Literally this emoji

Good points. As to whether PMC is a class, I think no, because it has neither independence as a class, nor any tendency toward a future independence. Contrast this with the bourgeoisie in the feudal era, who by the force of commerce had an ascendant trajectory and increasing autonomy on the basis of private property. The most that any proletarian, be they PMC or the lowest paid worker, can hope for, is a rise to bourgeois class position.

However it remains critical to analyze this fraction of the proletariat because their interests are somewhat detached from the broader class. From the small amount I’ve read on this topic, I don’t really agree with one attitude that seems to moralize about whether the wages are deserved or if the PMC do “real” work. They still do work, far more work than the bourgeoisie for sure.

The rise of the PMC in my opinion is not hard to understand if one looks less at what the workers themselves are doing, and instead examines what capital is doing. Here I would say that the emergence of the PMC is intrinsically tied to the emergence of monopoly finance capital, and global neoliberalism more generally. People focus too much on the numerical salary of a doctor, when the focus should be why it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to be educated as a doctor in western countries. The secondary education system is highly extractive of rent, and this has effects like the divergence of wages depending on education. Economic rent is part of the equation before the PMC workers ever sign a contract. Furthermore there is the financial speculation I mentioned before, which has two purposes. One, it helps the stock price and the image of the company if their labor force is highly paid, because it upholds a narrative that the product is impossibly complex and worthy of the (patent protected) license fees etc. Secondly, and apart from this whole situation is a problem, that there is an excess of capital that needs somewhere to go, and highly speculated stock prices are a sink for this. So irrationality is a necessary part of the process, not something to be corrected from the pov of the capitalist class.

what I do see happening, is the devaluation of the PMCs labor. The mass adoption of AI is an attack on the PMCs

Incoming yap / rambling ideas on this.

I’ll venture a bit out of scope of the book discussion to bounce some ideas about the professional-managerial class and its relation to “artificial intelligence.” Maybe this is a common sentiment, maybe not, I don’t really keep up with this discourse. But I think Marxists continue to struggle to find a sweet spot on a proper analysis of the current “AI” bubble.

You mentioned PMC labor devaluation. I have been thinking, is this really properly understood as devaluation, or is it a correction, a regression to the mean? If it is a correction, then it needs to be analyzed why and how, before now, the PMC enjoyed such high wages relative to both the broader proletariat and their own education.

I think what “AI” has demonstrated is how deeply intertwined is financial speculation within the productive process within the imperial core. It is easy to conclude that the capitalists have lost all their sense and fully detached from reality if they believe what they say about “AI”. But I think they understand perfectly well the ridiculousness of the proposition. It is like when Grandma makes her favorite recipe — when she asks if everyone likes it, there won’t be a single person at the table who does not smile, nod, and choke down the burnt casserole, because they love Grandma. Well, Zuckerberg and Musk and Bezos love the stock market and the immense wealth it provides them.

Speculation around “AI” is not a new idea. What I want to suggest is that speculation of this kind has been not only a significant, but the defining aspect of western capital for several decades, at least starting from the dotcom bubble. In these conditions, the purpose of the high PMC wages is to fuel speculation. This is counter-intuitive if someone continues to think in a Capital Vol 1 mindset, in which capital always minimizes costs. Quite the contrary now. Capital tolerates increases in certain kinds of costs when those costs (1) fuel speculation and (2) justify increased rent-seeking from clients, especially governments. It does not matter to Microsoft if they pay a developer at 3x their real value, if that 3x is guaranteed to be passed through to the consumer and it adds to the brand prestige, not dissimilar from Louis Vuitton or Lamborghini or other luxury brands. So on top of speculation there are royalties, license fees, and other types of economic rent.

This brings two conclusions. First is that this “AI” speculation is the continuation of a norm, and not remarkably new. Second is that the rules surrounding wage price formation for the PMC follow a different logic from the standard kind from Das Kapital. Here there is a tendency to increase wages outside of the rationality assumed in Das Kapital. What we might see in the next 10 years is a collapse of PMC wages, not because anyone believes “AI”, but because the economic rent has dried up — on this point you were very correct to bring up the Chinese “AI” models as a kind of controlled bubble-pop because they act as a foil to the speculation.

Shaun on YouTube has a good analysis of the fascist elements in the Dark Knight Trilogy. Nolan has been this way for a long time if not forever

Kinda. His goal was not merely to describe or “interpret” as he says in Thesis XI. He wanted a philosophy which could be wielded by humans to change the world through revolutionary practice. The only way this works is if it is assumed that (1) reality is ontologically materialist, and also (2) humans have agency. Whether or not something is “true” on a deep ontological level is a “scholastic question” for Marx, and outside the scope of his practical philosophy. His conception of “truth” is similar to the modern scientific kind which says something can be tentatively regarded as true as long as empirical evidence supports it (Thesis II).

Hi Cowbee, I disagree on certain aspects here and in the original post. I’m gonna write down some of these thoughts, but mainly because I need to clarify this to myself as this is one of my special interests, so I don’t intend anything personal.

I’m not as well read on Lenin, Plekhanov, Stalin etc. as I am on Marx. That’s something I want to rectify… but for the moment, it has the convenient side effect that I’m sensitive to the addendums (or “revisions” although that term is loaded) that are not necessarily attributable to Marx. I think it should be clarified that the Soviet theory(ies) of diamat are not authoritative of the entire theory of dialectical materialism, and in any case there is no single Soviet theory of diamat. Those theories were constructed at an early time in Marxology, when essential texts, like Marx’s 1844 economic and philosophic manuscripts, had not yet been published. Moreover the theories of Lenin and Stalin were instrumental and political; I don’t mean to entirely dismiss the ideas but neither do I think it is correct to see them as inevitable elaborations on Marx’s dialectic.

The main point I would make is most of the positive attributes you attributed to dialectical materialism were merely transmitted from its historical precursors. That Hegel does not appear in the original post, except implicitly under the banner of “idealism”, in my opinion this does not explain Marx’s motive to flip Hegel or use dialectic at all. And for the mechanical materialists, you said they were incoherent, but I don’t think this is true. Moreover Marx was very inspired by Feuerbach’s materialism despite critiquing it.

Marx acquired these attributes from Hegel:

• The general form of the dialectic, which was essentially a response to the Kantian epistemology, which had utilized a priori (arbitrary/not derived) fundamental categories of knowledge. Hegel wanted a system of knowledge that required a minimal amount of a priori parameters. This led to his immanent critique which directly translates in Marx to the theory of internal contradictions, or change arising internally instead of externally (e.g. mechanical impetus)
• The concept of mutual interdependence or “everything is connected”; you refer to this as owing to dialectical materialism, when it should be attributed to Hegel.
• Because of his idealism, Hegel affirmed human agency (free will), though in a teleological way.

Marx acquired from Feuerbach the materialist critique of religion. Marx thought that Feuerbach had completed the critique of religion. The only problem was generalizing materialist critique beyond critique of religion by historicizing religion and therefore bourgeois society.

So Marx was a materialist and mostly agreed with Feuerbach. But the mechanical materialists like Feuerbach lacked any explanation of consciousness in their theories, hand-waving consciousness as needing no explanation beyond the configuration of brain matter. This ceded theory of consciousness to idealists. Marx’s materialist dialectic is a synthesis of Hegel, who completed German idealism, and of Feuerbach, who completed the materialist critique of religion but failed to fully refute idealism as such.

Apart from Feuerbach and Hegel, it needs to be clarified that the atom of Atomism is distinct from the empirically known atom. It is not relevant whether the modern concept of the atom is or is not divisible. This is because it was Dalton who named the empirical atom after the philosophical one, thinking he had properly identified it.

The important thing about the Atomists is that they were opposed to the Aristotelian system involving infinitely divisible, essential elements. Instead, the Atomists speculated that nature is made of fundamental particles of identical matter which can be formed and reformed into new “shapes.”

Thus the concept of quality arising from quantity, I think, ought to be credited to the Atomists, not to dialectical materialism. From Atomism directly follows chemistry theory (albeit speculative not empirical) and the idea that change in the universe is a result of a reconfiguration of matter and not from the introduction of essentially new elements. This I think is preserved in Marx.

Thanks, I listened to it and found the given definition:

Slavery is the enduring, violent domination of natally alienated and inherently dishonored individuals (slaves) that are controlled by owners (masters) who are permitted, in their social context, to use and enjoy, sell and exchange, and abuse and destroy them as property.

This expanded definition does include details about the social relation of slavery, so not too reductive like I had thought before. Like the host, I think the insertion of as property is dubious, but that’s a scholarly quibble for those guys to hash out.

Strong makes an interesting point that ideas of socialism inevitably arise after the bourgeois revolution, with comments how “abolition of poverty [is] already technically possible” and references to the productive forces “released” by “science and technical knowledge” which “seem adequate to abolish poverty, yet which at present give increasing unemployment, economic crises, and wars.”

Given a huge increase in productivity of use-values resulting from modern industry, there were two perceptions about the abundance of use values, based on the observer’s class position:

• To the bourgeois, the possibility of immense personal wealth not known in prior epochs.
• To the proletarian, the possibility to reduce working hours and increase the general standard of living.

On this second point, I think this is the essential basis of modern socialism. Certainly there were historical, “primitive” forms of “communalism” or society founded on common property. But this bourgeois era of human history entails a specific form of this idea, called socialism, which is intrinsically linked to the abundance deriving from modern industry. It is worth pausing to contemplate a world prior to modern industry, because it was not always technically possible to produce so much that a high standard of living is possible for every human being. Only when this is possible, ideas of socialism proliferate.

I have some critique of Strong over a few lines which, I think, indicate some level of West-centrism or Orientalism. For example:

Their situation is the more distressing because for most of our Western world the past hundred years has been what John Strachey aptly calls the ‘century of the great hope.’ […] Especially America— where [there was] a continent-wide expansion into lands of vast wealth […] Did not the great lands of America […] offer the basis for a good standard of life for everyone—an ‘American standard’?

This part, at face value, is factual — this is how the US proletariat understood their existence in the country. But I think, during Jim Crow when this book was written, it is unfortunate that Strong does not connect this apparent prosperity (for whites) to chattel slavery and indigenous genocide.

Furthermore, this line rang Orientalist to me:

Even today, do not hundreds of millions of people—those great suppressed races of the East—find life’s processes so fundamentally evil that their essential faith is Buddhism in which Nothingness is bliss?

The myth of property remained long after the reality had vanished. Millions of these salaried people still felt that they owned something—no longer a store, a small workshop, an unencumbered farm, but savings in stocks, bonds, insurance—which lifted them somewhat above the ranks of laboring hands. Crashingly the world economic crisis destroyed this illusion.

Feels eerily similar to the present day in the US, in which many workers trust their retirement to the stock market. If any revolution comes to the US, I think it would necessarily be tied to a crash that wipes out savings similar to this. That would shatter the illusion of the petty bourgeois and professional-managerial class.

General thought about the first chapter is that Strong’s writing style is pleasant and evocative. I think this will be an enjoyable book and an easy page turner; thanks for recommending this one.

Now to review some of my highlights.

The opening pages of the introduction effectively put to words some of the intangible benefits of a socialist society. It is not merely an economic problem but a problem of society, and humanity more generally. “But their individuality is expressed not by possessions and polish but by the various ways in which men create.” In their daily life, the Soviets attempted to live for themselves, and their own futures, with an independence and clarity of purpose not known to their capitalist counterparts.

“The regimentation of life by property is my next shock in the capitalist world.” Not much to add except that I think most Marxists can relate to the inability to ignore this once you notice it.

I appreciated Strong’s unpretentious explication of the dialectical attitude: “I tell not the ‘whole truth,’ for truth is never ‘whole’; there are always at least two truths in conflict: the truth that is dying and the truth that is coming into existence.” How good is this line! In a few words it summarizes the kernel of the dialectic, how it allows us to grasp concepts in their instability and dynamism.

Out of the whole of this week’s reading, this part struck me the hardest:

It was then that my companion said: ‘I think that Dnieprostroy has answered the question that brought me to Russia.’

‘What question?’ I asked.

‘Whether the world is to be changed by trying one at a time to improve human beings or by changing the social environment that makes human beings.’

This line was timed well after the opening line of the introduction which described the difficulty of the Soviets speaking the ‘same language,’ so-to-speak, as the capitalist world. Pedagogy is central to Marxism for this reason. It is not enough to have the best theory of society. We must also have the best theory about how to teach these ideas our fellow citizens, how to understand their position, not paternalistically, but as peers, or as Paulo Freire puts it, as “co-producers of knowledge.” And everyone who has ever explained the rules of a game to a friend knows well that, eventually, the agreement is made to “just play a round and you’ll get what I mean.” It is deeply frustrating sometimes, to try to convince someone of an insight you feel so strongly; to feel a guilt, as though if you could only explain it better that your friend will understand what you mean. But sometimes it does not matter, there may not be any set of words that will make a person understand. Only experience can.

I had the same feeling from that line, good point

A definition of slavery ought to refer to the process of slavery, the social relation of exploitation and coercion that maintains the process. I don’t think it can be reduced to just the kidnapping

The trick is to use xanthan gum or some other emulsifier. That keeps the ice from separating out, and it helps the flavors shine through. But in the blender only use the tiniest amount, like a pinch, otherwise it will turn into… gum

Kopiko is good

instant

Lumpenproletariat

The excerpt of Cornforth given by @Cowbee@hexbear.net is good, though maybe a bit advanced or “in the weeds” given you recently said you are new to Marxist theory. Furthermore Cornforth commits to some stances that I think are not necessary to answer this question. (Tagging Cowbee since I’m curious what you think, if I missed the point or not)

This can be answered from a careful reading of a brief early Marx writing, Theses on Feuerbach (1845). Marx, having recently completed his PhD, was an expert on the materialism of antiquity: his thesis compared the systems of Democritus, the father of atomism, and of Epicurus, the father of western materialism. The latter directly and explicitly inspired the enlightenment thinkers including Newton.^[1] In the Theses, Marx summarizes the weaknesses of “contemplative materialism” in order to motivate his own, new materialist attitude, which will manifest in his life’s work.

It was Epicurus who laid the groundwork for a nondeterministic or “non-mechanical” materialism. Being an atomist himself, he believed that reality consists of atomic matter, and that physical phenomena are caused by the continual reconfiguration of matter; this differed from the Aristotelian view that matter consisted of distinct essences. But Epicurus’ key contribution in this context is the concept of the swerve. He posited an explanation of free will through the possibility that, although matter generally follows mechanistic laws, it contains a potential to “swerve” caused by an inner change.

Returning to Marx’s Theses, there are a couple to highlight. Note well, in Thesis IX, that Marx does not use the term mechanical materialism but contemplative materialism as mentioned previously. This difference, combined with the final Thesis XI which advocated for practical philosophy over interpretive philosophy, lays out the problem Marx had with Feuerbach, the representative of what might be called mechanical materialism. For Marx, the point of philosophy is not to prove materialism through contemplation. Indeed Marx takes materialism as an apparent fact, the starting point of his thought, when he advocates in Thesis II for an empirical mode of knowledge acquisition. The point of philosophy is to improve our understanding of the world, to make it intelligible, so that we can change it. Therefore Marx’s materialism is inherently practical. Materialism for Marx is not a question of ontology, and it does not hinge on whether actually atoms swerve on some plane of reality. Marx’s materialism has a metaphysics (as all science does), but it is settled as an a priori given; the substance of Marx’s philosophy itself is not at all metaphysical.

To illustrate the point: it may be true that Donald Trump is made of atoms and that those atoms approximately follow the known laws of physics. This is not practical information for us to understand his behavior nor modify our own in response. The point of dialectical materialism, as explained in Thesis I, is to grasp human activity as an objective force in nature; in other words, that humans have free will, and that this modifies and produces our objective reality. This is in stark contrast to a materialism which conceives of humans as passive observers or subjects existing within reality but not part of it.

I believe it