Research talk:5¢/RegenMag/ParallelEconomyWright
Marxism and the Solidarity Economy
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⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽ Chris Wright ( / W)1
-1-1 - organization
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⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽ Regeneration Magazine ( / W)1
-1-1 - field, scope, or group [Item]
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⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽Western Marxism
(Q41,08)1-1-1
Links
Nickel usage or significance
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Motifs or claims
- When Marx conceptualized revolution in terms of a fettering of the productive forces by production relations, as well as in terms of a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” he was the victim of both analytical imprecision and a misunderstanding of his own system -> wow! that's a big one. now, sure, "dictatorship of the proletariat" is a really weird phrase, so if you want to call the same thing something else, I'd have no problem with that. but... revolution isn't related to fettering of production relations as they undo themselves? are you serious?
- Marxism makes more sense when you conceptualize it in a gradualist way instead of in a statist way -> oh no! oh my god. this article is fun in the wrong ways.
this is... exactly what you'd say if you actually lived in the Soviet Union and like, a workers' state was already created so socialist transition is happening through gradual changes. you can't confuse the Lenin process that is a sharp transition from capitalism to proletarian society with the Stalin process that is a slow transition from various production structures to better structures. those are not the same thing, and you can't do just one of them. if you want to say that doing the Stalin process leads to the Lenin process, that's one thing, but I don't think that's what this is saying. this legitimately sounds like some kind of 1900s Menshevik nonsense
paragraph 1: we need to re-evaluate Marxism. paragraph 2: what the hell even is a dictatorship of the proletariat? - gosh the Trotskyists will already have quietly shooed you off the stage, they hate it when someone does this - Marx has a different theory of transition from feudalism to capitalism than of transition from capitalism to post-capitalism -> of course he does, because feudalism is two different things: warring states period, and monarchy. capitalism is a warring states period that refuses to be unified, so it has to be unified into a single thing first, exactly as it will otherwise do utter violence to prevent. this is a different dynamic from feudalism, where nobody really wanted to be stuck in warring states periods and everyone wanted regional states to conquer each other so wars would stop.
- Men enter into definite relations not of their choosing / (9k) -> article pulls out Marx quote about modes of production forming SPSs and generating formal government specific to their internal structure and spatial extent. the productive forces, the smallest units of production connected most closely to nature or material reality itself, come into conflict with the structures around them, this may be the peasants contained in a manor or the workers contained in a corporation. when the structures around the workers are inadequate to develop society and the workers realize that only they have any idea how to build better structures then they end capitalism per-se and they try to build a new economic base. but the people who built the current structures don't want that, so they have to build a state to even get time to think about how to fix society's economic base. as the workers' state is built the economic base changes slightly (state capitalism! oh no! it's almost just capitalism!), then greater changes have to happen to really complete the transition. the Lenin process and the Stalin process both have a time limit on them of some kind, you have maybe 10-20 years on the Lenin process with some _minimum_ time over a year or two, and 40-50 years on the Stalin process which is a _maximum_, and it's only if you get through both of them that you get to the next truly unique historical period that will be stable for some 200 years. this article doesn't really get the fact that like.... the Soviet Union didn't even change the economic base sufficiently, it was scrambling to buy time with some stuff left unfinished especially in rural areas and it ran out of time.
- Men enter into definite relations not of their choosing -> ok, so what's wrong with this?
A) we don't understand what productive forces are, and the fact that productive forces are people, making the meaning obvious. B) we might not understand causality and the idea of reterministic causality. C) how do you understand when the workers are impeded by the corporations??? D) marketing is a waste, lack of social problems is a waste, recessions are a waste, copyright is a waste [god yeah], billionaires are a waste E) capitalists are wildly speculating F) war is a waste
d) no, you don't get the scale of exactly what kind of waste of workers we're talking about. all of those are like, 10% to 60% the level of waste that creates a revolution. we're talking about 90-100% waste. it's actually hard to waste an economy that much, which is why the time windows come so suddenly and critically.
e) irrelevant. that's divorced from what the productive forces are doing and experiencing.
f) this one is actually relevant because it affects workers. sometimes movements actually start at stopping wars.
c) what is 90% waste? when all the corporations are falling apart and a lot of them are producing scam products and education hardly correlates with jobs and scientific research is useless because there's too much technology so anarchists hate scientists, and people are boasting about streaming games for money instead of being employed because of how much being employed isn't getting them houses and moving out feels useless and you aren't earning enough to get married and you don't want to have a kid and you wonder why anybody bothers to feed you honestly because everything is so pointless everybody could just.... stop going to work and making anything and it would feel like everything was the same except for the fact that there will eventually be war and death when at various scales people's supplies run out. that is when the production relations have caused problems for the productive forces. - farm capitalists enclosing every pasture (England) -> I didn't think too deeply about the fact these were capitalists versus just the feudal manors and stuff. that is... something, imagining all these peasants moving to towns while 'pastures georg' takes up every single pasture. how did they even maintain that much land, this was before Europe got fixated on slavery wasn't it, wasn't that mostly in the New World?
- Marx did not acknowledge that a mode of production can both fetter and develop productive forces -> I feel like he did, because why was it so obvious to Stalin?
- Capitalism experiences two kinds of production relations which are in contradiction horizontally, therefore a new Social-Philosophical System will emerge inside capitalism containing new production relations which does not need a state when it first appears but which will overtake the other set of production relations to produce a new state ->
this feels.... ahistorical. the problems are so subtle because it almost sounds like Marxism. but it doesn't address the way all human relationships are affected by the way Filaments of people on or in particular production structures link together and exert power together, and that affects every single person who would want to 'create new production structures'.
I feel like you do need to add another kind of relation to the model, but not on that level, instead add imperial relations. imperial relations are emergent processes made of production structures or processes that exploit them, which complicate or disrupt the development of production structures by fighting over what groups of people are divided into what populations. the nobility or princes or WWII Axis powers have their own relations now. tough luck making a new cluster of production structures without making them mad or getting absorbed by one of the structures they control.
Subjective themes
- The fact that Marx and Engels were embedded in a particular historical period constituted by its own particular economic base and formal government means we should not waste our time looking for an originary Marxism shorn from its historical development [3] -> I started reading this one first and I have to say that's a great summary of Wright's article
- imperial relation -> an imperial relation is a group of relations of production that are bound together by some kind of imperial power to regulate chunk competition between two such groups of production relations wildly growing or changing in shape. this kind of thing was common in feudal orders at many scales but also existed in a more limited form in times of conflict between First World countries and the outside world, like World War I or World War II.
I honestly think the whole concept of primitive accumulation 'happening just once' should be replaced with this. this actually captures the dangerously dynamic nature of empires where primitive accumulation can open back up at absolutely any time. - imperial relation -> Trotskyism hates these. one of the good things about it, I suppose. there's not a lot to like about them; they're at best a necessary evil and most of the time just senseless.
- imperial relation -> is the new Russian empire a kind of imperial relation? the regions of Russia are very divided internally. so if you interpret that as similar to growth in each region smashing into the others, you'd believe that pointing all the regions toward Ukraine would alleviate that tension simply by giving them all a single direction to expand into that isn't each other.
truly agorism has saved the world. tens of regions of non-aggressive Russians can surely become liberated from..... Ukraine existing, and having to help Ukraine.