>>1915117
>There are educated proles and then not so educated proles.The majority are kept uneducated, and even the educated ones are deliberately kept uneducated on political matters. You know how many people are great at math and science but don't have an ounce of class consciousness? Ever wonder why it's so much easier to organize an amazon warehouse than a software development team?
> There are sectors that are revolutionary and others that are not. Sectors that require more education than others. Some hypothesize that the revolutionary nature of a sector of labor correlates with its education, while others hypothesize that it correlates with its immiseration. I hypothesize that it correlates specifically with political education + immiseration. If you're not miserable and also politically educated, you're unlikely to organize. A lot of people are politically educated but lack the misery that drives them to organize or die. A lot of people are miserable but lack the political education. A lot of people are educated in a way that has nothing to do with politics. Like the type of person who knows 5 programming languages and how write a good resume, and how to maintain an immaculate LinkedIn account. Well that person is educated, but not necessarily politically educated.
>WorkerismAs in
operaismo or something else?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorkerismI might not be familiar with the way in which you're using this word. Do you just mean I'm
vulgarly upholding workers or something?
>As much as education can be cut, there will always be a necessity for education nonetheless. Maybe. But there ought to be a distinction between political education which reinforces class consciousness and "apolitical" education which teaches bourgeois aspiration and suppresses class consciousness. There's a lot of the latter. And maybe failure will eventually teach them that they're wrong, but will they take away the right lesson? Will the medical student who dreams of opening up their own practice realize it's impossible under capitalism, or will they just conclude that they didn't work hard enough? Will they get amnesia about capitalism crushing them and instead blame themselves as they've been taught to?
>This will always lead to people picking up the theory books (or whatever is available, or just eventually retreading old ground).Always? That's very confident. I hope you're right but I suspect there are other counter-revolutionary paths people can go down.
> The crux of your argument ignores the fact that capitalist society will always create the conditions for its destruction.The crux of my argument is it's capable of absorbing and adapting to critique because it's capable of change. I look at past "modes of production" and they didn't really get "destroyed" in some cataclysmic revolutionary moment, nor were they even totally phased out through reformism. They just took a back seat. There are still elements of feudalism and slavery, even in modern society, such as the slavery of America's penal system, or the continued existence of royal families in several nations, or the "neofeudal" rent seeking behavior of capital adapting to TRPF. There are even societies still practicing "primitive communism" like the Sentinelese. Capitalism is the dominant mode of production, but there are still elements of past modes of production coexisting within capitalist society. And capitalist society might be gestating socialism, but when socialism is "born" will capitalism die immediately and completely or will it simply cease to be dominant (and I'm not suggesting "Dengism" or whatever I've seen you take issue with in other threads, I'm just making observations).
>And three, on praxis and reaching out to the working class. Education is key, but what follows education is organization and practice. As I said above, a man can write bookshelves worth of critiques, theories, and polemics as dry or as fanciful as they come, none of it means anything if it isn't brought to the masses and tested in practice. Hudson wrote a book, its 30 bucks on Amazon. He is not head of a party nor is his book freely distributed. His background is one of economics and such his audience are people who share that interest. So, is it really a surprise that bourgeois economists and the neoliberal establishment would be more drawn by his work than the run of the mill Starbucks worker or construction workerCapital wasn't freely distributed when Marx wrote it either and workers still took an interest in it. And workers take an interest in Hudson. I was recommended Hudson by a co worker when talking about imperialism. The point here is that because working class theorists perform the labor or writing theory, and rely on getting paid for that labor to survive, and publishing companies dictate the terms of distribution, the bourgeoisie always have a high ground in terms of access to theory, absorbing its ideas, and incorporating it into their own strategies. They can do it faster and more easily, because they have more access to resources. It's about an advantage, not about a failure of the theorist to run around giving their work away for free. I'm wondering how to make up for this disadvantage the workers have.
> His "theory" is less theory and more analytical understanding of western imperialism and its history since ww2. While it is important to understand imperialism and the US's dominion over such things, it does not offer any remedy. There is no link to practice and his connection to economist circles make any remedy he supposes to be ultimately economistic. There are arguments to made that the link is what communists make of it in their own education/organization/practice, so the ultimate problem here is not wide spread education (or lack of), but of organization, of reaching out to the masses and forging refined theory through that practice.I only cited Hudson because he pointed out a more broadly existing problem in the 2nd edition preface of his own book, i.e. the departments bought his book and obfuscated the statistics that made US imperialism obvious. This kind of tactical response to theory is possible with anyone. Indeed it happened in response to Marx writing Capital. When Marx wrote Capital, Capital responded by abandoning the bourgeois LTV embraced by Smith/Ricardo early bourgeois economists, and moved over to subjective theories of value in order to obfuscate exploitation. Any exploitation pointed out by a theorist, the bourgeoisie responds by obfuscating and hiding. This is true whether you agree the particular work counts as theory or not.