So why do we continue to support Wolff? Or are we going to pretend that the system he proposes is not 100% capitalist?

So why do we continue to support Wolff? Or are we going to pretend that the system he proposes is not 100% capitalist?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=GpR11AY5-gk
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalism
marxists.catbull.com/archive/bukharin/works/1927/leisure-economics/index.htm
marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1951/fundamental-theses.htm)
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm).
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a4
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm.
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/
libcom.org/library/eclipse-re-emergence-communist-movement.
youtube.com/watch?v=8tVmSHEIKwk
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Are you going to pretend that Wolff doesnt see cooperatives as a stepping stone?

...

I never saw him propose any system tbh. Watched a couple of talks and while he does advocate for co-ops I never saw him claim that it was the end goal, or socialism, just a step up from the current way of things.

Is he ever clear in what he wishes for?

how creating cooperatives without doing anything about the existance of capital any more of a stepping stone than social democracy is (That is, none)?

Bringing up coops every 2 seconds seems like a clear indication. He also spoke about the USSR in one of his talks and made it seem as if the problem was that they did not give control to the workers through coops, rather than the problem being that they never abolished capitalism to begin with.

We don't. That's redditor scum and, AFAIK, mods. Because Left Unity has to be based on Capitalism.

We will not.

He had books written. He is borderline AnCap, with his anti-state, free-coop things.

He doesn't advocate anything else.

Market Socialism is a transitory stage not the final goal. I'm sure Wolff supports an eventual move to production for use. What is with leftcoms and their all or nothing autism?

marcsucc is not a transition. if you don't abolish capital, you still have capitalism. There is no transitional stage, you either have capitalism or socialism, you can't have half-and-half.
Why do you people always make fun of socdems for believing we need "a mixture of both systems" and then turn around and act as if socialism and capitalism is a sliding scale?

Its propaganda in action, its denying capitalist myths about human organisation. Thus directly supports the spreading of socialism.

It also enables more people to understand cooperative economy and could create more leaders for a post revolutionary society.

most likely he realizes that socialism is a dirty word for most americans while co-ops is a fresh concept for most people, so he's trying to get amerifats to support a core socialist idea without them being aware that it's socialist.

He's doing a fucking shit job at that if he's trying to get amerifats to support socialism by preaching capitalism.

What's so bad about stepping stones? If communism has to naturally emerging from the material conditions in place, just as capitalism did, wouldn't it actually preferable to make the transition towards it as humane as possible? Wouldn't a superstructure that ideally makes use of social organizations and the market in such a way as to bring about the material conditions for communism be our best choice? Or do you believe that the material conditions are already met and the only thing standing in the way is revolutionary potential?

Holy fuck, is this a real quote? Is this what he actually thinks? He's literally just a Mutualist.

I get it now. Leftcoms are just inverted liberals. I have to explain to liberals the difference between markets and capitalism all the time. Yet you have this same confusion. It all makes sense now.

youtube.com/watch?v=GpR11AY5-gk
He doesn't seem to be somebody inherently liking markets though.

This. Immediate communization is the only way.

I don't think that's a real quote.

So is Capitalism. Incidentally, this is exactly what he is suggesting.

"Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man." (c)

It Marxists, you moron.

RDW shits on markets all the time. His proposal of cooperatives is either as a transition, or he's just a syndicalist. Calm your autism.

I'm saying it's not a stepping stone.

Jesus fuck read Marx for like half a second.

Fugg, left the wrong flag on :-DD

if we're going to sit here and shitpost for all eternity then persuasion is the only way to gradually reach socialism. if you really don't want transition of any sort then full revolution 1917 style is the only way it's going to happen. and of course a revolution in america in this age is not very easy.

Even if it wasn't, the rest of my post is still the same

Read Marx.

I'm not a Marxist, though.

Figures

Does the idea of non-Marxian socialism trigger you? Let me guess, it's not real """""scientific""""" socialism. Kill yourself.

What is "non-marxist" liberalism? How do you define it? Does it involve private ownership, wage labor, and surplus value extraction?

Meant "non-marxist" socialism. Actually curious by the way, not trolling.

What.

Not defending Market "Socialism" but even early Marxists (dont know how Marxs personal attitude was towards that at the end of his life though) realised that they wouldnt abolish capitalism instantly after taking power, a transition phase was allways anticipated during which society is reformed just like capitalism didnt emerge in a single moment from feudalism. Also I would like you to adress this

...

This

Those are not stepping stones, Einstein.

"Stepping stones" is Marxist concept - the transition state. Centralized economy that is being directed, economy that is doing some specific task (industrialization) that will allow economy to transition to Communism when productive forces (industry) is sufficiently developed.

Decentralized co-op economy cannot be directed, hence it does not transition anywhere. It is the final destination of Anarchist ideology. Or - Marxist, after all stepping stones of hyper-industrialization under centralized economy had been passed.

...

Fair enough. It's any socialism that doesn't use Marxism as its foundation.
For one thing, the labor theory of value. In my opinion, it's shaky at best, and always has been. It's useless as a price theory, and if all you're going to use it for is to state a vague philosophical connection between average labor time and price, then it's not really doing anything for you.
Not to say it should be thrown out, but you can advocate socialism without depending on Marx's law of value.
That said, I think a lot of schools of though pick and choose from Marx's ideas, and with good reason. He was one of the first economists to put forth the idea of modes of production as transient historical states, and to specify how culture, consciousness, and social relations depend on the material conditions of society. That's all pretty valid, I think, and vindicated by further study.
Also, all moral arguments for socialism or against capitalism are inherently non-Marxist (though not necessarily anti-Marxist).

Proving my point.

See

Because he has a lot of reach, goes further than muh coops, and is better to get a normie to read Marx than say Jason Unrhue or FinnishBolshevik.


It is, but coops are a better situation than most workers will have and the way to organize workers in burgerland as RTW legislation spreads. What else would you suggest? Another 100> man party, smashie autism, or sitting in the armchair until the terracotta proletarian army rises?

He shits from non-Marxist point of view. Consequently, it is wealth inequality that is the root of all evil - for him. Not market exchange itself - as it is for Marxists. He doesn't even attempt to refute Marx to justify himself. He simply ignores him.

Except Wolff pretends to be Marxist, not Anarchist - the only non-Marxist Socialism.

Do elaborate.

In other words, social democracy.
reading Bordiga

I think a lot of this disagreement stems from one main fact: that certain leftists disagree on what exactly the core problem of capitalism is.
Some, including nearly all Marxists, view the market as the core problem, because they consider it an irrational way to structure society, and think that society should be as rational as possible, which is (I think) a Hegelian idea.
Others view the core problem of capitalism to be private property, because they object specifically to the hierarchy and exploitation that it produces, and want to live without it–and the question of markets vs. planning becomes secondary.

Ah, so you were baiting the whole time. Should've known after you switched flags.

What a shitty post.

No economic system has ever been fully implemented or fully abolished. Even today there are activities best described as communist labor - barn raisings for example. There is also slave economics in action in the form of captive immigrant exploitation - sex trafficking, forced labor in UAE, and incarcerated labor in American prisons.

You're never going to abolish wage employment. It will always exist in the underground economy at the very least.

The best you can do is abolish the suffering that leads to large scale exploitation, and transition as much of the ownership into the hands of labor as possible.

Even if you abolish currency and replace it with nontransferrable labor vouchers, the personal property can still be used as currency to perpetuate the activities of capital on the black market.

So what do you do? You make the ownership of the means of production nontransferrable and democratize it. Better known as worker coops.

I was referring to market socialism as a whole, not to RDW in particular.
top heh

kek, so nothing but autistic screeching. got it.

I didn't, though I don't have a problem with them. Work on your reading comprehension.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalism

I'm not even a Bordigist, I'm just not going to respond to stupid questions like "What else do you suggest" as if it wouldn't be obvious just from reading Marx.

Also, I didn't change flags intentionally, I was using it to shitpost elsewhere.

If the choice is between social democracy and lolbert wet dreams and there is no current revolutionary potential, as leftcoms often claim, why wouldn't workers choose social democracy over ancapistan?


So in other words accepting whatever falls into place.

Rad, because I wasn't interested in your suggestions and never asked for them.

It wasn't a suggestion, I was obviously dodging.

How about you actually explain why it would be valuable to ditch Marx as a theoretical framework, what would be gained? What are these non-Marxian traditions that could better help us reach a state of absolute classlessness and statelessness, actual Communism?

Did he claim so in his works?

Because he advocates for socialism. Leftcoms will be first to gulag.

I refer to your actual post:

You should probably stop moving the goalposts.

Meant for

Why bother? They won't do anything to stop us.

Fucking purests. You are the ideological cancer that makes us all look like larpers. Mixed market untill the next revolution. Sail towards communism always and forever.

What's so bad about social democracy? If communism has to naturally emerging from the material conditions in place, just as capitalism did, wouldn't it actually preferable to make the transition towards it as humane as possible? Wouldn't a superstructure that ideally makes use of social organizations and the market in such a way as to bring about the material conditions for communism be our best choice? Or do you believe that the material conditions are already met and the only thing standing in the way is revolutionary potential?

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Why'd you take off your flag?

...

Nigga, I'm just trying to get you to define what "non-marxist" socialism is, it's not that hard, can you not do it in the span of one post? Why are you evading this question so hard? Is it just Social Democracy with Kenysian economics? Is it post-Left anarchism? Are you a Communalist? I'm trying to literally just figure out what you're advocating here.

The problem of Wolff is that he is a fraud. Instead of clearly defining what exactly he is talking about, he presents only semblance of Socialist theory, without any of the content.

Nobody would've minded if he clearly stated that he is presenting his own, personal ideas. But he pretends that he is mainstream. I wouldn't have cared if Wolff clarified he is proper Anarcho-Capitalist that also supports coops.

Kill yourself.

No, it isn't. Idea of rational organization of society dates all the way back to the earliest moments of recorded history. Take a look at Plato's Republic or Indian Arthashastra.

No, they don't. Market relations are unavoidable consequence of private property. You can't separate those two.

Goes there:

inb4 self-exploitation meme

marxists.catbull.com/archive/bukharin/works/1927/leisure-economics/index.htm

No.
I can almost guarantee it's fake.

LMAO

please respond

Leftcoms should love market socialism tbh. It's literally an easy bake oven that creates socialism without them having to get up out of their armchairs.

Just "support" his Economic Update series because separate of his esssentially non-Marxist and much more Lassallean political advocacy, Economic Update is nonetheless a decent review of the latest trends in global capitalism.

There are just my 2 cents though. I feel like all threads that say "do we do X?" presuppose that the board is a sort of hivemind that will inevitably follow some narrative. Even if it were on a subject like Wolff where I 100% think "we" should stop spreading his ideas under the guise of socialism because there's little socialism to them, people are gonna think what they're gonna think. You can't force people to understand, let alone read, Marx. Wolff himself (topical) is testament to that fact.

I guess I don't care about RDW's views as much as other people ITT, then. I'm just happy he's getting normalfags to question the underlying system. If we actually had a class-conscious workforce and any revolutionary potential at all, then I might oppose him. But we don't, so I'm not that bothered.

You first.

What Is Property?

Yes, but the relationship is one-way. Markets predate private property. Though I'll grant you that production for exchange doesn't.

At the end of the day, I would rather have market socialism or planning than capitalism. I'm not too picky. But if you think it's reasonable to expect us to go right from the hyper-capitalist shitshow we have now straight to production for use, you're delusional. A cooperative movement is: 1) possible within a capitalist framework, and 2) shows people, in a concrete and undeniable way, that there are better alternatives out there.

This is what Market Socialists actually believe :^)

It's the coop virus meme all over again. Never thought I'd see the day.

HAHAHA HOLY SHIT
Hey, I guess state ownership is private property too, right?
I was right, leftcoms are literally liberals.

Both are literally Capitalism, so yes.

It literally is.

I'm aware of Bukharin's response to marginalism. He, like you, miss the point: that it's a better price theory than LTV. He just resorts to saying, "Well, why are equilibrium prices this particular amount rather than another?" While that's a useful question to ask, it just reverts to the other function of LTV once it's been discredited as a price theory: a (weak) and relatively useless philosophical tie between SNLT and price. Which is fine, but this is the substitution game that I always see Marxists play. LTV is a price theory until someone points out that it sucks ass as a price theory, and then suddenly it's an effusive link between labor and value.

...

Are leftcoms anarchists when it's convenient?

Otherwise, nah. Left comunists want active class struggle and a dictatorship of the proletariat transforming society like all communists (should). Careful not to take the doing nothing meme too seriously there.
t. le Italian do nothing man (marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1951/fundamental-theses.htm)

Yes.
No, they're just consistent Marxists.
t. Engels (marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm). To explain: private property is an emergent property of commodity production: the fact that goods are produced for exchange. It is wrong to view private property in a false dichotomy between individual and state. The important feature is exclusivity: as long as there is an instance restricting free access to the means of production, private property exists. It doesn't matter whether that instance is an individual, a state, a corporation or a cooperative. As long as commodity production continues, you have capitalism, nothing else. You reproduce wage labour as a consequence of reproducing capital as an automatic subject. This is the most elementary Marxist view of things.

since no one bothers replying I take it social democracy is alright and we should all vote succdem

thank

Lurk more, you desperate fuck.

I'm curious now. How would a non-market based socialist (non-state crapitalist/vanguardist) system be organized?
Isn't socialism about workers owning the means of production?

It's about workers owning the product of their labor. Seizing the means of production is just one way (probably the only way) to accomplish that.

Correct. Well, worker coops anyway. There's more than one kind of coop.

It's not. It's about the elimination of private property, that is, of restrictions on the use of the means. Co-ops create said restrictions.

...

We can't tell, and shouldn't. Our immediate task is establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat, nothing else.
Socialism is about abolishing (private) ownership as well as the proletarian class entirely; to create a society without class and free access to production and the fruits of one's labour. To recreate the firm horizontally is to mask the class tensions inherent to a society dominated by the commodity firm; it doesn't last and merely creates a society of abstract capitalists.

Cooperatives aren't private property. In cooperatives, you get an equal vote on what is done with the product of your (and your coworkers') labor. In capitalism, you get nothing. In communism, you get a vote, but it counts for less, since your vote is counted along with every other citizens', rather than simply along with your coworkers'.
Given your absurd standard of what constitutes "private property," the only production that doesn't involve private property would be people working alone.

He literally never said that.

Have fun not achieving anything ever and never convincing anyone ever. This isnt even Marxism anymore.

Social democracy is already failing or rather being abandoned because capitalism has become truly dominant. The workers movements of the past were able to make the gains they did because capital's position wasn't fully shored up and these movements were able to exploit this space. With the global economy, international labor market, and the atomization of western culture the bourgeoisie no longer finds it necessary to grant concessions to the working class. Let the ardent social democrats waste their time trying to salvage capital despite itself. Capitalism ends when the proletariat stops reproducing it and as communists that's what we should be concerned with.

Nailed it.

I actually think we already have a society of abstract capitalists.
Most production, in the West at least, is undertaken by public corporations now. The shareholders in them are relatively weak, and the boards of directors notoriously corrupt. Executive-level management has become, I would say, the new ascendant class. They appropriate the surplus value of workers, but while they do it in the name of the shareholders, they really serve themselves. It's weird.

Do you think the endgoal of Marxism is the creation of an authoritarian state that has completely nationalized the economy? Have you literally never read Marx? For that matter, to any MLs, Trots, or Market Socialists in this thread, why would a protracted "stage" of Socialism between Capitalism and Communism even be necessary in any nation that has actually thoroughly underwent Capitalist development and industrialization, and where there doesn't need to be a long period of developing productive forces or creating a material surplus, do you faggots even realize what Communism is? It's the abolishment of the literal fucking political economy itself. The only larpers on this board are the retards who want to endlessly recreate all of the Marxist-Leninist and Social Democratic states of the 20th Century.

He wrote what amounts to fanfiction about how to reorganize the state organs in Germany after the revolution.

tbh.

Let's read some Marx:
>Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a4
Was that fun? Here, have some more: marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm.

Put simply: attempting to be orchestrator of a hypothetical society is utopic, and the bourgeois revolutions before ours succeeded not on the merit of a successful implementation of such utopic visions either. Drop Marx if you want your politics utopian, it's for the best of both of us.

Welcome to left-communism.


No, I think its goal is the creation of a libertarian state that has completely nationalized the economy, then will magically wither away via a process that nobody can seem to explain.

...

Read David Schweickart. The means of production are owned by the community and "rented" by the co-op. The rent is transferred into a fund used to invest in new co-ops and upgrade old capital.

The entire argument of you initial post was that Communism is impossible because all of the aspects of Capitalism Socialists have sought to negate and abolish since the 1800's are somehow inalienably intrinsic to the human condition, a typical liberal argument, even though wage labor and the value form are completely contemporary developments created by human activity and reproduction, therefore as easily negated as any other human act or practice. I didn't feel I needed to address your post because it was it was retarded.

Not my favourite utopian tbh. Graeber's much more laughable.

That's also a very nice social democracy you've got there.

I kind of admire leftcoms, their ability to outautism most posters on Holla Forums forces the increase of discussion to the levels that would be undreamt if they weren't around

Why don't you actually read Marx, literally, read him. He very specifically makes the argument that Communism is a movement towards the negation of Capitalism, and that any attempt to predict what the end result of this process of negation is would be pointless and futile.

sorry thicc dick wolff porked your mom OP

Do you have transcripts of his video-lectures? Quoting them is painful.

So … never actually achieve it?

Oh, they actually loved it in 20s (except for Bordigists). Except they admitted that it was still Capitalism.

It doesn't.

Unless you intend to go caveman, this has no relevance to contemporary situation.

If you have private property in industrial economy, you must have production for exchange and market. If you have exchange system - you have private property. Those are inseparable today.

I consider it delusional to go to market "socialism". How many people will be self-employed or in co-ops? 1%. 5% tops. That's it. We are already centralized. Only not by Socialist state, but by Capitalist finance capital.

The only way to get market "socialism" is to forcibly decentralize everything after Revolution - privatize factories, shops, etc. But that's patently insane: efficiency will drop.

But if you don't do it, if you have 95% of population working for state - it is not mixed economy. That's planned economy. Pretending otherwise is retarded. And yet, Wolff does exactly this. Instead of discussing reality, he creates delusional pseudo-socialists who are marginalized from the mainstream Socialist thought. Morons who start screaming about State Capitalism at the first mention of state ownership - as if there could be any other way to manage economy in 21st century!

Moreover, he has the gall to simultaneously support Green - the only non-Socialist movement that must fight for centralized management of industrial economy at all costs, otherwise it is impossible to control impact on ecology.

1) no, you retard. It is impossible to buy MoP with your own money. And financial slavery IS NOT Socialism, even if Wolff pretends it is.

2) no, you retard. It shows that you don't need revolution and Capitalism works fine. At least it would show, if it worked. But it doesn't because you can't buy equipment and have to sell yourself to banks.

This summarizes the typical Holla Forums poster's relationship to reading books.

you know it to be true

There is no point in reforming society without revolutionary vanguard. Syndicalists in Italy are a living proof of this.

wdhmbt?

When did anyone in this thread deny the role of a Vanguard? I don't know if anyone has even mentioned it tbh

It only means that you are a dogmatic.

This sounds a lot like activly undermining capitalist dogma, ie. only hierachical organisation is possible, that means coops are shit.

No, it only means you're wasting your time, you can't predict what Communism will look like, how could you possibly know what a completely classless or stateless society would look like? How could that be mapped out? The point is to create a movement towards the negation of Capital, and through that negation the conditions of Communism organically arise, anything else is just fantasy, which is fun, but not very useful outside the realm of art.

How do you convince anyone to follow you when you cant even say whats to be done? How do you prevent reactionary forces from taking over when you dont plan how to keep the revolution secure, by making sure you can maintain atleast a basic level of needs? A revolution doesnt happen every at once, it has to spread and its unstable, being unorganised means death and being organised means making plans.

Most production, in the West at least, is undertaken by public corporations now. The shareholders in them are relatively weak, and the boards of directors notoriously corrupt. Executive-level management has become, I would say, the new ascendant class. They appropriate the surplus value of workers, but while they do it in the name of the shareholders, they really serve themselves. It's weird.
Don't expect that to be understood by any of the "muh sdade gabitalism" types. Marx understood that the rise of the corporation meant the fall of private property in its traditional sense back in the late 19th century.

One of the appeals of the "state-capitalist" critique is to make it seem like 20th century attempts at socialism is an even worse system then Western capitalist imperialism. Despite the fact that state-spending makes up between 35-50% of most economic activity in Western countries and the state sector is completely monetized via the public debt/bond market. Modern Western capitalism is actually more state-capitalist in the real sense then the Soviet system under Stalin is alleged to be because the capitalists actually make private profits from the debts incurred by the state that they themselves control! How's that paid for? Generally with taxation on workers income which was generally absent under the Soviet system under Stalin.

Essentially, everyone is a debtor to the collective capitalist of the state and their income is confiscated by the law and thrown into the collective pot, only to shared out to private capitalists who voluntarily injected money into the system in order to extract it at interest.

And this is somehow not "totalitarian" and not true state-capitalism etc.

As for your point on the managerial class that's quite true, and in fact that's by design as members of the American business class recognized that shareholders could be bad for business. Thus trend started with the Depression and intensified with the "golden age" of capitalism in the 50s-60s when capitalists pointed to the fact they were taking more of their wealth in the form of income ("labor") as proof their wealth was earned, and America was achieving something like socialism etc.

Fast forward and activist shareholders have regained some power but the board room has counterbalanced it with even worse moves like debt fueled mergers and other "poison pill" strategies.

As for the financial system there is no great private financial house a la the Rothschilds and Morgans. It's the hedge funds and other "institutional investors" (like Black Rock) who are the real goliaths.

That is another kind of "collective" capitalism though in a private form workers pensions are put in the hands of managers whose job it is to give them their money back at interest. They don't personally own these funds but they control their investment and pay themselves enormous salaries.

These institutional investors actually make up an enormous proportion of the capital raised in the OECD.

Despite the private Western lassiez-faire individualist forms retained from the era of bourgeois revolution you're absolutely correct–capital accumulation in the West is extremely abstract and "collective".

really made me think

Worker cooperatives have production for exchange without private property.

Those numbers come straight from your ass. I'm not saying we can transform capitalism into market socialism by just building cooperatives, but a mass movement could make them a regular, permanent feature of society that would act as a constant critique of capitalism and help in its erosion–though it would also require reform and revolution and all the other things.

I think you're onto something here, but it would, I think, be disingenuous to compare capital's effect of consolidation with something like central planning.

They're already private. A revolution isn't a change in production, fam, it's men with guns killing each other, and nothing else. Afterwards, when it comes to production and distribution, either (or both) can be either centralized or decentralized.

I really, really hope you're not taking the efficiency argument seriously, because markets are inherently more efficient than planning. I've been happy in the past to say that planning's benefits may outweigh its inefficiencies, but if you're contending that efficiency is a critical factor that we need to make tradeoffs in order to maximize, you're going to destroy your own position.

Maybe you should let some of your leftcom buddies in this thread know that.
Also, I don't know if you were implying this or not, but just to be clear: I don't advocate a mixed economy.

I can't tell if you're being hyperbolic or just focusing on the macroscopic here. If the former: yes, it is possible to buy productive machinery using your own money. If the latter: you'd just use debt, like any other sane startup. Before you respond how I already know you're going to do anyway, I hope you understand that debt does not confer ownership of a firm's assets. I get the feeling that I'm still going to be in for spergouts about how loans are capitalism somehow.

Not every type of production that can take place under the capitalist system today is inherently capitalist. Sharecropping, for example, is essentially modern serfdom.

Everything you've described is basic immediate strategy, what I'm saying is that Socialists can't make broad schematics of what the coming world after this one is, because that isn't how reality works, and I don't know if any successful Marxist revolutionaries have even done that in the past, my only real problem with contemporary MLs and Market Socialists is that they seem to think they can micromanage the shape of the world to come, they think they can recreate the material conditions of previous epochs, and even think to do so is favorable, that it means you've got a real "plan" that you can sell to the Proletariat, it's like they've forgotten the entire point of Marx's philosophy, they've forgotten that we have to respond to the material conditions of our own time, they've forgotten that the endgoal of Communism isn't some obtuse State which micromanages "market that isn't really a market" with "currency that doesn't really function as currency" the endgoal of Communism is a complete negation of the current state of things, if we discard that then I'd say there isn't all that much reason to be a Socialist at all to be honest, because if the only option is the creation of zero growth Social Democratic welfare states that easily collapse within a few decades at most, then humans are completely fucked as a species, but I think that isn't true, I just think too many anons on this board have swallowed a lot of Liberal ideology and haven't actually read all that much Marx yet. I mean, look at this faggot or this retard do these anons sound like they understand even basic history or economics? I don't mean to bully, but this board puts so much emphasis on reading theory, but half the posters on here are terminally retarded. No offense comrades.

Cooperatives can be large, centralized orgs. Finance too, can be socialized and made public. You're not presenting a real argument for these things to be consolidated under state control. Why should we possibly trust a state that powerful?

Wolff has repeatedly advocated for a mass movement of the state facilitating the workers getting control of the MOP through public finance and subsidizing, as well as the first right of refusal.

I wonder how it changes things for socialism. Could you convince the public of socialism by framing it as "everyone having an equal share in public corporations' stock"? That's essentially a lie, but if most production is ostensibly "owned" by anyone in the public who can buy a share, yet serving the interests of disloyal managers…you can see the parallels, right? You just have to slip in the little detail that votes would no longer be weighted by share ownership.
I was under the impression that they just printed money. But you're essentially right. The fact that I can make a profit off of every taxpayer by simply buying government-issued bonds should be insane to anyone who thinks about it for more than ten seconds.
I will never understand why anyone would think that it's a good idea to put your retirement fund into an actively-managed account. The only sane thing to do with it is put it an index fund, which requires essentially zero management except for upfront fees and redemption.

Anyway, I'm glad someone else here actually has some grasp on the modern financial situation of our world. I think we need a new understanding of modern capitalism, because it's so different now that it really bears only a loose relation to its conception in the 19th century.

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The thing is that you retards even attack people that say stuff like "lets organise in local basic democracies and municipalise the economy instead of giving it to the state after the revolution" as utopians. When the one thing we should have learned after all these failed revolutions that mainting the basic revolutionary actors of the councils/whatever is the most important step in protecting the revolution. Mechanisms and plans activly change our chance at surviving the counterrevolutionary onslaught which will be much, much worse than in the past. Your anti-utopian shill crusade recently just reeks of lazyness and not wanting to analyse the specific mistakes that happend in organising. While material conditions are important, if not the most important, looking at the details and understanding how powerstructures allowed revisionism or whatever you call deadly ideological compromise to happen.

I've always felt like ancoms and leftcoms should be natural allies on this board, but sometimes we end up arguing even when we're nearly advocating the same exact thing tbh

You're not fooling anyone leftcom.

I don't think any Leftcoms disagree with Communalism because your "paxis is just too good!", it more so has to do with your rejection of the Proletariat as the central revolutionary subject for the negation of Capital, and your broad rejection of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in favor of "local democracy" as a broad panacea to everything without any kind of investigation into the actual class character of said democracy.

How does that change anything of the way of commodity production or how power is distributed under capitalism? I think that analysis is important but it doesnt really change the workings of capitalis,.

You're thinking is mostly on the right track; it does make it easier to sell because its easier convince people that on the efficacy of expropriating gigantic corporations which are often state-subsizided then it is on the notion that you want to seize assets from the local shipowner or petty-entrepenuer.

I like you're thinking on how these public investors fleece private investors and are run by corrupt management. It really routes the argument that all that will occur by instituting socialism will be the creation of some corrupt bureaucracy when in fact this corrupt bureaucracy exists already and it exists in the private sector just as much as the public sector.

It's important to drive home that the answer to this problem should be worker control and revolution not stronger laws in support of the stockholder who passively earns income from enterprises he doesn't manage.

One thing about the bond-market is that it underscores that capitalists are totally in favor of the state when they stand to make a profit. So we move beyond the false dichotomy of public vs. private bourgeois ownership and towards the issue of worker control and planning of society.

As for the question of how modern capitalism works there are these two guys. I think Lenin is the closest to an authentic Marxist analysis then the Monthly Review school but they also have some important insights.
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/

I probably side more with the orthodox Marxists on the issue of the rate of profit then I do with Sweezy et al. but they have an important perspective on the issue of monopoly/state-interference under capitalism.

There are others but most people seem to be interested in just LARPing like its the 19th century and ignoring any fragment from the later Marx and Engels on how one might view the advanced capitalist system of our time.

communization fam


I'm legit ancom. I like how leftcoms completely buttblast MLs

t. Stirner

And yet all they wish to do is try the same old things as the ML's, retracing the steps of lenin right into the place of Stalin.

Ideological United Front of revisionist socialists confirmed over and over again. Funny how ya'll can never seem to unite in practice tho.

Absolutely not, and this goes much more so for today than for yesterday. Consult chapter 3 of this: libcom.org/library/eclipse-re-emergence-communist-movement.

The proletariat also exists outside of the workplace you know? When they go home into their municipalities they dont suddenly loose their status as proletarians. I mean there are probably communalists who reject class conflict but Bookchin clearly didnt dismiss class conflict. Reducing the proletarian individual into the conflict he experiences at his workplace is stupid, thats all that I drew from Bookchin. Accusations of utopianism from leftcoms are just as anoying and unprecise as antiorganisation anarchists whining. Just because you understand the power of describing a better future and reason why one kind of organisation(confederalism) is necessary to protect democracy which in turn is mandatory to protect the revolution doesnt mean you are an utopian who thinks they can ignore capitalism by convincing people to join their stupid commune. Leftcoms often seem as if they think that "the right material conditions" are some kind of mystical thing that unites the proletariat behind some intrinsic ideology when it is just people being in a really shit situation caused directly by capitalism, seeing the conflict clearly.

same

He's an academic in America, if he says anything actually pro-revolution his ass is grass.

Because the proletariat sure has done a good job at independently organizing en masse and overthrowing the bourgeoisie to establish the DotP, haven't they?

It's not like workers have continuously failed to achieve more than trade union-consciousness and have repeatedly demonstrated their commitment to reformism and willingness to accept bourgeois nationalism over the past 150 years, right?

in what way?
subjective price theory has its own share of problems no less than transformation problem
from nonsensical assumptions about the form of demand and supply curves, to problems with aggregation, to marginal productivity assumptions clusterfuck

Cockshott said it better than anyone
theory that ==NOT EVEN WRONG==

Because everyone knows the best way to get normies to turn socialist is to brain them with all 3 volumes of Capital.

You won't make anyone a socialist by telling them capitalism with added democracy is socialism either, though. You'll just get edgy socdems like you.

I'm not a socdem. Neither is Wolff for that matter.

you mean their usual screeching?
for all their talking about establishing DotP, they will never convince anyone without a constructive program

has narco larping gone too far?

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Stop being so gullible

For fuck's sake a leftcom of all people should know sometimes things take time.

- Karl Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Again, actually understanding what Marx wrote would really help here. You won't know what to do until the time actually comes. You won't get rid of capitalism by selling the proles your special brand of socialism. Socialism will be achieved through the real movement of the working class and society as a whole, not some elitist vanguard party that supposedly 'represents' the workers and knows what's best for them

I would like to work at a worker co-op more than most of the jobs available to me, therefore I support him until we can progress past that as well.

you're not convincing anyone with your vague phrases
what movement is real and what is not?

what you can't get, is that you just can't build mass movement without a constructive program

This. Marx was BTFO by Stirner but he still had plenty of spooks, including authenticity.

And what you can't get, is that you just can't build a mass movement until the collapse of capitalism is imminent. I am being vague where Marx was being vague, because I, like he, don't know, and can't know, what the transition to socialism will look like until capitalism as a system fails to function.

Marginalism in price isn't subjective. There's a qualitative aspect that comes in before you get to price, which is marginal utility. (Though a lot of later Austrian school types just went "lol dollarz = utility :::DDDD" and left it at that, which is utterly retarded.)


hownew.ru
Reddit got absolutely butthurt over RDW saying "Holla Forums" out loud on his show.


This. I only have a few years to live, and there's no revolution around the corner from what I can see. Hopefully there will be in my lifetime. But the best way for me to act in my self-interest without actively fucking over my fellow workers is to try to work in a cooperative, or even to form one.

Capitalism fails to function perpretually. Every time a kid starves to death, every second that we have 6 times as many vacant houses as we need to fix homelessness in America, every time someone dies of an entirely curable disease the system has failed. The idea that capitalism has to fail in some grand sense is an arbitrary measure. With all the built-in systems that try to keep the system running there won't be a moment where everything suddenly collapses, but a sputtering that happens over a period of time. It's going to happen like the dialectic process, things will change incrementally and subtly with the system degenerating until one day - surprise! - people rise up. Of course, it'll only be a surprise to the people who aren't aware of the revolutionaries organizing beforehand.

I think he means failure in the sense of "failing to reproduce itself."

what about mass labor movement when capitalism was still in its infancy?
your fatalism just reveals your intellectual impotency

utility in a marginalist theory is a subjective category

There is a difference between moral failures and failure to reproduce itself as a system. Look into the inherent contradictions of capitalism, anarchy of production, tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the impossibility of expansion on an ever increasing, exponential scale. Things like the tendency of the rate of profit to fall will take time, like you said, and are not manifested over night. The revolution, when it comes, will be a surprise to no Marxist who is paying attention

Are you talking about primitive accumulation?
Maybe I should have been more precise. You cannot have a popular movement that aims to dismantle capitalism before capitalism itself no longer can continue to function

You're misusing "subjective" in place of "qualitative."

I thought the point [was] to change [the world. Or does that bit of Marx not count?

so was Paris Commune DotP or not?


from each additional unit of a particular commodity you get less and less utility
how is this not subjective?

And when do you think wage labor began? With the bourgeois revolutions?

No, it began with the invention of agriculture. A farmer who lacked the skills to build a mill would give a portion of the grain to a builder. The grain in this case is the currency, the builder the wage laborer who does not own the products he constructed.

The product of that builder's work would then enrich the farmer's family for generations, allowing them to continue seeking wage labor until eventually purchasing slaves or entering a landlord/serf relationship.

This is a tale as old as time. You can quote Marx at me all you want as if he were infallible, but his interpretation - though it did accurately criticize capitalism as it existed in the 19th century - did not offer a viable way to solve it's problems. Hence why the revolutionary theory of Lenin and Mao and all the others have been necessary to create the deformed socialist states that we saw in the 20th century.

A solely planned economy has never proven stable. The USSR implemented market reforms as a way to delay the collapse due to its inherent contradictions. SFRY implemented market reforms as a way to delay the collapse due to its inherent contradictions. PRC implemented market reforms as a way to delay the collapse due to its inherent contradictions.

And an unplanned, communal economy becomes untenable once the population grows beyond everyone's ability to know everyone else.

To put it into Hegelian terms, Marx asked what we do to build a post-mercantilist/imperialist economy. To him, the thesis was Capitalism, the antithesis Communism, and the synthesis Socialism.

To me this approach fails because it proceeds from the wrong question. We must ask how to build a postcapitalist economy. The thesis was Marxism-Leninism, the antithesis is welfare state capitalism, and the synthesis is market socialism.


And then there's this asshole.

Because it holds true for everybody and for all commodities. It's jut not quantifiable. (Unless you're from the later school that equated "how much you're willing to give up," i.e., price, with marginal utility, which is absurd because it fails to account for different purchasing powers.) Economists will occasionally refer to units of utility as "utils," but that's almost a running joke. Though with neuroscience and fMRIs, we may one day reach a point where utility can actually be meaningfully quantified.

I'm aware of these. None are going to suddenly hit a breaking point all of a sudden. They will break down the same as the examples I gave (trying to sound artful and shit) getting progressively worse until something changes. Capitalism is inherently rotting/degenerating (however you want to put it). My examples are also failures of the system to replicate itself because when someone dies or is unable to work, the system has failed to incorporate them into itself. These failures contribute to the system's collapse just like the ones you listed, since they make people more desperate and more willing to oppose the system / unable to participate.

You could not possibly be more wrong. Agriculture was undertaken at the subsistence for thousands of years.

*subsistence level

it's not
don't even start on aggregating
with a representative agent we are back at square one

It's not currency because it's not a medium of exchange. The builder is going to use the grain he gets, rather than exchange it for a third item, so it isn't money. Also, this isn't a wage; the farmer in your example is compensating the builder for the final product to be delivered, not for the number of labor-hours he is contributing.

I'm a market socialist as well and I've had this thought before, but I sometimes wonder if we are knee-jerking against planning too hard because of the Soviet experience. When you look at the improvements in AI and IT planning looks increasingly feasible. In my marksoc society from day one I would be investing huge amounts into developing technology capable of facilitating efficient planning based on production for use. Depending on the speed of technological changes its possible that the need for a market transitory stage will disappear in the future.

Don't interpret the world with an ideal fantasy of what you think it should look like. Change it by actually dealing with and understanding how it actually works


I haven't yet read The Civil War in France, so I can't form a coherent opinion on that yet. Though I am more interested on revolution on a global scale, against an inherently global capitalism.


I'm not saying that they will hit an arbitrary "breaking point," but that they will make it so that capitalism literally can no longer reproduce itself. Only when the system cannot reproduce itself can a new system replace the old. Here, I am more concerned with the formula of reproduction M-C…P…C'-M' than I am with with anything else

Could be. I think the main objection to the Soviet system should be to its undemocratic nature, censorship, forced labor (who the fuck thought that was anything other than a cruel joke on the entire notion of socialism?), etc.
I'm a market socialist, too, but I wouldn't be dead-set against planning as long as it could be done in a relatively libertarian way. Perhaps the anarchist model, where people who don't contribute to the plan simply aren't allowed to receive the products of social labor, rather than being forced into labor camps or some other awful punishment.

Yeah no shit. That's why the idea that it was reddit that did it is fucking stupid. Read context and learn to understand sarcasm before responding

I have a pet theory that, as Asian economies develop and slowly transition more toward consumer markets, the global bourgeoisie will try to make Africa, the only less-developed region, into the new center of sweatshop labor. I hope it fails.

Sarcasm doesn't always come across well in text, fam.

so what do you propose convicts should do?
just sit on their ass?
prisoners in the SU were paid for their labor if you didn't know
not the full value of their work, but that is to be expected

If you still have commodity reproduction, as you do in market "socialism," you still have capitalism. With M-C…P…C'-M', you still have all of the contradictions of capitalism. You haven't changed, or synthesized, the situation at all. You simply put a different name on it.

Not forced labor. The purpose of prisons should be to isolate dangerous people from society, for society's protection. Not to be forced into slavery.
Prisoners in the US are, too, at dogshit rates well below the minimum wage. They do it because they have nothing better to do most of the time, which I can understand, but profiting off of prisoners' labor is monstrous. There are other ways to be constructive in confined or remote locations that don't involve making a buck for porky.

So for thousands of years, literally everyone farmed and made all of their own implements?

OK, buddy.

why not euthanase them then?
far more humanitarian than locking a human being in the cage like some animal

Yes? Why is that hard to believe? Agriculture is something like 10,000 years old. In fact, it was agriculture that made the division of labor possible, because only after the development of agriculture was it possible for one person to produce more than he could eat. It is literally impossible for the division of labor to have pre-dated, or shared the same date of invention, as agriculture. Read a fucking book on it sometime.

Spoken like a true tankie. I'm not saying prisoners should be prohibited from doing constructive things. Quite the opposite; it's necessary for people's mental health. I'm saying they shouldn't be put into forced labor. Which you would know if you had actually read my post.

Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production in a transferrable, undemocratic manner. Has nothing to do with the exchange of goods.

Planning and socialism are not one and the same, neither are markets and capitalism. The US has market capitalism, the USSR had (and PRC still has to a lesser extent) planned capitalism.

Planned socialism is a thing. Market socialism is also a thing.

Considering urbanization didn't start until around 4000BCE and agriculture had been in use for ten to twelve thousand years before that, yeah, probably.

No shit, that's what I'm saying. The first time someone worked to produce surplus for another based on ownership of the means of production predates currency.

You can be pedantic over whether it happened immediately when agriculture was invented, or after a slight delay, it doesn't matter. You're not arguing the point, your nitpicking.

so they can sit on their ass and maybe even live like some Breivik consuming surplus?
why should society tolerate parasites?

You're equating surplus with wage labor, you retard. That's not pedantic or nitpicking, that's just you being wrong. Just like you're wrong about the division of labor being as old as agriculture. This is top-tier fucking Dunning-Kruger.

This might be hard for a tankie to understand, but most prison sentences aren't for life. And sometimes, people in prison can even contribute usefully to society once they're out of prison.
Oh, I should probably clarify. In some countries that aren't the USSR, people can leave prison because judges (these people that interpret the law, don't worry about it for now) decide that they have to spend some time in prison, but not all their time. It's pretty complex and probably Trotskyist bourgeois imperialism, but I thought you should know.

SU had prison colonies of various types
some colonies were towns that prisoners couldn't leave until their term was over
essentially it was exile

anyway, even in the SU where ex-prisoners were guaranteed job in accordance with their profession and they could acquire worker profession in the colony where they worked, they often committed crimes again upon release

what society should do with such professional convicts?

Exchange is how profit and capital on an ever increasing scale is realized. Also, only through exchange can the exchange value of a commodity be realized. The competition of exchange between capitalists on the market is where many, if not all, of the inherent contradictions of capitalism lie. Without expansion, there is no such thing as capital. Expansion can only be realized through the sale and purchase of an ever increasing amount of commodities. This is done through exchange.

Well, the thing is that would have been the next logical step. How do you propose to abolish capitalism?

It's not contradictions that lead to a system's downfall.

t. Deleuze

he's also made clear they did have markets and private property. But certainly, I think he makes a very effective point that when workers have agency in the system, which cooperatives certainly gives them, they will steer things towards communism much more effectively than a party clique ever could. Read Luxemborg.

You misunderstand what those contradictions are, then. Something like the tendency of the rate of profit to fall isn't something that can just be easily overcome by the system, that's why it's a contradiction.
Say a contradiction, such as anarchy of production, leads to an increased amount of unemployment. Due to being unemployed, some of a worker's family dies due to malnourishment. This is not a hypothetical, but in fact has happened many times before
Most who well read in Marx are definitely not in this camp, whatever the hell 'attrition' means

And yet being overcome it is! Look at the economy around you! Yes, the rate of profit is going down in many places, and it's being dealt with in one of two ways. 1) Rent. Big firms increasing market power, decreasing competition and increasing the use of the state to keep profit steady. Artificial barriers to entry, whether initial investment, patents, advertising, or other legal hurdles. Even UBI. See: youtube.com/watch?v=8tVmSHEIKwk 2) A rising rate of exploitation. The decreasing negotiating power of American workers, the outsourcing of jobs. Now that wages have risen to Latin American levels in China, you're already seeing jobs leave for Vietnam and India.

Ours is an economy moving away from commodity production as the driver, and towards raw power and rent. Giant companies will produce commodities with either automation or third world labor for sale in the first world, who will buy these products not with wages, but the rent of being citizens to the state they live in.

He was referring to internal contradictions there.

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