Truths you never understood until now

Me first: labour vouchers are utopian

Other urls found in this thread:

youtu.be/tqVGZhI5GY8?t=26m54s.
libcom.org/files/Gilles Dauvé- The Renegade Kautsky and his Disciple Lenin.pdf
youtu.be/E6ODS6_iz4Q
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch27.htm
marxists.org/glossary/terms/s/o.htm#socialisation.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1866/08/instructions.htm#05
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

OP is a faggot

Please define, in your own words, "scientific socialism" for me.

To take historic materialism as the main theoretical framework

Getting a STEM degree and progressing technology is the most revolutionary act.

Coops aren't socialism.
Neither are markets.

Ma nigga

All our troubles derive from being stuck in flesh.
Our pure essence gets constantly poisoned by the ills of the flesh.
Seek non-attachment to reach the path to enlightenment.

when people lust about killing rich capitalist it means nothing, they're just the personification of capital itself, the whole "killing your boss" thing is useless. I actually read Bordiga. He was right, the hell is not that the firm has a boss, its that the firm exists.

keep telling yourself that

Keep telling yourself there's going to be some glorious worker revolution.

these tbh

Bukharin deserved it, though Stalin was hardly in a position to criticize him.

You're correct, but also there's nothing wrong with wanting to extract a bit of revenge

Bukharin did literally nothing wrong

The death of Utopian Socialism was the worst thing to happen to the left.

Hello retard

This but unironically. Matter is our first and last prison, and only by breaking free of it without our consciousness perishing in the process will humankind find liberation.

I've for a while entertained the thought Marx might have spoiled a lot in regards to utopianism's real obsolescence.

Imagine if people like Lassalle and Proudhon went unopposed and that their theory had managed to bind itself to workers' movements. We'd no longer be here talking to coop fetishists and their pseudo-dual power fantasies if history had shown just how heavily it failed; there would be no need to refute them theoretically. Instead, we only now have the iota of possibility that their utopian heirs and similars take the rudder and head towards inevitable failure. Letting the contradictions and failures iron themselves out without anything but themselves opposing them might have been much better for the communist cause. Now we only have a single complete failure (Stalinism) to completely disregard instead of potentially ten different ones. Fuck Marx and his ruthless critique of all that exists in a sense tbh.

But there's still Marxists despite the Marxist revolutions ending in total failure, so obviously utopian failures would have done nothing.

I feel for you, and assorted transhumanists.

Define "Marxist revolution" and give me an example of a Marxist revolution, because the whole thrust of Marxism is to present a hypothetical economic and eschatological revolutionary view of history that only concerns itself with form, not content, i.e. class antagonism and rebellion against capital is capable of creating a revolutionary subject, and this revolutionary subject will necessarily be shaped in what we may define as "proletarian dictatorship" and will attempt to by whatever means to overcome itself. It was almost entirely inspired by just looking at history, and most paradigmatically the Communard uprising, as reference points. We can look at a given moment in time and say, "hey, this is likely to be possible this way", but we can't ever hope to come close to what the details to that would truly entail, and the more we try to cling on to X possibility to the more we need to monitor that possibility over time to see if it remains as viable, or viable at all.

For example, Leninism arises at a historical point where like during the Communard uprising, everything until the point of needing to concoct a praxis is determined by the situation. Lenin is more than clear in his writings in showing that Marx (on purpose) offers him no clear blueprint on how to effectively do revolution at all, just a basic framework of analysis, and from the situation he finds himself in within that framework springs forth a notion like vanguardism as organizational structure and revolutionary defeatism as strategy for dealing with imperialist wars. We can call Leninism to court and critique it because it can generally be seen as a particular content for revolution, but not Marxism, which only concerns itself with hypothesizing form and ends precisely there. If we want to discredit Marxism we have to attack the validity of its conceptions and assumptions, because that's all Marxism again expressly limits itself to having.

I think they would have done something. Utopian failures would at least in the first place have done something in that they would have completely discredited the suggestions brought forth by such and such particular utopian attempts, but they also would more and more bring to its knees the idea that you can blueprint your way out of history, forcing revolutionaries to themselves turn around and look at history where nothing was ever pre-planned: youtu.be/tqVGZhI5GY8?t=26m54s. And the self-vindication of utopianism's failure is not just the most effective at obsoleting utopianism, but if by chance the utopians manage to recuperate themselves while still in the driver's seat and rid themselves of their excess utopianism after becoming cognisant of it they may succeed anyways as they are more and more forced into submitting themselves obeying scientific socialism in all but name.

Unironic nazbols and self-described utopian socialists have no business calling anyone retarded. Now kill yourself faggot.

Stalinism didn’t fail Khrushchev’s revisionism did.

...

This

It's pretty obvious that Stalinism is going to quickly breed revisionism in a system though.

In what way do you think Stalin and Mao were crazy? I have the impression that what characterized Stalin (and maybe Mao too, not as familiar with him) was a cold, brutal pragmatism rather than being "crazy". A rejection of the millenarian dreams of perfect world socialism where everything is directly democratic and non hierarchical and instead a determination to just build a functioning nation as first priority.

ultimate redpill: gold is nature's form of labor vouchers

Proudhon invented the term scientific socialism and was acknowledged as a scientific socialist by Marx. Kill yourself.

Lenin was not a Marxist at all.
libcom.org/files/Gilles Dauvé- The Renegade Kautsky and his Disciple Lenin.pdf

That's literally retarded. By that logic all commodities are "labor vouchers" because they can be used to represent a quantity of labor.

climate will kill us before the world socialist revolution

Market socialism is a type of socialism. Leftcoms are a joke.

this shit again. OP doesn't even know how the word utopian is in the socialist sense is using it to mean 'it wont work' or w/e.

Workplace democracy and worker's self-management aren't very effective in creative industries. Accountable hierarchies and management are necessary is large-scale systems.

I feel like leftcoms have read utopian and scientific socialism and nothing else.

...

Why do you need to have a hierarchy in management anyways? Is there a reason why you couldn't just do it in a circular fashion rather than a top-down one?

Sure, but at some point you're going to need someone who's job it is to figure out what the workplace needs to get done to make sure it meets whatever goals have been set for it.
Plus, like I said, different industries require more or less management than others. Management shouldn't be viewed as a hierarchical position but as another form of specialized labor. After all, non-owner managers are proles too.

Yes i do you idiot

this

If you have the time, watch this guy speak about technology: youtu.be/E6ODS6_iz4Q
Basically he makes a good case that, other than information technology, we are struggling to advance forward, and the governments aren't trying to make us go faster, further, cheaper, etc.
He doesn't outright blame the free market, as he doesn't want to commit academic suicide, but clearly longs for state funded and organized research.

Op is retarded

So any of my fellow cockshotters going to reply to my idea for solving the shop problem in the TANS thread?

Fresh new screencaps hot off the presses

Well yeah there are, and I'm sure your poor cognitive capacities will surely enjoy this one, from volume 3 of Capital:
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch27.htm
>The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage. Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale. The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.
You know how co-ops are actually not very good because they maximise exploitation and the workers exploit themselves and thus have no personified capital to resist? That's basically this. See the text "The Myth of Mondrágon" by Sharryn Kashmir to see a first hand account of this fact, and most hilariously note the fact that, if anything, like with any other cooperative, social and economic life in them is if anything more conservative than in the more common Ltd.-types (and derivatives) for the very same reasons underlined before. Communism is destroyer of the eulogy of the business, not its ethicizer.

But there's more. Marx is talking about all the developments of capitalism, and how all these in itself are not good things, like money and industrialisation, but also that they are necessary requirements for communism to arise in the first place. These things help capitalism function better, because they enable better extraction and production. If you suppose that the co-op is even more efficient, because it's more productive (i.e. more exploitative) than the regular capitalist factory, it might actually be in some way helpful for communism too, but as noted at the very end of the quote in the exact same way that the stock company is useful. He is here predicting that co-ops will be used to escape the crisis of credit, which is what he further talks about in this chapter.

I feel really bad for whoever wrote that. It's a literal copy and paste from the Wikipedia article on socialized production, using as its source the exact same segment of the exact same quote. No, socialization != turning into the socialist mode of production, socialize = the forced conjoining and conditioning of individuals to a workplace in the productive realm, the more centralized productive realm (with things like public institutions, like the State or other governmental bodies of capital's inter-linking are examples of this). Whoever goes quote-mine hunting on Wikipedia should probably look for more reputable places instead: marxists.org/glossary/terms/s/o.htm#socialisation.

What's more is that in the very text cited (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific) Engels at length goes into opposing the Bernsteinean co-operative notion of socialism and revists prior debates Marx had with his spiritual predecessors, also co-op utopians, like Proudhon and Lassalle.

m8 my point was not that they constituted socialism but that the irrational hatred of some on here towards them as a transitional step is completely unfounded. Cooperatives are definitely something to be encouraged not discouraged as many leftcoms on here do.

And I mean the most damning thing is that you can find direct passages of Marx literally saying that co-operatives, like before, are not just literally capitalism with a different dance, but that they don't and aren't even capable of changing anything at all about capitalism in the short or long run:
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1866/08/instructions.htm#05
>[…] the co-operative system will never transform capitalist society. to convert social production into one large and harmonious system of free and co-operative labour, general social changes are wanted, changes of the general conditions of society, never to be realised save by the transfer of the organised forces of society, viz., the state power, from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves.
In other words, as noted in the last bolded part, only the complete social struggle which consists of seizing the State, transforming productive relations entirely, abolishing private property relations (whether in limited or cooperative forms) and finally overcoming the State itself, can constitute a truly new mode of production in any meaningful sense.

Make us a tl;dr plz

You're practicing a selective reading of what he said, implying that he said there's nothing good or encouraging about cooperatives. From the own link you posted.

Selective reading? My aim was to take a section of text that introduces something new. Of course he said that. Posting that as well would but be a rewording of the excerpt of Capital 3 I posted; they're a development of labour's struggle against capital just like trade unions are. They do not in and of themselves change anything.

I don't think anyone on here has preached solely cooperatives as praxis before. I just don't understand the irrational opposition on here by leftcoms. It seems like the only thing that is acceptable to them is their own specific interpretation of the party and everything else is utopian or opportunism

I'm not a leftcom, and I don't object co co-operatives because "they're not my specific interpretation of the party" (sick projection), but because they fundamentally don't change anything whatsoever. Our aim is to completely negate capitalism and the proletarian condition, not delude ourselves into thinking that its cooperativization changes anything about it on even close to a fundamental level, or even that it can potentially do so. For the latter point, let me tell you as a guy who works in a co-operative, that it's in no way different from any other business. To agree with the Marxist critique of co-ops and market socialism is not necessarily to be a leftcom, even though leftcoms are quite a bit more expressive of that critique than other posters here.

Holla Forums is always right

It improves the immediate lives of the workers who participate in them, and this isn't nothing. I never said I disagreed with Marx's critique of cooperatives, only that his critique has often been mischaracterized here as a complete rejection of them. No reason to be so hostile m8. What are you trying to prove?

...