RedSails editor. she/her.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I think framing it as “learned helplessness” is condescending and unproductive.

    We should be encouraging people to learn and to think critically, not tell them that they shouldn’t bother, that they would be better off if they didn’t bother, that they can never understand things so just leave it to the experts.

    Mao’s “no investigation, no right to speak” slogan is better in that regard in that it privileges people with expertise without putting up an insurmountable barrier in front of the right to speak.

    Even on some of the most technical sorts of examples the author of this piece gives, the experts have made bad calls. The history of medicine is littered with malpractice and scientific racism. Perhaps involving and valuing broader perspectives would have helped in some of those cases.







  • My experience as a scientist is that to do good science, you need to be thinking dialectically. I think a lot about why more scientists are not Marxists; people who are good at thinking about the interconnectivity and changing nature of things in their science turn to eclecticism in their political beliefs/philosophy. Part of this is that I think we treat science and politics as such disparate things that must never interact.

    A lot of the “business” of science is very undialectical, and that’s where you see the failures of the field manifest. For example, assessment of a scientist’s contributions based on first authorship, journal prestige, etc, encourages bad practices with respect to collaboration and sharing results.

    You might enjoy this article by Bernal, a Marxist scientist: https://redsails.org/the-social-function-of-science/

    Already we have in the practice of science the prototype for all human action. The task which the scientists have undertaken — the understanding and control of nature and of man himself — is merely the conscious expression of the task of human society. The methods by which this task is attempted, however imperfectly they are realized, are the methods by which humanity is most likely to secure its own future. In its endeavour, science is communism. In science men have learned consciously to subordinate themselves to a common purpose without losing the individuality of their achievements. Each one knows that his work depends on that of his predecessors and colleagues and that it can only reach its fruition through the work of his successors. In science men collaborate not because they are forced to by superior authority or because they blindly follow some chosen leader, but because they realize that only in this willing collaboration can each man find his goal. Not orders, but advice, determine action. Each man knows that only by advice, honestly and disinterestedly given, can his work succeed, because such advice expresses as near as may be the inexorable logic of the material world, stubborn fact. Facts cannot be forced to our desires, and freedom comes by admitting this necessity and not by pretending to ignore it. These things have been learned painfully and incompletely in the pursuit of science. Only in the wider tasks of humanity will their full use be found.



  • I think dota has a lot of avenues for better understanding communism and dialectics.

    As one example, the way the five roles fit together in the balancing of their power spikes and the harnessing of their skill sets towards a common goal, it makes me think of this Che quote:

    One acquires in the face of work the old joy: the joy of fulfilling a duty; of feeling important within the social mechanism; of feeling oneself a cog that has its own unique characteristics, that is necessary — although not indispensable — to the production process. And, moreover, a conscious cog. A cog that has its own engine, driven further and further every time, in order to bring about to happy conclusion one of the key premises of socialist construction: the availability of a sufficient quantity of consumer goods for the entire population.




  • I think you are very narrowly defining manager as a manager of capital (i.e., seeking to maximize profits without care for what products are being made). I think you should read this: https://redsails.org/the-relationships-between-capitalists/

    As Marx later emphasizes, one consequence of the development of management as a distinct category of labor is that the profits still received by owners can no longer be justified as the compensation for organizing the production process. But what about the managers themselves, how should we think about them? Are they really laborers, or capitalists? Well, both — their position is ambiguous. On the one hand, they are performing a social coordination function, that any extended division of labor will require. But on the other hand, they are the representatives of the capitalist class in the coercive, adversarial labor process that is specific to capitalism.

    It is only the last part — the coercive, adversarial role played as representatives of capital — that will become obsolete. The coordination part of management (which includes coaching and motivation and conflict resolution) will remain.

    My experience with organizations, from families to RPG groups to community associations to capitalist enterprises, is that in a management void, some people will take on management responsibilities. Since these roles require skill and entail responsibility for certain tasks, it’s better to formalize it and train people for it. Do you not also see this in the organizations you are part of? Or could you be underestimating the amount of labour others are putting in to managing your community?


  • Workflow optimization and employee morale will still be important under socialism.

    Workflow optimization is just management of people/resources/timelines (and is present in non-repetitive jobs too): what processes aren’t working well together, what were the root causes of issues we encountered, how do we fix these problems? This, too, gets better with experience and study and some workers should specialize in this sort of management.

    Employee morale (and other aspects of emotional work) will also still be a relevant question under socialism: how do you balance a specific worker’s development interests with the needs of the job, how do you manage interpersonal conflict, how do you build consensus for or mediate disagreement raising from decisions the group needs to make? Straight-up boring old motivation questions also do not disappear just because workers have a stake in the fruits of their labour.





  • I agree with another poster that more recent writers can be easier entry points into theory because the authors translate it in ways that highlight ML theory’s relevance to today and recent history. As the other poster mentioned, Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds is good on breaking through cold war nonsense about the USSR, there’s a couple chapters online here. Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter history dissects the dominant ideology of our time. There’s a short summary of that book by the author here.

    No one here has yet tackled the question on how important it is to read Capital: I think it’s crucial. There are so many concepts it lays out and arguments it refutes that it makes reading other theory much easier. I think of Lenin’s Imperialism as a sequel to Capital, so it makes sense to me you find it challenging to read. That said, Capital is also challenging to read and it might help to familiarize yourself with some of the concepts it covers before you tackle it. Here are some (mostly short) essays for that purpose.

    I’ve posted a lot of links from RedSails because it was started for this purpose: to make theory accessible and demystified and relevant for today. If there’s a topic or author you want to read more on, it has curated articles for those ends.

    I’ll end with my favourite Lenin, which I think highlights why we can’t “go back” to some better time before capitalism but must go through capitalism to socialism.




  • I think the confusion about “feudalism is rent” stems from a lack of understanding about what capitalism is and what feudalism is. Feudalism is a very different mode of production: serfs were tied to their lords, but lords also had duties towards their serfs. This essay talks about what changed from feudalism to capitalism, which is something everyone in the 19th century was very aware of. Today, feudalism is so long ago that we have a hard time even conceiving of something that isn’t capitalism. (And so we come up with bizarre, indefensible definitions like “feudalism is when rent.”)

    Marx lays out in Capital that rent, profits and interest are all crystallized surplus-value, i.e., all of them are capital:

    Capital, therefore, is not only, as Adam Smith says, the command over labour. It is essentially the command over unpaid labour. All surplus-value, whatever particular form (profit, interest, or rent) it may subsequently crystallize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid labour. The secret of the self-expansion of capital resolves itself into having the disposal of a definite quantity of other people’s unpaid labour. (Capital Vol 1)

    This point is really important to him, as he tells Engels:

    The best points in my book are: 1. (this is fundamental to all understanding of the facts) the two-fold character of labour according to whether it is expressed in use-value or exchange-value, which is brought out in the very First Chapter; 2. the treatment of surplus-value regardless of its particular forms as profit, interest, ground rent, etc. This will be made clear in the second volume especially.

    Something novel about Marx’s books is that they look at capital from labour’s perspective, which I wrote about here. There are scenarios in which the difference between rent and interest and profit are meaningful. But for the sake of the liberation of workers from the oppression of capital, they are all the same:

    In fact, the form of interest and profit of enterprise assumed by the two parts of profit, i.e., of surplus-value, expresses no relation to labour, because this relation exists only between labour and profit, or rather the surplus-value as a sum, a whole, the unity of these two parts. The proportion in which the profit is divided, and the different legal titles by which this division is sanctioned, are based on the assumption that profit is already in existence. If, therefore, the capitalist is the owner of the capital on which he operates, he pockets the whole profit, or surplus-value. It is absolutely immaterial to the labourer whether the capitalist does this, or whether he has to pay a part of it to a third person as its legal proprietor. (Capital vol 3)