/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>1087871
If you got the math skills, absolutely. Just remember that it's high-level shit

Is there a books against the liberal narrative of democracy ?.
they love to use it as the new civilized vs barbarians so having counter arguments would be good.

>>1087871
Shaikh is Victor Magariño's supervisor and seems like a smart cookie, so probably
>>1087944
Towards a New Socialism has a chapter on this

>>1087880
see >>>/edu/6088

>>1087871
Shaikh is a great economist, arguably the greatest currently alive, his magnum opus Capitalism is for somebody without a somewhat formal education in econ (and be it working through some texbooks) incredibly hard to read trust me I tried do your homework and then give it a read it's worth it.

>>1088012 (me)
However you can start watching the lecture series >>1087980 right now. In it he breaks his arguments down for the attending students.
I also recommend his lectures on the Historical Foundations of Political Economy >>>/edu/6098

>>1087963
>Shaikh is Victor Magariño's supervisor
>>1088012
>>1088028
Sounds amazing. I wish I had to attend these classes. I have 0 discipline God damn.

>>1088042
I downloaded his lectures on the Historical Foundations of Political Economy, converted them to opus and listend to them during workout maybe try this.

>>1088062
interesting. might do that. Have you given the Captial lectures a try? Do you happen to have the files? Maybe you can upload them to /edu/

>>1088012
I don't mean for this to be a challenge, but I have skepticism for more mathematical treatments of economics. Whether it be marginalism, marxian, whathaveyou. In my experience there will be some abstraction and it maps poorly to the real data, or the data themselves are practically too difficult to obtain, or they can be obtained but only at great expense and no one bothers. Picrel for a meme that has a lot of truth to it, both in the case of bourgeois and marxian econ.

My basic question is: Does he make quantitative predictions and compare them to observation? If this is the case then I am excited to check out the book, and if it isn't then I must prioritize other things. There are some people whose ideology I like more than others, e.g. I like Roemer's more than Leontief's, but on the other hand Leontief's book is full of tables of real economic data that are used to compute real economic trends, while Roemer's book is full of math and graphs of abstract functions.

>>1088689
William Phillips was a bourgeois economist. the entire basis for modern bourgeois political economy since Marshall is nonsense since they reject materialism in favor of subjectivism

>>1088705
This has nothing whatsoever to do with my post.

>>1088705
It's not what he is talking about anon, he's talking about skepticism against economic theory based only on math and no real economic data to collaborate with said math, and wants to know if Shaikh is just math and no data.

>>1088062
Just watched the first episode while I exercised. Looking good so far. It seems light enough and informative.

Do I really need to read theory? I actually like reading despite never finding time for it. But it seems like a lot of theory just boils down to oppose at all cost whatever benefits the elite, rich, corrupt and overtly religious and I don't have a problem with that. But I just question how important theory actually is if I all that matters is total dominance of the ruling elite by the working class.

Okay, so, please forgive my relative ignorance, but my brain seems to work a bit differently than average, and the mainstream seems to produce the worst possible arguments for any position. This has left me in extreme disarray. As such, being fairly drunk, I am actually able to allow myself to consider alternatives to the typical /pol/ worldview (the naturalistic, non-christcuck, ones, at least).

Also, I swear on my waifu (a Shoggoth, from Monster Girl Encyclopedia) that these questions are posed in earnest, and not posted in order to troll or to try and spark dissent. Granted, I cannot prove this, but hopefully my struggles will be relatively familiar to any anons who have themselves been in a similar position.

As far as I can tell, the idea of leaving the running of communities up to the individual communities (e.g. communism, anarchism, etc.) seems to hold much merit. However, most groups advocating for communism/socialism/etc seem to be corrupted by the powers that be, and seem to be oblivious to the incongruity that so many supposed socialist ideas are being funded and pushed by capitalists who seek to use the rhetoric to expand their influence by proclaiming social agendas that sound good, while their actual policies serve only to expand their own wealth and influence. Is this a known thing in true communist/anarchist circles? I have not seen it addressed before, but it is entirely possible that normalfags, being what they are, are simply too simpleminded to notice.

Additionally, one issue I am struggling with quite a lot is the issue of transgenderism. While I strongly wish I had been born a woman, I cannot understand the claims that trans women/men are *actual* women/men, instead of simply having strong psychological issues, and/or a psychological affiliation with the opposite sex's typical traits.
The crux of it is, in a purely natural world, male and female need to be easily identifiable and certain to ensure ease of procreation and continuation of the species. As far as I can tell though, personalities are significantly less vital to the continuation of the species, and can thus vary far more than reproductive capacity is allowed to by nature. Given such, it is easy to envision people who's personalities line up strongly with the typical psychology of the opposite sex, but there doesn't seem to be any reason to claim they *are* the opposite sex, as variance in personality is quite common, and there doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that personality could "outweigh", as it were, the physical attributes needed for procreation, with which the terms "male" and "female" have typically been associated with.
Granted, it is hypothetically possible that the capitalist class is simply pushing the mainstream version of transgenderism to distract from the true issue of the working class being exploited by the capitalist class, among many other distraction issues. Again though, I have not seen this position actually advocated for anywhere (nor have I seen any ridicule or hate from normalfags directed at such a position to hint that it exists), and so I am doubtful that anyone holds the position that the mainstream version of transgenderism is a distraction issue, or that they believe it is in any way incomplete.


I would greatly appreciate any advice or points of view from anons who have been in similar situations. I'm at the point where I have begun rejecting the idea that I have anything in common with humanity in general, due to the absolute blindness and willful ignorance of normalfags, and am desperately searching for any hint that others have gone through similar questions and doubt to what I've been recently going through. I understand that such questions are not very likely to have been documented or written about to any significant degree, but I can't quite bring myself to believe that I'm truly the only person who's ever had them.

>>1088689
this excerpt should answer you question

>>1094596
I really don't want to insult you but HOLY SHIT GET A FUCKING SOCIAL LIFE WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING ALL DAY PULL THE FUCKING PLUG AND TOUCH SOME GRASS TALK TO PEOPLE IRL WHAT YOURE DOING IS NEITHER NORMAL OR HEALTHY

>>1094212
>Do I really need to read theory?
yes

>>1094212
it's good to have grounding in theory because otherwise you end up like Caleb Maupin, Haz or Russel Brand, and becoming right wing schizos.

>>1094212
There really is no hard distinction between what is theory and what isn't, so contrary to what some dorks here have been saying, if you read history stuff or even biographies, you will also get theory by osmosis. Muh theoreee is absolutely not some higher form of thinking by special people.
>>1094612
Pretty sure Haz has read tons of bad theory.

>>1094596
You really didn't have to swear on your waifu, or really have the introduction. I don't know how good the DMT you were on was, but god damn I was surprised this wasn't a copypasta.

Trans issues are as much a distraction issue as women's rights are as much a distraction issue as civil rights. We all go together or we all fall together, social issues aren't supposed to divide a socialist movement.

>>1087895
What math skills do you need to fully understand this book, might I ask?

how do you pronounce uygha? i always read as 'iuga' but i just now realized that's probably wrong

If communism can only exist as a worldwide state of things then why would it necessarily be wrong for a sufficiently advanced socialist military coalition to go into a world war with the intent of overthrowing and destroying the bourgeois in all parts of the world and establishing a proletarian dictatorship everywhere they occupy? Might be a stupid question, but I'm interested in the responses so I'll ask it anyways.

Two questions.
1.Why are Markets shit, Sources are welcome
2.Why is a Planned economy better than Markets, sources are welcome too.

>>1097135
Markets have some kind of user-feed-back (whether or not people chose to buy something), that part is good.
Markets are however not good at determining prices, it's basically just capitalists guessing, and that results in huge amount of inefficiency and waste.
Markets do not measure costs that are external to an exchange, that leads to irrational decision making.
Markets concentrate most of the money into a few hands. Trades are not perfectly balanced, usually one side in a trade gets a better deal, and over time creates a small number of people who by random chance win more often then they loose. They also get compounding advantages. This leads to wealth inequality which causes bad resource allocation, that leads to societal dysfunction and bad economic performance.
Markets lack a function for people to influence the direction surplus investment.
Markets have social relations veiled by money.

Planned economies retain the one good feature of markets the user-feed-back, and do away with all the downsides. Planned economies calculate prices based on labor time and that gives accurate prices and social relations are not behind a money veil. It's easy to factor in external costs to a planning algorithm so that the economy makes much fewer irrational decisions. Planning systems have no tendency to concentrate wealth and that avoids the destructive side effects of wealth inequality.

For most people a planning system would not feel much different, you would still buy things as normal except that prices are now expressed in time (the actual time it took to make a product or render a service). Everybody can see how much time they spend working in the economy and how much of that time they get back from the economy in one form or another. People would have it easier to make rational spending decisions. Scamming people would become harder.

The planning system also has the advantage that it not only accounts for human time spend working but it accounts for also material resources in physical quantities. That makes it very easy for the system to prevent shortages and supply issues, fixing the other downside of the monetary veil in markets. The planning system can have a lot of features that let people influence the direction of surplus investment

>>1097178
>it's basically just capitalists guessing
Don't companies have complex internal planning mechanisms, like those of Walmart? In capitalism prices already correlate very closely to the price of labor. I think any guesswork would only happen when a product or company recently launch and they're doing price discovery - after that they adjust prices to conditions they are mostly familiar with.

>>1095834
wei-gur

Why Marxist support Hegel when he was literal fash?

>>1098852
anyone who calls themselves a marxist and thinks of hegel as anything more than a footnote in history, a turning point where marx's sole draw from hegelian philosophy was to completely invert it, is just fundamentally a liar or been lied to.

>>1098852
Brainlet, Hegel supported the French Revolution until his death.

>>1098861
Brainlet.

>>1098894
Did you not read Philosophy of Right? Who are you calling Brainlet?

>>1098894
Fascists also supported and drew from the French Revolution

>>1098861
philosophy today lives in the shadow of Kant, Hegel, and Marx.

>>1098861
Nah im with Lenin on this one, you cant truely understand Marx without with a deep understanding of Hegel. It underlines every part of his thought.

>>1100485
I'm certain you can just read an overview of Hegel's thought from a concise text instead of having to drudge through his whole works. What makes you say that a deep understanding of Hegel is necessary?

What is the Marxist response to this criticism?
>Marx obscured his historical thought, from the Manifesto on, and was forced to support a linear image of the development of modes of production brought on by class struggles which end, each time, “with a revolutionary transformation of the entire society or with mutual destruction of the classes in struggle.” But in the observable reality of history, as Marx pointed out elsewhere, the “Asiatic mode of production” preserved its immobility in spite of all class confrontations, just as the serf uprisings never defeated the landlords, nor the slave revolts of Antiquity the free men. The linear schema loses sight of the fact that the bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that ever won; at the same time it is the only class for which the development of the economy was the cause and the consequence of its taking hold of society.

Would you smell alunya's feet?

Opinions on Poulantzas? is he Based or Cringe?

Quick rundown on the Taiwan situation? I still don't get why it is getting so much spotlight now, wasn't all that pelosi stuff just a meme?

>>1103701
bwahahahah

is this a fake quote?

>>1107544
https://www.marxists.org/archive/gorky-maxim/1924/01/x01.htm
if Im not mistaken its Maxim Gorky quoting Lenin

>>1103946
Who is he?

Would a Communist prefer the proletariat to be poor under Communism or wealthy under Capitalism? Interesting hypothetical. Cuba is Communist but very poor. If Capitalism meant huge amounts of economic growth to Cuba which meant people got internet, luxury electronics, actual food and bare essentials would a Communist support this or would the Communist tell the poor it's better to starve under Communism than be wealthy under Capitalism?

>>1107549
tfw heavenly music but must harden your heart

>>1107622
>Would a Communist prefer the proletariat to be poor under Communism or wealthy under Capitalism?
The latter, but it's a moot point. Cubans aren't starving and the realistic point of reference for what would happen under capitalist restoration is probably Haiti, meaning worse quality of life.

>>1107549
wow he's literally me

Finished Capital Vol I, should I move on to the next two volumes first, or branch out to other theorists before doing that? Both at once?