Someone please explain to me why so many self-proclaimed anti-idpol socialists/communists believe socialism/communism is about the interests of the Proletariat in their class struggle against the bourgeoisie, rather than simply the abolition of rent.
The way I see it:
Other urls found in this thread:
...
...
Small mistake in this post: where I wrote "rent", I should have instead wrote "private rent". As Marx brings up in Critique of the Gotha Programme, some material must be taken from individuals (in his formula just workers, but I fail to see why it couldn't just be people in general) to provide for a bunch of stuff.
I don't understand what you're saying here, what rents do proletarians extract from others? And how is struggles for lower rents etc. not class struggle?
For first worlders, explicit social democracy, but also more implicit forms. Vicinity to wealth very often actually makes someone more wealthy, simply because consumption is quite often a social experience. If your neighbor steals someone's house and then gives you their chair, you're basically "extracting rent" from that person who got his house stolen. This is less the case for those who aren't first-worlders but third-worldism is a trainwreck of an ideology.
Because people can engage in struggles for lower rents without being part of the proletariat, and can be part of the proletariat without vying for lower rents.
Is not just the abolishing of rent but the abolishing of private property and market economy
Why bother with "muh proles muh bourgs" when everybody fucking knows the real problem is private property and exploitative businesses? Why spend so much time attaching labels to people when the true enemy isn't a person at all?
Without rent, private property is absolutely worthless. Also, the pursuit of rent is why "production for exchange" happens, so breaking that means you break the market economy.
This person is also correct.
Coz they are the biggest obstacle to the abolition of private property and shit?
this is exclusive to "anti-idpol" communists?
But why waste time arguing over who and what is bourgeois when you can just guillotine the CEOs, bankers, and elected officials now?
Not at all, but I'm pointing it out specifically about anti-idpol communists because "proletarian" is an identity. It's an identity that is indicative of material conditions, yes - but so is being black or female or LGBT or whatever. Communism isn't for the sake of a certain group of people, it's about pointing out that a certain aspect of society is harmful for the pursuit of the common good. Granted, that certain aspect hurts that certain group of people more than other people, but that's not why communism is important.
Because I can't actually do any of that?
You can't, but we can!
Why don't we instead actually try to show people how private property and its implications harm society's well being and that there is an alternative? Wouldn't changing society from the ballot box rather than the bullet be more peaceful (killing less people), more poetic (the bourgeois overthrown by a mechanism they created), and more realistic (don't have to defy advanced military) and lead to a more productive (having burned less shit) and less paranoid (not having emerged from a civil war) society?
You need to do that materially, and that involves a fair and open electoral process that isn't rigged to hell and back. By all means, try, but don't be surprised when it works as well as it has for the last 70 years.
lol yeah I'm trans-poor. It's just my identity shi.tlord!
Stop identifying as poor, you asshole. Gosh, capitalism would be great if people stopped doing what you do.
I still haven't heard any actual arguments as to why communism should be considered primarily an interest group for those for whom a certain predicate applies rather than simply a novel interpretation of republicanism.
According to marginalism capitalist is not a rentier – he gets marginal product of capital; workers get marginal product of labour. This is main point of contention between Marxists and everybody else (ancaps, georgists, neoclassicals and so on).
The capital would exist without the capitalist; how does that interpretation make him not a rentier?
Classes, in marxist theory, describe certain economic conditions. People either own MoP, which makes them bourg, or they don't, which makes them proles.
Through these coniditions, objective interests arise.
If you don't own MoP, it's objectively in your interest to seize them, because that gives you more power over society and your own living situation.
If you do own MoP, it's objectively in your interest to raise profitability of the labour that is carried out through your MoP, because that makes you have more wealth and more power over society and your living situation.
If a prole does not want to build socialism, and votes a conservative party, it still is the objective fact that socialism would be more beneficial to him.
Denizens of imperialist countries "own" the MoP to some extent, since the material wealth and labor of the third world is made available to them. Moreover, it's thoroughly possible to simultaneously own X dollars of assets and Y dollars of liabilities; one can say such a person would be bourgeois, but that person would be as directly interested in the overthrow of capitalism as the "proper" proletariat is, and if one said they were proletariat, they would be ignoring the social harm that person's assets translate to on other individuals.
Those with assets > liabilities may not be directly materially motivated to end communism, but that doesn't mean they aren't to any extent materially motivated, and certainly not motivated in general. Capitalism curbs innovation by denying prospective innovators access to capital and knowledge, as well as curbs overall production thanks to the omnipresence of bureaucracy and red tape thanks to the inherent issues of dealing with other firms. Other issues with capitalism the bourgeois faces include climate change, idpol, spectacle culture, diminishing marginal utility theory, and the Sword of Damocles.
I'm not denying that if your assets are nil or less than your liabilities you're inherently more drawn to communism, but I still don't see why the fact that communism particularly helps that group means we have to define communism as being about that group.
No one's given me a satisfactory answer in this thread yet I still keep seeing posts defending "workerism" constantly, like .
now this is utopian
i'm sure the bourgeois class will simply hand over power if they lose an election. don't get me wrong, many of them do actually genuinely believe in the 'democracy' that is set up to legitimise and sustain their class rule, but should a genuinely subversive and powerful such movement arise the institutions would be turned against the movement.
as has happened again and again in history.
it's more a point of 'is' rather than 'ought'
It's not workerism, it's just pointing out that workers are the revolutionary class. Not our fault you haven't read a book.
I'm actually going to bump this with something related:
Marx's theory posits that the urban worker, the proletariat is the revolutionary subject, but all countries where a revolution has succeeded have been agrarian, and the revolutions have been based on an alliance of the worker and the peasant under a vanguard party. In China for example the communist party initially concentrated heavily on the urban proletariat instead of the peasantry because of the accepted doctrine, but as we all know it was the vast peasantry of China that delivered most of the power to the CCP.
Contrast this with industrially developed countries where there were no notable revolutions - and now that deindustrialisation is at a high level in the developed west it's unlikely the industrial worker will ever be a dominant political force.
As I see it, this leaves 2 options:
1) Marx was wrong and mostly agrarian peasant societies could have socialist revolutions
2) The most notable revolutions of Russia and China were not socialist in character
I'm not saying direct action is wholly unnecessary - if nothing else, you'll need it to prevent capital flight, and it's also a great way to push your agenda into popular discourse and prove that a better world is possible. I just think that ultimately the transferal of power should come from the ballot box, so as to prove that the communism really is a popular movement, to frame the movement as being against liberalism instead of against autocracy (important so as to ensure the new order's "founding myth" is about bankers, not landlords and patriarchs which the invisible hand leads to destruction and hence can be described as "less" capitalist), to force capitalists who attempt to preserve their power to show their true faces to the world (to be resisted directly, ofc), and also for the reasons I mentioned.
A "revolutionary class" is a farcical concept. I don't think there's ever been a situation in the entirety of human civilization where everyone for whom a given, non-trivial predicate applies was responsible for a revolution and no one who that predicate did not apply to did not. Individuals are motivated by material conditions, but ultimately individuals, not material conditions, transform society.
Marx's observations are not only important in so far as their correspondence with reality but also their effects on reality after he spoke them. He influenced the poor of Russia and the China to engage in actual socialist rather than capitalist revolution - his wholly materialist hypotheses be damned. That said, what emerged in Russia and China was not socialism; this is because liberalism was allowed to escape being the subject of the revolution, and liberalism was allowed to survive elsewhere in the world. I think it might have been fully possible for communism to germinate before liberalism as the opposition to feudalism, but now that liberalism has risen to dominate the world, a successful communist movement must oppose specifically liberalism and not remnants of feudalism or elements of reaction.
how does direct action prevent capital flight? intimidation and threats towards the person of the capitalist?
have fun battling against the 'free press', 'free credit rating agencies', 'free judiciary', 'free and especially neutral security apparatus', and finally the 'free military that defends Our Country from hostile internal takeover'.
absolutely idealistic - historical capitalist brutality and failures of bourgeois society have not made leftism that argues against it the dominant ideology. Even in the most egregous example of Germany, the whole of German liberal political field from centre to the right and the SPD less directly enabled the nazis to rise, and yet GDR remained solidly liberal for its whole existence.
only if you make it into a farce as you do in the next paragraph
of course, but historical materialism is more about the broad progression of society than specifics. Marx was well aware of 'class traitors', his closest working partner and co-author was one. The notion of a class being revolutionary does not require everyone of the class to support the revolution, but for the material purposes of the revolution to provide for a specific class, thus those of the class supporting 'their' revolution do so not of false consciousness.
Very true. Marx did not expect or account for the Bernsteinian reformist turn.
no, a lot of socialist logic relies and is built upon a liberal foundation, I consider socialism a more complete expression of the liberal project of the Enlightenment.
Yes, but I think for the modern day a positive message of building rather than a negative message of opposition to liberalism is key.
Simply mobilizing the workers to refuse to move the MoP out of the country. If scabs are hired to move the equipment out of the factories anyway, block the roads.
that's what I spoke about forcing the capitalists to show their true faces to the world. being mostly peaceful and forcing your opponents to resort to such drastic measures is a sign that bourgeois democracy cares much more about the bourgeois than democracy - something that would fundamentally break the assumption of good faith on the part of the current order and make actual revolution much easier. on the other hand, engaging in primarily violent activity from the start means when they suppress you they're technically doing the right thing and no one will give a shit.
this is implicitly assuming that members of the bourgeois would see no non-aesthetic benefit in communism, which is not the case - it would reduce consumerist waste, provide for full employment and hence productivity, make for a much less stifling civil society, neuter the sword of damocles, stop price-gouging, among other things. the proletariat do get all of the things I mentioned but for the sword of damocles in addition to the cessation of rent extraction through the profit mechanism, but simply because an ideology would specifically benefit a certain group more than others doesn't make that ideology more about the group than the general republican effects
consider this: if a bunch of modern-day humans were transported back to prehistoric times with no material goods whatsoever, do you seriously think the society they would produce would progress through marx's hypothesized progression of societal types or would they use the ideas in their heads to skip a few rungs? point is, ideas are crazy things, and although in our timeline we've observed a particular progression there's no way to know if it could have gone a different way.
If labour power can do this without the bourgeois state interfering, you've already won. What I mean is if this amount of retreat from property rights has been achieved a very very fundamental change in the nature of the state has already happened.
youtube.com
They already do, and it already shows. And yet it is political apathy rather than political consciousness that is on the rise.
Indeed, but in the logic of capital, the brutal logic of capital, the capitalist also works against their 'true' self-interest by perpetuating their class rule and class advantage. The bourgeois class has internalised the logic of liberal capitalism to their own destruction. Your idea of socialism being better for everyone is correct, and I agree that much more should be done to reach for the well-to-do proletariat of the educated professionals and even the modern bourgeois. Managerial capitalism of the day means that even the CEO does work, and as such enslaves themselves to the logic of capital in some ways even more fundamentally and brutally than the wage-worker. The division between the leisure class and the working class doesn't work like in Marx's day. Anyone better read than me can correct me here, but I believe Camatte and Land have promoted the new dichotomy to be not between the bourgeois and proletariat, but between capital and humanity. I tend to agree with them on this. Both thinkers think that capital has won though.
The idea of capitalist being as much a slave to capital is not a new idea though. Pics related.
No, but thing is, people can't travel back in time; this sort of contrafactual is meaningless. I don't think you understand what a materialist conception of history means. Material conditions provide the framework for the ideas of individuals to grow from, not the other way around. Some people think it is a strictly determinist conception, but I think its more that material conditions define and largely decide the framework and field of possibility within which individuals operate.
Your response to my third point shows you and I are on basically the same wavelength as far as how communism isn't really wholly about "the proletarian side of the class struggle", which is what this thread was about - why did you not say as much, then? If it really is about Capital v. Humanity like I've been saying all along, why do you keep saying Communism is about proletarian victory against the bourgeoisie?
Because the socialist revolution, in direct, material tangible, and most importantly within the current set of social conception - is beneficial to the proletariat, not the bourgeois. The bourgeois does not see their freedom increase when their control over the MoP is negated - from the point of view of current societal logic. As I originally said, it's not that a socialist revolution or system isn't to the benefit of everyone; it is that only a certain part of the population doesn't have enough to lose to risk a revolution. When Marx says that proletariat is the revolutionary class he doesn't say that they should be but that they are. It is not a normative claim but a descriptive one.
To continue - I believe your confusion is due to the fact that you don't understand or accept materialism as the cornerstone of political understanding, and are instead idealist in your conception of history and societal change, as presented in your earlier parable about time travel.
sage for double post
THE BOURGIES IDENTIFY AS SUCH ACCORDING TO COMMUNIST ANALYSIS LELELELELE
Communists are looking at the impediments to the world-mastery of society at all levels and scopes; one is the relation of capital in market-like competition itself due to that leading to capital accumulation, the process by which people can become powerful and maintain that power. This class is the bourgeois class and the kernel of the social relation which sustains their rule is not based upon identity but economic relations.
Well, the alternative to materialism is the idea that ideas have any power or meaning outside of the power and meaning people give to them, which I most emphatically reject. I just think the idea that mankind works like a digital circuit where revolutions happen if and only if societies look like X or idea B can only appear given idea A is silly. I'd instead say it works more like a particularly sensitive system of water buckets, where despite having typically predictable behavior also have quite a bit of chaos and noise when water is moving that can dramatically change things. Chaos, more than predictable order.
The amount of proles that extract a net rent and the amount of the rent is negligible compared to wages and profits, and besides don't create the kind of power relation that ownership of MOP and other kinds of capital do.
side note: a materialism that stretches to "this ideology has to come after this one" runs into a dilemma with pre-modern impositions of class dominance. can the slaver or the warlord really be forgiven for conquering other peoples because by doing so he accumulated capital? and if not, doesn't that mean it would have been preferable for that conquest to have never happened and humanity to remain in a world where comfort is scarce, work is hard, and little is understood? there's a third option, of course: for those who would have been conquered and conqueror in our timeline to have instead come together to work for the mutual benefit of a newly created greater commonwealth, but under marx's framework of revolution emanating from solely a revolutionary class (in the case of our history, this was the conquerors!) rather than ideas I fail to see how this might have been possible.
How in the FUCK do you steal a house
I suppose desribong leftism in terms of abolishing rent, for a certain definition of rent that is, is an interesting way of framing the position. It would certainly be a more palatable way of explaining our side to the wider public.
In theory, you live in ancap world and show up to a house in the middle of the night, put a gun to their head, and force them to hand over the keys and walk out. However, ancap world doesn't exist.
In reality, I was trying to come up with something that would clearly be an analogy for imperialism and went too much for clarity rather than sensibility. Still, though, it's mostly the same point: just replace "house" with "car" and "gives you their chair" with "starts selling you taxi rides".