The Official Socialism/Democratic Socialism/Communism/Marxism Thread

[CHL]

Why isn't Anarchism in the thread title?
@Darth Humanist @JahFocus CS

Ask @Type Username Here

 

[JahFocus CS]

Why isn't Anarchism in the thread title?
@Darth Humanist @JahFocus CS

Anarchism = communism (stateless, classless society)

 

[ineedsleep212]

 

[I Lord Justice]

"People naturally care less about a person's claim to something the more steps removed they are from actually interacting with it. That's why thieves often target big box stores, not small proprietorships or family businesses, and even people who would never steal can intuit that one is worse than the other.

That infamous division between private and personal property people sometimes speak of is essentially just the distinction between property that achieves horizontal enforcement and property that doesn't, property that people earnestly choose to respect because they feel it's the right thing to do and that which people honor primarily because they fear punishment.

To create and maintain an economic system in which a small portion of the population controls the production process as private property while never directly interacting with it thus necessitates a system of vertical enforcement and control, because normal people wouldn't play along with it otherwise."

 

[Shogun]

I know I need to get to reading more of this thread, but can folks suggest like 5 books to peep.

 

[JahFocus CS]

Negged.

 

[Shogun]

Negged.

 

[CHL]

Some of my favourites. Always give me inspiration for the cause.

 

[Shogun]

Some of my favourites. Always give me inspiration for the cause.

 

[Tate]

Seriously brehs if you can look at bill maher and not think a gulag would improve this world I don't wanna know you

 

[YvrzTrvly]

To the guy looking for book recs

I would say kropotkin conquest of bread
Emma goldman anarchist essays
Proudhon capital

 

[Madvillain]

a Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson thread would be dope for the Coli

 

[CHL]

 

[JahFocus CS]

your favorite guy gonna listen later

 

[JahFocus CS]

I've got 99 problems but a class analysis ain't one

Capitalism however is not maintained by the actions of the Davos class or the 1%. Rather it’s a hegemonic social system that is maintained primarily through the social relationships of wage labour and commodities.

You have to earn wages to get money.

You have spend that money on rent, utilities and food in order to survive.

Your work either involves the creation/distribution of commodities, or the maintenance (or management) of the workforce itself if you work in sectors like education and health.

If you’re unemployed or imprisoned, you may be working anyway via workfare and prison labour, just on wages and benefits below the rate of subsistence.

Robots might be taking your job, but they aren’t delivering food free of charge to your door each week to make up for it, or wiping your arse when you get old.

These are not hard concepts to grasp, every time you wake up on Monday morning or look at your bank balance they confront you. Every hour you spend at work reinforces the system you’re fighting against one way or the other.

How do we struggle against the 1%? Unless you live in San Francisco, London or New York (or even if you do), you might never see a member of the 1% in real life. What we’re left with is usually symbolic protests inside or outside civic and financial institutions, which locate the source of power as something unattainable and remote. At its worst, talk of ‘bankers’ tends towards structural anti-semitism and locates all the world’s problems in the shadowy conspiratorial meetings held at international summits. Often it results in coalescing around left populist electoral campaigns, which need as broad a constituency as they can possibly have to hoover up disaffected voters.

Despite these limitations, Occupy did get involved with protests that disrupted capital and especially in Oakland made links with workers including the November 2nd 2011 demonstration. These aspects of the movement should be revisited as the reaction to Brexit and Trump gathers pace, but the idea of the 99% should be left behind in 2011 where it should have stayed in the first place. We should also be looking at other recent movements such as the 2010 student occupations and protests in the UK, the 2006 movement against the CPE in France, the 2012 student occupations in Quebec, the 2015 prison strike in the US, the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore against police violence in 2014/15, and the 2006 immigrant strikes in the US.

When you struggle against work via strikes, slow downs, and slacking off, you confront capitalism at the point of production. When you struggle against police violence, evictions, immigration raids and homelessness you confront capital as it maintains property relations and social control. This is class struggle against the processes of class reproduction, counterposed to the static categories and redistributionism of the mainstream left.

Rather than the 1%, these struggles come against the letting agent, the HR department, the police, immigration authorities, property developers, local government officials. Those who enforce borders, wage cuts, gentrification, rent hikes, criminalisation of communities and all the other shyt. They cannot be mobilised as part of the 99%, if at all by rejecting their role entirely. The abolition of the police, not their co-operation as we saw at Occupy Sandy. The expropriation of tech CEOs, not their incorporation into cross-class liberal #resistance.

Focusing on the 99% or the 1%, rather than encouraging class analysis, focuses attention away from class struggle and towards protests against abstract and remote actors. Even when owners of companies and housing are far away, the offices, shops, warehouses and housing blocks they own are the places we live, work and shop.