An Imaginary Conversation....

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chlamor
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An Imaginary Conversation....

Post by chlamor » Fri Oct 27, 2017 1:39 am

An Imaginary Conversation....

A modern fellow of genus Homo protests his innocence. "I don't work because I worked much harder before", says he. "I labored for ten years at a crap job earning $30,000 per year and that earned me the right to live in miserable conditions in which the loss of my job would have made me destitute in weeks. But, I was not content to labor as my fellows. I got a second job at $20,000 per year and I was so thrifty that I spent not a penny of it but banked it all so that at the end of my time I had $300,000, a princely sum. I invested it wisely at 10% and now I can live for the rest of my life, if modestly, off the proceeds of only my own sweat, my own thriftiness, and my own discipline. And, if there was any luck to it - in my not facing misfortune or ill health or any other calamity - that was the product of my own luck too. I owe nothing to anyone. What I have is due to myself alone, and those who have much more than I, it seems to me that they must have arrived at it the same as I, perhaps over generations. What is this social power you speak of when it is only individual labor and individual property that stems from it? It seems to me that you merely envy that which you are too lazy to earn for yourself."

"My dear independent fellow" says we, "let us understand the simple arithmetic of your claims. If your story is as you say and we ignore all else that you report, still at the end of ten years, we see only $200,000. And, if you continue to live at this admittedly low level, nevertheless, you will have run through your entire accumulated proceeds in only 6 years and eight months. More than this, by your accounting, it would take one and a third lifetimes to create a single lifetime without labor, and this at the exceedingly low standards and exceptionally favorable circumstances that you assume. How then are we to explain those who live without labor for generations, and this at a thousand or ten thousand times times the level that you report? How many generations of 'thrift' and 'hard work' would this require? What you claim is impossible for you and beyond impossibility for those who live above you. Where is this magic of 'individual labor and individual property' that you speak of?"

"But you forget interest", protests our friend. "My money makes money, and simply by the act of having some which is not consumed in day to day living, that which I save is augmented. It is this which grants me my independence."

"We forget as much as your money 'makes'," answers we, "which is nothing at all. Set your money on the table and leave it there for as long as you like. Nothing happens to it. It remains the same. It is only by setting it in motion as capital that anything whatever is 'made' and that 'making' is the product of labor, the same as your own. Your interest comes from the command of the labor of others, just as your own was once commanded and after 6 years and eight months not a speck of 'hard work', 'thrift', 'good luck' or 'wisdom' is left. Neither is there any trace of 'independence' or 'personal property' You now live by the labor of others... by the transformation of your pitiful 'savings' into Capital, no matter how small the sum. It is your ability to command the labor of others as a social power that gives you your ability and that you have a poor man's caricature of that process changes nothing other than to lay fraudulent your claims to the right. You might as well claim innate superiority or the right of the sword as did the slave master or the god-given hierarchy of obligations of the lord or even the phases of the moon, if you like. You eat without working because you have maneuvered yourself into a position in which others work to feed you. You are the opposite of what you claim."

"You're just trying to make me feel bad.", says our friend.

"We don't give a shit how you feel", says we. "It is modest enough what you do... just as you claim. It is your willingness to ignore what is closer to your face than your nose that we tire of. "

Our friend orders another beer and pretends to watch the hockey game though he would be hard pressed to name two players on either team.


- anaxarchos

Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.

There it is...

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blindpig
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Re: An Imaginary Conversation....

Post by blindpig » Fri Oct 27, 2017 11:48 am

Thanks for putting that up Chlams, I'd been thinking about it for a while but couldn't figure out where it was.

Think I oughta pin this sucker?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Dhalgren
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Re: An Imaginary Conversation....

Post by Dhalgren » Fri Oct 27, 2017 12:27 pm

I vote pin it.
" If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism." Lenin, 1916

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blindpig
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Re: An Imaginary Conversation....

Post by blindpig » Fri Oct 27, 2017 1:12 pm

Dhalgren wrote:
Fri Oct 27, 2017 12:27 pm
I vote pin it.
Heh, just realized that I don't have that capability here or at least don't know how to use it. Hey, Kid!
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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kidoftheblackhole
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Re: An Imaginary Conversation....

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Thu Nov 02, 2017 3:15 am

Done.

While I'm here let me serenade you with another type of imaginary conversation. (Imagine) You are attending a lecture by the wsws on the Russian Revolution at the flagship university in your state. You know wsws are insane but charitably think that maybe this is something they can't fuck up.

You would be wrong.

A sampling of the Q&A

Q: How did the Russian Revolution help Africa?

A: Long rambling response about Trotsky and the evils of Stalinism Condensed: it didn't but Stalin really fucked Africa over.

Q: Why was there barbarism in the Russian Revolution?

A: Long rambling response about Trotsky and the evils of Stalinism . Condensed: there was barbarism because it wasn't really socialism.

Q: Why did Trtosky kill the Krondstadt sailors?
A: Long rambling response about Trotsky and the evils of Stalinism. Condensed: the man justifies the means.

Q: What is the #1 takeaway from the Russian Revolution?
A: Long rambling answer about Trotsky. Condensed: it was a revolution..
Q: Are you sure the takeaway isn't that the workers seized power and held it for 70 years while beating fascism and being responsible for virtually every progressive development in the world?
A: That's a lie!

I've developed an algorithm that perfectly simulates this process.

1. Field question
2. Flip coin
HEADS -- provide lengthy biographical information of Trotsky
TAILS -- kiss Trotsky's ass

Worse, TrotskyISM seems to have frozen in time with the death of its namesake and is therefore unaware of such major developments in the last 75 years as DESTALINIZATION.

chlamor
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Re: An Imaginary Conversation....

Post by chlamor » Fri Dec 15, 2017 6:49 pm

They spend their lives standing on their heads, kiddo. For them, every cause is effect and every effect, cause.

Check out a dozen economic histories of the Great Depression and three quarters of them will report on how the Depression was "caused" by the Stock Market Crash or Hoover policies or real estate speculation in Florida in 1928. The super-heated speculation immediately preceding every single major crisis is not connected with the oceans of cash which always flood their system. Instead, it is all attributed to some individual human foible... just as today.

To paraphrase Malcom, they put a fox into the chicken coop and are surprised when it starts to kill chickens. "I always fed that fox. That was my pet fox. I told that fox to be friends with them chickens." It is so stupid. You can shoot that fox. You can throw that fox out. But, the one thing you cannot do is to expect that fox to stop being a fox.

You can see that shocked look on the faces of various Captains of Finance when they are being lectured by some corrupt congressperson about "greed". Inside, they are thinking, "say what?" Everything about the society is organized around greed, self-aggrandizement, and obsessive individual interest. It is the sole arbiter of a life lived "well". You take that environment and you mix in a tsunami of cash - private equity funds, hedge funds, index funds, derivatives, the ability to trade at any time on the Cairo Stock Exchange, free credit... "and then you say what to me?"

The question they all really want to ask is, "How come we got away with this shit for two or three decades?"

How come?

Because the fucking fox wasn't hungry, that's how come.


- anaxarchos

chlamor
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Re: An Imaginary Conversation....

Post by chlamor » Fri Dec 15, 2017 6:52 pm

I accept that you agonize over this material in a serious and sincere way. I also accept that Mr. Pig and The Ghost use this and similar material to "stoke the flames". This last is more a testimony to the skill of chlamor and blindpig, however. They could open a can of tomatoes with an el dente noodle. None of it counts in favor of this material which over the last few weeks constitutes a real and common "theme". That theme not only embraces Street's piece (which is probably the best of the lot) but also includes the astonishingly honest Hedges article, the CPUSA "analysis", and several others.

Without prejudice (really), let me disagree with you on all points:

1) "Demonizing" Liberals is precisely the task of the present moment

I grant you the danger in confusing the ideology with the person. In the chaos of American politics, many people have embraced Liberalism without sharing its root interests. For others, those interests have changed. Nevertheless, the line of distinction is not that fine. Without minimizing the potential contradiction, the following is still true.

a) There has never been a period in American history with greater "Left" unity than the one we are now coming out of. During this period, the dominant political ideology has been Liberalism, the dominant political activity has been electoral (almost exclusively within the Democratic Party), the sole political program has been focused on incremental "change" (through gradual "improvements"), and the overwhelming political perspective has been idealist (typically attributing social forces to "good" and "bad" individuals, groups or policies). Everything else has been marginalized, undermined, abandoned, or dismissed.

b) Despite this near total monopoly on the "Left", Liberalism has completely, absolutely, utterly failed. In the forty years in which it has dominated the "Left", the Liberal program has produced the exact opposite of every benefit which it claimed for the immense mass of working people.

Perhaps we need to review this. We could and should talk about how a movement born of ending one war has resulted in acceptance of perpetual war. We could and should talk about how a movement for civic equality has produced superficial "equality of opportunity" - and furthered the careers of some individuals - without ever changing by one percentage point the actual social inequality that was supposed to be its very basis. We could and should talk about how a movement for substantial but incremental improvement in democracy, safety, social security, occupational dignity, social mobility, environmental decency and equality of justice has produced, in every case, the exact opposite of what it claimed to favor.

We also could and should talk about how a movement which claimed the mass of working people as its base, actually presided over the destruction of industrial labor, the shock troops of working people, presided over the destruction of unions, of black political clubs, and of ethnic political organizations of all types... before presiding over the destruction of the Northern cities themselves.

All of the above is worth talking about, but none of it is really necessary in this context. Instead, we have the testimony of our "writers". At the end of an unprecedented political monopoly of 40 years, they admit to impotence on a Shakespearean scale - a defeat so complete that they pine for the return of their historical opponents to "scare" their current adversaries.

The demonization of such an "ideology", and a complete break with it, is precisely what is needed.

The truth about Liberalism is the exact opposite of what is presented: There is no imaginable path toward socialism in the United States today, in which a considerable portion of those who currently constitute the “liberal-left” play ANY role whatsoever. To the extent that any individuals play such a role, it will only be through their complete abandonment of Left-Liberalism.


2) Better materialist first, before 'Marxist'."

Our impotent Liberals would adopt the language of revolutionary Marxism in the same way that Roman soldiers would adopt the local gods of the regions in which their legions were posted... i.e. they will simply add the Marxist language to the Liberal doctrines they have always peddled.

The language is more strident, yes... the problem is no longer monopoly capitalism, unchecked capitalism, unregulated capitalism or even barbaric capitalism. Now, it is exterminist capitalism. My, my... that is bad.

Does it take a historical materialist to understand that *adjective*-capitalism always exists in contrast to some other kind of capitalism - a more negotiable, more compassionate, more democratic, more acceptable capitalism?

And now, it is an "absurd" system.... the ruling social system of our age simply does not meet the exacting logical standards of our theoreticians. It must be downright embarrassing.

This type of insufferable Liberal twaddle runs throughout this "call to arms". There is literally no sentence that does not stink of it. Ironically, the segments you choose to quote are unusually stinky:

“socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky”. The barbarism has already begun and the fight is now both against that and for mere survival. The corporate state is leading us on a death march at an ever-escalating pace. ... Only revolution can save the Earth."

"The ability of the Swedish Social Democrats to win their tremendous reforms arose through the struggles of a working-class movement that was always populated with “extremist” elements open to expropriating private capital altogether."

"... both sides work for increased social spending, environmental sanity, equitable taxation, increased regulation, reductions in militarism, open governance, full employment, civil liberties, and workers’ rights. It is all about reducing the power of capital and increasing the power of everyone else. This is the common ground that defines the broader left in the United States."

What anti-historical nonsense...

There is a reason that Mr. Marx lent his name to the revolutionary socialist movement. There is nothing in his words that even remotely approximates this kind of politics-mongering, let alone any prescriptions for "threatening" the ruling classes in order to get a better "deal". There is nothing whatever that is founded on being "for" socialism or adopting "anti-capitalism". That was the ground from which revolutionary Marxism began and not at all where it ended.

If these gentlemen want to change the world, they might well want to start by understanding it. This is just the same old Democratic Party politics writ large. Our left-Liberals are upset and their middle-class foundations are threatened... let the heavens rage in response.

But the worst is this: "we must not let this historic moment pass."

Who is "we", and whose historical moment is passing?

3) It takes more than a wolf suit to make a wolf.

These are no mere innocents. McChesney and Foster both became editors of the "Marxist" journal, Monthly Review in 2000. Foster remains that magazine's only editor. And these two prattle on about "demobilizing" the Left, about "broad agreement" on "improvements", about trading-in the class struggle in favor of "Swedish reforms" and the rest. That they can so easily talk in such philistine terms is itself stark testimony on how bankrupt liberalism, including "liberal-Marxism", has become. Still, Messieurs Hedges, McChesney and Foster can't have it both ways. Hedges invokes the Communists of the 1930s in the U.S. while McChesney and Foster not only invoke "extremists" in Sweden who were "open" to expropriation (and who were sold out by the Swedish Social Democrats), but the Soviets across the Baltic.

Which is it to be? Is the specter of communism an artifact of a bygone era... is it a marginal ideology without any chance of popular support in the present day? Or is it really the only thing that "frightens" the ruling classes? And if the latter is the case, why is that?

They want it both ways. Hedges wants the fear of communism to return but without any of the "anti-democratic" elements of real actual communism. McChesney and Foster want to threaten revolution but without criticizing the perspective that has led them to oppose virtually every real revolution in recent history, and without abandoning any of the "gods" which they have picked up in their tour of contemporary Liberalism. In a phrase, they want to control the return of the specter whose rebirth they want to threaten.

In reality, their sanction is not needed. Communism is back, and though the U.S. is not yet Greece, the same social conditions are common to both. "Let the ruling classes tremble..."

Listen to the actual Mr. Marx on this subject:

A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.
To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.

We may cite Proudhon’s Philosophie de la Misère as an example of this form.

The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.

Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.

Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism.

It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the working class.


-anaxarchos

chlamor
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Re: An Imaginary Conversation....

Post by chlamor » Fri Dec 15, 2017 6:54 pm

The "demonization" of Liberalism during the Reagan years and after - extending even to that term itself - served to further confuse the situation in the U.S. Before that point, there was a rich criticism (in literature, song, poetry, film...) of Liberalism in America, extending from before the First World War all the way to the 1960s. Every so often, someone dredges up the old Phil Ochs song or a Langston Hughes poem or Jack London on "Liberals".

The path to empire in America included the amputation of the entire "Left" in American politics, starting from well into the middle. It is long forgotten that the Liberal ideology was one of the integral doctrines of capitalism, reaching all the way back to its birth. It is not just that it is something different from us... it is one of the main political perspectives of the enemy.

What is weird is that Liberalism has never been "the Left", even among bourgeois doctrines. Historically, it has always been much closer to the "center" as the seemingly contradictory politics of inconsequential "reform" at home, and the boot heel in the "colonies".

The role of the "Left" in bourgeois politics was originally played by the "radical democrats"... They were as different from the Liberals as a house cat is from a panther. They mostly died out with the actual victory of capitalism. It's too bad because we could have had a chat with them.

In almost every other country, the place on the Left of the radical democrats was taken over by soft-socialists or social democrats. To this day, most claim to agree with us on "goals but not on methods"... that is until they hear their master's voice, as PASOK heard it recently in Greece.

In the U.S., many compare the Democratic Party to the European Social Democrats but that is a purely relative comparison. In doctrine, program and principle, the Democratic Party compares much more accurately to the long-exposed, thoroughly rotten, and mostly inconsequential Liberal Parties of the center, at least in most of the rest of the world.

Such is the price of living in the belly of the beast... you can't even tell your "left" from your "right" without a scorecard.


- anaxarchos

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