TreadOnMe [none/use name]

Ah yes, as if anarchism, liberalism, libertarianism or really any other human ideology and methodology centered entirely on egoism don’t engender some strange communal cargo cult behavior. It’s almost as though they too are full of shit?

It is funny to believe in ‘self-determination’ when you can’t even recognize that all the important decisions have already been made for you. It is rich to pretend to fight against the nihilist when you only believe in yourself. So go egoist, live your life as you please, blissfully unaware that you are just as stuck the very herd of individuality that we all find ourselves in.

So I read through his links. There isn’t a citation to any of these interviews (a necessity for actual academic journalism) to make sure things aren’t being taken out of context. The first document even says that “North Korean experts disagree with these things because they view North Korea through the lens of their propaganda.” And even then there are only three uncited interviews, one which is obviously an absolutely outrageous lie that breaking the frame of a photo of Kim Jon Il while polishing it is grounds for the execution of an entire family.

For context, the atrocities of the Pinochet regime are backed up by literally hundreds of recorded, cited interviews, some even by guards who participated in the violence admitting their culpability years later (though usually with the excuse that they weren’t the ones committing the mass rape, etc.).

This is nothing. This is unsubstantial.

Ehh, kinda, but not really. It’s pretty standardized (which is hilariously rare for these disciplines) within sociology, anthropology and even economic theory. At most economics would label it an ‘inefficient market’ but even they are stretching their definition to the breaking point when there is no actual expectation of reciprocity for most transactions.

You absolutely need an army to sustain market economies. Somebody has to collect the debts. Why do you think America spends more money than anywhere else on it’s police force? You have to have a monopoly of force in order to sustain obviously unfair and arbitrary property relations. Why does America have military bases across the globe and sanction countries that refuse to engage on it’s market terms? Because we need to have the potential to place a boot down or provide training for those that will do our enforcement for us.

Look at crypto, without centralized financial support it all but crumbled, to only resurge as a speculative asset, only to dip again. Maybe it will make a resurgence, but it is capital with no army, never to break the bounds of the fin-tech industry.

Force is what drives and has always driven market economies. To believe otherwise is to be an-cap, to separate the historical development of markets, capitalism and the state.

Look, when one says “There are (as in exists) only two classes” I generally expect them to mean “There are (as in exists) only two classes.” Which is not true.

I’m not offended, it’s just that I made my pedantic point, and now you are insisting that you didn’t say something that you said. You are only technically wrong, and it’s still a better quip than mine.

Look, I’ll take the L here if it really matters all that much to you, but claiming that we can’t make theoretical mountains out of molehills in terms of theory in arbitrary instances is practically denying our Marxist heritage. If anything we should be founding and publishing newsletters against each other at this point. Surely you can spare a section of a little ol’ measly memes comment section.

Again, purely pedantically, no it is not, unless you just mean ‘the middle class does not exist’, then we are in agreement. There are many classes that still exist, but only 2 have ‘revolutionary potential’ according to Marx.

Though I (and Lenin and Mao) would even disagree with that. The ‘peasantry’ of the 20th century proved to be more than capable at staging their own revolutions.

This is not true. Market economies originate with the state. Prior to markets, most societies engage in gift-economies, where value and price are relatively arbitrary and dictated by personal relationships, not scarcity. It is only when an army comes in and forces you to trade with it do we see the emergence of market economies. You are however, correct that the market we engage with right now focuses primarily on capitalization, which is generating the most amount of money. That is the structural logic of a ‘capitalist’ mode of production. The liberal (or really neo-liberal, but we are splitting hairs at this point) lie around this is that this mode of production is and encourages the most ‘efficiency’ or ‘productivity’. This is not true, as demonstrated in your example.

Within capitalism there will always be perverse incentives to value the ‘fetish’ (money) over the commodity (the object being produced). And it is this ‘fetishization of commodities’ that ultimately creates the series of rolling crises within capitalism, as the fetish must grow larger and larger even if (and especially if) the commodity production itself does not. The incentive isn’t to satisfy demand, it is to generate profit.

The problem is that the ‘middle class’ doesn’t exist. It is a series of cultural affectations, that do not apply to the majority that supposedly make up ‘the middle class’. If the ‘middle class’ can or can’t make up welders pulling 55 hours a week on overtime and an accountant working 40 hours a week, then the distinction is arbitrary. That is why Marxist distinctions of class are superior. They are dictated instead by your relationship to your means of production, and how you acquired the rights to that relationship.

From an purely pedantic Marxist standpoint, that is not true. Marx identified several classes. It’s just that he saw societal transformational potential in both the bourgeoisie (a revolution he lived and was living through) and the proletariat (a revolution that he expected and wanted to happen).