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#71

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by Norgy - August 29, 2025, 03:31:56 PM

I didn't think Eugene Debs was a Marxist.  There were certainly non-Marxist socialists

He was. Yes there were.
Can we end this circle of arguments now?

There is a difference between Marxist thought and Marxist-Leninist thought with a vanguard of the revolution of intellectuals. I think you may be confusing them.
Even conservative historians are prone to materialism and some degree of class analysis.

And let us not forget Karl Marx first and foremost was a historian. He analysed recent events, like the 1848 failed revolutions, using Hegelian dialectics and what I would call a heap of historical evidence.

The Communist Manifesto is just a small part of his work.

And why the fuck are you all of a sudden on a Marxist witch hunt?

#72

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by Norgy - August 29, 2025, 03:23:07 PM

Why are we having this conversation anyway? We haven't had a Marxist on this board in years.

 

#73

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by crazy canuck - August 29, 2025, 02:56:04 PM

Labor unions are to labor what corporations are to capital. They both exist to serve a specific function for a specific group of people and both are often counterproductive due to a focus on short-term results.

Yeah, both are subject to short term pressures, and both are capable of great things if they can overcome that problem.

#74

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by celedhring - August 29, 2025, 02:42:32 PM

I don't know. I'm thinking of Spain's most influential Marxist (Pablo Iglesias, founder of our Socialist party) and he famously came from a destitute family. He had little education but apprenticed as a typist, became a labor organizer, and ultimately became pals with Paul Lafargue (Marx's son-in-law), who was in Spain as an agent of the International.

Obviously at some point or another if you were a labor organizer in the mid-late XIXth century you had to interface with someone educated to learn about Marxism, but it seems disingenous to me to attempt to paint it as an ideology of the elites.

#75

Off the Record / Re: TV/Movies Megathread

Last post by Savonarola - August 29, 2025, 02:28:57 PM

Roman Holiday (1953)

It's been a long time since I've seen this.  I didn't realize how similar the plot was to "It Happened One Night" (1934) when I first saw it, nor did I notice that the Gregory Peck role had obviously been written for Cary Grant.

Some of the movie stretches the boundaries of credibility; (like the part when Audrey Hepburn gets dragged to court in Rome for reckless driving ) but it's still a lot of fun and a great document of the city in the early 50s.

#76

Off the Record / Re: Routine Shootings at US Sc...

Last post by Valmy - August 29, 2025, 02:23:47 PM

Same. After Sandy Hook, it's like america decided they're ok with dead kids.

That is just the beginning. America tolerates and celebrates widespread fraud and blames the victims for not being educated enough to explain the social devastation. If public schools just taught basic economics our economy could be overwhelmed with fraud and scams and nobody would fall for them ever. At least according to Americans.

We are a country of selfish psychopaths who glory in death and the suffering of others...so long as it isn't us.

#77

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by Valmy - August 29, 2025, 02:21:11 PM

I didn't think Eugene Debs was a Marxist.  There were certainly non-Marxist socialists, but who had but a student has the time or inclination to wade through Das Kapital?  I couldn't help but notice that most of the Bolshevik leaders came to Marx not through the factory but through the class room.  It seems that the Marxists were for workers, at least in rhetoric, but not workers themselves.  Workers certainly adopted radical politics, but especially before the Russian revolution they took other paths such as anarchism and syndicalism. 

Ok. 

But you don't need wealth or go to a classroom to be a Marxist if you would like to be one. I just handed you the entire library of Marxism for free in multiple languages.

Why are we having this conversation anyway? We haven't had a Marxist on this board in years.

#78

Off the Record / Re: Routine Shootings at US Sc...

Last post by frunk - August 29, 2025, 02:21:08 PM

The major impact of Sandy Hook I've seen is that about twice a year I get an ad from a sad, broken man urging action on gun control legislation.

#79

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by Razgovory - August 29, 2025, 02:17:05 PM

If you look at the background of American socialists and Marxists in the late 19th and early 20th century, it's a very mixed group in terms of education and background.  Many didn't finish high school and many worked low level industrial or trade jobs.  Some did have more middle-class backgrounds but a typical example would be someone like Gene Debs who worked as a clerk in his father's grocery store but also was a high school drop out who worked as a laborer in a rail yard.  The idea of a typical Marxist as an upper middle class academic in a university is really importing late 20th century stereotypes back into an earlier period.  There weren't very many Marxists at Harvard or Yale in 1900.  You'd be more likely to find them in small Midwestern cities with petit bourgeois or working class background, or among the ranks of European and Jewish immigrants in the big eastern cities working in the garment trades or related businesses.

This also raises the question of what is means to be Marxist; Marxism-Leninism was mostly unknown outside Russian circles until 1919 and even after that was only one tendency of Marxist influence thought.

I didn't think Eugene Debs was a Marxist.  There were certainly non-Marxist socialists, but who had but a student has the time or inclination to wade through Das Kapital?  I couldn't help but notice that most of the Bolshevik leaders came to Marx not through the factory but through the class room.  It seems that the Marxists were for workers, at least in rhetoric, but not workers themselves.  Workers certainly adopted radical politics, but especially before the Russian revolution they took other paths such as anarchism and syndicalism.  

#80

Off the Record / Re: The China Thread

Last post by Savonarola - August 29, 2025, 02:08:22 PM

AS for innovation, its very hard to make judgments without real subject matter expertise in the particular industry and technical areas, that most of us here  don't have.

The PRC is lapping the world in patent application filings and churns out ungodly numbers of research papers, but there are serious questions of quality vs quantity.

About a quarter of the research papers I've come across in my field originate in China.  They are innovative, in the sense that the present a new idea, and they're high enough quality to make it into English language peer reviewed journals.  The papers (like almost all research papers in engineering journals) present interesting ideas but, in most cases, will never lead to practical results as they tend to be too expensive, too niche or too complicated to be applied in industry.

As an example, one of the papers out of China I read was about quantum communication - that is using the spin of an electron as a dimension of communication.  I think that's really interesting (and I contacted the chief writer of the paper for more information) but it's completely impractical at our current level of technology and only effectively doubles throughput (which may sound large, but each generation of cellular has at least increased throughput by 100 times.)