[fuser]

TIG you misquoted, I never said anything about stars and energy.

it is plain that such a transitional period cannot be a statist one even if it is a so-called dictatorship of the proletariat.

How is it plain? This is exactly why Libertarians can't be taken seriously, there is no analysis involved, no logic presented but just a mere declaration of your ideological position even though in this very thread numerous arguments have been presented for the necessity of a powerful state subjugated to working class interests in order to do away with every form of class antagonism.

History has shown that approach does not work

What happened to Libertarian line of thought "if it hadn't happened it doesn't mean it can't." or in classic libertarian sense when applied to somewhere else other than their precious utopia, it certainly becomes relevant. French revolution failed "temporally" and monarchy was restored hence republicanism can never work?

The libertarian transitional period will work very well

Again no analysis no logic just a declaration. My personal dictatorship will most definitely work too.

[The Immortal Goon]

TIG you misquoted, I never said anything about stars and energy.

My mistake! You happened to have a two-syllable name that came up at about the same time. My mistake. Edited and fixed!

[Eran]

And you certainly underestimate the fact that century long projects to create the libertarian society taxizen, Nunt, and you advocate end up collapsing into their own contradictions in which we currently live.

How can you say that, given the profound differences between the policies we advocate (we are all anarchists, for one thing) and those that characterised the 19th century?

For example, we oppose arbitrary government assignment of property rights in land, or the perpetuation of large conquest-based single-owner land tracts.

We also oppose the many variants of government intervention that characterised even the relatively-free 19th century, including tariffs, monopoly grants and banking regulations.

It's not even that this makes it a "bad" system, but a system that exists. Stars are destroyed by their contradictions—either the gravity that they create, or the massive amounts of energy that they create. Flaws inherent in any system work in a dialectic and physical way. It's the same with this libertarian capitalism that has been tried repeatedly for centuries at a time and never are perfect.

What do you see as the "contradictions" (actually, merely opposing forces) of libertarian capitalism?

[The Immortal Goon]

Eran, you're asking me to repeat the entire thread again.

Is this really how libertarians argue? Just ignore everything for a while, then ask the same questions over and over? It's no wonder they have a reputation for being borderline illiterate.

How can you say that, given the profound differences between the policies we advocate (we are all anarchists, for one thing) and those that characterised the 19th century?

One of several posts that has addressed this.

For example, we oppose arbitrary government assignment of property rights in land, or the perpetuation of large conquest-based single-owner land tracts.

We also oppose the many variants of government intervention that characterised even the relatively-free 19th century, including tariffs, monopoly grants and banking regulations.

Of course you do. In doing so, "the relatively-free 19th Century" created incentives to keep slavery and serfdom alive, as has been pointed out.

What do you see as the "contradictions" (actually, merely opposing forces) of libertarian capitalism?

Since several of us have been bringing it up virtually every page, I am stupefied that you missed this. Nonetheless, to provide a convenient example that should be clear from this post alone:

This tends to be how laissez faire works. It has a dialectic character in regard to its material reality (as does everything) in that in trying to create capitalism, it must enforce the opposite to allow capitalism to survive.

We can be utopian and say that maybe every country will be equal and this could work—after all, that's one of the trends of capitalism. However, we have already discussed as side-points the improbability of this. The Wal-Mart family deserves to have each member have as much wealth as 41% of all Americans combined because they're related to someone that supposedly earned it all. You have also poo-pooed the idea of a 100% death tax in principle. These are microcosms of the same problem as above. Even if you were to put a 100% tax on the wealth upon death, the state that collects it is still in the business of business. That's what it's designed to do. So, another dead-end.

The fact that Russia was mostly feudal isn't a hole in the logic of the argument, it is the argument.

Further, libertarian Newspeak aside, the philosophical term is "contradiction." It has been since 500BC. "Opposing forces" could be anything. Like fire and ice or two other things jammed together for whatever reason with whatever definitions. "Contradictions" imply a certain unity within the system regarding these opposing forces.

[SolarCross]

Fuser - When I say 'it is plain' I mean of course it is plain to me, I can speak for myself only, not for the 'group' whoever they are. I am not a scholar nor a philosopher just a working class bloke unafraid to use such wits as I have even if mightier brains may sneer at my efforts. So with that in mind let me elaborate some of the reasons why I think libertarianism will make a better next step out of stamokap than a Dictatorship of the Proletariat (DoP) and you'll have to forgive me if it lacks the 'logic' and 'analysis' of the marxist intellectual.

- People don't want government, they suffer government. The marxist would give us more of what we don't want, the libertarian offers more of what we do want, the freedom to choose for ourselves. Therefore in the marketplace of ideas Libertarianism is more 'saleable' for the simple reason it offers to people what they want. In the 20th century many people fell for the marxist sales pitch but they were mostly people suffering feudalism whilst simultaneously suffering unusually harsh economic conditions, the appeal of marxism came more from desperation than anything else. That may still work in places in the world where people are sufficiently desperate (Africa?) but that is unlikely in the west where despite government licensed banking fraud, idiotic legislation and crushing taxation people are relatively prosperous and well fed.

- Representative government is looking increasingly like a con and a fake to people why would they want government (DoP) that not only has even less representative credibility but takes over even more control over their lives than the current unsatisfactory situation? Libertarianism offers at the very least fewer political parasites and if one goes the extra mile into anarchist-libertarianism no political parasites at all.

- Marxist economics is full of bogus ideas, LTV, anti-marketism, anti-investment, anti-consumption, centrally planned production, theft of property is good as long as it is the state doing the stealing which is effectively a hard-wired policy of 100% taxation on everything .

Well that will do for now, not very organised and incomplete but I feel very tired at the moment worrying about a tax bill I can't pay.

[lucky]

TIG: Find me one professional physicist or astronomer or a physics/astronomy paper that mentions a "contradiction" (using that word) between a star's gravity and its radiation.

[fuser]

People don't want government

You say that you speak only for yourself, hence asking to expand your thoughts is not right. But then you go again and make sweeping generalization like that and you still want me to refrain from asking you to expand your premise?

Your premise is of course wrong btw.

[The Immortal Goon]

TIG: Find me one professional physicist or astronomer or a physics/astronomy paper that mentions a "contradiction" (using that word) between a star's gravity and its radiation.

.

What a useless task. Look, I can use google:

A team led by Jeremy Tinker of New York University and including KIPAC professor Risa Wechsler and colleagues from several institutions has examined the relation between the star formation rate, stellar mass, and halo mass of galaxies in groups and found a surprising twist. The team used observational data from a small patch of sky known as the COSMOS field, which has been extensively studied and observed by telescopes in many different kinds of light from radio to optical to X-ray.

The results indicate that there is a lot of correlation between star formation rate and stellar mass, and that it changes completely over time. The farther away galaxies at the centers of groups - which, because of the time it takes light to travel we are seeing earlier in time - show an inverse relationship between stellar mass and star formation rate, meaning that star formation rate is higher in central galaxies with a lower mass. Unexpectedly, this relationship completely reverses for the nearer galaxies studied, which we are seeing as they are closer to the present time.

The data also show that central galaxies with a lot of star formation at the higher redshifts considered in the sample live in groups that are much more tightly clustered, on average, than those without a lot of star formation. Tighter clustering indicates a larger halo mass. This presents an intriguing contradiction with previous results that suggested that the opposite is true for very nearby groups, again indicating an evolution in behavior over time. It seems that central galaxies in groups have evolved in an unexpected way, a finding which will challenge models of galaxy formation and evolution that have been derived from large simulation efforts.

But to what avail?

I found someone in the field using the word, "contradiction" to explain star formation. This has nothing to do with the meaning pertaining to the philosophical construct of material reality. Scientists use the idea of contradicting forces all the time though.

I suppose now we're going to find out that there's no true scotsman though, right? Is this where you're trying to take this argument? Is this somehow going to change that Stanford, Heraclitus, Aristotle, and everyone else I've cited agrees with what I said about the use of the term "contradiction" in the way I was using it?

[lucky]

The quote from Stanford uses the word "contradiction" in the usual sense: new findings contradict a previous model, i.e. both can't be true at the same time because one says "X" and the other says "not X". It only confirms what I said about the meaning of the word.

[The Immortal Goon]

The quote from Stanford uses the word "contradiction" in the usual sense: new findings contradict a previous model, i.e. both can't be true at the same time because one says "X" and the other says "not X". It only confirms what I said about the meaning of the word.

Oh look at you moving the goalpost and ignoring everything in my post, as well as everything in the initial post where Stanford explicitly agreed with my use of the term and how I was using it.

Though I'm not really encouraged by the last few posts by libertarians that any actual reading will be done. Are you going to "forget" everything that's been posted to this point and then bring up something that's already been answered, cited, studied, and gone over sixteen times?

I don't mean to say that libertarians aren't literate, but have ye no shame in reducing the discussion to this kind of a thing? I mean, are there no other possible avenues to advance your case than to say try and point out that an extremely narrow field request from you doesn't have the exact phrase you're looking for on the first page of a google search, in a context totally unrelated to any of the discussion at hand? Are

[ingliz]

Asking the same questions over and over.

How are markets "irrational"?

"Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits – a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities."

J.M. Keynes

[Nunt]

"Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits – a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities."

J.M. Keynes

Obviously if the human nature is irrational than anything done by humans will also be prone to this irrationality. Thus, of course markets are not perfectly rational. But then again, nothing is. Rather than irrationality being a property of markets, it is a property of humans.

[Eran]

This tends to be how laissez faire works. It has a dialectic character in regard to its material reality (as does everything) in that in trying to create capitalism, it must enforce the opposite to allow capitalism to survive.

You stated, but never explained.

In what way does laissez faire enforces the opposite (of what?) to allow capitalism to survive?

Free markets contain within them a stabilisation mechanism. When demand for X rises, or its supply drops, the price goes up, causing both reduction in demand and increases in supply, both tending back towards an equilibrium of the levels of supply and demand.

You can call those "contradicting", but you'd have to show why they tend to destabilize the system.

Oh look at you moving the goalpost and ignoring everything in my post, as well as everything in the initial post where Stanford explicitly agreed with my use of the term and how I was using it.

lucky's (correct) point is that "contradiction" might be used in the sense you suggest in philosophical contexts (hence in your initial quote from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy), but not in the natural sciences (hence the use in your second quote is for a different sense of "contradiction").

[The Immortal Goon]

You stated, but never explained.

In what way does laissez faire enforces the opposite (of what?) to allow capitalism to survive?

You apparently missed it the first time I wrote it, the time I posted it, and the time I quoted it. Here you are:

To go back to the Manchester School's ascent to make laissez faire the policy of the British government as an example:

Crops in the United Kingdom are no longer given subsidies by the state, leaving Scotland, Ireland, and agricultural areas of Wales and Britain to compete with prices from the Americas (where slaves do the work) and Russia (where serfs do the work). They are imported in without extra duties and protectionism. The capitalist obeys all the rules of the market (in the same way you promote child-labor and sweat shops abroad) but the laissez faire society is now dependent upon slavery and serfdom as two countries it is trading with are not sufficiently sophisticated to create things any other way.

When the American Civil War breaks out, the British do everything they can to promote slavery because their new laissez faire system is dependent upon it. Note, they did not let the state interfere, and in fact—you had riots of the poor on the streets in London trying to stop the wealthy from promoting slavery.

Russia doesn't have this issue, as the Czar keeps the cheap grain going abroad. It goes so far that the French begin heavily investing in building Russian infrastructure just before WWI. Again, this is right in line with laissez faire capitalism as the country in question should theoretically start getting more sophisticated should it be involved in this system. However, these reforms are largely made to keep serfdom in practice. Further, it (and the production for the war) leads to lower wages and higher profits from among the few capitalists in Russia. We know what actually happened. The capitalists of the world actually went in there to forcibly keep the aristocracy in its place while starving people rebelled. The same as in China, India, Ireland, Haiti, etc.

This tends to be how laissez faire works. It has a dialectic character in regard to its material reality (as does everything) in that in trying to create capitalism, it must enforce the opposite to allow capitalism to survive.

We can be utopian and say that maybe every country will be equal and this could work—after all, that's one of the trends of capitalism. However, we have already discussed as side-points the improbability of this. The Wal-Mart family deserves to have each member have as much wealth as 41% of all Americans combined because they're related to someone that supposedly earned it all. You have also poo-pooed the idea of a 100% death tax in principle. These are microcosms of the same problem as above. Even if you were to put a 100% tax on the wealth upon death, the state that collects it is still in the business of business. That's what it's designed to do. So, another dead-end.

The fact that Russia was mostly feudal isn't a hole in the logic of the argument, it is the argument.

Since that single example seems to have gone over your head (or been ignored) I hesitate to go into greater detail, but here is some further reading anyway if you're legitimately curious:

When we consider a given country politico-economically, we begin with its population, its distribution among classes, town, country, the coast, the different branches of production, export and import, annual production and consumption, commodity prices etc.

It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations. The former is the path historically followed by economics at the time of its origins. The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought. In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being. For example, the simplest economic category, say e.g. exchange value, presupposes population, moreover a population producing in specific relations; as well as a certain kind of family, or commune, or state, etc. It can never exist other than as an abstract, one-sided relation within an already given, concrete, living whole. As a category, by contrast, exchange value leads an antediluvian existence. Therefore, to the kind of consciousness – and this is characteristic of the philosophical consciousness – for which conceptual thinking is the real human being, and for which the conceptual world as such is thus the only reality, the movement of the categories appears as the real act of production – which only, unfortunately, receives a jolt from the outside – whose product is the world; and – but this is again a tautology – this is correct in so far as the concrete totality is a totality of thoughts, concrete in thought, in fact a product of thinking and comprehending; but not in any way a product of the concept which thinks and generates itself outside or above observation and conception; a product, rather, of the working-up of observation and conception into concepts. The totality as it appears in the head, as a totality of thoughts, is a product of a thinking head, which appropriates the world in the only way it can, a way different from the artistic, religious, practical and mental appropriation of this world. The real subject retains its autonomous existence outside the head just as before; namely as long as the head’s conduct is merely speculative, merely theoretical. Hence, in the theoretical method, too, the subject, society, must always be kept in mind as the presupposition.

But do not these simpler categories also have an independent historical or natural existence predating the more concrete ones? That depends. Hegel, for example, correctly begins the Philosophy of Right with possession, this being the subject’s simplest juridical relation. But there is no possession preceding the family or master-servant relations, which are far more concrete relations. However, it would be correct to say that there are families or clan groups which still merely possess, but have no property. The simple category therefore appears in relation to property as a relation of simple families or clan groups. In the higher society it appears as the simpler relation of a developed organization. But the concrete substratum of which possession is a relation is always presupposed. One can imagine an individual savage as possessing something. But in that case possession is not a juridical relation. It is incorrect that possession develops historically into the family. Possession, rather, always presupposes this ‘more concrete juridical category’. There would still always remain this much, however, namely that the simple categories are the expressions of relations within which the less developed concrete may have already realized itself before having posited the more many-sided connection or relation which is mentally expressed in the more concrete category; while the more developed concrete preserves the same category as a subordinate relation. Money may exist, and did exist historically, before capital existed, before banks existed, before wage labour existed, etc. Thus in this respect it may be said that the simpler category can express the dominant relations of a less developed whole, or else those subordinate relations of a more developed whole which already had a historic existence before this whole developed in the direction expressed by a more concrete category. To that extent the path of abstract thought, rising from the simple to the combined, would correspond to the real historical process.

It may be said on the other hand that there are very developed but nevertheless historically less mature forms of society, in which the highest forms of economy, e.g. cooperation, a developed division of labour, etc., are found, even though there is no kind of money, e.g. Peru. Among the Slav communities also, money and the exchange which determines it play little or no role within the individual communities, but only on their boundaries, in traffic with others; it is simply wrong to place exchange at the center of communal society as the original, constituent element. It originally appears, rather, in the connection of the different communities with one another, not in the relations between the different members of a single community. Further, although money everywhere plays a role from very early on, it is nevertheless a predominant element, in antiquity, only within the confines of certain one-sidedly developed nations, trading nations. And even in the most advanced parts of the ancient world, among the Greeks and Romans, the full development of money, which is presupposed in modern bourgeois society, appears only in the period of their dissolution. This very simple category, then, makes a historic appearance in its full intensity only in the most developed conditions of society. By no means does it wade its way through all economic relations. For example, in the Roman Empire, at its highest point of development, the foundation remained taxes and payments in kind. The money system actually completely developed there only in the army. And it never took over the whole of labour. Thus, although the simpler category may have existed historically before the more concrete, it can achieve its full (intensive and extensive) development precisely in a combined form of society, while the more concrete category was more fully developed in a less developed form of society.

Labour seems a quite simple category. The conception of labour in this general form – as labour as such – is also immeasurably old. Nevertheless, when it is economically conceived in this simplicity, ‘labour’ is as modern a category as are the relations which create this simple abstraction. The Monetary System [19] for example, still locates wealth altogether objectively, as an external thing, in money. Compared with this standpoint, the commercial, or manufacture, system took a great step forward by locating the source of wealth not in the object but in a subjective activity – in commercial and manufacturing activity – even though it still always conceives this activity within narrow boundaries, as moneymaking. In contrast to this system, that of the Physiocrats posits a certain kind of labour – agriculture – as the creator of wealth, and the object itself no longer appears in a monetary disguise, but as the product in general, as the general result of labour. This product, as befits the narrowness of the activity, still always remains a naturally determined product – the product of agriculture, the product of the earth par excellence.

It was an immense step forward for Adam Smith to throw out every limiting specification of wealth-creating activity – not only manufacturing, or commercial or agricultural labour, but one as well as the others, labour in general. With the abstract universality of wealth-creating activity we now have the universality of the object defined as wealth, the product as such or again labour as such, but labour as past, objectified labour. How difficult and great was this transition may be seen from how Adam Smith himself from time to time still falls back into the Physiocratic system. Now, it might seem that all that had been achieved thereby was to discover the abstract expression for the simplest and most ancient relation in which human beings – in whatever form of society – play the role of producers. This is correct in one respect. Not in another. Indifference towards any specific kind of labour presupposes a very developed totality of real kinds of labour, of which no single one is any longer predominant. As a rule, the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing appears as common to many, to all. Then it ceases to be thinkable in a particular form alone. On the other side, this abstraction of labour as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labours. Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not only the category, labour, but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form. Such a state of affairs is at its most developed in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society – in the United States. Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the category ‘labour’, ‘labour as such’, labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice. The simplest abstraction, then, which modern economics places at the head of its discussions, and which expresses an immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society, nevertheless achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society. One could say that this indifference towards particular kinds of labour, which is a historic product in the United States, appears e.g. among the Russians as a spontaneous inclination. But there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply themselves to everything. And then in practice the Russian indifference to the specific character of labour corresponds to being embedded by tradition within a very specific kind of labour, from which only external influences can jar them loose.

This example of labour shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity – precisely because of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations.

Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have developed explicit significance within it, etc. Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known. The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient, etc. But not at all in the manner of those economists who smudge over all historical differences and see bourgeois relations in all forms of society. One can understand tribute, tithe, etc., if one is acquainted with ground rent. But one must not identify them. Further, since bourgeois society is itself only a contradictory form of development, relations derived from earlier forms will often be found within it only in an entirely stunted form, or even travestied. For example, communal property. Although it is true, therefore, that the categories of bourgeois economics possess a truth for all other forms of society, this is to be taken only with a grain of salt. They can contain them in a developed, or stunted, or caricatured form etc., but always with an essential difference. The so-called historical presentation of development is founded, as a rule, on the fact that the latest form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself, and, since it is only rarely and only under quite specific conditions able to criticize itself – leaving aside, of course, the historical periods which appear to themselves as times of decadence – it always conceives them one-sidedly. The Christian religion was able to be of assistance in reaching an objective understanding of earlier mythologies only when its own self-criticism had been accomplished to a certain degree, so to speak, dunamei[13]. Likewise, bourgeois economics arrived at an understanding of feudal, ancient, oriental economics only after the self-criticism of bourgeois society had begun. In so far as the bourgeois economy did not mythologically identify itself altogether with the past, its critique of the previous economies, notably of feudalism, with which it was still engaged in direct struggle, resembled the critique which Christianity leveled against paganism, or also that of Protestantism against Catholicism.

In the succession of the economic categories, as in any other historical, social science, it must not be forgotten that their subject – here, modern bourgeois society – is always what is given, in the head as well as in reality, and that these categories therefore express the forms of being, the characteristics of existence, and often only individual sides of this specific society, this subject, and that therefore this society by no means begins only at the point where one can speak of it as such; this holds for science as well. This is to be kept in mind because it will shortly be decisive for the order and sequence of the categories. For example, nothing seems more natural than to begin with ground rent, with landed property, since this is bound up with the earth, the source of all production and of all being, and with the first form of production of all more or less settled societies – agriculture. But nothing would be more erroneous. In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it. For example, with pastoral peoples (mere hunting and fishing peoples lie outside the point where real development begins). Certain forms of tillage occur among them, sporadic ones. Landed property is determined by this. It is held in common, and retains this form to a greater or lesser degree according to the greater or lesser degree of attachment displayed by these peoples to their tradition, e.g. the communal property of the Slavs. Among peoples with a settled agriculture – this settling already a great step – where this predominates, as in antiquity and in the feudal order, even industry, together with its organization and the forms of property corresponding to it, has a more or less landed-proprietary character; is either completely dependent on it, as among the earlier Romans, or, as in the Middle Ages, imitates, within the city and its relations, the organization of the land. In the Middle Ages, capital itself – apart from pure money-capital – in the form of the traditional artisans’ tools etc., has this landed-proprietary character. In bourgeois society it is the opposite. Agriculture more and more becomes merely a branch of industry, and is entirely dominated by capital. Ground rent likewise. In all forms where landed property rules, the natural relation still predominant. In those where capital rules, the social, historically created element. Ground rent cannot be understood without capital. But capital can certainly be understood without ground rent. Capital is the all-dominating economic power of bourgeois society. It must form the starting-point as well as the finishing-point, and must be dealt with before landed property. After both have been examined in particular, their interrelation must be examined.

It would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development. The point is not the historic position of the economic relations in the succession of different forms of society. Even less is it their sequence ‘in the idea’ (Proudhon) [21] (a muddy notion of historic movement). Rather, their order within modern bourgeois society.

The purity (abstract specificity) in which the trading peoples – Phoenicians, Carthaginians – appear in the old world is determined precisely by the predominance of the agricultural peoples. Capital, as trading-capital or as money-capital, appears in this abstraction precisely where capital is not yet the predominant element of societies. Lombards, Jews take up the same position towards the agricultural societies of the Middle Ages.

As a further example of the divergent positions which the same category can occupy in different social stages: one of the latest forms of bourgeois society, joint-stock companies. These also appear, however, at its beginning, in the great, privileged monopoly trading companies.

The concept of national wealth creeps into the work of the economists of the seventeenth century – continuing partly with those of the eighteenth – in the form of the notion that wealth is created only to enrich the state, and that its power is proportionate to this wealth. This was the still unconsciously hypocritical form in which wealth and the production of wealth proclaimed themselves as the purpose of modern states, and regarded these states henceforth only as means for the production of wealth.

The order obviously has to be (1) the general, abstract determinants which obtain in more or less all forms of society, but in the above-explained sense. (2) The categories which make up the inner structure of bourgeois society and on which the fundamental classes rest. Capital, wage labour, landed property. Their interrelation. Town and country. The three great social classes. Exchange between them. Circulation. Credit system (private). (3) Concentration of bourgeois society in the form of the state. Viewed in relation to itself. The ‘unproductive’ classes. Taxes. State debt. Public credit. The population. The colonies. Emigration. (4) The international relation of production. International division of labour. International exchange. Export and import. Rate of exchange. (5) The world market and crises.

But, admittedly, that's still pretty complicated. An actual good place to look is here.

lucky's (correct) point is that "contradiction" might be used in the sense you suggest in philosophical contexts (hence in your initial quote from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy), but not in the natural sciences (hence the use in your second quote is for a different sense of "contradiction").

One describes the other. But fine, since you're reduced to trying to make a big deal about your own illiteracy and reducing concepts to what can be scanned for a second on google:

Nobody can accuse Haldane as anything but a very respected scientific scholar.

Now let us rise still higher in the scale of magnitude, to stars. We know more than at the first sight would seem possible about the internal constitution of some stars at least, because the matter in them is not very densely packed, except perhaps at the centre; and though the temperature is very high, that is to say the atoms are moving very fast, their speeds seem to be no greater than we can obtain in a cyclotron. When atomic nuclei collide at these high speeds they sometimes unite, and heat is generated, as in ordinary chemical reactions, but in quantities which are about a million times as large per atom. The rate is sufficient to keep the sun shining at its present rate for many thousand million years. But the development of heat tends to make the stars expand, and the lessened density means fewer collisions, and therefore a slower heat generation. Similarly a decrease of temperature allows the star to contract under its own gravity, so that more collisions occur, and consequently more heat production.

In most stars these two tendencies are in equilibrium over short periods. But in one group of large stars, the Cepheid variables, they are not. These stars pulsate, expanding and contracting with periods of a week or so, and corresponding changes in light intensity. In case it be thought that I am dragging in “conflict” in the interests of Marxist theory, may I be permitted to quote from Gamov’s popular “The Birth and Death of the Sunâe: “The pulsations come as the result of a conflict between the nuclear and gravitational energy-producing forces in the stellar interior.” And in the long run the equilibrium is not stable, in many cases at any rate. Stars undergo two types of explosion. One type produces an ordinarynova , a so-called new star of which one flashes up in our galaxy every few years. This is not really a new star, but a vast increase in the light of a previously faint one. The other type, orsuper-nova , is far more brilliant. An explosion of this type occurs in our galaxy about once in a thousand years, and exploding star is visible in broad daylight. Enough super-novae been seen in other galaxies to make it fairly clear that the explosion is much more intense than the ordinary nova explosion.

It seems probable that most, if not all stars, explode in one of these ways once in their lives, and then change their structure considerably. It also seems that the explosions are not due to collisions or any other external agency, but to the internal struggle between the expansive and contracting tendencies, which, after millions of years of apparent equilibrium, produces a qualitative leap.

Many more cases might be given, notably the modern chemical theories of tautomerism and resonance energy, especially as developed by Pauling. But these examples should be sufficient to show that recent work is tending to verify Lenin’s statement as to “the contradictory, mutually exclusive- opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature,” and the view that the struggle between these tendencies is the cause of development.

But as I mentioned previously (surprise! It was ignored or not read!) just because scientists don't specifically say the word "contradictory" doesn't mean they don't talk about it all the time in terms of how reactions work and start. They sort of assume most of us are literate enough to know that when two opposing forces collide something happens. They didn't count on the libertarians though!

No offense, but it's pretty clear that ye don't know what you're talking about in general. To have to be reduced to having to find such boring semantic issues as you demand is frankly beneath all of us.

[Turning Point]

In the 20th century many people fell for the marxist sales pitch but they were mostly people suffering feudalism whilst simultaneously suffering unusually harsh economic conditions, the appeal of marxism came more from desperation than anything else.

Where to begin? First of all, it wasn't "feudalism" that people were suffering from in predominately rural/pre-industrialized countries in the 20th century, but more so a form of semi-feudalism and/or semi-colonialism. (this of course doesn't apply to all oppressed countries in the 20th century )

From Mao Zedong's On New Democracy (in relation to 1940's China):

Since the invasion of foreign capitalism and the gradual growth of capitalist elements in Chinese society, the country has changed by degrees into a colonial, semi-colonial and semi-feudal society.

and:

China today is colonial in the Japanese-occupied areas and basically semi-colonial in the Kuomintang areas, and it is predominantly feudal or semi-feudal in both

Mao continues:

It is precisely against these predominant political, economic and cultural forms that our revolution is directed. What we want to get rid of is the old colonial, semi-colonial and semi-feudal politics and economy and the old culture in their service. And what we want to build up is their direct opposite, i.e., the new politics, the new economy and the new culture of the Chinese nation.

The communists under Mao wanted to build a new China, a country freed from the grip of perpetual poverty under specific conditions generated by a combination of capitalism, semi-feudalism, semi-colonialism, and (Japanese) colonialism.

Your position showcases a general lack of knowledge about both Marxism and 20th century society in general.

The appeal of Marxism was not through desperation alone, and was more so result of years of what we Marxists would call class struggle. The working-class in the Russian Empire read the propaganda pamphlets passed out by the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and, due to decades of mistreatment by an uncaring and corrupt Tsarist bureaucracy, began to dream of a better world which the R.S.D.L.P. sought to explain (in simple terms) to the workers.

From Lenin's influential booklet What Is To Be Done (a greatly misunderstood little book!):

In a great many cases these forces are now being bled white on restricted local work, but under the circumstances we are discussing it would be possible to transfer a capable agitator or organiser from one end of the country to the other, and the occasion for doing this would constantly arise. Beginning with short journeys on Party business at the Party’s expense, the comrades would become accustomed to being maintained by the Party, to becoming professional revolutionaries, and to training themselves as real political leaders.

And if indeed we succeeded in reaching the point when all, or at least a considerable majority, of the local committees local groups, and study circles took up active work for the common cause, we could, in the not distant future, establish a weekly newspaper for regular distribution in tens of thousands of copies throughout Russia. This newspaper would become part of an enormous pair of smith’s bellows that would fan every spark of the class struggle and of popular indignation into a general conflagration. Around what is in itself still a very innocuous and very small, but regular and common, effort, in the full sense of the word, a regular army of tried fighters would systematically gather and receive their training. On the ladders and scaffolding of this general organizational structure there would soon develop and come to the fore Social-Democratic Zhelyabovs from among our revolutionaries and Russian Bebels from among our workers, who would take their place at the head of the mobilized army and rouse the whole people to settle accounts with the shame and the curse of Russia.

That is what we should dream of!

“We should dream!”

And they did dream, and would fight from 1905-1917 with the goal of creating a socialist society in Russia and soon enough (it was hoped) world socialism.

That may still work in places in the world where people are sufficiently desperate (Africa?)

People are desperate not just in Africa, but worldwide. I'd even go on to say that people are desperate in all countries, even in the west (Greece and Spain come to mind as two glaring examples). And for that matter, Marxism will only work globally and with assistance from all peoples. We either all reach communism or none of us do!

people are relatively prosperous and well fed [in the west]

Again, you fail to comprehend how people actually live in everyday society (this time in 21st century western, relatively advance societies)

I know a handful of very poor friends whom would second that notion that people in (America) are generally "well-off." Heck, I see poverty just by walking down the streets every day!

You once more make a wild assumption about how people live (contrary to how they actually live), and I'm willing to bet that your yourself have never actually experience poverty and/or studied up on poverty during any time period, be it 1940's China or 21st century America or western Europe.

- Representative government is looking increasingly like a con and a fake to people why would they want government (DoP) that not only has even less representative credibility but takes over even more control over their lives than the current unsatisfactory situation?

Under capitalism, representative government is indeed a sham even more so under the modern system wherein massive amounts of corporate donations can be sent out to campaigns and/or individual politicians. Your right in that regard. However, you fail to comprehend what a Dictatorship of the Proletariat actually is. I'd quote Marx or Lenin again, but I would seriously urge you to find out for yourself what a DOTP actually is rather then me spoon feeding you information quote-by-quote.

Libertarianism offers at the very least fewer political parasites and if one goes the extra mile into anarchist-libertarianism no political parasites at all.

How so? Why would Libertarianism be beneficial to the vast majority of mankind? What does the Libertarian have to offer that we've not already seen before?

- Marxist economics is full of bogus ideas, LTV, anti-marketism, anti-investment, anti-consumption, centrally planned production,

There you go, extreme bias towards Marxism based entirely on blanket statements as opposed to actual concrete analysis.

...not very organized and incomplete but I feel very tired at the moment worrying about a tax bill I can't pay.

Is the latter part about paying off a tax bill a joke? If it is, it's not funny.

[SolarCross]

TP - Feudal / semi-feudal / semi-colonial / colonial - seriously what's the difference? Whether the boot stamping on your face is the black boots of foreign invaders or the brown boots of feudal overlords doesn't matter as in comparison inviting the red boots of the commissariat to stamp on your face instead doesn't seem a bad bargain, things couldn't get any worse, could they?

The appeal of Marxism was not through desperation alone, and was more so result of years of what we Marxists would call class struggle. The working-class in the Russian Empire read the propaganda pamphlets passed out by the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and, due to decades of mistreatment by an uncaring and corrupt Tsarist bureaucracy, began to dream of a better world which the R.S.D.L.P. sought to explain (in simple terms) to the workers.

'Class struggle' and propaganda pamphlets is a sales pitch which was applied everywhere that there were marxists and other kinds of socialists not just the Russian Empire and China but it was only where people were the most desperate that significant numbers of people bought in. So it remains doubtful that the relatively undesperate people of the west, far east, middle east and India will buy in at this present time if they didn't in the 20th century when they were in general much more desperate than they are now. In the west people think they are poor if they have to take the bus instead of traveling in their own car and shop at discount stores but that is not desperate the way it is for a turn of the 20th century starving russian peasent for whom a market choice is whether they eat mud or grass.

People are suffering in Greece and Spain more than they were used to but for their problems the marxist has no credible remedies. Government licensed financial fraud and government misuse of stolen resources are the problems of the west which is hurting the Greeks and Spanish more than most. What is the Marxist remedy for that? A Libertarian solution would be for the people to renounce their 'obligation' to pay the state's debts and let it go bankrupt, leave the 'Soviet' European Union and let the people's own free enterprise take over the mismanaged services provided by the state, including issuance of currency, defence, law and enforcement of law.

On a personal note, I have indeed experienced poverty and I have even been homeless. Of course as an Englishman I don't pretend that my poverty was comparable to the kind of poverty experienced in some parts of the world but I have been about as poor as an Englishman can be on his home turf.

ME - Marxist economics is full of bogus ideas, LTV, anti-marketism, anti-investment, anti-consumption, centrally planned production,

YOU - There you go, extreme bias towards Marxism based entirely on blanket statements as opposed to actual concrete analysis.

But this is exactly what I hear Marxists and even anarcho-communists (who ought to have more sense by now) advocating! If Marxism isn't what marxists advocate then what the fuck is it?

Oh and that wasn't a joke about my tax bill, and yes it isn't funny.

[Nunt]

You apparently missed it the first time I wrote it, the time I posted it, and the time I quoted it. Here you are:

So you are trying to argue that a laisser faire system cannot work by referring to the practice of slavery. Something tells me that you have no idea at all what people mean when they talk about a free market. You only impose your view of what a free market is and then proceed to attack the strawman.

[fuser]

Something tells me that you have no idea at all what people mean when they talk about a free market.

Who are these "people" you speak of but just a bunch of libertarians. We are using the historical definition of capitalism and free market associated with it but of course we can't attack your mythical "free market" as it has never existed, how very fucking convenient.

[Eran]

This tends to be how laissez faire works. It has a dialectic character in regard to its material reality (as does everything) in that in trying to create capitalism, it must enforce the opposite to allow capitalism to survive.

I'm sorry. You provided a number of examples in which government forces intervened to maintain oppressive systems in foreign countries. This is an undeniable part of our human history. But it sheds absolutely no light on the inherent contradictions of capitalism.

Marxists, if I understand correctly, claim that capitalism is inherently unstable due to those internal contradictions.

What are those opposing forces that will inevitably lead to the destruction (or transformation) of capitalist societies?

What makes you confident that a society couldn't preserve the institution of private property (including, in particular, in the means of production) while shedding away the practice of using foreign (or domestic) armed intervention to enforce illegitimate property rights (or to violate legitimate property rights, including, for example, those of slaves in their own bodies)?

But, admittedly, that's still pretty complicated. An actual good place to look is here.

I can understand Marx's words, but not how they relate to the internal contradictions of capitalism. The reference is great at explaining dialectics, but not its relevance to economic systems.

Elsewhere I read:

Marxists define capital as "a social, economic relation" between people (rather than between people and things). In this sense they seek to abolish capital. They believe that private ownership of the means of production enriches capitalists (owners of capital) at the expense of workers ("the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer"). In brief, they argue that the owners of the means of production do not work and therefore exploit the workerforce. In Karl Marx's view, the capitalists would eventually accumulate more and more capital impoverishing the working class, creating the social conditions for a revolution that would overthrow the institutions of capitalism.

I highlighted the one substantive statement that would, if correct, indeed lead to inevitable instability.

However, I believe the statement to be both empirically and theoretically wrong.

Empirically, we see significant turnover, with people routinely making their way from working (or middle) class to that of wealth (though, unlike previous centuries, rarely idleness, at least in the first generation). Further, we see an ongoing improvement in the material conditions of the working class, in seeming contradiction to the statement above.

Theoretically, the statement is baseless. It ignores the ease and prevalence of capital aggregation, the pooling together of individually-modest resources to create usable concentrations of resources enabling even people of very modest means to partake in the benefit of capital ownership.

Thus if material circumstances somehow made the returns on an investment of $1,000,000,000 (in percentage terms) greater than the returns on an investment of $1,000, financial entrepreneurs would offer financial products which (1) bring together the investments of many small individuals, (2) invest those at the higher rate available to large investors, and (3) distribute the proceeds amongst investors.

The bottom line is that, subject only to ever-diminishing transaction costs, the return available to investors is virtually independent of their wealth.

Moreover, the total amount of wealth in society isn't fixed. We get wealthier and wealthier. Regardless of initial distribution of property ownership (within reason - assuming no monopoly ownership of vital resources, for example), new wealth tends to flow towards those responsible for generating it - be it entrepreneurs or workers, but NOT idle capitalists!

To demonstrate that last point, assume that a capitalist investor buys company X while leaving its management and day-to-day running to hired managers and workers. Assume that at the time of the purchase, the (risk-adjusted, present value) expected future value of the return from owning the company is $Y. Further assume that the capitalist paid $Y for the company (if he paid more, he is a sucker; if he paid less, the previous owners are suckers). That means that the (risk-adjusted, present value) expected profit from the purchase is $0!

For the capitalist to actually profit from the purchase, one of few things must happen:
1. The actual value turns out to exceed the expected value (sheer luck). That could happen, but is precisely as likely as the opposite event in which a loss will have been created.
2. The capitalists acts to increase the expected value of the company. That is certainly possible, but then the capitalist is no longer perfectly idle. In fact, his actions to increase the expected value of the company are perfectly rewarded by a profit equal to that increase in value.

Idle capitalists tend to waste their inheritance away. With new value being created and going towards those who create it, and inherited wealth gradually withering away, the statement above is clearly wrong.


The logic of capital accumulation isn't that capitalists are enriched at the expense of the workers. It is easy to see that workers wages tend towards their marginal productivity (because of competition between different employers). Capital equipment tends to make workers more productive, and thus tends to increase their wages (which is precisely why workers in America earn so much more than workers in China).

[Nunt]

Who are these "people" you speak of but just a bunch of libertarians. We are using the historical definition of capitalism and free market associated with it but of course we can't attack your mythical "free market" as it has never existed, how very fucking convenient.

These "people" are people who he is discussing with in this thread.
Feel free to define capitalism and free market as you will. But of course, then the discussion is pointless because libertarians are also against historical capitalism and free markets. What you are refusing to see is that even though current libertarians more or less use the same terms: capitalism and free markets and argue in favor of those. They actually define those concepts differently. Insisting that historical capitalism is what libertarians are in favor of is just a strawman.