devils_dust [none/use name]

https://www.fellowtraveller.games/citizen-sleeper-2-starward-vector

Available on many platforms, including gog (even though I got it on steam personally). It’s “pricey” since it is a new release, but I found it really worth it

Citizen sleeper 2 is pretty fun. Finished it on normal difficulty, got most of the “good” endings to the storylines, now wondering if it’s worth trying a new run on hard mode.

Reading the piece about “the last hour” made me realize how long the economic copromancers have been justifying the absurd with fancy words. It all boils down to “the economy needs your sacrifice”, but it was eye-opening to know that it goes as far back as Marx’s time.

Is that where the “learn Cobol for the banking industry, you’ll earn zillions” meme comes from? (in my experience the few Cobol people I met were only as well paid as the next bigcorp IT drone, and much less than the workers at fancystartup.io)

Not directly related to this week’s chapters but a question that came up when discussing Das Kapital irl: did you change your intuition / understanding about certain Marxist terms after reading it?

What motivates this question is that I previously thought that commodity fetishism meant something like “people ascribe magic to their possessions”, and I believed it was very closely related to some moral condemnations of consumerism. After reading the term in the book, with the context around it, now it feels more like “the commodity form and its commerce superficially looks liberating, but it constrains us all in strange ways”.

(Or maybe I just misread it again, who knows?)

What were your experiences with it? Did you go through something similar?

Hey comrade! On this specific passage, the last quote from this review sums up what Lenin means here:

When a big enterprise assumes gigantic proportions, and, on the basis of an exact computation of mass data, organises according to plan the supply of primary raw materials to the extent of two-thirds, or three-fourths, of all that is necessary for tens of millions of people; when the raw materials are transported in a systematic and organised manner to the most suitable places of production, sometimes situated hundreds or thousands of miles from each other; when a single centre directs all the consecutive stages of processing the material right up to the manufacture of numerous varieties of finished articles; when these products are distributed according to a single plan among tens and hundreds of millions of consumers (the marketing of oil in America and Germany by the American oil trust)—then it becomes evident that we have socialisation of production, and not mere “interlocking”, that private economic and private property relations constitute a shell which no longer fits its contents, a shell which must inevitably decay if its removal is artificially delayed, a shell which may remain in a state of decay for a fairly long period (if, at the worst, the cure of the opportunist abscess is protracted), but which will inevitably be removed

That review has some extra literature if you are interested - mostly on the economic aspects of Lenin’s thought and how most of it applies today.

Unfortunately I am not expert enough in Marxist thought to answer if this particular verbiage has some sort of cultural lineage that goes back to Hegel or some other thinker, but I think you could find some of that in The German Ideology, basically a critique of the philosophers of his time and their idealism. Since this is a heavy text, you may be better served by asking other comrades around here on this particular question.

My version has that quote as “[The banking system] presents indeed the form of common bookkeeping and distribution of the means of production on a social scale, but only the form”.

From what I could understand it is about how that information could be used in a socialized (“general”) economy for the benefit of all, but in practice conforms to the whims of Big Capital (the “private”).

Ping please

True! I remember marking down this passage as a “I’ll definitely use this irl when needed” (emphasis mine):

Certain bourgeois writers […] have expressed the opinion that international cartels, being one of the most striking expressions of the internationalisation of capital, give the hope of peace among nations under capitalism. Theoretically, this opinion is absolutely absurd, while in practice it is sophistry and a dishonest defence of the worst opportunism.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch05.htm

Played https://themachinegame.com/, but the revolutionary endings really let me down. Still very enjoyable overall

I love the footnotes on my edition for this, grandpa could’ve made a whole side career out of making fun of the bourgeoisie

Can you add me too? Thanks in advance!

I am not the most well read on Marx, but from what I could understand from his discussion on constant and variable capital, the former still requires human work for creating, operating and maintaining it.

Machinery would only be deployed if it was cheaper than the human workers executing the same tasks, and its adoption would lead to layoffs, thus to the reserve army of labor, humans made “cheaper” by competing against the machines.

I am not acquainted enough with the TRPF to comment on it, but my assumption would be that once labor is made cheap enough the capitalists would not have any incentive to keep investing in automation, thus restarting the cycle. I have a vague feeling that the TRPF also mentions the impact on profits of a much impoverished consumer base (the laid off workers) , but I defer to any comrade who can correct my understanding

Just thought it would be a nice addition, but yes, I don’t think he is writing anymore.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Parenti