/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Classic case of Stalinist paranoia killing communists.

Bump, interesting

>>2095888
No. All that just for North Americans. I’ll admit, knowing just how much territory has been ruined for farming here made me feel wheezy
>>2095747
Where the farms are. Agroforestry, polyculture, whatever method is necessary to produce a more sustainable farm is a method we should be using.

>We are awful farmers
Who's we?

>>2096055
North Americans

Its incredible knowing that we (im from there) haven’t experienced severe soil degradation by now

>>2096057
There was a time when the USA suffered from a lot of iodine deficiency. But that was a century ago.

>>2096088
Yeah sure. As if a problem like that won’t come again soon. :/

>>2094882
>An individual consumer is worse positioned to know the demand for roof repairs in society as a whole over the year or next few years than a bureacrat,
Consumers are by definition decoupled from reality
>because they have the data,
garbage in, garbage out. Mass data isn't necessarily better than the statistics that a small rural village worker has access to

>>2095967
>[…] then providing the grand plan budgets of inputs to the individuals sectors, and then they plan internally their own production within the budget based on the actual demand data of individual screws shirts etc.
>LP can not do this
yes it can. LP was used in Gosplan and its ministries/sovnarkhozy. it is also used internally in companies today. in other words: it's all LP. the main reasons why they didn't run everything in one coherent system, as one single LP, was part computational and part political
>neither can a central planning board planning the entirety of the economy for the next 5 years
you seem to be unaware of the difference between the planning horizon and the planning period. the longer the former and the shorter the latter, and the more disaggregated the planning, the better it will work
>it should not contain elements whose demand is volatile
why not? I would argue the opposite. Max Grünberg argues that demand forecasting is central to planning
>So, if we group them into categories which are roughly the same inputs in the same factories, we can let those who produce them, those who know consumer tastes, etc, decide on the basis of good and complete data and their expertise, to plan within their category
you don't need to aggregate things to be able to do this. in fact disaggregation is instrumental to being able to handle such trends well
>So they decide how much of a 30 mm galvanised steel flathead to make and how much of a 20 mm rvs Philips screw to make
this is incredibly dumb and will result in even worse performance than the Soviet system. you do not decide how much should be produced of what. that is worked out by the overarching planning system, given measured and predicted demand for final goods. what you suggest amounts to defecting from the collective will

>>2096039
>Mass data isn't necessarily better than the statistics that a small rural village worker has access to
If you think the average consumer has access to the same quality of data as the literal corporations doing the sales through their point of sale system then you're just detached from reality.

>>2096077
You just post a variation of "actually, disaggregate one giant plan planning is better because it is" with no substantiation or proof that it is. At least try to provide a the reasoning behind it, or link some things that prove what you say.

>Max Grünberg argues that demand forecasting is central to planning
That doesn't disprove what I said, and you seem to still misinterpret what I am saying
Plan with groups of catagorically similar products in the grand scheme, then on the layer below, plan the distribution of which variation to produce.

Just like how the grand plan should not plan which specific individual worker gets how much specific cups of coffee a year, you should not plan to such specificity on the highest that it both burdens the calculation and causes local domain knowledge to be impossible to take into account.

You give me the impression that you think central planning is just "remove all human oversight and let big computer do everything". The system itself is limited, the plan needs to be understood and checked and corrected for oversights in both parameters or unforseen consequences. The whole point of central planning and communism is to fundamentally break with blind impersonal uncontrolled processes and make the economy run by the will of the people politically, not the will of an algorithm. "The collective will" and "what people actually purchase" is not one and the same, which we can see in capitalism, people do not want the destruction of nature, child slavery labour, etc, but economic preassures and inability to see and consider the entire supply chain of every purchase causes consumer patterns to not reflect the actual will of the people. Not to speak of outright addictive behaviours which are economically in demand but rationally unwanted.

>>2091976
I'm sure its already been explained a million times ITT but basically being in NP doesn't mean it's incalculable. Just that it's a time complexity that "grows quickly with the inputs".

This doesn't have to be the case though, since you can get really good results in polynomial time. You can find interesting research on this topic for example in integer linear programming (NP hard) approximations for bin packing problems, since I had to develop something like this to a client, which are in polynomial time.

>>2096091
>You just post a variation of "actually, disaggregate one giant plan planning is better because it is" with no substantiation or proof that it is. At least try to provide a the reasoning behind it, or link some things that prove what you say.
because the space of possible plans is larger. the point on planning period vs horizon is a standard result in control theory
>Plan with groups of catagorically similar products in the grand scheme
why?
>causes local domain knowledge to be impossible to take into account
this is just ceding ground to the Austrians
>You give me the impression that you think central planning is just "remove all human oversight and let big computer do everything"
I have claimed no such thing. computers cannot "do" things. they can only perform computations on behalf of humans
>The system itself is limited, the plan needs to be understood and checked and corrected for oversights in both parameters or unforseen consequences
again I have not claimed that we shouldn't do this. moreover the aggregated planning you propose is necessarily less transparent than a single open global planning system can be. I would go so far as to say this desire to aggregate and localize planning amounts to de-socializing production. it constitutes private property
>not the will of an algorithm
algorithms do not have wills. people and people alone are the subjects of human society
>people do not want the destruction of nature
here we have one major reason why you want to disaggregate and centralize planning: the climate crisis. it might be tempting to say "we'll just assign each industry an emissions budget". but this makes impossible large swathes of possible plans. for example, emissions could be cut overall if one industry is allowed to emit more while another emits much less. in addition you also have the problem of how exactly to arrive at said budgets

>>2096006
Basically Anarchism?

>>2096014
Have you tried spending an unprepared for night in the cold? It's life threatening. No matter how edgy you wanna pretend to go your life instincts kick in and you realize that being homeless fucking sucks.

>>2096015
No. Anarchism historically has been a worker's movement (at least in My latin-america: patagonia peon movement, la forestal quebracho tree forest laborers, salt mines of Chile, banana industry in colombia, central-america banana republic sagas, etc)
I Talk about people who would deliberately mooch off welfare, support a capitalist president if he gives them welfare but screws up the working class, do -and sell- drugs, petty theft and shoplifting, go to Orgs just to get free food, etc
a Confederacy of Scoundrels!

>>2096006
> tibetan crazy-wisdom,
CIA psyop lol

>>2095242
I mean the other anon posted good arguments and you ignored them
I’m open that I think you need a brick through straight through your jaw and that half this board needs to be purged today

>>2095231
>None of this is remotely a Marxist conception of history
How is it not? The purpose of the bourgeois state is to protect capital by repressing revolutionary forces. The CIA (and US security state in general) is simply the organization which carries out this function on the largest scale. Would you call Marx an idealist for saying that the Prussian police were aiming to suppress communism in Germany? That's literally their job.

>>2095245
No they didn't, and my position that you need both is founded in dialectics, is quite mild, and does not exclude other work.

>>2095205
I think the point is that some conspiracy theories reflect real conspiracies and some don't, and, because we're materialists, we're (theoretically) equipped with the tools to tell the two apart.

Like: microwave weapons are real. The have been in development for some time, with well-known effects from well-understood properties of microwaves (discovered in 1888), while the U.S. conspiracy theory about long-range precision-targeted microwave weapons is false, and further exploits paranoia driven through poor understanding by previous conspiracy theorists of what microwave weapons can and can't do and what studies of microwaves do and do not demonstrate to be true.

–

I'm using this example to stress that conspiracy theories are not just an alternative media thing. A lot of conspiracy theorizing is extremely cynical, different from the way that ideology is often believed, or at least more than half-believed, by the bourgeoisie that benefits from it. At the height of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories among Democrats in the U.S, I think a surprisingly large amount of people didn't really believe in the absurd assertions they were making (that the U.S. was somehow being puppeteered by the Russian government). They didn't act like they believed it, after all. It's more like, *if* this is true, then Trump will be brought down, so it's IMPERATIVE people believe it. Because that would mean Trump ain't so patriotic now is he? He's taking Russian rubles (scary money) from people who speak RUSSIAN (enemy tongue) and you gormless rednecks aren't supposed to like that!!!

And what they share with people on the left and anti-imperialist ziggaroids who play with this stuff, is being swept up in a thrill "for a good cause." People like Jackson Hinkle know they're lying, and they're proud of themselves for lying to themselves as directed, just like the big boys, and that they're swaying some presumed audience of gullible "Middle America" spiritual-flyover-country suckers to whom none of the self-aware mini-propagandists relate, but with whom they believe they are in constant one-sided communication with … and who they believe MUST be fooled, it's IMPERATIVE they be fooled, or else the enemy will win. This hypothetical group serves as the theoretical ultimate audience for these self-conscious deceptions.

I feePost too long. Click here to view the full text.

U.S. homelessness jumps to another record high, amid affordable housing shortage
More than 770,000 people were living in shelters or outside in January, according to an annual federal report on homelessness by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The number is up 18% from last year's count — which had also jumped from the year before — and is the largest number since HUD started doing this report in 2007.
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/27/nx-s1-5241115/us-homeless-hud-housing-costs-migrants

Macy’s, Big Lots join other US retailers in shutdown of thousands of stores
Macy’s, the largest department store chain by sales in the United States, is set to close 65 “underperforming” locations by March 23, 2025, as part of a broader strategy to shut 150 stores—or about a third of its operations—by 2026. The move will eliminate thousands of jobs and follows an ongoing trend of retail closures driven by the shift to online shopping, and more cautious consumer spending due to inflation, higher interest rates and crushing levels of household debt.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/27/igan-d27.html

DOGE doubles down on eliminating the government agency that's cracking down on overdraft fees
The CFPB finalized a rule on December 12 that would require banks to limit overdraft fees — the amount charged to customers when they attempt to spend more than their balance. The agency estimated that the new rule would save Americans up to $5 billion each year, or $225 per household.
https://www.businessinsider.com/doge-delete-cfpb-elon-musk-vivek-ramaswamy-overdraft-fees-trump-2024-12

Most Americans think insurance industry bears some blame for CEO killing
78% of respondents overall said they believed the individual who committed the killing bears "a great deal" or "a moderate amount" of responsibility for Thompson's death. 69% attributed some blame to coverage denials by health care companies, and 67% to insurance industry Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

Starmer isn't working – and Starmerism cannot work
STARMERISM is an attempt to turn the clock back. It isn’t working, cannot work and tolerating it risks disaster for the working-class movement. It has always been an attempt to turn the clock back. The entire Starmer project was, from his election as Labour leader on a false prospectus, an attempt to undo Corbyn: to drag the unruly Labour Party back to a supposed “middle ground” of support for neoliberal economics and imperialist war. It has been a project pursued with total ruthlessness: Labour members were, and are, broadly supportive of Corbyn’s manifesto commitments to greater public ownership and redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation, and certainly weren’t happy with the former leader being portrayed as the devil incarnate and cast out of the party, so Starmer had to smash Labour democracy.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/editorial-starmer-isnt-working-and-starmerism-cannot-work

Israel Vows to Assassinate Houthi Leaders Amid Intensifying Airstrikes in Yemen
The escalation between Israel and the Houthis marks a dangerous turning point in the ongoing conflict between the two sides that began following October 7. The Houthis have been targeting Israel for the past year, repeatedly striking the port of Eilat in retaliation for Israel’s war on Gaza. But it wasn't until September 15, 2024 that the Houthis unveiled what they claimed to be hypersonic ballistic missile technology, that they then began deploying in attacks on the Israeli capital, alongside periodic drone attacks. Analysts believe the Houthis are getting some parts of their missile stockpile from Iran or elsewhere and that they have their own weapon plants. Regardless, they have shown improvements in range and sophistication over the past year. A missile attack on Tel Aviv on December 16 appeared to evade Israel’s defense system. The Israeli military claimed that it hit “military infrastructure” used by the Houthis, including for the smuggling of weapons. The Houthis responded today, striking Ben Gurion airport and leading to a brief halt in air traffic, according to its spokesperson. Israel, in turn, appears prepared to retaliate with even greater intensity. Israeli Air Force Maj. Gen. Tomer Bar threaPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

tybna

TYBNA

>>2093698
>New and Old Debates on Anti-imperialism and Socialism
It was a nice read but I really disagree with the trotskyist approach to the issue. My eyes tell me that China, whether it's an "authoritarian capitalist country with imperialist tendencies" or not, I can't help but look at the massive changes it has done on a global scale. Call it "stagism" if you want, I don't think that's a fair critique anyways. I mean this argument has been made a billion times on this site, but I really can't understand the opposing view point at all. Bellamy Foster has been an author I've been eyeing these past months, reading his writing on the subject could be a good into for me.

>>2094953
Update:
I'm reading the article mentioned in the above article. It is tremendously good shit. Highly recommended.
I still haven't read it all, but I think one missing piece here is a critique of Real Competition (a la Shaikh et al) that I think is one of the few "rejections of imperialism" (which really isn't) that actually has some merit.
Article here: https://monthlyreview.org/2024/11/01/the-new-denial-of-imperialism-on-the-left/

>>2095133
Cope, cry and die uyghur.

>>2095116
Imagine if he had won, and taken power in an alternative USSR, it would still exist, and better than it ever was. What a missed opportunity for humanity.

>>2095308
>Imagine if fiction was reality
Idealism, not even once

>>2092526
<Being this offended by being called names on an imageboard or twitter
You're to soft for the internet. You have to leave.
Besides, >>>/siberia/

>>2095162
>boys dressing girly calling themselves femboys is totally made up nonsense
>they should identify as non-binary instead
Kek(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

>>2095312 (me)
>>2095307
Oops greentexted my response.

>>2095311
>“race science” is fundamentally in contradiction with our knowledge of human evolution

You are absolutely wrong. There are objective morphological differences between human populations, which can be called "races". There is a good scientific book in Russian about it, I can post a link to Anna's Archive if you want(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

Moved to >>>/meta/37778.

>>2094966
>>2094962
Damn it's really depressing to see how a lot of Warsaw Pact governments were destroyed just as they were about to start improving things after the downturn in the 1980s.

not one crime!

>>2094843
i disagree. i still maintain that modernity is about the subject, while postmodernity is about the object. baudrillard writes expertly on this. poststructuralism revolves around the central trauma of the death of the author (the intentional subject) and this takes things in particularity therefrom. adorno and horkheimer's "dialectic of enlightenment" is the logic of modernity, which only ends in world war, while postmodernity is to jameson "the cultural logic of late capitalism".

>>2094276
Pure speculation and not a opinion you can take at heart or has value. For a group of people knowledge, training, budget and organizing.

>>2091415
what do you mean?
Should we flood military with Jeets?
I'm in!

>>2094847
>>I ask for academic sources
No you didn't and you dont deserve them either since you wont even bother to do any research yourself. I am not here to spoonfeed you more and more sources just for you to spit them out because they don't allign with your absolute delusions about reality.
It is. A very well known, undisputed fact. Inside china and outside of it. That they invaded and occupied vietnam several times.

You're just a flat earther.