9k:RD/ worker compression (Western-Marxism) (Q38,05)
Main entry
- worker compression (Western-Marxism) -> the motif of claiming that all human beings experiencing suffering or empathy and all workers experiencing working-class suffering are the exact same thing and there are no differences whatsoever between them, such that there is an implication that every single human being is currently a worker.
"Suffering in general"
- universal suffering / a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it (Marx 1844, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right) / a class with radical chains ->
oh boy. I am almost positive some people in Western Marxism have interpreted this totally wrong. you have to understand that the concept of "suffering" here means something oddly specific and isn't just any suffering at all, and the reason the statement is interesting is that it's saying that a highly specific form of suffering still applies to everybody.
let's see... hang on... okay I've got a B-side analogy. is your cat a member of the proletariat??? if you were a Western-Marxist talking about 'worker compression' or 'how Jungian psychoanalysis and repression define the proletariat' you'd be pretty much implying that. Marx isn't implying that. - universal suffering -> note: Marx quite literally means the physical bond of capital and what capital is doing as an object. I just rediscovered that today and suddenly felt like "wow, I've been stupid" because I talk about 'chunk competition' all the time but I rarely stop and distinguish how it changes things for it to be refined into capital per se. yes, there's a small difference and it makes all the difference.
Video that prompted this
- Trotsky said that the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers' state, but capitalism did not degenerate from a functioning status so much as contain many "degenerations" inside it in which non-owners would be ground down (degenerated) into materials for use by owners (labor power; created capital; housing buildings reclaimed by driving workers out of housing through competition against workers; housing buildings turned into data centers; spoils of invading Third-World countries to forcefully destroy feudalism and create global capitalism; etc); this happens because the process of capitalism (the "system" of capitalism) is made up of control, containment, and accumulation [??] [1] ->
the claim being made in this video is such a mess. first of all, Amber doesn't live in the Soviet Union, so Trotsky and the Soviet Union have nothing to do with the game unless you think Trotsky's critique of the Soviet Union is a critique of capitalism. which, okay, Trotsky said stuff about capitalism, so that is a thing you could try to argue, I guess. Trotsky said the Soviet Union stopped being a workers' state; the Soviet Union began to contain capitalism; Trotsky critiqued the Soviet Union and critiqued capitalism. but the frustrating thing is that the video isn't even making a point that intelligent. it's trying to argue that like, the Soviet Union and the screensaver are connected by Moral Evil and that is part of economics somehow, as is very common for Tories to argue but should have no place in academic analysis. so.... I'm going to just assume that the video is saying that the screensaver was a depiction of capitalism and Trotsky was criticizing Soviet capitalism even though that's not what it's saying, just because that's smarter and less stupid.
so. the screensaver is depicting the general suffering of capitalism, which creates abusive families. Dave Pelzer was left alone by capitalism and then fed straight into the Vietnam War; we're on track so far. worker degeneration (I remembered it as worker compression for some weird reason) is when capitalism is breaking down and giving rise to either fascism or Stalinism. the art was made in the United States and the United States is the former, not the latter, so capitalism would be breaking down into chunks of people aggressively colonizing over the top of each other and trying to kill each other to maintain the illusion there's enough space without people fighting each other. the video is sort of on track at this point, because it says that "control and accumulation" are problems of capitalism, and when capitalism is turning into aggressive, violent chunk competition they certainly are. the problem is that you can't stop this by complaining about "system oriented around", because the "orienting around" comes from chunks of human beings growing and reproducing; White people push Black people out of towns because White people are having babies, and pushing out other people gives them an advantage at them and their babies being able to survive, while any work they do to create something to use or sell can still be paraded around as hard work they did themselves to help everyone that remains as opposed to something they were able to do more of because they "degenerated" other populations, hence people get mad at you for trying to disturb capitalism including its intersections with racism. so, let's assume the video somehow knows that. capitalism is fundamentally broken because it breaks down to create fascism — or alternatively Bolshevism breaks down into Dengism which then breaks down into Bonapartism. capitalism is fundamentally broken because it requires chunks of people to compete over the top of each other just to exist, even if that would kill other people. capitalism was fundamentally broken and subject to chunk competition the entire time. true! what do you think markets even are but people competing over finite slots to form an arrangement?
the problem is "containment". how is "containment" part of capitalism? presumably in business territory owners creating fences to keep capital and other earnings they passively or violently collected from workers. but this video has defined people existing at all and occupying space at all as a form of containment. so, you'd think containment couldn't be an actual complaint here, because if you want to stop stuff like people being pushed out of countries and people losing their houses to data centers, then every time people need houses they need "containment" too. this framing is absolutely ripe for Tucker Carlson stepping in and calling poor people who want houses greedy, I've just gotta say that. this is a problem I've run into with meta-Marxism before, that if you get really fine-grained with your model and mention stuff like corporations growing or territories growing you quickly realize how complicated it is to separate what parts of capitalism are neutral from what parts are bad as long as capitalism still exists. and it ceases to be a big problem if you have room for learning from real historical events but I genuinely wouldn't recommend that Western-Marxists do it, because then you end up here. capitalism is "actually" made up of Subject degeneration. but, that exists day to day because customers latch onto particular corporations instead of other ones and they don't all perfectly sort themselves onto buying the correct things. retail stores choosing one thing to stock instead of another can lead to higher rates of bulldozing Black neighborhoods instead of lower ones. but retail stores choosing one thing to stock instead of another is also one of the big selling points to have capitalism instead of the Soviet Union (pun intended), because it supposedly leads to better horizontal and vertical growth of businesses. the Soviet Union would have the power to cap the growth of businesses and make them stop being based in "containment and accumulation", but to have that power they have to directly be part of it as state businesses. that's the fatal contradiction in this video. it's really anti- Soviet Union but most of the things it says about capitalism are actually arguments in favor of the Soviet Union and not proper arguments against it. when capitalism exists the primary method of control for businesses being "based in" the wrong thing is society choosing one specific business and destroying another specific business, having no ability to operate on all businesses at once. capitalist "freedom" is the ability to destroy and smash businesses. which is the same thing as capitalism being based on chunks "degenerating" each other. when you bash the Soviet Union for being Evil without having any idea what you're doing you just regenerate capitalism, and then end up complaining about how bad capitalism is more or less because of the decision you yourself made. it's projection! you hate your own decision! and then you make other people in other countries pay for it. you should be calling out your own behavior as unacceptable first. so let's rephrase this into its opposite. As a system oriented around Idealism, capitalism is forced to take coarse chunks of things and smash them in order to try to make all things apparently-good things by destroying apparently-bad things and driving everyone away from them; this need to locate "good" things based on whether they fit into the parameters of capitalism causes capitalism to destroy anything that is not capitalism, which recursively births capitalism and the necessity for some people to devalue other people in order to exist; in order to end capitalism and "worker compression" Idealism has to go away first, because although systems can be designed through unintentional processes or through fine-grained knowledge of their internal structure, systems cannot be created through announcing abstract qualities regardless of whether those qualities are "not Evil" or anything else. - It is impossible to design a computer / It is impossible to design a car / Because a computer is a system of interacting parts and systems of interacting parts can only evolve through their own internal interactions, it is impossible for humans to design a working computer from the outside, and it is only possible for computers to evolve spontaneously -> this would be true if it was actually impossible to design systems without already being in them. nobody lives inside a computer, but many people have designed them! they were able to do this because the design was based on the interaction of the small-scale components, not simply based on announcing abstract Ideals of what the computer "feels like" and what it's "bad for the computer to feel like".
Compressing petty bourgeoisie back into workers
- worker compression (ironic) / worker compression (Trotskyism; international Marxism) / worker compression (motif of petty bourgeoisie or formally unemployed getting "compressed" back into workers; ironic connotation, not original connotation)
- A layer of tiny contractors which has successfully been "googlized" or "Amazonized" will eventually get squashed back down into an owner and a proletariat
Related
Ideologies, topics, or genres
- / meta-Marxism
- / Trotskyism
- / Communist party aesthetics
- / Communist manifesto (1848)
- / Western Marxism
- / Western-Marxist distortions
Wavebuilder combinations
- : forms result [Item]
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- worker-compression (MDem scrap)
- FinalClass01 - bot log; is the proletariat really the final class of humanity?