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.
It appears continuing further will unfortunately be entirely unproductive. Your reply is clearly bad faith (I had hoped we could have at least some meaningful interaction but that was never your interest.): idiotic name-calling because you lack the theoretical capacity to engage with substance, zero grasp of formalism and how it directly negates Marxism’s scientific method, nearing functional illiteracy with your inability to hold or meaningfully respond to a single argument actually made, and CIA brainworms that have you wielding “Stalinist” as a slur while you plug your ears and turn away from reality. You project your own utopian immediatism onto me, demand purity tests instead of material analysis, and substitute sectarian noise for revolutionary practice. I stand by my opening conclusion that I was beginning to think was perhaps too harsh but now realise was directly on point. You have an understanding of theory and reality equivalent to that of the most learned dust mite yet hold an arrogance when you talk far greater than the most arrogant emperor.
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.
Yeah big issue with your attempt to demean me with your shitty meme you couldn’t even be bothered to find is that I am neither white nor a denizen of the imperial core. I am also absolutely not a Third Worldist. I am a Marxist-Leninist. I even have a Master’s in Marxist theory (not that that is particularly relevant in this context beyond credential-stuffing.). My positions come from study grounded in practice, not abstraction.
You aren’t stricter in your reading, you’re more dogmatic, and thus unscientific. That’s a massive break from the core of Marxist socialism, which demands analysis of concrete conditions, not the application of invariant formulae. You are a settler operating with much arrogance and little understanding beyond the academic exercise you take socialism to be. This is the pattern of many modern “ultra” flavours in the imperial core: much “critique” from the margins, zero real engagement with the material contradictions of actually-existing socialism. I hope one day you can grow up and move beyond your infantile disorder, best of luck to you.
There’s a ton that’s wrong with this comment, but I want to pick on something especially egregious that stuck out to me. Your conflation of administration with ownership:
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.
Here, Marx is responding to Bakunin:
…will consist of workers. Certainly, with your permission, of former workers, who however, as soon as they have become representatives or governors of the people, cease to be workers…
As little as a factory owner today ceases to be a capitalist if he becomes a municipal councillor…
…and look down on the whole common workers’ world from the height of the state. They will no longer represent the people, but themselves and their pretensions to people’s government. Anyone who can doubt this knows nothing of the nature of men.
If Mr. Bakunin only knew something about the position of a manager in a workers’ cooperative factory, all his dreams of domination would go to the devil. He should have asked himself what form the administrative function can take on the basis of this workers’ state, if he wants to call it that.
Your analysis is more that of an anarchist than a Marxist, and as I’ve shown before you frequently make metaphysical mistakes in your method. This is why Bordigists have never achieved anything of note, faulty analysis that results in self-sabotage.
Wordslop and the Stalino-Kruschevite fetishism of Formalism that doesn’t mean anything outside of its use as a verbal battering ram.
I could make the same analogy with a piece of equipment used in production of goods and it would still hold water.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then what the Soviet Union did was not socialist planning.
What does the word “good” even mean, who is “the public”???
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.
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.
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.
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.
It appears continuing further will unfortunately be entirely unproductive. Your reply is clearly bad faith (I had hoped we could have at least some meaningful interaction but that was never your interest.): idiotic name-calling because you lack the theoretical capacity to engage with substance, zero grasp of formalism and how it directly negates Marxism’s scientific method, nearing functional illiteracy with your inability to hold or meaningfully respond to a single argument actually made, and CIA brainworms that have you wielding “Stalinist” as a slur while you plug your ears and turn away from reality. You project your own utopian immediatism onto me, demand purity tests instead of material analysis, and substitute sectarian noise for revolutionary practice. I stand by my opening conclusion that I was beginning to think was perhaps too harsh but now realise was directly on point. You have an understanding of theory and reality equivalent to that of the most learned dust mite yet hold an arrogance when you talk far greater than the most arrogant emperor.
lmaoooooooooooo
Arrogance, man speak for yourself.
Sure thing settler
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.
Yeah big issue with your attempt to demean me with your shitty meme you couldn’t even be bothered to find is that I am neither white nor a denizen of the imperial core. I am also absolutely not a Third Worldist. I am a Marxist-Leninist. I even have a Master’s in Marxist theory (not that that is particularly relevant in this context beyond credential-stuffing.). My positions come from study grounded in practice, not abstraction.
You aren’t stricter in your reading, you’re more dogmatic, and thus unscientific. That’s a massive break from the core of Marxist socialism, which demands analysis of concrete conditions, not the application of invariant formulae. You are a settler operating with much arrogance and little understanding beyond the academic exercise you take socialism to be. This is the pattern of many modern “ultra” flavours in the imperial core: much “critique” from the margins, zero real engagement with the material contradictions of actually-existing socialism. I hope one day you can grow up and move beyond your infantile disorder, best of luck to you.
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
A poor translation of an idiotic point as I would expect given everything to this point
There’s a ton that’s wrong with this comment, but I want to pick on something especially egregious that stuck out to me. Your conflation of administration with ownership:
Here, Marx is responding to Bakunin:
Your analysis is more that of an anarchist than a Marxist, and as I’ve shown before you frequently make metaphysical mistakes in your method. This is why Bordigists have never achieved anything of note, faulty analysis that results in self-sabotage.