[SolarCross]

No one is asking you to do anything. Stop being so stand-offish.

So I should just wait quietly for the revolution then?

[Donna]

So I should just wait quietly for the revolution then?

I was referring to the thread.

[SolarCross]

I was referring to the thread.

Okay, well yeah I do not take @ckaihatsu seriously at all. Honestly after many years of time on pofo I am completely convinced a solid 95% of socialists / communists are completely insane or nonsense babbling morons. @ckaihatsu is probably harmless though.

[Donna]

Okay, well yeah I do not take @ckaihatsu seriously at all. Honestly after many years of time on pofo I am completely convinced a solid 95% of socialists / communists are completely insane or nonsense babbling morons. @ckaihatsu is probably harmless though.

Sounds like years on pofo has made you into a bit of a dick, no offense.

[ingliz]

So I should just wait quietly for the revolution then?

You should wait until your revolution has some chance of success. Revolutions are not something to be entered into lightly, on a whim.

[SolarCross]

You should wait until your revolution has some chance of success. Revolutions are not something to be entered into lightly, on a whim.

If the revolution happens the old bosses will just be replaced with worse bosses. Bosses who are apparently too miserly to even pay anything.

---------

Sounds like years on pofo has made you into a bit of a dick, no offense.

That's fair.

[ckaihatsu]

@ckaihatsu My car is in the garage having a service literally right now. In what universe can I just wave some wacky pictures under the mechanic's nose and expect him to fix up my car for free? I am telling you it will not work, I have to pay him, because he is not an idiot. He would not be a mechanic if he was an idiot, and I would not want an idiot fixing my car anyway. You will have to go back to shooting people in the back of the head, funky graphs are even less persuasive.

Well, you're mixing contexts.

Of course, in today's capitalist society, no one should be expected to work for free -- mechanic services require payments, with wages going to the mechanic laborer.

But what you're missing, economically, is that if a society's ethos was one of providing for *the commons*, and that society had collectivized all of its productive machinery (factories), then both private property (the mechanic garage) *and* wages would be unnecessary and superfluous.

What if the mechanic didn't want to work that day? Then he or she wouldn't, and presumably there would be plenty of others working that day (or, more realistically, everything would be fully modular and standardized so that anyone could easily find a replacement part and install it with no need for formal labor)(or most everything would be disposable and recyclable so that a damaged, semi-used unit could be discarded in favor of a new unit).

Nice stereotyping, by the way -- keep it up and see where it gets you. No, it won't be a bullet to the back of the head, contrary to your twisted fantasies.

[SolarCross]

Well, you're mixing contexts.

Of course, in today's capitalist society, no one should be expected to work for free -- mechanic services require payments, with wages going to the mechanic laborer.

But what you're missing, economically, is that if a society's ethos was one of providing for *the commons*, and that society had collectivized all of its productive machinery (factories), then both private property (the mechanic garage) *and* wages would be unnecessary and superfluous.

What if the mechanic didn't want to work that day? Then he or she wouldn't, and presumably there would be plenty of others working that day (or, more realistically, everything would be fully modular and standardized so that anyone could easily find a replacement part and install it with no need for formal labor)(or most everything would be disposable and recyclable so that a damaged, semi-used unit could be discarded in favor of a new unit).

Nice stereotyping, by the way -- keep it up and see where it gets you. No, it won't be a bullet to the back of the head, contrary to your twisted fantasies.

Historically that is what you people resort to when you find no one doing any work anymore because no one is paying them.

You need a sense of humour to survive communism, try some authentic soviet humour:

A man walks into a shop and asks, "You wouldn't happen to have any fish, would you?". The shop assistant replies, "You've got it wrong – ours is a butcher's shop. We don't have any meat. You're looking for the fish shop across the road. There they don't have any fish!"

[ckaihatsu]

Actually, you pretty much do:

'Pay' ('price') is not nearly as precise and valid as you, and all other market-touting advocates proclaim -- consider that 'price' (exchange values) have to empirically do double-duty as sourcing-price and also demand-price. It's overextended as a mechanism / variable, since even sourcing-price itself doesn't describe / quantify how labor and natural-resource raw materials are valuated, and the component of demand-price fluctuates, of course, due to population-based dynamics that have nothing to do with sourcing-price.

See? You can't understand that the whole point of price is to reconcile the utility of the item to those who want it with the supply conditions that make it scarce. If you want to relieve scarcity, you will pay people more for producing the items that are in more demand relative to their scarcity. That is what the price mechanism accomplishes.

I do understand the difference between sourcing costs and finished-good demand-price -- what's not explainable is why the 'middleman' person should enjoy the difference between these two valuations, however it may happen to fluctuate. The capitalist has added *some* value in facilitating the organizational ('private') process of manufacturing, but the capitalist benefits from that resulting discrepancy between costs and sales, and especially so if that market segment has been cartelized, oligopolized, or monopolized.

In other words the capitalist benefits greatly simply by restricting supply artificially, so as to stoke demand, if at all possible. These kinds of artificial market manipulations add *zero* to the production process and do nothing for underlying utility / use values of the end product.


---

You're trying to *criminalize* the politics of revolution, when in fact revolutionary sentiment is well-grounded, namely in the empirical social divide of *class* -- workers do *not* have the same economic / material interests as their bosses, since the ownership class of the world uses accumulated dead-labor (wealth) to economically *exploit* workers in the present and separate them / us from their / our labor, as a matter of regular material social practice.

Nope. Like all Marxists, you don't understand class, either. The worker and the factory owner both belong to the contributor class, while the landowner and other privileged interests belong to the taker class. The only difference between the small net taker class and the even smaller criminal class is that the taker class is legally entitled to take.

You're mixing apples-and-oranges -- class pertains to *control* of a society's productive processes, while what you're describing is the difference between rentier capital ('landowner'), and equity capital ('factory owner').

In Marxist / empirical terms, there's no 'contributor class' (a definitional mixing of the counterposed interests of factory owner and workers, respectively), and there's no 'taker class' (of rentier-capital).

You're off on your repeated rant / position of equity-capital-over-rentier-capital, which is understandable, but along the way you're misusing the term 'class', which conventionally indicates which interests control the productive process, through capitalism's component of private property ownership, whether that's rentier capital and/or equity capital.

[ckaihatsu]

How can it be? Orwell there was explicitly talking about middle class (pseudo) intellectuals, people who had never worked a day in their lives and 9 times out of 10 had never even met a working class person. He even is referencing them by name! Odious puss bags like George Bernard Shaw. These people are not the "labour aristocracy" because they are not working class nor have any connection with the working class. The "labour aristocracy" are like senior trades unionists and what not, people who generally at least from some kind of working class background and worked a job at some time in their life. Arthur Scargill or someone like that for an example. Perhaps they are problem people but they are a completely different problem to the "intellectuals" that Orwell is talking about in that passage.

Just want to point out that you're using cliched street-moralizing here, SC -- it's equivalent to saying that someone is 'hustling', as a perjorative, when they may in fact be providing a fully legitimate service, the same as anyone else.

To say that someone 'never worked a day in their lives' is simply facile moralizing that hardly takes actual material productivity into account, which is what the Marxist approach *does* -- the far-left perspective looks at what the *resulting* effect is, whether goods or services, and then looks to see which kinds of participation in the production process actually contributed materially to that output. Marxists are critical of the managerial and ownership roles of: management, security, policing, militarism, marketing, advertising, business rivalries, international rivalries, state administration, and anything else similar that I'm not recalling off the top of my head.

In other words, those 'work' roles I just listed are all part of the bourgeois class *facilitation* of organization of production, under bourgeois ownership control. In productive terms they're *not really* productive, because it's the *proletarian* work roles that actually directly produce goods and services (commodities) (economic activity).

Oftentimes the bourgeois ownership / management roles are even outright *destructive*, as we've seen globally with *two* world wars, not to mention scores of smaller international conflicts. This ongoing warfare and waste is *not* due to the social role of *workers* in capitalist society's productive processes.

[ckaihatsu]

Historically that is what you people resort to when you find no one doing any work anymore because no one is paying them.

You need a sense of humour to survive communism, try some authentic soviet humour:

A man walks into a shop and asks, "You wouldn't happen to have any fish, would you?". The shop assistant replies, "You've got it wrong – ours is a butcher's shop. We don't have any meat. You're looking for the fish shop across the road. There they don't have any fish!"

Hey, I *agree* with you on this, SC -- no society should be administered by a standing Stalinist-type bureaucratic elite (or by a bourgeois ruling-class, either). In both cases there's no accountability above the heads of those specialized institutions of rule.

As those Cold War economies were edged-out by the West they became economically isolated, static, and unviable, to the point where the market-dynamic Western model was actually an *improvement* -- thus they imploded and collapsed.

Guess what I'm going to say now -- ?

Those historical instances are *not* a definition of socialist politics -- Stalinism, or 'socialism-in-one-country', is *not* the goal. But you knew this, anyway, but continue to use the defunct Stalinist stereotype as your brush to paint those of us who want to genuinely liberate humanity from income inequality and private property.


Political Spectrum, Simplified

Spoiler: show

[SolarCross]

@ckaihatsu
The USSR did not start out "Stalinist", in its early days it absolutely had tons of simple minded ideologues pushing fairy tales exactly like yours. But ideologues can't stay in power for long because they are too disconnected from reality, so they can not see the real threats to their positions. So then gangsters and thugs take over, while the ideologues eat bullets in the gulag. You think you will get to be on some committee telling all the dumb working class people what jobs they can do and what rations they can have by virtue of your great intellectual privileges, but that is a fantasy. 5 mins after the revolution some street thug who used to make a living breaking people's legs for "protection money" will be made commissar over you by some other street thug who just made himself "secretary general" of the People's Revolutionary Committee. When you get too annoying with your dewy eyed fantasies, he will denounce you, rearrange your face with a mallet and send you to a slave labour camp, or you will just disappear...

[Truth To Power]

I do understand the difference between sourcing costs and finished-good demand-price

No, you obviously don't. No Marxist can.

-- what's not explainable is why the 'middleman' person should enjoy the difference between these two valuations, however it may happen to fluctuate.

It's easily explainable: they guessed right. As a Marxist, you can only see the profits of those who guess right, not the losses of those who guess wrong, so you think the profit is obtained in return for nothing.

The capitalist has added *some* value in facilitating the organizational ('private') process of manufacturing, but the capitalist benefits from that resulting discrepancy between costs and sales,

Because he is helping to REDUCE the discrepancy between what exists and what people want.

and especially so if that market segment has been cartelized, oligopolized, or monopolized.

To the extent that privilege has been added to the conditions of exchange, it is obviously no longer a free market process, so we can't explain the results by reference to the market.

In other words the capitalist benefits greatly simply by restricting supply artificially,

The capitalist qua capitalist has no power to do any such thing. Only privilege can.

so as to stoke demand, if at all possible.

The extent to which demand can be increased artificially through advertising is an open question. Certainly it has some effect. But where do you draw the line between exercising free speech and annoying or manipulating people?

These kinds of artificial market manipulations add *zero* to the production process and do nothing for underlying utility / use values of the end product.

Not so. The idea of advertising is to increase the perceived utility of the product. Marxists just think they know better than consumers what the latter want, or at least should want.

You're mixing apples-and-oranges -- class pertains to *control* of a society's productive processes, while what you're describing is the difference between rentier capital ('landowner'), and equity capital ('factory owner').

No. Class pertains to who is privileged over others: i.e., who is entitled by law to benefit from the violation or removal of others' rights.

In Marxist / empirical terms, there's no 'contributor class' (a definitional mixing of the counterposed interests of factory owner and workers, respectively), and there's no 'taker class' (of rentier-capital).

No. In empirical terms, contributor and non-contributor are the classes that actually exist as a matter of objective physical fact. The interests of factory owners and workers are not counterposed any more than the interests of bakers and bread buyers. Marxism just ignores the empirical physical fact of contribution vs non-contribution.

You're off on your repeated rant / position of equity-capital-over-rentier-capital,

No, contribution vs extraction. As a Marxist, you just can't tell the difference.

which is understandable, but along the way you're misusing the term 'class', which conventionally indicates which interests control the productive process, through capitalism's component of private property ownership, whether that's rentier capital and/or equity capital.

"Conventionally"? You mean by Marxist convention, which is wrong. The people who really control the productive process are managers, who are just hired employees. The landowner doesn't control or contribute to the productive process; he only takes a portion of production in return for no contribution to production, a role he could satisfy just as well while comatose. The provider of production goods only controls the production process to the extent that he decides what sort of production to enable through his contribution. The process itself is still controlled by hired managers. So Marxist class "analysis" puts the landowner in the same non-controlling class as the low-level hired worker, and calls the hired manager a capitalist even though he may have no capital invested in the firm. So it's just stupid, worthless garbage.

[Sivad]

[personal attack deleted; the rest of the post was a one-liner - Prosthetic Conscience]

[Donna]

Because he is helping to REDUCE the discrepancy between what exists and what people want.

This is also a limitation for bourgeois development, that it is predicated on human wants (and the reproduction of wants) rather than concrete material necessity and social-scientific execution. Capitalist development and civilization is essentially fueled by this dynamic of fantasy and caprice. This eventually must change: development must become organized around aggregate need.

The interests of factory owners and workers are not counterposed

If you were remotely thoughtful in your criticism you would have simply maintained that the interests of owners and workers are not always counterposed, contrary to the claims of dialectical materialism etc. Instead it is as if you are unconsciously accepting the zero-sum arrangement of some Marxist assumptions. These are very amateurish missteps.

[ingliz]

calls the hired manager a capitalist

Wrong!

It calls the hired manager a worker - "a functionary... a simple agent of the labour-process in general, as a labourer, and indeed as a wage-labourer".

[SolarCross]

[post constisting entirely of a personal attack deleted - Prosthetic Conscience]

[ckaihatsu]

@ckaihatsu
The USSR did not start out "Stalinist", in its early days it absolutely had tons of simple minded ideologues pushing fairy tales exactly like yours. But ideologues can't stay in power for long because they are too disconnected from reality, so they can not see the real threats to their positions. So then gangsters and thugs take over, while the ideologues eat bullets in the gulag. You think you will get to be on some committee telling all the dumb working class people what jobs they can do and what rations they can have by virtue of your great intellectual privileges, but that is a fantasy. 5 mins after the revolution some street thug who used to make a living breaking people's legs for "protection money" will be made commissar over you by some other street thug who just made himself "secretary general" of the People's Revolutionary Committee. When you get too annoying with your dewy eyed fantasies, he will denounce you, rearrange your face with a mallet and send you to a slave labour camp, or you will just disappear...

Once again all you have is your over-reliance on *stereotypes*. You obviously don't know what the Bolshevik Revolution was even *for*, nor have you bothered to understand my own position (non-careerist) from anything I've said or posted here.

This *carelessness* doesn't cut it on a discussion board because now you're just spouting your own one-sided version of things, without taking-in anything that's in front of you.

Your bias turns you into a naysayer, something that doesn't require thought or effort of any sort -- if this is how you're going to continue to conduct yourself here, please don't bother. I don't like my politics being misrepresented, so just do your knee-jerk contrariness *offline*. Thanks.

[ckaihatsu]

I do understand the difference between sourcing costs and finished-good demand-price --

No, you obviously don't. No Marxist can.

No, you're being too dismissive -- the difference is that between what a boss pays for labor-power from workers in wages, and the revenue received from the sale of those goods and services that those workers produced.

I have a schematic graphic illustration of these two components:


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show

---

what's not explainable is why the 'middleman' person should enjoy the difference between these two valuations, however it may happen to fluctuate.

It's easily explainable: they guessed right. As a Marxist, you can only see the profits of those who guess right, not the losses of those who guess wrong, so you think the profit is obtained in return for nothing.

And this is the crux of the philosophical / political difference -- revolutionaries like myself say that this 'guess' or 'estimation' of future market conditions is *insufficient* as a social function to merit the kinds of rewards that are typically paid-out for this financial role.

So, yes, the capitalist is providing liquidity to those enterprises that would benefit from leveraging such lent additional capital, and the winning capitalist has also 'bet' correctly, on the best 'ponies', so-to-speak. But when workers are seeing their wages and benefits cut, are being laid-off, are having to pay with their livelihoods and even lives, for the sake of this income inequality that benefits the already-wealthy, then there's a vast difference of opinion there, based on empirical conflicting class interests.


---

The capitalist has added *some* value in facilitating the organizational ('private') process of manufacturing, but the capitalist benefits from that resulting discrepancy between costs and sales,

Because he is helping to REDUCE the discrepancy between what exists and what people want.

Well, yes, I've already *acknowledged* this fact under capitalism ('social organization').

What's at-issue, though, as I just outlined, is whether the *rewards* for that financial role in the societal productive process -- as distinct from the actual *manufacturing* / provision of the goods and services commodities themselves, by the wage-workers -- are really accurately proportional to its proportional role in the overall process of commodity-production. When financiers are masters-of-the-universe while working families are struggling over getting the basics of day-to-day living, something's not right there.


---

and especially so if that market segment has been cartelized, oligopolized, or monopolized.

To the extent that privilege has been added to the conditions of exchange, it is obviously no longer a free market process, so we can't explain the results by reference to the market.

But the point here is that the 'free market' ideal is just that -- an *ideal*. In the real world, the provisioning of finance capital takes place in a 'meatspace' social reality, ultimately, so the prevailing social reality (culture) *will* have a tangible effect on financial participants.

Just by 'market' dynamics alone we can see that financial participants have a *social*, market-type *incentive* *to* organize for their own private class interests, and hence we have the bourgeois government apparatus that roundly favors the interests of capital through its monopolization of physical force and violence, under 'law'.

So the 'free market' principle includes not just private interests in the marketplace, but also in society, which, on the whole, has to *uphold* the social institution / practice of 'currency value', exchange values, 'markets', 'finance', etc., through its laws and use of physical force.


---

In other words the capitalist benefits greatly simply by restricting supply artificially,

The capitalist qua capitalist has no power to do any such thing. Only privilege can.

But don't you see -- the capitalist *enjoys* the privilege of state-sanctioned market-based economics, including the private accumulation of wealth.

With this right / privilege comes the *social* right / privilege to organize economically in whatever ways they find to be advantageous (within some mild limits), so today we have *corporations* that have more legal rights than people do, and that span continents with 'internal' freedoms for the intra-transfers of capital while people themselves have no such rights to cross national borders in search of working-type economic opportunities like better-paying jobs.


---

so as to stoke demand, if at all possible.

The extent to which demand can be increased artificially through advertising is an open question. Certainly it has some effect. But where do you draw the line between exercising free speech and annoying or manipulating people?

Well, more-to-the-point is that advertising media channels go to the highest bidder, since television bandwidth (so-called 'public airwaves') functions as private property.


---

These kinds of artificial market manipulations add *zero* to the production process and do nothing for underlying utility / use values of the end product.

Not so. The idea of advertising is to increase the perceived utility of the product. Marxists just think they know better than consumers what the latter want, or at least should want.

Actually, I wasn't referring to the corporate media, I was referencing the terrain of private-interest competitive space / arenas / dynamics -- your 'free market' ideology is oblivious to inter-capitalist turf wars, like the two world wars of the 20th century.

By ignoring the *political* and myopically focusing on the *economic*, you're unable to address the impact that *political* factors have on the economic / financial realm, which makes your 'free market' line into a fantasy of ideology, since it's unrealistic. As long as private capital interests exist, they'll need the bourgeois government apparatus to uphold their social practices of market exchanges, through the use of the police, military, etc.


---

You're mixing apples-and-oranges -- class pertains to *control* of a society's productive processes, while what you're describing is the difference between rentier capital ('landowner'), and equity capital ('factory owner').

No. Class pertains to who is privileged over others: i.e., who is entitled by law to benefit from the violation or removal of others' rights.

Okay, now this is sounding more accurate -- my position is that the *bourgeoisie* (private property owners) of the world are entitled, by prevailing law and its enforcement by police, military, etc., to the rights of private property ownership, over the rights of workers / people for humane living and working conditions because the latter would often require a *diminishing* of private property rights / privileges.

I don't know if you're trying to be evasive over this definition, but, yes, 'class' implies / indicates 'privilege' -- the privilege of elitist private property ownership and usage, versus the rights of regular-people over the control of their own lives when such personal interests inevitably come into conflict with the rights of private property ownership.


---

In Marxist / empirical terms, there's no 'contributor class' (a definitional mixing of the counterposed interests of factory owner and workers, respectively), and there's no 'taker class' (of rentier-capital).

No. In empirical terms, contributor and non-contributor are the classes that actually exist as a matter of objective physical fact. The interests of factory owners and workers are not counterposed any more than the interests of bakers and bread buyers. Marxism just ignores the empirical physical fact of contribution vs non-contribution.

I disagree, and I'll be glad to explain it further, but first you'll need to clarify what you mean by 'contribution' (to the commodity-productive process), as distinct from 'non-contribution'.

I *agree* (as I've said before, in past exchanges) that rentier capital is *non-productive*, economically. And, yes, equity capital *does* provide inputs to the capitalist commodity-production process, but the political discrepancy here is over *what rewards* this equity-capital participation merits. As things are equity capital (and rentier capital) are rewarded *disproportionately* in relation to actual proletarian work inputs, work that actually physically produces the goods and services commodities under capitalism.

Rentier-capital ownership and equity-capital ownership, respectively, are *not* 'classes' -- they are *factions of capital ownership*.


---

You're off on your repeated rant / position of equity-capital-over-rentier-capital,

No, contribution vs extraction. As a Marxist, you just can't tell the difference.

Let me put it *this* way -- to *your* worldview the rentier-capital aspect of capitalism is far more *political* -- you obviously favor *equity* capital for its relative historical economic progressivism, but you're blind to the reality that capitalism relies on *both* rentier capital ownership (land, etc. -- non-productive assets of financial value), and also on equity capital accumulations that can facilitate the commodity-productive process of modern capitalism, through the exploitation of wage labor.

Yes, a commodity-production enterprise like McDonald's seems 'independent' and 'dynamic' in what it does, producing hamburgers for customers, but capitalism also requires the rentier-type *real estate* component underneath the McDonald's franchise, so as to formally parcel-out who-does-what-and-where. This is more of the 'referee', 'governmental', 'regulatory' aspect of capitalism, which you abhor, while also completely ignoring the actual labor-productivity of the working class altogether.


---

which is understandable, but along the way you're misusing the term 'class', which conventionally indicates which interests control the productive process, through capitalism's component of private property ownership, whether that's rentier capital and/or equity capital.

"Conventionally"? You mean by Marxist convention, which is wrong. The people who really control the productive process are managers, who are just hired employees. The landowner doesn't control or contribute to the productive process; he only takes a portion of production in return for no contribution to production, a role he could satisfy just as well while comatose. The provider of production goods only controls the production process to the extent that he decides what sort of production to enable through his contribution. The process itself is still controlled by hired managers. So Marxist class "analysis" puts the landowner in the same non-controlling class as the low-level hired worker, and calls the hired manager a capitalist even though he may have no capital invested in the firm. So it's just stupid, worthless garbage.

No, this is a blatant *misrepresentation* of the Marxist line / analysis -- Marxism does *not* lump ownership-created management roles in with the hired, *productive* worker.

Management roles are *salaried*, and the compensation is often tied-into ownership-type rewards like profit-sharing, bonuses, incentives, etc., that are gauged to the growth of the company itself.

This economic fact itself makes the management role / position distinctly different from the position of the wage worker, since wages are *not* indexed to the economic growth of the company.

Management roles *politically* represent the interests of ownership, even if the manager may not own capital him- or herself.

[ckaihatsu]

that is exactly how it will go for ckaihatsu. I think PoD would be a top commissar though, he has the perfect mentality for it. He'd be a rockstar in the gulagist apparatus.

You, too, keep imputing this 'Stalinism' hierarchy framework, when what's desired is a stateless, classless society where no private ownership exists. If history had given us socialism we'd be living in it today -- what happened in the USSR was *not* socialism, nor do people politically desire Stalinism today, contrary to your projections.