US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4161

On March 09 2024 06:43 WombaT wrote:

In order of bolded statements:

• No, in the economic sphere at least, the leftist critique is more that those with economic power effectively already are the folks guiding things with ‘greater vision’ in a de facto sense.
  
  
• No, the general concept is that that system is not actually self-organised in any sense to begin with.
  
  
• This isn’t even a particularly left wing battlefield to begin with, and anyway in a more broad sense it’s one that is fought in the domain of capitalism and market forces and equilibrium anyway. If we’re talking self-organising, and supply and demand as a mechanism, there are many more women, gay folks and well, basically all sorts of non hetero white dudes playing games than before, and those changes will manifest in the kind of products people demand. If anything it’s stereotypical ‘gamer bros’ who are the ones trying to artificially ringfence the hobby against organic change, in this specific example.
  
  
• This is backwards. At the core left wing politics don’t deal in abstractions, but in conditions and reality and especially power in its various forms, but especially economically. In a crude sense abstract values, ideas or rights only matter insofar as you can actualise them. The distinction between so-called positive and negative liberty is absolutely core, even if the terminology was coined long after left wing politics had exerted huge influence.
  

On March 09 2024 20:16 Sbrubbles wrote:


The point you're making is that in a totalitarian state there are no rights, therefore state ownership doesn't equate to collective ownership, and if we're indeed talking about full-on 100% totalitarian state then I suppose you're right, but the USSR wasn't totalitarian like that full sense.

The USSR depended heavily on socialist ideology for maintaining legitimacy, so completely breaking the collective ownership of capital at the absolute leader's whim would break the very foundation of the regime (even if rampant corruption exposed its hypocrisy). The collective ownership wasn't breakable, it was just exercised through the state, so I disagree that the totalitarianism of the USSR disqualifies from calling it a socialist state as your comment implies.

In a somewhat similar fashion, Hitler's totalitarianism doesn't mean his state wasn't capitalist. Large industrialists thrived during much of the war. You might say their capitalist property rights were at the mercy of Hitler's whims, but these were respected to a degree, at least until 1942. Would you also imply that Hitler's germany wasn't capitalist?

On March 09 2024 07:55 WombaT wrote:

I’m not sure how impactful the former can be if his direct opponent for the office is hardly going to be better in that particular domain, if not worse. It may impact turnout and enthusiasm which could prove crucial nonetheless, but won’t see folks cross the aisle as it were.

Personally I don’t feel the latter necessarily means embracing the worst of conservative policy sentiment. I think it’s more cultural and in messaging, in a crude sense it’s ’hey we may have disagreements on the how, but we all love the country and its people and let’s work across aisles, our opponents aren’t inhuman monsters’.

If nothing else amongst his flaws as a politician Biden’s got a good record in this particular domain.

The problem with this is well firstly I’m not sure how many folks are even on the fence to begin with. Secondly you’re adopting this tact when the other party have essentially completely abandoned it wholesale. Obama tried it as well and IMO it didn’t bear much fruit for him either.

Appealing to some kind of communal idea of what everyone wants and values, with divergence on the ‘how’ only works if there’s significant shared commonality and your political opponents adopt a somewhat similar approach.

That just isn’t the case, and whatever voting bloc that responds really well to that messaging is likely dwarfed by partisans. Sure Obama could play nice in public proclamations about working with the GOP, but the GOP would simultaneously say the rather moderate changes proposed by Obamacare equalled him wanting to institute death panels who’d dictate who lived or died.

Biden has the exact same problem, just worse. You can’t pull the ‘Republicans are also chest-beating Americans like us Dems, we just disagree on the details’ in the context of well, everything the GOP have done in the Trump era

On March 09 2024 22:28 Sbrubbles wrote:


If you want to make a point, by all means do it and I'll respond, but I don't like answering a one-liner in a post that doesn't meaningfully engage with mine.

On March 10 2024 01:03 maybenexttime wrote:

I am pointing out that fact that you haven't provided any evidence for the workers collectively owning or controlling the means of production in the USSR. They didn't exert any power. Trade unions were illegal. The businesses were managed by party-appointed managers. Everything was organized top-down. Ordinary people earned subsistence wages while party elites raked in all the profits and lived in luxury.

You are conflating publicly declaring certain values with actually upholding them. If the owner of a company tells his employees "this is our company" but materially nothing changes, the workers have no say in how the owner runs the company, they continue to live paycheck to paycheck while he rakes in all the profits, would you say they still collectively own the company?

And to say that the Soviet Union wasn't fully totalitarian is incredibly ignorant. During its first four decades, the USSR used tens of millions of slaves in the Gulag and similar camps, working them to death. It moved people from one place to another like cattle, starved millions of people at gunpoint and summarily executed hundreds of thousands at the very least. Sure, things weren't nearly as bad in the post-Stalinist era, but the working class still had no say in the matter of running the economy or the country.

I repeat my question: how did the working class exert its ownership/control of the means of production?

On March 09 2024 16:25 sevencck wrote:


1. The criticism that political power follows economic power is not uniquely leftist. It is pretty close to a statement of fact, people merely disagree on why it happens and what to do about it. Again, many leftists wish to lift the means of production out of private hands, which is an innately revolutionary proposition.

2. No, it isn't. There's an entire Marxist literature which outlines how the capitalist economy functions, along with commentaries on how bourgeois groups hold on to power at the expense of the marginalized. It explicitly claims there is self organization.

3. Again, I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the state of gaming per se, I'm saying things like removing power from "white male gamers" is a revolutionary proposition, and not in line with the ecological and emergent change you're referring to. It's actually a good example of a revolutionary overthrow of the so-called status quo. The "white male gamer" is a non-human abstraction that becomes the primary reality, and so is the future "inclusive gaming culture" that the individual must be made to bend to.

Since there is no utopia, there will always be another revolution. It is an innately puerile state of being, rebellion against the oversights and imperfections of the universe. Working for change, improvement, and evolution within a fundamental acceptance of things is a more liberal outlook, and this is the distinction that I have drawn to answer the other person's question about how I might define the difference.

On March 09 2024 17:40 Broetchenholer wrote:


You Do know though that Liberalismus is a movement of the 17th to 19th century that was responsible for overthrowing the Status quo, most famously in the frech Revolution. your framing of every Rebellion against the Status quo is leftist only works if You define before what You consider to be a real Status quo and what is a fake Status quo. as trump is rallying his supporters against the Establishment, He is clearly leftist, making hin again extremely close to hitler. or is your fake philosophy artificially narrowed so that only libertarians can represent Status quo and everyone else is leftist?

On March 09 2024 16:55 GreenHorizons wrote:
While still obviously problematic, it'd be a lot less concerning if all Biden was doing was his "I miss hanging out with segregationists" and "McConnell never, never, never, misrepresented anything" schtick, but the dog whistles ("illegals"), crackdown on the border, cop cities, mobilizing the national guard to "fight crime", supporting genocide, and so on, are all being done by Democrats/Biden.

The general hasn't even actually started yet, so it's only going to get worse. As will the shaming and blaming of anyone that doesn't obsequiously fall in line to be tossed under the bus.

On March 10 2024 01:03 maybenexttime wrote:

I am pointing out that fact that you haven't provided any evidence for the workers collectively owning or controlling the means of production in the USSR. They didn't exert any power. Trade unions were illegal. The businesses were managed by party-appointed managers. Everything was organized top-down. Ordinary people earned subsistence wages while party elites raked in all the profits and lived in luxury.

You are conflating publicly declaring certain values with actually upholding them. If the owner of a company tells his employees "this is our company" but materially nothing changes, the workers have no say in how the owner runs the company, they continue to live paycheck to paycheck while he rakes in all the profits, would you say they still collectively own the company?

And to say that the Soviet Union wasn't fully totalitarian is incredibly ignorant. During its first four decades, the USSR used tens of millions of slaves in the Gulag and similar camps, working them to death. It moved people from one place to another like cattle, starved millions of people at gunpoint and summarily executed hundreds of thousands at the very least. Sure, things weren't nearly as bad in the post-Stalinist era, but the working class still had no say in the matter of running the economy or the country.

I repeat my question: how did the working class exert its ownership/control of the means of production?

On March 09 2024 06:43 WombaT wrote:

In order of bolded statements:

• No, in the economic sphere at least, the leftist critique is more that those with economic power effectively already are the folks guiding things with ‘greater vision’ in a de facto sense.
  
  
• No, the general concept is that that system is not actually self-organised in any sense to begin with.
  
  
• This isn’t even a particularly left wing battlefield to begin with, and anyway in a more broad sense it’s one that is fought in the domain of capitalism and market forces and equilibrium anyway. If we’re talking self-organising, and supply and demand as a mechanism, there are many more women, gay folks and well, basically all sorts of non hetero white dudes playing games than before, and those changes will manifest in the kind of products people demand. If anything it’s stereotypical ‘gamer bros’ who are the ones trying to artificially ringfence the hobby against organic change, in this specific example.
  
  
• This is backwards. At the core left wing politics don’t deal in abstractions, but in conditions and reality and especially power in its various forms, but especially economically. In a crude sense abstract values, ideas or rights only matter insofar as you can actualise them. The distinction between so-called positive and negative liberty is absolutely core, even if the terminology was coined long after left wing politics had exerted huge influence.
  

On March 09 2024 16:25 sevencck wrote:


1. The criticism that political power follows economic power is not uniquely leftist. It is pretty close to a statement of fact, people merely disagree on why it happens and what to do about it. Again, many leftists wish to lift the means of production out of private hands, which is an innately revolutionary proposition.

2. No, it isn't. There's an entire Marxist literature which outlines how the capitalist economy functions, along with commentaries on how bourgeois groups hold on to power at the expense of the marginalized. It explicitly claims there is self organization.

3. Again, I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the state of gaming per se, I'm saying things like removing power from "white male gamers" is a revolutionary proposition, and not in line with the ecological and emergent change you're referring to. It's actually a good example of a revolutionary overthrow of the so-called status quo. The "white male gamer" is a non-human abstraction that becomes the primary reality, and so is the future "inclusive gaming culture" that the individual must be made to bend to.

Since there is no utopia, there will always be another revolution. It is an innately puerile state of being, rebellion against the oversights and imperfections of the universe. Working for change, improvement, and evolution within a fundamental acceptance of things is a more liberal outlook, and this is the distinction that I have drawn to answer the other person's question about how I might define the difference.

On March 10 2024 05:15 Fleetfeet wrote:


Just replace "revolution" with "change". Me deciding to get a snickers bar once a month isn't a revolution. Someone suggesting I say "shit" less isn't them pushing for a revolution. There's a level of gravitas to the term that I don't think any level of removing power from "white male gamers" in gaming could meet.

You rely on a lot of strange use of terminology in your argumentation ("non-human abstraction", generous application of "revolution", alternate definitions of "leftist", etc) that makes it pointless to try engage with you; any conversation had necessitates backtracking to agree upon terms in the first place.

On March 10 2024 05:46 WombaT wrote:

Gamers rise up! Seize your snickers!

But yes, terminology aside hey it’s worth at least trying to unpack what makes each other tick. I’m not really seeing anything other than a bunch of arbitrary distinctions being made to delegitimise left causes and ideas.

So it’s ‘innately puerile’ or ‘utopian’ to look at capitalism and go ‘hey we think this thing kinda sucks’, but when a market’s demographics shift and appetites change in something like gaming, that’s fair game to complain about?

Hope I’m not being uncharitable it just doesn’t strike me as a particularly coherent analysis of the left and how it interacts with wider society.