/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2864957
>making the best use of available labor power is bourgeois
ok ultra

>>2864984
market economies have repeatedly shown themselves superior to vulgar taylorism with a red flag.

>>2864986
It's not just that. The very reason why ex-Soviet republics today are kleptocratic shitholes punching far below their weight, despite e.g. possessing vast oil reserves (Russia) or vast fertile lands (Ukraine), is because of the schizophrenic "dual-nature" economy of the late USSR. There was no proper market, but private wealth was nevertheless rapidly accumulated under Gorbachev's reforms which allowed the entrenched bureaucrats and their associates to engage in rampant corruption via arbitrage. When privatization came, because what already existed was Taylorist (one could say literally served on a silver platter for capitalists to take over), all the lumpen-oligarchs needed to do was monopolize and loot it, rather than competing as the traditional bourgeoisie did historically. When there's no competition, even if the market technically exists on paper, it is permanently kept in a retarded state rather than properly developed. Productive investment and innovation stall, real wages hit a low ceiling and stagnate. The population relies on the informal economy and nepotism to get by. The role of the "savior" Putin is not to get rid of the lumpen-oligarchs, but to play a Bonaparte, to pacify the underclasses from revolting and maintain the cartel of the lumpen-oligarchs by punishing the ones who attempt to subvert or escape the cartel. The tragedy is that in the past a Bonaparte would eventually face his own hubris, but as Ukraine's change in leadership shows, one Bonaparte is just replaced by another. The population neither gets to enjoy Western "luxuries" nor develops class consciousness. They are Marx's miserable wretches stuck in a bad loop.

>>2864027
> And if you think Marx and Engels thought reducing workers to miserable wretches would lead to communist revolution, you are an idiot again. They thought the exact opposite. They explicitly warned of the poorest and antisocial being easily mobilized by reaction. When we look at the Yugoslav wars, civil wars in Africa and the Middle East, we can only conclude that they were absolutely correct. Misery does not equal communist consciousness, it tends to produce the exact opposite of proletarian solidarity in fact.
trvke

>>2854584
>China correctly understands that communism requires the maximal development of the productive forces
Mao spinning in his grave is China's principal source of "clean" energy. The only emissions are the blood and surplus-value of Chinese workers!

>>2865051
VERY good post. Good to see at least one poster on this site has a brain.

>>2865083
Love reactions like these btw. They basically always boil down to "oh yeah? If China is capitalist then why can't you cite a source where China calls itself capitalist?" and "statistics coming directly from the Chinese government are no longer valid when people I don't like cite them". Naked anti-intellectualism at work justifying glorified Tumblr fandom around a country.

>>2864986
How is market "socialism" incompatible with assembly lines tho

>>2865929
basically because assembly lines themselves no longer operate on particularly taylorist lines. vulgar taylorists basically imagine the strawman of "communism will turn you into a cog in a machine" but take it to be a utopia and superior to the status quo, which they imagine to be inefficient, when the reality is that something like the toyota production system works better.
the USSR had some tepid steps in this direction with stuff like the Shchekino Method, collective contract brigades, etc, but this isn't part of the command-and-control aesthetic that draws in vulgar taylorists and in any case most of these attempts flopped because you can't just pluck one good idea and shove it into an economy that doesn't reward and encourage its use. e.g. if you've got a mix of incentives for managers to minimise unemployment at the plant and maximise labour productivity, you're in trouble!

basically a huge chunk of factory work is no longer unskilled labour and now consists of problem-solving when something gets in the way of the complex machines making the thing on their own. to be glib it is "individualist", it depends on the individual to be more than a cog, to think, make judgements, and generally act autonomously in a fashion completely at odds with the fantasy clock-world of vulgar taylorists.

>>2865051
>When there's no competition, even if the market technically exists on paper, it is permanently kept in a retarded state rather than properly developed. Productive investment and innovation stall, real wages hit a low ceiling and stagnate. The population relies on the informal economy and nepotism to get by.
Thank you for your review of such an interesting and exotic phenomenon that no one in the rest of the world can relate to, definitely not in western countries. It sure would be bad if capitalism itself resulted in monopoly haha.

>>2865981
monopoly is the least of the problems with the ex-soviet republics

>>2866012
Re-read the quoted part and think about it for a second.

>>2865981
People who read theory and then choose to not use their brains may as well have read no theory. Does it occur to you that the ex-Soviet Taylorist legacy combined with the overnight jump to monopoly may have perhaps created a concrete material divergence from the West with particular consequences? You are falling for the all-too-common trap of substituting study of the real world with abstractions, a trap Marx and Engels bitterly fought (verbatim from The German Ideology, philosophy is to the study of the real world as masturbation is to sex life), a trap that has unfortunately ended up infecting whole generations of "Marxists" without a hint of awareness. When they turn off their brains, they forget that an abstraction is just a reference, not even a map of the territory. If all that physics amounted to was manipulating equations and calling it a day, engineers would have nothing to work with.

>>2866031
monopoly is the only one of those problems that really applies to the average western country in any great measure. we cannot describe the market in the west as "kept in a retarded state" on the whole, productive investment and innovation continue at some pace in basically every country but britain, real wages are generally the highest they've ever been anywhere on the planet ever and continue to see moderate improvements, the informal economy is negligible everywhere but like italy and nepotism is substantially lower than basically anywhere else in the world.

that isn't to say that there aren't problems, lots of problems, but you have to be very lazy in your thinking to see the same problems in each case. the partial exception is Britain which should really be understood as completely and utterly blundering their "neoliberal" reforms and even there, there are well-functioning oddities: UK supermarkets are unusually competitive by international standards for example.

communism isn't a real thing, it's just an idea. people try to reify it into a real thing, but pretty soon capitalism creeps in because the state sucks at making money. the private sector sucks at almost everything, it's terrible at innovation and building infrastructure and maintaining stability and setting and achieving long-term goals and other things that the state does, but it is good at one thing which is maximizing surplus at all costs without being encumbered by any other concerns or by public oversight. a state cannot really compete in a global economy dominated by massive private corporations that can basically do whatever the fuck they want no matter how risky or destructive or unsustainable it may be, in the same way that an army of normal sane humans cannot compete with a horde of suicidal cultist lunatics who will do whatever it takes to win even if it means destroying themselves and the entire world in the process. communism can't really exist and function unless the entire world becomes communists and shuts down all private enterprise globally which is very unlikely to ever happen. this is what marx assumed would happen because he couldn't foresee all the major developments of the 20th century like nuclear weapons forcing all imperial superpowers into a permanent stalemate and the rise of globalization where all these stalemated superpowers would cease going to war with each other and instead focus their efforts on extracting wealth from the poorest countries by exploiting their unguarded resources and cheap labor pool. marx thought things would continue as they had where the various superpowers would continue waging destructive wars with each other and exploiting their own people which would lead to popular revolution all over the world, and things might have seemed like they were going that way until 1945 when the bomb changed everything and ushered in a new world order that is worse than anything marx could have imagined.

>>2866036
>Does it occur to you that the ex-Soviet Taylorist legacy combined with the overnight jump to monopoly may have perhaps created a concrete material divergence from the West with particular consequences?
Monopoly capitalism is a stage of global capitalist development, you moron. The fact that it was already achieved, including in Russia, was documented by Lenin before the October revolution happened in the first place. These same monopolies operated colonial extraction and industry. Pre-monopoly capitalism existed in the first place because the primitive state of the productive forces themselves didn't allow for consolidation on a vast scale. Once it is possible, the free market itself quickly crowns the winners, and it has been possible since the end of the XIXth century.
>>2866042
You haven't described any problem that isn't quite present and growing at an unprecedented rate in Trump's America in your posts. The overall trajectory has been for the west to become more and more like Russia in every single aspect, from cultural and political to the way the economy operates, largely because their exuberant privilege is slowly fading away.

>>2866095
You are an idiot. Lenin was describing the emergence of what historians today refer to as New Imperialism, of which Russia was one of the actors. Simultaneously, Lenin called the Russian bourgeoisie politically impotent and Russia a "semi-feudal" backwater. And what does that mean? Coincidentally, historians say Russia was actually losing money. Colonialism acted as a net drain for Russia, and in fact, Russia was a net borrower of foreign capital, it was not expanding with a surplus of its own, and money went into the black hole of expanding the military-bureaucratic apparatus instead of the severely lagging domestic economy. In other words, to say Russian imperialism was basically the same as Western imperialism, is to say a house cat is basically the same as a lion. The taxonomic categorization of the feline family is not a substitute for the real study of what makes house cats different from lions. And furthermore, to treat monopoly capitalism as if the accumulated domestic developments of competition vanish into thin air or become a non-factor in the political implications, is to mistake the abstract category for the concrete reality, to treat a theoretical milestone as if it magically breaks with historical continuity. That's a whole lot of words to say, turn on your brain for once.

>>2866125
toyota uses an assembly line, but there's a big difference between the qualified insanity of time and motion studies to make sure workers move like the most efficient machines possible, vs having some engineers watch the machines and occasionally go "wait, no, stop, that's wrong."
glibly, i would say toyota's factory floor workers are closer to engineers than to the assembly line workers of the 1960s. they're supposed to think and to respond dynamically based on their judgement, not just follow a process mechanically because thinking is handled by a different department.
(or to put it in other terms: the separation of mental skill and mechanical work is now such that 90% of a human's job in production is mental work, while vulgar taylorism pines for humans to mostly be engaged in rote mechanical work.)

your customized production example would be another good way that we've moved beyond the assumptions of the taylorist imagination. tables themselves aren't my area of expertise, but small/mid-sized production runs of a number of goods are now the norm. (e.g. leftypol t-shirts, basically anything you can 3D print, or for that matter print-on-demand board games, books, etc.) instead of a dedicated assembly line making thousands of one type of good, you can have more specialised equipment that makes whatever variants are desired for effectively no additional human effort on the factory floor. (if, indeed, there is a factory and not just some guy's house.)

>>2863890
>sources: harvard, wikipedia, credit suisse, forbes
Lmao

Markets are efficient in a sense yet at the same time produce stuff like corporate speech which either requires 200 autism score to understand and we're profoundly retarded for thinking it lacks substance or is actually complete unhinged gibberish that would get you put in a madhouse back in the day unironically.

Or, is it necessarily the product of markets, or of a parasitic leisure class? If it is the product of a parasitic leisure class, it implies markets are actually being held down in efficiency, which implies the capitalist manifestation of markets is not actually the ultimate possible form of the market.

>>2866118
Russia possessed a large and highly concentrated capitalist industry that was already at the monopoly stage. It created the proletariat that was capable of doing the revolution in the first place. The backwards part comes from the fact that it was similar to size to other European countries' while the population was much larger and the rest of it was still largely doing peasant labor. This backwardness doesn't change the fact that it has naturally developed to the monopoly stage and nothing would have rolled the time back to the XIXth century.
In fact, no one has been in the pre-monopoly stage of capitalism since then. Even the poorest and most underdeveloped countries like China were subjected to highly concentrated industry and forced to buy foreign goods. CPC itself started out mostly doing strikes and boycotts in the cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou. The difference is that the rest of the population was languishing as peasants. This languishing mass of people wasn't going to create an 1850s market even though we refer to them as backwards because backwards people aren't literally back in time, technology existed that both allowed and necessitated large enterprises in China and Russia too. And this applies especially to the Soviet Union 70 years later, a country that was at the forefront of technological development and industrial production at scale.

>>2865927
>how DARE you not take my cherry picked data seriously???

Remember: Holodomor myth persists entirely because of people like you demand to treat cherry picked data and fascist lies seriously

>>2866052
I think it's more foundational than that. Marx and Engels were mistaken in thinking the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers was the base "species-being". Modern anthropology says egalitarianism was consciously enforced, and without conscious enforcement, humans revert to oppressive chimp-like hierarchies. The thing is, and it's a bit complicated to understand, said conscious enforcement itself arose as a survival strategy due to human sociality. Humans, unlike other primates, or even our closest cousins neanderthals, are not automatically hostile to strangers. If your group is mistreating you, you can leave for another group, thus the group can't afford to mistreat you. Hunter-gatherers had loose networks of these groups that were far larger than Dunbar's number (up to a 1000 or so), meaning from our earliest days we were mingling with strangers. But imagine you're trapped in a Jonestown-esque cult, or a patriarchal multi-generational rural collective, boarding school, nunnery, neanderthal group… Places where you are isolated from contact with strangers. This is exactly where we observe the worst of individual abuse, and it is exactly the reversion to oppressive chimp-like hierarchies.

In other words, competition between groups to not lose members to each other is what makes us "civilized" in the first place. Because contrary to human goodness assumptions, we are extra-social chimps, not the children of heaven.

But there's more. You see, it turns out, modern anthropology says that even in our earliest days, we conceptually understood reciprocity (debt) and comparative value (arbitrage). Trade itself was born from mingling with strangers, and became a means of keeping different groups in good standing, keeping the peace. Of course, we weren't doing capitalism, but the seeds of capitalism were there from the start. What were our neanderthal cousins doing? Treating women like mobile property, as if they were pastoralists. How do we logically deduce this? We know that neanderthal groups didn't intermingle even with neighboring groups for tens of thousands of years. We know neanderthal excavation sites show the men being related to each other, but the women coming from "outside". The conclusion? These women were either kidnapped/captured, or exchanged during tense territorial stand-offs as a means of de-escalation. This slots in exactly with our "isolation creates oppressive chimp-like hierarchies" observation. The women were dominated by the men. A far cry from consciously enforced egalitarianism.

And what are the implications for communism? Inevitable "Stalinism". Not as in some ideology, but as how the USSR actually functioned on a daily basis. At the bottom, a society of strangers, just as in every modern society ever. Trade has to be consciously suppressed 24/7 by a special body of armed men, because when strangers intermingle, trade inevitably emerges. And at the top, a central apparatus has monopolized society itself into a single collective, and there an oppressive chimp-like hierarchy forms.

You know what historical society it ends up accidentally resembling? Sparta. Due to certain historical circumstances, the Spartans were subjected each other to their own terror to "discipline". Simultaneously, the helots were constantly terrorized by Spartans assigned the role of special body of armed men, because left to their own devices, they would have broken away from Sparta.

The conclusion is that the only possible communism is what Marx and Engels called crude or barracks communism, which they opposed on account of failing to liberate the individual from the collective, which for them was the whole point of communism. But what made hunter-gatherers "free" in the first place was competition between collectives for membership, not a collective monopoly.

And the final irony is, Marx and Engels traced the communist idea to François-Noël Babeuf, who specifically idolized ancient Sparta as the blueprint of communism.

>>2867792
fascism won

>>2854584
>all of civilisation is built on agricultural surplus.

Well thank god that surely is not in the process of falling apart lol

>>2867792
>egalitarianism
Marxism isn't egalitarian. Communists identified with egalitarian policies because they historically benefitted the proles more than the bourgeois, but there was never an official guideline that imposed all communists to be egalitarian. Political equality, taken to its maximal extent, is meant to overlap with productive equality in the sense that everyone has a say on production. This is the "equality" that Marx and Engels believed in, not the wealth equality.

>Trade has to be consciously suppressed 24/7 by a special body of armed men

1. Capitalism isn't trade. Trade is just exchanging one good for another through a medium. It's aim is use-value, it's to use the product newly acquired. Capitalism on the other hand is much less natural. Instead of trading something for something else, you find yourself forced to constantly compete to generate money through trade, otherwise you risk losing the ability to trade in the first place. It denaturalizes the natural "trade" precisely because it removes its natural function and replaces it with the injunction of maximizing profits.
   
2. Your argument is also incorrect. Having to enforce rules has always been the default in an organized society. According to you, every society would just find itself reproducing oppressive chimp-like hierarchies when there's been many counter-examples that still had armed police.

>>2864058
>Everything from housing to food to healthcare to education is affordable to everyone.
Not the case in China, so I guess they need unions

How many times does this need to be said? Chinese socialists are smart and sensible people, Western leftists are retarded freaks and degens. Follow Chinese socialists and don't act like a retarded freak. Simple advice.(FREAK WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

>>2869167
The chinese socialists who are malding about the nationalization of private companies right now?

>>2869167
Sorry what are we supposed to be mad at here?

>>2869193
This is truly what being LGBT these days is like

I want every dengist to explain why the CCP is hiding stuff about the peoples cultural revolution

>>2865083
>>2866166
>Commits genetic fallacy at first sight despite said sources citing CCP figures
Ok Chinaboos, but y’all just coping over the fact that China is free-market capitalist and part of the America-led unipolar order.

>>2869209
Western maoists just lie

They established their own "foreign language press" because they're the real ml-mzt authority,of course
Moronic larpers

>>2869187
drawn by a prevent who drew cartoon porn

>>2869185
there is nothing wrong with this tbh. the idea that nationalisation is, in and of itself, a good thing is pure cargo cultism. the british state obviously isn't going to run a steel mill in the interest of the proletariat. "now instead of being owned by the bourgeoisie, it's owned by the hand-puppets of the bourgeoisie!"
although tbh so far as i can tell the loss-making steel mill itself is a dog and the Chinese are just angling to get a high-end compensation payment, since the government hasn't decided how much it's going to pay yet.

>>2869311
ok, and?

>>2869346
pretending western leftists are "normal guys" is absurd

>>2869374
He still got more pussy and cash than you ever will, and all that by just writing ugly-ass edgy comics featuring loads of smut and gore.

That materially proves that he is better than you.

>Can someone please explain as to in what capacity china is communist other than their flag? No matter how you twist it they're literally just succdems.

You hit the correct conclusion - they cannot be considered even a DoTP considering there is zero workers involvement in its governance and zero movement towards abolishing capital relations.

>>2868682
>Marxism isn't egalitarianism.
You misunderstand what makes hunter-gatherers egalitarian in the first place. For hunter-gatherers, egalitarianism doesn't mean "wealth equality" or "we are all exactly the same". It means equitable cooperation and the active suppression of would-be chimps. What Marx and Engels called the "free association of producers" is the exact modern equivalent of this principle. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is functionally identical to the hunter-gatherer ethos.

>Capitalism isn't trade.
You are trying to separate "innocent trade" from capitalism, but Marxist theory itself rejects this when generalized commodity production is in play. The commodity form irreparably changes trade. Once labor is made abstract and directly comparable to commodities, that is, made a commodity itself, the law of value governed by SNLT (Socially Necessary Labor Time) is inescapable. Generalized trade among strangers in a modern society directly leads to (as Marx argued in his polemic against Proudhon) capitalist dynamics. That is exactly why the USSR had to suppress all trade. The central apparatus couldn't afford to let people exchange freely, because free exchange undermines the state's monopoly.

>Having to enforce rules has always been the default in an organized society.
You are missing the causal link and conflating two entirely different things: bottom-up enforcement and top-down terror. Consciously enforced egalitarianism in early humans meant the whole community enforced the rules against would-be chimps. It is not the mere act of policing that creates an oppressive chimp-like hierarchy; it is the collective monopoly itself. When a central apparatus tries to monopolize a society of strangers into a single, inescapable collective, it destroys the very mechanisms that kept early humans "free": the ability to exit, to mingle, and to freely associate. In other words, the special body of armed men does not cause the chimps; it arises because the oppressive chimp-like hierarchy needs a tool to violently maintain its collective monopoly. In fact, we observe a similar dynamic among actual chimps, where soldiers patrol borders, murdering outsider males and forcing female adolescent ones (able to bear children) into the group through terror. If the rule is "you are not allowed to freely associate or freely exchange", the producers will not police themselves, anymore than the helots will voluntarily kneel before the Spartans. A special body of armed men becomes a structural necessity for the collective monopoly.

>>2869374
maybe a bit odd but infinitely more normal than that poster is

>>2854570
>other than their flag?
Not even the flag is communist. It’s literally corporatist messaging that include the national bourgeoise.

The Chinese Communist Party could grind a million people into powers and still be more legitimate than all Western leftist forces combined. You have done nothing but degenerate over the past 70 years while the world rotted and you stood idly by. The Soviet Union and now the CCP are the only ones trying to elevate the human race to a higher plane, so that people do not have to live in their own filth and misery. I couldn't care less whether they are nationalist, imperialist, or revisionist, or what kind of bullshit Western leftists spout.

>>2869584
>>2867792
Thats the dumbest thing Ive ever read. Stalinism isnt a thing faggot, neither is your quasi capitalism in hunter gatherer societies.

>>2869997
>Stalinism
Crude or barracks communism. Read Marx and Engels.
>quasi capitalism
You don't even know what capitalism is, which is why what I've written is beyond your level of comprehension. A friendly tip is to stop relying on e-celebs, and actually read the primary texts. Come back in 10 or so years. That's how long I've been reading.