Ive talked to far left guys of various stripes and they always talk about how evil capitalism is and how much they hate racism/imperialism. they talk about the problems of the world constantly but when you ask for a vision of what the future should look like they either give very broad platitudes (WE WILL ALL BE EQUAL) but they dont really give specifics of how this would happen or why this is desirable
so Lefty pol, what does your ideal world look like, how do you want to get there and why is it superior to the current system?
or they start giving their specific idea of utopia and each one contradicts the other pretty widely except for the basic concepts like lol no money or muh equality
Levi Ortiz
so you're upset about these supposed leftists you've talked to being either being vague or being too specific?
Liam Wood
then maybe you should talk to adults
Hunter Rivera
kill all white pipl
Dylan Martin
sounds like you're talking to red liberals because every leftist I've interacted with can go on about their ideal vision until they collapse from exhaustion, even the no theory anarchist
I am confused that no one seems to actually know what we are going for here, thus they either contradict themselves or others who share the ideology or cant talk on specifics
Gavin Edwards
the 'left' is a very broad idea, encompassing hundreds of different ideologies. All of them will vary in their theory, praxis and goals. There's very little that unites the ideas of different movements 'on the left' except a history of constant conflict. Even of the broadest concepts of what 'communism' entails there is no real agreement between marxists and anarchists, anarchists and anarchists, marxists and marxists. Everyone here disagrees with one another since we all support a large variety of both overlapping and conflicting philosophical/political/economic positions.
Andrew Sullivan
I want labor to be the sole social unit of measurement. Capitalism is not about working hard, it is a hierarchical system based on class and status. It is not about labor but more about luck and happenstance
Adrian Gutierrez
Why don't you buy Das Kapital vol 1 & 2 by Marx and find where it all started from, to ease your confusion. After all, it definitely sounds like you're someone who reads :v)
Nathaniel Carter
This is the biggest meme. It’s never been a Marxist position to accept formal equality. Marx explicitly rejects this in the Critique of the Gotha program and there has been no major Marxist theorist who has advocated for this sort of childish “equality”.
Leo Bell
My ideal system is one in which everyone has to do complex physical labour a few days per week while also studying and graduating in order to take care of the intellectual labour. Money, free market, commodities, they all end. My ideal system is one in which there is a women's only special forces army in order to protect the women of my nation. My ideal system is one in which someone who unironically talks about positivelly about Pinochet is immediatelly shot down.
Luis Cruz
If no one is equal why should their material outcomes be the same?
Jackson Turner
Why is even justifiable to presuppose that the two should be linked?
Isaiah Williams
They aren't. "Too each according to their ability and need" summarize the society quite nicely. Genetic problems are considered medical problems and medical problems don't equate to material harm upon them, be it finnancial or otherwise.
You just fit another peg to its own shaped hole. Capitalism attempts to push a triangle peg, into a circular hole.
It doesn't work in the end, and causes unnecessary amounts of preventable suffering, misery, and death.
But this will be more clear to you as we progress into the 21st century. At some point you will realize this, I would hope
Because that is the way of the world and anything else is trying to impose an Ideology on biology and just generally reality and it's function.
Jacob Martin
What does “material outcomes” mean here? If you’re wondering why we abolish the private monopolization of distribution and production, it’s because Marx frames this as a realization of more individual and collective freedom. In this regard, we can understand Marx as working off frameworks provided by German Classical philosophy (I.e Kant and Hegel) in which a subjects freedom is the ability to freely determine and submit oneself to institutional norms. Freed from the logic of Capital Marx sees human productive activities as being something comunally free, while labour outside the sphere of necessity can take on a personal character due to the increased individual freedom this provides. If you mean “material outcome” as what one owns, Marx also repudiates this. Material outcomes differ due to individual differences both in productive capacity and in “higher stage outcome”, the varieties of needs that people desire or require.
Joshua Rogers
*higher stage of communism
What crap I hope you’re a troll.
Ethan Harris
Read this book. Basically this book.
Austin Wilson
Fuck Cockshott get off my board reee
Luis Peterson
Fuck you I've been on this board since the start, leave yourself if you hate it so much
Easton Morgan
Cockshott may be a TERF but that's why he's minister of economy not minister of culture
Mason Reed
You’ve been on the board so long yet you haven’t learned any Marx and fall for Cockshott’s cyber Stalinism.
My issue with Cockshott is his vulgarization of Marxism.
Xavier Taylor
How is Cockshott a vulgar Marxist? I'm going to need some explanation
Angel Morgan
I don't agree with his points of that the USSR was socialist, I just want that economic system because its the best way to get to communism
Grayson Cooper
He literally called trans girls crossdressers and said they weren't real women, if that's not TERF than nothing is
Luke Brown
Who gives a fucking fuck. Marx hated jews, that doesn't invalidate their theories.
Gavin Thompson
His assent to ideas like socialist commodity production is so far divorced from Marx and the Marxist tradition that it would basically take an entire explanation of the beginning of Capital to try and get why he’s wrong across. I will do this when I’m home from work if you so desire, but it should be pretty obvious why Cockshott is a vulgar Marxist if you take a look at section two of Chp 1 on Capital where Marx talks about the necessity of a value form and the conditions in which it arises, and then read the section in the Critique of the Gotha Program following his critique of Lasselles “undiminshed proceeds of labour”.
Marx didn’t hate Jews either the point of On the JQ is that the issues people have with Jews is a result of Capitalism and that when removed, Jews would be emancipated from their worldly Judaism so to speak. I think it’s anti Semitic but it’s really soft and not severe enough to warrant the same criticism of antisemitism someone like Proudhon or Bakunin deserves
Oliver Lee
You mean the same critique of the gotha program where Marx litterally proposes the same labour voucher system that Cockshott proposes?
Also its not fucking commodity production. They are not produced for exchanged and there is no profit incentive. The prices are only set by a semi-"market" on the consumer level as a means to organically and unintrusively measure the demand for the goods that people want to be produced, and change production to match those discrepancies with the labour value. There is also no surplus value (and no, taxing people to grow productive forces is not surplus value, as per marx), since all the money that they "make" with products in higher demand, they lose on the other goods, as there is a finite amount of credits and the prices are adjusted so that all credits are spend in the end. Credits cannot be saved, after all.
Maybe you should stop being such a twat.
Justin Watson
Maybe you should learn what the value form is because you somehow think Commodity production is synonymous with surplus value production (which is Capital, a development of value; btw is “profit incentive” supposed to be different from surplus value or? Where’s the “profit” in C-M-C?)
Its not fucking capitalism. Its not commodity production. Both are based in the production of goods and services for exchange between individuals in a market with the goal of maximizing personal gain. This is far different from what cockshott proposes.
Maybe you should stop being a twat and calling everyone who you don't agree with a hack and "uneducated".
Logan Gonzalez
I write reports constantly and doublespace them to make them more readable. In this tiny editor adding a double space makes is easier to read, though this may look silly when its only one or two lines in wide screen.
Cameron Hughes
Tbh I didn't give enough of a shit to finish reading Cockshott's article, the man can only make economics interesting.
Daniel Jones
No, commodity production is based around the production of social goods privately so that the labour in the commodity is validated as social only mediately through an exchange relation while Capital is the production of surplus value where the mass of labourers freed from the means of production produce a surplus of goods above that equivalent of their means of sustenance. But close.
Also your claim that “it’s a consumer market therefore not commodity production!” reminds me of all the critiques Engels and Marx made of the so called “socialist” for doing precisely this - divorcing production and distribution with the belief that you can have “socialist production” but with a bourgeois form of distribution.
Jaxson Harris
That means litterally the same as I said, with different words.
Its not a fucking market, its just fucking rationing according to how much stuff there is. It only superficially sorta of kinda little bit resembles a market because the amount of credits you need to get a thing can vary. Its not a bourgeois mode of distribution either, because there is no bourgeoisie, nor is there any form of class involved in it, unless you are of course just using "bourgeois" as a codeword for "anything I dont like". There is no owning class, there is no buyers or sellers, there is no differing class interests, theres nothing that resembles a market, its just a rationing system that changes rations according to how much you worked (which marx wants) and how scarce or plentifull it is, with a nice side effect of allowing you to see the discrepancy between the "correct" productive ratios and the actual ratios.
Hunter Nguyen
also No he did not and no that is not possible until we have reached full communism, which is not what the economic system cockshott proposes is for.
Brody Morris
No it’s not the same thing as what you said. You defined it as something based around individual gain, whereas Marx defines it as a type of allocating social labour. One is only tenuously related to Marxism, the other is the proper one.
Anyway when I’m home I’ll grab quotes from Cockshott’s book as well as Marx to try and support my argument.
Jace Reed
exactly that
Jason Hughes
It is litterally the same, as the individual gain is what leads to the allocation of the social labour. As individuals or groups of individuals produce their goods and bring it to the market, their value is realized in that market, and those who made stuff that is not needed cannot trade their commodities for the same equivalent value, but less, and vice versa, leading them to seek out production of commodities that have the highest (or higher) exchange value comrades to their labour value. This is the maximization of individual gain, both in the changing their production and additionally in any haggling or scamming (due to information asymmetry) that occurs during the selling and buying of the commodities.
Do try, I cannot promise I will read them because I got shit to do.
Justin Morales
Also keep in mind that the interpretation of marx and the economic system that cockshott proposes are not the same. I do not agree with him, he calls his own economic system commodity production. I do not think it is commodity production. His system is good, his (irrelevant semantic ☭TANKIE☭ fuckery) theory around it is flawed.
Jordan Taylor
IE I dont give a fuck if you quote cockshott saying that his system is x or y, I only care about the system itself.
John Phillips
Based on his definitions of terms, not that they're neccessarily the correct ones, he's not wrong. It's a completely different argument as to whether his backwards views about X or Y particular thing should be endorsed that has quite literally fuck all to do with his theory until we bring women (as in, faab) into his economic analysis. Tbh I'm getting a little fucking sick of this "criticism" even being entertained because it's always brought up off-topic as a smear, which is it's function, regardless of whether you agree with him or not (I don't). There literally just isn't any need for it, if you want to repudiate his blogposts attacking low hanging fruit like Butler then do that but don't fucking bring it up when discussing his work on econophysics or cybernetics or whatever.
Elijah Thomas
The abolishment of the present conditions
It is superior because it abolishes the present conditions.
