Are these mingy little beasts really the champions of the working class? - Page 35 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15086688
ckaihatsu wrote:Yeah, we keep spiralling around this, so it must be the crux of our disagreement.

Right: the crux of our disagreement is that you refuse to know facts, while I refuse to accept lies.
Equity capital *exploits* the worker of his or her economic labor value, so it's no less culpable than non-commodity-productive, asset-based rentier capital is.

That's just indisputably false as a matter of objective, physical fact. Without the factory owner, the worker would be left with less -- or no -- means to earn a living, because the factory would not be there without its owner; by contrast, without the landowner, the worker would be at liberty to use the land to earn a living, because the land WOULD still be there without its owner.

Your whole belief system rests on your refusal to know that fact.
Your phrasing of 'economic opportunity' for the worker, with a job, is *disingenuous* because all workers, by definition not-having capital, *need* jobs so as to get wages, so as to get the necessities of life and living.

GARBAGE. People have always had to work for a living, because food, clothing and shelter do not present themselves to us for consumption and use without any effort on our part. That is the condition of every animal -- such as those with which our remote ancestors were in competition for the available food. The human's advantage over the animals is that by producing tools, from the very first sharpened sticks and stones to the modern factory, we can make our subsequent work more productive of the things we need and want. Without the factory owner, the worker would simply have fewer and less attractive options for earning a living; but without the landowner, he would have more and better options.

Your whole belief system rests on your refusal to know the difference -- which in economics is equivalent to refusing to know the difference between air and water in plumbing.
If it's not one job here then it has to be another job somewhere else, so finding one is not a vaunted 'opportunity' as much as it is a *necessity*.

More absurd and disingenuous garbage. What happens to the worker if the factory owner does not exist, if there are no employers offering him economic opportunity, hmmmm? It's self-evident: he starves to death, or must accept less attractive terms of employment from the landowner. By contrast, if the landowner does not exist, the worker is at liberty to use the land to earn a living, to make tools using what nature provided and produce capital for himself. It is indisputable that the factory owner has NO POWER to do anything but make the worker better off -- which you absurdly and disingenuously call "exploitation" -- while the landowner has no power to do anything but make the worker WORSE off, by depriving him of his liberty to earn a living on the land.

Your whole belief system rests on your refusal to know that fact.
Your individual-centric scale of perspective (myopic) shows you to be favoring the side of the *employer* since the employer *does* take surplus labor value from the labor-power of the worker.

What "surplus labor value"?? What value would the worker's labor have had if the employer did not exist? Your whole absurd, dishonest, and evil Marxist belief system rests on your resolute evasion of such questions.
[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show
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What an absurd and disingenuous load of garbage.
No, you're disingenuously *imputing* that on my behalf, which is incorrect.

No. You were disingenuously pretending that my statements about workers' access to land only referred to access for agricultural use rather than economic opportunity generally.
If you simply were referring to land values for the sake of empirical *measurement* then the rest of what you said was just you going off on a fantasy tangent.

No. You disingenuously pretended that my statements about land were only relevant to agricultural use, and irrelevant to modern industrial economies, even though you knew that urban land values vastly exceed rural ones.
Yes, I agree that land values have empirically increased from rural settings to urban settings.

Then why did you disingenuously pretend that land is only relevant to agriculture?
No, you're just mouthing-off without knowing what it is that you're talking about.

<yawn> I have actually conducted empirical social science research. You self-evidently have not.
Let me put it *this* way -- your adherence to the *geneticist* / eugenicist approach means that *you're* depersonalizing around this method that you subscribe to.

I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, if anything, which I doubt.
If people are *overwhelmingly* determined in their phenotypical composition by their genetics then there's really little or no free-will or individuality involved, much less free markets.

Free will is a pseudo-issue that has nothing to do with free markets.
On the converse we have fields like sociology which posit that, while the individual *does* have free will, such is significantly constrained due to pre-existing material and social-structure ('superstructural') factors.

But the empirical evidence shows genetics is more important.
So, from the *sociological* perspective, it doesn't matter *who* the individual is, because the overarching material and social environment is going to condition *everyone* roughly the same way, per historical period, except for the factor of class.

But the empirical evidence shows genetics is more important.
Okay -- go ahead and let me know what you object to about the M-C-M' cycle:

It ignores the fact of production: that the entrepreneur is adding to total goods and services available for consumption in return for the commensurate increase in his funds. It also falsely assumes the entrepreneur is guaranteed a profit, when in fact he will often suffer a loss.
You're acknowledging that some (necessarily non-productive) assets *appreciate* in value over time,

They are not necessarily non-productive, just not necessarily productive.
and so profits can be made in the form of capital gains due to market speculation, anticipating a market increase in value though no commodities have been produced from that asset, and no sales have been made (because no commodities have been made, to sell).

We can include *land* in this rentier-capital category, which can be treated like a 'collectible' and held onto, anticipating a market rise in valuation, though, again, nothing has necessarily been produced with that land asset.

No, land is different because it exists unconditionally. Owning land therefore deprives others of their liberty to use it. Owning an ounce of gold does not, because the gold had to be produced; it would not have been available if the producers had not mined and refined it, so owning it does not deprive anyone else of anything they would otherwise have.
If I buy a plot of land for $100,000 and over ten years it appreciates in value by 10%, then I could sell it after that decade for $110,000 -- where does that $10,000 in profit *come from*, then, assuming that the total amount of exchange values (including my $10,000 in profit) in the economy represents *real value*? Does each and every dollar in the economy represent some kind of real past economic value added-in, or doesn't it?

No. In the case of land, its value is mainly based on the expected FUTURE relationship between its rental value, the tax on its value, the discount rate, and the rent growth rate -- i.e., the future net subsidy to the owner.
Can we compare a dollar made through the investment of equity capital and the exploitation of labor value (commodity-production), to a dollar "made" from an appreciation in value of a rentier-type asset like a plot of land, or art, or gold?

Art and gold are not rentier assets. Their owners take nothing from anyone else.

You have described three different cases.
1. The entrepreneur has added to the total of goods and services available for consumption.
2. The owner of art, gold, etc. has neither added to nor subtracted from the available goods and services, so his participation is effectively zero-sum: he might just as easily have lost money, and many speculators do.
3. The landowner deprived everyone else of the economic advantage of the land, which would otherwise have been available for productive use: i.e., he has profited by subtracting from the total available goods and services.
Where does my 'extra' $10,000 in profit *come from*, if not from the existing exchange-values in the overall economy? Doesn't the economy have to 'grow' somehow by at least $10,000 in those ten years in order to provide me with that increase in value when I sell the land for a profit?

No. The increase simply records an expectation.
Why is the market *rewarding* the owner of the appreciating rentier asset, by *legitimizing* that rise in market value, enabling the cashing-out of that asset for a profit, when that asset has *done nothing* / *produced no commodities* during that time period?

Because he is legally entitled to charge others for what government, the community and nature provide at that location.
It's my standing position that capitalist currency is *overextended* in function, by having to represent the *dual* / distinct economic variables of commodity exchange-values, *and* the pool of relative supply-and-demand (fluctuating market pricing), for any given item.

If that meant anything (it doesn't), it would be wrong.
Rent and interest payments on (necessarily) rentier-type capital / assets mean that productive activity has to *increase* elsewhere, to grow the total value of the economy by the amount called-for by the amount of rent or interest payment, or called-for by the appreciation of an asset price, since the asset itself *does not add* any value to the economy and only *withdraws* value from the economy, in cash, when it's cashed-out at a net gain in market price.

Gibberish.
I'll readily point to the ever-growing national debts of the major advanced (Western) national governments, to point-out that something is seriously *wrong* with capitalism if it can only survive going-forward by the increasing *indebtedness* of its host governments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... ite_note-1

You obviously don't understand the first thing about it. Public debt is undertaken to provide the private sector with secure interest income, not because the government is short of money.
Okay, as I just noted, the capitalist variable of 'market price' has to account for *both* value-increase (economic *growth*), *and* for relative supply-and-demand / market *speculation* as well.

Value increase does not depend on economic growth, just the supply and demand for that item.
TTP: [I propose] payment of the market rent (the high bid) by whoever gets secure, exclusive tenure to the community of those thus excluded, with a universal individual exemption to ensure everyone has free, secure, exclusive tenure on enough of the available advantageous land of their choice to have access to economic opportunity.

CK: Can you *rephrase* this? I've seen it before from you, and it's incomprehensible because you're not providing definitions or explanations for these parties involved.

It means the high bidder gets secure, exclusive tenure (like a leasehold tenure) by paying the market rental value to the community (i.e., the public treasury, through the land administration office) for depriving everyone else of the land; in addition, each resident citizen, whether direct landholder or tenant, would get a modest equal exemption for the land parcel they live on sufficient to ensure they can access economic opportunity for free.
From what I can see you're just upholding existing status quo conditions,

No. The similarity is only superficial. The actual economic relationships are profoundly different.
and you haven't denied such.

Yes, of course I have.
Your entire politics is a sham.

I have explained in detail why it isn't.
You just keep repeating your subjective idiosyncratic line that upholds status quo conditions.

Garbage.
At some point in history land *was not* a commodity -- it was *not* bought and sold.

So you may want to address *that* point in history -- who would someone 'pay' to own land when it wasn't previously owned?

All private land titles are based on forcible dispossession of all who would otherwise be at liberty to use the land. Usually government does that on behalf of private interests.
How did the *initial* owner obtain the land?

By government-issued and -enforced privilege. In the USA, these are called, "land patents."
Well *I* blame *both* factions of capital, both rentier and equity, because *both* factions lay claim to the worker's labor value, through leasing land (housing),

Housing is not land and land is not housing. Housing is produced by labor. Land is not.
for rent payments from wages (rentier capital), *and* through the economic *exploitation* of the worker's labor power, by the employer (equity capital).

<sigh> The employer/factory owner leaves the worker better off than he would otherwise be if the employer did not exist. The landowner leaves the worker worse off. How do you prevent yourself from knowing such self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality?
On the latter part, the 'voluntariness' that you assume *isn't* voluntariness at all -- the sale of labor power to the employer is *not* a level playing field, as you've acknowledged with your land-dispossession argument. The worker, as we all are, is *compelled* to secure the necessities of life and living, and, under capitalism, that must be done by earning a wage, by selling one's labor power (capacity to work). This social *desperation* for a wage is an *externality* to the employer, who acts, like you, as though it *is* a level playing field and that the exchange of labor for a wage is a socially *equal* one.

But that's not the employer's fault! He's in the same boat as the worker: deprived by the landowner of his liberty to use the land unless he pays him for permission to do so! You are in effect arguing that a baker, by charging his customer the market price for a loaf of bread, is "exploiting" his customers -- despite the fact that he is feeding them -- because they have to have food to eat, and he has the food! Well, guess what? He created the food, just as the entrepreneur created the job opportunity for the worker. If the customer (or worker) doesn't like that opportunity, he can try to do better elsewhere.
The Marxist noting of the expropriation of the worker's labor product (goods and/or services) isn't an argument for the worker to keep both wages and product,

Then it is nothing but dishonest propaganda.
as some kind of alleged economic reform *within* capitalism -- it's a noting of fact

It's not a fact, as I have proved to you repeatedly. It's a bald lie.
to urge and agitate for workers to control *all* production that they do, since it's the workers who are an integral part of the actual production process, who work on the machines, who *know* how to work the machines, and who produce the final goods and services.

But who were incapable of doing any of that without the entrepreneur to employ them and obtain all the other factors needed for production.
Private ownership of social production has to first be *overthrown* so that private interests no longer dictate what gets produced, and for who.

Huh?? On what basis do you incorrectly imagine private entrepreneurs' production decisions are made, but to create the greatest possible increase in consumable value at the lowest input cost?? All they are thinking about is the "private interests" of all the consumers they hope will buy their products! Just who do you think consumers are if not the public, hmmmmmmm?
By 'producer' you mean 'private owner', and you're saying that the private owner *owns* the product even though it's a 'product of labor'.

No, I'm saying the private owner owns the product because it is a product of labor: his labor.
The owner did not do the work that procured the product,

Yes, he most certainly did. He made the decisions and arranged, coordinated, and paid for all the factors that were needed to bring the product into existence, including but certainly not limited to whatever workers' labor might have been involved.
like fruit, from nature,

Nature doesn't pick fruit and hand it to you. Duh.
yet it's the owner who gets to keep and sell the product of labor, for just the cost of a wage.

No, that's objectively false, like all your other absurd and disingenuous Marxist nonsense. He paid workers wages, a landowner for land, probably a banker interest, and placed his own labor and resources at risk, all to bring the product into existence. The workers were only one factor; the owner brought together all the factors.
Also, ownership is *not* individualized or atomized, as you're suggesting -- the bourgeoisie is mostly class-conscious and socially *organizes* according to its class interest, typified in the functioning of its state apparatus such as laws, enforcement, judgments, fines, proscriptions, incarceration, and death penalties. And military attacks and warfare against geostrategic rivals.

Class is based on ownership of privilege, not production. It is the privileged who organize according to their class interest, because they know the liberty and justice of the market are their enemy.
Then this is just more of the status-quo --

No. In the current system the appropriate party is not paid.
only those workers who *can afford* to buy ownership (of the firm they currently work for) can be the ones to enjoy fractional private ownership and partial control of a workers co-op. This isn't saying much -- it's like saying one can be an owner today if one has enough money for ownership.

It's actually quite foolish -- typical Marxist idiocy, in fact -- for a worker to own shares in the firm he works for because it increases his risk: if the firm gets into difficulty, he loses his investment as well as his job.
In other words this isn't *political*

Wrong.
-- it's only through the world's workers *overthrowing* all private ownership that society's production can be made *political*, the way voting for presidential candidates is today.

So, you want production to be as ineffective and unresponsive to the people as politics is?? Socialism will certainly deliver that -- good and hard.
Today we vote for one representative of the bourgeoisie or another, when democracy needs to extend to *economic* matters as well, throughout.

No, it does not, because economics is based on consent, not force.
The bourgeois fetish with exchange values indicates its / your material-economic limits -- if it can't be quantified with exchange values / currency, then it's not deemed to be legitimate, regardless of the social facts of how production gets done under capitalism, namely the dispossession of the working class.

Marxist tripe.
Exchange-value fetishism -- those who can *afford* to buy, can buy. (I'll keep this sentence handy for copying-and-pasting, for further segments.)

Go ahead: it's a perfect example of cheap but meaningless Marxist propaganda.
You're just dramatizing and making it sound like humanity's social woes boil-down to the hierarchical gradient of commodity pricing, particularly for land.

That's not remotely similar to what I said.
You're proving that you have to resort to subjective *moralizing*

Morality is not subjective.
to confer a *qualitative* valuation over the initial capitalist procurement of natural resources, like land ('rightful' and 'wrongful').

Depriving others of what they would otherwise have without making just compensation is wrongful. I don't know if there is any way to state that fact so clearly or simply that you would be able to find a willingness to know it.
I'll counterpose that the social ills you list are in fact based in the *class division* of society:

That's what I said: class based on privilege.
This is a very ill-conceived notion, because 'the community of those whom he excludes from the land' could very well be the *entire world's population*, depending on whether or not they should want to access the land that the owner paid for and considers to be his or her 'private property'.

<sigh> No, it only includes the citizens of the polity that administers possession and use of that land, OBVIOUSLY, because that's what the state is: the sovereign authority over a specific area of land.
With this model of yours the landowner would have to pay for nominal ownership while also having to pay-off any random individual who makes any arbitrary claim to access that land for free but is denied.

No, the community would do it for him, by providing every resident citizen with an equal individual exemption from the land rent obligation, as I already explained. So everyone would already have free, secure, exclusive tenure on enough of the available advantageous land of their choice to have access to economic opportunity. So the only rival prospective users the landholder need concern himself with would be those willing to pay more for the land than he was.
Once word got out everyone would probably just willfully roam anywhere and everywhere, collecting compounding payments for a repeated legal maneuver and a little traveling.

Silliness with no basis in fact, logic, economics, or anything I said.
I suppose this is your own version of some kind of pre-industrial social "revolution" while upholding the legality of *equity* capital, and all non-land *rentier* capital, today, here in *industrial* society.

No, it's just some absurd nonsense you made up. And I am opposed to all forms of privilege, not just landowning.
In other words, 'Land for sale.'

No, improvements. The land would not be worth anything.
Why would a landowner be paying rent, and why would they limit themselves to not-making improvements on their own land, if they so wanted?

He would effectively be leasing the land, not owning it, and the prohibition on improvements when he no longer wants to pay the market rent would be imposed by the land administration office.
You're describing some kind of a TV *game show*, right? Is that it? When's the board game version coming out?

Puerile.
And, non-mockingly, how does the 'community' establish its 'authority'?

Democratically.
How is membership determined?

That's up to the democratically responsible authorities.
But being paid a wage is economically *exploitative* --

Only if the worker has been deprived of his rights without just compensation.
you're content to allow private land ownership to exploit workers who, out of material necessity, *must* find jobs and wages.

<sigh> Do bakers also "exploit" their customers, who must get something to eat "out of material necessity" or starve to death? Or are they the ones who actually save their customers from starving to death?
Here's this corroborating excerpt again:

It's just as wrong again.
You're not even upholding your own morality -- you're being a hypocrite -- because you're saying that land cannot rightly be anyone's property, yet you're clearly *condoning* the buying and selling of land as a commodity. Here's from earlier in your post:

Like most Marxists, you apparently cannot tell the difference between describing a phenomenon and condoning or advocating it.
Moralizing
.
No, just realism. If we just vacate land titles without any compensation, the title owners are going to resist, probably violently. We saw it happen with slavery, and it wasn't pretty. IMO the most just and appropriate compensation, which would leave the least room for objection from either side, is the acquisition cost of the land.
Status quo.

False.
You're leaving out the material value that *labor* has added to the land, as with landscaping.

Whatever value labor on that location has added to the location is improvement value, not land value. Landscaping is a fixed improvement, not a natural resource.
Well, here we are on a *political discussion board* so if you can't describe your vision so that others like myself can understand it, then what hope do you have left?

I have certainly described my ideas clearly and simply enough for you and every competent English user over the age of 12 to understand. You just choose not to understand by refusing to know the relevant indisputable facts of objective physical reality.
I never said that air and water are the same thing.

You have made the logically equivalent economic claim that landowning and factory owning are the same thing.
You're simply upholding the specific type of rentier capital known as 'land'.

No. I'm pointing out that land is not rightly considered "capital" -- or even private property -- at all, and describing and advocating a way to make equal access to the economic opportunity it offers for all citizens compatible with its optimal productive use. Which not coincidentally also establishes justice and efficiency in land tenure and public revenue arrangements.
Products of labor, like landscaping (to increase land asset value) or the installation of pipes (to increase the value of real estate, like housing), is *expropriated* by private ownership for the cost of a wage. That's the *commodification* of labor, by ownership.

Payment of agreed wages for labor is self-evidently not expropriation.
So this is a community-supported 'commons', correct? Locally-collective public administration of land, in exchange for fees / rent to this administration.

Right: repayment of the land subsidy to the government and community that provide it.
- If the payment of rent / fees to the local collective administration ('community') is voluntary, wouldn't there be some who would *not* do so, and yet still insist on leasing certain land(s) for free while others would be *paying* for the same benefit?

Only the one paying the market rent for exclusive tenure would get it. But everyone would get up to a certain uniform amount of rent exempted for the land they lived on. IOW, every resident citizen would get free, secure, exclusive tenure on enough of the available advantageous land of their choice to have access to economic opportunity, and those who wanted to exclude others from more than that would pay the community for the additional amount they deprived everyone else of.
- How is community membership determined? (What are the criteria for someone to be a 'member'?)

Whatever the community decides through its democratically accountable institutions, same as now.
- How does the 'community' initially procure land that is to be brought into the geoist / local-collectivist public administration?

It's all the land under its jurisdiction. All that changes is how its exclusive private possession and use is administered.
What if going market prices for land are too prohibitive for a community to purchase it in any significant quantities?

Purchase is not necessary, just a change in the rules governing tenure. But if the land reform is undertaken without monetary reform, it might be advisable to buy some parcels at their acquisition price from owners who don't want them, to prevent deflation as bank lending for land purchases dried up.
- What benefits / advantages / privileges would a monetary donor receive for being a partial funder of a land purchase that goes into this community's geoist collective public administration?

That kind of arrangement is not contemplated because all the land under the local government's jurisdiction is automatically included.
- How are leasees determined for the *most* advantageous pieces of land?

The high bidder.
- How *much* land can a leasee claim at one time?

However much they pay for.
- What if multiple parties all want the same parcel of land at the same time? How would a determination be made as to which party gains access to that land for the time of the lease, over all other prospective leasees?

Bidding in the market.
- How is *authority* conferred within this community, and what are the requirements for authority-level membership?

Authority comes from democratic consent.
- What kinds of *enforcement* is the authority prescribed to use? Would they be able to use physical violence against transgressors? Incarceration? Death penalties?

The enforcement is simply exclusivity of tenure: those who pay for it are legally entitled to exclude everyone else, by police intervention if necessary. Incarceration is not necessary unless transgressors offer violent resistance.
Anything that can be bought-and-sold is a *commodity* and has exchange-value, under capitalism.

I'm not advocating capitalism.
#15086965
Truth To Power wrote:...the crux of our disagreement is that you refuse to know facts, while I refuse to accept lies.


He then listed some important lies that he had previously accepted when he wrote:(my brief retorts in parenthesis)
1. The entrepreneur has added to the total of goods and services available for consumption. (middlemen add nothing)
2. The owner of art, gold, etc. has neither added to nor subtracted from the available goods and services, so his participation is effectively zero-sum: he might just as easily have lost money, and many speculators do.(owners subtract the public use of everything they own)
3. The landowner deprived everyone else of the economic advantage of the land, which would otherwise have been available for productive use: i.e., he has profited by subtracting from the total available goods and services. (owners are free to permanently scar or destroy the productivity of the land they own - a major subtraction)


So you're using thousands of words, and many colorful graphs, to say, basically:

"I am not!"
"You are so!"
"Am not!"
"Are so!"
"Know you are, said you are, what am I?!"

Does this qualify as spam?
Is it in any way therapeutic?

Here's some good advice on debating from a Western Culture icon:

"You gotta know when to fold 'em"
#15087008
QatzelOk wrote:He then listed some important lies that he had previously accepted when he wrote:
(my brief retorts in parenthesis)
1. The entrepreneur has added to the total of goods and services available for consumption. (middlemen add nothing)

Your claim is false on two counts:
1. The entrepreneur is not a middleman but the initiator and organizer of the production process. That is why nothing gets produced without his decision and initiative to bring together and PAY FOR all the factors -- including but most certainly NOT LIMITED TO labor -- needed for production to occur. Socialist fools have always claimed the entrepreneur adds nothing, and tried to do without him whenever they seize power. Of course, it has always been the victims of their false and evil ideology -- the people -- who consequently ended up with the nothing that the socialists added.

2. Even actual middlemen do add something: market liquidity and price information.
2. The owner of art, gold, etc. has neither added to nor subtracted from the available goods and services, so his participation is effectively zero-sum: he might just as easily have lost money, and many speculators do.(owners subtract the public use of everything they own)

False. The owner of a product has directly or indirectly paid the producer (the initial owner) of the art, gold, etc. to produce it, so it would never have existed or been available for anyone's use without that decision and initiative.
3. The landowner deprived everyone else of the economic advantage of the land, which would otherwise have been available for productive use: i.e., he has profited by subtracting from the total available goods and services. (owners are free to permanently scar or destroy the productivity of the land they own - a major subtraction)

It's very difficult to destroy land's productivity permanently, and that is not the major deprivation landowners inflict on everyone else.

Here's some good advice on debating from a Western Culture icon:

"You gotta know when to fold 'em"

Somehow, despite the unanimous verdict of historical fact, socialists keep betting and raising on their busted flush....
#15087031
Truth To Power wrote:
Right: the crux of our disagreement is that you refuse to know facts, while I refuse to accept lies.



No, this is more of your typical rhetorical hyperbole -- you'd rather make grandiose pronouncements than deal with the *issues* at hand.


Truth To Power wrote:
That's just indisputably false as a matter of objective, physical fact. Without the factory owner, the worker would be left with less -- or no -- means to earn a living, because the factory would not be there without its owner; by contrast, without the landowner, the worker would be at liberty to use the land to earn a living, because the land WOULD still be there without its owner.



No, your perspective is skewed and disingenuous as a result.

You make it sound as though all that people need these days is land, and that equity capital owners are doing workers a favor by making some jobs available. In fact workers have been *dispossessed* and are exploited when they *do* work at a job.

You're being too glass-half-full about capitalism, and forgetting that the glass is half-empty as well.


Truth To Power wrote:
Your whole belief system rests on your refusal to know that fact.



It's not a 'belief system' because a class analysis (Marxism) looks at *actual* existing conditions, meaning *facts*.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Your phrasing of 'economic opportunity' for the worker, with a job, is *disingenuous* because all workers, by definition not-having capital, *need* jobs so as to get wages, so as to get the necessities of life and living.



Truth To Power wrote:
GARBAGE. People have always had to work for a living, because food, clothing and shelter do not present themselves to us for consumption and use without any effort on our part. That is the condition of every animal -- such as those with which our remote ancestors were in competition for the available food. The human's advantage over the animals is that by producing tools, from the very first sharpened sticks and stones to the modern factory, we can make our subsequent work more productive of the things we need and want. Without the factory owner, the worker would simply have fewer and less attractive options for earning a living; but without the landowner, he would have more and better options.



What you're conveniently forgetting to include is that there exists a people-based organization / institution of conscious, explicit quasi-collective *administration*, which sets the political paradigm / 'superstructure' for all of the economic dynamics you're describing.

Your ideology leads you to compare our current administrative ruling paradigm to one of 'nature', when in fact human society is *far more productive* than any nature-derived-based form of sustenance, as with the past hunter-gatherer mode. What capitalism *doesn't* do is *distribution* according to actual human need, and so those who tend to market transactions, and have been born into wealthier social cultures, are the ones who benefit disproportionately from the status quo.

Here's from a recent article that exposes any unfounded arguments, like yours, as to how the capitalist economy is structured, regarding food, and other commodity, production:



https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/0 ... m-a21.html


US farm relief program hands billions to agribusiness while millions lack food

By Alex Findijs
21 April 2020

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced plans on Friday, April 17, for a farm relief program. Funded largely through the CARES Act, the $19 billion package
will be used to funnel funds to corporate farms while providing little assistance for the vast majority of small or working farmers.

Like other government programs to help farmers, most of this money will end up in the hands of agribusiness. The majority of farmland is owned by farms grossing over $500,000 in
sales, a figure that demonstrates the demise of the American family farm. In total, $16 billion will be handed directly to farmers, of which $9.6 billion goes to the livestock industry. This
funding will be given largely as reimbursements for “losses” and will not be contingent upon providing food to those in need.

The remaining $3 billion will be used to purchase $100 million each of produce, meat and dairy that will be distributed to food banks, nonprofits and community and faith organizations
every month. This is a paltry sum, amounting to just 27 cents a day for every food insecure person, a figure that will only decline as America’s now 22 million unemployed seek
assistance.

It will also provide funds to distribute 1,000,000 meals a week to children in “a limited number of rural schools.” How this would actually be done given the wide dispersion of such
students, many of whom rode buses for an hour or more to reach their schools, is unclear.

This bailout is intended to offset financial losses from the collapse of distribution systems during the pandemic. While grocery stores are having difficulty keeping their shelves stocked,
much of the food in the pipeline is packaged in bulk quantities for institutional buyers such as restaurants and schools.

The closure of restaurants, schools and other institutional buyers has resulted in farmers destroying millions of pounds of food as their distribution chains are disrupted. This is not because
there is no demand, but because transitioning to retail packaging is too costly. It is cheaper to destroy food than to repackage it and send it elsewhere.

[...]



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Truth To Power wrote:
Your whole belief system rests on your refusal to know the difference -- which in economics is equivalent to refusing to know the difference between air and water in plumbing.



It's *not* a 'belief' to point out that equity capital exploits the labor commodity.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
If it's not one job here then it has to be another job somewhere else, so finding one is not a vaunted 'opportunity' as much as it is a *necessity*.



Truth To Power wrote:
More absurd and disingenuous garbage. What happens to the worker if the factory owner does not exist, if there are no employers offering him economic opportunity, hmmmm? It's self-evident: he starves to death, or must accept less attractive terms of employment from the landowner.



Again you're ignoring the *superstructural* / cultural paradigm (regime), which is about *private property ownership*. If real estate / land didn't exist, and factories didn't exist, then society would be back to hunting and gathering, because there wouldn't be any economic material basis for a *state* / government, and so the institution of private property couldn't be enforced.

I don't *advocate* a return to this 'primitive communism', because human society / civilization now *has* the technological ability to *produce* sufficient food, etc., for everyone, and to distribute it according to human need, instead of being *blackmailed* for the same by private production (and non-production) ownership interests.

Social norms under capitalism *legitimize* and *legalize* the private-ownership 'middleman' role in the economy, so production *can't* happen unless private interests for profit-making are fulfilled, as a cost to funding. It's the *workers*, though, that physically produced the buildings and equipment that are held hostage by private ownership, so it's the *workers* who should be the ones to control such, for the benefit of those in need of their production, and *not* for private aggrandizement.


Truth To Power wrote:
By contrast, if the landowner does not exist, the worker is at liberty to use the land to earn a living, to make tools using what nature provided and produce capital for himself. It is indisputable that the factory owner has NO POWER to do anything but make the worker better off -- which you absurdly and disingenuously call "exploitation" -- while the landowner has no power to do anything but make the worker WORSE off, by depriving him of his liberty to earn a living on the land.



You're *validating* the equity-capital owner's role in production, while all they've done is to *expropriate* the labor-product commodity from the workers who have been the ones to actually *produce* that, whatever it may be -- the factory building, the productive equipment, the raw materials from nature, r&d, 'intellectual property', whatever.

*Stop* legitimizing equity capital's exploitation of labor power, as a commodity.


Truth To Power wrote:
Your whole belief system rests on your refusal to know that fact.



So you're going to go through life verbally *abusing* anyone who doesn't agree with your political ideology. Nice. Tell *me* how that works out for you.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Your individual-centric scale of perspective (myopic) shows you to be favoring the side of the *employer* since the employer *does* take surplus labor value from the labor-power of the worker.



Truth To Power wrote:
What "surplus labor value"?? What value would the worker's labor have had if the employer did not exist? Your whole absurd, dishonest, and evil Marxist belief system rests on your resolute evasion of such questions.



It's *because* of the capitalism-legitimized role of 'employer' -- the *exploiter* of labor -- through private ownership of the means of mass industrial production, that labor-power is even *assigned* a 'value', its exchange-value.

Don't *malign* my politics with your childish name-calling just because you don't agree with me -- you need to acknowledge that the *products* of the labor-commodity are sold for more money than is passed back to the laborer (the provider of that labor commodity) in the form of a wage.

This is the economic *fact* of labor exploitation, by equity capital.


Truth To Power wrote:
What an absurd and disingenuous load of garbage.



More name-calling on your part. You're *not addressing* the argument contained within, which is what I just wrote-out in the previous segment.


Truth To Power wrote:
No. You were disingenuously pretending that my statements about workers' access to land only referred to access for agricultural use rather than economic opportunity generally.



Bullshit. This is what you *just said*, earlier in this post:


Truth To Power wrote:
By contrast, if the landowner does not exist, the worker is at liberty to use the land to earn a living, to make tools


Truth To Power wrote:
[...] People have always had to work for a living, because food, clothing and shelter do not present themselves to us for consumption and use without any effort on our part.



So you *acknowledge* that people empirically / objectively require food, clothing, and shelter (housing) -- this would mean a hyper-balkanized / hyper-individuated *sustenance farming*, or agriculture, for the sake of your ideological notion of individual self-sufficiency, even over the basic necessities of life and living. It's *absurd* in our modern world to advocate this, because we live in an *industrial* age -- should everyone have to produce their own cars and computers, as well?

What *I* want to know is why does your ideology ignore current, modern-day *industrial* mass techniques of production, and instead pretend that all equity capital ownership over the same is legitimate, as though we live in a perfect economic meritocracy?

Your entire *politics* is dependent on *personalizing* people's / labor's role in the productive economy, with your *scapegoating* and blaming-the-victim, as an inevitable *result* of this mindset of yours. You assume that equity capital ownership's role, under capitalism, is without fault and blameless, so any failings can then be ascribed to the *individual*, and to individual foibles.

If you want to characterize the individual's role in the world-at-large as being similar to that of animals foraging in nature for daily sustenance, then why is there *private property* in existence, in this world? You claim that only private property in *land* is the problem, but it's not *only* land that preys on the individual, unorganized worker -- it's also private ownership of the means of mass industrial production, since such employers make *profits* off of labor-power, by selling the products of wage-labor for more than is paid back to those workers in the form of a wage.

Let me put it *this* way -- what is the amount of goods and services necessary to keep the total population of workers worldwide *maintained* and sustainable going-forward, into the future indefinitely? (This would include food, housing, utilities, transportation, education, training, personal supplies, etc.) This volume of goods and services, for all workers, can be called 'necessary labor value', meaning the total amount of production, by all labor, to produce this quantity of goods and services, that labor itself empirically needs to exist, indefinitely.

Guess what? Labor produces *way more* than this baseline amount of goods and services, for its own self-sustainability. Where does this *surplus* labor value go? Yes, to qualitatively improve civilization / infrastructure, but mostly to *private pockets*, with no accountability, all for the capitalist-private-property 'role' of social organization of production ('business'), which the workers could readily do *themselves*, since they're the ones *working*, and they *best* know what needs to get done, and exactly how to do it.

*You* think that just because human society / civilization happened to emerge the way that it did, through to today, that means that such is *legitimate*, and that private-property ownership of the means of mass industrial production is all morally *justified*. You're wrong. Private property ownership is better-thought-of as an emergent *private bureaucracy*, corporations included, that exists as an *extraneous layer* of ruling-class *control* over the mass population of *workers* who are the ones doing the actual work, to produce for society's actual human social needs -- including all equity-type productive infrastructure.

Your line *sounds* populist, by calling for the de-privatization of land administration, but you'd allow corporations to continue as they are since they're based on equity capital ownership. Your politics is pro-corporate.


Truth To Power wrote:
No. You disingenuously pretended that my statements about land were only relevant to agricultural use, and irrelevant to modern industrial economies, even though you knew that urban land values vastly exceed rural ones.



No, you're *assuming* that I had malicious motives, and you're *imputing* that I'm only able to visualize *agricultural* uses for land.

We've been over this terrain before, anyway -- you want to pretend that land itself, however it's used, is *not* a commodity, yet you acknowledge that it's bought-and-sold, and would *continue* to be bought-and-sold (leased) according to your geoist politics, so it *is* empirically a commodity, under *any* version of capitalism.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
This part doesn't reconcile with what you just said - - if public natural resources ('the commons') need to be resocialized to the common good, what does that have to do with *land values*?

Perhaps I'm being too critical though - - perhaps you just mean it as a *measurement*.



Truth To Power wrote:
Right. The fact that land value is no longer mainly rural shows your attempt to pretend I am advocating some kind of return to bucolic existence just because I talk about land is a disingenuous attempt on your part to divert attention from what I actually said, and from the salient economic facts.



ckaihatsu wrote:
No, you're disingenuously *imputing* that on my behalf, which is incorrect.

If you simply were referring to land values for the sake of empirical *measurement* then the rest of what you said was just you going off on a fantasy tangent.

Yes, I agree that land values have empirically increased from rural settings to urban settings.



Truth To Power wrote:
Then why did you disingenuously pretend that land is only relevant to agriculture?



I didn't *say* that -- you're making it up.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
No, there are social sciences, particularly sociology, that *do not have to* examine social dynamics at the scale of the individual.



Truth To Power wrote:
They do if they want to understand, and understanding is the goal of all genuine science.



ckaihatsu wrote:
No, you're just mouthing-off without knowing what it is that you're talking about.



Truth To Power wrote:
<yawn> I have actually conducted empirical social science research. You self-evidently have not.



You're trying to make it sound as though your geoist ideology can be verified with science, out of a lab, like something from the hard sciences -- nice try, but it doesn't work that way.

You're again revealing your need to *personalize* the subject matter, that of political economy, which is inherently *not* about the individual, because it's about *macroscopic* social forces at work on *all* of us, and particularly according to class (one's relationship to the means of mass industrial production).


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Let me put it *this* way -- your adherence to the *geneticist* / eugenicist approach means that *you're* depersonalizing around this method that you subscribe to.



Truth To Power wrote:
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, if anything, which I doubt.



ckaihatsu wrote:
If people are *overwhelmingly* determined in their phenotypical composition by their genetics then there's really little or no free-will or individuality involved, much less free markets.



Truth To Power wrote:
Free will is a pseudo-issue that has nothing to do with free markets.



ckaihatsu wrote:
On the converse we have fields like sociology which posit that, while the individual *does* have free will, such is significantly constrained due to pre-existing material and social-structure ('superstructural') factors.



Truth To Power wrote:
But the empirical evidence shows genetics is more important.



ckaihatsu wrote:
So, from the *sociological* perspective, it doesn't matter *who* the individual is, because the overarching material and social environment is going to condition *everyone* roughly the same way, per historical period, except for the factor of class.



Truth To Power wrote:
But the empirical evidence shows genetics is more important.



Okay, then, to *what extent* do you think genetics determines our personhood? Can you give a rough *percentage* regarding nature, versus nurture? (60/40? 70/30?)

If you think that genetics is *100%* deterministic of our personhood then that would mean that individual free will would *not* exist, and that our futures would be fully predetermined by our respective *genetic* makeups. There could be no individual decision-making in the markets because it would actually be our *genes* at-work, and there would be no free markets because it would all be the outgrowth of individual chromosomal expression, through our minds and bodies, into the social material world.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Okay -- go ahead and let me know what you object to about the M-C-M' cycle:



Truth To Power wrote:
It ignores the fact of production: that the entrepreneur is adding to total goods and services available for consumption in return for the commensurate increase in his funds. It also falsely assumes the entrepreneur is guaranteed a profit, when in fact he will often suffer a loss.



This is apples-and-oranges -- the M-C-M' cycle simply says that the capitalist looks to use money (M) to buy *commodities* (C) (which includes the *labor* commodity), to sell for an *increase* of money (M').

So what do you object to about the M-C-M' cycle?

Regarding the tangent you went off on, you're just describing the entrepreneur's / capitalist's role as a facilitator of *social organization* -- bringing the various private-bureaucratic pieces together for the business to be viable and profit-making. This is mostly social-networking, which could be done by *anyone*, including the laborers who actually *make* the commodities, though without owning capital.

I maintain that the capitalist is just one of *any* of the components of the private bureaucracy, or 'corporation', like an accountant or secretary, or whatever. It's only because of the state enforcement of *private property* / exchange-values, that we have the norm of private ownership of the enterprise's *capital*, in private / entrepreneurial / capitalist hands, thus controlling the resulting revenue.

Regarding *risk*, the only thing the capitalist *risks* is capital. If you want to talk *risk*, take a look at what any given *worker* risks -- without capital the risks for workers are their very lives (Covid-19), not to mention any personal resources like cars, fuel, bus fare, time, food, rent, etc.


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Truth To Power wrote:
No, they do not, so no, they do not. Producer goods like buildings, equipment, vehicles, etc. depreciate over time. Saved money is slowly eroded by inflation unless its owner takes the risk of letting someone else who thinks they have a better use for it use it. Collectibles like art, etc. only appreciate to the extent that their original producers created value that increases over time: most such products depreciate and are eventually thrown away. Gold and precious metals sometimes appreciate faster than inflation, sometimes not, depending on market conditions. Gold has done better than inflation for the last 20 years or so, but before that was actually declining in value for a similar length of time. Silver and platinum have done badly for ~10 years.



ckaihatsu wrote:
You're acknowledging that some (necessarily non-productive) assets *appreciate* in value over time,



Truth To Power wrote:
They are not necessarily non-productive, just not necessarily productive.



You should really *define* what you mean by 'productive', or 'non-productive'.

*I* mean that equity capital *only* is *commodity-productive*, or productive of *commodities*.

*Non*-productive / rentier-type assets like land or gold do *not* themselves produce commodities.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
and so profits can be made in the form of capital gains due to market speculation, anticipating a market increase in value though no commodities have been produced from that asset, and no sales have been made (because no commodities have been made, to sell).

We can include *land* in this rentier-capital category, which can be treated like a 'collectible' and held onto, anticipating a market rise in valuation, though, again, nothing has necessarily been produced with that land asset.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, land is different because it exists unconditionally. Owning land therefore deprives others of their liberty to use it. Owning an ounce of gold does not, because the gold had to be produced; it would not have been available if the producers had not mined and refined it, so owning it does not deprive anyone else of anything they would otherwise have.



I won't oppose your geoism because it's at least *reformist*, somewhat, compared to the status quo, but it certainly doesn't go *far enough* because you're unable to address the hegemony of equity capital, the exploitation of labor, and the accumulation of surplus labor value, with your geoist line.

Also, keep in mind that the private purchase of *any* asset, like gold, requires the person to have *disposable income* in the first place, which isn't a reality for many / most workers. Workers are deprived of access to *many* commodities, including land and other assets, due to the lack of a suitable wage, due to the employers continuous expropriation / exploitation of labor value, from the worker's work.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
If I buy a plot of land for $100,000 and over ten years it appreciates in value by 10%, then I could sell it after that decade for $110,000 -- where does that $10,000 in profit *come from*, then, assuming that the total amount of exchange values (including my $10,000 in profit) in the economy represents *real value*? Does each and every dollar in the economy represent some kind of real past economic value added-in, or doesn't it?



Truth To Power wrote:
No. In the case of land, its value is mainly based on the expected FUTURE relationship between its rental value, the tax on its value, the discount rate, and the rent growth rate -- i.e., the future net subsidy to the owner.



Okay, net value, EBITDA, whatever -- the *point* is, that with the case of *non-productive* assets, which don't produce commodities, it's the *rest of the economy* that has to pony-up the liquid cash (economic value), to pay for any non-productive appreciation (as through scarcity and supply-and-demand) in asset value over time.

But, remember, productivity-based profits for equity capital investments is *not* the same as non-productive asset appreciation values, for rentier-type, non-productive asset values. Yet market pricing *mixes* these two *different* economic values / valuations together, although one is commodity-productive and the other is *not* commodity-productive.

If we go through the capitalist economy and look at *all* the economic activity that is non-commodity-productive, it all adds up to a *lot*, that is effectively a *drain* on actual productive economic activity -- F.I.R.E. (finance, insurance, real estate), all militaristic destructive and non-destructive activity is all non-commodity-productive (military Keynesianism, or military syndicalism). Financial crashes, like the most recent one, requiring bailouts from public funds, are non-commodity-productive.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Can we compare a dollar made through the investment of equity capital and the exploitation of labor value (commodity-production), to a dollar "made" from an appreciation in value of a rentier-type asset like a plot of land, or art, or gold?



Truth To Power wrote:
Art and gold are not rentier assets. Their owners take nothing from anyone else.



Even if you watch 'Star Wars' 100 times you're *not* going to be able to do Jedi mind tricks -- art and gold *are* rentier assets because they don't produce any commodities, not the way an equity-capital-based factory, and its machinery, does.

The owners of rentier-type assets like art or gold *do* extract value from the economy, upon cash-out, if the asset has appreciated at all in value over that time. Exchange value is only produced when the *commodity* is initally produced, from the exploitation of the labor-commodity, and then sold, presumably for a profit.

Just consider the secondary market -- initially-produced commodities, say a book for example, once bought, can no longer be productive to the economy because it can no longer be produced -- it's *already* been produced and now exists and was paid-for. It still has *use* value, though, for anyone who wants to read that particular book, and so it has exchange value on the secondary market. But now it's an *asset*, and may certainly appreciate in exchange value over time (or it may not), but it certainly isn't *productive*, and is only subject to change in value according to the balance of supply-and-demand over *pricing*, but will not add anything new to the economy, thus it can no longer be part of any *growth* of the economy.


Truth To Power wrote:
You have described three different cases.
1. The entrepreneur has added to the total of goods and services available for consumption.
2. The owner of art, gold, etc. has neither added to nor subtracted from the available goods and services, so his participation is effectively zero-sum: he might just as easily have lost money, and many speculators do.
3. The landowner deprived everyone else of the economic advantage of the land, which would otherwise have been available for productive use: i.e., he has profited by subtracting from the total available goods and services.



1. It's not so-much the entrepreneur / capitalist who has added to the total of goods and services in the economy, it's the *capital* that they've invested into the enterprise / business, in whatever forms. If you're going to look at the capitalist in terms of the "work role" that they do, then such is basically *management*, or the *directing* of the entity, to whatever extents they're circumscribed to. (Again my own take is that the capitalist / manager is just one private-bureaucratic role in the overall business, like any other white-collar 'service' role, for capital ownership / the business.)

2. The owner of *any* rentier-type asset, like art or gold, etc., has *zero* productive input into the capitalist economy. Again the only relevant variable is the *valuation* of whatever's at-stake, in this case it's the rentier-type asset itself, and its potential appreciation in exchange-value. In the case of a *decrease* in exchange value, there's *no* impact on the overall economy because nothing additional has been produced, and the time-lapsed claim to existing value from the economy, upon cash-out, is *less* than what was paid for the purchase of the asset initially. It's a *financial* loss to the purchaser, but not any kind of detriment or decrease, or addition, to the overall total valuations in the economy.

Here's from that Wikipedia entry again:



Marx believed that capitalism was inherently built upon practices of usury and thus inevitably leading to the separation of society into two classes: one composed of those who produce value and the other, which feeds upon the first one. In "Theories of Surplus Value" (written 1862–1863), he states "...that interest (in contrast to industrial profit) and rent (that is the form of landed property created by capitalist production itself) are superfetations (i.e., excessive accumulations) which are not essential to capitalist production and of which it can rid itself. If this bourgeois ideal were actually realisable, the only result would be that the whole of the surplus-value would go to the industrial capitalist directly, and society would be reduced (economically) to the simple contradiction between capital and wage-labour, a simplification which would indeed accelerate the dissolution of this mode of production."[5]

Hence the extraordinary growth of a class, or rather, of a stratum of rentiers, i.e., people who live by 'clipping coupons' [in the sense of collecting interest payments on bonds], who take no part in any enterprise whatever, whose profession is idleness. The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries and colonies.[6]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rentier_capitalism



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Truth To Power wrote:
3. The landowner deprived everyone else of the economic advantage of the land, which would otherwise have been available for productive use: i.e., he has profited by subtracting from the total available goods and services.



See, you should just *expand* your critique here, to *all* rentier-type / non-productive assets, because they *all*, including land, are *deflationary*. Take the example of Bitcoin -- it has a *finite* number of face-values that will be released over time, so it is a *finite* pool of assets, unlike, say, the stock market, which keeps *adding-in* share values, minus downturns and speculative bubbles, from actual commodity-production and sales / profit-making.

Your land-constrained line is idiosyncratic because it's artificially circumscribed to just one type of deflationary asset, that of land. There are *plenty* of economic assets -- anything already produced and paid-for, really, that are finite in number and thus *deflationary* / appreciative, as we tend to see with real estate, also. Why aren't you critical of *real estate*, too, for the same reasons that you tout for the instance of land?


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Where does my 'extra' $10,000 in profit *come from*, if not from the existing exchange-values in the overall economy? Doesn't the economy have to 'grow' somehow by at least $10,000 in those ten years in order to provide me with that increase in value when I sell the land for a profit?



Truth To Power wrote:
No. The increase simply records an expectation.



I paid in $100k, sold it for $110k, got $10k in the process -- where did the extra $10k come from? It's not an 'expectation', it's cash in my pocket that the rest of the economy had to provide. This kind of non-productive appreciative dynamic happens *every day*.

To me, this kind of rentier-type side to the capitalist economy may as well be *feudalism*, because anyone who owns appreciative rentier-type assets (land, real estate, art) is *draining* economic value from the total economy. During the time of feudalism the 'drain' was directly on peasant's labor-power, but today, in the capitalist economy, the drain from non-productive, appreciative assets *has* to come from materially *commodity-producing* activity, meaning commodity-production, which expropriates / exploits *wage* workers' labor, which is why it's often called *wage-slavery*, because it's just a different scheme to rip-off labor again, based on the state-enforced norm of 'private ownership'.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Why is the market *rewarding* the owner of the appreciating rentier asset, by *legitimizing* that rise in market value, enabling the cashing-out of that asset for a profit, when that asset has *done nothing* / *produced no commodities* during that time period?



Truth To Power wrote:
Because he is legally entitled to charge others for what government, the community and nature provide at that location.



Thank you, and I'm going to hold you to this definition -- you're acknowledging that this social practice of appreciative rentier-type private asset ownership is nothing more than a government / state-enforced *social norm* ('superstructure').

Even your own politics / political line is *critical* of the commodity-valuation of *land*, and you find *this* particular political-economy norm to be problematic. I just happen to *extend* your critique to address the exploitation / expropriation of surplus labor value, the capitalist state, imperialism, and all private property ownership as well.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
It's my standing position that capitalist currency is *overextended* in function, by having to represent the *dual* / distinct economic variables of commodity exchange-values, *and* the pool of relative supply-and-demand (fluctuating market pricing), for any given item.




Truth To Power wrote:
If that meant anything (it doesn't), it would be wrong.



(I just delineated the different economic functions of equity-based capital versus rentier-based capital -- the latter is *non-productive* and is an economic *drain* on the total value of the economy since actual, equity-based *productive* economic activity has to take place to *generate* those economic values upfront, that are then paid to service non-productive rentier-type assets.)


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Rent and interest payments on (necessarily) rentier-type capital / assets mean that productive activity has to *increase* elsewhere, to grow the total value of the economy by the amount called-for by the amount of rent or interest payment, or called-for by the appreciation of an asset price, since the asset itself *does not add* any value to the economy and only *withdraws* value from the economy, in cash, when it's cashed-out at a net gain in market price.



Truth To Power wrote:
Gibberish.



Well, where does the extra money *come* from? You still haven't addressed this dynamic, like the fictional, but realistic, extra $10k in my pocket, without having to produce anything.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
I'll readily point to the ever-growing national debts of the major advanced (Western) national governments, to point-out that something is seriously *wrong* with capitalism if it can only survive going-forward by the increasing *indebtedness* of its host governments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... ite_note-1



Truth To Power wrote:
You obviously don't understand the first thing about it. Public debt is undertaken to provide the private sector with secure interest income, not because the government is short of money.



Any government *wouldn't need* to issue debt if it was already solvent -- consider the colonial-era empires from the golden age of capitalism. They chartered out entire *corporations*, under the government / country name, like the Dutch East India Company. These modern nationalist corporations got *rich*, and so did the hosting countries, like England, Spain, the Netherlands, France, etc., due to their hyper-exploitation of the indigenous labor of foreign, colonized countries abroad.

Ironically enough, you're unwittingly *backing* *my* line about rentier-type assets being an economic *drain*, by acknowledging that interest *has* to paid, from somewhere (government debt today), on these non-commodity-productive assets.

My points stands, that this ballooning-government-debt phenomena is indicative of the capitalist system's *crisis*, since it can't adequately service its own internal claims to increased gains, as from rentier-type capital appreciations (interest payments), without appealing to government / public funds, for financial bailouts.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Okay, as I just noted, the capitalist variable of 'market price' has to account for *both* value-increase (economic *growth*), *and* for relative supply-and-demand / market *speculation* as well.



Truth To Power wrote:
Value increase does not depend on economic growth, just the supply and demand for that item.



Yes, value increase *has to* come from economic growth (GDP), otherwise it's *fictitious*.

This is why we can't include *debt* as being economic growth, because it, too, is *fictitious*, until it's paid off. And economic growth can only come from economic *productivity*, which is equity-capital-based and labor-exploiting.

Think of this way -- if the government prints more money it's actually issuing more *debt*, correct, because the overall economic productivity of that country hasn't increased in one day to match the extra face-values printed (consider the U.S., or Venezuela or Lebanon, etc.).

Likewise, if an asset appreciates in nominal value, there hasn't been any *additional productivity* in the economy to match that appreciation in nominal value -- once cashed-out the extra cash has to come out of the economy, but nothing new has been *produced* for the economy that matches the increase in nominal value.

Yes, it's a change in the empirical balance of supply-and-demand, but where is the actual *cash* supposed to come from? You're *sidestepping* this economic dynamic.


Truth To Power wrote:
It means the high bidder gets secure, exclusive tenure (like a leasehold tenure) by paying the market rental value to the community (i.e., the public treasury, through the land administration office) for depriving everyone else of the land; in addition, each resident citizen, whether direct landholder or tenant, would get a modest equal exemption for the land parcel they live on sufficient to ensure they can access economic opportunity for free.



Okay, here's the unclear part -- are there private property owners of land, or not? In the past you seemed to indicate a government single-administration landlord, with only leasing of land being available to the markets, but here you're mentioning a 'direct landholder'. Can you clarify?


ckaihatsu wrote:
From what I can see you're just upholding existing status quo conditions,



Truth To Power wrote:
No. The similarity is only superficial. The actual economic relationships are profoundly different.



Then why aren't you *explaining* / describing your position more clearly? You often just rely on a one-line *opinion*, or abstraction, like here. I would think that you would have an interest in thoroughly *communicating* the ideology of yours that you're trying to sell to others.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
and you haven't denied such.



Truth To Power wrote:
Yes, of course I have.



ckaihatsu wrote:
Your entire politics is a sham.



Truth To Power wrote:
I have explained in detail why it isn't.



ckaihatsu wrote:
You just keep repeating your subjective idiosyncratic line that upholds status quo conditions.



Truth To Power wrote:
Garbage.



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
At some point in history land *was not* a commodity -- it was *not* bought and sold.

So you may want to address *that* point in history -- who would someone 'pay' to own land when it wasn't previously owned



---


Truth To Power wrote:
All private land titles are based on forcible dispossession of all who would otherwise be at liberty to use the land. Usually government does that on behalf of private interests.



And what do you *think* of this reality? Why does your politics of choice *accept* this legacy of colonialism, imperialism, and forcible dispossession?

What would prevent your type of political administration from doing this kind of thing *again*, if you've accepted the practice of it from the past? Shouldn't a touted *better* politics attempt to *address* and *compensate-for* any socially transgressive land practices from the past?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
How did the *initial* owner obtain the land?



Truth To Power wrote:
By government-issued and -enforced privilege. In the USA, these are called, "land patents."



So your expressed politics is supposedly *against* land privilege, but you're accepting of this past government-issued and -enforced privilege over land that was used by *indigenous* peoples.

*This* is why I say that you're a hypocrite and that your politics are hardly different from the status-quo. You should realize that your *credibility* ('political capital') is suffering as a result of this internal contradiction in the politics that you advocate, 'geoism'. You really can't guarantee that a future land-grab wouldn't happen, under your type of political administration.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Well *I* blame *both* factions of capital, both rentier and equity, because *both* factions lay claim to the worker's labor value, through leasing land (housing),



Truth To Power wrote:
Housing is not land and land is not housing. Housing is produced by labor. Land is not.



What did I *just* say -- ?

*Both* factions of capital are to blame -- rentier capital for extracting interest and rent (and for non-productive appreciations in value), and equity capital for exploiting and expropriating labor value.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
for rent payments from wages (rentier capital), *and* through the economic *exploitation* of the worker's labor power, by the employer (equity capital).



Truth To Power wrote:
<sigh> The employer/factory owner leaves the worker better off than he would otherwise be if the employer did not exist. The landowner leaves the worker worse off. How do you prevent yourself from knowing such self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality?



The employer/factory owner is not running a *charity*, which is how you're characterizing it. The employer/factory owner buys the labor commodity at a *low* price, the cost of wages paid to the workers, and *sells* the product of that labor (goods and/or services) at a *higher* price, in the markets, to realize a *profit*.

You're trying to make it sound as though the employer/factory owner is doing the worker a *favor*, when in fact it's just an economically *necessary* relationship between the equity capital owner, and the worker / employee -- it's just business, but an existentially *necessary* task, employment, for anyone who doesn't have capital of their own to leverage, for the material necessities of life and living.


---


Truth To Power wrote:
Huh?? Why would he get both the product of his labor and the wages he voluntarily agreed to exchange it for??



ckaihatsu wrote:
On the latter part, the 'voluntariness' that you assume *isn't* voluntariness at all -- the sale of labor power to the employer is *not* a level playing field, as you've acknowledged with your land-dispossession argument. The worker, as we all are, is *compelled* to secure the necessities of life and living, and, under capitalism, that must be done by earning a wage, by selling one's labor power (capacity to work). This social *desperation* for a wage is an *externality* to the employer, who acts, like you, as though it *is* a level playing field and that the exchange of labor for a wage is a socially *equal* one.



Truth To Power wrote:
But that's not the employer's fault! He's in the same boat as the worker: deprived by the landowner of his liberty to use the land unless he pays him for permission to do so! You are in effect arguing that a baker, by charging his customer the market price for a loaf of bread, is "exploiting" his customers -- despite the fact that he is feeding them -- because they have to have food to eat, and he has the food! Well, guess what? He created the food, just as the entrepreneur created the job opportunity for the worker. If the customer (or worker) doesn't like that opportunity, he can try to do better elsewhere.



I'm not trying to blame the *individual employer*, *directly* -- but I am pointing out that there's an empirically existing context of *coercion*, due to the lopsided material desperation of the worker to sell their labor power for a wage, which you're now nominally acknowledging (it's *not* a level playing field, economically).

This material desperation means that the worker's *free time*, to shop-around for optimal employment conditions, is objectively *limited* -- the labor market is *not* a level playing field for the employer and employee, respectively, or as leisurely as you make it out to be.

The employer is *financially vested* and has much more ease in 'shopping around' among prospective, economically competitive prospects in the labor market, for any given unfilled work position, than does the prospective employee, among potential employers, due to this objective time constraint, based on the pressing material need for the necessities of life and living (commodities) in our modern world.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
The Marxist noting of the expropriation of the worker's labor product (goods and/or services) isn't an argument for the worker to keep both wages and product,



Truth To Power wrote:
Then it is nothing but dishonest propaganda.



Why are you so blithely disparaging and dismissive, without making any argument against what I'm posting?

If we have to do this the *hard* way -- and it looks like we do -- then I'm simply going to ask appropriate follow-up questions to *all* of your opinionating statements, since you're not providing any reasoning or argumentation for your blithe dismissiveness, name-calling, and even insults.

How is what I said 'dishonest propaganda'?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
The Marxist noting of the expropriation of the worker's labor product (goods and/or services) isn't an argument for the worker to keep both wages and product, as some kind of alleged economic reform *within* capitalism -- it's a noting of fact to urge and agitate for workers to control *all* production that they do, since it's the workers who are an integral part of the actual production process, who work on the machines, who *know* how to work the machines, and who produce the final goods and services. Private ownership of social production has to first be *overthrown* so that private interests no longer dictate what gets produced, and for who.



Truth To Power wrote:
It's not a fact, as I have proved to you repeatedly. It's a bald lie.



No, you *haven't* proven that my factual recitations are lies -- you've even nominally acknowledged that there's no level playing field in the economic relationship between employer and employee.

Because of the mutually antagonistic economic interests over the revenue from the sale of commodities, between the employer and employee -- the slices of the pie -- the working class of the world has no good, thorough interests in mere *reforms*. The workers *do* have a sound interest in *controlling* the production process, on the best industrial practices, collectively, as a class -- this is *revolutionary*, meaning that the existing ruling class of capitalists needs to be *overthrown* and *dispossessed* of the means of mass industrial production ('production goods'), so that labor is no longer exploited and expropriated by the capitalist private bureaucracies / corporations, and by any and all private interests for aggrandizement.


Truth To Power wrote:
But who were incapable of doing any of that without the entrepreneur to employ them and obtain all the other factors needed for production.



You already know that this social reality of capitalism is just a superstructural construct, or norm -- you've described this for the instance of land ownership:


Truth To Power wrote:
By government-issued and -enforced privilege. In the USA, these are called, "land patents."



So, likewise, to address your point, the only reason the entrepreneur / capitalist benefits so disproportionately from their economic activity, compared to other roles in the capitalist bureaucracy, is due to pre-existing *capital ownership*, and to the government-enforced privilege of this capitalist type of *social organization*, based on the state-violence-enforced norm of private property ownership.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Private ownership of social production has to first be *overthrown* so that private interests no longer dictate what gets produced, and for who.



Truth To Power wrote:
Huh?? On what basis do you incorrectly imagine private entrepreneurs' production decisions are made, but to create the greatest possible increase in consumable value at the lowest input cost?? All they are thinking about is the "private interests" of all the consumers they hope will buy their products! Just who do you think consumers are if not the public, hmmmmmmm?



No, you're mistaken -- capitalists' decisions are made on the basis of increasing *shareholder value*. What *you're* thinking of is the location-centric managerial training / ethos of 'customer service'.

Sure, I'll readily agree that capitalism has, on the whole, drastically increased material productivity and the availability of life-necessary commodities to workers / consumers, but, in modern-industrial times like these, that's *beside* the point -- what matters is *how* industrial-scale technologies are controlled, and wielded, and for whose interests.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
By 'producer' you mean 'private owner', and you're saying that the private owner *owns* the product even though it's a 'product of labor'.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, I'm saying the private owner owns the product because it is a product of labor: his labor.



This is incorrect, because the private owner / equity capital owner / manager only inputs *minimally* to the overall commodity-productive process. At *most* it's a matter of managerial-type decision-making, and even this function is often outsourced by ownership itself.

What the owner and/or manager adds to the enterprise / business / entity is not *labor* as much as it's *managerial decision-making and social organization*. While important, ownership and management is *not productive* of the final commodity that is sold, for revenue, wages, and profit. It's the steering of the ship rather than the straining at the oars from dozens of laborers below the deck.

Therefore that's why I recommend viewing the entrepreneur / capitalist's role as being basically like any other in the private capitalist bureaucracy of the corporation -- it's a white-collar position at the service of ownership, and is *not* commodity-productive itself.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
The owner did not do the work that procured the product,



Truth To Power wrote:
Yes, he most certainly did. He made the decisions and arranged, coordinated, and paid for all the factors that were needed to bring the product into existence, including but certainly not limited to whatever workers' labor might have been involved.



So capital ownership and management of the business, basically, which is what I just outlined.

Go ahead and pick *any* commodity as an example and let's see if private capital ownership inputted any work effort to produce the final product / commodity. (Fruit? No, no picking done by ownership. Transportation? No, no driving done by ownership. Education? No, no teaching done by ownership. Etc.)


---


Truth To Power wrote:
The producer owns it. When one picks -- i.e., extracts -- naturally growing fruit, it is no longer a natural resource but a product of labor.



Truth To Power wrote:
Huh? What nonsense. Products of labor are no longer natural resources. As soon as a physical material is extracted from nature by labor, it is no longer a natural resource but a product of labor, and thus rightly owned by its producer. You know this.



ckaihatsu wrote:
But under capitalism it's the *owner* who has bought the commodity (land, etc.) from the previous owner or government, and has paid for the human labor power to make it a usable, saleable product, and so deprives the worker of the *product* of his or her labor. The *laborer* does not walk-away with the product, it's the *owner* that does, contrary to what you're indicating.



Truth To Power wrote:
I have stated the fact that the producer gets ownership because he made the decisions and arranged, coordinated and paid for all the factors that made the product exist rather than not exist.



ckaihatsu wrote:
By 'producer' you mean 'private owner', and you're saying that the private owner *owns* the product even though it's a 'product of labor'. The owner did not do the work that procured the product, like fruit, from nature, yet it's the owner who gets to keep and sell the product of labor, for just the cost of a wage.

Also, ownership is *not* individualized or atomized, as you're suggesting -- the bourgeoisie is mostly class-conscious and socially *organizes* according to its class interest, typified in the functioning of its state apparatus such as laws, enforcement, judgments, fines, proscriptions, incarceration, and death penalties. And military attacks and warfare against geostrategic rivals.



Truth To Power wrote:
Nature doesn't pick fruit and hand it to you. Duh.



Duh -- *I'm* the one who originally stated that *all* natural resources have to be processed by *labor* before they can be used as saleable commodities. Even raw land, taken from indigenous populations through genocide by Western imperialist governments, has to at least be surveyed and its geographic parameters defined, by labor, so that it can be specified as a parcel and sold as a distinct commodity.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
yet it's the owner who gets to keep and sell the product of labor, for just the cost of a wage.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, that's objectively false, like all your other absurd and disingenuous Marxist nonsense. He paid workers wages, a landowner for land, probably a banker interest, and placed his own labor and resources at risk, all to bring the product into existence. The workers were only one factor; the owner brought together all the factors.



So you're actually *not contradicting* anything I said -- it's the *owner* who gets to keep and sell the product of labor, for just the cost of a wage.

Labor is a *commodity*, and it's bought low, and labor's products sold high, thereby making a profit for those with capital to invest.

I've already addressed the material function of ownership, above.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Also, ownership is *not* individualized or atomized, as you're suggesting -- the bourgeoisie is mostly class-conscious and socially *organizes* according to its class interest, typified in the functioning of its state apparatus such as laws, enforcement, judgments, fines, proscriptions, incarceration, and death penalties. And military attacks and warfare against geostrategic rivals.



Truth To Power wrote:
Class is based on ownership of privilege, not production. It is the privileged who organize according to their class interest, because they know the liberty and justice of the market are their enemy.



You're obliquely referring to *land* owners, who you think, combined, are the root of all evil within capitalism, for whatever paranoid conspiratorial beliefs you have about them. You describe them as an aristocracy, yet you've stated that you're not anti-aristocratic, which is basically a contradiction within your politics since it's historically been the aristocracy that has owned and controlled all relevant and important parcels of land.

You're taking land to be some kind of a-priori source of all subsequent capital value, when, in modern times, it's just another commodity, like anything else, though, being non-productive, is an *asset* and draws non-productive interest and rent payments.

The capitalist class is based on *both* types of capital ownership, both equity (commodity-productive) and rentier (non-commodity-productive). Those who own land, like all capitalists, use the markets, as for land, to do their business and to make their profits, though non-commodity-productively.


---


Truth To Power wrote:
Whoever has paid the appropriate party for it.



ckaihatsu wrote:
Then this is just more of the status-quo -- only those workers who *can afford* to buy ownership (of the firm they currently work for) can be the ones to enjoy fractional private ownership and partial control of a workers co-op. This isn't saying much -- it's like saying one can be an owner today if one has enough money for ownership.

In other words this isn't *political* -- it's only through the world's workers *overthrowing* all private ownership that society's production can be made *political*, the way voting for presidential candidates is today. Today we vote for one representative of the bourgeoisie or another, when democracy needs to extend to *economic* matters as well, throughout.

The bourgeois fetish with exchange values indicates its / your material-economic limits -- if it can't be quantified with exchange values / currency, then it's not deemed to be legitimate, regardless of the social facts of how production gets done under capitalism, namely the dispossession of the working class.



Truth To Power wrote:
No. In the current system the appropriate party is not paid.



Who's the 'appropriate party'?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
only those workers who *can afford* to buy ownership (of the firm they currently work for) can be the ones to enjoy fractional private ownership and partial control of a workers co-op. This isn't saying much -- it's like saying one can be an owner today if one has enough money for ownership.



Truth To Power wrote:
It's actually quite foolish -- typical Marxist idiocy, in fact -- for a worker to own shares in the firm he works for because it increases his risk: if the firm gets into difficulty, he loses his investment as well as his job.



Well, no Marxist would *advocate* this worker-owner co-op thing, for the reason you just stated. It tends to be more the anarchists, and the soft-left, who push this line, without addressing the critique of it (Who finances this large-scale change of ownership?).

Revolutionists like myself note that no one is going to finance a large-scale change of ownership (of co-ops) over to workers' control, so therefore *proletarian revolution* is empirically necessary, and productive assets need to be *seized* by the working class, collectively, without compensation to existing ownership, so as to get over this material hurdle.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
In other words this isn't *political*



Truth To Power wrote:
Wrong.



No, *you're* wrong -- this economic-only approach is endemic to an anarchist-type, localist treatment, where all potential / possible worker communes are supposed to each be *circumscribed*, presumably self-sufficient (even over the production of cars and computers), and can only barter laterally since all communes must adhere to this ideologically-driven 'flat-level' mode of social organization. (I'll note that exchange values *wouldn't* be abolished this way, and that they'd be *implicit* in any and all barter-type exchanges, laterally, from one commune to the next. Any commune could just *haggle* over offered quantities / exchanges, thereby making a market out of it even if no explicit currency is used.)


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
-- it's only through the world's workers *overthrowing* all private ownership that society's production can be made *political*, the way voting for presidential candidates is today.



Truth To Power wrote:
So, you want production to be as ineffective and unresponsive to the people as politics is?? Socialism will certainly deliver that -- good and hard.



Well, it's a rough analogy -- I mean to impart that the world needs *economic democracy*, since it certainly isn't that way today. Your pessimistic assumption is also *misplaced*, since you continue to mean revisionist, so-called 'socialism-in-one-country', or Stalinism, when you use the term 'socialism'.

Collectivized production needs to be *worldwide*, without regard to capitalist-nationalist economic interests, and fully done by the workers themselves, overthrowing all private ownership claims.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Today we vote for one representative of the bourgeoisie or another, when democracy needs to extend to *economic* matters as well, throughout.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, it does not, because economics is based on consent, not force.



You're flip-flopping yet-again, since in this same post you said:


Truth To Power wrote:
All private land titles are based on forcible dispossession of all who would otherwise be at liberty to use the land. Usually government does that on behalf of private interests.



(You haven't *denounced* this historical practice of land-procurement.)


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
The bourgeois fetish with exchange values indicates its / your material-economic limits -- if it can't be quantified with exchange values / currency, then it's not deemed to be legitimate, regardless of the social facts of how production gets done under capitalism, namely the dispossession of the working class.



Truth To Power wrote:
Marxist tripe.



In other words, I'm describing capitalist balance-sheet 'externalities'. You described one of them yourself:


Truth To Power wrote:
But that's [worker's desperation for a wage] [is] not the employer's fault!



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Exchange-value fetishism -- those who can *afford* to buy, can buy. (I'll keep this sentence handy for copying-and-pasting, for further segments.)



Truth To Power wrote:
Go ahead: it's a perfect example of cheap but meaningless Marxist propaganda.



Thanks -- your characterization aside, here it is again:


ckaihatsu wrote:
Exchange-value fetishism -- those who can *afford* to buy, can buy. (I'll keep this sentence handy for copying-and-pasting, for further segments.)



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You're just dramatizing and making it sound like humanity's social woes boil-down to the hierarchical gradient of commodity pricing, particularly for land.



Truth To Power wrote:
That's not remotely similar to what I said.



Okay, then you may want to rephrase and do better at *describing* what you *do* mean.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You're proving that you have to resort to subjective *moralizing*



Truth To Power wrote:
Morality is not subjective.



Yes, it is -- there are *all kinds* of disagreements over morality and social functioning among the various brands of religion out there, for example. Also, *countries* disagree on social morality, as do the classes. Since society / civilization is currently elitist, how is the favored, high-social-status demographic group decided-on, and benefitted with selection / favoritism by the prevailing governing apparatus in any given country?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
to confer a *qualitative* valuation over the initial capitalist procurement of natural resources, like land ('rightful' and 'wrongful').



Truth To Power wrote:
Depriving others of what they would otherwise have without making just compensation is wrongful. I don't know if there is any way to state that fact so clearly or simply that you would be able to find a willingness to know it.



The reason I keep parsing your ideological statements is because your entire political line is *not internally consistent*. If you're so concerned with land-grabs then why are you silent on the *initial* land-grab, the one that nationalized and commodified land away from the indigenous peoples all over the world, while fomenting genocide to do it?

I would think that your land-centric politics would want to at least *address*, and/or moralize over this *initial* land-grab, perhaps as an introduction to your entire politics of preventing land-grabs going-forward, as a matter of political administration.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
I'll counterpose that the social ills you list are in fact based in the *class division* of society:



Truth To Power wrote:
That's what I said: class based on privilege.



But your own idiosyncratic meaning of 'privilege' is 'land ownership only', and doesn't extend any further than this single-issue concern, not to mention your inconsistencies and expressed hypocrisy around just this *one* political issue.

The nominal class division that you *do* recognize is in reality *not* based on land ownership, or not, but rather is based on *total capital ownership*, which you *don't* acknowledge as being a problem, one that *defines* the class divide, and income inequality.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
This is a very ill-conceived notion, because 'the community of those whom he excludes from the land' could very well be the *entire world's population*, depending on whether or not they should want to access the land that the owner paid for and considers to be his or her 'private property'.



Truth To Power wrote:
<sigh> No, it only includes the citizens of the polity that administers possession and use of that land, OBVIOUSLY, because that's what the state is: the sovereign authority over a specific area of land.



Oh, okay, so in practice you're a *localist*.

Which polity, exactly, should be fortunate enough to receive the implementation of your particular geoist treatment, and which polities *shouldn't*? How would this decision be made?

How would inter-polity relations be done, and what if there are *disputes* among these polities? How would such differences of political philosophy be handled by these polities, and to what extents could any or all of these polities morally / justifiably use *violence* and *warfare* to resolve these policy differences?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
With this model of yours the landowner would have to pay for nominal ownership while also having to pay-off any random individual who makes any arbitrary claim to access that land for free but is denied.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, the community would do it for him, by providing every resident citizen with an equal individual exemption from the land rent obligation, as I already explained. So everyone would already have free, secure, exclusive tenure on enough of the available advantageous land of their choice to have access to economic opportunity. So the only rival prospective users the landholder need concern himself with would be those willing to pay more for the land than he was.



Great -- let's start there.

How would your politics handle the situation of a private landholder (apparently with control / ownership of that land below the level of a polity-wide state-type single landlord administration of all land) who receives a higher bid for a choice parcel of land that he or she owns?

And what happened to your touted 'land reform' politics? If there is to be private landholder ownership of parcels of land, then how is your proposal any different from the way things are today, the status-quo?

Who would win-out for any given parcel of land, a 'community member', or a high-bidder?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Once word got out everyone would probably just willfully roam anywhere and everywhere, collecting compounding payments for a repeated legal maneuver and a little traveling.



Truth To Power wrote:
Silliness with no basis in fact, logic, economics, or anything I said.



Don't blame *me* for any lack of clarity as to what your politics is -- you've had *ample* time, over dozens of exchanged posts, to spell-out whatever it is that you're proposing, and to make clarifications on any misunderstandings I may have of it. There's only two people talking here, you and me. I assure you I'm not intentionally trying to *misunderstand* or *misinterpret* where you're coming from, but I will continue to point out *inconsistencies* and *lack of explanations* on your part wherever I see them.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
I suppose this is your own version of some kind of pre-industrial social "revolution" while upholding the legality of *equity* capital, and all non-land *rentier* capital, today, here in *industrial* society.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, it's just some absurd nonsense you made up. And I am opposed to all forms of privilege, not just landowning.



Then you should *define* what you mean by 'privilege' -- as I currently understand it you use 'privilege' to mean 'land ownership' *only*, and possibly all natural monopolies and intellectual property, but you've just stated that your politics would continue to retain 'private landholders', so I don't see exactly what (land) reforms you're proposing, if any, and you're certainly not specifying what *else* you may mean, even though it's *your* politics that you're quasi-describing.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
In other words, 'Land for sale.'



Truth To Power wrote:
No, improvements. The land would not be worth anything.



If 'the land would not be worth anything', then why would there be 'private landholders'?

What would be the point?

Would there be a governmental single-administration landlord of all land, to only be leased-out, as you've previously described, or wouldn't there be?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Why would a landowner be paying rent, and why would they limit themselves to not-making improvements on their own land, if they so wanted?



Truth To Power wrote:
He would effectively be leasing the land, not owning it, and the prohibition on improvements when he no longer wants to pay the market rent would be imposed by the land administration office.



So by 'landowner' you mean land-*leaser*. (I'm waiting to hear back whether there is still private land property under your geoist politics, or not.)

Can you see that this term, 'landowner' is semantically *misleading*, as is your past use of the term 'producer' to mean 'private owner' (when in fact the owner does *not* add to the actual physical production of the resulting commodity, for sale).

Would people be able to lease government-controlled land *without* paying any rent, as you've indicated previously?

What sort of 'improvements' / modifications could any given leasee make to the land they're leasing? Would they be under any obligation to 'undo' those modifications once they give up their lease?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You're describing some kind of a TV *game show*, right? Is that it? When's the board game version coming out?



Truth To Power wrote:
Puerile.



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
And, non-mockingly, how does the 'community' establish its 'authority'?



Truth To Power wrote:
Democratically.



ckaihatsu wrote:
How is membership determined?



Truth To Power wrote:
That's up to the democratically responsible authorities.



Can you get into any *specifics* here -- how would a person legitimately claim 'membership' in any given polity? Could a person be a 'member' of *several* polities at once?

*How* would a member become part of an 'authority' group? How would disputes *within* this 'authority' group be resolved? What would the criteria be for a decision that's said to come from the *authority group* as a whole?


---


Truth To Power wrote:
Huh?? Of course it doesn't. Rights are conserved in consensual transactions. The worker's legal entitlement to be PAID the agreed sum for the product of his labor is precisely how his right to own it is recognized, secured, and enforced. That is why wage labor is as different from slavery as consensual sex is from rape.



ckaihatsu wrote:
But being paid a wage is economically *exploitative* --



Truth To Power wrote:
Only if the worker has been deprived of his rights without just compensation.



So you're confirming that your geoist ideology would prefer to see all material transactions in terms of 'economics' only, and that any social or political concerns along the way would be treated as 'externalities', and ignored, regarding the economic / material inputs and outputs.

If I were, for example, to tell you that the labor market is *not* a level playing field, regarding the involvement of employers and employees, respectively, and that labor is treated as a *commodity* by the employer, what would your (economics) response be to that?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
you're content to allow private land ownership to exploit workers who, out of material necessity, *must* find jobs and wages.



Truth To Power wrote:
<sigh> Do bakers also "exploit" their customers, who must get something to eat "out of material necessity" or starve to death? Or are they the ones who actually save their customers from starving to death?



Neither -- it's all *market* dynamics, right? As long as we trust in the capitalist market everything will turn out all right, correct? We can ignore genocide, land grabs, colonization, exploitation, world wars, holocausts, famines, starvation, and imperialist warfare, all because 'the market knows best'. Is that it?

You're content to recommend an ill-defined land reform of some sort, at least 200 years too late, and you implicitly defend nationalist political actions as long as they serve to keep the markets functioning, right?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Here's this corroborating excerpt again:




The labour put forth toward production is embodied in the goods and exploitation occurs when someone purchases a good, with their revenue or wages, for an amount unequal to the total labour he or she has put forth.[6] This labour performed by a population over a certain time period is equal to the labour embodied to the goods that make up the net national product (NNP). The NNP is then parceled out to the members of the population in some way and this is what creates the two groups, or agents, involved in the exchange of goods: exploiters and exploited.[5]

The exploiters are the agents able to command goods, with revenue from their wages, that are embodied with more labour than the exploiters themselves have put forth- based on the exploitative social relations of capitalist production. These agents often have class status and ownership of productive assets that aid the optimization of exploitation. The exploiters would typically be the bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the exploited are those who receive less than the average product he or she produces. If workers receive an amount equivalent to their average product, there is no revenue left over and therefore these workers cannot enjoy the fruits of their own labours and the difference between what is made and what that can purchase cannot be justified by redistribution according to need.[7] The exploited are the proletariat.[1]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitat ... ist_theory



Truth To Power wrote:
It's just as wrong again.



Okay, *how* is it 'wrong'?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You're not even upholding your own morality -- you're being a hypocrite -- because you're saying that land cannot rightly be anyone's property, yet you're clearly *condoning* the buying and selling of land as a commodity. Here's from earlier in your post:



Truth To Power wrote:
Like most Marxists, you apparently cannot tell the difference between describing a phenomenon and condoning or advocating it.



Okay, then help me out -- why don't you *describe* what you mean so that there's no possibility for me to conceivably get it wrong? You're remarkably tight-lipped for someone who's proposing a set of politics to others, for public consideration.

Allow *me* to clarify -- would there be private-property-type 'landholder' *owners*, or not? Would there be a state-type single landlord administration over all land, or not?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
but the owner will say 'I paid someone for the land itself, and I paid the laborer to landscape it, so I get to keep the full value of what the landscaped land is worth on the market.'



Truth To Power wrote:
That is a more plausible claim, and certainly entitles him to the market value of the landscaping. But he paid the wrong party for the land, and thus can't rightly claim to own it, much less its current publicly created value. At most, he may claim the purchase price he paid for it, and I would advocate such compensation to existing landholders as a transition measure when vacating their titles.



ckaihatsu wrote:
Moralizing



Truth To Power wrote:
No, just realism. If we just vacate land titles without any compensation, the title owners are going to resist, probably violently. We saw it happen with slavery, and it wasn't pretty. IMO the most just and appropriate compensation, which would leave the least room for objection from either side, is the acquisition cost of the land.



So then, given this, who's going to *fund you*?

You're running into the same *financing* problem that *all other* localists are facing, like that for worker co-ops. At this point you're basically proposing a *social club*, since it's going to be limited to a single polity at a time and it's unclear how your *club* is going to get the funds to get the change in ownership that you're looking for.

Would you have preferred that there *not* have been a U.S. Civil War, that got rid of chattel slavery? What would an *alternative* to the U.S. Civil War conceivably have been, according to you?

And, isn't it better to use *industrial machinery* for manufacturing, instead of *human slaves*?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Status quo.



Truth To Power wrote:
False.



How is it 'false'?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You're leaving out the material value that *labor* has added to the land, as with landscaping.



Truth To Power wrote:
Whatever value labor on that location has added to the location is improvement value, not land value. Landscaping is a fixed improvement, not a natural resource.



You're just kicking-the-can-down-the-road on this one, because *what incentive* would any leasee -- under your geoist line -- have for making improvements to the land when there's *no guarantee* that these modifications will be saleable to the next party when the lease expires and the leasee must vacate the land?

Your politics is starting to sound downright *imperial*, and not even as advanced as the bourgeois market, given your proffered policy approach regarding land modifications done by leasees. You're effectively saying that if modifications done can't be *separated* and sold-off, separately from the leased land, then the person who provided the equity capital for those modifications will effectively *forfeit* that capital to the state.

You really don't see any problems with this administrative policy of yours?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Well, here we are on a *political discussion board* so if you can't describe your vision so that others like myself can understand it, then what hope do you have left?



Truth To Power wrote:
I have certainly described my ideas clearly and simply enough for you and every competent English user over the age of 12 to understand. You just choose not to understand by refusing to know the relevant indisputable facts of objective physical reality.



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
I never said that air and water are the same thing.



Truth To Power wrote:
You have made the logically equivalent economic claim that landowning and factory owning are the same thing.



You should provide some kind of *context*, because, in the abstract, both landowning and factory (equity) ownership *are* effectively the same because they both exploit the working class.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You're simply upholding the specific type of rentier capital known as 'land'.



Truth To Power wrote:
No. I'm pointing out that land is not rightly considered "capital" -- or even private property -- at all, and describing and advocating a way to make equal access to the economic opportunity it offers for all citizens compatible with its optimal productive use. Which not coincidentally also establishes justice and efficiency in land tenure and public revenue arrangements.



You mean that, within the scope of your proposed 'geoist' politics, you would not treat land as private property.

What's outstandingly *unclear*, though, is what the administrative *rules* would be for the *use* of this governmentally leased land -- what would prevent someone from leasing a small parcel of land, for a short-term, and then sucking out all possible petroleum and minerals, to sell to a neighboring locality / polity?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Products of labor, like landscaping (to increase land asset value) or the installation of pipes (to increase the value of real estate, like housing), is *expropriated* by private ownership for the cost of a wage. That's the *commodification* of labor, by ownership.



Truth To Power wrote:
Payment of agreed wages for labor is self-evidently not expropriation.



If there's no expropriation / exploitation of labor going on within capitalism, then why can't the workers control the *revenue* from the sales of the products that they themselves *produced*?

You keep trying to make it sound even-handed between employers and employees, but it's the *employers* / bosses who control the revenue, even though they did no work that physically added to the finished product / commodity.


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show
Image



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
So this is a community-supported 'commons', correct? Locally-collective public administration of land, in exchange for fees / rent to this administration.



Truth To Power wrote:
Right: repayment of the land subsidy to the government and community that provide it.



Okay, since you confirmed my understanding, please clarify what the administrative rules regarding leased land would potentially be -- to what extents could the leasee *use* and/or physically *modify* the land itself while leasing it?

Could someone be a member of *several* communities at the same time? What would *prevent* someone from being a member of several communities at the same time?

Would anyone be allowed to lease the land *for free*, without payment? Why would *anyone* pay rent to the polity administration if they found out that someone leased land *without* paying any rent? If no one paid rent, how would the administration get enough funds to properly administrate? How would the administration *enforce* any given policy over land usage?


Truth To Power wrote:
Only the one paying the market rent for exclusive tenure would get it. But everyone would get up to a certain uniform amount of rent exempted for the land they lived on. IOW, every resident citizen would get free, secure, exclusive tenure on enough of the available advantageous land of their choice to have access to economic opportunity, and those who wanted to exclude others from more than that would pay the community for the additional amount they deprived everyone else of.



Okay, this is clearer -- so your land reform would be similar to *reservations* for the Native Americans -- what would *prevent* the consolidation of shitty land, into reservations, for those who just wanted the *free* leases? Would those displaced onto shitty lands *really* be advantaged enough to adequately compete in the labor market with those who could afford to lease *better* land?

How would a geoist-type polity administration resolve competing claims over a single, disputed parcel of land? How would this administration *uphold* and *enforce* that administrative decision?

Would today's wealthiest capital owners continue to have disproportionate clout over which land of their choice they get to lease, based on their ability to pay higher rents?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
- How is community membership determined? (What are the criteria for someone to be a 'member'?)



Truth To Power wrote:
Whatever the community decides through its democratically accountable institutions, same as now.



Oh, okay, so then, true to being a localist, there would be no guarantee of *consistency* of civil society from one polity to the next. People could commit financial crimes in one locality and then just flee to another one, and there wouldn't necessarily be any inter-locality treaties to cover and address such actions.

Here's more from that book, which is relevant here:



Today we take it for granted that a country consists of geographically continuous territory within fixed boundaries. We expect it to have a single administrative structure, with a single set of taxes (sometimes with local variations) and without customs barriers between its different areas. We assume it demands the loyalty of its ‘citizens’, in return granting certain rights, however limited. Being ‘stateless’ is a fate which people do their utmost to avoid. We also assume there exists a national language (or sometimes a set of languages) which both rulers and ruled speak.

The monarchies of medieval Europe had few of these features. They were hodgepodge territories which cut across linguistic divisions between peoples and across geographical obstacles. The emperor of the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ usually ran Bohemia as a kingdom and claimed sovereignty over various territories in the German speaking lands and in parts of Italy. The kings of England engaged in a series of wars to try to assert a claim over a large chunk of French-speaking territory. The kings of France sought to hold territory across the Alps in what is today Italy but had little control over eastern France (part of the rival Dukedom of Burgundy), south west France and Normandy (ruled by the English kings), or Brittany. There could be wholesale movement of state boundaries, as marriages and inheritance gave kings sovereignty over distant lands or war robbed them of local territories. There was rarely a single, uniform administrative structure within a state. Usually it would be made up of principalities, duchies, baronies and independent boroughs, with their own rulers, their own courts, their own local laws, their own tax structure, their own customs posts and their own armed men—so that the allegiance each owned to the monarch was often only nominal and could be forgotten if a rival monarch made a better offer. Monarchs often did not speak the languages of the people they ruled, and official documents and legal statutes were rarely in the tongue of those subject to their laws.

This began to change in important parts of Europe towards the end of the 15th century, just as Spain was reaching out to conquer Latin America. Charles VII and Louis XI in France, Henry VII and Henry VIII in England, and the joint monarchs Isabel and Ferdinand in Spain all succeeded in enhancing their own power at the expense of the great feudal lords and in imposing some sort of state-wide order within what are today’s national boundaries.



Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 172-173



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
- How does the 'community' initially procure land that is to be brought into the geoist / local-collectivist public administration?



Truth To Power wrote:
It's all the land under its jurisdiction. All that changes is how its exclusive private possession and use is administered.



Is a polity's local land territory *private*, or is it *public*? If it's *private*, what would prevent the private owner from personally changing the rules of land leasing at any given moment, on a whim? And if it's public, how would this polity initially acquire the territory in the first place, from the existing private land property owners? Even if that were possible, wouldn't it just be a 'club' then? Wouldn't the partial funders want some kind of political *privileges* for their monetary contributions to the club's land acquisition?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
What if going market prices for land are too prohibitive for a community to purchase it in any significant quantities?



Truth To Power wrote:
Purchase is not necessary, just a change in the rules governing tenure. But if the land reform is undertaken without monetary reform, it might be advisable to buy some parcels at their acquisition price from owners who don't want them, to prevent deflation as bank lending for land purchases dried up.



So your club is admittedly dependent on land purchases that are necessarily already for sale on the market, and which may not all together be contiguous.

Why would the club's land-acquisition funders put up their money for acquisitions for land for the club without expecting anything in return? Wouldn't they at least demand special, elitist club 'privileges' in return for their monetary investments in the club?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
- What benefits / advantages / privileges would a monetary donor receive for being a partial funder of a land purchase that goes into this community's geoist collective public administration?



Truth To Power wrote:
That kind of arrangement is not contemplated because all the land under the local government's jurisdiction is automatically included.



Then please refer to my previous question -- what *incentive* would any prospective funder of this club's land acquisitions *have* for considering a monetary investment in the club if their funding is just going to be pooled into the public 'jurisdiction' without any reciprocity to the funder(s)?

And, since you used the term 'jurisdiction', what kind of rules *enforcement* would there be within any given polity jurisdiction? How would inter-polity political relations take place? Any vision on that?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
- How are leasees determined for the *most* advantageous pieces of land?



Truth To Power wrote:
The high bidder.



ckaihatsu wrote:
- How *much* land can a leasee claim at one time?



Truth To Power wrote:
However much they pay for.



ckaihatsu wrote:
- What if multiple parties all want the same parcel of land at the same time? How would a determination be made as to which party gains access to that land for the time of the lease, over all other prospective leasees?



Truth To Power wrote:
Bidding in the market.



ckaihatsu wrote:
- How is *authority* conferred within this community, and what are the requirements for authority-level membership?



Truth To Power wrote:
Authority comes from democratic consent.



ckaihatsu wrote:
- What kinds of *enforcement* is the authority prescribed to use? Would they be able to use physical violence against transgressors? Incarceration? Death penalties?



Truth To Power wrote:
The enforcement is simply exclusivity of tenure: those who pay for it are legally entitled to exclude everyone else, by police intervention if necessary. Incarceration is not necessary unless transgressors offer violent resistance.



ckaihatsu wrote:
Anything that can be bought-and-sold is a *commodity* and has exchange-value, under capitalism.



Truth To Power wrote:
I'm not advocating capitalism.



Everything that you *just described* is *exactly* capitalism.

This is why I say that your politics is barely different from the status-quo -- your 'land reform' would be politically and financially dependent on *charity*.

I'll *correct* myself -- your politics are not even *near* Stalinist-type nation-building. You're marketing a *private club*.
#15087233
ckaihatsu wrote:No, this is more of your typical rhetorical hyperbole -- you'd rather make grandiose pronouncements than deal with the *issues* at hand.

As that much more accurately describes your "contributions," and QatzelOk and Beren, apparently the only other people reading this thread, seem to agree with me, I won't be wasting any more of my limited remaining time on earth with them.
#15087396
ckaihatsu wrote:
You're running into the same *financing* problem that *all other* localists are facing, like that for worker co-ops. At this point you're basically proposing a *social club*, since it's going to be limited to a single polity at a time and it's unclear how your *club* is going to get the funds to get the change in ownership that you're looking for.


ckaihatsu wrote:
Is a polity's local land territory *private*, or is it *public*? If it's *private*, what would prevent the private owner from personally changing the rules of land leasing at any given moment, on a whim? And if it's public, how would this polity initially acquire the territory in the first place, from the existing private land property owners? Even if that were possible, wouldn't it just be a 'club' then? Wouldn't the partial funders want some kind of political *privileges* for their monetary contributions to the club's land acquisition?


ckaihatsu wrote:
So your club is admittedly dependent on land purchases that are necessarily already for sale on the market, and which may not all together be contiguous.


ckaihatsu wrote:
I'll *correct* myself -- your politics are not even *near* Stalinist-type nation-building. You're marketing a *private club*.



After some reflection I think your proposal better-resembles that of a *franchise*, than anything else.
#15090853
Truth To Power wrote:As that much more accurately describes your "contributions," and QatzelOk and Beren, apparently the only other people reading this thread, seem to agree with me, I won't be wasting any more of my limited remaining time on earth with them.

Sorry, but I must intervene here to apologize and offer a correction of my original rant.

I originally criticized a few posters in this thread for long, run-on posts that aren't interesting or readable to other people reading the thread. I mentioned that I found them too long and boring, with too much detail.

Then, I realized that this thread is posted in "Socialism" where an accurate (and perhaps tedious) precision of Marxist theory (and word-by-word text analysis) is actually appropriate. My bad. This is the right place for this kind of posting. 8)

But I would caution a few posters to be more careful to attack-unpack the IDEAS that other posters contribute, and not just THE WORDS they use. We all use different vocabularies (depending on our education and background), and it's not very interesting for other thread-readers to sift through pages and pages of grammar and syntax bitching.

The IDEAS are the beating heart of this and any other thread.
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