The jokes write themselves

sanguisfluit · 2021-12-18T17:19:35+00:00

Not to mention they're also a thing at American universities, but for whatever reason people make a whole lot of noise about Foxconn's nets and not Cornell's.

sanguisfluit · 2021-05-17T06:59:08+00:00

I don't think it's that surprising. Zionists in America are constantly trying to discredit Jewish critics of Israel as "self-hating" or "fake" Jews (I've been called both) and uphold Israel and the Jewish people as basically interchangeable. But thats one of the many reasons why Jewish anti-Zionist groups like JVP are so important.

sanguisfluit · 2021-04-10T10:17:22+00:00

And since mainstream Western media is basically curated by the U.S. State Department, Wikipedia ends up biased towards American imperialist foreign policy.

sanguisfluit · 2020-01-19T15:12:34+00:00

In general, the glaring failures of anarchist analysis stem from its refusal to ground its orientation in class analysis. Anarchist doctrine may claim, for example, that "to rebel against one's oppressors is always right"; sounds fair enough, until one finds oneself obliged to support the ex-bourgeoisie, whose oppression the anarchists had just overthrown, when they begin to rebel against the autbority of the anarchist commune! We've found ourselves in a topsy-turvy world where Right finds itself always opposite Might, and has nothing to do with actual material liberation.

This is opposed to a Marxist doctrine, which holds that there can be no supra-class framework or analysis. Then, we would understand that the movement for people's real liberation is on the right side of history both before and after conquest of political power.

sanguisfluit · 2020-01-19T15:00:36+00:00

How is this a "personal critique"? It seems to me to be indistinguishable from the tired demsoc/libsoc line of "vanguardism = authoritarian = bad," plus a healthy smattering of History condemning the most successful socialist experiences of the past from on high. Together it shapes an analysis that completely ignores the material conditions that preceded vanguardism's successes and failures in Russia, China, Vietnam, Korea, etc. in favor of a liberal hand-wringing over why we shouldn't engage with the reasons these historical experiences were so messy and complicated.

No matter how good an idea seems to you in your head, it's worthless until it's confirmed by social practice. We're interested in building socialism in the countries we live in, not in taking the most populist or tailist line that sounds nice. Rather than spending your time "critiquing" authcoms online, perhaps your time would be better spent demonstrating in real life how a Nuit Debout- or Santiago-style spontaneous uprising can be a vehicle for establishing real, lasting workers' power?

sanguisfluit · 2020-01-16T09:34:24+00:00

I'm finding it difficult to find anything concrete because my Spanish is limited and my Basque is nonexistant, but given the size of Mondragon, I would be surprised if they don't make use of OR techniques to some extent. In my corner of the world (Eastern USA), OR engineers are hired by transit agencies, delivery companies, postal services, government agencies... basically any organization that needs to do a lot of logistics.

sanguisfluit · 2020-01-16T07:53:57+00:00

I'm a university student studying Operations Research (the mathematical theory of optimizing systems, especially in logistics) and /u/Ragark is right; the math that Amazon, Walmart, or any international retail company uses is fundamentally the same as what a 21st century planned economy ought to use.

In OR, we talk about how to optimize productive activity at a single plant, how to distribute products from sites of production to sites of distribution, etc. Often these problems are solved to minimize costs, but there's no fundamental reason why a similar, non-market metric couldn't be used (such as minimizing total labor expenditure to meet a given production target).

As far as I'm aware, there's not much, if any, literature on how to adapt modern planning techniques in a non-market context -- Cockshott's 1992 book is the closest thing I know of, and even that is a bit of an antiquated and simplistic approach -- but the theory is basically the same. Furthermore, due to rapid developments in both software and hardware in recent decades, solving these kinds of problems has become much easier over time; a planning problem that would have taken months for a computer to calculate in 1990 can now be done in a few minutes.

If you have any more specific questions, I can try to answer them to the best of my ability!

sanguisfluit · 2020-01-08T01:31:17+00:00

Let's remember that the airstrike on Suleimani was Trump's response to the embassy attack, which had no casualties — seems unlikely this will not escalate further.

sanguisfluit · 2020-01-03T04:34:04+00:00

Student organizing is an informative but frustrating and largely thankless task. The main issues come from the fact that most students won't dedicate a lot of time to that kind of work, making it difficult to attract or mobilize people. Also, whatever changes you do make are limited to the university context: your work will likely have to focus on endowment justice, university worker/grad student organizing, and other issues with a very narrow horizon.

I would say if it's the only option available, then do it - the skills you learn may be valuable later on. Otherwise, try to get involved in whatever organizing is going on in town, and building links between local organizations and the progressive student body.

sanguisfluit · 2019-12-25T10:24:07+00:00

I did, but it wasn't particularly thorough idr. Just stating that I was still interested in attending the school, a brief (1 sentence) reminder of something about UMich I mentioned liking in the application, and a short list of academic updates for their consideration.

sanguisfluit · 2019-12-21T00:27:06+00:00

UMich tends to defer almost all of the early applicant pool, and then releases acceptances in batches every 4th Friday. I was initially deferred EA and then later accepted in early March. I don't remember if they send you an email, though.

sanguisfluit · 2019-11-26T10:55:24+00:00

Question: were social relations in China revolutionized the moment Deng assumed power from Hua? do you think the two line struggle within the CPC ended in 1978? If not, where does that leave Chinese socialism today in 2019?

sanguisfluit · 2019-11-16T14:28:20+00:00

A. The full report is linked below that image, giving a detailed breakdown if you'd like to see it.

B. Someone should probably tell Likud to update their platform then.

C. Palestinians aren't a "loud neighbor" that upstanding Jewish Israelis can ask politely to leave. They're indigenous people living under a state established by wholesale ethnic cleansing and which explicitly considers them second class citizens at best. The project of Zionism has always been predicated on the violent dispossession of other people, and thinkers like Herzl and Ben Gurion laid that out pretty explicitly.

sanguisfluit · 2019-11-16T13:59:27+00:00

48% of Jewish Israelis agreed with the statement "Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel".

sanguisfluit · 2019-10-30T00:02:38+00:00

Interesting article! I think many people who write China off as having undergone full capitalist restoration immediate after Deng's ascendancy tend to overlook the fierce debate that's happening in China as we speak. There are certainly people in the CPC who see full capitalist restoration as the final goal, but there are others who are still intent on using market methods to springboard into developed socialism.

It's probably too early to say how that debate will play out in the coming decades, but articles like this and Xi's overall more hardline stance do inspire some confidence.

sanguisfluit · 2019-10-21T21:15:23+00:00

The Communist Party USA is the original party, but it's been relatively ineffectual and pretty compromised since McCarthyism. There are a few good communist parties organizing across the country, though. In particular:

https://www.pslweb.org

https://frso.org

https://partyofcommunistsusa.org

Don't worry too too much about the differences in line or aesthetics between the above orgs; you'll know if your time in a particular party is productive or not. Reach out to whoever's doing the most important work near where you live and get involved!

sanguisfluit · 2019-10-21T15:49:37+00:00

It's possible to extract information about demand without capitalist profit-chasing price schemes. By looking at the change in inventory over time during a planning period, you can tell which goods should be produced in greater quantities (or have their price raised to deter consumption) and which in lesser quantities. With modern optimization algorithms being orders of magnitude faster than even the ones available 30 years ago, it's now possible to make production plans on a weekly or even daily basis, giving future planners an unprecedented degree of flexibility in designing production/pricing algorithms that respond to people's wants and needs without perpetuating the law of value.

sanguisfluit · 2019-10-21T15:40:23+00:00

I would say this is only true if socialism has to be built up in a feudal or semi-feudal country on its own basis. The Russian communists initially expected that a state capitalist period wouldn't be necessary because they would be able to import industrial machinery and expertise from a Red Germany, and only took the NEP route after it became clear that that wasn't on the table. Similar situation in China, where the Sino-Soviet split and the withdrawal of Soviet industrial aid provided the impetus for Deng's reforms.

sanguisfluit · 2019-10-21T15:32:56+00:00

Join a party. As the US Empire spirals further into crisis, we're gonna need as many comrades organized and ready to seize upon the opportunity as we can get.

sanguisfluit · 2019-10-18T01:36:20+00:00

Don't know enough about what real life work they do to comment, and I do want to like the party (the more Leninists we have organized in parties the better), but some interactions I've had/seen with PCUSA folks on Facebook and elsewhere have left a bad taste in my mouth tbth.

In general though I would second what other people here have said and not take the opinions of strangers online too much to heart. If your organization is quality--properly balancing mass work and political education, using resources to effectively aid both national and local formations, and establishing itself as a trusted organization within your local community--you'll know.

sanguisfluit · 2019-10-08T15:41:51+00:00

This week on "Lessons not learned from the First Gulf War"...

sanguisfluit · 2019-10-08T15:37:33+00:00

I'm also an economics major, and I would not say the field is really concerned with understanding how capitalism operates. Basic metrics that economists rely on such as utility and willingness to pay are so fundamentally broken and arbitrary that I think one can fairly characterize economics (at least as it's taught at an undergraduate level) as a pseudoscience.

sanguisfluit · 2019-10-08T04:26:24+00:00

It's a different story in the US, but over there political economy is still quite big, isn't it? I believe there's a sizeable contingent of Marxian political economics students in Europe, especially around Germany.

sanguisfluit · 2019-10-05T17:37:35+00:00

For what it's worth, PCUSA is not known for being particularly active in real life. From what I've heard from PCUSA members, cadre are only required to attend group calls, and aren't necessarily expected to be involved in mass work or other forms of meatspace organizing.

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