StalinForTime [comrade/them]

  • 3 Posts
  • 48 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 9th, 2023

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  • I think it’s a bit more complicated and localized. Like I’ve met bourgeois people who are otherwise idiots, but have been or are sufficiently effective at managing and exploiting their workforce or have inherited wealth and know sufficiently how to play the networking, corruption, and non-disastrous asset-management game, but if you asked them what they think about the influence of British financial institutions on third-world resource extraction they wouldn’t know what the sentence meant, even when spelt out and explained.

    Most elected politicians do not need any actual specialized knowledge about the socio-economic system they are supposedly governing, largely because they do not govern it on a day-to-day basis. It’s a different situation once we are talking about the higher up capitalists and the professional administrators, bureaucrats and managers of the state and commanding heights of the, notably in the financial sector (which carries out many of the functions of central planning in a capitalist economy) and the deep state. The latter are well aware of what is going on and know we are correct. That’s why they are the most dangerous.








  • You’re completely correct in the sense that the West or Western, in the sense of a cultural identity as opposed to a geopolitical alliance (although materially in the modern world these are ofc connected), is not only modern but pretty artificial (though real). However the appropriation, which ran through Roman culture to modern Western culture, still indicates by itself that modern Western culture was and is very influenced by Graeco-Roman civilization. Although a lot of this appropriation is also explicit, retroactive and indirect, and based on idealistic attempts to identify themselves with supposed aspects of ancient Greek culture which don’t actually hold up on scrutiny.

    As you’ve said, Ancient Greece had far more in common with the other Mediterranean cultures of the time than the modern WASPs of the West or the ancient Germanic or Celtic peoples. Like if an ancient Greek teleported to the current era your average yankie WASP would deffo not think they’re hwhite like them. This is also ignoring the fact that whiteness as a category as it emerged in early modern Europe and America did not exist for the Greeks, who would also have seen themselves as having far more in common with, say, the Egyptians or Phoenicians than with the ancient Teutons.

    Then again WASPs already think the same thing about many modern Greeks, joking that they are basically Turks. There is a bunch of cultural things that are shared due to the Ottoman period, but we all known what they mean when they say this (i.e. the joke that southern Europeans are only semi-hwhite).





  • By design.

    One of the purposes of the planned inefficiencies of state services, often the direct consequence of completely economically irrational private-public partnerships and offloading to private firms of public services who will bid for contracts to run state-constructed infastructure on the basis that they will minimize costs (inducing low wages, high turnover rates of workers and low efficiency, surprise suprise). The malignant genius of it is that the inefficiency of the effects of partial and shadow privatization of what should be public services turns people against them and pro privatization because they still perceive it as public.

    A similar phenomenon can be seen in the case of tax systems, especially the US tax system, or the US postal service.

    Neoliberalism reestablishes profitability by sefl-destructive cost-cutting.


  • Yeah it’s important that we, as Marxists, therefore proceeding scientific,ally, make very clear from the onset as to what we mean when we use the term ‘imperialist’ with this more specific, narrow, Leninist definition which only really applies to modern capitalism, or more precisely the modern capitalist world-system. Conceptual clarification is essential for any scientific endeavor, including Marxism.

    Even on this definition however, we can note that it is perfectly possible (and concretely, empirically, historically confirm this possibility by looking at the international situation pre-WW1) that there be several powers or polarized groups of powers each of which behaves imperialistically in the Leninist sense. The difference today is that we currently still have a more or less unipolar as opposed to multipolar imperialist (Leninist sense) world-system.

    If someone calls Russia ‘imperialist’ in a different sense, then they might not be wrong, and saying that they are because our definition doesn’t apply isn’t relevant beyond the fact that there’s confusion over the concepts being used because people are equivocating between them, simply because we are using the same term/sound/word/signifier. If we do the latter we are engaging in a semantic debate disguised as, because confused with, a substantive debate.