/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

this is an interesting post. I don't know if it's an accurate one, but it's definitely written by someone who did their research. it's kind of uncanny: Marx through the looking-glass. this is a non-Marxist, explaining Marxism to other non-Marxists in non-Marxist terms, but it's eloquent enough that I think they basically got it right. and it is true that self-described Marxists have a bad habit of trying to appeal to the workers with ideas instead of action, but I don't think that's the fault of Marxism, just of opportunism.

I honestly agree that his revolutionary bias was one of his theoretical weaknesses. I'm not saying that in the Vaush sense of "hurr you just need to voot guys dont do direct action" but just that I don't think the transition to Communism will be quite like the transition to Capitalism, in that I don't think it will look like armed people with guns raiding government capitals and killing officers.

>>90693
It's uncanny to me because of the conclusion, implying that you can make the material conditions of plebs just good enough so that they will content themselves with eternal wageslavery. I hope this isn't the Fukuyamaist end of history we are going to get. I think a post-capitalist future with a much more lenient approach to labor is possible.

Otherwise, yeah, this anon's take on Marx is pretty spot on IMO, the dude certainly made a good job at explaining historical materialism without resorting to any of the usual jargon, it's quite impressive.

>>90698
>in that I don't think it will look like armed people with guns raiding government capitals and killing officers.
as Lenin said,
>What this "new" trend, which adopts a "critical" attitude towards "obsolete dogmatic" Marxism, represents has with sufficient precision been stated by Bernstein, and demonstrated by Millerand.

>>90698
I agree with this too, I think that at this point in history, a radical shift in economic dynamics is still possible without ending in a massive bloodshed like 1917 or most of the 19th-century movements.
I'm not saying any labor or populist movement that could move things forward won't be mutilated by the police, I'm just saying that, for example, the US Fed could eventually push quantitative easing to the next level and start buying shares like the Japanese. If central banks somehow end up owning more than half of their respective economies then what happens? Isn't it like Engels when he said capitalists would eventually be obsoleted by the State in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific?
>If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock companies, trusts, and State property, show how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first, the capitalistic mode of production forces out the workers. Now, it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus-population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.

>But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the 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.

I'm not certain about any of this, it's just food for thought lol.

>>90727
these state-monopolies are consequences of the highest stage of capitalism, imperialism. the radical shift of which you speak was the shift that already happened when imperialism developed, and now imperialism's descent into massive crisis (even as it continues to try and stuff more crap into the state-monopoly) is the harbinger of actual literal revolution involving guns and death. the reason people are so quick to avoid the possibility that revolution is the path to communism is not because they think it's "obsolete" or "impractical" but because they would not dare pick up the gun if they were called upon to do it.

One of the points I interpreted from those posts is the distinction between how people act and what they believe in (see monarchist wageslave example). It emphasizes the importance of changing what people do being more important as changing what they identify as.
If someone in your wagie cage considers themselves alt-right because they honestly believe leftism means tumblr SJWs and rainbow capitalism, you can still help them support causes we consider leftist like unionizing. Thinking they need to like leftism in order to advance agreeable socialist ideals is just IDpol, really.

>>90727
We sort of saw a shift toward this after the great depression with the ideas of Keynes and the social democracy of Europe. Obviously this is in the process of being undone in the age of neoliberalism but even neoliberalism seems to be on the way out, especially in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and covid with more and more people calling for radical change to sustain capitalism. Honestly, I could absolutely see a shift in the non-burger world towards Chinese style state capitalism with largely unprofitable state owned enterprises that help with some of the most key industries to keep an economy and country running and stable (railways, defense, energy, aviation) but the rest of the economy being run by private hands with only some involvement from the government. I know that some countries already sort of do this, like Bolivia and Russia.

this comment is just the ol marx could not predict X that liberals love, in reality history and society behave more like natural selection and organisms. Certain features of the material basis will tend to make certain kinds of societies fail, if they are ever tried, making it so that eventually the perfect fit for that particular enviroment is born. These societies are less mutable than actual animals, so their political structures will rather change very little and stagnate, so when the material conditions change a lot sometimes the society is just able to adapt by random mutations, but likelyhood is that the animal just dies and another one takes iits place, and this doesn't even have to be a conventional revolution

>>90777
I naively assumed money-focused forums and industries would promote capitalism, but like /biz/ anon said, your job doesn't need to match your beliefs. /biz/ traders can be leftists.
I had a job at a Fortune 500 bank two years ago and of the first three coworkers I had dinner with, one was compass-pilled (discussing how an independent politician often demonized as far-right is better than the libs, their only issue is racist immigration policies that thought-terminate libmedia and normalfags) and another admitted to being a far socialist and was quoting Manufacturing Consent when we talked about the bank's corp propaganda induction videos. All four of us were firmly in the green corner of the compass, yes I know the compass is stupid.

>/biz/

Kys OP

>>90803
>/biz/ traders can be leftists.
Yeah, Engels literally said this:

>But one can perfectly well be at one and the same time a stock exchange man and a socialist and therefore detest and despise the class of stock exchange men. Would it ever occur to me to apologise for the fact that I myself was once a partner in a firm of manufacturers? There's a fine reception waiting for anyone who tries to throw that in my teeth! And if I could be certain of making a million on the stock exchange tomorrow, and thus put an ample supply of funds at the disposal of the party in Europe and America, to the stock exchange I should promptly go.

>>90870
In UK and France at least lots of leftist economists ended up just deciding fuck it and decided to make $$$ on the markets and such simply because they had a very good understanding of economics.
t. third generation radical.

>>90872
I heard a story once that you could always tell who the Marxists were during the miner's strike because they would have rolled up copies of the Financial Times with them.

It's true in my experience. My friends who have really dived into Capital and been through commie boot camp with study sessions lasting hours read the economics and business news more than most people I know.

>>90876
>I heard a story once that you could always tell who the Marxists were during the miner's strike because they would have rolled up copies of the Financial Times with them.
KEK! I get so much shit from my lib and midly leftist friends because A. I still buy a paper and B. the FT is the only paper i will even entertain… But yea, my parents were dirty poor when i was growing up and I was still taught that if you wanted the news you readd the finanical news to know what was -really- going on.
Anecdote made me laugh, cheers anon. :)

>>90876
>>90882
The financial press is the venue in which material conditions relevant to capital are documented most accurately and reliably in a somewhat timely fashion. Their readers, who are working in the real world with real resources rather than the hyperreal MSM land of make-believe, can't afford to be misled by confabulation and propaganda, pic related

I actually made those posts. I was targeting them to /biz/ so I tried to make them approachable. I think in respect to actual Marxists it probably sounds a little heavy handed, I don’t really think Marx made a mistake or was “wrong” about revolution, Marx was kind of muddled at times on how much he truly prioritized violent overthrow of the state. I’d say he did have more of a tendency towards prioritizing steady development of the working class movement, it’s a part of why he was so critical of certain tendencies like in the case of denouncing Lassalle all the time. He would say something like some such tactic or goal proposed by his peers was misguided because it would result in confusion of the workers as to their class solidarity or power. So he treated strategy as very didactic, it’s like political goals were supposed to be the classroom or the forge of the new proletarian “ruling class” (understanding that the proletarian class would disintegrate the true ruling class and create classlessness by its victory). So in that sense I don’t think Marx was “wrong” about revolution, but I think he was responding to his times and his times seemed revolutionary. But people read Marx and draw dogmatically revolutionary conclusions when revolution (in my mind) is more of a chance event, a big break that is foisted on you because the ruling class won’t relent and people are desperate for change. Although I hope that I indicated that in the post when I said that sometimes violence is necessary, after all revolutions DO happen.

But the point was definitely more to dissociate Marxism from communism in a way, or you could say idealism from materialism, because I think I was responding to someone who was conflating the two which is common. To me Marxism is that more impartial attempt to understand human history and society, how humans develop socially. Marx himself was a communist, but the bulk of his work is about his social theory. Communism was his stance, it was what he advocated for as the way forward. He may have truly believed at times that it was inevitable but to the degree that he had such confidence it was just a motivated prediction like any other, he wanted communism because he had spite for the social contradictions he witnessed. He wanted them to be resolved positively. So communism was his program. But his social theory was the tool he used to help build that program, and his social theory suggested that ideology was second order to the relationships people had to production. So in that sense whether people are communist right now or not is irrelevant, you just want to push them to tear apart capitalism through antagonism to existing institutions and social relations whether they know they are doing it or not. That also doesn’t mean spreading Marxism or communism is a bad idea, but it is generally always going to be a small group that truly engages with that stuff. Those are the potential consciously political allies, but the goal isn’t to bring the whole working class into that group through education. Maybe in the long term, but success in such a project, analyzed through the lense of Marxism, almost seems to presuppose that the social system that exists benefits in some way from them being Marxists. In the future after drastic social change maybe it is normal to have Marxist ideas, but it mostly follows the establishment of a state of affairs that either isn’t threatened by or benefits from such beliefs.

>>91152

Oh, and I also recognize there is an irony in me saying ideas don’t matter but posting some essay to /biz/ about Marxism, but that is less a consequence of my belief in the importance of such things and more a consequence of me being a permanent inmate of image boards. I just get bored/triggered sometimes when seeing people spreading totally unfounded nonsense and feel the need to respond.

>>91152
>>91157
Great work tbh, that was a wonderful read

>>91152
Yeah that was definitely not a /biz/tard post, but from an actual Marxist. Just surprised that the original poster is here. Can I have an autograph and a selfie?

>>90691
a succdem is gonna read this and use it as justification for coops
>>90698
ofcourse is gonna look like that at some point but most of the time revolution is just boring activities like working and planning

>>91152
Exquisitely based, anon. Jargon is a form of private property. The line between pseud and intellectual lies precisely at the ability to explain Marxism without using the in-group jargon.

>>90691
>>91152
A common tenet of orthodox Marxist thought was the "progressive socialization of the process of production, which creates the germs of the future social order," to quote Luxembourg. The idea that Capitalism destroying old social relations and supplanting them with factory production, industrial education, urbanization, etc. was by itself creating class-conscious, self-organizing populations of workers. These workers only needed to be knit together and guided towards eventual revolution by a socialist movement once the crises of capitalism become unbearable.

This of course never came to pass outside of a few select circumstances (i.e. Russia and Spain). Much of 20th century Marxism (Lenin's imperialism, the Frankfurt School, Baudrillard, etc.) has been an attempt to grapple with and explain this failure as a way to reclaim the ultimate goal of communism.