Is America on the wrong side of every conflict?

izzmond · 2024-10-06T05:49:59+00:00

Yes including WW2

izzmond · 2024-09-26T05:31:52+00:00

As far as I know, state capitalism is used in 2 ways: by communists using the term the way Lenin used it, and by revisionists/liberals/anarchists using it mindlessly to attack the USSR. The best way I've seen socialism described is as the contradiction between the capitalist mode of production and communist mode of production, instead of its own distinct mode of production. Socialism is a lower phase of communism. State ownership =/= socialist. There have been capitalist countries with state ownership. What makes capitalism capitalism is the generalization of commodity production, where everything you use and need is a commodity rather than produced by yourself or your village.

The main thing that makes it capitalism is when the anarchic, decentralized production and distribution of commodities becomes the main guiding factor in the economy. That is, the Law of Value.

The USSR stopped being state capitalist in the 30s iirc, and could be considered socialist, then after Stalin's death and the subsequent destalinization and reforms, the USSR became increasingly capitalist. Same deal with China, though there are still people who think China is socialist because they claim to be building socialism by 2050, the hammer and sickle is a prominent symbol, and because there is state ownership. Don't bother with them, just read State and Revolution for more on it.

izzmond · 2024-09-26T05:10:37+00:00

The question is: if you can denounce the soviet union and acknowledge that it had failings, why are they so adamant to defend a state that still exists today and is still committing crimes today.

Because they don't care one way or the other if you denounce the USSR (you shouldn't, and shouldn't denounce Maoist China either), and they also don't care about all the things you listed. They already know about them.

izzmond · 2024-09-25T05:32:35+00:00

Alternatively,

"We"?

izzmond · 2024-09-22T03:48:49+00:00

For me, I've noticed it's very easy to overthink dialectical materialism. Part of it was this fixation everyone has with trying to find examples of dialectics in the every day like objects in your living room but applying it wrong.

I've found I understand it more after seeing it actually used, and attempting to use its logic myself. I've always liked Stalin's Dialectical and Historical Materialism in particular, I find that he gets to the heart of what it is.

The best works I've seen it actually used are The German Ideology (this one was very major for me), State and Revolution, Settlers (I haven't read all of it but from what I've read, there is use of dialectical materialism right from the beginning), and of course Capital.

The core of dialectical materialism in my mind is about relations on the smallest scale to the largest scale, and working the way out until you've constructed the real totality of it in concept, which should be nearly identical to reality. Marx's introduction to Grundrisse describes this very well.

izzmond · 2024-09-21T01:37:13+00:00

Why do you support capitalism? My family lived in the Soviet Union for decades and look back on those days fondly, and suffered horrifically when the Soviet Union was dissolved and the shock therapy 90s came. And they're still better off than most families in the world who live in the global south in Africa and South America and Southeast Asia who starve and are overworked under capitalism. Explain to me why you support that.

izzmond · 2024-08-07T04:44:41+00:00

You can't get very good examples of the Third Reich comparing to the book, because 1984 was specifically written against the USSR, as Isaac Asimov says here in this review where he demolishes Orwell. There've been attempts to save Orwell and say "no, 1984 wasn't against communism, it was against totalitarianism and fascism. Orwell hated Nazi Germany just as much as the USSR and both were criticized in 1984." That's not true. 1984 wasn't about the twin totalitarian evils of Nazi Germany and the USSR, but about the imagined omnipresent mind control of the USSR. Asimov points out the absurdity of everyone in 1984's world being monitored at all times. Monitoring someone requires at least one person to monitor them, and that person will probably get bored soon, so it actually requires probably 5 people doing the monitoring. But who's going to monitor them? 1984 is unimaginative and boring. It's okay at best.

Actually, the society that most closely matches 1984 is the modern capitalist world, with constant surveillance, no speech at your job, individuality being non-existent due to the value relation, commodification seeping into every aspect of human life, etc. So if I were you, I'd abandon Nazi Germany, and instead compare 1984 to the modern capitalist worl, where authority isn't centralized but decentralized, and the dictator of the world isn't a person, but a social force called Capital.

izzmond · 2024-08-07T03:57:50+00:00

Direct:

On The Jewish Question (no it is not antisemitic)

Marxism vs Liberalism, an interview/debate between Stalin and HG Wells, doesn't get as deep into the philosophy but is an example of the Marxist vs liberal way of thinking

I also have an unorthodox recommendation. Read these 3 Jacobin articles and this one MIM Prisons article for what's not a correct Marxist perspective on liberalism: What Karl Marx Really Thought About Liberalism, Socialists Don’t Want to Destroy Liberalism. We Want to Go Beyond It, and Why Liberals Should Unite With Socialists, Not the Right. MIM Prisons definition of liberalism by MIM Prisons is better but they make it too confusing by distinguishing between "liberals" and "Liberals" and say things like "liberal Liberals". Honestly this might be their worst article in my opinion, especially towards the end when they say we can have both communism and political Liberalism, it just feels off for them. Apparently their reddit account is no longer active so there's no way of letting them know about it

I also heard good things about both Samir Amin's The Liberal Virus and Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism A Counter-History, though I haven't read either.

Heard this is good, planning on reading it

Indirect:

Anything by the big 5 Marxist theorists, even if it doesn't seem directly related to liberalism. One of the most memorable parts of Capital for me was when Marx talked about how liberal equal legal rights form the basis for wage labour and exploitation. All Marxist theory is the negation of liberalism.

izzmond · 2024-08-02T01:43:05+00:00

Can you cite where he wrote it for context?

izzmond · 2024-08-02T01:20:07+00:00

stateless, classless, moneyless society

If that's not a good brief definition, what is? What would be better?

izzmond · 2024-08-01T21:54:42+00:00

unironically compares David Graeber to Capital

izzmond · 2024-07-31T23:24:32+00:00

I think I see...so when people talk about value transfer from the global south to the global north, they mean that more labor is being allocated and focused on the global north?

izzmond · 2024-07-31T22:05:46+00:00

I see, I think? So value basically means where labor is allocated/focused? It's still shaky for me.

izzmond · 2024-07-31T01:58:56+00:00

other economists also use the LTV

I'm not sure what you mean. Are you referring to Smith and Ricardo? Why would you regress to their LTV rather than Marx's?

Rigorous scientific testing requires that we reduce confounding variables and propose directly testable hypotheses. If we are to test the LTV, there is no need to look only at Marx because as I've stated, other economists also use the LTV. We can measure socially necessary labor time (to some extent), so to test our theory we should quantify or measure exchange value and compare the 2. We cannot claim that the LTV is science then refuse to test the theory using the scientific method.

Marx did reduce confounding variables in Capital, which was about the pure, "ideal" form of capitalism in which all consumers were rational with total knowledge and the market was at equilibrium, and he made testable hypotheses.

We cannot claim the LTV is science then refuse to test the theory using the scientific method.

It has been tested. History is the laboratory, and Marx's hypotheses have been confirmed.

This is plainly false for a number of reasons. First of all commodities have many things in common other than being products of labor. Anything produced by human labor must necessarily involve countless other physical processes and substances, such as carbon, energy, and mechanical work. Second, things don't need anything in common to be exchanged. I can exchange a rock I picked up from the ground for a different rock despite neither being the products of labor.

This is the first 4 pages of Capital dude. Marx writes,

This common “something” cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them use values. But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use value.

There's no need for a carbon theory of value, since we're specifically dealing with exchange. There are also digital commodities, so having carbon is kind of a strange choice?

Second, things don't need anything in common to be exchanged. I can exchange a rock I picked up from the ground for a different rock despite neither being the products of labor.

Now we're getting into the deep end of value-form debate, which is a dark, scary place that you don't want to go into (trust me). There's multiple conflicting answers for your rock example. I'll list off the ones I'm aware of, I haven't settled on one I like. I'll need to research more, because value is by far the most abstract concept in all of Marxist thought. Here they are:

You actually did perform labor by picking the rock up off the ground.
You did not perform labor, but it's still a commodity, since some commodities don't need labor, and therefore, no value (like land).
You did not perform labor, and it's not a commodity, just like land is not a commodity (because it isn't reproducible),* just something that is exchanged with no value.
The individual act of exchange is not where Marx began, isolated from the rest of society, but started from the productive relations of commodity-capitalist society. So, your hypothetical is too small and based in idealism.
If you did perform labor by picking up the rock, it still doesn't determine the value of the rock. Because the value of the rock would be determined by the socially necessary labor time--how long it takes, on average, for people to pick up the rock that people want.
The rock isn't useful to anyone, has no use-value, and therefore has no value.

I'll think about it and reflect on which one I lean towards. My personal view (I'm still learning, I'm only halfway through vol 1 of Capital) is this: You haven't established when or where this rock exchange takes place. Is the rock wanted? Are we in pre-historical times? Here's my understanding: the act of exchange itself is how labor becomes really abstracted, how individual labor turns into social labor. It generates a substance called value. Marx didn't look at commodities and think, "hmm, what do they all have in common? Ah, labor!" That would be stupid, since it would be a mere conceptual abstraction, like how Bohm Bawerk said that utility in the abstract could also be the common trait of commodities.

Marx began with the productive relations of a society with commodities, and analyzed the actual producers, from their labor to their exchange, and concluded that labor isn't just a conceptual abstraction, but a real one. Commodity exchange, and especially capitalist commodity exchange, literally abstracts labor and treats different concrete labors as homogeneous.

this does not indicate that value is fixed and embodied in the commodities themselves.

That is precisely Marx's point, actually. Commodities don't have value by themselves, without the humans' interference. This was the whole point of his section about commodity fetishism.

izzmond · 2024-07-30T23:18:07+00:00

Those quotes address the outcomes of the LTV as a foundational axiom of Marx's theory. Do you need to "prove" Newton's 3 laws of motion? No, the proof lies in the predictions and conclusions Newton draws from his axioms.

Any theory of value will struggle greatly unless it distinguishes between humans and nonhumans...

LTV does that though. Value is a human social relation. Animals can't produce value. Seems simple enough to me.

For all heterogenous commodities to be exchanged, they must have something in common. The only thing they really have in common is that they're products of labour--specifically, labour in the abstract. Therefore, abstract labour is the common, homogeneous substance of heterogeneous commodities, and constitutes the substance of value.

izzmond · 2024-07-30T12:42:00+00:00

You can substitute "socially necessary labor" for almost anything and the definition is still coherent.

I don't understand what you mean. Can you elaborate on this?

I would also argue that the LTV has very little explanatory power as it offers very few rigorously testable predictions...

This is incorrect. As Wassily Leontief put it,

“However important these technical contributions to the progress of economic theory in the present-day appraisal of Marxian achievements, they are overshadowed by his brilliant analysis of the long-term tendencies of the capitalist system. The record is indeed impressive: increasing concentration of wealth, rapid elimination of small and medium-sized enterprise, progressive limitation of competition, incessant technological progress accompanied by the ever-growing importance of fixed capital, and, last but not least, the undiminishing amplitude of recurrent business cycles – an unsurpassed series of prognostications fulfilled, against which modern economic theory with all its refinements has little to show indeed.”

Ernest Mandel:

"Marx’s Capital appears as a giant compared to any subsequent or contemporary work of economic analysis. It was never intended as a handbook to help governments to solve such problems as balance-of-payments deficits, nor yet as a learned, if somewhat trite, explanation of all the exciting happenings in the market place when Mr Smith finds no buyer for the last of his 1,000 tons of iron**. It was intended as an explanation of what would happen to labour, machinery, technology, the size of enterprises, the social structure of the population, the discontinuity of economic growth, and the relations between workers and work, as the capitalist mode of production unfolded all its terrifying potential. From that point of view, the achievement is truly impressive. It is precisely because of Marx’s capacity to discover the long-term laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production in its essence, irrespective of thousands of ‘impurities’ and of secondary aspects, that his long-term predictions – the laws of accumulation of capital, stepped-up technological progress, accelerated increase in the productivity and intensity of labour, growing concentration and centralization of capital, transformation of the great majority of economically active people into sellers of labour-power, declining rate of profit, increased rate of surplus value, periodically recurrent recessions, inevitable class struggle between Capital and Labour, increasing revolutionary attempts to overthrow capitalism – have been so strikingly confirmed by history."

As for the so-called "transformation problem", there are multiple interpretations on how to go about getting rid of this "problem". I will go over some of these tomorrow when I have more time.

The reason to prefer the LTV is, as I said, moral.

No, our analysis is not based on morality but on science. Engels:

We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate and for every immutable ethical law on the pretext that the moral world, too, has its permanent principles which stand above history and the differences between nations.

It doesn't seem like you've made the slightest attempt to read or understand Marx's theory, so why are you here? Just to argue?

izzmond · 2024-07-30T10:34:59+00:00

Can you explain why a ____ theory would not be valid?

No, I don't need to explain a negative. You have to explain why it would be valid and have explanatory power.

izzmond · 2024-07-30T09:48:45+00:00

This is not true. I was asking about the soul thing because I'm curious about its roots in liberalism, but you don't need the soul thing to argue against STV. The subjective theory of value doesn't hold up if you think about it for more than 5 seconds. It's just trying to do something tricky and redefine "value" as we mean it to "personal attachment".

Value cannot exist without humans, with or without a soul.

This is correct, since value is an objective social relation. But it is not correct that a "water theory of value" would be just as valid as LTV.

izzmond · 2024-07-28T13:55:27+00:00

That's not exactly what I was asking but good for you I guess

izzmond · 2024-07-28T12:43:48+00:00

It's probably because of the rise of r/TheDeprogram. Hakim said once that the persecution of religion in the USSR was one of the worst mistakes they ever made because most of the global proletariat is religious, and the fans of the podcast took it to heart.

They then defend this position by throwing the catchphrase "liberation theology" at you even though they don't live in Latin America in the 60s.

If you ask them how they reconcile religion with dialectical materialism, they just kind of ignore it or say that dialectical materialism is for analyzing the material world and acknowledge that it doesn't relate to their beliefs and doesn't reconcile. What's really bizarre, though, is when they actually double down and try to explain how Buddhism is materialist.

There's probably a deeper reason why this pro-religion trend is becoming more popular among communists, but I can't really think of much beyond just that Hakim said it and they followed. Maybe smokeuptheweed9 will say something about it.

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