/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

"The left" Is just a convoluted term that was created by right wingers to describe anyone moderately left of joe biden. The political compass meme doesn't exist and what actually matters political is how one views relations between workers, owners, the productive forces and how society functions politically. That is all that really matters.

>>465309
"leftist" is a very broad catchall term that just means "pro economic equality". this includes strawman ideologies like "i want everyone to be equally poor". obviously most people don't think like this and seeking to maximize collective prosperity is good, but the thing that separates leftists from rightists is the former oppose benefitting some at the expense of many others

I'm probably that one guy, incidentally passing through this site after not doing so for literally months.

It's not asinine or convoluted whatsoever.

There is no such thing as the left. It's a meaningless word. It's like saying 'socialism' in America. You might as well just say the definition instead so people know what you're talking about.

The left does not exist, and what we call the left today is part of the right. If this isn't true and the left is still alive and well, then Marxists aren't leftists, because Marxists and leftists share almost nothing in common.
Either there is no left, or Marxism isn't on the left. Pick one.

>>465309
Within the west:
On the bourgeois political spectrum, there is no more left and arguably also no more classical liberals, it's all just degrees of right wing now. The people that now consider them self liberal, aren't, because they went along with ideas of collective punishment, and they even accepted undoing the universality of money, when they accepted weaponizing the financial systems.

I think the minimal definition of the left is furthering the interests of the working class.

All the economic breakage in all previous class based economic systems comes from the fact that the people who produce the surplus aren't the class that rules over society. All the ruing classes with their exploitative modes of productions are basically just people who found a trick to steal from society. Like the feudal lords they figured out that if they could control land for agriculture they could steal surplus from peasants, but inevitably the material conditions changed and their trick stopped working. You have this churn of new parasitic ruling classes displacing the old parasitic ruling classes, causing enormous chaos, destruction and suffering in the process while wasting vast amounts of resources.

So a left goal is to create a stable economic system that creates continuous improvement of the material conditions for the masses with an improving political system, that gets better at preempting disasters and interruption of comfortable existence. Once that is achieved the goal becomes to make work non-alienating. You need of course low wealth inequality and democracy that prioritizes the interests of the masses. Wealthy people always seek to use their wealth to get political power, and once they get it they fuck everything up. So it's better to redesign the economic system so that it rules out the possibility of concentrating wealth.

The deadest part of the left is probably the section that tried improving culture. The culture industry chewed them up badly and when it spat them out they had become crypto-right-wingers that utterly despised the proletariat, cheered for imperialism and worst off all they even tried to bring back and make fashionable again old forms of oppression like racial segregation. To be honest i don't know what a genuinely left culture would look like at this point. Norman Finkelstein has recently suggested that a left cultural framework should go for homogenizing culture that emphasizes all the things that people have in common. I'm not sure what that would look like but maybe it's a good point to start from.

But outside the west there are of course many left-wing success stories, on a planetary scale the left isn't dead.

>>465325
Burgers are so dumb you can literally flat out explain to them what you mean and they will still think you mean another thing.

>>465326
>Marxism isn't on the left
Ministry of Based Affairs

>>465327
>I think the minimal definition of the left is furthering the interests of the working class.

Let's pick this apart. This working is ultra divided along all sort of lines. This is kind of by design, obviously, and something of a feature of the nature of technological society. It's difficult to unite service worker, tech dorks, landscapers and roofers (based), and someone who works at a call center.

But let's back it up a bit more. I highly suggest read to first essay of the first volume of Mao's selected works.
Spoiler alert: it's a detailed analysis of classes in china in that period of historical development - not muhworking class.

But - let's go back even further. Why is the working class some important in Marxism?

They're a mass base vehicle for the movement of society in a positive direction.

So, again, the question of 'left' or revolutionary Marxism comes down to orientation.

>All the economic breakage in all previous class based economic systems comes from the fact that the people who produce the surplus aren't the class that rules over society.
What 'breakage'? Imperial China, most definitely an unequal class society, lasted 1000s of years.
I think what you means to say is 'problems,' which is more relevant. What problems and limitations are created by a given mode of production. And, in many ways, the development of a new mode of production (from hunter gatherer to agrarian, to fuedalism and then capitalism) occurs as a sort of overcoming the problems and limitations of the previous mode of production.

<All the ruing classes with their exploitative modes of productions are basically just people who found a trick to steal from society.
I mean, it's usually strong arm robber at the end of the day.

<You have this churn of new parasitic ruling classes displacing the old parasitic ruling classes, causing enormous chaos, destruction and suffering in the process while wasting vast amounts of resources.

I know it sounds kinda like a canard - but it kinda works. Literally everything you own, besides maybe the stuff you made yourself, is the result of capitalist market relations under given political/cultural conditions. This is literal, nothing you own was made by socialism (or maybe it is, if we shift the definition of socialism to include the economic system modern China). So, it obviously delivers the goods to some extent.

>the left is furthering the interests of the working class

In ways ways materially, the condition of the working class has dramatically improved because of capitalism - with a very recent downturn (the western imperialist bubble popping, perhaps). This is a simple fact. Even in terms of the ongoing development of the means of production, this is kinda still occuring. Zoomers don't remember corded phones or internet that made a static tones when you logged on, but even the steady development of communication technology has been dramatic just in the past few decades. This is just one example, of course. And now we have automation and robotics being rapidly developed.

And all of this is to say, it's another sort of nail in the coffin of the blanket 'muhworking class' as some political sign post.

That's not to say I don't support populism, creating a 'united front' - winning over the middle forces to isolate class enemies, in Maoist speak (before you bash it, Maoists actually had a revolution).

>So a left goal is to create a stable economic system that creates continuous improvement of the material conditions for the masses with an improving political system, that gets better at preempting disasters and interruption of comfortable existence.

That just describes what capitalism has largely been. Development, check. Fairly stable, check (and let's not forget Chernobyl). Excess comfort (which spoiler alert, doesn't equate to happiness or physical/mental well being).

But you did bring up one thing that I liked

>stable economic system

I think that's on obvious check. And system has to be able to overcome some of the problems and limitations of the previous. Previously I kind of indicated that fundamental question:

<To what end?

I stated mine in the op - social and personal free development (along with the caveat I outlined)

So I guess this is where the crux of our difference lies. You'll settle for stability and comfort. My Marxism seeks to expand human freedom AND capability.

And one further part.

I earlier mentions that all changes of modes of production are sort of exchanging one set of general systemic problems for another. I think we should be mindful of that regarding our vision.

But let's focus on something we agree upon:

<You need of course low wealth inequality and democracy that prioritizes the interests of the masses.

Unequivocally, yes and yes. Shit is obscene right now on both those fronts.

<Wealthy people always seek to use their wealth to get political power, and once they get it they fuck everything up.

Yes, and that sort of generalized excess of political financial power is what we ought to be building a united front against.

>So it's better to redesign the economic system so that it rules out the possibility of concentrating wealth.

That's actually pretty hard to do. I don't pretend I would have somehow done better that the political leadership of every single socialist revolution. It's kinda idealism to believe you can just draft up a system where power won't concentrate.

>Norman Finkelstein has recently suggested that a left cultural framework should go for homogenizing culture that emphasizes all the things that people have in common. I'm not sure what that would look like but maybe it's a good point to start from.

I kinda like local distinction tbh, but ya, there's utility to universal human values at this point.

>But outside the west there are of course many left-wing success stories, on a planetary scale the left isn't dead.

By your own token, there's not. Most of the world operates under capitalism. Even the remaining socialist countries have market economies somewhat managed in total by a state through policy and regulation.

So it doesn't exactly fit the notion of a society without exploitation, private property, class distinction, etc.

That said, they are pretty comfy. It sort of is what it is. And it actually 'solves' some of the problems accompany liberal capitalism. You don't have multi billion dollar kayfabe elections, for example. Similarly, you don't have as much manufacturered culture war drama faggotry (or open race wars at the subway station). But there is some of the other problems (traffic and car culture, consumerism, etc). Supranationalist one party social democracy isn't so bad.

So again, all of this is to say that the left, or Marxists, or whatever, ought to be ultra undogmatic while at the same time understanding their core orientation (see Marx quote in OP).

>>465347
>Let's pick this apart. This working is ultra divided along all sort of lines.
I think this is just you being a problem, you are looking for stuff that divides the working class rather than what can unite them. It's the wrong focus.
Look for unifying things and focus all your mental energy on how to glue the working class into a unified force.
So lets not pick the working class apart and instead do the opposite.

>What 'breakage'?
Are you kidding me, all class societies are constantly broken for everybody except the ruling classes and a few circles near the center of power. With the only exception being the socdem period that only existed because the capitalists had to make concessions to the labor movement to prevent them from aligning with Soviet power.

>but it kinda works. Literally everything you own, besides maybe the stuff you made yourself, is the result of capitalist market relations under given political/cultural conditions. This is literal, nothing you own was made by socialism (or maybe it is, if we shift the definition of socialism to include the economic system modern China
Lel what an epic self own, all the stuff gets made by Chinese workers, hail socialism with Chinese characteristics. Seriously tho workers make the things, capitalists take a big cut, and we're supposed to be great-full for what exactly ? They are not organizing production or distribution, they hired other people who do that for them. Or should we be great-full for the planned obsolescence, the repair-hostile design, the proprietary standards that make interoperability and modification a pain in the ass. This list of what's wrong with capitalist production is extensive. You also have to understand that the Neo-liberals in the west who outsourced industrial production can't put them self's feathers in their cap for being creators of products, they just sold off what was build up during the soc-dem period with mostly public money, and pocketed the profits. What they have created is a low wage service sector that's mostly precarious gig employment that doesn't pay enough for a dignified existence, nobody is thankful for that.

>In ways ways materially, the condition of the working class has dramatically improved because of capitalism - with a very recent downturn
Improvements happened despite of capitalism, because of class struggle by the working class, nothing was given, everything that makes life bearable had to be fought for.
You are beginning to irritate me, capitalism once had a progressive side, but it hasn't been that in a very long time. Right now capitalism is edging towards WW3, the life expectancy of people is declining and even bourgeois freedoms are being trampled on. It did fuck all to prepare for crisis like Covid and it's not preparing for the crisis that are already visible on the horizon. I'm sorry but I can't understand how you can praise capitalism for the material conditions while we're are sliding towards barbarism.

>Even in terms of the ongoing development of the means of production, this is kinda still occuring. Zoomers don't remember corded phones or internet that made a static tones when you logged on, but even the steady development of communication technology has been dramatic just in the past few decades. This is just one example, of course. And now we have automation and robotics being rapidly developed.
You are delusional beyond imagination, we are living in a time of great technological stagnation, there hasn't been a single new fundamental branch of technology for decades. All the communication technology is incremental improvements of technology conceptualized in 1940s-1970s. The hottest new thing in computer-tech, the machine-learning stuff (or AI if you like buzzwords) dates back to the 1980s and the first digital-neural-network is about 40 years old.
The first non wired phone dates back to 1946, your cordless landline phones date back to late sixties and picked up mass production in 1982. What robots are rapidly developing ? The only really novel (only 20 years old) application of robots is in autonomous military drones. Yay better murder instruments , praise capitalist innovation.
If you lived in the 20th century you witnessed fertilizer technology ending famines, affordable modes of travel went from horses to jet-liners, vaccines ended plagues, and plate cement-buildings changed affordable housing from cold sheds with outhouses to apartments that had electricity, running water, plumbing and central heating for basically everybody in industrial societies.
Today the tech-company with the highest stock-price is making the same smart-phone for well over ten years, and tiny almost unnoticeable improvements are "rapid technological advance". We didn't get a robot butler that does all our house-work, only one that removes dust from the floor. There has been slow but steady technological progress in computers and communication, i admit, but everything else is moving at a total snails-pace. Russia is bringing an old soviet airliner production facility back online, and they are beginning to produce a derivative of a soviet jet-liner with a few modern upgrades to the engines and navigation, and that can fill the gap of embargoed western airliner technology. If we lived in a era of rapid technological advances that would not be possible.

>capitalism has largely been a stable economic system that creates continuous improvement of the material conditions for the masses with an improving political system, that gets better at preempting disasters and interruption of comfortable existence.
It has been anything but.
Capitalism has never had more than 10 years of consecutive stability, it's constantly in crisis, constantly at war somewhere, and capitalism is extremely resistant to long term thinking that would allow to prepare for crisis. Very few people have a comfortable existence.

>and let's not forget Chernobyl
let me guess you watched that terrible works of pure fiction from HBO, which can only be described as throwing science out of the window. By the way Soviets did exemplary crisis management, they could evacuate a small city and surrounding areas within days, and they stabilized the plant. Only a little over 30 people died, it wasn't a big crisis. It's only hyped up as as one because it serves the purpose of attacking nuclear power.

>So I guess this is where the crux of our difference lies. You'll settle for stability and comfort. My Marxism seeks to expand human freedom AND capability.
This is retarded beyond believe, you can't be free if you lack stable economic support. You can't expand your capabilities unless you live a fairly comfortable live. Have you ever experienced what wretched precarious conditions do to people ? it becomes a prison of unmet needs.


This post is already a wall of text, i'll forgo replying to the rest.

You have internalized ruling ideology to an extraordinary degree.
It's very disheartening.

>>465347
>Zoomers don't remember corded phones or internet that made a static tones when you logged on, but even the steady development of communication technology has been dramatic just in the past few decades.
LOL, who are you trying to kid, little kid? If you are old enough to remember dial-up modems, maybe you also remember how we got off of them. That's right, the cable TV companies just piped that shit into our homes using the exact same cables that we already had in our homes from decades ago. It wasn't some great technological achievment, just a repurposing of old tech. Nothing about telecommunications has greatly–or even marginally– improved since the late-Nineties. On the contrary, companies keep burying the best technologies that we had back in the day in order to make us buy the inferior trash that they produce now. Anyone here remember Windows 2000 Professional Edition? Who wouldn't rather have that than every other operating system produced since then? Remember when cell phones had replacable batteries and didn't come loaded with Google bloatware? Remember when every piece of hardware wasn't lowjacked? Oh, and remember when you could buy a video game and you got the entire game?

Quit acting like you're old. Old people remember when computer shit didn't suck.

>>465376
>Emotional rant
>Thinks he's a radical intellectual
Many such cases

Historically, the left and right referred to a divide within the liberal order. All of these people are liberals in the broadest sense, or have agreed to work within the liberal institutions, in order for "left" and "right" to have any useful meaning as political alliances. Essentializing "left" and "right" as universal poles in a grand struggle is the position of the most reactionary elements that didn't like any part of the liberal thinking, and wanted to take it all back. These terms were always understood to refer to a struggle between factions in liberal society, which eventually was represented by a struggle between those who aspired towards democratization and thoes who aspired towards the rule of a minority that formed an oligarchy.

For a lot of reasons, the left/right distinction is largely irrelevant after 1945. In a vague sense, the fascists are the inheritors of the right and its program. There weren't any direct inheritors of the left. The factions that were "the left" historically became the ruling faction, and began to adopt the positions of the right. And so, the 20th century has been a struggle over the institutions, and it consciously excludes most of the people from any part of the struggle. The people are only given the option of established parties and ideologies that lure them into wars for other assholes.

The divide is still relevant, but the left broadly speaking is nothing but a grift. Any democratic idea is dead on arrival - it is incompatible with the current system of government, which is not at all democratic or even remotely close to what that word meant in the 18th century. All that remains is a game of who gets to be king of the oligarchic mountain, and members of the club know to march in lockstep. The rulers are not worried about a revolution from below, but one of their own breaking ranks and undoing the oligarchic system by winning it. They fear a Caesar more than an angry mob.

Oh the ancap fag is in this thread too. Once someone becomes a hardcore fag you can't really help them. You can present them a willing female partner and they can't do it because they're only sensitive to penis now. It's a disease. Many such cases!

>>465387
The mob loved Caesar

>>465391
There are a lot of people who don't get what was really happening with the fall of the Roman Republic, or what the system was. There's a clumsy effort to superimpose the political narrative of the 20th century onto then, but Caesar at heart was part of the club. The losers in that club just decided that they were going to kill the first man in Rome because he won and they really were big nothings, who claimed that they were totally the bestest and special. The smarter of the optimates would have done the same thing Caesar did if they could, and Caesar in power was not giving the plebs everything, but gave that which would allow him to rule. The populares/optimates divide wasn't really an ideological one, and the gangs of Rome worked for either faction and had no compunction about changing loyalty when the money was right. Caesar's program of forgiveness would not be possible if these were ideological movements.

The left is simply those who oppose the capitalist economic system. Nothing more complicated than that. Just as those who sat to the left of the king after the French Revolution opposed the contemporary feudal order, those on the left today oppose the contemporary system. Fart-sniffing pseuds will try to convince you that the left no longer exists and everything is hopeless, but they of course never leave their armchairs and can only peddle doomerist cynicism.

>>465386
>refuting your argument with examples is an emotional rant
>muh intellechals
You suck at arguing.

>>465393
Caesar got killed because while at the height of his power he had no leg to stand on. He didn't have support among the senate, nor among the plebs, nor among other groups, except his veterans. He ended up politically isolated.
Everything that Caesar wasn't - Octavian was - truly a fascinating politician. A fucking political machine, a historical necessity incarnate. Understood perfectly what needs to be done for his class and his mode of production to get out of crisis. Played his part in the comedy of life (his words) flawlessly.
Revolutions do bring out great individuals indeed - and a century of Roman revolution brought about Octavian and Principate.

>>465393
>The losers in that club just decided that they were going to kill the first man in Rome because he won and they really were big nothings, who claimed that they were totally the bestest and special.
Caesar imposed a military dictatorship like Sulla had before, and they were rightly worried about what a general with his own army already inside Rome would do with them in time. Military dictators have a tendency to kill select members of the ruling class, and there was no reason to think that Caesar–who was a bit on the unstable side–would refrain. There was some sense of self-preservation there.

>>465397
You know, the worst thing about Augustus is just how convincing a poster boy he makes for the Great Man Theory.

>>465397
The only reason Octavian got away with what Caesar didn't is because Octavian sided with the optimates.

>>465401
>they were rightly worried about what a general with his own army already inside Rome would do with them in time
what bullshit

they feared Caesar would act like Sulla when he first entered Rome
He obviously had no intention of killing anyone - that was part of his downfall, his error, that the second triumvirate did not repeat - causing a massacre that Rome has never seen before

>>465405
He did not side with them. He submitted them. And those that he couldn't submit - he killed.
He was very smart - creating a new regime by dressing it in the old clothes. By convincing everyone that he restored the Old Republic lol.

>>465397
That's really the heart of the republican system, and thus the left/right distinction - it really is a contest of who can be king of the mountain, because an aristocracy must fear its members most of all. The republic is always a fiction, and much of what Caesar does were very basic things that were intended to salvage the Romans' way of doing business. He was, like all of them, looking out for number one, but the optimates killing him was just pure stupidity. They actually thought they'd be praised as heroes for defeating the tyrant, when Rome very much needed a tyrant due to the rot in the society.

There is a need to both suck people back into the system of acceptable discourse, and to give them the false promise of someone who will resolve the contradictions and make the bad people go away. That was the crucial advance of the moderns to make sure they don't get anyone or anything that would disrupt this arrangement. So, you get a lot of fascists who claim they're totally not left or right, but who stand for everything the right historically stood for and rebrand it as revolutionary. The fascists do stand for a lot of other things too, that had nothing to do with the official settlement at first glance but were latent in the republican form of government. The only way the republic could end is if one man became king, and the republic will devour everything in sight to ensure that doesn't happen, even if it means handing power over to some national security spy lord to make all of the actual decisions. This doesn't end well if you look a little further into the future, seeing what we actually live in today and the mechanisms and incentives at work.

So I would say "the left" as a meaningful force is dead, or at best it transformed in a way that allowed it to survive the end of mass politics. Mass politics can only return if some very drastic changes took place to institutions, which would entail the end of the republic and would only be imposed by an enlightened tyrant. This is what is being offered, but instead of the enlightened tyrant, we get either showmen or people who are there to make the situation worse and keep the rot going. At some point - and this has already happened - ordinary people are going to first drop out of republican political thought entirely, and then out of society, because the society is alien to them and they are forbidden from associating with each other freely. Those who are cast out will have little recourse but to go their own way and live out the remainder of their lives, such as they are.

>>465407
No one who knew anything was convinced they actually ruled anything under the Augustan settlement. They were allowed the cope of continuing to sit in the Senate because overturning the senatorial system wasn't really on Augustus' todo list. By time Augustus won, there was no alternative. You either bent the knee or you got the wrath. All the people who really thought they could be the first man in Rome were either dead or submitted. The republic wasn't just a thing forgotten that faded away. There were enough people who were disgusted with the entire rotten construct, who were happy to see it go and build something that actually functioned, to the extent anything could function. The same fate awaits us in the end, but this time the optimates figured out they can hold the world ransom and point nukes at civilian population centers to keep their rotten way of doing things intact.

It would be better if there were something other than despotism or this shit, but that's all we have left. Everyone who conceived of something other than that gets sidelined. Maybe if we had that, we wouldn't have the current situation where depopulation is considered a good thing. That's what most people see in their lives as the problem - not that the institutions need to be set right, but that the institutions are the problem. I just don't see the Caesars being something that different from what came before. They just took off the mask and showed what the republic always was. There were many opportunities to restore it, and senators could become emperor if they played their cards right, but no one saw any purpose to setting up a republic again. There is a reason republics are historically uncommon. The question isn't whether the republic was the default, but whether the republic can justify its continued existence. It's always been like that.

Mind, I'm not writing this as a defense of despotism, but that it is inevitable at this point, and no alternative to despotism is offered with serious meaning. The generation born after 1980 is given over to dictatorship and doesn't want anything else. Eventually there will be something other than this shit they're doing right now with a eugenic depopulation purge, but it won't be in most of our lifetimes. I'm guessing you won't see anything until close to the end of this century, and the millennials will be destroyed just like they happily destroyed the prior generations. That's the way we set for ourselves. By then, the victors who know what this really is will have stripped out the fight of anyone who would oppose them, and you'll see the world to come is worse than you imagined. But it will be the end of depopulation - mostly because the people they really needed to eliminate will be dead, and there won't be living memory of what a free society is like. The ultimate goal of depop isn't to actually reach some kill goal, but to impose the conditions of a slave society and perpetuate them. Eventually there will be a world where most people are born slaves and know nothing else. It's going to suck, but it was the inevitable outcome of this republican idea.

My guess is the remaining leftists who have any sense figured the new game was to enter this arrangement of the world to come. They just hate the people and believe in their heart that the people aren't worth saving. If there were a genuinely democratic current left, it would aim for things that are totally verboten today. The Republican hatred of "entitlements" would be reersed - the people who have had the world taken from them will demand the return of the world to them, and they will not accept the state or "society" as an intermediary. Once accomplished, the people will sit on what they took back and never give it up again to any institution. Regardless of what happens, that is the only response of the people to the current situation. They're not invested in institutions or this idea of a revolution, because they know such an event would be stage-managed and work against their interests. The majority of humanity, or what was formerly called humanity, will insist on their own institutions and independence, and there will be no return to the institutions of old. You'd see the people form their own medical corps, hold their own farms, and the society would truly split into two. The rulers would be true aliens, but rather than the siege pressing against the lower class, the democratic faction would conspire and make clear that if anyone seeks the return of the old institutions into their lives, there will be blood. That's the only way this can turn out, unless the alternative is the lower class eating shit and becoming total slaves. There might have been a world where we could have gotten along, but that was thrown away the moment eugenics was allowed to insinuate itself, and confirmed when this beast wasn't put down like a dog after 1945. So, there won't be a democratic society ever again unless those who would defend it are prepared to do things that are unspeakable today. After this much blood, which is all on the hands of the eugenists, the only possible retribution is blood and the defeat of the institutions. Trying to salvage republican institutions is the problem.

Anyway the change coming forward isn't comparable to Augustus - that was what FDR sort of did. We're getting the Diocletian thing at some point.

>>465409
>By time Augustus won, there was no alternative.
exactly
the genius of Augustus is that he understood the new political base of his future regime very well - the army and the small landowner-veteran that continued to reproduce the municipal polis as the basic unit of the Empire for at least two and a half more centuries
it's truly fascinating seeing how he consciously builds this new base at the same time as he wages a civil war - slowly and methodically

>>465407
Superficially Octavian opposed some elements of the conservative oligarchs, but as a class his program largely aligned with the optimates. That's why the civil wars ended for a time afterwards: because the populist movements were defeated and they got what they wanted.

>>465406
>He obviously had no intention of killing anyone
"Obvious" to who? Rememeber that all of the political history we have from that period comes from Cassius Dio and Suetonius who weren't even born when Caesar was assassinated, and those two have been proven to be less than reliable historians. On top of that, Caesar's deification and the popular reverence he was afforded after his death make it likely that historians (sort of) wrote about him with rose-tinted glasses on. What the senate thought of Caesar at the time and what Caesar's actual expressed motives were are not a part of any reliable historical record. The facts were that he had an army that he used to invade Rome and to impose his will on the senate which was entirely helpless. That is a situation where senators are going to fear for their lives. Whatever promises of safety that Caesar may have made to them would have sounded like a Chicago mobster holding a gun on a cop and saying, "Relax, kid, I ain't gonna kill ya." They were effectively hostages with no clear use to Caesar going forward. Caesar, notably unlike Augustus, showed them no future Rome in which the Senate was to play a part.

>>465326
Well if you are talking about marxism you must get away from strictly defining things like you do in math: with axioms and lemmas. This method doesn't let us work with history, so we have this thing called historical and dialectical materialism which can be crudely summarized as: together we watch the replay, talk about what went wrong and how to fix it.

leftism is a discussion

>>465417
See this is what I'm talking about - an ideological thinking today is superimposed on the past, but anyone in Roman politics would be screamingly "conservative". There wasn't a concept of liberalism or democracy in a genuine sense, and what would have counted as democracy was to give the mob what they wanted, which no one actually wanted to do or could do. The objective of the mob leaders was to make something of their lives, in hopes that their families could promote. All you did in Roman society was an effort to become socially acceptable enough that you weren't a victim of the system, and a few who showed determination could claw up the ranks until they had money and status. You could only really do that if you went through the channels the Romans liked, so your way to success was through the legions or becoming a lawyer, both of which were tied together due to the Roman way of conceiving the state and its purpose. There isn't a concept of doing things because it would be nice if we all got along. That's not how the republic actually rolled, and it was a pretense sold to the losers as a cope.

Members who were reforming the republic like the Gracchi were understood to do this as a way of becoming the leading men of the city, rather than any ideology that suggested they actually cared if the lower classes had a thing. It was understood on some level that you did need a productive base to recruit useful soldiers, so long as you were going to use Roman soldiers. One of the things Augustus brought in was elevating the provincials, and this was one of the things the old guard fought against bitterly; but the reason the optimates went against Caesar is because they couldn't out-Caesar the OG, and so they turned to petty bigotry as a cope for their own impotence. That's really all it was. The better of the optimates weren't trying to defend the republic out of some sense that it was virtuous, but were trying to compete to do what Caesar, Sulla, Marius, etc. did. Caesar obviously sided with other men who were either trying to join in his party or who saw in Caesar someone worth following. None of these people thought about class struggle - they were all in the ruling class, for the ruling class, and to be anything else would have been beyond the pale. It would have undermined the slave system that the senators all understood to be the basis of the empire's labor force. They specifically didn't want the free farmer-soldier because that was the class whose stuff was taken by the senators who won the great game. If that class reconstituted itself, it was over for all of them. So, a lot of the reforms to reconstitute that class were not actually that, but ways of obligating the recipients of this assistance to the man who made it happen. It might have been with an eye towards the long-term viability of the Roman system, but everyone involved saw the republic not as a perpetually stable fount of virtue, but as the vehicle for playing the political game. The only way it could end is with one man becoming king, and they all figured that out well before Caesar. The only thing stopping it is that because all of them wanted this or something to that effect, they had to be wary of each other, and resorted to the things aristocratic oligarchies usually do.

As for the ordinary people, their way of looking at politics was purely about who they would attach to. It wasn't ideology. The poor would align with Sulla when Sulla was winning, and abandon that alliance when Sulla was no longer winning. They could not afford sentimental attachment to any of these men, but if they're inducted into Caesar's legions, then they're obligated to Caesar regardless of what they think of the man. It was the same for those who aligned with Pompey (who himself had no ideology or commitment either way; he was brought to the optimates because his alliance with Caesar was no longer operative). The optimates had their mobs and clients obligated to them.

If you did see a mass popular uprising - and these did happen in Roman history - it would have looked very different, and they would face the same problem every peasant or slave rebellion did when they had to actually keep that in place. The usual attitude of the free commoners was to stay out of politics, or at most lend their support to whomever was winning. The republican settlement was almost entirely driven by patronage and favors, rather than people knowing a damn thing about who they were voting for. None of that mattered to the common voter. What mattered was keeping this thing that allowed them to simply exist, and that would be taken away from them because of incentives built into the republic from the start. A popular uprising would have been the end of Rome in any recognizable form, and that's exactly what the allies were attempting to do - they made what was almost a carbon copy of the Roman system, except the Italian allies sat in the ruling positions. They were accused of being puppets of factions in Rome, and they basically were, but the old guard losers were pigheads who didn't want to share a thing, as the republican form of government suggested they do with those who are not in the club. There's no ideology about it. The republic just sucked from start to finish, created by men who made a big show about their greatness but who could only think of making slavery bigger and didn't want to hear about anything else. It only exists because none of them trusted each other to submit to a king, like most of the world did.

>>465418
We do have some writings from the time period that come down to us. Sallust writes as Caesar rules and is assassinated, and aligned with Caesar at one point. He's considered less reliable because his alliance with Caesar is known. Some of Cicero's writing comes down to us and he was a prolific writer.

I don't think Caesar wanted to abolish the Senate - just make them his bitch, after decades of intransigence and their stupidity disallowing basic things to be done. Caesar was not moving history alone. To be who he was required alliances, and he inherits the old Marian network through his family. There were conspirators seeking to up-end the system, like Cataline, and that is conveyed in the notes Romans at the time were noting about events. The Senate by the time Caesar becomes dictator probably deserved to be made bitches, for their repeated failure to do basic things a government would do. If not Caesar, it would have been done by someone who saw what a piece of shit the republic was, and really always had been. The story of preserving the republic was always kayfabe that they chanted because that was how the cult of power traditionally functioned. They liked this beast that locked ranks to arrest anything that would possibly usurp it, even when it was obvious the imperator and the Praetorian Guard were to actual kingmakers. The Senate didn't really have a problem with this in the end. No one in the body was fit to inherit the empire or really knew what the hell they would do with it. It took a long time before there was a senator who would become emperor himself, and he did this by being involved in the quasi-succession of the "good" emperors and agreeing to adopt their preferred man as his heir.

>>465420
That's not Marxism, that's retarded doublespeak masquerading as something profound. It's full of lies. If you have a scientific view of history, you are proposing axioms and principles and then testing them against your observations to build your model. There is a danger with using models to describe history, since there is not any physical place where the past is still happening.

Marxism is not strictly a "left" philosophy or an assocation with feelings. You can adopt the Marxist method of looking at the world while rejecting communism or Marx's stated project with the International. There is of course the theory that Marx was a saboteur from the start, which a lot of liberal thinkers believe to be true for very valid reasons. I just see it as Marx writing to a particular type of person, and once that type of person got what they wanted in the 20th century, they had no further use for the workers or revolutionary rhetoric.

To answer broadly the real and meaningful distinction between left and right, they are two different sets of prerogatives that were in force between those who contested the modern state. The Right believed in defending the traditional seats of authority and institutions that were suitable for them, and harkened to an imagined past where things worked in ideal form. The Left questioned that authority and asked how a new aristocracy could arise, and they all had different ideas of who was the most meritorious. These are very different propositions of what should rule from the outset, and so you can't make a moral euivalence between the Right and the Left, or treat this like a game of political football. The commitments of the Right and Left historically led them to conclusions that made sense for their respective bases.

If you asked most ordinary people, assuming they could vote at all, they didn't care what a "liberal" or "conservative" was. They asked that age old question - "are you better off now than you were four years ago?" Then of course the entire process would be managed during the 20th century, and what little expectation of class mobility you had was at first only possible through institutions totally controlled by the ruling oligarchy, and then just cut entirely and the rulers declared that intelligence is 100% hereditary and the poor are forever reduced to the most abject slavery and humliation, who should be grateful they are allowed to live in this torture and Hell.

>If you have a scientific view of history, you are proposing axioms and principles and then testing them against your observations to build your model.

No you are not. Precisely because you cannot alter history.

>>465423
What sort of nonsense are you implying? What you think has nothing to do with the real world. Humans can only affect the world through the mechanisms available to them. You don't decide history by thought alone. That's the disease you people suffer from, and you keep doing it no matter how many times you are told to stop doing it. Then you lead people into a ditch and keep asking these stupid questions. It happens too often to be an accident, but there are people who really do think like that. It's brain damage.

>>465421
>There wasn't a concept of liberalism or democracy in a genuine sense, and what would have counted as democracy was to give the mob what they wanted, which no one actually wanted to do or could do
lol no, the ancient Romans were actually intimately familiar with democracy, because ancient Syracuse right next door had been a democracy directly in the mold of Athens for a few generations. What would have counted as democracy was government by random lot and an end to the oligarchy of elections, and the oligarchs weren't about to have that happen. You can't project today's modern Orwellian distortion of "democracy" onto ancient Rome, because the Romans were uniquely positioned to be very well aware of what democracy actually entailed.

>>465421
>Members who were reforming the republic like the Gracchi were understood to do this as a way of becoming the leading men of the city
That's not entirely fair. A number of other populares were certainly operating out of opportunistic self interest when they supported populist reforms, but there actually is reason to believe that Gaius Gracchus did what he did out of a genuine hatred for Rome's ruling classes, trying to avenge the murder of his older brother.

>but the reason the optimates went against Caesar is because they couldn't out-Caesar the OG
This is a gross simplification that empties the class content of this struggle. The optimates faction absolutely had slumlords like Cicero in their ranks who stood to lose personally if reforms like debt relief were passed. Members of the Senatorial class did not exist in a vacuum outside the class struggles of ancient Rome.

>>465425
None of those states would be democracies in any sense that the people had any say over events, or could have any say. It was a way to get people invested in the process of governing, so that cities could have armies. Democracy implied that the stakeholders had some property to even participate, which also qualified them for service in the army and usually "service guarantees citizenship", as these things go. It was relevant to those who could participate, but most of the free male populace didn't participate. You're talking about 5-10% of the population being members of that democracy, which is a lot more public input than most governments allow, but none of these people were going to give the poor free money. Those who had did not believe in giving those who had not any free shit. This was the exact problem Rome faced.

There hasn't been a democracy inclusive of anywhere near the whole population for most of human history, nor could there be. If such a thing happened, it would have no easy precedent to point to. It would entail the true end of class struggle and the end of institutional control over life. Such a world became inconceivable, ironically the moment it became technologically possible, because there were agitators calling for exactly that - to get rid of these institutions no one wanted and no one asked for, which insinuated themselves. What we actually got was the opposite, where the institutions took over our lives specifically so a democratic force would be defeated. That's why you have police everywhere checking your papers and compliance with absurd "health" regulations that have nothing to do with keeping anyone alive and a lot to do with killing people off.

>>465426
There was no class content that would be represented in the political arena. The political class were all for the senatorial class staying in power. The dispute was among each other, and the failure of the republican system to curry favor as it existed. Caesar and the people around him were able to command the loyalty of the important things like the army, and crucially Augustus aligned with the money men. So did Julius, which meant JC was up to his neck in debt. Of course these men hated each other, and some were willing to transgress the rules that were set up so the Senate controlled everything and made sure there was not even the appearance of democracy. None of this was about having a revolution in the modern sense.

The concept that ordinary plebs were going to have a revolution is not "let's make reforms". It would be an overturning of literally everything Rome entailed. That only happens at the very end, and it is not so much a revolution but Rome failing completely and everyone fucking off, because the state became such a ruinous parasite and couldn't field an army any more. There were people in Rome who hated everything about the Roman way of doing things, and their answer was to retreat from Rome and politics and general, seeing no further reason to involve themselves in such a foul business. There is no changing that arrangement from within, at the apex of it. Anyone who tried faced a challenge, until it became absolutely necessary to salvage the situation with something. It certainly wasn't on the mind with the civil wars - those were all contests to see who would rule, and the breakdown of the republican system and its ability to command any authority. In an earlier time, there was a level of mobility that allowed men from low origins to rise in position - never too high, but there was a possibility your children could do better than you. Men of low origin found their way to advance, which is where Agrippa came from. It is the interest of every aristocracy to lock out forever such examples, not because such a thing would be good for the country but because that is the entire point of establishing an aristocracy.

>>465426
Anyway I think you're not getting that mass politics simply wasn't a thing at the time. It certainly helped to have an angry mob on your side, riled up over the shit hand they've been dealt, but the mob wasn't going to make decisions in their own right, and they weren't asking for entry into the political class themselves. It seemed right and fair that Gracchus was going to do the thing that would have made sense if the republic weren't a flimsy lie from the outset, like all republics are. A lot of ordinary people probably wondered why a gift horse of free land had to be claimed by a few wealth estates, when the solution to Rome's manpower difficulties was to give people land, so they could become soldiers with land to till and thus be gainfully employed.

Just put it this way - do you think workers would be able to walk into the US Senate and stand their ground against the ruling class? They would wither if they had to endure the horseshit that is Washington. There are a few brave souls who try and they all figure out just how hard politics is, and how unreformable republics are. It's not that the workers are too stupid to get it or the ruling class possesses innate virtue that allows them to rule. It's that the republic as a concept is so rotten that it boggles the mind how anyone thought it was a great idea. Most of humanity didn't do this, because they could see what an unworkable mess it is.

>>465427
Fair enough: by democracy you in fact mean a system that enfranchises all including women and slaves. One should be explicit trying to project that onto ancient Mediterranean societies, especially given a society that was likely very familiar with the original definition of democracy as people in the Roman Republic were.

By the way there were many local democratic self rulings scattered throughout Europe during feudalism when peasants and serfs were managing their affairs beyond the scope of their feudal lords. This often including substantial egalitarian participation from women. Ironically the French Revolution actually represented a step backwards in women's self-rule because it replaced feudal democratic assemblies with oligarchic elections with only male enfranchisement.

>>465427
>Democracy implied that the stakeholders had some property to even participate
Also wrong, one of the central pillars of democracy in the ancient world was not having a property qualification for participation.

>>465430
Not just about enfranchisement, but about the nature of institutions itself. A meaningful democracy would entail significant independence of its members. The forms of democracy, or what amounted to such, that were genuinely democratic involved very low-level decision making. Those are ubiquitous. There is no easy way to establish that over a large space, or to build such an entity that can withstand attack from other states if it were the state of a given area. It's not impossible, but a democratic society has never been done. It would mean circumventing a rule that had been identified in politics where a political elite holds the real power of governing society; in short, it would mean the political elite would become the majority, and the ruled would be a minority. Such a society would not be compatible with the university, private armies, capitalism in any form that has existed up until now, and quite a few other things that are taken for granted and naturalized today. It's the path that wasn't taken, and again this is something that was on the mind of radical reformers late in the 19th century. There was a great distrust of the institutions that had formed, and especially distrust towards these new institutions which announced a permanent tyranny beforehand and that they would make humanity into animals.

>>465431
You had to be a free citizen, and you don't stay free without property. It was seen as a shame to enslave free citizens, and so there was a solidarity among them to keep the free free. What was not done was elevating slaves or freedmen to the status of citizens, and democracies are always wary of letting just anyone in. Slavery had a stigma that is roughly equivalent to how mental defectives are treated today. If you did anything that was slave-like, you were fucked and there would be no mercy. So, if you think the system works and are too naive to survive, you get a cruel reminder of what humanity really was. There is a reason the democratic forms were unstable and usually co-opted by tyrants after a while. In every case, there was always an expedient to control the system - just say that whoever you don't like is crazy or retarded, and start the cycle to purge them. It works every time, and that's a law of humanity that will never change and can't change in any serious way.

Anyway a meaningful democracy would place most of the people at the level of the political elite. This isn't just a matter of saying you've abolished class, but realizing it in practice. It would entail that the kind of machinery conceived for the management of society as we know it today would be a menace avoided at all costs, and circumvented so that people have a reasonable expectation they aren't arbitrarily seized by some gangsters in uniforms. It would likely require humans to be something they are not, and no known moral or ethical thinking would allow such a thing to happen. It would likely mean nothing less than a new religion taking root and perpetuating itself for at least a century, acting in direct contradiction to the current trends in humanity towards more slavery and a Satanic moral and spiritual foundation. It is unlikely to happen any time soon, and if it does, people like us will probably have been killed off by the current trends in humanity. Whoever survives what we're going to live through in the next two centuries won't be like us, and it is highly likely that whatever comes out the other end will be so monstrously evil that we should probably wish for them to fail.

>>465347
<So it's better to redesign the economic system so that it rules out the possibility of concentrating wealth.

>That's actually pretty hard to do. I don't pretend I would have somehow done better that the political leadership of every single socialist revolution.

It's not that hard to build an economic system that doesn't generate wealth concentration.
Marx already described the basics in the Gotha Program with labor vouchers and calculation in kind. The cyber-socialists have proposed a much more sophisticated implementation of that. If you combine it with a political system that has Democracy by lot. Wealth concentrating won't be possible anymore.

All the political leadership of every single socialist revolution knew this but they all occurred in backwards countries that did not have the technical means to set up a highly ordered society like this. But it's trivial to do this today. There will likely be more revolutions in the future and some of them will be able to do this. The US empire is declining and will soon no longer be able to undo revolutions that occur in the world. This might just be an imperial interim phase where a few new revolutionary countries can constitute them-self. But it's very possible that the US empire will not be replaced. China would be strong enough to build a new empire, but all the indications are that they are actively struggling to get away from imperial structures internally and externally. The US empire will run out in 2030 (earlier if they start more wars) and that means the conceivable future has no big power that can crush revolutions in their crib. The field for experimenting with new forms of governments and societies will open up again.

To people like us damned to live in pre-history it seems almost impossible to prevent wealth from concentrating because people that want this, are very powerful right now. But you have to understand that this power is not innate to them, it's nothing but a manifestation of a structural tendency in the current economic and political system. It's easy to make the mistake of personifying systemic tendencies. Once other systems that lack a tendency to concentrate wealth take root, all the people living within those systems will find the possibility of wealth concentrating very hard to imagine. Maybe even harder than it is for us to imagine their dispersed wealth societies.

>>465436
If you draw plans on paper, equalizing wealth is a trivial task. The problem is moral and educational - no one has any reason to believe they are treated fairly by the planner. When you suggest a cybernetic planning mechanism, whoever writes the program is going to have considerable control over that system. This was something that went into industrial technology - at the start, ordinary line workers were required to write programs because the IT people at the time didn't know a fucking thing about machinery or what is done. The primary objective was to strip the worker from the machine, and this was not done in the interest of efficiency but because it was desired to forestall workers controlling the environment.

You're not going to convince people who expected a wage that they should accept government-approved chits instead. The labor voucher example is something you would never do straight up or take for granted, unless it were backed by some property the workers would hold that isn't conditioned on submission. Telling people to trust the system and institutions has been a disaster for most of them, unless they are part of those institutions and command the machinery in which case they lord over the rest of us.

If you did want to use cybernetic principles to plan human activity, you're dealing with very different people who are habituated to it first of all, and second, it would imply both accessibility to knowledge and the ability of people to put into practice what they wanted to do in the first place. If you're dickering over the correct compensation for such and such labor-time, you're missing the point. The point of planning would be to overcome the most pressing needs of people, so that people can be paid an income worthy of a free society. You would have to take it on faith that people have a drive to contribute to the system, because they see the alternative as worse, and in reality that's always been the case. Money doesn't have the power to motivate many ideologues presume it does, especially if the money is no good and all the things you really want are put behind a wall, where the moment you manage to save enough money to buy your way in, the holder jacks up the price just to remind you what this really is. That's what neoliberalism did - jacked up the price of things that should never have been a profit-making venture in the first place, and then told people they were dependent on this racket and obligated to pay into it for "society". Planning the operations of enterprises is not difficult, because this is already done out of necessity. Organizing that into a general plan is not much more difficult. The problem is that the antagonisms in society have become so dominant that the people hate each other more than they love the idea of something other than this, and so many basic things we could do now will not be permitted. If you made life too easy, people would see no need for anyone lording over them, and would start to ask why they're still made to follow a system that is alien to them. The final step - where people take control of their own lives - is a bridge too far because that gives up ancient privileges certain people believe they must hold over the rest of us.

It is difficult to prevent concentration of wealth because it is a tendency in people to seek to defend their property. Even if that wealth is allocated in a different way, people are very defensive of their stake in society and the world for all the reasons you would expect. Those who have will not easily surrender what they have, even if what they have is not much. Submitting to an alien plan does not make any sense to most people, especially when those making the plan make it clear who they believe should be promoted in the new society and who should be demoted. That's how you get the strange situation where the right can co-opt hatred of the institutions and have an in that they should not possess, that they did not historically possess and could easily have taken from them if the left could get over itself and speak to us normies. That has become anathema, which makes it easy for the Right to just pander and insult their base to whip them into compliance. The Left went out of its way to ignore that ordinary people see the institutions as the problem, not the solution.

>>465436
The real problem isn't that the economic plan must be just-right and needs The Science, but that the moral foundation that would make socialism anything normies want has been shattered and is no longer even admissible as an idea. This happens when the baseline for "human" is raised and most of humanity is cast into the residuum.

>>465436
>It's more feasible to totally redesign all of society from scratch based on imagination than it is to personally learn the rules of the current system and reasonably succeed.
There's no nice way to say this. Functionality, you are a retarded child

>>465438
You are a normie

>>465439 (You)
>>465436
>Inb4 b b but the mode of production will inevitably change
Yes, but not in some ideal way based on the wishful naivety of people without power. It already is changing, but that's another discussion.

>>465437
>The problem is moral and educational
I don't understand, how is there a moral problem in preventing a group of super-wealthy people from subjugating humanity. There is no educational problem, using labor-vouchers is less complicated than doing finances.

<Planning the operations of enterprises is not difficult, because this is already done out of necessity. Organizing that into a general plan is not much more difficult. The problem is that the antagonisms in society have become so dominant that the people hate each other more than they love the idea of something other than this, and so many basic things we could do now will not be permitted. If you made life too easy, people would see no need for anyone lording over them, and would start to ask why they're still made to follow a system that is alien to them. The final step - where people take control of their own lives - is a bridge too far because that gives up ancient privileges certain people believe they must hold over the rest of us.
<Socialist Planning would work but people have to many spooks.
This the old argument that feudal Kings will rule forever, but oh wait they don't rule anymore.
It sounds like a bunch of unfounded pessimism, or "doomerism".

>no one has any reason to believe they are treated fairly by the planner.
Socialist economic planning is a trust-less system.
>When you suggest a cybernetic planning mechanism, whoever writes the program is going to have considerable control over that system.
No the planner is basically just calculating prices, it doesn't have a need for secrecy so everybody sees exactly what the planner does.
The priorities for how the surplus of society is spend are determine politically.

>It is difficult to prevent concentration of wealth because it is a tendency in people
<it's human nature
And here you lost the debate
This argument is dead, please stop exhuming it.
The current system has an in-build tendency to concentrate wealth, it's a systemic thing, a statistical effect, it has nothing to do with the nature of people. We evolved in small groups of hunter gatherers that for the most part shared their wealth with each other. So our "Species being" is likely tilted heavily against wealth concentrations. But none of that really matters because individual characteristics of people do not play a role in large systems.

>>465438
>the moral foundation that would make socialism anything normies want has been shattered
Ruling classes don't base their power on "moral foundation" that is insane idealism.
There are systems that create this society and those systems can be changed

>This happens when the baseline for "human"
<baseline for human
what nonsense is that ?
Ruling classes can't install their power into people, that is even more ridicules idealism.

Seriously stop thinking this crap and analyze how the superstructure actually works.

>>465445
Economic thought is always moral thought. Cybernetics can automate the managerial task, but it does not automate away moral consideration of what you do. Because morality is determined by people in response to their environment - because morality is not fixed in nature because we are active participants in the world - any cybernetic approach to this will have to consider the very important machine that is the human itself, and it would have to account for a simple reality that humans do not wish to be reduced to animals or lab rats.

If you treat economics as simply a problem of calculating an optimal strategy, then the answer is trivial in any era. We could have done that a long time ago and saved ourselves this problem. That's never been the issue at the heart.

It's pretty clear you're huffing ideology and simply don't see how blind you are. I'm writing a book that should elucidate this. The chapters follow each other so I can't post them out of context, and it's rough draft. I'll share what I have so far but so much of it will be rewritten. My approach is very much in line with the cybernetic approach to the problem - I am disregarding that humans have anything special in them in making this claim. You don't know, and can't know, what I am even referring to. If you think morality is about feelings and subjective wants, you're not dealing with morality in any meaningful sense. Moral decisions imply that they occur in a world where real events happen and the consequences are undeniable. If you are implying a moral obligation to hold certain thoughts, and not tie those thoughts to any reality we experience, then that is not morality but its exact opposite.

>>465446
>>465447
Seriously you are a mental child who doesn't seem to have a connection to the way humans are at all. Capitalism didn't invent these things - they've been part of human societies for as long as humans have thought about this question and had a language to communicate it. This game of revisionism where humans are made into something they're not is very tiresome.

>>465442
Wow what a childish attempt to dismiss arguments.
When the masses grow up they assert political power, and seize the means of production.

It feels almost like the thread is getting astroturfed by Capitalist realism.
Radically different economic systems are possible, even likely.
The masses can crush the rulers and progress societies to something better.
Ruling classes that think they can stay on top eternally are utterly delusional.

If you lost hope it just means you got psy-oped by ruling ideology.

> It already is changing, but that's another discussion.
I'd say it's not changing into something new, it's just dying. Neo-liberal end-stage capitalism is on the way out but it's for the moment still strong enough to prevent a new system from being born.

But we can already see some things about the future.
The demographic trends will tremendously increase the class power of labor.
And the decline of imperialism will open up the possibility for new governments to emerge.

>>465447
Continue of textdump. The final chapter is the relevant section on this but the explanation doesn't make sense without the framework. The first two chapters aren't too important but explain how I'm setting up this view in the first place.

>>465450
Seriously, I don't think you know what you are talking about. If you think you're going to win by screeching autistically, that does not work. I've tried it. Autism is death. Don't be autistic.

>>465448
>Cybernetics can automate the managerial task, but big muh-moralism
pure idealism
If the economic system works it will create it's own superstructure, and social value systems.
That's what every mode of production does.

>>465448
>you are a mental child unless you believe in human nature the way i define it.

You lost that debate because you are wrong in the particular about "human nature" but also in the general that systemic tendencies overwrite the individual characteristics of people.

There is no one human nature, that's just essentialist bullshit that gets made up to attempt to justify a shitty system.

>>465453
It's not a statement of essential human nature, but the basic concept of what it means to conduct politics in any meaningful way. That is going to be a concern of any person who thinks about themselves and their relation to the world. Before you can talk about socialism and some grand plan, members of your society have to answer a basic need of security, because they have no reason to trust their government without question. I don't know how to explain this to you because you're thinking autistically - like literally textbook autism. This is something that has to be explained to certain people, and when you do the autism thing, it's the absolute most maladaptive thing possible. Autism itself is pure depoliticization and dehumanization, so if someone wanted to induce "autism", they'd teach them this antipolitics and lie profusely to their face, laughing at them the whole way. There's textbooks about how to abuse kids to make them turn out that way. I think in your case you really are a victim of that.

>>465453
Your thinking is philosophical anarchism basically. They actually try to tell people there is no such thing as politics or the devil and that it will just magically work. That's autism pure and simple, and you'd only advance that idea if you want to lord over the people imperiously.

If you can make people surrender all property and thought, then you could, but you'd be making them into slaves and this is known if you think about the question at all. This is what eugenicists actually believe they're going to accomplish, and they go out of their way to make it true - and so they spend vast effort "correcting" the instinct for self-preservation and security with hamfisted tactics, and when those tactics don't work, it can't possibly be the system that's wrong. Eugenics cannot fail, it can only be failed.

>>465452
Maybe you are wrong, and it's actually capitalism that is death and we need more weaponized autism.

>>465456
>>465457
How is anything of this related to the discussion that wealth concentration in society is not inevitable ?

>>465450
Bro. Let's be real.
You couldn't organize your way out of a paper bag. Maybe your time would be better spent trying to do something mildly possible, like having a decent and admirable life, rather than crying like a retarded child about how about how we can just change everything on a whim, end all the problems of capitalism, and not create new ones in the process.
>If you don't buy into my fever dream (which is really just an autistic tantrum that the French Declaration of the Rights of Man isn't literal reality), it means you must be psyoped.
Cultish dogmatism is on point

Logic 101:
Proposition A (a change in the mode of production is inevitable), the one I admit to, carries with it a much lower burden of proof than proposition B (a classless mode of production will inevitably emerge or is even feasible in a technological society), which you insist upon with all the conviction of a flat earther.
This is what I mean when I call you a retarded child.
>Tsar killed
Didn't result in classless society
>Louis 14th killed
Didn't result in a classless society
And not for lack of trying. But let me guess. Every leader of actual revolutions were just dumb and or morally corrupt compared to you. If you organized the rev, things would all work out better \s

Again, retarded child tier thinking.

Replying to another anon is isn't completely retarded:
>you'd only advance that idea if you want to lord over the people imperiously.
That would require competence, something sorely lacking among the most r r r revolutionary leftists and only compensated with delusional self assuredness.

Leftysperg is beyond help. Literally, it costs about $700 to fly to China. Maybe, as practice for organizing the revolution, you could practice making $700 and flying there to see what people think and how they act. I've been there. It's meh - something I tried to explain but couldn't be comprehended by the crying child.

>>465460
I swear, the leftist utopia taken to it's logical conclusion is a gray mist without distinction or concentration of anything.

We get it. You're a bugman. Distinction and comparative superiority make you uncomfortable.

But let's play with this idea more. Where is everyone equal. Where do they all live in the same type of room, wear the same clothes, eat the same food - and it's all provided to them. A prison in unironically the closest thing in reality to the leftoid conception of paradise.

>>465460
You'd have to ask why that tendency exists, rather than just taking it for granted. It is easier to secure one big hoard, or collectivize wealth and place its management in the hands of a small number of people, then it is to give each person their stake in the project. If the person loses interest in the project, there goes your planning mechanism, and people have obligations to things other than "society" as a whole, like their family or their associations of their choice. People will place their first loyalty to those they interact with on a daily basis and have direct relations with, over society as a whole, especially if that society is presented as a vague blob and something alien to them. There are certain people who can adapt to that world and happily march with society, but they tend to be the favored classes in the arrangement (and you will have classes of people, your thinking basically guarantees antagonistic relations will increase rather than decrease).

I didn't say that wealth concentration is "inevitable", but there are a lot of reasons pointing to why people look out for themselves and local interests. This is something that has played out in history, which you would understand if you approached history in a not-stupid way. The countervailing tendency - giving the people their shit back - has never been a consistent policy, and this is where the Roman example is very helpful to understand why the senators didn't do the thing that members of their own class admitted would have salvaged the situation. It wasn't because the senators were too stupid or blinded by "class interests", but that mechanistically the slave economy did not desire free citizen-soldiers, because the free cannot compete with estates that can buy up the best slaves and acquire all of the land. The way the farms were taken from the free wasn't economic competition, but by Rome initiating one bullshit war after another, which meant that the men sent to fight could not attend their farm and were coerced into surrendering their land. Some sold willingly, while others were persuaded very violently and were left with nothing for their years of service. The economic competition didn't guarantee that the freeholder was doomed - that was a political decision that the consuls knew they were doing to undercut their own soldier base, because they didn't give a shit about those men. When Rome starts to fight actual invasions again, some genius got the idea of just abolishing the property requirement and fielding a professional army, the first of its kind in the world, and that was the decisive break that made the republic a complete farce. Now, the generals gave their soldiers an IOU, promising land in return for completing 20 years of service. Sometimes they would get the land, but often they got the shitty land where they had to fend off raiders. Often they took up land in Pannonia or Illyria, and that's one reason why they became prime recruitment grounds during the Principate and Dominate. A lot of them didn't get any such land, because a time honored tradition of militaries is screwing over the sods who thought any of this was about serving their country. They can always find a way to dishonorably discharge anyone and leave them with not just nothing, but a black mark on their record forever.
These are the kinds of questions you have to ask yourself when you make the economy a political matter. You are in effect militarizing the whole society, unless your conception of socialism entails some way to work around this problem of the political. Not every form of socialism does concern itself with a political proposition - it is entirely possible to accept a liberal socialism where the institutions remain liberal, but it is decided by the government that sharing the wealth is preferable to individualism. In this case, the government of the people specifically decides it is done with the price system and does something completely different.

>>465461
There's a lot of dumb fucks who latched on to Marxism as their ideology of choice, and then bastardize it by cherry-picking quotes completely out of context and mashing it with whatever jargon they want. It's the state of the left right now.
I'm not a Marxist but what a lot of these internet idiots advance has nothing to do with anything Marx wrote. The typical actual communist is a grody politician like so many others - there's nothing magical about it in most of the world. It's only in Angloworld that communism has this weird aura and mysticism, and the Krauts as is typically have their Satanic version of everything.

>>465461
>Personal attacks
discarded
i can't be bothered to insult you back, it seems pointless to me.

>Tsar killed
>Didn't result in classless society
>Louis 14th killed
>Didn't result in a classless society
Straw-men argument.
The actual argument was that neither of those ruling classes were protected by muh human nature.

Please respond to the central argument that wealth concentrating into the hands of a few super-rich people is not inevitable, but rather just a tendency of certain economic systems.

Ruling ideology is invested into making people believe that wealth inequality is inevitable, it's demonstrably false of course.
You have Econophysicists like Victor Yakovenko explaining what causes inequality, (if you ask i can expand on this)
and spoiler alert it's just a economic mechanism, no spooky human nature or moral foundations of society.
And even less hardcore materialists like Thomas Piketty showing that high economic inequality is a temporary phenomenon. He makes a strong case that if social and political mechanisms fail to reduce economic inequality, then it will be reduced in other ways like wars.

>>465462
>the leftist utopia taken to it's logical conclusion
Cybernetic socialism is not a utopia

>pseudo elitists gibberish about wealth inequality being the result of merit
It's mostly just luck that decides about who ends up with all the riches.
In the capitalist system the wealth gets concentrated into the hands of a super tiny minority, because the distribution laws inherent in the capitalist system dictates that outcome.
It's just a feature of the system it's got nothing to do with humans. The differences in wealth distribution are so staggeringly huge that it can't be explained by differences in people. The variation in humans is so small compared to the systemic effects that it's a negligible factor

>>465465
>Personal attacks
>discarded
I know. How dare I bring up the fact that you aren't qualified to provide reasonable and realistic solutions to social problems! Better just ignore it and double down…
>The actual argument was that neither of those ruling classes were protected by muh human nature.

Ruling classes and cliques sometimes get overthrown. Where did I say that wasn't the case or that human nature prevented it from happening. I said human nature is antithetical to egalitarian utopias. At least try to argue against what I'm saying.
>Please respond to the central argument that wealth concentrating into the hands of a few super-rich people is not inevitable, but rather just a tendency of certain economic systems.
In virtually every society, ever, power and wealth have accrued to those with power and wealth. Occasionally, things reach a tipping point and a social conflict or other crises 'resets' things. But this has never created a society in which the general rule of power/wealth concentration wasnt operating. You can(/should) have regulations/social norms in place which mitigate this general tendency, but the general tendency still exists.
Inb4: muh hunter gatherers. Ya, I suppose when your society is so non complex that virtually anyone can do something as rudimentary as forage for food, you don't get massive inequalities or power divisions (until someone gets the bright idea to force other people to supply food for them, usually through raiding and taxes). But these were bands of 200 people all related, not a complex society in with technology demanded that specialization, management, and has gigantic population numbers.
>Prove to me why a perfect world can't exist
This is essentially what you are saying. As I've said, it's childish and fairly unintelligent.
And referencing the imagination of others, be it Marx or the faggy liberals you read, isn't evidence that something is or isn't real.L

>>465464
>You'd have to ask why that tendency for the wealth concentrations exist
oh you are asking for theory
it's caused by the statistical distribution of the thermodynamics of money
https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=BQrEEdy_uwM
feel free to ask questions.

>>465466
>Cybernetic socialism
It's speculation and a cope for the fact that human central planning was such a miserable failure in the general sense that the communists (the one's not living in a dirty trailer or their mom's basements) literally reintroduced markets.

I don't think you understand how marginal differences translate into real world disparities. But that sounds like a nice, ego soothing explanation
>Muh, I'm exactly the same as the wealthy, but they just got lucky and have bad morals
Childish and faggy

This isn't to say that the present system is perfect or natural, that massive wealthy inequality is good, etc.

But in your black and white childish fagleft mentality, it's hard to imagine a scenario where some people are in fact simply more capable than others or where some inequality is a good thing.

>statistical distribution of the thermodynamics of money
>feel free to ask questions
What does that mean

This may be a weird question, but it's pretty obvious:

What's with the obsession with creating a society without wealth inequality or classes? Why is that so important to end all wealth inequality and distinct classes?

couldn't you have a society with some wealth inequality and classes which is still ok?

>>465467
You are two strawmen arguing against each other, so much that I wonder if you're both the same person. Nothing about egalitarianism is antithetical to what it means to be human or to be a political actor. It is entirely possible for the political settlement to entail an egalitarian society without classes as such. If it did though, it would demand some basic questions must be answered.
The great difficulty arises when trying to proclaim that egalitarian is natural and eternal, which is not supported by anything. Egalitarian societies are only maintained through the effort of their members to keep it so. There is, if someone is willing to commit to it, a distrust of large concentrations of wealth or influence, and a distrust of conspiracies. This distrust requires someone to have a mind aware of conspiracies, so that threats to the egalitarian society are identified and neutralized. The rise of technocratic institutions made such an egalitarian world a near impossibility, especially when it concerns large institutions that are dictated by the state. If you wanted an egalitarian society, it couldn't be through the state which is definitely antithetical to egalitarianism, which is why state socialism is so absurd.

There was for a long time a tension between the egalitarian tendency in humanity and the need of security which incentivized hoarding and privation. In order for human society to function, it must accept a level of equality among the race in some basic regards. If you don't accept that, the inevitable outcome is slave society and there's no argument to say you shouldn't just have the maximal slave society. For humans to cooperate as humans, it requires a baseline level of regard for the members of a society, so that they may develop free of interference. Believing that wealth concentration is inevitable or that it is contrary to human nature to work against it would destroy the basis which allowed humans to be free in the first place to hoard wealth. It is self-defeating in other words.

My point is that if you want to favor egalitarianism, you do not get that just by stating it is just-so. Just-so stories are always the stories of imperious people who want others to be negated. That has nothing to do with human nature having a preference. Humans are versatile creatures which have to regard equality, authority, and judgements of superiority and inferiority simply to exist. This sort of reductionism is moronic and evades the crucial questions which we face every day. It also means that looking for perpetually stable systems of any sort is a retarded errand, which is what the Austrian School does because they are deliberately being retards. It comes as some grand revelation to the idiots that human economic behavior has never been nor can be a steady state, let alone perpetually stable. Humans devise their social arrangements because they are deliberate actors, not because one form or another is "naturally selected" or any such nonsense. Likewise, belief in an exorable inequality for its own sake is silly. People violate the drive towards concentration every day - that's why people hold stubbornly to their wealth and avoid scammers or being in hock to banks. The situation we are in now required immense set up and a preponderance of force and terror to make people give up their security, and with it any genuine freedom. In its place, you get "freedom", an empty word token bereft of meaning.

Speaking of hunter-gatherers, their egalitarianism was not a moral or philosophical position, but a matter of expedience. It was impossible to enforce the kind of imperious control we are used to, and it would be counterproductive for someone to be an overbearing petty-manager in that time. Even today, managers who spend all their effort power-tripping are terrible for accomplishing anything. It just so happens that the chief aim of the neoliberal settlement is to cannibalize anything productive, and make misery itself life's prime want. Misery is assigned a great value, and great prestige is given to trained liars and those tasked with elimination of the residuum and stripping away the wealth of the people. We're asked to praise men who did nothing but loot and plunder the world and its people, and consider that the most valuable effort of mankind. It's truly fucked.

>>465468
Talk about mystifying something basic so you don't have any pesky pleb political thinking.

>>465469
Central planning wasn't a failure until Cornholio decided to shit it up by trying to emulate America. You really don't know what the Soviet Union was - they didn't see communism as an ideology to impose on the world, but a way to build up the country's industry because there were no capitalists. If there was going to be industry, which Stalin needs if he doesn't want his people to be raped and enslaved, the state has to step in and plan operations, and this was done through state enterprises that were coordinated by the Party. It worked well enough for what it was intended to do - the CIA's own figures suggested the problem wasn't that central planning had perverse incentives, any more than capitalist oligarchy had them. The perverse incentives in post-1930s America were well know to CIA and to anyone who actually knew what political economy meant.

>>465471
Social class exists because there are institutions with conflicts that are not reconciled, and can't be. You don't have distinct classes in the sense that is relevant without one class losing in the arrangement; and if you had full class collaboration, either one class is regarded as the brain (fascism), or the classes are little more than professions and there is genuine communication between members of society, and most people are integrated into the society. The latter was never accomplished by anyone, because it would have entailed the end of a political elite's relevance, and it would have required what every politician dreads - giving the little people their shit back plus interest for all we have had to suffer because of a few assholes.

>>465471
One's wealth can amount to the power to command the labour of others, therefore those with undeserved wealth have undeserved power.
Any society that calls itself democratic will distribute power equally amongst the common people. Any society that calls itself meritocratic will distribute power based on deservedness. Our economic system is both anti-democratic and anti-meritocratic.
If that is the sort of system you are okay with living under, then you are my enemy. This is politics 101. It's a struggle for power and freedom.

>>465472
How closely did you read that study? It explicitly outlined the effects of the pareto principle, which got shit on all over by mouthbreathing leftoids in another thread. It cites a bunch of authors that the muhleft tends to hate, like Nassim Taleb (I'd highly recommend Antifragile, btw).

Also, it doesn't mention the viability of creating a utopia that caters to fags.

Pic related: the conclusion on the TvL(talent versus Luck) model, which basically states that you can't control luck but you can operate in a way that maximizes its possibly; and the outcome breakdown which shows that talent, while outweighed by luck, still very much effects the outcome.
<Cope harder and keep telling yourself it's all just luck. This is the faggy incel/blackpill version of social science, very suitable for you tbh.

>>465474
I'm not arguing that the present system is great, merely that it's stable enough to not be easily overthrown. Nor is it in some state of ongoing 'breakdown into barabarism' or on the brink of total collapse.

Really, that's one of the 'positives' of the system as it exists: it's somewhat infragile and doesn't easily collapse. [Obviously, if you don't like the system, this is something of a negative]

My central argument is that a classless society that is also technological, one without any wealth inequality, is a ghey fantasy that will get 'the left' (for lack of a better word) nowhere. I literally would argue for something like a 'socialist oriented mixed market economy.'

I like your reasoned explanations btw, even if I don't agree on all the tiny details.

>>465467
I don't care what you think about me, you are wasting your time with this. You just make me think you have a weak argument and are trying to pat it out with personal attacks. All i see is the distinction about whether you respond to my arguments or whether you speculate about my person. I'm exclusively interested in the former, and think that the latter indicates an argumentative weak-spot.

The fact that ruling classes get overthrown means that the societal structures they build are not rooted in some kind of transcendental human nature. If there was such a thing as a fixed human nature and you could find a system to match it, it should work without any disruptions. But in reality we just have a long succession of different variants of class societies failing after a time, and sometimes they fail badly enough that the rulers get wrecked.

I'm thinking about relabeling all the political violence that has occurred in Actually existing socialism in the 20th century as human nature. As an expression of my frustration that "human nature" as an ideological concept hasn't died yet. Stalin did nothing wrong, but just in case he did one thing wrong it was human nature. Maybe low brow facetiousness can kill this thing.

>muh hunter gatherers.
On a biological level humans are basically that, so if you try to reach towards some kind of human essence, you have find it there, If you can't find it in the most primitive form of human society, it just doesn't exist at all.

>I suppose when your society is so non complex that virtually anyone can do something as rudimentary as forage for food, you don't get massive inequalities or power divisions
But you don't need economic inequality for complex societies. Increasing labor specialization for the division of labor, doesn't have to be coupled with unequal wealth distribution. I get that in class societies that's always the case but it's not necessary for societies in general.

Look at the soviet Union they had very low inequality compared to capitalism but on a per/capita basis they produced many more highly trained people like engineers and doctors. Further more the people with the most power in the country were the high ranking communist party members, but they earned considerably less than doctors and engineers. You find that in every type of socialist country that the people with the most political power do not have most of the wealth. Even China that has a significant amount of capitalistic elements, the CPC members in ruling positions do not have the most wealth.

The reasons for wanting egalitarian wealth distributions are clear, as soon as you have wealthy people they are going to produce corruption, which will make any and all political systems fail. You can remedy this with old school communist problem solving. By shooting enough corrupt people you can keep it in check pretty much indefinitely, because bullets can be manufactured much faster than corrupt people. But you want to find ways to reduce the level of brutality in society. And that leads you down the path of redesigning the economic structures that do not exhibit the tendency to generate lots of wealth inequality.

The only practical and fully thought out design that i know about is socialist cybernetic planning. But if you are for some inexplicable reason fixated on keeping money and markets, you could start dicking around with digital money that behaved differently, because you programmed it to follow a different statistical distribution. Lets call it programmable money with a distribution algorithm like social democracy in the post WW2 era in Europe and America. I'm giving you the benefit of doubt here assuming that you are not just a capitalist ideologue defending the status quo. I think you might associate cultural or social values with markets and money, and i don't understand why. I just think it's economic recipes and you pick what ever works for your political goals.

My political goals are unequivocally getting rid of economic inequality and money. I want to get rid of money specifically because super-rich people have used money to politically disenfranchise me (and probably also you assuming your wealth is less than about 100 million bucks), so this is getting rid of the tools that were used against me. And getting rid of high inequality means getting rid of the position in society that could disenfranchise me. I basically think that super rich people are like bad politicians that you can't unelect. I'm perfectly aware that this change isn't sufficient for political enfranchisement, but it's a point to start from. I like the Athenian democracy model that's electing politicians by lottery because even soc-dems can't win anymore in elections so it's kinda pointless, to bother with that and just get a random statistically representative sample from the population. The gaggle of polit-randoms make a bunch of political decisions, then rinse and repeat, statistically speaking the results of that ought to be much better and representative than what neo-liberlaism does. And the hole neo-liberal scheme of grooming fake-political-candidates that if elected just sell out society, that would be foiled. It's very unlikely that Neo-liberal sleeper agents would get selected often enough to cause any real damage. You probably need further political structures for a working system but this is a plausible base to work from.

I'm also not universalizing this, the Chinese seem to be able to make their socialist markets work, Chinese billionaires are not able to fuck with politics or undermine social outcomes, they reached their elimination of extreme poverty a year ahead of schedule. I'm assuming that the CPC is doing that by holding them at gun-point and sometimes they pull the trigger if any doubt arises about their seriousness. Given the amount of bloodshed that wealth elites in other places of the world have caused that doesn't seem unreasonable to me. But i don't see how you could replicate the Chinese model in the west.

I think that arguing for society with a low inequality is also a form of ideological struggle, it's de-legitimizing the claim to power that the current ruling class has, by saying a better future doesn't include people like them having any kind of power. If you look at what they are doing right now, it's unrealistic to think that the human species can survive in a organized form if those people hold power for much longer. So it might be that the ability to create low wealth-inequality societies is like passing one of the great filters that can destroy civilizations or even species. (Not unleashing nuclear holocaust is also such a great filter, and they are definitely playing fast and loose with that one as well)

>>465479
>Let's just shoot the corrupt people, problem solved
I really feel like you have the mental capacity of a teenager who smokes too much weed

>>465469
>It's speculation and a cope for the fact that human central planning was such a miserable failure
Socialist planning in the 20th century was a big success. All socialist countries economically out-competed comparable capitalist countries by a big margin.
>communists literally reintroduced markets.
Yeah but in an abstract way you can see this as Chinese communists making it a point to prove to capitalists that they are better at the capitalists own game. It's a cosmic Irony chad move.

>>465481
Meanwhile, in Shanghai today. Do you think they bought their clothes with a labor voucher, anon?

>>465479
And there it is.

Despite all the protests about 'muhstrawmen,' muhleftists really are just people who cognitively desire and value equality over all else.

They do this, naturally, because they themselves are deficient and resentful.

<Sorry fag. Real Marxism is outlined in OP and about creating the red uberman.

(In China, you'd be thought-reformed out of your weaknesses and vices, btw)

>>465481
>Yeah but in an abstract way you can see this as Chinese communists making it a point to prove to capitalists that they are better at the capitalists own game. It's a cosmic Irony chad move

Yes, the CPC passed on superior 'cybernetic socialism' and adopted markets just to just to make a point…

Serious question: are you on drugs, including weed, alcohol, or psychiatric pharms, at this moment?

>>465473
>Talk about mystifying something basic
I gather you didn't understand advanced economics that studies the thermodynamics of money.
You know you can ask just for a simpler explanation, i get that it's very dense theory.

Think about it like this, If you use money to make a exchange in the market.
You have 3 possible out-comes:

First is you make a perfectly balanced exchange, where neither side of the exchange makes a better deal than the other. That's such a rare occurrence that we can just ignore it.

The second possible outcome is that you make a favorable trade where you get the better deal and your overall wealth increased but it did so at the expense of the other faction.

The third possible outcome is that you make an unfavorable deal and you're the one that loses out.

Now we can look at the hole system, there are going to be a small number of lucky people that make lots of favorable exchanges that allows them to grow their wealth at a faster rate. This is definitely luck because the economy has probably about a billion commodities and there is no way for one human to have an overview about all of that to base rational economic decisions on. And of course on the other side of these lucky people are unlucky people that loose the game of chance.

What exists now is a group of people that got a little bit more out of the market at the expense of the rest. At this stage there is some inequality, but not that much. The wealth distribution now follows what's called a thermal distribution. But those people can use the money they gained to change the conditions in the market so they always get the better deal, no matter what. And at this point you have wealth inequality exploding because everybody that participates in the same market as them looses wealth to them. At this point there is a pareto distribution for about 3% of the population. You don't need intelligence or skill to change the market conditions to your advantage because you can use money to hire skillful and intelligent people to do that for you. An that shows in reality the super-wealthy are just kinda average people.

Simulations found out that it really does not matter what individual agents do, basically the system creates a distribution of wealth and a few luck out and get insanely rich.
Here are the visuals of that simulation, that follow the distribution of money over time.
https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=NSelyltIilo

>>465480
>Let's just shoot the corrupt people, problem solved
You are either straw-manning, or lack reading comprehension, it specifically said it would not solve the problem only forestall it.

>>465487
Oh my god you do not understand market exchange at all. You're literally claiming market actors are incompetent and don't know what they are doing. Unequal exchange is the most basic characteristic of market societies - the participants all seek advantage over each other in dealing. The smart merchants know that they want to accumulate wealth in unequal exchange as much as possible. That is their entire model for attaining wealth, and other market participants will act accordingly and for the same reasons. Random luck has little to do with it. If you're a smart merchant, you seek to engineer a situation where you can push the "I win" button. If market exchanges were random between equal participants, there would be temporary winners and losers who take advantage of whatever fortune gives them. Capitalism wouldn't be possible if market actors were not deliberate - nor would socialism or any other arrangement of society be possible. It would just be chaotic actors who aren't organized by any principle.

I shouldn't have to explain this, but the autism is insufferable. It is not an accident that Mr. Rockefeller took Standard Oil to the top, and he didn't get there because he had some innate genes that meant that he and only he could win. He got there because he was smart and he was ruthless, and figured out all the things you could do with oil and how to best corner the market. Smart merchants have a mind towards empire, and from the start, the rising capitalists understood that they could only lock themselves in by commandeering education. You can see Rockefeller, Harriman, Mellon, etc. involved in forming educational curricula during the formative years of American state schooling, with an intent to make compliant subjects who will follow orders and bring in what eventually happened during the 1930s. The same influence of oligarchs on education continues to this day, and the educational institutions very much welcome this alliance because it secures their interest against interlopers and grants to them a chokehold on all employment opportunities. Eugenics is their joint program, the ride and die that keeps this empire together.

There is no "random tendency towards inequality" from an imagined start position where everyone is equal. The situation in reality did not start with equal participants. Even if there were a tendency towards inequality, there would be a countervailing tendency to correct this, if an egalitarian society were sought. Egalitarianism was never a goal of capitalism or liberalism - it's dog eat dog and emphasizes inequality on the basis of ability. Once someone has their hoard of wealth, they will hold onto it. That is not limited to capitalism, but it is how humans manage any wealth or property or influence they possess - they seek to expand it if possible, so they can use that base for security and all the things money can buy. The first priority of everyone is their own security, before they can do anything else. Self-sacrifice is not common among merchants, or in general. The argument for cooperation and egalitarianism has always been, as I said, the threat of the alternative being much worse, rather than an obsessive desire for absolute leveling. Slight disparities in wealth would not amount to class distinctions in of themselves. At the heart there is a simple concern that is not dependent on any economic logic - people do not want to lose their institutions, and do not want any other institution to exist that threatens them. The encroachment of technology and the invasion of private life was resisted, however it could be, and every step forward on the invasion has met resistance. This was predicted.

I don't even know where to begin with you. You're really just locked in ideology and can't tell your head from your ass, without retreating to this imperial science that you don't actually understand but use for ideological purposes. That's what eugenics does to a motherfucker. It's a disease.

>>465487
>TDLR: wealth concentrates because people with wealth use wealth to generate more wealth.

You don't need an obscure theory that uses an analogy from physics to figure that out

>>465482
>>465483
>>465485
this is clearly the expression of butt-hurt about Chinese Communists beating capitalists at their own game

>>465486
>Yes, the CPC passed on superior 'cybernetic socialism' and adopted markets just to just to make a point…
That was meant as a humorous remark.
In earnest the CPC couldn't implement cybernetic socialism because at the political juncture in the 70s when they chose the track for their economic development path, they didn't have the technology to implement cybernetics.

They do have the technology now to do cybernetics, however at the moment the Chinese system work very well from their perspective, and it's politically impossible to change it. Eventually they will run into problems again (that's pretty much universal to all economics) and then they will make changes to the system. And it kinda depends on lots of factors what those changes are going to be.

So if for example the US were to start a big imperial war against China, they would have to put their entire economy on a war-production footing. And that means converting the market economy into a command economy controlled by the state to supply a big war effort. From that juncture they would definitely turn towards a cybernetic socialist planned economy. Because that's the least effort path for converting a command economy for war production back into a civilian economy.

There could be other political stuff effecting the direction. The CPC is driving down wealth inequality in china a little bit and they are converting the private real-estate sector back into a public-sector. If the Chinese capitalists react to these changes the same way the western neo-liberals did to social-democracy by subjecting society to shock-therapy they will create instability. And in China that means loosing the argument, big economic instability would give cybernetic planning political upwind, because that would solve instability.

It could also be that the Chinese system keeps the market system and over time converts the entire economy to worker owned cooperatives, combined with heavy market regulations that prevents market dynamics from re-emerging, so that wealth concentrations and all the stuff that leads back to capitalism does not come back. I haven't seen any Marxists really explain how thats done in detail but, i won't rule out the possibility.

>>465491
I unironically support the notion of a nationalist one party state with a social democratic mixed economy, where cultural leftism is either looked down upon or outlawed. America should copy that model.

Something tells me that drug addicted leftoids with facial piercing and gender dysphoria probably still wouldnt fare to well under that system though.

>>465489
>You're literally claiming market actors are incompetent and don't know what they are doing.
I made a different claim.
I claimed it doesn't matter what market actors do, they could literally make random exchanges and the wealth distribution in society would be exactly the same. With regards to how wealth distribution plays out it really doesn't matter what market actors do. So any claims really that the markets selects the most clever capitalists is entirely refuted.

But you are not wrong i also do think it's impossible for market actors to make rational decisions, the economy is way to large for anybody to process all of it. Individual people mostly just guess. Some might guess better than others, but that has no effect on the economy as a hole. What you do as an individual gets entirely neutralized by the overwhelming systemic effects.

>>465490
>You don't need an obscure theory that uses an analogy from physics to figure that out
Of course not, it's super obvious, but if you want to prove it you need the theory bludgeon.

>>465493
Ultra disempowering cope
Must make it easier to have a shit life though

>>465496
What you mean, 'Nazi'?

By definition, my politics are more closely aligned with modern Marxism and Communism than yours. You just preach a fake and ghey western Marxism that has no currency outside of the liberal arts department and the DNC field office.

>>465478
>It explicitly outlined the effects of the pareto principle, which got shit on all over by mouthbreathing leftoids in another thread
dont care lmao
>It cites a bunch of authors that the muhleft tends to hate, like Nassim Taleb
dont care lmao
>it doesn't mention the viability of creating a utopia that caters to fags
dont care lmao
>the outcome breakdown which shows that talent, while outweighed by luck, still very much effects the outcome.
which means…that success is almost entirely decided by chance LMAO
<when you utterly fail to refute the central point and cant help but screech about muh left wherever you go

>>465498
>Almost entirely
Did you take another hit?
>Muh Nazis
You really do live in fantasy world. No one cares when some fag calls you a nazi anymore. It's lost all weight outside of your own foggy brain

>>465473
>You really don't know what the Soviet Union was - they didn't see communism as an ideology to impose on the world, but a way to build up the country's industry because there were no capitalists.
No, they didn't see communism as a way to build up the country's industry, because nobody in the USSR ever claimed to have communism. We're reaching levels of state capitalism apologia that shouldn't be possible when historically illiterate Western "leftists" stop referring to socialism on an ambiguous and useless Whig History spectrum of "better than that thing before" and just start calling fucking everything communism like a John Bircher nutcase.

>>465494
That's not a proof, it's stupidity. Economic behavior is not a random process. It is only sensical because people are deliberate actors, or at least are oriented towards certain goals in their behavior. The entire basis for economics is moral philosophy rather than any scientific principle. If you wanted to do science, you would be asking different questions about human nature and what we are doing, rather than making grand claims about what humans are based on the theory alone, and then making humans fit into that theory.

Economic inequality exists because certain people want it that way, for all the reasons that make sense. It isn't something imbued in nature, but it is a result of self-interest and the interest of institutions. There's no inherent collective interest in society that would compel true equality of conditions in the human animal. There is a sense in people that people who are starving or under threat of attack will act accordingly, but clearly that hasn't stopped the purge against the weak and despised.

If you read my attached text files - I know it's a lot and it rambles a lot - this would be clearer.

>>465503
The plan of the Soviet Union was ostensibly oriented towards the goal of establishing communism, which is the only reason they entertained concepts like equality or allowing people to have anything. When they totally abandoned communism in principle, they began to treat the common people selected to lose like dogs, just as the Americans treat their people now.
By the rules of capitalism, there was only submission to the global hegemon. So socialism, so far as it existed, was a rival global system. The proper opposition to it was the faith in eugenic superiority of an elite over the people.
But yeah, if you want to call socialism your super special theory of what it was s'pos'da be, rather than its historical expresesion, you do you. That whole thinking was designed to make capitalism appear eternal, when capitalism in the form Marx described died in the 1930s. What we live in today is a very different beast with different motives. Communism as any real movement was the push of a part of the middle and lower classes for global relevance, and that was defeated utterly to bring in the shit we live under today where a few elites want to kill off most of humanity. You're awfully committed to defending this ongoing democide, which is all we have left in this cursed world.

>>465503
Put another way - the Soviets did not see a conflict when they emulated the United States in building up their industry, nor did the people in the United States inherently see communism as a big enemy. Up until 1947, there was a certain level of acceptance for socialism in America, and the idea of fighting a crusade against "communism" was a Nazi thing. Most Americans were like "wait, weren't these guys our allies just yesterday?" There would be in America a faction that had no interest in fighting communism, or saw the Cold War correctly as a farce. The US and USSR were never going to go to war and didn't even suggest that they would - they remained technically on peaceful terms. You don't send missions to the Great Satan advertising capitalism or communism during the 1950s, during the height of anticommunism, but Nixon as VP goes to the USSR, Cornholio comes to the US.

>>465510
>capitalism in the form Marx described died in the 1930s
I'll await an evidence-supported argument on this one. Marx described the transformation of industrial capital into finance capital clearly in Vol 3, and that's exactly what happened in mass in the 20th century (but in the 1970s, no the 1930s). Capitalism still follows the same fundamental rules.

>>465513
You really don't know what changed. It's understandable, since the interests Marx was really writing to got what they wanted. They're not going to let people question what happened, because they got theirs and they don't want to share with the uneducated rabble.

That's been the great stumbling block in understanding what happened to the left - the left formally got what they wanted, and the losers who didn't get what this was were left holding the bag. Monopolists are not motivated by profit - I don't know how many times this has to be told to you, that the ruling class does not care about profit and goes out of their way to say profit is evil. Certain people simply refuse to see what is right in front of them, because they won't question eugenics ever.

>>465514
>the left formally got what they wanted
>profit doesn't matter
Oh okay then, I didn't realize I was talking to an imbecile.

>>465516
Awaiting an evidence-supported argument. You've asserted a bunch of dumb bullshit but haven't given me any reason to accept it.

>>465517
>I'm waiting for your evidence -based argument that Hilary Clinton isn't a shape shifting alien satanist
High quality discourse on leftychan

>>465518
It's quite obvious she is a Satanist though. This is a Satanic country after all.
Hilariously Podesta was bugging government people for information about aliens, and it was thought he was just nutty about these thing.

>>465423
>Precisely because you cannot alter history.
history happens in parallel for pre-capitalist societies
capitalism is the first global system, so it makes it impossible to use comparative analysis

classical ML systems are better in this regard because ML states are more isolated, so you can deduce some general properties by comparative analysis

>>465433
>If you did anything that was slave-like, you were fucked and there would be no mercy.
One of the laws that Solon passed was the ban on selling citizens into slavery for debts.
Police in Athens were state owned slaves, as well as were many experts.

Also speaking of Athens… the mad lads invented the whole new "Goddess" to then tax "gifts" to her kek

>>465524
Pretty sure that's just Athena.

>>465572
Athena was usually depicted as a warrior goddess tho.
Tho maybe they mean Athena as a "Goddess" in the body of law, and relief is unrelated.

>>465572
also, the woman on relief has none of the usual Athena's regalia

>>465524
Institute of ancient slavery in general is very misunderstood. In roman empire the slave class went through a massive wealth differentiation, that by the third century you had slaves who owned property, had their own business and hired procurators to run their affairs, loaned money, including to their own owners.
There was also a difference between being a private slave and an Emperor's slave.

In general by the third century the class composition of the Empire was a clusterfuck.

>>465489
>It is not an accident that oil-monopoly-guy took an oil company to the top,
You don't understand, it is a particular characteristic of the economic system that it is possible to steal so much wealth from the workers to get super rich. That has nothing to do with the personal characteristics of this guy and everything to do with the current economic system. We could implement a different economic system that does not have the flaw of allowing a few people to steal most of the surplus from society to get super rich.

>and he didn't get there because he had some innate genes
Well at least we can agree on that.

>He got there because he was smart and he was ruthless,
No that is wrong, we can statistically prove that if everybody within the capitalist system was just doing random trades, just rolling the dice, not applying any smarts or ruthlessness, there would still be super-rich people because that is an emergent aspect of capitalist market money exchanges. It's build into the system, and what individual people do really doesn't matter. I believe the technical term is "an over-determined system". For the outcomes of the hole system it really doesn't matter what individual people do.

>and figured out all the things you could do with oil and how to best corner the market.
No at best he hired a bunch of people that figured it out for him, and he also probably mooched off publicly funded research.

These super rich people aren't self-made, they are just an artifact of the capitalist system.

Extreme wealth stratification is a huge economic inefficiency, because the super rich act like a huge hand-break that is slowing down the development of society. They really aren't better people, they're average smucks who got lucky and in order to stay on top they have to hold everybody else down.

>>465635
>Extreme wealth stratification is a huge economic inefficiency, because the super rich act like a huge hand-break that is slowing down the development of society.

To some degree, true. On the other hand, if this was the case and it was that simple, we'd quickly see a society with less equality break out from the capitalist system due to its productivity/efficiency advantage.

Every system has positives and problems. What you aren't accounting for is the uniquely innate problems of a system that tries to force everyone to an equitable outcome. This is probably because you are a poorly travelled burger.

That said, advances in productive efficiency (producing more shit with less labor) isn't exactly moving humanity forward in the same way it was. 1860. Capital understands this in an organic way, and this is why so much surplus is dedicated to tertiary activities.

>>465636
>To some degree, true. On the other hand, if this was the case and it was that simple, we'd quickly see a society with less equality break out from the capitalist system due to its productivity/efficiency advantage.
But more equal societies like the Soviet Union kinda did that.
The soviet Union was 2% of the world economy when it was founded, and by the 1960s it was 40%.
The Soviets were damaged by WW2 and the Cold war, and eventually it was brought down by internal failures .

But if you look at only the economic side of this struggle between capitalism and communism in the 20th century, than communism wins hands down. The capitalist world knew that, that's why they conspired against the socialist countries. It's once again the super-rich of the world trying to hold down the proletarian run countries.

Societies that have less equality do have an economic advantage. But even with that advantage they are still vulnerable to predation from the incumbent capitalist system until they can grow to sufficient size. Imagine the Soviet System had about 200 years of undisturbed development (like what capitalism got).

>What you aren't accounting for is the uniquely innate problems of a system that tries to force everyone to an equitable outcome.
That's where you are making the mistake of believing ruling-ideology propagated by the superstructure. Humanity doesn't naturally tend towards inequitable outcomes, it's class societies that impose this on society with an extreme level of coercion and violence. If you took away the means of violent repression and political domination as a means of maintaining extreme levels of inequality. It would evaporate in no time. Do you understand this unequal world that we are living in, is in fact forced on everyone.

>That said, advances in productive efficiency (producing more shit with less labor) isn't exactly moving humanity forward in the same way it was. 1860.
No there is no problem with technology as a way of enhancing labor productivity, that trick still works as well as ever, possibly even more than it used to. The problem we are having is that capitalism is no longer investing in improving the means of production. Some people have called that a "capital strike" The reason is basically that labor-power is undervalued.

>Capital understands this in an organic way, and this is why so much surplus is dedicated to tertiary activities.
Ruling classes always try to divert surplus away from society into "tertiary activities". For example: extreme luxury for the super-rich, or means of political-domination, war-mongering and so on. That is causing the slackening advances in productive efficiency.

This has to be understood as capitalism becoming a fetter on the productive forces, meaning that as an economic system it's no longer able to level up the economy. The capitalist system has run it's course.
In simple terms capitalism is no longer able to really harness new technologies for the sake of advancing the techno industrial base of the society.

>>465635
You don't need a "system" to exploit people, nor can invent a system which eternally forestalls that. The reasons for exploitation are not strictly economic or a matter of natural forces. If there is a will to dominate, that person will work within whatever arrangement they are in. You can find perverse incentives in any arrangement of human society.

Capitalism obviously is not a boon to the many who lose, whose capital is absorbed by a larger capitalist. Free trade didn't invent this, from a position in some imagined past where humans lived in a utopia. That's what you're implying. Humans started as individuals looking out for themselves and those close to them. You're taking the republican, technocratic polity for granted and superimposing it on nature, as if it were an eternal state, yet you deny you do it. There is no "society" you would serve by default - there are only people and families in primitive conditions. Any larger society forms out of those constituent parts, rather than by some natural force which compels people into any preferred social behaviors. The social actors are always deliberate towards aims that they would possess because they are conscious animals, not because of some "gene" or seed compelling humans to be this or that. All of our behavior stems from rationalized objectives we have held, and a few very basic biological components and facts which inform what we can do before we have awareness to affect the world ourselves.

Again, you should just read all the text files I attached. It is a rough draft but it explains my reasoning, from philosophical principles to this moral question. It is nowhere near complete. If you'd just fucking read uygha instead of recapitulating ideology, we would be spared this circular conversation. I don't know how else to tell you these things. You just refuse to listen, so you can recapituate this stupid failed ideology.

>>465650
>You don't need a "system" to exploit people
You 100% do. That is the only way to do so on more occasions than one simple robbery.
>nor can invent a system which eternally forestalls that
That is actually true.
>The reasons for exploitation are not strictly economic
Only if you play with the word "exploitation" to make it mean something unreal.
>Free trade didn't invent this
Of course not. "Free trade" is a fantasy.
>That's what you're implying.
No, it's not. Deal with what he is actually saying, not what you imagine that he really for realz means deep in his heart.
>You're taking the republican, technocratic polity for granted and superimposing it on nature, as if it were an eternal state, yet you deny you do it.
That is because he is not doing it.
>There is no "society" you would serve by default - there are only people and families in primitive conditions.
Really? Because it sure as fuck looks like there is. It looks like everything of use that gets made is produced socially according to plain repeating patterns. It looks like every single individual's livelihood is either had or not had according to the flow of those patterns. It looks like there isn't a single human being left on Earth who is really in it all alone.
>The social actors are always deliberate towards aims that they would possess because they are conscious animals, not because of some "gene" or seed compelling humans to be this or that. All of our behavior stems from rationalized objectives we have held, and a few very basic biological components and facts which inform what we can do before we have awareness to affect the world ourselves.
Ah, the classic composition fallacy. You can't see the machine just the cogs.
>It is a rough draft but it explains my reasoning, from philosophical principles to this moral question.
Every "moral question" is nothing but jerking off.

>>465651
You're failing to understand BASIC things. I can't even with you. You're poisoned. Just READ THE FUCKING THINGS I WROTE before you respond to me again, because you're obviously incapable and just autistically screech your talking points about systems that you don't even understand.

Since you won't do that, because you're being autistic on purpose, there is no point to further discussion. You don't know what society is, you don't think mechanistically which is the only way you could begin to understand any system. This is basic shit I shouldn't have to say, but because of shitty education, basic things have to be taught to people who think they know the world because they utter a bunch of nonsense.

So let me summarize:
Chapter 2+3 explain how this framework can be constructed for us to speak of the world, since we have some basic poison in how we understand things in the first place. This should dissolve the language tricks used by bad Hegeloids.

Chapters 4+5 set up the "information world", the version of reality in which economic planning and any "system" could exist. Because we communicate through symbolic language, this is the way in which we can approach questions of sociology rationally, rather than relying on crude metaphors and bastardizations. If you want to speak of a system, you must start with its components and the relations of them.

Chapter 6 outlines why the state exists, and what its purpose is - that is, why we speak of the state at all. It doesn't exist "just because", but because state society is a response of people to the situation of life. You would not magic away the root cause of the state by any ideology, unless you supposed that people had nothing to fear whatsoever. You're not going to bullbait everyone into submission as your creed dictates we will do.

Chapter 7 explains the germ of education, which is necessary for state society to exist beyond the most crude forms.

Chapter 8 describes in part the most basic division of labor by actual tasks, rather than by classes as such. It was originally intended to lead into a discussion of the technological interest in another book I wrote, because the technological interest does not conform to any one thing we do. It is not at the root of anything, but technology and attitudes towards "The Science" emerged only in modern times, for reasons particular to us.

Chapter 9 deals with the concept of spiritual authority, which is the necessary starting point for the material division of labor to become something more. Without spiritual authority there is no science or a scientific view, nor is any society beyond the most trivial possible. We regard society as real because we have faith that there is such a thing as society, and this is played with. Today, we are made to interpret "society" as something wholly alien to us, because it is held by an elite - an elite you supplicate to pathologically.

Chapter 10 concerns war as social engineering, and thus why the language of war is often used for praxis.

Chapter 11 deals with morality in a real sense, which you deny because you are Satanic.

I didn't post 12 and 13 which get into the position of the beggar and the fool (the basic class from which others are derived - the human project is a project of suffering), and then the opposing position from those who rule over the fools, which is the basis for formal imperious institutions lording over us. They rule us by telling us we are all retarded and must obey or die. They do not respect us, and obviously you have no regard for anyone who does not share your Satanic ethos.

And of course, a Satanic will not find value in my explanation, because he has already decided that his feelings and sense of the world prohibit the view of the lowest class, which has no regard for his pretenses. For the Satanic, thought creates reality. This is not an accident, but a deliberate choice of the Satanic, which has been the foundation of most world religions.

>>465639
>Muh That's where you are making the mistake of believing ruling-ideology propagated by the superstructure.
You're own ideology is just the preamble of the declaration of independence tho, autistically taken as if it should be literally true, and seething that reality doesn't conform.
You show me the egalitarian society which has ever existed beyond the level of hunter gatherer. (Even in the case of hunter gatherers, its egalitarian by today's standards only.)
All and all, equality is an ideology for midwit losers and grifting fags who on their hopes and insecurities.

>Do you understand this unequal world that we are living in, is in fact forced on everyone
That's like saying rainy weather is forced on people. Simply put, people aren't equal. Granted, the system tends to take minor personal differences and blow them up into major outcome inequalities, but that's always the case with a winner take all system. (And yes, luck does play a large factor - which is why you should be maximizing your exposure to the potential for opportunity).

If we were living in a primitive state of nature on some Savana, you being 5% slower than average would mean you get eaten by the predator 98% percent of the time.

Really, capitalism has rescued people from that sort of barabaric outcome and just forced them to live lives of petty and miserable squalor - which most people prefer to death.

I know you want to cope and believe that you are a quality person. But that's simply not the case.

Likewise, you keep saying that capitalism is some major fetter on technology, when that's simply not the case. The technology we're communicating with is fairly new. And moreover, if it were the case, command economy socialism wouldn't take over due to some logical progression, but because it was competitively advantageous.

As it turns out, a state centric system very well may take over, just not one that is a faggy egalitarian utopia. You can assert the opposite, but the reality is, it's just an assertion. You have no evidence to back you your claim.

It's womanly behavior at the end of the day
>Since I believe it so strongly, it must be true.

>>465657
Egalitarian ideas exist, and social hierarchies are not absolutes. There is a concept of class mobility and promotion from the lower ranks to fill the higher ranks. The argument for equality isn't an absoute, as Germanic thinking dictates it must be. One arugment for equality is that it would allow the meritorious to rise. Another is that we really need to ask ourselves if enforcing "natural inequality" through gratuitous sadism is a worthwhile use of our time, and if you abandon gratuitous sadism, you are implying a baseline standard of living. Satanics, and eugenists do not have this thought. It is inadmissible in their entire world-system, because the whole point of society for them is to celebrate inequality for its own sake, and enjoy the thrill of seeing others suffer. That is the root of "false egalitarianism", where a basic principle of equality in politics is replaced with a meaningless word token and turned into an absurdity.

Equality under the law is still the official principle. Eugenics can only operate by subverting law and declaring the opposite - that the will of the Satanic is the only law, and inequality is an absolute to defend at all costs. They will torture endlessly and destroy the world if they ever face defeat. So, you will eventually have to ask if it is worth it. There is no moderate version of political inequality that remains a steady state. Those who lack security but possess life will behave in ways that allow them to attain security, or at least that is their goal. It is unusual for people to gleefully sacrifice themslves, when the Satanic ethos and the thrill of torture is so evident in eugenic society.

Of course people are unequal in ability, and political equality is always a choice people make in society rather than a natural order. Liberals understood equality to be aspirational rather than built in to nature - it was a theory of why and how institutions could be legitimized, rather than a celebration of individual vices and "me wantee" that the Germanic parody of liberalism produced. Krauts, of course, do not believe in equality or democracy or anything except a drunken warrior aristocracy, and they've always been a Satanic country and race. After killing each other for centuries over bullshit religious wars, they decided to export their stupidity to the rest of the world and insist it is the greatest civilization ever. What a joke.

The attainment of political equality does not mean "everyone gets treated exactly the same", but that there are no classes as such, and no premise that some are born unfree and exist to be dominated and tortured. The only reason you get to live is because political equality is a concept - without it, you'd be toiling as a slave, tortured daily, and live as an abortion. I can tell you from experience, that life is not a good one, and you fucking know it. If you want to be a sniveling coward and take your piss out on others, you can do that, but eventually it will come for you, and you'll cry like every other faggot who realized it was all a lie.

I think you should know that capitalism as a situation implied political equality of the bourgeoisie. They didn't see the workers as people (neither do most socialists), and so their freedom was irrelevant. In principle, though, they know their workers are human and live in the same world. That's what eugenics curtailed - it redefined humanity as a purely Satanic race, and excluded anyone who didn't scream like retards just like they always do.

>>465658
This is a bit too esoteric for me to pretend to understand what exactly you mean, but you unironically sound like a fun person to chat with.

>>465659
I don't think it's very esoteric if you understand why political equality arose as a proposition - because humanity had seen a lot of the alternative and figured out "hey, this class society thing and endless cajoling actually sucks and we could all be better off if we didn't do that". Even if someone had social distinction and was known as a leader, he was still drawn from the populace just like anyone else would be. There is nothing mystical about it. Eugenics has to violently assert the exact opposite - that inequality is absolute, total, and justifies cruelty and sadism for their own sake. That's why I keep telling people to at least acknowledge the centrality of eugenics. They won't, because they would rather continue the Satanic cycle than change anything.

>>465655
No, I am not reading your autistic screed. Morality is for retards like you.

>>465661
Okay, fag.

>>465662
I agree with esotericbro on this.

The walking example of dunning kruger syndrome is a pretty big fag. I assume that's why he goes to such great lengths to try to prove to people online about how right he is. Constantly calling other people retards is a pretty big tell, tbh. This along with the overbearing certainty (and nothing tangible to show for it) comes across as very desperate and insecure. I imagine his real life is sub-mid.

>>465657
>You show me the egalitarian society which has ever existed beyond the level of hunter gatherer. (Even in the case of hunter gatherers, its egalitarian by today's standards only.)
The Soviet Union was very wealth egalitarian, that existed, and it was a very sophisticated complex society, very technological and scientifically minded.
>All and all, equality is an ideology for midwit losers and grifting fags who on their hopes and insecurities.
I think all this rudeness betrays a lack of argument.
Egalitarian societies tend to be more meritocratic and the kind of people that luck into becoming super-rich in capitalism don't make it very far in those societies. Many of these billionaires give speeches or write books. Just listen/read to some of that, it's very pedestrian stuff compared to for example dense theory tomes written by high ranking communist party members that governed socialist societies.

Even within capitalist societies when inequality rises the quality of people that make it into leadership positions declines. Just look at the current US ruling class that is running the American empire into the ground, You can't tell me those are the best and brightest people in the US.

>>465657
<Do you understand this unequal world that we are living in, is in fact forced on everyone
>That's like saying rainy weather is forced on people.
The rain that falls from the sky is a gentle pleasant experience generally.
It doesn't compare to the extreme levels of structural, physical and psychological violence that the wealth inequality maintenance machine inflicts on humanity. Most of the brutality and terror that exists today is in service of holding down the poor so that the rich can keep exploiting them.

>>465657
>If we were living in a primitive state of nature
It is a false dichotomy to pretend that primitivism is the alternative to being brutally subjugated and exploited by parasitic super-wealth. We can have an advanced civilization without excessive wealth inequality. Maybe it's even a prerequisite to cast off class-society to reach a truly advanced level of civilization.

>Really, capitalism has rescued people from that sort of barabaric outcome
But capitalism and class society is a barbaric outcome.

>>465664
If the USSR was a egalitarian place, why did it change?

>>465665
Most people around the world are doing fine. It's mainly faggy First Worlders who suffer from your existential dread.
>Most of the brutality and terror that exists today is in service of holding down the poor so that the rich can keep exploiting them
The irony

Again, this is a lot of vapid hyperbole. Everything you've stated seems to indicate you have very little real world experience, especially outside of your little First World shithole bubble. This is leftychan, so I honestly expect nothing more.

>>465663
If you're referring to me as "esotericbro" and slamming the guy who is trying to talk sense in this thread, we're one and the same. It's not "Dunning-Kruger Syndrome" because esotericbro isn't part of any institution enabling him. He's just some American rando who is sick of dumbasses not understanding basic shit. He makes no claim that he possesses any special knowledge.

If you're referring to the cybersoc guy - I really just think he's a victim of his own conceits about the world, rather than actually retarded. Smart people can believe in really stupid things. Just look at the world where smart people are made to dance like Satanic retards for pharma, because that's the plan and they can't go against depopulation. It's shit like that which makes this life so unpleasant. As long as I'm still able to do anything about it, I'm going to keep shouting. I have nothing to gain by going along with any of it, and no one should have enabled the eugenicist faggotry in the first place. If we didn't do that, we would live in a much different world, and the enemy would be denied its most valuable rhetorical weapons.

Anyway, getting back to the original post - we see the difficulty of making reality a political matter and associating political labels with world-views. This was not how people originally conceived of republican politics, where the politician tells you what to think and you vote for pure samefaggotry and pandering. You were voting for men, usually men you knew nothing about so you could only go off of impressions of whether the man was worthy of ruling or not. This idea of submitting your thought process to experts is dictatorial and imperial. You couldn't have a functioning republic on that basis, and that has been the point - to make the solidaristic politics a republic implied an impossibility. Rather than abolishing the republic outright, it was decided to work through the republican institutions and turn them into parodies, taking advantage of the inherent flaws in that form of government, so that a tyranny may be maximized. Only in this way could the conditions of Galton's eugenics be realized - that is, the conditions of pure, unrelenting, Satanic terror made infinite.

>>465667
The USSR didn't change it was dissolved. Technically it was illegal because a referendum of about 70% of Soviet citizens supported the continuation of the Soviet system.

The 3 factors that lead to the fall of the Soviet system, were the lingering damage from WW2, the drain of the cold war, and critical errors in internal organization, both politically and economically.

>>465668
>I'm denying the barbarism in capitalist class society.

The only conclusion
You're too far gone

>>465669
>Most people around the world are doing fine.
If you mean surviving, sure, but the vast majority of people are not thriving.
You can't even credit capitalism with survival, because most of the people that have been lifted out of extreme poverty, did so because of Chinese state-policy.
If you subtract the Chinese effort and look at only the capitalist system, then poverty is increasing.
The sole reason why the periphery is able to have some development is because China is offering an alternative source of industrial development to the capitalist imperial order.

>Capitalism makes "First Worlders" suffer
So it would be legitimate to characterize capitalism as an engine of suffering.
I'm glad you admitted this, even if it is somewhat surprising.

If you look at objective reality of what capitalism is inflicting on people, it's extremely grim. It's hard to put statistical data in a form of words that really captures the brutality. If you could here all the screams of people being destroyed by this economic structure, the sound would have bone-shattering amplitude.

Your personal experience must be very insulated and you lack the investigative drive to find out what lies beyond that. That too is a characteristic of capitalism it creates cognitive bubbles.

Here may try reading these books to broaden your horizon.

>>465670
The guy talking about eugenics and satanism is who I'm referring to as esoteric bro – so you, I guess.

The guy prattling on about cyber socialism is who I refer to as dunning kruger boy. In this case, it's not because I think he's wrong, but because I think he's naive and ridiculously self assured. Additionally, I call him a fag because he fetishizes equality (basically parroting a western 3rd grade education to the point of parody) and evidences a strong loser morality.

>>465672
Damn, doesn't sound too egalitarian if a small group was able to dissolve the USSR against the will of the people…
Beyond Soviet history, what other subjects are you an expert in from the comfy confines of your mom's basement?
>Killing Hope
I read this like 15 years ago.
>Still won't admit he's kinda a loser who lives in the shithole he was born in and has little real world experience.
Seriously, bro. A plane ticket is relatively cheap. It's pretty obvious your not in the middle of organizing the revolution, since you have all this time to argue online. Why not just travel more and learn from people around the world? Honest question.

>Muh china
China has a market economy, which is fairly evident if you've spent any time there…

As I've said a half dozen time, capitalism kinda sucks. Believing a perfect system exists and can be created out of imagination is naive, however, and would probably create more problems than it solves before inevitably reverting back toward market mechanisms. And believing some egalitarian world is possible is childish to the extreme. Loser shit

>>465677
>Damn, doesn't sound too egalitarian
The Soviet Union was wealth-egalitarian, it doesn't mean they did not have hierarchies.
>if a small group was able to dissolve the USSR against the will of the people
The soviet system was brought down by a large number of factors working against it both internally and externally. It would be a grave mis-characterization to say a small group brought it down.

>I read Killing Hope like 15 years ago.
I don't believe you did, because you appear to be thinking that capitalism isn't barbaric.
This book is a tour the force walking the reader through quite some scale and depth off barbarism in the capitalist system.

I think that you lack a strong argument that would justify your stance and that's why you are attempting to make personal jabs. You aren't doing your self any favors, you just look petty.

>>465677
Well ("esotericbro" here), an egalitarian world is possible, if we chose to live in one. For a lot of reasons, certain people will refuse that, even if they aren't currently winning, because they have a sense of themselves and just hate others, and don't want the undeserving to have anything nice. But again, political equality and equality of social status are different propositions. It would be a lot better for everyone if we did have an egalitarian baseline for everyone, rather than pay the cost of police to suppress a very large hated underclass. Certain people clamored for depopulation, and now that they set their plan in motion, they're committed to it until the bitter end. Those people will resort to unlimited terror before they give up depopulation, and until they are suppressed, there is nothing for us to do except fight them. This would be very basic if you wanted to survive at all, let alone envision a world worth living in. The logic of depopulation attacks the valid and people who were productive. COVID showed that the aristocracy are happy to cannibalize their actually productive workers to push them to accept particular outcomes. Like I said, the arguments for equality and freedom is because we've seen the alternative, and the rule of eugenics is very much the absolute form of slavery and inequality. That's what motivated the communist revolutions in the first place - that the masses were made to die for complete bullshit, and some bright guys got the idea that it was indeed bullshit. The communist revolutions were that before they conformed to any ideology. You didn't need an ideology to tell you what the aristocracy and reactionaries wanted, because back then, the Right bragged about a world of war, death, and misery, and that they would glorify the death cult. That's why Nazism wasn't seen as particularly unusual in that regard, because the Nazi evil was not that they were unique in clamoring for death. The dominance of eugenics in the liberal world, and the lack of a suitable response to it, made something like the Nazis inevitable. It was only as the full implications of Nazism and eugenics were revealed - the tortures and glorification of war, and the betrayal inherent in eugenics - that the Nazis gained the reputation of being evil incarnate. Back in the 1930s, the Nazis were just another political party, and they had their backers around the world, saying the same lines that Nazi apologists use today and the same faggotry.

The way egalitarianism is poopoo'd by everyone today tells you just what won, and how political equality is no longer conceivable in any serious way. The institutions became too large and invaded our lives too much to imagine political equality of the older sense - or, for that matter, the idea of an individualistic society not trending to some form of Satanic tyranny. But, we are denied our own social forms. We are instead supplied a thought-form alien to us, and told that total lies are normal, as we are prepared for the slaughter. It's why so many people associate socialism with that shit and come to hate it more than they ever hated the capitalists. The use of false egalitarianism is an old fascist trope.

Stuff like this is at the heart of the cybersoc delusion - that you're going to automate away the problem if anyone disagrees with this totally perfect and infallible system, and that the system won't be gamed at all because the planners are just that clever. It's stupid, and it ignores some pretty basic shit in cybernetics if you actually look into what they're doing with it.

Ultimately I place the root of this at an education system which is eugenic in purpose, which lies to everyone about basic things and forces them to utter lie to make themselves "retarded", which tells us any opposition to eugenics is automatically "retarded" and submission to a Satanic view of the world is intelligence. It's a regime premised on segregation and depopulation. Since this institution is unreformable, the only thing for us to do is build something outside of it, whatever we can. I hold on to the hope that some day, the stupidity of this will be seen. I won't be alive to see the future world, and I already know that even if people in this world regain sanity and we can have meaningful conversations again, my life was over a long time ago. I'm just pissing in the wind, in the hopes that someone in the future will find something in what I do. At the least, I want the world to remember what this was, and that eugenics is Satanic and evil and did nothing but make us suffer. It accomplished nothing, and did not make us better.

>>465677
>China has a market economy
Yes China has markets, but their economy, in materialist terms, is almost a total inversion of the neo-liberal economies in the west, that are considered the prime example of free market capitalism.
China has relatively unrestricted markets for commodities and services, perhaps even more so than the west ever had, but that's a free market for producers, not all of capital. Because the overarching structure of the Chinese economy is planned and directed by the Chinese government. There are no billionaires telling the Central committee what to do. Quite a number of Chinese billionaires that tried to fuck with the Chinese state ended up executed, imprisoned or exiled. When a notoriously abusive construction company boss known for working large numbers of people to death, and coining the phrase "you have to sacrifice at least one generation" was captured by organized workers, the Chinese police looked away when he got lynched.

When the neo-liberals in the west say free markets they don't mean any liberty for makers and producers to sell their wares without hindrance. They mean wall-street gets to rule shit, rent-seeking capital gets to take a cut and corporate privatized bureaucracy tries to invade and manipulate society. When they complain that Chinese markets aren't free they mean it really hard to do stuff like patent-trolling, monopoly entrenchment and large scale insurance fraud in China. The neo-liberals aren't wrong to call this free markets, because that is what free market economies tend to evolve into.

You could use a computer metaphor to describe the Chinese economy, It is a socialist system that has a deeply entrenched dictatorship of the proletariat as host-system, but they have a virtual machine that emulates many aspects of capitalism. They are basically taking Karl Marx's original prediction, that stated "the country with the most advanced industrial capitalism would lead to socialism", as a blue print to build the material conditions for socialism.

The social hierarchy that is generated by capitalist economies, is that people with more money have more political power, and the people with the most money rule society. That is not the case in China, where the most senior people in the CPC that govern China are not super-wealthy, and yet they have much more power than the extremely rich capitalists in China.

This difference in social hierarchy is what produces this hysterical reactions in some members of the ruling class of the west. Some of them genuinely drank the ideological cool-aid, that people like them (means having most of the wealth) are destined to lord over the world by the force of some law of nature. They do believe the story that there is no alternative to neo-liberalism. And now that there's a huge china sized example that proves them wrong, their seething manifests in a flood of anti-china hysteria in the media.

>>465680
>There are no billionaires telling the Central committee what to do.
I think the sheer fact that there are billionaires gives lie to this nonsense. Not to mention the fact that China has a majority of the world's billionaires now. What a load of horseshit.

>>465682
I think you make a valid criticism. Dengs reform-and-opening-up probably was a little too extensive, and the Hu Jintao period was too lax with "laizer-fair capitalism" But they course corrected after Xi Jinping.

They are clearly trying to do the middle path strategy.

Chinese Marxism is very eclectic and hard to understand but what i have read appears to suggest that they think that China has to complete the industrial capitalism story-arc under lower phase socialism before they can reach higher phase socialism. They justify this with having to use up all the material conditions that make it possible for capitalism to reproduce it self, before they can level up to socialism. That's supposed to prevent regressions back to capitalism.

The reason they aren't getting rid of all the billionaires is probably geo-political. They want to keep the peace with the west as long as possible, because the cost of having a few porkies porking around is lower than the cost of having to fight off the west. Doing some very overtly communist stuff like stamping out the bourgeoisie class that's probably going to spook to many people in the west.

Lets be fair to them Chinese porkies are cucked, there is zero chance of them installing a bourgeois dictatorship.

>>465683
>a few porkies porking around
You mean the majority of the world's billionaires. In other words, more billionaires than the United States and the rest of the world put together.

>>465680
Let's ignore the mental gymnastics about the meaning of socialism. Let's also ignore the fact that CPC politburo members likely are billionaires in terms of net worth. Let's also ignore that China has a Gini coefficient similar to the USA. Let's do that for argument's sake.

Why don't you advocate for a similar system, which at least has some semblance of practicality, here in the US? Earnest question.

Why go for the faggy pie in the sky fantasy of egalitarian classless society which has been tried multiple times by people far more competent than you (the expert on the USSR, China, Marxism, all from your shithole apartment) and failed.

Or literally, why not just advocate for a DPRK style system? Again, I'm being 100% serious. (I'd be willing to be that people are far more happier in the DPRK than most western countries tbh).

Instead of coming across like a clown or naive child and assuming an ideal society could be dictated (all while clearly having very little practical real world experience and tbh a pretty limited range of book knowledge), why not support an nonideal society, which while neither is some pure vision of socialism nor hardly egalitarian, at least avoids some of the worst aspects of capitalism?

I've already said I support something similar to China itt, without having to stretch the truth about what's happening in China, shift goalposts, or retreat to some hazy (likely drug induced) theory about what's feasible. You keep talking about speculative stoner visions of 'cybernetic socialism', and now pretend like Xi Jingping is secret playing 28 dimensional chess and really on your side as some ghey egalitarian. It's rather comical.

Like I've said a dozen times. Try kicking the drug habit and visit more places around the world. Put down the books about the exact same thing (which don't make you smart but merely strengthen your confirmation bias) and broaden your field of vision.

>>465696
>Let's ignore the meaning of socialism.
Socialism is a process of building a socialist society.
>Let's also ignore the fact that CPC politburo members likely are billionaires in terms of net worth.
There were billionaires in the upper ranks of the CPC at one time but they got kicked out. I think that campaign was called something about taming the tigers.
>Let's also ignore that China has a Gini coefficient similar to the USA.
Most of that is because of uneven development, there's just a lot of people in China that haven't yet been fully uplifted to modern standards of living. But China is doing this at a much faster rate then any western country. Maybe give them a chance to complete their work before you judge it.

>Why don't you advocate for a similar system, which at least has some semblance of practicality, here in the US?
I wasn't aware i was making suggestions for US socialism.
But since you asked.
I don't think the US can copy the Chinese system, as is, the material conditions are different.
The US still lacks capacity in primary sector heavy industry, and it needs to rebuild a secondary sector manufacturing base almost entirely from scratch, in order to support it's truly massive tertiary sector.
US infrastructure is terrible, it's significantly degraded, and probably not optimal (too few rail-lines and too many roads)
Then there is the geo-political aspect of the Chinese system, they basically let western capitalists take surplus from Chinese workers as appeasement to avoid imperial predation, and as exchange for more advanced technology. The US has advanced technology and doesn't have to fear imperial predation from anybody.
China is also less food secure and resource independent as the US. For China a big trade network like Belt and Road is important to ensure redundant reliable resource supply, but for US socialism it's not. If the future USSA builds a giant trade network it's probably more for international solidarity than necessity.
A big chunk of the US population has basically no trust in government institutions, a not insignificant part of the population thinks the police is worse than the mafia and considers the legal system to be pay to win tyranny. In stark contrast the Chinese population has 90% trust in institutions.
I think US socialists would have to remake a lot of government institutions to regain the trust of the masses. I highly doubt that it's possible to just copy the Chinese government model like a recipe.
You have make something, for the specific conditions in the US.

>Why go for the egalitarian classless society
Well every socialist model kinda has that end goal.

>why not just advocate for a DPRK style system? Again, I'm being 100% serious.
To be honest I just read one book about the DPRK, so my knowledge about Juche is very superficial.
It's a rather complicated political system, the way i understood it is that their hierarchical structures are modal, and sometimes it changes who outranks who.

>assuming an ideal society
Why do you think a class-less society is somehow an utopia ?
Class societies tend towards creating a shrinking pool of candidates for leadership, and that causes political degeneration. All elite circles eventually go bad. Going class-less is a practical necessity for a political system to survive in the long term.

>speculative stoner visions of 'cybernetic socialism'
Paul Cockshott seems to be extremely serious.
The appeal of a fully planned economy is that you'll get better efficiency and no economic crisis.
Sortition democracy is appealing because it promises political representation that isn't such an uphill battle.

>Xi Jingping is secret playing 28 dimensional chess
he probably plays GO, i wonder if there's a 3 dimensional version of that.

>egalitarian
this is clearly a loaded term for you and I'm pretty sure we don't associate the same things with it.

>>465615
>In general by the third century the class composition of the Empire was a clusterfuck.
Eh, I wouldn't go as far. The end of the II century was only the beginning of erosion of the slaveholder and slave classes and the polis commune.

On a somewhat related note, it always amuses me how Romaboos hate Commodus for "setting the Empire on a path to ruin" when the madlad was the first ever soldier's emperor and tried to protect the very foundation of the Empire - the polis of small slaveholders.
Oh, the horrors! He mass killed landed aristocracy, took their lands and gave them to the veterans! We must support the landed aristocracy that tried to secede three (!) times from Rome in the next century!

What I wanna know is how Commodus came to be in such a militant opposition to the aristocracy. It seems like he just couldn't wait to start killing them after his father died. Well, he did have a monarchistic program, making a big deal to the soldiers, out of him inheriting his title as opposed to being adopted, so that it made him more independent from the senate.

>>465707
If the US wanted to, they could impose nearly anything by social engineering. There is no material limitation, only a limitation of political will.
The rulers don't want that. They want China to conform to US dictates, so the social engineering is applied the other way. This has been ongoing to fuck with China, and the CCP makes a cope that it commands its internal affairs to hide that they basically do what the Empire wants.
Also Belt and Road is part of the global system. It's Xi's way of being a team player and he banked his entire reign on this thing succeeding, which it probably will.

>>465708
Come on, Commodus was a piece of shit. You can't make up the gladiatorial spectacles and the level of crapulence among Commodus' favorites, no matter how shitty the senatorial class is and how much Marcus Aurelius is overrated because he's the favorite emperor of nerds, being basically a proto-nerd himself who became alpha by being given all the imperial exceptions.
Realistically, the Empire was not a sound construct, and this starts with Augustus not wanting to expand the Empire's borders and failing to fully subdue the Germans. The Empire really was a predatory state, and it might have been wise to not expand the Empire beyond what it could hold, but it would doom the project in the long run unless very dramatic changes in Roman society were imposed from above. There were a few guys like Domitian who were trying to get the idiot senators out of the system, but the establishment got their way aside from the occasional infighting purge during the succession of adoptive emperors.
You weren't going to get Roman proletarians to become a working class as it would happen in modern society, but that would have been necessary, and it would have been ahistorical and require a crystal ball to allow such a thing - for capitalism to become a thing centuries before it did. Such a thing was highly alien to the interests that ruled the Empire and every other empire at the time, and implied a favoritism towards mercantile activity that was frowned upon and seen as insane at the time.
As for the remote possibility of Rome crossing the Atlantic - technologically impossible for Roman ships but perhaps it was possible and it has been suggested that others made the trip at this time without it entering our historical record - the difficulty is that the natives are too numerous and technologically capable of resisting the legions. Consider that it took the United States about 100 years to fully close the frontier and subdue the natives, with all the advantages of an early modern state. The Romans not only operate with far inferior technology, but their entire system would have made colonies so far away rebellious and disinterested in having anything to do with Rome. Invading Africa and boosting the slave trade with African slaves would have been difficult because it would mean breaking deals with Roman clients in the region, and they were probably getting as many slaves as they could get from their clients in the region. The only other way to expand - since conquering further north from the Krauts was just a conquest of shitty tundra and people who were far too difficult to deal with - was into the Middle East, which was tried and wound up leading to revolts and a running series of wars.
Rome suffers the same sickness of Europe today - an idiotic concept of politics and reality itself, an indulgence in sophistry over meaning, and a lack of spiritual morale as a result of their maladaptive social forms. What happened was probably the best way to salvage it - just have the Catholic Church inherit the Empire and become the Empire's modern face. I just don't see it being much more than what it was, and the whole civilized world was getting its shit kicked in during the 5th century.

>>465669
>Most people around the world are doing fine.
They are working until they die broke.

>>465456
Entirely correct. "Aut" meaning "self" and "ism" meaning "being". It's the ideology of the self. Idealism in it's most vain, self contained, politically impotent, and meaningless form.

Whenever I remember the time of my life when someone like you would have called me a "retarded child" for the rancid idealism I posted (lol, I don't mean that as an admonition of you by the way, everything is dirty in this holocaust. So there's no point getting upset over every patch of mud that gets flung at me.) I remember it with the same humiliation and fear, or greater humiliation and fear that I associate with my experiences of being sexually abused as a child.

Autism is not just some mental disorder, it's political torture and brainwashing, it's definitely something the ruling class understands, the dirty fucking scum only know how to hurt and torture. It's spiritual, it's linguistic, the utter isolation from the world, the total mystification of how the world works, the goading into (assisted) self-humiliations are so heart wrenching to see play out again and again and again.

I wish I could take all of these retarded children and clean them up and give them some healthy food to eat and clean water and rooms with privacy and fresh air and books about reality instead of the endless dripfeed of anglo progressive fabian nonsense they've been drugged with for who knows how long until they get better, but I haven't got the resources or authority or allies to do that yet.

Maybe one day the retarded-child left can be cured, until that day we can only demote and ignore them and try to go above their empty little heads with whatever kind of little theoretical or practical advances we try to make in such a hopeless world.

>>465708
Commodus was the first emperor of the Antonine Dynasty that was the birth son of a previous emperor. He was the poster boy for dynastic succession, not some anti-aristocracy revolutionary. That was Domitian, the most badass of the Roman emperors to ever get himself assassinated.

>>465712
Stay sad and broke, wagecel

>>465713
Hey buddy, if you know who I am, I've been called a retard the really harsh way that destroys not just my life but my whole family, so I've had to live with that guilt for as long as I can remember. I don't like to dwell on diagnoses but the ruling system uses these ideas as it sees fit. They literally refused to care about anything that actually happened in my head. If they ask that with any seriousness, they have to acknowledge two brain injuries, the first caused by hospital neglect and the second most likely mistreated and used as a pretext to say it was due entirely to "genes" rather than physical trauma and a whole system of lying to my face for as long as I can remember. I'll never recover from all of that and still have the stutter and dread in my bones to this day. It's worse now because the Nazis just brag they're killing us off, while in the past there was still a sense that what they did to us was wrong. It was a sudden shift first the year I was born, and then in 1994-95 when a lot of the globalization reforms came out and the new world order was showing what this really was.
At least I can say I was not sexually abused, though I would be accused of being an abuser because that's what they do. Won't go there except that I've heard plenty of what that does to people, and I'm sorry.

If someone wanted to understand what was happening, they would be looking at psychology as if there were mechanisms, rather than asserting "it's pure genes and you can't dare say anything about it". It's a great story to cover for depopulation and to absolve the institutions of any guilt. They're autistic in their thinking, and impose their own bugbears and insist we are "absolutely retarded", autism score 0. The hatred for us is off the charts, and dumb naive me was asking why they would do this. That's my problem though - I'm not a Satanist like the people who were the first to carry this shit along. Normal people are not Satanists. They knew the way I was treated was foul, and that they could be and perhaps would be put through the same routine later in life. The older I get, the more I see that what I went through was a whole system and less about anything that happened to me individually. Too many people who are better than me have been made to suffer, and told the only way out is to keep kicking down, keep sacrificing, keep the Satanic dancing nurses on the monitor. It's gross that it has come to this and we should all hang our head in shame for allowing it to happen.

Just know there are a lot of people who survived it and didn't turn into raging assholes like me. The Satanic cycle can be evaded, but Those People will never let it stop. The best thing to do is not encourage it. That's what the more decent normies were trying to do, because they didn't want to see that shit and knew I could only be blamed for so much, when they knew the institutions were damaging people.

I don't think you can teach this away or find an easy praxis to solve the problem, because it is not a new one. Ritual sacrifice of the retarded is the oldest ritual and rite humans perform. It is what separated us from the animals, and it is something beyond ideology. The Fabians just mainlined it and put it at the center of their entire program, and declared that everyone was retarded except them… which is funny because the Fabians are the failsons and faildaughters of the imperial camp, only useful for being idiots and shitting up anything decent. When I was a dumb kid, nothing could have stopped the shit that was done to me, short of a miracle where I didn't have to go to school and could become independently wealthy. All I could do is start picking up the pieces when I was 20, basically starting to live for the first time and being like a kid in the candy store now that I could go out. I could only shop for stuff like groceries and wander around since I couldn't have any actual friends, but that - along with being outside of any "help" - was a world of difference. I could finally conceive of a world other than torture as a real possibility, and wasn't crying every day. I did have to drug myself and this came after a pretty nasty failure of the brain where I nearly shut down, but I'd rather inhale the cancer sticks than return to crying. Only drug that has been particularly helpful for me, but I can't recommend smoking because it's ridiculously expensive.

In some ways it is better. They were just slaughtering us during the 1990s and that was the peak of the Blackest Reaction. Now they have to allow some of us to have jobs because they damaged so many people and destroyed the world. More of us know their Nazi tricks and the desperate have none of the promises that were made during the 1990s that it would be better if they keep their head down. There is no more pretending, whereas during the 1990s, the mystification was intense. Now, mystification and post-truth is intense online, but offline so many people are done pretending any of this shit is real. Back in the 1990s there was a critical mass of useful idiots who clapped their hands and believed the liberals would become gods. It was insane and it's even more insane when I read articles from that time and think that they actually believed in that shit.

>>465714
Based Domitian Gang. I relistened to the History of Rome episode about the Flavians recently (because of the whole Caesar's Messiah thing claiming that Christianity as we know it was a Roman psyop). My good friend Mr. 2youngbadazz on Twitter went into this a while back in one of his megathreads. General rule of classical history - Romans Always Lie. Just like the rule of modern history where Germans Always Lie.

>>465709
>If the US wanted to, they could impose nearly anything by social engineering. There is no material limitation, only a limitation of political will.
While the possibility for a number of different political, economic and social systems exist, there always are material limitations.
>The rulers don't want that. They want China to conform to US dictates, so the social engineering is applied the other way.
The US ruling class has virtually no ability to influence the Chinese system. That's why they are so mad and make the media yell about China being muhtotalitarian 24/7

>This has been ongoing to fuck with China, and the CCP makes a cope that it commands its internal affairs to hide that they basically do what the Empire wants.
It is true the CPC has made a lot of concessions to the US empire in the past, however that's a waning trend. The Chinese communists are not subservient to the US empire, they just are very patient realists. China wasn't strong enough in the past to assert it's will against the US, and that's why they did not try.
China is much stronger now and that's why they make fewer concessions to the US.
There is a cold calculation behind this, it is cheaper in human lives and material resources for them to make some concessions to bloodthirsty capitalists then to destroy their invading armies. If you look at Chinese military spending, it is very low in comparison to the US, and that's one of the reasons why the Chinese economy can grow faster.
The increasingly hostile military posture of the US probably means that China will re-allocate
economic value away from concessions that US capitalists could get, towards Chinese military expenses, to make capitalist greed collide with capitalist imperial ambitions.

>Also Belt and Road is part of the global system.
I would say Belt and Road is a global system, one of many. I don't think there's a "THE global system" anymore.
>It's Xi's way of being a team player and he banked his entire reign on this thing succeeding, which it probably will.
I guess that's not wrong, although your way of framing it is strange, Belt and Road was born out of material needs not personal ambitions for a "reign".

>>465456
>It's not a statement of essential human nature, but the basic concept of what it means to conduct politics in any meaningful way.
What ? you want to rescue the idiotic Von Mises muh-human-nature talking-point, by redefining it as "meaningful politics". Just say that instead, and drop the hole "human-nature" BS entirely.

>That is going to be a concern of any person who thinks about themselves and their relation to the world.
Well perhaps it is the gate-way to narcissism to ask your self about how do I(ME) relate to the world.
If you are a hardcore materialist you'll consider that ME-World dichotomy as an illusion. It's useful for navigating in 3d space-time without colliding into objects. But in order to understand how the world works in a more objective way, you can't look at everything in terms of "how does that relate to me". Most things just don't relate to you. If you try to analyze the world in that way, you will at best create slightly solipsistic idealism, and at worst you'll become a raging narcissist, that attempts to insult everybody that disagrees with you with bad pop-psychology.
Like this:
>you're thinking autistically
You just suck at insulting people, maybe use Shakespearean insults:
<Thou surly puke-stockinged imbossed carbunkle!
<Thou pestilent doghearted infection!
<Thou beslubbering tickle-brained promise-breaker!
https://www.literarygenius.info/a3-shakespeare-insult-generator.htm

>textbook autism
Autism is a severe mental disorder that prevents people from effectively communicating with others. It's very unlikely that somebody like that replies to you on the internet. It's far more likely that an autistic person will use a labtop to bash your head in instead.

>Autism spectrum
That started out as interdisciplinary academic rivalry between the so called "soft sciences" and "hard sciences". Basically psychologists and behavioral analysts were mad that scientists like chemists, physicists and engineers had much greater professional glory and got much more funding for their projects, so they decided to pathologize their academic rivals. So that if they weren't going to get professional glory, the other side would at least be considered socially inferior.
Computer scientists who had observed this spat in the 60s, thought it was funny to create a computer therapist called Eliza
You can try it out online here:
https://www.cyberpsych.org/eliza/
It is also included in the Emacs software, which has better privacy. It can be summoned like this:
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsDoctor
There also is a free open source perl version, if you want to mess with it.
https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/impish/man3/Chatbot::Eliza.3pm.html

What originally had grown out of the feather of petty academic grievances got picked up by pharmacology companies. Pathology expansionism in medical theory proved useful as edu-tisment (education-advertisement word-portmanteau) to sell meth to children.
You could fund schools to have more teachers and more engaging learning material, put in walking desks for those that can't bare sitting for hours on end. Or you could just get children hooked on drugs and numb them into compliance with human-unfriendly environments.

>you can induce "autism"
this reaches levels of pseud that were previously considered impossible

>>465709
>You can't make up the gladiatorial spectacles and the level of crapulence among Commodus' favorites
I can, because I can differentiate between Commodus the statesman vs Commodus the person.

>>465714
>He was the poster boy for dynastic succession, not some anti-aristocracy revolutionary.
First, he wasn't a revolutionary, he was a conservator - he tried to preserve the ancient property relations. It was landed aristocracy who wanted changes.

Second, at the time of crisis of the III century being monarchistic was being anti-senate. Senate and aristocracy in the III century idealized the Flavian Emperors - adoption, not inheritance. It's no coincidence that almost all soldier's emperors adopted monarchism as their ideology.

Also, sorry, but no other Emperor embarked on such a massive terror campaign against landed aristocracy in Roman history. He not just killed them en masse, he tried to change property relations.
His various policies were also continued in one form or another by all the soldier's emperors to come.

>>465722
>First, he wasn't a revolutionary, he was a conservator - he tried to preserve the ancient property relations. It was landed aristocracy who wanted changes.
Thinking about it.. no, that's not the right expression.
Commodus was a reactionary and he wanted changes in the other direction from the changes that the landed aristocracy wanted (feudalism).

>>465717
>Stay sad and broke, wagecel
Capitalism in a nutshell.
>>465718
>General rule of classical history - Romans Always Lie. Just like the rule of modern history where Germans Always Lie.
God, that is the truth. Every Roman "historian" was playing some political game with his writings. It makes studying the Classical Mediterranean incredibly difficult.
>>465722
>Also, sorry, but no other Emperor embarked on such a massive terror campaign against landed aristocracy in Roman history. He not just killed them en masse, he tried to change property relations.
As was the case with Tacitus and Domitian, Cassius Dio had plenty of political motivation for playing up the misdeeds of Commodus. However, unlike Domitian, Commodus did not leave behind a record number of great public works and a revitalized economy; rather he left behind a bunch of statues of himself dressed as Hercules and an economy that had clearly fallen off a cliff. If Dio's reports of him trying to change property relations can be believed, Commodus was much less successful at doing so than Caracalla was with his massive sweeping reforms that transformed the empire.
>Second, at the time of crisis of the III century being monarchistic was being anti-senate.
"King" had been a curse in the Roman World since the Republic was founded. That sentiment does not seem to have been limited to the Senate.
>His various policies were also continued in one form or another by all the soldier's emperors to come.
Up until Diocletian mananged to survive to a long reign against all odds, the Barracks Emperors can hardly be said to have accomplished much of anything policy-wise apart from Galienus' visionary reform of the Roman military.

>>465719
Dude, you have to get out of the Dengoid echo chamber and deal with reality. China does what the global oligarchy wants. Most of what the CCP does is stuff that was worked out by American and British social engineers. That social credit system was a foreign idea, as was the Chinese compliance with COVID shit. The people in China don't want to do this shit or shout like Nazi retards. They want an actual country.

The global oligarchy is stronger than ever. It isn't about this or that country, it's the global rulers against everyone else who is confined to their national holding pens. Get out of this retarded version of history where you imagine eternal struggles between nation-states. That was a fake narrative and you're an idiot for going along with it.

>>465720
I don't know how to tell you what politics is. If you have any familiarity with Marxism, you should be familiar with basic politics. Marxism is not a friend to autistic thinking. Telling people to reinforce their autism - and we've been trying to tell you this in this thread because some of us know this cycle painfully well - is what you do if you really hate people. You're either a victim of your own stupidity or you're a monster cynically lying to people. In an actual world, people have individual wants. You don't get to bullbait and cajole people infinitely unless you see them as absolute slaves. I don't know how else to tell this to you, but you refuse to learn this basic thing, and if you can't do that, there is no possible discussion. That's why you believe in all sorts of nonsensical things like the Clash of Civilizations narrative (which you do if you maintain this fake geopolitics narrative).

>>465724
I don't think reactionary or progressive can describe Commodus or any Roman ruler. What we call "reactionary" was the default for a Roman. If you talked about historical progress in that time, people would see that as craziness. Historical progress was not an idea with currency - it's a very peculiar interpretation of Christianity that gave us our understanding of historical progress. Most of humanity has been screamingly reactionary by that standard.
With Commodus I just see someone who is extremely corrupt, around other extremely corrupt people and the senators' stupidity.
At the time, feudalism would have been seen as a step back and regressive. That is how Marx understood it too - that is what happens when the struggle between classes ends in mutual ruin.

>>465739
The Communist Party China probably just sacked another billionaire
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/17/chinese-billionaire-tech-banker-bao-fan-goes-missing
the global oligarchy just took another L

>That social credit system was a foreign idea
Was it ? Anyway it doesn't really affect average citizens, it's mostly stuff like people who commit commercial fraud can't go to luxury hotels anymore.

>the Chinese compliance with COVID
Based on what i saw, the public reaction in China was very different than in the west, and most Chinese people were on board with the anti virus stuff. Of course if you live in the mainstream media bubble, you wouldn't know that.

>They want an actual country.
This is a Neocon fantasy
Independent polling shows that the Chinese government has between 80% and 90% popular approval.

>>465736
>Cassius Dio had plenty of political motivation for playing up the misdeeds of Commodus
He did though exile and kill plenty of large landowners and confiscated their property into the roman fisc out of which veterans were given their land plot after their honorable discharge.
Rome at the time had a 600 thousand strong regular army in which soldiers served 20 years. 600/20 = 30 thousand soldiers (tho the actual numbers were lower because not all survived to their discharge) a year were discharged which all had to be given not just any plot of land, but a plot of land they could cultivate and not go bankrupt, ie a good plot of land. Which Commodus fucking did by taking this land from the aristocracy, and not giving his veterans the shit land in the bumfuck border-of-the-Empire nowhere as senate had wanted.

>However, unlike Domitian, Commodus did not leave behind a record number of great public works and a revitalized economy;
By redistributing land he objectively gave some more time to the polis municipal economy - the economy of small to medium slaveowners that was the backbone of the Empire and the army. Exactly in this period you see a revitalization of municipal life in Illyricum and Danube regions - the same regions whose legions constantly were the backbone of the soldier emperors in the civil wars to come, the same legions whom Gallienus later granted the title "fidelis" - loyal.
The whole first half of the century went by this scenario - aristocracy starts rebellion in Gaul/Spain/Britain - Rhine and Danube legions proclaim their emperor and go beat the aristocracy into submission. Repeat until the death of Gallienus.

>Commodus was much less successful at doing so than Caracalla was with his massive sweeping reforms that transformed the empire.
Again, all soldier emperors worked in the same political vein - in the interests of the ancient polis. Commodus was just the first.

>"King" had been a curse in the Roman World since the Republic was founded. That sentiment does not seem to have been limited to the Senate.
The monarchist sentiment was spreading wide in the third century with the spread of the eastern cults and gnostic philosophy. The old Roman polis morals were on their way out.
Again, Commodus specifically pointed out to the soldiers that his ascension by blood was an advantage to his predecessors.

>Up until Diocletian mananged to survive to a long reign against all odds, the Barracks Emperors can hardly be said to have accomplished much of anything policy-wise
Well, yes, the slaveowner class have failed and a century later you had free roman citizens being turned into serfs with the Diocletian's edict that they are now "slaves to their land" and are not allowed to move. But that is a whole another story.

>>465739
>I don't think reactionary or progressive can describe Commodus or any Roman ruler. What we call "reactionary" was the default for a Roman.
He was reactionary in relation to the new mode of production that was being born - feudalism.

>>465745
>Independent polling shows that the Chinese government has between 80% and 90% popular approval.
Chinese people interpret "not support the government" as a call for revolution. Unsurprisingly, most people are not interested in being in a war. If you asked Americans if they approve of having a civil war between Republicans and Democrats, the vast majority of people would not approve. Certain retards want that because they think struggle is life, but they are stupid and should be ignored.

>>465746
>He was reactionary in relation to the new mode of production that was being born - feudalism.
This is what autism does to a concept of history. Read, uygha, read.

>>465748
>This is what autism does to a concept of history.
That is what reactionary actually means, booklet.

>>465739
>I don't know how to tell you what politics is
Admitting you don't know something is the first step.
>autistic thinking
You can't win arguments with pseudo intellectual condescension.
You didn't make a single valid point about anything.

>>465749
No, that's what a retarded conception of history believes, that people are all consumed by the thought-forms of the present. "He who controls the present controls the past." The Romans didn't have any concept of reaction or progress in this way and did things for entirely different motives. No one was thinking about changing the system for an imaginary world-spirit, because that is not how history actually progresses.

>>465750
The point being is that you fail to grasp basic things people would have to do to conduct politics or maintain a state, so long as people are constituted as individuals. If we were constituted as collectives and tied to social units in the way you imagine, we would be very different creatures, in ways that would be obvious. Cooperation between any two social agents that are socialized as individuals will always require a genuine understanding between them. You want to bullbait because you are purely autistic in your thinking, and that's all you know. That makes a conversation with you impossible, until you're willing to consider that other people don't agree with you on 100% of everything. If you're going to make people follow you, other people have no reason to bow automatically. That's how Krauts think when they draw up their war plan, then cry when the conquered don't respect the "right of conquest" or whatever faggotry they invent to justify their failure.

>>465751
>The Romans didn't have any concept of reaction or progress in this way and did things for entirely different motives.
Reactionary is not a subjective category. It is an objective category, you don't need to understand and accept that you are a reactionary to be one.
I don't know what subjective motives drove Commodus to start his terror against the aristocracy. Whatever they were - it was an objectively a reactionary move.

If you don't accept that conditions motivate individuals - you might as well throw the history proper out of the window and stick to chronology.

>>465749
kek he autism-slapped you too ?

>>465752
Stop, stop. Examine your autism.
What is "objective progress"? The conceit you hold about the world? The will of God? You do understand where this concept of historical progress arises in Hegel, and how it was the ideology of the Prussian monarchy, so that Hegel can claim history has ended? If you don't understand where these concepts come from, you wind up saying stupid shit without really knowing what you refer to, and imposing the present on a time where people thought very differently, and where institutions rose and fell.

You literally claimed feudalism was "historical progress", when everyone at the time knew this was a regression and the breakdown of the empire. The empire and all it stood for was premised on slavery, and the slave system was wildly profitable and effective for what it was intended to do. It screwed the Roman freeholder, who became the Roman proletarian and eventually the coloni if they survived the lumpen life, but it was seen as "civilization" to its beneficiaries, and feudalism was seen as a bunch of Christian yahoos destroying the world and imposing a new normal. That was the understanding that survived all the way up to Marx's writing, who repeats the understanding that feudalism was the breakdown of the imperial system.

Historical progress is entirely a conceit of people. The world doesn't care about us. You suffer from this autism and it's Satanic at its heart.

>>465754
>What is "objective progress"?
I wasn't talking about "objective progress", I was talking about one mode of production replacing another in a specific timeframe. Relative to those two modes of production an individual can be reactionary or progressive.

From the word "progressive" - "characterized by advancement, going forward, moving onward" (in action, character, etc.), from progress (n.) + -ive, or else from French progressif, from past participle stem of Latin progredi.

>If you don't understand where these concepts come from, you wind up saying stupid shit without really knowing what you refer to, and imposing the present on a time where people thought very differently, and where institutions rose and fell.
What "people thought" has no relevance to this discussion. Mode of production exists outside people's mind.
Next, institutions rise and fall not on a whim of some individual but due to conditions of material life.

>You literally claimed feudalism was "historical progress"
Where?
I do not claim that it is progressive by itself, only that it is progressive relative to this particular timeframe.

>when everyone at the time knew this was a regression and the breakdown of the empire
It sure as hell wasn't perceived as "regression" by the landed aristocracy.
The first sign that you are talking to a brainlet - he uses such words as "everyone", "people", "nation".
This is not kinda classification that is of use to any serious analysis.

>It screwed the Roman freeholder, who became the Roman proletarian and eventually the coloni if they survived the lumpen life, but it was seen as "civilization" to its beneficiaries, and feudalism was seen as a bunch of Christian yahoos destroying the world and imposing a new normal.
A lot to unpack here.
The landed aristocracy in the senate were the first feudals.
Proletarians were irrelevant.
The average roman citizen was a polis citizen and a relatively small slaveowner with a plot of land.

Coloni in the third century were usually barbarians captured in military campaigns, bankrupted citizens, freedmen.
Coloni were employed in the manors of large landowners and were basically proto-peasants.

>Historical progress is entirely a conceit of people.
Idealism. Modes of production change each other independently of what people "conceit".
A yardstick for "progressiveness" can be the productivity of human labor - measured in kind - and the related state of technology.
It is a fact that the ancient polis based mode of production was in a deep decline - with polis citizens going bankrupt en masse and becoming coloni or slaves (who were basically coloni by the mid third century too).
This can be illustrate by the widespread decline of the cities and related monetary based economic activity and with the progressive naturalization of economic activity in large manors of the proto-feudals.
In these conditions, in this timeframe, the feudalism in those manors was progressive.

>>465755
Look, you just don't know what you're talking about. You're an automata saying shit about historical progress. I'm trying to explain this to you but you refuse and you keep shitting up this thread with circular logic. It's clear you actually do believe the shit coming out of your mouth, which is fucking sad.

>It sure as hell wasn't perceived as "regression" by the landed aristocracy.
>The first sign that you are talking to a brainlet - he uses such words as "everyone", "people", "nation".
>This is not kinda classification that is of use to any serious analysis.
Did you think the feudal lords liked having to recede from the empire because it was no longer functional? The feudal lords weren't engaged in a revolution against the empire. They had no choice but to accept that the empire was done. No one was thinking they were going to cajole historical progress by fucking off to their estates. They couldn't pay the taxes and didn't want to, and the empire failed to defend itself against barbarians. What use is the empire if it cannot maintain a national army?
Oh wait, you don't believe there is such a thing as a nation, and ideas just-so happen. That's the only way your entire historical theory works. It's not materialist or true or tied to anything real. It's just navel gazing and mystification.
God you refuse to learn basic shit about what it means to have an empire, and substitute this wonky theory that has nothing to do with how anyone actually thinks. It's total autism.

>>465746
>Rome at the time had a 600 thousand strong regular army in which soldiers served 20 years. 600/20 = 30 thousand soldiers (tho the actual numbers were lower because not all survived to their discharge) a year were discharged which all had to be given not just any plot of land, but a plot of land they could cultivate and not go bankrupt, ie a good plot of land.
There was always plenty of arible land in the empire, especially so at that particular time with the Antonine Plague literally decimating the population. Come to think of it, I don't know about that "600k strong" figure, considering the Plague hit the army harder than it hit any other segment of the population. The number of individuals surviving twenty years in the Roman army during the time of the Antonine Plague would have been few indeed.
>Exactly in this period you see a revitalization of municipal life in Illyricum and Danube regions
The regions that Marcus Aurelius had recently pacified, yeah. You can't rightly give credit for the success of Dacia to Commodus. It would have been difficult to fuck that up after his father's legions did all the work.
>The old Roman polis morals were on their way out.
I don't think that ideology played much part in the birth of the new bureaucratic aristocracy (as opposed to the old aristocracy that emperors had spent the previous two-hundred years killing). Rather, I think that it had become an inescapible reality that rule by the sword with only the barest pretext toward republicanism was how the empire must operate. The Antonine Plagues, the instability caused by the civil wars that flared up every time an emperor was assassinated, the aggression of the Parthians, and the economic stagnation of the Pax Romana all made centrally governing a Medierannean-wide empire increasingly unsustainable. It needed to be broken into pieces with aristocrats with their own little armies independently controling their own regions, which was, more than anything else, the key to Diocletian's success.
>He was reactionary in relation to the new mode of production that was being born - feudalism.
I know what Marx said, but I do not buy that "feudalism" was anything fundamentally different from what he called "slavery." It was more like the aristocratic class adapting the state to account for the effects of de-urbanization. I wonder if Marx would have also drawn a different conclusion if he had had access to the archaeological record that we have now and not just the accounts of Cassius Dio, Suetonius, and Tacitus to go by.

>>465757
The concept "mode of production" does not conform to a system, which is the failure of understanding of the cybersoc guy who is being autistic about systems. Feudalism and capitalism are situations in which people act, as they have done for as long as humans have been a thing. His whole view is that humans do not actually have agency but are cajoled by "material forces", i.e. Malthus' hobgoblins and a belief that the poor are animals who will breed out of control. He's brain poisoned and the meme spreads itself.

With Rome, there is a misunderstanding where the city of Rome and the urban centers of the empire are interpreted as "the Empire", even though much of the populace was rural, and rural life was farming and selling the crops. That was the basis of the economy the whole way through. The failure of civilization was just that - the failure of the cities, which were premised on Roman slavery to continue as they had.
To understand this requires being able to get past the idea that "modes of production" are hobgoblins or world-spirits. Mode of production is a shorthand for a lot of things that are conflated to describe a general situation in which humans work and conduct political affairs. The actual motives are not materially or naturally ordained, but a matter of spiritual authority or what people want out of this project. It is generally accepted by reasonable people that production is useful for a lot of things, but humans are not motivated by productivity for its own sake. The attitude of the ancients is that they only wanted to produce that which reproduced the empire, which is one reason industry would not pick up for a long time - there was no reason to and nothing to gain. It took modern science and the rise of new war machines to sell the idea that industry was a concern in its own right, because you need this industry if you want artillery and better ships and all the things relied on today for empires.

>>465746
I missed one thing.
>He did though exile and kill plenty of large landowners and confiscated their property into the roman fisc out of which veterans were given their land plot after their honorable discharge.
This was just the same thing that Caligula had done a century earlier–kill rich guys you don't like, steal their shit, and give the spoils to the military. As was the case during Caligula's rule, it was nothing more than robbery to fill empty coffers that were needed to keep the military loyal.
>Commodus was just the first.
Nah, Domitian holds that distinction, although his father Vespasian is said to have given him the idea.

I'm not following this debate very well but I'll take the side that isn't screaming about imaginary "Malthusians" hiding around every corner.

>>465760
That is literally where he gets this idea from - that the poor are stupid and will breed out of control unless they are managed by his obviously superior intellect. It's a bunch of shit and you're a coward for enabling any of it. It was recognized as a bunch of shit back when this started, but a certain sort of person was always there to enable it. That's why we have to suffer this stupidity after two centuries, because there will always be those people who maintain the rot in humanity.

I didn't know when it became leftist to defend people who plan famines and genocide, but there you go. No wonder people hate you all so much.

>>465758
>The concept "mode of production" does not conform to a system, which is the failure of understanding of the cybersoc guy who is being autistic about systems.
It really seems to conform to capitalism given the near-universal bourgeois control of the means of production and the commodification of absolutely everything of use short of air and sunlight. How well it conforms to "slavery" and "feudalism" is suspect. I suspect that the problem there lies with the conception of slavery and feudalism and that "agrarianism," wherein the surplus produce of farmers and miners is extracted by violence and used to sustain a specialist class. It is a fundamentally different system of production from the many varieties of hunting/gathering, pastoralism, and slash-and-burn horticulture, and ethnographic parallels between seperate agrarian societies are common enough to make the framing at least look right.
>To understand this requires being able to get past the idea that "modes of production" are hobgoblins or world-spirits.
Nope, I don't buy that. The similarites between isolated societies that fall into a given mode of production are too plain to ignore. Anthropology may not be a hard science, but it sure makes a compelling case in this regard. Check out the book Our Kind by Martin Harris.
>The actual motives are not materially or naturally ordained, but a matter of spiritual authority or what people want out of this project.
How do you draw that conclusion?
>It is generally accepted by reasonable people that production is useful for a lot of things, but humans are not motivated by productivity for its own sake.
The notion that humans are motivated by productivity is not an assumption that is made by marxist anthropologists. Not at all. In fact, they make the opposite claim.
>The attitude of the ancients is that they only wanted to produce that which reproduced the empire
I would think, rather, that their attitude was that they were principally interested in perpetuating themselves–rational self-interest. That certainly seems apparent from the discussion of Imperial Rome.
>It took modern science and the rise of new war machines to sell the idea that industry was a concern in its own right, because you need this industry if you want artillery and better ships and all the things relied on today for empires.
No, not really. It was wool and later cotton combined with the colossal bonanza that was the depopulation of the Americas that did that.

>>465762
You literally are retarded. Pure autism. I can't even with you.

>>465761
>That is literally where he gets this idea from - that the poor are stupid and will breed out of control unless they are managed by his obviously superior intellect.
Is he? If he is, he's wrong. I didn't notice. I am just here for the Roman shit.

>>465763
Okay, I guess you are done trying to argue. Oh, and that guy, Malthusian or not, does seem to know Classical history better than you do.

>>465765
If he knows classical history then he and you should know that superimposing a modern conceit about historical progress on an earlier time is a piss poor understanding. This idea of historical progress is really a mangling and an attempt to build grand narratives about nothing. That was one of my arguments, which gets back to this whole problem of what the left even is. The left was replaced with a narrative rather than what it was in the past, when the left was a force that could affect anything.

Everyone involved in Roman times believed slavery was the basis for their empire, and acted accordingly. Nobody thought they were making a system called "feudalism" or that what was put in place from Diocletian on was intended to be a whole "system". They were instead a series of reforms and edicts intended to salvage Rome because it was basically broken beyond repair. That is all anyone can really do - engage with the world as they confront it, rather than live in a narrative detached from anything real. You would want your historical narratives to match real events if you are studying history through science, rather than try to fit history into a politically convenient narrative of what you think historical progress is. To someone in the future, capitalism will almost certainly appear as a regression and a willingness to transgress norms that were in place and worked fine. Capitalism exists not because it was historically inevitable by some spooky force, but because the trading monopolies like the East India Company wanted to run drugs around the world and fuck everyone up. If you understood American history and what the project was, you'd understand that, instead of imposing this ridiculous and artificial European narrative on a country where it doesn't apply, and it doesn't even apply to European nation-states. The European nations worth a damn were all in the imperial game, and weren't isolated nation-states but competitors who wanted to claim the global empire. The world wars would probably be seen in hindsight as a really big global civil war to decide who and what would rule the whole thing.

>>465768
>If he knows classical history then he and you should know that superimposing a modern conceit about historical progress on an earlier time is a piss poor understanding.
You are objecting to our respective ideas about historiography, not our knowledge of history. I am better than most at understanding Roman history, in the sense that I can discuss the Antonine Plagues, the Edict of Caracalla, the military reforms of Gallienus, and the establishment of the diocese with folks who also know a bit about that stuff. The alleged malthusian seems to be likewise knowledgable, but I disagree with his historiography as far as feudalism is concerned. I agree with him as far as acknowledging that overwhelming evidence of distinct modes of production can be found in the historical record.

Your historiography appears to be an individualistic conception of history, which is its own "modern conceiet." Certainly it was not a popular concept before the Enlightenment. Furthermore, it does not jive with the historical record very well. There very clearly were sea changes in the ordering of historical societies when they were introduced to significant external economic forces. Likewise, there are marked similarities between societies in isolation that operate under the same mode of production. A posteri, the mode of production framework fits the historical record where the idividualistic model does not, at least as far as I can see. What evidence do you see for individualistic historiography?
>Everyone involved in Roman times believed slavery was the basis for their empire, and acted accordingly.
The other guy and I were discussing Domitian, Vespasian, Commodus, Gallienus, and others who were of the opinion that the empire was based upon tough, scary motherfuckers with spears and shields. They all disregarded other concerns in favor of courting the support of said scary motherfuckers, sometimes to their own detriment. As far as production is concerned, slavery was central during the Imperial Era, but the emergant peasantry, notably in Egypt, was a huge part of what kept the army and the major cities fed.
>Nobody thought they were making a system called "feudalism" or that what was put in place from Diocletian on was intended to be a whole "system".
No, they did not. I am with you on that.
>They were instead a series of reforms and edicts intended to salvage Rome because it was basically broken beyond repair.
The Edit of Caracala and the reforms of Gallienus and Diocletian kept the empire going for a really, really long time. Don't forget that the Roman Empire did not fall until 1453.
>You would want your historical narratives to match real events if you are studying history through science, rather than try to fit history into a politically convenient narrative of what you think historical progress is.
Marx absolutely, unquestionably invented historiography as science. The mode of production model was the first such model, and it still holds true, although not in the form that Marx originally laid out, despite what the other guy thinks. Still, Marx never couched the transition of "slavery" to "feudalism," or even the transition from "feudalism" to capitalism as a historic necessity. Unlike with capitalism, there are no dialectic contradictions inherent in the agrarian mode of production that would necessitate self-destruction. According to the model, the transitions were facilitated by extraordinary circumstances.
>To someone in the future, capitalism will almost certainly appear as a regression and a willingness to transgress norms that were in place and worked fine.
A regression? No, not in any sense. The advent of capitalism was explosive, a devestating upheaval unlike anything human society had experienced before, but it transformed the social order into something truly new. It necessitated new kinds of production and adaptation in ways that hadn't been matched since humans first climbed out of the trees and started walking across the savannah. 1492 should be Year 0 on the calendar as the beginning of the Current Era. Capitalism was that fucking seminal.
>Capitalism exists not because it was historically inevitable by some spooky force
That is true. If the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria had sunk, and if Vasco de Gama had died of malaria in South Africa and the Mexica and the kingdoms of the Andes had been left alone for a couple hundred more years, the Americas would have likely had more than just syphilis to inflict their discoverers with. No definitive quality of the ancien regime necessitated its annihilation.
>but because the trading monopolies like the East India Company wanted to run drugs around the world and fuck everyone up
Fuck no. Capitalism happened, because an empty pair of continents full of silver and where sugar could be grown just appeared before the conqistadores.
>If you understood American history and what the project was, you'd understand that, instead of imposing this ridiculous and artificial European narrative on a country where it doesn't apply, and it doesn't even apply to European nation-states.
You are going to have to unpack that one, buddy.
>The European nations worth a damn were all in the imperial game
Only if you define "being worth a damn" as being in the imperial game. Switzerland has been a pretty nice place to live for just about its entire existence as such.
>The world wars would probably be seen in hindsight as a really big global civil war to decide who and what would rule the whole thing.
Oh, no. The last two World Wars (the British/French/Spanish wars that preceded them were pretty damn global) constituted the ultimate annihilation of the old empires. Regardless of who "won," none of them survived. Leninists like to call the United States an empire, but in fact it serves more as a barracks for a global bourgeois order than it does as a proper empire in the antebellum sense. That is my take on it, anyway. It isn't a popular take.

>>465773
Keep it up, comrade. Just 2 more posts in this super important debate, and we will have entered the period of strategic equilibrium!

>>465773
Oh you really don't know. You think you do, but you don't. It's like you don't want to because you're afraid to acknowledge how fucked we all are, or you think you're totally going to win.

The empires never died. One empire won, absorbed the United States which was always basically part of it, and could conduct plan wars basically at will. Everyone eats out of their hands and is afraid to challenge any of their core doctrines and practices, unless they're crazy suicidal. That's how it goes. You never want to go against the Satan for real, and guess what they believe in…

>>465773
Empires are never fixed things in the realm of ideas. Empires in practice are dynamic beasts clashing with each other and sucking the life out of the world every single day. It's always been that. There is usually one hegemon above all. China believed itself to be that, until it wasn't. Rome, as big as it was and as much as we regard it as central to history, was born on the periphery of civilization, and could have been seen as just another barbarian tribe that happened to rule for a long time. All of the money, culture, science, and basically anything worthwhile was in the East and was never really "Roman". The Romans just ran the place for a while.

>>465775
Damn, now you're two posts away from reaching strategic equilibrium too. However, if they're not at least 9 paragraphs long, you might fall back into strategic defense. Don't let that happen.. The revolution is upon us, comrades!

Point being, empires are not lines drawn on a map, but interests and particular people and families. The name of the empire is less important than the continuation of imperium itself, whomever holds it. All who vie for the world have to play that game. They don't play the game of nation-state essences locked in eternal war. That's the fools' narrative. People don't want to fight the empire - they always seek to join the biggest thing, and right now that's the empire ruled nominally by the Americans. No one is there to challenge the empire. Purin, Xi are doing their part, team players. It just so happens the people of the supposed metropole are not on the team, and the rulers of America have been running it into the ground since 2000. Why wouldn't they? They fucking hate Americans and hate the idea of America, and can't shut up about their plans to demolish American living standards. If you think this is going to turn out to be a good thing for the world, you haven't seen the shit they're pulling in Putin's Russia… it's full bore eugenics over there, with a whole Satanic contingent pushing the present war. Shit like that wants to be the norm, and as it happens, anything decent in this world is going the way of the dodo. You uyghurs enabling this, and you are uyghurs, are going to be cucks.

>>465775
>You never want to go against the Satan for real, and guess what they believe in…
Praise hell, Satan.

>>465780
t. broke loser.

A least Hollyweirdoes become rich and famous for worshipping Satan. You just get a small dirty apartment/trailer and a porn addiction

>>465781
LOL, Satan is cooler than your god.

Ironic satanists are prematurely aged fat men with receding hairlines and a double chin with gross looking facial hair. Not a single masculine or successful men among them. Often, they are in an 'open relation' (i.e perennially cucked by) equally unattractive women.

How many of those boxes do you check?

>>465786
I love that Slayer offends Zoomers every bit as much as they offended Boomers.

>>465779
>Point being, empires are not lines drawn on a map, but interests and particular people and families.
>The name of the empire is less important than the continuation of imperium itself
I'm not entirely convinced about the power of family clans, but this is generally true especially the latter part.
I think that capitalism would have already been replaced by a more advanced mode of production if it wasn't for "imperium" stamping out attempts of individual countries to move on to a newer mode of production. In a way imperialism is capitalism attempting to halt time.

>They don't play the game of nation-state locked in eternal war
Yes the really big bourgeoisie is transnational and has no loyalties. But it would also be wrong to omit the fact that nation states are competing against each other. The version of imperialism that keeps order and piece, that's fiction, going all the way back to people like Karl Kautsky.

>People don't want to fight the empire
That's wrong there's always people who fight against the empire.

>the empire ruled nominally by the Americans
>No one is there to challenge the empire
Yes the US empire is the biggest force, but that doesn't guarantee that people will seek to submit them selves to it. Most people will avoid submission with considerable effort. But that's not all, the US empire is also declining and that negative trend-line is a factor too. Forward looking people will seek out the rising trend-line.

>Putin, Xi are doing their part to challenge the empire.
I think that Russia and China are in the process of becoming regional powers that are undoing the regional structures of imperial domination. Neither is really seeking to break the US empire, just push it back a little. They want the US empire to sunset gradually without setting the world on fire.

>the rulers of America have been running it into the ground since 2000. Why wouldn't they? They fucking hate Americans
That's true.

>you haven't seen the shit they're pulling in Putin's Russia… it's full bore eugenics over there
Full bore eugenics ?
Like Fascism in WW2 ?
Not buying that.
Your comment was pretty reasonable until that.

>>465794
Look at Putin's alliance with the WEF program and what they're teaching in Russian schools. They teach kids about the essences in people to track them. Literal Plato's Republic shit. It's madness and a sign of what the right wants to become, the agenda they would push if they win the culture war. You already see that in the Anglo-American right and the program they hint to with their many influencers and shills - they want full bore eugenics and they all march to the same program. The "left" has a slightly different program but still eugenist. Eugenics is the one thing that is paramount above all, because that is what the rulers actually care about now. They don't care about capitalism and talk about how profit and productivity are evil and economic growth is out of control (because it's a proxy for population and population is evil).
You'd have to see enough of the rightoids' own propaganda and be able to pick it apart to see it represented in Putin's Russia and the Dugin shit, plus the shit Russian English-language propaganda puts out. I've been lurking and see their shit for the past several years, and they stepped up with COVID, the Trump cult, and that infusion of money for influencers after the Floyd riots. I know for certain eugenics is their ride or die. That's the only thing keeping the coalition of interests and the ruling institutions together. They don't believe in the market system as a disciplinary force, because increasingly people realize the market is rigged and the rich can just print themselves free money and make us accept it. There was doubt that 2008 could be repeated, until they did that in 2020 and burned everything to the ground while they offered the so-called stimulus.

>That's wrong there's always people who fight against the empire.
There are people who fight the empire out of a pathological opposition to the Satan, and those who fight the empire because they must and submission is not an option. Most people who want to take part in politics know how this game works, and if you are a revolutionary, you are playing that game. Not playing that game entails being a hermit or being a madman fighting a doomed cause. If you have political though, you realize empires are the only way humans can really orient the state towards aims. People will not fight and die for an idea bereft of any real purpose. They will not fight for a lie, and that's all republics ever were. Since we are denied a type of government that overcomes the irrationality of republicanism and we're not even allowed the dignity of an enligthened despotism, we're stuck in this cycle for a long time.
Look around most of the people who are active in politics, and if you talk about a world without empires with any seriousness, you realize you're in the wrong game. Calls to abolish the empire are always sops. The Marxists are no different. They were not fighting to end empires, but to gain position in the imperial camp. It was one of the charges Mao made against the Russians - they were selling out to the imperials and going against their fellow communists, which they were. Then the Chinese sold out to the empire even harder, finalized with the ascension of Deng.

>Yes the US empire is the biggest force, but that doesn't guarantee that people will seek to submit them selves to it.
The US as a legal institution is not the empire. This global network of oligarchic firms, NGOs, and institutions above the state is the form the empire takes, supplying its useful officers. The formal state is just an arm of the beast. Private bureaucracies and enforcement mechanisms are massive, and the formal state as massive as it is largely exists to keep this private sector aligned to the mission, and the state is owned by those oligarchs. There is no public oversight or interest overriding oligarchy, and hasn't been for a long time.
Most of the people opposing "the US" are really seeing that the US is a sick dog and jumping on to the new thing, thinking they'll be on top. It's still going to be the same people, and the US state apparatus isn't going anywhere. The only thing that is being abolished is anything good in the former United States.

> But it would also be wrong to omit the fact that nation states are competing against each other.
The nation-state as a geopolitical actor was done after 1989, which is something most history and political theory students will know. The rulers of constituted nation-states are tasked with keeping local interests in line, but they cannot pursue genuine "national interests", and really never did. The national interests of the older nation-states were that they sought to enter this global system that was coming into the world. First they compete by racing for colonies and trading opportunities, then they see the global market, the rise of monopolies, and the dominance of oil in technology and industry. Controlling the oil was key to the global system during the 20th century. Only now do you see the interest of oil receding, and it is still necessary to ensure that no one breaks the oil monopoly or utilizes the machine for unapproved purposes. Now the interest is in mechanisms of control, and the rise of data mining and operational control is the "new oil" of the 21st century.

Imperialism never "kept the peace" in any serious way. A look at the Anglo-American empire shows an empire kept in line by war, deception, narcolords, Satanism, a particular attitude towards science and technological institutions, eugenics, gratuitous sadism as a moral philosophy, and whatever genuinely productive qualities can be squeezed out of a wholly maladaptive society. Fortunately for the Empire, the rest of the world doesn't present any serious alternative idea and gave up trying, because in their heart they just want to do the shit the Americans do. If they had a different idea for a global empire that didn't involve planned wars, depopulation, narcostates, and eugenics, they haven't propagated the idea - not that they would, since going against eugenics is going against the Satan. It's death, unless you're like me and have nothing serious to lose. I'm just pissing in the wind, but political actors cannot do what I do. They'd be destroyed if they refused to play with the kayfabe.

Kautsky gets a lot of shit, much of it deserved for being pretty fucking wimpy about the war and what Nazism really meant. Imperialism was the global system at that time, and the supposed conflict of nation-states - which was really a conflict within the nation-states to control the empire - was a temporary state of affairs. The Nazis aren't fighting for Germany - they hate Germany and hate Germans, and sacrificed it all for the eugenic creed. They really did, and that is the only explanation for Nazi conduct during the war. The Nazi strategy was all about organizing fifth columns in any country they wanted to take over, either by invasion or subversion. They were the conspiratoral Jews themelves when it came to their strategy, and that's what you would do if you wanted to win in Germany's position. The moment one country did the right thing and purged the shit out of fascists is the moment they were fucked. German war plans were premised on the idea that the British and Americans were secretly with their Aryan brothers and would coup the US. You still have the apologist types in the US who bemoan the Krauts losing and fail to recognize who their betters are. They didn't succeed in shitting up the world in the 1940s so they try, try again, this time with the support of blue blooded English assholes and the slimiest of America's aristocracy.

>I think that capitalism would have already been replaced by a more advanced mode of production if it wasn't for "imperium" stamping out attempts of individual countries to move on to a newer mode of production.
1930s, new economic order. The capitalism Marx described was superceded by this new thing, by decision of those who won rather than by revolution. The revolution was defused by allowing some of the left elements into the imperial structure and allowing them institutional legitimacy - this is what Gramsci's strategy was, march through the institutions. Once that part of the left got their stake in the institutions, they held on to that and turned against the working class base. They invented "fuck you, I've got mine".
The market system persists because a lot of people were invested in it, and that was the only thing they had. They had no reason to ever allow that stake to be sacrificed in favor of any socialist plan. The communists had to defeat their enemies, and when they did win, they usually co-opted the bourgeois in their nation rather than destroy them. They had to give up their claims to property but they often found themselves in favored positions so long as they accepted the Party's rule. That's why you have aristocrats all over the Soviet Union who remain in good standing, because they didn't really consider the Soviet Union ideological evil or fanatical at all.
This just gets to how "mode of production" is nebulous, and is never constituted as a wholly realized "system". Capitalism forms gradually as merchant banks gain prominence and are the facilitators of trading empires starting in the 16th century. By the time there is a revolution to formally introduce capitalism, the bourgeoisie had insinuated themselves in the older system, and the old nobility really could not save the ancien regime. There were liberal nobles who saw the revolution as a conspiracy to put themselves in charge, because Louis was a piece of shit surrounded by other pieces of shit. It gets complciated when you look at the details of these things, and get past the idea of a clean narrative and just-so stories. The people who lived through the French Revolution and its aftermath had a more nuanced view of what happened, because there was enough living memory of how it actually was.

>>465796
>Look at Putin's alliance with the WEF
All the Russians were thrown out of the World Economic Forum club in Davos.
They made their own club called "St Petersburg International Economic Forum"

>look what they're teaching in Russian schools.
>They teach kids about the essences in people to track them.
tracking essences ?
I don't understand what that means

>Literal Plato's Republic shit
Marx read the Greek classics, didn't harm him.

>eugenics stuff
it's not clear what you mean

>empires are the only way humans can really orient the state towards aims
i call bs

>politics is about selling out to the empire
it doesn't have to be, there's always an alternative

>Then the Chinese sold out to the empire
And yet here we are in a world where China offers alternative ways of development for countries all around the world

>The US as a legal institution is not the empire.
>This global network of oligarchic firms, NGOs, and institutions above the state is the form the empire takes.
I don't know if you can pin it down, i always thought the managers and henchmen of empires were flexible about what hat they wear. Like for example the German foreign minister Bearbock, she's parts of the US empire as well.

>The nation-state as a geopolitical actor was done after 1989
That's technically not true, the DPRK for example is a nation state and a geopolitical actor. Try setting up a fake NGO there. Belarus also acts a nation state. I think that state-power can override the imperial tentacles if it wants to, it's just that ideologically it doesn't want to, but not for lack of capacity.

>The capitalism Marx described was superseded by this new thing
I agree that there have been several capitalist variants since the 1800s but Marx is still correct about the core mechanisms.

>This just gets to how "mode of production" is nebulous, and is never constituted as a wholly realized "system".
You almost never have a single mode of production over the entire economy, you usually get a dominant mode of production with remnants of the previous mode of production still fading away and also parts of the more advanced mode of production already forming. That's not nebulous it just lacks clearly delineated boundaries.

>>465756
>Did you think the feudal lords liked having to recede from the empire because it was no longer functional?
They sure liked Diocletian, Constantine and other monarchs who supported aristocracy and their economic interests, so much so that soon after the last militant soldier emperor was killed and Danube regions entered the same crisis of the polis as the rest of the Empire, there was finally peace in the Empire for 50+ years.
Only it was all just the clam before the storm. Soon there would be a class war of such intensity that it would wipe the Empire off the face of the Earth, leaving only scattered feudal kingdoms. Soon the great masses of coloni will rise and fight together with the invading barbarians against the late roman army, that is no longer an army of free roman citizens, but a closed warrior military caste.
Of course the senate aristocracy would have preferred the feudal Empire of Diocletian and Constantine to last longer. And it did last much longer in the east. But this was a whole another Empire from the Ancient Roman Empire of the roman citizen-slaveowners. That Empire died in the civil wars of the third century. The landed aristocracy proved in those constant wars that it would sooner see the Empire die than to sacrifice their new economic class interests.

>>465802
<empires are the only way humans can really orient the state towards aims
>i call bs

Think about what a state actually is, rather than the pretenses that are made about it. If you want a state that is anything more than a club of men with swords or guns or a secret society where they do the paddling of the swollen ass and slap each other on the back, you need an apparatus to find men who will serve the state, feed those men and feed their activity. The ideal city-state was premised on parasitically extracting from the world everything that fed the ruling philosophers, making everyone and everything alien to the ruling ideas on purpose, but somehow operating on inertia. This doesn't work once the assumptions of a city-state with antagonistic relations in close quarters are inoperative, and it never works in its pure form. To reliably extract wealth and feed the beast, you need an empire and a whole ethos of extraction. Slavery is one way. The moral philosophy of capitalism is another. All of these apparati are imperial in purpose, and that includes socialist or communist societies. In communist societies, the collective feeds either on the world or on a group that is considered "outside of society", and so the class conflict is invisibilized. The mental invalid is a slave class in all ways today, using the same justification that was used for chattel slavery in the American South. The earliest psychiatry in America is an extension of methods used to control slaves, and psychiatry and therapy today are insanely racist when you know what these people really think. The only place where I saw more racism was in education. The typical Trumptard has nothing on the racism of the worst ivory tower liberals, and it's not all of the liberals, but it is enough of them and they set the policy. It's one reason why we still have racism even though it no longer serves any direct economic benefit, and is economically a pain in the ass due to promoting intercine conflict and resentment and the need to placate the failing white populace with racist pandering. The rulers would very much prefer not to rely on racism, and replace it with pure eugenics, and that is what the Reaganite version of racism did. The racists can't say "uyghur uyghur uyghur" any more, that hurts them, it backfires as Lee Atwater mentioned. Shifting racism to support liberal policies to suppress the poor was a deliberate switch, and the liberals learned to give enough cheap hints to the white rabble that they really mean it for the nigras, while those who figured out what this was learned that it was time to figure out which white people were "real whites" by enforcing a Hitlerian echo chamber, and kicking out any white person who wasn't a screaming maniac and accusing them of self-hatred for not going along with this cuckold ideology. There was a brief period where it seemed like white people could get over themselves, but then that was corrected from the 1990s onward to create the discourse of today.

>Marx read the Greek classics, didn't harm him.
There's a difference between understanding the classics and actually thinking it would be a good idea to do exactly that. The Republic was a thought experiment, not a how-to to implement exactly as it says. A lot of the crude interpretations in modern utopias and dystopias are things that would have been avoided if someone was familiar with how the Greeks and the Platonists in particular viewed the world. You're not supposed to actually think the Forms are the real nature of things if you get what the thinking was. It is rather that by "mastering the Forms", you're mastering how to communicate power and control the world, and control people. It's about how you present to the unwashed masses, not what you are supposed to believe yourself. Someone seemed to not get that the ideal city is not actually a utopia you would want to live in, and it actually is pretty shitty - the whole thing is premised on a grand deception and keeping up kayfabe.

<politics is about selling out to the empire
>it doesn't have to be, there's always an alternative
No, there is no alternative. The only alternative is another empire. That was an alternative in the distant past, but from the late 19th century on, all contests would be for the world. Any empire that could seriously stand against the British enterprise was nowhere near the extent of influence, when you understand what the British Empire was/is. The Germans were pretenders. The Soviet Union was not fully independent from the global system, but was an offspring of it and its necessary counterweight. In both cases, the contesting nations in WW2 didn't want to become a different empire, but inherit the one that had been created or steer its development. So you had a "British liberal" faction, a Germanic faction that wanted full reactionary eugenics, and a pro-Soviet faction that was sort of okay with the liberals on a good day when it came to internal Anglo-American politics (they had to be, there was no space for communism as an independent trend in this part of the world for a lot of reasons). There were a lot more Americans who wanted to work with the Soviet Union and thought the Cold War posturing was idiotic from the start. The anticommunist crusade was purely about enabling the Nazi types who never stopped screaming for hardline eugenics. Most Americans thought it was a bullshit pseudo-war engineered to make them suffer, and there was a lack of seriousness about the threat communism posed. This is mostly because the communists weren't threatening anything and weren't the crazy aliens they would be made out to be during the neoliberal period. It took the most extensive brainwashing effort ever to eradicate any understanding of what communism even meant. Most of the people denouncing communism in the past could tell you roughly what communism meant, because there were actual communist countries who made no secret about what they were for. Americans simply did not want communism, and it's not because they didn't understand the magic of dialectics or were too stupid for it. Communism was not in their interest, and the groups for whom it was an interest were going to get rekt and didn't have the support of international communism anyway. All the basically normal communists were scared out of the party during the 50s.

>>465804
At this time, there are actual rival empires, and contenders that want to capture or inherit Rome, or take lots of gold from it like the Huns.
"Class war" doesn't describe any of the actual wars, and often misunderstands why events like the secession of the plebs happened in the first place. There weren't any material conditions prompting the patricians to lock ranks - that was the right of the patrician nobility, and a struggle of capable plebians to quit Rome until the nobility stopped pulling the usual horseshit aristocracies did. The classes were defined by this institution of the nobility, rather than property rights. The only property the patricians held was their access to the highest offices and the religious functions of their class and institution (with the religion remaining in patrician hands for a long time, because noble blood was holy or something). The wars of history are usually between men jockeying to rule the world, rather than whole classes organized in formation. About the only war in history that is truly a "class war" is the democide going on now, where economic interests are the decisive division between who is selected to live and who is selected to die. Funny how that class war is not considered a class war, but the narrative of class war is superimposed to build a false narrative of what actually happened in historical events. The American rebellion against the Crown was not motivated by class struggle, because the colonial leaders saw themselves as an aristocracy with the same rights as other British free men. They figured out that they could shake off the crown forever, but a good number of them wanted to do nothing but make a whole new aristocracy and appoint an American king. The republic only exists because no one fucking liked the guy who really wanted to be king, and they didn't trust any of each other. Factionalism would prevent any one king from ruling. That's all it was - not a narrative of republics replacing kings because republics were virtuous, but because the new aristocracy didn't fucking like each other, and realized they had far more to gain by colluding against everyone else. The republic in all of its forms is nothing but a racket, but we have not been allowed any alternative.

There are class struggles, but the nature of those struggles is horribly misunderstood, especially when people wish to obfuscate the mechanisms of a ruling class and how they maintain discipline. The cajolers and mystifiers like the idea of a ruling class marching in lockstep and indestructible, because they see themselves in that position after the revolution and make that clear with everything they do. It also increases the glamour of making grand political gestures. The ugly truth is that ruling institutions lock ranks by compromising each other and making sure everyone plays the game, and this infects anyone who wants to play the game of politics. Ideology is for the slaves.

What has the struggle truly been for? It has been for freedom, including the freedom to simply exist and not face constant threats, as most of us do. It was not about "class war" for its own sake, but because class war was a proxy for a war against freedom and security. The oppressed classes certainly weren't free. If this were merely a theoretical exercise, class war is stupid, and collaboration between classes has been the norm rather than the exception. The ruling class like having their cuckolds in the lower classes, and the lower classes more often want to join the cycle of plunder and looting rather than end it. Truly ending it is only what the very desperate desire, and those people are systematically ignored when they hit upon solutions that would actually accomplish that. The peaceful solutions that seem reasonable enough are rejected out of hand because they would entail leniency towards the historically hated groups in humanity, while the necessarily violent solutions would entail transformations not just of institutions but of people themselves, in a way that the conceits of an aristocratic mindset cannot abide in any form. An aristocracy might be able to pretend they're just like you and me, but they know in their heart they are not, and they emphasized in eugenics exactly who they didn't want in their society, which is someone like me. The war against the hated retards was more valuable than any vision of the world where people got along, and for that reason, there was no class war. There was only the democide.

>>465757
>There was always plenty of arible land in the empire, especially so at that particular time with the Antonine Plague literally decimating the population.
That there was plenty of "free land" is proven wrong by the fast growth of the colonate at the time, which was a form of exploitation exclusive to the large landowners and Emperor's estates. This indicates a growing concentration of land.

>Come to think of it, I don't know about that "600k strong" figure, considering the Plague hit the army harder than it hit any other segment of the population. The number of individuals surviving twenty years in the Roman army during the time of the Antonine Plague would have been few indeed.
Plague would only affect the numbers for twenty years after it had ended max. Anyway, this would have only further exacerbated the crisis of the polis.

>The regions that Marcus Aurelius had recently pacified, yeah. You can't rightly give credit for the success of Dacia to Commodus. It would have been difficult to fuck that up after his father's legions did all the work.
I don't give credit to Commodus for any military achievements. I give credit to his policy of land expropriations that objectively had a positive effect on the polis economy and decurion class.

>I don't think that ideology played much part in the birth of the new bureaucratic aristocracy (as opposed to the old aristocracy that emperors had spent the previous two-hundred years killing).
Imperial bureaucracy was not a social force in itself, ie a class. Its position was fragile and depended entirely on the mercy of the army, which represented interests of the municipal roman citizenry.

>Rather, I think that it had become an inescapible reality that rule by the sword with only the barest pretext toward republicanism was how the empire must operate. The Antonine Plagues, the instability caused by the civil wars that flared up every time an emperor was assassinated, the aggression of the Parthians, and the economic stagnation of the Pax Romana all made centrally governing a Medierannean-wide empire increasingly unsustainable. It needed to be broken into pieces with aristocrats with their own little armies independently controling their own regions, which was, more than anything else, the key to Diocletian's success.
I see all the external shocks, such as the plague and the external threats, to be marginal. In the bloody civil wars of the first century BC Rome was waging constant wars on the side with all kinds of external shocks. And yet Rome was never even close to collapse.
Again, the crisis had something to do with the changes in the economy, because you see a growing trend of immiseration of the free roman citizenship with such symptoms as citizens selling their children into slavery, decurions struggling with their financial responsibilities, etc. It's characteristic that Commodus reemphisized again that free roman citizens can't be sold into slavery, including by their parents, and passed a law that severely punished such behavior.

>I know what Marx said, but I do not buy that "feudalism" was anything fundamentally different from what he called "slavery." It was more like the aristocratic class adapting the state to account for the effects of de-urbanization.
Well, one distinct characteristic of colonate compared to slavery was that, as Diocletian pointed out, they were "slaves to their land", as opposed to slaves to their owner. In practice that meant that landlord bought land with peasants who were tied to this land due to them being born on it, and the landlord couldn't sell the peasant without also selling the land that he is tied to. While in antiquity you bought slaves who were not tied to the land.
This is a distinct form of exploitation compared to the ancient slavery, where slaves were employed in all sorts of activities.

>This was just the same thing that Caligula had done a century earlier kill rich guys you don't like, steal their shit, and give the spoils to the military. As was the case during Caligula's rule, it was nothing more than robbery to fill empty coffers that were needed to keep the military loyal.
Caligula ruled only for four years. His expropriations were very individually targeted and not comparable to that of Commodus (including because there wasn't such a massive concentration of land at the time).

>Nah, Domitian holds that distinction, although his father Vespasian is said to have given him the idea.
The term "soldier emperors" is used in the context of the crisis of the third century. Landed aristocracy was in its embryonic state at the time of Domitian.

>>465757
>I know what Marx said, but I do not buy that "feudalism" was anything fundamentally different from what he called "slavery."
Also, coloni were exploited differently from slaves in the past (slaves in the third century were largely exploited as coloni).
They were exploited as peasants - they were given a plot of land that they worked and paid to the landlord with a share of the produce.

>>465808
>Think about what a state actually is
implying a state is the same as an empire.
The Soviet Union had a state but it wasn't an empire
>There's a difference between understanding the classics
Sure but there's no reason to think people can't understand it by reading it.
>No, there is no alternative. The only alternative is another empire.
There's always an alternative. The TINA mantra from the Neo-liberals is false.
>The Soviet Union was not fully independent from the global system, but was an offspring of it
That's patently false
>and its necessary counterweight
Although i do agree with that

>>465809
>If this were merely a theoretical exercise, class war is stupid, and collaboration between classes has been the norm rather than the exception.
Sounds like reactionary apologetics.

>>465779
Man, you were even more drunk when you wrote that silly shit than I was last night, weren't you?
>>465802
>it's not clear what you mean
That guy is high.
>And yet here we are in a world where China offers alternative ways of development for countries all around the world
Capitalist "development" is not an alternative. It's the same devil's bargain in a red and yellow package.
>>465804
>And it did last much longer in the east.
A thousand years longer. It's a wonder that the Byzantines do not get more love, in a historical nostalgia sense. The capital of the empire was in Constantinople far longer than it was in Rome.
>But this was a whole another Empire from the Ancient Roman Empire of the roman citizen-slaveowners.
I don't buy that the Byzantine Empire was different, frankly. It looks to me more like the empire had been undergoing incremental changes from the moment that Pompey the Great established the grain supply, and it never reached any kind of conclusion, politically speaking, until Mehmed II dragged his ships around the chain. Where the Roman Empire ended is ultimately just a question of framing. If the "Roman Empire" was the economic system that brought wealth in the form of slaves and grain to the city of Rome from the rest of the Mediterranean, then it ended with the loss of the grain supply from Egypt, or maybe even when the capital efectively moved to Milan. If the "Roman Empire" was a particular class dominating the Mediterranean, then it had existed before the Republic fell and didn't really die until Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

What, after all, is the difference between a slaver and an aristocrat? I would contend that there is no real class distinction to be made, regardless of what Marx thought. Slavers and aristocrats have the exact same relationship to those who produce their wealth for them–armed men force them to work on their owner's behalf or die. In terms of the Roman Empire, the only difference between them appears to me to be merely that one operates in an urban environment, and the other operates in the countryside.

>>465808
>"Class war" doesn't describe any of the actual wars, and often misunderstands why events like the secession of the plebs happened in the first place.
What about massive coloni uprisings that welcomed invading barbarians all over the western empire in the late fourth century? If this is not class war I dunno what else is.

>>465817
>Capitalist "development" is not an alternative. It's the same devil's bargain in a red and yellow package.
Most of the Chinese foreign investment is done by SOEs (state owned enterprises) who are bound by political considerations, and China does a lot of debt forgiveness, so it's not a devils bargain.
The Chinese are of course self interested, and want to get something out of it too, but it tends towards mutually beneficial agreements, rather than neo-collonial pillaging with financial characteristics.

It's about 12:30 pm in central burgerstan. Comrade dunning kruger must have just woken up

>>465818
It's more like "there's a lot of barbarians who have just been fucked over by Rome, and the Roman Empire is run by sadistic gangsters, so better the new boss than the old boss". The barbarians setting up shop were using fleeing to the Empire and working with the Empire. There was a history of this where the Romans let barbarians enter the empire in exchange for service in the army. It was a way of acquiring manpower both for the legions and for farm labor, since the slave supply was running out. Those barbarians were fleeing from each other and especially the Huns when they came knocking.

The barbarians weren't an oppressed class, but an alien within the empire that eventually looked to their own chiefs rather than Rome for leadership, since Rome wasn't doing much for them and couldn't lead anything by that point. It's less that the coloni had a choice in the matter, then the simple reality that there was nothing left of "Rome" except the military and the bureaucracy, and eventually the "military" part was supplied by, you guessed it, the barbarians offering their service - not as members of the legion, but fighting under their own kings. If all that remains of Rome is a predatory bureaucracy, of course the locals are going to be happy to accept the new boss. Rome didn't have anything like a national myth for the provincials, or any "Roman" ideology. The provincials usually retained many of their own customs and had local elites, who often intermarried with Italian elites. Rome survived because they were the biggest game in town, and meant economic and military stability. That was what Rome had been to most of the colonies.

The idea that the invading barbarians were taking the side of the peasants is rather curious. Perhaps the Goths and Vandals were better lords than the Romans, but it wasn't really going to be a choice of the coloni, unless the coloni developed patriotism. Serfs, unsurprisingly, are not very patriotic.

>>465818
You might find more class war in the East, where class struggles would have been more at the forefront due to being basically the economic center of the empire. There still wasn't really a concept of class struggle at that time in history. There was a struggle over religion - paganism was the religion of the ruralites and the elite aristocracy and many of the intelligentsia, and Christianity was the equivalent of bluehaired anarchists propped up by the empire to have a replacement cult. Once the Christians got in they conspired to keep themselves there, and made people convert and go along with their fruity cult if they wanted to keep their job. They were the new normalists of their time, and Christianity had that legacy going for it up to now. But, Christianity was really class collaborationist, and paganism didn't care about class so much because it had always been about an elite lording over the fools. It was fag versus fag, as I like to call such lose-lose situations for anyone who believed in something decent.

The religious struggle was the closest proxy to class struggle - because it shouldn't be forgotten that to mean anything in politics at this time, you either had to be a rich proprietor or you had to be a soldier. The civilian path to rule was pretty much closed. You have to make your way into the imperial college and play that game. Also, the barbarians represented a wholly different element and a whole different system, and the steppe tribes were pushing against everyone at this period - they're active against Iran and China as well, and shit is going really bad for virtually everyone. It's not the situation where you can really have revolution, and when there is revolution it was often religious in nature.

I recall reading about a proto-communist-like class struggle in Iran during the 6th century, where a holy man starts talking about shit like feeding the poor and doing one better than Christianity's reputation for charity. There were questions of the failure of their country, which is one reason they were getting stomped by the Romans shortly afterward and then got BTFO by Islam.

In that time and place, there was no vehicle for the subordinated classes to do much, unless they could rise through a very small number of institutions to make something of themselves. It really remained the case all along. The workers' struggle in modernity was fighting a bitter retreat from the rulers' offensive. You have to believe that the state is a primarily passive actor to believe in the narrative that the working class is the conspiratorial party, always ahead of the curve and duping the foolish aristocrats. It was the other way around - the workers were scattered regularly and every victory was bitterly contested and then muted almost as soon as the workers finally won. The workers didn't fight because they believed they had a long-term strategy for their own class, but because they were basically forced to fight or die. Eugenics was already making clear its genocidal plans towards the end of the 19th century, and the workers were already on the defensive after the ruling institutions redoubled their offensive. The state is always a very active institution, not a passive one. Having a legal monopoly on violence is something a state will use very often - that's what states do every day. The idea that order is maintained by passivity is illusory. States reproduce themselves every day in a million diffferent ways, and then the mystification is sold as ideology to claim this is all passive and natural. It's an old trick, but in the 21st century it is running out of steam and no longer desirable for the rulers even if they wanted to keep it. The new order of things displays the activity of the state in the things it actually values, which is the imposition of eugenics - since eugenics is what keeps the alliance of interests that can rule together more than anything else. That's their ride and die and their weapon against those who are locked out.

>>465826
What's your definition of eugenics?

I'm sure I'm an outlier here, but I support eugenics in the most basic and literal sense. Imo, societies are either eugenic (in which case, heritable health and adapativeness is improving) or it's dysgenic (degrading). I see this in the most basic and literal sense, stripped of class context. There isn't really a middle ground where the genetic condition of a species ceases to develop or change, either for better or worse. Obviously, modern society, especially in the west is highly dysgenic (except penis size apparently). As a correlary, I think epigenetics is the most important factor when it comes to genetic changes, not necessarily telling xyz type people that they mustn't have children. Nor am I for imposing a singular standard of what genetic health means (though I think we can broadly describe what genetic disease and degradation is - morbid obesity and slavish mental lethargy for example).

This, of course, is in line with the OP:
>the expansion of personal and collective capability and achievement

I have a feeling we are somewhat on the same page,
since you've hinted at a critique of technocratic oligarchy, and we're just using the term differently. But I'm still curious as to what you mean by eugenics since it's something you frequently mention.
Even if we disagree on this issue, your opinion on this is something I'd still find interesting and perhaps informative.
>Comments from comrade dunning kruger will be ignored. He should go try to convince normal people of his revolutionary expertise and brilliance, or at least go outside and touch grass.

>>465817
>It's a wonder that the Byzantines do not get more love, in a historical nostalgia sense.
You heard my point of view. I view it as one of the feudal shards of the roman empire equivalent to the Frankish Kingdom.
The primary characteristic for me is the mode of production and the corresponding social content of the empire. I don't care about what emblems you put on your banners and what language you speak. All throughout history various societies claimed to be the successor of the empire - all while being nothing like it.

>I don't buy that the Byzantine Empire was different, frankly.
Well, that's what denying the difference between feudalism and ancient slavery does to you.

>It looks to me more like the empire had been undergoing incremental changes from the moment that Pompey the Great established the grain supply, and it never reached any kind of conclusion, politically speaking, until Mehmed II dragged his ships around the chain.
If the changes were truly incremental there would be no social explosions and prolonged bitter civil wars. There are weeks where decades happen.
Also Africa was a breadbasket no less than Egypt.

>If the "Roman Empire" was the economic system that brought wealth in the form of slaves and grain to the city of Rome from the rest of the Mediterranean, then it ended with the loss of the grain supply from Egypt, or maybe even when the capital efectively moved to Milan.
The roman empire was the global (for mediterannian) political system of the ancient polis communes and their corresponding mode of production.
When the ancient polis died - so did the empire.

>If the "Roman Empire" was a particular class dominating the Mediterranean, then it had existed before the Republic fell and didn't really die until Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
How so, when the class composition has changed? You talk as if it's the same class throughout history.
I can make the same argument that we are still living in feudalism because majority of Britbong capitalists came out of the feudal class.

>What, after all, is the difference between a slaver and an aristocrat? I would contend that there is no real class distinction to be made, regardless of what Marx thought. Slavers and aristocrats have the exact same relationship to those who produce their wealth for them–armed men force them to work on their owner's behalf or die.
There is a difference in *how* they produce the surplus for the ruling classes from one mode of production to another.
Else you can reduce all history to "armed men force people to work" - it has no explanatory power for the observed massive social changes throughout history.

>Also Africa was a breadbasket no less than Egypt.
to clarify, I mean Africa as a roman province, not a continent.

>>465812
>That there was plenty of "free land" is proven wrong by the fast growth of the colonate at the time
That is not proof at all. All that shows is consolidation, which would have happened in an environment where huge swathes of the population were dying of what was probably smallpox. And let us not forget that Marcus Aurelius had only recently won territories with legions that had since been largely annihilated by plague. There was plenty of good land to be had.
>Plague would only affect the numbers for twenty years after it had ended max.
It hadn't been twenty years since the first outbreak, and the plague kept coming back in waves during Commodus' reign. The legions were utterly laid waste.
>I don't give credit to Commodus for any military achievements. I give credit to his policy of land expropriations that objectively had a positive effect on the polis economy and decurion class.
I would think that the influx of slaves and spoils that his father claimed had a greater effect. Conquest always brought about good economic times in the Classical Age. With empires, military campaigns are economics.
>I see all the external shocks, such as the plague and the external threats, to be marginal.
"Marginal?" The Antonine Plague killed more people than the civil wars did, even by the most conservative estimates. Commodus himself likely lost siblings to it. The plague more than the Germanic tribes had halted Marcus Aurelius' conquests.
>as Diocletian pointed out, they were "slaves to their land", as opposed to slaves to their owner.
That effectively concerns only how slaves/serfs are traded between lords. The relationship of the individuals themselves to the means of production is the same. Furthermore, slaves are useless without land to work, so both slave-based production and serf-based production worked out to the same combination of violently compelled labor combined with land claimed be way of upper class rule. Strip all of the legal fictions like "ownership" and "duty" away from the material relationships to the means of production, and "feudalism" is just the same machine with a new paint job.
>This is a distinct form of exploitation compared to the ancient slavery, where slaves were employed in all sorts of activities.
That harkens back to my point earlier about the distinction between a slaver and an aristocrat being that one operates on rural land and the other operates on urban land. Slaves, being employed in urban environments, had a lot more varied functions to perform than did serfs who only really had rural land to work.
>His expropriations were very individually targeted and not comparable to that of Commodus
How are they not? Both Caligula and Commodus killed rich guys that they didn't like to steal their wealth and give it to the soldiery to garner loyalty. It was the exact same act with the exact same motivations, and I don't imagine that Commodus chose who to terminate with any less than extreme predjudice.
>The term "soldier emperors" is used in the context of the crisis of the third century.
Yeah, but killing senators to steal their shit to bribe the soldiery with was not an idea that was conceived during the chaotic reign of Commodus or the Barracks Emperors.
>Landed aristocracy was in its embryonic state at the time of Domitian.
Perhaps if you draw a clear distinction between Imperial Era slavers and aristocrats, but I see no reason to do so, especially not before the diocese were established.

>>465824
>The idea that the invading barbarians were taking the side of the peasants is rather curious. The invading barbarians were peasants.
>>465825
>There still wasn't really a concept of class struggle at that time in history
Oh, there absolutely was. The most powerful office in the senate apart from maybe the two consuls was the Tribune of the Plebs who had sweeping veto powers, which he was expected to employ to prevent the aristocracy from enacting policies that would be harmful to the plebians. The social distinction between slaves and plebians was well-entrenched, even when emperors started using slaves as advisors. The small rural landholders, most notably in Egypt, were also their own nascent order. Truthfully, class had been at the forefront of the social order from the first time that some asshole declared himself king until about seventy years ago when it began to be intentionally obscured.

>>465826
>In that time and place, there was no vehicle for the subordinated classes to do much, unless they could rise through a very small number of institutions to make something of themselves.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.

>>465836
In fact the Tribune of the Plebs was an office that itself was created from a historic general strike of the plebeian class, the Secession of the Plebs. The plebeians orchestrated general strikes multiple times in the first few centuries of the Republic. Anyone who claims there wasn't a class conflict doesn't know Roman history.

>>465834
Beautiful bust.
Take notion of the symbolism - Commodus as Hercules - one of the most venerated religious figures in the third century - holding the apples of the Hesperides in his hand - the symbols of fertility and prosperity - with the horns of plenty below him.
Very ideological, don't you think?.. Nah, must be because he is just a madman and thinks he is a literal Hercules or something.. nothing to do with politics.. everyone knows that Hercules is a just a silly country bumpkin..

>>465830
I refer to the program of Francis Galton in particular, and similar such drives to police through strict taboos who is allowed to mate with whom. If you wanted to selectively breed for whatever quality, you wouldn't do anything like the program Galton suggests, with its insinuations and brazen lying at every step of the process. If they didn't lie, though, the hypocrisy and stupidity of their claims would be too obvious. This was nothing but a coup to destroy what little good there was in the empire. Eugenics as a policy has meant in practice dysgenics. It has split humanity into two camps, with every dysgenic habit imaginable promoted among those selected to die. Those selected to live are bred not for any quality we would consider good, but for nothing more than a low cunning and obedience to Galton's coup. Today's ruling elite is a pale shadow of those who built this system - but of course, the people who actually built this apparatus saw eugenics as a means to an end, and knew it was bullshit. Retards like Galton and the screamers that latch onto eugenics are the worst of the ruling elite, offering nothing but terror and lies. They're the worst thing to happen to this cursed Satanic country, and the whole world. They're worse than the Nazis.

I rather doubt you could accomplish anything by selective breeding except the culling of the residuum, which would be repopulated because the conditions of eugenics are deprivation and overwhelming fear. Even a benign eugenics program would only amount to population control and clearly political objectives. That is what such policies meant in the past where they have existed - they were less about any marked improvement in hereditary traits, and more about ritual sacrifice that has been the original moral code of the human race. Generations of eugenics have not led to any improvement, let alone the grandiose claims the eugenic faithful believe in. The eugenic faithful themselves are depraved and usually insane, and their intelligence is always of a low sort. So far as intelligence has improved, it has been due to arranged pairings that occur in secret, without Galton's bullshit involved at all. There's an underground world where the intelligent figure out who's actually smart and decide among each other who they believe will live and die. Galton's project is purely about exterminating anyone who is caught in the trap, to ensure that no one who isn't approved can become anything. It exists entirely for social control and behavior modification. That's why it resorts to moral shrieking and always resorts to an absolute insanity, rather than anything that would be practical. They could just say who is allowed to mate and who is not, but that would be too decent. The entire point is to transgress all decencies, because decency itself is a trait to be abolished.

Since I'm in that group selected to die, I'm obviously not thrilled about anyone suggesting I should be put to death or relegated to the desultory existence I live now. I really think humanity didn't need state intervention or this purge that consumed so much of the world's wealth and destroys the valid by wasting them on Galton's perverse insanity. It is also unlikely that marked improvements to intelligence by heredity would be better than the long-term damage over a century of maladaptive education has done to humanity. We've been made far stupider and denied even simple solution, because education and society are set up as a giant trap to weed out the majority of people, all for eugenics. If people were allowed an education worth anything, or allowed standards of comparison to know how much they've been lied to, they would resist eugenic encroachment. Every eugenic policy has been proclaimed with an imposed crisis and threats. They knew they were never going to persuade many people to go along with Galton's program, or any eugenics program.
If you ask me, the entire welfare state is set up for eugenic purposes and with perverse incentives. If support were given to families so that the working class could retain their standing and wealth, that would be far better than giving a desultory existence on the dole on the condition that welfare recipients are tagged as morally bad and evil and worth purging. We punish people who fall on hard times or are unfortuante, and it is really a lot of cost just to keep people damaged, while depriving them of any purpose beyond being whipped and judged for eugenic qualities. Eugenics as a policy, Galtonite or otherwise, must consume the whole society in inhabits and become life's prime want - and this means life's prime want is suffering. Galton's eugenics is just the purest form of this, which is one reason it won out of all the variants of eugenics. Galton's moral and political philosophy is basically Satanism, announced as loud as possible and maximizing the thrill of torture. That is what they are. They're the worst thing in the world.

I mentioned technocracy in some past writings. It is not one and the same as eugenics, because they represent a different interest and it is one that has many antagonisms with eugenics. They don't care about the magic genes - they simply care about holding the machines and extracting their pound of flesh. Many of the technocrats know they are nothing special and know not to believe in the mystique of science they tell to the plebs. I'm writing again and I note three interests latent in the philosophical conception of the state - the eugenic, the technological, and the "cybernetic", or roughly speaking a drive in the state to get rid of the managers by automating them. This last interest would have entailed a few things:
- the working class is dragged into technological society by the technocrats
- the working class is eliminated by the eugenists
- the working class seizes both their lives and the machines, not just with a claim to property or by institutional authority, but in their own person.
Since the working class is not one monolith, and the other interests ultimately have to draw from men of humble origins to populate the state and higher classes to start, these are not mutually exclusive.
The right to property is not inherent in the philosophical concept of the state. Just about every philosophical concept of the state does not have regard for a particular type of property or any "rights" you would have for it. Plato's ideal imagined wealth held in common. Many other takes imagined the base of society being the real wealth and health of the productive basis that creates crops and soldiers, and allowed for some concept that wealth could be pooled collectively on a smaller or larger scale. So, the rights of the proprietor are really represented by one of these three interests in one way or another. The eugenic corresponds to the interest of those who aspire to rule through fear and imperium, and that is the basis for all eugenics-like plans for humanity, which imagine society as livestock to be controlled utterly. The technological interest corresponds to a coalition of work types found among all classes that imagine transformation that perpetuates their interest before anything else. Their role is not inherent to nature or a "basic task" that humans perform, but something that arose that does not correspond to any single division of labor, and has an interest in eliminating that division of labor, and thus it does not have the same affinity for classes that a eugenic society has. The rise of the technological interest is the rise of class consciousness in a sense we would recognize. Earlier concepts of the state and society were purely about religious institutions or clans, while the philosophical state relating to individuals and promoting empires creates a niche for technological advancement and a class of specialists that were previously limited in scope. The technological interest arises out of both necessity and opportunity, but it can only arise in earnest when specialized knowledge and a theory of perpetuating knowledge formally becomes normal - that is, when philosophy expounds on ideas and education becomes something more than a crude method of passing status to prospective youth. The cybernetic interest corresponds to both the interest of workers, who fucking hate managers telling them what to do and running their life, and the dispossessed and damned - the retarded - who are the only ones in the whole society who actually want the entire cycle to end for everyone. There are occasional hangers-on among the other classes that entertain this idea of getting rid of the managers, but they cannot win so long as the conceits of the other two interests are dominant. The eugenic and technological interests are antagonistic, but in our time they formed an explicit alliance, which is what eugenics really did. Before eugenics was formalized and imposed on the world, there was a genuine conflict between rising industrial technology and the eugenic interest in forcing humanity into livestock. You still see this antagonism play out in the discourse, but the seeming "factions" in the ruling system are more performative. Those in the know are always careful to never attack each other directly, and enjoy sending proxies to kill each other for an alien cause.
It's a complicated theory to explain here, which is why I'm writing. I have to rewrite and I think I'm going to spin off my method and the writing on the state into separate books for brevity, since they go over a lot of material that is well known and I need to make clear my approach before proceeding with the overall view of society. Right now at the rate I'm going the final book would be about 2,000 pages if I go into excruciating detail, so I need to condense some of the explanatory stuff about the method and direct to a summary for those who are super nerdy and into my system.

To go back to the original point; if there is a way to improve the actual health of people in society, I would be open to it. I don't celebrate sickness and I hate being the way I am. The way I am isn't genetic so they're barking up the wrong tree with that. My genes are from the same sort of stock that populate the English aristocracy with a stick up their ass and I know for a fact they don't have any special sauce that makes them living gods. It's a mass delusion. I don't see any point in this level of braying over who has the best pedigree, when it is clear humanity is really fucking stupid and has clear methods to improve living standards and not do this stupid shit that destroyed my whole family and this whole country. Eugenics destroyed America through and through, and it was all for a Satanic lie. Eugenics is a piss poor way to make the antiseptic pure society of beautiful people only they imagine, and the Galtonites' idea of beauty is faggotry anyway. I am a beautiful creature who was marred by their institutional bullshit and the poison put into the youth starting in the 1980s. So are most of the people in humanity. There is no real pressing need to kill off the people. The people were never going to rebel, but that was just a pretext. They simply don't want us and would rather have their Satanic orgy-porgy, and chose to sacrifice everything we would like so that they get their jollies. That's all it was for. Unfortunately, we can't say humanity ever was anything else as a project. So, if we wanted something different, we would have to think of something very new, rather than try to rehabilitate past failures. We can learn from the past to see what clearly doesn't work, like republican ideas of government or the conceits inherent to that form of government, but we're being herded towards a kind of despotism that doesn't allow us to call it despotism and emphasizes the worst aspects of republicanism and despotism combined, which is called philosophical anarchism. It's a damned travesty that all this potential I saw growing up is thrown away so a bunch of Satanic retards can tell us they're gods. It's fucking gay.

>>465831
Rome wasn't just the social content imagined in one moment - socially and economically the empire shifted over its existence in some big ways, as it grew from just another Italian city-state to this sprawling beast with a US-tier appetite for death before the Principate came about. The army would be rejigged many times and with it the basis for how politics was conducted changed, since Rome was oriented around the legions in one way or another rather than a consistent ideology.

Why people call themselves the successor of Rome is because inheriting imperium is a big fucking deal. It's like apostolic succession, but for the Satan. You don't just start anew with the power of life and death. That's why the eugenic creed knew what to target and what to make sacrosanct and only accessible to eugenics. By claiming the right to control life, eugenics was claiming imperium and the true basis for the law - and as we know, eugenics does not believe in law, and goes out of its way to transgress any law except the law of eugenics, which is the law of Satanism - the will to power gone apeshit. They would need to claim imperium and then insist on absolute control to secure the coup and create the "conditions of eugenics". The choice of Satanism for the eugenic ethos is not accidental - it is the religion most compatible with the exercise of imperium eugenics must assert.

>>465836
Class had always been understood, but "class struggle" as a going concern is unusual. Classes do not struggle out of some essence. Institutions struggle, and masses of people who are pressed into action by institutions struggle. Classes without institutions to call their own cannot rebel until they form their own institutions and their own base. That is how the bourgeois were able to attain status - they became lawyers and scientists and all the things an early modern state really wants and encourages, and had a revenue stream to feed their activities which favored overseas trade and conquest. If you want that East India Company making ridiculous wealth from over there, you aren't going to get some nobles to do it, because they are invested in their landed estates at home. A merchant class and anyone with the cunning to rise in that world made themselves in that time, and many times the people who rose were nobody in particular. The American aristocracy were basically nobody of note, none of whom would seem selected for greatness. Class struggles weren't always "class struggles". By the time the French monarchy is going to shit, just about nobody, royalist or liberal, believed monarchy was salvageable as it existed. The narrative of Jacobins guillotining royals for a class purge sounds great to a noob, but it's not how it actually happened. The turn against liberal nobles only happened against those it did happen to because the Jacobins were going off the deep end and there were calls to rein in Robespierre. The mob of Paris was motivated because food was unaffordable and the king was gloating about starving out the unworthies because of course he does. They can join Danton's mob to get rid of that asshole, or they can eat cake. It's not like the Jacobins tricked or lied to the people to get them to hate the king. The king conspiring to send a foreign army to slaughter his own subjects pretty much made any doubters acknowledge that fucker needs to go. Then the royal assholes decide to declare war on France because they can't stand the idea of commoners having anything, then get BTFO by the first mass army and really really hate the idea of any mass army.

>>465834
>That is not proof at all. All that shows is consolidation, which would have happened in an environment where huge swathes of the population were dying of what was probably smallpox. And let us not forget that Marcus Aurelius had only recently won territories with legions that had since been largely annihilated by plague. There was plenty of good land to be had.
Coloni at the time were free roman citizens. It was their legal status, distinct from the slaves. At the heyday of the empire free citizens farmed their plot of land with some slaves, took part in the municipal life of their polis, fulfilled their municipal duties. You had no such phenomenon as mass bondage of free citizens as coloni.
It must be that free citizens became coloni of some landlord out of the good life, because there was just so much "free fertile land" laying around.. and there was no such phenomena as raider takeovers of the polis lands by landlords and the arbitrary moving of the landmarks that required a special attention of the emperor with a rescript..

>I would think that the influx of slaves and spoils that his father claimed had a greater effect. Conquest always brought about good economic times in the Classical Age. With empires, military campaigns are economics.
By that time the municipal slaveowners didn't need more slaves, they were struggling with their own. It was landed aristocracy who was in a constant state of labor shortage - from this you had incessant whining how "good" emperors should go conquer more barbarians and bring prisoners to toil the landlords lands and images of kneeling barbarians on the coins of the Gallic Empire.

>"Marginal?" The Antonine Plague killed more people than the civil wars did, even by the most conservative estimates. Commodus himself likely lost siblings to it. The plague more than the Germanic tribes had halted Marcus Aurelius' conquests.
The actual numbers are widely disputed.
It's not about how much the civil wars killed, it's about the relations of production and their effects on the social classes and their material position.

>That effectively concerns only how slaves/serfs are traded between lords. The relationship of the individuals themselves to the means of production is the same. Furthermore, slaves are useless without land to work, so both slave-based production and serf-based production worked out to the same combination of violently compelled labor combined with land claimed be way of upper class rule. Strip all of the legal fictions like "ownership" and "duty" away from the material relationships to the means of production, and "feudalism" is just the same machine with a new paint job.
Further into feudalism the land was no longer traded too.
The relationship of the individual is also not the same. In the classical antiquity you had slaves working in a small estate with their owner, or working without owner in a medium estate. Or working in large latifundias that produced more specialized cultures that were more labor intensive and required specialization. Or they worked in a craft workshop. Or they were sent to the cities to work as hired day laborers. Or they were made freedmen by their master, but required by the roman laws to support their patron and his family. I hope you get the drift.

While as a coloni you are tied to your land, not even your landlord can free you from it. You get your individual plot of land and work it individually with your family and pay your landlord with your produce.
If this is not a different relationship, I dunno what else is.

>That harkens back to my point earlier about the distinction between a slaver and an aristocrat being that one operates on rural land and the other operates on urban land. Slaves, being employed in urban environments, had a lot more varied functions to perform than did serfs who only really had rural land to work.
The difference is that large latifundias of the ancient slaveowners mainly produced specialized cultures for the market, while the economy of a feudal landlord is largely naturalized. Obviously with the decline of the polis life and the money economy there was no place for such latifundias anymore.

>How are they not? Both Caligula and Commodus killed rich guys that they didn't like to steal their wealth and give it to the soldiery to garner loyalty. It was the exact same act with the exact same motivations, and I don't imagine that Commodus chose who to terminate with any less than extreme predjudice.
One seem to have killed his personal enemies to finance his construction spree, while the other seem to have a political and ideological program - Hercules, the new golden age, the new founding of Rome, etc.. In other words an ideological program of "renewal"

>Yeah, but killing senators to steal their shit to bribe the soldiery with was not an idea that was conceived during the chaotic reign of Commodus or the Barracks Emperors.
"stealing" implies that they got their property by their own labor. There is nothing wrong in looting the looters.

>Perhaps if you draw a clear distinction between Imperial Era slavers and aristocrats, but I see no reason to do so, especially not before the diocese were established.
It's simple. Nascent feudal aristocracy used colonate as their method of choice to extract the surplus product.

>>465857
My reaction to this whole thread. People seem to have nothing better to do.

The other leftist imageboard censors anything good so as far as I know this is the only game in town. It's a dire situation.

>>465860
Well if you want to post nothing but pepes and le heckin soyjackarinos go to 4chan

>ZOMG GUIS WHY ARE YOU HAVING AN INTELLECTUAL CONVERSATION ON A LEFTIST IMAGE BOARD CAN'T WE JUST POST ONE MAN ONE JAR FOR THE 1MILLIONTH TIME?

>>465844
You really have a thing for that LARPer.
>Very ideological, don't you think?
No, it's narcissistic cosplay, which is what he did regularly in public.
>Nah, must be because he is just a madman and thinks he is a literal Hercules or something.
That would definitely appear to be the more likely scenario given how he liked to play at being a gladiator.
>nothing to do with politics..
Nothing about the reign of Commodus suggests that he had any political acumen whatsoever. We are talking about the guy who crashed the Antonine Dynasty.
>>465855
>It must be that free citizens became coloni of some landlord out of the good life, because there was just so much "free fertile land" laying around.
Are we talking about Roman plebs or are we talking about veterans of the legions?
>and there was no such phenomena as raider takeovers of the polis lands by landlords and the arbitrary moving of the landmarks that required a special attention of the emperor with a rescript..
I seem to recall Augustus (or was it Tiberius?) dealing with that little scheme in his day, but he did so by convincing the senate to condemn the offenders so that it would be regared as an act of justice rather than an arbitrary assassination of his own political opponents. That is the way that someone who is good at politics handles such a situation.
>By that time the municipal slaveowners didn't need more slaves, they were struggling with their own.
How long had it been since there had been an actual slave revolt at that point? Two-hundred years? The slavers weren't struggling that badly.
>It was landed aristocracy who was in a constant state of labor shortage - from this you had incessant whining how "good" emperors should go conquer more barbarians and bring prisoners to toil the landlords lands and images of kneeling barbarians on the coins of the Gallic Empire.
Or they could just invite barbarians in like they often did.
>The actual numbers are widely disputed.
That is why I cited the most conservative estimate of about five-million dead which would have been about ten percent of the population of the Empire.
>It's not about how much the civil wars killed, it's about the relations of production and their effects on the social classes and their material position.
Catastrophic demographic changes have a tendency to do exactly that, especially when they most affect specific groups, like slaves, soldiers, and people who live in hubs of trade. The plagues that kept rolling in after the initial outbreak of the Antonine Plague encouraged deurbanization.
>While as a coloni you are tied to your land, not even your landlord can free you from it.
Not in theory anyway. Of course, what is legal theory to a lord on his own land and with his own armed thugs?
>You get your individual plot of land and work it individually with your family and pay your landlord with your produce.
Yep, the farmer keeps what he needs to sustain himself and surrenders the rest.
>If this is not a different relationship, I dunno what else is.
A different relationship to the means of production? If the means of production in question are arable land, then both slave (imagining a slave farmer and not an urban slave) and serf have the same material relation to it–they are compelled by threat of violence to make the land produce both their own subsistence and surplus for its claimant. If we are talking about just physical relationships to the means of production, slaves and serfs belong to the same class.

Also, the arguable classes that were had been discussing were slavers and aristocrats, not their respective subordinates. How would you say the relationships of slavers and aristocrats to the means of production differ?
>One seem to have killed his personal enemies to finance his construction spree, while the other seem to have a political and ideological program - Hercules, the new golden age, the new founding of Rome, etc.. In other words an ideological program of "renewal"
They were both just vanity projects, but at least Caligula made things that people could use later.
>It's simple. Nascent feudal aristocracy used colonate as their method of choice to extract the surplus product.
See, that is just a legal framing of the relationship between an upper class and a lower class. Class is defined by an individual's relationship to the means of production.

>>465866
Go back, trawny

>>465869
No u

>>465867
Ok, I really need to expand on how I view the Roman history in general so you can understand where I am coming from.

First, the basic foundational element of the roman and ancient way of life is civitas - a polis commune. A commune with common polis lands, assembly, magistracies, division of labor by "orders" and all the bells and whistles that come with it. This commune by its very nature produces slavery because to enable expanded reproduction of the polis beyond the family unit and a mutual neighbor help you need non-citizens.
The foundation of the civitas, a citizen who can take part in the public life of the polis (including deciding agrarian policy) - a self-sufficient free farmer.
The polis ideology was such that wealthier citizens were morally required to "take care" of their poorer brethren. From this you have what in general could be called "bread and circuses" and later in the Empire basically basic income for the poorest citizens of Rome.
The poorest citizens of Rome in the course of its history have won some concessions including a say in the decisions of agrarian policy. They got land all around Italy and then the Meditterain.

Long story short, for the last century of the Republic for the large part the Roman state was conducting a program of the populares in its agrarian policy. The Emperors of the first century for the most part continued this program by confiscating the lands of large landowners and redistributing them to the citizens.
Then came the Antonines who were the henchmen of the senate, who branded the previous emperors as "tyrants", who ended the practice of land redistributions, and so you see a rapid growth of large landownership, with the first landowner and the feudal being the Emperor himself (the villas of the emperor were among the first to widely use colonate on their lands), which was a death warrant to the Roman civitas and the roman army and so to the Roman Empire itself as a political entity (which is what happened further down the line).

So in the light of all this, I see Commodus and the later soldier emperors as a reaction (and a belated one at that) to this existential threat to the Roman civitas.