logicp_writings/collectivist_theology/StakeholderCapitalism.md

Stakeholder Capitalism

12:00

"As you can see, according to Karl Marx, Communism true and proper is the self-conscious solution to the riddle of history. Where things have to work, in reality, there is no riddle of history. The riddle of history Marx refers to is Dialectical Anthroposophy (man-centered heretical nonsense). Any claim upon a solution to that riddle is pure pretense and dangerous hubris. The true solution to the riddle of history, if should even allow even such a phrase, must begin with the outright rejection of Communism, and the dialectical framing in which the riddle is posed in the first place, including the underlying assumption that history has a purpose and, thus, a riddle to be solved."

Listen, Karl Marx said there's a riddle to history. But there's no riddle to history - this is dialectical nonsense. This is not much we should be thinking the issue

51:30

Marcuse wrestles with a number of mid-century challenges, sputtering Marxist sophistry, which was just barely chugging along on fumes everywhere outside of east Asia (China) and Latin America (Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Soviet Union going okay in the 60s - Kruschev has come out and confessed to the sins/crimes of Stalin and things are starting to get dark.) Everybody is recognizing it - Marcuse, Freire etc that Stalin messed up.

Prominent among those challenges and the thesis of the second chapter of One Dimensional Man is the Dialectical Relationship between capitalism in the west and socialism in the east/south. What that means is that capitalism and socialism are the same thing viewed in different incorrectly opposing lights. They're not truly opposites, but the same thing and we're not seeing how yet from a higher perspective.

They are both partial answers to the riddle of history, which finds itself on a higher plane of understanding that synthesizes them both together into one single program - putting capitalism and socialism in a dialectical relationship might have been Marcuse's most significant contribution to leftist thought, because it in a sense poses two great warring systems as two great insights into solving the riddle of history.

I think it is my (James') most significant contribution to recognize this in Marcuse - that he reframed socialism and capitalism so that they're put into a relationship to be mixed together - be left with a liberated socialist program that can actually produce and deliver the goods - but not at an unsustainable level like you have in shareholder capitalism.

53:40

For Marcuse, part of the solution exists in what he sees as the chief problem of capitalism: capitalism "delivers the goods." It allows the middle class to rise and the worker to have a good life that he enjoys. He has stuff, he isn't hungry or cold, he isn't miserable. Though he's allegedly still exploited, he's conditioned by the goodness of his life (the inversion of Praxis). He's conditioned to accept and even enjoy it, and he admits it's absolutely true that "everyman"'s life is a good life under capitalism. That makes your average man one dimensional, though. He accepts and embraces the system and has no revolutionary thought against the system. No critical dimension to his thought to see how the system is conditioning him to accept the system. Even though he has a good life he's imprisoned in his life and sees no way out of it.

Not having a miserable life, which Marx depended on to get the worker to revolt (which most workers don't want - most want lunch). All of a sudden, by the 60s, you have capitalism delivering the goods (Marcuse's words). In Horkheimer's words, it's not emiserating the worker, it's allowing hi mto build a better life. Marxists have a big problem with this because it turns people counter-revolutionary - even conservative. They have no desire to overthrow a society that's working for them. But, as one-dimensional, they don't even understand that there's a utopian possibility out there that they're not even willing to consider anymore because they're too happy with having a life that's actually good.

It sounds preposterous to think that they're being imprisoned by the goodness of their own lives, but that's exactly the case that Marcuse and Critical Theorists are making. It's not "really" good. IT's selling you culture and your own life and meaning as fake commodified packages that aren't even real, and you don't even know it because you've been so conditioned to just accept it - that's your false consciousness. That's Marcuse's big idea.

To be a revolutionary, the worker has to be radicalized by becoming miserable enough. Marx thought that woudl happen through the abuses of monopoly capital and exploiting that misery. Advanced capitalism had fairly-effectively put a stop to these abuses, thus flattening man and conditioning him to accept and even love his largely meaningless and static one dimensional work a day and consumerist life.

Again, you're in prison by the fact that your life doesn't suck, because if it sucked you'd want to break free of it and get to utopian socialism. For Marcuse, the working class was removed from his historical position as a revolutionary base by this evil success of advanced capitalism so much that he insisted tha ta new working class woudl have to be found through Identity Politics (Racial, Sexual, Feminist and more) that would then be led, in turn, by the more easily programmed college students.

Now, of course, Marcuse would be aware that Mao Ze Dong in China preferentially brainwashed the youth to lead his revolution, just as what Marcuse was recommending through college students. But he was also a professor and therefore knew that he had access to college students and that people like him could get access to college students and that colleges could be manipulated to bring people like him in to indoctrinate impressionable young people who are just now confronting that shit in the world costs stuff and, woe is me, they're easier to radicalize (get them on racial and sexual issues that the vanguard of the civil rights movements that are happening (civil rights, stonewallll / gay civil rights, feminism)). And he knew that he could use them, just like Mao used the youth in China.

What they can do, then, is bring theory to these radical groups that are fighting for civil rights and basically poison those groups from the inside. We see that now. The queer agenda, which is these Marcusian radicals, have burst forth and destroyed the gay civil rights movement.

CRT, derived off of Marcusian identity politics and Critical Marxism, has bburst forth and cannibalized the civil rights movement around race.

Feminism

Look at feminism. RIP feminism. Consumed utterly by its own social constructivism. You have to be a man in a dress, now, in order to be a real woman that count for anything. Completely destroyed.

Marcuse

In Marcuse's telling, besides flattening man and locking his essential nature as a socialist away from his consciousness, this successful dimension of capitalims creates an impending disaster of excess.

He devotes so much time in the book to talking about how excessive it is. Capitalism delivers the goods but it turns people into relentless consumers whose needs multiply as fast as they can be satisfied. In fact, what he argues, is that once you have your needs satisfied you just take it for granted and you, therefore, have new needs. It doesn't matter how satisfying your life is, there's no end to your new needs and, meanwhile, capitalism keeps expanding to keep satisfying more needs until all it's doing is producing meaningless stuff that conditions you.

You can see it tipping into the Beaudrillardian hyper-real where nothing is real, everything is completely commodified and reproduced and taken out of its context as original to the point till the original cannot be found. You can feel this mood of the 60s.

Capitalism delivers the goods but turns people into relentless consumers whose needs multiply as fast as they can be satisfied. A problem of intrinsic, unsustainable excess. It profiteers off of deliberately wasteful practices, like planned obsolescence and the destruction of the limited natural environment. Capitalism works in Marcuse's dialectical view of it, btu works too well and isn't sustainable.

On the other hand, of the great riddle of history, Socialism has the right view of things - the right sensibility. (But it's a dump. Capitalism's delivering the goods but it's going to destroy us all. It makes you hollow/empty an turns you into a consumer. It makes everything a commodity. It's excessive. It has planned obsolenscence. It's wasteful and giong to be unsustainable and build itself out until it finally collapses (that's capitalism!) but, on the other hand, socialism has all the right ideas but it can't produce)

Riddle of History

By 1964 when Marcuse publishes One Dimensional Man the riddle of history is Socialism has the right idea, but it's a dump. Capitalism has the wrong idea but it delivers the goods. How do we mix them together?

Socialist nations were undeniable shitholes - far worse because they were brutally totalitarian and abusive on top of it. Marcuse pinned these failures on the abuses of bureaucracy and their tyrants but those in turn were, to him, the result of a specific problem that the Marxists of his era didn't know how to solve. That problem is sometimes called the problem of production.

Socialist societies cannot produce. They cannot even manage to meet the basic needs of their people and in their mounting failure to be able to produce, they become brutal. Socialism, for Marcuse, has it right, but it doesn't work. If it did work it would be both productive and sustainable and the people would be happy. How do we make Socialism Sustainable?

They can't meet basic needs - they can't produce. The marxists can't figure out why. They can't brainwash people, they can't force people or re-educate people into being productive members of a socialist society - it just keeps not working. They run through people, literally, killing them, murdering them, sending them off to the mud fields, whatever it happens to be. They don't know how to solve this problem.

The other problem is the problem of distribution (Friedman? von Hayek? Mises?) One fo these famouns anti-communist economists put forth that one of the reasons that socialism fails is because market economies don't just exchange goods and services, they exchange information about supply and demand. The question of how we distribute our goods and services is also being answered by the fact that people rae buying and selling these things and working to supply them.

So when you go into a command economy, like a centrally planned one in moscow or beijing, it doesn't have that information sharply enough to be able to do the distribution.

AI might be smart and predictive enough, and the stakeholder capitalism tyrants are kind of banking on that. They think the problem of distribution can be solved through AI-predicting. They look at things like Walmart being able to predict how many boxes of strawberry poptarts are needed if the weather takes a particular turn, and they think the ycan look at these supercomputer number crunching statistical patterns and produce the distribution outside of having to actually pay attention to supply and demand except that supply and demand provide a feedback into the supercomputer crunching the numbers. The classic argument about socialism not being able to overcome th eproblem of distribution because the information exchange isn't happening correctly but the current regime believes that AI solves that problem, and they might actually be right about that.

The problem of production, on the other hand, they're banking on automation to solve. They aren't under and illusion, at this point, that people are actually going to do the work. That they can be forced to do a bunch of work for free - as the old saying goes, pointless work for pointless pay - or - we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us, as characteristic of these regimes.

The riddle of history for Marcuse's time is "Socialism has the right idea but it can't deliver the goods, capitalism delivers the goods but it's not sustainable (and it's not socialisM). What to do?"

Marcuse's contribution is put these things in dialectical relationship with one another to try and solve it. So that riddle of history, which I insist defines Marxist leftism (a redundancy) in the tumultuous 1960's and stagnating 1970's was the framing in which stakeholder capitalism and the notion of a "sustainable and inclusive future" first emerged. The Soviet Union was toast - for all its might. The model wasn't tested there. They tested the new model/combination in China.

They didn't go to a capitalist country like the US or UK. They didn't go to an advanced socialist nation like the Soviet Union - advanced dilapidation - they went to Green Space. They went to a newly communist, but without having done too much as of yet, China. Mao got something out of the way. The old guard dictator model got out of the way with Mao's death in 1976.

Under his successor, Deng Xiaoping, who rose to chairman of CCP following a couple of politically tumultuous years following Mao's death, the productive socialism experiment was to open up restricted markets under China and Chinese industry, and open them to western markets.

"I don't care if the cat is black or white so long as it catches mice." SO why not experiment with a market-driven solution to the problem of production. Meanwhile you have these neoliberal shitheads going over there, thinking they're going to get rich moving production to a dirt poor autocracy. We're going to put american manufacturing and world manufacturing in China to exploit the fact that of how cheap labour was there and how cheap it would be and the fact that it's under a command economy and can therefore do crazy things to build and open factories that no one else could do. These brilliant neo liberal hegelian shitheads are going to move all of our production ove rthere and then we're going to have this market relationship - and this will bring CHina into capitalism and defeat Red china - but as Vivek has said, that's not what happened.

Chine built the great firewall to their market and if you want to participate in the chinese market iwth their huge amount of consumers that have emerged since the 1990s (like the NBA and Disney definitely do), you're going to roll out the red carpet for the CCP and you're going to be anti-west, because they's what the CCP works.

So you're going to crap on your country and you're going to elevate China and turn a blind eye to all of its excuses. So it actually backfired, whether that was the original plan or not we won't speculate, but it was a neo-liberal scam. Deng Xiaoping was no fool, however, and was ready to take advantage of this - he didn't care if hte cat was black or white:

• As long as China becomes powerful and succeeds, i don't care how we do it
• I don't care if we use Socialism or Capitalism; let's do both

China was rapidly enriched and went from being a broken backwards extremely populous nation with an econom the size of Italy's to a global financial superpower in just a few decades. Huge consumer base - a center of financial gravity that's heavy enough to throw the world around. Also, a gigantic manufacturing base because that's one of the blessings of Socialism is that you can make people work for very little money.

They had, it seemed, cracked the code on Productive Socialism. The trick (it seemed) was to open quasi-capitalist markets like little controlled terrariums inside of the socialist architecture of the command-driven Communist state. THere's your state capitalism, that Klaus was talking about.

The trick in reality was probably little more than turning that humungous impoverished and easily exploitable population-base into a gigantic manufacturing base for western consumer goods (thank you Henry Kissinger) which was only so good as long as it lasts. The cheque might be coming due on this, for what it's worth. They think they cracked the code, but they didn't. They have gigantic reservoirs from capitalist-generated or market-generated wealth from western nations dumping in and propping this whole thing up. That's why it seems to work.

Their own markets inside, however, are a catastrophe. Their housing market fluctuates and threatens to crash and gets papered over. In shambles internally ebcause it's super fake, but it has an unbelievaable river of market-generated western money flowing into it.

Meanwhile they engage in massive exploitation of Africa and the Carribean to colonize and steal their natural resources to their own wealth. So it doesn't really work, but it looks like it works because there is a gignatic wealth base that are being able to be dumped into that economy, which is socialist and therefore not actually productive. It's not "productive socialism".

The thinking, though, is that if the model could work in China, then not why in the west? (because it only can LOOK like to work by having a reservoir of riches in one form or another being dumped into it from the outside. it doesn't work otherwise). It has to have wealth dumped into it from the American, European and British markets to buy manufactured goods. It has to have wealth poured into it through exploitative practices to gather natura lresources. Only then, it can look like it works, at least for some.

It's kind of like OnlyFans, unless everyone is taking off their pants and then no one really wants to pay each other to take their pants off.

If the model of prostitution (a luxury good, like academia) could work in China, then why not in the west? The west, obviously, would naturally fall behind the rising command-economy behemoth in the east if it doesn't transform itself as well (that's the logic beign applied here). We'll transform China, get it working, it's so amazing look how much it's grown (a gigantic wealth transfer from th west into China). The gigantic mineral grab, using that wealth, by China. They've convinced themselves that this works and now the West, as Biden might say, "If we want to keep up with china we've got to compete. We've got to chang eto be like them"

State Capitalism has certain advantages! Klaus says. Yes, there are certain advantages: command economy, very fast an dflexcible in terms of what it wants to decide to focus its resources on. But it's also a parasite on a reservoir from somewhere else. That makes for one hell of a sale's pitch that many western elites have bought hook line and sinker.

So with Socialism in the west, where socialism is mostly anathema, you're going to need a radicalized youth that believes it can't live without socialism. Remember that biological bfoundation for socialims that seems more like psychology? that you can't function in the world unless it's tha tway, because it's at the level of vital needs? What does that mean? It means you can't function psychologically in the world if it's not catering to you.

Herbert Marcuse told what was needed in the US to transform into that system.

• Radicalized youth that believes it cannot even live without liberated socialism
• as simple a matter of getting ahold of the education system through which you can disrupt family, faith and national identity
• News media and entertainment industries, and do the same thing with them
• More would be needed, too: the right understanding of capitalism - the basis fo the west that synthetically moves it towards productive socialism.
• How do we become happy and comfortable with less? We have to be sustainable - recycle

Again, to believe Marcuse on the issue that the probelm of western capitalism wasn't that it couldn't produce, but that it produces too much, is unsustainable. The problem of western capitalism isn't production int he satisfcation of needs, argues Marcuse, it's overproduction and thus the insatiable production of newer and newer false needs.

"in the comptemporary era, the conquest of scarcity is still confined to small areas fo advanced industrial society. Theirprosperity covers up the inferno inside and ouside of their borders. It alos spreads a repressive productivty and "false needs""

He said this:

• Scarcity has been conquered in the west because it's an exploitative practice that rips everything off
• Ignore it, here, and ignor ethe damage it's doing (the inferno tha tconsumes the world);
• meanwhile, we're producing false needs

What's to be done about these false needs generated through theexcessive successes of advanced captialism?

"The process always replcaes one s ystem of preconditioning by another. The optimal goal is the replacement of false needs by true ones . The abandonment of repressive satisfaction."

You accept your conditioning , your corvette, you accept your house, your comfortable life. You're ust consuming commodified forms of life and not living life at all.

The replacement of false needs is necessary and to get there you have to abandon repressive satisfaction. You are repressing ourself by satisfying yourself with a life you actually like. So, of course, consciousness - the Marxist Gnostic counterfeit of Christian discernment and Greek wisdom - is needed to distinguish the two - true needs and false needs.

They know what they are! They're gnostics. They know not even just theirs but your true needs. They know that when you're happy with street tacos and a 48,000 brands of IPA and stouts and the grocery store, that you didn't need any of that in the first place> They're just examples of things you've convinced yourself you need that you dno't actually need that are just a repressive satisfaction, holding you down, making your life miserable through playing the rat race. EArn money to spend money to get stuff you didn't want that's actually just kind of junk in the first place.

But you don't know that - you're stupid and buying that stuff because the economy is evil and doesn't care nad just wants to make money off of you.

So they have consciousness of which needs for you are true and false needs, bceause they're better than you, and you're an idiot who doesn't have true mind. They have an awakened conscious mind, and you are conditioned by society to work like a hamster and a dog - like a pavlov's operantly conditioned dog - to continue the capitalist machine and make yourself miserabel in the guise of making yourself satisfied all the time. Your satisfaction is preventing you from true satisfaction.

True needs are the basic needs of life, and not more ,which a government of productive socialism should be able to provide and thus liberating man from needing to provide them for himself. False needs can be identified through Critical Consciousness (the Critical Marxist gnosticism - you understand how the demiurgic society conditions you into false consciousness that serves its interests and not yours).

Gnosticism