US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1495

On May 25 2019 19:12 GreenHorizons wrote:


I can't speak to Neb's reading and so forth but there reams and reams of readings, discussions, and so on. This is the realm of socialist discourse. The fears most people have of socialism are based in a desire for people to fill their pitcher with the knowledge of socialism and Freire and the thinkers I tend to agree with suggest that doesn't work (and would to the degree necessary say that some of those attempts you mention demonstrate why).

If someone reads an exhaustive amount of socialist/communist literature and having displayed/demonstrated they comprehended the overarching themes and strategies and concludes socialism/communism isn't viable or whatever that's one thing but that's pretty much never the case. Someone reads a critique of Marx and presumes to know all socialist/communist theory is flawed based on their remarkably limited understanding.

A lot of critiques of socialist/communist theory read like someone who has only read game reviews critiquing a game they haven't played.

EDIT: This isn't unique to any particular political bend either, I run into plenty of socialists that know nothing about the work the Black liberation movement (or really any Marxist socialists outside of Europe) did to advance not just Marxist theory, but play out various lines of thinking regarding how to gain liberation and implement systems of accountability that address those that want to operate outside of the social agreement.

On May 26 2019 10:14 Nebuchad wrote:


The main thing I want to do is distinguish between a system where the state owns the means of production and a system where workers own the means of production, in my view that's a pretty vital difference. I probably should make sure I clarify when I say "democratic control" cause I can see how that makes you think of the former. But in my view we're talking worker co-ops and a somewhat regular market in terms of how it looks like. Just no bosses, and as a result, no exploitation. Extending the concepts of democracy to the workplace, not keeping control of the means of production and concentrating it to a single place that we assume is better because it's the state and the state is democratic.

It's possible that GH is more open than I am to a state ownership system, I'm not 100% sure on that. I find the threat of authoritarianism very hard to ignore in these systems, and more directly I doubt that we are really eliminating exploitation when we do this, and that's supposed to be the goal.

On May 27 2019 05:35 Acrofales wrote:


Can you explain a bit better how this works? In fact, how is this different from paying employees with stock options... the standard form of payment for most start-ups. In start-ups it's kind of a massive scam. You could be a senior programmer earning a very good salary for an established company, but you get drawn in by the adventure and passion at the start-up and accept a really shitty salary, plus stock options. Those *might* make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. But mostly they are entirely worthless, and there are about 3000 accounting tricks that are used to screw these "early investors" out of their money even if the company does go on to make it big.

The other place this idea already seems to exist is in cooperative enterprises (coops). How is your model different, except that you want to make it mandatory?

Anyway, the start-up problem illustrates one of the greater issues: sharing in the profits is only a good idea when the company is making a profit, whereas a fixed wage insulates you from bad times (until things are really too bad and lay-offs start happening). Of course, this decreased risk also means that someone else is increasing their risk (the investors), and with that risk comes the benefit of increased profits. At the cost of sometimes losing big too. Now I will happily admit that right now, the rewards far outweigh the risks, most of which are buffered and insured anyway. So some form of adjustment is needed. But I don't see how making every employee co-owner of the company can work.

It also, critically, doesn't deal with the wealth transfer due to automation, when these "co-owners" are instead fired, and replaced by machines. Or, if you say they're co-owners and don't agree to that, what if 51% of the "co-owners" get together and fire the other 49% to replace them with machines? And "co-owners" of companies that don't do that simply go out of business because they can't compete with machines.

On May 27 2019 05:06 Acrofales wrote:

I will readily admit I don't know much about the advancement of Marxist theory outside of what mainstream economists and socialists, and popular science articles have written about it, which is mostly that as a whole it still suffers from the same basic flaws, which I will come back on in the below response to Nebuchad. If you have anything specific I should read/watch/listen to, I am open to spending a bit of time on it. I have your previous response bookmarked, because I need to listen to the podcast you linked.

In general, the idea that the revolution will happen through education rather than pitchforks sounds like something I could get behind. I think it's in the Euro thread where there's a discussion about what it means when people don't vote in a democracy. Someone pointed out that one reason is that problems are too complex, and people aren't really interested, leading to (1) a disconnect from politics and (2) simple (non-)solutions drawing votes (such as: build a wall). Someone else aptly responded that it's a bit paradoxical that the issues facing us are too complex for "common people" to understand, yet we put absolutely no requirements on what training/education our politicians have had. The only thing required to get the job is that enough people vote for you. And it has been shown that "competence" is not something people (1) care for or (2) even know how to evaluate.

So, I am with you that education is something that is needed at all points in society. And not education in terms of "learning enough to do your job", but learning in general, and also in how to even search for information yourself, which people are actually really bad at. Now, whether Coelho's "critical pedagogy" is the right framework? I don't know. I do believe most autocrats hate him because he believes in educating the masses, and it's quite obvious that keeping the commoners stupid and entertained is the tried and tested method of autocrats to keep control and power; from ancient Rome til today.

On May 27 2019 14:37 IgnE wrote:
Why Memmi over Fanon?

On May 27 2019 14:37 IgnE wrote:
Why Memmi over Fanon?

On May 27 2019 14:47 Artisreal wrote:

Would it make ghs post any different if he states that?

On May 27 2019 14:51 GreenHorizons wrote:


I feel like Memmi's articulation of the "colonial", "colonizer who refuses", and "colonizer who accepts" would be particularly helpful for this crowd to better understand how I see their arguments/frame the relationships.

Fanon's got some good stuff too though. Particularly on the international interests of the period imo (Presuming you're talking about A Dying Colonialism). I can't say I've read much Fanon myself yet, mostly just summaries and such. We could pull some short selections from them to discuss if you want though?

+ Show Spoiler +

On May 27 2019 16:12 IgnE wrote:


Why are you asking?



No I am talking about Black Skin White Masks and Wretched of the Earth. I haven't read Memmi, but I have read Fanon and several contemporary scholars. It's mostly pretty good stuff. But I would stress that a lot of it is based on situations that are a half century old or more. I am becoming very wary of "twitter-theory" uses of terms like "colonizer." People toss it around to mean just about anything — people who are into astrology and witchcraft and Marvel movies.

It's one thing to diagnose and critique a situation where colonized populations are second class citizens by law, by institution, by religion, by pseudoscientific concepts of race. It's another thing to talk about global capital and nation-state politicking in 2019 as broadly "colonizing" without going into the weeds about the structure of global finance, international law, natural resources, nation's own governmental apparatuses, and other systemic factors by which capital reproduces itself. And it's another thing yet to talk about middle class brown people in the United States with graduate degrees being "colonized" by cis white heterosexual ableist neurotypical patriarchal culture. The term and its cognates have become synonymous with something like "being a subject." Certain, unpopular things get scrutinized and condemned for being part of a colonizing hegemony that is oppressive. A wide variety of other desires and attachments are uncritically seen as acts of "resistance."

My frustration with most of the current discourse is that it's not obvious to me why a subjectivity centered around astrology, skincare products, fashion, and self-care is any less "colonized" — that is, subjectivated, formed as a subject — than the ostensibly unfashionable, bourgeois, colonizing/er subject. It does not seem clearly more free, "desirable", sustainable, ethical, etc. In fact, it seems to me that nearly everyone gets "colonized" in this sense by external forces which increasingly, and paradoxically, simply do not care about the particular intersections of your identity except insofar as your identification with certain affiliations and your attachments to certain identity-based desires can be used to capture your attention and/or sell you something. Everyone, brown or pink, binary or non-binary, is both more and less "colonized" than ever. Consumers are consumers are consumers. It also seems to me that "resistance", such as it is, is only possible through strenuous self-subjectivation, or discipline.

There's certainly room for people to make themselves in a way that incorporates whatever they like, be it astrology or whatever. But I wonder why it is that I so often see critical terms like "coloniz-" associated with thoughts like "I'm tired! [let me just put on a face mask and watch Netflix while sipping wine]" or "I'm not here for your white feminism." It's almost like it's become an epithet used in the performance of a slow death: colonization is killing me. There is certainly a sense in which that is true, it just doesn't seem to be a meaningful or useful one. And the imagined "decolonization" (decolonize your mind bro) that accompanies such thoughts often looks like an escapist fantasy or a nostalgic return to lost origins.

It is the mediocre citizens who set the general tone of the colony. They are the true partners of the colo­nized, for it is the mediocre who are most in need of compensation and of colonial life. It is between them and the colonized that the most typical colonial relationships are created. They will hold on so much more tightly to those relationships, to the colonial system, to their status quo, because their entire colo­nial existence-they have a presentiment of it-de­pends thereon. They have wagered everything, and for keeps, on the colony.

To agree on a convenient terminology, let us distinguish among a colonial, a colonizer and the colonialist. A colonial is a European living in a colony but having no privileges, whose living conditions are not higher than those of a colonized person of equivalent economic and social status. By temperament" or ethical conviction, a colonial is a benevolent European who does not have the colonizer's attitude toward the colonized. All right! Let us say right away, despite the apparently drastic nature of the statement: a colonial so defined does not exist, for all Europeans in the colonies are privileged. Naturally, not all Europeans in the colonies are potentates or possess thousands of acres or run the government. Many of them are victims of the mas­ters of colonization, exploited by these masters in order to protect interests which do not often coincide with their own.

On examining the situation more closely, one gen­erally finds only men of small stature beyond the pomp or simple pride of the petty colonizer. With practically no knowledge of history, politicians given the task of shaping history, are always taken by surprise or incapable of forecasting events. Specialists responsible for the technical future of a country turn out to be technicians who are behind the time be­cause they are spared from all competition. As far as administrators are concerned the negligence and indigence of colonial management are well known. It must truthfully be said that better management of a colony hardly forms part of the purposes of colo­nization.

This self-defeating process pushes the usurper to go one step further; to wish the disappearance of the usurped, whose very existence causes him to take the role of usurper, and whose heavier and heavier oppression makes him more and more an oppressor himself.”

But I wonder why it is that I so often see critical terms like "coloniz-" associated with thoughts like "I'm tired! [let me just put on a face mask and watch Netflix while sipping wine]" or "I'm not here for your white feminism." It's almost like it's become an epithet used in the performance of a slow death: colonization is killing me. There is certainly a sense in which that is true, it just doesn't seem to be a meaningful or useful one. And the imagined "decolonization" (decolonize your mind bro) that accompanies such thoughts often looks like an escapist fantasy or a nostalgic return to lost origins.

On May 27 2019 18:31 Danglars wrote:
It mirrors the lazy Keynesian arguments to justify any deficit spending, Piketty just to do unoriginal rifts on wealth inequality, and Foucault to just reduce things to power relationships.

On May 27 2019 18:34 GreenHorizons wrote:


This exemplifies the lazy "communism doesn't work because humans" to justify rank exploitation for personal benefit imo

On May 27 2019 18:45 Danglars wrote:

More like if people cited Solzhenitsyn and said it proved Obama wanted gulags. The idea here that I'm borrowing from IgnE+ Show Spoiler +is the grounding in theory of some author/s gets lost as it's overapplied to ill-fitting situations. You're no longer looking for what describes the situation, but writing a paper on how one viewpoint can fit if you do enough work with the shoehorn.

On May 28 2019 04:22 Ben... wrote:
The biggest issue I have with their corruption claims is that they are making a conclusion without even making any semblance of an effort to try and back it up. If you are doing an investigation correctly, you don't say "The FBI is corrupt" and then go looking for evidence to back up your claim. You pose the question "Is the FBI corrupt?" and then look at evidence one way or another. But as with everything so far in this administration, evidence is almost never likely to be on their side, so they have to make these ridiculous claims and hope people don't pay attention and just remember the first claim about the FBI while ignoring everything that proves otherwise.

On May 28 2019 04:25 GreenHorizons wrote:



The FBI is corrupt (I don't know so much that it's for the money or even personal gain though), but I'd expect Trump to clean it up about as well as he drained the DC swamp.

On May 28 2019 04:49 Ben... wrote:
I am sure there are cases where the FBI has been corrupt in the past, but I think in the context the Administration is claiming (i.e. the FBI has a grudge against Trump and wanted to use investigations to bring his administration down and that the investigations were started improperly because the people who started them didn't like Trump), it is likely not to be the case.

I mean, I see a lot of Trump admin. supporters claiming Page and Papadopoulus were incorrectly investigated, but in Page's case he had been under suspicion for a long time after he happened to be picked up in US monitoring of Russian communications, and Papadopoulus was being monitored after he drunk bragged to an Australian diplomat about Russia having dirt on Hillary Clinton well before that was a thing in the news or otherwise. Previous investigations into why those two were monitored indicated everything was above board. They were monitored because of their past behaviours, not because they were on the Trump campaign. Same with Flynn. Trump was warned about Flynn not because the FBI had beef with him or something, it was because Flynn was involved in a bunch of shady business and was likely susceptible to blackmail.

And yes, Trump's attempts to "clean up" the FBI will not go well. If previous efforts of the administration's attempts to improve the function of the government are any indication, it will either be filled with incompetent yes-men or turn into a scary, hyperpartisan beast. Hopefully neither happen.