Why?

This tbqh

Oh now i fucked up with the flag
Sry

how about you try looking at the DPRK not from the lense of american """news""".

marxism was nothing more than a jewish fever dream

I feel it's an issue of awareness and education more than anything. And that for those who are somewhat educated on the matter, the education generally comes from a standpoint painting it in a negative light, as seems to be the case in amerca and europe.

...

In my opinion as long as developing nations are exploited, then main capitalist nations can afford welfare to keep proletariat at bay.
In order to win first world, first third world need to rebel and take control of their nations. In my opinion the path to communism is world LIKBEZ + GOELRO

So much lies and misinformation in one post.

How could you look at the history of socialist struggles and conclude that proles simply are reactionary? What happened is that capitalist states have brought the hammer down in a way Marx could never have imagined. Secret police, automatic rifles, tanks, military dictatorships in Africa, Asia and Latin America etc.
And right after this violent crushing of revolutionaries comes the "sunshine" of social democratic compromise which stifles revolutionary potential. But the time of social democrats has passed and we can't rely on them to bargain anything on our behalf.

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There will never be a spontaneous revolution with universal participation. The proles need to be led by a vanguard when the historical circumstances are right, and most of them will opportunistically adopt their politics, ready to drop them if they become disillusioned. This is just how social change works, if you drop the romantic stories. There will probably never be a society where everyone is conti ually satisfied with the current system. What the advanced proles need to do is set up socialism firmly enough that inevitable reactionaries can't reverse it. Obviously this is really fucking hard and we don't quite know how to do it, but ML states still exist so they must be doing something right.

The fact of the matter is that humans are not nearly as rational, where "rational" means supporting one's material self-interest, as Marx and most other modernist thinkers thought in the 19th century. People will often choose their faith or culture over their material self interest, especially when it comes to those things they see as inviolably foundational to their personal morality. Christian Social parties exist because of the inability of many religious working-class people to reconcile their support for reactionary social policy with their need/desire for a welfare state.

Jesus Christ faggot have you ever made a thread that isn't just screeching about how "the right is winning". This, only a couple of hours after you got put in your place in another thread explaining to you that Right-Wing support is not organic and is literally funded by same people who keep the entire political machine greased. I was right about you, you're actually just from Zig Forums.

Mods, check this guy's post history has he ever done anything other than spew defeatism?

After being successfully petit-bourgeoisified the past decades, the again-impoverishing western proletariat is comparable in their worldview to declassé petit-bourgs, which have always been the biggest supporters of fascism.

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you don't even know what the words mean you're spouting and it's just painfully obvious to anyone who ever read Marxist literature
seriously you need to feel ashamed for posting that and thinking this shit is worth taking serious
thats the most blatant and weakest attempt at pushing defeatism i've ever seen

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He's the same person who made the "right wing is owning libtards epic style on youtube" thread, blatant Zig Forums defeatist psyop

Where was it implied otherwise?

colddarkstars.wordpress.com/2018/07/23/the-rise-of-the-right-wing-is-not-due-to-the-working-class-because-workers-dont-vote/
Just gonna leave this here

Because too many people actually believe in american dream. And they refuse take reality when it fade, alas they invent right wing to explain that someone just stole it from them.

This. Also the American and western "working class" is fairly small. What OP is probably referring to as the "proletariat" in the first world really is just labor aristocrats and petite bourg parasites.

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Reactionary ideals are not prevalent because they are natural, they are prevalent because they are the only coherent (a word I use lightly) way of thinking that many people even know. People can do their own research of course, but it's hard to start when you don't really know what you are even looking for.

You would be surprised how many people in the Western world haven't even heard of politics outside of the scope of identity.

Which is why you kill them before they try anything.

Aren't you that autistic ChristCom that constantly rags on the US? Regardless, contrary to your belief, earning more doesn't make you less a member of the proletariat.

The majority of Americans may be reactionary bootlickers, but that's simply because my countrymen are politically-illiterate and think transgender people and kneeling before a football game are national crises.

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No, but it may give you petit-bourgeois ideology. Labor aristocracy is a thing even if it doesn't encompass all of Western working class like MLMs claim.

MLMs dont claim most of the FW proletariat are labor aristocrats, Maoist Third Worldists do

What puts one in the labour aristocracy category anyway? Is it earning a certain wage, one's wage in proportion to cost of living? My wage would barely see me scrape by if i didnt move back in with my parents, and as it is now I can afford rent, my car, some disposable income and still save. Does this context put me in the LA category?

Incoming rant, please critique:

I'd suggest looking back to the decline of serfdom for some concept of how these things work. In England during some of the peasants revolts you even had peasants who were not asking to be freeholders, but rather claiming they were attached to the ancient holdings of the crown, and so weren't as beholden to their lords. These were revolting peasants, pretty "radical" in the sense that they were taking violent political action, and yet instead of asking for outright freedom (though some groups did) they'd even go so far as to appeal to certain ancient laws to achieve a net benefit for their class position.

Which is just to say that you need to understand what the possible is and maneuver in it. Not even attempting to get all dialectical with this, but the failures of feudalism literally resolved themselves at the margins, which built in strength until eventually they overcame the whole system. In England it was the lords that abolished the customary agrarian mode of life, not the peasants. The peasants took advantage of gaps to achieve freedom without any wide cohesive base of organization, simply as a matter of their own interests. An example would be the widening amount of freeholds in the countryside in exchange for clearing out waste and forest for use by the lords. Or the Spanish and French monarchy granting freedom to peasants in exchange for fees (which also occurred in England) as a quick way to make money. This was built into the political economy of feudalism, as such fees and powers were the means for the aristocracy to extract wealth. At the same time, they served as the destruction of their future privileges to access the surplus, or to control the peasantry. But as the peasants gained power and the lords saw their ability to extract surplus directly wane through the changing substrate of the lower classes and their legal obligations, they started to look elsewhere. The writing was on the wall, there needed to be adaptation. Leasing large amounts of land for years to gentry and wealthy free peasants became more common, and it proved profitable. Eventually it was the lords, merchants and gentry who used their enduring political power to abolish the commons, drive peasants out of the wastes and institute wage labor across the whole countryside, and they did it because the contradictions of feudalism had already began to deprive them of their old material power, but the resolution of those contradictions had directly led to the introduction of a free and mobile labor force that was already serving as the wage labor which could bring about the new form of exploitation.

It is up to us to do what the lords did in England. We find the margins of capital to build material power underpinning a real change. Political parties are not that, there may be bursts of activity like in Germany much like the bursts of peasant revolts that could see concessions but also be crushed with very little effect on the long term trajectory of the mode of production and social relations. Sometimes people may get in power who represent these parties, but the best they can do is attempt to establish a material basis for enduring class power, and they often don't. They secure concessions from capital that don't represent material power.

This applies to trade unions as well. It has been shown that trade unions often peak in the best economic times, and get crushed or lose membership after the bust. That is because they require concessions that capitalists can afford to make. The cost of losing members is historically much greater than the benefits of gaining new members, because people move to new companies that don't have a union presence, or they even change careers to an industry that is not unionized. The trade union structure is inherently contradictory as it is established to organize workers as block of power against capital, but when capital is in trouble it immediately hurts the trade union's ability to maintain ranks and organizing power. Meanwhile, capital has a LEGAL RIGHT to its material power. A recession will reduce the ranks of capitalists and shrink their pool of wealth, but capital as a whole will always endure a recession. Meanwhile, the workers have little claim to property and the basis of their power shrinks in greater proportion than that of the capitalists. Trade unions experienced this typical peak in the boom of the 20s before collapsing in the great depression when the government actually stepped in on their behalf and bolstered membership through work programs and favorable legislation. This doesn't have to happen and just as often the bourgeois state will destroy unions when they are weak as a wide concession to capital, which has been happening in Spain since 2008.

1/2

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But it is important to note that "stepping in" on behalf of the laborers, because the much applauded nordic countries have models that have created real power in the unions. The unions have historically offered unemployment and other benefits for its workers (I don't know how these look today), making them more resilient to declines. These benefits are partially or fully subsidized by the state through the union. The downside, of course, is that they could be attacked through the state. The upside is that the social democracy directly acts through the unions, the worker's base of power, keeping them organized. That is MORE of a non-reformist reform than many alternatives, like just having the state give social programs directly, leaving the door open for workers to be disorganized and living off of the good graces of the state, which then inevitably gets attacked even more viciously than in the alternative trade union model because the workers are more organized in that system by the very act of being eligible for those benefits.

So I know it is often maligned as "not real socialism" and prone to its own contradictions, but I think the model of transformation that most matches what we've been historically familiar with which can secure a base of material/political power that is lasting is the refinement and expansion of co-ops. They exist at the margins of capital's contradictions, exactly where the first world multi-nationals start abandoning workers in the intense competition of the globalized economy the co-op promises to give people statistically higher paying jobs with less precarity. They are also within the current framework of laws or can be easily accommodated through political action. They also act on the same pressure that acted in the transition from serfdom, the deprivation of the capitalist class of its means of extraction. As in, the more co-ops exist, the less equity available for capitalists to trade in. Their theoretical expansion to a critical point will literally render capitalists money lenders exclusively. They also remove labor to a sector of the economy that is increasingly difficult for capital to access even through higher wages, because there are non-monetary benefits to being a part of the co-op. This mirrors the English peasantry who would actually attempt to gain freehold status even when the freeholds may have largely been working on unfriendly land in almost below subsistence conditions. The peasants wanted it anyways, because they wanted the dignity associated with no longer having to do labor for the lord, or be restricted in their movements and be unable to appeal to the courts. That set of enticements aren't SO extreme with co-ops, but there are some studies which demonstrate co-op workers tend to feel more attachment to their businesses and more pride in what they do.

That isn't to say there should be no party or no unions, but just that I don't think they have the same MATERIAL underpinnings to their strength which change the landscape. Parties either sit around waiting for a crisis to try to seize power, or they try to use the state to enforce material change. But in either case power already rests with the capitalists, they have the advantage. To use the state to enforce material changes when the workers are essentially dis-empowered as it is most often results in concessions by capital, as said before, rather than non-reformist reforms (though capital can be duped into non-reformist reforms). We already went over the problems inherent in unions. But with a material base of power in the form of property already held in common by the workers, which is unassailable unless the bourgeoisie capitulate to total reaction (a real possibility) and dismantle their own laws by expropriating the workers, the party has a basis for greater electoral movements and leftist power can have a bulwark in the cooperative sector for when unions may wane or deteriorate during crises.

When that power is at its peak, the left makes counter moves on capital that it can't fully reconcile with its loss of political power. We take big moves like ending the public trade of equity or mandating that all public corporations be headed by a majority of workers, some want to ban interest, nationalize the banks, etc.

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Oh, and as a last addition the building power of co-ops will naturally expose class relations, which is not analogous to the example of feuadalism because here is obviously where capital stands unique. Capitalism hides class relations, whereas they were obvious to the serfs. The serfs didn't necessarily have widely held revolutionary beliefs about the overthrow of the lords, but they knew the lords had power and it was through the extraction of their surplus that they maintained their power.

But if co-ops become widespread enough capital could react through retaliatory legislation when it is understood that this growing model represents a threat to their ability to trade in ownership and procure labor. However, assaults on the co-operative sector legislatively will be transparently an attempt to disincentive their expansion. There could only be one possible reason for this, so it will be obvious to all that there is a class struggle occurring over who gets to own the MoP. So assuming it got to that point, class consciousness would start generating itself naturally among the worker-owners as a matter of their direct self-preservation.

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Socialism or Barbarism?

Barbarism! Hail Odin.

The Great General would not have approved of this nonsense.

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It's time to return Jews to their promised land…in a pit about 250m down.

Great posts, not sure I agree entirely with you because your line of logic could be taken to a conclusion similar to that of Postone's, or rather, it seems to have already accepted some of his conclusions and is attempting to navigate a path through them. Your writing style and ideas sound familiar, but I can't put my finger on it.

My writing style feels super sloppy to me because I knew the post I wanted to make was going to be big but I didn't want to put the effort into editing it.

As for Postone, I actually haven't read him but know of him and recently wanted to read him. I started feeling more favorable towards the co-op model recently because of a couple of parallel coincidences that pushed me there, but I definitely want to scrutinize it because it was a really recent connection of thoughts. I had just been reading more in the past month about the fall of serfdom, which I'm continuing looking into, and I was listening to a Zero Squared podcast with some Platypus guy. I don't normally listen to Doug Lain's stuff, but I was bored in the car and threw it on without knowing who he was talking too. The Platypus guy was talking about failures of the new left, the need for a new party, but also the inability to really build it now because of a left that was allowed to wither, and that therefore a good object of action was to rebuild a "civil society" through mutual aid type activities pushing the government out of the loop. Sounded very anarchistic to me, and while I agreed with the general sentiment of alternative institutions and felt that idealized anarchist spirit of a big community just helping each other out, I always feel this kind of things sounds weak and unrealistic. Partially because of experience, I've been in some local parties and seen their mutual aid attempts, and even the people who deeply care are fickle in how they can show up to help because of life obligations. These usually only increase as they age. This seems to be a result of the fact that people are forced to reproduce their class position 70% of their waking life. Then you have all of the other realities that can come about, like kids and commute and whatever else, and soon you are a burn out who desperately wants change but barely has the means to actualize. In contrast, the big capital owners can actualize even their most marginal of interests because their claims to property allow them to wield immense amount of labor power. They even have a gravity to them, whereby people start believing in the ideologies favorable to the capital owners because it seems like an opportunity to make money (ie, wagie capital ideologues or right wing media types who authentically hold pro-capital beliefs. Arguably even phenomenon like subjugating yourself to deprivations and indignities in pursuit of celebrity).

But anyways, this coincided with my deeper reading of serfdom to produce that whole line of thinking about searching for certain points of weakness. One would be an area that is either already allowed within the current legal structure and its logic, or maybe is allowed to an extent but it isn't so hard to imagine it being expanded, which reduces the legal rights of capital to a means of extracting surplus. Another would be securing legal rights for workers to their means of subsistence in a way that is integrated into the "basis" of the system. As in, for feudalism from what I've read this far I'd say freeholds were in a more secure position as freeholds than, say, if they somehow secured a form of "welfare" from the crown itself. This is because even though freeholds were still at the bottom of the pyramid, they were higher in status than the villeins and so called descendants of "slaves", with hereditary rights to their land being guaranteed. They had laid out a spot for themselves on the ladder, and for the ancient laws this macro level of fixed hierarchy itself was so foundational that it had to be respected. Court documents in England in respect to villeins or other servile peasants trying to sue their lords for some kind of concession would show lords arguing that the servile peasant had to be subject to his law or else the entire divine structure of society was going to be undermined.

So I kind of naturally drifted to one model I was aware of, the co-op, because I know that it is a more foundational form of claim to one's livelihood than state programs since property is sacred in capitalism. I also know it has the potential to squeeze the horizon of capital in that sense I mentioned before, it removes their access to markets for equity.

holy shit i ranted again/2

I actually fucked up and didn't copy my next post properly, so maybe this will actually be brief.

I do see the inherent problems of co-ops in that there is nothing guaranteeing that they don't employ labor. As it is, the larger co-ops get the more they seem to employ labor. I'd like to think we can remedy this with certain structures from the outset that guarantee a level of power and inclusion to employees which can diminish the ability of worker owners to start exploiting them. For instance, the well known critique of Mondragon is precisely that they employ large amounts of foreign labor that has no ownership rights in the company. But, Mondragon also did not have its beginnings in leftist movements, from what I understand. The clerical guy who started it was considering it a practical matter of securing the livelihoods of the people living there, not really a way to slowly debase capital or whatever. I'd hope there may be ways we could bring a left wing co-op movement directly under our wing such that they are nearly inseperable from left wing culture and practice, more like the Kibbutz maybe in that sense (though that is a straight up commune).

But I wouldn't say I was necessarily trying to reach a conclusion in terms of co-ops. I was trying to substantiate that idea that there could be this gap in material power somewhere that mirrored the feudalist one, but co-ops specifically I don't have any particular love for. Once I started being led to them as a possibility I absolutely did start poking them for benefits, though, which could create issues. I'd like to analyze parties and unions more for positive material outcomes, because another thing I had read about the abolition of serfdom was how it was easier in the west than the east due to village level and regional institutions of organization of the peasants (Brenner's work). Brenner attributed this difference at least somewhat to a trajectory of development that was more colonial in the east, leading to a kind of stilted distance between peasants and highly organize lands under the lords. In the west, on the other hand, lords may have overlapping claims, and the organic growth of claims led to a disorganization that was often resolved by necessity at the village level with peasants coming together and agreeing on who would do what in which areas and what times to create a successful harvest. This sense in which organization itself contributed to successful resistance is important, but I think it still relies on that sense of contradictory gaps in power that need to be teased out properly to best ensure the organizations last and are highly effective.

I liked it, and hope you'll try again in a more worthy thread.
Any ideas on what sort of industries co-ops could succeed in today? What kind of material power?

This Is Not A Program should be required Zig Forums reading

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Material power as ownership of large amounts of diverse capital to create independence for the working class, in the form of their own reproduction. A lot of co-ops exist now, but their problem is that they aren't particularly left-wing institutions, and they aren't interconnected in any way. The farmers behind Sunkist are a co-op, for instance, but I'm pretty sure they all hire labor to work on their farms. I don't know the scale of it, but when you look to a behemoth like Mondragon the proportion of workers who are non-owners to worker-owners is pretty high.

But I get the sense that the easiest place to start is labor intensive service industries. Software, design, other kinds of relatively skilled work that can have little overhead (a co-op of private tutors/teachers? Real estate brokers?). I don't want to get too cringy with this because I'm not even trying to suggest a specific, impassioned path right now, but I'd imagine given the limitations of something like I'm describing (not everybody can be a designer or software engineer immediately due to lack of skills) that if you wanted to get started on some kind of wider leftist project to start building this form of power you'd basically need a kind of politically directed group of people who are making their business decisions according to this larger goal. Like a vanguard party of co-op formation (there is the probable cringe).

One form of this directed strategy would be how to use instances of success to diversify into either things which are more capital intensive, or to really focus on accruing to your collective some more reliable forms of property that can get you rents. In the latter case I'm talking mainly about IP, or B2B SaaS that can kind of tie up the operations of larger business entities into your maintenance of their systems. In the other case of drawing in more fixed capital, it can be a good hedge against failures since you may find yourself in a position to have assets you can sell off if something isn't working, but you're also looking to use your money to get into businesses with higher barriers to entry, and somehow flesh out what you did into other areas that include low-skilled labor just to start expanding their access to this model. If you could get a regional co-op federation that starts establishing/sucking up cafes and boutiques or whatever, these little kind of shitjobs a lot of young people have, I think you're moving towards building a real culture on the ground level of life experience of expecting something from your employment or having a new understanding of how your private life interplays with your social work. That is a little vague but once again, I didn't intend to make some giant rant so I'm gonna fuck off for a bit back to work.

Labor aristocracy created inept unions that were easily defeated, the petit bourgeoisie created jokes like the SDS.

The working class isn't good but lets not act like the other classes are better. No one is more reactionary than a petite bourgeois man who sees his little bit of status threatened.