[zodium]

Originally Posted by BlackBellamy [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Thanks, I thought Red Storm Rising was just awesome although I didn't care for his other works. I was a big fan of the Soviet bum-rush but I found books like the one by Hackett to be dry. I like a little fiction in my jursidiction.

I wish you the best of luck in your goals though because I admire the struggle up to a point. I want to remind you that the systems your're trying to abolish are organic. I'm not passing value judgement on them, just saying that organic things are very hard to fight. Because they form naturally.

Like look, the thing about workers and the police. Let's take a person, we can call him a worker because they are self-fulfilled mostly by being productive and being occupied and useful. That person doesn't want to be armed for several reasons. First is that the vast majority of people they don't like the anxiety of thinking they might have to shoot someone and there would be blood and people screaming. And two is that as someone who wants to be productive, a worker, they know that they can spend a lot of time providing security or standing up for their rights with their guns, or they can spend less time making some product, selling that product, and then pooling their money with other workers to...hire security people. Who carry guns.

In a primitive society, every male outside the infirm carries a spear. So there we go. But organically, all primitive societies become complex, and then some cop is hassling you. You can't abolish the police because you can't abolish crime and you can't abolish the ability and desire of people to cooperate in groups and assign specialized tasks among themselves. You can make the police better or worse but that's the range. If you abolish the police I will hire someone to be the police and then we will have police again. And I will be more powerful because you guys are going to be part-time policemen and my guys well...they're just going to be cracking skulls and there goes your society.

Same thing with wealth and state. Your wealth means nothing if there isn't an administrative body that allows you to compare your wealth and trade it. I mean yeah, you can trade one pelican for three rocks, but for any transactions more complex you need standards so you can build trust. You can't build a hydroelectric plant in a barter economy. So as a worker you're outsourcing stability, security, and regulation. If you had to do all that it would take you all day. But this way it's paid off by April.

Other things are more possible. I mean I'm all against "seeking funding" from aristocrats, by which I mean stopping the destructive power of private equity firms who like my past girlfriends only destroy wealth and never add anything of value. I worked for an outfit that was acquired by Henry Kravis' for a bit, I've seen the damage they do firsthand the fucking vultures. I'm all for people developing systems where they don't have to suck dick for money they are being scammed into thinking they need.

I don't have an opinion on the Palestinians.

Thank god.

capitalism is a natural and organic stage of economic development. the class struggle you describe is central to its development, although it plays out slightly differently: "primitive" people going about surviving developed useful skills and tools, like cultivation and animal husbandry and medicine, and as these became more efficient and valuable relative to laboring, the use-value of violence rose. specifically, warrior classes appear because it is easier to make violence your labor and threaten others to hand over their labor, forcing societies to piss away resources on "guard labor" to survive. this is not "more complex," and the notion that it is is perhaps the oldest case of revisionism -- in reality, even neanderthals enjoyed the benefits liberalism assigns to "complex" societies, which really stretches the word beyond meaning. capitalism derives power not from creating surplus, but from managing surplus, from finding the optimal amount of violence to inflict.

your analysis of wealth is true as well. indeed, hunter-gatherers can't build a hydroelectric plant. nor do they need to i suppose, but i am not a primitivist, so i can't speak to that. i like civilization. in any case, we marxists do not propose a barter economy. but we understand that capitalism will end, organically, by the same forces that birthed it. that is the whole point of lenin's warnings about imperialism, or "crony capitalism." that it is every bit as inevitable for the parasitical capitalist class to emerge and grow within the capitalist economy as it is for a warrior class to emerge within the hunter-gatherer society.

in both instances, the increasing dominance of the new class brings the system to a higher level of organization where all non-members of the dominant class (if you can't stop working while you live off passive income, that's you) are enslaved, and the lower to middle members of the dominant class become gradually relegated to working class. there is never a point where it fully implodes in a cataclysmic explosion. it's more like the centuries of slowly receding productive forces and organization you saw after the western roman empire failed to produce a new superstructure when the economic base outgrew the imperial state, where everyone was a huge doomer walking around constantly being reminded of living in the corpse of a much greater civilization.

joe biden and donald trump are both members of the parasite class, as are the UAE's elites, as are all bourgeoisie (people who can stop working and live off passive income) who participates in the global system of capital and dont turn class traitor. the parasitical class' material interests lie with bringing the system to this higher state as soon as possible. it's all organic, individual decisionmaking based on material conditions. its still happening.

in some utopian sense, communism is simply the very common-sense idea that we shouldn't have a parasite class. pretty much everyone agrees with that. the hard theoretical problem is how we get rid of them.