Vivek Chibber Anonymous 25-04-23 22:19:09 No. 13924 [Last 50 Posts]
how has the board missed the work of Vivek Chibber?
>dunks on pomo leftists >dunks on thirdworldists >dunks on defeatist Christoid Western Marxists and their deathism and glorification of suffering >the reason India and Africa are so poorly developed isn't because they're overexploited but because the peasantry has not had their land taken from them, that is, because they haven't been exploited enough <Rescuing the Left From Its Obsession With Culture — Vivek Chibber https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=EQ5gLuk06TU <Slavoj Zizek vs Vivek Chibber: What Is Ideology? https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=rLNSzxzEbKU this man is the personification of this board and I refuse to believe otherwise
Anonymous 25-04-23 22:52:09 No. 13934
>>13932 >maupin in the comments 👌
>Was this written by a worker in a wealthy country like the United States by any chance? oh boy here we go
>Ok, JaKKKobin >cracker detected >read settlers read settlers read settlers read settlers read settlers >noooo don't advocate for building socialism in the most technologically advanced area in the world think about the brownerinoes!! Langley pls
Anonymous 25-04-23 22:57:37 No. 13937
>>13934 >>13933 Its always odd days when you wake up with Maupin on your side on a particulate matter. He is a retarded russian paid multipolaristoid but he at least understands the basics of imperialism
>company gets big >uses money and influence to bomb and destroy competition abroad >undermines local industries for own private benefits even if it is a net loss for the economy or even the bourgoies class as a whole because the bourgoiesie isnt a single block and the total destruction of capital in country B doesnt matter for capitalist in country A if they can use the freed up land and people to do whatever their company wants, causing poverty by imperialism >workers can never be paid more than the produce so first world workers arent paid off Cockshott, Chibber and Maupin all agree, imperialism is conscious underdevelopment, income differences are a factor of productivity (machination levels) and unionization grade
Anonymous 25-04-23 22:59:41 No. 13940
>>13935 >>the wealth definitely trickles down, imperial core proles! you LOVE neoliberalism! Thats not what he says.
You can claw back a lot more pie, if the pie is bigger. A worker in Nigeria can get 90% of his produced value while an american workers gets 10% but because an american worker operates the SuperWeaver20000 that 10% is more in terms of exchange value. If the americans unionised and got 90% like the other one they would get fat stacks (like in the 50s)
Anonymous 25-04-23 23:00:23 No. 13941
>>13938 I am being bullied by anglos again.
I have no respect for your language
Anonymous 25-04-23 23:02:32 No. 13945
>>13936 >He's a Jacobin Trot so?
>>13937 totally agree
>>13939 can't decrease the value embodied in the land without yeeting the peasants anon. critical support for comrade Chibber in his noble struggle to mechanize sub-Saharan agriculture
Anonymous 25-04-23 23:03:25 No. 13946
>>13940 Now look at the stats for the % of americans who work on the superweaver10000 you damn fossil
You ever heard of the service industry?
Anonymous 25-04-23 23:05:46 No. 13947
>>13946 (me)
This is without even approaching the issue of debts and rents, you're so fucking illiterate
Anonymous 25-04-23 23:06:37 No. 13950
>>13946 Yeah a lot less people operate weaving machines in the west than in africa. Thats because they are more productive an hour, so the rest do other shit to make more shit. Thats why there is more material wealth to be taken back by workers through union power.
Its not that hard.
Unless you're seriously saying that all the profits in the third world are being used to pay first world workers more than they produce. Hard mode: dont say "muh starbucks" workerisms
Anonymous 25-04-23 23:14:26 No. 13956
>>13953 Not an argument.
Financialisation of the economy and extraction of money from the third world doesnt magically end up in the hands of first world workers, unless either
>they are paid more than they produce or
>trickle down economics is actually real, settler, long live chairman mao and ronald reagan Anonymous 25-04-23 23:22:35 No. 13966
>>13956 >Financialization of the economy and extraction of money from the third world doesn't magically end up in the hands of first world workers I'm saying it's sucked up by the importers, by rents, by debts, by their employers.
There are people here who do get some of the plunder but most people are not lucky enough to work as an HR person at amazon or as a cop or military contractor or something.
Anonymous 25-04-23 23:23:33 No. 13968
>>13966 So you agree then that the idea of "all of the first world workers are paid off by the spoils of imperialism" is abolutely retarded?
Then you agree with the argument of comrade Chibber.
Anonymous 25-04-23 23:24:08 No. 13969
>>13961 no. I will support the bourgeois state in which I live in whatever inane wars they start
>kids no one on this board has sex and you know it
bloodgasm 25-04-23 23:33:51 No. 13976
>>13932 While I agree with some of what he says, that interview was absolute trash. Literally said Kautsky was right and Lenin was wrong. Shit that would be shit on by 90% of this site if it was posted here.
To say there is no labor aristocracy is one of the stupidest things one can say. Its willful ignorance. It exists, but is definitely not the majority.
Also just starting off and saying there is not a connection between capitalism and imperialism, is fucking dumb. Idk. Trot shit tbh.
Anonymous 25-04-23 23:40:14 No. 13978
>>13950 >Western labour is more productive No. Just no. Is a bus driver in the west/north more productive than a bus driver in the South? Of course not but they get paid less because of political arrangements not economic ones.
>>13952 >Low value labor power This is the ultimate in western arrogance. Imagine being so out of touch that you call sweatshop workers and people mining rare earth minerals for your laptop 'low value'. Who the fuck is your thought leader on this? Please read John Smith instead.
Anonymous 25-04-23 23:42:35 No. 13979
>>13978 >No. Just no anon this is literally the case
>This is the ultimate in western arrogance. Imagine being so out of touch that you call sweatshop workers and people mining rare earth minerals for your laptop 'low value' anon the only way for companies that operate in these areas, with shitty means of production, and still making a profit, year after year, is for the labour power to be of low value
Anonymous 25-04-23 23:45:50 No. 13980
>>13951 I mean it comes from Lenin and I believe Engels also referred to a similar concept when talking about England in his day. The answer to the question of whether a labor aristocracy exists in the United States seems like an obvious "yes," but I don't think it's also so simple or black/white that we can reduce the entire American population to that. It seemed significantly stronger in the past but has also been eroding as the rate of worker exploitation rises, which is contributing to political instability and its the dynamics of imperialism and capitalism itself that are causing it, like "what will make you rise will also make you fall."
>>13948 One of the things the Settlers types (and ironically Maupin too I think, or some of the people in his crowd) say about the "DSA left" (or a particular type that was drawn to it) is that it's basically an attempt to restore a declining labor aristocracy which is why it compromises with imperialism. Not to pick on that particular organization since it's more like a loose confederation of a bunch of different people with a bunch of other different people who have been doing entryism in it, but I think that does explain a tendency on the left. But the catch is that MAGA is that, too, but in the far right form. Two forms (left/right) of the same kinda thing.
>>13956 Someone just mentioned him but I think the counter-argument to this comes from "Imperialism in the 21st Century" by John Smith which goes into how exchange is manipulated by the role of the dollar as the world's reserve currency to settle cross-border transactions, which creates a system of global labor arbitrage, and the amount of value transfer from the exploitation of poor countries by the advanced capitalist economies is masked by neo-classical concepts of productivity, "trade deficits" and the like. It looks like poverty wages in Bangladesh in Kenya are due to lower levels of productivity, but this is an illusion since a lot of what is being counted in the GDP of the advanced capitalist countries is more the value-added of non-production, than the actual production of products.
>>13966 Not to get all "Starbucks" workerist about it, but a retail sales clerk at an H&M in one of the major capitalist countries is paid considerably more than the textile worker who made the clothes. On a different level, the workers who designed the brands or concepts in an office building in downtown Stockholm.
>>13973 It's just not one or the other. It might be better to say something like, the labor aristocracy exists within the first world / imperial core.
>>13975 That's another things. The U.S. recently for example has been raising interest rates, which lowers the cost of its own imports as the dollar rises in value relative to other currencies. This reduces its own inflation, benefiting American consumers, while raising the costs for other countries' imports as their currencies fall. And those imports are taxed by the U.S. government which takes a little bit off the top and helps pay for a variety of things, the military, pensions, etc.
Anonymous 25-04-23 23:53:10 No. 13983
>>13979 Begging you to explain what you mean by 'low value' are you literally just equating the money they get paid with the value of the labour?
Are you seriously, unironically saying that a Starbucks worker in the north is adding more value to the commodity chain than a coffee bean farmer in the South?
Once again I am asking you where you are getting this theory from because John Smith absolutely demolishes this in IIT21C
Anonymous 25-04-23 23:53:57 No. 13984
>>13978 >Let's compare a cherry picket job Pay levels in an area because of competition.
Let's actually compare
>Farmers >Factory workers >Weavers >Lumberjacks >Foundry workers >Mining All of these have astronomically higher productivy in the west. Not because of "hard work" like you seem to think, it's not some emotional attack on lazynrss or whatever, it's because these core industries are far more automated in the west, meaning that a lot more is produced per hour of work, meaning that at equal level of exploitation, workers in areas of the world with higher automation get more material wealth as pay.
Anonymous 25-04-23 23:55:40 No. 13985
>>13976 >Also just starting off and saying there is not a connection between capitalism and imperialism, is fucking dumb. That isn't what he said though. He said people shouldn't mistake them as the same thing, that imperialism is not just international capitalism but is more than that.
<VIVEK CHIBBER Imperialism should be distinguished from capitalism. Marxists have a robust theory of capitalism as a system in which one class exploits another, and exploitation doesn’t have to be confined to national boundaries. It can occur across borders. So imperialism has to be something more than just exploitation across national borders, because that is just capitalism.
Anonymous 25-04-23 23:57:23 No. 13986
>>13983 I mean that it takes less labour to reproduce them
>Are you seriously, unironically saying that a Starbucks worker in the north is adding more value to the commodity chain than a coffee bean farmer in the South? these are different jobs
Anonymous 26-04-23 00:00:41 No. 13988
>>13983 The value, in terms of money than can be made from the labour by the capitalist, in Bangladesh is lower than the west. This is because in Bangladesh there aren't highly advanced factories connected to a network of other highly advanced factories needed to maintain it connected through a high quality infrastructure network. One hour of Bangladeshi work cannot produce as much as an hour in America because there's no effective machines to operate compared to the USA. That's also why an hour of labour in Appalachia or Poland is worth less than an hour of labour in the Netherlands or new York.
This is the difference in productivity. Its caused by machines and environment. And because there is barely any value to be made by bangladeshi labour it is one of the few places where labour intensive work (sowing shit by hand) is economically feasable within capitalism.
Anonymous 26-04-23 00:57:57 No. 13998
>>13924 we haven't missed him, he was huge here when /leftypol/ was more anti idpol.
However he is sort of a niche thinker, that is to say he's more associated with oldschool stupidpol shit meaning critiquing liberal identity politics from a Marxist perspective.
Anonymous 26-04-23 00:59:54 No. 13999
>>13983 >Are you seriously, unironically saying that a Starbucks worker in the north is adding more value to the commodity chain than a coffee bean farmer in the South? Not that anon but…
How many cups of coffee do you think is in the daily haul of a coffee picker?
<A good picker averages approximately 100 to 200 pounds of coffee cherries a day, which will produce 20 to 40 pounds of coffee beans. t.
https://www.ncausa.org/about-coffee/10-steps-from-seed-to-cup Depending on the size of a cup, you're looking at about 30 cups of coffee per pound, which puts the number in the range of 600-1200 cups of coffee worth of coffee cherries harvested per working day. If you look up the number of cups of coffee made by a barista per day it's in the mid to high hundreds (assuming an 8 hour shift usually, for instance a typical seeming number was about 80 cups per hour per barista or 640 per 8 hours). So if we're talking in terms of value added per cup of coffee, the socially-necessary labor time is actually pretty similar, certainly same order of magnitude (at least for the job of picking which is probably the most labor intensive since the other steps like drying and packing all involve more mechanization and probably even less labor per pound of coffee). It may actually require more labor time per cup from the barista depending on details like the length of the working day, but looking into some stats for coffee production it seems like standard weeks are about 40 hours (pic 2).
https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_protect/---protrav/---travail/documents/projectdocumentation/wcms_765134.pdf The data is from a UN agency so take it with a grain of salt.
Of course, the conditions being labored under are obviously different (outdoors in the heat vs indoors in the air conditioning) but that's not what you asked for. In terms of value (labor time) added to the commodity it seems like coffee pickers and baristas are kind of similar.
Anonymous 26-04-23 08:16:46 No. 14005
>>13997 >These people don't exist in isolation. quite, which is why this whole "northern workers are more productive because they have machines!" argument that people are making isn't sufficient because it is ignoring the global value chains that very likely produced those machines.
What's happening in this thread is that people are looking at the surface price of a commodity in a market and conflating that with "value". yes this is exchange value, but in terms of raw use values, the Southern laborers are producing more, so when the fruits of their labour get exported for cheap prices, pushed down by imperial multinationals this is a theft of surplus value from them. This appropriated value is then used to subsidize jobs in the North.
>Examination of unit labor costs of key countries in both the center and the periphery of the world economy demonstrates that, in twenty-first-century imperialism, multinational corporations are able to carry out a process of unequal exchange in which they get, in effect, more labor for less, while the excess surplus obtained is often misleadingly attributed to “innovative,” financial, and value-extractive economic activities taking place at the center of the system. Indeed, much of the immense value capture associated with the global labor arbitrage circumvents production in the center economies, at the expense of workers there who have seen their jobs offshored. This has contributed to the amassing of vast pyramids of wealth disconnected from economic growth in the center economies themselves.15 Much of this draining of value from the periphery takes the form of unrecorded illicit flows. According to one recent pioneering study of global financial flows by the Centre for Applied Economics of the Norwegian School of Economics and the United States-based Global Financial Integrity, net resource transfers from developing and emerging economies to rich countries were estimated at $2 trillion in 2012 alone.https://monthlyreview.org/2019/03/01/global-commodity-chains-and-the-new-imperialism/ Chart from
https://monthlyreview.org/2015/07/01/imperialism-and-the-transformation-of-values-into-prices/#en20 Anonymous 26-04-23 08:20:51 No. 14006
>in terms of its productivity of use-values, the labor of Bangladeshi barbers and bus drivers is no less productive than that of their Belgian counterparts. But when we consider the exchange-value of their product, the quantity of money with which haircuts or bus journeys in Belgium and in Bangladesh are equated, we obtain a very different result—barbers and bus drivers in Belgium produce far more value added than in Bangladesh. Both definitions are true, even though they contradict each other, even though, according to the formal logic that hobbles bourgeois economics, one of them must be false. >Things get considerably more complex when we turn to analyze the productivity of industrial workers in the two countries, whose relative capacities to produce both use-values and exchange-values are significantly affected by differences in the technologies they set in motion. But the same contradictory definition of productivity applies to the labor of industrial workers as it does to service workers. >Statistics on labor productivity, obtained by dividing the value added of a firm, industrial sector, or nation by its total workforce, are highly deceptive. Much of the alleged increase in labor productivity in the imperialist nations is an artifact resulting from the outsourcing of low value-added, labor-intensive production processes to low-wage countries
Anonymous 26-04-23 09:22:57 No. 14009
>>14008 you need to make this a concrete proposition. What industry are we talking about here. I am talking about global value chains of a single commodity, i.e. coffee beans, smartphones.
Your idea of a northern worker operating a machine pumping out parts, well sure, in abstract isolation that's more productive, but in a globalised system, the raw material and the parts that make that machine have likely come from Southern resources and labor.
Anonymous 26-04-23 09:58:08 No. 14011
>>14009 >What industry are we talking about here. As I've explained already, it's precisely that you cannot look at a single (cherry picked) commodity, because wages level out across an area. A bus driver is not going to drive a bus if the assembly line manufacturing job in a factory makes 10 times as much.
Differences in local wealth come from the fact that both western countries and third world countries can in many cases produce similar goods but because of higher automation grades the production per hour of labour is higher in those industries than the third world. This means that the third world will be driven out of industries that can happen at a technologically high level in the west and into either local resource production and manual intensity labour that has now become economically feasible for capitalists due to their lower wages. It's not about whether or not a coffee bean comes from X or Y place, it's about the *capacity* of their society or area to produce at similar levels to the west. The differences in productivity mean that even though the amount of hours worked in the west may be smaller, they produce, seemingly paradoxically, more than an hour of value per hour of work. That is because value is based on the snlt, the avarage time it takes to produce something, and the first world does export their products to the third and second world (see American and European agriculture being exported to Mexico and Africa). Conversely, workers in Bangladesh produce less than an hour of value per hour in those industries because they produce below the snlt.
This is also where the concept of unequal exchange has an aspect. More hours of third world labour are exchanged for less hours of first world labour. But this is (not just) because of colonial relations of power, but finds its root in productivity. Hence why if third world countries develop productive forces, their wealth increases even if they are still a client state.
This is why capitalism steals local value from the global South. Partly due to direct theft through profits and rent, partly due to this productivity difference. Tons of hours of work are lost due to being kept underdeveloped, hours that could be better spend on their society rather than trying to make up for their lack of development. And tons of hours of work are gained by the first world, simply due to them having better machinery. The solution is to develop the third world. A simple hypothetical way to rectify this under socialism is to have equal pay for equal hours of work, immediately showing areas of low productivity as areas to build up first. Under capitalism this is not as immediately incentivised because lower productivity is paid for by the workers in terms of dirt wages.
>the raw material and the parts that make that machine have likely come from Southern resources and labor.This has been covered already.
Anonymous 26-04-23 16:13:59 No. 14012
>>14011 Explain how the workers who pick coffee in the South are less productive than the Batista's who serve coffee in the North?
We're talking about value *chains* of production here not competing industries like in the 1960s
Anonymous 26-04-23 16:54:42 No. 14017
>>14012 >Explain how the workers who pick coffee in the South are less productive than the Batista's who serve coffee in the North? What do you
mean by productive? Because productivity in a Marxist sense refers to how much surplus (profit) the labor generates. Worker A could add more value through their labor than Worker B (say A:$80 vs B:$60 per hour), but if Worker B is paid less (A:$30 vs B:$5), they can be "more productive" because more of the value they produce goes into profit (A:$50 vs B:$55). Workers in the global south are more productive as a rule because they're paid so little, not because their labor just has more merit or something. There are workers in the global south who don't do a lot of labor (mainly due to lack of opportunity) and workers in the global north who work 100+ hour weeks. That's not what determines productivity.
Anonymous 26-04-23 17:04:32 No. 14021
>>14013 Bad faith kys
>>14016 >This is literally what right wing economists say to apologize for imperialism. Facts can be used to make false claims. Imperialism conciously keeps the third world underdeveloped.
>>14017 No. Productivity in Marxism is not "how much surplus value you make". It's the degree of how much stuff you make per hour of work compared to others.
Anonymous 26-04-23 17:08:46 No. 14022
>>14018 The 1st world mainly extracts value from the colonies through loans or from "investments" to buy ownership over means of production, not from taxes. Tariffs cost the importer money. They don't subsidize importation or make it cheaper, they make it more expensive. They exist to discourage imports and encourage domestic production.
>>14020 >It's the other dude who's saying 'Northern labors are more productive because they have fancy machines' That can be true in another sense (although maybe using "productive" wrong) since the labor saving devices available in one area can enable much greater production of material goods (and total revenues or profits), whereas workers trying to produce the same things in an area without those labor saving devices will not be able to produce as much with the same amount of labor.
Anonymous 26-04-23 17:14:17 No. 14023
>>14021 Not taxes on neo colonies, taxes on multinationals (admittedly these are being reduced across the board but they still exist)
As for labor saving devices yes of course if one capital has better technology they put the other out of business, but modern global capitalism doesn't work that way anymore on a political level, e.g. the tech for making iPhones is in China not the US.
Anonymous 27-04-23 07:38:44 No. 14029
>>14028 (me)
What do you think deindustrialisation is about?
Anonymous 27-04-23 19:32:54 No. 14030
>>13934 >most technologically advanced area Angloids have never had a good revolutionary movement, their parties have just been a sock puppet of the KGB and used to serve the interests of actually revolutionary states
Nobody in the third world gives a shit about retards like Browder and Maupin or follows anything written by Anglos, while everyone in your rich white boy academies reads "brownerinoes" and follows their ideologies like Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Deng, Ho Chi Minh, Hoxha, even Gonzalo.
Nobody in the third world argues over whether some nobody American or Brit is more correct, but everybody argues about Mao vs. Deng, Hoxha vs. Tito, etc. etc. The brownarinos in the Philippines are mogging your enlightened superior race in every way imaginable
The golden billion should be starved and nuked so the rest may live. The Anglo settler world will not lead humanity into socialism, it will be cucked and relegated to the dustbin of history.
Anonymous 28-04-23 09:15:24 No. 14034
>>14033 that's not how productivity works you stupid cuck
that's like saying a worker making stuff from gold is more productive than a worker making the same stuff from steel, just because the gold is more valuable
Anonymous 28-04-23 11:00:15 No. 14035
>>14030 NTA but don’t waste our time with idpol dick-waving.
>WESTOIIIIIIIIIIIIDS is just cheap rhetoric
Anonymous 28-04-23 11:12:43 No. 14043
>>14041 God's Guillotine will evaporate all the filth
Let us now pray for hellfire to rain down on every NATO country
Anonymous 28-04-23 11:17:07 No. 14048
>>14047 Ah it's you
liberal filth
Anonymous 28-04-23 11:19:54 No. 14050
>>14049 You are pathetic and not even trying to mask it.
Which is way the most disgusting way to be a pathetic liberal.
Anonymous 28-04-23 11:29:13 No. 14054
>>14053 You are just filth
You don't need a name
Anonymous 28-04-23 11:32:21 No. 14057
>>14056 No, but it’s very telling that you just admitted it right there.
What are you gonna do, go on another murder rant? Post a soyjak?
Anonymous 28-04-23 11:32:54 No. 14058
>>14057 Admit what you loon
that I hate liberals? Sure I'll admit to that.
Anonymous 28-04-23 11:34:37 No. 14060
>>14059 Sure whatever
Liberals need killing, it's just a fact
We can do this the easy way or the hard way
Anonymous 28-04-23 16:50:24 No. 14068
>>13975 >1) imperial value chains are taxed by northern governments and this is translated into welfare for their citizens That claim has been on /leftypol/ before. The counter-claim was:
<Customer pays tax. Then (some of) the tax goes back to the customer. Can you give an argument as to why the first claim is more accurate than the counter-claim?
>essentially subsidise labour in the North meaning people can work less hours and still consume as much One can likewise say that anything that costs more to produce in a poorer country (or is impossible to produce there) and that is imported from a richer country is subsidising the lifestyle of the people in the poorer country who now have to work less than they otherwise would have without that trade.
>>13978 >Is a bus driver in the west/north more productive than a bus driver in the South? What use value is a bus driver producing? A change of location (which also counts as a use value, so says Capital volume 2). Are the two bus drivers in your question producing the same? No, as that would require the drivers visiting the same stops. Which means they are producing different use values.
>>14011 >This is why capitalism steals local value from the global South. Partly due to direct theft through profits and rent, partly due to this productivity difference. Would you say then that the shittier the tech in the South is, and thus the lower the productivity there, the more the North benefits by extracting from the South?
Anonymous 28-05-23 18:30:27 No. 14072
>>14070 99% of western leftoids who go LOL WHITE WHITE WHITE are white themselves.
Meet a Communist from outside the first world like, you know, India where Chibber's from. They dont actually do this identitarian one up shit.
Anonymous 29-05-23 12:25:07 No. 14084
>>13976 Mostly agree, but I certainly think he's got a point when he says
>On the basis of this reasoning, Lenin and the Soviet Union, the latter particularly after 1945, lent support to nationalist movements that could be quite backward and right wing, as long as they were fighting against domination by a Western country in some way. So, for example, the insistence that the Communist Party of China support Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists, because they represented the “national bourgeoisie.” The justification was that by withdrawing from the imperialist chain, they would weaken the global capitalist system. Again, this was completely wrong. >The countries that were led by right-wing nationalist movements never tried to withdraw from the capitalist system. They ended up actually crushing their own workers’ parties using the language of nationalism. The Leninist parties weren’t very successful in opposing this because they held and abided by the same language. >The Leninist theory of imperialism is still used as a justification for Third World nationalism, which is not progressive in character. Some of the largest communist parties still abide by it, like the Indian, South African, and Philippine. This has been disastrous. The justification is: “We must first fight imperialism, then we’ll settle the national question.” But you can’t — you always have to fight both fights simultaneously. >You don’t hold the domestic class struggle in suspended animation while you’re fighting your imperialist enemy. There’s always a tussle going on as to which class will define the terms on which you gain your independence from colonialism or from imperialism. In this regard, the Leninist legacy did a lot of damage. >What’s ironic here was that Lenin was entirely correct in his criticism of the German Social Democratic Party and of the Second International, their decision to vote for the war, and of the workers’ parties across Europe that lent their support to it. So his political conclusion was right. He was entirely correct in saying that the Third International should support every anti-colonial movement in its entirety. But the theory of capitalism underlying it was flawed. You can come to the same political conclusions using a more accurate theory of capitalism, and of capitalism at that time. And that theory of capitalism can also help you avoid some of the more catastrophic errors around nationalism that the Left committed in the postwar era.Anonymous 29-05-23 12:29:37 No. 14085
>>14084 HOWEVER this part raises an eye brow
<In my view, these are all empirical questions, so we shouldn’t turn them into an orthodoxy. The error was in thinking that capitalism, as it matures, veers toward a monopoly stage. Capitalism, as we’ve known it so far, has always had very powerful impulses toward eroding monopolies, not toward constructing them. It has remained competitive throughout. We can’t predict the future, and maybe there will be a time when you see monopolies taking over the economy, but it hasn’t happened yet. <What you do see is certain sectors becoming vulnerable to monopolization at certain times, and there are some sectors which are always vulnerable to it — sectors which even mainstream economists realize you need to regulate, like certain natural resources. But that doesn’t mean that the system as a whole has become fundamentally monopolistic.Correct me if I'm wrong anons, but isn't the point of capitalism to replace one monopoly over another to ensure that the capitalist maintains their income and maintains their position? Yes, one could argue that the capitalist class "erodes" a monopoly, but what exactly does it replace it with? It may erode a state-monopoly and then replace it with a privatised one, or when a private monopoly falls, a state-capitalist one or a competing monopoly may take its place.
Am I wrong for thinking Vivek needs to elaborate because i'm confused by what he's trying to articulate.
Anonymous 29-05-23 13:00:00 No. 14087
>>14086 >NOOOOO you can't just criticise Marxism as a whole and update it to relevency within 21st century material conditions because… BECAUSE YOU JUST CAN'T OK. Really, lad? From the very wikipedia article that you just quoted in relation to analytical Marxism
>Cohen's book, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978), in which he attempts to apply the tools of logical and linguistic analysis to the elucidation and defence of Marx's materialist conception of history, is generally regarded as having started the analytical Marxist approach.[1] >For Cohen, Marx's historical materialism is a technologically deterministic theory, in which the economic relations of production are functionally explained by the material forces of production, and in which the political and legal institutions (the "superstructure") are functionally explained by the relations of production (the "base").[2] >The transition from one mode of production to another is driven by the tendency of the productive forces to develop. Cohen's accounts for this tendency by reference to the rational character of the human species: where there is the opportunity to adopt a more productive technology and thus reduce the burden of labour, human beings will tend to take it. Thus, human history can be understood as a series of rational steps that increase human productive power.So it's not that he doesn't disagree with historic materialism or dialectics for that matter but rather he's trying to reformulate them.
Furthermore, not all Analytical Marxists think alike:
>Elster's account was an exhaustive examination of Marx's texts in order to ascertain what could be salvaged out of Marxism employing the tools of rational choice theory and methodological individualism (which Elster defended as the only form of explanation appropriate to the social sciences). His conclusion was that – contra Cohen – no general theory of history as the development of the productive forces could be saved. Like Roemer, he also rejected the labour theory of value and, going further, virtually all of Marxian economics. The "dialectical" method is rejected as a form of Hegelian obscurantism. The theory of ideology and revolution continued to be useful to a certain degree, but only once they had been purged of their tendencies to holism and functionalism and established on the basis of an individualist methodology and a causal or intentional explanation. /leftypol/ tries to actually read a fucking article/book challenge so they know what they're talking about challenge (IMPOSSIBLE) Anonymous 29-05-23 14:29:50 No. 14088
>>14087 >So it's not that he doesn't disagree with historic materialism or dialectics for that matter but rather he's trying to reformulate them. That's a long ass euphemism for revisionism. Unlucky for you that I already read the Wiki page. That shit was an insult to read.
Not only do all of these quotes out this school of thought as positivistic and mechanistic drivel, but there clearly is no dialectics left. With that, the core component of Marxism is discarded while taking in major philosophical antagonists of Marxism that have historically been criticized by actual Marxists in the past, such as Lenin and Ilyenkov. Analytical Marxism is even founded on the same fallacious and Neoliberal premise that human beings are perfectly rational actors which guarantees every subsequent conclusion is false if the foundation is already incorrect. It's downright philosophically idealist even as it treats the progress of human society as the product of their intellect and rational decision-making while also stating no source for where their thinking is coming from. But of course, a "Marxism" founded on analytical theory that possesses no regard for dialectics will just assume we are thinking from some sort of objective perspective where through rationality we positivistically move onward in our organizing of society. Which also explains why Cohen naïvely assumes "human beings" (notice how no class distinction is made and human society apparently acts in unisons) will just take up new technologies because "rationally it would reduce the burden of labor" as if we have never seen capitalist interests CONTRADICT what could arguably be called beneficial for humanity as a whole just to maintain their profit and position of power.
>Like Roemer, he also rejected the labour theory of value and, going further, virtually all of Marxian economics. The "dialectical" method is rejected as a form of Hegelian obscurantism.Not to pull a guilt by association fallacy here but it's not a good look to act as a "Marxist" intellectual under the same label as people who would ever think this.
They didn't update Marxism to the 21st century they gutted it, leaving nothing behind except the skin. I was already wondering why Chibber's rambling sounded so convoluted to me. I was genuinely wondering if I'm lacking some sort of esoteric knowledge that I wasn't in the know of, falling for all of those "misconceptions most Marxists have" according to Chibber. But after reading all of this I get it now. He's a liberal. That's the same feeling I got reading liberal economic theory. It's not convoluted in the sense that it's profound and complex, but typical to liberal analysis there is no hard basis and you are free to re-select and re-weigh all the factors you want, so you can come up with an infinite amount of different rationalizations for why X posed impact Y and lead to event Z. He's not bringing anything new to the table, it's just liberalism.
Anonymous 29-05-23 15:11:39 No. 14090
>>14077 >It‘s not impossible that Chibber‘s apologia for white society stems from some emotional need to be liked by white people because he wants acceptance into whiteness. The fact that its possible doesn't mean that it's true. Wtf are you even basing this accusation on?
>>14084 I think a lot of the assumptions involved in the Leninist theory of national liberation need to be reassessed. A lot of its points continue to hold a lot of merit. Imperialism does often take on the character of a primary contradiction, which of course creates a material basis for an alliance between the workers (in both the colonies and metropole) and the oppressed nations as a whole. It's also correct to say that national liberation struggles, even bourgeois ones, endanger capitalism by severing the flow of wealth from the colonies to the core, which is the lifeblood of the modern capitalist-imperialist system.
That being said, I think that the 19th and 20th centuries have demonstrated a few key lessons that can inform the relationship of communists to bourgeois national liberation struggles. Anybody familiar with European revolutionary history will know how the 1848 revolutions unfolded. The bourgeoisie rose up against feudal absolutism, the workers supported them. The question for the early communists at that time was whether the proletariat should assert their own programme during this revolutionary moment, or seek an alliance with the bourgeoisie against feudalism. Marx himself was of the latter opinion, and many in the Communist League broke with him over this issue. But what ended up happening? The revolutionary upheaval unleashed the pent up anger of the workers, who began to assert a more radical program, which caused the bourgeoisie to close ranks with the aristocracy and accept the reimposition of aristocratic power. In other words, the proletariat spooked the bourgeoisie into betraying their own revolution! For the bourgeoisie, private property and profit seeking are sacrosanct, and they will throw their lot in with anybody who guarantees these things against anybody who threatens them.
Fast forward to the 20th century and what do we see? The KMT is founded as a bourgeois, anti-colonial revolutionary force, and within a few decades they are the main agent of imperialism in China. Indonesia's bourgeoisie wins its independence with major communist support, only to turn around and massacre them all less than 20 years later and become the biggest US outpost in Southeast Asia. Attaturk prevents a Western conquest and colonization of Turkey, now his country is a NATO member. Modern Egypt is established by a coup of anti-colonial officers who go on to lead the Arab nationalist movement, but by the 80s they are a major US ally. I could go on, but the point should be obvious: the bourgeoisie are not reliable in any supposedly progressive capacity they are meant to have. They can't be relied upon to challenge feudalism or imperialism so long as they themselves feel threatened by the proletariat. Any such challenge they offer is inherently weak, full of vacillation, compromise, and in constant danger of being abandoned altogether.
Where does that leave communists? Well for one thing it means that if we are to accept the Leninist formula of the natural affinity between the proletariat and the oppressed nations (and I think we should), every effort should be made to subsume the national liberation struggle within the struggle for communism, with the national bourgeoisie taking a secondary role. That is to say, the communist vanguard, dominated by workers and peasants, must become the primary vehicle of the national liberation struggle. This is what was accomplished in China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc., and its no coincidence that these countries continue to resist imperialism today while many others are now aligned with it.
Second, in situations where this can't be accomplished, the communists bust be alert to the vacilations of the bourgeoisie, and take steps to anticipate and counter their eventual betrayal. This is where you'll run into controversy with some multipolarista types, since they hold that anything which may disrupt the stability of an anti-imperialist bourgeois government is counter-productive at best and the product of imperialist subversion at worst. However if we adopt this position, that communists should essentially abandon any effort to develop an independent power base, or keep the national bourgeoisie in check, then they are essentially saying we should just trust the natbourgs to remain committed to the struggle, despite their horrendous record. Imagine a multipolarista of today in the early 60s, when Indonesia was a leading anti-imperialist bourgeois government supported by a massive communist party. Many people saw the trouble brewing, Mao himself advised the PKI to arm itself and prepare for a betrayal. They refused, and no doubt many leftypolers would have dismissed his advice as the work of "ultras" in alignment with imperialism. Obviously that wasn't the case, and it was Indonesia's bourgeoisie that was in alignment with imperialism. The refusal of the Indonesian communists to recognize the weakness of the bourgeoisie on the question of national liberation is why children in that country are still today taught that communism is a witchcraft cult that wants to cut off people's dicks for black magic purposes (I'm not exaggerating, this is the official narrative).
Of course it goes without saying that all of these questions have the most relevance to comrades in the countries where these contradictions are unfolding. For firsties the solution is simple: oppose any and all interventions, troop deployments, sanctions, regime change ops, etc imposed by your imperialist government. It should also he clear that even a bourgeois dominated anti-imperialist government, at least so long as it retains that character, is a good thing and vastly preferable to a comprador regime. We just need to remember the inherent limitations of such states.
TLDR: The "national" bourgeoisie are, when left to their own devices unreliable at best and traitorous at worst. They are most useful when subordinated to communists and workers/peasants. James Connolly was right: only social revolution can defeat imperialism.
Anonymous 29-05-23 19:28:38 No. 14095
>>13977 The only way to break this wheel is westerners start going to the third world to develop it and not as pawns of the exploiters.
How can they do that?
Who the fuck knows.
Anonymous 29-05-23 19:30:05 No. 14096
>>14091 Not a third worldist but
>Socialism already exists in the first world Please jump of a tall place into nothingness
Anonymous 29-05-23 22:21:05 No. 14101
>>14100 if they do then they're fools deserved of mockery
but actually ground rent can work quite well here because people tend to stay near where they're born. there's no need to invoke unmarxian notions like unequal exchange, a theory that requires arbitrage to not exist. it is enough to observe that capital must avoid raising the standard of living too much in the south, for fear that this will necessitate investment in means of production to compensate for the rising value in labour power
Anonymous 29-05-23 22:25:55 No. 14102
>>14101 >if they do then they're fools deserved of mockery There are so many arguments about this topic that this describes.
>it is enough to observe that capital must avoid raising the standard of living too much in the south Yeah it's not like the theory of imperialism needs to be massively revised. Imperialism has developed further but it's not like it's fundamentally changed. The tools have gotten more sophisticated.
Anonymous 30-05-23 01:25:26 No. 14107
>>14090 >This is what was accomplished in China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc., and its no coincidence that these countries continue to resist imperialism today while many others are now aligned with it. True, but sadly in relation to China the national bourgoise still has a vast amount of power and is responsible for a lot of the corruption within China. While it's true Xi is putting them in line, it's clear that they have far too much freedom- allowing them to exploit loopholes in international law and avoid the Communist Parties jurisdiction, allowing them to exploit other parts of the world.
>It should also he clear that even a bourgeois dominated anti-imperialist government, at least so long as it retains that character, is a good thing and vastly preferable to a comprador regime.True, but as you said- it shouldn't be trusted, and even if successful, as you say- there's a chance that international capitalism will still be standing.
So if that is the case, we're in agreement that unless the national bourgoise are not- subordinated to communists and workers/peasants- they are not to be trusted nor should they be supported, and at best ought to be criticised ruthlessly and pointed out during the national liberation struggle.
Anonymous 30-05-23 03:19:40 No. 14108
>>13924 >this man is the personification of this board and I refuse to believe otherwise you are overestimating this board. do you think people are here are just being edgy or ironic when they say stupid shit? try to correct them, take the bait, and you will get banned. which might be a hint on your question:
>how has the board missed the work of Vivek Chibber? the naive answer is that maybe their favorite twitch streamers haven't talked about him yet
anyway, I wish there was a better term than "thirdworldists". all the relevant organizations in my third world country have historically rejected stuff like the unequal exchange theory since the 60s. it would also be hard to find a relevant party in the neighboring countries that follow or base their agenda on these theories. it is misleading
Anonymous 30-05-23 08:15:20 No. 14109
>>14106 nukes make another world war very unlikely. although if it does happen, the profits to be made rebuilding by >survivors would be great of course. also much of the south (esp. Africa and South America) would not get hit directly and might see a golden age as a result
>>14108 TWism seems defeatist to me
Anonymous 31-05-23 08:47:25 No. 14121
>>14119 >*randomly quotes some crap from Wikipedia about Analytical Marxism* Fascinating. Two problems:
1. Self-labeling in politics doesn't mean much. I'd need to hear from Chibber himself whether he approves of e. g. methodological individualism and so on.
2. I don't see how a reference to that article amounts to an argument for unequal exchange as something in the real world or even just as something in Marx.
Anonymous 01-06-23 13:13:23 No. 14123
>>14119 >Elster is all of analytical Marxism Lmfao no
Chibber isn’t even influenced by Elster, he’s influenced by Wright
Anonymous 01-06-23 13:35:15 No. 14125
>>14096 Literally Lenin has the same opinion as me
>Thus, at the present time we are confronted with the question- shall we be able to hold on with our small and very small peasant production, and in our present state of ruin, until the West-European capitalist countries consummate their development towards socialism? But they are consummating it not as we formerly expected. They are not consummating it through the gradual "maturing" of socialism, but through the exploitation of some countries by others, through the exploitation of the first of the countries vanquished in the imperialist war combined with the exploitation of the whole of the East. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/mar/02.htm Lenin here is saying that socialism is being consummated in the west by the exploitation of peripheral nations.
Anonymous 01-06-23 15:41:24 No. 14127
>>14125 >Lenin here is saying that socialism is being consummated in the west by the exploitation of peripheral nations. Yet in no moment western nations ever had vanguard parties taking power for good, achieving any control over the MoP or establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat, worse, socialism lost power in these nations and replaced with a wish to become a social democracy that don't break with any relation of capitalism, especially imperialism.
lenin here is just wrong that the exploitation of the periphery would bring a revolution in the west, a hundred years have passed and this never happened, with and without the USSR here.
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