuss each in turn. Before I do so its important to note that the ideas presented here do not stem entirely from my own original research but are rather largely based on the ideas presented by the Marxist theorist Michael Lebowitz in his books The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development and The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now, which I highly recommend.

Marx’s View of Society

For Marx society is a totality, or as he sometimes calls it, an organic system, composed of parts which come together to form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The parts which form the whole are not separate independent entities but rather co-exist with one another, mutually determine one another, co-define one another and support, constrain or damage one another. This perspective can be seen in the Poverty of Philosophy where Marx writes that an organic system is one “in which all the elements co-exist simultaneously and support one another” (Marx and Engels 1976, 167). Marx similarly claims in the Grundrisse that “production, distribution, exchange and consumption . . . all form the members of a totality” in which “[m]utual interaction takes place between the different moments”, as is “the case with every organic whole” (Marx 1993, 99-100).

Given this framework, Marx holds that we must think about economic systems as totalities composed of parts that presuppose one another because each part is constituted through its relations with all the other parts. This perspective can be seen throughout Marx’s work. In the Grundrisse Marx writes that,

in the completed bourgeois system every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition, this is the case with every organic system (Marx 1993, 278).

Marx similarly writes in Wage Labour and Capital that, “capital presupposes wage labour; wage labour presupposes capital. They reciprocally condition the existence of each other; they reciprocally bring forth each other” (Marx 2000, 283). Capitalism is therefore reproduced in so far as a chain of interlocking parts, which presuppose one another, continually create the necessary social relations that not only stand between each part but in addition constitute them. For Marx one of the prime examples of this was the process whereby capitalism continually reproduces the division between capitalists and workers. As Marx writes in Capital Volume I,

The capitalist relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labour. As soon as capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation but reproduces it on a constantly extending scale. (Marx 1990, 874).

This process of reproduction begins with capitalists who own the means of production and seek to make profits, and workers, who do not own means of production and so must, in order to reproduce themselves, sell their labour to a capitalist in exchange for a wage. As a result, a worker enters the labour market and competes with other workers for jobs. Once a worker has a job they engage in labour under the direction of a capitalist, who in turn appropriates the products produced by the worker. The capitalist proceeds to sell these products as commodities and pays the worker less than the value that they produce. The worker uses up their wage to buy commodities and thereby reproduce themselves, while the capitalist re-invests their profits in the business and is thereby able to keep earning profits. The cycle then begins again with a worker needing a wage to reproduce themselves and a capitalist needing workers to make profits from.

For capitalism to be a dominant mode of production is therefore for every economic relation to presuppose every other in its capitalist form, such as the economic relation of selling labour power presupposing the existence of a labour market which in turn presupposes production for profit, the private ownership of the means of production by capitalists, and workers having nothing to sell but their labour power."

@Logiko I think another way to think about it is with the idea of prefiguration and the building the new in the shell of the old,

I would like to use slavery as an example,

Say you have a society where slavery is very popular, how do you change it?

First you build an alternative structure within that society, so that when the slaves are freed, they have an alternative to go to, something to work on, a place to work to sustain themselves, tools, means of self-defence and living,

Otherwise if they are freed, and have no alternative, they will either die starved, or come back into bondage,

This is I think what we see with God freeing the israelites in the desert too, first He prepares Aaron and Moses, and the alternative way of life that the jewish people can go to, and then He frees them, and when some jewish people doubted and thought there was no alternative, they even said this:

Exodus 14:11-12
And they said unto Moses, Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness? wherefore hast thou dealt thus with us, to carry us forth out of Egypt?


12 Is not this the word that we did tell thee in Egypt, saying, Let us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians? For it had been better for us to serve the Egyptians, than that we should die in the wilderness.

A free society has two stages too, its stage of becoming, which is when it is being prefigured, when the structures to support a system free of slavery are being built and people are organising it while the old society is still there, and its stage of being, when it has overthrown the other society based on slavery,

Just because there is a period of transition between slavery and a slave free society, it doesn't mean there is an intermediary mode of slavery, where slaves are owned and managed by the people who want to free them,

Same with capitalism and communism,

And actually one really important anarchist idea is that the means and the ends are the same, which is to say, if you push a ball one way, all else being equal, the ball will move in that direction, so if all you do is reproduce capitalism, and reinforce the state, like many anarcho-communists say that marxist-leninists do, you will only end up with capitalism and with a stronger and stronger state,

Edit: And I would like to add another example of the idea of an organic system pressuposing other parts of it, Proudhon said that property is theft, and in response Marx said that that can't be true, because theft pressuposes property, so if someone stole your property, before that you had stolen someone's property, and so on, making everything theft, not just capitalist profit,

Proudhon may have responded, I'm not sure, but I think this may a good example of it,
 
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NikaInParis

NikaInParis

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#48,331
#48,331
Apollo said:
In another episode of crimes commited by the Israeli terrorist force, earlier this week they were caught trying to use UN Peacekeeping forces on the border of Lebanon as human shields against Hezbollah's attacks.

https://www.rte.ie/news/primetime/2024/1006/1473827-un-raises-concerns-over-idf-tanks-placed-close-to-irish-post/

an images showing merkava tanks in one of those UN positions, using as human shields:


After withdrawing from these positions, 2 days ago the Israeli terrorists and their tanks fired directly on UN positions injuring som peacekeepers in the process.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-israel-has-fired-on-their-bases-deliberately

Sad to see the American taxpayers money is used to maintain this wild terror group that inflicts damage on everyone in the Middle east yet plays victim.
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Israel has a right to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity
 
Blax Blah

Blax Blah

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#48,334
#48,334
The Power of Hope: Unveiling Why It's Essential


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Personally for me though materialism, in the sense of thinking that the world is made out of just physical things, is hopeless and a death-oriented philosophy,
 
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NAMELESS

NAMELESS

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#48,335
#48,335
Blax Blah said:
The Power of Hope: Unveiling Why It's Essential


Post automatically merged:

Personally for me though materialism, in the sense of thinking that the world is made out of just physical things, is hopeless and a death-oriented philosophy,
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Read "A man's search for meaning" by Viktor Frankl. It's a great book about hope and stuff.
 
Logiko

Logiko

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#48,336
#48,336
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1845414132960448795

"
2013: law against “LGBT propaganda” accessible to under-18s.
2022: law prohibiting all “LGBT propaganda”.
2023: law prohibiting gender transitions.
2024: LGBT+ people are designated as “terrorists”, police raids increase.

Everything changed in 10 years
"

https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/20...e-raid-two-moscow-gay-clubs-overnight-en-news

Blax Blah said:
I will try to put some things here that explain part of their argument, to get an idea of it,

This is a quote of Zoe's article:
Maoist Rebel New’s view can be summarized as follows: Muke is wrong to think that Marx does not distinguish between socialism and communism because if communism is a stateless society and if Marx advocates a revolutionary state during the transition from capitalism to communism then there must be a mode of production in-between capitalism and communism which has a state. A mode of production cannot after all simultaneously be stateless and have a state. The mode of production which contains the dictatorship of the proletariat is socialism. Given this, Marx holds that the achievement of communism is a three step process during which society transitions from the capitalist mode of production to the socialist mode of production and from the socialist mode of production to the communist mode of production.


In arguing this Maoist Rebel News is operating on the false assumption that the only way to conceptualize the transition from capitalism to fully fledged communism is through the notion of an intermediary mode of production called socialism. Marx himself, as Muke correctly pointed out, did not distinguish between socialism and communism. Marx instead held that there was a single mode of production – communism – at two different moments of its development: communism during its phase of becoming, when it is arising out of capitalism and contains the dictatorship of the proletariat, and communism during its phase of being, when it is stateless. To explain what this means I will have to explain a) how Marx thinks about society, b) what Marx thought about the transition from feudalism to capitalism and c) what Marx thought about the transition from capitalism to communism. I shall discuss each in turn. Before I do so its important to note that the ideas presented here do not stem entirely from my own original research but are rather largely based on the ideas presented by the Marxist theorist Michael Lebowitz in his books The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development and The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now, which I highly recommend.

Marx’s View of Society

For Marx society is a totality, or as he sometimes calls it, an organic system, composed of parts which come together to form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The parts which form the whole are not separate independent entities but rather co-exist with one another, mutually determine one another, co-define one another and support, constrain or damage one another. This perspective can be seen in the Poverty of Philosophy where Marx writes that an organic system is one “in which all the elements co-exist simultaneously and support one another” (Marx and Engels 1976, 167). Marx similarly claims in the Grundrisse that “production, distribution, exchange and consumption . . . all form the members of a totality” in which “[m]utual interaction takes place between the different moments”, as is “the case with every organic whole” (Marx 1993, 99-100).

Given this framework, Marx holds that we must think about economic systems as totalities composed of parts that presuppose one another because each part is constituted through its relations with all the other parts. This perspective can be seen throughout Marx’s work. In the Grundrisse Marx writes that,

in the completed bourgeois system every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition, this is the case with every organic system (Marx 1993, 278).

Marx similarly writes in Wage Labour and Capital that, “capital presupposes wage labour; wage labour presupposes capital. They reciprocally condition the existence of each other; they reciprocally bring forth each other” (Marx 2000, 283). Capitalism is therefore reproduced in so far as a chain of interlocking parts, which presuppose one another, continually create the necessary social relations that not only stand between each part but in addition constitute them. For Marx one of the prime examples of this was the process whereby capitalism continually reproduces the division between capitalists and workers. As Marx writes in Capital Volume I,

The capitalist relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labour. As soon as capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation but reproduces it on a constantly extending scale. (Marx 1990, 874).

This process of reproduction begins with capitalists who own the means of production and seek to make profits, and workers, who do not own means of production and so must, in order to reproduce themselves, sell their labour to a capitalist in exchange for a wage. As a result, a worker enters the labour market and competes with other workers for jobs. Once a worker has a job they engage in labour under the direction of a capitalist, who in turn appropriates the products produced by the worker. The capitalist proceeds to sell these products as commodities and pays the worker less than the value that they produce. The worker uses up their wage to buy commodities and thereby reproduce themselves, while the capitalist re-invests their profits in the business and is thereby able to keep earning profits. The cycle then begins again with a worker needing a wage to reproduce themselves and a capitalist needing workers to make profits from.

For capitalism to be a dominant mode of production is therefore for every economic relation to presuppose every other in its capitalist form, such as the economic relation of selling labour power presupposing the existence of a labour market which in turn presupposes production for profit, the private ownership of the means of production by capitalists, and workers having nothing to sell but their labour power."

@Logiko I think another way to think about it is with the idea of prefiguration and the building the new in the shell of the old,
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You didn't understand my question.

I watched that video and yes I agree with the statements of Marx (I actually thought about the notion of new through old as a world building exercice and fundamental part of change before even beginning to think about leftism lol, the old creates the old/new and the old/new then creates the new by self reproduction, this is what happens in every societal changes)

But what I want to understand is how they define "socialism". Because they seem to oppose socialism and communism here. I do not disagree fundamentally, but I want to understand what i'm disagreeing with as a concept hehe.

Why can't we call the period of transition "socialism" for ex instead of just calling it "communism phase one / embryonic communism" ?


Blax Blah said:
And actually one really important anarchist idea is that the means and the ends are the same, which is to say, if you push a ball one way, all else being equal, the ball will move in that direction, so if all you do is reproduce capitalism, and reinforce the state, like many anarcho-communists say that marxist-leninists do, you will only end up with capitalism and with a stronger and stronger state,
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Which is a reaonnable critic. Sadly, I can't see how we can manage to have an anarchy without a big period of transition or big series of periods of transition.


Blax Blah said:
Personally for me though materialism, in the sense of thinking that the world is made out of just physical things, is hopeless and a death-oriented philosophy,
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I don't know how you will be able to hold to a leftist anarchism if you do not hold a materialist belief as well.. you might open yourself to a whole lot of contradictions and paradoxes.

For me, Materialism is the OPPOSITE of death. Of course it presuppose that there is no such thing as the mind and the free spirit that prevails over nature. But it also place us in a natural and full of life context.

There is no hope without materialism. Because to understand how to create a classless and stateless society, we need to understand how the world works or social relationship work and we must admit our material condition and how they influence our structures.

Meaning does not preceeds us, it's something we create.
 
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