volodya_ilich @ volodya_ilich @lemm.ee

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1 yr. ago

For all of feudalism, serfs (majority of the population) worked the fields not for a wage on a free contract (i.e. commodity labor), but bounded legally to the land by the local aristocrat. That's why it wasn't capitalism.

I specifically made a mention to free markets, and to workers selling their labor as a commodity, in my comment.

You're wrong in your analysis. The system hasn't qualitatively changed. It's still a system with an owning class and a working class. The difference is that capital now, as you say, mostly revalorizes in the financial sector instead of in the industrial sector. But capitalism is called capitalism, not industrialism.

Lenin already talked about this in his 1916 treatise "Imperialism: the highest form of capitalism". He describes the process of concentration of capital that took place over the 19th and especially the beginnings of the 20th century, the consolidation of trusts and cartels, and the financialization of the economy. You're describing nothing new, he calls this phase of capitalism "imperialism". But it is a phase of capitalism, the social relations haven't been changed, workers still have to sell their labor force as a commodity, goods and services are exchanged in the free market, and the owners of capital, be it financial or industrial, rake the surplus value from the workers.

Which is why we normally argue for democracy. If everybody acts collectively in their own interest, we all win.

As a hypothetical investor, why would I invest my money in a company that promises profit in 10 years, when I could invest in profits for the next quarter, then take back my investment + profit, and invest somewhere else with profit next quarter?

Blood is an ingredient in many other countries. We have blood sausages (morcilla) in Spain, and they're common in many other places too

Why no mention to the democratic participation in Cuba in your response?

Who do you think makes such decisions in a capitalist context?

Markets make those decisions in a capitalist context, surely not a committee of experts consulting the unions.

According to Worshiping Power by Peter Gelderloos, decentralized structures have an advantage in self-defense but a disadvantage beyond their base territory. That's why both the Spanish Civil War and the Makhnovshchina were lost once the popular front strategy were implemented.

I'd have to read that book to give an actual answer to why that analysis is made. My point is that the coup was allowed to happen to that degree in the first place due to the failure of anarchists of arming the working class and stewarding it against the increasing threat of fascism.

Once everything belongs to the state, it really belongs to those who rule the state.

Again, not that easy. Khruschev didn't decide that the iron in the factory #3 would be used in the steel beam factory #7. The planning of the productive forces was an incredibly complex process in which thousands of bureaucrats union members were involved. Calling that amalgam of workers an "owning class", especially when they're not extracting surplus value at all from the workers seems a big stretch to me.

Centralism is never democratic.

The fact that the USSR wasn't as democratic as ideal, doesn't mean that the existence of a state can't be democratic. "Centralism" is an umbrella term covering many different possibilities of governance, and a single party ruled by elected leaders of worker councils is a recipe of some sort of centralism that can provide a very reasonable degree of democracy. I'm not arguing this was the case for the USSR. If you want to read on a practical case of the existence of democracy within a Marxist-Leninist single-party regime, I recommend you have a look at a book called "How the worker's parliaments saved the Cuban revolution", from Pedro Ross, which describes this exact form of functioning of back and forth between the central government and the worker councils in which millions of Cubans participated to overcome the worst consequences of the "periodo especial" after the illegal and antidemocratic dissolution of the USSR.

I myself am from a country with a rich history of anarchism in the 20th century: Spain. By the 1930s, the CNT, a union of workers which proposed some sort of anarcho-syndicalism (which I bet you'd be happy to agree is a good method of governance), had more than a million members, which for the population of the country at the time was absolutely huge. The lack of centralization of sorts initially among the leftists, and their consequent weakness to respond to threats, is actually the very reason why fascism could trump the democratic government in many places of the country and destroy this anarchist movement and all social progress for the following 40 years. Funnily enough, the dictatorial USSR was the only country which assisted the republicans in their civil war against fascism, other than the admittedly heroic volunteer corps from the brigadas internacionales.

Nobody in their sane minds argues that there wasn't overbureaucratisation in the USSR. That's a well established truth. The question is, if people aren't only allowed but encouraged to join the party, and if there's no exploitation of the working class, what's the argument to suggest that the "bureaucrats were the new owning class"

Id rather wait for you to answer my comment instead of deflecting

Ok, so in the USSR, the country with no exploitation of labor and which promoted membership of party and unions, the owning class was the working class, right? Or are you gonna do some mental gymnastics to say it was the politician class?

I wouldn't say that an American mainstream economist from the mid 20th century is part of the pipeline to radicalization, but sure

communist party

private property owning class

If there's no exploitation, and if everyone can voluntarily join the communist party and the unions (and is encouraged to do so), how can you say there was an owning class?

John Maynard Keynes isn't Marxist though

Well, congrats I guess

Spain

So your only point is "analog has less maintenance". Sure, it has less maintenance. But digital with maintenance has no losses, and analog with maintenance does.

And if your vinyl collection catches fire it also gets lost, what's your point? That's an argument for preservation of storage media, not for intrinsic benefits of analog.

As long as the original recording is 48kHz or higher, digital recordings are awesome. We might not be able to hear beyond the 20Hz - 20kHz, you can most certainly feel it.

Someone hasn't heard of the Nyquist theorem :)

Efficiency doesn't care how big your country is, sprawl would be as inefficient in Cyprus as in Russia, you spread your services and infrastructure over an unnecessarily large area, to huge economic and environmental cost, and forcing people to rely on a car to move around