#1 https://nitter.net/Itmechr3/status/1327814014630584320

#2 https://nitter.net/OneiricCanid/status/1295866346727710726

#3 https://nitter.net/Lynxgespuis/status/1327824748550770692

Where do you even begin with some of this? It’s all so mangled and stupid.

Some greatest hits from these:

The problem is that as a propaganda tool the labor theory of value needs to function at an individual level so you can tell a worker that their surplus value is being exploited ect. ect. even if the truth is likely much more complicated. Class functions much the same way.

I’ve seen like 14 different theoretical explanations claiming to be from the left for why it’s actually good when store owners shoot looters, including my favorite "Korean store owners weren’t actually shooting at Black looters to kill them and besides this whole thing is a distraction from fighting the white ruling class

Left Twitter doesn’t care about about class in a sociological sense. What it cares about is class in a moral sense

the Marxist definition of “Bourgeoisie” is not the colloquial one.

You need class consciousness before a Marxist analysis of class can be helpful.

the idea of surplus value has also seemed largely pointless in a world filled with jobs which don’t actually contribute to material production

  • @Shaggy0291@lemmygrad.ml
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    23 years ago

    Once a prominent national proletarian leadership emerges in my country I hope the first thing they do is push a 21st century redux of left wing communism: an infantile disorder. It can take the form of a video essay, a recorded speech or some spicy memes, I don’t care. All that matters is that some form of popularly consumed media is disseminated through which the absurdity of their political delusions is thoroughly torn to pieces.

    • @pimento@lemmygrad.ml
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      13 years ago

      That graph is so useless, it doesn’t even list the bourgousie as nonworkers. Which probably means that they are counted as “workers”.

  • loathesome dongeater
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    13 years ago

    I have no idea what the person in the first link is trying to say. Can you summarise their argument?

    • loathesome dongeater
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      13 years ago

      Ok I parsed their tweets into a readable format. First of all I don’t think they understand how unreadable the thread is rendered by their shoehorning of ICE must be destroyed line at the end of every tweet.


      Ok so my real answer to this is that Marxism as a theory was designed as a critique of political economy. It’s thus designed to work on a systemic scale, but tends to fall apart when applied on the individual level. There’s a few good examples of this. The first is the labor theory of value. When read in a limited, Ricardian sense, applied to the lowest level of social organization, the entire thing falls apart. On the level of the firm there’s no way to get from value to price (the famous transformation problem), which caused many economists to claim that Marxism had been refuted altogether. But there’s good reason to believe that Marx never intended for it to, that value only functions on a total social level, or at the level of the entire global economy (see Mattick’s Theory as Critique). The problem is that as a propaganda tool the labor theory of value needs to function at an individual level so you can tell a worker that their surplus value is being exploited ect. ect. even if the truth is likely much more complicated. Class functions much the same way. There have been attempts made by Marxists to assign every person in a society a class. The Maoists did this during the socialist period and wound up with something like 60 classes. A few of those were purely political (war hero ect) but most of them were supposed to be sociological. The system was a complete disaster and quickly devolved into a moral system instead of a sociological one. The result was that class background, which was slippery to begin with and often included people like petty artisans as people with “bad” class background, became a kind of race system, divided into people with “red blood”, who came from a “good” class background and people with “black blood” who came from “bad” class backgrounds. This led to students with “red blood”, the now privileged children of cadre, attacking students with “black blood” in the streets and became the undercurrent of much of Cultural Revolution politics. The slipperiness of class on an individual level (Is a janitor who won the lottery still working class? What about doctors and lawyers? Managers with no firing capability? Construction worker with a rich family? Student estranged from rich family? Retiree living off of the capital gains from their retirement funds?) makes for endless, shitty left twitter discourse, compounded by the fact that Left Twitter doesn’t care about about class in a sociological sense. What it cares about is class in a moral sense, understood through as a bunch of symbols and affects and a conception of “normal” that essentially means cis, straight, white, and abled and almost exclusively gives you members of the labor aristocracy if it gives you workers at all. The abandonment of sociology in favor of affect also leads to an essentially right-populist or fascist conception of class in which the petty bourgeoisie are considered to be the working class and grad students, journalists, and Hollywood (really anyone involved in cultural production except podcasters) are considered the bourgeoisie. All of this makes discussions of class or intertwined phenomenon like looting completely insufferable (I’ve seen like 14 different theoretical explanations claiming to be from the left for why it’s actually good when store owners shoot looters, including my favorite "Korean store owners weren’t actually shooting at Black looters to kill them and besides this whole thing is a distraction from fighting the white ruling class) and inhibits basic solidarity with the oppressed in favor of the oppressors.

        • Dreadful WraithOP
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          13 years ago

          I think they’re referencing other criticisms of Marxism they’ve heard of though out it, but they don’t explain anything and I’m skeptical about the 60 classes in Maoism thing, for instance. It reads like a long run-on sentence generated by a GPT-3 bot almost. I don’t think they actually care expressing their idea here, they seem much too sure of themselves to bother.

          I disagree with whatever small points I could make out of it. The main point about Marxism not being 100% accurate at the individual scale for everyone sounds reasonable until one realizes they’re making an argument that class, relationship to the means of production, etc. almost don’t exist and they’d have a hard time labeling even someone like Trump as bourgeoisie because of it. Class is actually pretty simple and powerful as an explanation of how capitalist politics works, so for them to reject that for some ultra-individualistic anarchist, almost post-modern, nonsense is just stupid. The marxist definition of class relating to their relation to the means of production lays out why worker and employer have opposing politics, which we can see is obviously the case, while they’d struggle to prove even that with their model that cares only to label everyone as unique individuals who can’t be labeled.

          A lot of it reads like they didn’t even try to understand Marxism and at best read a bunch of Libcom and bourgeois criticisms of it.

      • Muad'Dibber
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        13 years ago

        The red blood vs black blood thing is pretty messed up, wtf are they talking about.