Yep, as real as it gets. @Pfhorrest, its from the Amazon union-busting video I posted, where the mention of a 'living wage' by employees is cited as a potential warning sign of worker organization.

Written interview with Chibber: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4717-capitalism-is-complex-but-not-difficult-to-understand

"Your three pamphlets, The ABCs of Capitalism, have just been published in Germany. In the introduction, we find the sentence, “capitalism is complex, but not difficult to understand”. Is that true?

Yes. Every aspect of social reality under capitalism has several dimensions, which is why it appears complex. However, it is very easy to understand the essence of capitalism: there is a small group of people who own almost everything, while the vast majority of people own almost nothing. This vast majority has to go to work for the propertied class every day. Take this as the starting point, and from there you can explain everything else – you just need to follow the tracks.

You demand simplicity. Then explain in a few simple words: why overcome capitalism?

So we can live under conditions in which people thrive because they have autonomy over their lives. That is, in principle, a liberal conception. But it cannot be realised under capitalism, because most people spend most of their day under somebody else's supervision and control - namely at work. Every day, they sell not only their labour power but also their autonomy for a certain number of hours. Thus, they lose freedom, which in turn means a loss of self-determination. The power that the capitalists exert over workers doesn't benefit workers, it benefits the enterprise, which often enough turns against the workers. If you depend on someone else for your survival for the rest of your life, you are constantly forced to ensure that you remain competitive, i.e. cheaper and more productive than others. Your entire social environment is influenced and shaped by this competition, which extends into leisure time too."

I mean, you just have to look at this dystopian nightmare video, and the idea that collective bargaining is just fine as it is, or that corporations aren't shit scared of unions, can be seen for the joke it is. Or just watch American Factory and see union-busting at work. Or else consider Walmart, the US's biggest employer:



Both videos making the point to champion 'direct relationships' with 'associates' - i.e. no mediation or collective bargaining pls, we like our overbearing asymmetry of power exactly as it is.

Holy shit now they want to pass laws against making fun of the Chinese national anthem with max penalties of 3 years.

But the Marxist rhetoric tends to carry a certain baggage — Marchesk

And capitalism kills people everyday by means of the exercise of force and coordination of power. What's your point?

It's so absurd isn't it?

It's pretty funny watching American Trumpists bang on about their rights when refusing to wear masks in stores when just a couple of years ago they were crying about how stores should be able to refuse making cakes for gay people.

This particular line of conversation is pretty absurd. States, for instance, nationalize, or even break-up - under anti-trust legislation, for instance - companies with relative ease on various occasions. Hell, capitalists, by means of hostile take-overs, regularly take over - against what people 'want' or 'agree with' - companies all the time. The dividing line seems to be what is and what is not sanctioned by law. When sanctioned by law, 'people who disagree' are magically irrelevant, but all of a sudden, when it comes to strategies for increasing the sum-total of human liberation in the world, they're an unsurpassable bulwark for which violent force is the only option? Please. Utter tripe.

By the way was there a specific work you recommend that delves into Marx's concept of freedom? — Maw

Hm, I'm not super familiar with Marx's writings on this topic specifically, but On The Jewish Question has some great stuff on what Marx calls 'emancipation', where he contrasts the liberal conception of rights with a more properly 'human emancipation'. Wendy Brown has a great treatment of that essay in her States of Injury, chapt 5 ("Rights and Losses").

https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/19190975?hl=en

Gee wonder whyyyy

udon t kMow me

D'oh! Lol.

If only.

OK Boomer

Universal health care isn't even a question! It's the minimal basis of any society: there's no freedom without a sound body, and there's nothing like ill health to keep people from realizing their capacities (i.e. to keep people unfree). And labour unions are - or should be - central to worker organization. As Chibber points out, the kind of collective action that unions can put into effect are one of the few countervailing forces able to properly combat the imbalance of power involved in wage relations. It was the unions who gave us the 5 hour work week, paid leave, and a relatively capped working day. It's no accident that the total demolition of unions has coincided with a massive rise in workplace casualization and the rise of the 'gig-economy'.

The problem here is what to do with the people who don't agree. — Marchesk

Really? 'Cause no one asked me, or in fact the majority of the human population, if the current socio-economic arrangement in which vast swathes of humanity are wage slaves for an exploitative capitalist class is OK. That seems to be much more of a problem than your hypotheticals. And if you want to shoot workers for striking or whatever, and you think that the problem with this scenario are workers, then so be it, I've nothing to say to you.

If Biden is elected and starts gassing people, my qualified support of the court argument will look silly, I grant that. I will even send you a $100 amazon gift card as penance. — csalisbury

Do the concentration camps on your Southern border set up by Obama and by extension, Biden, count? No gassing just yet, of course, but hey, with COVID doing the job of killing the wretched and the brown housed in them, who needs gas?

But look - I'm not denying that there are reasons to vote for Biden. Just as there are reasons to vote for Trump, or third-party candidates, or whatever. I'm just saying, that the smug ease with which those equating not voting for Biden with Trump supporters and somehow responsible for his victory, is, well, shit, and peddled by shit people.

I removed the thread because it was indeed a low quality one. A bunch of just-so stuff about the universe having been some kind of hell or whatever. And now, since you don't care about being banned, I've obliged.

I'm guessing anarchists will disagree with this — Marchesk

Not in the slightest - perhaps the central tenant of anarchist politics is mutual aid and communal organization, and perhaps the central cry of all leftist politics is: 'organize!' Libertarians of course can all fall in a bottomless well as far as I'm concerned, but the point is that the augmentation of power by social and collective means is equally the augmentation of freedom. This is probably brought out best in the 3rd lecture of Chibber's above, in which collective action is the royal road to a free society. It's precisely the atomization and isolation of individuals - as is encouraged under neoliberalism, and oiled by the diarrhoea of American liberalism - that leads to the most grotesque destruction of all human freedom.

(Ironically of course, those in power know this very well: the fact that the powerful are 'well-connected' is not a result of power: it is a pre-condition of it. The powerful are the least isolated, most well-organized people on Earth - freedom accrues upwards because of it, even as they sell the snake oil of individually-engendered freedom, which many unwittingly buy into).

3rd and last video out!

Not interested; not interesting.

No idea what you mean by 'true freedom'. It's like asking for triangles without angles.

Need to hit the sack but a quick comment: the exercise of force and coordination of power are the conditions of, and not constraints upon, the exercise of freedom.

Didn't mean to get so caught up on freedom! Watch the Chibber videos!

Yes and no - one has to be careful about Berlin's distinction here. Berlin's 'positive freedom' was still a kind of individualist, rationalist freedom (modelled on Kant), which aligned with the ability to give oneself a rule for action (auto-nomos; self-rule) and leave it at that. Importantly too, 'positive freedom' was the name Berlin used to try and discredit what he understood to be socialist conceptions of freedom. Raymond Geuss, who contrasts Berlin's positive and negative freedom with Marx's account, notes that what's missing even from Berlin's notion of 'positive freedom' is any link with the notion of power:

"The third conception of “freedom” [in Marx] is the materialist notion that identifies it with power. “I am free” means “I am free to do... ,” and that means concretely that I have the power or ability to do....” To be more exact, Marx seems to think of the full notion of freedom as comprising the conjunction of the ability to determine what one will do and the power to do what one decides to do. Anything less than this is not freedom, but a mere shadow of that concept. This part of Marx’s analysis breaks dramatically with the account which Isaiah Berlin will eventually give of the concept of freedom. Berlin does not even countenance the possibility of construing freedom as power, but rather counts “power” as belonging not to liberty but to a wholly different subject, namely the conditions under which liberty can effectively be used." (Geuss, "A Metaphysics of Right").

Effectively this agrees with your substantive point: freedom to choose, without the freedom to determine the very choices set out, is no freedom at all. But this should not be confused with 'positive freedom', which has a very iffy conceptual history.

. I see prioritizing social welfare - establishing a baseline of core human values that supersede monetization - as the focus. Freedom can take care of itself as long as we start to take care of each other. — Pantagruel

Absolutely. But I think the reworked notion of freedom that falls out of this - freedom that 'takes care of itself', as you put it - is or can be an incredibly powerful element of political mobilization. As in: let's get to the point where freedom does indeed take care of itself - freedom less as originating principle (arche) from which politics flows (what one might call the 'liberal' understanding of freedom), than as a telos, that towards which we work. A kind of centripetal rather than centrifugal freedom, one that works from the outside-in, rather than the inside-out. Maybe I'm old school like that, but I'm not keen to jettison the vocabulary of freedom, so much as rework it.

#COVIDGate
#5G
#Obamadidit

And in case anyone is a further masochist: a reading on why this is the perfect opportunity for the left to reclaim the value of freedom from the shallow, hollow shell of it made by the right:

"While voices of the left periodically worry that freedom has been lost irretrievably to the right, there is an ongoing contest in this country between elite claimants invoking freedom as a possession already had and subaltern counter-claimants envisioning freedom as a struggle to be won. Yet the real reason... to defend a politics of freedom is not that it fits into a national narrative or is an available vernacular—there are many of those, after all. The real reason is that it names the problem that an increasing number of people face today: systemic unfreedom in the neoliberal economy. By confronting that unfreedom, the left can do more than identify, in a coherent and cohesive way, the myriad problems that individuals are currently facing. It can offer people an opportunity for acting collectively, for creating the sort of realignment that in the past has reordered the policies and priorities, the broad language, of public life."

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/708919

Given it some thought. Neither the sonderkommando nor the katechon are quite the right images. Better are the collaborationist vichy, who, no doubt, argued with perfect rationality that France would be better governed by the French than the Germans, even as they helped the latter send their own citizens to the camps. Flawless arithmetic. "Yes the vichy are terrible, but...". Of course now we cheer when either the SS or the vichy are hung from the rafters in our historical reconstructions, even as the latter protested their supposed differences from the invaders. Mm. Much better.

Eh, go tone police somewhere else. When dealing with Ackchyually-bois I consider most bets off.

Then take it into account. And do what you must. But take everything else into account too. I simply take exception to the idea - not yours - that this is straightforward.

Your judiciary has been compromised for a long time - with Biden, by the way, playing an oversized part in making sure that's the case. The calculus is simple: the state won't save you. It's not about the logic of 'how' to vote; it's about the logic of voting at all, in the current circumstances.

And let's not talk about Australian idealism. Our current government is a US lapdog which is doing everything they can to ape American policy and gut any semblance of democracy we have left.

What does being an australian with a chinese background have to do with US elections

Idk you're the one who brought up personal stakes, like it mattered or something.

I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of someone with a real issue that will be voted on. — csalisbury

If that hypothetical issue is so overwhelmingly important to you (or whoever), over and above everything else, then vote for the candidate you think will get it passed, if that item even exists among any of the existing policy platforms. If that's Biden then so be it. I don't know what specific policies bear on you. I don't know how how you weigh the importance of said policy or policies against everything else. But here's what I do know: that electoral politics in the US are largely a sham (again, not bluster - quite literally and empirically, if you're just an average US citizen, the chances of your policy preferences having any influence on legislation are (1) practically nil [PDF]; (2) actually fucking nothing [PDF]) and that the illusion of you making a difference by means of voting is the most powerful bulwark to you actually being able to make a difference.

In the meantime, voting only functions to legitimate a broken system that will fuck you in every other way, if not that one or two ways that are offered like stale pieces of meat to offset the rest of the rottenness.

Imagine thinking Trump will literally destroy the planet. Here I was thinking we weren't discussing cartoon supervillains.I mean, how hilariously terrible is your 'logical point' when you have to make a caricature out of the already living, breathing caricature vivant that Trump already is in order to get it off the ground?

I see the argument about judges come up alot - I mean, we're talking about a man who fought, in the most shameful and misogynistic way - joyfully, maliciously getting Anita Hill to recount her rape trauma on national TV - to get Clarence Thomas - the most conservative high court justice - appointed. Biden was directly, personally responsible for that. And if the democrats are so fucking concerned with distinguishing themselves from their opponents, perhaps they might actually, I dunno, fucking distinguish themselves rather than voting to pass every other piece of Trump legislation that's put on the table, or better, trying to out-Trump Trump. We're talking again about a piece of shit who released an ad - in the last month - criticizing Trump for not being anti-Chinese enough. Someone asked above if Biden can seriously be taken for a racist. The answer is an unequivocal yes - he's a racist fuck, and fuck him forever*.

I'm serious when I said earlier that the hope that Biden would change is no different from the hope that abused women have when their partners promise that everything will change after the baby, or the marriage ceremony, or whatever. If the sonderkommando call-out is a bit much, the domestic abuse tropes aren't. Everyone knows this script, everyone knows what will - or rather won't - happen. Call it bluster if you want. Biden is not the lesser evil. He's the same evil who just happens not to say the quiet part out loud. Look at his past actions. Look at his current actions. This is a man whose spent his whole life making the world a worse place to live in. He's not going to stop any time soon.

I'm not saying this ought to be an 'easy' choice for anyone. It's all the more soul destroying because every other option is the worst option. That the options are indeed clear-cut (Biden or bust) is the most bullshit thing about this whole 'debate'. 'The logical option' my ass.

*Do I get skin-in-the-game points if I mention that I've got a Chinese background? What should it even fucking matter? A racist cunt-bag is a racist cunt-bag is a Biden.

Excellent.

I was considering going for political katechons but I figured two obscure references would be a bit top heavy.

Sonderkommandos weren't Nazis.

Nah Proth, not you.

Gotta admit it's nice having a forum clown like NOS.

It's funny, this attempt to foist responsibility upon people who literally have no obligation or responsibility is indistinguishable from the kind of gaslight logic of abusive partners - 'if you dont do this [forced choice] you're going to be responsible for [violent outcome]'. And when push comes to shove they'll say: "OK, it's not like you're making me beat you, but it's your fault really'. Just logic and reason really.

These people who think a lowest common denominator democracy - vote for this peice of shit because he's not this other, slightly bigger piece of shit - is a democracy worth having are not 'progressive'. They're the willing sonderkommandos of an irredeemable system.

Something something life imitates art. What shitty art though.