Silver Needle

中國將卡爾·施密特納入其政策框架。馬克思已淪為資本手袋上的裝飾品。在這個已將道教與中國古代哲學家重新納入其神話體系的國家宗教中，他不過是眾多神祇之一。哈

I unfortunately cannot find it, there is the this meme where a white person tells another other white person that they need to be killed with the subtitle “third worldism”.

I think it’s quite interesting how you just launch all these attacks against someone who is mostly in the same boat with you but much stricter in their readings. I attend protests, I have been part of what people in my lane would deride as “activism”. Not because I believe in it, but because I want to understand organisation from a first hand perspective. I know socdems, demsocs, Maoists, Trotskiites, fuck it I was in a reading circle with a co-author of Cockshott, I don’t hate them nor do I want to see them completely disempowered because I do believe that organisational structure can experience ruptures and change towards radicalism no matter the exact tendency. There are certain fearless groups in Eastern Europe doing incredible work within the self-action of the worker and they do not belong to any ultraleftist orgs.

Keep doing what you are doing. I don’t see it necessary to actively convince anyone or proselytise. I don’t have any pretensions to drag people into camps.

CIA

lmaoooooooooooo

most learned dust mite yet hold an arrogance when you talk far greater than the most arrogant emperor.

Arrogance, man speak for yourself.

A formalist reading of Marx is not just wrong. It abandons the soul of scientific socialism and borders on the reactionary. It substitutes legal abstractions for the analysis of concrete social relations and replaces historical materialism with moralistic catechism.

Wordslop and the Stalino-Kruschevite fetishism of Formalism that doesn’t mean anything outside of its use as a verbal battering ram.

Your watch analogy is idiotic

I could make the same analogy with a piece of equipment used in production of goods and it would still hold water.

Administration is not ownership

It literally is. But in the Stalino-Trotskiite worldview you need to add extra steps to explain why managers, party officials and people high up in the military were totally socialist or communist and A OK.

Try exercising your supposed “ownership” by walking into that bank and demanding to appropriate that capital you “own” as personal wealth

You completely incorrectly conflate the subset personal wealth with capital. Just because the USSR had collective democratic mechanisms and was depersonalised (in a limited way) doesn’t mean it gets to be exempt from analyses of it.

Administration is not ownership.

To reiterate, it is. When I hold dominion over something like a steam train I practically own it because I get to say what happens to it, I get to say that it’s mine for example.

Your point about public land, firefighters, and internet services under capitalism is detached from both theory and reality. Thatcherites privatized public land on a massive scale. Tech firms and telecom monopolies wage constant campaigns to enclose the digital commons and commodify every facet of the internet. The fact that capitalism tolerates or even manages certain public functions currently does not negate its driving logic. These are concessions wrung from capital or functional necessities for reproducing labour power, not evidence of a different mode of production.

Here is the thing. Even if public land is privatised there is a hard limit to which you can do that. You might have a few counterexamples examples where land and certain services are privatised, but that does not disprove the fact that socialisation is an absolute necessity even in capitalism. You are also twisting my words, I never said that this as is was evidence of a different mode of production.

Your KMT comparison remains idiotic even after clarification. Yes, both the KMT and the USSR employed state centralization. But form without content is idealism. The USSR broke private property relations in land and industry. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The class character of state power and the direction of surplus allocation were fundamentally opposed. To ignore this is to reduce Marxism to a checklist of administrative techniques. That is not analysis. It is fetishism.

Yo, I am literally pointing out the content. A few hammer and sickles on flags and pins are not content, that there wasn’t private property in exactly the same way as in Spain is not relevant. Making the state the landlord does not alter the class character of anything or whatever that word is supposed to mean. I am not reducing Marxism, a term Marx completely rejected, to a checklist of things. I am pointing out that the Soviet experiment from a standpoint of history had a very similar trajectory to many unabashedly capitalistic nations and that it failed in its goals.

[…] the privatization creep across Scandinavia if you like. Ignore the private health insurance racket in America if it suits your argument. But do not pretend these are equivalent to socialist planning

Then what the Soviet Union did was not socialist planning.

Scandinavian economies do not subordinate firms to the public good.

What does the word “good” even mean, who is “the public”???

Private ownership remains the principle. Decommodification is tactical, contingent, and constantly under assault. Under socialism, social ownership is the principle and capital is repressed. That absolutely determines the direction of travel. The USSR, for most of its existence, directed surplus to industrialization, universal education, healthcare, and defence against imperialism. That is not a minor variation. It is a qualitative break.

If I abstract concrete needs into an average of a population and go to the stock market to let this population do the bidding, or let bidding be done in its interest by some sort of elected representative or whatever, I no longer have private ownership per se, I have common ownership. I am however still doing capitalism. For example: the point of critique in regards to cooperatives is that their engagement with society, with the world at large, is still a capitalistic one. Again your line of argument conflates some form of common ownership with communization.

You can issue all the plans you want. Without the proper material conditions and productive forces, they will not amount to shit

This is the problem with Stalinists. When Cuba or Vietnam fails it’s the material conditions, when China actually makes a leap it’s material conditions. This is the handwavy explaining that Marx actively tried to avoid. Marx talks about the organisation of society as being part of the base, it’s most its important aspect in fact. The base does not just include the ultra tangible stuff you refer to when you talk about materialism.

[…] To cite these as evidence that capitalism already does what socialism does is to ignore the direction of travel and the class struggle over every concession.

This entire paragraph is confusing. Capital tends to centralise as a default and for its continued functioning needs to abolish certain aspects of trade, there is no movement to transform this centralisation and inherent partial decommodification into communist relations yet and the class struggle from below has been dead for half a century when you look at your beloved imperial core. Only very recently there were two or three practically meaningless deeds of adventurism by lone wolves and sixteen years ago you had occupy.

[…] Bordigist purism offers the comfort of certainty without the burden of construction […]

I frankly do not know what this last paragraph is supposed to mean really. If you want to critique my negativity or skepticism because it doesn’t nativly offer a planned out concrete alternative then I refer to the various critiques of appeals to constructive criticism that have existed in history. If you want fantastical imagery of a planned society then you’re asking for bona fide utopianism and immediatetism.

Your “argument” rests on a formalist reading of Marx

Trve

The Soviet nomenklatura held administrative authority, not private property.

The thing is though that private property is literally administrative authority and vice-versa. When I give my sister my Tudor Montecarlo from 1970-something with the grey dial and the steel bezel I give her administrative authority over the watch, she now administers the watch. Conversely, when I handle accounts as someone at a bank I have administrative authority in spite of dues to be paid to customers that make me the effective owner of a certain amount of capital. In other words the bank alienates something from customers in a similar way to a factory owning capitalist alienating labour power.

They could not sell factories, bequeath positions, or extract profit as personal wealth. That is a qualitative difference.

There very well could have been these limitations. To keep it short I am not going to critique these points about specific restrictions. There was still capital which crept into society through literal competitions between workers enforced directly by the state and periphery around productivity maximisation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Stakhanov

There are things which we cannot sell/be nominally capitalistic about in societies we all would agree are capitalist, pretty significant ones like public land, firefighting and certain internet services

Comparing the USSR to the KMT shows some impressive ignorance and ignores the rupture in property relations. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The Soviet state expropriated both.

These are rather specific points that don’t get to the statement I was trying to make. I was referring to aspects of state-administered centralisation/monopolism and expropriation where it was necessary to advance the development of the working class (for both capitalism and socialism).

Planning under capitalism coordinates individual firms while leaving social reproduction to market anarchy

When the great man of history Trump says he should send another bajillion to Israel in the form of very specific arms shipments, isn’t that centralised planning? When Sweden built one million apartments were they doing socialism? Market anarchy doesn’t just concern the level of firms.

Socialist planning, however imperfect, subordinates enterprise activity to social goals: full employment, universal services, industrial catch up

While not strictly subordinated all the Scandinavian economies do or have done this, but they are not socialist.

The presence of markets or external trade does not erase that direction of travel.

It doesn’t, but it the existence of socialisation also doesn’t prove the direction of travel.

The law of value cannot be abolished by decree because it is a social relation

What is planning if not a decree, after all we are talking about instructions not proclamations in church. The whole point of socialism and communism is that instead of just doing stuff and then thinking about the consequences/handling them, we plan according to need and that changes the societal structure at its base. Call that thinking before doing. For that we really need to stop and think as a societal organism. The whole thinking process is not negated by the primacy of the development of the economic structure, it is something that arises out of the economic realities by necessity. Think of it as a collective awakening.

Achievements in literacy or industry under socialism are not “just development”. They are the result of surplus being directed to social need rather than private accumulation

We do this in capitalism as socialisation is necessary for the continued existence of the economy. Postal service, social security, educational incomes, care work, libre software, you name it. Surplus being directed to social needs is not exclusive to socialism or communism. My friends call it necessary communization and they contrast it with movements that actually demand communism. In the first chapters of Kapital Marx grounds exchange of goods to necessity, without it no such thing as a commodity or capitalism.

Bordigist purity spectacles are a luxury of those like yourself, a settler, denizen of the imperial core whose only interaction with socialism is as an academic exercise

Yeah whatever, just ignore me not being able to find a job, afford an education and my account balance being -30$. A true academic with just a highschool diploma. Beyond my intellectual circlejerking I probably have absolutely no reason to concern myself practically with the economy since I have it so good

Let’s suppose that this interpretation of finds by contemporary archaeologists is correct. There is quite a clear distinction to be made between exchanges between otherwise isolated communities that didn’t have a burning need for trade (which they btw absolutely didn’t, there is the concept of primitive communism that is rather well established from observations of recent hunter-gatherer societies) and trade as the dominant social force.

So it is your claim that we need some sort of political realism. We have to make use with what exists and anything which posits a beyond is metaphysical territory? We might as well stop at doing social democracy because it doesn’t get any better than that with the means available to us. I hope I did not strawman your argument

They did fascism

Which is basically social democracy, see the new deal being an inspiration for Mussolini. Heck he had his start as a self proclaimed commie. The trouble is though that fascism tends to be an unstable construction of sorts and what the Soviet Union did in its later stages had a lot to do with stabilisation and it never really evoked a volk myth in the style of fascist dictatorships. Plus when you look at fascism as an interclassist movement taking place under the roof of the nation there are overlaps with projects that claim or have claimed to be communistic like China/Vietnam/etc…

literally wtf r u talking about m8

Where I am from Prussian history has relevance and is taught. Prussia is renowed for being one of the first places if not the first to introduce compulsory education and other socialised services.

Before I answer I want to know what you mean by dialectics. That words gets thrown around harder than a dodgeball in middleschool

Trade predates capitalism and has taken different forms under different modes of production. Its existence under socialism does not make a society capitalist. What defines a social system is who controls the means of production and how surplus labour is allocated.

It makes the society very much capitalist because it doesn’t rid it of an owning class. Here the party of the USSR.

The Soviet Union inherited a devastated, largely agrarian economy encircled by imperialist states. Socialist construction could not skip stages.

The Kuomintang and certain aspects of S. Korea after WWII share a very similar backstory, did they do socialism? You would probably deny this.

Public ownership of industry, finance and land became the foundation. Market mechanisms and limited private trade operated within boundaries set by the plan, not as its driving force.

Ok, you have centralised state enterprises that did trade with entities in other countries. Ok, you have planning, we have planning in all of capitalism today, capitalism is entrenched by it. It merely exists in an anarchic state, which was also the case for the USSR and its allies, you even had conflicts spurred on by nationalistic perversion that came from the logic of capital between nations that ideologically should have been brethren. Ask yourself why China and Vietnam post-“revolution” didn’t get along for most of their shared history.

Under socialism, the law of value is not abolished by decree

It is, that is what you call a being programmatic. The early Soviet Union had programmatic characteristics which it lost due to being a rushed development just like any other area on this blue planet late to the table of capitalism.

By these measures, the Soviet project lifted hundreds of millions from illiteracy and poverty, built industrial capacity from scratch, and defended social gains against relentless external pressure.

Literally Prussia

Trade is not tens of thousands of years old. That is ahistorical. And my argument was not about capitalism per se, it was more about the soviet union not having been socialist and not at all having been a development towards communism because it did trade as firstly as an entity within a world market that was not at all socialist and because trade was allowed internally and not necessarily bound to labour time or necessity, among an entire multiplicity of reasons.

Read “Dialogue with Stalin” on Marxists.org

Social demokkkrat on social demokkkrat violence

The post mid-1920s govt expanded the development of capital, made medium-sized business possible and killed many of the most important theorists and revolutionaries. Then there was a reaction to that mid 1950s which culminated in the USSR completely abandoning the international struggle. The period between 1945-1970 cemented freaking patriotism as a “revolutionary doctrine” and perverted the memory and meaning of revolution as a result of the development of national-capitalism, i.e. trade with other nations and a central party of bureaucrat managers subordinating the worker and ripping the effort out of their hands. The USSR became the devil child of the reformist tendency adorned with the horns of the New Deal and futurist Italy, I would go as far as to call it the wet dream of the MSPD parliamentarian.

Socialism should build communism. This however was decades-long, and in its last decades largely unmoving, social democracy.

Socialism

Yeah let’s exchange commodities and call that socialism.