• 2 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: March 24th, 2022
  • CommunistWolf@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•Did the average ancient roman have a better life than someone under feudalism/early capitalism(during industrial revolution) ?
    6·
    2 years ago

    “Better” is a bit of a misnomer. What is actually claimed is that the “development of the productive forces” - which is to say, the extent to which that economic formation can get stuff done - increases at each stage.

    In the model, before Rome (slave society) would have come primitive communism. The Romans got more architecture done, which is enough for the model.

    Pushing on, the slaves got some of the benefits of the architecture. They were treated like property, but got use out of the aqueducts and hypocausts and roads that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.

    How would you decide if their overall situation is “better”? It’s something British imperialists like to try to do for their empire, but I’d be wary of even trying the exercise, myself.

  • CommunistWolf@lemmygrad.mltoCommunism@lemmygrad.ml•What would happen under late-stage communism if/when all basic jobs are fully automated but more skilled labor is not?
    4·
    2 years ago

    This is one area where speculative fiction can do a reasonable job of opening the mind to possibilities. Iain M Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, Elizabeth Bear - just picking a few recent reads - all have sketches with some relevance to your questions, for instance.

    Also worth remembering that work and “jobs” would look rather different in a communist society to the kind of things we have at present. For a start, hours can be much less, and the content of the work would be less degrading. That works wonders all by itself.

    The model I like - which is different to saying if it’s likely or not - is work as sport. If you imagine a position like “economic planner”, for instance - and you might imagine that a lot of these would be needed in a communist society, and that we might struggle to automate the position away - it seems compelling to me that some people would want to do this for the challenge it would provide to them, and that more people would want to do it than there are positions.

    Out of that, rather quickly, amateur leagues and tournaments with the prize being “you get to be the planner for X” arise, at least in my head.

    Why would people do these things as a sport? Well, for the same reasons people do amateur sports at the moment. Fun, prestige, group belonging, etc.

    Prestige is interesting to dive into, particularly as it relates to jobs like doctors. The social position of a Cuban doctor is quite different to that of a “western” one, for instance. Definitely worth digging into more.

  • CommunistWolf@lemmygrad.mltoComradeship // Freechat@lemmygrad.ml•Marxist-Humanism?
    7·
    2 years ago

    Don’t worry, I only read On Materialism this year and would have been clueless about this if you’d asked last year :D. I’m still absorbing it and the various follow-ups, so hardly an expert or authority.

    I’ve been suspicious of humanism-itself for a lot longer, though. As with everything, it becomes watered down and repackaged over time, until you end up with pithy statements like “good without god”, etc, and as a general statement of anti-religion, fine, sure, that’s marxism-compatible, materiaism-compatible, etc. But in this form, it’s also unnecessary to synthesise it into marxism at all, since what you end up with is not “marxist-humanism”, it’s just “marxism”. The only reason to add “-humanism” to the end would be marketing, branding, that kind of thing.

    What’s interesting to dig into is where humanism and marxism don’t overlap, whether that’s just addressing different things, or actually conflicting with each other. That’s where a synthesis of the two has tricky questions to answer, and maybe - just maybe - value to bring. That kind of effort will use a much more in-depth and rigorous understanding of what humanism is, with jumping-off points like the amsterdam declaration, etc.

    What did marxist-humanists come up with when doing this? I’m as in the dark as you as to specifics, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_humanism briefly say:

    Marxist humanists reject an understanding of society based on natural science, asserting the centrality and distinctiveness of people and society.

    So this basically says “historical materialism is false”, and it comes about because humanists believe individual human free will is supreme and, somehow, the aggregate effect of humans having free will cannot be investigated scientifically.

    Marxist humanism views Marxist theory as not primarily scientific but philosophical. Social science is not another natural science and people and society are not instantiations of universal natural processes. Rather, people are subjects – centers of consciousness and values – and science is an embedded part of the totalizing perspective of humanist philosophy.

    So much for “scientific socialism”, I suppose. My best summary of this would be “science doesn’t work on people, sike”. Forgive me my skepticism.

    Echoing the inheritance of Marx’s thought from German Idealism, Marxist humanism holds that reality does not exist independently of human knowledge, but is partly constituted by it

    I’ll get my coat.

    (edit: I didn’t say explicitly, but each of these three examples is chock-full of idealism, which is to say, “metaphysical perspectives which assert that reality is indistinguishable and inseparable from perception and understanding; that reality is a mental construct closely connected to ideas”. What marxist-humanism takes from humanism, in these passages, is idealism, and the “synthesis” is to discard materialism and replace it with that idealism)

  • CommunistWolf@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•Strongest navies currently
    4·
    2 years ago

    About UK, just lol. Their fleet is few in numbers, have problems with equipment and weapons, carriers break routinely and are also obsolete like the US ones (also needless for anything other than imperializing defenseless nations), and “the progressive updating of its submarine fleet” apparently include superglue in reactor chambers, lol.

    There’s also the small matter of the planes to put on the carriers; they go out with about 5 F35s on them at the moment, which is, what, 10%? of capacity.

  • CommunistWolf@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•Cuba question
    4·
    2 years ago

    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvx070m4

    It’s about a decade old now but still worth a read to get a general idea of the wider context.

    The blockade is crippling, but but also crippling is the currency reunification project that has been ongoing since 2013 or so. When the split currency was introduced, it was quite unpopular; now that it’s been undone, the results of that are also unpopular. The government was basically dragged kicking and screaming to do it by the populace, despite knowing that. Hardly the actions of a government that can dominate its people.

    As for these people specifically, it’s a waste of time to go canvassing people in the street. It’s a waste of time when BBC News does it, and it’s a waste of time when they do it. Any argument based on that sort of method is just… pointless.

  • CommunistWolf@lemmygrad.mltoComradeship // Freechat@lemmygrad.ml•*Permanently Deleted*
    17·
    2 years ago

    Basically, following events in Venezuela whilst hanging out (online) around a very patient communist.

    Growing up poor in a western country didn’t hurt the journey, but it definitely wasn’t sufficient by itself - they’ve got us so broken that no element of class consciousness was transmitted intergenerationally.

    At some level, I think everyone knows the media lies to them, but the extent - and the one-sidedness - of it eventually became evident and kick-started further study into what was actually happening there, and in Cuba, and around the world.

    I’ve still got a ridiculous amount of learning to do, but the basic field of play is a lot clearer now,

  • CommunistWolf@lemmygrad.mltoComradeship // Freechat@lemmygrad.ml•Can someone please explain transgenderism to me?
    22·
    2 years ago

    People who talk about “biological sex” often forget two very important things:

    • Biology is descriptive, not prescriptive
    • Biologists have lots of different descriptions of sex. We can talk about genotype vs phenotype, for a start; they can be pretty independent of each other, and in contexts where it matters, a biologist (as opposed to some internet carper) will specify.

    A common tactic of “gender critical” types is to say “biological sex is immutable”, meaning genotype, while actually caring about phenotype (“does this person have a penis?” - which is eminently mutable). Fun times.