/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>70875
Get Haz to write something for you.

Any planned articles you have in mind?

>>70950
who's Haz?

>>71126
Nothing at the moment! Do you have something or someone in mind for an article?

I'm trying to reach out to people on here and twitter, but it's a slow process.

I have one person from Denmark who wants to write about the immigration system there, Also in contact with some comrades from Kenya who I asked to write something.

>>71577
>who's Haz?
He's the streamer from a group called Infrared who has popped up lately and been engaging directly with /leftypol/.
Here are the threads.
>>66678
>>70323
Haz streams for hours at a time and has read through and replied to entire threads about him and Infrared.

The tl;dr on their stance is they are "MLs" who are putting out fairly unorthodox ideas and trying to build a following starting with a more devoted core with a high barrier to entry (discussing philosophy and metaphysics) and expanding outward by lowering the bar. Haz's stated goal is to eventually make MLism as accessible as possible to everyone, following the model that he describes as "socialism with Chinese characteristics."

>>71577
Multitude anon please allow people to submit pieces of flash fiction (100 words to about 1500 words) with a leftist theme

>>71585
This is a good idea.

>>70950
Shut the fuck about haz you embarrassing spergs. He's just a meme of the month.

>>71585
I would love to have that! send some my way for sure.

>>71582
looks kinda cool. I agree with the need to stop conceptualising different modes of production as categorically distinctive, when in reality they can be highly diverse.

>>71582
>unironic ML vanguardists using esotericism and idpol to build a flock of followers, likers and subscribers
Into the trash

>>72017
They are also (Haz at least is) lolcows who are giving us attention (increasing traffic).

>>72038
>increasing traffic
>so new people can see the cultish book worshippers denying reality and conclude that everything porky ever told them about communism was right
Anon, I…

>>72049
What are you trying to say?

>>70875
anon i don't know if you remember me, but i've been meaning to write an article since a while ago, i send it, and someone gave me corrections. well in any case, i was very busy, but now i've gone into a bout of depression and lloneliness, so i've decided to finish it. well not exactly, it's missing a conclusion, but i've revised it in the ways that you told me, and it's almost there, i feel like it is appropiate to conclude with a paragraph stating how the information i said could be used in future comunist programs, and i have some ideas, but i am mostly out of ideas, and do not feel like i've read enough on the subject of programs to really make coherent sugestions, so i don't know if maybe some anon can help me with this? or maybe i'll write it, but only after researching more about the topic.
anyway here it is
https://pastebin.com/Q7ky49VD

>>72070
>be me
>hear about this great new leftist discussion board
>www.leftypol.org
>see people arguing in favor of totalizing ideologies, whether ironically or not
Consider two possible futures of "increasing traffic".
#1:
>nope.jpg, treat leftists as crackpot cultists forever
#2:
>argue against them using apocryphal sources
>be told to "read marx" by people who can't even name a chapter, let alone a book
>maybe nope.jpg, treat leftists as crackpot cultists forever
>if not, try arguing further
>be called schizo, told to read more marx
>decide that anti-empiricism is just a power play
>nope.jpg, conclude that Marxists are just an upstart elitist band looking to usurp the levers of domination with no intention of unhanding them
There are very few cases where "more traffic" works out well for leftism as a whole. Maybe a few orgs will get a few more members, oh boy.

>>72076
Not any of those anons. Bretty insightful, especially about reproductive rights policy variations as a supply control. But the last paragraph, on home industries, is ahistorical and seems misinformed by liberal/Whig historical narratives. I suggest reading this essay by Graeber for some wider perspective on what is called cottage industry:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-turning-modes-of-production-inside-out.pdf
<Here I want to take a radically different tack. I want to argue that it might be possible to re-imagine the whole concept by seeing ‘modes of production’ not simply as about making and struggling over some kind of material surplus, but, equally, about the mutual fashioning of human beings – the process sometimes referred to in the Marxist tradition as ‘social production’. The moment one does so, all sorts of things leap into focus that might have otherwise remained obscure. For example, one of the most striking things about capitalism is that it is the only mode of production to systematically divide homes and workplaces: that is to say that the making of people and the manufacture of things should properly operate by an entirely different logic in places that have nothing to do with each other. In this, it actually does have certain striking similarities with slavery, so much so, in fact, that one could say that one is, in a certain sense, a transformation of the other.
I also have a few comments on that last para, more related to gig workers than cottage industrialists.
>or at least to the extend that it must be prevented from spoiling, i.e. dying in mass.
You may be underestimating the level of surplus labor that could be done without. Porky doesn't really need much of a working class anymore to provide for social reproduction, and hires many, perhaps most workers simply to absorb their labor and prevent it from being used outside of the market economy. Telemarketers, for example, are objectively useless. Gig work provides the additional innovation of allowing the employer to demand readiness to move on a moment's notice without porky paying for that readiness, thus partially encumbering a gig worker's time at no extra money cost to porky.
>This is why as much as i love empanadas legislation against these industries is progresive, as it forces them to centralize
I ask that you show your work. What are their other options, and why didn't they take them instead? If I were a small pork running an empanada truck or a guitar amplifier repair shop in my garage, I would sell what I could and move out of the country. The service would remain unprovided as too small for porky to care about, and lots of means of musical labor would become scrap or be shipped overseas (with money) to my workbench. If I were Uber porky and (somehow) the momentum of labor casualization turned against my business model, I'd simply shred the zero-hours contracts, wipe the servers, leave the country, and let the national governments take care of the problems as they may or may not. There is an American witticism: "When you owe the bank a million dollars, that's your problem. When you owe the bank a billion dollars, that's the bank's problem."
>, and unify the proletariat interests around wage gains.
Why is this the most likely option in the face of a massive increase in surplus labor? Especially if porky has learned to use surplus labor via immigration as a downward wage pressure tool, and you've only just given him that? Porky can include contradictions within his concessions to split you and he can always find a place in Asia to build a factory and hire cheaper labor, and do the same all over again if they make too much noise.
Centralization is only progressive if you believe that porky wouldn't simply write off and destroy the fixed capital and do his business in a more pacified neighborhood. Porky only gets stronger and smarter, as more and more labor enters his grasp. Acceleration only pisses people off, and will drive people firmly against the movement when they figure out who supported oppressing them in the name of some (as they see it) utopian scam.

>>72116
> I suggest reading this essay by Graeber for some wider perspective on what is called cottage industry:
i'll try reading the article, i'm sure there is something i'm missunderstanding, after all my readings on the matter come only from marx and some other secondary sources, but to me iif you come to the third world, empanada stands do sure look like cottage industries. We are not talking here about a guy and his empanada truck, that is way too much capital for this, we are talking people who live in abject poverty,who happen to use their family and put them to work long hours, in the double digits long, to make empanadas, these people usually live in the very edges of urban centers, in conditions more akin to cattle, they operate with almost no capital, their fixed capital being reduced to like a couple of aluminium pans, a spatula, a glass counter, and some often improvised bowls for salsas, some even using shit like improvised kitchens with burning wood, and oil that is quite literally toxic. there is a series of industries that operate like that here, i'm only using the example of empanadas because it is quite iconic, so with this in mind

>If I were a small pork running an empanada truck or a guitar amplifier repair shop in my garage, I would sell what I could and move out of the country. The service would remain unprovided as too small for porky to care about
these people cannot move out of anywhere, they can't even move out of the 3 km radius where they were born, and there is already existing proper mass scale, "bourgeois versions" of these industries, operating with actual fixed capital, that would fill these niches, they just can't because people in the cottage version of them are so hyper exploited that they can sell below the value. the reason why the government keeps them like that is because this industry just kinda stores people, so when there is a boom of something they can be used there, otherwise they would just die out, and any boom would fuck the capitalists

>You may be underestimating the level of surplus labor that could be done without. Porky doesn't really need much of a working class anymore to provide for social reproduction, and hires many, perhaps most workers simply to absorb their labor and prevent it from being used outside of the market economy.
this might be the case in the first world, which has dynamic labour markets, but absolutely nobody wants to move to the third world, so if there is a call center boom in here, it cannot be met with immigrants, it has to be met with the native population, which means that there is supposed to be a ready to use population

The whole point about this type of industry being comparable to cottage industries of the past is secondary, my point is that these industries store surplus population, and thus are a means of controlling it, which was the exact role of cottage industries to marx, even if the relationship between both is not exact the point stands

>Centralization is only progressive if you believe that porky wouldn't simply write off and destroy the fixed capital and do his business in a more pacified neighborhood
for this type of business, they can't. see above

>Especially if porky has learned to use surplus labor via immigration as a downward wage pressure tool, and you've only just given him that? Porky can include contradictions within his concessions to split you and he can always find a place in Asia to build a factory and hire cheaper labor, and do the same all over again if they make too much noise.
i mean to be fully honest i don't know, but if i were to guess, that much capital can't travel forever, specially if it keeps growing, eventually iit is going to get so big that it has to ocuppy both asia and the usa, just out of sheer neccesity to avoid a huge crisis

>>72151
Thanks for the details. I don't think I've seen anything quite so intensive as that here in burgerland, and I have traveled a bit. Some smaller restaurants and shops, manned entirely by one family, usually first generation immigrants, hint at a similar dynamic.
A reserve army of labour is pretty much unavoidable under unplanned capitalism. IMO, states exist for the purpose of accounting for people and resources, and providing a stable agency to engage in exchange and agreements with other states. There aren't many options for a state to keep the RAoL accounted for, especially if foreign investment must be prioritized. A state can pay them to idle until porky has a great idea that needs workers, which costs money, which a particular government may not be able to print. It can regularize them to make safer and healthier empanadas in proper conditions, but having labor standards may make the country less attractive to foreign investment. It can employ them in open-ended public works programs with no-strings contracts, if international investment agreements have not limited the capacity of the state to do so. Or it can pay porky to come in and make work for them, which is also expensive.
Or, let them make empanadas for one another and pay for the privilege, which keeps them too busy to challenge or threaten porky. Problem solved, as far as porky and the state are concerned. ¡Haz, putas!
Do you suppose that a strike among these underground kitchens would have any leverage in getting any of those other policy options? Is there a way to make them better off striking than hyper-exploiting themselves?
>that much capital can't travel forever
It doesn't need to travel forever. Once it has depreciated into the production, there's no real loss in chopping it up for scrap. The temporary displacement and the running down of savings is usually enough to make workers less defiant for the next entrant. In burgerland we have a similar dynamic where cities will compete against one another on concessions, to entice some company to set up a workplace in the city and, hopefully, employ some of the residents. The concessions can get ridiculously generous, and the company is almost never bound to make good on their promises. Foxconn's Wisconsin boondoggle is a famous example, but such subsidies regularly happen on the level of regional supermarket chains too.

>>72210
Do you suppose that a strike among these underground kitchens would have any leverage in getting any of those other policy options? Is there a way to make them better off striking than hyper-exploiting themselves?
perhabs if the strike happened in the proper food businesses, like small restaurants, of chains maybe, but these people simply do not have leverage, the state has and will kill them in mass, as they are quite liteally expendable.

and regarding how they can be put out, well there is several options, in capital for example, this type of industry was faded out by applying the regulations of the rest of bourgeois to them, and stop making them an exception, which is difficult, because how the fuck you enforce that? it would require some kind of legislation making it so that you only can run a business in the street with a permit that requires like a small fee, and warranty of a normal 50 - 60 h week like the rest of us.
or maybe some combination, of health, labour and business standards that target them specifically and nobody else, i'm sure it can be done, you can call it the innitiative to protect children or some shit, and everyone will eat it up
and i've seen governments like mine and india try to do stuff like that, specially when they are ttrying to squeeze people out and force them into other wage labour, but if it is to be done, it must be done by proletariat action, this is the type of thing a proper party should have in its program, as the interest of trade unions are too narrow here, and purely economistic measures won't help this.
I guess the us version of this struggle is private prisions. It is beyond the scope of unions to ask for abolition of private prisions, and justice reform, but without that the labour movement can be easily broken by an army of convicts. I should def include a paragraph about that

>>72076
Hi, I see you're having a dialogue with another user, but I also wanted to add on with a reading suggestion: Kalyan Sanyal's Rethinking Capitalist Development. The reading is a bit dense at times, and I'd advise a skim at first, but essentially Sanyal says that in the underdeveloped world, alongside the reserve army of labour there is also "the wasteland", basically those people (and even societies, e.g. slums) that are swallowed up by the process of accumulation and spat out again because capitalism has no use for them. Sanyal identifies that within the 'wasteland' you see small business owners, who basically operate for subsistence etc. He also sees that the western-normative idea of the development industry has now becomes rather than building structures of welfare, "poverty management"is the new norm, which is basically about providing needs but not tackling the rootc auses.

It may be interesting to see how this links with your essay

> it is possible to increase the employable people by loosening regulations on industry, which can increase surplus labour conversion into capital.

Could you elaborate on this?

>another example in the first world would be the abundance of self employed contractors, and independent workers, who could easily reduce cost of circulation and production by centralizing, but don't

it might be interesting to note the "platform" economy where freelancers use online platforms, that inevitably treat them like employees by sucking away a percentage of their earnings.


Overall, I think the article has good ideas, but it's still in the sketch phase. My criticism would be that it's very functionalist when it comes to population control and states, and while that's fine if that's your view point it would benefit from some 'colour', i.e. real world examples to back up your claims.

>>72607
>Could you elaborate on this?
NTA, but that's a fancy way of saying that it you deregulate companies they'll hire subpar labour, provide subpar products and services. They'll employ more workers, but pay them less on account of their lack of skill, thus "increasing surplus labour into capital".

>>71582
Editor here, does anyone have any feedback on articles we have published?

Also, we have been in contact with the organised labour resistance in Myanmar during the coup. There is a general strike happening right now and we are donating to those labour leaders who have been leading these strike, even before the coup.

We have donated roughly $500 worth of VPN so they can communicate with each other and the outside world more freely. If you'd like to support this, please consider making a donation via our patreon.

>>74972
Damn that's based. Is there a way to donate a bigger amount than 7 dollars?

>>74972
>We have donated roughly $500 worth of VPN
doubt

>>74976
I've just added a $25 button on Patreon. You're also welcome to contact me via twitter, but even the smallest tier of $3 a month is appreciated and is a psychological boost for me to continue this project too.

>>75021
If people have doubts, I'm willing to give proof to the leftypol admins if they want to contact me via twitter.

>https://newmultitude.org/is-the-uk-a-managed-democracy/

>https://newmultitude.org/the-democratic-foundations-of-marxism/

some new articles from this week

>>71585
any updates on flash fiction?

Bump. Is there a way to make a one-time donation?

Bump

Hi Editor here

We're still around! We just published some stuff from a Malaysian comrade and a British Comrade.

in talks with a Korean Comrade to do some translation for us!

But we still desperately need more content. I have reached out to the infrared guys but they didn't seem too interested in writing something, so they said they'd keep it in mind (someone here might want to interview them and publish that?)


We still need


>>114545
yes you can do it through the Patreon channel

>>131028
>someone here might want to interview them and publish that?
This simping has long gone past the point of embarrassing

Just published today: a brief history of the Nigerian left.

https://newmultitude.org/a-brief-history-of-nigerias-left/

>>152868
Interesting subject

>>131028
Ah, I think that you were misled to talk to those Infrared guys.
Theyre not too good, just your average breadtuber

>>152868
Based

I don't read New Multitude because most of the articles aren't directly relevant to the western world and so I have little interest in them.
I'm not saying this is a bad thing, I suppose it's something that will make the site a step above the rest. Does anyone have recommendations for a more western-centric magazine that doesn't go full-sensationalist?

>>153113
Thank you for your feedback.

Actually we have quite a few articles relevant to west some of them:

The potential and the historical limitations of the proliferation of Marxism-Leninism in the Brazilian youth
Well it says Brazilian youth, but this is actually very relevant to all Marxist Leninists:
>Reproducing postmodern cultural logic, many people have resorted to the revolutionary theory of the proletariat as an individual response to the impacts of the contemporary identity crisis. It is in this sense that several times Marxism-Leninism has erroneously appeared to the youth: simply as an identity, a kind of new social tribe to participate in. It is a mercantile absorption of the theoretical construction that aims to overcome the capitalist mode of production.
>https://newmultitude.org/andre-brandao-the-potential-and-the-historical-limitations-of-the-proliferation-of-marxism-leninism-in-the-brazilian-youth-translation/

Is the UK a managed Democracy? A look at the UK State
>https://newmultitude.org/is-the-uk-a-managed-democracy/

>>103520
Just made a new thread since the first one fell off the board >>153783
Go write some shit anons.

>>153113
Why don't you write something for them then?

>>153113
Pretty sure the site is open for anybody to submit but they prefer it not to be US/euro centric. Maybe some people have interpreted that too strongly and are reticent to post articles.

>>154004
Yeah it's definitely open for any submissions, But the express goal of the journal is building worldwide links, so I specifically reach out to writers across the world and invite them to write for us.

But yeah there's no limits. (actually we don't have anything on the US right now, so if an Anon wants to step up, that would be great!)