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Intersectional identity politics

0 (0%)

Liberation politics

2 (13.3%)

To be honest I've never heard of Liberation politics before

13 (86.7%)

Total Members Voted: 14

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

[Wrong thread]

[TempAcc]

Good luck maintaining the magical system of marxist utopia, in which nobody will ever think up ways to exploit one another and if they do everything gets progressively more fucked because 1) if there's no system in place to maintain a level of control over these things, then it'll spread around like cancer since people generally don't like doing honest work when there's people sitting around earning 5 times that and 2) if there IS a system to keep such things contained and solve problems, then said system WILL be the place in which corruption is more likely to sprout from;

TBH marx should've just went with fantasy writing and sold books so he'd stop leeching off Hegel. Its what you get when you got a permarich german academic who never worked, owned a company or partook in any sort of administrative activity and have him write on how to solve social inequality. Good for impressionable rich german academics, but not for much else. Thanks but no thanks.

[Reelya]

2) if there IS a system to keep such things contained and solve problems, then said system WILL be the place in which corruption is more likely to sprout from

Which wouldn't necessarily be any worse than the equivalent institutions that exist under any other system. All you've shown is that the fall back system under a decentralized socio-economic system is no worse than what we already have. There's certainly no reason to think society would be more corrupt if employee-owned local corporations were more common.

If autocratic structures are inherently bad, then they must be inherently bad in both the public and private sectors. Think about the kinds of bullshit we blame government for, then compare that to similar bullshit dealing with bank errors or large phone companies. It's the same shit. Who owns it isn't the issue - inefficient screw ups are inherent to large centralized organizations.

Marx was actually talking about historical stages. i.e. his idea of socialism is that it would supercede capitalism in the same sense that capitalism superceded feudalism. "revolution" in the sense of "industrial revolution" not "french revolution". So, cooperatives and employee-owned corporations can arise gradually - they can exist contemporaneously with autocratic corporations and still in fact meet Marx's predictions, in the same way that feudalism didn't magically end all at once. But the idea is that this sort of economic arrangement will win out because it's better. When employees own the corporation there's less overheads with management and unions basically disappear. This was experienced in the Brazilian company Semco. Under a industrial-democratic system with generous profit sharing, unions vanished, management costs plummeted and revenue grew from $4 million to $200 million in a decade. Because such a system is just better. Sure, there are autocrats holding onto their mega-corps right now, but those structures are massively inefficient. They can hold on for a while however, in the same sense that feudal lords held out for centuries. But in the end, efficiency inevitably wins, which was Marx's point about historical inevitability.

[DJ]

I think that a large part of why communism failed was that the administrative tools available at the time were a lot better suited for hierarchical organization of labor rather than a network model. The IT revolution has made the network model a lot more viable, though.

[Loud Whispers]

I think that a large part of why communism failed was that the administrative tools available at the time were a lot better suited for hierarchical organization of labor rather than a network model. The IT revolution has made the network model a lot more viable, though.

What do you mean by this? I've heard technocratic marxists before but I don't really get their angle

[RedKing]

I think that a large part of why communism failed was that the administrative tools available at the time were a lot better suited for hierarchical organization of labor rather than a network model. The IT revolution has made the network model a lot more viable, though.

What do you mean by this? I've heard technocratic marxists before but I don't really get their angle

Well, for instance, getting input from thousands of collectives across Russia is a tough thing to do with telephones and typewriters and telegraphs. Real-time is impossible. So you organize them into oblasts and SSRs and all sorts of administratve divisions. And put an administrator in charge of each level. That administrator suddenly has more power than the people he's administering, and more potential for corruption because they become a gatekeeper for information, both from the center outwards and from their region back to the center.

In theory, with modern IT, you could bypass a lot of that and have all the collectives/communes/etc. reporting directly to a master feed that could collect and collate the data and present the central planners with accurate information. You could also facilitate information and technology transfer between communes instead of having to go up and down through the hierarchy.

China has long had a problem with mid-level bureaucrats fucking up the whole thing for personal gain, even before they were Communist. There's a good argument that the great famine of the 1960's was caused in part by Mao and the central committee getting greatly exaggerated reports of crop yields from the various provinces, because those provincial officials knew their rewards and job security depended on good output from their regions. So they faked the shit out of it, even as they were having terrible harvests. If all that information reporting could be automated somehow (the thinking goes), central planners get better info and the power of the lower-tier administrators is reduced.

Modern China has been aiming for a technocratic Marxist system for at least 35 years now. And it's better than it used to be, but still has a long way to go, as the corruption scandals of the last several years have shown.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, that looks like it. IMO that's the fairest economic model for everyone involved.

As a bonus they also tend to be more consuimer-friendly, since they are generally more local/regional concerns, which means that the members are intertwined with their customer base.

Morrigi basically said everything that needs to be said about identity politics. Marxism is obsolete not just because of what Harry discussed re: the conditions of the early industrial revolution being steadily stamped out by every country that has or is industrialized/-ing (see China becoming less attractive for sweatshop-model multinationals because they're starting to improve conditions for such workers, leading to an exodus to other East Asian/SEA nations), but also because the bits which are important have been folded into a mixed economic model that lacks the crazy inefficiencies of pure mid-stage Marxism.

That, and because end-game Marxism is the same impossible delusion which is pursued by every radically anti-state ideology.

[Reelya]

I think that a large part of why communism failed was that the administrative tools available at the time were a lot better suited for hierarchical organization of labor rather than a network model. The IT revolution has made the network model a lot more viable, though.

What do you mean by this? I've heard technocratic marxists before but I don't really get their angle

Top-down vs bottom-up. Marx proposed bottom-up organization, but the crude technology of 1900's was better suited to top-down organization. But with modern communication tech, a bottom-up organization has the chance to be more efficient than top-down because you cut out the layers of bureaucracy.

Another thing basically everyone failed to get is that Marx was a futurist. Trying to "implement" his ideas was always going to be idiotic, because he was fairly clear on what he was saying. That things were going a certain way, and that when certain prerequisites were met, certain other things were likely to happen. You can't jumpstart that any more than you can make the sun come up faster. e.g, example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_needs

Marx delineated the specific conditions under which such a creed would be applicable—a society where technology and social organization had substantially eliminated the need for physical labor in the production of things, where "labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want".[12] Marx explained his belief that, in such a society, each person would be motivated to work for the good of society despite the absence of a social mechanism compelling them to work,

In other words, the core prerequisite for Marx's view of the future were complete automation of all production processes. Nobody has ever really got that. Marx tried to clearly point out that "communism" as he described it is a post-automation society. And that in such a society, people would only need to work if they really felt like doing something.

Marx might have the last laugh here. Right now a big topic of debate is about the coming automated future, and how do we feed everyone if workers are no longer required. Basically, the most common sense proposal: paying a living allowance to everyone and people only work if they really want to. That's basically 100% how Marx said things would work out.

[Loud Whispers]

Where does Marx say these things will work out?

[Reelya]

In his entire body of works basically. He founded the school of Historical materialism, which is posited on that exact thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism

In his analysis of the movement of history, Marx predicted the breakdown of capitalism, and the establishment in time of a communist society in which class-based human conflict would be overcome.

It's a prediction, not a "call to arms". And part of that prediction was that industry would move to full automation, thus making workers obsolete (see quote in my previous post). And that after that, a new economic situation would arise which he called communism.

Basically, if we start handing out a minimum income to everyone because nobody can get a job because everything is automated, that's pretty much spot-on with what Marx claimed would happen.

Communism in Marx is what happens after everything becomes automated. Trying to "jump start" that through political organization before the tech even exists was as idiotic as it would be to create a "Galactic Empire" when you don't have Star Drives yet.

Marx was also pretty spot-on about how capitalism would develop -> socialism. Basically, even the most hardcore modern capitalist nation is WAY more socialist than anything that existed during Marx's lifetime. Even the poster-boy for capitalism, USA has 40% of it's economy dependent on the government. The vast majority of "low government spending" nations are in fact poor as dirt rather than the "economic miracles" the right wing claim they should be.

[Harry Baldman]

It's probably difficult to divorce revolution in the Russian sense from Marx's writings because Marx himself seems to have both acted in groups that furthered armed revolution and supported their aims (with varying degrees of evidence, mind you). When Marx is mentioned, one thinks of The Communist Manifesto rather than Das Kapital, the product of his later, mellower years. Well, when one actually knows the difference between the two, at least. I know I'm foggy on the actual history of things on that end, let alone the actual contents of the philosophical treatises in question.

[feelotraveller]

What I find interesting is the way the 'intersection' is staged as a confrontation - Us vs. Them - both between identity politics and liberation ideologies, and within each respective discourse/movement.

Identity politics is good in outlining some of the specific processes and mechanisms for socialising (aka brainwashing) various people into prejudice against or compromised behaviour towards others.

Liberation writings are good in envisaging how the world could be a different and better place.

I guess that's my ability, what's your need?