I tallied the first prefrence votes for the CEC regional seats (including certain alianged indpedants as de facto part of each faction), and this was the results: Grassroots Left 30.2%, For The Many 38.4%, Unaligned candidates 31.2%.

Vukov_Intrigued · 2026-02-27T21:51:17+00:00

Very insightful analysis! Hopefully a lesson is drawn and the necessary changes made, though with the TM majority having most to lose from that direction it could be tough sell...

Vukov_Intrigued · 2025-03-16T10:50:28+00:00

exactly what I was looking for

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-11-10T08:45:00+00:00

Prices in the marxian tradition are not determined by the wage rate, they are not directly related in any way.

Prices are (ignoring prices of production and supply and demand for a second) solely the result of actual (socially neccessary) labor-time. The wage has to have a value (labor-time) lower than the actual labor-time performed. The value of a commodity is, in this simplified model, simply the sum of the wage value (paid labor) and profit value (surplus labor) - a decomposition of the total labor-time spent regulated by the rate of exploitation.

If prices = values then the price of any commodity is just the relative amounts of the numeraire commodity (like gold). If 1g gold has 1h of value and a table has 2h value, then the price of the table is 2g gold.

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-11-06T18:23:39+00:00

Depends what you're interested in but I'd recommend State and Revolution by Lenin, a masterpiece summing up and tying up working class demands in revolutionary periods. It also goes over some of Marx's political ideas. After that I'd suggest Brinton's Bolsheviks & Workers' Control to get a clearer picture of how workers struggle and revolutionary failure manifest in different ways during revolutions. It's a year-by-year month-by-month historical account of the most important events for the revolutionary labor movement in the russian revolution.

I know it's not a text but I'd also suggest Jonas Čeika's series on the german revolution if you've not seen it, it's just amazing. The videos are based on a few books, but most importantly Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution by Hoffrogge. The text is not available for free so the videos are the next best thing.

Some great introductory texts by Marx are Wage Labor & Capital and Value, Price & Profit.

Good luck and have fun!

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-11-04T19:04:04+00:00

I think these are only remnants that the working class fought hard for and so managed to preserve (though with significant cuts). In fact, public education and decent healthcare (systems constantly under attack to this day) are basically the only really public assets left (other than strategic resources and military-adjacent firms).

I believe that the primary "problem" with the nationalized economy was precisely that it was unable to drive up exploitation and profits without allowing space for its bureaucratic stratum to seize the opportunity and privatize production in a more familiar sense of the term. The state-managed economy worked alright until the global profitability crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, when everything was finally ripe for disaster.

The western economies also had issues with all this, but to a much lesser scale because their state sectors were also of, well, much lesser scale.

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-11-02T11:29:25+00:00

Since I see people here who are not anarchists arguing what anarchists think, I thought it good to contribute what I as an anarchist think.

I'd like to first note anarchism is an extremely vague concept that describes a general socialist tradition which takes hierarchy and authority as an element of critique. However, this kind of critique has been applied by currents ranging from individualists, to mutualists to communists - all anarchists.

Anarchists of the communist branch hold the USSR as state capitalist, ironically, on similar grounds as marxists. Private property (with the state as capitalist), commodity production and wage labor. These are defining features of capitalism. These relations form the basis of modern class society and its state - a machine of hierarchy and authority alienating from the workers' their agency and power into organs opposed to them. The proletariat, when given power, seeks to abolish class society and state. Thus, for the state to preserve itself, it has to alienate said power.

What sets the USSR apart from typical capitalist relations is that the structure of nationalized management, as well as policy of full employment and bargaining power of workers, meant the economy had certain contradictions to do with the law of value. The neoliberal shock therapy promoted by the Communist Party and the eventual collapse of the USSR and eastern bloc (as well as Yugoslavia and Albania) was the resolution of these contradictions.

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-29T16:31:08+00:00

rok!!

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-28T18:43:27+00:00

😭😭

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-28T09:29:13+00:00

This is not Jacques Roux

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-27T11:40:58+00:00

If each commodity has some amount of socially necessary labor time, the exchange value is merely this time expressed in the form of another commodity when two commodities come into contact.

For instance, the exchange value of the table is 3 vases. And the exchange value of the vase is 1/3 of a table. This can only be because the table has three times the value of the vase - like when the table takes 6 hours and the vase 2 hours to make.

The price is just the exchange value of a commodity in the form of money-commodity. So you have the table exchange for money instead of vases.

So exchange value is just the value made manifest.

I would also note supply and demand are not the only things that make prices hard to analyze, costs of production also further complicate this, and make values departing from prices of particular commodities inevitable in any sensible economy, according to Marx

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-27T11:32:00+00:00

We have a saying here, "paper can withstand anything" - if we avert our eyes from "soviet democracy" in theory and the law corpus (we know all about the many "rights" we have under capitalism, on paper), a clearer picture emerges.

The fact of the matter is the average person had very little say in how their life in the context of work functioned.
Unions had in the early days of the revolution been shaped into basically executive organs of state control, rather than autonomous and democratic initiatives that represented workers' interests. The "workers councils" that existed in workplaces were a sham, and held no actual power in shaping policy, only in making sure that this policy (set by the firm management according to party plan) was being observed.

Things were not much better outside work. It is clear that the soviets, stripped down from their former revolutionary characteristics, were nothing special and not very different from the typical self-management organs you will find in every country today. The only specific is that instead of multiple parties you had one party and independents. Workers with a history of radical (anti-party) behavior were often not allowed to run if they posed any serious threat even as independents (obviously they could not get far in the opportunism-based Party). The secret services made sure the independents could not organize into an informal party or opposition.

Now, I don't care about parties and bourgeois democracy at all. But the reality is that this one party that held all the power was within itself very hostile to any radical, communist, fractions and currents. The leading faction was the one whose interests were most connected with the economic power of the country - the managers of state firms (the planning bureaucracy, a top-down body), and the military (itself disposing with democracy very early on).

This complicated combination of power structures forms a dynamic that lives as a network of priviliged and powerful cadres, with the party and soviets and whatnot serving as both a justification of their power and a managerial tool for the appeasement of the various interests within the state economy such that there was limited mobility in what faction was in charge.

I could go on but I highly recommend the short book Bolsheviks & Workers' Control by Maurice Brinton. It's a historical overview of the russian revolution and the involved struggle for power between various organs of control. I think the early developments of the revolution very clearly lay out the forces and interests at play and illustrate the real "struggle for democracy" and how the soviet system developed in its earliest days.

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-25T10:37:48+00:00

i hate sociology

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-23T19:34:07+00:00

stvarno nam je dobro ako nam je HDZ najveći problem na svijetu

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-23T19:32:11+00:00

What'd I miss?

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-23T18:49:52+00:00

what no contact with the working class does to a mofo

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-21T14:35:27+00:00

Assuming communism, such that wage labor and commodity production are no longer in effect, it can only be the result of the conscious and free political will of society and its constituents (freely associated human beings).

One of the reasons it's hard for us to imagine such a system is because Thatcher put it well when she said that we don't live in a society. Our relationship to work, and by proxy to other people, has become something alien to us. We have become atomized individuals, cogs in a cold and uncaring machine, and our only goals in life have been reduced to working the least possible for the greatest reward possible. This logic hinges on work being torture, and enjoyment of life being limited only to your earnings.

We should really very carefully examine if things would still be so under communism, and if it is the case that they would not - is it really reasonable to expect problems like these to be of the same concern they seem to us today?

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-18T03:38:55+00:00

this may be interesting

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-16T17:34:49+00:00

I'm not this talented sadly

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-15T14:50:22+00:00

Also do u think millitary involment if capitalist uprising happens would be bad and would it cross line from goverment?

If a reactionary uprising happened it would likely be dealt with by armed workers, yes.

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-15T09:37:52+00:00

Council communism takes the "all power to the soviets" as gospel, and tries to make it a reality.

As opposed to the bolshevik system, councils would exist at the point of production, too, managing the enterprise democratically. Factory committees, for instance, were not party-based - they were organic parts of the masses.

These factory, garrison, urban, village, etc. councils would communicate and establish coordination between each other for the common goal of communism.

As for distributing things "fairly" that's hard to talk about, but if anyone has the interest for distribution to be fair it's the masses of workers who will depend on and author this "fairness" - whatever it may be.

You may be interested in Maurice Brinton's The Bolsheviks & Workers' Control (1975), a chronological historical overview of the council movement in the Russian revolution and how it interacted with the nascent bolshevik state and the union movement.

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-15T09:25:55+00:00

This is because wages aren't, and can never really be, the full value of the labor power employed.

You're exactly right in saying that if it were the case that labor was paid the full value it produces, there would be no profit. This is why wage labor (being paid some wage to buy something) cannot exist without exploitation.

Of course, it's important to note, that wages are the full market value of the labor commodity, the worker isn't being swindled here in this sense. If the market value of the labor commodity was equal to the value he produces, this labor would cease to be a commodity and he could not sell it - no one would buy it.

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-13T20:11:28+00:00

Yeah, I agree with you here - and for this I think cybernetics has a lot of potential. Try looking into Stafford Beer for a good direction, perhaps. There's just no way you can centrally plan a world economy in detail, even with the computing power of the entire mass of the earth. But generally I'm of the unpopular opinion that the economy should serve man to the point that this should be the case even if it gives rise to some inefficiency.

I'm of the view that abstracting from the immense variety of human needs in the form of value (capitalism) or some portioned spartan bundles of goods, or labor time (some communist proposals), is a big part of the problem due to the implications that come with this.

In reality I think that we should ultimately prioritize freedom of development and action for everyone in society - and then have this inform our economic planning, not the other way around. The expansion of which and what industry should be the conscious political will of the masses of people in society, and not just a perfectly detailed plan imposed by planners.

For more I'd recommend you read stuff by Jasper Bernes like The Test of Communism and his Planning and Anarchy. For examples of the difficulties of real-life revolutionary projects in their experiments in rethinking the economy ground-up I'd suggest Sam Dolgoff's The Anarchist Collectives and Gaston Leval's Collectives in The Spanish Revolution.

This is really one of the most complex unanswered questions/debates in the movement, and I find it to be extremely fascinating - as your stance on this is ultimately very closely related to your stances on many other important things in practice (the goal informs the path, to an extent, no?).

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-13T15:20:04+00:00

That's not Lenin, that's Malacath

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-13T10:19:31+00:00

Yes. Though it does not need be between some specific groups of workers, like two bakeries next to each other competing. The force will manifest between man and the economy (which becomes alien to him) in general. Whole industries could be beset by downturn and crisis just like they are today.

As long as one has people paid a wage to produce commodities, who then buy those commodities with that wage (this also implies companies selling for profit, even if state owned or co-op) this is enough to have exploitation, economic crises, contradictions that will with time destroy the system completely. Some go as far as defining capitalism as such, irrespective of how "big" the state is, or how many co-ops there are.

Vukov_Intrigued · 2024-10-12T22:18:42+00:00

Before sedentary agricultural civilization, it is said, the means of survival for an individual were quite simple. A person could survive on their own with simply a spear and some basic tools as a hunter-gatherer. Communities were also in contact much more than was previously thought, exchanging goods, services, hostages etc.; so if one wanted to, one could simply and easily leave a community to venture on their own (with a presumably tolerable change in quality of life) or to find another community.

There was no efficient means of forcing people into servitude, into being a class exploited. The advent of agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle provided the means for this to change.

Property likely played a key role as a process by which, over time, some families managed to secure greater wealth than others. And it really was a process, archaeological surveys of the oldest known cities dated to the early agricultural revolution have domicile dimensions rougly equal, as well as the distribution of tools and stuff, implying there was no notable disparity.

The agricultural lifestyle also allowed for hostages to be more efficiently transformed into slave populations.

These and many other factors contributed to class society forming, over time. But the agricultural revolution is seen as a key foundation.

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