When we look at the transition from slave societies to feudal ones, we can notice that, as the development of roman villas into proper feudal domains shows, it was a process of "islands" existing in one areas(Gaul and the surrounding areas) and "classical" slave societies in the other ones.
Same often applied for feudalism vs. capitalism, where "islands" of capitalism existed among feudalistic realms, like the English after their civil war or the Dutch who pioneered market bubbles with their Tulip mania about 150 years before the French Revolution.
How much of that can be applied to the transition from capitalism? I understand the capitalism's need to expand due to the production for profit means anybody trying to remove himself from the world market would become a target because muh profits, but is waiting until global perfectly unified market and then trying to overthrow it all at once truly the only choice?
When we look at the transition from slave societies to feudal ones, we can notice that...
age
I do think it would be interesting if commies could try to move into some area with lax government en masse and set up their own state, and I don't mean a micronation but a real nation.
vertically integrated corporations are the islands of the next mode of production
The primary obstacle to that approach to socialism is the interconnected nature of modern global capitalism. Capitalism is in constant need of expansion, so carving a chunk out of it and making it socialist would trigger an existential dilemma which could only be resolved by reintegrating what was lost.
I got a wave of nostalgia from seeing "age" instead of "bump."
Maybe the world isn't a computer on which you install a new operating system. Maybe you keep running into exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions because your technological enframing of history is a case of the map not being the territory.
what
I have no idea what he is trying to say, but I am sure that it sounded deep in his head when he wrote it.
It's a pseudointellectual version of 'it only works in theory'
I was actually thinking about that that, especially since corporations are planned, not to mention that things like international trade treaties seem to be a foundation for the system where the bourgies themselves slowly override the state apparatuses (see: those lovely cases of corporations suing the entire countries)
If this is the case, then what is the next step? Worldwide ancapistan?
I think the problem is that people still have this poster's backward understanding of what these 'islands' look like. I think it's both historically and contemporaneously inaccurate to say that these islands have been or will be geographical.
Instead, it's more accurate to say that these islands were industrial. That is to say, the capitalist mode of production existed for a few key industries (tulips, cloth, wine) suspended in a sea of the old mode of production (grain production remained mainly tributary, for example). In those industries where the capitalist mode of production dominates, it is clearly superior and the tributary mode cannot effectively recover.
We see the same process today. There are islands of the communist mode of production in information-based industries (software, media, etc) while the rest of the economy remains capitalist. As previously, in the parts of the economy that have adopted the new mode it is clearly superior, and the old mode can only gain temporary advantage by imposing artificial restrictions that are eroded quickly (eg, copyright).
Starting up a state amounts to a political change, an attempt to declare the old mode of production null and void through fiat. It won't work. You must have the new mode of production in hand. When you have that, you don't need a 'separate state' to impose new social relations - the new social relations will flow from the new mode of production as a matter of course.
Trying to take over the state before the mode of production has been revolutionised is a fool's errand. You would be exactly like all the peasants who rebelled during the dominance of the tributary mode of production without having a new mode of production to replace it: Even when they won they had no choice but to shuffle around the current order. The revolts of the 20th century suffered the same fate, which spawned the 'socialism' that some misguided adherents stick to even today. Revolt without a new mode of production can only yield a return to the old mode of production.
Actually, the problem with the Left is that the our technological framing of history is exactly correct, but we ignore that fact in our praxis. The Left instead spends its time trying to impose new social relations on societies that do have not developed a new mode of production in the womb of the old society. The result is failure, every time. Failure that Marx would have said "I told you so" about. The only people that realise this and are trying to break out of this cycle of failure are the leftcoms, but everyone else shits on them for it.
Cyberpunk, not quite ancapistan, nations will probably still notionally exist, and the police, but states will be all but openly run by corporations instead of the process being secret, politicians will be the ultra rich themselves instead of just their representatives
Well gee, sorry. OP started talking about countries so what do I know.
I'm not trying to shit on you, it's an absolutely dominant view on the Left. I was just pointing out that the Left's analysis is seriously lacking here.
Sorry, I meant the same thing as you, I just used an oversimplification
An example of enframing is a forest tribe who see the world as animated by spirits, a dimension in which they merely wander, to them there is no distinction between biology and geology. The language you use forms a model that is technological in nature, you form your thoughts around the assumption that history is machine like, that it has modes, that it produces, that it works or is faulty.
Everything works in theory, theory is only bound by it's own rules.
The fact is ignored, because in order to keep the fact as fact, it has to be ignored when working in it's servitude. All facts, all holy principles, only really live as idols, kept alive by worship, not emulation.
The leftcoms are not trying to do anything. They are like Mr. Salacia on Metalocalypse. You know that they have some grand plan, but all it ever seems to involve is sitting around and watching stuff happen.
Oh god, linguistic pomo shit. Fuck off, Derrida.
no transitions like that happen.
the only authentic transition was going from hunter-gathering to agriculture (The Neolithic Revolution). And we're still in the agriculture phase for the foreseeable future, although our technology change much will change in terms of organization and worker/owner relationships. Unless a major environmental shift happens forcing us to back to hunter-gatherer mode.
There's basically two modes of economics: hunting-gathering and agriculture. They aren't simply determined by the material conditions but also by the will and goals of the people. And both modes will incorporate a certain amount of trade and both will differ in the technology they use as time passes, but fundamentally these are the only modes we engage in. And everything else is a minor detail.
Better than doing stuff around while not having any coherent grand plan
The best linguistic shit comes from analytics, Wittgenstein and Korzybski.
Marxism falls apart at the meta-level.
Sure thing genius. We might as well say there are basically only two kinds of people, those who have hair and those who don't, and that everything else is a minor detail. How's that working for you?
OR Marxists ignore their own theory regarding social change because they don't know how to change the mode of production and can't be arsed to figure it out, so they instead try to turn Marx on his head because that involves doing stuff they know how to do: political agitation and philosophising. It's a classic case of the 'streetlight effect'.
Also has anyone ever told you that you write like a cunt?
fuckin love Metalocalypse
The leftcoms are trying to figure out how the mode of production can be revolutionised and how production can be made directly social again. Part of that involves identifying already-existing trends that point the way toward communisation, and part of it involves attempting to use new technologies to create a new mode of production. The cybernetics thread is crawling with leftcoms and sympathisers, because they can practically smell a new mode of production brewing.
Also your fetishisation of action for its own sake is showing. Flailing around without a real plan has led to many, many failures. Stop for a second and ask yourself: Where is the new mode of production? If you don't have an answer to that question, you don't have a revolution. If you don't have a new mode of production, you will never be able to kill all the kulaks, because the kulak will be inside you all along.
Correct.
that would be a false analogy since hair is not fundamental to what a human being is, but the The Neolithic Revolution was fundamental to how humans organized their life, culture and economics. Once agriculture replaces nomadic hunting-gathering you inevitably get the master-worker dynamic, you get landlords, you get taxation, you get large static communities that need armies to protect their produce and property, etc…
>I think it's both historically and contemporaneously inaccurate to say that these islands have been or will be geographical.
>Instead, it's more accurate to say that these islands were industrial.
I was aware of that fact, yet I failed to fully realize its importance, thanks a lot for highlighting it user.
...
They don't know how to change the mode of production because there is no such thing as "changing the mode of production" as a conceptual purity. There is no computer to install a new operating system on. What they can do is work in service of this idol, they have to make it theirs for it to be anything at all, the most successful marxists were those who made it their own: Mao, Lenin, Tito… It's still a question if there is a bang when a tree falls in the forest when there's no one to hear it fall, there is no question if a page in a book has any meaning if there's no one to read it.
Communism is always defined as wish fulfillment, as a fantasy, "a classless society", "worker ownership of the means of the production", "abolishing the present state of things", which is then supposed to encompass the entire world. This fantasy can by it's very nature not be fulfilled, for any attempt to do so will not be fantastical. This contradiction makes communists create horizons to attach their actions too, some of it being "the people", history itself, "materialism". Common point in all of them is future-indefinite, the fulfillment of the fantasy is not a date somewhere in the future at which the deed will be done, but a dot on the horizon to give place to the present. Moving towards it is like chasing the sun when it sets.
In friendlier terms.
OK this part I definitely agree with. This conception of communism is absolutely the most prevalent one on the Left - even, unfortunately, among the communisation theorists that I am normally quite sympathetic to. However, it's totally misguided to suggest that this is the only conception of communism that exists. I would also argue that it's off-base to suggest that this millenarian communism was Marx's understanding of communism. I'm trying quite hard to recover a concrete understanding of communism from the clutches of the semi-religious Left that you decry.
Which brings me to your first paragraph.
This is totally incorrect, and cedes the entire field to the pseudo-religious 'Marxists' that you criticise in the second paragraph. Changing the mode of production is a concrete activity - weaving cloth for sale on the market (indirectly social production) instead of for the direct use of your family or lord (directly social production) is an example of a changing the mode of production. For a modern example, contributing code to a free software project instead of coding proprietary software for a wage is changing the mode of software production from capitalist (characterised by indirectly social production) to communist (characterised by directly social production). The mode of production is most definitely something that has been and can be changed - and changed consciously.
Welcome to the internet.
Step away from the computer screen, Mr. Autism.
free software is literally communism
Comrade Stallman approves of this message. You will not be picked off of His Holy Foot for consumption on this day.
Have you tried switching your rhizome on and off? If that doesn't work, try reversing the polarity of your ontology.
If anything there are ever shrinking islands of capitalism on ever widening seas of socialism. Capital still predominates, but it's assailed on literally every side.
Explain.
So piracy is direct action?
Combinations of de industrialization, general economic decay, and technological innovations brought via the internet have hollowed out the material base of capitalism in large swathes of the US. It's only exacerbated by capital increasing its legal grip on these regions to wring every last drop of liquid capital from them to the ruin of local economies.
So in these places where capitalism is failing, residents have to either turn to communal solutions in order to pool resources (largely relying on things like food pantries, civil services, or religious institutions, depending on availability, but also moving toward other solutions not traditionally employed in a capitalist context), especially as even rural chain or franchise stores close in these areas.
Because of this, outside major cities or lingering industrial zones, the machinery of capital has ground to a halt. It still has a great deal of influence, but it has to brutally enforce this dominance with totalitarian moves by the state. In general though, out side of large cities your choices are either the military, reform, or drug addiction. The general population is progressively being disconnected from direct interaction with capital, except where it has to enforce its priviIege, like this recent fight between farmers and John Deere, or Hollywood's cracking down on piracy, things like that.
This is a total illusion. The export of blue collar (and since the 2000s white collar) jobs offshore, and of non-offshorable service jobs to immigrants, can't continue. It's slavery 2.0, and will meet a similar end.
There's pretty much two ways this will go down:
a. The 1st-world is drug down to the 3rd-world's level in terms of compensation and regulations, we're already hearing whispers of this idea with "onshoring" to the most destitute communities in the 1st-world.
b. The policy of total economic suicide in the 1st-world triggers enough popular outrage for a repeat of the late-1800s protectionist labor mobilization.
Thanks
Isnt that essentially what the ussr, catalonia, rojova or any of other communist attempts have been?
Just like how the transition to socialism has been opposed and attacked, so had the transition to capitalism. Every time a feudal kingdom was overthrown, other kingdoms came to the rescue. They tried it in france, the royalty opposed it in the netherlands etc.
The only difference is that the abolishment of a feudal kingdom in one area didnt affect other areas aside from the opposition to the idea that it is the natural order sounds familiar. In order for a feudal kingdom to expand, they had to fight other kingdoms, and with the feudal lord gone, they still had the fight the same kind of battle. But with capitalism, the destruction of capitalism in one area restricts the access of the bourgeoisie to that, because they have no direct control over geographic areas, but rather control smaller parts within the capitalist system. Therefore, the destruction of capitalism in one area is the destruction of the power of all of the bourgeoisie, which is why it is much more fiercely opposed by the global capitalist class than local feudal lords opposed their opponent getting dethroned.