What does anyone of us think of the computer scientist crypto-leftcom Paul Cockshott's essay on imperialism...

Say it with me.

FIRST WORLD GADSDENISM! NAZJEF GANG ATTACK!

his L part is pretty weak tho
at the core of Leninism is a theory of vanguardism
Cockshott is not enthusiastic about representative democracy in general and party democracy specifically, for him it is a necessary evil in situations where direct democracy cannot be used effectively
MLs in general are not critical of vanguard theory, except on the superficial level, ie more purges of revisionists and careerists

He is my favorite living theorist, along with Chomsky of course.

Is that a Gnome hat on the fascis?

I don't garee with you Comrade, Cockshott says that Vanguardism should only be used for revolutionary situations, not that he rejects Leninism or Lenins theory, still he tries to improve it.
I will call him a "post-revolutionary" Marxist, he does not suggest how could teh revolution take place, he talks about how
this socialist mode of production could work afterwards.
Still he calls himself a Leninist (read his works and blog) , also I agree with some of his citiques of Vangaurd party theory and how it , easely leads to an infiltartion of capitalist interests on it (such as burgeois revisionism), or how the majority of the USSR problems could have been solved with a more direct democracy.
I'd say every ML should at least read TANS, as it tries to improve and adapt Marxism Leninism to current times, based on past experiences.

I've talked to Cockshott yesterday, as we are trying to get his help with the creation of our new party and it's program, and trying to adjust it to the conditions of my country. If you anons have any important questions I could ask him the next time we talk.

what country?

I don't want to talk about it, I am kind of spooked at the moment. It's a balkan country though.

the doctrine of one man one vote ignores natural human inequality. Is a civilised
white man really to be compared with a nigger fresh out of the bush?
just posting this to prevent mister bullets in the balls from becoming another nazbol meme

whoops fucked up this greentex

understandable, just thought the picture was funny.

Could you ask him, about his thoughts on Cuba , and if he has tried to extend his ideas to self-proclaimed socialist states like it?
Also he is pretty based, does he now he is pretty well known in Socialist inernet and some kind of meme ?

I will ask him, I think he has attended some sort of communist conference in Laos and was pretty disappointed that they were enrooted in market socialism. I think he would be extremely critical of Cuba, from what I have read from him and spoken to him.

No, I don't think he knows he is a shitty MS paint meme on some esoteric left website for armchair socialists, I don't think he would like the idea lol

Ask him if he thinks traps are gay.

The article is was written after the end of Apartheid in South Africa.

In the most crudes form, the anti-imperialist theory that literally one whole nation is exploiting another whole nation, every person in one nation a perpetrator and every person in the other a victim, is of course silly. But this is often just a sloganized version of a deeper analysis (one would hope). The bourgies of the foreign imperialist nation had their lackeys among the native population. I haven't seen yet a particularly thorough analysis by the small group of "Maoist-Third-Worldist" bloggers really making a convincing case for the extreme hypothesis that the capitalist exploiters of the third world really bring so much home and share it so widely, so that the very distinction between capitalists and workers basically vanishes in the richest countries (and I don't believe this case can be made). That said, I do claim that sections of the working class are guilty. Say what you will, not every capitalist is a drug dealer, and workers likewise do make some choices they are responsible for. I'm thinking here of people who work in manufacturing arms for the US military.

Yeah lol, I think it's a reference to the paris commune as that was their symbol. The stars look EU-ish but idk how to interpret it.

Will there ever be a big rewriting of Towards a New Socialism? There could be more details about planning and decision-making procedures. I know Cockshott advocates for sortition, but that seems too random if it isn't used for selecting a group, but a position where a single individual makes decisions. What voting method would be good for electing a single individual person? I think TaNS should have a section addressing that shills for Approval Voting here or Top-Flop (see pdf, ignore the other voting method in it, that one is for really lazy/disinterested voters and can be ignored). Your party should also use one of these.

I don't think Cockshott agrees with Dauve/communization style leftcoms (pretty sure he had arguments when them on revleft back in the day) and he definitely sympathizes with the ML side of things, but I don't recall him ever saying fuck leftcoms in TANS. Quote plz?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrygian_cap

Good entryism to introducing Cybernetic socialism would be to begin with MMT, full employment through infrastructure programs, tech, agriculture etc. introduce a Universal basic dividend as well and put elected members of the community within corporations as part of the social stock ownership.

If we seriously introduced these two concepts into an economic program, I think McDonnell might do it I'm not sure. Then I think the transition to direct democracy and planning could come about :)

Praise be to WPC, shining light in these dark times.

MMT a shit tho
p. sure that full employment is utterly unsustainable in a modern economy.
Yeah, what you're describing is called fascism, twat.

eyy, yes, praise consumerism!

why? Soviets managed to prevent creation of reserve army of labour by giving people work in research (for everyone with at least master degree) and agricultural coops (for everyone else). And you can still reduce work week.

if you read Marx you'd know leftcoms are no less revisionist than tankies or anarchists.

Is that so? Explain how then.

There is a wide range of thought within leftcommunism. If we take the term to simply mean Marxists left of Lenin, then Marx himself was a leftcom.

i thought he was an econo-physicist

ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/memes.html

forreal?

Yes, Cockshott is a logical person unlike Anarchutopians

Yes, he hates gay marriage and supports Assad. A true ML.

nothing wrong with hating gay marriage. Don't like the support of Assad though.

Both false

Souurce please?

You deserve to get tarred and feathered for that level of stupidity. Maybe even guillotined.

It's a phrygian cap, you dip

Still, I wonder if I can get Paul Cockshott to join the gang. :^)

I don't think he gives a rat's ass how same-sex couples refer to their partners or that they can perform some ritual in a church. His point is: In many countries, the category of people in "married" get financial support / are taxed less by the state. Having kids is extremely consuming in time and money and the state support helps here, but doesn't make up for it. It's not impossible for a gay couple to raise kids from a prior engagement or adoption, but the average gay couple certainly raises fewer kids than the average straight couple. So, gay marriage amounts to a policy towards a less egalitarian distribution of wealth. No state I know of really fully makes up for the disparity between the sexes when it comes to the burden of pregnancy, so it's male-male couples in particular that benefit financially from gay marriage as a state policy (an invention which has virtually nothing to do with the gay radical movement of the 60s, which was about protecting each other from violence).

The sensible policy would be to completely end any financial support for people just because they are married, and focus entirely on giving help because of pregnancy and the number of kids that people actually do raise.

Bump

just rehashed world systems theory which is fucking nonsense, none of the BRICS/mexico/taiwan would have grown massively or started to export high tech goods etc. in the last 30 years if it was true

send this to roo

that this had to be written by anyone is pretty fucking flabbergasting. MTWs need to be struggle sessioned to oblivion.

You'd have to be a special kind of mouthbreather to conclude something like this after reading Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism.

So according to Cockshott, every lowly dude working in a Colt factory is an imperialist pig?

And yet you see MLs who advocate for national self-determination. The B.O. here even goes as far as defending/sanctioning ba'athism. Really makes you think, no?
I think that's the user giving their opinion, not necessarily what Cockshott thinks.

Full employment is only unsustainable if you keep clin gin to the retarded long 40+ hour work week. Reduction of labour time is in the interest of all the working peoples.

Ask him how significant the chapters on communal living and feminism are to his economic theory. I found them to be oddly out of place.

What did he say exactly?

as far as i know, there's a revleft post somewhere indicating that he was profoundly influenced by leftcom theory on communist society

The statement was not that this is exactly what all MTWs believe, rather it is the most crude form of anti-imperialist theory, "often just a sloganized version", meaning that even when MTWs make as statement to that effect, the poster tends to give them the benefit of the doubt by taking it to be hyperbole resulting from time/space restrictions. It is often the case that people with an outlook that puts class conflict first still write an occasional sentence where it appears country X does something to country Y like a liberal or a class-collaborationist third-world nationalist would say it; but they don't necessarily mean it that way, they just put it like that because it is shorter, and one figures out how the sentence is meant by taking in the context around it. Most groups that call themselves Marxist or Marxist-Leninist actually do not have strict requirements about reading works for joining, and I don't believe most MTWs are different in that regard.
I don't believe he posts here. You don't think that workers who have a strong interest in high military spending due to their jobs depending on that are influenced negatively in their world view by that?

Bordiga was a Leninist. The term doesn't mean that.

What does the term actually mean? It's so broad and vague I wonder if it even should still be used.

It means "that section of the Third Internationale which criticized the Soviet Union". Why it's still used for anything beyond that is a mystery to me.

That's not what LeftCom means. Most LeftComs simply were not part of the Third International.

Kill yourself

The usual meaning of Market Socialism entails that the means of production are split up between different groups and allocated via a market mechanism.

I guess his theory is simply so likable that everyone is trying to project his ideology on him. Is this the power of immortal science of Marxism-Leninism?

That isn't what Cockshott advocates for?

Cockshott and Cottrell don't advocate that MOP should be owned by separate groups. Relevant quote from Towards a New Socialism, chapter 14:

Hipsters wanting a snowflake label that wasn't just anarchist or ML. They brought this entirely on themselves

Correction: 'people who seem very smart and cite Marx and his ilk a lot'. It is easy to fall into the trap of following their responses to people in a cultist fashion; I am often guilty of the same thing. However, it is absurd and rather telling that it is 'leftcoms' in particular whom this is attributed to, almost as if there is a comparison of brands here. 'They're the smart ones; we don't and cannot have access to the same kinds of reason which they can access.' (A possible reason behind the attribution that those who display their intellectualism slap the label of 'leftcom' onto themselves in comparison with 'those LARPing red liberals', as if they wish to show that they believe that they have ascended above the matters entirely while committing the mistake of comparing such LARPers to the sincere intellectuals of the respective movements, if one must classify these social phenomena as such. I am not begging the question because I have not assumed this to be true.)

Greentext only applies to a single line at a time; use multiple >s next time.

You don't know what a public corporation is; you assume the term to mean 'privately-owned corporation'.

Unless you qualify 'labour' as being 'necessarily negative and outside a subject's interests', that is simply reductionist. The 'human nature' argument deployed by liberals is screaming through this sentence. Furthermore, you've made no consideration of mutual-social benefit in trying to advocate the "interests of all the working peoples". A post- successful revolution society is unknown to us. While we may forecast, there is no telling as to what social relations will manifest themselves in a society in which class divisions related to production and redistribution of value (such as the forces which realise the effects of labourers catering to the socially-necessary labour time within given markets and economic macrostructures) have been annihilated in a sustainable manner. One might be able to juggle concepts and reason deductively based on definitions which ultimately based on past observations which have remained constant with regards to history (which does not mean that they won't change in future - for example, our presence on this planet), but one would have to ensure that they are relevant with regards to their definitions when applied to these hypothetical, 'future' societies, which for all uses of any communist movement and its praxis requires forecasts based on the present state of affairs. This does not come without great uncertainty.

bump

why do bongs look like that

the worker has to sell their labour to survive. and as alienation continues its march, people don't really work to make a thing, they work to work because work=money
could be guns, could be canned fish, doesn't matter, same difference

Yeah, no.

source

Well, with sortition I think the point was these are administrative positions and are beholden to the voters(legally). They only fill the position of administration and make no decisions themselves.

What's out of place about them?

His source is probably a bunch of buttblasted wadical students. You have to understand that there are people who just "hang out" together (that is: online) and who put that sort of support for each other and their illusionary e-friends above any sort of serious consideration of positions, with people just mindlessly repeating what they sort-of remember a "friend" saying who got that from somebody else. Zanthorus spread that co-op claim on a forum called Red Marx. (There also is or was another ex-Revleft "comrade", red rooster, who has posted bullshit about Cockshott on Reddit.) But compare that with what is actually said in TANS: Maybe Cockshott said some mildly positive thing about co-ops for improving your quality of a life a little bit in the very short term, though I haven't found it. You can ctrl-f in the collection of essays "Arguments for Socialism": (Keep in mind this bit from the preface though: "David Zachariah wrote The socialist project and the working class, Democracy without Politicians and Limits of social-democratic politics.) Here is how Cockshott's article How physics is validating the Labour Theory of Value ends:
From: Economic Factors in the failure of Soviet Socialism:

eprints.gla.ac.uk/47872/1/47872.pdf bnarchives.yorku.ca/308/04/20101200_cockshott_nitzan_bichler_testing_the_ltv_spurious_correlation.xls

The anglo genome