Friday, April 2, 2021

deathtokoalas
the pmc should not exist at all, it should be abolished and replaced by a series of committees.

her arguments in favour of the pmc were really the only reactionary things she said, and this is typical of the so-called academic left, which loves to pretend that it's doing something useful but are in truth mostly useless eaters on state subsidies. that mirror needs to be held up.

they would be - and should be - the first to go.


Immortal Science of Hauntology
npc

deathtokoalas
i have no idea what you're talking about. at all.

(pause)

so, this is apparently something that gross, smelly gamer bros say when they mean to suggest that somebody doesn't think for themselves - which they need to do by implementing a generalized groupthink meme, rather than coming up with something original and pertinent.

it's not subtle enough to be ironic; it's just dumb.

stakkanov friman
some good points you make.
The workers can not wield the state tool for their own interest for it is an oppressive system. but academia? shure.
i see a problem

deathtokoalas
academia will never lose it's superiority complex, and it is consequently forever lost to communism. it is itself a tool of oppression that must be brought under the control of the cooperative, and not the other way around.

stakkanov friman
i am unshure if you are aware of my attempt to explain their hypocracy.
i was trying to mostly agree with you infact. but i do not think that a workers cooperative can wield academia as a tool for their goals. just like the state it must be destroyed and built for a new purpose in a differenet form from the ground up

deathtokoalas
the problem with academia is that it's inherently hierarchical, and consequently can't avoid implementing tyrannies of knowledge. and, in a past era, that may have been unavoidable, but we don't need experts anymore when we have searchable databases - they can be bypassed almost entirely. the technology undoes a certain type of division of labour, which necessitates it's democratization, like any other. 

you were repeating my statement that the academy is hypocritical and i agreed with myself and expanded upon the point. but, it's more than hypocrisy, when they start producing these ridiculous prices to attend the institution, and then restricting access to meaningful labour based on an ability to pay. that's a source of oppression, and it has to be democratized for that reason as well. 

but, because their own self-interest is to perpetuate these prices and this exclusion, these decisions need to be taken away from them and placed in the hands of the people, more broadly. they can't be allowed to run themselves, as it will lead to continued restrictions to access. and, in the existing world, where data is power, that's almost the most oppressive thing you could  imagine.

we could have a debate about the definition of the state, but i'm not entirely sure where you're coming from. you sound almost right-libertarian. i'm a libertarian socialist. so, when i talk about abolishing the state, what i mean is democratizing decision making power, by taking it away from a professional managerial class and putting it into the hands of a collective. maybe you mean something else.

======

deathtokoalas
marx was critical of anybody who called themselves socialist but refused to perfectly adhere to his theory. i think what you're discussing here would better refer to lassalle than proudhon, but there's a commonality in the critique - he felt he had an authoritarian monopoly on socialist theory, and anybody that deviated from it was wrong. so, he would have been vicious on lenin, vicious on mao and vicious on anybody else that tweaked his theory at all. what that's really uncovering, if you look at it, is that marx saw himself as a prophet, and refused to tolerate dissent. and, then you get to  the real point of what marx really was - a cult leader, a religionist.
 
zero books
He argued persuasively that many socialists continued to formulate their notions of socialism on a bourgeois/class basis.

deathtokoalas
see, i don't think that holds well with proudhon, which he seemed to think was just a kind of a loose cannon. but, i think it holds well with lasalle - i don't disagree with you. but, i mean, i'd rather live in sweden than the ussr, too.