His constant sniffing and sloven appearance is physically repulsive and makes me gag. Of course he wants socialism. He hates beauty and wants to destroy it wherever found like the Eliot Rogers of “philosophy” he is.
>No son be strong pick up a book.
But dad Im a lazy neet Black person who wants to be given a 5 minute synopsis of a topic he doesnt understand and then go around calling himself an intellectual when talking to even bigger autistic neet Black folk...
2 years ago
Anonymous
marx has been disproven by modern economics
freud has been disproven by modern psychology
lacan was a complete freud that used mathematical notation in his writing while having zero idea what any of it actually meant in math
people who actually know real subjects laugh at you pseudo-intellectual marxist troons.
2 years ago
Anonymous
We're hitting levels of ironic detachment that theoretically shouldn't be possible
2 years ago
Anonymous
>lacan was a complete freud
hehe
2 years ago
Anonymous
>marx has been disproven by modern economics
how so, economics is a set of stipulations based on observation of cultural phenomena >freud has been disproven by modern psychology
how so, psychologists are trying to decypher the human mind within the constraints of a human mind.
2 years ago
Anonymous
fricking cringe. underage for sure.
2 years ago
Anonymous
being fat means you're failing at the most basic task of being human, don't pretend you could make statements about science, Black person.
Not a fan of privileged yuppies in general
[...]
Spoonfeed me daddy. No, son, be strong, go out into the world, pick up a book, fricking read it.
I'm almost completely certain this guy is some transitory worthless intellectual of the week. I trust my gut.
But we won't know until a century or two has passed.
https://i.imgur.com/YpxX7r3.jpg
What are your opinions on Slavoj Zizek.
He eats two sandwhiches on the street and that makes him amiable enough for me.
Pretty sure he was yugoslavian in some way.
You can read any of his popular stuff with a basic understanding of Marx. But you'll need Lacan and hegel as well as an understanding of a lot of the modern trends of philosophy to understand his serious work. Maybe 1 - 2 people in this thread understands the history of philosophy well enough to even place him in it yet alone evaluate his work.
I have read (some) of his work (mainly The Sublime Object of Ideology, his best known work, which was quite a difficult read ill admit) and have watched a lot of his public speaking content.
I am thoroughly over trying to figure him out as a valuable intellectual although I admit he has a fun personality and often has an 'outside the box' view which can be fun to ponder on.
Here's the TL;DR of everything you need to know about Slavoj and my thoughts on him
Zizek has two sides. Philosopher and public intellectual. In terms of philosopher, he is basically a VERY direct follower of Hegel and Lacan, towards a Marxist end. If that means nothing to you, just put it down because that is the foundation of 99.9% of his output besides generic leftist critiques of the world.
In terms of what that actually means, it means he is into psychoanalysis and the Hegelian dialectic (the mental model of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, and Hegel's concept of 'Recognition' as a meaning-making process) to explain how people think and behave in our societies today and why that's bad because capitalism or at least point out the issues with it.
The main themes of his output are that ideology is not something doctrinal like Marxism or Liberalism or an "ism" per se, its the entire worldview and often un-considered assumptions we have about life and society. So, its all very "Continental European" philosophy in that its very dense yet abstract stuff, not exactly falsifiable. It has a similar flavor to Freudianism if you know much about that - intuitively some things he says make sense, but not exactly 'scientific'
I dont want to write an essay and I got bored writing this so frick it, the main takeaway is he has some interesting things to say, but he doesn't really offer a 'project' or a 'call to action' and his stuff is very airy. He gets points for being relatively un-woke and willing to say as a leftist stuff like "the West is a great place to live and be from"
Also I'm not a leftist or a marxist (though some things marx wrote I find intellectually interesting, I do not believe in his works as a doctrine or as 100% valid) so I got pretty tired of everything circling back to "yeah so capitalism is bad" or whatever, but through a psychoanalytical lens.
One thing I just find annoying about these kinds of philosophical works in general is just their inability to (or choice not to) to grapple with some of the basic foundational assumptions and arguments of their main competing ideology, Liberalism.
Again I dont want to write an essay but it is an objective fact that human beings have been doing 'business' since the earliest civilizational history. Like, a merchant has a trading business, and he hires people to work the trade caravans. Or he buys wheat from farmers to trade. Whatever. The point is this structure of ownership and employee is a very intuitive social organization that occurs organically and naturally in all human societies. The Liberal framework is that therefore people have an inherent right to establish ownership of property, and organizations, and land, and human beings have the right (and government should establish / protect the right) to engage in consensual fair contract agreements with each other to perform work, i.e. as an employee of the owner's establishment.
The Marxist argument is of course that there is an inherent exploitation of any non-owner who works for this business, because TL;DR the labor theory of value and the taking of surplus value.
But I think the Marxists have way more to prove here considering that they are challenging a very intuitive and universal human mode of organization. And I don't find their stuff compelling. Frick it dude I'm hung over TL;DR adam smith and john locke were right their work is more clear and compelling and intuitive and marxists need to figure out how to explain how they're gonna actually 'solve' this 'problem' of business ownership
OK ill just slam this out basically Marxhomies be like "capitalism is exploitative and inherently bad for philosophical / moral reasons; also, capitalism regardless of its 'morality' will collapse as a viable form of economic organization because the structure is inherently flawed"
on the second point they are clearly objectively wrong its working fine its objectively better to live in the good ol US of A then frickin USSR or CommiChi or whatever, and his specific predictions about wages being starvation wages etc. clearly not true.
then on the moral point its like OK i can see where you came up with this exploitation point, but you gotta tell me how thats worse than a clearly articulable alternative, AND you have to show me that the exploitation point outweighs or overcomes the inherent loss of freedom to own property and organizations and companies you call your own, and the liberty to engage in consensual contracts with other citizens. They never really try to do either of these
So Marxhomies be like "workers need to own all the places they work in" and you're like OK well who's gonna do that and how. What does that look like IRL. USSR style where the central government is going to nationalize every mom and pop gas station in the entire united states? would that really be better? or something where its like "everything is a worker co-op but its basically still a market based system". OK that sounds nice, seems more plausible, but how is that going to be enforced? Additionally, isn't that basically how every like Law Firm and Management Consulting company is organized? So really this is just the system we have now but with no stock market and 'full employees' must be given company shares by law? That just seems like a less efficient way of doing things than we do now. homie how are the banks gonna work. How is finance gonna work. You need well-priced risk and a healthy amount of capital and credit to make economy work good, we figured this out already,.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>on the second point they are clearly objectively wrong its working fine its objectively better to live in the good ol US of A then frickin USSR or CommiChi or whatever, and his specific predictions about wages being starvation wages etc. clearly not true.
I agree on the inevitability of capitalism collapsing being bs, capitalism has clearly shown itself to be capable to adapt to the circumstances - not perfectly, but effectively enough to maintain itself and fix some of the contradictions brought up by Marx.
HOWEVER a metric frickton of the wealth in the USA or Europe (the 'imperial core') is extracted from the rest of the planet (mostly Asia, south America, Africa) at the expense of the people living there. Working conditions in most of those countries are still utter dogshit, and their politicians are usually corrupt and basically function as extensions of the core's political will. Whenever a country says no (like Cuba did) they will get hit pretty hard by shit like sanctions, attempted coups, embargos etc. Ofc this isn't to justify the authoritarianism in Cuba but I don't think it's entirely their own fault that they're in the shitter when their biggest ultra-wealthy trading partner the US just tells them to frick off.
Ultimately, and yes this is gonna be controversial, you can't have socialism in one country, socialism's power is *dependent* on the existence of capitalism before it, it wishes to alleviate the bad elements of capitalism (somewhat arbitrary oppressive mechanisms, centralization of exorbitant amouns of capital in the hands of very, very few) whilst maintaining its productive power. IMO too many people look at socialism vs. capitalism as a 'contest' when it's supposed to be a progressive step that can only really happen when capitalism has paved the way for it.
Any marxist who isnt historically illiterate recognizes that capitalism has brought great wealth to many nations and is much more liberating than what came before it.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>HOWEVER a metric frickton of the wealth in the USA or Europe (the 'imperial core') is extracted from the rest of the planet (mostly Asia, south America, Africa) at the expense of the people living there.
I appreciate your genuine engagement with my post so dont take it like an insult when I say I really think this is a huge cope from the Marxist PoV
I really think that this idea of imperialism and colonialism being the 'true source' of the Western world's wealth is a cope, to answer the very troubling question of "if Marxism is true, then why did Western societies develop a 'Middle Class' and things basically worked out OK under capitalism?". The attempted answer is to say that actually OK yes that did happen, but it happened at the expense of other people not in those countries, so capitalism is still bad.
The reason why I think it doesn't work on its own terms as an explanation is that 1. Western Euro countries without significant empires or colonies also experienced a similar post-industrial boom in living standards; 2. You can look at trade balances from countries at the time and see that most of the wealth that was being created was mostly from trading *between* rich countries of value-added goods (i.e. manufactured goods and refined foodstuffs), most of which were made with inputs that are domestically (not imperially) sourced (coal, iron, steel, wheat, etc.)
Of course it would be stupid to say that having slave labor / free real estate / free natural resources didn't supercharge this process, but you can look at China as an imperfect but recent example of this process. China doesn't have an overseas empire, but it basically said "we're gonna improve agriculture and export that, and use that to fund basic manufacturing and export that, and use that to fund advanced manufacturing and export that, and also create a consumer class". It's a state-pushed example of the process that resulted in Western societies getting rich - specialization and trade.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>I appreciate your genuine engagement with my post so dont take it like an insult when I say I really think this is a huge cope from the Marxist PoV
Usually people on here just call you a Black person and/or israelite for saying their PragerU vision of socialism is silly so no worries lol >Western Euro countries without significant empires or colonies also experienced a similar post-industrial boom in living standards
This is true but I think this has to do with geography and also the fact that imperialism isn't really the same as colonialism. Whereas a colony would only be exploitable but the country that its colonized by, and subsequently have the good traded internationally at the discretion of the colonizing country, imperialism is a bit more 'widely' accessible. Any country that wants to can buy from most other places directly, and afaik most industrializing/'exploited' nations etc. do sell to just about anybody who's up for paying.
There's also the fact that historically a country like Sweden just has been much closer to the 'core', in terms of both geography and culture, which probably meant more beneficial trading relations between them. I don't think it's just not the case that places like Sweden don't import very cheap goods from poorer nations.
Can't really refute point 2 I'm too lazy to read up on it rn, I hope that's okay. I'll just assume you're right. (xd stupid commie knows nothing xd)
2 years ago
Anonymous
(me) >but you can look at China as an imperfect but recent example of this process. China doesn't have an overseas empire, but it basically said "we're gonna improve agriculture and export that, and use that to fund basic manufacturing and export that, and use that to fund advanced manufacturing and export that, and also create a consumer class". It's a state-pushed example of the process that resulted in Western societies getting rich - specialization and trade.
Well yeah it's certainly possible to become more wealthy through simply building up your own country, the issue for me is that the third world is basically given the finger when they try to do that. China is probably an exception because 1) it's been developing very much along 'capitalistic' lines anyways ever since the death of Mao Zedong and 2) it's just got such a massive fricking workforce that can pump out so much shit that cutting off trade relations with them would just not be beneficial.
Historically a lot of times when countries have elected left wing leaders or just had revolutions (which sprung up out of authoritarian shitholes anyways so its not like any democracy was lost) America and Europe will try to frick it up and install a government sympathetic to them again because it benefits them. E.g. Chile, Burkina Faso, the amount of times they tried to kill Castro lol
2 years ago
Anonymous
>Western Euro countries without significant empires or colonies also experienced a similar post-industrial boom in living standards
You mean like Germany and Italy? A rising tide raises all ships but when things got tight those countries fell to fascism because they failed to establish economic footholds in imperialism and were forced to invert that process and basically cannibalize Europe in its death throws. Now we have the EU that's supposed to resolve that issue by distributing its colonialist plunder. >You can look at trade balances from countries at the time and see that most of the wealth that was being created was mostly from trading *between* rich countries of value-added goods
But "most" isn't what's important. Obviously most of European activity is European. Profit is only a very small fraction of the cost of a good and yet its what our system runs on. Even getting a 1-2% increase can mean the difference between success and failure. >China doesn't have an overseas empire, but it basically said
What it really said was that instead of British people owning their inexhaustible supply of human manpower instead the Chinese themselves would lease it to the highest bidder which caused Americans to never buy anything that didn't come from Chinese slave labor. The point being you have two choices in developing Capitalism. 1. Exploit others 2. Exploit yourself those are the only two options. That's not good or bad it's just fact. This isn't a moral argument it's a description of material reality which may or may not be justified.
2 years ago
Anonymous
this is nothing but rhetoric >tight those countries fell to fascism because they failed to establish economic footholds in imperialism
plenty of other countries were also non-colonial empires and did not fall to fascism, so that explanation doesn't make sense. also, the marxist explanation of fascism as 'what if imperialism was against wypipo when capitalism is sad' is simplistic and lame. read robert paxton's anatomy of fascism, fascism has a lot underneath it that has nothing to do with economics >Profit is only a very small fraction of the cost of a good
Obviously we know what a profit margin is, but this point is a dodge. leaving aside that if resources were slightly more expensive then that just means the price would be higher to achieve a minimum profit; if a majority of a country's increase in wealth is from domestic labor extracting domestic resources for domestic manufacturing to be shipped to another country, then the point is that colonies don't factor into this at all. OFC colonies gave victorian era europe a lot of free real estate, resources, and labor, but the point is that if they never colonized another country at all there still would have been the industrial revolution and 'capitalism' would have been basically as successful, just would have taken longer. besides, what was the alternative exactly? set up a customs office with the Zulus? history is history >The point being you have two choices in developing Capitalism. 1. Exploit others 2. Exploit yourself
Yeah in other words in order to have work done people need to do the work. The thing here that is actually making money is not 'exploitation' but trade. and when you dont got much you gotta trade shitty to produce goods before you get develop society enough to make better goods which make more profit and therefore make societies richer.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>plenty of other countries were also non-colonial empires and did not fall to fascism
Give me a list of Western countries that stayed afloat without any colonial holdings and I will show you a list of countries economically and politically dependent on Colonialist European countries. >but this point is a dodge
You missed the point. Europe was in lock step with each other. The exploitation from Colonialism fueled the relative power growth which drove the rise of the industrial revolution. >Yeah in other words in order to have work done people need to do the work.
Well you need some people to work without being compensated. Most people get paid less than dollars a day by major corporations.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>HOWEVER a metric frickton of the wealth in the USA or Europe (the 'imperial core') is extracted from the rest of the planet (mostly Asia, south America, Africa) at the expense of the people living there.
I appreciate your genuine engagement with my post so dont take it like an insult when I say I really think this is a huge cope from the Marxist PoV
I really think that this idea of imperialism and colonialism being the 'true source' of the Western world's wealth is a cope, to answer the very troubling question of "if Marxism is true, then why did Western societies develop a 'Middle Class' and things basically worked out OK under capitalism?". The attempted answer is to say that actually OK yes that did happen, but it happened at the expense of other people not in those countries, so capitalism is still bad.
The reason why I think it doesn't work on its own terms as an explanation is that 1. Western Euro countries without significant empires or colonies also experienced a similar post-industrial boom in living standards; 2. You can look at trade balances from countries at the time and see that most of the wealth that was being created was mostly from trading *between* rich countries of value-added goods (i.e. manufactured goods and refined foodstuffs), most of which were made with inputs that are domestically (not imperially) sourced (coal, iron, steel, wheat, etc.)
Of course it would be stupid to say that having slave labor / free real estate / free natural resources didn't supercharge this process, but you can look at China as an imperfect but recent example of this process. China doesn't have an overseas empire, but it basically said "we're gonna improve agriculture and export that, and use that to fund basic manufacturing and export that, and use that to fund advanced manufacturing and export that, and also create a consumer class". It's a state-pushed example of the process that resulted in Western societies getting rich - specialization and trade.
>I appreciate your genuine engagement with my post so dont take it like an insult when I say I really think this is a huge cope from the Marxist PoV
Usually people on here just call you a Black person and/or israelite for saying their PragerU vision of socialism is silly so no worries lol >Western Euro countries without significant empires or colonies also experienced a similar post-industrial boom in living standards
This is true but I think this has to do with geography and also the fact that imperialism isn't really the same as colonialism. Whereas a colony would only be exploitable but the country that its colonized by, and subsequently have the good traded internationally at the discretion of the colonizing country, imperialism is a bit more 'widely' accessible. Any country that wants to can buy from most other places directly, and afaik most industrializing/'exploited' nations etc. do sell to just about anybody who's up for paying.
There's also the fact that historically a country like Sweden just has been much closer to the 'core', in terms of both geography and culture, which probably meant more beneficial trading relations between them. I don't think it's just not the case that places like Sweden don't import very cheap goods from poorer nations.
Can't really refute point 2 I'm too lazy to read up on it rn, I hope that's okay. I'll just assume you're right. (xd stupid commie knows nothing xd)
(me)
(me) >but you can look at China as an imperfect but recent example of this process. China doesn't have an overseas empire, but it basically said "we're gonna improve agriculture and export that, and use that to fund basic manufacturing and export that, and use that to fund advanced manufacturing and export that, and also create a consumer class". It's a state-pushed example of the process that resulted in Western societies getting rich - specialization and trade.
Well yeah it's certainly possible to become more wealthy through simply building up your own country, the issue for me is that the third world is basically given the finger when they try to do that. China is probably an exception because 1) it's been developing very much along 'capitalistic' lines anyways ever since the death of Mao Zedong and 2) it's just got such a massive fricking workforce that can pump out so much shit that cutting off trade relations with them would just not be beneficial.
Historically a lot of times when countries have elected left wing leaders or just had revolutions (which sprung up out of authoritarian shitholes anyways so its not like any democracy was lost) America and Europe will try to frick it up and install a government sympathetic to them again because it benefits them. E.g. Chile, Burkina Faso, the amount of times they tried to kill Castro lol
(me)
Also if you're actually interested in different perspectives on Marx check out stuff like the Neue Marx Lekture or Left Communism, I think they generally apply different arguments to how thinks work (the NML seems more sympathetic to the state and is more of a Marxian econ thing), unfortunately the discourse is dominated by anarchists and Stalinists so it makes it seem like there's only one interpretation of Marx's works in existence that isn't outright hostile to his work.
>their inability to (or choice not to) to grapple with some of the basic foundational assumptions and arguments of their main competing ideology, Liberalism.
Marxists are basically secular gnostics. They're interested in gaining mass appeal but they're not interested in retreading that ground to the knowing. > it is an objective fact that human beings have been doing 'business' since the earliest civilizational history.
Sure depending on the definition. Marxists don't dispute this but previous forms of production were very different from Capitalism. >a merchant has a trading business
The class that would create capitalism, yes >The point is this structure of ownership and employee is a very intuitive social organization that occurs organically and naturally in all human societies.
Basically the Merchant classes' system of production and relationships have become the dominate form of all of the world's production and relationship. In the previous world system it was kings and peasants who were outside that relationship and merchants were considered even lower class than that. They then used technological progress to gather power and usurp the rulers. >The Liberal framework is that therefore people have an inherent right to establish ownership of property, and organizations, and land, and human beings have the right (and government should establish / protect the right) to engage in consensual fair contract agreements with each other to perform work, i.e. as an employee of the owner's establishment.
Yes, God gave the merchant the right to his merchandise and business relatjonships. Wow, amazing that is the one and only true principal. Thank God it took a bunch of wealthy merchants and relatives of wealth merchants to figure that out.
2 years ago
Anonymous
people making stuff, trading it to each other, and hiring other people to help them do this is a natural, intuitive, and universal human behavior, correct.
the state protecting people's right to do this without molestation or expropriation is the foundation of economic liberalism, correct.
and yes, everything built on top of this, which we loosely call 'capitalism' today, is just an elaboration on those simple principles
2 years ago
Anonymous
>people making stuff
Yes >trading it to each other
For most of human history most goods produced and consumed were for their use value by the consumers themselves. When they did "exchange" it usually wasn't for other goods but because of master peasant/master slave relationships >hiring other people to help them do this
This actually in particular is funny because why wage labor is actually an incredibly modern invention. It's essentially an outgrowth of slavery, legally.
>If you don't like his work and way of thinking you didn't understand him.
When will this left wing snob argument stop? You don't need to be an homosexual sapiens to understand his work. What's more, you don't even need to be homosexual sapiens to understand how socialists view the world.
Has some great books, and his "First as Tragedy, Then As Farce" helped convince me to quit the right, but also after a while of reading him and listening to him speak you realize that he does extensively repeat himself, and many of the books are just reformulations of his earlier works.
Sniffles!
He is a pessimistic socialist, which seems odd considering socialism generally holds humanity to be good with the institutions controlling them bad. He seems to think the other way in that institutions have a duty to regulate the evil in humanity. Which I don't fully disagree with.
At last that's what I got from him.
His constant sniffing and sloven appearance is physically repulsive and makes me gag. Of course he wants socialism. He hates beauty and wants to destroy it wherever found like the Eliot Rogers of “philosophy” he is.
>and Slovene appearance
FTFY
Pseud
>XDDDD SNIFF XD LOOK ISN'T HE FUNNY
Based fat moron
greasy autistic blob
Nobody on on this board has
1. Read his work
2. Read his major influences
3. Over two brain cells when if comes to anything tangentially political
ChapoBlack person
>doesn't deny it
>doesn't deny it
Not a fan of privileged yuppies in general
Spoonfeed me daddy. No, son, be strong, go out into the world, pick up a book, fricking read it.
>No son be strong pick up a book.
But dad Im a lazy neet Black person who wants to be given a 5 minute synopsis of a topic he doesnt understand and then go around calling himself an intellectual when talking to even bigger autistic neet Black folk...
marx has been disproven by modern economics
freud has been disproven by modern psychology
lacan was a complete freud that used mathematical notation in his writing while having zero idea what any of it actually meant in math
people who actually know real subjects laugh at you pseudo-intellectual marxist troons.
We're hitting levels of ironic detachment that theoretically shouldn't be possible
>lacan was a complete freud
hehe
>marx has been disproven by modern economics
how so, economics is a set of stipulations based on observation of cultural phenomena
>freud has been disproven by modern psychology
how so, psychologists are trying to decypher the human mind within the constraints of a human mind.
fricking cringe. underage for sure.
being fat means you're failing at the most basic task of being human, don't pretend you could make statements about science, Black person.
Me neither. Can you please summarise them?
Kek. Good one
Don't trust
I'm almost completely certain this guy is some transitory worthless intellectual of the week. I trust my gut.
But we won't know until a century or two has passed.
He eats two sandwhiches on the street and that makes him amiable enough for me.
Pretty sure he was yugoslavian in some way.
>Pretty sure he was yugoslavian in some way
Hes literally slovenian and was running for the 1990 presidential election there.
I am mentally moronic. I am currently realizing that he would be 20 something or 80+ if he was born anywhere else than yugoslavia in slovenia.
>t. has read marx in his late twenties and tries to come of as intellectual
you know that it's a sign of great competence when even a monkey understands your talk, without having read derrida first
You can read any of his popular stuff with a basic understanding of Marx. But you'll need Lacan and hegel as well as an understanding of a lot of the modern trends of philosophy to understand his serious work. Maybe 1 - 2 people in this thread understands the history of philosophy well enough to even place him in it yet alone evaluate his work.
Did he shill the vaccine?
Theorycel fricktard
Yeah unfortunately, so opinion discarded
I have read (some) of his work (mainly The Sublime Object of Ideology, his best known work, which was quite a difficult read ill admit) and have watched a lot of his public speaking content.
I am thoroughly over trying to figure him out as a valuable intellectual although I admit he has a fun personality and often has an 'outside the box' view which can be fun to ponder on.
Here's the TL;DR of everything you need to know about Slavoj and my thoughts on him
Zizek has two sides. Philosopher and public intellectual. In terms of philosopher, he is basically a VERY direct follower of Hegel and Lacan, towards a Marxist end. If that means nothing to you, just put it down because that is the foundation of 99.9% of his output besides generic leftist critiques of the world.
In terms of what that actually means, it means he is into psychoanalysis and the Hegelian dialectic (the mental model of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, and Hegel's concept of 'Recognition' as a meaning-making process) to explain how people think and behave in our societies today and why that's bad because capitalism or at least point out the issues with it.
The main themes of his output are that ideology is not something doctrinal like Marxism or Liberalism or an "ism" per se, its the entire worldview and often un-considered assumptions we have about life and society. So, its all very "Continental European" philosophy in that its very dense yet abstract stuff, not exactly falsifiable. It has a similar flavor to Freudianism if you know much about that - intuitively some things he says make sense, but not exactly 'scientific'
I dont want to write an essay and I got bored writing this so frick it, the main takeaway is he has some interesting things to say, but he doesn't really offer a 'project' or a 'call to action' and his stuff is very airy. He gets points for being relatively un-woke and willing to say as a leftist stuff like "the West is a great place to live and be from"
Also I'm not a leftist or a marxist (though some things marx wrote I find intellectually interesting, I do not believe in his works as a doctrine or as 100% valid) so I got pretty tired of everything circling back to "yeah so capitalism is bad" or whatever, but through a psychoanalytical lens.
One thing I just find annoying about these kinds of philosophical works in general is just their inability to (or choice not to) to grapple with some of the basic foundational assumptions and arguments of their main competing ideology, Liberalism.
Again I dont want to write an essay but it is an objective fact that human beings have been doing 'business' since the earliest civilizational history. Like, a merchant has a trading business, and he hires people to work the trade caravans. Or he buys wheat from farmers to trade. Whatever. The point is this structure of ownership and employee is a very intuitive social organization that occurs organically and naturally in all human societies. The Liberal framework is that therefore people have an inherent right to establish ownership of property, and organizations, and land, and human beings have the right (and government should establish / protect the right) to engage in consensual fair contract agreements with each other to perform work, i.e. as an employee of the owner's establishment.
The Marxist argument is of course that there is an inherent exploitation of any non-owner who works for this business, because TL;DR the labor theory of value and the taking of surplus value.
But I think the Marxists have way more to prove here considering that they are challenging a very intuitive and universal human mode of organization. And I don't find their stuff compelling. Frick it dude I'm hung over TL;DR adam smith and john locke were right their work is more clear and compelling and intuitive and marxists need to figure out how to explain how they're gonna actually 'solve' this 'problem' of business ownership
OK ill just slam this out basically Marxhomies be like "capitalism is exploitative and inherently bad for philosophical / moral reasons; also, capitalism regardless of its 'morality' will collapse as a viable form of economic organization because the structure is inherently flawed"
on the second point they are clearly objectively wrong its working fine its objectively better to live in the good ol US of A then frickin USSR or CommiChi or whatever, and his specific predictions about wages being starvation wages etc. clearly not true.
then on the moral point its like OK i can see where you came up with this exploitation point, but you gotta tell me how thats worse than a clearly articulable alternative, AND you have to show me that the exploitation point outweighs or overcomes the inherent loss of freedom to own property and organizations and companies you call your own, and the liberty to engage in consensual contracts with other citizens. They never really try to do either of these
So Marxhomies be like "workers need to own all the places they work in" and you're like OK well who's gonna do that and how. What does that look like IRL. USSR style where the central government is going to nationalize every mom and pop gas station in the entire united states? would that really be better? or something where its like "everything is a worker co-op but its basically still a market based system". OK that sounds nice, seems more plausible, but how is that going to be enforced? Additionally, isn't that basically how every like Law Firm and Management Consulting company is organized? So really this is just the system we have now but with no stock market and 'full employees' must be given company shares by law? That just seems like a less efficient way of doing things than we do now. homie how are the banks gonna work. How is finance gonna work. You need well-priced risk and a healthy amount of capital and credit to make economy work good, we figured this out already,.
>on the second point they are clearly objectively wrong its working fine its objectively better to live in the good ol US of A then frickin USSR or CommiChi or whatever, and his specific predictions about wages being starvation wages etc. clearly not true.
I agree on the inevitability of capitalism collapsing being bs, capitalism has clearly shown itself to be capable to adapt to the circumstances - not perfectly, but effectively enough to maintain itself and fix some of the contradictions brought up by Marx.
HOWEVER a metric frickton of the wealth in the USA or Europe (the 'imperial core') is extracted from the rest of the planet (mostly Asia, south America, Africa) at the expense of the people living there. Working conditions in most of those countries are still utter dogshit, and their politicians are usually corrupt and basically function as extensions of the core's political will. Whenever a country says no (like Cuba did) they will get hit pretty hard by shit like sanctions, attempted coups, embargos etc. Ofc this isn't to justify the authoritarianism in Cuba but I don't think it's entirely their own fault that they're in the shitter when their biggest ultra-wealthy trading partner the US just tells them to frick off.
Ultimately, and yes this is gonna be controversial, you can't have socialism in one country, socialism's power is *dependent* on the existence of capitalism before it, it wishes to alleviate the bad elements of capitalism (somewhat arbitrary oppressive mechanisms, centralization of exorbitant amouns of capital in the hands of very, very few) whilst maintaining its productive power. IMO too many people look at socialism vs. capitalism as a 'contest' when it's supposed to be a progressive step that can only really happen when capitalism has paved the way for it.
Any marxist who isnt historically illiterate recognizes that capitalism has brought great wealth to many nations and is much more liberating than what came before it.
>HOWEVER a metric frickton of the wealth in the USA or Europe (the 'imperial core') is extracted from the rest of the planet (mostly Asia, south America, Africa) at the expense of the people living there.
I appreciate your genuine engagement with my post so dont take it like an insult when I say I really think this is a huge cope from the Marxist PoV
I really think that this idea of imperialism and colonialism being the 'true source' of the Western world's wealth is a cope, to answer the very troubling question of "if Marxism is true, then why did Western societies develop a 'Middle Class' and things basically worked out OK under capitalism?". The attempted answer is to say that actually OK yes that did happen, but it happened at the expense of other people not in those countries, so capitalism is still bad.
The reason why I think it doesn't work on its own terms as an explanation is that 1. Western Euro countries without significant empires or colonies also experienced a similar post-industrial boom in living standards; 2. You can look at trade balances from countries at the time and see that most of the wealth that was being created was mostly from trading *between* rich countries of value-added goods (i.e. manufactured goods and refined foodstuffs), most of which were made with inputs that are domestically (not imperially) sourced (coal, iron, steel, wheat, etc.)
Of course it would be stupid to say that having slave labor / free real estate / free natural resources didn't supercharge this process, but you can look at China as an imperfect but recent example of this process. China doesn't have an overseas empire, but it basically said "we're gonna improve agriculture and export that, and use that to fund basic manufacturing and export that, and use that to fund advanced manufacturing and export that, and also create a consumer class". It's a state-pushed example of the process that resulted in Western societies getting rich - specialization and trade.
>I appreciate your genuine engagement with my post so dont take it like an insult when I say I really think this is a huge cope from the Marxist PoV
Usually people on here just call you a Black person and/or israelite for saying their PragerU vision of socialism is silly so no worries lol
>Western Euro countries without significant empires or colonies also experienced a similar post-industrial boom in living standards
This is true but I think this has to do with geography and also the fact that imperialism isn't really the same as colonialism. Whereas a colony would only be exploitable but the country that its colonized by, and subsequently have the good traded internationally at the discretion of the colonizing country, imperialism is a bit more 'widely' accessible. Any country that wants to can buy from most other places directly, and afaik most industrializing/'exploited' nations etc. do sell to just about anybody who's up for paying.
There's also the fact that historically a country like Sweden just has been much closer to the 'core', in terms of both geography and culture, which probably meant more beneficial trading relations between them. I don't think it's just not the case that places like Sweden don't import very cheap goods from poorer nations.
Can't really refute point 2 I'm too lazy to read up on it rn, I hope that's okay. I'll just assume you're right. (xd stupid commie knows nothing xd)
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>but you can look at China as an imperfect but recent example of this process. China doesn't have an overseas empire, but it basically said "we're gonna improve agriculture and export that, and use that to fund basic manufacturing and export that, and use that to fund advanced manufacturing and export that, and also create a consumer class". It's a state-pushed example of the process that resulted in Western societies getting rich - specialization and trade.
Well yeah it's certainly possible to become more wealthy through simply building up your own country, the issue for me is that the third world is basically given the finger when they try to do that. China is probably an exception because 1) it's been developing very much along 'capitalistic' lines anyways ever since the death of Mao Zedong and 2) it's just got such a massive fricking workforce that can pump out so much shit that cutting off trade relations with them would just not be beneficial.
Historically a lot of times when countries have elected left wing leaders or just had revolutions (which sprung up out of authoritarian shitholes anyways so its not like any democracy was lost) America and Europe will try to frick it up and install a government sympathetic to them again because it benefits them. E.g. Chile, Burkina Faso, the amount of times they tried to kill Castro lol
>Western Euro countries without significant empires or colonies also experienced a similar post-industrial boom in living standards
You mean like Germany and Italy? A rising tide raises all ships but when things got tight those countries fell to fascism because they failed to establish economic footholds in imperialism and were forced to invert that process and basically cannibalize Europe in its death throws. Now we have the EU that's supposed to resolve that issue by distributing its colonialist plunder.
>You can look at trade balances from countries at the time and see that most of the wealth that was being created was mostly from trading *between* rich countries of value-added goods
But "most" isn't what's important. Obviously most of European activity is European. Profit is only a very small fraction of the cost of a good and yet its what our system runs on. Even getting a 1-2% increase can mean the difference between success and failure.
>China doesn't have an overseas empire, but it basically said
What it really said was that instead of British people owning their inexhaustible supply of human manpower instead the Chinese themselves would lease it to the highest bidder which caused Americans to never buy anything that didn't come from Chinese slave labor. The point being you have two choices in developing Capitalism. 1. Exploit others 2. Exploit yourself those are the only two options. That's not good or bad it's just fact. This isn't a moral argument it's a description of material reality which may or may not be justified.
this is nothing but rhetoric
>tight those countries fell to fascism because they failed to establish economic footholds in imperialism
plenty of other countries were also non-colonial empires and did not fall to fascism, so that explanation doesn't make sense. also, the marxist explanation of fascism as 'what if imperialism was against wypipo when capitalism is sad' is simplistic and lame. read robert paxton's anatomy of fascism, fascism has a lot underneath it that has nothing to do with economics
>Profit is only a very small fraction of the cost of a good
Obviously we know what a profit margin is, but this point is a dodge. leaving aside that if resources were slightly more expensive then that just means the price would be higher to achieve a minimum profit; if a majority of a country's increase in wealth is from domestic labor extracting domestic resources for domestic manufacturing to be shipped to another country, then the point is that colonies don't factor into this at all. OFC colonies gave victorian era europe a lot of free real estate, resources, and labor, but the point is that if they never colonized another country at all there still would have been the industrial revolution and 'capitalism' would have been basically as successful, just would have taken longer. besides, what was the alternative exactly? set up a customs office with the Zulus? history is history
>The point being you have two choices in developing Capitalism. 1. Exploit others 2. Exploit yourself
Yeah in other words in order to have work done people need to do the work. The thing here that is actually making money is not 'exploitation' but trade. and when you dont got much you gotta trade shitty to produce goods before you get develop society enough to make better goods which make more profit and therefore make societies richer.
>plenty of other countries were also non-colonial empires and did not fall to fascism
Give me a list of Western countries that stayed afloat without any colonial holdings and I will show you a list of countries economically and politically dependent on Colonialist European countries.
>but this point is a dodge
You missed the point. Europe was in lock step with each other. The exploitation from Colonialism fueled the relative power growth which drove the rise of the industrial revolution.
>Yeah in other words in order to have work done people need to do the work.
Well you need some people to work without being compensated. Most people get paid less than dollars a day by major corporations.
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Also if you're actually interested in different perspectives on Marx check out stuff like the Neue Marx Lekture or Left Communism, I think they generally apply different arguments to how thinks work (the NML seems more sympathetic to the state and is more of a Marxian econ thing), unfortunately the discourse is dominated by anarchists and Stalinists so it makes it seem like there's only one interpretation of Marx's works in existence that isn't outright hostile to his work.
>their inability to (or choice not to) to grapple with some of the basic foundational assumptions and arguments of their main competing ideology, Liberalism.
Marxists are basically secular gnostics. They're interested in gaining mass appeal but they're not interested in retreading that ground to the knowing.
> it is an objective fact that human beings have been doing 'business' since the earliest civilizational history.
Sure depending on the definition. Marxists don't dispute this but previous forms of production were very different from Capitalism.
>a merchant has a trading business
The class that would create capitalism, yes
>The point is this structure of ownership and employee is a very intuitive social organization that occurs organically and naturally in all human societies.
Basically the Merchant classes' system of production and relationships have become the dominate form of all of the world's production and relationship. In the previous world system it was kings and peasants who were outside that relationship and merchants were considered even lower class than that. They then used technological progress to gather power and usurp the rulers.
>The Liberal framework is that therefore people have an inherent right to establish ownership of property, and organizations, and land, and human beings have the right (and government should establish / protect the right) to engage in consensual fair contract agreements with each other to perform work, i.e. as an employee of the owner's establishment.
Yes, God gave the merchant the right to his merchandise and business relatjonships. Wow, amazing that is the one and only true principal. Thank God it took a bunch of wealthy merchants and relatives of wealth merchants to figure that out.
people making stuff, trading it to each other, and hiring other people to help them do this is a natural, intuitive, and universal human behavior, correct.
the state protecting people's right to do this without molestation or expropriation is the foundation of economic liberalism, correct.
and yes, everything built on top of this, which we loosely call 'capitalism' today, is just an elaboration on those simple principles
>people making stuff
Yes
>trading it to each other
For most of human history most goods produced and consumed were for their use value by the consumers themselves. When they did "exchange" it usually wasn't for other goods but because of master peasant/master slave relationships
>hiring other people to help them do this
This actually in particular is funny because why wage labor is actually an incredibly modern invention. It's essentially an outgrowth of slavery, legally.
fat and dumb
postmodern neo-marxist
Whats even interseting about him? I know that he is a socialist and that he doesnt care about his appearance. But what else does he say??
Frankly I have a hard time fathoming half the shit he's saying most of the time.
pseudo intellectual fraud. completely worthless.
Both IQfy and IQfy are incapable of understanding Zizek, which is funny because he's somewhat entry level in terms of philosophy
it's funny how commies think there's only one type of philosophy and it's their kind
And there you go proving my point. You imply it's difficult to understand Zizek, or that you must be left-wing in order to understand him
Nice strawman you commie loser
Are you a bot? Do you speak English?
You are a commie no?
>If you don't like his work and way of thinking you didn't understand him.
When will this left wing snob argument stop? You don't need to be an homosexual sapiens to understand his work. What's more, you don't even need to be homosexual sapiens to understand how socialists view the world.
Has some great books, and his "First as Tragedy, Then As Farce" helped convince me to quit the right, but also after a while of reading him and listening to him speak you realize that he does extensively repeat himself, and many of the books are just reformulations of his earlier works.
Basically what I learnt is that he acts like Diogenes and that most people dont know what the frick his ideas actually are.
>Now heres why I'm fricking gay and shit and
SNORT
>capitalism and fricking shit and I'm gay
SNORT
Sniffles!
He is a pessimistic socialist, which seems odd considering socialism generally holds humanity to be good with the institutions controlling them bad. He seems to think the other way in that institutions have a duty to regulate the evil in humanity. Which I don't fully disagree with.
At last that's what I got from him.
Don't care for him. Prefer Agamben and Sloterdijk