Juice

Why do you think this? This reminds me of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Friere says the same thing about peasants, that they lack subjectivity

Depending on how we perceive things, I agree, just about everything is, or can be made to be, political. I think probably one of the biggest exceptions here is democratic, of all things. We learn that Democracy is a political system, when really its a political process and has very little to do with the actual politics.

The part of democracy that, to me, seems the most political and urgent is the way it is defined. The ruling class defines it as a parliamentary democracy where, as you mentioned, the masses have very little direct political power and basically anything that isn't this specific form, is called authoritarianism, dictatorship or whatever. Socialists struggle to expand this definition or implement new forms of more direct democracy where political power stays with the people where it originates.

"Genocide" is a political/social category. There are people who want you to believe that civil rights are genocide, there are people who want you to believe what is happening in Gaza to the Palestinians isn't genocide.

Genocide was defined by the UN in like 1950-51. Before then nothing was really called genocide because the term didn't really exist. It had to be redefined by the UN in order for the term to be ratified because historically colonialist countries like France, GB, the US, realized that their history could be defined as genocidal. While it was being ratified, the US was decimating North Korea with bombs and caused over a million deaths, the "Korean War" was a genocide. But now most people don't know anything about it.

Because it is political, that means that what gets called a genocide is determined by struggle over time. The term (rightly) elicits an extremely negative reaction from most people, the definition has power both psychologically and legally. But it doesn't have an essential quality, it isn't beholden to undeniable natural laws (especially considering that even natural consequences are also deniable and therefore political.) So we fight to have legitimate genocides be recognized as such, while our enemies fight to use the term to slander the history of socialism and justify military action against countries attempting policies like land reform and nationalization of resources.

Liberals emerged as the opposition to the feudal system, along with enlightenment philosophy, science, industrialization, etc. Revolutionary liberals wanted freedom, democracy, self determination, independence, freedom of movement, and a world without the tyranny of a king. The class that emerged during these periods was the capitalists who also wanted to get away from the feudal system ruled by nobles and the church, who said, "the way to get rid of these feudal relations and get freedom, democracy and independence is a system built around private property rights." But of course once the capitalists seized power and owned everything, those other values of self determination, freedom, independence all became wrapped up in and subordinated to private property.

Now when people talk about these values, the only one that really has any social substance is property. Socialists are in many ways the inheritors of that first mission that early radical liberals were fighting for, but when we talk about liberals, what we mean is anyone who believes that private property is a core political and social value to uphold. This includes most conservatives and what would traditionally be considered as liberals, like the Democratic party. But we recognize that private property and capitalism was not the way to win freedom from tyranny, it was just a new form of tyranny. It was a big con, a game of switcheroo, and it continues to be that to this day. Liberals can't really see it because there are things that they believe to be essential and natural that are really social and historically contingent. But becoming a socialist we have to sort of de-liberalize in that we purge those core beliefs that uphold private property and dictatorship of capitalists, which has this weird side effect of always having to distinguish our socialist beliefs from liberalism.

A Soviet is just a term for basically a union, but adapted to the unique conditions of the emerging Russian proletariat after the failed 1905 revolution. The capitalist class was very weak so the soviets developed differently without many weaknesses of western labor unions; by 1917 the soviets were very democratically run, free of much of the business unionism and tendency toward craft unionism and bureaucratic labor aristocracy that we associate with unions of the latter part of the 20th century. By 1917, the combined soviets were a form of dual power that controlled still emergent production capacity, hospitals, military, just about everywhere there were workers and peasants there were soviets.

My understanding is that many soviets were run by council democracy, where workers would vote for their leadership, and send delegations to other soviets to handle negotiations and distribution of resources. I'm still learning when it comes to the various periods that make up the history of the FSU, but I think that as production became more centralized, the Soviets became more bureaucratic, which might be closer to what you would have considered a "Soviet Leader." But at the time of the 1917 October revolution the soviets hadn't formed a national cohesiveness, and aligned with different factions vying for political supremacy, which all would have had different consequences for the soviets depending on who seized power. But basically there was the Bolsheviks, who had a slogan and programme of "All Power to the Soviets", where as other factions like the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaties wanted to subordinate the Soviets to a bourgeois parliament (Duma) which would have more or less immediately done away with them, while other groups wanted to restore the tsar and do martial law, and every shade in between and mixed together, over constantly shifting material circumstances.

This was all going on during WW1, and many of the soldiers who were also organized (more or less) into soviets, wanted an end to these wars, even if it meant civil war. After the February revolution, the officer corps and bourgeoisie were not only for participation in World War, but were intentionally losing it, withholding provisions from the front lines and sending them into unnecessary danger, under threat of execution for desertion and disobedience. The Bolsheviks wanted to end the war, do away with corporal punishment for soldiers, redistribute land to the toiling peasants, and subordinate the Duma to the Soviets which eventually won over the workers, the peasant soldiers, the rural landless agricultural peasants regardless of what the "leaders" of the soviets (who were often from bourgeois aligned parties like the Mensheviks and SRs) wanted.

So the soviets, and the leadership, were drastically different depending on when you look at them. There was the period from 1905-1917, from Feb to Oct 1917, the period of counter revolution and civil war after the October revolution, The periods before, during, and after WWII, and the periods after where the soviets were more centralized and bureaucratic compared to when the Bolsheviks were attempting to make the Soviets the cornerstone of a new society.

Only if you limit "material interests" to the realm of capital. As materialists, we only deal with material interests, and those interests include the realm of social interests.

But I can think of historical examples too. During the Minneapolis uprising of 1934, the Teamsters shut down all trucking within the city that attempted to ship goods without the truckers union. One of the groups that emerged was petty agricultural producers that trucked their own agricultural goods to markets. The Teamsters gave these petty producers passes to truck their goods, which while keeping the food supply for the city available so that people wouldn't starve, it also split these petty producers from the reactionary forces. I can think of a more recent example in Seattle with the campaign to pass a $15 minimum wage. small restaurant owners were allowed a few years to implement those changes whereas other cities which required an across the board implementation for small businesses as well as large ones, the campaigns failed or were quickly rolled back. And no, neither of those movements were revolutionary (though the teamsters rebellion was pretty spicy) but they were progress for workers that was only successful by splitting the petty bourg by making concessions to their material interests.

And maybe this is where we diverge as communists, as I don't see a road to actual communism that comes from an uncompromising adherence to the maximum program. Its politics all the way down.

My point in the post above is more directed toward the creation of a socialist material interest that supercedes capitalist material interests, but I can support both perspectives given the right historical circumstances and a powerful materialist dialectic

You're right, the petty bourgeoisie will have to work with the proletariat to abolish their class, just as the proletariat will have to work to abolish our class. They will have to work against their interests as capitalists. This has happened before and it will happen again, because if revolution is to happen it will be a necessity. So "appealing to" material interests as capitalists is impossible, I agree. But unless you plan on guillotining millions of people, there will have to be an appeal to a material interest that emerges as a contradiction to their interests as capitalists, that will emerge from the struggle for revolutionary conditions. So you caught me out on a technicality, but my point still stands. The mass movement will include people who are from the petty bourgeois classes, unless you disqualify them from it on essentialist grounds. If you can't deal with contradiction in your analysis then you're not doing critical analysis, you're participating in an aesthetic.

The original argument was "any form of investment is a form of rent seeking, land lords are rent seeking, landlords are bad, so investment is bad."

I didn't say landlords aren't bad, I said that what makes them bad isn't their individual consumer decisions, but the decisions they are likely to make with the ruling class against our working class.

When I'm talking to other leftists I'm hoping that we share some common values. My fear is that we share values but we don't understand the material circumstances from which those values manifest. There is a reason we are against private property, rent seeking, etc., but it isn't ethical. We use a materialist dialectic. If not we are no different from religious zealots and liberals. Our beliefs aren't shibboleths, they emerge out of revolutionary necessity. I'm not picking friends or people I agree with, I'm trying to engage with messy, contradiction laden politics; History, not dogma.

The action of rent seeking is bad, but it doesn't make someone a class enemy by sheer virtue. It dehumanizes over time, people become class enemies, they arent born evil. And people can change. All I was saying was there are cases where regular people are just going along with what their material circumstances dictate, like op, and there's absolutely no point in trying to make them feel bad about it or alienate them from the broader movement. We should be bringing people in, not locking people out. This is an ethical value that I believe more than nit picking their investments or lack thereof. If we don't understand why rent seeking is bad, then we end up making lousy formulations like the one I was responding to.

When you quote me like that its like you're just trying to misconstrue what I'm trying to say, and I don't know what the point of that would even be. The post I was responding to used a really bad example, with the $200k investment even, so it was clear to me where they were coming from. You seem to want to make it look like I'm saying being a landlord is okay. What I'm saying is that if you ever want to get something done politically for the working class, you will have to do it in a way that splits the petty bourgeoisie; and the only way to do that is by objectively understanding and appealing to their material interests, and not alienating them as individuals. And that is never gonna happen when your method of critique coarsely amounts to "Landlords bad."

This is literally what the national bourg of the western consensus fears most, hence the constant "China's economy is going to collapse any day now" posting in the media.

a small contradiction

Individual, alienated, consumer decisions are ethical? This is what happens when no class analysis. Landlords aren't bad because they make money from rents. Landlords are bad because their interests align with the interests of the ruling class, and they oppose the interests of the working class, who they exploit as a class. the contingent material realities of owning property for the sole purpose of getting personal income has the effect of changing peoples beliefs and behaviors. The system warps their worldview and pits them against the workers, but it is the system that benefits one class by exploiting another that is the enemy, not individual landlords. It is the system that alienates and exploits.

There are undoubtedly evil, unethical people who are drawn to real estate and speculation, and I would have serious reservations calling the bourgeois capitalist executive of some giant real estate development/property management company a "good person." But an individual owner of a 200k property (which is essentially nothing, a tiny house far from any urban area), which may have come to them through a lifetime of earnings, or just lucked into it or inherited it from a family member, is not by default a class enemy or individually ontologically evil. They may become that, though owning a single small property wouldn't produce much income; forcing them to either sell or expand with the market.

I really don't see the point of lecturing somebody over a fucking 401k. Must be nice living in a perfectly hermetically sealed ethical bubble, into which no evil ever permeates. People out here calling themselves leftists while recreating the underlying logic of religious purity politics.

It's the Wall of Awful - sounds like ADHD anxiety