Spencer Leonard asks "Is Capitalism Ending Itself?"

[@inkacolasinazucar6495]

Hope to see Spencer Leonard more often, great insights as usual

[@electrical_journeyman7380]

Cutrone might be the last marxist, but Leonard has the largest dome on the left!

[@absinthe_apostle]

I was in the IMT (Trotskyist) and they hate on the Frankfurt school, lumping them in with the postmodernists (and one almost doesn't want to blame them given that that's how they're taught on campuses, cf. Chris Cutrone. Ultimately it comes down to a view that the Frankfurt school is pessimistic about the working class, in search of more "sociological" explanations of society. Now, we can ask the question whether or not they should have been or were pessimistic in their own time, but that's not how the question is being posed, unfortunately. It's rather a matter of people today using the legacy of the Frankfurt school to make points about what *they* are not. Just like the debate on whether or not there's still capitalism today as Marx understood it, there's a game of smoke and mirrors politically, with people trying to come to terms with despair or to justify optimism

[@sankarchaya]

I think any adequate critique of Luigi Mangione's act needs to begin with why he did this and why people support it in the first place, which is the foreclosing of all options to redress this grievance while setting up a legal system that entitles corporate leaders to make life-or-death decisions for Americans and makes them only accountable to shareholders. That murder is wrong is in itself rather uninteresting, and I can go back to Marx or Lenin for criticisms of individual acts of "propaganda of the deed".

[@qaq89]

This was a really thought provoking discussion. I wonder what Spencer makes of the frankly bizarre and historic reversal we have now where today’s revisionists actually claim fidelity to the Marx of Capital to justify anarchist style politics. I experience vertigo thinking about the historical mess we’re in. Doug, why do you say Grossman believed in a terminal or permanent crisis? Can you point me to a text or extract where he lays this out? I’ve said this on another comment section but I’ve learned a lot from Grossman and I didn’t get the slightest impression that this is what he was saying at all. For me Grossman was not saying anything Marx wasn’t already thinking as early as the Grundrisse at least (which had yet to be published by the time Grossman’s Law of Accumulation was published) and obviously fleshed out in the three volumes of Capital. Grossman absolutely understands that absent a working class organised to take political power, the breakdown of capitalism is just the precondition to reconstitute capitalism on a different basis. Finally I would just echo another other comment. Can you make the two referenced texts available to read? Thanks!

[@shan-chaofu5079]

Maybe it's just my own symptom, but I can't get over with the split between the politico-economic Marx and the political Marx. Hope to hear from you some more clarification on this! Great conversation, thanks!

[@mattgilbert7347]

It's not just your own symptom. I couldn't get over it myself.

[@AshleyAFrawley]

Being trapped in the comment section with you NOT SHOWING A SINGLE ONE OF THEM really made me feel unloved, Doug.

[@letsstudyquantum]

Ashley do you have a place where you are still doing speaking gigs? I wanna have access to an audio version of you. You are only writing for compact magazine now? Theirs gotta be something besides the utilitarian framework of chasing happy. That isn't just being present, having mindfulness, and self reflexivity.

[@letsstudyquantum]

oh good your own youtube channel has new clips.

[@sankarchaya]

Now you know how it feels Ashley … except you were good at catching some of my takes 😂

[@riddlerdon]

*batman voice* so that’s what that feels like….

[@sublationmedia]

I'm sorry, Ashley. I don't think I showed a single comment from anyone as I was so caught up with what Spencer was saying if that's any consolation. Without you the comments were neglected! Already the stream is falling apart.

[@MeisterBeefington]

Providing a link to the text in question might be helpful if there's one easily available.

[@qvixote430]

Where are the links to the readings Spencer was talking about?

[@saleonar]

The name of the essay is "Fifty Years of Struggle Over Marxism, 1883-1933." In addition to the Haymarket Collected Essays, vol. 1, it's also available in a little book called "Capitalism's Contradictions." A Google search will reveal a pdf version.

[@sankarchaya]

I havent followed the Neely case closely, but from what I understand of it the problem is the way the homeless and addicts are objectified and viewed merely as either an inconvenience or a threat and not as people who themselves have a right to feel safe etc. People are understandably afraid and uncomfortable when they see homeless addicts behaving erratically or dangerous. And Neely was behaving erratically and in a way that would justifiably make someone afraid. But we ought to be profoundly uncomfortable when people use that fear and discomfort as a justification for applying potentially lethal force to people. And I think it's hard to argue in cases like this of alleged self-defense that ideas of race and prejudices towards those perceived as "lumpen" play a role in the extent to which people perceive an individual as a threat. Would Neely have had a right to use lethal force against Perry once Perry put him in the chokehold? Wouldn't Neely at that point had the right to self-defense? Self-defense always has a subjective element, but we ought not prioritize that subjective element over objective questions of how much threat people face. Leftists should instead be trying to undermine and critique the stereotypes and objectification of the homeless while also admitting that people's fears are not entirely ungrounded. I dont know if that means we ought to say Perry ought to rot in prison, but we shouldn't be defending his acts either. On Luigi Mangione, I am generally mistrustful of propaganda of the deed tactics, but based on the public discourse right now it does seem like it's had a significant effect on the public discourse. That rage was already there, but people had largely forgotten about it. And UHC will this month alone kill far more people than Neely could have on that subway if he really was armed. So empirically, I'm not sure if Spencer Leonard's point is quite accurate that it will have no positive impact on the debate. It seems then we're presupposing it won't have a positive social or political impact because it's something we think is normatively icky.

[@sankarchaya]

his thesis on capitalism and socialism is interesting, but its convenient he doesn't address Capital because i dont think the argument is compatible with what Marx outlines there. I think SL gets the causal order reversed, since the existence of a modern socialist movement isn't a necessary condition for capitalism but the other way around.

[@saleonar]

Not if you understand capitalism as Marx did, i.e. as crisis of bourgeois society transitional to socialism. Perhaps he was wrong about that, but I'm interested in preserving the thought of Marx and Marxism, which didn't have us and our condition in mind (except as "barbarism").

[@sankarchaya]

@ based on capital that’s not how Marx understood capitalism.

[@sankarchaya]

​@@saleonar its kind of a shifty rhetorical move to just assume the definition you are arguing on Marx then assert I don't understand Marx's definition. Marx's Capital, his work of political economy, doesn't define the "system of capitalist production" that way. He does argue that Capitalism produces working class movements like the movement to shorten the working day, but the defining feature of capitalist production is the systemization of production of surplus value that emerges through primitive accumulation and the division of labor. To define the system of production in such an eschatological way mystifies the system. That's not to say Marx doesn't see the seeds of socialism in capitalism, but that's not the same claim. Even if that claim was true, it's a further leap to assert that a system is only capitalist if there's a socialist movement. Saying capitalism is transitional to socialism as its defining feature does not mean that at there must be an active socialist movement at all moments of that history. Here's how Marx characterizes the "system of capitalist production" in Capital: "Co-operation based on division of labour, in other words, manufacture, commences as a spontaneous formation. So soon as it attains some consistence and extension, it becomes the recognised methodical and systematic form of capitalist production. " "The factory code in which capital formulates, like a private legislator, and at his own good will, his autocracy over his workpeople, unaccompanied by that division of responsibility, in other matters so much approved of by the bourgeoisie, and unaccompanied by the still more approved representative system, this code is but the capitalistic caricature of that social regulation of the labour-process which becomes requisite in co-operation on a great scale, and in the employment in common, of instruments of labour and especially of machinery. The place of the slave-driver’s lash is taken by the overlooker’s book of penalties." "The whole system of capitalist production is based on the fact that the workman sells his labour-power as a commodity."

[@baegel7624]

your objections to SL are on the money and speak to deeper issues with platypus writ large. in casting capitalism as the possibility of socialism engendered by the crisis of bourgeois society, they sacrifice historical sensitivity (and coherence) in the service of what the 20th cen has decisively proven to be a dead end: programmatism. in this standpoint, that "capitalism is the possibility of socialism" is always mediated by the dotp, ie, prosecuted politically by a workers movement. the determinism (both the eschatology and the stagism) is theoretically incoherent; others have torn into it with more clarity and force than I have the willingness to devote here. however, there's another contradictory and equally problematic side to it: unless they can explain the failure of the workers movement in the 20th cen with reference to capitalism itself (which they NEVER do), they're forced into an idealistic voluntarism that treats social change as exclusively a function of people having the right ideas and the will to act on them politically. ascribing such causal efficacy to politics completely forgets the fact political change always comes after structural economic change, ie, that ideas and wills are constituted and constrained -- a lesson they would learn if they attended to the historical emergence of capitalism. (as their consistent conflation of 'bourgeois society' with 'capitalism' makes abundantly clear, they don't.) the failure of the workers movement indicates that capitalism has undergone structural changes that eroded the conditions that made it (ie, programmatist politics) possible. to attempt to revive it is to claim that nothing has changed. sorry to soapbox and indirectly scapegoat SL here -- just needed to vent some long-simmering frustrations I've had with the platypus line. even if I don't see them as much more than leninists dressed up with posh adornoisms, I still respect them for at least forcing these conversations in a way that demands intellectual rigor

[@mattgilbert7347]

​@@baegel7624these problems with Marx's critiques of Capital have led me to the "new theory of Capital as Power" (CASP) as developed by Nitzen and Bircher and, more recently, Colin Drumm.