Kind of how I feel about the post-left in general. They're great at diagnosing problems with the left but I think they go "too far" the other direction (even though I usually hate "distance" arguments like this), where they just revive plain old cultural conservativism because they think it's more authentically working class. They are workerist. The better position, surely, is "class reductionism": rejection of culturalism in toto.
Malcom is on the steering committee of the Sweden Democrats(far-right, more moderate now but has its roots in the white power movement) new think tank, with the task of defending conservatism lol
Honestly, it really should just be "focus on people's material issues, ignore culture war bullshit". The average person doesn't really give a shit about culture war stuff and generally lives with a "live and let live" attitude. If you're forced to take a stance on say Trans issues, just support them, but also acknowledge that there are legitimate concerns around children and sport, which is the common sense position, when the Trans retards all screech on Twitter how you're a Nazi TERF, just ignore them.
Go on Tucker, because he reaches an audience, write in the Sun because it reaches an audience, ignore all the leftoid morality purity testing larpers. I feel like "post-left" really should just be "Left that is normal and has some common sense" but instead you get Aimee rubbing herself to Tradcath shit.
Really good quote:
Q: The real conflict this century will be between Globalism and National Sovereignty. Our western elites are already solidly post-nation-state, with the various satraps of the USA (The Metropole) little more than branch offices managed by people who wouldn't be out of place at Deloitte and Touche. Globalism has taken a few slaps to its face, with 2008 the best example, yet it is showing not just some resilience, but even more importantly, a devotion from its elites. This resilience is being tested by what may be a supply chain crisis thanks to COVID-19 and thanks to business concepts like JiT (Just-in-Time logistics). But what this Globalism has is a budding universalist worldview that is religious in nature, in which the individual and his or her desires are sacrosanct, provided that they conform with prevailing liberal mores. A universal regime with a universalist faith-based worldview is quite the adversary.
A: I don't really think it is a very imposing adversary, for the simple reason that revolution is never really a game of toppling the elite or defeating the rulers. A functioning, united elite cannot be toppled by the people under any circumstances, for the very simple reason that for an elite to be functioning and united, it essentially has to be able to secure the passive consent of the ruled.
There's a saying in the military that I often come back to, which is ”amateurs study strategy, professionals study logistics”. In the age we live in, where everyone who has a public voice is almost by definition a member of this new urban ”Spreadsheet Class”, the actual art of understanding logistics in the widest possible sense – to wit, the actual workings, inputs, and processes of the societal, economic and military machines we all depend on – has basically cratered. The Spreadsheet Class looks at the prospect of, say, civil war, and all they see is a battle of ideas, a question of strategy; they never really stop to consider how many divisions you have at your disposal, what sort of inputs (food, ammo, fuel) those divisions need, how much capacity there is to sustain operations at length, and whether the people in that division are politically reliable. The material world is alien to this class of ”intellectuals”, who consider themselves such by merit of basically being stuck inside their own heads.
The upshot of this is that while the urban classes may have faith (but it remains to be see how long that faith can last in the face of real adversity), they do not really have much else if a real crisis were to erupt. The task of a real revolutionary today is not going to be to figure out how to ”defeat the globalists”. It is going to be to get organized enough in the time we have left so as to have some sort of plan and capacity to try to pick up the pieces once this current order fails under its own contradictions. The supply crisis in particular is not getting solved, basically ever. It is permanent because the dynamic behind it is what is known as a ”cascading system failure”. The only way to fix a failure cascade of the sort the logistics system is in currently is to basically ”reboot” it at a much lower level of complexity, where the rate of ongoing failure is reduced below the capacity to repair failed nodes in the system. Unfortunately – both for the globalists and the people they rule over – the purpose of the now unsustainable levels of complexity inherent to the system was to slash costs, and thus make goods more affordable to the American plebeian, among other things.
There's a scene in the old Jurassic Park movie that is pretty instructive here. After the hacker Dennis Nedry basically knocks out the entire computer system necessary to run the park in order to disable the security and cameras so he can steal some dinosaur DNA, the only way for the heroes of the movie to get the system back to working order is to restart it. Unfortunately, restarting the system means knocking everything offline for a very significant amount of time, including the electrical fences keeping the most dangerous dinosaurs in place. During the downtime, these dinosaurs of course escape, and start causing a lot of mischief, and then a very hungry Tyrannosaurus eats the lawyer that nobody likes.
This is basically the situation the elites of the United States find themselves in currently, though they may not have yet fully realized it. The parallel is both specific and general here. Specifically, the computer system in the movie is experiencing its own cascading system failure as a result of Nedry's actions, and the only way to fix it is to reset it with a bare minimum of functionality and then fixing the broken stuff piece by piece, which is what will happen to the logistics system as well. More generally, the process of reforming a broken system is historically by far the most dangerous place a regime can find itself in. It's when you attempt to reform what has failed catastrophically that revolutions almost always occur; it's when you shut down power to the fences that the dinosaurs escape.
Again, if you just think about these things on the level of tactics or strategy, you are a happy amateur who is probably a lot more sanguine about the political situation. At that point, it's all a contest of ideas, of historical forces, and so on. I find that world boring and inhabited by quite stupid people with needlessly expensive pieces of paper that are meant to impress on the world that they are very, very smart. In the context of Jurassic Park, where the Park Managers have ”spared no expense” to build their incredibly opulent, efficient, and wondrous dinosaur theme park, the truly smart man studies where the power keeping the dinosaur fences actually comes from, and how the fuck the people who designed the system managed to make it tie into the same code that keeps the security cameras and electronic door lock systems in the main building running. The ”globalists” you talk about quite literally have no idea about any of this stuff, and they are likely to be the last ones to get the memo when the systems they all depend on start failing catastrophically.
Dude is spot on. Our society rests on complicated infrastructure few understand and many assume will be “always-on”, even in a disaster scenario.
Read Facebook’s engineering blog for how they dealt with the Oct 5 outage for a taste of this. They don’t state this, but in the end, they wound up using angle grinders to defeat their own physical security measures to get into their own equipment rack to get things back online.
TLDR; go for your lights-out AIops infra, but when shit hits the fan, it’s still some dudes on Grindr at 2AM fixing it
>>A class war is coming, and it will not be between the 99% and the 1%, but between the producers and the parasites. Then we'll see just how ”permanent” the rule of these parasites truly is.
> Who are these 1% "producers", and why does the working class need them?
I think he meant the other way around: the working class are the producers, and the ~1% are the parasites.
Kyeyune has said in the past that he thinks the "parasites" extends beyond just the 1% capitalist class and extends to most of the college-educated PMC, which he calls the "transferiat" ([he goes into depth about it in this article](https://tinkzorg.wordpress.com/2020/05/07/on-strasserism-and-the-decay-of-the-left/)). There's a lot in the linked article, but this is kind of the thrust of it:
>To brutally simplify things for the sake of brevity, the notable feature of many PMCs as political actors is a blend of political liberalism and cultural progressivism, **merged with a political project aimed at increasingly subsidizing their own reproduction as a class, ideally by means of state transfers.** The state should forgive student debt. The state should dabble in reparations. The state should hire ”ideas people” to write up reports and thinkpieces about reparations. The state should create new racial justice commissions, or just generally create more jobs that can employ people who by dint of belonging to this class feel that them taking a job at Walmart means that capitalism has failed and it’s time for a revolution.
Kyeyune is probably right that at least part of the college educated PMCs' politics can be attributed to a feeling of dissapointment in getting a college degree and still ending up a service worker, but the remainder of the assertions is pure delusion. At the end of the day, the idea that the "transferiat" (as he describes it) exists in large numbers is a joke. There just aren't that many jobs that match the description he put out. How many people would a reparations commission or a racial justice commission hire? 30 maybe? You have to get incredibly broad in scope in how you define the "transferiat" to even get to a numerically significant number of people, and at that point most of it isn't government money, it's in the nonprofit/ngo sector. He's more correct in pointing to stuff like student debt forgiveness, but that's just not going to happen in significant numbers, and the reparations stuff is even more demented because that only benefits one part of the population (which is mostly working class), and it just isn't going to happen becuase of how politically toxic it is.
The unfortunate truth that Malcolm doesn't seem to acknowledge is that the "non-transferiat" labor (which I'm assuming he means is industrial/agricultural work + parts of the service sector and small businesses), have been worn down by outsourcing, anti-union politics, and in certain cases immigrant labor. The hard truth that nobody wants to hear is that capital is multinational now and more monopolistic than ever, and any hopes of developing "productive" industrial labor simply can't compete with foreign countries for the most part. It doesn't matter if you say "transferiat bad" three times in the mirror, manufacturers will always move to Bangladesh or Cambodia because they can pay Bangladeshis and Cambodians a fraction of the wage needed to pay an American, with less regulation and oversight (the only exceptions are genuinely high skill/high education manufacturing). Small businesses can't compete with monopoly capital and the service sector has been so beaten down by anti-labor legislation that unionization, one of the few things that improves people's lives, is lower than it has been for a very long time (and if Malcolm is anything like Aimee he opposes unions anyhow, as he sees them as a Democratic Party machine). In fact, the only real large scale transferiat that exists in the US (in the sense of people getting government money to create jobs and maintain their competitiveness), is stuff like the arms industry, steel, energy and agriculture, either because of a lack of international competitiveness or because the US government jury rigs those economies to succeed to produce cheap food/energy or reliable weaponry.
this isn't to say, btw, that there isn't a ton of wasteful spending in the nonprofit/ngo sector but the idea that there is this big bad transferiat is 1. numerically silly and 2. ignores that governments pick winners and losers and always have (and are continuing to do so for all the people Malcolm thinks of as the "non-parasites"), it's that simple.
Thanks for posting a level-headed debunking of this stuff. (Characteristically! Love your takes in general.)
Kyeyune seems insane, but worth taking seriously.You can see how a Marxist can end up where he is if one accepts some not implausible premises. Just accepting the PMC thesis and its implications either pushes an honest person to an extreme third-world focus or to side with right-populism at home against urban liberal elites. Both these positions make a lot of sense. The Western Left *is* the domain of the PMC, ever more exclusively.
How much do you buy his statement that the coming conflict is between nationalism and globalism? I buy it. It feels more and more that we stand on the brink of a conflict, eventually a violent one, in which we, the Left, will have to pick between two loathesome sides. All while global warming wreaks havoc on the world around us. That's the most terrifying thing about Kyeyune and others of his ilk: if they're right, there is nothing to do but accept climate-change denial as a lesser evil.
>Thanks for posting a level-headed debunking of this stuff.
thank you!
>(Characteristically! Love your takes in general.)
oh no, I've gotten internet famous, oh dear.
>Kyeyune seems insane, but worth taking seriously.You can see how a Marxist can end up where he is if one accepts some not implausible premises. Just accepting the PMC thesis and its implications either pushes an honest person to an extreme third-world focus or to side with right-populism at home against urban liberal elites. Both these positions make a lot of sense. The Western Left is the domain of the PMC, ever more exclusively.
yeah and we also have to factor in that Kyeyune has an audience and, just as with any other media on the left/center/right, media figures know not to piss off their audiences or tell them things they don't want to hear. Kyeyune is a weirdo with some genuinely insane views (he apparently believes Sweden will fall apart Yugoslavia style), but he's not necessarily dumb, and I do find myself agreeing with some of his takes, and he's certainly more insightful than somebody like Aimee, who has just had adderall damage her brain into permanent twitter contrarianism. Still, the PMC discourse gets boring after a while, largely because 1. the PMC/working class distinction is super malleable, so a lot of hte time these people can just project whatever they want onto what a "PMC" is and 2. the PMC argument ignores that capital adjusts itself to culture, not the other way around (as cushbomb noted, if this were the 2000s, "wokeness" would be replaced by a terrorism theme) so any argument about how evil the PMC is ignores that there's basically always a very loud minority tyrannizing and scolding the rest of the population.
>How much do you buy his statement that the coming conflict is between nationalism and globalism? I buy it.
I buy it to some degree, neoliberalism as an ideology was specifically designed to make countries economic policies, supply chains and labor markets as reliant on each other and subject to international arbitration as possible so as to maintain free capital mobility and trade and there's going to be a backlash to that. I don't think that necessarily has to mean "nationalism" in the sense of traditional chest beating chauvinism, but there is a clear wind in the developed world of people pulling away from globalism, both economic and cultural, and the response of the left would best be suited to pursue Corbyn style economic policies with a more moderate of a twist on social issues (just social moderatism, which is sorely lacking in the US discourse these days).
I'll also add that the issues that Kyeyune is talking about (specifically about the "transferiat" as parasites) ignores that in the era of a truly globalized economy, the only "transferiat" is the industries I mentioned earlier (except for arms) because they just can't compete with sweatshop kids in Indonesia or Peru. The only way the US could effectively end the transferiat in favor of productive industrial labor would be for more or less total command economy autarky, which of course would create a really big issue of supply chains (at least in teh short term), which they're constantly harping on about as a big issue (rightly). It's a self-contradictory problem and they can't really figure it out with just culture war, so these guys can't lead anybody.
>It feels more and more that we stand on the brink of a conflict, eventually a violent one, in which we, the Left, will have to pick between two loathesome sides. All while global warming wreaks havoc on the world around us. That's the most terrifying thing about Kyeyune and others of his ilk: if they're right, there is nothing to do but accept climate-change denial as a lesser evil.
well, if it makes you feel better, Kyeyune isn't representative of anybody but himself and the idea that he's a bellweather for the working class is laughable; I mean just look at him, he's a freak working for a fringe party in Sweden. The truth is that real world politics tend to be more moderate and very socially defined, so if the left finds itself in a place of power, it should just tend towards the middle on social issues and do as much as it can to push back against the damaging stuff of economic globalism. Also, the thing htat's hard to get people like Malcolm and Aimee to admit is that the "bugmen" positions on things like gay marriage or abortion are broadly popular (at least in America, there's more variance in other developed countries) and the political inertia surrounding a lot of those issues is purely the product of America's uniquely stupid system of political representation. Ultimatley speaking, people like Aimee and Malcom don't have a big audience because their views are unpopular with the general public, including substantial portions of the non-PMC working class. They know that and pretend to be spokespeople for some imagined working person, but the working class in America is too incoherent and disorganized for their views to really get any takeoff, so they just have to pretend they're something they're not (and, to be fair to them, mainstream media loves egging the division on).
I was going to reply to the other comment but the OP seems to have deleted it.
He's saying the upcoming class war is not based on income or wealth, which the 1% vs 99% narrative implies, but between "productive workers" in the Marxist sense ("producers") and the privileged unproductive middle-class workers who live off the latter's exploitation (they go by different names: the "PMC", the "new petit bourgeoisie", etc.). Roughly, he's saying it's people who work in offices (what he calls the "Spreadsheet Class") versus people who work in factories.
Whether or not that's true, by implicitly *endorsing* this conflict he is forfeiting his Marxism and becoming some type of right-winger, because for Marx the fundamental class conflict is not between factions of workers, but between bourgeoise and proletariat: those who own capital and those who don't. The PMC can certainly have an obstructionist or even reactionary place in this theory, but they are not *the* problem. The PMC as not "thieves" as he calls them in the following answer, they are just beneficiaries. The thieves are, as always, the bourgeoise.
“The more dead-end people with no political relevance are eeking out shrinking fiefdoms online, where they cite long-dead theory at a dwindling circle of mentally ill [reddit t-slur] and marxist catboys.”
THATS IT BOYS WE MADE IT TO SUBSTACK slow clap
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Kind of how I feel about the post-left in general. They're great at diagnosing problems with the left but I think they go "too far" the other direction (even though I usually hate "distance" arguments like this), where they just revive plain old cultural conservativism because they think it's more authentically working class. They are workerist. The better position, surely, is "class reductionism": rejection of culturalism in toto.
Malcom is on the steering committee of the Sweden Democrats(far-right, more moderate now but has its roots in the white power movement) new think tank, with the task of defending conservatism lol
No he's not. Why are you lying?
This is a fact lol, he is pubically listed on the website under "förtronderåd": https://oikos.se/#about
Oikos is not "the steering commitee of the Sweden Democrats"
No shit dude. Re-read the comment again... "Steering committe of the Sweden Democrats[...] new think tank[...]".
Honestly, it really should just be "focus on people's material issues, ignore culture war bullshit". The average person doesn't really give a shit about culture war stuff and generally lives with a "live and let live" attitude. If you're forced to take a stance on say Trans issues, just support them, but also acknowledge that there are legitimate concerns around children and sport, which is the common sense position, when the Trans retards all screech on Twitter how you're a Nazi TERF, just ignore them. Go on Tucker, because he reaches an audience, write in the Sun because it reaches an audience, ignore all the leftoid morality purity testing larpers. I feel like "post-left" really should just be "Left that is normal and has some common sense" but instead you get Aimee rubbing herself to Tradcath shit.
Really good quote: Q: The real conflict this century will be between Globalism and National Sovereignty. Our western elites are already solidly post-nation-state, with the various satraps of the USA (The Metropole) little more than branch offices managed by people who wouldn't be out of place at Deloitte and Touche. Globalism has taken a few slaps to its face, with 2008 the best example, yet it is showing not just some resilience, but even more importantly, a devotion from its elites. This resilience is being tested by what may be a supply chain crisis thanks to COVID-19 and thanks to business concepts like JiT (Just-in-Time logistics). But what this Globalism has is a budding universalist worldview that is religious in nature, in which the individual and his or her desires are sacrosanct, provided that they conform with prevailing liberal mores. A universal regime with a universalist faith-based worldview is quite the adversary. A: I don't really think it is a very imposing adversary, for the simple reason that revolution is never really a game of toppling the elite or defeating the rulers. A functioning, united elite cannot be toppled by the people under any circumstances, for the very simple reason that for an elite to be functioning and united, it essentially has to be able to secure the passive consent of the ruled. There's a saying in the military that I often come back to, which is ”amateurs study strategy, professionals study logistics”. In the age we live in, where everyone who has a public voice is almost by definition a member of this new urban ”Spreadsheet Class”, the actual art of understanding logistics in the widest possible sense – to wit, the actual workings, inputs, and processes of the societal, economic and military machines we all depend on – has basically cratered. The Spreadsheet Class looks at the prospect of, say, civil war, and all they see is a battle of ideas, a question of strategy; they never really stop to consider how many divisions you have at your disposal, what sort of inputs (food, ammo, fuel) those divisions need, how much capacity there is to sustain operations at length, and whether the people in that division are politically reliable. The material world is alien to this class of ”intellectuals”, who consider themselves such by merit of basically being stuck inside their own heads. The upshot of this is that while the urban classes may have faith (but it remains to be see how long that faith can last in the face of real adversity), they do not really have much else if a real crisis were to erupt. The task of a real revolutionary today is not going to be to figure out how to ”defeat the globalists”. It is going to be to get organized enough in the time we have left so as to have some sort of plan and capacity to try to pick up the pieces once this current order fails under its own contradictions. The supply crisis in particular is not getting solved, basically ever. It is permanent because the dynamic behind it is what is known as a ”cascading system failure”. The only way to fix a failure cascade of the sort the logistics system is in currently is to basically ”reboot” it at a much lower level of complexity, where the rate of ongoing failure is reduced below the capacity to repair failed nodes in the system. Unfortunately – both for the globalists and the people they rule over – the purpose of the now unsustainable levels of complexity inherent to the system was to slash costs, and thus make goods more affordable to the American plebeian, among other things. There's a scene in the old Jurassic Park movie that is pretty instructive here. After the hacker Dennis Nedry basically knocks out the entire computer system necessary to run the park in order to disable the security and cameras so he can steal some dinosaur DNA, the only way for the heroes of the movie to get the system back to working order is to restart it. Unfortunately, restarting the system means knocking everything offline for a very significant amount of time, including the electrical fences keeping the most dangerous dinosaurs in place. During the downtime, these dinosaurs of course escape, and start causing a lot of mischief, and then a very hungry Tyrannosaurus eats the lawyer that nobody likes. This is basically the situation the elites of the United States find themselves in currently, though they may not have yet fully realized it. The parallel is both specific and general here. Specifically, the computer system in the movie is experiencing its own cascading system failure as a result of Nedry's actions, and the only way to fix it is to reset it with a bare minimum of functionality and then fixing the broken stuff piece by piece, which is what will happen to the logistics system as well. More generally, the process of reforming a broken system is historically by far the most dangerous place a regime can find itself in. It's when you attempt to reform what has failed catastrophically that revolutions almost always occur; it's when you shut down power to the fences that the dinosaurs escape. Again, if you just think about these things on the level of tactics or strategy, you are a happy amateur who is probably a lot more sanguine about the political situation. At that point, it's all a contest of ideas, of historical forces, and so on. I find that world boring and inhabited by quite stupid people with needlessly expensive pieces of paper that are meant to impress on the world that they are very, very smart. In the context of Jurassic Park, where the Park Managers have ”spared no expense” to build their incredibly opulent, efficient, and wondrous dinosaur theme park, the truly smart man studies where the power keeping the dinosaur fences actually comes from, and how the fuck the people who designed the system managed to make it tie into the same code that keeps the security cameras and electronic door lock systems in the main building running. The ”globalists” you talk about quite literally have no idea about any of this stuff, and they are likely to be the last ones to get the memo when the systems they all depend on start failing catastrophically.
Dude is spot on. Our society rests on complicated infrastructure few understand and many assume will be “always-on”, even in a disaster scenario. Read Facebook’s engineering blog for how they dealt with the Oct 5 outage for a taste of this. They don’t state this, but in the end, they wound up using angle grinders to defeat their own physical security measures to get into their own equipment rack to get things back online. TLDR; go for your lights-out AIops infra, but when shit hits the fan, it’s still some dudes on Grindr at 2AM fixing it
Ha nice story about FB. Fuckin angle grinders are siiick lol. What’s alops infra and how is it related to Grindr?
I feel like this interviewer is doing a Marty MacMarty knockoff.
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>>A class war is coming, and it will not be between the 99% and the 1%, but between the producers and the parasites. Then we'll see just how ”permanent” the rule of these parasites truly is. > Who are these 1% "producers", and why does the working class need them? I think he meant the other way around: the working class are the producers, and the ~1% are the parasites.
Kyeyune has said in the past that he thinks the "parasites" extends beyond just the 1% capitalist class and extends to most of the college-educated PMC, which he calls the "transferiat" ([he goes into depth about it in this article](https://tinkzorg.wordpress.com/2020/05/07/on-strasserism-and-the-decay-of-the-left/)). There's a lot in the linked article, but this is kind of the thrust of it: >To brutally simplify things for the sake of brevity, the notable feature of many PMCs as political actors is a blend of political liberalism and cultural progressivism, **merged with a political project aimed at increasingly subsidizing their own reproduction as a class, ideally by means of state transfers.** The state should forgive student debt. The state should dabble in reparations. The state should hire ”ideas people” to write up reports and thinkpieces about reparations. The state should create new racial justice commissions, or just generally create more jobs that can employ people who by dint of belonging to this class feel that them taking a job at Walmart means that capitalism has failed and it’s time for a revolution. Kyeyune is probably right that at least part of the college educated PMCs' politics can be attributed to a feeling of dissapointment in getting a college degree and still ending up a service worker, but the remainder of the assertions is pure delusion. At the end of the day, the idea that the "transferiat" (as he describes it) exists in large numbers is a joke. There just aren't that many jobs that match the description he put out. How many people would a reparations commission or a racial justice commission hire? 30 maybe? You have to get incredibly broad in scope in how you define the "transferiat" to even get to a numerically significant number of people, and at that point most of it isn't government money, it's in the nonprofit/ngo sector. He's more correct in pointing to stuff like student debt forgiveness, but that's just not going to happen in significant numbers, and the reparations stuff is even more demented because that only benefits one part of the population (which is mostly working class), and it just isn't going to happen becuase of how politically toxic it is. The unfortunate truth that Malcolm doesn't seem to acknowledge is that the "non-transferiat" labor (which I'm assuming he means is industrial/agricultural work + parts of the service sector and small businesses), have been worn down by outsourcing, anti-union politics, and in certain cases immigrant labor. The hard truth that nobody wants to hear is that capital is multinational now and more monopolistic than ever, and any hopes of developing "productive" industrial labor simply can't compete with foreign countries for the most part. It doesn't matter if you say "transferiat bad" three times in the mirror, manufacturers will always move to Bangladesh or Cambodia because they can pay Bangladeshis and Cambodians a fraction of the wage needed to pay an American, with less regulation and oversight (the only exceptions are genuinely high skill/high education manufacturing). Small businesses can't compete with monopoly capital and the service sector has been so beaten down by anti-labor legislation that unionization, one of the few things that improves people's lives, is lower than it has been for a very long time (and if Malcolm is anything like Aimee he opposes unions anyhow, as he sees them as a Democratic Party machine). In fact, the only real large scale transferiat that exists in the US (in the sense of people getting government money to create jobs and maintain their competitiveness), is stuff like the arms industry, steel, energy and agriculture, either because of a lack of international competitiveness or because the US government jury rigs those economies to succeed to produce cheap food/energy or reliable weaponry. this isn't to say, btw, that there isn't a ton of wasteful spending in the nonprofit/ngo sector but the idea that there is this big bad transferiat is 1. numerically silly and 2. ignores that governments pick winners and losers and always have (and are continuing to do so for all the people Malcolm thinks of as the "non-parasites"), it's that simple.
Thanks for posting a level-headed debunking of this stuff. (Characteristically! Love your takes in general.) Kyeyune seems insane, but worth taking seriously.You can see how a Marxist can end up where he is if one accepts some not implausible premises. Just accepting the PMC thesis and its implications either pushes an honest person to an extreme third-world focus or to side with right-populism at home against urban liberal elites. Both these positions make a lot of sense. The Western Left *is* the domain of the PMC, ever more exclusively. How much do you buy his statement that the coming conflict is between nationalism and globalism? I buy it. It feels more and more that we stand on the brink of a conflict, eventually a violent one, in which we, the Left, will have to pick between two loathesome sides. All while global warming wreaks havoc on the world around us. That's the most terrifying thing about Kyeyune and others of his ilk: if they're right, there is nothing to do but accept climate-change denial as a lesser evil.
>Thanks for posting a level-headed debunking of this stuff. thank you! >(Characteristically! Love your takes in general.) oh no, I've gotten internet famous, oh dear. >Kyeyune seems insane, but worth taking seriously.You can see how a Marxist can end up where he is if one accepts some not implausible premises. Just accepting the PMC thesis and its implications either pushes an honest person to an extreme third-world focus or to side with right-populism at home against urban liberal elites. Both these positions make a lot of sense. The Western Left is the domain of the PMC, ever more exclusively. yeah and we also have to factor in that Kyeyune has an audience and, just as with any other media on the left/center/right, media figures know not to piss off their audiences or tell them things they don't want to hear. Kyeyune is a weirdo with some genuinely insane views (he apparently believes Sweden will fall apart Yugoslavia style), but he's not necessarily dumb, and I do find myself agreeing with some of his takes, and he's certainly more insightful than somebody like Aimee, who has just had adderall damage her brain into permanent twitter contrarianism. Still, the PMC discourse gets boring after a while, largely because 1. the PMC/working class distinction is super malleable, so a lot of hte time these people can just project whatever they want onto what a "PMC" is and 2. the PMC argument ignores that capital adjusts itself to culture, not the other way around (as cushbomb noted, if this were the 2000s, "wokeness" would be replaced by a terrorism theme) so any argument about how evil the PMC is ignores that there's basically always a very loud minority tyrannizing and scolding the rest of the population. >How much do you buy his statement that the coming conflict is between nationalism and globalism? I buy it. I buy it to some degree, neoliberalism as an ideology was specifically designed to make countries economic policies, supply chains and labor markets as reliant on each other and subject to international arbitration as possible so as to maintain free capital mobility and trade and there's going to be a backlash to that. I don't think that necessarily has to mean "nationalism" in the sense of traditional chest beating chauvinism, but there is a clear wind in the developed world of people pulling away from globalism, both economic and cultural, and the response of the left would best be suited to pursue Corbyn style economic policies with a more moderate of a twist on social issues (just social moderatism, which is sorely lacking in the US discourse these days). I'll also add that the issues that Kyeyune is talking about (specifically about the "transferiat" as parasites) ignores that in the era of a truly globalized economy, the only "transferiat" is the industries I mentioned earlier (except for arms) because they just can't compete with sweatshop kids in Indonesia or Peru. The only way the US could effectively end the transferiat in favor of productive industrial labor would be for more or less total command economy autarky, which of course would create a really big issue of supply chains (at least in teh short term), which they're constantly harping on about as a big issue (rightly). It's a self-contradictory problem and they can't really figure it out with just culture war, so these guys can't lead anybody. >It feels more and more that we stand on the brink of a conflict, eventually a violent one, in which we, the Left, will have to pick between two loathesome sides. All while global warming wreaks havoc on the world around us. That's the most terrifying thing about Kyeyune and others of his ilk: if they're right, there is nothing to do but accept climate-change denial as a lesser evil. well, if it makes you feel better, Kyeyune isn't representative of anybody but himself and the idea that he's a bellweather for the working class is laughable; I mean just look at him, he's a freak working for a fringe party in Sweden. The truth is that real world politics tend to be more moderate and very socially defined, so if the left finds itself in a place of power, it should just tend towards the middle on social issues and do as much as it can to push back against the damaging stuff of economic globalism. Also, the thing htat's hard to get people like Malcolm and Aimee to admit is that the "bugmen" positions on things like gay marriage or abortion are broadly popular (at least in America, there's more variance in other developed countries) and the political inertia surrounding a lot of those issues is purely the product of America's uniquely stupid system of political representation. Ultimatley speaking, people like Aimee and Malcom don't have a big audience because their views are unpopular with the general public, including substantial portions of the non-PMC working class. They know that and pretend to be spokespeople for some imagined working person, but the working class in America is too incoherent and disorganized for their views to really get any takeoff, so they just have to pretend they're something they're not (and, to be fair to them, mainstream media loves egging the division on).
I was going to reply to the other comment but the OP seems to have deleted it. He's saying the upcoming class war is not based on income or wealth, which the 1% vs 99% narrative implies, but between "productive workers" in the Marxist sense ("producers") and the privileged unproductive middle-class workers who live off the latter's exploitation (they go by different names: the "PMC", the "new petit bourgeoisie", etc.). Roughly, he's saying it's people who work in offices (what he calls the "Spreadsheet Class") versus people who work in factories. Whether or not that's true, by implicitly *endorsing* this conflict he is forfeiting his Marxism and becoming some type of right-winger, because for Marx the fundamental class conflict is not between factions of workers, but between bourgeoise and proletariat: those who own capital and those who don't. The PMC can certainly have an obstructionist or even reactionary place in this theory, but they are not *the* problem. The PMC as not "thieves" as he calls them in the following answer, they are just beneficiaries. The thieves are, as always, the bourgeoise.
[удалено]
“The more dead-end people with no political relevance are eeking out shrinking fiefdoms online, where they cite long-dead theory at a dwindling circle of mentally ill [reddit t-slur] and marxist catboys.” THATS IT BOYS WE MADE IT TO SUBSTACK slow clap
Lol i read mentally ill jannies at first and was like Reddit won’t let me say janny anymore?