Marxism Updated: The Class Matrix by Vivek Chibber

Oddly enough, I listened to the debate a few days ago. In case anyone is wondering, Zizek agrees with Chibber, it's not really a debate. But it's worth listening to.
It's not academics, he's talking about all bougie leftists. He's basically calling them out for being preoccupied with id-pol instead of real class warfare.

Most likely this will end with Chibber being called a racist in the NYT and never getting published again.

The position is very clearly worded and simple. It engages almost strictly with only Marx, which makes it very easy to understand. The position is also unique. If you don't wanna read it, watch the video or read my summarization and reply to it.

Anarchist detected

I should say that I mischaracterized the notion of relegating the revolutionary role to the academic. That is part of it (ie in the form of a program), but he also takes a practical approach and states political or social action must occur to reduce the barriers to labor organization. I commend him for his practicality (in keeping in line with that tradition) but I don't think a fundamentally nonviolent and legal labor movement in this day and age would ever culminate into some sort of revolution or rejection of capitalism rather than a simple expansion of the welfare state. If the telos of the activist framework is to extirpate the alienation and exploitation of a capitalist division of labor that are apparently contradictory to that division, this does not seem like an alternative at all without resorting back to the deterministic explanation (though it obviously has tangible benefits for workers today).

Everyone should read Djilas' The New Class. An excellent critique of Marxism, which inevitably becomes a bureaucratic two-class state.

Zizek has no credibility since he thinks pharma pandemic profiteering is good.

Marxism has the problem of being fundamentally a cult of technology worship and ALWAYS degenerates into a technocratic state where the proles are ruled over by a more affluent bureaucratic class.

The Marxist insistence on it being the only *real* path to socialism has the result of being an attack dog for capitalism. All other anti-capitalist forms of resistance must be removed to make way for the spoiled Marxist theory that yet openly admits you can't live a socialist life today because there's still not enough tech made. The result is omnipotent neo-liberal capitalism and a fake left Marxist pseudo-resistance.

>Zizek agrees with almost everything
>begs Chibber to meet him when he's next in New York

Is this guy going to be the next meme leftie?

Marxism will never save the proletarians. They actually despise them.

What'd you think of his argument
Makes me curious. Care to sketch a quick synopsis?
Why is that the case?

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>Care to sketch a quick synopsis?
not him but djilas describes how soviet communism didn't actually overcome class structures, just shifted their terms around to create what piccone and others have called derisively "red capitalism" and related terms going back to bakunin's warnings about "red bureaucracy"

basically bakunin wanted a dissolution not of particular states, but of the whole "state form," so that a new era of spontaneous and organic association would dawn, and marx likewise sublated this anarchist and "utopian socialist" vision into marxism but made it the endpoint (and thus the litmus test) of any complete communist revolution. so for either an anarchist or marx, the proof is always in the pudding: did this so-called revolution actually create a classless society? if so, it was THE communist revolution, that is supposedly coming. if not, no matter how much it wears a neon sign that says "COMMUNIST" on its head, it's not THE communist revolution.

djilas is just describing from the inside how class warfare re-manifested, arguably in an even worse way than it had in bourgeois society, in the soi disant communist states. it's vital reading for any marxist.

of course most marxists today are not marxists, they are red fascists jerking off to mythology like videos of T-34, which is thoroughly, almost unimaginably bourgeois and utopian.

damn, niggas still to this day are writing entire cope books supporting Marxism while still not solving the inherent problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat lmao. even if people did become class conscious and successfully sought revolution along Marxist lines it wouldn't usher in communism. this is all just pointless cope trying to redirect away from the fact that communism is inherently broken

>Marx was incorrect in his determinism: the division of labor in capitalism is fundamentally stable. The contradiction evinced by the exploitation and alienation of the worker does not compel him to form with his class and seek revolution.
that's plainly wrong. the workers are constantly organizing and fighting on class basis all around the world and they'll be continually compelled to do so for as long as the proletariat exists. the fact that they're presently overpowered as a result of the counter-revolution doesn't prove that this is something that will remain constant. only two kinds of people can think that: 1) coping believers in bourgeois society, 2) retarded leftoid academics who want to exploit Marxism in order to sell you books that otherwise would've been pointless because in that case Marxism wouldn't need any "updating".
>It is not the case that the worker is simply incapable of realizing his material interests, and this seems like a point that Vivek attaches great emphasis to
wow, how fantastic it is that we have some moron waste paper to repeat obvious shit stated by Marx 180 years ago. what would we have done without him?
>In believing this to be the case, the cultural theorists are guilty of a sort of bourgeois contempt for the working class, Vivek argues, that is pervasive in the intelligentsia of today
it's not contempt, it's the same thing he's doing: brainstorming how to put the proletariat to work for petty-bourgeois aims.
>The worker is not retarded, he is disheartened.
no, that's a simplistic non-answer that disregards different particular reasons. some workers have been granted a petty-bourgeois social position due to the privileged status of their countries in the global division of labour (e.g. Sweden). some workers haven't been forced by decreasing real wages into even basic wage struggles, since their countries have been experiencing rapid economic growth in recent decades for various reasons (e.g. Poland). some workers believe the new populist parties will solve their issues, since they're yet to see for themselves that reforms will not help them. and so on. reducing various stuff like this to "the worker is disheartened" is kindergarden tier analysis.

soviet communism was defeated by the counter-revolution which resulted in a bourgeois state that kept the facade of a proletarian dictatorship for the purposes of its capitalist development (keeping the internal proletariat subservient and influencing other states from the inside with the use of their proletarian movements). this is all perfectly in line with Marxism. it was even predicted by Engels in 1853 lol:
>we shall find ourselves compelled to make communist experiments and leaps which no-one knows better than ourselves to be untimely. One then proceeds to lose one’s head — only physique parlant I hope — , a reaction sets in...

>the program provided by his supposed allies in the intelligentsia is very clearly not in his best interest
again repeating the most obvious things already stated by Marx and Engels
>Neither the Zukunft nor the Neue Gesellschaft has contributed anything that might have advanced the movement by a single step. Here we find a complete lack of genuinely educative matter, either factual or theoretical. In place of it, attempts to reconcile superficially assimilated socialist ideas with the most diverse theoretical viewpoints which these gentlemen have introduced from the university or elsewhere, and of which each is more muddled than the last thanks to the process of decay taking place in what remains of German philosophy today....
>When people of this kind, from different classes, join the proletarian movement, the first requirement is that they should not bring with them the least remnant of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices, but should unreservedly adopt the proletarian outlook. These gentlemen, however, as already shown, are chock-full of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideas.

>To the extent that they are not poisoned by their own ideology (in the loose sense) of social justice, they are themselves part of the elite and not interested in potentially threatening that status
wow, the petty bourgeoisie isn't interested in overthrowing bourgeois society. who the fuck would've guessed.
also this has little to do with the ("social justice"), but I guess books sell better to the stupidpol redditor types if you shove that shit in.
>Basically the motto is "do better academia." He relegates the revolutionary role to academics
haha. so the guy bemoaning the intelligentsia's contempt for the proletariat proclaims that the proles can't emancipate themselves and instead need to be enlightened by the employees of bourgeois ideological institutions.
>specifically to create a platform that is palatable to the workers
that's just a retarded euphemism for a communist party. the absolute necessity of one has been known by communists since 1840s. and what's also been known for a long time is that it has to be an independent class organ, not one created by bourgeois ideologues.

>At the founding of the International we expressly formulated the battle-cry: The emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself. Hence we cannot cooperate with men who say openly that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves, and must first be emancipated from above by philanthropic members of the upper and lower middle classes.

>political or social action must occur to reduce the barriers to labor organization
another brilliant insight. in order to progress, the proletarian movement must act to reduce the barriers to the progression of the proletarian movement! spoken like a true sociology professor.

Marxist-Zizekianism is clearly being promoted by neo-liberalism.

>If you believe the apriori premises of my religion, my religion is true

We know. Glad to see you back, greentext discord tranny. Another full workday about to be well-spent bitterly replying to everybody in the first Marx related thread you can find, I see.

kek I wrote this post before I even saw I feel bad for whoever you rope into endless reply chains again. Home posting on social media on a Monday afternoon :workers" of the world, unite!

I would feel bad for you that you're in such a pathetic state that you become obsessed with obscure anonymous posters, but I figure you probably deserved it

Hard to miss you doing this for 14 hours at a time multiple days a week

I searched my browser history and I think I made 1.5 posts over the week that ended yesterday. even with the generous assumption that it took a whole hour, you still need at least 41 hours of posting to account for
being obsessed is one thing, but delusions are pretty serious bro. I might start feeling bad for you after all

>that's plainly wrong. the workers are constantly organizing and fighting on class basis all around the world and they'll be continually compelled to do so for as long as the proletariat exists. the fact that they're presently overpowered as a result of the counter-revolution doesn't prove that this is something that will remain constant. only two kinds of people can think that: 1) coping believers in bourgeois society, 2) retarded leftoid academics who want to exploit Marxism in order to sell you books that otherwise would've been pointless because in that case Marxism wouldn't need any "updating".
That seems to me to be a fair argument at its core; there are certainly reasons to believe that the advanced Western democracies are not as stable as they seem in light of the global trend. The decline in population growth, the slowing of production growth (and technological innovation), and the rapid industrialization and integration (and subsequent exhaustion of cheap labor) in developing countries all appear to have profound consequences for the stability of the division of labor. Is that the line you would go down?

Also, moving away from the US (and the argument above) into Western Europe, do the accommodations you see (ie the Welfare State) for labor strike you as something that will stabilize and nullify the revolutionary impulse?

>no, that's a simplistic non-answer that disregards different particular reasons. some workers have been granted a petty-bourgeois social position due to the privileged status of their countries in the global division of labour (e.g. Sweden). some workers haven't been forced by decreasing real wages into even basic wage struggles, since their countries have been experiencing rapid economic growth in recent decades for various reasons (e.g. Poland). some workers believe the new populist parties will solve their issues, since they're yet to see for themselves that reforms will not help them. and so on. reducing various stuff like this to "the worker is disheartened" is kindergarden tier analysis.
Vivek seems to expand the bourgeois class to include what would is colloquially called the professional-managerial class. This doesn't strike me as what you describe as a petty-bourgeois social position due to the privileged status of their countries in the global division of labor, but is that to what you are referring?

And drop the attitude nigger, it's hardly worth such a purile attitude to defend orthodox Marxism.

Marxist theory is a machine for producing books of this kind. That is its only purpose at present. The discursive and rhetorical maneuvers you describe at the exact same one finds in all Marxist theory of the past 80 years. It is rote, insular, and worthless.

Only if the lesson you learn from it is that you need to sit back and shill for the EU/Berniebros.

user here has a point , all of this bemoaning is a euphemism for a lack of party oragnization, the bread and butter of workers organizing. Democratic instutions are being hollowed out because there is virtually no opposition or repressentation, workers were duped for the milionth time by refformists instead of following the Leninist line of active resistance. When chad Lenin saw the bourgeois democratic process had reached its end limit and declared them null. We have a clear cut historical example from recent times with bankrupt Greece in 2015, with its back against the wall, it cucked out against the EU, because the party itself was made up of refformists and cucks instead of taking things to the end limit and exposing the inherent contradictions of the financialy collapsed european banks.

I don't think that your analysis is correct in light of this text strictly because the text takes (allegedly) such a fundamental break from traditional Marxist theory.

>the text takes (allegedly) such a fundamental break from traditional Marxist theory.
This alleged "break" is the animating principle behind all but the most orthodox Marxist theory since the 1920s, including post-Marxists, postcolonial and feminist Marxists, poststructuralists, and the Frankfurt school. You will find this "break," announced as more or less "radical," in all of them. It is a feature of Marxist theory.

>instead of following the Leninist line of active resistance.

You're a moron.

The cultural turn, which describes what you're talking about, is different from what this book advances. They are both reactions to the apparent contradictory stability of capitalism. But the cultural turn writers place responsibility for this with ideology, culture, and the superstructure; they do not take the position that the division of labor, in spite of the contradiction, is fundamentally stable. This is the position the writer takes.

I am not concerned with the supposed content and motivation of the "break," because this discursive maneuver, in general, is the primary motivation of Marxist theory: shifting pieces around on the same board, no matter what pieces and in which direction, to the overall furtherance of the same discourse.

I hate "multiracial populism" so mvch.

the machine is academia and leftist political tendencies, representing the interest of the bourgeoisie and of the petty bourgeosie.
the only way you can use Marxist theory for doing it is by first rejecting what it says and saying it needs to be changed and cured with your snake oil. so, as long as it remains itself, it's not only not a machine for producing those books, but not even a simple tool: it's utterly useless for the purpose.
>Is that the line you would go down?
no, this one: marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm
>do the accommodations you see (ie the Welfare State) for labor strike you as something that will stabilize and nullify the revolutionary impulse?
no, the welfare state is based on profits and capital undermines its own profitability. a stable welfare state in Western Europe would require a stable rate of profit and a stable hierarchy between states regarding which direction the surplus value flows and how much of it, both of which are impossible due to the shocks that capital creates though its own normal functioning.
>Vivek seems to expand the bourgeois class to include what would is colloquially called the professional-managerial class.
that's the basic modus operandi of all pb and bourgeois when they want to use the proletariat for their internal struggles: paint some of their factions as the root of all evil and try to get the proletariat to help them fight against those factions instead of fighting against private property. "fight the 1%!", "fight the rent-seekers!", "fight the financial capital", "fight the Russian state!", "fight the Jews!".
>This doesn't strike me as what you describe as a petty-bourgeois social position due to the privileged status of their countries in the global division of labor, but is that to what you are referring?
no, I was referring to people with proletarian jobs. many professionals and managers will retain a petty-bourgeois position up to the day of the revolution (those who are absolutely crucial to the functioning of bourgeois economy and state). same with university professors (the bolder the proletariat is, the louder the leftist loudspeakers dedicated to redirecting it away from revolutionary struggle need to be).
>And drop the attitude nigger, it's hardly worth such a purile attitude to defend orthodox Marxism.
lol shut the fuck up snowflake. I'm practically being a paragon of virtue over here, if you measure it relatively to the utter retardation, vacuousness and anti-communism people like that guy represent. the only thing they deserve is a priority ticket to the gulag, so you can't even imagine how gracious I'm being right now by making serious comments about what they're saying.
>the break from Marxism is the real Marxism because... it came after it chronologically or something, and because bourgeois institutions say so

can you be less shrill

I don't think attempting to contribute to the tradition is so bad; the notion that I am getting from you and the other poster that Marxism was sort of completed with Marx or with Marx through Lenin including X, Y, Z or whatever (I don't know your position) seems to me to be nuts and bordering on religious (not to paint you as zealots; it's only my first impression or reaction). But that is probably because my interest in Marxism is as a historical intellectual tradition, not as a revolutionary vehicle for the overthrow of the existing order.

Thanks, I'm going to read the Capital chapter and the rest of your post in a sec and get back to you. Ur gay, but you're right that a lot of the clowns in this thread are fuckin smoothbrains.

>He relegates the revolutionary role to academics, specifically to create a platform that is palatable to the workers.
I don't know if Chibbner is a Leninist but I think that was the basic idea of a vanguard party; i.e. a group of intellectuals who are experts in revolution which seems to at least tie in to something I heard him say in that interview, in that workers know what's going on in their workplace but can't know *everything* there is to know about running an economy or building a new state, because nobody does. That takes committees and bureaucracies and experts who study that stuff. It just so happens that the experts we have are not interested in any kind of revolutionary politics.

>It is not immediately obvious to me that the workers in his conception of the solution would want to do anything like ditch the capitalist division of labor.
I dunno. But it helps to read about what the Bolsheviks actually said to people in the lead-up to the 1917 revolution. There's a common idea today, promoted by both MLs and Trotskyists, that the Bolsheviks showed up one day and were like "hey gang we're hardcore socialists and that's why we should take power." But that's not really the image they tried to portray at the time.

Their argument instead went like this: we all know the government is a bunch of crooks and idiots. We also know what everyone agrees has to be done -- we need to keep the factories running and make sure food systems work and get rid of these idiotic generals who keep sending you into losing battles. The other parties all agree with us that we need to get more factories built and better technology on the farms, and all the progressive parties know that this will require that we fight for socialism. We all agree on that. So why can't we get things working? Because there's no legitimate people's government. You can't expect the crooks to run things, right? Because they're crooks. The so-called "provisional government" is a joke. But look at the soviets, in some places they are helping a bit and they have real connections to a lot of people. Everyone agrees we need an effective people's government, and all the socialists say we need socialism, so why don't we let the soviets take the lead, it can't get worse than this...

Which is interesting because it combines an underlying Marxist explanation of Russia's crisis (which was emphasized after they took power) with a very pragmatic suggestion that soviet government has to be better than no government.

Anyways, my thinking is that just talking about abstract revolution might just lead to people thinking you're crazy or irrelevant, and that it might be alright being a propagandist when large numbers of people aren't expecting you to actually solve their daily problems now. But more people are having problems, so...

>It is at its core a pamphlet advocating for more labor unions.
That's not a bad idea but the strategy has to just be reconfigured (I think it is).

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>Because Ben Shapiro told me so!

>Vivek takes the position in his work that the cultural turn of Marxism that emerged following the failure of the revolutionary class to initiate revolution missed the mark;
Well obviously that's not real marxism
>The cultural treatments of Marxism and ideology in the works of Gramsci and Adorno and Marcuse are mostly (but not totally, as you will see) dismissed.
I don't have to write a whole book to tell you that they should be.
Here's a simple rule of thumb: if it isn't about the means, mode, factors, or relations of production it's not marxism.

>But that is probably because my interest in Marxism is as a historical intellectual tradition, not as a revolutionary vehicle for the overthrow of the existing order.
That's cool but at some point it's supposed to be a philosophy of praxis. That's where its theory of truth derives.

So one problem today is that capital is globalized which killed the old-style industries in the U.S. and some other countries. Labor costs too high? Workers go on strike? Shut down the factory and ship it overseas. The spigot of easy financial credit that's available today is also a tool companies can draw from to offset losses from strikes. So companies have more leverage than they used to have over workers. Automation has reduced the number of workers in traditional industries, etc.

There are more Arby's workers in the United States than coal miners nowadays. You see what I mean?

It's mostly a service-based economy. Now, a lot of those workers are still poor. Services industries have a lot of "churn." Short-run employment is expected so workers burn out, quit, then move on to another terrible job. This makes organizing difficult. Labor organizers typically try to gather enough union signatures to trigger an NLRB-recognized election (that's the National Labor Relations Board) before the bosses can find out and send in the union busters (and firing the leaders, which is illegal, but rarely anything comes of it and it's really just a factored-in cost of doing business nowadays). Workers also don't have much experience with unions as many are young and don't know about them, and so the inherent secrecy of trying to start one can make unions seem suspicious.

So yeah. There are still ways to do it, though. Like you see with the Amazon and Starbucks thing. See, what makes these service retail jobs open to this (and also warehouses if you include that in retail) is that they're not gonna outsource an Amazon warehouse or close it down and move it to another state or country because Amazon is supposed to be... everywhere. That's how their business model works. So it's almost like a "guerrilla" or asymmetrical strategy where the labor organizers are hitting them all over the place, and while Amazon can probably crush many attempts, you only have to get lucky once while they have to get lucky every time, and you're basically organizing the retail proles while tactically retreating from the core industries like Mao going to organize the peasants after they got shellacked by trying to follow the Orthodox Soviet policy in the cities (they got massacred trying that in 1927), but you build up your forces and gain experience that way.

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Communism is inherently anarchistc. Damn, if only the supposed Burgeois would've banned Marx and saved us from your circus shows.

I also can't really argue with Chibber's roasting of bourgie leftists enthralled by identity politics. But there's an important consideration here that these low-paid service jobs have a workforce that is quite different from the 1930s. Women in these jobs outnumber men 2:1. In the U.S., it's disproportionately not white if you compare this workforce (which is a lot of people) with the population as a whole. The explosion of wealth for financial capital has also -- no surprise -- benefited people who work in financial services and large banks and the demographics accordingly.

So the Patrick Batemans of America have done well, and racial inequality has actually intensified in the U.S. over the past 40 years -- but a lot of whites took a blow when their mortgages blew up in the financial crisis which didn't recover. And then tell that to a white guy working at Amazon with the rest of the proles. He doesn't feel privileged and I think that's where the left-wing intellectuals do a lot of damage. Chibber's argument seems to be that what constitutes wokeness for the professional types is basically a bourgeois thing where you open up Harvard admittances without talking about making community college tuition free. But that also seems like an unsustainable contradiction when the rulers are swearing up and down about how inclusive they are while the majority of people they're claiming to include are locked in as retail and warehouse drones for the rest of their life. People instinctively know that's a sham.

And then both the bosses and the left-wing intelligentsia types repeat this defeatist mantra -- the former perhaps much more intentionally -- that diverse workplaces won't unionize. The left-wing types say it's because of racism. Okay, racism is insidious but don't be a defeatist about this. Amazon also said this according to their whiz computers that became a meme. Ah, so, that means it's pointless... we should just give up and accept our fate. But that's not true. The whole "internal study" that Amazon did which was "leaked" to the press could've easily been some psyop because, surprise, bosses lie a lot. If someone is reading this and believes that leftists spend too much time enthralled by identity politics and should focus on the real class enemy, I accept that, but don't just up and believe whatever the class enemy says is true... because if you're in a class war they're going to use misinformation or psychological warfare to try and confuse or demoralize you.

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>no, this one: marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm
Marx is a very compelling writer. To summarize at the risk of oversimplification or misinterpretation his point and your position, inherent in capitalism is the tendency towards monopoly. This inevitable process of monopolization and centralization necessarily leads to concomitant worker cooperation and organization, which will at some point inevitably realize the incompatibility (or contradiction?) of the capitalism and overthrow it. In other words, to greatly oversimplify, it is only a matter of time.

I do have a question. Do no subsequent developments in your view change the tenability of this? For example, it seems to me that a recent development that may spread, the uprooting of the worker from his place of work to the home (remote work) has potential to spread significantly. Obviously it is only in its rudimentary form today, and its adaptability is certainly not universal (a great many industries will never be able to adapt this model, and it is not even close to an infancy [or even possibility] in most non-Western economies due to their more direct physically productive role) but it seems to me in Marx that part of the centralization that gives rise to the ability to organize in greater numbers is the mere physical proximity of workers with each other. Is this incorrect, is the physical proximity aspect not as important as I think, is it not as adaptable as I think, or something else?

Additionally, do you not believe that some sort of police, social, or even psychological form of domination might prevent the revolution from ever occurring, with regards to potential technological and scientific advances in psychology, weaponry, or propaganda?

Thanks for engaging, best conversation I've had on Yea Forums in an unfortunately long time

Halting problem

>Additionally, do you not believe that some sort of police, social, or even psychological form of domination might prevent the revolution from ever occurring, with regards to potential technological and scientific advances in psychology, weaponry, or propaganda?
No, the truth is that revolutions are just a recycling of elites and Marx was wrong about pretty much everything. The state will never go away and communism will never happen no matter how often you say "just two more weeks" or how much you trust the plan I'm afraid.

>the notion that I am getting from you and the other poster that Marxism was sort of completed with Marx or with Marx through Lenin including X, Y, Z or whatever (I don't know your position) seems to me to be nuts and bordering on religious
you're free to say what's incomplete about it. or maybe not, since later on you imply you haven't even read the first volume of Capital, which would, hypothetically, put you in no position whatsoever to make any judgments on completeness of Marxism (we can even say making such judgments from that position would be nuts).
>but I think that was the basic idea of a vanguard party
no, it wasn't. the vanguard is simply the conscious section of the class. it doesn't have to come from a specific stratum, and it definitely won't be formed by people whose entire careers are in bourgeois ideology factories and in selling books and lectures to young middle class leftists.
>That takes committees and bureaucracies and experts who study that stuff.
it takes a communist party
>It just so happens that the experts we have are not interested in any kind of revolutionary politics.
they don't need to be. Engels:
>Admittedly we are still short of technicians, agronomists, engineers, chemists, architects, etc., but if the worst comes to the worst we can buy them, just as the capitalists do, and if a stern example is made of a traitor or two — of whom there will assuredly be some in such company — they will find it in their interest to cease robbing us. But apart from specialists like these, among whom I also count school-teachers, we shall manage very well without the rest of the “educated” men; e.g. the present heavy influx of literati and students into the party will be attended by all manner of mischief unless those gentry are kept within bounds.

>But that's not really the image they tried to portray at the time.
because they didn't represent just the communist revolution. since Russia was still half-feudal and its bourgeoisie wasn't strong enough to carry out its task, the bolsheviks represented both the bourgeois revolution and the communist revolution.
>Anyways, my thinking is that just talking about abstract revolution might just lead to people thinking you're crazy or irrelevant
obviously. but that's not what communists do, just leftist morons in academic ivory towers and pb kids on twitter. what communists are concerned with is forming, strengthening and expanding an independent proletarian class movement. this starts with local wage struggles. and speaking in terms of logical succession it starts earlier yet, with dissuading the workers from lending support for initiatives of other classes.
capitalism is inherently anarchistic because it's premised on individual production and exchange. communism is its negation.
>The essence of bourgeois society consists precisely in this, that a priori there is no conscious social regulation of production.

>capitalism is inherently anarchistic because it's premised on individual production and exchange. communism is its negation.
No, because capitalism doesn't exist. It's a made up term for communists to describe their supposed antithesis. Stop pretending economics will ever be a hard science. Communism is anarchistic because it presupposes the individual as being prior to the state and it's possible demise like liberalism, they are both progressive so it's really no surprise.

>This inevitable process of monopolization and centralization necessarily leads to concomitant worker cooperation and organization, which will at some point inevitably realize the incompatibility (or contradiction?) of the capitalism and overthrow it.
I think Marx also saw the "socialization" of labor that occurs in capitalism happening at the same time as capitalism -- as it goes global -- polarizes the world so the difference between owner and worker is going to grow to unbelievable proportions which makes the contradiction truly excruciating, and I think that has been borne out in many ways. But if you can find this in Plato too who said that democracy emerges from an oligarchy (which grows smaller in proportion).

>it seems to me in Marx that part of the centralization that gives rise to the ability to organize in greater numbers is the mere physical proximity of workers with each other. Is this incorrect, is the physical proximity aspect not as important as I think, is it not as adaptable as I think, or something else?
Not that user, and I'm not sure, but I think for Marx, the proletariat was significant because it had the power to withdraw its labor in such a way that society would just stop functioning. They're necessary in other words, and you could probably call the proletariat the "producers" or something instead of a French word and it would go over the same.

>Additionally, do you not believe that some sort of police, social, or even psychological form of domination might prevent the revolution from ever occurring, with regards to potential technological and scientific advances in psychology, weaponry, or propaganda?
I think you should be careful about predicting the future either way. Like "it's gonna happen" (immature utopian idealism) or "it's never gonna happen" (cynical nihilism). Marxism might be better thought of as a serene way to understand change when it happens and how it comes about. You might have some success rebranding Marxism as like "complexity theory" or something like that.

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>it's never gonna happen" (cynical nihilism)
Why is it nihilism? It sounds more like realism

>you're free to say what's incomplete about it. or maybe not, since later on you imply you haven't even read the first volume of Capital, which would, hypothetically, put you in no position whatsoever to make any judgments on completeness of Marxism (we can even say making such judgments from that position would be nuts).
Obviously I don't have as complete a grasp on orthodox Marxism as I could, but my reaction is more coming from what I see as the apparent total acceptance of the completeness of the thought of Marx, a single man (or a small number of Marxist thinkers). It's just very rare for me to come across that level of certainty, in anything (except in religion, hence the reference).

History? When Lenin was sitting around with his buds in Zimmerwald in 1915, they weren't saying "Comrades, in two years, we will make revolution in St. Petersburg." They had no idea it was going to happen.

But I think doomerism is the dialectical twin to reckless zero-to-hero optimism where by faith and will-to-power alone you can overcome any challenge. You see how people flip between that and doomerism when the former doesn't work out.

>Do no subsequent developments in your view change the tenability of this?
no
>the uprooting of the worker from his place of work to the home (remote work) has potential to spread significantly
middle class jobs like teaching at a university or doing lectures with the words "Marxism" and "revolutionary" in the title for bored leftists. not proletarian jobs though
>Is this incorrect, is the physical proximity aspect not as important as I think
the really important part is proximity in terms of communication and direct interest (being in the same position with regards to the same employer, the same interconnected industry, and so on). and this only grows larger, examples being (obviously) the Internet, companies such as Amazon employing people all over the world, factories on one side of the planet depending for their life on other factories on the other side of the planet and on logistics between them. also the economies being overall more interconnected and, for example, workers in Poland experiencing drastic rise in the cost of living at the same time as workers in Peru and Sri Lanka (all happening right now). those sorts of things.
>do you not believe that some sort of police, social, or even psychological form of domination might prevent the revolution from ever occurring, with regards to potential technological and scientific advances in psychology, weaponry, or propaganda?
I can't exclude science fiction scenarios, but if we're talking strictly about things that can be reasonably predicted, then I don't see how the class that couldn't even deal with a glorified flu without immense chaos could ever achieve anything similar. even China, supposedly the ultimate totalitarian state, is apparently currently having zombie apocalypse like scenes happening because of the dumb virus. lol.
>Communism is anarchistic because it presupposes the individual as being prior to the state
no, according to Marxism the bourgeois individual is constituted by the bourgeois state through it's laws (esp. guarantee of private property)
>my reaction is more coming from what I see as the apparent total acceptance of the completeness of the thought of Marx, a single man
the completeness regards just a few basic facts from which all relevant general facts follow. but you make it seem like people claim Marx knows if you should text that one girl you just met immediately or wait two days, and you only need to read Capital to learn the answer.
>It's just very rare for me to come across that level of certainty, in anything (except in religion, hence the reference)
it's certainty in just a few very fundamental facts, and consequently a certainty that a whole bunch of shit that goes against those facts is wrong. I get how that could give a wrong impression from the outside, but it isn't really anything special
and isn't it true that Einstein got the fundamental facts of relativity pretty much right? we have at least one non-religion in that case

>no, according to Marxism the bourgeois individual is constituted by the bourgeois state through it's laws (esp. guarantee of private property)
That's because Marx's conception of the state is retarded and self fulfilling. The state never poofed into existence you lib. It has always been here as that social relationship between master and servant. And it will never go away. There is no society without the state.

>This inevitable process of monopolization and centralization necessarily leads to concomitant worker cooperation
This really isn't true whatsoever. Marxists don't understand what are monopolies. They think Google and Amazon are monopolies even though they are competitors. They also don't make any sense - monopolies fail all the time, that's why US Steel and Atari are not around anymore. Competition literally killed these companies. The fucking Soviet Union was evidence that "monopolies" can not be perfect because people will always find someone to compete or improvise. And no, capitalism does not inevitability lead to worker co-operation. If that was the case, unionization would not fell so significantly. Its really retarded to argue economic interests are only drive of worker action, and its extremely contradictory for the same people to argue for a vanguard party when believe such action is inevitable without your input. Clearly, this isn't the case if Marxists have to constantly shill, and lie, yourself to push this narrative. And I don't even understand why you retards constantly push this non-sense, and forgo the historical evidence of communism being a failure. You people never actually use physical or case studies, to back up your arguments. The fucking idea of communism was mocked by Plato in the Republic and Greek comedians - even they were smart enough to discard such stupid thinking thousands of years ago, why do you sophists have to waste our time with it?

>capitalism is inherently anarchistic because it's premised on individual production and exchange. communism is its negation.
Communism is the negation of food. You can't really have an economy if your workers starve to death.