You don't need marginalism to explain that making some money doing Uber given fixed costs for your car is better than making no money at all and incurring same or similar costs.
I agree, however the Communist form is merely a re-telling of the capitalist form, it results from the same contradictions, the same process, and has the same result. Under the states of the past the control is unhidden and in fact presented unashamed by the powers that be. In the present day, the infiltration of the new rationality pervades not only media but all experience within modern society. When you hear Bach in the supermarket or watch the news or go to the voting booth, it is exactly the same domination, but in different forms.
This is why both the USA currently and the USSR formerly deserve the same criticism, and we need to move beyond this rationality of unfreedom, and the answer to this I belive lies firmly within the realm of revolutionary Communist movements, but only after realising exactly what inspired the controlling rationalities of the US and the USSR.
The US (as it continues) and USSR both institute(d) a policy in which the only freedom is that which you are told you are supposed to have, and that any freedom which transcends is called either "Socialist" or "capitalist". These are projected as 'bad' because they appear within their respective societies to reach 'the limits of reason itself'. To the American taken in by his 'freedom', Socialism is not only unreasonable, irrational or unjustifiable but it is impossible itself, because to him what is rational is production, the pervasiveness of technology and relentless consumption. Similar things can be said about the USSR and its descendant Marxist-Leninist states.
Within the USSR, there was no qualitative change, there was only quantitative change, and indeed due to their rationality, Socialism could only be seen as quantitative change, a sliding axis between capitalism and Socialism. This is because they were fixed by controlling rationality in which Communism has become quantitative, obscuring the fact that it is truly qualitative, Marx said as much all along: Communism is the rejection of all established notions, Communism abolishes all notions of morality, justice, freedom and indeed stands in opposition, contradiction to all previous societies.
I don't deny that he or she may be correct about how Communism was practiced. In fact, Marcuse doesn't deny this either and describes the Soviet model as just as much of an issue in terms of rationality and consumption as Western capitalism. However, while Marcuse is a pessimist I consider myself an optimist, along with Zizek and Alain Badiou and Negri on the Communist Idea in general.
I don't think the errors of the 20th century's Communsit movements should be repeated, and it's our job to look for what these problems were and how to effect qualitative rather than merely quantitative change in them. I'm generally a skeptic of Marxism-Leninism and the idea of an elite group of educators to teach the masses.
Communism is not a 'utopia' in the sense that everyone is happy all the time. It aims simply to do away with certain problems, just as public health services don't do away with every problem in your life. Your insinuation that I or any other Communist thinks this way is a strange one, though not unheard of.
>you should educate youself better by consuming mass media.
Is this not precisely the opposite of mass media? Marxist social critic Herbert Marcuse wrote about how, beacuse Communism is a subversive movement, and indeed the Left, it cannot gain mass media time, because of its nature as subversive; it can only be snuck in under capitalism, as capitalism is willing to accept any ideology for the sake of profit. I would recommend One-Dimensional Man on the topic of what problems Communists have with late capitalist media and production, and the hiding of information.
>If you are interested, you might want to read Orwell's 1984
I have; although it's a little funny to see Orwell used to rebut the Communist project, seeing as he was a Socialist himself who fought on the side of anarchists in Spain, there's a deeper point here that you are missing. Orwell wrote about very obvious misdirection - "war is peace", "peace is war". However, you are missing the fact that it is not this easy to see.
Nowadays, as I am sure you know, the contradiction and control is hidden not in the sentence but within the noun. In words such as "freedom", "democracy", "control", etc. the actual meaning can be discerned only by the speaker of the word and the historical time period. Please read Marcuse on this topic. I don't know where you're getting the idea that I'm in favour of rewriting the past from.
Upon second reading, that makes more sense, however it would be clearer if this were the case. "Chinese Communism" can refer either to the ideology which the CCP claim to adhere themselves to, or it can refer to the actual state-capitalist bureaucracy as practiced in China.
I'm not so sure what is meant by it. Adherents of Marxism-Leninism utilise the method of dialectical materialism to analyse the past and to provide a model for the structure of the future based on the resolution of dialectical contradictions. The contradictions of feudalism led to capitalism, and the contradictions of capitalism (the value-form in particular, class antagonism) lead to Communism.
I've heard about this too. A member of the IWW, also a Deliveroo rider, told us about how in his region fellow riders reported people for unionising. A manager fired them. After protests, Deliveroo fired the manager responsible for firing people for unionising. I still think that there is a strong anti-union undercurrent in the """sharing""" economy.
I think there's certainly an argument to be made for social health care, the restriction of that health care for certain illnesses, and limiting the ability or capacity of companies to knowingly and deliberately entrap people into a cycle of sugar "addiction". Of course they are only offering goods to sell, but the effects of this simplified reductionist view are seen through society and deserve to be studied and inspected.
I'm usually a strong proponent of regulation to protect people, but only where the harm can be studied and analysed. If games are not marketed to minors, I do not think it is reasonable to restrict the content of the games lest minors see or interact with them. If the content is aimed at children, then a case may be made (as gambling can develop extremely harmful addictions and tendencies) for their restriction.
Many things which adults may freely consume within society, including pornography (and certain genres therein), alcohol, tobacco, etc. are regulated, but these "vices" are not illegalised for the sake that a child may engage in it, and I think that an effort to do so would be very disappointing.
Although this reads like a typical libertarian argument, I want to note that I simply don't consider myself to be an advocate of illegalising something because it has a bad effect on some users, or it is used for nefarious purposes. Encryption can be used for terrorists to communicate, the Internet can be used for revenge porn, and a baseball bat can be used to bludgeon someone to death.
There is similar problems with the software that runs pacemakers and other such devices, in which the source is not made available. The protection of users against themselves is an easy example of the intrusion of technological rationality and production for the sake of production in capitalism in which the totality of experience, even life itself for such people, is administered living.
The most strange bugs have the strangest solutions. Just an hour ago I was trying to debug a queueConstructor (it returns a malloc'd pointer to a queue data structure), right after I finished implementing the operations for a stack data structure. Malloc was inexplicably causing the program to hang (I don't know if it's a segfault, I was using Windows). printfing around the constructor and inside it didn't work. I had included all the libraries I needed to, syntax was good, no warnings, I even changed the declarations from int var to int var.
It turns out the problem was that in main() just before I called queueConstructor, I added the item 633346 as an integer element in my stack data structure. Whether this overflowed the integer, I don't know. But I don't know why it would stop malloc for a different data structure stored in a different variable from working (perhaps it was occupying some memory that my queue wanted?).
This isn't the first time bugs like this happen, and as a novice programmer I really wish tools were better, or I knew how to use the tools. GDB available via CodeBlocks wasn't helpful.
This is precisely where the criticism that the USSR was "state capitalist" came from; it operated as a corporation owning its own means of production, not a dictatorship of the proletariat. "All power to the soviets" faded rather quickly even under Lenin.
>claiming that this time it will be different due to some vague, hand-wavy reason.
Because I'm not an advocate of Marxism-Leninism nor Soviet state capitalism, or depriving people of life.
>Yeah, millions being moved out of poverty is the same as "exploited".
Both can be true, the forms of exploitation have changed but the essence remains the same - the massive extraction of surplus from those in too dire a situation to do anything about it, especially in sweatshops.
>removing 50% of the world population from extreme poverty in half a century
The Soviet model transformed Russia from a barely industrialised feudal backwater into competing with the world's largest superpowers and enduring a world war and making extreme advancements in science and technology while facing constant embargoes. It lifted many people to much better standards of living and education and liberty.
>where death is part of the governing process.
I disagree that this is a feature of Socialism, it is a feature of an authoritarian state. Pinochet's Chile and Hitler's Nazi Germany were destructive even though neither were Socialist societies.
> as if he is a reasonable source
Marx is highly respected in the fields of classical political economy, philosophy, critical theory, sociology, journalism and revolutionary and liberation movements. Even his bourgeois critics hold him as one of the best critics of capitalism. The continuance of his ideas which goes on to this day in new Communist projects and research within philosophy by the likes of Badiou, Zizek, Negri, and the Frankfurt School has ensured he hasn't died. As his friend Engels said at his funeral: his name will endure through the ages.
Why do you think strawman thought-terminating cliches are an acceptable level of discourse? At best they serve to be distracting and needlessly hostile.
>but you keep insisting in trying again a system that again and again has proven itself to be horrible.
Not really; have you heard of Badiou's concept of the Communist Hypothesis? His argument is that Socialism, well, Communism has existed as an Idea for centuries, it is always the force to break down the "present state of things", it is the first element of society, the subversive one, to oppose the action of the State. To dismiss thirty years of research into Communism, creating branches such as anarchist Communism, communalism, feminist anarchism, Socialist technocracy and others with faux-empiricism is a little heavy handed in my view.
As for your support of the wonders of capitalism, neither I, nor Marx, Engels or any contemporary Communist denies its push to reduce poverty.
>shifting value from developed countries to developing countries.
"Shifting value" is a very strange way of saying that developing countries are being systematically exploited due to the low cost of labour because they have almost no training.
>but the current system has worked miracles
So did the feudal system, and in fact so did the Soviet system (which I do not by any means support).
>It can be improved
So can Socialism.
>but proposing a dramatic change to a system that ALWAYS results in bloody dictatorships makes no sense.
Capitalism itself was extremely dramatic, it came "soaked from head to toe in blood" as Marx put it. In fact, he dedicates two chapters of his magnum opus to detailing the bloody history of capitalism and the laws passed in Western Europe that allowed it to flourish.
>Every single time, over dozens of times, it resulted in bloody dictatorships.
It is very much worth studying why this has happened and what kind of methods can be used to avert it. Not only is Marxism-Leninism not the only form of Socialist praxis (neither is Marxism the only Socialist theory for that matter), but it's unwise to dismiss "failures" for the reason that they were authoritarian. Allende, Sankara's Burkina Faso, the Paris Commune, revolutionary Catalonia, and most recently Rojava are examples of the Socialist project experiencing some faults but not nearly as uncharitably as you are painting them here.
This kind of attitude from your parent commenter is extremely common, it is an artifact of ideology and the working of technological rationality into the consciousness. While the parent commenter probably believes he or she lives in a post-ideological world in which rationality has been obtained and found to be forever placed somewhere between right and left, a compromise of two extremes in which domination cannot be acknowledged because as Marx put it, Bentham reins, J.S Mill makes a strange comeback in the denial of structural effects and seeing totality. The kind of ignorance or blindness to the totality of society is well captured by P.W Bridman quoted by Marcuse:
>"We evidently know what we mean by length if we can tell what the length of any and every object is, and for the physicist nothing more is required. To find the length of an object, we have to perform certain physical operations. The concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is measured are fixed: that is, the concept of length involves as much and nothing more than the set of operations by which length is determined. In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations."
>Bridgman has seen the wide implications of this mode of thought for the society at large:
"To adopt the operational point of view involves much more than a mere restriction of the sense in which we understand 'concept,' but means a far-reaching change in all our habits of thought, in that we shall no longer permit ourselves to use as tools in our thinking concepts of which we cannot give an adequate account in terms of operations."
This is precisely correct. I think the replies to you are missing a very central point (speaking as if the accusation of advocating Marxian Communism was a serious charge, too). Perhaps the important authors about the relationship between media and capitalism are the Frankfurt School, in particular Herbert Marcuse's works. I'm reading his book One-Dimensional Man at the moment.
He's advocating exactly what you are: democratic deployment of technology. How this relates to media is very interesting, and the idea that these problems exist merely quantitatively different in a possible Socialist society is a fundamental lack of imagination for qualitative change.
The other people replying to you forget a key component of history - that rationality is not fixed. Technology has the capability to change what humans consider rational, rationality is a process, a movement in which different societies have different views. The current rationality of late capitalism is what Marcuse terms technological rationality. That is, the rationality of production. This kind of rationality is the production for the sake of production, for the sake of profit. After all, what is more rational than developing machinery, streamlining it, making it more efficient, increasing the role of mechanization in society? Hardly anyone would disagree that these are wonderful advancements - however with them, they have brought rationality of production which pervades society everywhere. This rationality is actually irrational, but few see this. Advertising, planned obsolescence, extreme marketing, the working of the market into the education systems are all simply parts of the production process. Just more costs.
Artwork is affected by technological rationality. The old pieces of art often had an alienating component, that is to say, they displayed a clear break from the state of things, and a hope for a different kind of future, the outcast, the mastermind thief, the unemployed person, etc. all fulfilled a role that was outside of the system of rationality, acting against it; even when these roles were not glorified, they existed as an opposition to the system. Marcuse notes that in modern artwork, this notion has largely disappeared; the villains and outcasts are no longer outcasts, they are within the system but in the bottom rungs, and their opposition cannot be seen as clever, but it is only misguided. Their opposition to the bourgeois system from within is always shown as a false opposition, a threat to our notions of freedom conferred by technological rationality.
When you hear Bach, Freud, Marx etc. in the supermarket, he is stripped of his alienating or any kind of critical dimension. An element of his truth has been taken away by the new consideration in the light of technological rationality, reduced and sublimated into the totality.
Socialism, what you are advocating, carries with it a very different set of rationality in which man is liberated from the freedom of being a free economic subject, free from the bounded freedom of the welfare state. The welfare state, which many proponents of "soft capitasm" advocate is another form of repression of the individual, but in different forms. It is administered living, the restriction and control of the free time made available by technological advancement and control over the intelligence necessary to comprehend self-determination.
When we advocate Socialism, we do not mean a central party committee deciding what to read, we mean the liberation of people from the restrictions of the new rationality which insists in its own mode of living through our leisure time, our work time, our sexual enjoyment and artistic pursuit.
Isn't the only reason why they wouldn't block booting "other OSs" was because you can use their Boot Camp utility to dual boot Windows? Then someone figured out that the machine didn't care what you ran once you selected the Windows option, so they started doing things like running Ubuntu on there. Most operating systems know the genies is out of the bottle more than Apple apparently, as they let you not only customise your partition schema at install time, but you can use standard utilities to change it whenever you want.
I may be misrecollecting, but Apple doesn't let you resize the Windows partition unless you do it manually from Windows/Linux, or you use the Boot Camp assistant again. The utility is deliberately built so that you can't resize the partition without erasing it. Things may have changed, though.