Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q87,67-DR/econ

Prompt

Isn't a crisis of revolutionary leadership the same thing in practice as Marxists not having a complete understanding of economics?
One function of historical materialism is to cut through mystifications of where capitalism exists and where the bourgeoisie exist. For instance, people may wonder "why social media became so much more corporate than it had been", but looking at things on a larger scale, online social platforms are generally just boxes containing disorganized collections of people that exist within the real world also in disorganization in the real world, many people being workers, a few people unemployed, and a small number of people owning businesses, and the way people go about their lives and settle into particular patterns of order like being customers of specific businesses or some businesses succeeding and some failing will have effects on social platforms, including existing news corporations posting headlines and continuing to have some ability to filter what becomes a headline through their internal corporate structure, or businesses that are somewhat successful in "real life" having an easier time drawing people to their posts about new releases online.
Historical materialism uncovers capitalism as a set of physical processes underlying all things that happen within the capitalist economy — which is specific to a particular slice of the world during a particular period of time. In contrast, bourgeois economics tries to frame capitalism as an inescapable aspect of existence that will be studied through the discipline of "economics", or a study of "markets". Although words are somewhat arbitrary and do not construct society themselves, the word "economics" fails to do much obfuscation and in a way accidentally reveals what it really is: if "eco"-"nomics" summarizes itself as "the mathematical laws of houses", that goes back to suggesting that economics is nothing more than a study of socially-linked chunks of people that sometimes occupy buildings, and of how various islands of people interact starting at small scales to turn a disorganized sea of people into ordered structures that are never completely in order. No book on economics can fully hide that economics is actually the dynamics of society itself and "the economy" can't be neatly separated from society and the development of society over time. This implies that, although some parts of bourgeois economics will simply turn out to be wrong and irrelevant and those will not in any way have been part of Marxism, whatever fraction of it does turn out to have been correct is actually a crude study of the same subject matter as historical materialism. In a manner of speaking, studying the development of society and how commerce is part of society's structure and development is another way to construct a study of "economics". And in that sense the study of economics / historical materialism is loosely connected to the study of proletarian revolution.
When unions back down from negotiations, it can happen partly because people do not have a good understanding of the behavior of other islands of people around them and when those islands might all be able to link up instead of one of many firing off spontaneously at the wrong time and giving up. Bourgeois economics, obviously, does not give clues for how to get out of bourgeois economics (capitalist processes), but after seeing economics for what it really is, understanding the behavior of these kinds of islands is a similar thing.
I have always found it strange that Trotskyism has spent decades and decades talking about "the crisis of revolutionary leadership" but it seems like it has never gotten better. It almost seems like there are many small crises of revolutionary leadership distributed throughout the world instead of one big one, although a success of revolutionary leadership would be a singular thing where people increasingly become connected. So, before I knew as much as I do now, I often tried to look for some sort of social dynamic missed by bourgeois economic or political theories that would explain the failures of Stalinist and Trotskyist parties because it would show that "economics as a greater whole" was incomplete. (At one point I thought factions or culturally-linked graphs of people were special — "Social-Philosophical Systems" — and the Third International and the United States had experienced society breaking up into countries or polarized factions because capitalism itself had started out as antagonistic plural patches of capitalism and "nobody had noticed it". At another point I thought individuals sorting together into arbitrary communities with some individuals allowed in or not allowed in might be creating capitalism sometimes. I've never liked Western-Marxism or tried to give a special role to "cultural beliefs" or "media", but one thing I kept looking at was whether separate physical bounded groups of people inside a population could cause problems.) I know that Trotskyists don't like the suggestion that socialist society is having trouble emerging because the overall internal behavior of either capitalist or socialist society is not well understood, and often tend to say that putting together revolutionary leadership and coming to understand it *during* that process is more important than that. But if understanding revolutionary leadership (Leninism) is the way to overcome the crisis of revolutionary leadership, then why is it that capitalism has so much power over workers to make them realize they don't understand what is happening around them and surrender? Why is it that even people attempting to be Marxists still primarily spend so much time talking about the process of how Stalinist leaders took over all the responsibilities of understanding and running their nation (and handed most of them to bureaucrats), whether they spin these events positively or negatively? I know that the Soviet Union is a bit different from movements inside capitalism because in that case there was rapid industrialization that had to happen almost unreasonably fast for the region to survive against the First World and people were physically exhausted. But it does seem like in the First World there are a lot of attempted Marxists trying to start apparent Marxist parties but most of them have no real understanding of worldwide revolution or why Trotskyists exist, none of these parties achieve much of anything, and between Stalinist parties and workers nobody really has the slightest idea of what's going on. What is the relationship between analyzing the internal processes of an emerging socialist society ("socialist economics", "economics as a greater whole") and analyzing a crisis of leadership or a crisis in building movements where workers seem to be giving up?

Motifs or claims from response

• the Transitional Program (Trotsky)
• The crisis of revolutionary leadership is not a crisis of analysis or understanding
• The crisis of revolutionary leadership is a crisis of representative bureaucracies
• Capital is a critique of the concept of political economy as set down by bourgeois analysts (Marx)
• Economic statistics are the outer expression of underlying class processes (Nick Beams) -> ooh, I like that one. great illustration of how you have the appearance-form / "phenomenological observation" on the outside but science continues on because finding the "hidden variables" and showing how they function in general is the more important thing. the "wave function" is not the end, not as long as whatever is inside does anything at all outside the areas bounded by wave functions.
  and when you realize that unlike quarks workers can go from being nearly unknown and unheard to breaking out entirely, that's powerful.
• Proletarian revolution does not need a better sociological study of bounded groups to create a leadership
• The power of capitalism over workers is not a disparity of understanding, and is mainly in controlling all material things within society to block workers' escape -> I actually would have agreed with this one even early on. I threw around words like "Hyper-Materialism" for it.
  though, I didn't think deeply enough about how this is connected to appearance-forms and the concept that workers are constantly blocked from speaking or acting outside particular narrow areas of 'normalcy' drawn out by corporations. I really can't unsee "Communist Elsa" now. I keep thinking about it. I can't stop thinking about how Toby Fox unintentionally turned Elsa into a Communist just because the Disney worlds are like products and Sora is 'a real boy' and Sora is trying to free what exists in everyone's hearts from an evil empire but what exists in everyone's hearts is corporate property so Sora is fighting a battle over capital at the age of 15
• At the beginning of proletarian revolution, socialist society does not exist and has no internal economic processes -> this one did occur to me while writing the question, which is why I had to quickly pivot the last line to "the relationship between" the two periods.
• There is only one crisis of revolutionary leadership in that there is only one proletarian revolution if it succeeds -> it pushed back on my thought that there were 'many crises' only to then say, actually, that's fine, it's a difference of phrasing if you understand there is a single world revolution

Subjective themes (no AI)

• appearance-form

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Ideologies, fields, topics, or search engines

4699. Q4699/Q46,99 IV (pronounced Trotskyism) / Socialism AI