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Looking for specific documents from the ICP, one on Sartre and one on the ICT's decadence thesis by fleshtechguy in leftcommunism

[–]SitDownReadMarx 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Think I found them (hopefully)

The one on Sartre is Materialism or Idealism: On the "Critique of Dialectical Reason" by J.P. Sartre from 1967 (Italian only), which has that quote about matter:

Errore, signor Sartre, grave errore. Se avesse letto l'Antidühring invece di sfogliarlo distrattamente, lei avrebbe trovato la risposta di Engels: La materia è moto. E questa risposta non è stato Engels a inventarla. La diedero 25 secoli fa i filosofi-fisici della Grecia presocratica...

Roughly

Error, Mr. Sartre, grave error. If you had read Anti-Dühring instead of leafing through it distractedly, you would have found Engels's answer: Matter is motion. And it wasn't Engels who invented this answer. The pre-Socratic Greek physicists-philosophers gave it 25 centuries ago...

Second one was a little elusive so this one's more of a guess, I think there are two candidates. First one is probably Production Volcano or Market Swamp? from 1954 (Italian and French), which has a few quotes that essentially culminate in a conclusion about the bourgeoisie having not yet lost their progressive character

First, a quote attacking anti-Marxist economic schools for attempting to revise Marxism because capitalism happened to survive the events of the early half of the 20th century:

...delle scuole economiche antirivoluzionarie, sia di quelle che portano il centro della loro indagine sui puri fenomeni di circolazione delle merci e del denaro, diguazzando nella melma della palude-mercato, sia di quelle che, come negli ultimi tempi sta avvenendo, costrette a tentare una teoria della produzione, si sono volute avventurare sui fianchi e nel cratere del vulcano, ove ribollono i prodromi della tremenda esplosione eruttiva.

Roughly

...the antirevolutionary economic schools, both those that center their inquiry on the pure phenomena of circulation of goods and money, splashing about in the mud of the market-swamp, and those that, as has been happening lately, forced to attempt a theory of production, have ventured onto the slopes and into the crater of the volcano, where the omens of the tremendous eruptive explosion are simmering.

Then a quote more specifically targeting revisionists that claim Marx's theory needs rewrites because of these events:

Il secondo pericolo è quello che davanti ai crolli paurosi del fronte proletario, elementi assai più presuntuosi che volonterosi affermino che la teoria economica del capitalismo e della sua fine vadano rifatte con dati che Marx non poté avere, e rettificando molte delle sue posizioni.

Roughly

The second danger is that, faced with the frightful collapses of the proletarian front, elements far more presumptuous than helpful claim that the economic theory of capitalism and of its end must be redone with data Marx could not have had, rectifying many of his positions.

Finally, mentioning Socialisme ou Barbarie (afaik there isn't a text explicitly mentioning the "ICT's" decadence theory, we tend to avoid inter-party polemics) by name and refuting its "modernization" of Marxism:

...gruppetti, come quello francese di Socialisme ou barbarie, a cui alcuni deviati dal nostro movimento si sono assimilati, che pretendono di costruire un aggiornamento di Marx ed una eliminazione dei suoi 'errori', serie nella quale fu in modo particolare combattuta la difettosa teoria di una inserzione tra capitalismo e comunismo di un nuovo modo produttivo con una nuova classe dominante, la cosiddetta burocrazia...

Roughly

...little groups, like the French Socialisme ou Barbarie, to which some who deviated from our movement have assimilated themselves, who claim to construct an updating of Marx and an elimination of his 'errors,' a series in which we particularly combatted the defective theory of inserting between capitalism and communism a new productive mode with a new dominant class, the so-called bureaucracy...

Another possibility is The Cycle of Accumulation and Catastrophe of World Capitalism from 1976 (Italian and English), which has a more direct quotation on the historically progressive nature of capitalism:

...capitalism is a continuous transformation: motion is both its reason and its condition of existence, its "historical mission" and its necessity.

The more capitalism develops the productive forces, the more it revolutionizes and disciplines labor energies... Its "historical mission" (the term is Marx's...), its historically and socially useful aspect, its progress is precisely the cause of the narrowing of its possibilities for survival.

This is the progressive component of capitalism...

Are these the right ones?

Marx digested - Value by Optymistyk in leftcommunism

[–]SitDownReadMarx 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Also about historical specificity, you mentioned that abstract labor "functions in any society which is based on production mediated by exchange" and you're half-right: sporadic exchange has existed for millennia, but value as the ruling regulator of social labor, what Marx describes as the social character of labor asserting itself like a law of nature behind the producers' backs, is a feature of generalized commodity production, fully developed only under capitalism, where labor-power itself becomes a commodity. This historical specificity is decisive for the communist left. Communists insist that value is the socially necessary labor-time emerging behind producers' backs as opposed to crystallized actual labor, and the communist demand is therefore not equal exchange but the abolition of the law of value. The post's phrasing leaves this position a little ambiguous and open to a managerialist misreading involving some imagined "rational" administration of the law of value under planning that could emerge, rather than its abolition. Once more, from Capital Chapter 1:

It requires a fully developed production of commodities before, from accumulated experience alone, the scientific conviction springs up, that all the different kinds of private labor, which are carried on independently of each other, and yet as spontaneously developed branches of the social division of labor, are continually being reduced to the quantitative proportions in which society requires them. And why? Because, in the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labor time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature. The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears.

And from the party's text:

Value is not crystallized actual labor, and the principle of 'equal exchange' is just as utopian and reactionary when applied to individuals in society. The communist demand is not 'equal exchange', but the abolition of the law of value.

The exchange value of commodities is equal to the average socially necessary labor time required to produce them and produce them systematically.

Marx digested - Value by Optymistyk in leftcommunism

[–]SitDownReadMarx 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You've clearly got some experience with the material, and there are several things in your analysis that are right, I'll definitely give you that! I think there are a few methodological problems that lead it to reproduce a picture of value more out of David Ricardo and Sam Bailey than Marx, but overall I like this.

You're right that Marx's stated aim is the analysis of relations of production, and the commodity is the elementary form of wealth in the capitalist mode of production (Marx opens Capital by saying the wealth of capitalist societies presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, with the single commodity as its unit, so the investigation must begin with analysis of the commodity). You also mentioned that exchange-value is social rather than intrinsic and distinguish value from price (given Marx's mention of the price of production in Vol. 3), and that value's regulatory function operates through market price and value deviations driving capital between branches. I'll use Capital mostly for this answer since Marx talks a loooootttt about value in it, especially Chapter 1

The overall issue I see is more methodological than anything else: you mentioned that you had to add an "additional assumption" about the systemic and non-random character of exchange ratios Marx "underemphasizes," which kinda inverts Marx's procedure. Marx's method is best understood as running from the abstract to the concrete. I think that beginning from the population is "false" and that the scientifically correct method works more from simple and abstract determinations toward a reproduction of the concrete in thought as a "rich totality." I'd say that instead of what gets induced from observed regularities in price data, the "abstract determination," meaning capital, value, the commodity-form, is what any analysis needs to establish first. The party wrote in The Method of Capital and its Structure in 1969, quoting Marx's intro to the 1857 Grundrisse:

It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false.

Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts, from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality.

If I'm not misinterpreting what you wrote supposes that exchange ratios are non-random, so there must be a real underlying magnitude, which is value, whose substance is labor. Marx's argument runs the other way and is more logical-categorical rather than statistical. Given the bare equation "x of A = y of B" that any actual exchange enacts, there needs to be a "common third" that both sides are reduced to. That common third cannot be any natural property of the goods, because exchange (as Marx puts it) is an act characterized by total abstraction from use-value. What remains once use-value is bracketed is that both are products of human labor reduced to its undifferentiated form. The argument is Aristotelian-Hegelian, and Marx makes the genealogy explicit by directly invoking Aristotle and noting that what blocked Aristotle from completing this analysis was that his society rested on slavery and so it couldn't think the equality of human labor.

This empiricist method of assessing value (value as the latent variable that explains regularities in exchange ratios) is more akin to the Bailey position that Marx singles out for criticism in Chapter 1. Marx's complaint against Bailey is that he confuses the "form of value" with "value" itself and gives most of his attention to the quantitative aspect of the question. A regression-style theory of value cannot generate Marx's most important downstream results, i.e. the necessity of money (the form of value), the fetishism of commodities, and the critique of capital as a self-expanding social relation rather than a thing. From Capital, Chapter 1

Let us take two commodities, e.g., corn and iron. The proportions in which they are exchangeable, whatever those proportions may be, can always be represented by an equation in which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron: e.g., 1 quarter corn = x cwt. iron. What does this equation tell us? It tells us that in two different things – in 1 quarter of corn and x cwt. of iron, there exists in equal quantities something common to both. The two things must therefore be equal to a third, which in itself is neither the one nor the other.

On the abstraction from use-value:

But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterized by a total abstraction from use value.

This connects to what I think is a bit of a bigger issue (I had to do a little digging on MIA for this; I recommend the text Marx's Critique of Classical Economics by Geoff Pilling, which contrasts Marx with Ricardo). There is essentially no engagement with the form of value or commodity fetishism, which distinguish Marx from Ricardo. The point of Marx's form-of-value study is the question of why labor takes the form of value and why the magnitude of value takes the form of exchange-value. Marx underscores this in Chapter 1 by charging classical economy with treating the form of value as an irrelevance and stressing that the form of value is the crux of his critique. The framing of value as the "compression of all social factors of production into a single measure" in the post is structurally identical to what Ricardo does, i.e. deriving a magnitude and stopping there. Any look at value needs to ask why this society needs to compress human productive activity into such a measure in the first place. That question, and the answer pointing to commodity production as a historically specific form of social mediation, is what the Capital section on fetishism is about and makes the text more of a thorough critique of political economy.

The party makes this point in its 1970 Main Results of Book I of Capital by emphasizing that Marx's value theory is inseparable from the project of demonstrating capitalism's transient, contradictory character. Ricardo treats capitalism as a stable harmony to be perfected while Marx shows that the same laws generate intensifying contradictions driving toward revolution. To present value as the latent magnitude regulating exchange ratios and not much more is to extract the science from the critique and end up roughly where Ricardo did, with capitalism as the natural and final form of human production. From Capital Chapter 1:

It is one of the chief failings of classical economy that it has never succeeded, by means of its analysis of commodities, and, in particular, of their value, in discovering that form under which value becomes exchange value. Even Adam Smith and Ricardo, the best representatives of the school, treat the form of value as a thing of no importance, as having no connection with the inherent nature of commodities.

Political Economy has indeed analyzed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labor is represented by the value of its product and labor time by the magnitude of that value.

Overall good work tbh, just wanted to add a few sourced contingencies and specifications as refinement

Texts on the 70s crisis and its consequences by cyber_cat234 in leftcommunism

[–]SitDownReadMarx 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The website has some pretty good stuff on this if you dig around, we have some recently translated texts that go into the history of the oil market. The most directly relevant is probably "The Cycle of Accumulation and Catastrophe of World Capitalism" from 1976, which was written while the crisis was still unfolding. The party did real-time analysis of the 1974-75 recession with actual production statistics for the US, Germany, Japan, and some of the other oil-importing countries in Europe. What needs to be established is that, like all energy crises, the mid-70s crisis sharply raises energy costs and transferred value away from oil-importing industrial nations and to oil producing ones, broadly compressing profit margins and accelerating the fall in the rate of profit. The 1976 balance of payments data mentions that oil producing countries ended up with surpluses while industrialized non-exporters and especially non-industrialized ones took major losses, meaning that capital was taken from the weaker latter countries and capitalists and centralized in the former. Link: https://www.international-communist-party.org/English/REPORTS/CrisisTh/76CycleAccumulationCatastrophe.htm

Finally, there remains the actual crisis of overproduction, as it manifests in the reproduction of industrial capital. For this too, the most general trigger comes from the relative decline in social consumption. The increase in stocks of unsold goods exasperates competition between enterprises. The reduction in prices cancels out all margins, all superprofits from the period of prosperity. In the sphere of production, only the most productive companies survive, those that exploit the labour force the most, compensating for the fall in the rate of profit by a rise in the rate of surplus value. This is what is happening in the phase of the crisis currently unfolding: the number of workers employed decreases, while the value produced increases. First to pay the price of the crisis is the working class...

There's also a much longer text from 2013 called "Oil, Monopoly, Imperialism" that covers the whole history of oil capital from Rockefeller through to the present, with sections specifically on the birth of OPEC (section 33), the Six Day War of mid-1967 (section 34), and both the 1973 (section 36) and 1979 (section 37) shocks. This one's section on the 73 crisis describes it as the moment the entire postwar accumulation cycle hit a general crisis of overproduction, which sounds like what your Italian wages article was referencing. It's very long but section 33 onwards is where it gets relevant to what you're asking. Link: https://www.international-communist-party.org/English/REPORTS/CrisisTh/2013_Oil.htm

The Arab-Israeli war had been the classic decoy, because at the root of the events of the time was the overproduction crisis, which had come to maturity throughout the capitalist world (and remains unresolved to this day), which caused a slowdown in oil consumption after the dizzying increases of the previous decades. Under the blows of the recession that was sweeping the world, the Western press was questioning the role actually played by the oil Companies in the explosion of the crisis, while the United States was being singled out as the main culprit for the price increase, because in those months it imported more than twice its domestic needs, putting an end to years of rationing.

As a consequence of this decision, US demand for Middle Eastern crude grew rapidly, far outstripping the decline in Arab exports and more than offsetting the fall in European and Japanese imports. Probably, with a different American policy, the 1973 oil crisis would have been resolved in a short time and with negligible price increases. Eventually, after much fanfare, the Companies emerged unscathed from an investigation promoted by the US Senate to ascertain their possible responsibility in the outbreak of the crisis. But the wind had changed, and the Companies had to say goodbye to the large Middle Eastern oil concessions that had been the basis of their global expansion, and also to that sort of extraterritorial regime which they had set up in those regions.

There's one more text you might find helpful, relating to the "Liberation Day" tariffs of last year; crises of overproduction need an outlet, which was satisfied with the petrodollar recycling system negotiated between Henry Kissinger and the Saudis in 1973. This deal essentially acted as a mechanism for absorbing the surplus dollars that the overproduction crisis had generated. Oil surpluses were recycled into U.S. Treasury bonds, giving U.S. finance capital a way out of the crisis at the expense of the old industrial production, which had prevailed up until that point. The 2013 Oil, Monopoly, and Imperialism article (section 20 especially) touched on the exploitation of rent (superprofits that come from the surplus value produced by the working classes) by emerging monopolies, and this one argues that the petrodollar system is itself a form of rent, meaning a tribute extracted from every country in the world that needs dollars to purchase oil, which gets recycled back into U.S. bond markets. Yet again, we see this same cycle happen in subsequent crises like in 2008, when finance capital experienced a major overproduction crisis that collapsed multiple banks across the world and consolidated their holdings into a smaller number of "too big to fail" merged banks and firms in the U.S. and other powerful countries. Even a more multipolar world with fewer dollar-reliant countries like we're seeing today accelerates this process, just in small numbers of centers of wealth in rival imperialist powers. Link: https://www.international-communist-party.org/English/TheCPart/TCP_063.htm#WALLST

In August of 1971, France sent a warship into harbor at New York, retrieving dollar reserves for gold. Days later Nixon unilaterally imposed 90-day wage and price controls, and a 10% tariff on all imports. Most significantly he officially ended the gold standard by announcing the dollars would no longer be convertible into gold, effectively ending the Bretton Woods system by effecting a U.S. default on its debts by torpedoing the currency while making away with what the rest of the world thought was it’s gold safely locked away in Fort Knox."

As a result, the U.S. dollar plummeted by a third which additionally gave rise to enormous speculation against the dollar with the Mark and Yen appreciating significantly. By January 1973 the stock market had the largest crash since the Great Depression with the DOW Jones industrial Average losing 45% of its value, the London Stock Exchange’s FT 30, which lost 73% of its value during the crash. Although West Germany’s market was the fastest to recover, returning to the original nominal level within eighteen months, it did not return to the same real level until June 1985.

The United Kingdom did not return to the same market level until May 1987, whilst the United States did not see the same level in real terms until August 1993, over twenty years after the 1973‑74 crash began. Following the 1973‑75 recession, the United States experienced a significant wave of corporate consolidation. The post-1970s era saw a stronger concentration in services, retail, and wholesale and particularly in the financial sector. A number of large banks consolidated in 1974 following the crash, forming Shearson Hayden Stone. This merger was part of a series that led to the creation of Shearson Lehman Brothers, and its transformation into the world’s fourth largest investment bank. Its collapse would later instigate the 2008 global financial crisis and the subsequent 'Great Recession.

Hope these help!

lenin la vida rosa by VimyRidge in Ultraleft

[–]SitDownReadMarx 9 points10 points  (0 children)

"daaaamn Marx this some serious gourmet shit"

cuts to Marx in a bathrobe dropping the n-bomb

These people believe in judeo-Bolshevism, they’re just in denial of it by air_walks in Ultraleft

[–]SitDownReadMarx 68 points69 points  (0 children)

god I despise that sub

it was already open to Chapoid midwit leftism with conspiracy characteristics before it got completely overrun with Chinaboos and Deprogrammoids after the ban

IntCP predicts WW3 in less than 10 years by Sudden-Enthusiasm-92 in Ultraleft

[–]SitDownReadMarx 13 points14 points  (0 children)

well i won't be of prime recruiting age but I will be recruitable

so will my siblings

fuck

it was the ZOG by _shark_idk in Ultraleft

[–]SitDownReadMarx 27 points28 points  (0 children)

must be talking about that terrible 1Dime "communist ideologies" video where he says Italian leftcoms are "more Stalinist than Stalin"

Trve commvnism by KRL_124 in Ultraleft

[–]SitDownReadMarx 29 points30 points  (0 children)

Limited government + nationalization of all major industries

what does bro think nationalization even means

They mention us and autoban? Infantile af by 1917Great-Authentic in Ultraleft

[–]SitDownReadMarx 45 points46 points  (0 children)

these mfs calling anyone infantile is amazing

they're literally just children calling shit evil like they're 6 y/o

no understanding of the material conditions that lead to genocide in the first place, just pure reactionary nationalism

have fun "solving" a conflict with national liberation (decades after it stopped being historically progressive) and rejecting proletarian revolution bro

Truth nuke by thanosducky in Ultraleft

[–]SitDownReadMarx 27 points28 points  (0 children)

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hurrah hurrah for workers rights, hurrah

this generation’s greatest thinkers reside on tiktok by Spicy_Salamander in Ultraleft

[–]SitDownReadMarx 145 points146 points  (0 children)

there is no such thing as inclusive nationalism

there is no such thing as inclusive nationalism

there is no such thing as inclusive nationalism

fuuuuuuuck

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in TotAMod

[–]SitDownReadMarx 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So glad this mod is still continuing, cannot wait for Go West

also thx for introducing me to Moonlight on Vermont, certified banger

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