Zoot Allures wrote: barracuda wrote:I must assume you refer to labour as childbirth here, since human life is very much possible without proletarians and the sweat of their brow. In fact, id contend that the proletarian did not precede he human.
every form of life labors to live. the term 'proletariat' refers to a specific kind of laborer in a specific time period in specific circumstances. labor precedes, or exists simultaneously to, all life.
It is roughly the third caste, between the warrior and the untouchable.
Ordinary folk. The salt of the earth. People that don't hate their jobs, people that are proud and unionize.
Unions existed before Marx, Marx parasites off the English workers revolts, which were beautifully sane and started a good thing, which turned sour, and perverted the power of the worker to become nonexistent, as it is now.
barracuda wrote:Long before Marx sat, staring at his quivering shadow, and produced his rubbish, humans owned slaves, and these slaves were capital.
sure, if those slaves could be traded or sold for money or property. this does not detract from anything marx said. in fact, it exemplifies an even more extreme marxian truth: that not only is the labor of people exploited for profit, but the very people themselves can become a profit.
again, i'm no marxist, but i am a fisherman of red herrings... and you are one helluva catch.
Marx didn't figured that out, it was a well known fact in England where he was supported by Engels living what looks to have been a quite stuffy life.
I say Marx went wrong when he started thinking things through in his psychotic German way. You'll not be able to move me from this long and hard fought position. Ive gone all the way through Hegel. That was
not pleasant. Reading Hegel is just pure papercut. It is all that the mind can do wrong, deliberate cognitive dissonance, resolved in a way that, in the real world, just costs so much pain it is dizzying.
barracuda wrote:That is they were too incompetent to own themselves, or had too little in them for their self-ownership to amount to capital.
pretty much, yeah. but it's a little more complicated than that. the proletariat of the industrial revolution, for example, had basically four options: 1) keep his job, 2) revolt against the owners of production and take control, or 3) start his own business and become the thing he so despises, or 4) become a bum and get arrested for trespassing.
not the easiest set of decisions to choose from, brocephus.
To a sane person there is also option 3.1; start his own business, and be happy he has become self-sufficient and a source of money and meaning for others.
Yes, labor is meaningful. Which is why it can be sold, and why it should be owned.
barracuda wrote:The world is will to power, not the yearning for fairness. You might want to question your premises.
AGAIN, i am no marxist. and a good question of conscience for you might be: would it be okay if the proletarian class overthrew the bourgeois class? it would be, after all, their will to power, right?
Ive been waiting for em to join me in revolt (I rebel by excelling throughout all institutions) since the mid 80's but all that happens is that proletarian people become
bourgeois slaves. But still I hope it wil happen and I have much glee for what we've already accomplished.
Trumps electorate is todays proletariat.
along with understanding what the WTP is, must come the total lack of ressentiment for all its possible expressions. can you do that, brocephus? can you take that final step?
Thats only possible through overcoming all that one resents. Otherwise it is hypocrisy. I attain such states frequently, but m no in it permanently. That would be nice, or will be, Illl have to see.
barracuda wrote:You are supposed to be able to read a famous book without kneeling before it and offering yourself in lobotomy before it, man.
I have completely torn Marx apart.
lolz. you tell me that, and then immediately link me to a book you wrote.
Yes, more than a chuckle I wasn't after.
but no, you haven't. entire armies of philosophers can't beat The Beard. if scientific materialists were italian gangster actors, marx would be al pacino, and engels would be robert de niro.
Hahaha, but dude, you are so definitely a Marxist. The only person that I know who actually admires the man, and I grew up inside the heart of European Communism. My grandfather wrote the Article 1 of our constitution, the equal rights doctrine, and he did so as a Communist. Marx was mistrusted, Marxists had isolated stoner positions. And yet things were accomplished, wages raised, unions had power, healthcare was free, this so called "intermediary phase" which Marx saw coming like a deer sees headlights approaching, he didn't invent any of it, give me a break -and which was supposed to be a mans to an end, was in fact the closest man will ever come to Socialism. Because, mind you, and pay attention please, the dictatorship of the proletariat is an illogical conjecture.
How would the proletariat manage the possessions, without the wil ti power interfering? How would one guarantee the sainthood of the proletariat?
How indeed.
I take you for a very smart person, so I am perplexed that this is not a problem for you. Marx, with the explication of his aims and conclusions, demonstrates a sort of moral autism.
The agent to the power of Communism in Europe throughout the Cold War was the USSR, the leverage we had. We could push through because we could threaten sabotage and eventually, occupation. Thus, the riches of the Capital Owners got trickled down a bit more lavishly. Thats all there will ever be of Socialism - Philanthropism, forced or spontaneous.
I bet you the world.
barracuda wrote:My grandfather met Stalin and Mao
my mother met
james brown. top
that.
Cool. Well Ill tell you a bus driver I talked to on the way up from El Paso to San Fransisco told me he had once stepped on Jim Morrisons shoes. He apologized but Jim said don't worry man, people came here to listen to my music, not to look at my feet.
I don't know why I told this story. I feel we are drifting off.
barracuda wrote:Because, you're so damned special, because you're so damned poor.
my battle has never been with poverty, but the criminal justice system, and it keeps getting better.
Tis prison system is absurd, and could only happen through the maximization of the state - Capitalism is a given, when you mix in Socialism, you get a lot of blurred incentives, people get jailed just to keep the system running. In a libertarian state this shit wouldn't occur, and that alone is reason enough for it.
Yu just dont wan tot give government too much power. Socialism is all about turning all over to the Institution; namely, to an abstraction.
Not to Money, which is not a pure abstraction, it is a brilliantly found form of semi-abstraction, it is the
text of capital, excuse my French -
but the politics of the Proletariat is a pure abstraction, and not only that, it is not abstracted from truth but from the wish that workers will be able to govern without bias.
Humans are flawed, perhaps my acceptance of that is what makes me a bit noble sometimes. It also makes me have no hope for anything close to Marxist politics.
Why I think we need something entirely new, based on the simply given of individual being tied intrinsically to other beings on the planet where still individual and value based group-joy is seen as good and aim, and collective joy as at best a means, to forget misery or overthrow tyranny -
overthrowing tyranny isn't the issue. That can always be done. The issue is whether what you set up in place doesn't respond to the forces that make a tyrant.
Or else it is about whether or not we can find a perfectly justified tyrant.
U reckon the best example of such a thing was the man who enforced in Athens by law the full citizenry's attendence of yearly tragedy festivals. Everyone, even slaves, were forced to attend the competing plays. Now that is a cathartic, "Christening", "Socializing" event of some substance.
Humble the Will, subsume it in eternal beauty, before the eyes of every man woman and child. Now this is what you call
Bildung.
barracuda wrote:The advantage of wage work is a lack of responsibility, of being actually free of it all after 5PM. The owner-employer doesn't have this tremendous luxury, nor does the philosopher, for that matter.
depends on the business. some business owners have employees who handle public relations as well as finances. the owners quite literally do nothing but make money. they might pick up a phone once in a while, though.
I would agree that 90 percent or even 99 percent of todays businesses are tainted by if not completely existent in terms of pointless predation. I really hate how this works has shaped up. I want to break it down and I am not someone who just sits and suffers it as it is. VO is a definite weapon against fake structures.
We probably agree that social orders need to be justified from the ground up, that top down control is just fucking ridiculous, unless you have a proper Superman in charge, like Jesus, or otherwise Napoleon, who looked up to Jesus but not the Popes. Hitler shows how ridiculous it is, Churchill shows how comedy is the only way to beat a tyrant.
barracuda wrote:And put bread on their table which their incompetent selves can't do without me, or they wouldn't come to me for a job.
there's a third alternative here: dispose of you and take back the bread they baked before you sell it back to them.
will to power, and all.
Violence begets violence. As the violence of the Owners begets that of the Workforce, so the Total Revolutionary begets the Earthly hell of today.
I admit to a bit of shortcutting here - what I mean to point out is that Socialist doctrines have only enabled Capital to become more concentrated in the hands of pieces of shit. Only innovation and technology had been able to break this bond somewhat. Philosophy is bound to be the technology of mind that allows for proper law giving so as to set man free forever of tyranny, private and public.
I am an anarchist at heart who loves New York City of the early 90's. I believe Capital must, de facto and almost ad hoc, exist to produce space for the exploration of human rights. I detest the American pre trump Establishment because they are the primary fascist agent in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa With Trump the grip of this sanctimonious force of scumbags on Europe has been greatly lessened, which has been the greatest relief of my life. Ive been close to suicide when Nato appeared to have won world dominance. Thats what I consider pure evil - the sanctimony of the west after the USSR fell. My grandfather was a good fighter against Nato from within the Netherlands. He played a strong part in preventing nukes from being stationed here. As a Communist also secured classica education, because the Socialists wanted to abolish it on account of it being elitist - he asked the minister in parliament, why just now that the workers were finally entitled to learning Greek and Latin, he would take it away from them. He didn't ask politely, and he phrased it a hel of a lot better, and in Dutch, but that was it, I was able to be born, so as to learn to know ZEUS.
barracuda wrote:Any worker worth more than a pig or a cow is able to turn his labor-power into a profitable business and a rewarding career. Those that aren't are just human cattle, and deserve and want what they get - a mindless job about which they can complain and for which they are still rewarded. Moo!
agreed. one thing i can't stand is an atheist materialist who's afraid of social darwinism. either start your own business, or keep your job, or kill yourself. but for the love of man, stop complaining you miserable wretch!
The benefit of parliamentary capitalism, Capitalist Government with a House of Representatives, is that the term "employment" covers a great deal of meaningful terrain. Even the presidency is "a job". I find this to be a rather proletarian approach to power, compared to say, Crown and Aristocracy led England or Industrial-Bureaucratic Germany. I think the US has done far more for the empowerment of the Worker than Marx, who has, I think, mainly allowed for China to move directly from Antiquity into Modernity.
One word: opium.