Author Topic: Laissez-faire Politics Thread - Praxis? I didn't play Deus Ex, sorry.  (Read 217117 times)

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shosta

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.


Yue Xin, still missing after organizing workers at Jasic.
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benjipwns

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Slate says Socialism is over thanks to Bhaskar Sunkara: https://slate.com/business/2019/05/socialist-manifesto-bhaskar-sunkara-socialism-bernie-sanders.html
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Should the U.S. Trash Capitalism?

After reading The Socialist Manifesto, I’d have to say no.

...

What I got instead was a book that mostly dwells on how socialist movements have failed throughout history, either falling short of their goals or descending into nightmarish authoritarianism. Even Sweden, famous for its generous welfare state, is treated as a cautionary tale. “The best we can say about socialism in the twentieth century is that it was a false start,” Sunkara writes. Out of this dismal track record, Sunkara tries to draw lessons about how today’s radical leftists can do better, but the result is not always inspiring. A more fitting title might have been The Socialist Manifesto: Let’s Try to Get It Right This Time.

First, the definition: From the get-go, Sunkara draws a bright line between social democracy—a capitalist economy where workers have strong legal rights and enjoy a robust welfare state, which is to say, Denmark—and democratic socialism, aka socialism, but with a democratically elected government. Social democracy sands off capitalism’s rough edges; democratic socialism feeds capitalism into the wood chipper, then builds something else in its place. Sunkara very much wants to make mulch from our current system of private enterprise.

But how, exactly, would he do it? Sunkara imagines a world where individual companies are technically owned by the state but collectively controlled by their workers, who get to keep and split the profits, while all lending and startup funding are handled by a government development bank (goodbye, J.P. Morgan). His utopia is not a Soviet-style command economy; businesses would still compete freely with one another. But the labor and financial markets as we know them would no longer exist. (Sunkara handles much of this description in an oddly whimsical chapter involving a pasta sauce factory owned by Jon Bon Jovi’s family and a political movement started by Bruce Springsteen.* The term “pasta proletarian” is deployed.)
pasta proletarian

Kara

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Quote
First, the definition: From the get-go, Sunkara draws a bright line between social democracy—a capitalist economy where workers have strong legal rights and enjoy a robust welfare state, which is to say, Denmark—and democratic socialism, aka socialism

 :stop :rage

benjipwns

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The virgin Socialist Manifesto:
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288 pages

The chad Communist Manifesto:
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24 pages

cover blurbs on the virgin Socialist Manifesto:
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"Accessible, irreverent and entertaining, Bhaskar Sunkara has delivered a razor-sharp guide to socialism's history, transformative promise, and path to power. This book also serves as an irresistible invitation to join in building that power, and in shaping the radically democratic future that is our best hope in these make-or-break times."―Naomi Klein, New York Times-bestselling author of This Changes Everything and No is Not Enough

"American politics is gripped by the worst kind of debate over socialism: one where everyone has an opinion, but few know what they're talking about. In this book, Bhaskar Sunkara, one of America's leading socialists, shows what socialism is and how it might work. Whether you consider yourself a socialist or just want to argue with socialists, this is the place to start."―Ezra Klein, founder and editor-at-large of Vox

"In this erudite call to action, Sunkara, publisher of Jacobin magazine, draws lessons from the history of various socialist movements to imagine how socialism could rise in the U.S..... His recommendations for today's socialists are logical and well-informed."―Publishers Weekly

cover blurbs on the chad Communist Manifesto:
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BUCH IST VERBOTEN

publisher of the virgin Socialist Manifesto
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multinational conglomerate founded by Michael Eisner

publisher of the chad Communist Manifesto
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barely anyone until 30 years later and then whoever the fuck wanted to

Kara

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Despite the frankly hurtful accusations Dmitri Dmitriyevich hurls at me in the bad dragon show thread, I haven't read Girondin with any regularity since my baby leftist days, but I do follow Bhaskar and the gang on social media still because I'm a 9 to 5, lunch pail kind of doxxer (unlike my good friend and ideological enemy benji, the consummate flashy, hip hop doxxer) so I'm usually somewhat plugged in to whatever they're on about at the moment. The self-promotion for the Cooperative Manifesto has been a little odd, rarely talking too much about the content itself, but that's not too unusual for Verso type stuff. Contrast this with Comrade Daddy Furr who goes on long podcasts with humble aspirations to tell you exactly how many of Trotsky's lies are destroyed in his latest book.

This digression (and Kenny outing himself in the late stage capitalism thread) reminds me that I should probably look over my estate planning; I think all of it goes to the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation right now if I kick the bucket.

benjipwns

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actually, some of the cover/review blurbs for this book read like what BA (or his cult) puts on his own books :lol

Quote
"Thanks to the dysfunctionality of contemporary capitalism, 'socialism' has reentered the American political vocabulary, especially among the young. In The Socialist Manifesto, Bhaskar Sunkara gives us a lively account of socialism's history and current meanings, and makes the case for a genuine alternative to our deeply unequal social and political order."―Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, emeritus, Columbia University

"A brilliantly compelling vision of why the US is ripe for socialism in the twenty-first century, from one of the brightest stars of the American left. Essential reading for anyone who wants to build a new society based on people's needs, not profit for the elite."―Owen Jones, Guardian columnist and the author of Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
« Last Edit: May 23, 2019, 02:18:20 AM by benjipwns »

benjipwns

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i just realized that if BA died it could be weeks before i found out

this is a very sobering thought

Kara

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Kara

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Speaking if Bob, did you get any exposure to the BEB meme benji? It eventually returned into a riff on Jeb! so I thought of you as it was ongoing.



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benjipwns

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what ARE Bernie Sanders views on the lies about the Great Leap Forward/Cultural Revolution and famine in the Ukraine? :thinking

Kara

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what ARE Bernie Sanders views on the lies about the Great Leap Forward/Cultural Revolution and famine in the Ukraine? :thinking

*Bernie Sanders voice* the millionaires and the billionaires are not the only ones who should have access to the truth about kulaks. Thank you.

shosta

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The idea that “Mao was responsible for genocide” has been used as a springboard to rubbish everything that the Chinese people achieved during Mao’s rule. However, even someone like the demographer Judith Banister, one of the most prominent advocates of the “massive death toll” hypothesis has to admit the successes of the Mao era. She writes how in 1973-5 life expectancy in China was higher than in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and many countries in Latin America 1. In 1981 she co-wrote an article where she described the People’s Republic of China as a ‘super-achiever’ in terms of mortality reduction, with life expectancy increasing by approximately 1.5 years per calendar year since the start of communist rule in 1949 2. Life expectancy increased from 35 in 1949 to 65 in the 1970s when Mao’s rule came to an end. 3

To read many modern commentators on Mao’s China 4, you would get the impression that Mao’s agricultural and industrial policies led to absolute economic disaster. Even more restrained commentators, such as the economist Peter Nolan 5 claim that living standards did not rise in China, during the post-revolutionary period, until Deng Xiaoping took power. Of course, increases in living standards are not the sole reason for increases in life expectancy. However, it is absurd to claim that life expectancy could have increased so much during the Mao era with no increase in living standards.

For example, it is claimed by many who have studied figures released by Deng Xiaoping after Mao’s death that per capita grain production did not increase at all during the Mao period. 6 But how is it possible to reconcile such statistics with the figures on life expectancy that the same authors quote? Besides which these figures are contradicted by other figures. Guo Shutian, a Former Director of Policy and Law in the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, in the post-Mao era, gives a very different view of China’s overall agricultural performance during the period before Deng’s “reforms.” It is true that he writes that agricultural production decreased in five years between 1949-1978 due to “natural calamities and mistakes in the work.” However he states that during 1949-1978 the per hectare yield of land sown with food crops increased by 145.9% and total food production rose 169.6%. During this period China’s population grew by 77.7%. On these figures, China’s per capita food production grew from 204 kilograms to 328 kilograms in the period in question.7

Even according to figures released by the Deng Xiaoping regime, industrial production increased by 11.2% per year from 1952-1976 (by 10% a year during the alleged catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution). In 1952 industry was 36% of gross value of national output in China. By 1975 industry was 72% and agriculture was 28%. It is quite obvious that Mao’s supposedly disastrous socialist economic policies paved the way for the rapid (but inegalitarian and unbalanced) economic development of the post-Mao era.8

There is a good argument to suggest that the policies of the Great Leap Forward actually did much to sustain China’s overall economic growth, after an initial period of disruption. At the end of the 1950s, it was clear that China was going to have to develop using its own resources and without being able to use a large amount of machinery and technological know-how imported from the Soviet Union.

In the late 1950s China and the USSR were heading for a schism. Partly, this was the ideological fall-out that occurred following the death of Stalin. There had been many differences between Stalin and Mao. Among other things, Mao believed that Stalin mistrusted the peasants and over-emphasized the development of heavy industry. However, Mao believed that Khrushchev was using his denunciation of Stalinism as a cover for the progressive ditching of socialist ideology and practice in the USSR.

Also the split was due to the tendency of Khrushchev to try and impose the Soviet Union’s own ways of doing things on its allies. Khrushchev acted not in the spirit of socialist internationalism but rather in the spirit of treating economically less developed nations like client states. For a country like China, that had fought so bitterly for its freedom from foreign domination, such a relationship could never have been acceptable. Mao could not have sold it to his people, even if he had wanted to.

In 1960 the conflict between the two nations came to a head. The Soviets had been providing a great deal of assistance for China’s industrialization program. In 1960, all Soviet technical advisers left the country. They took with them the blueprints of the various industrial plants they had been planning to build.

Mao made clear that, from the start, the policies of the Great Leap Forward were about China developing a more independent economic policy. China’s alternative to reliance on the USSR was a program for developing agriculture alongside the development of industry. In so doing, Mao wanted to use the resources that China could muster in abundance-labour and popular enthusiasm. The use of these resources would make up for the lack of capital and advanced technology.

Although problems and reversals occurred in the Great Leap Forward, it is fair to say that it had a very important role in the ongoing development of agriculture. Measures such as water conservancy and irrigation allowed for sustained increases in agricultural production, once the period of bad harvests was over. They also helped the countryside to deal with the problem of drought. Flood defenses were also developed. Terracing helped gradually increase the amount of cultivated area.

U.S. demographers have tried to use death rate evidence and other demographic evidence from official Chinese sources to prove the hypothesis that there was a “massive death toll” in the Great Leap Forward (i.e. a hypothesis that the “largest famine of all time” or “one of the largest famines of all time” took place during the Great Leap Forward). However, inconsistencies in the evidence and overall doubts about the source of their evidence undermine this “massive death toll” hypothesis.
« Last Edit: May 23, 2019, 03:27:19 AM by shosta »
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shosta

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wait, hold on, that was monthly review
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team filler

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 :doge
*****

Kara

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Kara

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Checking your posts for likes and seeing people hate 😡

Bhaskar didn't let the staff of Girondin unionize until 2016, I'd say he knows a lot about being an employer. :hitler

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Insert "Jacobin doesn't pay for articles" joke here.
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Unrelated:
 https://twitter.com/amnesty/status/1131502985933144064

Kara

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Peeps say I'm a clown for being hopepunk but this is what we're up against now.


curly

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Despite the frankly hurtful accusations Dmitri Dmitriyevich hurls at me in the bad dragon show thread, I haven't read Girondin with any regularity since my baby leftist days, but I do follow Bhaskar and the gang on social media still because I'm a 9 to 5, lunch pail kind of doxxer (unlike my good friend and ideological enemy benji, the consummate flashy, hip hop doxxer) so I'm usually somewhat plugged in to whatever they're on about at the moment. The self-promotion for the Cooperative Manifesto has been a little odd, rarely talking too much about the content itself, but that's not too unusual for Verso type stuff. Contrast this with Comrade Daddy Furr who goes on long podcasts with humble aspirations to tell you exactly how many of Trotsky's lies are destroyed in his latest book.

This digression (and Kenny outing himself in the late stage capitalism thread) reminds me that I should probably look over my estate planning; I think all of it goes to the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation right now if I kick the bucket.

This post confuses me because I assumed Kara was born an Old Bolshevik

shosta

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I'm pretty sure in Kara's opinion, turning everything into a worker co-op isn't the end goal of socialism.
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Kara

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This post confuses me because I assumed Kara was born an Old Bolshevik

At the time I thought it was amusing that I could leave money to an ostensible policy institute of the SED's descendant. Since they have a U.S. office I also assumed it would be easier for whatever poor soul was left with the task to distribute the money; it's probably a little harder to get money to Cuba.

This was also a bit before before Die Linke leaned in hard on the anti-immigrant drivel and it became apparent that the New York office of the foundation was obviously in the orbit of Jacobin / NYC DSA instead of bringing us piping hot (subnational) governing party praxis.

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There were three in the family--a papa, a mama, and a son. Papa was an Old Bolsehvik, Mama was an old housewife, and the son was an old Pioneer with close-cropped hair and twelve years of life experience.

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"Not in 'class', but in the 'group'", the son answered. "How many times do I have to tell you, Papa, that 'class' is a reactionary-feudal concept?" :dead :dead :dead
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Kara

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That video Esch posted reminded me of something that happened in grade school. :six:

One year we had to do something similar to Young AmeriTowne that was called "Town." Each classroom in the grade would split up into teams and develop a "business." All the other students in the other grades would visit our classrooms on designated days, be given a fixed amount of scrip, and then permitted to shop at our respective "businesses." I forget what we could use the scrip on... in my classroom it was probably privileges and what not. (We had a bizarre system of credit that you spent to use the bathroom, get a drink of water, pay for a demerit, or go on a special lunch trip to Carl's Jr--this was where I learned about debt financing btw but as always I digress.)

To date myself horribly here, my group decided to sell sports trading cards. This wasn't the best idea but it also wasn't the worst idea given that it was 199X; I think we were all mainly concerned about getting rid of a lot of excess inventory we'd all accumulated over the years more than anything.

Our teacher at the time was dating a guy who would often come around our classroom and unbeknownst to us he was extremely into sports trading cards. When he found out what our wares were for Town he arranged to purchase all manner of cards at whatever price we named because he had access to the scrip bank through his personal relationship. Since we were little shits we named (what I recall as) absurd prices for our cards, or at least prices that could never be supported by the vulgar market in which we operated. Since these sums were utterly irrelevant to our buyer he gladly paid and we more or less crushed our classmates in this exercise of bourgeois propaganda.

Not only did I buy myself out of using the bathroom credit hell with this endeavor but I learned a valuable lesson about the ethics (or lack thereof) in for-profit markets. 8)

curly

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Kara

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^based on its early Twitter follows that account is a probable (non-state) infiltration; no idea why everyone felt the need to quote tweet / screen cap and dunk on it this weekend.

BUT SPEAKING OF MELTDOWN MAY, the other day George Ciccariello-Maher posted a photo of him and a much younger woman unprompted--like "I just graduated from university so my relationship with George Ciccariello-Maher is no longer #problematic" young--and he got ratioed for looking like a groomer / creep professor so he promptly melted the fuck down, accused people of being racist for assuming that they could tell a woman of color's age, then deactivated his account. He probably did more to set back Chavismo in a single meltdown than every buffoonish speech given by Mike Piss or comical op-ed published in the elite tiers of bourgeois press.

Also there's a lot of amusing whispers about the woman too, one of which is that she forgot to turn off locations while tweeting and ended up tweeting from a U.S. military base. :doge

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A couple of years ago I was reading Building the Commune in an airport bar. The bartender asked me what I was reading and I lifted up the cover to show her without saying anything because I'm even less personable when I have to fly. Then she asked me if I was learning how to build a commune and all I could do was give a wry, knowing smile.
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benjipwns

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this BernardBro I know told me that The Conquest of Bread is "really really good, very interesting"

send help asap

shosta

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How about, The Conquest of Head, and it's an anarcho-PUA guide to having sex in communes
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benjipwns

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no solo-winging allowed, only collective labor

shosta

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"Let some people get laid first"—Deng Xiaoping
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Crash Dummy

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How about, The Conquest of Head, and it's an anarcho-PUA guide to having sex in communes
i want this written by someone like irvine welsh from the pov of those guys who go undercover investigating cults but by the end have joined the cult and are fully indoctrinated. the twist would be he's a deep state agent with a vd

Kara

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#NotAllCommunes obviously but mine has been pretty tame in matters of the flesh over the years with the only real outlier being a comical caricature of a lumpenproletariat that even a middle class values guy like Marx would have found hard to believe. The weeb who stopped wearing pants even acts embarrassed about not wearing pants half the time our paths cross.

Kara

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There's a lot of chatter lately about corn planting being way behind schedule this year. Don't know if that's a climate change thing, a tariff thing, or a cosmic horror thing so I'm talking about it here instead of the climate change thread.

Anyway, there's a running gag on Trash Future where they remark that we live in the Soviet Union except everything costs too much so here's to Khrushchev and thinking widespread meat consumption is a development milestone. :ussrcry

Example:

https://twitter.com/kannbwx/status/1133465061559865344

Speaking of Trash Future, they had a pretty black pill climate change episode the other week and they read Jeff "Fidel took my stepdad's slaves :'(" Bezos' solution to the problem... doing Gundam (i.e. themed space colonies). The mythology of the brilliant bourgeois is more far-fetched than any ancient society could dream up.

Kara

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New episode of RevLeft is entertaining. They brought on Alyson Escalante so it's almost like an episode of Red Menace in debate form. And it's everyones favorite subject "is Marxism a science?" Some bits on historical and dialectical materialism, lysenkoism, older and newer definitions of science, etc.

https://twitter.com/RevLeftRadio/status/1132522051804155905

I listened to this (thanks for posting).

1. Not a huge fan of its use (and overuse) as a term but uncomradely seems an appropriate description for a debate between reds and blacks (no racist) about Marxism as a science that more or less veers straight into litigating Lysenkoism like it's RationalWiki outchea and drifts into non sequuntur such as the terrors in Revolutionary Catalonia.

2. This is probably demonstrative of having had my brain poisoned by liberalism but this debate really needed an """impartial""" moderator or an audience asking questions to refocus the conversation. Under no circumstances whatsoever should a debate in this space drift to a point where someone says, "social democracy did some good things too," without the very delineating statements "in the economic periphery after the end of the Cold War when few options were available" or "up until 1914 when it decided to self-immolate" appended to the end.

3. At this point in their short history I don't particularly care for Marxist Center as an organization and things like this are a large part of the reason why. Why are we entertaining the Utopian or Scientific debate in 2019? Utopianism lost quite convincingly ages ago and only exists today in RevLeft self-categorizations and the odd vestigial organization. Marxist Center describes itself as a "pre-pre-party" organization "looking to build a base" yet it does the same stuff as the extant Marxist-Leninist groups that never have.

Great Rumbler

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The corn planting issues are due to once-in-a-lifetime* flooding in the Midwest and Central states.

*More like once-a-year now, amirite :doge
dog

shosta

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The vast majority of that corn is for livestock anyway, hopefully beef prices soar through the roof
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toku

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The vast majority of that corn is for livestock anyway, hopefully beef prices soar through the roof

They will. Corn crops have suffered but farmers have lost livestock as well.

shosta

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I think people tend to have an idea in their head of a commune as a sort of culty, do as thou wilt in a bad way type jim jones deal but id imagine that most people in urban commune just go to work and occasionally fuck strangers like everyone else.
they also invent ridiculous terminology like "do-ocracy"
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curly

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New episode of RevLeft is entertaining. They brought on Alyson Escalante so it's almost like an episode of Red Menace in debate form. And it's everyones favorite subject "is Marxism a science?" Some bits on historical and dialectical materialism, lysenkoism, older and newer definitions of science, etc.

https://twitter.com/RevLeftRadio/status/1132522051804155905

I want to send the guy who wiki'd Lysenkoism beforehand and keeps bringing it up to the gulag

Kara

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https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/heshmat-alavi-fake-iran-mek/

imo The Gets Intercepted doesn't make a particularly convincing case here (I believe what they're reporting, to be clear) but it's absurd that a plant who the Daily Caller (!!!) severed ties with can get peddled so widely and easily. Crime may not purportedly pay, but manufacturing political will sure seems to.

@Esch will reply when I got a moment.

Kara

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shosta

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socialism in the first world is just a fun roleplaying exercise and there really isn't anything to be done at all in the global north except acting as a genuine ally for the global south, or manning up and committing acts of sabotage

[/elbabua]
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toku

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If you can't tell from my meme output, I was reading the 18th Brumaire recently and the lumpen sack of potatoes analogy stuck with me strongly. We just exist in these little fragments of social spheres, online and in the real world. We are not only split from each other by our class and the intense blurrings of those classes that distribution of financialization has created but also little isolated social pockets, leftism in the first world is mostly an aesthetic choice ffs and we act so 'uncomradely' as Kara put it behind those choices. At times it makes me think I never really left console wars.

Ed: I need to put the phone down I'm just ranting about nothing


shosta

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If you can't tell from my meme output, I was reading the 18th Brumaire recently and the lumpen sack of potatoes analogy stuck with me strongly. We just exist in these little fragments of social spheres, online and in the real world. We are not only split from each other by our class and the intense blurrings of those classes that distribution of financialization has created but also little isolated social pockets
SPUD: Socially Passive Urban Dweller
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Mandark

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If you can't tell from my meme output, I was reading the 18th Brumaire recently and the lumpen sack of potatoes analogy stuck with me strongly. We just exist in these little fragments of social spheres, online and in the real world. We are not only split from each other by our class and the intense blurrings of those classes that distribution of financialization has created but also little isolated social pockets, leftism in the first world is mostly an aesthetic choice ffs and we act so 'uncomradely' as Kara put it behind those choices. At times it makes me think I never really left console wars.

Ed: I need to put the phone down I'm just ranting about nothing

After watching leftists with like 2,000 followers on Twitter get into really protracted, bitter feuds with each other I have a new appreciation for the People's Front of Judea vs. Judean People's Front gag.

curly

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The Left Twitter Cycle:

-Find new account, follow them because they're smart/funny/whatever
-Come across a bunch of other accounts that hate them for some obscure reason
-Laugh at how insular and bitchy these people are
-Slowly begin to hate the original account and yourself for ever liking them

toku

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twitter is only good for one thing and that's giant anime titties

shosta

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Great Rumbler

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twitter is only good for one thing and that's giant anime titties

100% Accurate
dog

Kara

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I've been on Twitter long enough to know small groups eating themselves on ideological grounds that are inscrutable to those without is not exclusively (or even predominantly) the domain of the left. Even if you're including the Hillary Clinton Revanchists in left it wouldn't be true. Very unpopular front line of discussion, everyone.

And to head it off at the pass, the most obvious one that comes to mind are the right wing wannabe militia gun nuts.


shosta

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median profit margin in this country is like 12% or 15% or something across all businesses. And even then, payout ratio for shareholders goes anywhere between thirty percent and zilch, the rest being reinvested. For larger companies that can dominate markets this goes higher to 20%, maybe even 25% (APPL), and economists believe this is evidence of monopoly, but even then, spread across the entire workers of those companies, there is not a lot of profit left to reclaim in developed countries with a diverse, skilled laborforce
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Kara

  • It was all going to be very admirable and noble and it would show us - philosophically - what it means to be human.
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You don't have to depart from notional liberalism into surplus value appropriation, hyperexploitation of the economic periphery, et cetera for that meme to make sense: literal, de jure, wage theft is rampant.

Now why the various states department of labor don't enjoy investigatorial and corrective capabilities on par with the various state and local police forces despite the widespread and costly theft is a question liberal ideology would struggle to answer, of course, but I'm skipping a couple of tracks on the album there.

Mandark

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Fun fact: undergrad economics students are mostly taught to use models that incorporate the assumption of zero profits.

Kara

  • It was all going to be very admirable and noble and it would show us - philosophically - what it means to be human.
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Fun fact: undergrad economics students are mostly taught to use models that incorporate the assumption of zero profits.

Not really related per se but I've been looking for a reason to post this here: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-highlight/2019/5/14/18520783/harvard-economics-chetty

For a sensible chuckle be sure to search for "Russ Roberts" in that article.

Kara

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Linking this jeremiad is #problematic and if you want to cancel me or critically support me for doing so then I understand.

https://medium.com/@stephensrl20/socialism-deferred-how-dsa-failed-in-the-fight-against-sexual-violence-racism-3ca541333d60

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Shout out to SMB-ianca and @turing_police's favorite member of the U.S. Imperialism Caucus Jason Schulmann getting name dropped in here.
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https://twitter.com/lilmissagitated/status/1138317527883247616

I think this is the first time the other party has responded publicly? Long tweet thread, be warned.

Kara

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Aren't we at the point where wage theft actually outweighs total petty theft?  I've heard this theory bandied around a couple times but couldn't find anything to support it in my Googles besides this.

I think there was a Citations Needed about this, or at the very least Adam Johnson mentions it in passing all the time.

When it comes to violations of this nature I'm a little too insider (not to tell on myself here) to want to research the stats people have actually been able to pry out of the exchange archipelago.

spoiler (click to show/hide)
You are a member of the most oppressed segment of society, small business owners. You don't like paying payroll taxes so you just don't report payroll regularly. You still pay your employees their net checks, but they're hand checks with no accompanying pay stub to verify anything. You do this so much that your employees are issued Forms W-2 that materially misstate the work they performed and the money they were paid in a calendar year. The lucky ones file resident income tax returns. Some of them receive an incorrect Earned Income Tax Credit. Some of the lucky ones also sign up for health insurance in an Affordable Care Act exchange. Because their reported wages are materially misstated they receive inaccurate Advanced Premium Tax Credits. You buy a boat because your net operating loss carryforward can cover any lost deduction from not paying payroll taxes. The Democratic Party has won a sweeping election and suddenly everyone is very concerned about the solvency of Social Security.
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shosta

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BisMarckie

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Expropriations of landlords and prohibiting to buy land for speculative reasons have entered the public discourse in Germany over the past weeks and months. :ussrcry

shosta

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Expropriations of landlords and prohibiting to buy land for speculative reasons have entered the public discourse in Germany over the past weeks and months. :ussrcry
If you're having trouble getting the right on board with it you can make it racist, too, by raising the specter of chinese foreign investment. No nazbol, no nazbol, you're the nazbol
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BisMarckie

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Don‘t need the Chinese if you can point to American tech bros like AirBnB ruining the market. :pimp

What is scarier than a huge influx of foreign capital? That‘s right, the internet.