SEGA GOON

4y

Inflation benefits those with debts (i.e. the wealthy who live on credit) and harms those who rely on wage labor

The ability to get such debts and credit for the purpose of expanding your wealth hinges on how much surplus value you can extract drom the workers

krishna bound

4y

business credit is so absolutely insane i cannot even begin to explain it to someone who's not experienced in the field

the sheer extent of how credit works will always be unknown to the average citizen

SEGA GOON

4y

I had to draw up these contracts for a job

They were business credits from about 10 million to a couple hundred million dollars

It was such a boring job ngl these highly paid lawyers just fill out boilerplate forms It's quite tedious

And the collateral is always crazy big

And then the interest rates

It's all a racket...

krishna bound

4y

the thing is about credit as well is that it has a knock on effect. so if you run a business that maybe makes $1M a year, it's very easy to get credit for another $1M. but then you can scale the owners' paychecks at an applicable rate, which then multiplies your own credit. so you could easily do the following:

business makes $1M - owner makes $100k a year
business takes on $1M in debt
owner raises paycheck to $175k a year
owner now has access to relative credit increase
owner takes out a $500k 30 year mortgage (realistically could be a lot higher but just as an example)

owner has now essentially increased their net worth multiplicatively while fundamentally not changing anything about their income or scale of business; the thing is that they could theoretically even sell the house early if they wanted before the mortgage is up too, meaning they could make profits in the hundreds of thousands without ever even really having any of that money

SEGA GOON

4y

Phrases like "It takes money to make money" should be considered Marxist redpills rather than #grindset mottos

krishna bound

4y

it's one of those situations which is hard because you're basically forced to play by the rules if you want to have a decent life. not saying on the scale of millions, but in terms of using credit and money management and what not.

Scratchin Mamba

4y

On this:

also could the overt turn since the 70s of every marxist movement into even recognizing some need for a struggle to study the superstructure be related? in that whether conscious or not, the lack of the capability to navigate a clear path to revolution resulted in all this effort being spent scrutinizing mostly philosophical minutiae.

SEGA GOON

4y

I'm not the big philosophy guy here tbh, I'm more the politics and economics guy

There is the famous Lenin quote: "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."

The role of any communist should be to prepare for whenever these "weeks" happen. They are a handful of moments in the history of any part of the world where there is an opportunity for revolution. However, we are very limited in individually causing these moments to happen. We are subject to the wheels of history like everyone else (so are the capitalists).

“The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.” - Huey P. Netwon

This quote shows me that many revolutionaries were fully aware that they would not reep the fruits of their actions during their lifetime, but that they were merely planting seeds for the future. A Marxist has to become comfortable with the scale of history and understand that for example the transition from feudalism to capitalism took centuries and a few failed attempts. The peasant revolts of the late Medieval Ages for example all failed. There is no reason to believe that it would be any different for socialism, although maybe the wheels of history spin faster this time because of information dissemination speed increasing.

Furtheremore, the achievements of the previous generations live through us, as do their struggles. That is why reading their works and studying their history is so important, because they already suffered many similar things and we can learn from them. You could read parts of Marx or Lenin and think it was written in 2022. Many problems didn't fundamentally change. The way we culturally package things change, and we must understand the shifts of society and even inside capitalism (capitalism has different phases and developments too), but the core mechanisms didn't really change since the days of Marx.

Marx is valuable because he was at the right place at the right time. Germany was still semi-feudal, so he was able to see how primitive capitalism was slowly seeping into Germany. Engels was a factory manager (later owner) in England and saw the first organized working class movement, the Charterists. He too was at the right place at the right time. They were able to view how ideologies changed, how economic modes of productions changed. They saw how liberal revolutions failed (1848/1849 revolutions), and how the Enlightenment values were forgotten in the pursuit of profit and private property. In our time, these systems are very settled in. The last shift that occurred was the shift towards neoliberalism occurring between the late 70s and the early 90s - this wasn't as major of a shift as Marx and Engels witnessed. We are just approaching the "end of the end of history" recently.

I also believe as a matter of strategy that every part of the world - imperial core, semi-periphery and periphery - must use different aims.

Capitalism cannot be reformed into socialism. Socialism can only be born out of a revolution, in which the proletariat forcefully imposes its will onto the bourgeoisie. However, revolutions can take different forms. A revolution can be a rapidly unfolding event, but a revolution can also be a gradual event. A rapid revolution is vastly preferable over a gradual revolution. In the periphery, revolutions will be rapid. In the semi-periphery, revolutions will either be rapid or gradual. In the imperial core, revolutions are highly unlikely as of now. Hence we must adapt our strategies here. Revolutions in the imperial core will only become likely if a good part of the periphery and semi-periphery are already socialist.

A gradual revolution can win if:
1. Land is nationalized; or: 100% taxation of land
2. Finance is nationalized
3. Military, intelligence and police are controlled
4. Money-to-labor voucher transition occurs
5. The judiciary and other political structures are slowly taken over.
If market socialism is necessary, it should only be a transitional method.

These points are very hard to achieve as of now - and this isn't even a full-fledged revolution. Perhaps the pink wave countries of Latin America could have achieved these if there were a big communist sponsor - however, without one, they are not able to cross the Rubicon, especially in taking over the military. But if we look at China versus Venezuela, the reason China works and Venezuela doesn't is that in China, land is nationalized, finance is nationalized and military is controlled by the party. At least in theory, China has the tools to progress to a socialist mode of production rather easily.

If China should not decide to take the role of the socialist hegemon aiding other movements (very likely), then the only other chance I see is smaller countries turning socialist in a regional revolution spreading to several countries and them sticking together very closely in political and economic affairs.

A gradual revolution takes years of fighting and backlash (imagine how hard even it was for Venezuela to do its mild anti-imperialist) social democracy), and even a rapidly unfolding revolution takes years, if not decades of preparation. 1917 couldn't have happened without 1905.
A revolution can occur in random moments, but it can only be steered into the direction of socialism if a proper movement is already in place. It is too late to start organizing once revolutionary fervor already spreads, let alone post-revolution.

Us in the imperialist core must follow a minimum-maximum goal, as Marx, Engels, pre-WW1-SPD and pre-1917-Bolsheviks demanded. The minimum goals are in reforms, short-term gains. Reforms are useful for the movement. With reforms, the communists can win the trust of the people, increase class consciousness and spread their name.

Rejecting reforms in order to promote accelerationist goals is counter-productive. Reforms alone do not decrease revolutionary pressure. The idea that we shouldn't bother with reforms at all is what Marx called revolutionary phrasemongering and the famous phrase "if that is what Marxism is, then I am not a Marxist". How will we gain the trust of people if we just speak of a distant hypothetical future event than of the now?

However, minimum goals of reform must always be combined with maximum goals of revolution. Reforms without revolutionary struggle is counter-productive, revolutionary struggle without engaging in reforms is counter-productive. Reform and revolution are not dichotomies, as is often portrayed. They must co-exist with each other; they are two sides of the same class struggle. The vanguard must combine both methods. This is the real crux of the thing: It is rare to see communists do both these days, you either have reformist types or purely revolutionary types, neither of which are effective in the imperial core.

Now, even if we are "effective", this doesn't mean we will switch to socialism. I think our short-term goals should be reforming and organizing within the workers movement while raising class consciousness, the mid-term goal should be to aid the semi-periphery and periphery of the world by keeping pressure on our bourgeoisie to keep peace and oppose imperialism, and the long-term goal should of course be a systemic change of our mode of production.

These timelines will mostly likely be accelerated through climate change. But even climate change won't make let's say France the new epicenter of socialism, it will still start in the semi-periphery and periphery of the world.

The Western socialist movement is probably at a point of 1870s, 1880s again if we were to recall the ghosts of the past as a comparison. It's gonna need a mass movement (1890s, 1900s) and massive shifts in world history (1910s) to make any long-term progress.

To round off, some Marx and Engels quotes:

"Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence."

"But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them."

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."

deadacc

4y

i felt this could be filed under obscure leftist take which i feel is ur third niche

def glad you wrote all this up a lot of good s*** to think about

SEGA GOON

4y

What's the obscure part about it if I may ask

space0cadet

4y

Mikhail Gorbachev has diabetes and kidney problems, he is in dialysis, said the economist Ruslan Grinberg, who visited the poltiican in the hospital. He is 92 years old.

space0cadet

4y

Mikhail Gorbachev has diabetes and kidney problems, he is in dialysis, said the economist Ruslan Grinberg, who visited the poltiican in the hospital. He is 92 years old.

space0cadet

4y

More agusto pinochet lore:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonia_Dignidad

krishna bound

4y

my favorite pinochet lore

SEGA GOON

4y

What's the obscure part about it if I may ask

space0cadet

4y

More agusto pinochet lore:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonia_Dignidad