Moishe Postone Thread

His explanation of how anti-Semitism is a fetishized form of anti-capitalism is really good.

I think Zizek has taken a lot of influence from Postone and his views on Israel are not that different, but Zizek is a goofy sniffle man so he doesn't get this kind of heat.

Attached: postone.jpg (452x640, 64.65K)

Attached: 5.jpg (640x559, 29.42K)

What a pathetic attempt at spiteful smearing.

The whole point of the Anti-Deutsch is to whine about anti-semitism, so of course they would refer to leftist writers who have addressed that topic. They are also "influenced" by Adorno; does that make Adorno a Zionist…?

Postone never even discussed Israel or antisemitism with the Platypus Society. The latter conducted a single interview with Postone in which he talked about crisis theory, and that's about it.

Attached: very-nice-and-gay-14890760.png (500x595, 121.08K)

Attached: nazbolallende.jpg (2275x1079, 464.57K)

The part where Postone tries his best to comfort him is really sad.

Attached: e55b4b9a789ef861d9003b3aa9d219d89aa494dcdc6b932623f3f2e55569a727.jpg (1890x1417, 160.84K)

How is this garbage even different from Holla Forumstards claiming niggers deserve what's coming to them? Fuck off.

t. booty blasted "Left" Labour Zionist

The lowkey diss on Wolff was a nice touch.

Postone doesn't imply that. He's saying that the paranoid, conspiratorial anti-Semitism of the Middle East that blames all problems on the Jews cannot simply be explained as a response to Israel's actions. It is part of the reason but it is not enough. Like I was saying Zizek makes the same basic point here: youtube.com/watch?v=SkSV4xyKkds

But Marx literally argued this. Capitalism is contingent on wage labor and the value form, not on the existence of the Bourgeoise, they're more a byproduct of Capitalism, not it's defining feature. This was Marx's central argument against Proudhon, that even without a Bourgeoise the working class could still oppress itself.

Love Postone, wish he was discussed here more often.

Just because Zionists cite Postone doesn't mean he's a Zionist. Richard Spencer likes Gramsci, does that mean Gramsci was a Fascist? Please, next time you want to post on this board exercise the absolute minimum amount of critical thinking it takes to make a coherent point.

ITT: Holla Forumsaks

I have to disagree that antisemitism is simply "anti-capitalism". If that were the case, why are the biggest Jew-haters also huge apologists for capitalism? These people hate us because they envy the success of the rich Jews in the existing system; rather than desiring the end of capitalism as a whole, they merely want to take the place of the "rich Jews" and live as the big capitalists themselves. Even quite a few of the white people who call themselves anti-Zionist aren't even all that anti-imperialist or make any attempt to understand Amerikan support for Israel as an integral part of imperialism as they love the way of life that Amerikan imperialism has given them. They only see Israel and its supporters as aliens which manipulate the United Snakes into doing evil, and assume that once the aliens have been exposed the U.S. will go back to being "good" (as if the US's entire existence isn't predicated on settler-colonialism imperialism). You can't be the richest country in the world without multiple proxy states doing your bidding.

Chaya are you allowed to have a goy as a bf

Attached: R14kkDj.png (657x527, 13.38K)

His argument against Bakunin was literally the opposite. Bakunin argued that a workers state would merely end up“oppressing” other classes simply by seizing and using the weapon of state power. Marx argued against this fetishistic view of power by pointing out that even if this were the case the proletariat would merely become bourgeois and the other classes would become proletarians. Historical evidence also speaks in favor of this point as I already mentioned.

Notice I never even claimed that the bourgeoisie was a central feature of capitalism but only that the bourgeoisie actually is an integral part of capitalism. Commodity production and the value-form would be oppressive without a bourgeoisie, true, but these things actually are not capitalism but merely parts of it left-coms intentionally misunderstand and seek to mislead others on this point.

Robert Kurz is better.

This is perhaps the weakest point in both the lexicon of contemporary Left anti-Zionism and the philo-Semitic response to Jew hatred. The United States does not control Israel— Israel is a formidable imperialist power in its own right. On the other hand it’s untrue to say that Israel controls the US; rather, both Israel and the US are best thought of as evil symbiotic twins.

Tbh given Israel’s immense influence the anti-Semitic view of a Zionist-controlled USA comes closer to the truth then the Israel-is-a-pupper-of-the-big-bad-goy meme. Both views are wrong and both are worse from a political perspective but the Chomsky-Finkelstein view about Israel is simply weak on both logical and historical grounds.

But there was no Bourgeoise in the USSR, but (and I know this is a controversial topic on this board) Capitalism did still persist, maybe we could argue that it "wasn't quite Capitalist", but there was still wage labor and production of commodities for the creation of value, i.e. the working class did not reap the full fruits of their labor, and there didn't need to be a Bourgeois class. Unless your argument is that the Nomenklatura were the new Bourgeoise, but I've always found this to be a ridiculous argument as they never actually held the position within social relations that the Bourgeoise does in a normal Capitalist society, at most they were a somewhat privileged class, but they didn't sit around endlessly accumulating wealth without restriction, and they did not privately own the means of production. Also, I'm not a Leftcom friend.

This is a strange assertion. If there is no bourgeois class, then where are those fruits of labour not reaching the working class going exactly? Unless you mean that it went to the big evil state. Even though communism is perfectly compatible with a portion of the proceeds of labour being siphoned of to improve forces of production, to provide for common necessities like defense, and so on, it explicitly says so in the Critique of the Gotha programme.

Or do you want to posit that a whole new class came into being defined by their relation to the MOP and labour, something like managers and apparatchiks or something?

But this perfectly encapsulates the contradictory logic of reactionary thought. They rail against modernity, they rail against the Bourgeoise, they rail against Capitalism, against cosmopolitanism, against Jews, ect. ect. And yet what they offer in lieu is essentially just a more authoritarian and more alienating/atomizing version of Capitalism, not an actual break from Capitalism. To them the issue isn't really Capitalism, it's all these alien entities that have ruined Capitalism form the inside. Maybe I'm wrong, but this is how I've understood Postone's argument, when he talks about ant-semitism as a sort of false consciousness that blots out class consciousness he's referring to the way that Fascism offers a false solution to the problems of Capitalism by exacerbating the problems of Capitalism.

No, you're exactly right, but that's what Postone is getting at, I think. Note he says that anti-Semitism is a fetishized form of anti-capitalism. Capitalism meets a crisis, and instead of challenging the abstract domination of capitalism, which anti-Semites don't understand, they blame the Jews as stand-ins for it.

Capitalism's power is "abstract" because it naturalizes and objectifies the social relations between things (which are really the material relations between people) in the form of commodities, right? I don't really understand all of this, but Postone is arguing that Jews in the anti-Semitic mind take the form of a commodity.

Postone:

If one reads Marx, the issue with Capitalism isn't just that Capitalists sit on accumulated wealth, I mean that wouldn't be something unique to Capitalism, that's what Kings and Emporors did long before Capitalism, what's uniquely destructive about Capitalism is that the value produced by labor gets constantly reinvested into the means of production in order to constantly expand the means of production, and therefore also constantly necessitating more and more labor time in and endless spiral. Whether it's Capitalist markets or Soviet productivism the end result is the same.

lel, meant Emperors of course

But Marx explicitly points out this will also happen under communism in CofGP. It makes sense, it's one of the great potentialities of capitalism that you can increase the productive forces. It's good to have more productive forces, it makes shit we need and want. It's just a question of whether it will happen as a collectively and knowingly willed process (part of an central plan say), or a blind and parasitic one.

Hmmm, maybe I need to reread the Critique of the Gotha Program. I have always understood the transition from production for value to production for use as the end of that cycle of constant reinvestment of value. Or the end of "value" itself, as labor no longer produces excess value.

IIRC it's where he talks about how people will be rewarded for labour under communism, and posits that first a slice of that rewards is set aside for what we would call welfare, but also to plow into the MOP. Communism isn't inherently anti growth, though it could be if that is what the collective implements I suppose.

This highlights things very well. The critique of the Soviet model as being bound by the same growth imperatives as capitalism is particularly weak imo and is typically a line of analysis spouted by liberals. Marx did not oppose growth and the creation of new wealth, in fact he actually praised capitalism for these things, but critiqued the capitalist process on the grounds that the worker produces more and is exiled from the riches of what they produce in-turn.

Working hard to produce more wealth when it is for yourself is not a bad thing and in fact, Marx was the first to show concretely that the potential for a society where wealth grew and labor-time decreased at the same time was possible.

Finally, I find this an odd criticism when the main criticism of the Soviet socialism that one hears is that it did not produce as much wealth as quickly as the Western capitalist world–particularly the US. This isn't necessarily true, as H.W. Edwards points out the Soviet standard of living in the early 60s was close to West Germany and many others there were other intangibles like say free childcare and college education that make the Soviet standard of living difficult to calculate exactly in dollar-terms against say the US

Ah, I see what you mean, like the difference between the lowest phase, and then the highest phase when "all needs are already met", but in order to reach that higher phase growth is required. I see what you mean, but it is tricky to balance that productivism with the decidedly post-work/post-class goals of Communism, I mean a Communist society is by definition a society without a working class. I wouldn't want to hinge the entire idea of Communism solely on automation tho, because I generally think it's retarded to hinge one's bets on technologies that don't exist yet, and therefore we can't know what they'll actually look like in practice, but then again I suppose some would say we already are at a level of automation where we could have Communism, that now it's just a matter of planning.

This is the thing I find so odd about the Soviet Union. I don't have a good grasp on what exactly went wrong in the 60s that ruined the productivity growth, beyond Fukuyamaish explanations of a lack of management/leadership feedback and replacement.

Well communism doesn't mean a world without work, just one without a working class. It can be one with a lot less work if you harness growing productivity for long enough and everyone does their part, but that's all contingent on (as I see it) democratic decision making. Maybe we don't want FALC if it entails installing a Master AI, say. The point is that we all get to decide it, and porky and self-reproducing capital don't decide for us.

In communism everyone is proletarian as no one will own any means of production but they will be collectively owned. Class is abolished by forcing everyone to take the plunge into proletarian status.

Truth be told, the nature of work and its distribution will be far different than what we have today and to wit, even terms like "proletarian" and "bourgeoisie" conjure up their opposites: the haute-bourgeois and aristocracy. It will be classless in the sense that there are no longer antagonistic classes dividing humanity but it will also be the product of the absolute victory of the proletariat over all competing classes.

This I think sets Marxists apart from reactionary socialists and conservative critics of capitalism. Our end is not to restore the small-artisan or the peasant in a modern form–that would only lead back to the same problem. The secret of the existence of the proletariat, as Marx pointed out, is that it is the end of the world–at least the world as 6,000 years of civilized life that we've known

I'm reminded of Marx's comments on "universal prostitution" and how in a dialectical fashion he posited that the solution wasn't to moralize about marriage which he saw as corollary to private property but to do away with the conditions that force women to sell themselves. And in that sense, since marriage has historically revolved around property relations, marriage itself will be abolished.

Attached: nobreaks.jpg (500x393, 133.64K)

*"proletariat" and "working class"

Objectively not true. Why are you so frightened by self-critique and discussion that you can only strawman your opponents as Liberals? Whether you think it was a valiant effort or not, the USSR did fail at it's historical mission to create Communism, I think it's worth our time to figure out why this happened, and mindless dogmatism gets us nowhere.

I'm pretty sure it's Capitalism that proletarianizes the world, not Communism, Communism is universal luxury fam :^) What you're describing is literal Barracks Communism.

How so? Again, you can't critique the Soviet model on the grounds that it was too obsessed with growth and its obvious corollary, enriching society while maintaining this:

Attached: 1956leningrad.jpg (800x586, 78.42K)

*of liberal nonsense that you could hear

The abolishment of class is necessitated by (in fact, is defined by) the abolition of the distinctions of class, of both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. If you still have an actual proletariat (not in the ongoing revolutionary or post-revolution romantic sense, but in it's strict definition) then you aren't in socialism, but instead in some kind of Camatte-esc hypercapitalism where capital has escape velocited out of the confines of needing of a bourgeoisie and now operates on a "capital vs humanity" level of conflict. And that's literally genejacker territory, so best if we never got to that point.

That’s literally socialism

That babe is rocking those converse.

That makes as much sense as saying "after abolition, everyone will be a slave". The point of communism is to abolish the proletariat, not glorify it.

No it isn't you braindead marksoc. Read Marx for fuck's sake.

Market socialism is the only economically efficient type of socialism. Are you some kind of Marxist-Leninist who unironically supports central planning?

Markets are the most inefficient way to organize society. It's like all you want to do is paint capitalism red.

We, market socialists, generally know how to deal with market failures such as information assymetries, principal-agent problems, negative externalities, non-excludability of certain goods and so on. But how are you, non-market socialists, going to deal with problems which will inevitably arise in a command economy? Take, for example:
1. Encouragement of black-market activity due to fixed resource allocation
2. Neglect of consumer preferences due to lack of price signals
3. Inability of planners to predict things like weather, trade, and technological advancement
4. Poor quality of products resulting from the tendency to delay the fulfillment of the production target until the end of a planning period (in the USSR, this was known as “shturmovshchina”)

1.Take into account what their wants and needs are during production
2. Same as 1, we have smartphones and shit you know. I just ordered mcdonalds through a phone and had it delivered in 20 minutes
3.AI would be able to take care of variables like those better than any human could ever dream of
4.Seems like a 1940's problem not a 2018 problem

Wether you like it or not you advocate for generalized market exchange, something that never existed in any other system but capitalism and would cause all the problems for your system that it causes for capitalism.

How would you solve the falling rate of profit?

I oppose capitalism for the same reason I support free market. Both capitalist and command economies are based on hierarchical control and centralized management which inhibits the use of dispersed information. Only market socialism gives workers direct control over allocation of resources as well as their workplace. In contrast, Soviet-type “socialism” gives control over allocation of resources to government officials who are no better than capitalist entrepreneurs.

There is no empirical evidence that suggests that there is a tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Chaya is a practicing Jew, m8.

Also, this term is becoming a boggyman. Is loving Jews really any worse than being a Chinaboo?

Who, aside from the Palestinians and African refugees, does Israel oppress that the United Snakes doesn't? You can't say black South Africans, because supporting apartheid South Africa was already American policy. You can't say Central Americqns, because those RWDS the IDF trains all work for Amerikan companies (and your average Amerikan benefits way more than your average Yerushalmi family).

No one denies Israel has its own interests, but the idea that we Jews hold a constant desire to lord over people is ridiculous.

Just take a look at the majority of garbage that gets posted on sites like Mobdoweiss: it's all by hardcore Amerikan patriots who love the U.S. and capitalism and who simply want that $2 billion in military aid to go to them. That's the reason why they're so eager to divorce US support for Israel from capitalism and scapegoat the AIPAC Lobby, "Jewish choseness", or some other crap. It has nothing to do with anti-imperialism or anti-capitalism as much as it has to do with wanting to be porkies in their own right.

This makes more sense.

I might also add that, in terms of Arab culture there is a very big "muh bootstraps" mentality. Like Jews, they tend to be very obligation-oriented, and if they can't pull themselves up they feel an overarching amount of shame.

Are you denying that AIPAC has an enormous influence on American foreign policy?

lmgtfy.com/?q=Tendancy of the rate of profit to fall empirical studies

bfy.tw/2mlY

If AIPAC didn't exist, the Amerikan Empire would just have created it. You honestly believe a small group of "rich Jews" would outweigh and entire array of capitalists? Please. Show me the evidence AIPAC has a bigger influence on foreign policy than Microsoft, Exxon, GE, Lockheed…

Also:
No one except Jews supports Israel because they love Jews. Even Xtian Zionists see us as defective because we won't accept their cuck zealot as moshiach.

Call it "efficient" or "God's way" if you want, just don't call it socialist when it clearly isn't. Socialism isn't just about the workers owning the means of production, that's not sufficient.

Attached: laughing monster girls54.png (597x316, 37.04K)

Markets are not only inefficient, but markets literally can't be socialism.

Why not?

tfw Israelis shoot children, force families from their houses, empower Hamas and then claim victimhood when people criticize them for taking a land and doing apartheid because some jews inhabited thousands of years ago.

Attached: Flamenco What?.gif (650x366, 235.37K)

This is literally the argument Holla Forums makes in favor of South African apartheid or Rhodesian colonialism - "hurr durr dumb nogs are killing whites just cuz dey mad about losing their ancestral lands".

How does this describe all Israelis, let alone all Jews?

Jewish Voice for Peace wouldn't be a thing if Jews were all inherently evil. There are even Israeli Jews who attack the apartheid system.

Moishe Postone is probably one of the dankest Marxists alive right now, listen to his lectures. There is some hard to grasp shit but if you have some understanding of "Capital" you can get a lot out of it.

Attached: adadasdasdasdasdasd.jpg (625x672, 149.09K)

The question might easily be framed as “who does China/Russia oppress that America doesn’t” or “who does Germany oppress that America doesn’t”

When your the global super-power you pretty much exploit almost every neo-colonial country in the world and America arguably exploits its own allies as well but that’s another topic.

The fact that you identify Jews everywhere in general with Israel says a lot. I’m not one to deny that it is a Jewish entity but most Jews in the world probably have rather little to do with it even if many are complicit or vitrilolic supporters

It’s an imperialist power like any other and it’s aim is to expand its power, wealth, influence and do exactly what you described “lord over people”

I would be curious to hear your explanation for multiple Israeli invasions of Lebanon. It’s not exactly as if the US Empire or the average American stood to benefit a whole lot from an Israeli victory there. There’s not much oil there but there were Israeli interests that Israel sought to protect.

In fact, most of the states that Israel has went to war with (Egypt, Jordan, Syria etc.) don’t have very much oil in them at all. On the other hand Israel hasn’t lifted a finger to fight in Iraq for instance when its lobbyists and intelligence agents played a key role in pressing the US for war and propagandizing the US public. Yes, obviously, there were other non-Jewish elements of the American establishment that wanted war but that is not the point.

When was the last time that the US actually slammed down a major Israeli decision? The Suez Canal invasion of 1956? Arguably they were more opposed to the British-French attempt to preserve their sphere of influence than the Israeli role in the action.

Israel is in many ways a net-loss for the American Empire but since there isn’t a way to put a genie back in the bottle and rich American Jews love Israel the US keeps a close relationship with this small but very powerful imperialist power

Market socialism is the only real socialism, you are just state capitalists in denial. We want workers to control allocation of goods and services. You, on the other hand, want the state to control it. Why would a system where workers are told what to produce by the government be any better than a system where workers a told what to produce by the bourgeoisie?

Certainly more efficient than central planning.

Germany, Russia, and China weren't created for the sole purpose of establishing a permanent western entity in the ME, dumbass.

LOL it's not even about oil. It's about preventing states with the potential to break from imperialism from doing just that.

Israel's biggest supporters are Evangelical Christians.

America benefits way more from a destabilized MENA than Israel.

Do you agree with Soygon that states go to war over ego? Because that's what you sound like.

Israel is literally the only country that benefits from destabilized MENA whatsoever

How many layers of irony are you on? Market relations is what define capitalism.
So do I.
Why the fuck did you assume I'm a ML? I'm a LeftCom, I don't support so-called state socialism or Soviet-style central planning.

You need facts to make your case, user.

Nice Hasbara, but in what way is it relevant to the overall point that Chaya made and my counterpoint?

It has a something to do with it, no? Prior to the financial-tech boom of the 80/90s the most powerful faction of the US capitalist class was the oil industry. It re-emerged in a big way in the 2000s with high oil prices and the later surge in production.In relation to oil, US middle eastern policy has been concerned with:
1. keeping the oil flowing to America's capitalist allies
2. keeping the price of oil in a goldilocks area where it neither impairs American industry, nor drops so low that it sends the American oil industry into the poorhouse
3.Making sure that Arab countries use their oil surpluses to buy American weapons, use American industrial contractors to build their cities, provide their industrial goods and technical assistance, and reinvest their leftover holdings in the US

And yet they were all states threatening Israeli imperialist interests most of all, considered high security threats by the Israeli establishment most of all, and conveniently located on Israel's border where she could easily deploy force against them at minimum cost. It's not like Israeli troops travelled to Vietnam to fight for American interests, but we would expect something like that if Israel was a puppet of the United States–which she is not.

Likewise, Israel had territorial disputes with nearly all of them and Zionist leaders have long held that large chunks of their territory would become part of Greater Israel. As Israel Shahak explained Zionist leaders have never renounced the Greater Israel project in words but their mouthpieces are quick to denounce anyone who attributes expansionism to them as conspiracy theorists

I'm not that user but it is rather quite simple, Israel wants to expand both territorially and in terms of influence in the region. So, a destabilized MENA region allows Israel greater room to expand physically and to install more pliable client regimes. For decades, Israel has singled out secular Arab nationalist leaders as its greatest threat and quite conveniently the vast majority of them have met their end at the same time that their major geopolitical rival, Russia, has largely retreated post-Soviet collapse.

A destabilized MENA region threatens to undo both US and especially Russian spheres of influences but its quite beneficial to Israel who emerges as a sort of last-man-standing in the Middle East. The fact that they have hundreds of nuclear weapons and more fighter aircraft than any European power puts them at a decisive military advantage over any other regionally based power in the region.

Attached: Georgieboy.jpg (1368x1026, 80.22K)

*their (meaning Israel) major geopolitical rival

If neither the state nor the market will control allocation of resources, than what will?

Market relations have existed for thousands of years, capitalism has existed only for a couple of centuries.

His story checks out.

Attached: 69bd1a0994bf19b958bd037e355042fd789490bf224b0a6c5be5e172dad4c004.jpg (1218x1015, 212.15K)

Why use a state in the MENA to fight all the way over in East Asia? That would be a tremendous waste of resources. Even when Israel is involved in Latin America, it doesn't do so directly.

Those Arab leaders were also enemies of the US.

Israel is incredibly weak without US support. It's the South Korea of the MENA. No way it could be the last man standing without help from at least one major superpower.

Claiming AIPAC pushes the US to war assumes the Sargon argument about states going to war over ego, and seems to assume all US politicians are unbelievably stupid to the point where they'd let a single lobby group dupe them.

What the fuck do you think define capitalism, shit for brains?

Capitalist relations. Bourgeoisie owning the MOP, and the labourers selling them their labour power for a wage.

You're leaving out the laws of motion of capitalism to focus exclusively on direct class domination. "Capitalist relations" do not consist solely of surplus extraction, and you could even theoretically have capitalism without a specific, separate class doing the extracting. You can get rid of the bourgeoisie and in certain aspects it might be beneficial, but that doesn't mean you've gotten rid of capitalism.

According to you, just like it was described in Endnotes, "the 'solution' to capitalism is seen as workers, via the state or other means, shifting that distribution in their favour" because you believe that "if exploitation is a matter of the deduction of a portion of the social product by a parasitic ruling class then socialism does not have to substantially alter the form of commodity production; but may simply take it over, eliminate the parasitic class, and distribute the product equitably."

don't pin this retards idiocy on us, he's litter ally the furthest one can stray from the light

t. never read Marx

This should be good. Lay it out.

Why did the Turks fight on the American side in the Korean War? In addition to many other countries that seemed to have rather little direct interest in propping up a US-puppet regime. It would have been in America's interest should the country with the fourth most powerful army in the Cold War had stepped in to relieve some of the burden of the Vietnam War.

Today, Israel is ranked number 8 in global power:
haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-is-eighth-most-powerful-country-in-the-world-survey-says-1.5450650

Usually, puppets aren't that powerful, certainly as a dutiful puppet of the US it should have no qualms about getting directly involved in America's war on terror. I think the fact that it hasn't yields more support to my thesis that Israel actually is an independent imperialist power with its own interests.

Right, because it isn't in Israeli interests to send troops to fight and die to protect US imperial interests, which is what I've been saying all along. But is in Israel's interest to sell weapons to right-wing Latin American regimes, to bring them to power so that they might support Israel diplomatically and in other ways, and to stop the advance of national liberation and communism in the region since it might have an effect on their own turf and in their own spheres of influence.

Israel is more dependent on the "military-industrial complex" economically then any other country and hence it welcomes any opportunity to sell its weapons and expertise.
libgen.io/book/index.php?md5=47795EE74794D588505C1876880626F4
ipk-bonn.de/downloads/israels-worldwide-role-in-repression.pdf

This was never my claim–only that Israel did push for and support the US War on Iraq but did not lift a finger to help the US in the War they propagandized for. The US wanted the war for their own reasons but parts of the elite were split on it and so Israel's support for it did help smooth the process along somewhat. I just don't understand what's up with Hasbara shills and reading comprehension.

They were more hostile to Israel than the US and US support for Israel was not a small cause of their hostility.

Sure, its a demographic midget, even if its military-economic giant in relative terms. This is why they have been courting India and China in recent years.

In fact, they've even turned down demands from Washington in favor of rival Chinese demands regarding a recent court-case involving terrorism:
youtube.com/watch?v=ytqQACDzKNI

Think about it this way, Switzerland is also an imperialist power but could Switzerland survive without Britain, the US, France, Germany etc. throwing their weight around in the world? Probably not but that doesn't mean it doesn't have its own interests; Switzerland isn't a puppet of the United States.

Israel is far more powerful than Switzerland by many measures and is only looking to expand its power, especially in the area where it has both the most tied up and the ability to exert power directly.

Attached: KoreanWar.png (158x412, 36.08K)

Private ownership of the means of production.

This is liberal posting on Trump's Twitter account-tier.

This is not sufficient. Private property predates capitalism.

I remember watching that video when it came out and finding it absolutely mundane. Not my kind of guy, I guess. Also,

this.

You literally can't, especially on the long run. Just think it through, holy shit.

S H O C K I NG

Explain why.

Well I mean hes not wrong.

just read the thread,
Sorry, I though you where the Market Socialist

Let me guess. This is the line of thought under which Postone & co. justify calling the USSR "state capitalist?"

Capital accumulation, unequal development, rapidly growing pay and wealth gap. Literally what happened under Tito.

"Exploitation without exploiters!"
"Democratize exploitation!"
"Equal exploitation!"
Magnets.

No, seriously, explain your thinking. How does one have capitalism without a surplus extracting class. Let's say everything is co-ops. Write up a short paragraph explaining how an economy with only co-ops will replicate a capitalist contradiction of your choosing.

I'm interested in this as well.

Tell me how workers could "control allocate of goods" under a market system!

I'm the LeftCom. I oppose market systems.

I erred.

Attached: 26594988-a-cartoon-girl-with-a-confused-expression--Stock-Photo.jpg (647x1300, 74.02K)

And with exactly what would you like to replace market systems?

Individual workers as well as worker cooperatives would voluntarily convey their preferences to each other through price signals.

Fuck it, I'll do it myself then.

So assume a baseline of two co-ops. One with outdated machinery and one with new ones. The labourers pay themselves the full value of their labour power. The average amount of labour time per commodity will be higher for group A and lower for group B. To be able to compete with group B, group A will have to sell below cost, and so they will have to pay themselves at less than they would pay accounting for average necessary labour time would be. Call it exploiting themselves. The other group here is the beneficiary, as they can sell at the cost of average labour time, while actualy not putting in as much labour time. So they could work less, or pay themselves more.

So here you'll get a leapfrogging of groups of labourers in various co-ops who have to work less or more depending on how outdated their machinery us, until such time as it has been replaced. But it is plain that this is a totally different dynamic from capitalism. Workers can here choose, have agency, to set aside value to upgrade machinery or not, to reduce work hours or pay more, to be frugal now in hopes of being rewarded later, and so on. It's in their own hands, it's in their power, all within the bounds of society's level of productivity as a function of technology, education, and other factors like geography. This is a totally different condition to live under as a labourer than is capitalism as we know it. It's qualitatively different.

Attached: leftypol feels.png (281x242, 30.47K)

I don't think Postone or most LeftComs would describe the USSR as "state capitalist" (I know I wouldn't), this is more of a post-war Trotskyist thing. This definition does have some merits but it's too flawed to be relied upon. I would argue the USSR was neither capitalist nor socialist, in fact it was strangely similar to French absolutism though that's a bit of a stretch.

Exactly. The worst about capitalism is that the exploitation isn't the result of direct personal domination as in the pre-capitalist world but of abstract market imperatives. If you eliminated the bourgeoisie (who are nothing but the stewards of capital) you could arguably share wealth more equitably but capitalist laws of motion would remain untouched.

Because capitalism isn't just about surplus extraction. Feudal lords also extracted a surplus from serfs through taxation, this isn't unique to capitalism. Under capitalism, society is ruled by impersonal market imperatives. An economic sector made entirely of co-ops would still be capitalist, it would just be more egalitarian and democratic because workers themselves manage the surplus extraction.

Interesting reads:
en.internationalism.org/ir/126_self-management-or-communism
endnotes.org.uk/issues/2/en/endnotes-communisation-and-value-form-theory

great plan, tell me more

I'm not advocating it, I'm simply saying it is theoretically possible — in order to make a point. Besides, the co-operative model has nothing to do with scale — a mom-and-pop store around the corner hiring a couple employees who have no say in the way the company is run is not a co-op, but a large corporation like Mondragon in which thousands of workers are democratically involved is. Again, I do not defend this model, I merely describe it.

How is this not putting an end to "being ruled by impersonal market imperatives"? The market imperatives are put up to a vote in every co-op. With enough coordination, they could decide nationwide to stop improving productivity, to shrink capital (which is where a central plan comes in). Or not, if they so choose. How is it stall capital if everything is made explicit and subjected to democratic control?

Yes, that's what I call it. How exactly is this any different than how it happens under capitalism, bar managers with exorbitant salaries?

You've just described the capitalist mechanism of competition. Market imperatives driving how the productive process is organized.

It is different and arguably preferable the same way single-payer healthcare is preferable to Medicaid but it still is very much capitalism.

Democratic capitalism is still capitalism. Whether or not capital is "democratically-controlled" is irrelevant. Workers can vote all they want, that won't change a thing about the law of value, commodity production or abstract labor. Seriously, read the article by the International Communist Current I linked above — you can skip to "Self-management, a fatal trap for the proletariat" if you wish.

Fuck that. Tell me explicitly what contradictions of capitalism still operate under the system I described. Tell me explicitly why this totally different, qualitatively different democratic capitalism is still bad. Tell me why it matters that you can still label it capitalism.

What is so terrible about democratic capitalism beyond the name?

this is some epic trolling if you are indeed a troll, my friend

But what kind of alternative to capitalism can you propose? An economy based on labour notes?

What’s the matter, you’ve got a better idea?

Alright. That Luxemburg quote from the ITC article I believe is pretty telling:

She is clearly talking about co-ops that exist among capitalist enterprises, the logic would be totally different for co-ops who "compete" against other co-ops, especially of they centrally coordinate production and abolish the market. You're choosing to ignore the point about what it would mean for co-ops to be generalized. If all setting of wages and commodity output targets were the subject of an explicit and transparent vote by the people who will do the labour, it would take a very cynical mind to think they would all collectively vote for their own exploitation.

What I do agree on is that you can't abolish capitalism by establishing co-ops who compete with existing capitalist firms, who can exploit their laboureres without being subject to democratic control by those same labourers.

In order to build an alternative to capitalism we need to find a way to get rid of ALL its fundamental components: private property, surplus extraction, commodity production, abstract labor, market discipline. That is: abolish the value form because as Engels stated it "already contains in germ the whole capitalist form of production".
How do we get there, you ask? I don't know. I can't pretend I know. If anyone knew for sure, the world would most likely be in the sorry state it is today. But if we ever want to know, we need solid theoretical foundations that allow us to tell genuine alternatives apart from more-or-less radical rebrandings of capitalism.

Why would a non-market network of coordinated entities require competition? If you have companies competing against each other, then that means you have a market and along that everything its existence implies.

But that’s empirically wrong, there's a large body of research which shows that in a market economy, worker cooperatives generally peform better than hierarchical capitalist firms. See, for example, the following studies:
1. esop.com/pdf/esopHistoryAndResearch/researchEvidence.pdf
2. www-siepr.stanford.edu/repec/sip/12-003.pdf
3. community-wealth.org/sites/clone.community-wealth.org/files/downloads/article-logue-yates.pdf
4. brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/1995/01/1995_bpeamicro_craig.pdf
5. econpapers.repec.org/article/eeejfinec/v_3a82_3ay_3a2006_3ai_3a3_3ap_3a673-710.htm
6. ftp.iza.org/dp5460.pdf

I did scare quote it didn't I. If you take away central coordination, you'll still be left with the market and everything it implies, but that's not identical with being left with capitalism.

As always, non-market socialists either don’t have any alternatives at all or just want to return to the same planned economy which has catastrophically failed in the 20th century.

I mean, how obvious is this: the surplus does not come from market exchange, market exchange does not require surplus extraction. The extraction happens during the labour process.

I'd rather admit that we're still looking for a way to go beyond capitalism than present alter-capitalist false alternatives just to keep face.

That’s just embarrassing, but at least you are being honest.

>I don't think Postone or most LeftComs would describe the USSR as "state capitalist" (I know I wouldn't): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_criticism#Aspects_of_value_criticism

I don't think so. Not necessarily and not exclusively.

No. Simply, logically: no. There has to be no exploitation [economic fact] for there to be no exploiters [agents]. Every other notion is sophistry and magnets, amounting to poetic absurdities like "he sang but there was no song," or "there was a fart but no farter" etc. which is cool if you are into literature but not cool if you pretend to be a Marxist.

That's actually an objective improvement over direct domination. Its concealed nature is a bothersome obstacle to those involved with revolutionary struggle only. You do realize that every single communist would prefer living under capitalism rather than feudalism, right?

Who are you quoting?? You are quoting another user while responding to me without indicating that you are talking to somebody else.

But since you didn't…
I know.
These are not the same things: taxation, surplus extraction. You can work under capitalism without taxation (e.g. tax evasion) but not without surplus extraction.

Surplus value is the unpaid labour expropriated from the working class as a whole. Political expropriation (you pay taxes as a citizen to the state IF you work and IF you abide the laws) and economic expropriation (part of his labour will inevitably be unpaid for EVERY WORKER) are completely different.

No shit. Taxation and surplus extraction aren't. Surplus extraction under a wage system for market distribution is – all of which you want to uphold, btw.

>Under capitalism, society is ruled by impersonal market imperatives.
So your whole sophistry boils down to this:
impersonal market forces --> magic --> personal market forces
while the two endpoints are – systematically speaking – the same. Just because you have democratic daily meeting of workers and coordination between coops you didn't »repersonify« or »unalienate« the market.

Again, epic troll if troll.

Why?

Just because you scare quoted it doesn't mean it's not what it is. Rule of thumb: if you scare-quote a concept, that usually means you're simply trying to give it a human face.
Yes, it does — because society would effectively be ruled by market imperatives.

That's correct. But the market is not just a network through which commodities are exchanged, it's a framework with much wider ramifications — be it only because generalized commodity production cannot exist independently of capitalism.

I also suggest reading Ellen Wood's Origin of Capitalism, which explains really well how "the market" is inextricably linked with capitalism and how the generalization of market relations marked the birth of capitalism as a mode of production.

Do you have any alternative to market economy or no?

...

That’s absolute nonsense, market mechanism predates capitalism by thousands of years.

Let's backtrack a bit here. would it be communism if all production was done under the workings of a central plan, subject to democratic control or whatever, with each labourer's share of the output determined by his share of input measured in labour time (assume away non productive people for a second)?

Using Wikipedia as a source, really? I've read and discussed with many LeftComs who do not believe "state capitalism" accurately describe the Soviet Union. Don't get me wrong: it certainly wasn't socialism, but it wasn't exactly capitalism either though it did share many similarities.

The agent and the subject here are both the same: workers engage in self-exploitation under a co-op system.

I wouldn't say it's an improvement, it's simply qualitatively different. When I say it's the "worst part" of capitalism, I do mean so in the sense that it is a rather difficult obstacle to overcome.

I agree.

… What? I've spent the whole time arguing how we need to do away with all of capitalism's fundamental categories including market discipline and how democratic capitalism is still capitalism. I think you're mistaking me for someone else.

Capitalists are "capital personified". Market imperatives such as competition dictate their behavior. As subjective agents they obviously have some leeway but ultimately how the company fares is dependent on the market.

Markets as networks of exchange do predate capitalism, the market as a generalized framework doesn't. Pre-capitalist societies had markets, capitalist societies are markets — that is, we transitioned from a society in which it is POSSIBLE to enter into market-based relations (which are subject to all sorts of political or customary regulation) to a society in which it is IMPERATIVE to do so because all other possibilities have been gradually destroyed by proletarianization.

It's a neat turn of phrase but it doesn't describe what you fear. If toy exploit yourself the benefits of exploitation rebound to yourself, and it all cancels out. A co-op that pays its members less than the value of their labour in wage will return that extracted value to them as dividends. Unless you posit that the extracted value is somehow lost if it is sunk into fixed capital that the workers themselves own.

"Central plan" can refer to a lot of different things, including the bureaucratic trainwreck that were Soviet economies — and they were not socialist. However, your system does seem to still rely on abstract labor, so I don't think it qualifies as "communism", no.

Self-exploitation itself cannot be reduced to quantitative surplus extraction. You also have to compute in how market imperatives qualitatively shape the productive process and ultimately, your own life.

That is a problem unto itself. The extracted value is sunk into fixed capital not necessarily because it is socially useful to do so, but because market imperatives require it so the company can compete with other companies by producing more value.

Then we are back to the issue of some of them eventually and inevitably becoming bourgeois. There's no going around it. Capital accumulation continues, market inequalities grow, hiring of workers creeps back in.

Toy economy. We have two car factories, one already highly automated with 20 workers, and one lagging behind in tech, with 100 workers. Say they produce equal amounts and equally good cars. Simply due to the fact that the automated factory's workers have way better wages and that the shitty factory requires much more capital reinvestment to gain upon the former at one point the 20 workers could actually offer the workers of the other factory to hire them for better wages they have under the shitty factory. There's clear economic incentive on both sides: the workers in the high-tech factory won't have to work any more (for one thing) and still get a hefty sum, while the workers from the shit factory would receive a better paycheck.

This is just one obvious example. For this not to happen you'd need heavy state monitoring, price controls, constant interventions, never ending taxation reforms following market trends to even get close to an egalitarian society, but worse, you'd be pissing off a lot of people while doing so (again, you just trampled on the "economic incentive on both sides"), but fatally: you are eternally postponing an economic inevitability through political means, which, for a Marxist, means that you will lose.

Hello, comrade communist brothers!

I am what you call "leftcom". I think we can will away the forces of competition of a market economy if we try hard enough.

debate me xD

Attached: 820100841.jpg (250x280, 30.76K)

2spooky4me

Why?
And what is so terrible about abstract labour? Making useful things takes labour, and if we want to control our (collective) production using reason, we'll have to do some accounting.

There would be a lot of accounting in his LA-LA system as well. You simply can not run a modern market workplace without an accountant, lawyer, designers, trainer, HR, PR, etc.

Which reminds me. Answer this, "leftcom!" Will your system have advertisements?

I have repeatedly stated that you cannot have a market economy and not have market imperatives like competition. I think you should go back to smugly posting "le armchair xD" memes somewhere else.

What? Capitalist firms exist precisely because it is not always useful to enter into market-based contractual relations. Ever heard about Coase theorem?

Attached: 1218927.jpg (297x475, 24.15K)

ok bro

As Debord stated: "The Stalin era revealed the bureaucracy’s ultimate function: continuing the reign of the economy by preserving the essence of market society: commodified labor. It also demonstrated the independence of the economy: the economy has come to dominate society so completely that it has proved capable of recreating the class domination it needs for its own continued operation."

It supposes "the economy" as a distinct sphere of human activity lording over other spheres. I'd suggest reading Dauvé (theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alfredo-m-bonanno-let-s-destroy-work-let-s-destroy-the-economy).

Ah, yes, the soviet millionaires.

By the way, sorry lads but I have to leave for today. Someone will have to take it up from there if any leftcom is around.

Just because someone is a millionaire doesn't mean they aren't part of a ruling class dominating society. Class defines your role in the productive process, not your wealth or income — even clueless Holla Forums newfags know this.

In what meaningful sense of the term was the communist party a ruling class?

Are you literally retarded?

In what meaningful sense of the term was the communist party a ruling class?

Read Trotsky.

>There has to be no exploitation [economic fact] for there to be no exploiters [agents]. Every other notion is sophistry and magnets, amounting to poetic absurdities like "he sang but there was no song," or "there was a fart but no farter" etc. which is cool if you are into literature but not cool if you pretend to be a Marxist.
Self-exploitation sounds like a really dumb term like self-parasite is a dumb term. It seems to be an agent in the system cannot perform self-exploitation by definition. But are all agents in capitalism necessarily human? If a market system can be modeled as a game of actors with goals and strategies, and one actor is like a very simple AI that is like a huge ball made of billions of tiny residual pieces from decisions by others (with individuals acting as individuals having little to no incentive to go against it), maybe that automatic actor can suck wealth from everybody, and as it grows its gravitational force grows, and we all incentivized to make ropes for it in hope that we'll get hanged a little bit later than the others?

Socialism.
Free association of production.

To the best of my knowledge Trotsky called it a degenerated worker's state, lead by a ruling caste and not a ruling class.

Requesting a Marxist definition of

>The bureaucratic society continued the consolidation by terrorizing the peasantry in order to implement the mast brutal primitive capitalist accumulation in history. The industrialization of the Stalin epoch revealed the reality behind the bureaucracy: the continuation of the power of the economy and the preservation of the essence of the market society commodity labor.[*] The independent economy, which dominates society to the extent of reinstituting the class domination it needs for its own ends, is thus confirmed. Which is to say that the bourgeoisie created an autonomous power which, so long as its autonomy lasts, can even do without a bourgeoisie.

>The totalitarian bureaucracy is not “the last owning class in history” in the sense of Bruna Rizzi; it is only a substitute ruling class for the commodity economy.
>Capitalist private property in decline is replaced by a simplified, less diversified surrogate which is condensed as collective property of the bureaucratic class. This underdeveloped ruling class is the expression of economic underdevelopment, and has no perspective other than to overcome the retardation of this development in certain regions of the world. It was the workers’ party organized according to the bourgeois model of separation which furnished the hierarchical-statist cadre for this supplementary edition of a ruling class. While in one of Stalin’s prisons, Anton Ciliga observed that “technical questions of organization turned out to be social questions”(Lenin and the Revolution).

COURTESY OF THE SITUATIONIST GANG

[*] : Yes I know the USSR had to consolidate its position on the global worldwide against the USA, but still…

Sorry for the autism, but I believe "substitute ruling class" means "a class that manages the means of production, and that is neither the proletariat nor the liberal Western bourgeoisie"

Attached: lespectacleface.jpg (397x474, 19.94K)

shit, meant to say "consolidate its position on a global level", I need to take a nap

Good point.

Agent? Yes. Subject? I guess you could stretch it to include capital, a kind of partial subject that has no autonomy on its own (needs the proletariat and the bourgeoisie) but has more freedom than those whom it devours into itself.

So, again, not a class in the strict Marxist sense of the word.

What is the difference between a ruling class and a ruling caste then, according to (You) ?

Which is to say they came up with a theoretically superfluous term. Call it class, if it a class. Call it a "substitute class" if it actually replaces many of the exact same functions (already problematic*) while giving a rigid definition on how it exactly differs from the original "class."

For example: I take out the cork from a wine bottle. I lose the cork. I use cellophane to cover up the opening of the bottle. The cellophane in this case a "cork substitute" in that it performs at least one of the same functions (covers up the hole), while not performing at least one other function (a cork can "breath," expand, etc. cellophane can't) the cork proper had and not sharing a hundred possible functionalities (you can easily and conveniently build a raft with corks, much harder with cellophane; a single cork can act as a substitute doorstop, a single strip of cellophane can't etc.).

*Here we have fucking complex problems, unlike with the previous silly example. Already we are dealing with AT LEAST two real frames of references (planned economy, market economy) and a bunch of theoretical ones (socialism, communism).

So yeah, fuck good sounding but clumsy theory. Tell me exactly what the fuck the politburo was, and stop telling me useless shit like "the politburo is like a box of cigarettes in that it gathered many faggots together."

Because I already can tell with that faggy Debord quote and previous cited articles all this posturing will essentially lead to "hurr, de politburo did things to the economy like capitalists do things to the economy, durr, like counting which is oppressive and patriarchal and abstract labor, hurr, the economy oppresses people, durr, TRUE communism abolishes the economy altogether, hurr."
(I'm talking about this shit article: )

I'm not going to be able to tell you what Trotsky meant by it, because I haven't read his works after the big butthurt. (I'm intending to, tho, got not much against him.) I can highlight to you why he consciously made the distinction: the politburo wasn't a class in the Marxist sense (marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/l.htm) but it was a political body any worker could potentially become a member of. (Just like the US presidential cabinet is not a class.)

For the leftcom claim about a world of co-ops = capitalism to actually become an argument, they would need to define some type of exploitation-rate (alienation rate?) that stays invariant under any sort of allocation of initial endowments as long as there is a market system and sketch an alternative system that doesn't have that.

No, you can't calculate abstract rates, that's too alienating already apparently.

Leftcoms make capital and the market into a mystical force and marxism into a mystery cult.

I have bad news: Postone is apparently in very critical condition and it's likely he won't survive for long. This apparently happened the day I posted this very thread. Well, damn…

Attached: 92633bc9084a5c15537db5c9267ab77d3b1fec6b897c6fdf40b3d34fa0fb3a1c.jpg (567x437, 25.94K)

:( source?

twitter.com/DanyaLagos/status/974854629266808838

^ UofChicago sociology student. :-(

F

Attached: postone-karikatura.jpg (1640x1084, 793.52K)

I've also resorted to calling it 'exploiting themselves', as if it's weird to call it exploitative if they're doing it themselves instead of being exploited by others. But this isn't generally how Marx uses the term. Exploitation is used by Marx in the same way as other resources are exploited. So it's actually not a moral category, as liberals often think it is.

Show me a quote by Marx where he talks about a rate of exploitation of things.

Doesn't the way of talking of a quantitative rate of exploitation reveal the technicality of the usage of the term? How can we determine a rate of exploitation if we use the term in an ethical or moral way? I think Marx talks about the horrible and amoral effects of exploitation of human labor-power, but the exploitation itself isn't used in a way that means 'oppression', but more like 'extraction'.

with him, identical with exploitation of the machine by the workman.

those employed in textile factories and metal industries, taken together, number 1,039,605; in
both cases less than the number of modern domestic slaves. What a splendid result of the
capitalist exploitation of machinery!

the labourer.7

Here's some quotes I've found by searching through Capital volume 1. I think these show that exploitation isn't only done by capitalists and isn't only done to workers.

Well yeah you can just use exploit in the sense of "take advantage off"; as long as the other entity in that equation is not a person, it needn't imply anything bad. It's often used in sports and war this way too: exploit the space opened in an aggressive play with a counter, things like that.

I think the point here should be here to look at what this supposed self-exploitation would actually mean, rather than just call it self-exploitation and pretend like that ends the discussion. As I see it, in a universalized co-op system, the "self-exploitation" could have two forms: one is where the workers have decided to put aside so much of the value they produce to increase their portion of fixed capital, to buy better machines and so on over time. So they don't take home the full value of their labour. A second version, also sketched above, would be where workers because of conditions like technology etc. have to produce commodities above average socially necessary labour time, and so take home less than you would expect based on the average price of labour. Neither of these seem like exploitation as such.

The leftcom counter, as far as I can tell, is that they are still subject to market forces, and even if you take those away by instituting a central plan, there would still be a kind of capital or market logic. You are accounting human activity in production as value, and set up production as a separate sphere of life that comes to dominate all others.

I don't follow this kind of reasoning. Production is and has always been a sphere of human activity. Applying human labour, its force multiplied by tools and machinery, it is the only way to improve our material conditions. But human labour is scarce, and it has to be renewed as its products are consumed daily. Material conditions have historically and continue today to be one of the biggest checks on human freedom. Accounting for and planning our collective labour is the most rational way to further expand that realm of freedom, freedom from want. Currently, we are not going about it rationally, and we are not going about it democratically. Those are the real problems, not the rational accounting of human labour (law of value) as such.

Attached: 0e6ad78ea39c65c717e64129bf8ca204bf65c3eba04f17597cb2bdc81380fb79.jpg (620x400, 38.92K)

u jinxed him

Attached: 1.png (681x320 37.88 KB, 40.34K)

You were asked to show a quote by Marx talking about an exploitation rate of things. None of these quotes do that. "Exploitation of the workman by the machine is therefore, with him, identical with exploitation of the machine by the workman." With him, do you who know who is meant here? Marx refers to economists shilling for capitalism, not his own view.
You believe one can't use numbers when talking about ethics? But just about everybody does that, for instance when talking about how much prison time would be merited by this or that crime.
When you extract something, my galaxy-brained comrade, what you extract has to go somewhere. Where does it go and why does it have the same quantity in current society/co-op world/Bolshevist system/anything else that isn't your leftcom thing?

Well yes, I (>>2437330) am trying to demonstrate Marx uses exploitation in the sense of the first definition in the second pic. Exploitation as used by Marx is not a value judgment.

You are thinking of production in a fethishized way. If society is subject to the law of value, we can derive that this society will have the same symptoms that exist in any other capitalist society (fall of rate of profit, crises, centralization). Wishing these away by saying that things will be "planned" does not mean these effects will magically go away. Will we also plan demand? What will we do when it's not profitable to keep a factory of workers open?

Producing for profit is not the same as increasing productivity. In many cases it is more profitable to prevent technological development or destroy capital.

Is the capitalist taking advantage of water-power in an unfair way?

See how it says capital, rather then a capitalist.

The point of Marx is that reasoning from the bourgeois, economic perspective produces an inhuman, fethishized logic. Instead of thinking of relations between humans, we're thinking of relations between things. This is the reason why you co-op idealists produce bourgeois solutions. You're reasoning from the perspective of capital.

We should think in a more ethical way then just a another resource to be extracted, but by the logic of capital it isn't anything other than that. This is the reason why we should do away with capital itself, not just its temporary wielder.

Leftcoms: None of the Leninists, syndicalists etc. have a theory of how to get rid of capitalism, since even their loftiest dreams are capitalism, since these have exploitation – and anything with exploitation is capitalism QED!
Also leftcoms: By exploitation we mean not some ethical concept, but any sort of extraction or simply taking advantage of a situation.
…

Exploitation is not an ethical concept. Marx never used it that way in his theoretical works. He used it to describe an objective process, not take a moral stance. Also, nobody claims that every mode of production involving exploitation is capitalistic — feudalism was exploitative and yet it was not capitalism.

And you are thinking of production in an unscientific way. Scarcity of labour power (and raw materials, which mostly tracks how much labour you put into acquiring them) exists. Wishy washy talk of ethical thinking about relations between humans does not do away with the need for the production of food, clothing, houses, infrastructure, medical appliances, etc., or the constraints we labour under to provide for these. Keeping an "unprofitable" (meaningless term under a planned economy but whatever, I'll take it as a stand in for obsolete) factory open means wasting labour power on inefficient production of desperately needed goods.

As to managing demand, that's can be made entirely subject to democratic control by doing away with the market and instituting a democratically agreed upon planned economy. Then you can demand just as little as you like. Don't want to work but in stead spend all day socializing? Then vote for reductions in production and convince enough people to follow you, and you can be content with less stuff and less work.

But if we're producing for value we are producing for profit. You want production for use under a planned economy, right? Then you want communism, not capitalism with co-ops.

You argue like a muke. It's clear from your quote "identical with exploitation of the machine by workmen" that you weren't aware of the context it appeared in, and you could have avoided that just by skimming a few sentences before that. You haven't read Capital, and you don't have a theory of anything. And all you do is throw around vague terms without giving a definition, then doing a very transparent equivocation strategy. Like right now. When you say "law of value", it's up to your opponent to disprove you, and since you never actually talk in a clear manner, you can always claim that you are misunderstood and 2deep4 others. So what does "law of value" mean when you say it? It doesn't mean anything. And when asked about it you will say something like: I am shocked that you don't know that, any TROO marxist knows what it means blahblahblah. And indeed, any Marxist finds some meaning in it. But you never actually make clear what you mean by that and show how this law works in exactly the same way under some Leninist model of a state-run economy as it does under generic capitalism. You are actually worse than an equivocation-spouting fuckwit, you are an equivocation rentier, you outsource the equivocation to others. You have made little chairs for your fingers and just wait until somebody else picks up the ball and makes something that looks more like a proper argument, and when the best of them wins saying things you never thought about, you can claim to be the original that anticipated all that and him to be a plagiarist. But that victory will never come if the audience isn't completely retarded, because the outsourced strategy will be just an equivocation, first showing a capitalist "law of value" to do bad things, then redefining that law to just mean any sort of operation involving estimates of work-time or even any mental process involving numbers.

Just because the law of value operates does not mean you produce for profit. Even if you produce for use, you still have to account your costs using the labour theory of value.

Now I know my way of argumentation is a little messy. I'm engaging in these arguments to improve, but this is ridiculous. It is ironic that it is you that is the one equivocating things. There are two arguments being had here.

1. Exploitation either is or isn't an ethical concept.

2. Having co-ops involved in market exchange is or isn't capitalism.

I ctrl+f'ed (and explicitly stated that I did) through Capital to demonstrate the first argument since it has been a while and my memories aren't perfect.
I am using my (limited) knowledge of what I have read in Capital to demonstrate the second.

So,
you are mixing the two different arguments here. But the more ironic thing is that you co-op idealists equivocate something worse,
see:
What? Are you saying that the LTV is operative under communism? Calculating labor inputs is not the same as calculating value. We need to do away with value. It's you guys that need to reread Capital REEEEEEEEE.

I misused this a little here, I mean equate.

You should read Marx first.
You don't mean anything when you say that.

You have constructed your mortal enemy in your head. I am not him.

Again, you're equating me searching through capital quickly for quotes involving exploitation specifically with me doing the same for anything involving value.

If you take out surplus value it actually is.

In communism value ceases to exist.
>Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.
Critique of the Gotha Programme

Only he then directly goes on to specify that people are still taking out of the common pool of products only as much as they contributed, accounted for by, you guessed it, individual labour time. And then specifies that the same law prevails as it would for the exchange of commodities, only under a qualitatively different regime due to the collective ownership of the MOP. That's the whole point.

Weren't you arguing before that even when there's no surplus extraction the law of value can still be operative? How can there be "profit" w/o surplus extraction?
Very vague, even if you restrict it to economics. The USSR couldn't and didn't have the kind of crises the capitalist world had. For example, there's no way to have 2008-current type of crisis without the behemoth global stock market.
Again, vague catch-all (left-)libertarian phraseology. In itself there's nothing wrong with centralization. Some projects demand it. Explain to me how you'd manage the massive immigration crisis looming due to climate change without centralization? "Everybody goes wherever, lol!" Or explain to me how you manage NASA without centralization, or a CERN? "Do your projects however you wish and eventually we'll have our Star Trek Voyager, hurr!" How do you run a mundane (not even atomic) power plant without strict codes of conduct? "Jerry, come in whenever you want, we'll figure out something, durr!"
You do realize that Marx argues for centralization in the Gotha Programme?
And this is the point where you are indistinguishable from a liberal.

Your implicit claim is that if something isn't subjective and outside of possible measurement, it must be completely distinct from ethical questions. But why do you believe that?
Some co-ops exchanging some things via a market is not enough information to determine whether society is capitalist or socialist.

That refers to how people will see and understand products, it's not a statement denying that things will be rationed by labor-time with many different items having evaluation ratios between them very similar to now.

also
>

Advertising does not plan demand, it's a gamble on creating or maintaining demand.

Now as for stocking a shop, or really the whole infrastructure of retail, yeah, that is mostly run on a planned basis, with complex predictions about how many goods can reasonably expected to be withdrawn at this or that store in a given time. Because that's the most rational way to fulfill the task of distributing large amounts of goods, off which they extract their surplus. "Capitalists use reason, therefore it must be bad" is infantile to the extreme.

Yiff in hell, Postone.

IMO this is just semantics. Sure, largely a gamble (although note how the P.R./marketing industry basically perfected manipulation into science), but it's not just for maintaining demand: you can also introduce something new in public consciousness, discourage one type of consumption (our toothpaste is better than the alternative), or direct the consumption flow physically (try our new shop on x street).

Sure, no argument there. That's a good observation, it also destroys demand for the competitor.

Likely we should give some thought to how we run public information under socialism. It would be a problem if demand creation were left to mental manipulation of this sort, created outside of a transparent democratic process. I'm not sure of how to balance this with freedom of speech.

...

I've been thinking exactly about this when I was reading certain chapters of TaNS.
I'd prefer the term: supply awareness. Otherwise we are back to manipulation, competing products, etc.

So the problem is: a factory under a planned economy starts pushing out a new kind of… cake. You want the population to know that it is available and where. Without us reverting back to advertisements on the TV, radio, net, streets I see only one option: an internet interface where you can access every "civilian" activities relating to your bureaucratic needs, your work prospects (e-booking your hours worked [voucher], tax paid every month), local political activities, and, hopefully, a kind of central requisitioning (as I see it having thousands of little brick and mortar "shops" is completely wasteful, and socialists should work out sustainable alternatives to Amazon, ordering) where the system neutrally lists all available products in the economy, highlighting new items.

None of this should be too much trouble. Crowd-sourcing already exist, you could imagine it being done with labour vouchers for novel products, locations, etc. People can take a gamble on new things if they want, but on their own labour time. As to a universal catalogue or some such, it should definitely be a restricted space; informing us about products should be reduced to its proper place, namely some kind of specialized portal, and not on every medium as it is now.

At any length, when people's livelihoods don't depend on pushing this or that on others, advertising would become superfluous, no? At worst you'll still get fads, fashions and trends that propagate organically.

I think I am beginning to understand the confusion now. I argue that the term exploitation as used by Marx does not refer to an ethical concept. I am therefor not arguing that there will be no exploitation under the the first stages of Communism when we refer to exploitation as meaning "make full use of and derive benefit from". The existence of exploitation in this way is not a determent for either being communist or capitalist. What would determine this difference is the use of this exploitation. Either workers exploit themselves to produce exchange values or they exploit themselves to produce use values.
I will retract any statements on the law of value being applicable in the production of use values, as I am unsure of this.

You are presenting the views I am arguing against as my own.

What? No.

I agree. It's referring to centralization under capital, where (among other things) companies fail and are consumed by larger ones. Something that would still occur with co-ops in capitalism because of competition.
I am in favor of a planned economy. I am arguing precisely against the view that parts of the economy should be left to a market.

I agree. This is why the view of extraction as a ethical category is faulty and should be seen as an objective process.

Some co-ops exchanging some things via a market is not enough information to determine whether society is capitalist or socialist.
I agree, this is vague. What is "some"?

I am not.

Even if you start producing for use the, law of value still doesn't go away, even if the appearance does. If it takes two hours of snlt to make a shoe, and eight to make a shirt, any shirt you are collectively making for use is four shoes you are not making. You will have to account for the exchange values measured in snlt of goods when you decide on what basket of goods will be produced for use, and when you change the composition, the quantitative changes will reflect the exchange value of the goods in question, depending on the relative amounts of snlt that has to be preformed to make any of them.

As far as I know this is in direct correlation with class societies, its modern roots especially with early burgher life. If you look at proto-cities (societies on the brink of the agricultural revolution still heavily involved in hunting&gathering) like Çatalhöyük there was a kind of mono-culture with individualized expressions: the same patterns, tools, symbols used in everyday life, with individual divergence. This can be observed as well in European feudal villages as well: individual work (practical, everyday) clothes + uniform clothes for festivities (marriage, festivals), folk songs and tales with shared characteristics (melody, rhythm, harmony; narrative structure, story elements) but with individual ways of passing them over.

A seemingly neutral (and seemingly scientific, imo) way to talk about "trends" is with Dawkins' conception of memes, which shifts the emphasis from the reproducer of the thing [cultural artifact] to the lure of the thing itself.

As I'm an adherent of the rather pessimistic Althusserian (Zizekian, etc.) view on ideology, I don't think that under communism we'll arrive at a self-transparent, post-ideological world. Still, I don't think either that we will directly return to the cultural patterns of proto-cities or peasantry, though these indicate a kind of egalitarian relationship towards culture that possibly show the basis of what is to come. If I have to risk a hypothesis: the system of communes proposed by TaNS would replicate similar results of the above mentioned under socialism, but in communism will be something like post-modernity without the "culture of the self" and consumerism, essentially a society where the myth of individual is completely abolished.

Take the absolute disregard for the "cultivation of the self" observable to this day in hunter-gatherer societies, combine it with the modernity and independence of urban life, and you get something horrible I look forward to. (To paraphrase one of Zizek's quips: we don't know what communism will be like, maybe that guy over there will bark, I will meow back as a response at him, and we go on with our own business…)

Attached: 24572254.jpg (201x199, 15K)

It's almost as if Holla Forums is always right and here is a happy merchant using buzzwords that amount to "it's whitey's fault, goy."

I like the pretzels people bend themselves into in this thread to not acknowledge this.
:^)

This is above my pay grade.
Well our socialist society will be birthed from our current bourgeois one, so we'll inherit the cultural affects at least. It needn't be too much of a problem: a sufficiently productive society can withstand frivolous fashions. Re: the totally self-transparent, post ideological world, that's putting the bar a bit too high. Let's start by a rationalized production process. We can treat our own input in it at the decision level as coming from a black box for the time being. Or would that be the worst thing we could do? I don't know, I plain don't get even half of the things Zizek argues about this.

I actually really like Dawkins' idea of culture as memes. It's elegant, universal and it provides an interesting feedback loop between what is good for the meme, and what is good for the carrier. Is the meme catchy? Does it lower your chances of reproduction? and so on. Though it does paint a rather unpleasant image of the self as a bundle of mind viruses in a biological information carrier. Also some shallow critique: like the regular theory of natural selection, it is noteworthy that it comes from a society characterized by brutal competition, and uses that notion to understand the broader world. I happen to think it's just an "aha" moment; the Darwinian struggle was always there, but maybe it just takes someone growing up under capitalist modernity to recognize it for what it is.

Source: facebook.com/ZeroBooks/posts/1640392509381903?pnref=story

So sad to learn this. Press F to pay respect.

Attached: flat,800x800,075,f.u1.jpg (800x800, 67.34K)

I haven't read shit from him but according to this thread's version of him he's not /ourguy/. I'm not pressing F until convinced otherwise, sorry.

How the fuck is he not /ourguy/…? Even if you disagree with him you have to acknowledge his contribution to contemporary Marxist theory.

I didn't express myself adequately. I'm not entirely certain that he didn't belong among those academics who poison the well of Marxism and halt the development of our movement.

F

F

F

Fucking all of them. Falling rate of profit, contradiction between use value and exchange, probally imperialism. Its the same except the workers get directly beaten around by impersonal market forces instead of through the filter of a boss.

You're right. Simple commodity production doesn't always mean exploitation but profits in a market economy always does.

Value =/= labor time

CONTENT AND FORM.

No such thing (see pic related)

A distinction between "production for use" and "production for profit" is largely meaningless since in a market economy, competitive pressure creates a downward pressure on profits and forces businesses to be responsive to demands of consumers, effectively leading to production for use.

Worker cooperatives have less incentives to expand than capitalist firms, and therefore it is unlikely that they would put pressure on their governments to asist them in expansion into foreign markets.

Getting "beaten around" by a system of voluntary exchange is certainly better than getting "beaten around" by the state in a planned economy.

Attached: IMG_4878.PNG (6107x3993, 503.97K)

This is one the core distinctions in Marxian theory…

Co-operatives are capitalist firms. They're just more-or-less democratically managed.

Granting all that for the sake of argument, my point was to get someone to explain a bit more how this would be bad in concreto. Market forces and the falling rate of profit are a bitch if it makes the absentee owner decide to close the plant and fire everyone. But how is this affected by having every worker get their say as in a co-op? What if everyone was in co-ops? What if they all coordinated their production via a central council of some kind? It would be absurd to say that the abolition of the separation of the worker from the ownership of the MOP would leave everything unchanged. It will interact with all other parts in the system you are looking at.

He wrote against a class-struggle point of view (this is a phenomenon common among "Marx-inspired" academics and can be explained for the most part by the class composition of that milieu). It's a good thing he stopped writing, though I would have preferred a different reason for that. Press Y so he can yiff in hell.

except those "voluntary interactions" are predicated on the forceful enclosure of private land and property, creating conflict. Also, a planned economy does not have to inherently be centralized.

But he didn't deny the importance of class struggle, what he did was stress that socialism should champion the self-abolition of the proletariat and not its realization as the camp of labor, be it only because the traditional working class is in decline both in numbers and significance. To claim his dissent with orthodox Marxism was caused by the "class composition of his milieu" is disingenuous ad-hominem, and to say.

PRESS Y TO YIFF

Your reading comprehension is abysmal.

So now Postone isn't only "arguing against a class struggle point of view", he's downright "against class struggle". Have you got anything more retarded in store, you meme-loving fuck?

Y

What a master politician!

t. Marx

t. Typical Holla Forums babby who reveres Marx's word as the Gospel while having read absolutely none of it

Goddamn you people are an embarrassment.

Attached: c70409b8d0cdeb0ad3aa96693a8cbe8a4d7f89d9fd98f01d147b40efa855323b.gif (186x266, 372.93K)

This isn't twitter here. Make an actual argument or fuck off. How would production for use work, according to Marx?
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
So there would still be a pricing system for consumer items, and it would be pretty similar to the one in capitalism. It makes sense to increase production where demand outstrips supply using a criterion analogous to profit for measuring that (and likewise the other way around, decreasing supply when that quantity of consumer item can't justify its production cost), irrespective of whether production will remain compartmentalized into units with their own distinct budgets or not.

Is this irony? Is your misreading of Marx so distorted that you don't know that one of the core prerequisites to Communism is that the working class abolishes itself? Is this bait?? The only reason Marx and Engles believed the proletariat were a revolutionary subject at all was because they believed that they had the potential, or desire, to self-abolish, as it would benefit them in a way that self-abolishing would not benefit the Bourgeoise. Is your misunderstanding of Marx truly this vast? How are there Marxists who think this.

Attached: 12.png (478x523, 14.01K)

> So there would still be a pricing system for consumer items, and it would be pretty similar to the one in capitalism.
Why call it socialism, then? I'm not even saying you're wrong policy-wise, I'm just curious as to why you would describe a system that retains money, wage labor, market imperatives and generalized commodity production for profit as socialist. What even is the difference with capitalism at this point?

Why is this even remotely controversial? Why are there so many tankcucks in this thread arguing that the goal of Communism isn't classlessness? Why are the tankfags in this thread arguing that Communism is a society built on forced labor and Socialist overproduction? Is this the actually state of discourse on this board? lmfao, why would any worker want to die for Communism if it still means they have to work just as much and still sell their labor time for a wage? Why do tankcucks even bother invoking Marx at all if all they really want is a nationalized economy and little else? Are the Red Army aesthetics just too enticing to let go of? At the end of the day the goal of Communism is statelessness and classlessness, just because the state manages property doesn't mean you have Communism, but apparently asking the question "how do you actually get to a classless society" is just too triggering for the average tankfaggot and everything breaks down into an apologia for their favorite extinct nation-states, like a zealot who's faith has been insulted.

Consumer items priced in proportion to work-time required in production actually tells you very little about what a society is like. (The reason leftcoms don't understand this is that they have a rentier-class viewpoint, because they still live with mommy and interface with the rest of the world only when ordering pizza and fuckpillows.) It doesn't even imply the existence of money (labour vouchers != money, read a book nigger).

Attached: Bully You.jpg (570x321, 38.3K)

You conveniently left out all the other elements I listed.

It tells you it operates on the basis of abstract labor. That's important.

Marx only advocated labor vouchers to be used in the early stages of the dictatorship of the proletariat following a successful revolution. They're an imperfect mean still "stamped with capitalism's birthmarks", not a desirable end.

From Grundrisse:

Like profit is when you have a surplus, durrrrr? Or the bit with when consumer items exist you must have generalized commodity production? Put Postone in the trash and actually read Marx:

No, profit is not "just having a surplus". It has something to do with, you know, capital valorization.
You still haven't answered my question, by the way: why do you call the system you promote socialism when it is virtually indistinguishable from capitalism?

Are you fucking retarded?

why don't you answer the man?

Not him but socialism is simply defined by social ownership of the means of production. Only Marxists think that socialism must necessarily involve the abolition of wage labour, interest and production for profit.

No, it isn't — only by vulgar crypto-utopians it is.

Because they understand the abstract nature of capitalism instead of simply whining about its surface manifestations.

Is this the power of leftcom thought? I want to be a leftcom, too. But I heard to be one, you have to put your books on your shelves in a rotated position, and I don't have enough space for that. Pls halp :(

“Let us suppose the workers are themselves in possession of their respective means of production and exchange their commodities with one another. These commodities would not be products of capital.” (Capital, vol. 3, p. 276)

Apparently it's a thing:
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4623059
sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007153681800502

What?

Thanks for your derailing comment linking to paywalled content which you haven't read yourself and you don't even understand the abstract of and that in no way describes self-parasitism as a general mode of existence.

I think this thread is a good demonstration of what deep leftcom thonking is capable of.

This. Tankfags don't care about abolishing wage labor because they aren't Marxists, they're just Kautskyites with guns :^)

Attached: take note lads.png (300x180, 28.09K)

so your not going to address his claims and resort to "leftcomms lmao eksde" rhetoric?

t. brainlet

Attached: communism karen marx.png (456x456, 291.82K)

Prove me wrong, multiple tankcucks in this thread have already defended wage labor multiple times on the grounds that it's okay as long as it's done in with a nationalized economy. Honestly, after reading this thread my opinion of MLs is at an all time low. Almost as bad as a thread we had a few months back where a bunch of MLs argued that the way we'll achieve statelessness is when every individual worker becomes apart of the state. I think that was perhaps the moment I realized that the average tanktard isn't really a Marxist at all, it's more of a strange cocktail of random cobbled together ideas from Kautsky, Lenin, Mao, and Fredrick Taylor.

Attached: aRKKzFY8xGGqjkGhcMk1s4ox0zQS1qwXR4ppxeXqmcc.png (500x514, 67.9K)

as a palestinian i can honestly say that the only reason why arabs hate jews is because of the racist apartheid colonial project of israel. and all the problems and human rights abuses on palestinians that came with it.

my grandma got kicked out of her home for not being jewish even though her best friend at the time was jewish. her husband was killed by zionists and she had to ride on a donkey all the way to syria. to this day she still curses jews

Attached: tumblr_mm4kp4PWm91s3m57zo1_1280.jpg (720x500, 141.76K)

...

from each according to their ability to each according to their need

Just heard he passed away three days ago. BDE

So it is your opinion that Marx was against communism? Or is it communism when Marx says labour vouchers, but it isn't anymore when somebody else says the same?

lolwut

Attached: Che und Fidel heiter.jpg (468x499 58.11 KB, 58.11K)

Because the core components of capitalism are market discipline and the law of value, with class domination being but the most glaring phenomenal manifestation of the current condition of these laws of motion. You could theoretically have capitalism without a specific, distinct class managing surplus extraction — that's entirely within the realm of the possible. That's arguably not happening anytime soon though.

Suppose two business guys, none of them owning land, talk about how landlords are a drain on society. One of them has absorbed the thoughts of Henry George, and he points out that the market-value of land is strongly shaped by what happens around it, due to the actions of both private actors and the state; so how could it be fair that an utterly passive absentee landlord benefits from that? The other agrees with the sentiment and makes a proposal that only people who run a business or have some other legitimate (in his view) income should be allowed to own land. But the Georgist isn't quite happy with that proposal. He points out that the absentee landlord is just the most clear example of what's wrong with that type of income, and even in a world without pure landlords (people who get all their income from being a landlord), the unearned landlord income would continue to exist, it would be big for one person and small for another, with neither doing anything to deserve that. To get to the root of the problem, he suggests enacting the land-value tax as proposed by Henry George. And this makes sense (in their shared narrow world-view of how much change is possible), so both agree to it.

Now, what would a similar dialogue about how much society should change look like between a co-op fetishist or ☭TANKIE☭ on one side and a leftcom on the other? The possible changes they consider are much bigger, of course. Could a leftcom convince the other, in the same way the Georgist could in the story above? Leftcoms continually talk as if they have experience in putting forth obviously correct arguments, they talk as if their position is obviously correct and they are oh-so-tired of winning people over in debates all the time, drowning in pussy and so on – but for the life of me, I just can't find an example of them actually doing that. Has any leftcom in human history ever even made one honest attempt to even roughly sketch out in plain language why they believe a system with democratically managed co-ops and a democratically managed state bank issuing an electronic fiat currency with regular referenda setting min and max of hourly salaries and most investment being state-directed would necessarily suffer from booms and busts, for instance? Wildly gesticulating and sputtering sentence fragments in four different languages while smoking a pipe is not an argument.

Attached: 0646ec29bd3a8309223d37ba498691c6.jpg (427x640, 95.83K)

*sigh* They don't make leftcoms anymore like they used to. You could at least have said:
Seriously though: The analogy should be clear. The Georgist points out that the landlord's role and income stream can exist without anybody being a pure landlord. Now, it's your turn to make the analog case about how democratically run co-ops fuse the role of capitalist and worker, and that the performance as capitalist remains unaffected by that fusion of roles. Do it or admit you can't.

I've never come across a leftcom whose work read like this. Leftcom theory is rarely all that more obtuse than the most arduous sections of Marx's Capital. You're living in an alternate reality fueled entirely by memes.

They still respond to market discipline. Instead of the good ol' boss driving wages down or laying people off, now the democratic council or elected official does. The nature of the mode of production remains unchanged, only the way it is managed was altered. The policy might have its advantages, but overall it certainly cannot be described as a socialist or anti-capitalist development.

I don't think any leftcom believes the "fusion of roles" (as you call it) wouldn't result in an affected performance as capitalist. But it wouldn't change a thing about the fundamentally capitalist nature of these social relations.

...

Market discipline and the law of value predate capitalsim

>Has any leftcom in human history ever even made one honest attempt to even roughly sketch out in plain language why they believe a system with democratically managed co-ops and a democratically managed state bank issuing an electronic fiat currency with regular referenda setting min and max of hourly salaries and most investment being state-directed would necessarily suffer from booms and busts, for instance?

Capitalism is not wholly defined by "responding to market discipline". The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. Marx said that about post-capitalist society, and that statement implies that individuals won't directly produce everything they themselves individually will consume, and it implies measurement of performance. It implies reward and penalty.
Do you actually have a model that tells you that booms and busts must continue to happen in a system described as above or don't you? You know, the thing you guys were asked about. Do you have anything more to offer than vague feelings of dread and calling that theory?

Yes. That's clearly what everybody from tanks to anarcho-whatevesr are saying in this thread: Leftcoms read too much and are too intelligent. That is the criticism against leftcoms. They always read everything, they have a knack for instantly getting the gist of it, and they give honest and on-point responses like yours, so everybody else is just jelly of them. In general, when somebody takes a stand that is called anti-intellectual by those she criticizes, it is not because she doesn't believe in the competence and honesty of the people she criticizes, oh no, it is because she hates thinking and being intelligent. Oh yes. Good post.

No, they don't.

A simple system of "rewards and penalties" is very different from market discipline.
I haven't read enough crisis theory to pretend that I do. But what's your point? That a system that has done away with "booms and busts" somehow isn't capitalist anymore? There are different ways in which a capitalist system may experience crises.
You spend most of your posts obsessively whining about how leftcoms are supposedly holier-than-thou bullies. I'm afraid you have unresolved issues.

jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black/

Attached: no one has good answers.jpg (682x960, 55.87K)

The point is that you can't put forth a coherent argument about anything. The reason you can't do it is as follows: You have chosen the role of the "left"-"com" because of how comfy it is. You like the conclusion of doing nothing, while putting on the garb of the radical, who only criticizes the left because you are from the super r-r-radical and pure left, how to arrive at the comfy conclusion is an afterthought. You like pretending to read things, pretending to know things, but you don't like the work of getting there, to even do basic reading. You can't put into words your trail of thoughts arriving at your position because you don't have a trail of thoughts, aside from "being a useless shit sure is comfy", but not even crimethinc would accept that as a proper theory piece.

Seth Ackerman doesn't define what falls under "price in some form", so it's not possible to check that statement.
Typical liberal sleight of hand: centralized data processing doesn't imply a separate group of people being really in control.
No. Smith is classical economics Neoclassical equilibrium is about supply and demand curves. You will not find reasoning assuming rising costs per unit when output is increased aside from references to putting to use land of decreasing quality, and the classical concept of equilibrium is about profit rates.
>simple fact:in market systems firms are autonomous
Legal fiction.
>East European economists realized that an essential precondition for firms to be truly autonomous was the existence of a capital market
t. anti-communist

I have no idea where people get that idea that the conclusion of leftcom theory is to "do nothing" — besides armchair memes, that is. If anything, leftcom intellectuals tend to urge people to develop new forms of struggle that go beyond decreasingly relevant orthodox labor agitation. Being critical of the latter doesn't mean you write them off as worthless or that you advocate not doing anything in its place, it means you hope to see anti-capitalist growing increasingly radical in shape and form rather than stagnating and ultimately being defeated.

Because clearly there is no ground for any criticism of the contemporary left — it's just perfect like it is and anyone engaging in anything but sycophantic phrase-mongering must be a resentful academic arguing in bad faith and whose opinion shouldn't matter. Quite honestly, you just sound jelly that some people have the gal to be critical of your pet dogmas and subsequently berate them as bad guys with malevolent intent. There are tons of criticism of leftcom theory out there that is perfectly genuine and worth the read, but you just hate leftcoms because of a gut feeling. That's whack.

So your problem with leftcoms is that they actually don't read as much proper theory as you do. You know, for someone who likes to claim leftcoms are dismissive and haughty, you sure spend a lot of your time writing these posts being a belligerent, ad hominem-spouting little shit.

Shitty post made by a faggot.

Literally the next sentence:
Hmm, really makes you think.

Q: Which of the statements from that post is correct though?
1. Seth Ackerman doesn't define what falls under "price in some form".
2. Centralized data processing doesn't imply a separate group of people being really in control.
3. Neoclassical economics is not a formalization of classical economics, e. g. it uses a different equilibrium concept.
4. Firms are usually dependent on other suppliers, they don't create things ex nihilo.
5. The proposal by Seth Ackerman isn't communism.
A: All these statements are correct.

Care to actually address the point in place of spouting memes? How are developing new forms of struggle "not doing anything"…?

absolutely disgusting

Attached: ce1bfb4a8fd72795ca4d25424a651799ef4734fd.jpg (355x499, 88.73K)

Shitty post made by a faggot.

The full sentence was actually (gee, leftcoms really don't read anything):

Don't you agree that orthodox labor agitation is becoming less and less relevant in a world where the industrial working class is in decline both in numbers and influence, and the workplace has undergone significant transformations undermining old approaches to organization? No leftcom ever argued that say strikes for higher wages were useless or shouldn't happen, they merely insist that the left needs to broaden its theoretical and practical horizon beyond that on which it usually relied during the 20th century, lest it fails to develop thorough alternatives to capitalism if not flat out succumbs to capitalism's mutations.

I have never encountered a leftcom who trusted the mainstream media about social struggles. In fact many leftcom publications are unique sources of information regarding workers' struggle, like Chuang which specializes in what's going on in China for instance. Besides, lack of presence on the site of struggles does not mean your arguments are irrelevant, this is "lived experience" militant-liberal bullshit. Marx was never part of a strike and spent most of his time reading or writing, does that mean what the theory he formulated should be ignored?

"Uh uh, you can't criticize anything if you can't deliver a ready-made solution on a silver plate!" Sounds like a clueless normie trying to argue politics. As Adorno once said:

Now this is just shameless, baseless slander. You've formed your opinion of leftcoms entirely through memes; this is just sad. Here is what Postone has to say about the proletariat as the revolutionary subject of history:
> It seems to me that the proletariat is a revolutionary force in several respects. First of all, the interaction of capital and proletariat is essential for the dynamic of the system. The proletariat is not outside of the system, the proletariat is integral to the system. The class opposition between capitalist and proletariat is not intended by Marx as a sociological picture of society, rather, it isolates that which is central to the dynamism of capitalism, which I think is at the heart of Marx’s concerns. […] Nevertheless, one of the differences, for Marx, between the proletariat and other oppressed groups, is that if the proletariat becomes radically dissatisfied with its condition of life, it opens up the possibility of general human emancipation.

tl;dr What you say might as well be summed up to "leftcoms are meanie doo doo heads that just won't stop disagreeing with me."

Nice goalpost moving fractal you got there, we get from a leftcom stating:
and the reply to that was that leftcoms don't do anything, and the "reply" to that is now pretending the haters asked for nothing less than perfect ready-made solution on a sliver plate. Actually, to criticize something, you have to make a comparison. Something is only good or bad in comparison to something else. Asking for this is not the same as asking for a precise plan how to get there or even a very precise picture of what "there" will be, but if you don't even have a rough picture of what's better, you don't really have a critique, you have incoherent rambling that doesn't go anywhere, using out-of context words from the Marxist lexicon without care (like Adorno using bourgeois above, he sounds like a pretentious hyper-idealist dumbfuck in that quote).

You came to that conclusion arbitrarily. I don't see why comparison necessarily needs to be employed in the course of critique. It is sometimes relevant, other times not so much. I don't really need a "comparison" to claim that co-ops can be subject to market discipline the same way conventional top-down companies are. I don't have to compare it to something better I would advocate in its place for the critique to make sense.

Moishe Postone makes it clear in the OP's video (youtu.be/OJIaze-C2Qs?t=29m15s) that his work is an attempt to contribute towards creating a new social imaginary that is capable of addressing unprecedented issues the left currently has no answer for, of fostering new possibilities for alternative arrangements that have done away with all of capitalism's fundamental categories.

Claiming that theory can transform social reality is not "idealism" unless you adhere to a very rigid understanding of interactions between base and superstructure. As Marx claimed in his contribution to Hegel's Philosophy of Right:
> The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.

But let's face it, you're too smug to concede that leftcoms are in fact not inherently malevolent people and I'm to stubborn to stop bitterly defending them as if my life depended on it — so this discussion isn't going anywhere.

It's not a conclusion, it's baked into the meaning of words like good and bad and fast and slow and big and small and so on in human language.
He doesn't need a comparison to… compare co-ops with conventional top-down companies, to come to the conclusion that they are very similar in the comparison that he totally doesn't make, and moreover, he comes to the conclusion that they are each worse than another configuration which he doesn't describe and which he doesn't need to describe, because he doesn't compare it to them, even though he "concludes" it is better in this non-comparison. I guess one could say that you don't make comparisons in that your thinking, if it can be even called that, happens entirely outside of rationally deducting anything, your positions are entirely made of feelings and contrarian reflexes.
Postone and Kurz are doing as much today to engage the masses as they did back when they were alive.

I don't need a comparison to something better (which was your point) to make the claim that co-ops can be subject to market discipline — which in itself doesn't even require a comparison to conventional companies anyway. At this point you're just toying with words to make sure everything I say can be construed to your liking. And leftcoms are the contrarians, uh?

I've repeatedly claimed that I believe co-ops can offer advantages when compared to conventional companies, so I do think they can be "better" the same way having a welfare state is better than having none. I don't disagree with people who believe co-ops might be a step forward (just like a UBI or another policy would), I disagree with people who present co-ops as anti-capitalist, as an alternative social arrangement, as a possible end in themselves. I don't pretend I have something better in stock, because I would rather admit I'm still searching for an answer than claim the problems we're faced with regarding capitalism could be magically solved with whatever alt-capitalist panacea is advertised as "radical" at the moment.

Postone arguably wasn't a great popularizer, that is true. Kurz was different, be it only because he contributed to the Krisis group's Manifesto Against Labour which I found pretty clear and easy to relate to. Anyway, just because your theory isn't directly referred to by most people doesn't mean more pedagogically competent authors cannot pick up these very ideas and from there go on to make them more accessible and popular. Anselm Jappe tried to do exactly that with his recently re-printed Les Aventures de le Marchandise, an attempt at synthesizing the ideas associated with value-criticism.
The only book Marx himself targeted at the masses was the Communist Manifesto, a short pamphlet. Most of his work remains pretty much unread by non-academics — yet that doesn't mean it didn't have a lasting influence on the real world or that it should be ignored as ineffectual ramblings.

Look, forget it. I'm not continuing this conversation. We're both wasting our time, and we know it.

Look, given the way you talk this wasn't clear at all. And if you do agree that current thing is worse than co-op world and co-op world is worse than some other thing, you are of course making a comparison. You are not putting forth complex thought, but you are writing in such a manner that you are hard to understand, and you contradict yourself. Maybe you have a little awareness of how little you can't into logic, so that's why your writing is so vague (I mean not just you individually, but also other "leftcoms" like Kurz and Jappe).
You relate to pompous words and a silly world-view due to lack of data, lack of logical thinking, lack of interaction with working-class movements.

Here's a pseudo-archive of an old Postone/Wertkritik thread from here recycled into a thread on a spambot forum: hollaforums.com/thread/1272194/activism/wertkritik-thread.html