>It is in the working class‘ interest to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism
is actually a normative statement disguised as a descriptive statement. It arrogantly elevates a Marxist attitude to a matter of fact. The working class has through their behavior regularly shown that they are fine with capitalism as long as there are enough goodies for them (hence why Westerners at best want social democracy while a desire for socialism has been a tiny outlier). Even in times of crisis this is the case. The rise in socialism is therefore an anomaly and not the class interest of the working class that is somehow innate to these particular class relations.
>Oh, but socialism affords worker control, and worker democracy, and guarantees everyone‘s base needs are met!
And again, who says every worker wants that? Not everyone wants to partake in the mental labor of organizing the economy, perhaps not even a business, not everyone wants every schmuck to have a say in organizing either, and not everyone believes that everyone is entitled to base needs, as cruel as that may sound. This isn‘t my opinion, but many people don‘t think that way and at some point you have to take overwhelming historic precedent into account and acknowledging that what you’ve claimed doesn‘t line up with observations. So the question becomes, will you adjust to observations that have repeatedly contradicted your theory (science) or stick to your guns (ideology)?
>>2438777> is actually a normative statement disguised as a descriptive statement. It arrogantly elevates a Marxist attitude to a matter of fact. The working class has through their behavior regularly shown that they are fine with capitalism as long as there are enough goodies for them (hence why Westerners at best want social democracy while a desire for socialism has been a tiny outlier).The proletariat’s objective interests have nothing to do with their political consciousness as a class. In fact, because the proletariat are constituent of capital itself, their immediate class interest of a higher wage normally supersedes their revolutionary interest of abolishing the wages system
The ignorant consenting submission of the peasant congregation didn’t mean feudal lords seizing their surpluses were to their own benefit anymore than the submission of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie would make the dispossession of and external control over the proletariat within their interests. It isn’t in the interest of a woman to stay by her abuser even if she would never leave him.
> And again, who says every worker wants that?Wants are irrelevant in this instance, Marxism isn’t a popularity contest and its mission isn’t to win at the ballot box
>>2438804marx actually says that labour-power as a commodity is paid entirely what its worth in wages. exploitation occurs by over-work, not under-pay. so a marxist society would be one with 20 hour work weeks, not double the pay, or whatever.
>>2438809so what class are the revolutionaries? the intelligensia?
>>2438806I think this is an appropriate answer. A vanguard party can be an aggregate of consciousness that has arrived at a certain conclusion, and with its knowledge over how the world works tries to influence this other aggregate of consciousness that is short sighted, ignorant or otherwise unwilling on their own. There are just many factors more, both internal and external to the individual, as to why not all and seemingly most working class people have not ended up agreeing with this alleged „rational interest“.
>Huh, consciousness? You‘re an idealist!No, I do agree that these processes are materially based and that there is a mutual relationship between consciousness and the environment. I‘m just saying that what (some) Marxists claim and continue to hold onto doesn‘t seem to be the case. What if the average person is sort of a short sighted animal who is unwilling to take such great risks, to sacrifice what they currently have and are in fact contend with what they have under capitalism and at best want only slightly better? What if socialism only resonates with a few due to idiosyncratic character traits, be they inborn or acquired under more peculiar circumstances than just being working class? None of this defies materialism.
I think the problem is that what I say here is usually meant to dismiss the feasibility of communism and said by anti-communists, but I do agree with socialism but simply suggest that this „rational interest“ assertion is misguided and also bad at predicting behavior.
>>2438810> so what class are the revolutionaries? the intelligensia?The proletariat is the revolutionary class, the proletarians are the revolutionaries, proletarian is not a synonym for illiterate, ignorant, politically unconscious, or any other degenerate cultural signifier for “redneck” in the USA
The majority of socialists and communists are just proletarians who developed political consciousness before the rest of our class
>>2438809>objective interestsI don‘t believe this exists. I think this is a fallacious concept you are doing your reasoning with. Interest is subjective as it doesn‘t exist outside of consciousness. Rationality itself is not enough to draw such a conclusion because it depends on the psychological make up of a person that leads them to desiring one thing over the other and only afterwards rationality is used as an intellectual faculty to acquire it. It‘s odd to get hung up over this concept of „objective interest“ when it neither describes human behavior nor helps with predicting it.
>Wants are irrelevant in this instance, Marxism isn’t a popularity contest and its mission isn’t to win at the ballot boxWant is integral to this matter. It‘s integral to making sense of this „interest“ we are dealing with, it‘s integral to making sense of human behavior, it‘s integral to working out a strategy to get other people to do what we *want* and nowhere did I advocate to go voting.
>>2438820> I don‘t believe this exists.Subjectivity is irrelevant here, the proletariat gains nothing as an object to be controlled and resource input other than being an object to be controlled and resource input, proletarians do not necessarily exist to be consumers either since they originally were not and products aren’t actually made to be used necessarily
> Interest is subjective as it doesn‘t exist outside of consciousness. Explain why you believe this.
Interests aren’t a form of ideology, the existence of manipulation and deception make clear that mere perception does not define material interests
Capital’s existence is necessarily at the expense of the proletariat, this is not rationally deduced but evidentially concluded through Capital’s necessary structural determinations bent around the radical separation of labor from control (of the process and purpose of labor), of labor from consumption (this ties back into the problems caused by production only for sale/waste rather than use by a consumer which necessarily define production under capitalism, this causes social crises ranging from baseline poverty existing in all capitalistic countries from the very weakest and poorest to the very strongest and wealthiest as an unintended but unmitigateable outcome of capital’s productive determinations), and labor from distribution (self-explanatory but ask if needed)
> Want is integral to this matter. It‘s integral to making sense of this „interest“ we are dealing with, it‘s integral to making sense of human behavior, it‘s integral to working out a strategy to get other people to do what we *want* and nowhere did I advocate to go voting.Marxism is not a theory about psychology
Marxism is also specifically not a theory about how to run an electoral campaign
It might be more beneficial to attempt understanding the Marxist theory of social change and analysis of the Capital System if your goal is to thoroughly critique it, of course, the purpose of promoting bourgeois ideology often depend very heavily on *not* understanding Marx’s analysis and assuring others maintain a similarly opaque understanding as bourgeois ideology may simply be incapable of a theoretically compelling response to Marx
>>2438819was marx or engels proletarian?
how about lenin or stalin? trotsky? mao?
you live in a dream world.
>>2438823the way marx understands it is that the working divided into two parts; necessary and surplus labour. you are paid for your necessary labour (i.e 4 hours), but unpaid the surplus labour, so its not that you are paid less per hour, but that you are paid for your necessary labour and unpaid for surplus labour. thats the dichotomy.
>>2438828> was marx or engels proletarian?No, but am I Marx or Engels?
Were they the first communists?
Did they create the worker’s movement?
Did they cause the Paris Commune, the revolution of the Sans Coulotte, the uprising of the proletarians in 1848? Your mind is rotted by Great Man history, the majority of actual communists to have lived and live now are people whose names you will never know.
>>2438833so the founding theorists of the communist movement were not revolutionaries? lenin lead the october revolution - what does that make him?
>>2438836>underpaidNOT according to marx, but you are free to disagree
>a cut-off is made to when you reach the necessary labor threshold then the latter boils down to the former because the unpaid hours diminish your average hourly pay.yes, but you would still be paid the same salary, even if you receive higher wages, since you'd be working less hours.
>>2438837> so the founding theorists of the communist movement were not revolutionaries?They were, as were the proletarians who historically have made up the majority of the parties, you, right now, are speaking to a proletarian wage worker who is a communist, your entire point is nonsensical
> lenin lead the october revolution - what does that make him?A leader
Now, if he was like Homelander and singularly stormed the Winter Palace and defeated the Whites with his barehands, well….
People on this hellish site have no idea what socialism is or what a worker is, or the interests of workers. Workers frankly do not care about any of this political shit. They want their lives back. That is the demand, and if you really talk to workers and engage with them, they will tell you this. It's more or less universal.
Is your theory going to allow workers to have their lives back? It is going to undo the ruin the institutions have done to workers for the past 100 years? If no, you have no business selling the same failed shit to workers… but of course, none of this is about workers. This is about self-important assholes selling themselves. Not one iota of this answers a single question the worker would have about their condition in political society.
The worker sees himself as a slave to these institutions from cradle to grave. Freedom is a total impossibility under such a regime, and the socialist has been trained to recapitulate exactly this idea, regardless of what good these institutions did or what evil they created. When you see that there has been nothing good whatsoever coming from these institutions, you see the nature of the problem right in front of you, but it has gone on like this for so long that no politically acceptable idea can even acknowledge the nature of the problem. The end of the institutions can only be understood as the end of the world where everyone panics and is herded to their death. That is what we have been consigned to, and no one in any position of power wants it to be any other way. They're all competing for their place on the lifeboat. That is the only idea that can exist. Even if you suggested this is fucked up, it started many decades ago. The people are defeated, poisoned, mutilated, ruined. There is no more "the people" you can speak to, and the institutions made sure this will not end any time soon. They were thorough in the poisoning and humiliation program and insisted "this always works", because that is what they were taught and that anything other than this was "retarded" and therefore inadmissible.
The workers do not want anything you are likely to offer. At most, you could promise to leave the workers alone and not interdict their efforts to live independently of the institutions, such as they are. This will only ever work day by day, with limited expectations that anything good can last. The workers know they are doomed under Eugenics, and none of you disgusting, simpering retards can even say the word Eugenics without screeching, because leftypol is a faggot forum. Most of the workers have already resolved that they will go down shouting and never, ever do anything else. What else is there for them? They may go about it in their different ways, with most workers doing no more than totally avoiding any "political" content and spiting this system by withdrawing themselves from it and presenting as little more than cattle. You all saw to that fate by allowing any of this travesty to go on, decade after decade, and aiding and abetting it at every opportunity because you thought it would get you something or because it "felt good".
>>2438839>they wereokay, so proletarianship is not the determining factor of one's revolutionary character, then. and the most notable revolutionaries have in fact NOT been members of any working class.
>a leaderyou surely mean a revolutionary, but i'll ask you clearly:
(1) was lenin a revolutionary?
(2) was stalin a revolutionary?
(3) was trotsky a revolutionary?
(4) was mao a revolutionary?
Socialism is always a decidedly middle class movement. It may speak to the workers sometimes, and nothing prevents class mobility or members of a class choosing a greater purpose than their class interest. If you look at what the broad masses want out of life, it does not line up with what socialism entails, and it is not the obligation of socialism to meet halfway or compromise. What a socialist could do, if they were smart, and socialists are not smart, is ask themselves what they can do for the world and for the overall situation humanity finds itself in, rather than this mindless retreat to the institutions that was the basic proclivity of the middle class. If they answer that question, the socialist can simply say they want to make life easier for the poor and the lowest class. That was a basic expectation of early socialism. That is all the socialist could offer, and the socialist submits proof of this concept to the public and to workers, who have every reason to doubt this intention until it can be proven that the socialist will do no harm.
>>2438845>>2438844how? he is just mirroring the manifesto:
>Thus, in 1847, socialism was a middle-class movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, “respectable”; communism was the very opposite.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/preface.htm>>2438848>>2438849yet you are still responding. curious.
>>2438853And the Manifesto repeated the common understanding at the time. Communism evoked images of the most extreme of the enrages of the Revolution, the ones who were super radical and wanted to sever the head from every aristocrat who ever sneered at them. The socialists at that time wanted to move away from the Revolution and do something different. The communists, well they weren't really about creating a "revolution" or repeating history in that way, but they were calling for nothing less than a total inversion of class privilege. They wanted the people who had everything now to have nothing, and the people who have nothing now to have everything. Communism couldn't have been anything else if it were to be a serious proposition of what is to be done, or else those who stand to lose their wealth will certainly reclaim it. The early communists, the few that there were, wanted the political question to answer their basic demand to be allowed to live, without any reference to the liberal idea of political rights or any necessary philosophical idea. The communists ranged from those who thought it was a thought experiment and nothing more, to those who agitated against everything that the rule of the rich entailed; in other words, they wanted what amounted to a peasant rebellion on a massive scale, which would be made permanent. They wanted communism not in the distant future or as part of a technocratic program. They wanted, and needed, the wealth to be redistributed now and without remorse. This is where Marx jumps in and starts putting his own spin on events, but throughout the 19th century, "communist" was not associated with "Marxist" uniformly, and it retained its early definition all the way up to 1917 when a communist party actually won the state.
>>2438840> People on this hellish site have no idea what socialism is or what a worker is, or the interests of workers. Workers frankly do not care about any of this political shit. They want their lives back. That is the demand, and if you really talk to workers and engage with them, they will tell you this. It's more or less universal.Okay I’m sorry but what the actual fuck does this bullshit even mean? Want their lives back? What fucking lives? Not a single generation of people or single individual on this planet alive today was born before capitalism and the state completely dominated the world. There isn’t a single living person born before 19th Century European imperialism. What fucking lives? For well over a century almost every living human was born to be a wage slave. They were born with nothing.
>>2438841Marx was analyzing interactions within society itself, the proletariat is the revolutionary class, only classes can make revolution, this does not have to do with whether or not an individual is a revolutionary
Once again, if you want to critique Marxism you at least need to understand it, it sounds like your brain is cooked by idealism and Great Man theory
>>2438883Education defines the "middle class" most of all, whereas other classes are not so tied to education as a function in society. That is the dominant value of the educational institutions; a need to make everything "middle class" and expel those who do not belong in it. Their efforts always revolve around the middle class, whatever their method and whatever claims they make about the ideal society or purpose of their institution.
I use "middle class" as the generally understood class of the commoners, rather than a vague measure of civic worth or a legal class explicitly defined. I wrote quite a few words on the origins of this middle class and its genuine character, but they are beyond you.
Everything you are doing right now? It's the most pigheaded conceits of the middle class consolidated into a dumbass who thinks snark makes him strong. The middle class is disgusting. I hate the middle class. But, I do recognize that the existence of such a class is inevitable and certainly exists before us, and I don't believe in the current plan for humanity that segregates all into those selected to live and those selected to die. That plan, I believe, is the inexorable result of the "middle class" being what it is, for they are never content with what they have taken from the world.
>>2438899And this is what I mean by "taking our lives back". To take our lives back from this situation that exists to feed middle class ambitions. A socialist, a member of the middle class, can understand that the very existence of their class is a bad thing, which has produced terrible effects for the world and for mankind, and those terrible effects eventually cannibalize their own kind and themselves. Usually humans can know evil well enough and wish to avoid it or defeat it, whatever curses they may live under. The people do not have to live for someone else's ulterior motive, their instigation or insinuation. They don't need to live for the rich or some assholes calling themselves Grand Wizards or High Priests. They don't need to live for some ideology. They don't even need to live for some conceit they hold about themselves, or another person. If you want to do the right thing for the poor, you can ask the poor what they want, figure that out over time. Many poor people will tick off their complaints about the present situation if you talk to them enough, and they usually want higher wages and/or lower taxes, so far as their problem is an economic one. Also, they'd like to not be interdicted for something simple and innocuous because some paranoid assholes wanted to get on a power trip. Workers, like most reasonable people, hate that.
>>2438905Classes are signifiers. They don't exist "in nature", you dingus. Social class is something humans make up to justify their shitty behavior towards each other or some conceit they hold about how society should be ordered. Nothing in the material world requires it to exist or naturalized it in some way we have to respect.
Why do the classes of bourgeois and proletarian exist in the Marxist model? They exist because the bourgeois wanted it to be so and drew up contracts to make it so, then realized those contracts by forcing them on the workers. The effects of living under such a contract are very real and independent of social class. You wouldn't wave a magisterial wand and say "now you're free" and edit reality. Workers live with the consequences of being made to toil. And yet, they were never consigned to be "natural workers". It was Eugenics that sought to essentialize the status and make it permanent and inescapable, and premise the status not on a contract or the interests of society but on the pure insistence that some were selected to live and some were selected to die and live to be sacrificed.
>>2438906>they want higher wages/lower taxesall this talk is well and good,but it has already been determined that as long as the profit motive decrease (and it DOES,inexorably,as time passes) there will inevitably be lower wages,increase in unemployment,and by the same breath,a slow starving and systematic death of the most impoverished,whose definition will only grow with time.
while you can call that Eugenics if you want,or even say that it is imposed by the top on the rest of the population,it would still happen even the ruling class was ferverously dedicated to "good",since everyone that isn't ruthless enough would inevitably lose their position in the ever increasing monopolization of capital,maybe not now,maybe not in a hundred years.
>>2438910>From ranting about his hatred of the middle class to spewing actual postmodern garbage you really only get from a philosophy class Can’t make this shit up
> Social class is something humans make up to justify their shitty behavior towards each other or some conceit they hold about how society should be ordered. Nothing in the material world requires it to exist or naturalized it in some way we have to respect.Humans didn’t “make up” the job market and my fundamentally imposed necessity to get a job to survive you fucking retard, not at all in the sense you’re thinking
People didn’t “decide” to just exist in capitalism. Nobody alive today is just “deciding” to exist in capitalism. The necessity of proletarians to sell their ability to work in return for a wage isn’t something they’re imagining in their heads. Their lack of ownership over the productive assets, land, and resources isn’t imaginary. The orders they follow daily to survive aren’t imaginary. The imperative to accumulate profits that condition firms isn’t imaginary. Postmodernism really is aggressively retarded; Marx generally did not analyze things that can at all be dismissed as mere abstractions such as Hegel’s hypostatized Ultimate Ideal preceding from the dialectical progression of the Cunning of Reason, you cannot just define wage workers out of existence, they exist whether or not you admit that they do
> Why do the classes of bourgeois and proletarian exist in the Marxist model?They don’t “exist in Marx’s model”, they exist in reality, Marx didn’t just imagine hypothetical people who own the productive implements and control the labor process and distribution of resources and a separate hypothetical group of people who actually did the labor process and distributed the resources and as a class generally bought them back on the same market (the bourgeoisie does as well but cannot make up the needs of consumption for the economy)
> They exist because the bourgeois wanted it to be so and drew up contracts to make it so, then realized those contracts by forcing them on the workers.This isn’t what Marx claimed at all, this is something socialists who are not Marxists or do not understand Marx claim, but Marx himself situated capital’s historical ascendancy as beginning in the 16th Century, capital is not synonymous with the bourgeoisie, capitalism is not a conspiracy of the bourgeoisie, Marxists are not anarchists
> The effects of living under such a contract are very real and independent of social class. You wouldn't wave a magisterial wand and say "now you're free" and edit reality. Workers live with the consequences of being made to toil. And yet, they were never consigned to be "natural workers". It was Eugenics that sought to essentialize the status and make it permanent and inescapable, and premise the status not on a contract or the interests of society but on the pure insistence that some were selected to live and some were selected to die and live to be sacrificed.Oh it’s just the eugenics retard
>>2438920You do realize ownership is also a made up thing and doesn't exist in nature, right? Why do workers have to sell themselves to survive? They could easily circumvent any lockout placed on them. They are not obligated to "stand and die" when the law says they must starve no matter what. This situation has to be created by repeated violent force to make it so.
You will do everything to defend the unlimited right of transgression and insist it is unnatural for anything else to exist.
>>2438906> And this is what I mean by "taking our lives back". To take our lives back from this situation that exists to feed middle class ambitionsWhat exactly do you mean by “taking our lives back”? If you just mean you want higher wages alongside eternal wage slavery just say you’re a socdem and be done with it, because otherwise no human alive today existed before European imperialism carved up the planet and thus the workers have not got anything to have had stolen from them, unless you mean their labor power, but id you’re a postmodern anti-communist I have a hard time believing you could conceive of wage labor as a transcendable position.
> They don't need to live for some ideology. They don't even need to live for some conceit they hold about themselves, or another person. If you want to do the right thing for the poor, you can ask the poor what they want, figure that out over time. Many poor people will tick off their complaints about the present situation if you talk to them enough, and they usually want higher wages and/or lower taxes, so far as their problem is an economic oneSee, you could have just said you want wage slaves to get paid more instead of going on a genuinely worthless rant against the proles that dare to embrace communism and seek the abolition of wage slavery
Social democracy is actually an extremely popular political ideology despite its current collapse
>>2438939> As it turns out, workers did keep on existing without selling themselves. They lived longer when they didn't sell themselves and lived off the land, before capitalists enclosed what they didn't claim in the first wave of seizuresOkay so you want to return proles to the condition of peasantry and abolish the socialization of the labor and production
Why do people like you write these long screeds against “the middle class”, which you conflate with communism, when it isn’t a requirement for writing your personal middle class fanfic about wholesome atomized subsistence plots finally rvturning to tradition?
In fact, why would you rail against “communists” not listening to the poor and then your actual outlook is just a fantasy about returning to a 14th Century that never existed?
>>2438941The stupid in your response is so overbearing I can't even. It's exasperating to talk to you people who can't understand the most basic things outside of your cult.
If you think capitalism gave the workers life to serve capital, then you've already defeated any purpose there ever was to rebellion. You've naturalized capitalism and you can only make arguments that it's "mean" and you don't personally like it. That's always what this stupidity comes down to. It's insane that I have to say this but this is leftypol. They're bigger Nazis than the original Nazis.
>>2438963> If you think capitalism gave the workers life to serve capital, then you've already defeated any purpose there ever was to rebellion. I’m not discussing “workers” in the abstract term of laborer, which is transhistorical, but proletarian, which is historically contingent and relevant to the contemporary world
Do you know what a “peasant” is?
> You've naturalized capitalism and you can only make arguments that it's "mean" and you don't personally like itI think you genuinely cannot comprehend what I have been writing if this is your actual interpretation of my point
Are you mad that I’m writing directly and objectively instead of writing vague slogans from the 1920s labor movement?
>>2438777You're confusing short term interests of better pay in some local job field with long term interests of the end of the wages system. You're also confusing objective long term political interests of a given group with the level of political consciousness currently attained among a given group. Yeah, not everyone wants life-saving surgery when they need it, because it's scary, invasive, traumatic. they want to go on coping with ineffective solutions until they die. That's true
>And again, who says every worker wants that? Objective long term multigenerational class interests of abolishing an exploitative unsustainable system before it destroys the planet aren't the same as your individual interest in living a comfortable easy unsustainable life. Yes a lot of workers in the imperial core are not only willing to throw the whole third world under the bus of capital to guarantee themselves an easier life, they're also willing to throw the whole future of humankind itself under the bus so they can enjoy a few more years of zooming around in fast cars while working for Raytheon on Uncle Sam's Palestinian-child-killing-drone assembly line.
>Not everyone wants to partake in the mental labor of organizing the economyUnder bourgeois democracy you only need a plurality of consent to get something done, not even a majority, yet a society run by the proletariat is for some reason held to the standard of needing the consent of "everyone" including every single last proletarian. Curious.
>perhaps not even a business, not everyone wants every schmuck to have a say in organizing either, and not everyone believes that everyone is entitled to base needs, as cruel as that may sound. Who cares what people believe or want? It's about what makes society long term sustainable. Capitalism necessitates so much waste and destruction to maintain falling profit rates. It has sown the seeds of its own destruction. I say this way too much on here but please READ Chapter 3 of Fascism and Social Revolution by Rajani Palme Dutt, particulary the section entitled "The Destruction of the Productive Forces". Here is a free audiobook of that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3m7MWWUZfYBy the way, even under comfy liberal bourgeois democracy, you spend a majority of your life doing things you don't want to do because it makes sense to do it. Few people "want" to go to school tomorrow. Few people "want" to go to work tomorrow. Few people "want" to roll out of bed in the morning. Why make it about that? It's about historical necessity and the unsustainability of systems that operate automatically without anyone's individual consent and contain internal contradictions that are insurmountable and lead to disintegration.
>>2439003>You're confusing short term interests of better pay in some local job field with long term interests of the end of the wages system.No, I‘m saying that the former is the real attitude of the working class while the latter is just a self-serving assertion by Marxists that doesn‘t reflect the attitudes of the demographic they are speaking of. The distinction short term and long term interests is only warranted if the people you are talking about actually have it, e.g. long term interests. And even then said long term interest doesn‘t necessarily reflect what you claim it is.
>You're also confusing objective long term political interests of a given group with the level of political consciousness currently attained among a given group.Read
>>2438820
>Who cares what people believe or want?Perhaps people discussing such concepts as „political interests“? Seems kind of related. But I think that one statement is already telling. You speak of “objective interests” and would like that subject to be wholly divorced from the people’s input who you are making claims about. It‘s an arrogant Marxist concept that is flawed and is attempting to resist falsification.
>>2439014>. The distinction short term and long term interests is only warranted if the people you are talking about actually have it, e.g. long term interests.Most working class people want life to be better for their kids, their grandkids, their great grandkids. Just ask them. Most people want humanity to have a future. Just ask them. Short term interests are often at direct variance with it. Which is why a lot of the non-class-conscious working class simply wants to escape the working class and become petty bourgeois without any consideration of whether that is sustainable in the long term (it isn't). Seriously consider the rest of what I said before responding.
>>2439012>youre just defeating your own point>>workers are revolutionary><well, actually, they wil be forced to be revolutionaryYou're making up things I didn't say. I didn't say either of those little arrow memes you did just then. Workers AREN'T revolutionary necessarily. A lot of them aren't. I actually agree with that part of your thesis. I also think it doesn't matter because revolutions are waged by vanguard minorities, whether they're bourgeois or proletarian revolutions. Even peasants revolts were waged by an agitated minority of peasants. The majority of people are apathetic which is why coups are always carried out by a non-apathetic minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not supposed to be democratic in the bourgeois sense of requiring a majority vote from a disinterested population. If you want to know why capitalism is unsustainable, regardless of whether most people "want" it go read that audiobook. It's just 1 chapter.
flood detected post discarded >>2439019>Most working class people want life to be better for their kids, their grandkids, their great grandkids.You realize „better“ doesn‘t necessarily mean the same thing to them as for you right? You are running into the same fallacy I‘ve just explained because you are too absorbed in your own subjectivity and then think if it as objective.
>Short term interests are often at direct variance with it.Please formulate a correct sentence because „at direct variance with it“ is not a proper statement. And my answer to that is „no“ by the way.
>>2439055yes and i want less of that!
you offer the same thing in red paint
>>2439058force against government is permissible; its called self-defense
>>2439062you just stop giving them money presumably
>>2439069taxes dont fund governments?
>totalitarianyes, we exist in a totalitarian system; i would prefer not to.
>Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
>Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.
>>2439131>the vanguard simply being the most class conscious, educated, organized, militant section of the working class.again:
fourier, saint-simon, owen, marx, engels, kautsky, lenin, stalin, trotsky, mao, etc.
none of these men were members of the working class. you are a deluded dogmatist.
>>2439150right, so the bourgeois intellectuals create communist movements, then use workers as pawns to save them from themselves, as the other anon wrote.
>>2439153this whole site is a circlejerk of marx; im not the one infected with great man syndrome.
>>2439161lets break it down incrimentally:
lets say the average hours people work is 40 hours
if the average was recuced to 32 hours, what would happen?
if it was reduced to 20 hours, what would happen?
>>2439168but he is right; workers are not revolutionary
>>2439166okay, so only 50% of the site worship marx, then.
>>2439163Yes idiot there is a difference.
If you have a car where 50% of the torque of each cycle goes to cycling the engine, and half pushes the car forward. It is an engine with 100% surplus.
If you cut the fuel input by half, the engine will have no surplus.
That doesn't make us suddenly sensible to make clear cut distinctions been which gas molecule impacts do which except in abstract modeling sense
>>2439182>there is a differenceright, and what is the difference?
if a new law was passed that limited working hours but fixed salaries at the same rate, would things be better or worse?
>>2439183>His class analysis was too local to Europe and Englandelaborate
>>2439196what do you think the implications of this are on historical materialism? i know in a letter he wrote to a russian woman he said that the myopic view of progress is expressly eurocentric and for this reason the russian commune may be an alternative model for progress. this then particularises historical development of course, which i think is critical, especially against the irresponsibility of what engels writes here:
>Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science, without slavery, no Roman Empire. But without the basis laid by Hellenism and the Roman Empire, also no modern Europe. We should never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual development presupposes a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it was universally recognised. In this sense we are entitled to say: Without the slavery of antiquity no modern socialism.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch16.htm>>2439199i havent promoted any ideology, but only criticised the false notion that the working class is revolutionary. its intellectuals who are revolutionary, which is why they come to dominate political spaces.
>>2439203>i havent promoted any ideologynonsense
>its intellectuals who are revolutionary, which is why they come to dominate political spaces.this is your ideology. now criticize it to prove you aren't a dogmatist. isn't this a fun game? come on. i already played it for you. it's your turn.
>>2439898During October 1899, he worked as a meteorologist at the Tiflis observatory (Deutscher 1966, p. 54; Conquest 1991, p. 27; Service 2004, pp. 43–44; Montefiore 2007, p. 76; Kotkin 2014, pp. 47–48.)
Rothschild refinery storehouse, where he co-organised two workers' strikes. (Montefiore 2007, pp. 90–93; Kotkin 2014, p. 51; Khlevniuk 2015, pp. 22–23.)
These are anti-Stalin sources btw who would be highly motivated to say he wasn't working class, yet even they say he was working class. So if that does not satisfy you, I do not know what will.
The idea stated in this post
>>2439893 that Stalin went from seminary school to robbing banks is completely ludicrous. He left seminary in 1899 and only partook in one bank robbery that we know of in 1907, the Tiflis bank robbery, where he played a mostly auxiliary role, standing off to the side and phoning Lenin when the job was complete. It was his friend Kamo who actually partook in the direct action of the robbery.
>>2439907he was an intellectual, not a prole
>>2439904>anti-stalin sources would be motivated to say he wasnt working classwhy? what is virtuous about being a wage slave?
>meteorologist<In this position, he worked during the night for a wage of twenty roubles a month.[80] The position entailed little work, and allowed him to read while on duty.[81] According to Robert Service, this was Stalin's "only period of sustained employment until after the October Revolution".https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Joseph_Stalin>>2439903>Beso insisted that Josef should become a cobbler like himself, but young Stalin was more interested in reading. His mother Ekaterine saw young Josef’s potential and tried to do everything she could to make sure that Josef would be well-educated, hoping that one day her beloved son would become a priest.he was an intellectual, not a labourer. God even intervenes on this occasion:
>When Stalin entered an Orthodox seminary in Tbilisi, his father tried to kidnap him from school to train him as a cobbler by force, but his mother was always there to help her son.and he only organised a strike, but never worked there:
>They met for the last time in May 1901, when Stalin was organizing a strike in the Adelkhanov shoe factory where his father worked. He was furious that his son was organizing strikes instead of learning a trade as he wished.his father still lamenting.
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