/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

But all those wage workers were rural peasants! Now they aren't poor cause they work in cities!

China isn't welfarist enough to be socdem. China correctly understands that communism requires the maximal development of the productive forces. As China's wealth and consumption grows it is true that there will be some outsourcing, but not as much as you expect: a lot of production in China is sufficiently efficient and automated that it will not produce cost-savings to outsource it. For everything else, outsourcing will raise the income of Vietnam, Ethiopia, or where-ever else they outsource to. This outsourcing is exploitative (as the west's outsourcing to China was) but it is positive sum exploitation, these countries are better off for being exploited for cheap manufacturing labour (which then becomes more expensive and automated as living standards rise) than for being left alone.

Trade is fundamentally good. You do not have to love capitalism, you do not have to love China, but you must learn to love trade. So long as the people of the world are free to trade with one another, it will all be okay in the end.

>>2854578
Yes. Subsistence agriculture is an awful existence as far from your stardew valley fantasies as you can imagine. Almost anything is preferable to it. There is a reason that famine outside wartime is basically unknown to even the shittiest of industrialised economies.

All of civilisation is built on agricultural surplus.

>>2854578
>Now they aren't poor cause they work in cities!
HAHAHAHA

>>2854584
All this automation will just cause unemployment

>>2854588
And then new desires will be thought up and people will be employed again. The postal service bankrupted the medieval page, the railway bankrupted the intercity carriage business, the car caused mass unemployment for horse breeders, sellers, carers, feeders, and so on. The computer eliminated the typesetter, the alarm clock put the knocker-upper to bed, hand-weaving was knocked out by industrialisation, ice cutters were eliminated by refrigerators, switchboard operators were removed by automated switching machines, bank tellers saw mass redundancy not - as you might think - thanks to the ATM, but due to the roll-out of online banking. elevator operators were eliminated by automatic elevators, scribes were eliminated by movable type, bowling alley pin setters, film projectionists, radium girls, town criers, milkmen, human "computers" (women doing calculations), soda jerks, dispatch riders…

And yet the highest unemployment has been in the past hundred or so years has been 25%, during the great depression, a unique series of policy fuckups. Not even a global pandemic that required everyone to be locked up indoors whenever possible could get much better than 15% unemployment, and generally speaking there has been no link whatsoever between overall employment and technological development, because every single time a job was eliminated by automation it cut costs and made life easier in such a way that the opportunity cost (what you have to give up to get it) of some other task went down.
The fact I can convey this message to you now for effectively zero cost is the result of eliminating thousands of redundant jobs. The fact someone else has made a full time job of posting screeds on substack is the result of the same cost-reducing effect.

And yeah, a lot of the new jobs created have been shit like uber-eats driver, and yeah, a lot of them are obvious candidates for automation: but something else will come along, and then that too will be half-automated. In the last resort there's always caring for the elderly.
You cannot have progress without eliminating redundant jobs and creating new ones to meet new desires.

>>2854608
maybe read just the tiniest bit of Marx so that you don't post such high school tier liberal turbo garbage.

>>2854835
I've forgotten more Marx than you've ever read, you elevator button pushing horse fiddling prick.

>>2854584
>but you must learn to love trade
It's not trade per se, it's Verkehr which means something like traffic, intercourse between people.

<The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.
<This production only makes its appearance with the increase of population. In its turn this presupposes the intercourse [Verkehr] of individuals with one another. The form of this intercourse is again determined by production.

>>2854586
Anon… YouTube is the sloppiest source out there. Any content creator can just cherry pick shit

I’m not even a China simp but come on

i am europ and i am opress by chiner

plz send help

>>2855007
Glad if it's actually good, but if it's like honey (completely fake shit made with glucose syrup) then they shouldn't brag about it

>>2854586
Who else watching this just to learn how to doompost about the US economy in Chinese?

>>2855007
>Germany may never recover from China's assault
True, catering to chinese tastes has been an absolute disaster.

>>2855132
That's one way to cope / postpone dealing with the terminal state of ML

>>2855272
>"The book"
>A meme
>Zero proof of cognitive engagement, just low-quality propaganda reply
You can start with this specific book bud:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
>the less developed a nation is
Meanwhile China itself, last week:
>China discards 'developing-country' status
https://apnews.com/article/china-wto-reform-developing-country-special-treatment-20c70ec00d9502189bba87f93521b09f

>>2854570
What became Marxism-Leninism and Maoism is based on two popular premises:

1. That capitalist industrial development which builds and redistributes social wealth is not possible; and
   
2. That same industrial development under a single-party state will automatically lead to communism.
   
   

The 20th century has proven both of these things incorrect. Capitalist nations are perfectly capable of developing and providing social welfare under certain conditions, and the only thing 'AES' nations did was adequately prepare their populations for working in capitalist factories once their autarkic developmental regimes collapsed.

>>2855284
Gothakritik is utopian slop
when 3rd worldists whine about exploitation, they usually talk of people who are the least exploited, the least valuable, the least developed
>China discards 'developing-country' status
so? why should we be mad that Chinese communists have managed to develop their agrarian shithole country into a world superpower? communism is not christcuckery

>>2855312
>why should we be mad that Chinese communists have managed to develop their agrarian shithole country into a world superpower?
Cause that isn't communism. Good job on Mao, Deng and Xi in progressing capitalism tho. I'm sure China post-revolution will talk about them like the Roberspierres they were.

>>2855328
Don't slander Mao by associating his name with those traitor dogs (who will only ever be remembered as filth)

>>2855272
>exploitation is when wages are low or when commodities are cheap
Exploitation is when you have 539 billionaires and 170 million minimum wage workers like china.

>>2855362
Better to have a billion starving peasants on below minimum wage and a few thousand on western middle income salaries?

China is a leninist state, a leninist state is nothing more than a worker co op at the scale of a nation state, thus it’s workers exploiting themselves, not the other businesses that supply their inputs

>>2855328
>Cause that isn't communism
communism is the conditions of the liberation of the working class anon, not some end goal
>>2855362
have you read Capital?

>>2855399
Then what is the end goal?

>>2855387
That would imply workers were the ones actually in charge of marxist leninist states.

>>2855422
Pen and paper workers are workers, putting the general secretary in a hard hat and a safety vest does nothing

>>2854570
>low-wage chinese workers
chinese labor hasn't been cheap for over 15 years

>>2855400
liberation of humanity from class systems, states and capital rule, and eventually labor as much as possible

>>2855452
if cheap labor is western capitalists top motivation, why are they still dumping investment in china and not thailand or philippines ?

>>2855464
Many companies are alredy moving their factories and setting up factories in vietnam, bangladesha and other south-east asian countries and this trend will only increase in the coming years.
technical expertise infastructure and supply chain already exist there labor cost is not the entire reasona fctories exist in the places they do if that was the case uganda would be the only country in the world with any industry.

>>2854578
>Rural poverty is nbd, who even cares?
Bro just say you hate chinese people and you don't see them as human

>>2855470
>technical expertise infastructure and supply chain already exist there labor cost is not the entire reasona fctories exist
not really. if that were the case, industry would have never left america. the question of why western capitalists still invest in china despite its expensive labor costs remains unanswered

>>2855387
No. I was about to make a thread about this but then stumbled here.

China's agriculture is co-op based. But only its agriculture. Everything else is either dictated by the state or by private capital.

I don't know how many of you have read Engels's The Peasant Question. I don't even know if any of the big revolutionary names have read it. Engels argues that voluntary cooperatives for peasants are an absolutely necessary step for the transition to socialism. He specifically argues against what we've termed forced collectivization. Furthermore, he specifically says, most peasants are natural allies of the movement, not "class enemies" (God forbid the people feeding us were enemies!).

Thinking about what Engels wrote there, the various disasters of the 20th century, what China is doing, modern logistics, etc. I think I've finally cracked the code for scientific socialism. Unfortunately, I suffer from imposter syndrome and terminal ADHD, so the necessary confidence and research to produce a serious pamphlet is holding me back. I just came to this realization today after months of poking at the disasters of agriculture in Actually Existing Socialism and other problems faced by the movement in general ("why no insurrection in the West damn you labor aristokkkrats!!").

My proposal is this: the co-op model isn't just right for agriculture, it's right for everything. And it leads to outright communism, provided a few questions of the state are provided for.

Socialists of today are split into two or three camps blind to the synthesis of each other. These are the "micro-level" advocates of workers' democracy, and "micro-level" advocates of state necessities and cybernetic planning. The former struggle to answer the Proudhonist dilemma of how are they not recreating capitalism, or how can these poor co-ops defend themselves from the onslaught of big capital, the latter struggle to answer the Leninist dilemma of how the state is supposed to wither away, or how to "convert" people to socialism.

Scientific socialism is the understanding that human behavior is not dictated by what is in people's heads, but by what is the source of their comfort. Thus, a scientific socialist approach ties the source of the comfort to the workers themselves. The point is not for workers to suddenly realize they want to help an abstract humanity, the point is for their work to directly benefit their actually existing community they reside in. This is EXACTLY how rural co-ops in China, or co-ops like Mondragon Corporation in Spain, function. Of course, Spain is by no means a workers' state, Mondragon Corporation engages in capitalistic practices like exploiting gig workers and workers abroad without a stake in the co-op, but this is where I get to "a few questions of the state are provided for".

No gig work. Every worker must have a stake.

No bailouts, this was and is the fatal flaw in Yugoslavia and Venezuela. Instead, co-ops that fail are acquired and restructured by more successful co-ops. Workers do not lose jobs, they're just shuffled around, either by the successful co-op, or by a National Labor Reserve, utilized for temporary work needs across industries (gig workers become totally unnecessary).

Co-ops of critical industries such as weapons manufacturing and infrastructure construction do not operate in the open market, the state is the sole "customer".

National plans of development to avoid a blockade trap like Venezuela. When the state plans a big project, this is where the National Labor Reserve is funneled towards.

Co-op to co-op trade. The state takes an active role helping co-ops establish themselves in other countries, building a global network of co-ops that become resilient to big capital pressure.

Two-tier production. This is what China did for agriculture with incredible results. Every co-op has a baseline production quota, based on algorithmic consumption data. The purpose of this production quota is to ensure basic needs of every citizen and national security contingencies are met. Everything above that, the surplus, the co-ops take full. This directly incentivizes co-ops to employ more workers and automate, just to clear their quota faster (and is what happened in rural China).

How is communism achieved? When the final mega-co-op forms, that has absorbed all others, the state becomes unnecessary, and the co-op takes over its administrative functions. Every worker works for and consumes from the same co-op, every worker has a common interest, competition, the market, it's all gone. The workers have literally conquered capitalism.

The dismissal of co-ops is based on the assumption of isolated co-ops operating under capitalism. My proposal fundamentally puts that dismissal to rest.

There are more things to write about. What would the "army" look like? I've answers for those questions too. Of course, open to criticism and refinement.

And to cut through the endless, irrelevant purity testing of the modern left. Questions such as: Do they think Stalin was a good guy? What's their opinion on Kronstadt? Utterly irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the capture of State Power and the implementation of these structural rules. Whether a vanguard party, a mass movement, or a Chavista-style coalition captures the state is secondary; if they implement this structural base, the mode of production will mathematically resolve itself into communism. That's scientific socialism.

>Is this Lassaleanism?

No. Lassale wanted to plead with the existing Prussian government, and there was no larger foresight, vision, just "support the co-ops, big man, I'm begging you!".

>>2855472
the second photo I recognise is from the 90s. probably all of them are from radio free asia. fact is if you hate poverty so much why are you singling out the country that is doing more to end it at home and abroad than any other country on earth?

>>2855400
>Then what is the end goal?
whatever the Party says

>>2855472
Moving them to cities isn't socialism. It may be good, but it ain't socialism.

>>2855475
Industry does still remain in america in a reduced capacity.
>a despite its expensive labor costs remains unanswere
The labor costs in china are nothing compared to the west. And now that theyre rising lots are being taken out of china.
What is this pathetic attempt at a gotcha what are you even trying to prove?

>>2855378
Better to have neithet which would be possible under communism which china is not.

>>2855477
>co-ops!
petty boorj nonsense
>How is communism achieved? When the final mega-co-op forms
wow it's almost like all means of production have to be centralized in the hands of the state

>>2855507
The Peasant Question was written by Friedrich Engels. Neither have you read it, nor have you read much of anything I have, it seems.

Marx's address to the International Working Men's Association
<But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labor over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands”. The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labor need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the laboring man himself; and that, like slave labor, like serf labor, hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labor plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/10/27.htm

Marx was not opposed to co-ops, he only thought they were limited if kept isolated under capitalism, which is exactly why my proposal uses State Power to ban gig-work, set quotas, force mergers, etc.

>centralized in the hands of the state
This is State Capitalist worship and it is a historical dead-end. To quote Engels in Anti-Dühring (Part 3: Socialism, Chapter 2)
<But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.
Technical conditions. Your centralization scheme requires the workers to rise up against their own workers' state.

My proposal is the actual, scientific mechanism for Engels's "administration of things" transition. When the associated producers themselves coordinate production, the State is rendered obsolete and actually withers. You are defending the very State Capitalism that led the 20th century movement absolutely nowhere.

>>2855328
progressing capitalism to its logical end point, at which point it is outmoded as a means of production and will end, is communism. all attempts to "skip a stage" have at-best resulted in less efficient versions of capitalism that ultimately collapsed back into capitalism.

>>2855452
china was a third world country. communism will arrive, chronologically, when all of those countries are wealthier than china is today.

>>2855496
it isn't socialism, but it is necessary for both capitalism, socialism, and any kind of modern civilisation in general. you are looking at a rocket on the launch pad and going "yeah cool, not a moon landing though is it?" - good luck doing a moon landing without one!

>>2855502
you confuse an end goal with the means to get there. do you think there's just some "do communism" button nobody pushed that would let you skip this stage and get to the fun part? do you think someone (maybe even deng) just held mao's finger back from pushing it?

>>2855552
I am well aware that co-ops can be a useful tool. but they are just that - a tool - towards the goal of full centralization. like every other petty bourgeois socialist you fetishize small scale manufacture. historically we see tha tpetty bourgeois socialists turn into little Hitlers the moment one suggests taking their toys away and making them the property of the collective
>Marx's address to the International Working Men's Association
nothing at all here contradicts what I'm saying. in fact to achieve what Marx says, to do away with the ruling classes, the proletariat must centralize all MoPs into a single global state, a single organ, a single weapon with which to smash any remaining bourgeois states
>State Capitalist
oxymoronic Hitlerite whining. Engels is talking about bourgeois states, not the proletarian state
>Your centralization scheme requires the workers to rise up against their own workers' state
such an uprising would be reactionary, and would be rightfully beaten down. do not start independent unions. do not agitate outside of the existing political structure. do not engage in oppositional behavior
>When the associated producers themselves coordinate production
mhm. and how is said coordination supposed to take place? is it supposed to.. take place in isolation? in little islands? how are these islands to coordinate production between eachother? because there are only two ways to do so: exchange or planning. it is only through centralization that exchange can be done away with
since you like quoting things so much, allow me to provide this very important bit from the Manifesto:
<The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

you're all morons
Cuba is simply moving towards the tried and true China model. China (and Vietnam) showed and continue to show that is the only form of socialism that will work on the long term, lift millions off poverty and raise the country to global relevance.

I'm actually pretty happy with these reforms, I just wished they'd come sooner.

>>2854588
>All this automation will just cause unemployment
Automation can create a larger reserve army of labor by displacing workers, increasing the supply of labor power and weakening workers' bargaining power. But if labor power is treated as the commodity, Jevons paradox suggests that making labor cheaper through automation can increase employers' demand for labor overall, because lower labor costs make it profitable to expand production and hire more workers in new or existing sectors. This means automation may initially increase unemployment while also creating conditions for renewed demand for labor power. We see this play out historically through boom and bust cycles.

>>2856145
So what if they put all the profits into financial speculation instead ?

>>2854584
>but it is positive sum exploitation,
dengoids cant even pretend lol

>>2855563
>history is a civ game
actual cognitohazard

>>2856286
Why should anyone pretend? In a world where lots of miserable things are true, where there are parasitic flies that grow in the eyeballs of starving children and good people die young in freak accidents and the soviet union imploded spectacularly, what benefit comes from denying ugly realities and setting oneself up for failure? You have to face these things head on: you can abolish exploitation by abolishing industrial civilisation entirely and returning to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, or you can abolish it by accepting a medium term increase in exploitation in exchange for the development of the productive forces that will one day render exploitation obsolete.

Fundamentally, it is better to produce a lot of value and have half of it stolen than to produce almost nothing and get to keep all of it. The logical implication of your derision is a demand for less exploitation but more poverty, however much you might want to couch it in the language of some secret third thing that nobody with access to the levers of state has managed to deliver but that you've nevertheless worked out in the depths of your gut.

>>2856296
You have to be pretty stupid to draw that reading from what I'm saying. It's not even accurate to Civ, where every single game contains a big "do communism" button that you can rush. Prerequisites aren't just a civ game thing: you cannot have the lightbulb without electricity and without going through capitalism (or the "primary stage of socialism") the only communism you'll find is long in the past and prefixed "primitive".

Anyway, everyone should study the example of India (which remember, is constitutionally socialist!) versus that of China.

>>2856334
Whoever you are I like your style. You put things very well

>>2856345
>>2856334
>Fundamentally, it is better to produce a lot of value and have half of it stolen than to produce almost nothing and get to keep all of it. The logical implication of your derision is a demand for less exploitation but more poverty, however much you might want to couch it in the language of some secret third thing that nobody with access to the levers of state has managed to deliver but that you've nevertheless worked out in the depths of your gut.

Like this is just fucking BARS lol respect

>>2855472
>just say you hate chinese people and you don't see them as human
Westoid challenge: impossible

>I am well aware that co-ops can be a useful tool. but they are just that - a tool - towards the goal of full centralization. like every other petty bourgeois socialist you fetishize small scale manufacture.*
Did you even read my original post, or did you just see the word "co-op" and turn off your brain?

I explicitly argued for forced mergers, state-planned production quotas, algorithmically driven consumption data, and the ultimate formation of a single Mega-Co-op. There are no "isolated islands" or "small-scale manufacture" in my model. The entire point is that the co-ops structurally devour the market and centralize through the associated producers themselves. You are arguing against a Proudhonist strawman because you have no actual counter-argument.

Furthermore, your use of "petty bourgeois" here is completely theoretically incoherent.

Marx makes it explicitly clear that means of production only function as Capital when they are used to extract surplus value from wage-labor. A petty bourgeois proprietor is someone who owns small property, operates anarchically in the market, and exploits wage-laborers.

My model explicitly bans stakeless workers and gig-labor, and subjects the enterprise to state-planned quotas and forced mergers. Without wage-labor, there is no extraction of surplus value. Without the extraction of surplus value, the means of production cease to function as Capital. Calling a cybernetically-planned cooperative of associated producers without wage-labor "petty bourgeois" is Marxist illiteracy.

>how are these islands to coordinate production between eachother? because there are only two ways to do so: exchange or planning.
This was already answered, but you turned off your brain. No "planning" is necessary, or rather, the same method used for coordinating production based on exchange-value, is also the same method used for coordinating production based on use-value: algorithmic data. And when I say same method, I mean, this already exists, in both the logistics between departments of megacorporations, and the logistics of a factory in Shenzhen or wherever updating production based on real-time demand.

>oxymoronic Hitlerite whining. Engels is talking about bourgeois states, not the proletarian state
Calling "State Capitalism" oxymoronic whining means you are calling Lenin a Hitlerite, genius. Have you never read Lenin’s The Tax in Kind? Lenin explicitly defined the Soviet economy as State Capitalism.

The political form of the state is irrelevant to the underlying mode of production.
<But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces.

The capitalistic nature of production is not magically abolished just because a state is painted red. If the producers are alienated from their labor, if they work under the conditions of wage-labor, and the law of value remains, exploitation continues.

Of course, co-ops don't do away with the law of value on their own, and I never claimed they did. What I said is that if they are organized in this fashion, they serve as the necessary stepping stone to structurally rendering the law of value obsolete.

>such an uprising would be reactionary
No, it would be the solution Engels is talking about in that exact same passage to rid the capitalistic nature of production under your centralization scheme.

>since you like quoting things so much, allow me to provide this very important bit from the Manifesto
Quoting the 1848 Manifesto is the ultimate rookie trap. Marx and Engels explicitly corrected and retracted that exact passage following the Paris Commune.

From the 1872 edition's preface:
<The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.”
"Section II" is the part you quoted, for reference.

The goal is not to centralize everything into a State and call it communism. THAT is "oxymoronic". The State, regardless of form, is a meta-manager of capital by design structurally. When we speak of a workers' state, we speak of a temporary weapon only tolerated as a necessary evil given present political conditions, neither an end-goal nor something to be admired (God forbid we admire the enforcer of our misery). A workers' state only fulfills the requirement of political power, but it does not in of itself fulfill the requirement of economic power. And why is economic power necessary? Because you do not magically abolish capitalism by legal decree. What appears to a dull mind as trivial "micro-level" Proudhonist navel-gazing about ideals like "justice" and "dignity", has at last been revealed as an absolutely essential component of the war against capitalism: the workers taking charge.

Engels said the State withers. I'm with Engels. And I provide the scientific, structural mechanism for how that actually happens, alongside how workers participate in the building of socialism regardless of what's in their heads. You don't.

>>2856439
meant for >>2855968

>>2856334
>Fundamentally, it is better to produce a lot of value and have half of it stolen than to produce almost nothing and get to keep all of it. The logical implication of your derision is a demand for less exploitation but more poverty, however much you might want to couch it in the language of some secret third thing that nobody with access to the levers of state has managed to deliver but that you've nevertheless worked out in the depths of your gut.
Your implication that China under Mao was "poverty" is incorrect as is the implication that the people under Soviet Union were poor. The thing you are essentially implying is: markets are a necessary evil, so is wage labour. I disagree. We are long past that point of "developing productive forces", if China insists on that matter it will become another Japan. A society that reached a dead end of capitalist development that masks its own stagnation through hyper-consumerism. Partly its already there.

>>2856439
>I explicitly argued for forced mergers, state-planned production quotas, algorithmically driven consumption data, and the ultimate formation of a single Mega-Co-op. There are no "isolated islands" or "small-scale manufacture" in my model.
and yet you decide to be oppositional
>through the associated producers themselves
again you are trying to make a distinction where there is none. because you have swallowed anticommunist propaganda. you whine about muh state capitalism, but said state capitalism is nothing but the merging of all means of production under one single roof, into one single mega co-op, one and only one organ of class power. that is, the state. you whine about "forced collectivization" only to advocate for forced collectivization in the next breath. again, because you are oppositional
>the same method used for coordinating production based on exchange-value, is also the same method used for coordinating production based on use-value: algorithmic data
there's a big fucking difference between calculation in kind and calculation by value. like yes, both use data. so?
>Lenin explicitly defined the Soviet economy as State Capitalism
I have read The Tax in Kind. Lenin is wrong. capitalism depends on the private ownership of the MoPs. was there private property in the USSR? certainly not in the planned sector. in the kolkhozes? maybe. but that's also why there was a push towards further collectivization, towards sovkhozes. still not capitalism either way
we could of course view the entire USSR as just one giant company, that is compelled to deal with the surrounding market. but again this is no different than what you are saying. the state is merely one giant co-op. the reason you're arguing otherwise is because you're oppositional
>The capitalistic nature of production is not magically abolished just because a state is painted red
did the USSR engage in production for the purpose of wertvermehrung? they did not
>The goal is not to centralize everything into a State and call it communism
and yet that is precisely what you describe. everything is centralized, and it is indeed the proletarian state
>The State, regardless of form, is a meta-manager of capital by design structurally
no it is not. the state is an instrument of class rule. capital does not exist in a proletarian state, since the purpose of the proletarian state is not wertvermehrung. the bourgeois state and the proletarian state have different telos
>When we speak of a workers' state, we speak of a temporary weapon only tolerated as a necessary evil given present political conditions, neither an end-goal nor something to be admired
it's like you have failed to grasp the absolute basics. when Porky is no more, there is no more any ruling class to combat. the state therefore seizes to be a state, and is now merely government. the struggle towards such a goal is long and difficult, and will almost certainly take centuries. for example, we must see to it that the PRC, Vietnam, Laos, the DPRK, Cuba etc merge into one and only one state. without such merging there will inevitably be competition and war

>>2856471
>Lenin is wrong.
Fascinating. So when Lenin analyzes the actual material conditions of the Soviet economy and diagnoses it as State Capitalism, he is "wrong". But when you magically decree that it wasn't capitalism because the State had a different telos (purpose), you are right?

Judging a mode of production by the "intentions" or "telos" of its leaders rather than its material relations is literal textbook Philosophical Idealism. You have abandoned Historical Materialism completely.

>the bourgeois state and the proletarian state have different telos
>without such merging there will inevitably be competition and war

This is the most damning contradiction in your entire post. Think about what you just said. If the "telos" of these states is purely proletarian, why would they inevitably go to war with each other? Communists in a book club don't murder each other. So why would communist statesmen? Why did the USSR almost nuke China? Why did China and Vietnam go to war?

Because the State itself operates on bourgeois logic. Regardless of the red flag or the "telos" in the politicians' heads, a State must preserve its own institutions, its borders, and its national economy to secure the tenure of its bureaucrats. Bureaucratic degeneration isn't a bug; it's a structural feature of the State. If you put a communist in charge of a capitalist machine (the State), the machine doesn't magically become communist, it is the communist who is transformed into a "national capitalist".

>capitalism depends on the private ownership of the MoPs. was there private property in the USSR? certainly not

Wrong again. Marx defines Capital as a social relation, not merely a legal title of private ownership.

I literally just quoted Engels explaining this to you, but you ignored it:
<The transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces.
If the workers do not have democratic control over the surplus, if they still sell their labor-power for a wage, and an alienated bureaucracy directs the accumulation of that surplus, the capitalist relation remains.

>did the USSR engage in production for the purpose of wertvermehrung? they did not

They absolutely did. How do you think the USSR industrialized in a single decade? They engaged in massive capital accumulation by extracting surplus value from the peasantry and the working class to build heavy industry and compete geopolitically. Evgeny Preobrazhensky literally wrote the book on this which became the basis of the USSR's economic policy. Just because the surplus was directed by a Gosplan bureaucrat instead of a Wall Street banker doesn't mean the law of value magically stopped operating.

>there's a big fucking difference between calculation in kind and calculation by value. like yes, both use data. so?

You completely missed the point on algorithms. I am not talking about bureaucratic command planning with guys in suits using abacuses to guess prices, totally defeating the purpose of planning (phasing out the law of value, which prices are a reflection of). I am talking about cybernetic planning.

The logistics algorithms that megacorporations (like Amazon or Walmart) currently use to track real-time consumption and dictate internal supply chains… that is calculation in kind masquerading under a capitalist shell. They track physical inventory (use-values) and physical nodes in real time. My proposal rips that existing cybernetic infrastructure out of the hands of the bourgeoisie and hands it to the associated producers to dictate the Baseline Quota.

>you whine about muh state capitalism, but said state capitalism is nothing but the merging of all means of production under one single roof, into one single mega co-op… that is, the state.

No, it is not. You fundamentally do not understand the difference between the State absorbing the Producers and the Producers absorbing the State.

In your model, a State apparatus manages the Producers, top down. The chain of production itself is fundamentally driven to peak alienation. As Marx wrote, the State is by its nature alienated from society, and as Engels explained, state ownership does not decrease the antagonism, it increases it to its maximum, creating the "technical conditions" for a mass rebellion. Maybe this would be coherent if you were an accelerationist. But you don't sound like one to me.

In my model, the Producers manage production themselves, bottom up. As the co-ops merge and take over administrative functions, the State doesn't centralize - it literally withers away, leaving behind Engels's administration of things. My Mega-Co-op IS that transition mechanism. The State is not and cannot be.

>you whine about "forced collectivization" only to advocate for forced collectivization in the next breath.
Because you don't read, you don't understand the difference between expropriating successful producers and acquiring failed enterprises.

In The Peasant Question, Engels explicitly warns against forcibly expropriating small peasants who are successfully working their own land. My model uses forced mergers on FAILED enterprises (the "No Bailouts" rule). When a co-op fails to meet its cybernetically-planned social quota, it is acquired and restructured by a successful one. This destroys the "Soft Budget Constraint" that historically plagued Actually Existing Socialism to fatal ruin, holding producers accountable to society without sending in a standing army (a "special body of armed men" if you will, not very communist) to steal grain from successful producers.

You call me "oppositional", whatever that means, while I have deduced a scientifically grounded roadmap for the transition, while your only strategy is to paint the State red, wait 300 years, and hope the bureaucrats are feeling nice on the fated day. It doesn't need spelling out that this is not science, this is basically secularized religion. And I hope it doesn't need explaining that Marx and Engels were confident in logic, not faith.

>>2856654
You are one dense mother fucker.