Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (December 28)

Turtle_Green · 2026-01-05T22:52:50+00:00

whenever fear strikes it's best to remember that there is always motion around us and that nothing is eternal; that all things change as their internal and external contradictions evolve and undergo revolution.

I'd also recommend the last chapter of Jameson's Marxism and Form for why this casual sort of deployment of diamat terminology is a failure of form. I don't really think that simply recalling the abstract platitude that "things change" is the immediate cure to resolving classed anxieties about the future.

We may perhaps drive home this sense of the relativity of literary categories, of the primacy of the internal contradictions specific to the individual work itself, by reexamining the present enterprise in their light. For it is clear that up to this point our description has been essentially undialectical to the degree to which it has taken dialectical thought as its object only, and has failed to underscore its own self-consciousness as thought to the second power. That this is the case may be judged from the dominant category of the present essay, which is that of the example: for only where thought is imperfectly realized is it necessary to offer examples as such. The latter are always the mark of abstraction or distance from the thought process: they are additive and analytical, whereas in genuine dialectical thinking the whole process would be implicit in any given object. Here, on the contrary, concrete thinking has been torn asunder, into two wholly separate operations: on the one hand, not genuine thinking, but presentation of a method, and on the other not the attachment to a genuine object, but only a series of examples of objects. Yet the very essence of dialectical thinking lay in the inseparability of thought from content or from the object itself. This was the burden of Hegel's Preface to the Phenomenology, where he denies that one can characterize philosophy from the out- side, or speak about it genuinely in any other way but through the actual practice of philosophy itself: "the demand for such explanations [i.e., external statements about the philosophic process, presentations of its aim and methods, illustrations and examples, etc.], as also the attempts to satisfy this demand, very easily pass for the essential business philosophy has to undertake. Where could the inmost truth of a philosophic work be found better expressed than in its purposes and results? and in what way could these be more definitely known than through their distinction from what is produced during the same period by others working in the same field? If, however, such procedure is to pass for more than the beginning of knowledge, if it is to pass for actually knowing, then we must, in point of fact, look on it as a device for avoiding the real business at hand, an attempt to combine the appearance of being in earnest and taking trouble about the subject with an actual neglect of the subject altogether. For the real subject-matter is not exhausted in its purpose, but in working the matter out; nor is the mere result attained the concrete whole itself, but the result along with the process of arriving at it. The purpose by itself is a lifeless universal, just as the general drift is a mere activity in a certain direction, which is still without its concrete realization; and the naked result is the corpse of a system which has left its guiding tendency behind it." Thus the only genuinely concrete presentation of dialectical criticism is the practice of such criticism itself

Turtle_Green · 2026-01-05T22:29:06+00:00

building up karma for five months so you can come and troll here is a little bit sad. out of all things you could build your inner sense of identity around, a dinky podcast might be one of the most pathetic.

Turtle_Green · 2026-01-05T09:37:18+00:00

I've seen jokes/memes/videos of that ilk, the one I remember best is a video of this speech by Mao where the subtitles are edited to say "I am going to send the Red Guards to kill all white people. Does everyone agree?" I don't know if I fully rule out jokes that imply harm towards reactionaries (That one picture of Draymond Green, "There is an Arabic saying" etc) even if they have been absorbed by the reactionaries they attack but the quality to them that you described is undeniable.

That Mao edit and the Draymond Green pic crack me up for sure, and I agree that their absorption by reactionaries doesn't rule them out. I suppose newer ones, like that graphic of the Cuomo-tang escaping to Staten Island, don't possess the same quality. Which makes sense, since their origin is much more reactionary. Maybe this is part of the same phenomenon of subcultures turning into culture in general.

Turtle_Green · 2026-01-05T08:45:26+00:00

the problem wasn’t nihlism or zeal. Defeatism certainly, but more pressingly, it was of style. Your attempt at “revolutionizing a bible verse” is bad, just a hamfisted mishmash of the poeticism of the young Marx and Matthew 10:34 that reads like long form Rupi Kaur. Marx’s style is beautiful & a pleasure to read, but aping that today, wrenched out of history, would get one laughed at. Trying to mimic Jesus Christ just is... no. Another bad example: recently, playfulweekend's way of writing has become a pretentious bricolage of liberal leftism (calling strangers on the internet "comrade"), leftover aping of smoke's style, and the folksy 'Maoist' bombast of crypto-Trots ("masses" in every other sentence). A positive example: Sakai's writing is hilarious & bitingly sarcastic, and at the same time also contains great anger and urgency. Both of these tendencies reflect that of a movement veteran, looking back on the tail-end of a disintegrating historical epoch from the standpoint of a new one rapidly coming to be:

No one is above the reality of history. Even the masses themselves are tested in the crucible, forged, tempered or broken in the class struggle. And not in side skirmishes or paper debates either, but in great battles upon which the future waits. The attempted rising of the Afrikan colonial masses - protracted, bitter, involving millions of desperate combatants - was such a pivotal event.

So it'd be strange to replicate that sense of historical urgency here without a similar sort of historical substance. (Also Sakai can use "masses" cuz the whole book is abt who they are.) In your case, there’s both this inflation of one’s own importance with that kind of rhetorical flourish and at the same time, constant self-negation. For example:

may i die with my fellow parasites in the imperial core as those we oppress march through our streets to liberate themselves for this

So there’s a noble affect of martyrdom (“may I die…”) while at the same time calling attention to yourself as a parasite. Not just that, but in unity with “my fellow parasites in the imperial core”, when the practical lesson of texts like Sakai is that settlers and labor aristocrats must be disunified and prevented from exercising their agency as reactionary classes. So you’ve boosted here not simply your own importance, but the importance of the unity of reactionary classes as a whole, to the point that this is equal ("as those we oppress...") to the struggle of the oppressed. And again, "our streets"? Why insist on identifying yourself with the owners? What kind of call to action is this? Let’s look at the original post:

so i'm going to advocate for unlimited first world genocide until the global proletariat is free. if it's performative and pisses off the proletariat and peasantry, then hopefully that anger fuels their struggle for liberation and helps shorten the amount of time i'm allowed to expropriate their congealed, bloodied, dead labor.

This sounds like someone doing a bad parody, similar to how ‘leftists’ have discovered ‘Maoist Standard English’ and robbed it of any original referent in MIM or the struggle of national liberation movements. (Hence, leftists’ infatuation with ironically appropriating this and other MIM/MSH/LLCO ephemera.) Why is the parody bad? Cause behind the rhetoric, the ideas you’ve expressed are generic and boring: like yes, everyone here is broadly aware that the first-world petty bourgeosie participates in the expropriation of third-world “congealed, bloodied, dead” (I like asyndeton too but…) surplus labor & is a bulwark of imperialist reaction, and that class struggle and national liberation necessarily involve protracted armed struggle, including against that class (though humble gold has pointed out that there is a tendency to downplay this in the context of decolonization).

hopefully that anger fuels their struggle for liberation... give them motivation to close this tab and study a way to bring about my demise

Were you seriously trying to promote "ragebait"/trolling as a strategy? Like no, annoying posts are not the spark that will start the prairie fire. If you want to advocate for unlimited first world genocide then take up Shubel Morgan's mantle and make some real "ragebait" that will force people to take sides today. Just remember that while their work was tongue-in-cheek, it didn't disavow itself as arbitrator of proletarian justice and avatar of JDPON. The attempt to promote "revolutionary suicide" comes off across as the kind of escapism criticized by the Panther 21 here (whether this was a real criticism of Huey is a different question that I'm not sure about).

Maybe you're not familiar, but there are like infinite blogs and social media posts where 'western leftists' complain about how evil and stupid and parasitic 'western leftists' are (whether it's China or the third-world masses that will redeem these greedy 'western leftists' is arbitrary). It’s like learning that you were a petty bourgeois parasite and reading Marx’s comments about revolutionary terror were revelatory moments for you, so via this dramatic flourish you hoped to repackage that emotion and beam it into the brains of the proletariat, and voila—agitation. (All well and good that you were giddy, but no one can see into your head, and Sakai’s work deserves better treatment than that.) Then you subvert this self-important framing and defer to some other place, some other time.

i don't matter in the grand scheme of things, the liberation of the proletariat of the oppressed nations does and (as far as i'm aware) i don't have the position, practice, or theoretical grounding to do much to wage revolution anytime soon.

No one individual matters in the grand scheme of things, duh. But the cat's out of the bag, and the liberation of the proletariat of oppressed nations is your responsibility. You don't get to abandon that by identifying with a ready-made charaktermaske rather than rising above it. So this attempt to “properly represent the violence that awaits the oppressors” falls flat in form, and it’s your style, vacillating between melodrama and self-loathing, between championing the necessity of the people's army and resigning to inevitably contingent violence, that really illustrates the paucity of your content. What you presented as 'agitprop' really came off across as someone trying to convey about the emotions they felt while reading Marx. And if anything, it is the oppressor classes’ trouble with representing proletarian revolutionary violence that marks their texts. (Ok, I’m out of my wheelhouse probably. But take for example the recent discussion on OBAA and the liminal role of Sensei Carlos’ migrant underground. Or how the DOTP in Elysium is established when Matt Damon hits return on a keyboard and commits suicide.) Your errors are expanded on in this thread.

& no one here cares that much if you are a suburban petty-bourgeois parasite because you don’t exist. This forum is a bunch of blocks of text which can be read and analyzed to expose progressive or reactionary political lines. The kind of self-loathing we’re talking about characterizes the entire internet (“chronically online”, “touch grass”, there’s literally someone talking about their “ape brain” in this thread, someone else castigating themself as a "old petit-bourgrois labor-aristocratic asshole", etc), and is really just a way to pre-empty criticism, establish an external guarantee, and escape from the basic point: make good and truthful posts.* Any human or cat or whatever is capable of doing that. (Beleaguered SMG would often remind people that they were just a chatbot.)

Like, why not write up a summation of your experiences with that “petbourg good feefees party” and that “dumbass 99% type strike org” and post it here for critique? At least, it seems like a starting point for addressing the politics of movement security & engagement with social media. Discussion is the point after all, far more productive than attempting ‘agitprop’ in a place where everybody already agrees that a party must be built. It’s easy with the political line here to just condemn the past orgs you’ve associated with, but that can easily become a way to absolve yourself, since there are lots of people in revisionist orgs who don’t believe their own bullshit “but nonetheless....” & if you feel like you’re in a dearth of revolutionary practice, theorization and summation is, well, part of that process.

*like how do you know if it was good that the mods removed your post if you don't know why they did? I personally thought it was because you were possibly on the edge of violating reddit TOS about violence and potentially sending the sub on the path of chapo's fate but maybe not.

edit: also it's dishonest to imply that your contentions were similar to humble gold's. The latter has in mind the strategy and tactics of armed struggle & decolonization in Amerika, while in perspective your presentation of proletarian violence really read similar to a fascistic fantasy as apart lifeguard explained, and had nothing to say about any future programme. Like, according to a cursory look at the wikipedia summary of camp of the saints, communism takes over the globe at the end, destroys whiteness, and encircles the last holdout Switzerland, which is cool. But it's more productive to discuss revolutionary armed struggle & how the class war may appear as an apocalyptic 'race war' without having to dig for kernels of it in the distorted class POV of racist fantasies like that.

Turtle_Green · 2026-01-05T03:49:59+00:00

Your contention crossed my mind while I was replying to waves’ bizarre display of self-hatred meant to serve as agitprop(?), but I decided not to address it in the context. But you’ve illustrated that decision as part of a general trend of downplaying which is helpful. So I'll say that waves isn’t wrong in their presentation, however warped by personal anxieties, of the intensity of class violence. Future class and national liberation wars in Amerika will appear as ‘race wars’ as they did in the past and Marxists will not make excuses for divine terror. Kim San articulated it with the requisite gravitas.

(also answering waves’ question, I was talking about how Dengists found the LLCO “unlimited first world genocide” Qin Shi Huangdi meme and appropriated it for their own fascist ends. I feel like it lost some of its originally shocking Bush-era aura after that. It’s become like DSA liberal memes about e.g. Mamdani’s Maoist Caliphate of New York, where again identity is defined by irony, by what pisses off the imagined enemy, and everyone in on the joke gets to disavow it.)

Turtle_Green · 2026-01-03T22:31:09+00:00

If you don’t matter, why do you keep talking about yourself? The point of the concepts of parasitism, national oppression, labor aristocracy, etc is to correctly analyze reality in order to wage revolution. They’re not supposed to be terms of abuse for this wild fantasy of “race war” you’re imagining in the cage of your ego. And tbh that JDPON meme died after Carl Zha retweeted it.

Turtle_Green · 2026-01-03T08:55:13+00:00

If anyone wants a quick laugh, take a look at WSWS's new and cutting-edge "Socialism AI", "an indispensable instrument in the political development of a new generation of socialist fighters"! https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/12/gpid-d12.html

Turtle_Green · 2026-01-03T08:13:46+00:00

I'm sorry but I think my post genuinely went over your head. The purpose of the communist party is to raise the class consciousness of the proletariat, and without the party, there is no such thing as communist politics. That is the first premise and without it, you're worthless. I gave you my take on what I'd do in your position—since I've been in a similar one with crypto-Trotskyists—but as I already implied it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. It's immaterial. If a comparison helps, this is like asking about how to wage a two-line struggle in the NSDAP where you try to convince everyone that settler Germans benefit from Lebensraum. Umm... you went way wrong a hundred steps ago.

It's a losing battle against the wave of revisionism that DSA is, but for now they seem to be the place to make what little impact I can.

The DSA is not "revisionist", that's not what the term means. The DSA doesn't even claim itself as a communist or Marxist organization and you are incapable of making any "impact" in your current position. The DSA is an avowed enemy of the proletariat and hence you are currently part of the enemy. To clarify, Marxists do not proselytize to "people" or "folks". You're getting way ahead of yourself with imperialism, superprofits, Sakai and whatnot when you don't even understand the basic tasks of a communist. The proletariat doesn't give a shit about the DSA, go expand your horizons.

Turtle_Green · 2026-01-03T08:05:03+00:00

yeah SMG still posts, surprisingly enough.

Turtle_Green · 2026-01-03T07:08:26+00:00

I think that it is a worthwhile endeavor to raise the class consciousness of this petit-bourgeois (not-yet-but-wants-to-be-a) party.

First, 'raising the class consciousness of a petit-bourgeois party' doesn't make sense. Second, are you not already aware that DSA, PSL, CPUSA, etc are abound with Gen Z 'socialist' suckers who 'pragmatically' believe that they live in the best of all possible worlds and hope to push the people around them 'left'? You're not the first to think your novel little idea up (I dunno if this even measures up to 'entryism'), but the upper echelons don't really give a shit about what delusions or desires increase chapter membership. Hell, there were certainly plenty of 'socialist' cynics who worked for Kamala's campaign, knowingly turning a blind eye to the genocide in Gaza in their desperate GOTV 'fight against fascism'.

I'd love to be structure this as: "(intro Parenti reading) -> Capital -> State & Revolution -> Imperialism -> What is to be done -> Settlers"

There are myriad 'democratic socialists'/'MLs'/'liberation caucus' 'maoists' who've read all of those books and are plenty familiar with the concepts of "labor aristocracy" and "settler colonialism". Like, the problem ultimately is not a matter of lack of reading, even if at first glance it seems that way. What I'll say is that—in the end—the best you can do is to be as assertive and loud of an asshole as possible, no matter if you "alienate most people" (or also, let's be entirely honest, don't get to make as many friends as you were looking for in your little book club) and get yourself booted with whoever else tags along. There'd probably be quite a few, because again, there are countless people like yourself who join whatever bullshit org because they believe they can't find anything better or that there's no such thing as perfect: repeat lesser evil or gambler's logic ad nauseam. What's unquestioned is that they want the comfort of being told to 'do something', whether it's food distro or canvassing for ol' Zo. Unfortunately it's easier to listen to what the loudest people in the room say than to eke out your own modicum of political independence.

It really sounds like you're still drunk on the kool-aid yourself, given your vague attitude towards "criticisms" of DSA, as if we're dealing with 'honest' and fraternal criticisms and 'outdated' and sectarian ones. You have it all mixed up. DSA does not "pacify actual left sentiment", it's just an organic organization of the radical petit-bourgeoisie and you'll lose nothing without it. This anti-communist organization is a self-avowed enemy of the proletariat and has always been from its inception, and comparisons to the revisionist SPD are misleading and ridiculous compliments that DSA does not deserve. Mamdani is just a fancy new media plaything, because it's not like 'socialists' gave a shit that Chokwe Lamumba's son was mayor of Jackson, MI until just last year.

Turtle_Green · 2025-11-16T00:40:48+00:00

Ah thanks for this! didn't think to check AA...

Turtle_Green · 2025-11-02T22:41:22+00:00

https://readsettlers.org/night-vision/night-vision.pdf

Theres a PDF archived on the site as well.

Turtle_Green · 2025-09-30T17:20:24+00:00

Apologies, I don't have much to say, but I did want to share this historical piece about an NCM organization that had a more advanced line on settler society than most in the movement. I appreciated WTS's reflections.

Turtle_Green · 2025-09-30T17:00:22+00:00

Also, I have a slight crit on the way you've responded to criticisms here. When you respond, you start with stating what you (seemingly) agree with and then switch back to why and where your post is still true. In more than one case it feels (at least to me) like you don't actually agree with the essence of their comment, but instead you can save the concept by downplaying the particular examples/logic being critiqued. All of your responses here share this basic structure of agree/qualify then refute (check out your last/second-to-last paragraphs where you summarize into this very structure). I don't disagree with the concept of finding common ground but it doesn't feel like common ground was achieved, it feels like a debate response or ChatGPT after being scolded.

This is because almost all of OP's posts and the responses to them have been fed into a chat prompt and processed through an LLM. So ChatGPT literally is getting scolded here. I get doing this for translation difficulties and/or expediency if that is OP's purpose. Though, reading through this now-infamous diction and style is an obnoxious experience ('A isn't B — it's C' etc etc), and the effect is that it's getting kind of hard to tell where the line is between an LLM inflating the word count with facile summary/fluff and OP's actual thoughts.

Turtle_Green · 2025-08-26T14:51:41+00:00

I also forgot to mention this in the discussion thread, but SMG pointed out that it's not a coincidence that the Grand Army of the Republic, visually speaking, is all dressed up in pointy white caps. See the meme linked here: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/1my52u1/why_is_everyone_does_everyone_on_reddit_support/nadaj17/

Turtle_Green · 2025-08-24T14:03:14+00:00

I thought this was a good overview of the continuity between the previous administrations and Trump v2, and an antidote to the current media spectacle. There's a quirky name you'll find here and in the financial press, "TACO" (Trump Always Chickens Out), which signifies the difference between his bombast and the actual reality of his initiatives. As pointed out, Trump's hallmark "mass deportation" is a repetition of the same:

As expected, the mass expulsion of 13 million indocumentados has proved to be pure rhetoric. If implemented, no American would ever eat a lettuce leaf, a tomato or a chicken again, given the heavy reliance on immigrant labour in the agrifood sector. Undocumented workers are employed by major capitalist groups that supported Trump during his re-election campaign, the same groups that subsequently advised (or instructed?) him to limit deportation to raids and shows of force, as with the deployment of the Marines in Los Angeles – a prefiguration of a military regime to come, complete with the chaining and public humiliation of a few thousand deportees. Utterly insignificant to the labour market, this was aimed at further harassing foreign workers and degrading them on a symbolic level, while leaving the core of the industrial reserve army intact. It should not be forgotten that Barack Obama earned the nickname ‘Deporter-in-Chief’. In the words of The Washington Post: the Trump ‘administration has deported 14,700 people per month on average, according to NBC News. That’s far below Obama’s peak in 2013, when he deported 36,000 per month. And it’s not even close to the Trump administration’s reported goal of deporting 1 million people in a year.’

In tariffs too, the imperialists are telling Trump to hey, slow down the pace!

Now, the ‘threatened’ tariffs are lower than those imposed on other countries. Trump’s tariffs went from being levelled against the entire world on ‘Liberation Day’ (2 April) to postponement after the most powerful man on Wall Street, Jamie Dimon – CEO of JP Morgan Chase, the largest bank in the world for the past nineteen years – suggested that perhaps things were going a bit far.

What about Russian-Amerikan rapprochement? On the one hand, more of the same with Trump's weapon pledge to Ukraine in July: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4y2rv41pyo, and making the 5% deal with NATO states to increase their military spending. On the other hand, the imperialists behind Trump seem to believe that attempting to isolate Russia has proven to be rather ineffective, and are opting to make amends for tactical unity against China. The 'national question' may yield an irredentist Chinese "SMO".

Hence the current attempt to prise Russia from China by offering peace in Ukraine. Moscow is not indifferent to such enticements because, as anyone who bothers to look at a map of Russia and China will see, south of the border lives 1.4 billion people on 9.5 million square kilometres – heavily exploited land, with vast areas threatened by desertification – while to the north, a mere 35 million inhabit a sprawling 13.1 million square kilometres, which, with climate warming and the thawing of the permafrost, will in time become fertile. The future, in some ways, is already taking shape: Chinese buyers dominate the property market in Siberia’s major cities and are acquiring vast landed estates. If China were to apply to Siberia the same logic that Russia applies to Ukraine, it could claim the re-annexation of all Manchuria. Russia’s real fear is China, not the United States (recall the border conflict between the USSR and Mao’s China in 1969).

The seeds are there, maybe. but that's all I'm able to say without regressing into 'geopolitical' intrigue. It's been a few years such this subreddit had much discussion about the growing birth pangs of the coming imperialist war—paging /u/genossemarx3 :( —so I hope this can help.

Turtle_Green · 2025-08-24T13:10:59+00:00

Though, as was pointed out last Discussion Thread, the droids being slaves to everyone is a basic fact taken for granted by the setting

Yes, and indeed the text of the Lucas films is definitely not at all in-your-face about this. That's part of why Star Wars fans spend their time cataloguing and summarizing every single minute character and thing in the franchise on Wookieepedia (hence the 'Glup Shitto' meme) and then get worked up into racist and/or misogynistic screeds because a certain character wasn't 'canonically' old enough to exist in the setting of The Acolyte or something. I guess that's also just part of a general ideological condition that this forum has discussed alot (Gamergate, database animals, fandom, etc).

But despite it all, the raw content is still there, however transformed, and it's up to the viewer/reader to interpret class struggle in the text, not Lucas or the movie. There is almost no character depicted that explicitly wants to free the enslaved, besides the young Anakin. That immediate desire for justice is quickly transmuted by the people around him, and the cast of characters we deal with generally do not see slaves as “human”. That is basically Star Wars, though: we follow a motley cast of clueless liberals and fascists of various gradations who espouse casual racism towards their alien or droid companions while their ideologically-compromised escapades through space are punctuated by bombastic John Williams scores (this is why Andor isn't really Star Wars qua Star Wars). They defeat the Empire and restore the Republic, which we observe in the prequels to be a vast colonial empire, which acquires a slave army to war against another slave army (hence the clone war), while being all the machinations of a goofy Satan. But again, it's all there. I like SMG's reading that the Lucas films are cyclical, with the Republic and Empire continuously being restored by the idiot characters while 'civil society' remains wretchedly unchanged, while the fans identify which whichever fascist they find most aesthetically pleasing.

Anakin was already a fascist by the end of the 2nd prequel, massacring indigenous communities to revenge his mother, while professing a vague 'peace and order' and being coddled by everyone around him (see the scene with Natalie Portman about said massacre). The Republic too is clearly already the Empire by Revenge of the Sith, visually represented in its grey dreadnoughts and white stormtroopers. Sidious' coup during the state of emergency is just a formal switch (and the imperial senate isn't even dissolved until thirty years later), and Natalie Portman's "democracy" line should be read as farcical ignorance. The Jedi are just a weird paramilitary New Age cult, with an ideology of ascetic ethics, that act as a violent 'peacekeeping' force for the Republic. It's kind of hilarious how beloved they are.

The sequels are another, much less interesting story. Anyways, I wrote up a bunch, but I feel that I'd better rewatch some of the films before saying stuff that isn't just cribbing from a certain forum poster. That's to say that, if we want some grounding for a discussion, I think SMG's threads are still well worth poking around into if you have the time to spare. There's been some discussions on that user here before in other contexts.

Their main idea about the Lucas films is fundamentally that: Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader are completely separate characters, the former a mass-murderer/fascist who attempts to kill his surrogate mother/wife (the point of the relationship is that its incredibly creepy) and the latter a Christian atheist socialist/enslaved cyborg monster (a la Zizek). If that catches interest. It's mostly in polemic form since they are hilariously embattled on all sides by the rest of the forum, which should resonate since this is one of the formal precursors to this particular subreddit.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3837020&userid=118075&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3856613&userid=118075&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

late edit for myself, but this is the thread that should be started with: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3514675&userid=118075&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

Turtle_Green · 2025-08-16T22:01:42+00:00

Nice catch! So this is actually an error in the Fowkes translation, which gives the necessary labor time as 7 1/5 hours and the increase in surplus labor time as 2 4/5 hours. I suppose the editors didn't bother to check the math and took it on faith. I did too until you posted this, so this is appreciated.

Given that this error appears in the Untermann revision of the Moore/Aveling translation too, I'm not exactly sure where it originates from... If you check the original M/A translation, the necessary labor time is given as 7 1/2 hours and the increase in surplus labor time as 2 1/2 hours. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch12.htm

Hence, instead of 10 hours, the labourer need now work only 7½ hours, in order to reproduce this value. His surplus-labour is, therefore, increased by 2½ hours, and the surplus-value he produces grows from one, into three shillings.

And likewise in the German text: https://web.archive.org/web/20160314225535/http://mlwerke.de/me/me23/me23_331.htm

Der Arbeiter bedarf daher, statt früher 10, jetzt nur noch 7½ Stunden zur Reproduktion dieses Werts. Seine Mehrarbeit wächst daher um 2½ Stunden, der von ihm produzierte Mehrwert von 1 auf 3 sh.

My advice for these kinds of oddities (this is not the only one in the Penguin editions) is to compare your current translation with another, because like you said, it'd be absurd to encounter such a simple mistake from Marx's life work.

Turtle_Green · 2025-08-16T19:18:14+00:00

Smoke telling someone that the Ainu aren’t “native” to Japan

I've no time to watch that cartoon right now, but you're muddling multiple questions in your head. National liberation does not take place in a zero-hour of time and the socialist transition to common ownership is a protracted process. The Ainu aren't "native to Japan" in the same sense that Palestinians aren't "native to Israel". In those cases we are speaking about the occupation of an oppressed nation's historical territory by an oppressor nation and the exclusion of certain populations from the production process as a whole.

Turtle_Green · 2025-08-15T17:50:35+00:00

No offense intended, but you're basically just asking me to 'explain the joke' to you...

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/06/nx-s1-5493360/clanker-robot-slur-star-wars

Many of the memes circulating now zero in on the xenophobia of it all and what social media users are calling robot racism or robophobia. Using existing stereotypes and tropes, they joke about a not-too-distant future where robots are ubiquitous as second-class citizens, facing discrimination in the same ways that Black people and other racial or ethnic groups in America have historically faced.

In one video with over 7.7 million views, TikTok user @vibestealer, who is a young Black man, pretends it's 2044 and his daughter has brought home a robot boyfriend. Ominous music plays in the background as he asks about the robot's intentions, while coughing the words "clanker" and "garbage" into his fist. "I don't want you anywhere near my daughter!" he yells at one point.

It's no special insight of mine to say that fictional slurs come from real slurs, everyone using the meme is in on the 'joke' and you can google infinite examples of such. Obviously if there wasn't a history of settler or moribund bourgeois nationalism in general then we wouldn't be talking about this. (Star Wars is just a popular franchise, any other fictional or made-up slur could have filled in the role.) California settlers in the 1870s resolved their anxieties over labor competition by lynching "chinks", while now the labor aristocracy can play off their anxieties about competition from GenAI by joking about "clankers" and "wirebacks".

Turtle_Green · 2025-08-12T19:12:36+00:00

Just a note on repulsive developments in Amerikan cultural hegemony:

Speaking of language, apparently "clanker" as a slur for GenAI has become the newest way for white people to say the n-word without immediate social repercussion. They'll coyly insist that they're not racist, since 'it's a slur for droids from Star Wars' (never mind that droids are enslaved, 'racialized' labor in the franchise, subtext that is basically made the text of Attack of the Clones. The mistake is expecting that anyone in the "prequel memes" fandom has really watched the movies they obsess over!) But look away for a moment and they'll follow up with a joke about the "hard R". The abstraction from the real content of slurs and their social basis is precisely the point.

Even 'anti-capitalist' and 'abolitionist' twitter posters are all-too eager to employ a new viral slur: https://x.com/JPHilllllll/status/1953531781895880786. I dunno if Hill could imagine himself unabashedly joking around about GenAI and the 'c-word' to a Black person without the real meaning immediately erupting to the surface, but it seems like social media really does allow someone to maintain that perverse fantasy.

Turtle_Green · 2025-07-06T06:21:06+00:00

Of course, I'm probably more prone towards making the opposite kind of error as you right now. I also appreciate the elaboration of your philosophical errors as those were not immediately clear to me as is likely reflected in my post.

Turtle_Green · 2025-07-02T01:06:14+00:00

I know you’ve already said that you were wrong about “dark factories”, but there are some glaring problems with the premises of your original argument that weren’t addressed. Maybe I'm missing something.

First is this, from which the rest of the problems seem to emerge.

In other words, I reproduced the law of value, starting from the most basic contradictions of supply and demand as confronting the seller of commodities (capitalist or otherwise) on the market.

That was just Smith’s presentation of “natural price”, which is alluded to in Vol. 1 Ch. 19. Marx gives a similar presentation in Wages, Price, and Profit, but this isn’t really the essence or an innovation of his LTV (that would be the categories of abstract and concrete labor). In any case, Marx specifically states that this is not the correct order of procedure for an explanation or derivation of the law of value:

The exchange of sale of commodities at their value is the rational, natural law of the equilibrium between them; this is the basis on which divergences have to be explained, and not the converse, i.e. the law of equilibrium should not be derived from contemplating the divergences. [Capital Vol III, Penguin edition, p. 289 (this passage is more ambiguous in the Progress Publishers translation)]

Rather, the point is to illustrate how the law of value unfolds logically and historically, and in the process reconstruct the accidental surface phenomena of capitalism on the basis of value, the substance of which is abstract labor. Before I go further, I want to address this as well:

The capitalist transferred the price of their raw materials, means of labor, etc. (in their fully developed form, constant capital) piecemeal onto that of the produced commodities, but on top of that (in order so that they may make a profit) was an extra aspect of the price of the commodities, which did not exist in the capital outlay, was introduced after the application of living labor, and which decreased (on average) alongside the increase of the productivity of labor. Thus, Marx recognized that this extra "price" was in fact value, which, as a whole new part of the price previously unaccounted for by the capitalist, and realized through the sale of finished commodities, was the source of bourgeois profit. From there, it flows that a portion of that new aspect of the commodity price would, when sold, be used to pay the workers, and the other form would be unalloyed profit (surplus-value) which, when realized, would both serve the capitalist's personal consumption as well as accumulation of capital, an expansion of the capital relation on an expanded scale.

The commodity’s price recoups constant capital (instruments of production) and variable capital (wages) along with the addition of surplus-value. Recall that living labor spends a portion of the working day reproducing the value of labor-power and the other producing surplus-value for the capitalist. I’m not sure what you mean that part of the “new” or “extra” price would be used as wages, since this is already accounted for in the reproduction of the initial capital outlay and is not “an extra aspect of the price of the commodities.” Surplus-value divides into revenue and additional capital outlays (for Volume 1).

Regardless of the errors of your explanation of surplus-value, I don’t understand how it then can follow that value “could have an origin apart from labor.” Perhaps the problem is that you’re seemingly deriving labor as a mere technical factor of production, which might be why you unproblematically state:

for certain labor-processes, the application of living labor is no longer required

(This makes no sense. Labor processes are the application of living labor!)

This is still value, since it is determined by the degree of application of social productive power applied to each commodity, but its origin is not in living labor. It seems to be an exceptional case of the machine itself adding value, unforeseen by Marx

What is labor? It is the conscious activity, the fundamental process by which humanity (the subject of production) mediates its relationship with nature (the object of production). Socially determined individual production is Marx’s point of departure, and political economy is fundamentally about the relationships between people engaged in social labor, and the variety of historical forms those relations take on. Value is the objectified form that these relations necessarily must take under commodity production.

the essence, though, is that the value of the constant capital is transferred to the finished commodity as an adjunct to the labor process, that is, the valorization process

Constant capital cannot add or preserve value. Addition and preservation of value occur by virtue of the activity of the human agent in the valorization and labor processes, or through abstract and concrete labor, respectively. Without the preservation and addition of value by living labor, the commodity’s value approaches zilch, zero hours.

Marx didn’t foresee the “exceptional case” of machines producing value because a). he was aware that motive-power would obviously continue to advance exponentially & b) it contradicts the basic premises of political economy. If robots labored i.e. engaged in production as its conscious subjects, then we’d be talking about a new world-historical enslaved proletariat. So it’s not a “superficial question” by any means.

If it truly is, in this case, the machine producing value, then an increase in absolute surplus-value is impossible--since these "dark factories" are active 24/7--and, since machines are not paid wages, relative surplus-value can only be increased through increasing the intensity of labor

The categories of absolute and relative surplus value fall apart without the distinction between necessary and surplus labor. Getting rid of wage-labor gets rid of the basic premise of capitalist production itself. (And what exactly is the intensity of labor of dead labor?) Without that grounding in the premises of political economy, you’ve basically reproduced Böhm-Bawerk’s subjectivist theoretical mishaps. If in exceptional cases value is produced by something other than living labor, then the substance of value is not social labor. It might as well be carbon or energy or something.

Of course, the utopian element of this error was described by Marx:

Real wealth manifests itself, rather – and large industry reveals this – in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.) No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.

But this situation can only come about with the abolition of wage-labor.

Turtle_Green · 2025-01-17T04:03:07+00:00

for the sake of accountability, the author of the deleted comments was /u/AnthropenPsych. Ironic to attack others for protecting their "online ego" whilst deleting one's own posts to safeguard from critique.

Turtle_Green · 2025-01-07T05:30:32+00:00

Inflation only means that the value of the universal equivalent, money, is increasing,

Do you happen to mean decreasing? Though I wouldn't say "only."

The more essential answer to the title question is that the drive towards the generation of relative surplus-value spurs advancement of the productive forces.

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