NEW ECONOMIC UPDATE

>at two points during the opening, Wolff asks the audience to raise their hands if there's an empty seat next to them, because there are so many people in the building

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bump

capitalism will end any moment now, aaaaany moment, just wait for it, i know people have been saying this for 200 years but this time it will end, O SWEAR IT WILL END TRUST ME.

shame we can't get the youtube views as high

Liking, commenting, and subscribing helps a video get more views. You can also tweet the video or retweet it when [email protected]/* */ tweets it, you can share it on your fedbook page, etc. I just checked the [email protected]/* */ twitter and that tweet for this episode had a measly 10 retweets.

alri Fukuyama

For fuck's sake, I typed "democracy [at] work"

From 1:17:51 on he talks about establishing co-ops as new stage in the mode of production for the further development of socialism, just as in feudalism you had early forms of the capitalist mode of production which later developed into full-scale capitalism.

What would be the (for example) leftcom answer to this? I realize that the value-form would still exist in any kind of """market"""-socialist economy, but establishing new foundations seems pretty logical to me, historically speaking.

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Leftcom answer would probably be that attempts at socialism before the conditions are right are futile. Like Wolff describes happening with slavery in the US, you can try and try and it's not going to change the system until the time is right. What leftcoms generally ignore is that you can make things better for some people right now by having pockets of socialism or pseudo socialism. You might even have a revolution that attempts to overthrow captialism and succeed for a while but it will eventually degenerate back to capitalism. While it lasts it will improve people's lives over the capitalist alternative though, and the increased technological advances would likely move the material conditions along faster than not having those revolutions.

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Nothing. Cooperatives are indeed, in the direct sense, preferable to Ltds for any, but in the same sense as social democratic capitalist policy is to classical liberal policy.

The point is that positing cooperative enterprise as incubating proletarian type of organization equivalent to early bourgeois structures under feudalism is idiotic, because there is nothing in a cooperative that embodies the proletarian form of organization (socialism/communism). What would resemble this in equivalent is a council (a Soviet-type council, ideally), because councils actually work to threaten capitalism instead of conducing it in a different form. Never mistake capitalism for primarily being hierarchy.

So, yes: they're futile, and absolutely harmless to capitalism on every level. What they do is quite ironically expand the lifespan of capitalism by widening how much leeway workers can give themselves around socially necessary labor time.

As such, they're both not the fabled "microcosm of socialism" in capitalism, but they also mask the tensions of class struggle with horizontalist pretenses. Consider checking out PDF related for this: it's an ethnography of the Mondragon cooperative system, which is typically held to be the paradigmatic cooperative. This book shows that there's still class conflict in workers' cooperatives, which is merely masked by the ideological imperatives of the firm. Like all other firms, though, it is even in cooperation capable of paying Polish workers by the nickle for its logistics and whipping Chinese proles for manufacturing.

I know most ultras/left coms around shit on Wolff on every possible level, but I actually kinda like him for at least piquing workers into (vague, but still) anti-capitalist sentiments. Also, if anything he's informative and neatly bundles together some spicy news on the regular.

Rogue Economist Explains why Capitalism is Collapsing
youtube.com/watch?v=ozt5uGbTBm0

*autisti screeching*

Neat. Now we just need him on Comrade Jimmy's show.

I love/hate listening to Wolff because he's so informative. There's tons of great/horrific information in his lectures about Capitalism and its predations/decay.

Boys

Bump

Lifestyle mutuatist back at it again with the high tier critiques. Damn.