Juice

The question betrays an unspoken fact about capitalism: technological development is only invested in when it lowers the cost of wages (eliminates workers.) Capitalists don't invest in tech advancement for the sake of advancement. If a technology already existed that could be invested in to replace workers, it would already be known about in the trades and chances are the capitalist would already have invested to stay competitive. If not, the cost of r&d to develop a solution, especially when capitalists make exorbitant sums off of the surplus labor of workers, is going to cost more than what it would to pay the workers a little more.

Large businesses with existing investments in capital, this is probably more true in a modern setting, since new technical advancements capable of replacing a vast swath of workers would require replacing that capital with new, bespoke, experimental machinery. This just isn't that common for existing large production operations. This is where smaller "interruptor" start ups enter the market, which brings me back to my first point. There's always the possibility of it happening but if it does it was going to happen anyway. Capitalists aren't paying workers out of the goodness of their heart, and striking will make them decide to invest in new tech. It's market competition that forces investment in new tech. I would say that most of the time those are just empty threats.

so salaries. How the fuck are they determined

Not sure how yours is determined because I don't know what you do, but in software there are contractors that charge exorbitant prices to do like the most basic programming task. So if a company pays a developer a salary, they don't have to do very much to make it extremely worth the while of the business. Like if someone makes 80-100k per year and develops like an api layer using cloud services, maybe a few months work, it's already more than paid for itself. Anything else they work on that year, or doing tech support work, is basically free. I have a friend who writes yaml configs for azure services and makes incredible amounts of money, but works very little. But like you say, you have to always be by the computer. So even though the pay is high the work is still exploitative.

Deeply unserious

I can dig it. Yeah Friere's context was fairly specific, so he developed a method for teaching illiterate peasants how to read that starts with restoring their subjective experience and imbues them with revolutionary consciousness, and this is what motivates them to want to learn. He's viciously critical of teaching methods where a teacher dictates, which is the primary teaching method in the west.

Your comment touches some problems that face socialists in the core, like why do people act against their own interest and how do we get people who are imbued with sympathy and motivated to change things to become class conscious and revolutionary? Your comment reminds me of Friere because a lot of socialists have this experience of "radicalizing" which starts by just like giving up these preconceived notions that are force fed to us. The peasants that Friere talks about have a similar spell cast on them, they see themselves the way they are seen by the ruling class, as mere toilers with no potential, lower than animals even, dehumanized through oppression. And like, even those of us who benefit from the wages of imperialism and privilege, etc., are also alienated from each other and nature, we are subjected to the same dehumanizing forces, and dehumanizing the other dehumanizes the self. A lot of socialists are, understandably like, "so what? Fuckem." And maybe that's all there is to it. Friere was pretty insistent that the methods used to help the oppressed gain consciousness don't work on the oppressors. But yet there are always those within the oppressing "group" who actively fight against oppression. And in my experience, most of us started out educated the same way, by the same forces, receiving the same privileges, etc., so why didn't it stick, or how can it be unstuck?

Not sure what I'm trying to say here. Thanks for your response and comment.

Why do you think this? This reminds me of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Friere says the same thing about peasants, that they lack subjectivity

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Depending on how we perceive things, I agree, just about everything is, or can be made to be, political. I think probably one of the biggest exceptions here is democratic, of all things. We learn that Democracy is a political system, when really its a political process and has very little to do with the actual politics.

The part of democracy that, to me, seems the most political and urgent is the way it is defined. The ruling class defines it as a parliamentary democracy where, as you mentioned, the masses have very little direct political power and basically anything that isn't this specific form, is called authoritarianism, dictatorship or whatever. Socialists struggle to expand this definition or implement new forms of more direct democracy where political power stays with the people where it originates.

"Genocide" is a political/social category. There are people who want you to believe that civil rights are genocide, there are people who want you to believe what is happening in Gaza to the Palestinians isn't genocide.

Genocide was defined by the UN in like 1950-51. Before then nothing was really called genocide because the term didn't really exist. It had to be redefined by the UN in order for the term to be ratified because historically colonialist countries like France, GB, the US, realized that their history could be defined as genocidal. While it was being ratified, the US was decimating North Korea with bombs and caused over a million deaths, the "Korean War" was a genocide. But now most people don't know anything about it.

Because it is political, that means that what gets called a genocide is determined by struggle over time. The term (rightly) elicits an extremely negative reaction from most people, the definition has power both psychologically and legally. But it doesn't have an essential quality, it isn't beholden to undeniable natural laws (especially considering that even natural consequences are also deniable and therefore political.) So we fight to have legitimate genocides be recognized as such, while our enemies fight to use the term to slander the history of socialism and justify military action against countries attempting policies like land reform and nationalization of resources.

Liberals emerged as the opposition to the feudal system, along with enlightenment philosophy, science, industrialization, etc. Revolutionary liberals wanted freedom, democracy, self determination, independence, freedom of movement, and a world without the tyranny of a king. The class that emerged during these periods was the capitalists who also wanted to get away from the feudal system ruled by nobles and the church, who said, "the way to get rid of these feudal relations and get freedom, democracy and independence is a system built around private property rights." But of course once the capitalists seized power and owned everything, those other values of self determination, freedom, independence all became wrapped up in and subordinated to private property.

Now when people talk about these values, the only one that really has any social substance is property. Socialists are in many ways the inheritors of that first mission that early radical liberals were fighting for, but when we talk about liberals, what we mean is anyone who believes that private property is a core political and social value to uphold. This includes most conservatives and what would traditionally be considered as liberals, like the Democratic party. But we recognize that private property and capitalism was not the way to win freedom from tyranny, it was just a new form of tyranny. It was a big con, a game of switcheroo, and it continues to be that to this day. Liberals can't really see it because there are things that they believe to be essential and natural that are really social and historically contingent. But becoming a socialist we have to sort of de-liberalize in that we purge those core beliefs that uphold private property and dictatorship of capitalists, which has this weird side effect of always having to distinguish our socialist beliefs from liberalism.

A Soviet is just a term for basically a union, but adapted to the unique conditions of the emerging Russian proletariat after the failed 1905 revolution. The capitalist class was very weak so the soviets developed differently without many weaknesses of western labor unions; by 1917 the soviets were very democratically run, free of much of the business unionism and tendency toward craft unionism and bureaucratic labor aristocracy that we associate with unions of the latter part of the 20th century. By 1917, the combined soviets were a form of dual power that controlled still emergent production capacity, hospitals, military, just about everywhere there were workers and peasants there were soviets.

My understanding is that many soviets were run by council democracy, where workers would vote for their leadership, and send delegations to other soviets to handle negotiations and distribution of resources. I'm still learning when it comes to the various periods that make up the history of the FSU, but I think that as production became more centralized, the Soviets became more bureaucratic, which might be closer to what you would have considered a "Soviet Leader." But at the time of the 1917 October revolution the soviets hadn't formed a national cohesiveness, and aligned with different factions vying for political supremacy, which all would have had different consequences for the soviets depending on who seized power. But basically there was the Bolsheviks, who had a slogan and programme of "All Power to the Soviets", where as other factions like the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaties wanted to subordinate the Soviets to a bourgeois parliament (Duma) which would have more or less immediately done away with them, while other groups wanted to restore the tsar and do martial law, and every shade in between and mixed together, over constantly shifting material circumstances.

This was all going on during WW1, and many of the soldiers who were also organized (more or less) into soviets, wanted an end to these wars, even if it meant civil war. After the February revolution, the officer corps and bourgeoisie were not only for participation in World War, but were intentionally losing it, withholding provisions from the front lines and sending them into unnecessary danger, under threat of execution for desertion and disobedience. The Bolsheviks wanted to end the war, do away with corporal punishment for soldiers, redistribute land to the toiling peasants, and subordinate the Duma to the Soviets which eventually won over the workers, the peasant soldiers, the rural landless agricultural peasants regardless of what the "leaders" of the soviets (who were often from bourgeois aligned parties like the Mensheviks and SRs) wanted.

So the soviets, and the leadership, were drastically different depending on when you look at them. There was the period from 1905-1917, from Feb to Oct 1917, the period of counter revolution and civil war after the October revolution, The periods before, during, and after WWII, and the periods after where the soviets were more centralized and bureaucratic compared to when the Bolsheviks were attempting to make the Soviets the cornerstone of a new society.

Only if you limit "material interests" to the realm of capital. As materialists, we only deal with material interests, and those interests include the realm of social interests.

But I can think of historical examples too. During the Minneapolis uprising of 1934, the Teamsters shut down all trucking within the city that attempted to ship goods without the truckers union. One of the groups that emerged was petty agricultural producers that trucked their own agricultural goods to markets. The Teamsters gave these petty producers passes to truck their goods, which while keeping the food supply for the city available so that people wouldn't starve, it also split these petty producers from the reactionary forces. I can think of a more recent example in Seattle with the campaign to pass a $15 minimum wage. small restaurant owners were allowed a few years to implement those changes whereas other cities which required an across the board implementation for small businesses as well as large ones, the campaigns failed or were quickly rolled back. And no, neither of those movements were revolutionary (though the teamsters rebellion was pretty spicy) but they were progress for workers that was only successful by splitting the petty bourg by making concessions to their material interests.

And maybe this is where we diverge as communists, as I don't see a road to actual communism that comes from an uncompromising adherence to the maximum program. Its politics all the way down.

My point in the post above is more directed toward the creation of a socialist material interest that supercedes capitalist material interests, but I can support both perspectives given the right historical circumstances and a powerful materialist dialectic