The first question is should you bother.
I am very inclined to believe the answer is no. China has little bearing on the actions one can take to strengthen the working class in the US.
Why run interception for China when it takes time away from unioning, organizing, etc.
sovecon
joined 5 months ago
United $$nake$$ of Amerikkka
Guy who argues mumble rap is stupid because you can't even understand what they're saying while listening to Jack Stauber on spotify.
The sad fact for Marxists in the west is that the Anarchists are more organized and do more praxis these days.
I find it very annoying when my fellow comrades respond to the actions taken by Anarchists or non-Marxists by simply belittling them.
"occupy did nothing. chaz was doomed from the start. etc."
If we think we are supposed to be the vanguard, the most proactive guardians and forward pushers of the working class's power, we need to start doing shit. Because right now we're a laughing stock of sit-around bookreaders arguing theology.
Our main attack against all other forms of socialism are that they've never won and secured a worker state. Well right now the Marxists in the west haven't even started.
Marxists who do nothing but post will come up with some horrible names to call me which are just new fancier versions of "heretic" but as it stands, (on average) even the least read anarchist in Food Not Bombs has done more to advance worker power than the most well read "Marxist" in a typical org.
The clearest example I can think of:
It was ~~New York City~~ Anarchists working as part of the Direct Action Network who secured the massive abolition of Third World debt owed to the IMF. And it is not exaggeration to say they also almost suceeded in abolishing the IMF entirely. Despite the most vocal opposition to the IMF coming from us Marxists, it seems right now we are all talk. We must improve.
EDIT: I misremembered: DAN was most active in NYC but the anti-IMF successes were across the US not just NYC.
OP, your question is touching on a great discussion between how much of our social order is arbitrary and how much is determined by material conditions (for example: having visited Cuba, a thoroughly socialist state, I witnessed racism to about the same level as would exist in progressive communities in the US despite no capitalist relations to produce it.). The dialectic between the base and the superstructure, as a Marxist might put it.
I didn't want to muddy up my comment with a long quote, but I think this one has some nice insights.
But if reading isn't one's forte then the tl;dr is from Marx: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please"
These are from a book called "The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"
From a left perspective, then, the hidden reality of human life is the fact that the world doesn’t just happen. It isn’t a natural fact, even though we tend to treat it as if it is—it exists because we all collectively produce it. We imagine things we’d like and then we bring them into being. But the moment you think about it in these terms, it’s obvious that something has gone terribly wrong. Since who, if they could simply imagine any world that they liked and then bring it into being, would create a world like this one?
Perhaps the leftist sensibility was expressed in its purest form in the words of Marxist philosopher John Holloway, who once wanted to title a book, “Stop Making Capitalism.” . . . This is the ultimate revolutionary question: what are the conditions that would have to exist to enable us to do this—to just wake up and imagine and produce something else?
To this emphasis on forces of creativity and production, the Right tends to reply that revolutionaries systematically neglect the social and historical importance of the “means of destruction”: states, armies, executioners, barbarian invasions, criminals, unruly mobs, and so on. Pretending such things are not there, or can simply be wished away, they argue, has the result of ensuring that left-wing regimes will in fact create far more death and destruction than those that have the wisdom to take a more “realistic” approach.
Elements of the Right dabbled with the artistic ideal, and twentieth-century Marxist regimes often embraced essentially right-wing theories of power . . . in their obsession with jailing poets and playwrights whose work they considered threatening, they evinced a profound faith in the power of art and creativity to change the world—those running capitalist regimes rarely bothered, convinced that if they kept a firm hand on the means of productions (and, of course, the army and police), the rest would take care of itself.
The question every leftist has been trying to answer for the past 200 years is this:
"What are the conditions that would let us we wake up tomorrow and not do capitalism?"
All political theory on praxis has been trying to answer this question.
If everyone were class concious, the answer would be simple: just don't.
ai art is art because people are mad about it.
jokes aside, i think that machine art is going to basically just replace clip art and the like. it's like what happened to pottery. there are still artisinal potters (i love handmade pottery and the craft itself) but for everyday dinner plates you don't seek the connection and craftsmanship. you just need a plate.
some art has use-value as decoration (easily replaced with machines) and other art is about personal, emotional, or political communication (even if it could be replaced, it wouldn't be.)
it's literally a broken chain.
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People want to have it both ways.
Literally a broken chain.
You could make a movie called 'The Folly of the Phallus' where a man shoots himself in the foot everytime he feels emotions and people would idolize the main characters and complain that the message wasn't clear enough.
The reason for the VAT (in the USSR it was called a Turnover Tax. They're the same thing but a VAT does not tax means of production) was how incredibly simple it was to administer. Tax fraud could be kept relatively low for any given level of administration if a VAT was used instead of an income tax, for example. Many modern governments do this today for the same reason.
The USSR was constantly in a struggle to build an effective administration (a good book on this is Origins of the Great Purges ) while fighting what we today would call Bullshit Jobs and local strongmen.
Post-Deng China basically took a hands off approach to local strongmen and corruption skyrocketed but economic growth was heightened. The USSR was trying to mitigate markets (most of which were black markets) to prevent shortages and mismanagement in its planned economy. So the Deng approach was not something it could do. The USSR was much more developed at the time and the intricate web of an economy was more complicated than in China.
Just a reminder that the USSR had a VAT as its main tax revenue for almost its entire existence.
Hi comrades. My username is soviet entropy and the entropy part is not doomerism or a momento mori. Entropy is imo a vital part of modern materialist analysis. This post is an introduction to the concept and how it relates to political economy.
1. Information is Physical
"Information" is often considered to be immaterial. Many definitions of it are and many definitions of it are also bad an incoherent. As marxists and materialists, what is information?
Let's take a sequence. It could be a sequence of atoms or molecules or DNA base pairs. I'm going to have it be numbers for this demonstration. Here is the sequence: [0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1]
How much information does this sequence contain? Well let's compare it to another sequece: [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]
Now image want to perfectly re-create these sequences somewhere else. We need to store them first. If we wanted to store these sequences by compressing them, it would be easier to store the second one than the first one. We can compress the first by saying "repeat 0 four times, then 1 four times". To compress the second, we only need to say "repeat 0 eight times". The less you can compress a sequence, the more information it has. This is sometimes called Shannon Information Theory.
Imagine we have a completely random sequence. Well if there is no pattern to it, then the smallest way we can store it is simply writing the entire thing down. There are no patterns or anything. Sure it's not information that is useful to humans, but it's information.
But what does this have to do with Entropy or Materialism?
2. Entropy
Entropy is a simple concept that physicists have made difficult to understand. I think this is because they are often idealist or dualist and not materialist.
Imagine we have a six sided die that is perfectly fair. The numbers 1 thru 6 have a perfectly equal chance of coming up. We're gonna roll it a bunch of times.
Now, how surprised would we be if a 2 comes up? Not very surprised. If we roll it again and a 3 comes up, again we are not surprised. If we roll it 4 more times and only get 2 and 3, then we are going to be more surprised. We can say that our surprise is inversely related to the probability of something happening. And indeed this is a concept in statistics called "surprise". If something has a 1/10 chance of happening,we would be less surprised of it happening than something with a 1/100 chance. We define surprise as the logarithm of the inverted probability. So for the 1/10 and 1/100 things, they have a surprise of log(10) and log(100). We only do this log thing to make something with a chance of 100% have 0 surprise. Otherwise it would have a surprise of 1.
Now image we knew the chances of events happening. Say we know that a die is fair or we observed a process for a long time and now the typical things it does. We could have an expectation for our surprise. The surprise of each event that could happen weighted by how likely it is to happen. All of this added up is our total expected surprise. This is what Entropy is.
Let's go back to the sequences. Remember, these could be numbers or atoms of a metallic crystal or DNA base pairs. Let's say we have the sequence: [0,1,0,0,1,1,1,1]
The probability of getting a 0 is 3/8 (we count the number of 0's).
So the surprise is log(8/3).
The probability of getting a 1 is 5/8 so the surprise is log(5/8).
The Entropy of this sequence is therefore: 3/8 * log(8/3) + 5/8 * log(8/5) = 0.66
If we do it for this sequnce: [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]
We get 8/8 * log(8/8) = 0
Take a minute here if you want. Something might be about to click! Sequences with low information, like 0 repeated eight times, also have low Entropy! That's because Entropy is Information. They are the same thing. The amount of entropy in a sequence is how much information it contains and also how difficult it would be to compress it.
3. Increasing Entropy and Production
So why does Entropy increase?
This is not from some hand of God or a mystical force. Here's why it happens.
Imagine a sequence of random numbers that you get from rolling a six sided die. Maybe we get [1,4,3,1,1,1,1,1].
Now, of all the possible sequences we can have for numbers rolled from a die, how many of them have that many 1's? Not that many. If something causes some of those numbers to be re-rolled, there are way more outcomes where there are fewer 1s. In fact, the most likely outcome would be one where the sequence gets more random. There are way more sequences of 8 numbers from a die where there are a relatively equal amount of each number. And these sequences also have higher Entropy. So with random change over time, Entropy tends to increase.
But how to we remove Entropy? Well that takes energy. And it's what production is.
Let's say we have a sequence of aluminum atoms in a big sheet of aluminum. This is a very, very low entropy/low information material. To make it useful, we in fact want to put out own information into it. We use a big press to stamp a pattern into the alluminum and turn it into a car body. But in order to do this, we first needed to remove all the entropy that acrued over time from the random movements of matter and energy in the earth's crust. Aluminum ore has tons of entropy because of all the other atoms bonded to the aluminum and the other rocks and things in it. There are way more ways for 1kg of aluminum atoms to be in a hunk or ore than in a sheet of metal. So we first take out information and then put our own information in. We use energy to decrease the entropy and then increase it again toward what we want.
The same goes for printing a book, or for making a chair, or printing semiconductor chips, or building a cargo ship.
Finale
I hope you all found this interesting. Materialism is not just a belief that the universe is governed by rules or anything like that. Materialism means that the physical world of particles and energy are the only things that are real. Information is often thought of to be a human construct but it is not. It is a real, physical, material thing.
The relevance to modern political economy and marxist analysis can be gone over in more detail in anyone wants. One of the most important results is that in a situation where production and distribution are mediated by money and markets between equals, the maximum entropy situation is the same as the distribution of energy in a chamber of gas molecules. Meaning that over time there will be a large mass of very poor people and a small mass of ever wealthier and ever smaller people.
i'm sure you've all been hearing about the recent moves in the stock market. almost every stock in the US is overvalued almost all the time and stock prices basically never reflect material reality.
the basics of what happened are this:
- Japan had really now interest rates. So you could borrow money in Yen at like 0.5%
- To fight inflation, the US raised interest rates very high very fast. So the US would pay you maybe 5% if you bought treasury bills
- Investment banks would borrow Yen at 0.5%, convert it to US Dollars, then buy treasury bills which paid 5%. When the treasury bills matured, they would then convert the money back to Yen and pay off the interest and be left with 4.5% returns.
- Japan recently raised interest rates and this made the exchange rate between Yen and US Dollars change. Now the last step of converting back from US Dollars to Yen might not give you enough money to pay back the loan.
- Investment banks start selling other assets to try and get cash to pay their loans. Tons of stocks are put up for sale so their prices get lower and lower.
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Hi comrades. I was in a discussion last week about socialism (like I usually am) and I think we can do some self crit.
I think it's important to remember that multiple modes of production can (and almost always do) exist in a single soceity at once. There is a dialectic between the systems along with within them.
So when we discuss the social democracies, the soviet states, and modern communist projects like China, we should keep that in mind. There are capitalist, socialist, and communist sectors in many countries now. One of them will dominate, however (Marx says this in the first sentence of Capital).
When looking at the USSR, is had basically no capitalist sector, a very large socialist sector, and a big communist sector. But communist sectors are not unique to the USSR or a DotP. Denmark and the UK both had small communist sectors in things like their healthcare. The period before Thatcher actually saw a UK mix quite similar to post-Deng China--a large capitalist sector, a big socialist sector, and a sizable communit one. (This is likely why the economic performance and worker gains were so high during this time comared to other waning empires like France).
Modern China is very similar. And we should not be ultra leftists and ignore that these are all states in transition. We as communists, and Marxist Leninists do not deny that socialist sectors and communist sectors can appear in other societies. We simply state that unless there is a DotP established, the capitalist sector will erode them away.
Note: The definition of sectors here is whether production is governed by exchange value or use value. Capitalist ones have commodity production i.e. their productive forces are guided by exchange value. Communist sectors are governed by use value (to each according to their need and from each according to their ability). This means Communist sectos don't have commodities. Socialist sectors are ones where commodity production does exist but exchange value takes a secondary role in governing production.
UPDATE: Two comrades said they did not agree with how I defined socialist here. I don't think the definition of what true socialism is effects this argument. Feel free to replace "socialism" with whatever word you would describe for a sector where production is not entirely governed by exchange value but still is to some degree.
I hope you all gain something from this. Everyone in our discussion did. I look forward to any other perspectives. I'm originally a USonian so I know I may be narrow sighted.
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There are many ways of modelling the same thing. Imagine you have a limited amount of money to fence in your yard.
An economist would say “you have a budget”. A cyberneticist or a linear programmer would say “you have a potentially binding constraint on your objective function”. A marxist might say “there is a contradiction between the size of your enclosure and the amount of fence you can buy”. A normal person would say “well there’s a tradeoff. I can fence in my whole yard or I can spend my money to go drinking on the weekends.”
All of these basically say the same thing. Marxists like to use dialectics which is a philosophical idea originally from idealist philosophers. When brought into the realm of materialist philosophy it gets called dialectical materialism.
Materialist philosophy is the idea that ultimately everything is matter and energy. Nowadays this gets called Physicalism sometimes. Idealist philosophy says that there are things which do exist but which are not material or energy. Ideas, gods, angels, conciousness, etc. Most people have a combination of these two ideas and so would accurately be called “Dualist” but internet leftists tend to use the term “Idealist”.
The simplest way to understand a “dialectic” is, I think, the following: At the start of the industrial revolution in England there were the old lords and a new wealthy business class. There was a conflict between them over the limited resources. There are only so many people to control, luxury goods to purchase, government positions to hold, etc. And these people have different interests. So a Marxist would say, when speaking in terms of dialectics, that “there is a contradiction between the aristocracy (landowners) and the bourgeoisie (business owners, capitalists)”.
Now obviously the relative strength of either side in this conflict can change. Maybe the business class start organizing and take more seats in parliament, maybe the lords begin raising their own knights and armies again, etc. A marxist would say that this change is actually not unusual but a key part of the system. They say that modelling things using dialectics and materialist philosophy means we can understand how things change and not be so surprised when they do. And when something does change they might say “the dialectic is in motion” or “the contradictions are sharpening”.
Ultimately the entire thing is fancy language from the 1800s that should probably be replaced because it’s alienating and bad for propaganda. “Conflict”, “tradeoff”, and “change” are much more sensible in 21st century English than “contradiction”, “dialectic”, and “motion”.