/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Climate boogaloo isn't real, but energy policy is never dictated by the people or their wants. It is the exact opposite - energy monopolies were the birth of post-slavery capitalism, and were contingent on ensuring that the masses were as far removed from the benefits of electricity and technology as possible. Every decision of the state after 1870 was designed to eliminate the masses' comprehension of science and technology, so that people were ruled by the machine, completely alienated from it. It started with the type of education allowed for them in public or private schools, which emphasized slavish devotion to pedagogy and philosophies of rule, or emphasized avarice and a love of backstabbing and called it "business sense". It goes without saying that eugenics was at the center of this entire project.

If you did want to reduce the dreaded carbon emissions - which was always a bullshit excuse to invade peoples' lives and not anything real - you would begin by not making planned obsolescence the norm, and institute some fucking quality control over the entire chain of industry. It would be trivial to reduce energy requirements for many things, but this is not done because it was always an excuse to attack living standards. The rulers did not want to hear anything about technology being more efficient or better, and when it became too difficult to suppress new technology or changes in peoples' habits, the climate boogaloo was invented to justify a further invasion and begin fully stripping away people from technology. Not just the reduction of fuel use, but the elimination of private transport, the war against the countryside, and the shittifcation of everything were deliberate and the entire point. Ultimately it has nothing to do with any substantive use of energy, but seeding the idea that too many people is the problem, and using the control of energy technology as the vehicle to impose this from on high. That is one lever the oligarchs hold over the people, since energy is a natural monopoly. He who controls the oil controls the planet, and that is something they don't give up. Same with uranium or fusion power plants, or the infrastructure to even maintain electricity which is necessarily expensive. The only way this could be stopped is if people exert what leverage they possess and there is a force commandeering this infrastructure that will fight eugenics. That's why you can't bank on this idea of a peoples' revolution from nothing - thePost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>468911
>Climate change is real hurry durrr

Kill yourself Eugene.
You will never be an intellectual.

people that believe climate hooga booga: "i fricking love science!" "achtually men have periods"
people that don't believe climate hooga booga: "i love jesus and lenin" *build mach 15 long range cruise missiles*

>>468911
>planned obsolescence
>attack living standards
Those points are true, there is a fuckton of green hypocrisy and green-austerity-wealth-inequality-extremism in the ruling ideology.

Consider that climate change can be true and at the same time the ruling class also tries to bend every narrative towards their agenda.

It's actually pretty easy to cast the ruling class as climate sinners, their live styles are extremely wasteful, and they are casting stones in a glass house.

>>468918
This

>>468895
>what makes Ukraine as 'an example of what a country should avoid' different from 2003 Iraq?
Iraq was the enemy of the US empire, and it got destroyed. The story where the big powerful empire crushes a puny foe, shocked nobody.

Ukraine was a different story, because Ukraine was the ally of the big powerful empire, and as such the expectation was that the power of the empire would grant Ukraine a swift and triumphant victory without suffering much damage. Ukraine now lying in shambles despite being on team empire, that is the big shocker.

Of course the outcome was predicted across the political spectrum of realists, but that's another story.

>>468896
>Ukraine was a different story, because Ukraine was the ally of the big powerful empire, and as such the expectation was that the power of the empire would grant Ukraine a swift and triumphant victory without suffering much damage

Did anyone actually believe that? Barring a direct intervention (which wasn't going to happen - Russia is a nuclear power & Ukraine isn't in NATO), most in America expected Ukraine would have lost by now.

>>468895
Wait a minute, i might have misread that, you might have been talking about deterrence. As in the US destroying Iraq should have deterred more countries from opposing the US.

I have to admit i don't know how to quantify how many countries complied with the US empire because of fear from getting the Iraq treatment. I don't know if objectively the Ukraine-shock-effect is more powerful than the Iraq-avoidance-effect, but superficially it kinda does appear like it is.

Fear is only a short term motivator and people who are effective at reaching positions of power usually have a much lower fear response. So you'd expect that the people who end up the leaders of countries are less likely to act out of fear.

Also it's possible to draw the conclusion that because Ukraine got destroyed despite complying with the empire, that is worse because it being Submission + Defeat, while those that were defeated in defiance to empire did not loose their dignity.

I think that broken expectations also do play a role.

>>468898
>Did anyone actually believe that? Barring a direct intervention (which wasn't going to happen - Russia is a nuclear power & Ukraine isn't in NATO), most in America expected Ukraine would have lost by now.
It's hard to know what people really think, but it does appear that the Neo-liberals really believe their own superiority myths. If i had to guess what the neocons think: They can't make mistakes, they can only be failed by others.

The people in the west who expected Russia to curb-stomp Ukraine in 3 weeks, thought that Ukraine would take the first peace-deal the Russians would offer. I think the Russians might have had similar illusions. The other thing was that Russia didn't use heavy weapons in the first half of the war, they didn't destroy anything that would impact the civilian population. For a very long time they operated with damage minimization as a priority. Virtually everybody in the west expected Russia to go in like the Americans "shock and aw" massive fire-power unleashed. Nobody expected Russian legalism to be so influential, they declared it a "special military operation" and that really did put many constrains on what the Russian military coulPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>468899
>The people in the west who expected Russia to curb-stomp Ukraine in 3 weeks, thought that Ukraine would take the first peace-deal the Russians would offer.

I thought the former but didn't think the latter…
Yeah, Russia might have been under that impression, though.

>>468901
Most people who were paying attention to the Donbass civil war, had that impression. The expectation was that Ukraine would rather grant the Donetsk and Lugansk People's republic some concession over fighting the Russians.

tldr

>>468865
no clue what OP tries to say

There's a creativity sweet spot to drugs. You've veered too far, I'm afraid.
Now you're just incomprehensible.

>>468819
Okay fag

OP the sooner you realize that retards living in the past will never move on to achieve anything of note the btter off you will be.

>>468824
It certainly makes for easier praxis if you start from the belief that it's all already worked out for you, and all you've got to do is follow the roadmap. Because then you inevitably do fuck all, just like the rest of us.

anchored for low effort

go back to wikipedia and kill your self

>>468691
Everything you write presumes class exists as a narrative, an idea, unmoored from what a class actually is. There is no class without a functioning institution doing things, and the institutions in any society are things which can be known. Everything you write is consciously supplanting the actual actions with a story about what the classes are "supposed" to be, which will always lurch behind anything that really happens.

Ultimately, most people - and this does not require a great education to learn - understand politics first as people. For most people, "politics" for them is entirely at a local level, in what relationships they can actually affect. The idea that normal people had any participation in the state was always a fantasy, and normal people knew it from the start. You'd have to believe in the pretenses of liberal democracy to believe your version of class struggle, which no one did. Liberal democracy didn't exist in Marx's time, and so when Marx describes the classes in his time, he does not need to say "this is the grand theory that I and I alone can know". The classes contending in institutions were known to anyone and, at the time, there weren't people brazen enough to tell people to ignore what was in front of them. Marx would understand the classes by their praxis and what they do to maintain themselves - he describes it as a "class-for-itself", whereas the workers were at his time a "class-in-of-itself" - that they existed as a thing and the labor relation was well known, but the labor relation was not one the workers chose. The workers had no institutions of their own, and were mediated through this civil society that was entirely controlled by the bourgeois professions. The workers as workers had no legal or political representation except on the terms the bourgeois allowed, which were always about dragging the workers into the domination of the bourgeois. Marx suggests superficially that the workers need their own institutions, but in practice the Marxists insert themselves, since the workers will not on their own terms enter civil society, and couldn't participate at that level. The workers who tried found out that they weren't actually allowed to win.

Also funny you cite genetics - literally a pseudoscience - as your argument for race-theory. You don't even comprehend that you're recapitulating the Nazis' racPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>468695
As for "merchants inventing race", it did not require indoctrination to convince people that races existed. What was new was the idea that race was politically relevant, and this idea did not appear overnight or in the form of today's eugenic race-science. The African slaves and natives of North America weren't just different "race-essences" but came from a completely different history and background. Their societies were constituted in very different ways, and very likely they were physiologically distinct which would have meant differing mental states in some way. The idea that this was an absolute and politically relevant is a specifically eugenic claim - the black slaves were different in history and their thought, but this was not seen in of itself as the justification for slavery. It only gradually emerged that the justification for slavery shifted from history, religion, and practical expedience, to claims about African intelligence and a built-in servility. Obviously enough black slaves were rebellious that an ideology had to be imposed and enforced very violently, and the black ex-slaves had to be conditioned by exemplary violence to maintain the racist system. The extent of violence to uphold the eugenic race claims is always understated, and treated as a just-so story, where the state and dominant institutions are totally neutral or positive influences. This is the unyielding technocratic faith in institutions that were enshrined with an "above-the-law" status, very specifically in the eugenic forms of technocratic rule. The eugenists are the people who believe laws are only for the lower classes, who have an essentially Satanic moral and political view.

>>468695
>as your argument for race-theory. You don't even comprehend that you're recapitulating the Nazis'
<The Nazis were opposed to race theories

what ?

>>468712
You're not opposed to race-theory, you're fake-opposing while cleverly enabling the eugenic core of the belief. It's the "fake egalitarianism" smear you piggers like to use.

The right wing of capital is autistic
The left wing of capital is schizophrenic

>>468698
>>468699
supersede the textwall, post a tl;dr
I'm a slow reader, convince me your post is worth my time

>>468700
There's a tldr at the end of OP

>>468699
Niger. Do you even read the posts you reply to?

>The solution - a sort of 'sucks least' option
this sounds too much like neo-liberal lesser-evil-ism, as in a ratchet where every time the lesser evil is chosen it gets a little bit worse, until eventually the compounding effects create the worst possible world.

>Some sort of 'mixed economy' with a corporatist state is inevitable.
We're not going to keep state and corporate organizational structures. They are terrible, especially the corporate stuff, that have all the bureaucratic downsides of the Soviet State apparatus without any of the upsides.

We're going to make modal-organisations instead. Basically it's an organization that has a bunch of different modes, that are activated by changes in the material conditions. Because each mode only has to work for a narrow range of situations, organization can be much simpler with low administrative overhead. Each mode will have different people in charge, and that means that abuses of power can also be defined as material condition that changes the mode.

>It's naive to believe classes, castes, and hierarchy will ever disappear.
Maybe hierarchy doesn't have to fully disappear, like in Star Trek where space-ships still have a command hierarchy, but classes and castes, those will go in the dustbin of history.

-Vitalism
To me this is gibberish. You're not the first person to suggest something like this, there used to be a vitalism movement
<vitalism, school of scientific thought—the germ of which dates from Aristotle—that attempts (in opposition to mechanism and organicism) to explain the nature of life as resulting from a vital force peculiar to living organisms and different from all other forces found outside living things. This force is held to control form and development and to direct the activities of the organism. Vitalism has lost prestige as the chemical and physical nature of more and more vital phenomena have been shown.

Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

Bear in mind that if it comes to a civil war, that will be the end of any reconciliation between those selected to live and those selected to die. Those who survive the war on the latter side will never, ever trust the institutions, "revolutionary" or otherwise. They have no reason to ever believe any government, and no government will or can give assurances to restore any trust in institutions. The survivors of the damned will only be able to form their own institutions, if they are allowed, and they will continue to suffer under the pressure of the ruling institutions which are antagonistic towards them. Very likely the terms of "keeping the peace" will be a total segregation of those selected to die, and many selected to die becoming the reserve army of slavery. With the alternative being maximal torture and death in absolute terror, there is only slavery or suicide. Enough stubbornness will prevent suicide, and the maximal torture thing will be difficult without resuming the purge that was somehow miraculously defeated. So that will mean those who were truly defeated - us of the damned - will be allowed to live on the most meager terms possible. That is what we will be reduced to - arguing just how bad the coming slavery will be. There will be false promises of freedom and manumission, but that has always been a lie and will be doubly so after the struggle. They were never going to let us in their society.

Why didn't the Albanians have this many mass shootings?

>>468715
The Big Retard is right for once.

>>468467
>As to the video, Penisman seems to think that "financial vs productive" capital is divided between china and the west, which is not true. The west has its own productive capital, and china has its own financial, just look at the recent real estate bubble.
Marxists look at which part is dominant. In China productive capital is dominant, while in the west financial capital is dominant. That's what Cockshott says. The recent real estate bubble proves this point. The Chinese state is bailing out the customers who bought buildings and the construction companies, while financial capital took the L.

>His explanation as to why other countries agreed to sell their shit for dollars after the end of Breton Woods is also nonsensical
Explain why you think that.

>Bro they just need more money to accumulate more surplus and somehow only the US was able to provide this growing money supply
>even petrodollar recycling makes far more sense than this dogshit take
Not sure what this means

>>468469
>In China productive capital is dominant, while in the west financial capital is dominant.
The only problem is that chinese "productive capital" invests its trade surplus back into the us financial markets lol

>Explain why you think that.
you literally quote my explanation below retard lol

>Not sure what this means
It means that the explanations of the kind "well according to M-C-M' to accumulate more surplus value you need a bigger money supply, and so third-world capitalists agreed to be ripped off by the US Treasury and the wall street because the US dollar was already a reserve currency!" are nonsense
Capitalists are not a hivemind, they don't care about abstract M-C-M' schemes, they care about their individual financial accounts.

Capitalists don't want to be ripped off. You need to explain why they couldn't use any other currency, or multiple currencies, to facilitate their accumulation cycle.

I'm not sure where to ask this.

When the world de-dollarizes, does that mean that the US in particular but also the west in general will start shift it's capital composition towards productive capital, and away from financial capital ?

My reasoning is that if western currencies become weaker, exporting manufactured goods and machine capital will become easier while exporting financial capital will become harder. De-dollarization also means that the US can't print infinite money for massively bloated military budgets and they could be looking to make up the loss of global influence from receding military power towards gaining soft-power from exporting goods and machine capital.

Does that logic add up ?

https://invidious.sethforprivacy.com/watch?v=q1CrvY_of_8

>>468469
whenever you see someone making a statement like
>hurr durr china has a financial sector just like the US
without quoting numbers, regulations, policy, or literally anything besides their word, don't waste your time, they are arguing in bad faith. the financial sector represented 20% of the american gdp (5.1 t. usd out of 25.4 t.), or ~2 times the gdp of the manufacturing sector in 2022 according to official estimates. the financial sector in china for the same period represented only around 7% of the chinese gdp (1.32 t. out of 18.3 t.) while the manufacturing sector represented around 40%
just ask for numbers and data and see how their arguments crumble away
http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202201/t20220119_1826672.html

>>468655
>shift it's capital composition towards productive capital
capital isn't playdough. there won't be a shift: a large chunk of capital will just be destroyed if the dollar loses it's global currency status

>>468693
thanks
quality answer

>>467205

So are borders, money, and words - even "fake," here. What's it mean? It's gibberish. Just a bunch of chicken scratch imbued with arbitrary meaning, unless there's some reason to imbue it with meaning, some usefulness.

>>467214
And so is your manhood

>>467205
"fake" and "abstraction" are two different things and something being an abstraction doesn't inherently make it bad or not useful.

>>467221
Comrade dk just reupped and is ready to enlighten us

Socialism can unironically be somewhat monarchic.