Sorry, I know debatebro-ism is the 12th type of liberalism :denguin:
Disappointed by Wolff tbh. He's too moralizing, comes off as a Christian Socialist. He's also long winded, yeah I know it was a live debate but he should've been able to make his points more focused. He also hangs on to dead ends (Socialism's definition isn't amorphous, Mondragon is good, etc.) which he doesn't need to. He basically rolls over to Destiny's weird hostility to using history and class relations to explain modes of production, doesn't put enough emphasis in them as processes instead of things that people just enact one day.
Steve say “can you answer that [as] yes or no"
Was amazing, it literally is from Gorgias, one of the socratic dialogues, that Plato schools people who do bad faith rhetoric and sophistry and in Aristotele's De interpretatione he schools people with tertium non datur:
Which means as much as the excluded third. If you act as if there would only be Yes/No or True/False you ignore reality, cause a sentence for example like tomorrow there will be a sea battle is yet to be determined. It means that by acting as if all the other choices are excluded you leave 'the reasonable discourse' and the answer is one in sophistry then. Quine says more or less: 'Those who act as if they hold believes and argue without holding those believes are people you don't argue with' another truly inspiring philosopher that: 'If you start to talk shit, you get hit'.
Luckily, it will have no effect on anything and you only know and care about it because you're part of a vanishingly small niche within a vanishingly small niche in the rapidly receeding West.
Next time you have the urge to watch a pointless, ugly struggle session, pirate Godzilla vs Kong.
I don't get Richard Wolff sometimes. You watch some of his stuff and he comes across as a lib, but then you watch something like his interview with Hakim and everything he says makes complete sense and his viewpoint is very clear and reasonable.
Either way his stuff is a good introduction to Marxist analysis for left-curious libs.
What Wolff did was ingraining that 'China bad' 'Russia bad' is not helpful. The different definitions for socialism (not communism!) I understand as creating a field of multiple options depending on the social and material conditions at some points (which is good and levels against the charge of monolithic nature of communism leveled against it within the US).
He also highlighted with it that the successes were won by socialists - not by capitalists. This is good, if it is helpful we will see (and there is no problem to deal with it differently). I for one believe there was not enough differentiation between social democratic ideas and factors and such from within a self identified communist perspective (but that is okay for a debate!).
What he said was left and close to liberalism, however Wolff himself is aware that if you would try to get workplace democracy it would clash with capitalism and a huge reaction would be the result. The debate wasn't the best place to underline that though, the debate was to purge this idea of the own US-American exceptional viewpoint as being the only legitimate.
The 'long windedness' for the most part was contextualizing how material reality works: it is depending on the material and social conditions before which are related to the modes of production and the resulting super structure is influencing each step on the way. To understand how capitalism or socialism come to being you don't look in a dictionary ("There is no one body which accredits if this is true socialism"), you look at the historical processes birthing them. This was basically an introduction of ideas of the political economy and such for lay persons (this is why he used the employer-employee relationship instead of the doubly free worker).
Lets be clear: Quite a few people wouldn't have listened to Wolff, but even more now experienced a person who an actual academic expert and doesn't withdraw and introduced dozens and dozens of important materialist talking points. For me it felt like a win (and the chat made clear Wolff won, too). Even within Destiny's chat he was not seldomly dunked on, which is something, too.
Edit:
Sorry for the wall of text, however I would like to add even more: The Mondragon thing was really a bit long winded, however it is nice to see that Wolff did not say small disparities from perfection defeat Mondragon (which would be idealist conceptions), but that the reality of the 1:6 wage limits are there (there is also a 38% more between coops ceilings) and Destiny was exposted for everyone who wanted to look Mondragon up as liar. This was important to discredit the legitimacy of Steve (Destiny) for most who only would do a cursory glance at Mondragon later on seeing that Wolff was right and Destiny uninformed and a liar.Well he def. looked like prof "I-talk-a-lot", but this was combined with "I-know-shit", so the messages amount about who was getting points and who was better was heavily skewed towards Wolff, most of the time 5:1 for him and in the near end there were situations were multiple screens went without flak vs. Wolff.
I mean, the professor is a 79 year old academic who probably had no prior experience with these online debate bro types before this.
I think a 79 year old academic professor who is arguing for Marxist ideas for half a century got more experience with debate bros than most on this platform.
As a professor Wolff has probably heard every objection and question you could possibly imagine on these subjects—from students, colleagues, administrators, you name it, to the point where many of these arguments have become boring and predictable. Bertell Ollman, a Marxist professor at NYU, had an interesting piece which I believe was called "Teaching Marxism," which I found pretty useful, and which describes the experience of teaching Marxism to students who are not Marxists, but it seems to have vanished from the internet.
edit: found it
https://web.archive.org/web/20200901041551/https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/ssr_ch05.php
That is a very good text, thanks! I like how it tries to tell the problems of teaching partially within a marxist framework.
I wish the stock socialist reply to the debate stuff was just pointing out to the audience that there is really no point carefully curating your political beliefs just to arrive at the conclusion you shouldn't really have a say in anything because you don't believe in any kind of democratic economic input. You are literally watching this as a socialist, a billionaire or an idiot.
This reminds me of the quip:
Asking an auditorium Please show of hands, who here is a capitalist (some hands are raised)
Oh, okay, who of you does subsist from the profits your capital or rental objects generate and don't have to work or go into debt for attending school here? Nearly all the hands go down
Seems you aren't capitalist after all.
Debate bros ability to influence politics are meaningless compared to the tide of material conditions, Destiny is in a hot tub saying the water in the arctic ocean is hot. Wolf is also on shore but at least read some earth science textbooks.
Also, I would rather watching fucking paint dry than listen to that whiny asshole. I salute you for managing to get through what was destined to be a complete and utter waste of raw materials.
He had a deluge of bad takes, but what got me was how ridiculously smug he was about knowing literally nothing about the historical development of modes of production. Wolff was doing the most basic explanation of how class relations have evolved into the ones under Capitalism and he just accuses him of "talking about random historical facts" :smoothskin:
It was definitely kind of concerning to see how hostile the chat was to any discussion of history, specifically feudalism. Any history except for WW2, the Civil Rights Movement, Gandhi, or the collapse of the USSR is anathema to liberals. They hate it so much it just doesn't even exist for them. But Wolff had to bring this up because Steve kept saying that Mondragon isn't actually socialist because it must exist inside global capitalism and sometimes works with private enterprise; Wolff's retort was simply that capitalism in its beginnings likewise had to exist inside of and alongside feudalism. This infuriates liberals because they are forced to admit that things have not always been the same, that "human nature" depends on material circumstance and vice-versa, and that capitalism itself could even be viewed as an aberration.
Destiny was super snide & disrespectful
It's like yeah, the old guy is gonna talk a lot, but you obviously understand what he's saying or you wouldn't fidget so hard when Wolff brings up the word "history"
A true liberal. Let's talk about platonic ideals and first principals not historical facts.
This is why debates are pointless and not worth watching beyond their entertainment value. It doesn't matter one little bit who is actually correct. It's just a battle of rhetoric and charisma. Hopefully no one was watching it with the intent of trying to figure out whether capitalism or socialism is better.
I thought it was useful to see Wolff challenged by a guy who, although dumb (and obviously taking his talking points entirely from wikipedia), is still quite advanced compared to the average liberal on the street. Wolff has done other debates with exceptionally stupid people, but I don't think Steve is the dumbest. This guy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj-zFgxCUnY) in particular is operating on an entirely different level of stupid. I couldn't actually finish that debate because the dude kept arguing that Hillary was a socialist. He also said that he hired people based on their birthdays.
Is the average Liberal on the street 300% bet into showboating for their audience so they can take in endless cash?
This online bollocks is for morons, it's not politics, its not useful
I imagine myself, one day in the future, being able to debate a prominent liberal in some kind of public context. I think that although these debates are stupid, they can make a difference when it comes to the audience, especially in times like these when a lot of people are looking for answers. If Marxists don't step up and talk, liberals and fascists will.
I imagine myself, one day in the future, being able to debate a prominent liberal in some kind of public context.
Childish, cathartic fantasy.
You don't stand on a podium and wax lyrical like big King nonce. You do politics, you appeal to the electorate, your community, you find out their wants and needs, you work. You do a hundred thousand difficult tasks.
Individualistic grandstanding is for earning twitch bucks and grooming teenagers.
All true, but socialists do sometimes have opportunities to speak to large numbers of people who may be relatively open to new ideas. If you become a substitute teacher, which is relatively easy in the USA, you will eventually find yourself discussing these things, sometimes with large groups of students who themselves are probably more open to socialism than the average USAer because school is so amazingly unbearable here. (As a sub, you also don't really have to worry about jeopardizing your career, since you have no career to speak of.) When I was in high school several local politicians—not all of them elected—were invited to speak in our classroom as well as in the auditorium. None of them were socialists but they nonetheless made quite an impression (one said that he believed that yoga was our path to the stars). Imagine having the chance to tell students that they should consider unionizing and striking to get what they want. I hated high school but never thought of these possibilities, and it might have made a difference if someone had actually mentioned them to me, which no one ever did.
There was an event at my school in which the 'ambassador to Venezuela (Guaido guy)' was speaking alongside some other imperialists on a panel. There was a q&a portion. Some fedora wearing marxist 'how dare you, sir'ed the dude for like 6 minutes. While he wasn't wrong, he was so unconvincing and such an ass that even I was cringing and looking down on the floor.
What he was saying was entirely correct, the way he said it was entirely fucking cringe and totally lacked any charisma or understanding of how to play to an audience.
So in the future, don't shoot yourself in the foot with diatribes of 'well actually...' debate broism. Make your points short, make your points obvious, make them incisive, make them in a way the audience will understand and keep up with. That definitely matters more than truth content in those contexts. Don't lie, of course. But because the ambassador looked somewhat normal in comparison, he came away looking like the better of the two in the exchange.
That's what matters the most for liberals, the herd wants to attach itself to people who look normal/are funny/seem informed. It's all a balancing act.
Edit: Buenaventura Durruti was described by others in the union as 'speaking like a woodcutter'. He would listen intently, quietly. He would rarely weigh in and speak until hearing from others. He would make his points like an axe through wood: cutting quickly, cleanly, clearly and then resting again before speaking the same way.
Holy shit was that me????????????????
During the protests last summer in my very liberal area I was able to grab a megaphone for a few minutes in front of several hundred people. I'm a local politician so this was not the first time I had spoken before a big crowd, but the difference here was that I was completely unprepared. I was just kind of angry after listening to speaker after speaker tell us to GET OUT AND VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!!! I went up there and talked for several minutes. I can't recall exactly what I said, except that we were standing on stolen land, the people there should read Marx, and genetically random individuals have much more in common than socially constructed races. The audience of white liberals was super not into it! Most of them just watched me in silence.
However, at the following protest the next week—same time and place, similar if not identical crowd—we were completely surrounded by cops. There were at least two cop infiltrators at the protest. No cops had been present, as far as I know, when I spoke during the previous protest. Also, open mic was no longer allowed by the organizers. As far as I can recall, I was the only radical who spoke. I was also quietly running in a low-level local political campaign at the time, and the local liberals went absolutely into overdrive trying to stop me. They had pretty much been ignoring me before then. Months later, when the election took place, they succeeded in stopping me. One even spread rumors that the handful of black people at the protest had asked me to be quiet, which absolutely never happened!
So although I pretty much blew it here, the powers-that-be take this shit seriously. We talk about how the internet isn't real or how debates between Wolff and Steve are stupid and pointless, but capitalists do not want socialists (even mediocre ones like myself) speaking in the media or in public spaces.
And also it's not entirely a bad thing that I lost the election. Had I won, I would have been one Marxist surrounded entirely by liberals and reactionaries. I would not have been able to get anything done, and my family certainly would have started receiving death threats. There is no organization where I live and no protection of any kind. So I'm pretty much over it and ready to move on to the next battle. I had only run for that particular position in the first place because the friend who asked me to said that I wouldn't have to campaign. Once Bernie lost the primary I went full ML and pretty much stopped caring about winning, but that was several months before my own election took place.
Socialism’s definition isn’t amorphous
Ah, but it is (if you contextualize the different viewpoints). Lasalle thought himself a socialist. The important part here was to say: Vietnamese and Chinese have more right than you online-dude Steve to say what is socialism. The definition also isn't helpful. If you define a chair as sitting utensil any beer case is a chair. Its relations to the material world are what is important.
Communism from my Marxist perspective is clear, (a) it is the real existing movement which overthrows the current state of things (b) worker owned means of production which abolish class conflicts found in capitalism.
However Socialism’s definition isn’t amorphous, is right. Nothing Wolff said was amorphous. A lot was too lib, surely, but that doesn't matter too much.
He’s too moralizing, comes off as a Christian Socialist.
As a Christian Socialist, nothing wrong with that my man! Sometimes morality just grabs you by the balls and doesn't want to let go.
I'm not disagreeing.
On a more serious note one of the reasons the far right is so successful is that they have boiled their ideology down to a few really dumb, but also simple, easy to understand and memorable soundbites. The left could benefit from having some of that.
Is the US empire socialist now? Did we finally hit the communism button now that comrade Biden is in charge
