devils_dust

I am still reading and waiting for comments, and I intend to write some thoughts down after some reflection, but Capital volume 2 is hard, comrade.

I think I had a much more exploitative relationship working in one of the big Brazilian public sector tech companies than I am doing right now in a private company.

Fellow Brazilian IT worker here. Always felt the same regarding cultural differences between Brazilian countries and US companies, even though the sizes of companies I worked for were different (mostly bigcos in the home country, startups when I started working remotely).

When I was less politically literate I listened more to arguments about decentralization of power that are usually in that line between liberalism and anarchism. Lots of people here do the same.

The directors of the public state-owned companies are actually indicated from outside (politicians, top level bureaucrats and executives from the private sector) based on a neoliberal agenda that seek to provide services to provide data and public information for private companies

Most of our fellow citizens already associate the state with "corruption" due to that agenda, unfortunately. There is a cultural barrier to be won here. Tech has always branded itself as "revolutionary" and utopianistic, we could and should use that for good.

Gotcha, seems like a similar trajectory to many comrades who were more liberal - when they figure out the end result of "free" market competition it's almost a straight line towards Marx

there was this weird phase in US anarchism, where a whole lot of anarcho-capitalists finally started becoming anti-capitalist (which is good of course) and they wrote a whole book about it like they just personally came up with the idea capitalism is bad for the first time ever

Can you give more details on these people and this book? I always found ancaps very ideologically incoherent, wondering how they got around to reinventing Marxism using their own theory

Capital volume 2 is such a change of tone and pace that almost made me give up. Volume 1 is very readable, especially after the hard first chapters. Volume 2 feels like it's back to that style, but for the entire book.

Also using Emacs. If you are a dev magit is another must have. Even if there was a decent substitute for it (which I doubt - saw a lot of IDE churn and Emacs was very capable of keeping up with the times) I'd still use it just to use it and Org-mode.

https://www.fellowtraveller.games/citizen-sleeper-2-starward-vector

Available on many platforms, including gog (even though I got it on steam personally). It's "pricey" since it is a new release, but I found it really worth it

Citizen sleeper 2 is pretty fun. Finished it on normal difficulty, got most of the "good" endings to the storylines, now wondering if it's worth trying a new run on hard mode.

Reading the piece about "the last hour" made me realize how long the economic copromancers have been justifying the absurd with fancy words. It all boils down to "the economy needs your sacrifice", but it was eye-opening to know that it goes as far back as Marx's time.

Is that where the "learn Cobol for the banking industry, you'll earn zillions" meme comes from? (in my experience the few Cobol people I met were only as well paid as the next bigcorp IT drone, and much less than the workers at fancystartup.io)

Not directly related to this week's chapters but a question that came up when discussing Das Kapital irl: did you change your intuition / understanding about certain Marxist terms after reading it?

What motivates this question is that I previously thought that commodity fetishism meant something like "people ascribe magic to their possessions", and I believed it was very closely related to some moral condemnations of consumerism. After reading the term in the book, with the context around it, now it feels more like "the commodity form and its commerce superficially looks liberating, but it constrains us all in strange ways".

(Or maybe I just misread it again, who knows?)

What were your experiences with it? Did you go through something similar?

Hey comrade! On this specific passage, the last quote from this review sums up what Lenin means here:

When a big enterprise assumes gigantic proportions, and, on the basis of an exact computation of mass data, organises according to plan the supply of primary raw materials to the extent of two-thirds, or three-fourths, of all that is necessary for tens of millions of people; when the raw materials are transported in a systematic and organised manner to the most suitable places of production, sometimes situated hundreds or thousands of miles from each other; when a single centre directs all the consecutive stages of processing the material right up to the manufacture of numerous varieties of finished articles; when these products are distributed according to a single plan among tens and hundreds of millions of consumers (the marketing of oil in America and Germany by the American oil trust)—then it becomes evident that we have socialisation of production, and not mere “interlocking”, that private economic and private property relations constitute a shell which no longer fits its contents, a shell which must inevitably decay if its removal is artificially delayed, a shell which may remain in a state of decay for a fairly long period (if, at the worst, the cure of the opportunist abscess is protracted), but which will inevitably be removed

That review has some extra literature if you are interested - mostly on the economic aspects of Lenin's thought and how most of it applies today.

Unfortunately I am not expert enough in Marxist thought to answer if this particular verbiage has some sort of cultural lineage that goes back to Hegel or some other thinker, but I think you could find some of that in The German Ideology, basically a critique of the philosophers of his time and their idealism. Since this is a heavy text, you may be better served by asking other comrades around here on this particular question.