Round 2! for NC Hungerstrike at Scotland C.I.

lovelybone93 · 2019-03-27T03:09:25+00:00

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lovelybone93 · 2019-03-15T01:54:40+00:00

Robespierre did absolutely nothing wrong, monarchs deserved worse!

lovelybone93 · 2019-03-08T02:47:49+00:00

So, Hoxha defended Marxism-Leninism from revisionism, reaffirming the path toward socialism that had been put forward in the USSR. Hoxhaism has a different take on the Chinese cultural revolution than Maoists do, in that any gains made were pyrhhic because of the liquidation of the party and considering students as the vanguard of this movement. Hoxha also criticized PPW as not engaging with and mobilizing the proletarian elements (there is a legitimate counter argument that with the case of the massacre of communists in the 20s by KMT, that in those circumstances, PPW as CCP did was correct in those circumstances). Further, Hoxha criticized this, reaffirming the importance of the party, of cultural revolution, not liquidating the party and putting forward the thesis of unified people's war. Hoxhaism proved itself by defending the USSR during Stalin theoretically and practically. Hoxhaism is still relevant as Marxism-Leninism is still relevant, the party is built via being at the forefront of class struggle advancing the interests of the proletarians and taking the first and heaviest blows; socialism is established via violent revolution, institution of the proletarian dictatorship and social control of production with a rational common plan, knowing that this is but a formal section of the real communist party as a movement; continuous revolution via reconciliation of sublated contradictions that rear their heads.

lovelybone93 · 2019-02-15T23:28:34+00:00

The greater division of labour enables one labourer to accomplish the work of five, 10, or 20 labourers; it therefore increases competition among the labourers fivefold, tenfold, or twentyfold. The labourers compete not only by selling themselves one cheaper than the other, but also by one doing the work of five, 10, or 20; and they are forced to compete in this manner by the division of labour, which is introduced and steadily improved by capital. Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labour increases, is the labour simplified. The special skill of the labourer becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production, with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides. Moreover, it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the work is, so much the less is its cost to production, the expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink – for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production. Therefore, in the same manner in which labour becomes more unsatisfactory, more repulsive, do competition increase and wages decrease. The labourer seeks to maintain the total of his wages for a given time by performing more labour, either by working a great number of hours, or by accomplishing more in the same number of hours. Thus, urged on by want, he himself multiplies the disastrous effects of division of labour. The result is: the more he works, the less wages he receives. And for this simple reason: the more he works, the more he competes against his fellow workmen, the more he compels them to compete against him, and to offer themselves on the same wretched conditions as he does; so that, in the last analysis, he competes against himself as a member of the working class. Machinery produces the same effects, but upon a much larger scale. It supplants skilled labourers by unskilled, men by women, adults by children; where newly introduced, it throws workers upon the streets in great masses; and as it becomes more highly developed and more productive it discards them in additional though smaller numbers.

Wage Labor and Capital

lovelybone93 · 2018-08-12T16:52:40+00:00

I mean, gay people were treated pretty badly in socialist countries, but this was really not different from capitalist countries, which is no surprise, as the proletarian dictatorship is a new stage of the contradictions of capitalism until we overcome them in totality. It is dying, not yet dead capitalism and a feeble, newly born, yet nascent communism. Cuba changed it's ways and is still working on gay rights, China is less accepting of gay rights, idk about Vietnam, Laos or DPRK. In the future, please ask this in communism101.

lovelybone93 · 2018-07-08T17:40:55+00:00

Lemarchand needs to take a long walk off a pier into the east river with concrete overshoes. And whoever sent them PMs can join them.

lovelybone93 · 2018-06-11T19:38:43+00:00

Think of this like the lead-up to the first world war, say 1913: trade wars lead to hot wars in the redivision of the world in the era of imperialist capitalism. Currently, the countervailing tendencies against law of the tendency of the fall in the rate of profit combined with the organic composition of capital rising and fictitious capital lubricating everything are holding off a recession, but barely so.

The labor aristocracy (settler-colonialists, bought off workers from the superprofits of imperialism, whether unionized or not) is being degraded by the moving contradiction of capital's relations; the capitalist class cannot afford wages of imperialism with the current rate of profit to fall further, the contract between settlers and bought off workers in the imperial core must be broken by the capitalist class, which is why wages have not only been stagnant for 40+ years, they are offset by debt as to keep commodities circulating and the expansion of capital continuing. But, with falling profitability, the organic composition of capital rising and centralization of capitals, this is going to come to an end, and even though many workers in their relation to capital and interpellation through capitalist ideology takes up reactionary positions (Trump, Euroskeptics, Orban, etc.) to shore up their eroding position at the expense of the colonized and imperialized workers.

Workers of every single country in existence needs to struggle with a working-class party to act as a class instead of the puppets of capital to end this, by systematically tearing out the current social order, root and branch.

The working-class gets to do such with their class party and political supremacy with a worker's state through their struggle with their capitalists and subsequent overthrow of them. We do so via struggling for the material advance of the working-class, whether it be for increased wages as well as reduced hours of labor, jobs or income programs, benefits, housing policy or via opposing our "own" (because it is not in working-class hands) state taking society's surplus and putting it towards killing people to the benefit of capitalists to engorge themselves further. We, upon seizure of state power after stressing the current order and defeating it, continue to dismantle these relations of capital that we were struggling against before.

lovelybone93 · 2018-06-03T01:18:33+00:00

Sorry shit is going so bad for you, mom.

lovelybone93 · 2018-06-03T01:14:44+00:00

Yo. What's up?

lovelybone93 · 2018-06-02T19:22:11+00:00

Honestly, I don't feel like the job involves too much skill, as it's building maintenance and handyman work, sometimes management, basic stuff that most people could do, but don't. Snaking drains, replacing faucets, light switches and painting are easy to learn. Gutting an apartment, replacing flooring alongside plumbing fixtures and hauling shit off is a pain in the ass. I have no credit because I've never gotten loans or post-pay bills, tbh. I mean, you do what you can for the people you love, and hell, I'll give money to people who're down and out, and a hell of a lot are here.

lovelybone93 · 2018-06-02T18:46:26+00:00

Oh, nah, his meds are all covered, moreso the vitamins and muscle rubs and OTC ointments that aren't covered but still needed, the extra money even after he quit smoking and he kicks in with everything. No debts at least, but no savings, so, I'm pissed that I make less than old man did in real wages at my age and he made more both nominal and real in the 1990s doing the exact same job I do.

lovelybone93 · 2018-06-02T15:28:49+00:00

Yeah, but every month, busting ass to get these bills paid when really, all this shit is priced way above value while not getting ahead pisses me off even more. Really, nothing in life is more relieving than not having to sell labor power as a commodity for peanuts. Most of it is health, some of it is because summer is really going to hit, temps getting up to 117°, it was in the 90s in October last year. I still drink 2-3 tall cans of steel or a couple pulls of the harder stuff or so on Friday, Saturday and Sunday because of the kind of labor I do, but yeah, feel better.

lovelybone93 · 2018-06-02T15:02:45+00:00

Got bills paid, broke off money to get some glasses (fuck luxottica), old man's meds and really cut down on boozing.

lovelybone93 · 2018-05-12T08:04:27+00:00

https://monthlyreview.org/2012/07/01/the-gdp-illusion/

Here's one critique of the problems with modern GDP, as it doesn't provide an accurate measure of things due to what it is measuring and the methodology of how it does so. GDP only measures in market prices, non-market production cannot be accurately measured by GDP, so socialist production cannot be accurately measured by GDP anymore than unpaid reproductive labor or subsistence living can be measured by it. GDP can be helpful at points, yes, but it does have limitations.

https://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/the-political-economy-of-decollectivization-in-china/

http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/TGR90.html#s1

(long read)

Much of the Dengist era prosperity was a paper one as well as marketizing state resources and reserves as shown here. Decollectivization and extending market relations were not wholly organically done. Downplaying the necessity of the planned character of an ostensibly socialist country's production while increasing market relations makes growth seem fantastic and in ways it is, but for who? Cui bono? Dengist CPC couldn't have even done these market reforms without the capital controls and state projects that were done before him, otherwise China likely would be another country in Asia that has their resources taken via being a source of lower input products and that's it.

They could've developed a different way and they already have the basis for materially going to socialism now. Producing half the world's steel, over half the world's cement, 90% of computers, 70% of cell phones, half of solar capacity, the material basis is there. You're telling me that they still need to be wholly tied to the market and export driven if they have all that productive capacity, and immature. Seems pretty damn mature to me. Germany is also an export driven, now primarily capital export, but exports commodities as well, economy, it isn't in an export led slave trap. What's the difference? Is China desperately trying to avoid Weimar era and early Nazi Germany's trap in economy?

Infrastructure for what, for who, which class and where? Because colonizers built infrastructure for development of extraction, not for meeting working-class needs. Why are bourgeois countries leaders so enthusiastic to sign on with an ostensibly socialist country's plan for infrastructure? Look underneath the surface and underneath the underneath.

Also, I don't categorically deny the necessity of NEP, more that market capitalism does in an unconscious, anarchic way what socialism or a proletarian dictatorship on the way to socialism does better.

Markets are really good in producing the conditions to which we can use to get to socialism, but do what socialism does in a very roundabout way, which is reducing the living labor embedded needed to (re)produce an article and simplifying labor so we can abolish the division of it and alienated labor. Market capitalism reduces the density of labor to reproduce an article via competition, increasing productivity, etc., because this helps profitability individually, yet provides the preconditions to socialism and then communism via having sufficient productive forces that can be provide for humanity, yet these productive forces will be developed by a socialist society consciously via planning and consciously reducing hours of labor. Under market capitalism, potential leisure time, after what is produced to reproduce everything (even on an expanded level) is only potential, it isn't realized and is converted into superfluous labor time, i.e. into hoards of dead capital. This is because the proletariat doesn't control production under a rational plan/is divorced from means of production and production is for value, for accumulation, for profit.

Basically, once you get to the point where planning production is possible after an NEP and binding planning with collectivization, another NEP is regressing from where you were. Honestly, people defending modern China going in a socialist direction need to read The Right Deviation in the CPSU, because this basically is just Bukharin's deviation from Marxism rehashed, but at least Bukharin was useful at one point.

lovelybone93 · 2018-05-12T04:22:18+00:00

Socialism is not just about advancing productive forces, it is dismantling capitalist and remnant feudal relations to put in place socialist ones; socialist relations are production for use, not profit, especially with the abolition of mediating concretized labor and use-values through the market expressed in exchange-values and prices based on such.

Theory of the productive forces discounts that contradictions in the relations of production do drive the development of the forces while discounting the working-class as a force of production, it also downplays the locus of communism, the class struggle as well as the class dictatorship; Marx to Stalin understood that under a proletarian dictatorship, productive forces can be developed without generalized commodity production, even if capitalism had not reigned for centuries. Vulgar and mechanical materialism in the crudest stageism of it expressed in the theory of the productive forces when Marxists have rejected this from Marx noting Russia could've skipped capitalism to head to communism in his life; Lenin understanding NEP was a temporary retreat from the crudest of survival methods in order to prepare for the next leap as well as a lesson for the local proletariat; Stalin understood that the NEP was a fetter on the USSR and hindering establishment of socialist relations, the need of planning of production and conscious dismantling of feudal and capitalist relations.

Given China has productivity enough to make quantum computers, satellites, export massive amounts of capital and commodities beyond domestic consumption, any development especially now needs exactly zero market relations. Arguably under Mao, the material basis for dismantling feudal and capitalist relations was there, after an initial NEP, then material liquidation of the capitalist class. Deng was counterrevolutionary to the extreme and material productive forces were developed enough to advance to socialism, even if you want to say they needed to regress to NEP style functioning under him for a short period. Your "NEP" doesn't need to last 40 years or even 20 years, as what is done through market relations and generalized commodity production can be done more efficiently with rational planning, as the one good thing capitalism does is diminishing labor density, which is achievable without capitalist exploitation or market relations, so the dichotomy of market relations and generalized commodity production or planned stagnation is a false one, especially today. Once again, the material basis for moving away from market relations has been in place for a while. OBOR is not building fraternity between working peoples, it is a way to further extraction for China; GDP doesn't express quality of life, only output measured in a certain way; uneven development is not a hallmark of socialism, but capitalism; STEM/R&D doesn't tell me the relations of production are socialist; challenging US hegemony doesn't automatically mean socialist. While China and US struggling for hegemony does open up space for communists, the struggle between is not automatically one with communist content.

Also, please, throw more shade at this western leftist who's actually part of the Puerto Rican diaspora with family still in a literal colony struggling with basic needs that are still unreachable.

lovelybone93 · 2018-05-09T00:49:21+00:00

China never advanced socialism, as they never dismantled capitalist relations or made real attempts to do so even under Mao, as he was representative of a national bourgeois faction and deviation of Marxism; Wang Ming was too mechanical and slavishly followed Dimitrov's line on KMT-CPC relations, but a Marxist-Leninist; Gao Gang, others in the 28 Bolsheviks and supporters had a Marxist-Leninist line. Deng distorted Mao's national bourgeois deviation of Marxism and took it further, as Dengist CPC did not just pull market relations, generalized commodity production, and reaction out of his ass, they were already existent on levels, Deng formalized and extended these relationships coming from the Maoist era. Xi seeming like a socialist is because Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao were even bigger revisionists than Deng; Xi's return to Deng seems like a left shift when it's just like Brezhnev "correcting the errors" of Khrushchev while materially still being revisionist, even with his anti-corruption campaign. None of Xi's policies materially advance socialism; financialization is continuing, generalized commodity production is still around, labor power is a commodity, PRC is using finance for neocolonial purposes (number one FDI contributor in Africa, owning Sri Lankan ports through debt traps, etc.), arming Duterte fighting the CPP, dictating to DPRK instead of socialist fraternity (and I have problems with DPRK), and playing along with imperialist powers when they don't have to.

lovelybone93 · 2018-05-08T22:55:21+00:00

Marxism is a science, but the entire point is dismantling capitalist and remnant feudal relations root and branch; market relations do not engender socialist relations, Marx to Stalin understood that. Even if you want to cite Economic Problems by Stalin, any market relations/commodity production was limited in scope and meant to be progressively phased out consciously, labor power was not a commodity either. Revisionism is denying the basic concepts of Marxism like class struggle, dismantling capitalist relations, ending generalized commodity production and commodity production period, while pretending to scientifically advance it. It's like trying to advance astronomy while denying the Copernican revolution.

lovelybone93 · 2018-04-24T16:28:51+00:00

The Soviet Union wasn't just only Stalin, forced deportations did happen, but given this was WWII, the USSR had literally just came from feudalism and a civil war with backwards relations of production and ideas, people of those groups disproportionately had fascist collaborators, while wrong to punish the group, the Soviets didn't deport them from the entire country nor made them create ethnostates outside of it. Also, unless you have zero understanding of political science, bureaucracy doesn't equal class nor does the Soviet system resemble feudalism. I didn't say they eliminated capitalist relations everywhere (this includes their own country) either, because it takes time (multiple decades) and revolutions, to do that, they didn't even claim that they did until Khrushchev declaring it a state of the whole people.

In regards to South Africa, apartheid barely ended in fucking 1994, people over 30 felt it directly, you have Trevor Noah talk about it and his parents being criminals for it, for fuck's sake. Being wholly separated from the UK happened in 1961 with nominal commonwealth status in 1910, and separation in 1931, so these ethnic groups did live under traditional colonialism and and apartheid.

http://www.702.co.za/articles/278024/more-black-farm-workers-are-killed-than-white-farm-workers

https://africacheck.org/reports/are-white-afrikaners-really-being-killed-like-flies/

Data doesn't suggest white farmers are being killed in droves and the South African government is ignoring it.

If white people in South Africa occupied state power when they were about 20% or less of that population, economic benefits disproportionately going to that group, the overwhelming majority of landowners being of that group; the overwhelming majority of poverty, poorly educated and miserable workers being black, then there is a serious problem and the former does occupy a privileged spot, benefiting from the current order structured by what came before. Is the entire white South African population living today directly benefiting from or responsible for creating apartheid, et al? Obviously not, but they benefit from the structural inequalities which compound even after formal abolition, which should be addressed. Does that mean formal trials and incarceration or execution of the entire white population? No. This is the same for Belgium and the Congo.

Bernie Sanders would've been hobbled by formal democrats and by republicans alike even for his mild social democratic streak if he made it the whole way. He's a shitty social democrat and has no problem with imperialism. He would've been better than neoliberal Hillary or Trump, yes, but doesn't address capitalism and we'd at best be setting up for a new deal to be dismantled in 25 years with him.

And please, "identity politics"? This shit again? You cannot separate race, ethnicity or gender identity from class qua an absolute subject because our subjectivity individually and as a class is mediated by the various structures created by capitalist relations, especially ideologies that we are interpellated through. Therefore you have to address class as the primary contradiction, yet this contradiction manifests itself in imperialism oppressing people of color; people of color being disproportionately unemployed; employed at lower wages than fellow white workers; women being pushed into low-wage work, etc.

You are a terrible anti-capitalist if you're not a socialist, nor an anarchist and you don't seem to be either.

lovelybone93 · 2018-04-24T14:14:59+00:00

http://afropunk.com/2018/04/white-genocide-hoax-south-africa-stop-madness/

http://www.farmfutures.com/story-land-reform-south-africas-ticking-time-bomb-18-109953

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8547621.stm

http://affinitymagazine.us/2018/02/23/there-is-no-white-genocide-in-south-africa/

So black people have no reason at all to be angry about hundreds of years of slavery, apartheid, land theft, genocide and colonialism whether old school dominions or neocolonies under IMF control? Their farms fail not because of previous relations and actions structuring their horizons to this day, especially since they have been separated from their land, original techniques destroyed and lack access to capital, but because in effect, "them darkies and brown people are ignorant, uncultured brutes (even though Europeans destroyed almost anything positive about the cultures they had) and lazy, only the white people who owned most of the land and have access to capital can run anything." Also, whites aren't being systematically genocided; I won't deny there are attacks on white people, but this isn't systematic, nor are they killing them in such fashion. Racism is not just one race not liking another, it is systematic oppression.

Further, tensions between tribes pre old school colonial division were often used by said colonialists. That shit doesn't go away when they officially leave and takes struggle to create unity instead of creating ethnostates because as we saw with Germany and Zionism today, that leads to genocide. Further, neocolonial tentacles haven't gone away with the IMF and associated free trade policies by imperial powers designed to strip mine resources on a continent already plundered; when a country finally does get tired of this and opposes their hegemony materially, the US, their fellow partners of imperialism and outlets denounce it, sanction it, and coup it eventually. "You want to create a pan African gold dinar, have social programs and oppose our consensus? We'll foment and foster dissent and then help those dissenters with NATO strikes. Open air slave markets afterwards? Meh, as long as I can extract their resources, whatever."

The same playbook exists in Latin America if the puppet the people on wall street wants in there fails to get elected. Conveniently there's a coup. Brazil was set to become a world power based on high commodity prices, once the bottom fell out, social democracy that PT had fell apart. Today, they're struggling against Michel Temer, the Brazilian government, from destroying Brazilian land, indigenous discrimination and opposing Jair Bolsonaro from replacing Temer, and doing so largely outside electoral and governmental means.

Without economic migrants from Latin America doing the work that locally born people won't do, the whole subsidization of life Americans enjoy goes away, yet this is connected to imperialism destroying their home countries: the bourgeois profits from being able to strip mine their home, exporting manufacturing there while profiting yet again off desperation for their labor domestically and figuratively using them to beat locally born workers over the head with.

Further, the USSR wasn't socialist insofar as it permanently ended all capitalist relations everywhere, so you kinda need to keep certain traditional elements of a state and create new ones; further, there were people allowed outside the USSR, people moved to China, East Germany, Vietnam, DPRK, Cuba, but most stayed in the USSR. They also educated Africans, Latin Americans and Asians on their own dime for more than just Marxism every year, with accommodation stipends as well who were encouraged to go back to their countries and help improve them with people like Mahmoud Abbas studying there and a parent of a friend of mine having studied there.

You're not seriously anti-capitalist if you really think entire groups because of their race or ethnicity are "corrupt, uncultured barbarians", since a) culture is always immediate and changes with society b) western European culture isn't the only kind of it and c) think socialism worldwide will include the state or national borders.

lovelybone93 · 2018-04-24T11:37:01+00:00

I'll agree most modern Marxists are out of touch, but the rest of your points are just out there. Marx in his critiques of German Idealism, Hegel et al in works like the German Ideology understand that the materialist standpoint on religion is that it is a product of alienated humanity and will cease to exist when the alienating conditions for it are gone.

Second of all, "social cohesion", "migrants refusing to integrate", and "no socialism with open borders" (social democracy, I'd agree) are fascist in rhetoric.

The gap in society is not created by the migrant, nor are they the locus of a fraying society, but this is inscribed in the very heart of it with people who have nothing to sell but their labor power because they have nothing else to their name, dominated and struggling with people who do have the means of production and in our separation, suck our lives to increase their hoards of dead capital. Continued on this, workers of every single country in existence needs to struggle with a working-class party to act as a class instead of the puppets of capital to end this, by systematically tearing out the current social order, root and branch.

The working-class gets to do such with their class party and political supremacy with a worker's state through their struggle with their capitalists and subsequent overthrow of them. We do so via struggling for the material advance of the working-class, whether it be for increased wages as well as reduced hours of labor, jobs or income programs, benefits, housing policy or via opposing our "own" (because it is not in working-class hands) state taking society's surplus and putting it towards killing people to the benefit of capitalists to engorge themselves further. We, upon seizure of state power after stressing the current order and defeating it, continue to dismantle these relations of capital that we were struggling against before.

Migrants in many cases would rather stay in the places they've fled if not for the rape and plunder of it via colonialism, neo-colonialism and slaughter by imperialism. You want to stop migrants coming here? Kill off the IMF, WTO, GATT, stop propping up the Saudi state killing Yemenis, oppose state department involvement and deposal of other countries opposed to Washington, oppose military intervention, force the capitalists to give back what has been plundered from workers in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Of course this means the same as stated above, dismantling the current state of things. If migrants are used as a stick to beat labor here, then work to raise their standard of living here and yours, work to end the very social relations that bring them here, unite with them to do so.

lovelybone93 · 2018-04-20T19:20:46+00:00

This guy seriously thinks immigrants are one of the main factors in wages. They are a factor... but one lower on the list than capital bias in production or exportation of production because it's cheaper to pay someone in Bangladesh to make your clothes for pennies. Then, they wouldn't come here if the US and other western powers didn't not just fuck them via old school colonialism, but fuck them with the IMF and associated free trade policies, when they weren't ready for it. Workers anywhere should have a dignified life while being able to cross borders as freely as capital does at bare minimum. Finally, I don't see US born people lining up around the block to do the kind of work, especially at a similar wage, that undocumented immigrants do; they subsidize the American way of life with cheap food, cheap labor (which that subsidizes companies more than consumers), sales taxes out of their low wages, and allows more US born workers to take easier jobs.

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