Juice
@Juice@midwest.social
- Comment on Disney sued for $10billion over Moana 2 1 week ago:
- Comment on Disney sued for $10billion over Moana 2 1 week ago:
I feel like this thread is full of Disney lawyers trying out arguments to help them prep
- Comment on What's the endgame when the rich have all the money? 2 weeks ago:
They have to keep a lot of it circulating. As it zips around the economy, it is used to purchase capital, which soaks up the value of workers labor power by converting it into commodities, sells those commodities on a market for a higher price, and then returns profit to the “owners” of the capital.
Capitalism isn’t neutral, the system creates the rich and poor and delivers the value of worker labor power to the rich owners. The rich can’t control it any more than we can. They have their hand on the wheel through the state, which is just a mechanism that solves problems created by capitalism that can’t be exploited for profits, to violence. But they’re as ensnared by the system as we are. It robs them of their humanity the same it does ours.
We don’t overthrow capitalism to punish the rich, we do it to save everyone from it, and try to restore peoples humanity. The greed of the rich almost doesn’t matter, the system has a logic all its own.
The social system similar to what you describe, which is basically feudalism of nobles and serfs, has its own rules and arose out of its own conditions, like capitalism arose from the revolutionary overthrow of feudalism. Maybe capitalism will give way to some worse form of social relation, I suspect many people are working on that as we speak. But that’s why we have to fight and win for a better system
Socialism or barbarism!
- Comment on Anon's PC works 2 weeks ago:
I buy old electronics for 1/10 of what new stuff costs, install Linux or Foss os, keep it for years without problems until hard drive goes
I don’t game on PC but neither do a lot of people who pay $2500 for a laptop, people who inevitably call me for tech help for basic shit.
What’s the point? I’d rather have the commons than like a mountain of consumer goods that all suck and are getting worse.
- Comment on Communism 2 weeks ago:
For Marxists, the state is the institution that tries to resolve, with violence, the contradictions that are inherent within class society. So when class society no longer exists, then violence is no longer necessary, hence the state is no longer necessary, hence “withering away”.
This isn’t an all or nothing situation, just a theory. The laws of uneven and combined development indicate that this withering would happen in different ways at different rates. this process wouldn’t even begin until the whole world has become some form of socialism, and the social relations governing society would be much progressed. Its hard to imagine how this would work compared to our current situation
- Comment on Communism 3 weeks ago:
I disagree, but I appreciate you walking back the anticommunism. Paul LeBlanc covers about every argument for Lenin’s “opportunism” in great detail, I would recommend Lenin and the Revolutionary Party for a good description of Leninism before 1921. If you mean Leninism like “Foundations of Leninism” then yeah I’ll join you in calling Stalin an opportunist. But not even Paul Averich, anarchist critic of the Bolsheviks and historian, was willing to lay the authoritarianism of the USSR at the feet of Lenin. But I don’t want to legislate the tragedies of 20th century socialism. I’ll study it, but there’s plenty of reasons to be skeptical.
I recently read a couple books by Cyril Smith who is pretty negative toward Lenin, and while I don’t really buy his premise, I think his emphasis on what was missing (an analysis on “sensuous human activity,” like in Theses on Feuerbach) from the Plekhanov-Leninist tendency of Marxism holds water.
- Comment on Communism 3 weeks ago:
If you want to discuss the history of the Russian revolution, I saved but didn’t post several paragraphs, but deleted them for the sake of brevity. Flattening the whole 100 years of Russian “socialist” history to highlight it’s worst abuses is just as intellectually lazy as flattening it to only highlight the best parts of it. I’m not going to apologise for Kronstadt or anything that came after, but the civil war period was horrible. And had the Bolsheviks not taken power, Kornilov or Kerensky would have, and instituted far more brutal oppression; if not just tried to restore the Tzar.
The organizing principles of the Bolsheviks and RSDLP should absolutely be studied leading up to Oct 1917, as well as Rosa Luxemburg, and Anton Pannekoek’s criticisms of Lenin.
But saying “firing squad” doesnt prove that communism leads to authoritarianism, although it references a time in history that was very brutal and oppressive. However, Its not as good of a criticism as you are capable of. I’m used to having discussions with people who probably aren’t critical enough of the Bolsheviks, so its refreshing to hear from you, in a way.
- Comment on Communism 3 weeks ago:
Communism is the struggle for a moneyless, stateless, classless society.
There’s no connection between a supposed ideology of communism, and authoritarianism. The “authoritarianism” arose as a result of material circumstances, not ideology. I’ve looked into the histories a lot and its very complicated. Not like you wouldn’t understand it, just that it can’t be reduced to a simple truism, cant be made succinct.
Let’s just say that the capitalists who hoard all the wealth and do nothing to earn millions and billions, who own the media and for whose benefit the state represents, aren’t too keen on movements that sometimes overthrow them. So it’s in their interests to paint socialism and communism in as bad a light as possible.
- Comment on USA Air Force issues new guide regarding acceptable phrases to be used when on duty 3 weeks ago:
Your great great grandmother cheated on your great great grandfather with this joke. So fucking old
- Comment on Hypothetically, if some mysterious force started to jam every radio frequency, how would modern day society adapt to this? 3 weeks ago:
At what point does an EM jamming signal just become electricity running through the wires? That’s what would happen in a so called Harrington event, right?
- Comment on Well, I guess that settles it 4 weeks ago:
Publish this everywhere to get musk dumped on day 1
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 5 weeks ago:
Yeah its been interesting to see the development of the BRICS coalition as a counter to US trade hegemony. It makes one optimistic, but there’s still so much uncertainty. Venezuela’s economy is imploding due to some amount of mismanagement by Maduro’s admin, and not diversifying their economy like 10-15 years ago. And some very recent and concerning chatter coming from international contacts who would be fairly in the know and historically over optimistic about the tenacity of the Cuban revolution, are signalling that the Cuban government is extremely close to collapse (although we’ve been hearing the same from bourgeois media for 60 years, so its kind of hard to swallow.) Columbia is more social democratic than it has been in decades, Argentina is more exploited, Brazil is doing a wild flip from one extreme right wing president to a moderately progressive labor president. And developments on the African continent such as trans-national coalitions are reclaiming the Sahel. The US lost much of its ideological lustre it enjoyed during the cold war, but it makes up for that with naked violence. Our flagging superpower is still like historically the most powerful force in history, even as the international ruling class strips every last stick of profit out of our deeply paralyzed and ineffective political system. And our brainworms are still our #1 cultural export.
Its gonna be a crazy ass decade
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 5 weeks ago:
Well… some capital. Don’t try to order anything from Cuba or Venezuela or Russia and expect it on your doorstep any time soon.
This is a pretty interesting exception. The reason why Cuban or Venezuelan or Russian capital isn’t very available internationally is because of embargoes. These embargoes and sanctions operate for the benefit of western imperialism, itself just another form of capitalism.
So the reason why national capital isn’t available to international capital is because international capital prevents it from being available. Compare this to many post-colonial African and south american nations. The ones that towed the line of western imperialism, who politically nurtured a national ruling class to benefit and oversee the exploitation of the vast majority of their population in order to provide cheap labor and commodities, have “open” economies. Countries that attempt to provide for the social welfare of the masses (Cuba, Venezuela) or countries who pursue their own internationalist, “imperialist” agendas counter to the western consensus (current Russia) face embargo and sanction.
This is not to deflect any and all criticism from Cuba, Venezuela or historic Soviet Russia. It is an interesting condition to think about.
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 5 weeks ago:
I really wanna read that book, maybe this year :) I almost stole it from my wife’s cousin at Thanksgiving this year
I don’t think what you’re saying contradicts me, I agree my explainer is one view, one which addresses political economies, and the GrabGrow view is another more anthropological view. Unfortunately Marx never finished his anthropological works although there are a lot of notes from the end of his life that are worth parsing.
Saying it’s this one thing, when it can be scientifically understood as either or both things, is more like orthodoxy which I try to avoid. Both views help to understand a complicated topic made of historically shifting dynamics and changing aspects.
What your explanation doesn’t address that mine does, is what is the “social power” that congeals into these forms? It takes different shapes throughout history, but can be understood coarsely as “wealth”, which is the accumulated value of human labor. My explanation better reflects the class character of the state. However if we are to try and actually affect the world for the better, as we should, we would be better equipped with both views (and likely a few others) with which to determine truth in the functioning of political economy, than one or the other alone.
- Comment on Reading into something that is said 5 weeks ago:
Wealth is pinned to production and currency is pinned to wealth. You fundamentally misunderstand what wealth, money, and power are and how they function in society. Alienation from society and idealism distort the nature of these subjects. You’re right to question the way these things function, but you’ll not get much further than MMT or other idealist cul du sacs. If you want to understand how wealth operates as a basis for society, they you’ll need to start to study https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/.
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 5 weeks ago:
The state is formed by the historical mode of production, its like a contradiction that is the resolution to all of the other contradictions present in market social relations. In other words the state is based on how stuff gets made, and who accumulates the value inherent in the stuff, which is in essence the congealed work that went into making that stuff.
Politics and culture is always a factor in what shape the state takes, since politics and culture are social structures and sources of power themselves, bug politics is downstream from production
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 5 weeks ago:
You have to have an advanced degree, wealth and celebrity in order to publicly proclaim something that an introspective 12 year old would yell at his friends at 4 in the morning after completing a dare that he could gulp down a whole cup of sugar without coughing or puking
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 5 weeks ago:
This is clearly a completely natural phenomenon, like the weather !
- Comment on Depressing awful town 5 weeks ago:
I mean to be clear I’m from altoona and I’ve never seen pizza like this.
- Comment on The things you can buy on amazon 1 month ago:
Indeed
- Comment on The things you can buy on amazon 1 month ago:
Chlorophyll doesn’t immediately put you to sleep! Also it burns to inhale, from what I have read.
- Comment on I like Genesis 1 month ago:
Thank you! I can’t dance is cheeks, and they have so many good records
- Comment on And I will have my vengeance, in this file host or the next. 1 month ago:
I never noticed this before but why is Russell Crowes helmet the MFDOOM mask??
- Comment on I like Genesis 1 month ago:
Of all the great Genesis records, this meme goes with the single for I Can’t Dance. Jesus Christ get a grip.
- Comment on What are your favorite 1000+ hour games? 2 months ago:
I have around 1700 hs in Destiny 2, and close to the same in Bloodborne. Over 1000 hours in the last 2 monster hunter titles. I’ve replayed resident evil 4 and castlevania sotn dozens of times.
So those are my most played games
- Comment on Love her or hate her, she’s spitting facts 2 months ago:
Put a ring on it immediately.
- Comment on Enshittification only hurts product itself, not users. 2 months ago:
Oh enshittification is coming for Windows. In the future. Like it hasn’t happened yet or wasn’t the first and worst of these companies for it to come for. But something that hasn’t happened yet, not in the past. Interesting.
- Comment on [Même] Which movie was this for you? 2 months ago:
I haven’t played them since they first came out, practically a lifetime ago. Actually now that I think about it my friend is really into halo lore I wonder if they saw the show.
It was hokey but I liked it. And yeah I thought it ended really strongly but there’s no plan for a 3rd season
- Comment on [Même] Which movie was this for you? 2 months ago:
I played the first two
- Comment on [Même] Which movie was this for you? 2 months ago:
I just watched the Halo series, thought it was corny but kinda awesome, and then discovered noone else thought it was awesome. Def had some problems, tried to shoehorn in a lot of stuff but by the finale I was super hooked