Not a leftypol native, but I know you guys fucking love Cockshott. But I’m curious what other modern theorists are worth looking into, as I’m making a list of people worth learning from.
rn I’ve got
Who else should I add? Thoughts on the guys I already have?
Other urls found in this thread:
youtube.com
youtube.com
youtube.com
youtube.com
youtube.com
marxists.org
paulcockshott.wordpress.com
rdwolff.com
economicsofimperialism.blogspot.com
twitter.com
They are all useless. I like people who do stuff, not talk about it, preferably, but not necessary both, and there are, but not in the USA of course, which is doomed to be wholly interlinked with Capitalism.
Really, there is nothing more to add to the theory in our times of reaction, which, by definition, has no developments apart from escalating of crises.
I would add Mark Fisher.
Maybe Noam Chomsky is not modern anymore.
I would check out Zero Books catalog, there might be something that interests you and they are all modern authors.
I've heard bad things about Harvey, and possibly Anwair.
Shaikh, Cockshott, Keen and Ha-Joon are all you need.
Ignore the rest, especially Harvey.
Mark Blyth is a massive succdem who thinks if every economy worked like Scotland's but in the 60s the world would be perfect
Steve Keen!
no, no, no. they are shit.
I can understand Wolff and Harvey but come on why so much hate for Zizek? He's alright imo
OP: Why they hate for Harvey, out of curiosity?
He thinks that Global South countries are imperialist towards the USA and Britain, and he thinks that Marx didn't believe in the LTV.
What did you hear about shaikh?
That seems like a stretch.
Did he? I haven't read that much Marx. To say "don't read this guy he's shit" over some arcane thing like that is a bit… I dunno.
nevermind, confused him with some jewish writer. sorry fam.
He literally says it.
Read Marx then, it's absolutely central to Marxist theory.
No, he doesn't.
No, it isn't.
flag related
Regardless of Harvey’s views, LTV is pretty huge.
Alexander Anievas
Kees van der Pijl
Perry Anderson
Tony Norfield
Neil Davidson
To name a few I've been reading lately. Especially recommend Neil Davidson, his How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions is outstanding and doesn't get enough love here.
Giorgio Agamben
Yeah he does, KYS retard.
Yeah it is, fuck off back to reddit or whatever shithole you came from. Dear lord, is this the power of David Harvey? The LTV is irrelevant to Marxism?
Mark Blyth isn't a Communist (he's only good for offering an alternative perspective to apolitical/liberals), you know about Cockshott's YT channel (youtube.com
Add Kliman to this list, take Keen with a grain of salt, he's great but he doesn't fully understand Marx and thinks that things other than Humans can create Value. I've attached some works from each author to this post.
OP is clearly only just getting into serious Socialist Theory, in that respect, Wolff is salvageable (some of his introductory lectures are great and the things he gets wrong/teaches poorly can always be learned later) and Harvey, despite the fact that he doesn't think the LTV is neccessary for Marxism (which is absolutely fucking retarded, he's just pandering to bourgeois economists) has a couple of good works, Brief History of Neoliberalism is good for beginners
Fisher isn't a Marxist at all, in fact he more or less denies the Marxist conception of Class but yeah he's decent, obviously Capitalist Realism is a flagship work for people getting into leftism, but I'd also recommend browsing his old site (just look up k-punk) but you can also get a book which is a collection of stuff from that blog, idk if it's available in .pdf for free online though.
You know if any of these are on libgen? I've heard a couple of these names before but I haven't read any of them, give a quick rundown please lad?
(me)
Anwar Shaikh Capitalism: Competition, Conflict and Crises, Lecture Series
youtube.com
Richard Wolff Intro to Marxian Economics Session 1 & 2
youtube.com
youtube.com
Kapitalism 101 Law of Value
youtube.com
Wolff isn't that bad, people just like to mischaractarize him as some sort of marksoc when he's actually more of sort of De Leonist (if you take a De Leonist who's given up on labor unions being the revolutionary vanguard and upholds worker cooperatives as the vanguard instead, you get what is effectively "Wolffism")
If Wolff considers market economy to be Real Socialism, as opposed to Central Planning which is State Capitalism (according to him), then he is a 100% pure, undiluted marksoc, and it is not mischaracterization to identify him as such.
You're high on cold war liberal propaganda if you think markets vs planning is some inherent part for or against socialism and not some unrelated unimportant part of a bigger picture. Wolff makes the right call trying to do a liberal muh markets take on Marx that is undeniably easier to market in the west.
Franco Berardi
Moishe Postone
Anslem Jappe
Endnotes
Monsieur Dupont
"But every society based upon the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the producers have lost control over their own social inter-relations. Each man produces for himself with such means of production as he may happen to have, and for such exchange as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants.
No one knows how much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will be wanted. No one knows whether his individual product will meet an actual demand, whether he will be able to make good his costs of production or even to sell his commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialized production. But the production of commodities, like every other form of production, has it peculiar, inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws work, despite anarchy, in and through anarchy.
They reveal themselves in the only persistent form of social inter-relations — i.e., in exchange — and here they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. They are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, and have to be discovered by them gradually and as the result of experience. They work themselves out, therefore, independently of the producers, and in antagonism to them, as inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production. The product governs the producers. […]
With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer.
Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then, for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones.
The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social organization. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him.
Man's own social organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have, hitherto, governed history,pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own history — only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. […]
Solution of the contradictions. The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives their socialized character complete freedom to work itself out.
Socialized production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The development of production makes the existence of different classes of society thenceforth an anachronism.
In proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master — free.
marxists.org
Nice idealism bro.
Agreed. Whats your point?
yeah ok sure whatever you say big boy
I don't see contradiction. As socialism grows the market will grow obsolete and be replaced, the market is not the main focus but socialism. "Socialism is muh markets/planning" is a cold war meme.
What the fuck does abolition of the market being a necessary component of socialism have to do with idealism?
Sounds like a pretty idealistic way of opposing markets
...
I never once said i was a market socialist.
It's not just that Harvey thinks the LTV "isn't necessary" for Marxism it's that he believes - and has written - that Marx didn't even have a LTV. Cockshott even wrote a rebuttal of Harvey's ideas, here:
paulcockshott.wordpress.com
As far as I know that isn't Wolff's idea. He called the USSR state-capitalist because it left all the old capitalist structures intact (as well as all the old elements like money, commodities, wage-labor, etc.) but put the state in charge of planning and production. Wolff (at least, in the past) argued that socialism was defined more by producers and appropriators of surplus being one and the same. pic related are quotes from Class Theory and History cowritten by Wolff
Wolff's usual approach is to popularize this idea by advocating for worker coops even though he acknowledges a worker coop isn't necessarily socialist.
It kinda is. It's like saying that capitalism must go because it's evil and oppressive: you can't justify your claim saying that planning=rational, market=impersonal. You'd have to show that the market tends to produce and reproduce class divisions, and that therefore the different kinds of market socialism are just different kinds of utopia.
Thankfully it's not that hard.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Google Bookchin
So Marx was an idealist? Because I'm pretty sure that the impersonal nature of the market was a fundamental concept that led him to write about alienation and conclude that a planned economy based around use would eliminate the anarchic and alienating forces of the market.
He developed a very materialist view of the world but you can sometimes find some "idealist residues" in his works. I believe his theory of alienation in particular shows very clearly the influence that Feuerbach and Hegel (which were both quite idealist compared to later Marx) had on his early work; but there one can clearly see Marx's effort to build something concrete.
Are you saying Real Socialists(tm) think that abolishing private property is "some unrelated unimportant part"?
Such genius. Much wow.
Kid, it's a fucking no-brainer that you would be accepted, if you reject Socialism and ceaselessly work to suppress Marxism. Wolff is not inventing anything new here. That had been true since the 19th century. It is people like him who had diffused Spring of Nations, sabotaged Paris Commune, ensured that WW1 would happen, and protected nascent Fascist movements. And Capitalists loved them for it. All mass-media was praising their cunning insights.
So - yeah. They were extremely successful at "marketing".
But we also shit on their graves today because we know what they actually did. And when it comes to Wolff I'm simply ahead of the curve: shitting on him, while he is alive and before general public realized how his anti-Communist propaganda made people impotent and powerless.
Well, of course it isn't. Since the very first days it was a wet dream of world Bourgeoisie to destroy united labour movement by declaring its core power to be non-Socialist.
His specific theories are clearly derived from Titoism.
Read his books, you fucking degenerate.
He calls it Capitalist because Soviets used Central Planning. He openly says it. He also literally says that the only truly Socialist entities in USSR were kolkhozs. He doesn't give a fuck about money or commodities.
Then read the fucking book.
Wolff's usual approach is to lie his head off - especially, when it comes to youtube videos you retards constantly watch instead of reading.
Have you heard about Das Kapital?
Wolff has advocated for central planning before. He praised the US War economy for its distribution without exchange and said that the worker cooperatives should unite under a single umbrella organization rather than competing independently and eventually organize a system for economic planning. He isn’t a marksoc in the slightest. His criticism of the USSR is the old criticism that it had a de facto class system in the nomenklatura (as the other poster pointed out, he defines socialism as a system where the producers and appropriators of surplus value are one and the same)
Are you doing this on purpose? You literally quoted everything that I said except:
I know that the market reproduces class division; I was only saying that any argument against market socialism must be economic, not moral (material, not ideal).
Honestly, if Wolff goes to a bunch of burgers and says "Oh yeah 'free enterprise' Marx is totally about that you should go read him" what's wrong with that?
We love you, schizo-user!
Also, in case anyone is getting confused by this retard regarding Wolff's stance on markets, planning, etc. there is a convenient answer here:
Perhaps an important basic point: our focus on worker coops was never meant to suggest an alternative definition of or task for socialism: the idea was always to correct and complete the initial experiments with socialist economies (USSR, PRC, etc) of the 20th century by ADDING and INTEGRATING the democratic reorganization of enterprises into worker coops.
rdwolff.com
Alexander Anievas
Marxist International Relations / Imperialism theory. How the West Came to Rule is his best book. Part of a contemporary resurgence of Leon ⛏️rotsky's theory of Uneven and Combined Development, as laid out in HotRR and Permanent Revolution (inb4 ban)
Kees van der Pijl
Another Marxist IR / Imperialism theorist. Only book I've read from him is The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class, a history of the making of the US Led International Rules-Based Order Established After World War II (tm), from its ideological roots with Wilson, to the UN charter, to the Marshall Plan and eventual EEC. Good stuff, even if the focus on individual bankers, etc. seems a bit conspiratorial at times.
Perry Anderson
Wide body of work going back to the sixties, from philosophy to economic history. Recommend his American Foreign Policy and its Thinkers which is a great, easy to read overview of the history of American imperialist policy and the contemporary debate of its strategists ("Realism" vs. "Wilsonian Liberalism", etc.) His books on Feudalism and Absolutism are supposed to be his best but I haven't gotten to them yet.
Tony Norfield
Author of The City: The Global Power of Finance, a Marxist economic critique of the role of credit and finance in modern imperialism. Written by a former City of London banker and analyst. Good stuff but a bit daunting. He also has a blog: economicsofimperialism.blogspot.com
Neil Davidson
Wrote the Bourgeois Revolutions book mentioned above, covering the evolution of the theory from the revolutions themselves to the evolving views of the first, second, third and fourth Internationals. Exhaustively researched, reads a continuous Marxists.org binge full of gold. Like Anievas, heavily draws from ⛏️rotsky's theory of Uneven and Combined Development. Need to get a hard copy of this to read the whole thing.
Attached some of the PDFs I have. Got it all from LibGen so there's more there, along with ePubs. Also I posted Anievas' complete works in the reading thread a few months ago.
...
No.
Why the fuck hasn't anybody cited Jehu over on The Real Movement yet? Dude has been single-handedly rescuing Marx from the 'Marxists' that infest the Left for years now.
Sure. In form of futures contract.
The only way to keep claiming that Wolff is not dishonest is to say that US became Communist.
Do you really think you haven't been lied to?
With the right to opt out at any moment. I.e. power plant co-op has the right to shut down electricity any time, if their demands are not met.
Let me rephrase: Wall Street is not Central Planning, you retard.
100% undiluted marksoc.
This is not "de facto class system". He invented his own definition of social categories - and has no right to pretend that they have anything to do with Marx's class system.
Additionally, he did not prove that his social categories actually influence anything. This is no different from saying that anyone with a surname that starts with "C" must be a Capitalist - and then proceed to build theory based on that.
What he actually says is that planning cannot be delegated, that each and every worker must individually process all distribution withing the entire economy - otherwise it's not Real Socialism(tm).
That's impossible to accomplish on a global scale - and don't try to pretend that he doesn't realize it. He knows it perfectly and doesn't care. He makes Socialist-flavoured content, no different from Leninade.
Do you think you are going to make Revolution (or, at least, leverage higher wages) with Leninade? I mean, I have to ask.
This suggests that argument wasn't made. But argument was made. So what is your point?
I feel like I'm in kindergarten. Also, Wolff really prefers to peddle his own reading of Marx, rather than Marx himself.
Posting screencaps and actually reading (and understanding) book are different things. Reading comprehension can be abysmal.
For example:
>> the idea was always to correct and complete the initial experiments with socialist economies (USSR, PRC, etc) of the 20th century by ADDING and INTEGRATING the democratic reorganization of enterprises into worker coops.
Translation: China is Socialist and Gorbachev did nothing wrong.
If that is not MarkSoc, I don't know what is.
Step #1 of Jehu's masterplan has workers of the entire world (not just bits and pieces, but over 95%) voluntarily starving themselves to death. Thank you very much, but I prefer not to be "rescued" in this way from my "Stalin's death cult".
I love this conspiracy theory you’re pushing, that what Wolff advocates for on a daily basis is actually all lies and what he really wants is some shit apparently from a book no one has read that he co-authored a decade ago. This lectures and radio/tv program reaches far more people than any of his books. Are you some sort of Great Man idealist who thinks heretical opinions from old books will manifest into the material plane because because the whole movement is just an metaphysical extension of Wolff’s personality?
When recommending that people listen to his radio program or lectures, we’re only endorsing that content, and to my knowledge he’s never said anything close to what you’re claiming on that platform.
Too busy strawmanning the fuck out of the guy to bother engaging with the arguments, I see.
Also, I disagree that his definition of socialism is arbitrary. It’s a way of interpreting “worker ownership of the means of production.” If you own something, but have no control over it, your ownership is in-name-only. What is the purpose in ownership of the means of production? To control the surplus value produced by it. If workers “own” the means of production, but have no control over the surplus, their ownership is in-name-only.
...
Even Cockshott agrees, more or less, with this basic assertion, hence his belief in most major, broad planning decisions being approved by referendum organized by a council selected by sortition.
The sticking point is typically over whether effective worker control of the means of production is more important or the abolition of generalized commodity production. Whether or not you think the USSR was socialist or not depends largely on if you agree more with the former or the latter. The USSR had abolished generalized commodity production, whether or not the average worker had any meaningful control over the Soviet economy is a bit more questionable.
My point is that this
is not an argument.
Leninade is a perfectly good soda and it will be nationalized when Papa Wolff becomes the USSA's General Secretary of the Party.
For a company to have a surplus you either have to have:
· Exploitation: surplus = labour - value of labour-power
· Markets: surplus = value-productivity * labour-time
Since the second kind of surplus amounts to zero in the whole economy, some companies will have a negative surplus and will have to resort to exploitation.
The only non-exploitative way to increase investment in an industry is through taxation.
Thanks, I knew about Norfield through his blog because he's on Roberts Blogroll, and I'd heard Anievas' name in passing but the others I wasn't familiar with, I'll grab everything you mentioned.
So you were simply shitposting Zig Forumsyp.
According to Wolff nationalized property is State Capitalism.
Wolffist stance is that worker co-op should own the factory. I.e. workers will take a loan (10% annual) to buy factory from current owners and then will manage it, while being tightly overseen (and punished with potential expulsion from co-op) by the bank. Totes Socialism.
i have literally no idea what to tell someone who's this illiterate
just… i guess some people cannot comprehend even the most basic shit and still pretend like it's something they totally got and is in favor to the complete batshit insane stupid shit they want it to be
so i guess go have fun, there's nothing that can show you how stupid you are if you can't even read it in these very plain words i quoted for you
you are just mentally handicapped, there's nothing else that can be said to you at this point
If discussing whether an argument is idealist or not is shitposting then yes.