Why do people and nations become degenerated (as Holla Forums would call it) after living in prosperous economies? Traditional family structures get broken up, people are more willing to explore their sexual sides etc etc
This is not special to today's western nations (People also became degenerates in the last periods of the Roma empire)
Is what Holla Forums calls fun just actually bourgeois waste?
What is it? What is actually happening in Marxist terms?
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I apologize for the infectuous autism I may or may not have caused due to my writing, it is late here for me you see
And?
Because the law of value (the force that compels and impulses wage labor-powered production for market exchange AKA capitalism) seeks first to vary the the market's contents, which means introducing new types of commodities but very critically alongside new methods of fetishization.
If I make a new widget I want to sell, I don't simply enter the market, invest money or interest banks or investors to give it to me to invest, I first of all think of how to make the widget attractive for purchase. If I manage to do so succesfully, I thereby open up a new market for commodity and, as with all new developments in material conditions, the superstructural dimension of society is changed to accomodate the widget's consequences ideologically. Not to forget, I in this process require labor, which I purchase by also taking on workers for their productivity and in the realm of this productive process automatically normalize the commodity in a factory in which labor is socialized. These same workers automatically do the job of legitimizing their process of laboring to make the new dragon dildo because they have to excuse making this new device, thereby also making it palpable for us.
All the consequence of matter, which are the consequence of fetishizing into ideology the need for this matter to successfully come into social existence.
Even bigger than this, is the fact that traditional family structures are based on pre-capitalist productive relations, in which labor was not as fiercely regulated by production for market exchange. There was then no need to force women into the field of labor; their function was much better served by the feudal mode of production to serve as housekeepers in the lord's commune, which, if he didn't simply justify it with outright saying it is to be this way, he would otherwise justify through religion and religious institutions, pre-scientific ideas like the evil of the feminine, et cetera.
Fast-forward to post-feudal relations, after many successful bourgeois revolutions, and we have a productive mode entirely reliant on labor, which divides itself into a proletarian class and a borugeois class. Here, it is in the interests of production for exchange to have as big of a pool of labor to draw productivity from, thus slowly but surely, women are also motivated or even mandated to be working. This ultimately becomes more and more pressing, and waning post-feudal institutions and ideas like female inferiority are wiped away not first for some innately humanist principles, but first and foremost because it's in the interest of a world-systemic mode of production.
"World-systemic" then also answers the next question you probably have but for some reason didn't ask:
and to which the answer is: nation states may be a proper vehicle for organizing and discipling labor in, but even better is a worldwide pool of labor to draw from.
Article on the subject of how firms (like fucking Ford, no less), once they realized the potential of adopting feminism, directly worked to develop academic disciplines that would better conduce, like a metaphorical ideological suppository, the universal emancipation of women into labor by defining them as just as STRONG!, INDEPENDENT!, etc. as men, if not stronker and more independenter (why not, good prole? *oink*): archive.frontpagemag.com
Thanks for the detailed response comrade.
So what I'm getting out of this in TL;DR is that everything possible is getting and has gotten commodified?
Yes.
More precisely, that the basic function of capitalism rests upon commodification, and that this process's "logical" consequence is that, indeed, everything has been commodified and if not, it has yet to be.
Recent developments including:
How do you then explain the amount of Marxist thinkers pushing for more degeneracy'?
First, show them to me. Marxists having us all use dragon dildos for its own sake sounds like it could only be sourced by stormfront, much less Marxists having us all use dragon dildos through some perverse desire to "degenerate" us.
Second, understand that outlining the machinic function of the law of value and its function in commodifying is primarly the positing of a truism through looking at history with philosophical materialism: that of capitalism's lawlike dynamics. It's not a value judgement, and whether you consider it "degenerate" or not, while I loathe the fact that equality under capitalism by including women is pushed solely because the system desires it, I'm still happy for these productive forces of capitalism making it so, because the chaining of a sex to a productive relation just to keep it docile or more productive is cancerous and counter-productive to working class emancipation for the purpose of revolution (just like cappies want as many proletarian demographics to make them money, so do commies want as many proletarian demographics to neuter the cappies and end this shitshow for once and for all).
For example, Marx, while wishing to overthrow capitalism, welcomed things like free trade openly in communist journals, because it would hasten the development of capitalism as an international system, and form the basis for a fully industrialized world which could then consequently use these fully-developed late capitalist societies as the basis for revolution: marxists.org
Similarly, many other Marxists have attemtped to theorize how and, if they could, work towards positively reforming capitalism from its shitty backwardness towards material development with as little negative consequences as possible. Recall for example Lenin, noted Marxist communist, formally introducing his New Economic Policy AKA state capitalism en.wikipedia.org
On a civic level, many Marxists supported abolitionism, women's suffrage for working women, civil rights for working class blacks, et cetera. And for them, the motivation was indeed a primarily human one, instead of a profitable one, unlike for the cappies. The unity of opposites cannot be overcome under capitalism, but it can be used for commies.
We obviously don't care about your reactionary faggotry and cultrue
Okay, so what I am getting from this post is that liberal humanitarianism is just a meme like ethical capitalism while Marxists offer a genuine alternative?
Uhh, I am not a reactionary, I was using Holla Forums lingo because it is the one I am familiar with, I could use progressiveness instead of D.egeneracy
Yes, a genuine alternative that, in spite of being wholly different from pure liberal reformism under the guise of "progress" and "tolerance", has sadly shown itself to fail and ultimately die as a movement. This occurred either through external forces or completely because of an improper theoretical basis or improper course of action, both stemming from many other elements.
I unanymously regard 20th century communism as a failed movement, but see it as a husk we can learn from and build something better from. And our program's political horizon is still invariant: a break from the capitalist mode of production.
What's that pic from?
I think there are various parts to the answer.
One is the hedonic treadmill. Happiness is relative, and even some German bougie who has literally every aspect of his life better than some Kobane refugee can still be suicidally miserable.
About the family, it's something Marx already had said. Capital is an extremely "revolutionary" force, destroying any institution in its path. Old modes of production, superstitions, social organizations, everything gets flattened. The nuclear family is arguably the last great pre-capitalist institution still putting up a fight, and it will no doubt die off soon enough. Consider: anarchists and socialists had deliberate plans to destroy institutions, but also to create (or recreate) them. So in the USSR you had unions which provided some social service, youth groups, various cultural groups, children were assigned their own friends circle etc. In modern capitalism, there's almost nothing but the aforementioned nuclear family, and offers virtually no substitutes. Unions, homeowner's associations, parishes etc. are dying off, and all we have left are commodity-centered things suchnas consumer groups and celebrity fans. Needless to say, a vaping circle doesn't satisfy the same social need as, say, a trade guild. Even idpol, for all its supposed celebration of diversity, reduces everything to entertainment and spectacle.
About this modern focus on sex then, funny that you ask, because the answer came to me the other day, and it's simpler than I imagined it would be. Sure, there's all that media shit, and Porky exploiting sexual imagery and whatnot, but it's a simplistic to say that Porky creates this focus on sexuality in the people as it is to say that the people's demand for sexuality makes Porky respond. Both statements are true at the same time; it's a feedback system. Thus the collective obsession with sex isn't the direct fault of one or more parts, but a flaw in the superstructure, and that flaw is: in an increasingly alienated world, sexuality is virtually the only part of your life where you still have full agency.
Do Marxist thinkers promote banks? because i don't know anything more "degenerate" than banks in our societies.
They don't. Right wingers constantly circlejerk about a mythical past which has never existed.
Good post.
Also improv'd the pic a bit.
Families are economic units first and foremost. People arrange themselves in the most optimal economic arrangements possible. Family shapes are changing, because the structure that was economically viable before is no longer viable.
Also, calling the nuclear family the "traditional family" is, historically speaking, complete bullshit. It hardly even existed anywhere in the world before the ninteenth century, and afterward it only existed in the industrialized center of capitalism. It was not even the prevailing standard in the United States before the mid-twentieth century. If anything, the nuclear family was a historical aberration.
Hardly. Urban societies are always sexually active if not always overt. Right now, sex is overt in most of the world, because there is an economic interest to be such.
This as well. I have read pornographics books published in the late 1800's and some were quite graphic.
Holy fuck no. The banks control capital in capitalism. l do not think that there is any institution that marxists are more violently opposed to.
Oh yeah, here's a Kurd talking about celibacy in the YPG and stuff: reddit.com/r/syriancivilwar/comments/3dtszo/ama_was_in_kobane/ctapyo0/
pic related
Its the eugenic/dysgenic cycle of civilization. War and strife breeds good stock, good stock brings about wealth and prosperity, wealth and prosperity breeds bad stock, bad stock leads to war and strife.
Basically this. Empires never last bla bla bla
Why does bad stock lead to war?
Based post. Queen of hell approves.
Yeah except most empires take far longer than a generation to fall