quarrk

joined 2 years ago
[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 17 points 1 week ago

Marx and Engels clarified many of their ideas through their critical readings and polemics.

I can’t recall where — I think a preface to one of Marx’s works — Engels describes how the publishing of the work was not important in the end; that the important thing was the clarification of their own ideas through the effort of refuting their opponents. I think it was against Proudhon or Stirner… can’t remember…

[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

You want to pin down absolute definitions of idealism vs materialism, capitalism vs socialism, but the precise meanings of these words are not agreed by all thinkers if they are consciously defined at all. Many thinkers who are called idealist did not self-identify as such, same for capitalist economists.

These terms ought to be considered as post-hoc groupings of an eclectic set of philosophies, even contradictory ones. So what definition of idealism are you applying?

there are no serious incompatibilities between idealism and Marxism

How can this be? Marx wrote a bunch of polemics against idealism. The German Ideology notably, but also the Gotha Critique, Theses on Feuerbach, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844). Are you defining Marxism as the school that emerged after Marx, or Marx himself?

[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 31 points 1 week ago

If there are copycats, it still needs to be shown that it actually is effective in terms of political change. Likewise, if change does happen in the near future, it would be unclear whether it was already in the course of its own development with or without Luigi

[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 43 points 1 week ago

I don’t want to get into all the particulars here

— guy who got into zero particulars

Again,

— guy who didn’t say anything yet

[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago

I’ll def check it out

[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 1 points 1 week ago

Parenti is cool but nowhere near the level of Stalin and Mao

[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

She/him just because. It should be two separate rolls.

[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 3 points 1 week ago

Not Safe For Work(ers)

[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

That is a really good way to summarize it. Just adding a little more detail since it is not directly wages which are the deciding factor, but the rate of exploitation. The rate of exploitation depends on wages but also intensity of labor, duration of the working day, etc. so there can be rising exploitation even as wages remain constant.

As an industry develops its technology, the amount of constant capital (machines, robots, AI…) increases over time. Even with fixed wages, the organic composition of capital c/v increases. And from the rate of profit equation p = s/(c+v) = (s/v)/[(c/v)+1] one can see how the rate of profit varies inversely with this organic composition c/v and directly with the rate of exploitation s/v. If c/v goes up over time, then profit falls unless there is a compensating increase in the rate of exploitation.

It gets to a point where in order to open a lemonade stand, you have to borrow $100k to license some bazingamachine that squeezes lemons super fast, so that you can compete with the other lemonade stands. Of course, borrowing $100k to earn $30/day is an abysmal rate of profit, so no one would do that. Yet that is the direction the economy goes in all industries. You see it even now with how difficult it was for mega-corporation Alphabet to break into the broadband internet with Google Fiber.

[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago

Is this a joke about coffee having a laxative effect?

[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Leaving this comment as a bookmark. My initial thought is no, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall can be derived without any reference whatever to natural resource availability. The root cause of capitalist crisis is a contradiction: capitalism compels producers to minimize labor (and resource!) inputs in order to maximize value. The ideal end of this would be a kind of singularity in which value can be produced without labor. Contradiction.

Another thought is that value is strictly non-physical, although it is embodied in physical commodities. Andrew Kliman has argued at length against what he calls a “physical quantities” or physicalist interpretation of value theory.

The same wool coat can be worth 1 hour or 10 hours (in monetary terms, say $10 or $100) depending on the development of the industry at the time. The thing that is constant, independent of all changes in productivity, is that 1 working day contains 1 working day. It may be split up among varying physical quantities, but the value produced per day is essentially constant.

[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Both of those statements ought to be attributed to Lenin, since the first one seems to be Lenin’s paraphrasing (in What Is To Be Done?) of this letter written by Marx

 

Some breaking news

Too early to tell the cause. Of course they’re already blaming Russia lol

I’m not sure what motive Russia would have to target this particular cable. Any ideas or is it scapegoat time?

 

Scene from Fiddler on the Roof in which a Bolshevik revolutionary from Kiev proposes to a peasant girl from a small village.

Cracked me up because it’s so easy to overanalyze like this if you have studied Marx. He’s trying to understand the historical significance of his relationship with the girl, while she justifiably just cares that they love each other

 

Ryan Borgwardt

Either I’m gullible or I stumbled upon a 5 hour old TikTok with some guy who seems to be him. Or it’s an elaborate bit

Video: Girl offering free advice on side of road. Cyclist stops and makes weird conversation asking if he should go to Uzbekistan to meet a girl. Except he’s also married so … it ends up here in !gossip@hexbear.net

https://www.tiktok.com/@authenticalpha/video/7436641295742913834

 

We all know the saying: scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds...

I expected to see a bunch of random strangers on social media complaining about the election and suddenly pretending to care about human dignity.

But it hurts to see family, friends, and trusted content creators going down pipelines not dissimilar to Red MAGA pipelines. For as much as they hate Trump supporters, liberals are becoming just like them.

There is one creator on TikTok named Seema R (@artlust) who I occasionally watched. I guess she has a career and education as an art museum curator. Occasionally she dips into political topics, and I never had any major issue with her thoughts on those.

I was going to share a specific video of hers from today, but it has been deleted in the past hour or two. She was practically foaming at the mouth about nonvoters, calling them anti-semites and mocking them for complaining about "gEnOcIdE" as if that is some childish complaint.

(Edit: Here's a video with a similar vibe as the deleted one: https://www.tiktok.com/@artlust/video/7435258288767290654)

The shock of this video gave me a huge sense of dread. I think the election of Trump finally set in, but more than that, I finally let go of some silly hope I had that Trump's re-election would wake up liberals and realize the commies were right. But from all appearances, the exact opposite is happening. Liberals are so fuckin mad about Trump that they're taking it out on the commies. It's going to be a nightmare for the next four years and I fear that America is far more defenseless to rabid fascism than I thought.

 

I haven’t watched this yet, but I figure it’s notable for the sheer fact that it brought together Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff

Also why are there zero Hudson emojis but three for Wolff?

Richard-D-Wolff

 

I know someone who is reading it, and I’m trying to gauge how reliable it is. From my initial research, it seems to be a decent overview of socialist thought. But I am unsure about the author’s motivations. He was intensely critical of the Soviet Union but seems to have more or less supported socialism in theory.

 

Incoming: Heavy use of scare-quotes to emphasize I don’t agree with certain framings which nonetheless get my point across.

It’s hard not to be suspicious of any new housing built in an American city. A new apartment building intended for low-income tenants was opened in the “poor side” of town in an area I used to live.

For op sec, I won’t share which city, but consider a typical American town with rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods, and guess where most of the crime and policing is.

Is this a progressive move?

On the one hand, lowering housing costs is always a good thing, especially when it helps people who have less.

On the other hand, it could be a cynical ploy to continue quarantining “the poors” somewhere far away from the “nice” neighborhoods.

My gut feeling is that some sort of mixed-income housing would be the best progressive stepping stone because, gradually, middle class (ie white) people would have an increasing stake in this neglected part of town. But then again, that could also become a form of gentrification which ends up displacing the poorer tenants, so this solution would have to include some sort of rent control to work.

 

Inject those freedoms directly into my veins

 
 

Idk much about this, but thought it was cool.

Side note, it’s kinda sus that Siri claims him as an American academic when clearly he’s a Chinese man who has studied in America 🤔 and has taught at Peking University since 1997.

 

Has anyone here quit caffeine after consuming it regularly for years? What was your experience, and was it worth it?

I’m considering doing this because I feel it is affecting my mood, energy, anxiety, and overall stability.

Not needing validation or anything, just curious to chat about it if anyone else has been through decaffeination

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