Economic Self-Interest

The basis of working-class militancy is workers' willingness to defend their economic interests. To what extent however should workers rely exclusively on such interests to wage their battles against oppression and exploitation? An obvious answer would be "all the time", because proles are obviously always justified in carrying out class struggle. But think about it…

The abolition of slavery or later segregation was not in the economic interest of the white working class. It was in the interest of the black working class of course, but on a purely economic basis white workers had "good" reasons to believe it wasn't in theirs — more black wage workers likely meant increased competition and depressed wages. If white workers were to stick to their economic interests, then they would have had to oppose black emancipation — which though some actually did, appears incongruous with a proper socialist worldview.

You could make a similar point with foreign cheap labor today. The relative well-being of the first-world working class is predicated in great parts upon the over-exploitation of third-world workers. What reason do the former have to support social emancipation for the latter if this means no more cheap clothing and electronics? It's undeniable that proles in the developed world actually have no economic interest in seeing Pakistani textile workers freed from sweatshops.

Is "economic self-interest" a valid enough framework to pursue world communism?

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Inb4 stirnerfags

I am a nationalist and an isolationist, I have an interest to help my own country rather than expand the powers of my regional corporation to spread non-profitable propserity, if the public of lesser-off nations can't defend their individual and collective sovereignty against their slave masters, then they deserve to fail, and they will, as nature will intend, global communism is about decentralised global class consciouness, not about global collaboration, I think that if my country is the most leftist and the most propserous, then it deserves to be. It is all down to priorities and sustainability. If the third world are my whores, then that will only end with their own rebellion, right now, I am just watching the world adhere to it's own chosen destiny, because the world is full of cowards.

You're not describing communism, you're describing a social-darwinist strain of nationalism. I sure hope not everyone around here is such an uneducated pseud.

I'm talking about protecting my personal community, if you want to call that "social darwinism" then go ahead.

Spooky

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my self

The self is a phenomenological reality. The "nation" isn't.

The "self" is an illusion. It is literally a product of systems in society and of neurobiology, which can be affected by magnets near your skull. Give up the act, Max.

The nation is just the sandbox of subjects in it, if you change the conditions of the nation, you change them of the subjects inside it, creating a postive world starts with the promotion sof positive societies. And anyway, the nation is a good way to get people on your side, you can't convince average joes to get on your side with utopain rhetoric about global revolution.

But how big is this "sandbox" and why do people demand my loyalty to it?

Not, it isn't. And it so obviously isn't, I'm baffled anyone would argue otherwise with a straight face. If you still don't get that the nation-state form is more than just a bunch of people living in the same place after the absolute shitshow that was the 20th century, it might be time for you to hit the books.

You can post on here. A nation can't.

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If you don't want to live in it, you can leave.


Yeah exactly, the nation is just a larger form of society, I never stated that it was some object in space-time, I was using "sandbox" as a metaphor for the potential for autonomy of individuals that it offers.


We are made up of billions of living cells, do you give credit to them for your life, or do you pretend like you are one thing? The self is the most persistent abstraction which has ever been propagated, and for good reason, so your reductionism isn't exactly rational.

I don't know a lot about burger history but Marx wrote:

Scientism was a mistake, i need not the enlightenment conception of man as the whole complete self, i only am an agency my uniqueness isn't with in the folds of my meat and microorganism i carry around, it is within me as a creative nothing a corporeality of me i own not only this body with everything in it, i own the world at large as mine.

No it isn't, you insufferable brainlet. The nation-state is a historically-located framework and a recent one at that. Most people on the globe simply didn't see themselves as part of a "nation" until well into the 19th century. This is History 101.

None of those cells consciously interface with the world. Yes, I am "one thing" because the many cells that form my physical body are devoid of agency; only I as a social creature am aware of the world and myself.

Well the abolition of slavery and segregation were in the self interest of many: the former undercut theirnown labour with free workmand thenlatyer saw policies that also hurt their civil liberties. Most of the people that supported the antinsegregation movement were petit-bourgois, not proletarian.

I literally denounced scientism in my sentence, I said that suspending objective reality for the anthropocentric subjectivity of humans will only benefit us, and that the nation is just an extension of the ontology of the self, so using terms like "abstraction" is not sufficient.


You are an impure product of nature, you need more humility.

You didn't answer my question. How big is a nation, where does it end? Can you see it? Of course you can't, because a nation is just an abstraction, and claiming to belong to something that does not exist is just silly.

It is collectively decided upon, obviously. Substitute the word "nation" with "community" and I'm sure you'd be happier, right?

Okay so the burgerland civil war was preceded by 10 years of guerrilla warfare in the western states between pro- and anti-slavery white settlers. The anti-slavery settlers were known as "Free Soilers" from the north and formed paramilitary bands called Jayhawkers. (Funny fact: the University of Kansas still uses the "Jayhawk" mascot but it's a bird now, with references to the guerrilla bands scrubbed.)

In a nutshell, if you were a Free Soiler and moved to fresh territories in Kansas to Missouri, you'd be competing against slave-owning oligarchs who were the 19th century equivalent of millionaires and billionaires in economic terms. As in you set up a plot of land, and then next door comes in somebody bringing 500 slaves with him, along with a hired militia to shoot anybody who opposes slavery. He will easily undercut you since his labor works for free. The civil war was basically a bourgeois revolution against slavery that Marx hoped would eventually lead to a proletarian revolution. That didn't happen, though, but it was necessary to get rid of slavery.

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Except as the others have already said, a nation is not a "community". If I live at the border between two states, why would I be more connected to people hundreds of miles away than the people living right next to me, just because I supposedly belong to their nation?

I am corporeal unlike your metaphysical group ontology of a nation, the prime spook as Stirner puts it, even as power my power is curbed by the state the nation the community etc… decorporealized and assigned an identity a social alien self to call my own "citizen, volk, blackwhitewomenmanetc…" they all rope of your corporal creative nothingness, you clearly have an uncritical reading of Freud notion of narcissism and fromm "group narcissism" it is so obvious. gywn

You wouldn't, necessarily, I believe in free travel and all that stuff, but I think that if we were to centrally manage society, we would have to incorporate the nation as a landmass, at least, into that model.


You have the individual power to organise your own society, or to move to one that benefits you more, if you want a decentralised, individualistic, selfish society then call yourself an ancap, not a leftist, I'm guessing you don't respect the idea of democracy either?

Exactly, advance the dialectic.

It is, the invisible hand of the market can sort everything out. When all capitalists act in their self interest it benefits every single member of society.

goddammit this shit again.

Okay so I read Stirner but I disagree with him on the nation thing. A nation can be seen as different things. What was a nation for Renan is not a nation for Hitler for example.

Typically a 'nation' is what we use to describe a group of people that feels themselves impersonally bound in some way. Through democratic traditions, culture, ethnicity, or whatever they feel is special. Imo a nation *can* exist if with that we mean a collection of people who are similar and consciously form a larger community

what if all of the most powerful people solely act in their self-interest? Wouldn't that hurt the less powerful?

No, as we can see, people like Jeff Bezos are acting to pursue their self interest and it makes not only every one of his employees, but society as a whole happy and wealthy.

His employees are maltreated and underpaid.
What if I was a terrorist and my self-interest was to nuke different parts of the world? Would that be a rationally-selfish action.

But a nation is not a landmass. If I pick a clump of soil from the ground, I will not find the slightest hint of a "nation" in it. So a nation is not a community, since as you concede you can have a greater connection with people from another nation than with people from 'your' nation, and it is not a landmass either. What is it then?

A nation is a network of labour which interacts within a designated region, that is the minimal understanding of what a nation is, you can add any sentiments to it that you'd like, I just think that to have a socialist society, you need enough workers with enough resources in order to compute abundance for everybody, you can't have socialism in a desert, so you need to expand.

Like I said, reducing the worth of something down to it's fundamentalities is just meaningless reductionism, not understanding of what makes something necessary or important.

It is a spook of the mind tries to owns me not i owns it, i belong to no socaity
Democracy is a spook relies on a transcendent sovereign judgment backed by the threat of force.
And no ancaps are just neo feudalists they are too unselfish for my taste, and yeh im postleft

okay, good look with that, buddy.

That's ahistorical and incorrect. That's not how nationalists ever understood the nation and today labour is a global and borderless network. A Texan is as much conmected to Mexican labour dynamics as to Northwest America if not more

The "collective unconscious" is Jungian pseudoscience. Stop.

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gwyn quit yer retardation and sorel is a trash

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so what is a nation, then?


it is just an aspect of evolutionary psychology, it makes sense that as our bodies adpat to our environment through generations, our mind would too.

The question of self-interest was already a point of divergence before during the Second International, where a neo-Kantian revival in Europe got socialists fighting about whether they believe in some type of moral duty or just working people pursuing their rational self-interest. The two trends would split almost perfectly into revolutionary-marxist on one side (self-interest) and reformist-democratic on the other (moral imperatives), probably because you once get people thinking in these terms again it's hard to sell some of the tenets of revolutionary socialism.

Keep your pop evopsych out of here. Jungian psychology is largely pseudoscientific and useless to socialists, get over it. Go watch a Jordan Peterson video or something, you'll have more fun there than you do shitposting on here.

Well I posted on it here:

So basically it's when a large enough group (who don't all know one another personally) decide they have a special bond (irrelevant what bond) differentiating them as a group from the rest of humanity.

jeez, why so butthurt?

just seems like semantics to me. We are in basic agreement.

Stellar argument.

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Argument against what? You just called me a peterson parasite and then declared victory against a strawman.

Well, I disagreed with your definition that a nation is a labour network and said that it's not got to do with economics but feelings based on perceived similarities. That is a real difference imo.

It's not a strawman. You're peddling Peterson-tier spiritualist pseudoscience, that is all. The collective unconscious is not real and even Jung himself thought people tended to abuse the concept.

I am a mystic, not a spiritualist, an ecologist. The collective unconscious is not pseudoscientific, it is as scientific as the concept of the subconscious, the things people have an issue with in these concepts is the compartmentalisation of them, not the concept of them in themselves.

So is it scientific or is it not scientific? Just admit you're a spooked brainlet. Also, subconscious and unconscious aren't synonyms, and the idea that your mind is processing things that you are not actively thinking of or are unable to think about is very different from the idea of a collective unconscious. The former can be proven, the latter cannot.