/edu/ - Education

Has anyone here read any of post-marxist Cornelius Castoriadis' critiques of Marx? I feel that in some places he gets the criticisms right, and in other places very wrong. Note that Castoriadis still remained a kind of anarchist.

Something I feel he got right:
- Whereas Marx claims that tech reduces surplus, by claiming that fixed costs would increase over time, and should lead to a reduction in variable costs like labour, Castoriadis criticises this heavily and says that tech provides opportunities to reduce fixed costs, and subsequently can actually increases the number of jobs

Neutral on this one (looking to hear what other people think)
- Castoriadis is highly critical of dialectics as a whole and suggests that Marx is claiming that simply because two things have tension with each other that they are opposites. Especially in the modern world where the lines between workers and capitalists have blurred such that we are all a sort of 'executant' now (think for example, a worker who owns company stock in the company they work out, takes on administrative tasks, or acts as a sort of middleman like a middle manager) and therefore suggests that bureaucracy is the largest enemy we have today that actually unites us on a human level, rather than individual classes of people. Institutions are socially constructed but have taken on a life of their own due to our alienation.

I think he's definitely wrong on this one:
- Tendency of rate of profit to fall. He analyzed this after the war when it was going back up, but it has continued to fall even lower after that point. However he definitely was right to suggest that capitalism was far more resilient than Marx made out

https://files.libcom.org/files/cc_psw_v2.pdf
I'm taking most of these points from 'Modern Capitalism and Revolution'. Castoriadis essentially argues that Marx is outdated and that the system has already transformed from a simple capitalist struggle of 'the one who does not own but works' and 'the one who owns and does not work' into something a lot messier, which Keynes was (according to him) better equipped to analyse.

every time a liberal discovers that the molotov ribbentrop agreement happened, they think they've discovered some hidden gem, and the key to deboonking communism and making it a pariah in the arena of public opinion.

Perhaps they are correct.

See, the real truth behind the molotov ribbentrop pact or the winter war doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that the USSR was trying to buy time, cut off potential corridors of german invasion, etc. etc. What matters is that the liberals have a simple, and easily disseminated narrative that can be repeated much faster than the counter-arguments. In short, they have a "Big Lie."

The "big lie" is a propaganda technique that involves telling a bold, often outrageous untruth as if it were fact. The idea behind this method is that by making such outlandish claims, they will stick in people's minds more than smaller lies because of their shock value, even if there is no evidence for them. Over time, these lies can become widely accepted as truth simply due to repetition. This concept was famously used during World War II by Nazi Germany's leader Adolf Hitler who said: “The bigger the lie, the more easily it will be believed.” The term has since been adopted by other groups and individuals in order to manipulate public opinion on various issues.

The MR Pact is a "big lie." How is it told? It is told in a very simple form: Hitler and a Stalin admired each other, came together and rape poland, and only ever fought in WW2 because they disagreed on how best to divide poland.

With this big lie, you have a narrative where the last world war was entirely caused by "National Socialists" and "Regular Socialists" coming together to rape "Innocent Poland." and then the brave liberal democracies with their freedom-loving capitalist economies intervening to save everyone from the holocaust. In this narrative stalin is an opportunist who joined the winning side.

This is how most people in the EU/US/UK/Australia/Canada/New Zealand have come to see WW2. Why? Because it is convenient for their broader anti-proletarian agenda of keeping their economies in private hands.

Has anyone read picrel yet? Is it any good, or just more Applebaum tier trash? Obviously I'm not expecting a Leftist take, but anything critical of the usual "the people rose up to overthrow le evil tyranny" narrative would be good, even from the right. I think I heard the WarNerd guys rexerence it, so thought maybe it's not complete shit.

Mencius Moldbug begins with a great diagnosis of the modern state of affairs which calls back to the work of Debord and Castoriadis: nobody seems to 'own' (by which he means, to be responsible for) the state. He wishes to re-unite property with its owner, such that control and ownership once again become 'the same'.

>So this is the formalist manifesto: that the US is just a corporation. It is not a mystic trust consigned to us by the generations. It is not the repository of our hopes and fears, the voice of conscience and the avenging sword of justice. It is just an big old company that holds a huge pile of assets, has no clear idea of what it’s trying to do with them, and is thrashing around like a ten-gallon shark in a five-gallon bucket, red ink spouting from each of its bazillion gills.

>To a formalist, the way to fix the US is to dispense with the ancient mystical horseradish, the corporate prayers and war chants, figure out who owns this monstrosity, and let them decide what in the heck they are going to do with it. I don’t think it’s too crazy to say that all options—including restructuring and liquidation—should be on the table.

>Whether we’re talking about the US, Baltimore, or your wallet, a formalist is only happy when ownership and control are one and the same. To reformalize, therefore, we need to figure out who has actual power in the US, and assign shares in such a way as to reproduce this distribution as closely as possible.

However in this argument he reveals his remaining faith in Hoppean natural law, which even Mises scoffs at in his book on socialism, quite blatantly admitting, like Kropotkin, that property *is* theft. The leviathan cannot be owned (in his sense of being equal to 'control'), as it's too large and bureaucratic. This is a phantom ideal. People will own/control what they can, and fail to own/control what they can't. The 'cathedral' he talks about is nothing other than the state of affairs in which the leviathan *cannot* be controlled. It cannot even be 'liquidated', because it is a huge Nothing, as all property is.

>A formalist is only happy when ownership and control are one and the same.
reveals the implicit ideal that
>everything must remain under control!
but it can't happen. Some things must always fall by tPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

The history of philosophy is the history of the will-to-power coming to know itself and affirm its own validity against the lies of sophistry; a therapeutic endeavour of spirit against idealistic bullshit which produce narratives that serve the powers that be. In this regard, the task of philosophy has been fulfilled, completed by Nietzsche & Marx, and the domination of nature by man has found its final vessel in cybernetics. As Wittgenstein writes, "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." Philosophy itself has been embroiled in an endless struggle against itself over the same questions for centuries, but never coming any closer to real answers to those questions, with each generation it recedes into more meta-argumentation than before.Given that philosophy has been completed, what remains of the initial questions which plagued the pre-socratics? What is it to be? Why is there something rather than nothing? These are questions philosophy has actually left outstanding, problems that it just isn't equipped to deal with, as the pursuit of 'wisdom' (which reveals itself to merely be a facet of the will-to-power).

Let us ask the question another way. What is the will-to-power? The will-to-power is the actualising force of the ego onto the surroundings. In modern life, the world accelerates faster and faster as humans seek more and more to actualize their will onto the world. The lie we tell ourselves is that the faster we go, the more we can experience and enjoy. The active element of human life becomes frantic, restless, directionless, a mere reflection of the passionless bourgeois consumerism of the times. Though we experience 'leisure' it is nothing more than the brief respite from work, in fact many are compelled to work through this leisure time (productivity culture). We see that the vita activa without the contemplative element leads to a dead, unreflective life, and those who live under it become mere sheep. The man-as-labour metaphysics is not merely descriptive but prescriptive. You WILL work. You WILL be your labour.

As Byung-Chul Han writes
>"History – which, according to Hegel, is a history of freedom – will not be completed as long as we remain the slaves of work. The domination of work makes us unfree. The opposition between master and slave cannot be sublated by everyone becoming a slave of work. It will only be removed if the slave actually transfPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Apologies for any lapses in my grammar as English is not my first language.

I teach Marx's "Wage Labour and Capital" and "Value Price and Profit" in our native language, as part of a trade union movement, where we apprise the laborers with legal rights and theoretical foundations (as compared to "bread and butter unions").

Two questions are usually asked by the workers:
First, doesn't the "risk" taken by the capitalist (in not selling product or selling them below "profit margins") entitle them to a profit?

I'm aware that Marx has a manuscript on this, titled: "Bourgeois Conception of Profit as Reward for Risk" where he paints a dialogue between the worker and farmer. But I'm not so good at the English used here, and so I'd like to ask if my understanding is correct:

Am I correct in saying that because the worker also bears a risk when he sells his labor power to the capitalist (when Marx says: "The workman will he thrown out onto the street if the product is unsalable; and if it falls for long below the market-price, his wages will be brought down below the average and short time will be worked. It is he, therefore, that runs the greatest risk"), this also means that the laborer (seller of his labor power) should ask the capitalist to pay him more, just as the capitalist (as a seller of the finished good) asks the buyer in a market to pay him more?

I do give them an answer, but it's more along the lines of "risk alone is insufficient because there's also the risk of selling more, and in a huge company, profits are basically assured"). But of course, in a smaller enterprise (like a small restaurant chain), the capitalist still has a chance of losing everything and having to pay his creditors.

The workers usually follow this question up with: "what about our family's store?" Since any of their savings go to maintaining a small store (selling at profit). They usually employ someone from the community (or their children) to be paid way below minimum wage. They ask, if they want to pay their "employees." So in a way, they're also exploiting and thus (albeit in a micro and informal economy scale) not very different from their own employers?

Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

I understand the value of pure theory since that's the only tool we have for shaping ideas which where not put into practice or not properly investigated. However, when the body of scientific literature is ever expanding and more and more data is being available, where is the political theory that is backed with evidence?
This is just my preliminary thoughts but Im just wondering if this is already being explored in leftists circles. As someone who read theory before but stopped, looking back on it too much was just pure speculation, "source: trust me bro" and "its common sense" type of stuff. If we really want to claim that we are scientific, shouldnt we apply empirical rigor to our body of work, shouldnt we abide by the hierarchy of evidence (be praised) as much as possible instead of being content with Freud-level of theory?

If class conflict is a reality, why aren't politics divided along class lines already, even if immature in consciousness, what Lenin called "trade union consciousness". Instead politics is divided between different coalitions involving different sectors and industries of capitalists and workers, divided by education, race, religious, ethnicity, geography, and seemingly everything BUT actual class.

And I know people blame muh liberal idpol but this is lazy IMO. This is really a schizo tier conspiracy, the alex-jones-ism of the left. Liberals aren't capable of socially engineering class conflict out of capitalism's existence through mass media or anything else. Its the path of least resistance to just make coalitions out of existing groups of people. Liberal idpol is a consequence and coping political strategy over the lack of class politics, not the cause of it.

Doesn't the fact that the proletariat hasn't emerged as a united political constituency disprove the basic thesis of Marxism? There's no clear evidence that the proletariat is the revolutionary subject, or that a revolutionary subject even exists under capitalism?

A long time ago we had a very interesting thread on the question of what consciousness is. Perhaps we can have another interesting conversation like that. Share your thoughts and ideas of what consciousness is and how it arises.

Women are not biologically disadvantaged compared to men and men are not disadvantaged compared to women. Although most of the issues women face from their reproductive system are true men also have to bear the burdens of dealing with only one source of an x and y chromosome which can lead to many genetic abnormalities, illnesses and other problems, some that prey directly on that Y chromosome. Coincidentally men are actually more emotional due to centuries of neglect since the Holocene was initiated and have far more issues with impulsivity that can lead to self destructive decision making. The author was wrong to believe male privilege extends to a biological level