[maz]

I know everyone has seen this but it still needs to be discussed.



The person who captured this footage should win a Pulitzer

[ckaihatsu]

Yeah, I realized I was being imprecise, so I added the 'CLARIFICATION' post.

Here's more from that Wikipedia entry about 'financialization':

Again, the financial sector is *non-productive* -- it does not produce any commodities.

Is that why Marxists want to nationalize the financial sector? Because it produces nothing?

Well, more than 'nationalize', really -- you're thinking of Sanders-type socialism.

Finance can be *eliminated*, because it's non-productive (is all just *overhead*, producing zero commodities). A world of workers in collective control of social production would *not need* finance since all decisions would be based on *use values*, with no need for exchange values whatsoever.


---

You're not being clear -- do you mean the Declining Rate of Profit data that I shared previously -- ?




https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/ ... d-piketty/

I'm referring to stock market returns. Buybacks are a red herring, designed to distract from the issue at hand: If the profit rate is falling, why hasn't it shown in stock market returns for the last century?

You already *mentioned* this -- the stock market does *not* necessarily reflect real *growth* (GDP growth). It can run on a Ponzi-scheme-type of accumulation, or a tulip-bulbs-type speculative bubble, or from government funding.


---

Of course they [innovations] won't be adapted immediately. But they will, eventually, if they are invented and profitable.

Well, again, that's not *automatic* -- look at the Great Depression, for example, when consumer buying power was *sharply* reduced. (Etc.)

That was simply cyclical variation - a particularly bad one, indeed, as a result of many factors (including of the regulatory kind), but it's still not a trend.

It's a trend *against* technological innovation. (And did you *really* just make a supply-side argument here just now?) (grin)


---

Well, I can't *stop* you from doing it -- I provided sample data for it, and there's always Wikipedia as well....

---

Regarding the measurement used for 'profit', I just remembered that such is implied / included in my 'Labor & Capital' diagram that I posted last time. Here it is again:


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show

No, I want a clear definition from your own formulae.

For instance, one definition of profits I would use:

Profits = p*f(K,L)-wL-rK

Where p = the good's price; f(K,L) = the production function (in terms of labor and capital); L = labor; K = capital; w = real wage a.k.a. the price of labor; r = real interest rate, a.k.a. the price of capital.

You're not realizing that I have *no interest* in doing this -- to a Marxist 'profits' is the employer's legal *stealing* of surplus labor value, so there's no point in being mathematically precise about it. It's a *political* thing.


---

You *could* address the empirical data, in the graph, that I've now provided *twice*.

I already did

No, you're talking about the *theory*, in general. I provided specific empirical *data*, in a graph, that you're sidestepping.

by quoting the following:

Various efforts have been conducted since the 1970s to empirically examine the TRPF. Studies supporting or arguing in favour of it include those by Michael Roberts,[75][76] Minqi Li,[77] John Bradford,[78] and Deenpankar Basu (2012).[79] Studies critical or contradicting the TRPF include those by Themistoklis Kalogerakos,[80] Marcelo Resende,[81] Òscar Jordà[82] and Simcha Barkai.[83] Other studies, such as those by Basu (2013),[84] Elveren[85] Thomas Weiß[86] and Ivan Trofimov,[87] report mixed results or argue that the answer is not yet certain due to conflicting findings and issues with appropriately measuring the TRPF.


The empirical evidence is far from clear, differences arise because the rate of profit is not necessarily easy to define. Hence why I'm asking you to state your definition. First a conceptual one, but we will sooner or later turn into the operative definitions used to calculate the data in that plot.

I'll pass -- now what do you think about that world declining rate of profit as shown in the graph?


---

Well, look at Lebanon, for a recent example -- it suffered *hyperinflation* due to U.S. sanctions on its economics, so creditors weren't willing to lend it money to bolster its currency, and it turned to the IMF.

What good is its *stock market* when the 'real economy' itself was no longer functioning in any meaningful way?

Lebanon has had high inflation, but is not suffering from hyperinflation (at least for now). Now, Venezuela on the other hand...

Either way, this doesn't have all that much to do with the stock market.

Exactly. Now you're getting it.


---

You're *still* thinking conventionally and in a *state*-based way. Again, there's *no* standing government, or government / state of any kind. There are no financial institutions, or businesses, or companies, because there's *no need* for such in communism. No exchange values / finance / money / currency / exchanges.

Centralization would *only* happen over productive means in common (factories / workplaces), by combined consent of the respective active liberated laborers, per-item, for generalization over any given item, like face masks.

Here's a sample scenario -- let's say that face masks are being produced by liberated laborers in the factories roughly in the vicinity of Locality 'A'. It just so happens that liberated laborers near Locality 'B' are *also* making face masks at several factories around *their* area. Journalists around that industry are publishing a blog, and they pick up on what's happening with the Locality B area and that area's production of face masks. The active face-mask liberated-workers around Locality A read the industry press and they come across a series of articles on the face-mask industry around Locality B, and some of them decide as a group to take the initiative to reach out to Locality-B-area face-mask liberated laborers, and they suggest that, given the numbers reported, the face mask factories of *both* areas could see an increase in productivity by as much as 28% if they combine their respective supply chains to feed into *both* geographic areas, for face masks, realizing economies-of-scale as a result. (Factories near Locality A could concentrate just on the elastic string, while factories near Locality B could focus on just producing the fabric material, with final assembly at both locations, making the process more materially efficient, and faster.)

I see. But what you are saying would (among other things) require a constant effort for transparency, publishing production statistics of all kinds, etc. Am I correct?

Yes, exactly -- there would be no private interests any more, so there would be no private interests in *information*. (Etc.) (There would also be no standing centralized *state*.)


---

There *can't* be any such 'stealing' because no one *owns* anything, not even the machinery / factories, or the products of them. No one receives anything directly in exchange for their efforts to produce for the common good, so no one can get 'paid' more or less than anyone else, in a strictly 'pure' (*zero*-labor-credits) communist gift economy.

I introduce the vehicle of labor credits into the baseline communist gift economy so as to cover the possibility that *no one* would want to do certain labor roles that are socially necessary but are too hazardous / difficult / distasteful. (I've previously used the example of manually cleaning out clogged sewers in a municipal sewer system, like that in Mexico City.)

To sum up, people *could* simply take whatever they want, whenever they want, without money, and they wouldn't have to resort to using force, because everything produced post-capitalism would be *free-access* and *directly distributed*. Worst case would be that factories would keep a certain *surplus* -- maybe 20% -- of whatever it is that they produce, on-hand, according to the liberated-workers there, for any such 'walk-ups' (which would be outside of the formal daily individual self-ranked 'demands' lists, for mass-aggregation). Over time and experience this percentage could be tailored to each particular workplace. (In alignment with the overall description of 'a landscape of piles of stuff'.)

They would only be introduced as a form of compensatory earnings? If so, why would anyone work (generally)? After all, I can get free stuff and simply "work" as a hobby.

No, no direct rewards-for-labor / 'compensatory earnings', because everyone always has full access to 'the commons', meaning whatever anyone else produces for the common good, for their own *personal* consumption (no private accumulations). Sure, people could just get free stuff and simply "work" as a hobby -- this is the society of 'rock stars' that I mentioned earlier. *Or*, this population of 'rock stars' might realize that everyone's been spending too much time and electricity *on stage*, and that food supplies are getting critically low, so maybe *some*, at least, should shift their attentions and efforts to saving-the-world, with food production, and possibly fully-automated, so that they can get back to being rock stars.

Also recall this list:

Craft. Social consciousness. Wanting to see the end product. Experimentation. Wanting to provide for others. Escaping boredom. Pushing the envelope. Personal goals. Wanting to be self-sufficient. Social networking. Mixing work with pleasure. Being productive. Being creative. Access to social leadership. Wanting to be a part of collective self-determination. Stewardship over the earth's resources. Wanting consumption of a very specific kind of product. Hobbyism.

viewtopic.php?p=15088612#p15088612

---

Labor credits would be allocated to *proposals* and *projects*, per plan, and such plans / proposals / projects would *compete*, and would be open to inclusion on individuals' daily self-ranked 'demands' lists (as socio-political 'demands', either abstractly, or specificly, by plan).

Perhaps one active proposal would allocate more labor credits to 'elastic string makers', while another active proposal in circulation would allocate more labor credits to 'face mask material makers'. In both cases the 'funding' of labor credits would necessarily have to come from liberated laborers who *have* such potential funding, in part, *in hand*, necessarily from their *own* past liberated-labor efforts.

*Localities* could also issue their own *debt-based* labor credits, if necesssary, per proposal, but it would be public knowledge that such labor credits (by serial number, and batch) are *debt-based*, until enough people from that locality then go out and do work elsewhere to bring back sufficient amounts of labor credits to *neutralize* the debt that they issued as a locality. That information would be public knowledge as well, and the labor credits themselves would continue to circulate, regardless. (Think of the labor credits as 'IOUs', for actual liberated-labor done, that are debt-based until covered / neutralized by labor credits earned and brought-back to that locality that issued the debt-based labor credits, to cancel the debt. All labor credits *always* continue to circulate, regardless.)


communist supply & demand -- Model of Material Factors

Spoiler: show

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... ost2889338

Who would allocate labor credits? That is, who would decide how many credits would each community get?

It's not state planning -- I described how labor credits would come into existence, and how they would be valuated and function as an integral part of social planning.

If there was a widespread social consciousness for needing a *brand-new* factory for making face masks, to make more face masks, that would be reflected in high 'face mask' positioning (top-ten) on people's daily individual 'demands' ranking lists, for that locality, or across *many* localities.

Someone might come up with a 'Plan A' for such, saying that 'x' number of liberated-labor work hours would be needed for work role 'a', with an 'a-sub-m' *multiplier* for that 'a' work role, and a 'b' work role, with 'b-sub-m' *multiplier* of labor credits per hour for that 'b' work role, etc. Someone else might come up with a 'Plan B', someone else with a 'Plan C', and so on -- these plans / proposals / projects / policy packages would all be *competing* for attention and high daily rankings by individuals. (See the 'communist supply & demand' model, above.)

Each plan would have to actually *round-up* the numbers of labor credits specified in the plan, from among those who have them (necessarily from their own past labor efforts) -- this equates to pledged *economic support* from past active liberated-laborers, who *want* to economically support 'Plan A', or 'Plan B', or 'Plan C', etc., or even some *combination* of them, apportioning labor credits as they like, since it's *their* labor credits to apportion. (Labor credits are *never* exchanged for actual goods and services because such would be *commodity production*, and not communism. Produced goods and services would be *pre-planned* for specific and/or general consumption, according to whatever plan, as just described. See the section in the labor credits FAQ about checks-and-balances.)


---

It depends on the *scale* on the endeavor. Work roles could be for the common good, in concert with others, as on industrial machinery of mass production.

*Or* efforts could be at *any other* scale, conceivably, even person-to-person, as with handicrafts. Which work roles would be considered to be a *social priority*, for *socially necessary* production, would be a socio-political thing.

I've entertained the thought-experiment of 'a post-capitalist society of rock stars', meaning that maybe, post-capitalism, everyone would just want to work on their own music, and on performing -- many socially necessary work roles, like food production, would go untendered in that case, and society would have to adjust somehow, perhaps by *automating* all food production so that everyone could get back to playing guitar, or whatever.

Honestly, it sounds a bit like wishful thinking. After all, who would produce those capital goods? Who would work in their maintenance? Seems like a boring job, so I am not sure if enough people would be willing to do that as a hobby.

There *are no* 'capital goods', because there is *no* capital / exchange values / finance / money / currency / exchanges.

Instead of relying on the market allocation of finance, all production / social production would be done on a *planning* basis, according to pre-planned proposals / projects / policy packages, that *compete* with each other if they all pertain to the same goals, and cover the same production goods (means of mass industrial production), and resources / infrastructure.

No finance means no having to *look-after* finance, as you're noting -- existing productive assets like factories would have to be *scheduled* for use, anyway, so various competing plans could compete to *schedule* their particular production needs, for any given factory, or equipment, for any given calendar time.


---

Well, you're taking this rather *morally*, in a *moralistic* way, which is your prerogative, of course, but in the *socio-political* context, it realistically means that everyone in such a society would have to collectively set their own 'standards', or social norms.

Well, you introduced that concept of "taking responsibility for your failures" into this discussion, didn't you?

You're *still* speaking abstractly, without a context -- do you mean this *philosophically*, or within *capitalism*, or for the context of my 'labor credits' model framework?

If it's within my communist-gift-economy-based 'labor credits' model, then here's the section that speaks to this issue of 'responsibility', or *accountability*, for any given selected policy package:

Infrastructure / overhead

communist administration -- Distinct from the general political culture each project or production run will include a provision for an associated administrative component as an integral part of its total policy package -- a selected policy's proponents will be politically responsible for overseeing its implementation according to the policy's provisions

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... -Questions

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The USSR was a real example of *Stalinism*. No one before Stalin came to power *wanted* Stalin to come to power -- it was a historical *accident*, basically.

Of course I share the criticism of Stalinism in that it's *not* workers-of-the-world socialism.

I see. Well, the thing is, the USSR was not the only country where Sovietism was implemented.

Okay, and your *point* here is *what*, exactly?


---

No, I've never been an anarchist -- it's too *localist*, but, that said, I *am* in favor of *bottom-up* organizing of social productivity, post-capitalism, as seen in this diagram of mine (also a *critique* of anarchism):


Emergent Central Planning

Spoiler: show

For the proletarian revolution I'm a *vanguardist*, and I have a treatment of that here:

I see.

---

You're really *exaggerating* violent civilian crime, as though such *needs* policing, when crime rates are at historic *lows* -- again, the greater societal threat right now comes from *killer cops*, moreso than *killer civilians*, especially since the killer cops are state-sanctioned and mostly are not treated as criminals, unfortunately.

This is where *deterrence* is called-for, because in *any other* situation there would be changes made to *deter* such overreactions on the part of professionals.

Crime is at historic lows indeed, and yet police killings still represent a minor part of all crime. Of course it's important to consider whatever effects would abolishing the police have. Crime rates are low but not zero.

This is basically a *civil rights* issue -- if some school was physically preventing students from attending, then there would have to be a *greater authority* to intervene, to uphold those students' *civil rights* to attend school.

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


Likewise, if some various police departments are a standing, *legal* threat to people's safety, there should be a *federal* treatment for this problem so that a *uniform* policy of getting killer cops off the streets, by defunding all police departments, can be put into place.


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No, I can't agree, because my political perspective is that government is a *plutocracy* and primarily -- almost *exclusively* -- serves the interests of the wealthy. I think a particular anarchist saying is appropriate here:

The bourgeois establishment favors the *status quo* -- as you do -- or even *rolling back* social progress, as with civil rights, working conditions, gender roles, etc.

So I'm guessing US society today must be the same as that in 1790. After all, voting doesn't change anything.

Right?

You can use the killer cops / police brutality issue as a defining example. It's existed during *several* presidential administrations, despite the various kinds of voting that put those respective presidents in office.


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You're failing to see that *class* is paramount, and you're too caught-up in the *procedurals* of intra-national political rituals.


[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

Spoiler: show

This view of society stopped being useful quite a long time ago. Class reductionism cannot explain events such as WWI properly (why did the working classes in many countries preferred to kill each other in trench warfare rather than coordinating a Revolution? This is a question Marxists have never been able to address).

On *that* particular event, you can look into the dynamics of *false consciousness*, and *ruling class propaganda* / mass media.

'Class reductionism' is better described as 'class'. (See the diagram for a sorting of societal constants / components according to relative *scale*, yielding *class* as paramount in determinism.)

On your *historical* political question I've used the following treatment in the past:

The popularity of the war was not necessarily as deeply engrained among the mass of people as the enthusiastic demonstrations and singing of patriotic songs suggested. Historian David Blackbourn writes of Germany, ‘The patriotic demonstrations of late July involved relatively small groups, with students and young salesmen prominent. Working class areas like the Ruhr were quiet… Older observers noted a contrast with the enthusiasm of 1870’.41 Shlyapnikov, a revolutionary worker in St Petersburg, contrasted the enthusiasm for the war among the middle and upper classes with the more subdued mood in the factories:

The St Petersburg press did much to kindle popular chauvinism. They skilfully blew up ‘German’ atrocities against Russian women and old men remaining in Germany. But even this hostile atmosphere did not drive workers to an excess of nationalism.42

Ralph Fox told how, as a young worker in London, it was possible to organise weekly anti-war meetings in Finsbury Park.43

Trotsky explained the mood more as a reaction to people’s normal humdrum lives than any deep-seated nationalism:

The people whose lives, day in day out, pass in the monotony of hopelessness are many; they are the mainstay of modern society. The alarm of mobilisation breaks into their lives like a promise; the familiar and long-hated is overthrown, and the new and unusual reigns in its place. Changes still more incredible are in store for them in the future. For better or worse? For better, of course—what can seem worse than ‘normal’ conditions?… War affects everybody, and those who are oppressed and deceived by life consequently feel that they are on an equal footing with the rich and powerful.44


Different social classes are never fully segregated from one another. The mood of those at the top influences those just below them, and the mood of those in the middle influences those at the bottom. The determination of Europe’s ruling classes to go to war with one another was transmitted in a thousand ways to the middle classes and sections of the working class—through patriotic speeches and newspaper stories about ‘enemy atrocities’, through marching bands and popular songs, and through declarations by novelists, poets and philosophers. The German historian Meinecke described the outbreak of the war as filling him with ‘the profoundest joy’. The radical French novelist Anatole France recalled (with a sense of shame) making ‘little speeches to the soldiers’. The philosopher Bergson described the war as one of ‘civilisation against barbarism’. The English poet Rupert Brooke wrote that ‘nobleness walks in our ways again’,45 and the novelist H G Wells enthused about a ‘war to end war’. Schoolteachers repeated such statements to adolescent boys, urging them to go off and fight. Anyone who dissented was guilty of ‘stabbing our boys in the back’.

There were still wide groups of workers who could be expected to resist such pressures. Socialist movements and groups of trade union militants were accustomed to lies in the press and attacks on their principles. Many had flocked to rallies of thousands in London, Paris and Berlin on the eve of the war to hear their leaders call for peace. But once war broke out, those same leaders rushed to support it. The German and Austrian Social Democrats, the British Labour Party and TUC, the French Socialist Guesde and the syndicalist Jouhaux, the veteran Russian Marxist Plekhanov and the veteran Russian anarchist Kropotkin—all were united in their willingness to back their rulers against others. Those who had doubts—for instance, Kautsky and Haase in Germany, and Keir Hardie in Britain—kept quiet in order to preserve ‘party unity’ and to avoid being accused of betraying ‘the nation’. ‘A nation at war must be united,’ wrote Hardie. ‘The boys who have gone forth to fight their country’s battles must not be disheartened by any discordant note at home’.46

Decades of abiding by the rules of capitalist democracy were having their effect. Pursuit of reform within the structures of the capitalist state led to identification with that state in its military conflicts. In the warring countries only the Serbian Socialists and the Russian Bolsheviks came out in unremitting hostility to the war. The Italian Socialists also opposed the war when Italy finally allied itself with Britain, France and Russia. But their attitude owed much to a split within the Italian ruing class over which side to support—and the left wing editor of the party’s daily paper, a certain Benito Mussolini, split away to wage virulently pro-war agitation.

The belief in a quick victory proved completely misplaced. In the first months of the war the German army did manage to race through Belgium and northern France to within 50 miles of Paris, and the Russian army advanced far into German East Prussia. But both were then forced back. The Germans retreated before the French and British armies at the Battle of the Marne to form a defensive line of trenches some 30 miles back. The Russians suffered heavy losses at the Battle of Tannenberg and were driven from German territory. The ‘war of manoeuvre’ (of quick-moving armies) became a war of attrition, with each side suffering enormous losses as it attempted to break through the strongly entrenched positions of the other side. The expected four months of hostilities turned into more than four years, and spread from the eastern and western fronts to Turkey, Mesopotamia, the Italian-Austrian border and northern Greece.

Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 405-408

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I would say "stagnation" is only a partial description of what has been going on in capitalist economies. It depends on what has stagnated and where.

The USSR did indeed suffer from stagnation in many dimensions, including how its Government worked and its societal progress. But it also suffered from economic stagnation from the 1970s onwards, indeed, its Government's stagnation was one of the causes of the general economic stagnation of the time.

Okay, I won't simply *ignore* this point, as you do for so many of the points *I* make -- here's the proof:

The value of all consumer goods manufactured in 1972 in retail prices was about 118 billion rubles ($530 billion).[54] The Era of Stagnation in the mid-1970s was triggered by the Nixon Shock and aggravated by the war in Afghanistan in 1979 and led to a period of economic standstill between 1979 and 1985. Soviet military buildup at the expense of domestic development kept the Soviet Union's GDP at the same level during the first half of the 1980s.[55] The Soviet planned economy was not structured to respond adequately to the demands of the complex modern economy it had helped to forge. The massive quantities of goods produced often did not meet the needs or tastes of consumers.[56]

The volume of decisions facing planners in Moscow became overwhelming. The cumbersome procedures for bureaucratic administration foreclosed the free communication and flexible response required at the enterprise level for dealing with worker alienation, innovation, customers, and suppliers. During 1975–1985, corruption and data fiddling became common practice among bureaucracy to report satisfied targets and quotas thus entrenching the crisis. At the same time, the effects of the central planning were progressively distorted due to the rapid growth of the second economy in the Soviet Union.[24]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_o ... %80%931990

This is not in disagreement with what I said.

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I'm not predicting *shit* -- such would be *presumptuous* on my part. What I *have* done is to put forward a comprehensive communist-gift-economy-based *model framework*, which has its own internal logic and functioning.

Your position, though, is based on analyzing historical *Stalinism*, and I'm certainly not for such bureaucratic-elitism. I'm for workers-of-the-world *socialism*.

No, your proposal has your predicted internal logic and functioning. You don't know for sure if that's how would things pan out.

Of course I don't -- I'm not Crystal-Ball-History-Determiner-Guy, and neither are you.


---

And the data comes from *police reports*, I'd estimate.

Not necessarily. They can also come from other sources, such as eyewitness testimony and court cases.

Okay.


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Don't you think that even *one* death at the hands of the police, by overreaction, is one death too many -- ?

Sure...

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The government has the means to *shut that shit down*.

...But even a single death at the hands of a common criminal is also one too many, and that justifies the very existence of the police.

No, I think the priority is for the *government* to not be killing people in the name of the people. It would set a good example.


---

Because the life of a person taken by a cop is a life that could have been *saved*.

And the life taken by a criminal couldn't? Should people be armed 24/7 to deter people from killing them?

That's of a *secondary* concern, when the *primary* concern is to stop *state-sanctioned* killings by its own cops, and paid for with public funds.


---

Why are you so stubborn against getting cops off the streets so that there *are no* cops to commit killings? Human lives are more important than *property*.

Since when did I say cops exclusively protect property? Pretty disingenuous implication here.

Again, you have to examine your political *priorities* -- what good is policing if the police *themselves* are committing gratuitous killings in the name of 'preventing' crime? That's downright *Orwellian*.


---

I'm open to any observations you may have as to why *civilians* kill other people.

I can think of many reasons, actually.

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But don't you see that you're *not suggesting* any realistic way to *address* this 'serious problem' -- ? At most, over dozens and dozens of posts, you might *acknowledge* that this is a 'serious problem', and then you go back to your main political line of defending the status quo. Your words ('serious problem') have *no weight* to them, whatsoever.

Look at all the state resources that are dedicated to chasing 'bad guys', internationally, with full military spending and shitloads of killing gear. Maybe the 'bad guys' are *here*, on the streets, in blue uniforms. Shouldn't we send the military in after *them*?

I already provided proposals that would help deal with unjustified police killings. It ironically happens to be what BLM was demanding back in 2015.

What I don't understand is why would one simply not care at all if, for every police killing that is prevented, one or more civilian-on-civilian killings are committed.

Ultimately it's the private-interest *competition* that has to be outmoded, because *that's* what's at the heart of 'crime', as in the drug trade, or international bourgeois warfare, for that matter. The world is overripe for workers-of-the-world socialism, overthrowing capitalism.


---

Whatever -- you're splitting hairs again, since business is obviously *suckling on the government teat*, regarding the difficult-and-expensive 'basic research'.

What makes you believe basic research is necessarily more expensive than applied research and development?

That's beside the point -- you don't want to acknowledge that, when it comes to innovation / technological development, the U.S. is as Stalinist / crony-capitalist as any international rival.


---

I don't see the '60%' figure anywhere in the text you've excerpted here.

That's because the number is in Figure 4-4.

No, it's not.


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So you're *admitting* that the government does the expensive, difficult R&D, at public expense, for the sake of private-sector profit-making.

But most research is not basic science, and it isn't necessarily easy either.

You're not *addressing* what I've said -- you're going off on a tangent, and talking about something else, the private sector.

I think I did: Sure, basic research is not directly profitable and hence the private sector will tend to do less of it than ideal. But basic research does not represent most R&D activity, at all.

So, to summarize, basic research is not directly profitable so such is paid-for and administered by the U.S. government, using public funds, so that the private sector can *make profits* from such publicly funded R&D.


---

To *summarize*, I'd call the U.S. system of R&D to be a *bourgeois technocracy*, since government R&D is funded by bureaucratic planning, and done by academia, to directly benefit companies' profits.

(In other words it's *not* free-market competition among self-funded companies, competing over market share, because none of them would even *exist* if they had to do *their own* basic research, in market-redundant ways, instead of getting that for *free* from the government, meaning *public funds*.)

Sure, and the Government also gets a return for that.

---

Again you're showing that you don't understand the cause-and-effect here -- the *cause* of protests and riots is the government toleration of killer cops. If you're so 'annoyed' by protests and riots then *get rid of* the killings at the hands of cops. You've been provided with policy *alternatives* for enacting this.

It's akin to my saying that you can prevent headaches if you don't hit your head against the wall.

No, you won't have protests or riots over police killings.

Um, have you seen the *topic of this thread* -- ?

What do you think the 'violent protests in Portland' are *about* -- ?

About their pet topic for the day. But actually I don't think police killings are the only reason for the protests.

Yes, they are -- the protests and riots are about killer cops, or killings by police.


---

*Or*, the *new* asshole gets into power and the *issues* remain unaddressed, so the protestors / rioters have cause to do the same thing that they're doing *now*.

Or even if the issue of police killings was addressed, they will find some other issue to justify rioting.

I have one: the *military* killings abroad, as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.


---

I could just as easily say that issues like defunding the police are better dealt by the Federal Government, as are festering issues like COVID-19, unemployment, hazardous workplace conditions due to COVID-19, rent, etc.

States can and do deal with all those issues. Of course, the Federal Government can participate too, at least in terms of providing funding.

That's what this is all about -- that the federal government should be able to address *domestic* issues, with funding.


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You're more interested in legalistic aspects of government *procedure* than with the unaddressed social *issues* themselves.

That happens to be important in practice, so yes, I do care about procedure.

Well, that's *internal* to the bourgeois government bureaucracy -- what *people* care about is the *results*, so however you do it *internally* needs to produce the correct, desired *results*.


---

You're being *evasive* because the governmental *hierarchy* *could* undertake a *broad-based push* to stop killer cops, and their racist killings, if it wanted to.

There are limits to that under the US Constitution.

What the Federal Government can do is set minimum standards and deny funding to States and localities who don't comply. But policing, ultimately, is a local affair.

You're saying the *wrong* thing -- protestors don't need to hear the run-around.

Indeed, in fact they don't care about that. Again, deal with policing and they will find some other issue to justify protests. I can imagine rent being one.

Rent is a good one, since rent is real, as well. If the country winds up being in the same situation in January as it's in now, what do you think the government should do about rent, at *that* point?

Also, the government *isn't* dealing with policing, meaning killer cops.


---

Abolishing the police means that we can save 1000+ lives each and every year. That's worth it.

No, you don't know that. You don't know how many lives would be lost as a result of increased crime resulting from having no police around.

But I *do* know what's going on *now*, and 1000+ deaths domestically as a result of 'collateral damage' is *not* acceptable.


---

Yes, you did -- you call it 'crime' and you specifically cited 'home invasions' and 'vehicle thefts', by my recollection.

Those are examples, not an exhaustive list of crimes. I could have mentioned rape and murder too.

---

No, I never *called for* vigilantism. You're *assuming* that all hell will break loose if the police are disbanded, which is your *own* preferred nightmarish vision.

And yet that's what happened during these riots as police was overloaded. A couple of examples:

You're making my point *for* me -- this is all about 'turf', or private-interests over land and materials. In this case it's just smaller-scale.


---

Duh. If workers-of-the-world socialism was historically successful then we'd be living in it *today*.

Exactly, so what can you infer from that? Why would I believe you now?

You take yourself too seriously -- I'm not *asking* you to 'believe' me. I'm not *selling* you anything. I'm saying that historical Stalinism is *not* workers-of-the-world socialism.


---

Why don't you first personally undertake to make sure that all police departments *are* shut down, and then I'll enjoy the vigilantes, okay -- ?

No, I don't want vigilantes so I'll pass.

Okay, so how are you going to address getting killer cops off the streets, as in shutting down *all* police departments, so as to prevent 1000+ killings per year.


---

Well, you're just being *pessimistic*, to imagine that proletarian revolution will automatically fatalistically devolve into capitalist-type clientelism, or patronage.

I'm simply pointing out that clientelism/patronage isn't about ideology. Of course socialism can devolve into that... Why not?

Patronage / clientelism derives from *private property relations*, because everything that's useful is *commodified* / privatized, under capitalism, with patronage-type social relations being one possibility.

The key word is 'devolve' -- sure, if international militaristic pressure is pressed *against* a post-capitalist-type of new political economy, as against the soviets and the Bolshevik Revolution, then socialist-type social relations *can't* be sustained, and such will *devolve*, as we saw historically, into Stalinism / nationalist consolidation, and patronage / clientelism.

But -- as with all current government social services -- if the *funding* / economic integrity is allowed, then such collectivist-oriented directions *can* be successful, in the absence of artificial impediments from *without*.

[ckaihatsu]

I just did a cost-benefit analysis on my computer, and it turns out that we could save over a *thousand* lives per year if we get the cops off the streets so that they don't kill anyone in the "line of duty", versus your speculative imaginings.

Your “thousand lives a year saved” doesn’t take into account the explosion of deaths that would happen if we took all the cops off the street, both the victims of those criminals and the criminals killed by all their would-be victims that arm themselves seeking the protection the police no longer provide—the 2nd Amendment would rule.

Between *your* comments / speculations / concerns here, and wat0n's as well, I'm thinking that the situation *is* basically unsolvable unless we get society past capitalist competitive social relations, to *collectivize* all productive property -- workers-of-the-world socialism, in other words.

[maz]

[wat0n]

Well, more than 'nationalize', really -- you're thinking of Sanders-type socialism.

Finance can be *eliminated*, because it's non-productive (is all just *overhead*, producing zero commodities). A world of workers in collective control of social production would *not need* finance since all decisions would be based on *use values*, with no need for exchange values whatsoever.

V. I. Lenin
The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It

Nationalisation of the Banks
The banks, as we know, are centres of modern economic life, the principal nerve centres of the whole capitalist economic system. To talk about "regulating economic life" and yet evade the question of the nationalisation of the banks means either betraying the most profound ignorance or deceiving the "common people" by florid words and grandiloquent promises with the deliberate intention of not fulfilling these promises.

It is absurd to control and regulate deliveries of grain, or the production and distribution of goods generally, without controlling and regulating bank operations. It is like trying to snatch at odd kopeks and closing one’s eyes to millions of rubles. Banks nowadays are so closely and intimately bound up with trade (in grain and everything else) and with industry that without "laying hands" on the banks nothing of any value, nothing “revolutionary-democratic”, can be accomplished.

But perhaps for the state to "lay hands" on the banks is a very difficult and complicated operation? They usually try to scare philistines with this very idea—that is, the capitalists and their defenders try it, because it is to their advantage to do so.

In reality, however, nationalisation of the banks, which would not deprive any “owner” of a single kopek, presents absolutely no technical or cultural difficulties, and is being delayed exclusively because of the vile greed of an insignificant handful of rich people. If nationalisation of the banks is so often confused with the confiscation of private property, it is the bourgeois press, which has an interest in deceiving the public, that is to blame for this widespread confusion.

The ownership of the capital wielded by and concentrated in the banks is certified by printed and written certificates called shares, bonds, bills, receipts, etc. Not a single one of these certificates would be invalidated or altered if the banks were nationalised, i.e., if all the banks were amalgamated into a single state bank. Whoever owned fifteen rubles on a savings account would continue to be the owner of fifteen rubles after the nationalisation of the banks; and whoever had fifteen million rubles would continue after the nationalisation of the banks to have fifteen million rubles in the form of shares, bonds, bills, commercial certificates and so on.

What, then, is the significance of nationalisation of the banks?

It is that no effective control of any kind over the individual banks and their operations is possible (even if commercial secrecy, etc., were abolished) because it is impossible to keep track of the extremely complex, involved and wily tricks that are used in drawing up balance sheets. founding fictitious enterprises and subsidiaries, enlisting the services of figureheads, and so on, and so forth. Only the amalgamation of all banks into one, which in itself would imply no change whatever in respect of ownership. and which, we repeat, would not deprive any owner of a single kopek, would make it possible to exercise real control—provided, of course, all the other measures indicated above were carried out. Only by nationalising the banks can the state put itself in a position to know where and how, whence and when, millions and billions of rubles flow. And only control over the banks, over the centre, over the pivot and chief mechanism of capitalist circulation, would make it possible to organise real and not fictitious control over all economic life, over the production and distribution of staple goods, and organise that "regulation of economic life" which otherwise is inevitably doomed to remain a ministerial phrase designed to fool the common people. Only control over banking operations, provided they were concentrated in a single state bank, would make it possible, if certain other easily-practicable measures were adopted, to organise the effective collection of income tax in such a way as to prevent the concealment of property and incomes; for at present the income tax is very largely a fiction.

Nationalisation of the banks has only to be decreed and it would be carried out by the directors and employees themselves. No special machinery, no special preparatory steps on the part of the state would be required, for this is a measure that can be effected by a single decree, "at a single stroke". It was made economically feasible by capitalism itself once it had developed to the stage of bills, shares, bonds and so on. All that is required is to unify accountancy. And if the revolutionary-democratic government were to decide that immediately, by telegraph, meetings of managers and employees should be called in every city, and conferences in every region and in the country as a whole, for the immediate amalgamation of all banks into a single state bank, this reform would be carried out in a few weeks. Of course, it would be the managers and the higher bank officials who would offer resistance, who would try to deceive the state, delay matters, and so on, for these gentlemen would lose their highly remunerative posts and the opportunity of performing highly profitable fraudulent operations. That is the heart of the matter. But there is not the slightest technical difficulty in the way of the amalgamation of the banks; and if the state power were revolutionary not only in word (i.e., if it did not fear to do away with inertia and routine), if it were democratic not only in word (i.e., if it acted in the interests of the majority of the people and not of a handful of rich men), it would be enough to decree confiscation of property and imprisonment as the penalty for managers, board members and big shareholders for the slightest delay or for attempting to conceal documents and accounts. It would be enough, for example, to organise the poorer employees separately and to reward them for detecting fraud and delay on the part of the rich for nationalisation of the banks to be effected as smoothly and rapidly as can be.

The advantages accruing to the whole people from nationalisation of the banks—not to the workers especially (for the workers have little to do with banks) but to the mass of peasants and small industrialists—would be enormous. The saving in labour would be gigantic, and, assuming that the state would retain the former number of bank employees, nationalisation would be a highly important step towards making the use of the banks universal, towards increasing the number of their branches, putting their operations within easier reach, etc., etc. The availability of credit on easy terms for the small owners, for the peasants, would increase immensely. As to the state, it would for the first time be in a position first to review all the chief monetary operations, which would be unconcealed, then to control them, then to regulate economic life, and finally to obtain millions and billions for major state transactions, without paying the capitalist gentlemen sky-high “commissions” for their “services”. That is the reason—and the only reason—why all the capitalists, all the bourgeois professors, all the bourgeoisie, and all the Plekhanovs, Potresovs and Co., who serve them, are prepared to fight tooth and nail against nationalisation of the banks and invent thousands of excuses to prevent the adoption of this very easy and very pressing measure, although even from the standpoint of the “defence” of the country, i.e., from the military standpoint, this measure would provide a gigantic advantage and would tremendously enhance the "military might" of the country.

The following objection might be raised: why do such advanced states as Germany and the U.S.A. "regulate economic life" so magnificently without even thinking of nationalising the banks?

Because, we reply, both these states are not merely capitalist, but also imperialist states, although one of them is a monarchy and the other a republic. As such, they carry out the reforms they need by reactionary-bureaucratic methods, whereas we are speaking here of revolutionary-democratic methods.

This "little difference" is of major importance. In most cases it is "not the custom" to think of it. The term "revolutionary democracy" has become with us (especially among the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks) almost a conventional phrase, like the expression "thank God", which is also used by people who are not so ignorant as to believe in God; or like the expression "honourable citizen", which is sometimes used even in addressing staff members of Dyen or Yedinstvo, although nearly everybody guesses that these newspapers have been founded and are maintained by the capitalists in the interests of the capitalists, and that there is therefore very little “honourable” about the pseudo-socialists contributing to these newspapers.

If we do not employ the phrase "revolutionary democracy" as a stereotyped ceremonial phrase, as a conventional epithet, but reflect on its meaning, we find that to be a democrat means reckoning in reality with the interests of the majority of the people and not the minority, and that to be a revolutionary means destroying everything harmful and obsolete in the most resolute and ruthless manner.

Neither in America nor in Germany, as far as we know, is any claim laid by either the government or the ruling classes to the name "revolutionary democrats", to which our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks lay claim (and which they prostitute).

In Germany there are only four very large private banks of national importance. In America there are only two. It is easier, more convenient, more profitable for the financial magnates of those banks to unite privately, surreptitiously, in a reactionary and not a revolutionary way, in a bureaucratic and not a democratic way, bribing government officials (this is the general rule both in America and in Germany), and preserving the private character of the banks in order to preserve secrecy of operations, to milk the state of millions upon millions in “super-profits”, and to make financial frauds possible.

Both America and Germany "regulate economic life" in such a way as to create conditions of war-time penal servitude for the workers (and partly for the peasants) and a paradise for the bankers and capitalists. Their regulation consists in “squeezing” the workers to the point of starvation, while the capitalists are guaranteed (surreptitiously, in a reactionary-bureaucratic fashion) profits higher than before the war.

Such a course is quite possible in republican-imperialist Russia too. Indeed, it is the course being followed not only by the Milyukovs and Shingaryovs, but also by Kerensky in partnership with Tereshchenko, Nekrasov, Bernatsky, Prokopovich and Co., who also uphold, in a reactionary-bureaucratic manner, the “inviolability” of the banks and their sacred right to fabulous profits. So let us better tell the truth, namely, that in republican Russia they want to regulate economic life in a reactionary-bureaucratic manner, but “often” find it difficult to do so owing to the existence of the “Soviets”, which Kornilov No. 1 did not manage to disband, but which Kornilov No. 2 will try to disband.

That would be the truth. And this simple if bitter truth is more useful for the enlightenment of the people than the honeyed lies about “our”, “great”, “revolutionary” democracy.

* *
*
Nationalisation of the banks would greatly facilitate the simultaneous nationalisation of the insurance business, i.e., the amalgamation of all the insurance companies into one, the centralisation of their operations, and state control over them. Here, too, congresses of insurance company employees could carry out this amalgamation immediately and without any great effort, provided a revolutionary-democratic government decreed this and ordered directors and big shareholders to effect the amalgamation without the slightest delay and held every one of them strictly accountable for it. The capitalists have invested hundreds of millions of rubles in the insurance business; the work is all done by the employees. The amalgamation of this business would lead to lower insurance premiums, would provide a host of facilities and conveniences for the insured and would make it possible to increase their number without increasing expenditure of effort and funds. Absolutely nothing but the inertia, routine and self-interest of a handful of holders of remunerative jobs are delaying this reform, which, among other things, would enhance the country’s defence potential by economising national labour and creating a number of highly important opportunities to "regulate economic life" not in word, but in deed.

Even Lenin seems to disagree

You already *mentioned* this -- the stock market does *not* necessarily reflect real *growth* (GDP growth). It can run on a Ponzi-scheme-type of accumulation, or a tulip-bulbs-type speculative bubble, or from government funding.

Not for 100+ years.

It's a trend *against* technological innovation. (And did you *really* just make a supply-side argument here just now?) (grin)

Yeah, I guess technology is the same as in the 1920s. There were plenty of trolls on the internet too

You're not realizing that I have *no interest* in doing this -- to a Marxist 'profits' is the employer's legal *stealing* of surplus labor value, so there's no point in being mathematically precise about it. It's a *political* thing.

So you have no idea, then. Maybe you could do your own reading about Marxian economics instead of coming up with economic proposals, don't you think?

No, you're talking about the *theory*, in general. I provided specific empirical *data*, in a graph, that you're sidestepping.

I'll pass -- now what do you think about that world declining rate of profit as shown in the graph?

The data must have been calculated using a formula. Since you posted the graph, you have the burden of providing it. Other papers show that such trend does not exist at all, we can go through those if you want.

Exactly. Now you're getting it.

No, I'm not. That was a non-sequitur: Lebanon's economic troubles don't say anything about whether there is truly a tendency of the rate of profit to fall given the evolution of asset prices.

Yes, exactly -- there would be no private interests any more, so there would be no private interests in *information*. (Etc.) (There would also be no standing centralized *state*.)

And then I assume you understand that effort is a lot harder than it seems, and requires some measure of centralization. At the very least, localities need to use the same definitions and methodology to compile those figures.

No, no direct rewards-for-labor / 'compensatory earnings', because everyone always has full access to 'the commons', meaning whatever anyone else produces for the common good, for their own *personal* consumption (no private accumulations). Sure, people could just get free stuff and simply "work" as a hobby -- this is the society of 'rock stars' that I mentioned earlier. *Or*, this population of 'rock stars' might realize that everyone's been spending too much time and electricity *on stage*, and that food supplies are getting critically low, so maybe *some*, at least, should shift their attentions and efforts to saving-the-world, with food production, and possibly fully-automated, so that they can get back to being rock stars.

Also recall this list:

What makes you believe that people would just try to grab as much food and other critical supplies for themselves or that localities where people don't work much may not try to raid localities where people do work?

It's not state planning -- I described how labor credits would come into existence, and how they would be valuated and function as an integral part of social planning.

No, I don't think you were clear about that. You also were not clear about how would those be enforced, as opposed to having localities raid each other for the spoils.

If there was a widespread social consciousness for needing a *brand-new* factory for making face masks, to make more face masks, that would be reflected in high 'face mask' positioning (top-ten) on people's daily individual 'demands' ranking lists, for that locality, or across *many* localities.

Someone might come up with a 'Plan A' for such, saying that 'x' number of liberated-labor work hours would be needed for work role 'a', with an 'a-sub-m' *multiplier* for that 'a' work role, and a 'b' work role, with 'b-sub-m' *multiplier* of labor credits per hour for that 'b' work role, etc. Someone else might come up with a 'Plan B', someone else with a 'Plan C', and so on -- these plans / proposals / projects / policy packages would all be *competing* for attention and high daily rankings by individuals. (See the 'communist supply & demand' model, above.)

Each plan would have to actually *round-up* the numbers of labor credits specified in the plan, from among those who have them (necessarily from their own past labor efforts) -- this equates to pledged *economic support* from past active liberated-laborers, who *want* to economically support 'Plan A', or 'Plan B', or 'Plan C', etc., or even some *combination* of them, apportioning labor credits as they like, since it's *their* labor credits to apportion. (Labor credits are *never* exchanged for actual goods and services because such would be *commodity production*, and not communism. Produced goods and services would be *pre-planned* for specific and/or general consumption, according to whatever plan, as just described. See the section in the labor credits FAQ about checks-and-balances.)

What would happen if such "social consciousness" did not arise? How and why would it arise in the first place?

There *are no* 'capital goods', because there is *no* capital / exchange values / finance / money / currency / exchanges.

Capital goods are simply goods used to produce other goods.

Instead of relying on the market allocation of finance, all production / social production would be done on a *planning* basis, according to pre-planned proposals / projects / policy packages, that *compete* with each other if they all pertain to the same goals, and cover the same production goods (means of mass industrial production), and resources / infrastructure.

No finance means no having to *look-after* finance, as you're noting -- existing productive assets like factories would have to be *scheduled* for use, anyway, so various competing plans could compete to *schedule* their particular production needs, for any given factory, or equipment, for any given calendar time.

Who would make new factories and maintain existing ones?

You're *still* speaking abstractly, without a context -- do you mean this *philosophically*, or within *capitalism*, or for the context of my 'labor credits' model framework?

If it's within my communist-gift-economy-based 'labor credits' model, then here's the section that speaks to this issue of 'responsibility', or *accountability*, for any given selected policy package:

How would that enforcement work in practice? Normally, States do that but you are saying there would be no State.

Okay, and your *point* here is *what*, exactly?

That it's not a "special case" of how these revolutions end.

This is basically a *civil rights* issue -- if some school was physically preventing students from attending, then there would have to be a *greater authority* to intervene, to uphold those students' *civil rights* to attend school.

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

Right, and that was one case where the local police lost control of the events, the State refused to properly enforce civil rights law and the Federal Government intervened using its own powers. This is hardly a case for abolishing the police.

Likewise, if some various police departments are a standing, *legal* threat to people's safety, there should be a *federal* treatment for this problem so that a *uniform* policy of getting killer cops off the streets, by defunding all police departments, can be put into place.

I don't recall schools were ever defunded by the Federal Government for refusing to enforce Brown v Board of Education. In fact my recalling is that most districts complied and school closures were mandated by the States as a form of protest.

Note too that having uniform standards is not the same as defunding or abolishing the police, at all. I already provided some examples of some uniform standards PDs could be expected to follow, under threats to reduce Federal funding to the States and localities that refuse to cooperate (which is exactly how the Feds enforce policy for that matter - in principle, States/localities could accept the loss of funding and refuse to accept it).

You can use the killer cops / police brutality issue as a defining example. It's existed during *several* presidential administrations, despite the various kinds of voting that put those respective presidents in office.

And yet even that has not been constant. There has been a decreasing trend since 2015, which itself has been going on for much longer.

On *that* particular event, you can look into the dynamics of *false consciousness*, and *ruling class propaganda* / mass media.

'Class reductionism' is better described as 'class'. (See the diagram for a sorting of societal constants / components according to relative *scale*, yielding *class* as paramount in determinism.)

On your *historical* political question I've used the following treatment in the past:

And yet those workers weren't all for launching the worldwide revolution either. Even worse, just because enthusiasm in 1914 was not as much as that in 1870, it doesn't mean it did not exist.

Of course I don't -- I'm not Crystal-Ball-History-Determiner-Guy, and neither are you.

No, but the fact that past attempts have all ended in failure doesn't bode well for your position.

No, I think the priority is for the *government* to not be killing people in the name of the people. It would set a good example.

Then you will have people killing people in the name of order.

That's of a *secondary* concern, when the *primary* concern is to stop *state-sanctioned* killings by its own cops, and paid for with public funds.

Why is that of a secondary concern? How about having White Supremacists do this kind of stuff, lynching African Americans as they used to do in the South, would that be a primary concern to you?

Again, you have to examine your political *priorities* -- what good is policing if the police *themselves* are committing gratuitous killings in the name of 'preventing' crime? That's downright *Orwellian*.

How about preventing scenarios such as a repeat of racist people taking the law on their own hands as an excuse to do racist things?

Ultimately it's the private-interest *competition* that has to be outmoded, because *that's* what's at the heart of 'crime', as in the drug trade, or international bourgeois warfare, for that matter. The world is overripe for workers-of-the-world socialism, overthrowing capitalism.

This sounds more like gospel than reality.

That's beside the point -- you don't want to acknowledge that, when it comes to innovation / technological development, the U.S. is as Stalinist / crony-capitalist as any international rival.

No, I don't need to acknowledge something that is literally not the case.

No, it's not.

Yes it is. Should I include a screenshot so you can see the trend yourself?

So, to summarize, basic research is not directly profitable so such is paid-for and administered by the U.S. government, using public funds, so that the private sector can *make profits* from such publicly funded R&D.

And then a part of that profit gets taxed by the Government through Corporate Taxes.

Yes, they are -- the protests and riots are about killer cops, or killings by police.

No, they are not. As you said it yourself, it has been an issue for a very, very long time yet rioting hasn't been going on for that long. As such, no, it's not the only reason for protests.

And it's not just for these protests, it's no coincidence the LA riots of 1992 took place in a context of recession and high unemployment in California.

I have one: the *military* killings abroad, as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

Right, or some other reason. Rent is also one I can think of since some protesters are demanding an abolition of rent.

That's what this is all about -- that the federal government should be able to address *domestic* issues, with funding.

It already does, but the actual implementation is responsibility of the States for the most part.

Well, that's *internal* to the bourgeois government bureaucracy -- what *people* care about is the *results*, so however you do it *internally* needs to produce the correct, desired *results*.

Sure, results are of course important. But the wrong procedure can actually alter the results.

Rent is a good one, since rent is real, as well. If the country winds up being in the same situation in January as it's in now, what do you think the government should do about rent, at *that* point?

Also, the government *isn't* dealing with policing, meaning killer cops.

As I said, the Left will find a reason for protesting and even rioting. Thanks for proving my point.

But I *do* know what's going on *now*, and 1000+ deaths domestically as a result of 'collateral damage' is *not* acceptable.

Which is why a solution needs to be found, that doesn't lead to unacceptable collateral damage.

You're making my point *for* me -- this is all about 'turf', or private-interests over land and materials. In this case it's just smaller-scale.

And it's also an example of actual vigilantism.

You take yourself too seriously -- I'm not *asking* you to 'believe' me. I'm not *selling* you anything. I'm saying that historical Stalinism is *not* workers-of-the-world socialism.

Sure, no true scotsman. But, if workers of the world socialism has never been actually been implemented even when it has been truthfully attempted, one may workers of the world socialism simply cannot be implemented at all.

Okay, so how are you going to address getting killer cops off the streets, as in shutting down *all* police departments, so as to prevent 1000+ killings per year.

Compulsory use of bodycams and other forms of monitoring, cops who illegally kill someone need to face justice. Qualified immunity could be weakened or ended.

Find ways to decrease the need for policing, too, but that takes a while.

Patronage / clientelism derives from *private property relations*, because everything that's useful is *commodified* / privatized, under capitalism, with patronage-type social relations being one possibility.

The key word is 'devolve' -- sure, if international militaristic pressure is pressed *against* a post-capitalist-type of new political economy, as against the soviets and the Bolshevik Revolution, then socialist-type social relations *can't* be sustained, and such will *devolve*, as we saw historically, into Stalinism / nationalist consolidation, and patronage / clientelism.

But -- as with all current government social services -- if the *funding* / economic integrity is allowed, then such collectivist-oriented directions *can* be successful, in the absence of artificial impediments from *without*.

Clientelism is actually older than capitalism itself and as such can take place in non-capitalist societies as well.

[ckaihatsu]

Well, more than 'nationalize', really -- you're thinking of Sanders-type socialism.

Finance can be *eliminated*, because it's non-productive (is all just *overhead*, producing zero commodities). A world of workers in collective control of social production would *not need* finance since all decisions would be based on *use values*, with no need for exchange values whatsoever.

V. I. Lenin
The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It

Even Lenin seems to disagree

Yeah, that's fun and everything, but I never said I was *against* nationalization -- I said that finance can (ultimately) be *eliminated*, because the communist gift economy (and possibly my 'labor credits') would fill-in-the-void for all matters of political economy, post-capitalism.

Nationalization is basically a class-war *tactic*, meaning that it would be part of the transition *out* of capitalism, towards a vanguardist workers' control, to repress the bourgeoisie and to reorganize matters *internally* to the world's working class.

Here, try *this* out -- see how it feels:


[7] Syndicalism-Socialism-Communism Transition Diagram

Spoiler: show

---

You already *mentioned* this -- the stock market does *not* necessarily reflect real *growth* (GDP growth). It can run on a Ponzi-scheme-type of accumulation, or a tulip-bulbs-type speculative bubble, or from government funding.

Not for 100+ years.

Yeah, actually Trump just *underwrote* the stock market by pumping in trillions of cheap money, to *subsidize* bad debt, and zombie companies, and so on. So *that* happened.

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


---

It's a trend *against* technological innovation. (And did you *really* just make a supply-side argument here just now?) (grin)

Yeah, I guess technology is the same as in the 1920s. There were plenty of trolls on the internet too

Trickle-down economics much?


---

You're not realizing that I have *no interest* in doing this -- to a Marxist 'profits' is the employer's legal *stealing* of surplus labor value, so there's no point in being mathematically precise about it. It's a *political* thing.

So you have no idea, then. Maybe you could do your own reading about Marxian economics instead of coming up with economic proposals, don't you think?

Hmmmm, you keep *overlooking* things -- I supplied an *excerpt* from this entry, so if you want to read-up on the Marxist take on *surplus labor value* that's *expropriated* by the capitalist, there you go.

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


---

No, you're talking about the *theory*, in general. I provided specific empirical *data*, in a graph, that you're sidestepping.

I'll pass -- now what do you think about that world declining rate of profit as shown in the graph?

The data must have been calculated using a formula. Since you posted the graph, you have the burden of providing it. Other papers show that such trend does not exist at all, we can go through those if you want.

Nope, it was discrete *data*, not a formula. Strike two.


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Lebanon has had high inflation, but is not suffering from hyperinflation (at least for now). Now, Venezuela on the other hand...

Either way, this doesn't have all that much to do with the stock market.

Exactly. Now you're getting it.

No, I'm not. That was a non-sequitur: Lebanon's economic troubles don't say anything about whether there is truly a tendency of the rate of profit to fall given the evolution of asset prices.

You're just not putting in the effort to *find* it -- you're too blase.


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Yes, exactly -- there would be no private interests any more, so there would be no private interests in *information*. (Etc.) (There would also be no standing centralized *state*.)

And then I assume you understand that effort is a lot harder than it seems, and requires some measure of centralization. At the very least, localities need to use the same definitions and methodology to compile those figures.

What 'figures' -- ? You're still assuming some kind of Stalinist state planning, using exchange values. That's not necessary because I've developed the 'labor credits' framework model that runs on top of a communist-type 'gift economy', which itself doesn't use exchange values, either.

All of the necessary 'mass-aggregations' (by ranking slot, #1, #2, #3, etc.), can be done by a simple sorting function to see which proposals or policy packages are most-tallied for rank position #1, which are most-tallied for rank position #2, which are most-tallied for rank position #3, etc.


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No, no direct rewards-for-labor / 'compensatory earnings', because everyone always has full access to 'the commons', meaning whatever anyone else produces for the common good, for their own *personal* consumption (no private accumulations). Sure, people could just get free stuff and simply "work" as a hobby -- this is the society of 'rock stars' that I mentioned earlier. *Or*, this population of 'rock stars' might realize that everyone's been spending too much time and electricity *on stage*, and that food supplies are getting critically low, so maybe *some*, at least, should shift their attentions and efforts to saving-the-world, with food production, and possibly fully-automated, so that they can get back to being rock stars.

Also recall this list:

What makes you believe that people would just try to grab as much food and other critical supplies for themselves or that localities where people don't work much may not try to raid localities where people do work?

Oh, you're still thinking of *private property* -- such potential *scarcity* can be handled by any locality by using the collectivized means of mass industrial production (and full-automation). We already have the technological *means* to have fully web-interface *factories*, producing most -- and even complex -- goods with robots, using algorithms and even AI.

Since all of this infrastructure would be fully free-access and *socialized*, some kind of socio-political process would have to be in place, according to those of that society, to *schedule* formal time slots for whatever infrastructure, like factories. Once those suckers are underway they could easily spit-out goods 24/7/365, meaning that such automated productive prowess would *quickly* be more than all the people in the vicinty could *conceivably* personally consume themselves. Anyone who didn't want to work would *still* be able to take from the productive locations, because there would be *too much* produced and available, anyway.


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It's not state planning -- I described how labor credits would come into existence, and how they would be valuated and function as an integral part of social planning.

No, I don't think you were clear about that. You also were not clear about how would those be enforced, as opposed to having localities raid each other for the spoils.

Do we 'raid' other *neighborhoods* in the present-day for what we need? Of course not, because people mostly have avenues to make their own way, doing whatever work they want to do, for the means to live the lives they want to, give-or-take, and this is in the competitive ethos of *capitalism*.

Part of overthrowing capitalism would be the social prevailing of a *cooperative* ethos to replace capitalism's *competitive* ethos, so as to successfully do the proletarian revolution itself on a *class* / collectivist basis.

When there's *abundance* people are able to *rise* above the pettiness you're describing, and so First World countries don't have civil societies of *warlordism* -- unfortunately other, less-developed countries still *do*, due to lack of international cooperation within capitalism to *alleviate* such isolated areas from localist scarcity and starvation. With *abundance* enlightened social cooperation replaces *opportunism*.


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If there was a widespread social consciousness for needing a *brand-new* factory for making face masks, to make more face masks, that would be reflected in high 'face mask' positioning (top-ten) on people's daily individual 'demands' ranking lists, for that locality, or across *many* localities.

Someone might come up with a 'Plan A' for such, saying that 'x' number of liberated-labor work hours would be needed for work role 'a', with an 'a-sub-m' *multiplier* for that 'a' work role, and a 'b' work role, with 'b-sub-m' *multiplier* of labor credits per hour for that 'b' work role, etc. Someone else might come up with a 'Plan B', someone else with a 'Plan C', and so on -- these plans / proposals / projects / policy packages would all be *competing* for attention and high daily rankings by individuals. (See the 'communist supply & demand' model, above.)

Each plan would have to actually *round-up* the numbers of labor credits specified in the plan, from among those who have them (necessarily from their own past labor efforts) -- this equates to pledged *economic support* from past active liberated-laborers, who *want* to economically support 'Plan A', or 'Plan B', or 'Plan C', etc., or even some *combination* of them, apportioning labor credits as they like, since it's *their* labor credits to apportion. (Labor credits are *never* exchanged for actual goods and services because such would be *commodity production*, and not communism. Produced goods and services would be *pre-planned* for specific and/or general consumption, according to whatever plan, as just described. See the section in the labor credits FAQ about checks-and-balances.)

What would happen if such "social consciousness" did not arise? How and why would it arise in the first place?

If people were generally *lacking* face masks or whatever, everyday social exchanges would *reveal* that, and people would realize that people have been *asking* about face masks for several *days* (etc.) now -- journalism could pick up on it too, with exposes about where-are-the-face-masks. This would equate to 'social consciousness [about the problem]', then as now.


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Honestly, it sounds a bit like wishful thinking. After all, who would produce those capital goods? Who would work in their maintenance? Seems like a boring job, so I am not sure if enough people would be willing to do that as a hobby.

There *are no* 'capital goods', because there is *no* capital / exchange values / finance / money / currency / exchanges.

Capital goods are simply goods used to produce other goods.

Oh, okay, you're correct -- I tend to call this category 'infrastructure'.

The issue you raised is *precisely* why I developed the 'labor credits' vehicle -- as I've mentioned, labor credits are passed-forward only, from the past efforts of active liberated laborers, to those liberated laborers who are *completing* pre-planned work roles. Labor credits are strictly *internal* to the time-slice 'snapshot' of the population of liberated laborers, either with earned labor credits in-hand from past completed liberated labor efforts, or the *active* liberated laborers, with or without earned labor credits.

So, if 'capital goods' / infrastructure is required by social necessity to be *produced*, then there will certainly be a *demand* for such from below, as for more face masks, or food, or beer, or whatever. I have a good scenario for this that applies to *anything* / infrastructure, as well:

-> Why should anyone give a shit about labor credits?


Let's say that 'work-from-home mattress testing' is the *easiest* work role ever known, and so the multiplier for it is a '1' -- one hour of liberated-labor yields 1 labor credit.

'Spreading manure on a field' happens to be a '4' according to the mass work-role exit survey, but, as things turn out, people have *not* yet automated this kind of farmwork, yet *many* people are demanding beer, which requires this role, and other kinds of farmwork, for its production.

While engineering students and a worldwide legion of hobbyists unobtrusively work in the background on automating this task once-and-for-all, some others note the disparity between supply and demand and opportunistically announce that *they* will do this kind of work, to produce an abundance of beer for the greater region, but only at a multiplier rate of '6'.

Why would *anyone* give a shit about labor credits and agree to do shitwork, even for an increased rate of labor credits, you ask -- ?

Because anyone who can command a *premium* of labor credits, as from higher multiplier rates, are effectively gaining and consolidating their control of society's *reproduction of labor*. Most likely there would be social ('political') factionalism involved, where those who are most 'socially concerned' or 'philosophically driven' would be coordinating to cover as much *unwanted* work territory as possible, all for the sake of political consolidation. Increased numbers of labor credits in-hand would allow a group to *direct* what social work roles are 'activated' (funded), going-forward.

Perhaps it's about colonizing another planet, or about carving high-speed rail networks that criss-cross and connect all seven continents underground. Maybe it's a certain academic approach to history and the sciences, with a cache of pooled labor credits going towards that school of educational instruction. Perhaps it's an *art* faction ascending, funding all kinds of large-scale projects that decorate major urban centers in never-before-seen kinds of ways.

Whatever the program and motivation, society as a whole would be collectively *ceding ground* if it didn't keep the 'revolution' and collectivism going, with a steady pace of automation that precluded whole areas of production from social politics altogether. Technology / automation empowers the *individual* and takes power out of the hands of groups that enjoy cohesiveness based on sheer *numbers* and a concomitant control of social reproduction in their ideological direction. The circulation and usage of labor credits would be a live formal tracking of how *negligent* the social revolution happened to be at any given moment, just as the consolidation of private property is today against the forces of revolutionary politics and international labor solidarity.

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... -Questions

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Instead of relying on the market allocation of finance, all production / social production would be done on a *planning* basis, according to pre-planned proposals / projects / policy packages, that *compete* with each other if they all pertain to the same goals, and cover the same production goods (means of mass industrial production), and resources / infrastructure.

No finance means no having to *look-after* finance, as you're noting -- existing productive assets like factories would have to be *scheduled* for use, anyway, so various competing plans could compete to *schedule* their particular production needs, for any given factory, or equipment, for any given calendar time.

Who would make new factories and maintain existing ones?

There would be no automatic *guarantees*, and I've addressed this issue to some extent already.

Existing factories / infrastructure would not necessarily *have* to be maintained -- it could very well fall into *disuse*, and that would be okay, and it would effectively become 'resources' (scrap), instead of formerly being 'productive assets' / capital-goods / infrastructure. It may even, over time, revert all the way back to *nature*, as we've seen with the Chernobyl area (I saw a documentary).

*New* factories / infrastructure would have to be *planned*, as with proposals and *specifics*. A proposal that makes it all the way to having *all* formal details spelled-out and specified (locally), would be a 'finalized policy package' and would be ready-to-go as long as it has sufficient voluntary liberated-labor available and willing to do the formal work roles specified within, over specified calendar time.

(Liberated labor would be the ultimate determining factor, since production can't physically *happen* without the appropriate labor-power in place to do it.)


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You're *still* speaking abstractly, without a context -- do you mean this *philosophically*, or within *capitalism*, or for the context of my 'labor credits' model framework?

If it's within my communist-gift-economy-based 'labor credits' model, then here's the section that speaks to this issue of 'responsibility', or *accountability*, for any given selected policy package:


Infrastructure / overhead

communist administration -- Distinct from the general political culture each project or production run will include a provision for an associated administrative component as an integral part of its total policy package -- a selected policy's proponents will be politically responsible for overseeing its implementation according to the policy's provisions

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... -Questions

How would that enforcement work in practice? Normally, States do that but you are saying there would be no State.

Here's from the FAQ:

- Any given finalized policy package will include a formal announcement of key proponents, politically responsible for that project's implementation, if satisfactory participation to cover all the necessary components of it is present. There is never any *standing*, *institutional* administration over everything, as we're used to seeing historically at the nationalist level. If a project *isn't* performing up to formal expectations (as detailed in its policy package), the proponents can be replaced with a mass-approved (exceeding in ranking over the initial policy package) proposal that 'tweaks' those details that need changing, such as which personnel, exactly, are deemed to be the formal 'proponents' of that project. (Consumers vs. administration)

- Proponents of any given active finalized policy package would have considerable logistical social latitude for administrating over its implementation, depending-on / limited-by its finalized detailed terms. In some instances, for example, proponents over *several* localities, of several *similar* policy packages -- say, over agriculture -- or even at regional, continental, and *global* scales -- may cross-coordinate to *generalize* production across many similar policy packages, for the sake of greater efficiencies of scale. (Administration vs. consumers)

- Proponents are meant to represent the exact terms of an active finalized policy package, and by extension, to also represent popular demand for certain material production and/or socio-political initiatives. Proponents may bring attention to certain aspects of the active finalized policy package in the course of its implementation, as with any possible differences on the part of active liberated-labor on the project. (Administration vs. liberated-labor)

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... -Questions

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I see. Well, the thing is, the USSR was not the only country where Sovietism was implemented.

Okay, and your *point* here is *what*, exactly?

That it's not a "special case" of how these revolutions end.

You're still *oversimplifying* history, and trying to scapegoat the *ideology* for historical outcomes. You're not making any *case*, or *argument* for how the ideology itself (workers-of-the-world socialism) "automatically" results in Stalinism.


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This is basically a *civil rights* issue -- if some school was physically preventing students from attending, then there would have to be a *greater authority* to intervene, to uphold those students' *civil rights* to attend school.

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

Right, and that was one case where the local police lost control of the events, the State refused to properly enforce civil rights law and the Federal Government intervened using its own powers. This is hardly a case for abolishing the police.

Well I happen to see people's interest in their own personal well-being as being a *civil rights* issue, like that of access to education, not-being killed by police, etc.


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Likewise, if some various police departments are a standing, *legal* threat to people's safety, there should be a *federal* treatment for this problem so that a *uniform* policy of getting killer cops off the streets, by defunding all police departments, can be put into place.

I don't recall schools were ever defunded by the Federal Government for refusing to enforce Brown v Board of Education. In fact my recalling is that most districts complied and school closures were mandated by the States as a form of protest.

Okay, so the government policy of school desegregation was successfully implemented.

Note too that having uniform standards is not the same as defunding or abolishing the police, at all. I already provided some examples of some uniform standards PDs could be expected to follow, under threats to reduce Federal funding to the States and localities that refuse to cooperate (which is exactly how the Feds enforce policy for that matter - in principle, States/localities could accept the loss of funding and refuse to accept it).

*Or* the government policy of 'safety from killer cops' could become the *reality*, worldwide, due to sufficient political efforts to *implement* it that way, by whatever means.


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You can use the killer cops / police brutality issue as a defining example. It's existed during *several* presidential administrations, despite the various kinds of voting that put those respective presidents in office.

And yet even that has not been constant. There has been a decreasing trend since 2015, which itself has been going on for much longer.

You previously admitted that even *one* killing at the hands of cops is *too many*.


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This view of society stopped being useful quite a long time ago. Class reductionism cannot explain events such as WWI properly (why did the working classes in many countries preferred to kill each other in trench warfare rather than coordinating a Revolution? This is a question Marxists have never been able to address).

On *that* particular event, you can look into the dynamics of *false consciousness*, and *ruling class propaganda* / mass media.

'Class reductionism' is better described as 'class'. (See the diagram for a sorting of societal constants / components according to relative *scale*, yielding *class* as paramount in determinism.)

On your *historical* political question I've used the following treatment in the past:

And yet those workers weren't all for launching the worldwide revolution either. Even worse, just because enthusiasm in 1914 was not as much as that in 1870, it doesn't mean it did not exist.

I've already answered your question -- the dynamic is called 'false consciousness', and it happens *every day*.

False consciousness is a term used—primarily by Marxist sociologists—to describe ways in which material, ideological, and institutional processes are said to mislead members of the proletariat and other class actors within capitalist societies, concealing the exploitation intrinsic to the social relations between classes.

Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) used the term "false consciousness" in an 1893 letter to Franz Mehring to address the scenario where a subordinate class willfully embodies the ideology of the ruling class.[1][2] Engels dubs this consciousness "false" because the class is asserting itself towards goals that do not benefit it. "Consciousness", in this context, reflects a class's ability to politically identify and assert its will. The subordinate class is conscious: it plays a major role in society and can assert its will due to being sufficiently unified in ideas and action.

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

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Of course I don't -- I'm not Crystal-Ball-History-Determiner-Guy, and neither are you.

No, but the fact that past attempts have all ended in failure doesn't bode well for your position.

Let *me* worry about that -- you're being *disingenuous* again because you're not in the socialist camp. You're also *scapegoating* the ideology of workers-of-the-world socialism itself, with your baseless accusations.


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No, I think the priority is for the *government* to not be killing people in the name of the people. It would set a good example.

Then you will have people killing people in the name of order.

Or there may be a *socialist revolution*, crystal-ball-guy.


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That's of a *secondary* concern, when the *primary* concern is to stop *state-sanctioned* killings by its own cops, and paid for with public funds.

Why is that of a secondary concern? How about having White Supremacists do this kind of stuff, lynching African Americans as they used to do in the South, would that be a primary concern to you?

Of *course* it is, and *fortunately*, political activists like those in Antifa tend to *handle* this kind of thing, especially since the bourgeois state *doesn't*.


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Again, you have to examine your political *priorities* -- what good is policing if the police *themselves* are committing gratuitous killings in the name of 'preventing' crime? That's downright *Orwellian*.

How about preventing scenarios such as a repeat of racist people taking the law on their own hands as an excuse to do racist things?

I don't know what you're referring to here -- you're being unspecific and *vague*.


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Ultimately it's the private-interest *competition* that has to be outmoded, because *that's* what's at the heart of 'crime', as in the drug trade, or international bourgeois warfare, for that matter. The world is overripe for workers-of-the-world socialism, overthrowing capitalism.

This sounds more like gospel than reality.

Society has the potential to address and emphasize *use values*, while discarding *exchange values*, meaning *capitalism*.


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That's beside the point -- you don't want to acknowledge that, when it comes to innovation / technological development, the U.S. is as Stalinist / crony-capitalist as any international rival.

No, I don't need to acknowledge something that is literally not the case.

Okay, I disagree, and you've *admitted* that the 'difficult [basic] research' is funded by the U.S. government with public funds, and *given* to private corporations for profit-making.


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I don't see the '60%' figure anywhere in the text you've excerpted here.

That's because the number is in Figure 4-4.

No, it's not.

Yes it is. Should I include a screenshot so you can see the trend yourself?

Whatever makes your toes curl.


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So, to summarize, basic research is not directly profitable so such is paid-for and administered by the U.S. government, using public funds, so that the private sector can *make profits* from such publicly funded R&D.

And then a part of that profit gets taxed by the Government through Corporate Taxes.

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Yes, they are -- the protests and riots are about killer cops, or killings by police.

No, they are not. As you said it yourself, it has been an issue for a very, very long time yet rioting hasn't been going on for that long. As such, no, it's not the only reason for protests.

And it's not just for these protests, it's no coincidence the LA riots of 1992 took place in a context of recession and high unemployment in California.

Oh, okay, if you want to identify *larger socio-economic factors* being relevant for the protests -- usually I'm the one telling the likes of *you*.


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I have one: the *military* killings abroad, as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

Right, or some other reason. Rent is also one I can think of since some protesters are demanding an abolition of rent.

Check, and *check*.


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That's what this is all about -- that the federal government should be able to address *domestic* issues, with funding.

It already does, but the actual implementation is responsibility of the States for the most part.

Regardless of the *level* of government, the decades-long trend in government social services spending has been a *downward* trend of *austerity*.


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Well, that's *internal* to the bourgeois government bureaucracy -- what *people* care about is the *results*, so however you do it *internally* needs to produce the correct, desired *results*.

Sure, results are of course important. But the wrong procedure can actually alter the results.

I'll take my chances, thanks.


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Rent is a good one, since rent is real, as well. If the country winds up being in the same situation in January as it's in now, what do you think the government should do about rent, at *that* point?

Also, the government *isn't* dealing with policing, meaning killer cops.

As I said, the Left will find a reason for protesting and even rioting. Thanks for proving my point.

Well, such protests and riots are *valid* and *appropriate*.


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But I *do* know what's going on *now*, and 1000+ deaths domestically as a result of 'collateral damage' is *not* acceptable.

Which is why a solution needs to be found, that doesn't lead to unacceptable collateral damage.

Okay, I've got one -- defund and disband *all* police departments. Any resulting 'collateral damage' there will be acceptable.


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You're making my point *for* me -- this is all about 'turf', or private-interests over land and materials. In this case it's just smaller-scale.

And it's also an example of actual vigilantism.

No disagreement -- is this the 'collateral damage' you were referring to?


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You take yourself too seriously -- I'm not *asking* you to 'believe' me. I'm not *selling* you anything. I'm saying that historical Stalinism is *not* workers-of-the-world socialism.

Sure, no true scotsman. But, if workers of the world socialism has never been actually been implemented even when it has been truthfully attempted, one may workers of the world socialism simply cannot be implemented at all.

It's *not* hair-splitting, as you're implying -- as I said before if workers-of-the-world socialism *had* been implemented we'd be living in it *today*. *That's* a good litmus-test.

I have the 'labor credits' framework model that's consistent / compatible with *communism*, and is also *internally* consistent / coherent.


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Okay, so how are you going to address getting killer cops off the streets, as in shutting down *all* police departments, so as to prevent 1000+ killings per year.

Compulsory use of bodycams and other forms of monitoring, cops who illegally kill someone need to face justice. Qualified immunity could be weakened or ended.

I have no objection to these reforms.

Find ways to decrease the need for policing, too, but that takes a while.

*Or*, contrary to your linear thinking, perhaps the *removal* of all police departments would set an *encouraging example* and people would be *less stressed* and live *better lives*, contrary to the 'Mad Max' propaganda scenario that *you* have in mind.


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Patronage / clientelism derives from *private property relations*, because everything that's useful is *commodified* / privatized, under capitalism, with patronage-type social relations being one possibility.

The key word is 'devolve' -- sure, if international militaristic pressure is pressed *against* a post-capitalist-type of new political economy, as against the soviets and the Bolshevik Revolution, then socialist-type social relations *can't* be sustained, and such will *devolve*, as we saw historically, into Stalinism / nationalist consolidation, and patronage / clientelism.

But -- as with all current government social services -- if the *funding* / economic integrity is allowed, then such collectivist-oriented directions *can* be successful, in the absence of artificial impediments from *without*.

Clientelism is actually older than capitalism itself and as such can take place in non-capitalist societies as well.

Yes, I just acknowledged that.

I'll even go so far as to say that the patronage dynamic may even persist into *post-capitalist* social dynamics, potentially, but such politicking would be *acceptable* because such a society would be *post-scarcity*, so the important difference is that no one would be *stuck* in any given 'patronage' relationship, post-capitalism.

[wat0n]

Yeah, that's fun and everything, but I never said I was *against* nationalization -- I said that finance can (ultimately) be *eliminated*, because the communist gift economy (and possibly my 'labor credits') would fill-in-the-void for all matters of political economy, post-capitalism.

Nationalization is basically a class-war *tactic*, meaning that it would be part of the transition *out* of capitalism, towards a vanguardist workers' control, to repress the bourgeoisie and to reorganize matters *internally* to the world's working class.

Here, try *this* out -- see how it feels:


[7] Syndicalism-Socialism-Communism Transition Diagram

Spoiler: show

My point is that even Lenin could see banking generates value. It doesn't have to be physical output to be valuable.

Yeah, actually Trump just *underwrote* the stock market by pumping in trillions of cheap money, to *subsidize* bad debt, and zombie companies, and so on. So *that* happened.

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

Another red herring. I had no idea Trump was President in 1920

Trickle-down economics much?

Can't see why I'm right, can you?

Hmmmm, you keep *overlooking* things -- I supplied an *excerpt* from this entry, so if you want to read-up on the Marxist take on *surplus labor value* that's *expropriated* by the capitalist, there you go.

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

Then you should able to produce a profit formula.

Nope, it was discrete *data*, not a formula. Strike two.

Then post the code used to calculate the series to generate the graph.

It really is up to you to show why much of the rest of the literature is wrong and this paper is right.

You're just not putting in the effort to *find* it -- you're too blase.

I'm not supposed to make your argument for you.

What 'figures' -- ? You're still assuming some kind of Stalinist state planning, using exchange values. That's not necessary because I've developed the 'labor credits' framework model that runs on top of a communist-type 'gift economy', which itself doesn't use exchange values, either.

All of the necessary 'mass-aggregations' (by ranking slot, #1, #2, #3, etc.), can be done by a simple sorting function to see which proposals or policy packages are most-tallied for rank position #1, which are most-tallied for rank position #2, which are most-tallied for rank position #3, etc.

Production figures, of course. Ever heard of product classifiers? You could look for one and you'll see there needs to be some centralization in the statistics compilation process.

Oh, you're still thinking of *private property* -- such potential *scarcity* can be handled by any locality by using the collectivized means of mass industrial production (and full-automation). We already have the technological *means* to have fully web-interface *factories*, producing most -- and even complex -- goods with robots, using algorithms and even AI.

Since all of this infrastructure would be fully free-access and *socialized*, some kind of socio-political process would have to be in place, according to those of that society, to *schedule* formal time slots for whatever infrastructure, like factories. Once those suckers are underway they could easily spit-out goods 24/7/365, meaning that such automated productive prowess would *quickly* be more than all the people in the vicinty could *conceivably* personally consume themselves. Anyone who didn't want to work would *still* be able to take from the productive locations, because there would be *too much* produced and available, anyway.

That doesn't answer my question. How would looting of the produced goods be prevented?

Do we 'raid' other *neighborhoods* in the present-day for what we need? Of course not, because people mostly have avenues to make their own way, doing whatever work they want to do, for the means to live the lives they want to, give-or-take, and this is in the competitive ethos of *capitalism*.

Part of overthrowing capitalism would be the social prevailing of a *cooperative* ethos to replace capitalism's *competitive* ethos, so as to successfully do the proletarian revolution itself on a *class* / collectivist basis.

When there's *abundance* people are able to *rise* above the pettiness you're describing, and so First World countries don't have civil societies of *warlordism* -- unfortunately other, less-developed countries still *do*, due to lack of international cooperation within capitalism to *alleviate* such isolated areas from localist scarcity and starvation. With *abundance* enlightened social cooperation replaces *opportunism*.

Looting doesn't happen because the State exists and will stop such attempts. Furthermore, if the State fails to fulfill this function then people will do it themselves - and you'll get vigilantism.

I don't see much solidarity in that. It's almost as if people did not have a natural tendency to establish a workers' socialist system of any kind when the hold of the State weakens.

If people were generally *lacking* face masks or whatever, everyday social exchanges would *reveal* that, and people would realize that people have been *asking* about face masks for several *days* (etc.) now -- journalism could pick up on it too, with exposes about where-are-the-face-masks. This would equate to 'social consciousness [about the problem]', then as now.

Even now there are plenty who don't wear masks, and even now there needs to be State enforcement of those orders.

Oh, okay, you're correct -- I tend to call this category 'infrastructure'.

The issue you raised is *precisely* why I developed the 'labor credits' vehicle -- as I've mentioned, labor credits are passed-forward only, from the past efforts of active liberated laborers, to those liberated laborers who are *completing* pre-planned work roles. Labor credits are strictly *internal* to the time-slice 'snapshot' of the population of liberated laborers, either with earned labor credits in-hand from past completed liberated labor efforts, or the *active* liberated laborers, with or without earned labor credits.

So, if 'capital goods' / infrastructure is required by social necessity to be *produced*, then there will certainly be a *demand* for such from below, as for more face masks, or food, or beer, or whatever. I have a good scenario for this that applies to *anything* / infrastructure, as well:

Of course there will be a demand for them, but if people found producing them boring or otherwise tiresome then why would they ever do so when they can get stuff for free or do whatever hobby they please? The only way for them to have a reason to do so is for their labor credits to work as money or another sort of asset, allowing them to get more goods and services than those who don't do anything, as a way to provide a reason for people to do boring or hard work.

There would be no automatic *guarantees*, and I've addressed this issue to some extent already.

Existing factories / infrastructure would not necessarily *have* to be maintained -- it could very well fall into *disuse*, and that would be okay, and it would effectively become 'resources' (scrap), instead of formerly being 'productive assets' / capital-goods / infrastructure. It may even, over time, revert all the way back to *nature*, as we've seen with the Chernobyl area (I saw a documentary).

*New* factories / infrastructure would have to be *planned*, as with proposals and *specifics*. A proposal that makes it all the way to having *all* formal details spelled-out and specified (locally), would be a 'finalized policy package' and would be ready-to-go as long as it has sufficient voluntary liberated-labor available and willing to do the formal work roles specified within, over specified calendar time.

(Liberated labor would be the ultimate determining factor, since production can't physically *happen* without the appropriate labor-power in place to do it.)

Have you ever heard of the Prisoner's Dilemma?

Here's from the FAQ:

To make it clearer: How would you make sure people would not even attempt (and if they did, they would fail) to simply grab a bunch of guns and take over the socialized factories or their production?

You're still *oversimplifying* history, and trying to scapegoat the *ideology* for historical outcomes. You're not making any *case*, or *argument* for how the ideology itself (workers-of-the-world socialism) "automatically" results in Stalinism.

No, it doesn't automatically result in Stalinism. It can also end simply in failure and being crushed, there are many examples of that too.

Well I happen to see people's interest in their own personal well-being as being a *civil rights* issue, like that of access to education, not-being killed by police, etc.

Maybe, but that example of the Little Rock Nine was actually a great example of the Federal Government enforcing the law, and using the available law at that (the Enforcement Acts of the 1870s).

Okay, so the government policy of school desegregation was successfully implemented.

Correct, owing to a strong (militarized, in a very literal sense) Federal law enforcement response. That hardly backs your point up. It was implemented because rioters weren't simply stopped but had to deal with both real and threatened military repression (in Little Rock, it was threatened, but in the University of Mississippi the military had to actually use its bayonets against segregationist rioters who set the university alight and murdered two unarmed people).

*Or* the government policy of 'safety from killer cops' could become the *reality*, worldwide, due to sufficient political efforts to *implement* it that way, by whatever means.

Worldwide? So the US government would dictate policing to China?

You previously admitted that even *one* killing at the hands of cops is *too many*.

Correct, but that doesn't mean one cannot acknowledge the constant improvement over time.

I've already answered your question -- the dynamic is called 'false consciousness', and it happens *every day*.

Yeah, Marxism is such a religion that whenever people don't behave as expected, their behavior is false. Nothing new here.

Let *me* worry about that -- you're being *disingenuous* again because you're not in the socialist camp. You're also *scapegoating* the ideology of workers-of-the-world socialism itself, with your baseless accusations.

No, I also have to worry about that since "workers-of-the-world" means global: Be it successful or a failure, there would be no escape from it.

Or there may be a *socialist revolution*, crystal-ball-guy.

Of *course* it is, and *fortunately*, political activists like those in Antifa tend to *handle* this kind of thing, especially since the bourgeois state *doesn't*.

Indeed by *gasp* engaging in the use of lethal force if necessary. It seems not to be too different from what the cops do.

I don't know what you're referring to here -- you're being unspecific and *vague*.

Cue my example above: Lynchers would also claim that their victim had broken the law (for example, by claiming to have committed some sort of sexual offense against an alleged victim), and would use that as an excuse to justify their vigilantism.

Society has the potential to address and emphasize *use values*, while discarding *exchange values*, meaning *capitalism*.

This would imply there is an objective use value. Quite often, there's not.

Okay, I disagree, and you've *admitted* that the 'difficult [basic] research' is funded by the U.S. government with public funds, and *given* to private corporations for profit-making.

Sure, and as I said the US Government would also get a return - in the form of higher tax revenue - for it.

Whatever makes your toes curl.

Go ahead:

https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20203/rec ... -d-funding

Oh, okay, if you want to identify *larger socio-economic factors* being relevant for the protests -- usually I'm the one telling the likes of *you*.

Go figure, although I think most people understand that.

Regardless of the *level* of government, the decades-long trend in government social services spending has been a *downward* trend of *austerity*.

Indeed, but that has been the result of a political decision since people have not been too willing to pay the taxes necessary to fund a stronger social safety net.

I'll take my chances, thanks.

Good luck dealing with the courts or getting the broader public to comply with unconstitutional policies with no resistance.

Well, such protests and riots are *valid* and *appropriate*.

For you, maybe. I'm pretty sure most of the public would not find rioting over rent valid or appropriate and would vote for anyone who promised law and order.

Okay, I've got one -- defund and disband *all* police departments. Any resulting 'collateral damage' there will be acceptable.

Good luck dealing with vigilantes who begin to lynch Black people for real and imagined crimes.

No disagreement -- is this the 'collateral damage' you were referring to?

Among others, yes. I presume you are aware that the gangs there (Little Village) at some point simply began to chase all Black people in sight out.

It's *not* hair-splitting, as you're implying -- as I said before if workers-of-the-world socialism *had* been implemented we'd be living in it *today*. *That's* a good litmus-test.

Hence why it's a No True Scotsman fallacy.

I have the 'labor credits' framework model that's consistent / compatible with *communism*, and is also *internally* consistent / coherent.

But not with the real world.

I have no objection to these reforms.

Good.

*Or*, contrary to your linear thinking, perhaps the *removal* of all police departments would set an *encouraging example* and people would be *less stressed* and live *better lives*, contrary to the 'Mad Max' propaganda scenario that *you* have in mind.

Would they? Because I provided examples that undermine this narrative.

Yes, I just acknowledged that.

I'll even go so far as to say that the patronage dynamic may even persist into *post-capitalist* social dynamics, potentially, but such politicking would be *acceptable* because such a society would be *post-scarcity*, so the important difference is that no one would be *stuck* in any given 'patronage' relationship, post-capitalism.

Well, if scarcity disappeared then it doesn't matter if society was communist, capitalist or whatever. In reality though scarcity will never go away, because people will change their standards of how a "materially good life" looks like.

[ckaihatsu]

Yeah, that's fun and everything, but I never said I was *against* nationalization -- I said that finance can (ultimately) be *eliminated*, because the communist gift economy (and possibly my 'labor credits') would fill-in-the-void for all matters of political economy, post-capitalism.

Nationalization is basically a class-war *tactic*, meaning that it would be part of the transition *out* of capitalism, towards a vanguardist workers' control, to repress the bourgeoisie and to reorganize matters *internally* to the world's working class.

Here, try *this* out -- see how it feels:


[7] Syndicalism-Socialism-Communism Transition Diagram

Spoiler: show

My point is that even Lenin could see banking generates value. It doesn't have to be physical output to be valuable.

You're *misinterpreting* Lenin, because he says *nothing* along the lines of 'banking generates value'. What he *says* is:

The banks, as we know, are centres of modern economic life, the principal nerve centres of the whole capitalist economic system.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... 5zz99h-333

Do you really think that sloshing funds around, in and out of various accounts, is 'generating value'? Can't you see that it's just glorified paper-shuffling, and easily done by the client these days using online banking -- ? Sure, banking provides a nominal service to *capital*, but, no, it's *not* 'generating value' in the sense that *actual production of commodities* generates value.


---

Yeah, actually Trump just *underwrote* the stock market by pumping in trillions of cheap money, to *subsidize* bad debt, and zombie companies, and so on. So *that* happened.

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

Another red herring. I had no idea Trump was President in 1920

The 'CARES Act' is from *this* year, 2020.


---

Of course they [innovations] won't be adapted immediately. But they will, eventually, if they are invented and profitable.

Well, again, that's not *automatic* -- look at the Great Depression, for example, when consumer buying power was *sharply* reduced. (Etc.)

That was simply cyclical variation - a particularly bad one, indeed, as a result of many factors (including of the regulatory kind), but it's still not a trend.

It's a trend *against* technological innovation. (And did you *really* just make a supply-side argument here just now?) (grin)

Yeah, I guess technology is the same as in the 1920s. There were plenty of trolls on the internet too

Trickle-down economics much?

Can't see why I'm right, can you?

You're blaming lack of technological growth on *over-regulation*, as you purport caused the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression, but in fact capitalism has *cyclical* boom-bust periods, regardless of 'innovation' or lack of it. (Look at 2008-2009, and now 2020.)

You're a *supply-sider*, because you think that corporations *use* cheap government capital to *innovate*, and that's just bullshit, as evidenced by massive offshore tax havens and inactive corporate cash.


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


U.S. companies are rolling in cash, and they're growing increasingly fearful to spend it

https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals ... owing.html

The term "trickle-down" originated as a joke by humorist Will Rogers and today is often used to criticize economic policies that favor the wealthy or privileged while being framed as good for the average citizen. David Stockman, who as Ronald Reagan's budget director championed Reagan's tax cuts at first, later became critical of them and told journalist William Greider that "supply-side economics" is the trickle-down idea:[3][4]

It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory.

— David Stockman, The Atlantic

Political opponents of the Reagan administration soon seized on this language in an effort to brand the administration as caring only about the wealthy.[citation needed] Some studies suggest a link between trickle-down economics and reduced growth.[5][6] Trickle-down economics has been widely criticized, particularly by left-wing, centre-left and moderate politicians and economists, but also some right-wing politicians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics

---

Hmmmm, you keep *overlooking* things -- I supplied an *excerpt* from this entry, so if you want to read-up on the Marxist take on *surplus labor value* that's *expropriated* by the capitalist, there you go.

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

Then you should able to produce a profit formula.

No, *you're* talking about a 'profit formula', and *I'm* talking about surplus labor value -- not the same thing.


---

Nope, it was discrete *data*, not a formula. Strike two.

Then post the code used to calculate the series to generate the graph.

It really is up to you to show why much of the rest of the literature is wrong and this paper is right.

*Or*, go and read the article *yourself*, if you want to make a critique of the data.


---

[L]ebanon's economic troubles don't say anything about whether there is truly a tendency of the rate of profit to fall given the evolution of asset prices.

You're just not putting in the effort to *find* it -- you're too blase.

I'm not supposed to make your argument for you.

I provided *data*, in the form of a *graph*, for the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Decline.


---

What 'figures' -- ? You're still assuming some kind of Stalinist state planning, using exchange values. That's not necessary because I've developed the 'labor credits' framework model that runs on top of a communist-type 'gift economy', which itself doesn't use exchange values, either.

All of the necessary 'mass-aggregations' (by ranking slot, #1, #2, #3, etc.), can be done by a simple sorting function to see which proposals or policy packages are most-tallied for rank position #1, which are most-tallied for rank position #2, which are most-tallied for rank position #3, etc.

Production figures, of course. Ever heard of product classifiers? You could look for one and you'll see there needs to be some centralization in the statistics compilation process.

No, the individual 'demands' rankings that I just outlined are *not* about production, they're about *demand*. Put on your reading glasses this time.

Any centralization from my 'labor credits' model framework would be on the basis of cross-consensus, over two or more localities, or larger geography, *per-item*.

Yes, post-capitalist production could yield its own statistics, for public oonsumption, as through journalism.


---

Oh, you're still thinking of *private property* -- such potential *scarcity* can be handled by any locality by using the collectivized means of mass industrial production (and full-automation). We already have the technological *means* to have fully web-interface *factories*, producing most -- and even complex -- goods with robots, using algorithms and even AI.

Since all of this infrastructure would be fully free-access and *socialized*, some kind of socio-political process would have to be in place, according to those of that society, to *schedule* formal time slots for whatever infrastructure, like factories. Once those suckers are underway they could easily spit-out goods 24/7/365, meaning that such automated productive prowess would *quickly* be more than all the people in the vicinty could *conceivably* personally consume themselves. Anyone who didn't want to work would *still* be able to take from the productive locations, because there would be *too much* produced and available, anyway.

That doesn't answer my question. How would looting of the produced goods be prevented?

And *you're* not listening -- I said that 'looting' / stealing, etc., is *not a thing* in a post-scarcity political economy, because everyone can access more than they need, due to full-automation of industrial mass-production processes.

Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely.[1][2] Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services, but that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services.[3] Writers on the topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.[4][5][6][7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

---

Do we 'raid' other *neighborhoods* in the present-day for what we need? Of course not, because people mostly have avenues to make their own way, doing whatever work they want to do, for the means to live the lives they want to, give-or-take, and this is in the competitive ethos of *capitalism*.

Part of overthrowing capitalism would be the social prevailing of a *cooperative* ethos to replace capitalism's *competitive* ethos, so as to successfully do the proletarian revolution itself on a *class* / collectivist basis.

When there's *abundance* people are able to *rise* above the pettiness you're describing, and so First World countries don't have civil societies of *warlordism* -- unfortunately other, less-developed countries still *do*, due to lack of international cooperation within capitalism to *alleviate* such isolated areas from localist scarcity and starvation. With *abundance* enlightened social cooperation replaces *opportunism*.

Looting doesn't happen because the State exists and will stop such attempts. Furthermore, if the State fails to fulfill this function then people will do it themselves - and you'll get vigilantism.

I don't see much solidarity in that. It's almost as if people did not have a natural tendency to establish a workers' socialist system of any kind when the hold of the State weakens.

Well, that's where you're *wrong* -- history shows us *several* examples of on-the-ground working-class self-organizing. Take a look at labor history.

You're *so* concerned with property values that you don't *give a shit* whether more people are killed from today onwards due to the government's support of killer cops and police brutality.


---

What would happen if such "social consciousness" did not arise? How and why would it arise in the first place?

If people were generally *lacking* face masks or whatever, everyday social exchanges would *reveal* that, and people would realize that people have been *asking* about face masks for several *days* (etc.) now -- journalism could pick up on it too, with exposes about where-are-the-face-masks. This would equate to 'social consciousness [about the problem]', then as now.

Even now there are plenty who don't wear masks, and even now there needs to be State enforcement of those orders.

You're off-on-a-tangent again -- I addressed your question about 'social consciousness' and you have no follow-up, so I guess you implicitly *accept* that social consciousness equates to mass organic demand.


---

Oh, okay, you're correct -- I tend to call this category 'infrastructure'.

The issue you raised is *precisely* why I developed the 'labor credits' vehicle -- as I've mentioned, labor credits are passed-forward only, from the past efforts of active liberated laborers, to those liberated laborers who are *completing* pre-planned work roles. Labor credits are strictly *internal* to the time-slice 'snapshot' of the population of liberated laborers, either with earned labor credits in-hand from past completed liberated labor efforts, or the *active* liberated laborers, with or without earned labor credits.

So, if 'capital goods' / infrastructure is required by social necessity to be *produced*, then there will certainly be a *demand* for such from below, as for more face masks, or food, or beer, or whatever. I have a good scenario for this that applies to *anything* / infrastructure, as well:


-> Why should anyone give a shit about labor credits?


Let's say that 'work-from-home mattress testing' is the *easiest* work role ever known, and so the multiplier for it is a '1' -- one hour of liberated-labor yields 1 labor credit.

'Spreading manure on a field' happens to be a '4' according to the mass work-role exit survey, but, as things turn out, people have *not* yet automated this kind of farmwork, yet *many* people are demanding beer, which requires this role, and other kinds of farmwork, for its production.

While engineering students and a worldwide legion of hobbyists unobtrusively work in the background on automating this task once-and-for-all, some others note the disparity between supply and demand and opportunistically announce that *they* will do this kind of work, to produce an abundance of beer for the greater region, but only at a multiplier rate of '6'.

Why would *anyone* give a shit about labor credits and agree to do shitwork, even for an increased rate of labor credits, you ask -- ?

Because anyone who can command a *premium* of labor credits, as from higher multiplier rates, are effectively gaining and consolidating their control of society's *reproduction of labor*. Most likely there would be social ('political') factionalism involved, where those who are most 'socially concerned' or 'philosophically driven' would be coordinating to cover as much *unwanted* work territory as possible, all for the sake of political consolidation. Increased numbers of labor credits in-hand would allow a group to *direct* what social work roles are 'activated' (funded), going-forward.

Perhaps it's about colonizing another planet, or about carving high-speed rail networks that criss-cross and connect all seven continents underground. Maybe it's a certain academic approach to history and the sciences, with a cache of pooled labor credits going towards that school of educational instruction. Perhaps it's an *art* faction ascending, funding all kinds of large-scale projects that decorate major urban centers in never-before-seen kinds of ways.

Whatever the program and motivation, society as a whole would be collectively *ceding ground* if it didn't keep the 'revolution' and collectivism going, with a steady pace of automation that precluded whole areas of production from social politics altogether. Technology / automation empowers the *individual* and takes power out of the hands of groups that enjoy cohesiveness based on sheer *numbers* and a concomitant control of social reproduction in their ideological direction. The circulation and usage of labor credits would be a live formal tracking of how *negligent* the social revolution happened to be at any given moment, just as the consolidation of private property is today against the forces of revolutionary politics and international labor solidarity.

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... -Questions

Of course there will be a demand for them, but if people found producing them boring or otherwise tiresome then why would they ever do so when they can get stuff for free or do whatever hobby they please?

Yes, exactly, and I take this dynamic *seriously*, hence my formulation of the 'labor credits' as a *societal incentive* for doing hazardous / difficult / distasteful work, if such happens to be *socially necessary* (a significant 'organic demand' for such).

This dynamic also speaks to the post-capitalist collective *incentive* for *fully automating* all such boring / tiresome work roles, so that *no one* has to do those work roles anymore while *everyone* can benefit from the resulting (automated) production.

(See the 'Why should anyone give a shit about labor credits?' explanation, above.)

The only way for them to have a reason to do so is for their labor credits to work as money or another sort of asset, allowing them to get more goods and services than those who don't do anything, as a way to provide a reason for people to do boring or hard work.

No, that wouldn't be communism, then -- communism is *post-capitalism* and has *no* money / currency / exchange values / exchanges / finance / commodity-production. That way it has no labor *exploitation* as we know all-too-well under capitalism.

You need to understand how the 'labor credits' function for you to make sense of the 'labor credits' model. You're off on a tangent again.


---

There would be no automatic *guarantees*, and I've addressed this issue to some extent already.

Existing factories / infrastructure would not necessarily *have* to be maintained -- it could very well fall into *disuse*, and that would be okay, and it would effectively become 'resources' (scrap), instead of formerly being 'productive assets' / capital-goods / infrastructure. It may even, over time, revert all the way back to *nature*, as we've seen with the Chernobyl area (I saw a documentary).

*New* factories / infrastructure would have to be *planned*, as with proposals and *specifics*. A proposal that makes it all the way to having *all* formal details spelled-out and specified (locally), would be a 'finalized policy package' and would be ready-to-go as long as it has sufficient voluntary liberated-labor available and willing to do the formal work roles specified within, over specified calendar time.

(Liberated labor would be the ultimate determining factor, since production can't physically *happen* without the appropriate labor-power in place to do it.)

Have you ever heard of the Prisoner's Dilemma?

*Have* I -- ? I solve that shit like Sudoku!


x D


---

Here's from the FAQ:

To make it clearer: How would you make sure people would not even attempt (and if they did, they would fail) to simply grab a bunch of guns and take over the socialized factories or their production?

There would be no *reward* for doing so, because they would eventually have to depend on *others*, socially, anyway, for their daily life and living, due to *socialized production* (supply-chains, free-access, etc.).

Those who use *force*, as a faction, to 'take over' that which belongs to *everyone* would engender a lot of *resentment* from others and their takeover would quickly become *meaningless* because no one would *cooperate* with them since they went ahead and decided to forcibly not-cooperate with anyone else. Their factory would receive no supplies, and it would functionally be a *home* for those of the takeover since it wouldn't be able to function as a productive *factory*.


---

You're still *oversimplifying* history, and trying to scapegoat the *ideology* for historical outcomes. You're not making any *case*, or *argument* for how the ideology itself (workers-of-the-world socialism) "automatically" results in Stalinism.

No, it doesn't automatically result in Stalinism. It can also end simply in failure and being crushed, there are many examples of that too.

But even though that's happened *historically*, you're not saying what it is *within* the ideology itself that purportedly *causes* Stalinism, or failure. You're just *scapegoating*.


---

Well I happen to see people's interest in their own personal well-being as being a *civil rights* issue, like that of access to education, not-being killed by police, etc.

Maybe, but that example of the Little Rock Nine was actually a great example of the Federal Government enforcing the law, and using the available law at that (the Enforcement Acts of the 1870s).

So shouldn't there be laws against police doing summary executions (out of proportion to the offense, like noncompliance) -- ?


---

Okay, so the government policy of school desegregation was successfully implemented.

Correct, owing to a strong (militarized, in a very literal sense) Federal law enforcement response. That hardly backs your point up. It was implemented because rioters weren't simply stopped but had to deal with both real and threatened military repression (in Little Rock, it was threatened, but in the University of Mississippi the military had to actually use its bayonets against segregationist rioters who set the university alight and murdered two unarmed people).

This is effectively *centralization* of a monolithic-type government enforcement, which I'm all for, if it benefits the *people* and the *workers*.

But in the present-day occurrence of *killer cops*, summary executions, and police brutality, there's no effective *law*, and its enforcement, to *cover* these egregious government acts. You're unable, with your politics, to address *police riots* against BLM and BLM-type protests. In other words police should not be committing acts of *violence* against protestors when the cops' very *presence* is the cause of so many preventable killings (1000+ per year in the U.S.).


---

*Or* the government policy of 'safety from killer cops' could become the *reality*, worldwide, due to sufficient political efforts to *implement* it that way, by whatever means.

Worldwide? So the US government would dictate policing to China?

No, that's not how it works -- usually international diplomatic stuff goes through the United Nations.


---

You previously admitted that even *one* killing at the hands of cops is *too many*.

Correct, but that doesn't mean one cannot acknowledge the constant improvement over time.

I see no 'improvement over time' since killer cops (and fascists) have been committing killings and other acts of violence since the days of slavery.


---

I've already answered your question -- the dynamic is called 'false consciousness', and it happens *every day*.

Yeah, Marxism is such a religion that whenever people don't behave as expected, their behavior is false. Nothing new here.

I didn't give you a religious explanation, so you have no grounds to call 'false consciousness' a *religious* description.

Here's the *non-religious*, material / rational explanation for why 'false consciousness' is a thing in society:

Outside of the Marxist political ideology, the economist Edward S. Herman and linguist Noam Chomsky developed the propaganda model wherein information is selectively broadcast to serve the ends of a deeply centralized ownership of private media industries.

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

---

Of course I don't -- I'm not Crystal-Ball-History-Determiner-Guy, and neither are you.

No, but the fact that past attempts have all ended in failure doesn't bode well for your position.

Let *me* worry about that -- you're being *disingenuous* again because you're not in the socialist camp. You're also *scapegoating* the ideology of workers-of-the-world socialism itself, with your baseless accusations.

No, I also have to worry about that since "workers-of-the-world" means global: Be it successful or a failure, there would be no escape from it.

Wow -- at times you *do* have moments of understanding.

But again, you're *not* pro-socialist, so you have *zero* credibility to concern yourself politically *or* personally with its success or failure as a manifested ideology. You should stick to what you do best, which is to offer up trite and weak defenses of the status quo, meaning bourgeois capitalist rule.

Will you now please *stop scapegoating* the workers-of-the-world-socialism ideology for past historical events / results, which are *more complex* than just the ideology itself? You're showing that you *suck* at history -- here's something that may help:


History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show

---

Or there may be a *socialist revolution*, crystal-ball-guy.

Okay, you can be blinkered if you like. There's *historical precedent* for it.


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Of *course* it is, and *fortunately*, political activists like those in Antifa tend to *handle* this kind of thing, especially since the bourgeois state *doesn't*.

Indeed by *gasp* engaging in the use of lethal force if necessary. It seems not to be too different from what the cops do.

Means-and-ends, means-and-ends:


Means and Ends CHART

Spoiler: show

---

Again, you have to examine your political *priorities* -- what good is policing if the police *themselves* are committing gratuitous killings in the name of 'preventing' crime? That's downright *Orwellian*.

How about preventing scenarios such as a repeat of racist people taking the law on their own hands as an excuse to do racist things?

I don't know what you're referring to here -- you're being unspecific and *vague*.

Cue my example above: Lynchers would also claim that their victim had broken the law (for example, by claiming to have committed some sort of sexual offense against an alleged victim), and would use that as an excuse to justify their vigilantism.

Hey, if you want to be *anti-racist*, that's *good*. I have no objection to an anti-racist line.


---

Society has the potential to address and emphasize *use values*, while discarding *exchange values*, meaning *capitalism*.

This would imply there is an objective use value. Quite often, there's not.

No, your reasoning is *incorrect* -- just because there are *use values* to what humanity produces doesn't automatically mean that every object has the *same* use value to any and all people. Consider a gardening *rake* -- some people could use that implement more than others.


---

Okay, I disagree, and you've *admitted* that the 'difficult [basic] research' is funded by the U.S. government with public funds, and *given* to private corporations for profit-making.

Sure, and as I said the US Government would also get a return - in the form of higher tax revenue - for it.

---

Whatever makes your toes curl.

Go ahead:

https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20203/rec ... -d-funding

---

Oh, okay, if you want to identify *larger socio-economic factors* being relevant for the protests -- usually I'm the one telling the likes of *you*.

Go figure, although I think most people understand that.

---

Regardless of the *level* of government, the decades-long trend in government social services spending has been a *downward* trend of *austerity*.

Indeed, but that has been the result of a political decision since people have not been too willing to pay the taxes necessary to fund a stronger social safety net.

Bullshit. It's about government *spending* priorities. The money can be taken out of military and policing budgets.


---

Well, that's *internal* to the bourgeois government bureaucracy -- what *people* care about is the *results*, so however you do it *internally* needs to produce the correct, desired *results*.

Sure, results are of course important. But the wrong procedure can actually alter the results.

I'll take my chances, thanks.

Good luck dealing with the courts or getting the broader public to comply with unconstitutional policies with no resistance.

Who's calling for 'unconstitutional policies' -- ? (You just made that up -- it's a *strawman*.)


---

Well, such protests and riots are *valid* and *appropriate*.

For you, maybe. I'm pretty sure most of the public would not find rioting over rent valid or appropriate and would vote for anyone who promised law and order.

Hmmmm, I think you're overestimating the 'law and order' thing, but good luck with that Nixonian line.

Yes, rent is of paramount importance for most -- historically there have been 'rent strikes'.


---

Okay, I've got one -- defund and disband *all* police departments. Any resulting 'collateral damage' there will be acceptable.

Good luck dealing with vigilantes who begin to lynch Black people for real and imagined crimes.

You're making it sound as though police departments *police* white nationalists, but that's *not* the case.


---

No disagreement -- is this the 'collateral damage' you were referring to?

Among others, yes. I presume you are aware that the gangs there (Little Village) at some point simply began to chase all Black people in sight out.

I'm not going to comment on capital-based 'turf' wars -- are you equally as critical of the Western powers' international imperialism ('turf') around the world?


---

It's *not* hair-splitting, as you're implying -- as I said before if workers-of-the-world socialism *had* been implemented we'd be living in it *today*. *That's* a good litmus-test.

Hence why it's a No True Scotsman fallacy.

'No True Scotsman fallacy' implies *hair-splitting*, but this instance of what's socialism, and what's not is *not* that nuanced.

If a political economy is run by a bureaucratic elite, as in Stalinism, then that's a *clear-cut* characteristic of Stalinism. Workers-of-the-world socialism would be run by the *workers* -- those who do the work the undergirds that society / civilization. This isn't hair-splitting.


---

I have the 'labor credits' framework model that's consistent / compatible with *communism*, and is also *internally* consistent / coherent.

But not with the real world.

I *said* it's a *model*, or framework. I don't control the whole real-world.


---

I have no objection to these reforms.

Good.

---

*Or*, contrary to your linear thinking, perhaps the *removal* of all police departments would set an *encouraging example* and people would be *less stressed* and live *better lives*, contrary to the 'Mad Max' propaganda scenario that *you* have in mind.

Would they? Because I provided examples that undermine this narrative.

Examples? Then why aren't you *naming* / listing these so-called examples?


---

Clientelism is actually older than capitalism itself and as such can take place in non-capitalist societies as well.

Yes, I just acknowledged that.

I'll even go so far as to say that the patronage dynamic may even persist into *post-capitalist* social dynamics, potentially, but such politicking would be *acceptable* because such a society would be *post-scarcity*, so the important difference is that no one would be *stuck* in any given 'patronage' relationship, post-capitalism.

Well, if scarcity disappeared then it doesn't matter if society was communist, capitalist or whatever. In reality though scarcity will never go away, because people will change their standards of how a "materially good life" looks like.

You're glossing-over the distinction of *life-necessary* goods and services, versus everything else -- capitalism doesn't *provide* post-scarcity, and so even modern life-necessary goods and services are *unavailable* to many in the world because they can't *afford* them.

Yet our current technological *abilities* / capacities could *easily* provide everyone in the world with life-necessary goods and services, and especially so through full automation of industrial mass-production. Capitalism creates *artificial scarcity*, even, in order to avoid much of its *overproduction* from reaching the market, which would *drive down* prices. So capitalism is inherently, structurally more concerned with *exchange values*, than with *use values*. That's why I'm an anti-capitalist.

Sure, the standard of living keeps rising, as more things become possible for more people, as things generally keep developing over the centuries. But this dynamic is *separate* from capitalism's prioritization of *exchange values* -- meaning that general development happens *despite* capitalism's short-term efforts to prioritize exchange-values over use-values.

When it comes to more-specialized / more-discretionary types of consumption, it wouldn't even matter if that particular domain *retained* markets and market-type exchanges, because everything that's *essential* to basic life and living could be provided for, for all of humanity, with communism and fully-automated industrial mass-production.


I have an illustration that speaks to this issue in particular:


Multi-Tiered System of Productive and Consumptive Zones for a Post-Capitalist Political Economy

Spoiler: show

[Crantag]

I know everyone has seen this but it still needs to be discussed.



The person who captured this footage should win a Pulitzer

Maybe you should seek professional help for your psychological disorders, seeing as you find this fun. Good thing they got it extinguished. Hopefully the guy wasn't too seriously burned, though he may have been.

[wat0n]

You're *misinterpreting* Lenin, because he says *nothing* along the lines of 'banking generates value'. What he *says* is:

Right, the "nerve centers" of capitalism have no value whatsoever

Do you really think that sloshing funds around, in and out of various accounts, is 'generating value'? Can't you see that it's just glorified paper-shuffling, and easily done by the client these days using online banking -- ? Sure, banking provides a nominal service to *capital*, but, no, it's *not* 'generating value' in the sense that *actual production of commodities* generates value.

Taking risks when lending money of course generates value. Again, why do you think banks exist at all to begin with?

The 'CARES Act' is from *this* year, 2020.

Which is why it's a red herring, designed to distract from the obvious point regarding the century-long trend in asset returns.

You're blaming lack of technological growth on *over-regulation*, as you purport caused the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression, but in fact capitalism has *cyclical* boom-bust periods, regardless of 'innovation' or lack of it. (Look at 2008-2009, and now 2020.)

You're a *supply-sider*, because you think that corporations *use* cheap government capital to *innovate*, and that's just bullshit, as evidenced by massive offshore tax havens and inactive corporate cash.


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


U.S. companies are rolling in cash, and they're growing increasingly fearful to spend it

https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals ... owing.html

Again, you still can't see why I'm right. And no, I did not blame anything on over-regulation - you are literally making this up.

No, *you're* talking about a 'profit formula', and *I'm* talking about surplus labor value -- not the same thing.

We are talking about the (nonexistent) tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Of course this is about profits.

*Or*, go and read the article *yourself*, if you want to make a critique of the data.

No, your source, you defend it.

I provided *data*, in the form of a *graph*, for the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Decline.

And I also provided examples of other research showing there might not be such a tendency after all.

Also, it's interesting how you don't address when I provide you with data in the same form regarding R&D funding.

No, the individual 'demands' rankings that I just outlined are *not* about production, they're about *demand*. Put on your reading glasses this time.

Any centralization from my 'labor credits' model framework would be on the basis of cross-consensus, over two or more localities, or larger geography, *per-item*.

Yes, post-capitalist production could yield its own statistics, for public oonsumption, as through journalism.

How would such demand be satisfied without the corresponding production?

And *you're* not listening -- I said that 'looting' / stealing, etc., is *not a thing* in a post-scarcity political economy, because everyone can access more than they need, due to full-automation of industrial mass-production processes.

It's still a thing, because whoever controls the means for mass production will control the output.

Furthermore, there is one thing that is definitely not infinite: Time.

Well, that's where you're *wrong* -- history shows us *several* examples of on-the-ground working-class self-organizing. Take a look at labor history.

Are you seriously comparing unionization within a capitalist economy with a socialist revolution?

You're *so* concerned with property values that you don't *give a shit* whether more people are killed from today onwards due to the government's support of killer cops and police brutality.

Really? Because so far the one who's obsessed about taking other people's property and doesn't care about having people taking the law on their own hands is yourself.

Projection much?

You're off-on-a-tangent again -- I addressed your question about 'social consciousness' and you have no follow-up, so I guess you implicitly *accept* that social consciousness equates to mass organic demand.

No, I'm simply showing facts don't agree with your claims. There are no historical examples of something even remotely resembling that sort of consciousness arising, ever.

Yes, exactly, and I take this dynamic *seriously*, hence my formulation of the 'labor credits' as a *societal incentive* for doing hazardous / difficult / distasteful work, if such happens to be *socially necessary* (a significant 'organic demand' for such).

This dynamic also speaks to the post-capitalist collective *incentive* for *fully automating* all such boring / tiresome work roles, so that *no one* has to do those work roles anymore while *everyone* can benefit from the resulting (automated) production.

(See the 'Why should anyone give a shit about labor credits?' explanation, above.)

No, that wouldn't be communism, then -- communism is *post-capitalism* and has *no* money / currency / exchange values / exchanges / finance / commodity-production. That way it has no labor *exploitation* as we know all-too-well under capitalism.

You need to understand how the 'labor credits' function for you to make sense of the 'labor credits' model. You're off on a tangent again.

No, I'm not off on a tangent again. You are simply restating your claims there, as if repeating them will somehow turn nonsense into wisdom. It's up to you to explain how would the Prisoner's Dilemma be avoided here.

*Have* I -- ? I solve that shit like Sudoku!


x D

Then you should be able to understand why it's relevant here.

There would be no *reward* for doing so, because they would eventually have to depend on *others*, socially, anyway, for their daily life and living, due to *socialized production* (supply-chains, free-access, etc.).

Those who use *force*, as a faction, to 'take over' that which belongs to *everyone* would engender a lot of *resentment* from others and their takeover would quickly become *meaningless* because no one would *cooperate* with them since they went ahead and decided to forcibly not-cooperate with anyone else. Their factory would receive no supplies, and it would functionally be a *home* for those of the takeover since it wouldn't be able to function as a productive *factory*.

Since they would have taken over the means of production, they would be able to mass produce war robots to be able to defend their loot. And nuclear weapons too, while at it.

In fact, that's yet another problem. How would this stateless society deal with weapons control?

But even though that's happened *historically*, you're not saying what it is *within* the ideology itself that purportedly *causes* Stalinism, or failure. You're just *scapegoating*.

Well, that depends on the branch you consider. Stalinists argued they were still in the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that the time was not ripe for the next stage.

So shouldn't there be laws against police doing summary executions (out of proportion to the offense, like noncompliance) -- ?

There are laws against that.

This is effectively *centralization* of a monolithic-type government enforcement, which I'm all for, if it benefits the *people* and the *workers*.

Yes, I know you like Stalinism when it suits you

But in the present-day occurrence of *killer cops*, summary executions, and police brutality, there's no effective *law*, and its enforcement, to *cover* these egregious government acts. You're unable, with your politics, to address *police riots* against BLM and BLM-type protests. In other words police should not be committing acts of *violence* against protestors when the cops' very *presence* is the cause of so many preventable killings (1000+ per year in the U.S.).

According to whom, BLM rioters? As I said, they would still riot even if the issue of police brutality did not exist, and will still do so when it ceases to be a problem. Even more so if they somehow believe rioting will give them what they want.

No, that's not how it works -- usually international diplomatic stuff goes through the United Nations.

So the UN would dictate policing to China?

I see no 'improvement over time' since killer cops (and fascists) have been committing killings and other acts of violence since the days of slavery.

If you can't see why less killings represent an improvement, then I guess you and your ilk are in fact hopeless. You simply can't stop engaging in Nirvana Fallacies.

Also, this fake history of policing is boring, and hypocritical since communists have been committing genocide since the very first day they were able to get arms.

I didn't give you a religious explanation, so you have no grounds to call 'false consciousness' a *religious* description.

Here's the *non-religious*, material / rational explanation for why 'false consciousness' is a thing in society:

Ah, so on top of religious explanations (from prophet Karl Marx), now we got conspiracy theories to boot.

Wow -- at times you *do* have moments of understanding.

But again, you're *not* pro-socialist, so you have *zero* credibility to concern yourself politically *or* personally with its success or failure as a manifested ideology. You should stick to what you do best, which is to offer up trite and weak defenses of the status quo, meaning bourgeois capitalist rule.

Will you now please *stop scapegoating* the workers-of-the-world-socialism ideology for past historical events / results, which are *more complex* than just the ideology itself? You're showing that you *suck* at history -- here's something that may help:


History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show

I'm not "scapegoating" your ideology. I'm simply stating an objective fact: It has ended in failure whenever it has been attempted, either because the old order is reestablished or because the new order ends in an unending dictatorship of the proletariat.

Okay, you can be blinkered if you like. There's *historical precedent* for it.

Which one?

Means-and-ends, means-and-ends:


Means and Ends CHART

Spoiler: show

Yes, everyone knows Marxists don't care about killings but simply whine that it is not them who are doing the killings.

Hey, if you want to be *anti-racist*, that's *good*. I have no objection to an anti-racist line.

That's great! Then you should be able to understand why professional policing is necessary, since American history has already shown how the alternative looks like.

No, your reasoning is *incorrect* -- just because there are *use values* to what humanity produces doesn't automatically mean that every object has the *same* use value to any and all people. Consider a gardening *rake* -- some people could use that implement more than others.

Sure, so...?

Bullshit. It's about government *spending* priorities. The money can be taken out of military and policing budgets.

There are limits to what can be done by simply reassigning spending. At some point, the Government needs to spend more as a percent of GDP.

Who's calling for 'unconstitutional policies' -- ? (You just made that up -- it's a *strawman*.)

Who has Police Powers under the Constitution?

Hmmmm, I think you're overestimating the 'law and order' thing, but good luck with that Nixonian line.

Yes, rent is of paramount importance for most -- historically there have been 'rent strikes'.

That's not the same as abolishing rent.

You're making it sound as though police departments *police* white nationalists, but that's *not* the case.

You should tell that to the likes of Dylann Roof.

I'm not going to comment on capital-based 'turf' wars -- are you equally as critical of the Western powers' international imperialism ('turf') around the world?

International conflicts are quite obviously not comparable to vigilantism

And why don't you care about that example, I thought you cared about the problems of minorities?

'No True Scotsman fallacy' implies *hair-splitting*, but this instance of what's socialism, and what's not is *not* that nuanced.

If a political economy is run by a bureaucratic elite, as in Stalinism, then that's a *clear-cut* characteristic of Stalinism. Workers-of-the-world socialism would be run by the *workers* -- those who do the work the undergirds that society / civilization. This isn't hair-splitting.

Even accepting that argument, it would only show workers-of-the-world socialism has so far been failed to be implemented even when it has been tried.

I *said* it's a *model*, or framework. I don't control the whole real-world.

You don't need to, but one would think its proposals would be grounded in how agents have shown to behave in the past.

Examples? Then why aren't you *naming* / listing these so-called examples?

The events here in Chicago, not in the posh neighborhoods but in places like Little Village, aren't actual examples of 2020?

You're glossing-over the distinction of *life-necessary* goods and services, versus everything else -- capitalism doesn't *provide* post-scarcity, and so even modern life-necessary goods and services are *unavailable* to many in the world because they can't *afford* them.

Yet our current technological *abilities* / capacities could *easily* provide everyone in the world with life-necessary goods and services, and especially so through full automation of industrial mass-production. Capitalism creates *artificial scarcity*, even, in order to avoid much of its *overproduction* from reaching the market, which would *drive down* prices. So capitalism is inherently, structurally more concerned with *exchange values*, than with *use values*. That's why I'm an anti-capitalist.

Sure, the standard of living keeps rising, as more things become possible for more people, as things generally keep developing over the centuries. But this dynamic is *separate* from capitalism's prioritization of *exchange values* -- meaning that general development happens *despite* capitalism's short-term efforts to prioritize exchange-values over use-values.

When it comes to more-specialized / more-discretionary types of consumption, it wouldn't even matter if that particular domain *retained* markets and market-type exchanges, because everything that's *essential* to basic life and living could be provided for, for all of humanity, with communism and fully-automated industrial mass-production.


I have an illustration that speaks to this issue in particular:


Multi-Tiered System of Productive and Consumptive Zones for a Post-Capitalist Political Economy

Spoiler: show

The only problem with this argument is that, since resources are in fact scarce and it's not easy to draw the line between basic necessities and other necessities (sure, we can determine how much food, shelter or healthcare people need to merely remain alive, but most people would agree other goods and services are fundamental necessities even if they do not relate with fulfilling simple biological needs - such as educational services, utilities, etc), people will tend to redefine what's basic and what isn't. I can see it myself having moved to the US, stuff people take here as being "basic necessities" would not be seen as such in other parts of the world - and Americans see their standard of living as something normal in the global scale of things (it's not, the American poverty line would represent a middle class standard in much of Latin America - and in some countries it would even be an upper class standard -, for example).

[ckaihatsu]

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/0 ... n-s10.html


Democrats and media silent on execution of Michael Reinoehl by US Marshals

By Kevin Reed
10 September 2020

Six days after a multi-agency fugitive task force led by US Marshals tracked down, cornered and killed Michael Reinoehl, the corporate media and the Democrats remain silent on his execution in a hail of bullets in Lacey, Washington.

On Wednesday, OregonLive.com reported, on the basis of search warrants and police affidavits, that a Portland detective assigned to the US Marshals Pacific Northwest Violent Offenders Task Force obtained “pen register” and “trap and trace” warrants from a Portland-area judge one hour and 14 minutes before Reinoehl was shot dead.


A Washington State Patrol Crime Lab worker looks at evidence markers in the early morning hours of Friday, Sept. 4, 2020, in Lacey, Wash. at the scene where Michael Reinoehl was gunned down by police in a hail of gunfire. (Photo Credit: AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)


The court-approved warrants permitted the task force to track the GPS location and cell phone call data from Reinoehl’s cell phone and pinpoint his precise location.

Although the OregonLive.com report says it “appears” that the US Marshals “already had acted on other information that Reinoehl was in the Lacey area,” it is more likely that the warrants were an after-the-fact formality for police electronic surveillance tracking that was initiated as soon as the manhunt for Reinoehl commenced.

Reinoehl’s killing came several hours after he was charged with the murder of Aaron “Jay” Danielson, a Trump supporter and right-wing vigilante, at a protest in Portland, Oregon on August 29. Just minutes before Reinoehl’s death was announced, President Donald Trump tweeted a demand that the police take action to apprehend Danielson’s killer. “Do your job, and do it fast. Everybody knows who this thug is,” Trump declared.

A second report on Wednesday by OregonLive.com included a statement by an eyewitness to the shooting of Reinoehl at an apartment complex in the 7600 block of Third Way Southeast in Lacey. Nathanial Dingess, 39, speaking through his attorney, said he saw Reinoehl walking toward his car holding a cell phone in his hand when two unmarked law enforcement vehicles converged on him and began firing.

Dingess said no warnings or commands were issued as Reinoehl ducked for cover near his car. He was unable to enter his vehicle because it was blocked by the police cars. “Officers shot multiple rapid-fire rounds at Reinoehl before issuing a brief ‘stop’ command, quickly followed by more rapid-fire shooting by additional officers,” Dingess said. He added that he never saw a handgun in Reinoehl’s possession.

As reported Monday by the World Socialist Web Site, Reinoehl’s death was a state murder carried out with the endorsement of Attorney General William Barr and President Trump. On Monday, Trump hailed the killing of Reinoehl, saying, “If somebody is breaking the law, there has got to be a form of retribution.”

Taking care not to disrupt their own campaign for “law and order” in response to the mass protests against police violence across the country, Democratic Party presidential and vice presidential candidates Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris have remained silent on the extra-judicial murder of Reinoehl. They have similarly said little or nothing about the murder of two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin last month by Kyle Rittenhouse, a Trump supporter and armed vigilante who traveled to Kenosha to join other far-right vigilantes in attacking anti-police violence protesters.

In an interview with VICE News, published on September 3, Michael Foster Reinoehl, 48, said that he had been identified as the shooter of Danielson within an hour of the incident on August 29. Of the shooting, he said: “I had no choice. I mean, I had a choice. I could have sat there and watched them kill a friend of mine of color. But I wasn’t going to do that. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

He went on: “You know, lots of lawyers suggest that I shouldn’t even be saying anything, but I feel it’s important that the world at least gets a little bit of what’s really going on because there’s been a lot of propaganda put out there.”

Reinoehl described the arrival of the caravan of right-wing counter-protesters in Portland. He said, “There were 600 vehicles… I saw more of their vehicles than real citizen vehicles. It felt like the beginning of a war. It was a free for all and the police were letting it happen.”

Debunking the presentation of the protesters by the right wing and the media, Reinoehl said, “What they’ve done is they’re trying make it look like we are all terrorists. And they’re trying to make me look like a murderer. I’ve noticed that they keep saying that it’s not clear that it’s related to the protests. That’s a lie. They know that it’s related to the protests.”

On the question of Antifa, Reinoehl said, “They want to paint a picture of Antifa having major involvement. A lot of people don’t understand what Antifa represents. And if you just look at the basic definition of it, it’s just anti-fascist, and I am 100 percent anti-fascist. I am not a member of Antifa. I am not a member of anything. Honestly, I hate to say it, but I see a civil war right around the corner.”

Little of this interview has been carried by the corporate news media, which falsely repeated Attorney General Barr’s claim that Reinoehl was a member of Antifa. The media reported without criticism the official reports from the US Marshals Service that Reinoehl was gunned down because “initial reports indicate the suspect produced a firearm, threatening the lives of law enforcement officers,” and that “as they attempted to apprehend him, there was gunfire.” Officials later acknowledged that they “are not able to confirm at this time if he fired shots.”

Protests against police violence in Portland and other cities have continued since George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police in late May. With the encouragement of the White House, groups of right-wing militias and vigilantes have carried out acts of violence against the demonstrators with increasing frequency.

In August, a counter-protester was arrested in Portland for firing a weapon into a crowd of Black Lives Matter demonstrators, and Alan Swinney, a member of the neo-fascist Proud Boys, brandished a gun and pointed it at protesters.

Public outrage over the police killing of Reinoehl has been expressed on social media. Portland-area artist and musician David Rovics wrote a song about the murder titled “A Song for Michael Reinoehl” and posted it on Facebook and YouTube. The lyrics to the song include the following:

For years it was predicted someday Someone would retaliate
With all those weapons on display With that much fear and hate
Michael Reinoehl he was sought For murder, the alleged crime
But he was never caught Or given a chance for prison time
The cops came to the property From local deputies to feds
They came to kill their enemy They wanted this anarchist’s head

Speaking to the World Socialist Web Site, Rovics said of the killing of Reinoehl: “All we know is what the police say, which we also know is completely unreliable. But even according to what the police have said, he did not fire at them, and none of their body cams were on. So, based on that lack of information, my educated guess is Michael was executed.

“As for why, I’d say that’s because many of the cops, at every level—city, state, federal—are sympathetic with fascists and not at all sympathetic with antifascists, and this has been true since fascism has existed as a political philosophy.”

When asked about the response of the corporate media, Rovics said, “What they’re doing with him, as with so many other cases, is treating the police report as if it’s remotely believable. They know it’s not—or they should know. Pretending they don’t know this is collusion, it’s a sort of gas-lighting. So, basically, they’re giving us the impression that he did something other than raise his hands up and surrender, and thus, the police had some kind of justification to fire 40 bullets at him.”

Copyright © 1998-2020 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

[ckaihatsu]

You're *misinterpreting* Lenin, because he says *nothing* along the lines of 'banking generates value'. What he *says* is:

Right, the "nerve centers" of capitalism have no value whatsoever

You're confusing economics and politics, though -- sure, the 'nerve centers of capitalism' have *political* value to revolutionaries, wanting to reappropriate such for *working class* logistics instead of for capitalist purposes.

But, economically, all of that institutional concern over 'exchange value' is *misplaced* for a revolutionary, because of the ethos for *use values*, while *capitalist value* build-up is of no importance or value to the workers, since they can collectively run society's production *without* such baggage.


---

Do you really think that sloshing funds around, in and out of various accounts, is 'generating value'? Can't you see that it's just glorified paper-shuffling, and easily done by the client these days using online banking -- ? Sure, banking provides a nominal service to *capital*, but, no, it's *not* 'generating value' in the sense that *actual production of commodities* generates value.

Taking risks when lending money of course generates value. Again, why do you think banks exist at all to begin with?

No, lending / investing money *itself* really *isn't* producing new value -- it's more of a distributed *management* function, or *overhead* for capital itself, since someone has to expend that effort in managing the capital. Capital, however sliced-and-diced, still requires *labor* to make commodities (goods and/or services), which then are sold for the sake of making profits.


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show

---

The 'CARES Act' is from *this* year, 2020.

Which is why it's a red herring, designed to distract from the obvious point regarding the century-long trend in asset returns.

Now you're going off on a tangent again -- government deficit spending of trillions of dollars, to underwrite the stock markets, is not the same as the rise of financialization, which is particular to the 1980s onward.


---

You're blaming lack of technological growth on *over-regulation*, as you purport caused the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression, but in fact capitalism has *cyclical* boom-bust periods, regardless of 'innovation' or lack of it. (Look at 2008-2009, and now 2020.)

You're a *supply-sider*, because you think that corporations *use* cheap government capital to *innovate*, and that's just bullshit, as evidenced by massive offshore tax havens and inactive corporate cash.


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


U.S. companies are rolling in cash, and they're growing increasingly fearful to spend it

https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals ... owing.html

Again, you still can't see why I'm right. And no, I did not blame anything on over-regulation - you are literally making this up.

Here's the relevant past exchanges -- I'm not making anything up. You blamed 1929 on 'regulatory' factors, meaning the government's progressive tax structure at the time.

Of course they [innovations] won't be adapted immediately. But they will, eventually, if they are invented and profitable.

Well, again, that's not *automatic* -- look at the Great Depression, for example, when consumer buying power was *sharply* reduced. (Etc.)

That was simply cyclical variation - a particularly bad one, indeed, as a result of many factors (including of the regulatory kind), but it's still not a trend.

It's a trend *against* technological innovation. (And did you *really* just make a supply-side argument here just now?) (grin)

---

No, *you're* talking about a 'profit formula', and *I'm* talking about surplus labor value -- not the same thing.

We are talking about the (nonexistent) tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Of course this is about profits.

Here's the data, again:




https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/ ... d-piketty/


---

*Or*, go and read the article *yourself*, if you want to make a critique of the data.

No, your source, you defend it.

---

I provided *data*, in the form of a *graph*, for the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Decline.

And I also provided examples of other research showing there might not be such a tendency after all.

No, you haven't -- all you've done is *deny* that profit has a tendency to decline over the decades and centuries.

Also, it's interesting how you don't address when I provide you with data in the same form regarding R&D funding.

Your number ('60%') was made-up because it doesn't exist in Figure 4-4 in the document that you provided.


---

No, the individual 'demands' rankings that I just outlined are *not* about production, they're about *demand*. Put on your reading glasses this time.

Any centralization from my 'labor credits' model framework would be on the basis of cross-consensus, over two or more localities, or larger geography, *per-item*.

Yes, post-capitalist production could yield its own statistics, for public oonsumption, as through journalism.

How would such demand be satisfied without the corresponding production?

Socially-necessary production is a *requirement* to fulfill (organic) demand.


---

And *you're* not listening -- I said that 'looting' / stealing, etc., is *not a thing* in a post-scarcity political economy, because everyone can access more than they need, due to full-automation of industrial mass-production processes.

It's still a thing, because whoever controls the means for mass production will control the output.

Furthermore, there is one thing that is definitely not infinite: Time.

Those who control the means of mass industrial production are the world's working class, collectively, post-capitalism. The social production for the common good will have to take place using *fixed assets* -- factories -- which will have to be appropriately *scheduled* according to one plan or another. This is exactly what my 'labor credits' model framework *addresses*:


labor credits framework for 'communist supply & demand'

Spoiler: show

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... ost2889338


---

Well, that's where you're *wrong* -- history shows us *several* examples of on-the-ground working-class self-organizing. Take a look at labor history.

Are you seriously comparing unionization within a capitalist economy with a socialist revolution?

Yeah, I am, because both have workers power as the common denominator.


---

You're *so* concerned with property values that you don't *give a shit* whether more people are killed from today onwards due to the government's support of killer cops and police brutality.

Really? Because so far the one who's obsessed about taking other people's property and doesn't care about having people taking the law on their own hands is yourself.

Projection much?

This is a baseless accusation -- when have I said that I want to 'take other people's property', and when have I said that I want to 'take the law [into] my own hands' -- ?

Neither of these characterizations are a part of who I am.


---

You're off-on-a-tangent again -- I addressed your question about 'social consciousness' and you have no follow-up, so I guess you implicitly *accept* that social consciousness equates to mass organic demand.

No, I'm simply showing facts don't agree with your claims. There are no historical examples of something even remotely resembling that sort of consciousness arising, ever.

It arises *all the time* -- it's a part of living in *society*. For example, why weren't face masks being provided to everyone initially, at the time of Trump's CARES Act that bailed out the stock market with trillions of dollars?

Journalism picked up on the fact that in-person service workers like grocery workers and nurses weren't being provided with adequate PPE. That became part of the current social consciousness, that the Trump Administration was *negligent* regarding the distribution of PPE.


---

Yes, exactly, and I take this dynamic *seriously*, hence my formulation of the 'labor credits' as a *societal incentive* for doing hazardous / difficult / distasteful work, if such happens to be *socially necessary* (a significant 'organic demand' for such).

This dynamic also speaks to the post-capitalist collective *incentive* for *fully automating* all such boring / tiresome work roles, so that *no one* has to do those work roles anymore while *everyone* can benefit from the resulting (automated) production.

(See the 'Why should anyone give a shit about labor credits?' explanation, above.)

No, that wouldn't be communism, then -- communism is *post-capitalism* and has *no* money / currency / exchange values / exchanges / finance / commodity-production. That way it has no labor *exploitation* as we know all-too-well under capitalism.

You need to understand how the 'labor credits' function for you to make sense of the 'labor credits' model. You're off on a tangent again.

No, I'm not off on a tangent again. You are simply restating your claims there, as if repeating them will somehow turn nonsense into wisdom. It's up to you to explain how would the Prisoner's Dilemma be avoided here.

You're implying that there would be *scarcity*, when that would *not* be the case due to full collective implementation of industrial mass-production techniques, to provide for the common good, post-capitalism.


---

*Have* I -- ? I solve that shit like Sudoku!


x D

Then you should be able to understand why it's relevant here.

Answered above.


---

There would be no *reward* for doing so, because they would eventually have to depend on *others*, socially, anyway, for their daily life and living, due to *socialized production* (supply-chains, free-access, etc.).

Those who use *force*, as a faction, to 'take over' that which belongs to *everyone* would engender a lot of *resentment* from others and their takeover would quickly become *meaningless* because no one would *cooperate* with them since they went ahead and decided to forcibly not-cooperate with anyone else. Their factory would receive no supplies, and it would functionally be a *home* for those of the takeover since it wouldn't be able to function as a productive *factory*.

Since they would have taken over the means of production, they would be able to mass produce war robots to be able to defend their loot. And nuclear weapons too, while at it.

No, you *skipped* my response -- weapons require *supply chains*, and if some faction took over a factory it would be news and the ongoing 'social revolution' of mass liberated-workers political sentiment would *resent* that action, and would *disable* it by cutting off supply chains *to* it, like the cutting off of nutrients to a tumor in the body.

Also, if things escalated and this group holed-up in a non-productive factory decided on *violence*, such violence could be readily matched from *without*.

In fact, that's yet another problem. How would this stateless society deal with weapons control?

(See the previous.)


---

But even though that's happened *historically*, you're not saying what it is *within* the ideology itself that purportedly *causes* Stalinism, or failure. You're just *scapegoating*.

Well, that depends on the branch you consider. Stalinists argued they were still in the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that the time was not ripe for the next stage.

Okay, well now you know enough to tell them otherwise.


---

So shouldn't there be laws against police doing summary executions (out of proportion to the offense, like noncompliance) -- ?

There are laws against that.

And why aren't such laws being *enforced* -- the summary executions at the hands of cops *continue*, which is why there's protests and riots.


---

Okay, so the government policy of school desegregation was successfully implemented.

Correct, owing to a strong (militarized, in a very literal sense) Federal law enforcement response. That hardly backs your point up. It was implemented because rioters weren't simply stopped but had to deal with both real and threatened military repression (in Little Rock, it was threatened, but in the University of Mississippi the military had to actually use its bayonets against segregationist rioters who set the university alight and murdered two unarmed people).

This is effectively *centralization* of a monolithic-type government enforcement, which I'm all for, if it benefits the *people* and the *workers*.

Yes, I know you like Stalinism when it suits you

No, you're *misunderstanding* -- this is how *government*, of *any* kind, operates -- it *has* to be monolithic (single policy) or else it's not really government because it still has factional fighting within and lack of a clear policy decision.

In the case of school desegregation there *was* a clear monolithic policy that came down from Eisenhower, and this is a *precedent* for how killer cops should be handled.


---

But in the present-day occurrence of *killer cops*, summary executions, and police brutality, there's no effective *law*, and its enforcement, to *cover* these egregious government acts. You're unable, with your politics, to address *police riots* against BLM and BLM-type protests. In other words police should not be committing acts of *violence* against protestors when the cops' very *presence* is the cause of so many preventable killings (1000+ per year in the U.S.).

According to whom, BLM rioters? As I said, they would still riot even if the issue of police brutality did not exist, and will still do so when it ceases to be a problem. Even more so if they somehow believe rioting will give them what they want.

Now you're being *biased*, and you're *scapegoating* the activists, instead of looking at the *issue*, meaning *why* they're protesting / rioting.

Below are lists of people killed by law enforcement in the United States, both on duty and off duty.


The annual average number of justifiable homicides alone was previously estimated to be near 400.[3] Updated estimates from the Bureau of Justice Statistics released in 2015 estimate the number to be around 930 per year, or 1,240 if assuming that non-reporting local agencies kill people at the same rate as reporting agencies.[4]

Deaths by age group in 2015, according to The Counted

Around 2015–2016, The Guardian newspaper ran its own database, The Counted, which tracked US killings by police and other law enforcement agencies including from gunshots, tasers, car accidents and custody deaths. In 2015 they counted 1,146 deaths and 1,093 deaths for 2016. The database can be viewed by state, gender, race/ethnicity, age, classification (e.g., "gunshot"), and whether the person killed was armed.[5]

The Washington Post has tracked shootings since 2015, reporting more than 5,000 incidents since their tracking began.[6] The database can also classify people in various categories including race, age, weapon etc. For 2019, it reported a total of 1,004 people shot and killed by police.[7][8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_ ... ted_States

---

*Or* the government policy of 'safety from killer cops' could become the *reality*, worldwide, due to sufficient political efforts to *implement* it that way, by whatever means.

Worldwide? So the US government would dictate policing to China?

No, that's not how it works -- usually international diplomatic stuff goes through the United Nations.

So the UN would dictate policing to China?

I really don't know. You could ask the UN.


---

I see no 'improvement over time' since killer cops (and fascists) have been committing killings and other acts of violence since the days of slavery.

If you can't see why less killings represent an improvement, then I guess you and your ilk are in fact hopeless. You simply can't stop engaging in Nirvana Fallacies.

Also, this fake history of policing is boring, and hypocritical since communists have been committing genocide since the very first day they were able to get arms.

Again, you mean *Stalinists*, or countries that are *state capitalist*.

Even *one* summary execution at the hands of cops is one too many. You're making the death toll sound *inevitable*, instead of supporting a politics to *address* these preventable killings.


---

I didn't give you a religious explanation, so you have no grounds to call 'false consciousness' a *religious* description.

Here's the *non-religious*, material / rational explanation for why 'false consciousness' is a thing in society:

Outside of the Marxist political ideology, the economist Edward S. Herman and linguist Noam Chomsky developed the propaganda model wherein information is selectively broadcast to serve the ends of a deeply centralized ownership of private media industries.

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

Ah, so on top of religious explanations (from prophet Karl Marx), now we got conspiracy theories to boot.

Marxism isn't a religion, either -- it's based on *historical materialism*:

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


The Chomsky stuff you'd have to look into yourself, but it's not a conspiracy theory -- it's an examination of the media industry.


---

Wow -- at times you *do* have moments of understanding.

But again, you're *not* pro-socialist, so you have *zero* credibility to concern yourself politically *or* personally with its success or failure as a manifested ideology. You should stick to what you do best, which is to offer up trite and weak defenses of the status quo, meaning bourgeois capitalist rule.

Will you now please *stop scapegoating* the workers-of-the-world-socialism ideology for past historical events / results, which are *more complex* than just the ideology itself? You're showing that you *suck* at history -- here's something that may help:


History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show

I'm not "scapegoating" your ideology. I'm simply stating an objective fact: It has ended in failure whenever it has been attempted, either because the old order is reestablished or because the new order ends in an unending dictatorship of the proletariat.

Now you're *abandoning* your accusation that these historical results are due to the workers-of-the-world ideology itself -- you're citing *historical* factors, and not an *ideological* cause for these historical results.


---

Or there may be a *socialist revolution*, crystal-ball-guy.

Okay, you can be blinkered if you like. There's *historical precedent* for it.

Which one?

I tend to name the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Hungarian Revolution.


---

Means-and-ends, means-and-ends:


Means and Ends CHART

Spoiler: show

Yes, everyone knows Marxists don't care about killings but simply whine that it is not them who are doing the killings.

Yeah, *still* not a Stalinist, and killings is just a *tactic*, as we see from the police in their support of white supremacy.


Anatomy of a Platform

Spoiler: show

---

Hey, if you want to be *anti-racist*, that's *good*. I have no objection to an anti-racist line.

That's great! Then you should be able to understand why professional policing is necessary, since American history has already shown how the alternative looks like.

Oh, you seem to think that U.S. policing is *not* racist. It is.

According to The Washington Post, police officers shot and killed 1,001 people in the United States in 2019. About half of those killed were white, and one quarter were black, making the rate of deaths for black Americans (31 fatal shootings per million) more than twice as high as the rate for white Americans (13 fatal shootings per million).[83][84] The Washington Post also counts 13 unarmed black Americans shot dead by police in 2019.[85]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Liv ... sive_force

---

Society has the potential to address and emphasize *use values*, while discarding *exchange values*, meaning *capitalism*.

This would imply there is an objective use value. Quite often, there's not.

No, your reasoning is *incorrect* -- just because there are *use values* to what humanity produces doesn't automatically mean that every object has the *same* use value to any and all people. Consider a gardening *rake* -- some people could use that implement more than others.

Sure, so...?

So use values can be quite *subjective*, and/or *inter-subjective*, as with mass consumer items like DVR machines.


---

Bullshit. It's about government *spending* priorities. The money can be taken out of military and policing budgets.

There are limits to what can be done by simply reassigning spending. At some point, the Government needs to spend more as a percent of GDP.

This isn't *quantitative*, it's *qualitative*, as in what should government spending be spent *on*?


---

Well, that's *internal* to the bourgeois government bureaucracy -- what *people* care about is the *results*, so however you do it *internally* needs to produce the correct, desired *results*.

Sure, results are of course important. But the wrong procedure can actually alter the results.

I'll take my chances, thanks.

Good luck dealing with the courts or getting the broader public to comply with unconstitutional policies with no resistance.

Who's calling for 'unconstitutional policies' -- ? (You just made that up -- it's a *strawman*.)

Who has Police Powers under the Constitution?

Figure it out, and then make sure that your politics and efforts yield the *correct result*, given whatever 'procedures' you favor.


---

Hmmmm, I think you're overestimating the 'law and order' thing, but good luck with that Nixonian line.

Yes, rent is of paramount importance for most -- historically there have been 'rent strikes'.

That's not the same as abolishing rent.

A rent strike is a method of protest commonly employed against large landlords. In a rent strike, a group of tenants come together and agree to refuse to pay their rent en masse until a specific list of demands is met by the landlord. This can be a useful tactic of final resort for use against intransigent landlords, but carries the obvious risk of eviction and bad credit history in some cases.

Historically, rent strikes have often been used in response to problems such as high rents, poor conditions in the property, or unreasonable tenancy demands; however, there have been situations where wider issues have led to such action.

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

---

You're making it sound as though police departments *police* white nationalists, but that's *not* the case.

You should tell that to the likes of Dylann Roof.

Or, if I'd been in *Kenosha*, I would've let the police *there* know, since they were informed by *others* and did nothing anyway:

Rittenhouse subsequently walked towards police with his hands up and the semi-automatic rifle strapped across his chest; they allowed him to leave or appeared not to acknowledge Rittenhouse, though several witnesses and other protesters shouted for him to be arrested.[83][7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenosha_protests#Shooting

---

Among others, yes. I presume you are aware that the gangs there (Little Village) at some point simply began to chase all Black people in sight out.

I'm not going to comment on capital-based 'turf' wars -- are you equally as critical of the Western powers' international imperialism ('turf') around the world?

International conflicts are quite obviously not comparable to vigilantism

And why don't you care about that example, I thought you cared about the problems of minorities?

I gave you my position on that example.

The 'problems of minorities' are actually the problems of *oppression*, due to capitalist imperialism.

Doesn't the following sound like vigilantism -- ?

Imperialism is a policy or ideology of extending the rule or authority of a country over other countries and people, often by military force or by gaining political and economic control.[2] While related to the concepts of colonialism and empire, imperialism is a distinct concept that can apply to other forms of expansion and many forms of government.

The concept of imperialism arose in the modern age, associated chiefly with the European colonial powers of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries and New Imperialism.

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

---

'No True Scotsman fallacy' implies *hair-splitting*, but this instance of what's socialism, and what's not is *not* that nuanced.

If a political economy is run by a bureaucratic elite, as in Stalinism, then that's a *clear-cut* characteristic of Stalinism. Workers-of-the-world socialism would be run by the *workers* -- those who do the work the undergirds that society / civilization. This isn't hair-splitting.

Even accepting that argument, it would only show workers-of-the-world socialism has so far been failed to be implemented even when it has been tried.

Well, this is a *mischaracterization* of history, since you're making it sound like it was the *ideology itself* that's prone to failure, when, historically, there were many other social factors at-work, from *without*, that impacted on this-or-that revolution from below, like Western imperialism and its invasions in the Russian Revolution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_in ... _Civil_War


Again, your intent is to *scapegoat* the workers-of-the-world ideology *itself*, but you're not even making any *argument* as to what part of the ideology supposedly makes it prone to failure.

What you're doing is called *propaganda*.


---

I *said* it's a *model*, or framework. I don't control the whole real-world.

You don't need to, but one would think its proposals would be grounded in how agents have shown to behave in the past.

Oh -- you're trying to *psychologize* politics, as though history is entirely due to the actions of participants within various events.

Even more, you're making it sound as though the personal quality of 'character' is what shapes history. No, you're *mixing scales*. Yes, some individual decision-making, particularly from those in official positions of *power*, have been key in historical trajectories, but mostly there have been much *larger forces* already in-motion, such as the buildup of empires on a finite globe that led into the international conflicts of World War I.

You, in particular, need to look at 'mode of production', in your future examinations of history and what makes the world go-'round.


[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

Spoiler: show

---

Examples? Then why aren't you *naming* / listing these so-called examples?

The events here in Chicago, not in the posh neighborhoods but in places like Little Village, aren't actual examples of 2020?

What events?


---

Well, if scarcity disappeared then it doesn't matter if society was communist, capitalist or whatever. In reality though scarcity will never go away, because people will change their standards of how a "materially good life" looks like.

You're glossing-over the distinction of *life-necessary* goods and services, versus everything else -- capitalism doesn't *provide* post-scarcity, and so even modern life-necessary goods and services are *unavailable* to many in the world because they can't *afford* them.

Yet our current technological *abilities* / capacities could *easily* provide everyone in the world with life-necessary goods and services, and especially so through full automation of industrial mass-production. Capitalism creates *artificial scarcity*, even, in order to avoid much of its *overproduction* from reaching the market, which would *drive down* prices. So capitalism is inherently, structurally more concerned with *exchange values*, than with *use values*. That's why I'm an anti-capitalist.

Sure, the standard of living keeps rising, as more things become possible for more people, as things generally keep developing over the centuries. But this dynamic is *separate* from capitalism's prioritization of *exchange values* -- meaning that general development happens *despite* capitalism's short-term efforts to prioritize exchange-values over use-values.

When it comes to more-specialized / more-discretionary types of consumption, it wouldn't even matter if that particular domain *retained* markets and market-type exchanges, because everything that's *essential* to basic life and living could be provided for, for all of humanity, with communism and fully-automated industrial mass-production.


I have an illustration that speaks to this issue in particular:


Multi-Tiered System of Productive and Consumptive Zones for a Post-Capitalist Political Economy

Spoiler: show

The only problem with this argument is that, since resources are in fact scarce and it's not easy to draw the line between basic necessities and other necessities (sure, we can determine how much food, shelter or healthcare people need to merely remain alive, but most people would agree other goods and services are fundamental necessities even if they do not relate with fulfilling simple biological needs - such as educational services, utilities, etc),

Well, let's make a *list*, as you've started to do.

We have food, housing, health care, education, and utilities, so far. Anything else? (I'd add 'transportation', and 'household items'.)

people will tend to redefine what's basic and what isn't. I can see it myself having moved to the US, stuff people take here as being "basic necessities" would not be seen as such in other parts of the world - and Americans see their standard of living as something normal in the global scale of things (it's not, the American poverty line would represent a middle class standard in much of Latin America - and in some countries it would even be an upper class standard -, for example).

Okay, good point.

Socialism is only concerned with the *basic necessities* of modern life and living, so once that's accomplished the rest beyond that could be whatever the fuck the people of that society want to do at that point -- it would be more 'lifestyle' than 'necessity' at that point.


‭History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show

[wat0n]

You're confusing economics and politics, though -- sure, the 'nerve centers of capitalism' have *political* value to revolutionaries, wanting to reappropriate such for *working class* logistics instead of for capitalist purposes.

But, economically, all of that institutional concern over 'exchange value' is *misplaced* for a revolutionary, because of the ethos for *use values*, while *capitalist value* build-up is of no importance or value to the workers, since they can collectively run society's production *without* such baggage.

I'm actually referring to their economic importance.

No, lending / investing money *itself* really *isn't* producing new value -- it's more of a distributed *management* function, or *overhead* for capital itself, since someone has to expend that effort in managing the capital. Capital, however sliced-and-diced, still requires *labor* to make commodities (goods and/or services), which then are sold for the sake of making profits.


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show

Management itself generates value. Ever heard of the management consulting industry?

Now you're going off on a tangent again -- government deficit spending of trillions of dollars, to underwrite the stock markets, is not the same as the rise of financialization, which is particular to the 1980s onward.

No, you are going off tangent once again: I've never heard of a financial bubble lasting for 100+ years, and the fact that stock market returns show now trend (with a positive average) calls into question the idea that businesses are becoming less profitable over time.

Here's the relevant past exchanges -- I'm not making anything up. You blamed 1929 on 'regulatory' factors, meaning the government's progressive tax structure at the time.

No, actually the regulatory factors I was referring to was the poor financial and banking regulation of the time. The tax structure wasn't all that progressive at the time anyway.

Here's the data, again:




https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/ ... d-piketty/

And there's the other research showing there is no trend, again.

No, you haven't -- all you've done is *deny* that profit has a tendency to decline over the decades and centuries.

Yes I did. I even gave you the citation for you to educate yourself.

Your number ('60%') was made-up because it doesn't exist in Figure 4-4 in the document that you provided.

Yes it does, as easy as it is to look at it.

Socially-necessary production is a *requirement* to fulfill (organic) demand.

Then you are yet to address my earlier point on this matter.

Those who control the means of mass industrial production are the world's working class, collectively, post-capitalism. The social production for the common good will have to take place using *fixed assets* -- factories -- which will have to be appropriately *scheduled* according to one plan or another. This is exactly what my 'labor credits' model framework *addresses*:


labor credits framework for 'communist supply & demand'

Spoiler: show

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... ost2889338

This does not address the question of how would you prevent part of the working class from taking over the means of production for their own collective benefit.

Yeah, I am, because both have workers power as the common denominator.

Hardly comparable in terms of the scope of the changes they were aiming for.

This is a baseless accusation -- when have I said that I want to 'take other people's property', and when have I said that I want to 'take the law [into] my own hands' -- ?

Neither of these characterizations are a part of who I am.

Right, you want others to do that for you

It arises *all the time* -- it's a part of living in *society*. For example, why weren't face masks being provided to everyone initially, at the time of Trump's CARES Act that bailed out the stock market with trillions of dollars?

Journalism picked up on the fact that in-person service workers like grocery workers and nurses weren't being provided with adequate PPE. That became part of the current social consciousness, that the Trump Administration was *negligent* regarding the distribution of PPE.

So? It has little to do with the social consciousness required for people to act for the common interest instead of their own.

You're implying that there would be *scarcity*, when that would *not* be the case due to full collective implementation of industrial mass-production techniques, to provide for the common good, post-capitalism.

Wrong. There would be a scarcity of labor to fix and maintain machines, since most people don't take that as a hobby.

No, you *skipped* my response -- weapons require *supply chains*, and if some faction took over a factory it would be news and the ongoing 'social revolution' of mass liberated-workers political sentiment would *resent* that action, and would *disable* it by cutting off supply chains *to* it, like the cutting off of nutrients to a tumor in the body.

Also, if things escalated and this group holed-up in a non-productive factory decided on *violence*, such violence could be readily matched from *without*.

That could indeed strain the production of new weapons, but it would not make the currently existing stock disappear. A more realistic scenario would be one in which many worker societies have their own weapons, and basically fight a civil war.

Okay, well now you know enough to tell them otherwise.

They may call you a Trot in response

And why aren't such laws being *enforced* -- the summary executions at the hands of cops *continue*, which is why there's protests and riots.

Indeed, that is one great question. Why do you think that is the case? And to what extent is that actually true?

No, you're *misunderstanding* -- this is how *government*, of *any* kind, operates -- it *has* to be monolithic (single policy) or else it's not really government because it still has factional fighting within and lack of a clear policy decision.

This shows a misunderstanding of how the Federal system works. The US does have differing policies in the different levels of government in some cases (the very existence of sanctuary cities is a good example of this).

In the case of school desegregation there *was* a clear monolithic policy that came down from Eisenhower, and this is a *precedent* for how killer cops should be handled.

At the Federal level, yes, but there was indeed resistance from several State Governments.

Now you're being *biased*, and you're *scapegoating* the activists, instead of looking at the *issue*, meaning *why* they're protesting / rioting.

No, it's a simple inference from what even you have said here.

I really don't know. You could ask the UN.

Can the UN do that?

Again, you mean *Stalinists*, or countries that are *state capitalist*.

Even *one* summary execution at the hands of cops is one too many. You're making the death toll sound *inevitable*, instead of supporting a politics to *address* these preventable killings.

No, it's not inevitable but there is quite evidently a difference between having a single police killing compared to the killing of thousands or millions.

Marxism isn't a religion, either -- it's based on *historical materialism*:

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

Marxists will never admit to it, of course.

The Chomsky stuff you'd have to look into yourself, but it's not a conspiracy theory -- it's an examination of the media industry.

A conspirational one at that.

Now you're *abandoning* your accusation that these historical results are due to the workers-of-the-world ideology itself -- you're citing *historical* factors, and not an *ideological* cause for these historical results.

Should ideologies match the behavior of societies themselves?

I tend to name the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Hungarian Revolution.

We are going back in circles.

Yeah, *still* not a Stalinist, and killings is just a *tactic*, as we see from the police in their support of white supremacy.


Anatomy of a Platform

Spoiler: show

Indeed, the end justifies the means. This is a lot older than Marxism.

Oh, you seem to think that U.S. policing is *not* racist. It is.

No, it is not. And I can cite research regarding shootings in particular if you want, the fact that the people killed don't look like the racial makeup of the US is not evidence of racism in itself. If so, then policing is misandric too, since the vast majority of those killed are male. Do you want to get into that sort of reasoning (which is wrong)?

So use values can be quite *subjective*, and/or *inter-subjective*, as with mass consumer items like DVR machines.

I know, but how does this support your point?

This isn't *quantitative*, it's *qualitative*, as in what should government spending be spent *on*?

Both are important, why not raise taxes (for instance) to fund government spending? I do believe this is warranted to some extent.

Figure it out, and then make sure that your politics and efforts yield the *correct result*, given whatever 'procedures' you favor.

Hint: It's not the Federal Government.

Or, if I'd been in *Kenosha*, I would've let the police *there* know, since they were informed by *others* and did nothing anyway:

Yeah because they had just arrived to even see what had happened.

I gave you my position on that example.

The 'problems of minorities' are actually the problems of *oppression*, due to capitalist imperialism.

Doesn't the following sound like vigilantism -- ?

No, it doesn't. And no, capitalism is not the source of all problems - as the history of communist states shows for that matter.

Well, this is a *mischaracterization* of history, since you're making it sound like it was the *ideology itself* that's prone to failure, when, historically, there were many other social factors at-work, from *without*, that impacted on this-or-that revolution from below, like Western imperialism and its invasions in the Russian Revolution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_in ... _Civil_War

On the contrary, it shows that - for starters - it doesn't allow for military organizing to be able to repel foreign invasions.

Again, your intent is to *scapegoat* the workers-of-the-world ideology *itself*, but you're not even making any *argument* as to what part of the ideology supposedly makes it prone to failure.

What you're doing is called *propaganda*.

I think I've provided a few of them.

Oh -- you're trying to *psychologize* politics, as though history is entirely due to the actions of participants within various events.

Even more, you're making it sound as though the personal quality of 'character' is what shapes history. No, you're *mixing scales*. Yes, some individual decision-making, particularly from those in official positions of *power*, have been key in historical trajectories, but mostly there have been much *larger forces* already in-motion, such as the buildup of empires on a finite globe that led into the international conflicts of World War I.

You, in particular, need to look at 'mode of production', in your future examinations of history and what makes the world go-'round.


[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

Spoiler: show

It's not just a matter of individual psychology - there is also the issue of collective phenomena on this matter. But my comment goes beyond simply psychology.

What events?

Gangs engaging in vigilantism.

Well, let's make a *list*, as you've started to do.

We have food, housing, health care, education, and utilities, so far. Anything else? (I'd add 'transportation', and 'household items'.)

I would not say education is necessary to simply remain alive. Neither is transportation.

You do need both to have a good life, but if you just want to live... Well, you don't.

Okay, good point.

Socialism is only concerned with the *basic necessities* of modern life and living, so once that's accomplished the rest beyond that could be whatever the fuck the people of that society want to do at that point -- it would be more 'lifestyle' than 'necessity' at that point.


‭History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show

Right, but it's your view on this. Others may disagree.

[SpecialOlympian]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE_3LDvWcbY&feature=emb_title

This is just a homeless encampment, not antifa. Fuck off Mazi, you 4chan brain addled wannabe internet warrior.

[blackjack21]

I know everyone has seen this but it still needs to be discussed.

I notice they needed the police to help them put out the flames.

Finance can be *eliminated*, because it's non-productive (is all just *overhead*, producing zero commodities). A world of workers in collective control of social production would *not need* finance since all decisions would be based on *use values*, with no need for exchange values whatsoever.

Finance helps greatly with specialization of labor, and specialization helps greatly with productivity.

NOTE: I'm generally not participating in these discussions, because I find your quoting style almost unreadable. You requote yourself in your response to someone, requote them, requote yourself, leave inordinant amounts of white space, etc. For example:

---

I find no value in this type of thing at all. What's that all about? Notwithstanding the discussion is somewhat off-topic, why all the whitespace and requoting?

If there was a widespread social consciousness for needing a *brand-new* factory for making face masks, to make more face masks, that would be reflected in high 'face mask' positioning (top-ten) on people's daily individual 'demands' ranking lists, for that locality, or across *many* localities.

That's already handled very well in supply-chain management systems. I mean, what you are describing sounds archaic. For example, WalMart knows that if it's 60F or cooler in the South of the United States and rainy, they will anticipate selling more strawberry-flavored pop tarts--not blueberry, strawberry. You would simply not believe how incredible supply chain management systems are at this point. This idea of yours is so far behind, it's amazing that you'd even post it.

It's existed during *several* presidential administrations, despite the various kinds of voting that put those respective presidents in office.

Police brutality has next to nothing to do with who is president of the United States. Police are controlled by local municipalities under State law. The president only has federal authority.

That's what this is all about -- that the federal government should be able to address *domestic* issues, with funding.

You need to look up the definition of "federal." A federation is more like a broker between a plurality of states than it is a master state or super state.

Okay, so how are you going to address getting killer cops off the streets, as in shutting down *all* police departments, so as to prevent 1000+ killings per year.

Police unions have to go.

Capital goods are simply goods used to produce other goods.

I notice debates with Marxists always devolve into semantics and nomenclature.

And it's not just for these protests, it's no coincidence the LA riots of 1992 took place in a context of recession and high unemployment in California.

Rodney King was not killed. They beat his ass for non-compliance after taking the police on a high-speed chase. However, the police were overcharged and found not guilty because of excessive charging--kind of like what appears to be happening in the Chauvin case.

Democrats and media silent on execution of Michael Reinoehl by US Marshals

Michael Reinoehl was white. The media aren't suppressing the story. They simply aren't sensationalizing it. There isn't usually a public outcry when police kill white people, if you haven't noticed. The media fans the flames when police kill black people to suggest that black voters somehow need the Democrats when the police are usually controlled by the Democrats in major US cities.

[Drlee]

@blackjack21 Police unions have to go.

Yes. This one thing would go further to solving this problem than any other step or series of steps. The notion that public employees should be represented by unions is absurd.

[Pants-of-dog]

Public service unions are not the problem, even if police unions are.

Unions for nurses and librarians do not try and get killers back in the workforce.

[Drlee]

Public service unions are not the problem, even if police unions are.

Unions for nurses and librarians do not try and get killers back in the workforce.

I don't like any of them. We have representative government which looks out for the interests of government employees. I worked for "the government" for 20 years and the garbage I saw was disturbing. The old saying, "it is almost impossible to fire a bad government employee" is true. You would not believe the level of incompetence I have seen defended by public sector unions.

[ckaihatsu]

You're confusing economics and politics, though -- sure, the 'nerve centers of capitalism' have *political* value to revolutionaries, wanting to reappropriate such for *working class* logistics instead of for capitalist purposes.

But, economically, all of that institutional concern over 'exchange value' is *misplaced* for a revolutionary, because of the ethos for *use values*, while *capitalist value* build-up is of no importance or value to the workers, since they can collectively run society's production *without* such baggage.

I'm actually referring to their economic importance.

What *you* call 'economic importance' is actually *political* importance, to the bourgeoisie, because *economically* banks don't add *value* to funds -- they just shuffle it around, which is *management*, and not 'labor' / work.


---

No, lending / investing money *itself* really *isn't* producing new value -- it's more of a distributed *management* function, or *overhead* for capital itself, since someone has to expend that effort in managing the capital. Capital, however sliced-and-diced, still requires *labor* to make commodities (goods and/or services), which then are sold for the sake of making profits.


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show

Management itself generates value. Ever heard of the management consulting industry?

That's overhead for overhead -- another *political* function.

Either management is done well or it's done poorly, but in either case valuations are *not* going to increase unless labor is hired to produce commodities which can then be sold for a profit.

Ever hear the phrase that capital needs labor, but labor does not need capital -- ?


---

Now you're going off on a tangent again -- government deficit spending of trillions of dollars, to underwrite the stock markets, is not the same as the rise of financialization, which is particular to the 1980s onward.

No, you are going off tangent once again: I've never heard of a financial bubble lasting for 100+ years, and the fact that stock market returns show now trend (with a positive average) calls into question the idea that businesses are becoming less profitable over time.

The business cycle, also known as the economic cycle or trade cycle, is the downward and upward movement of gross domestic product (GDP) around its long-term growth trend.[1] The length of a business cycle is the period of time containing a single boom and contraction in sequence. These fluctuations typically involve shifts over time between periods of relatively rapid economic growth (expansions or booms) and periods of relative stagnation or decline (contractions or recessions).

Business cycles are usually measured by considering the growth rate of real gross domestic product. Despite the often-applied term cycles, these fluctuations in economic activity do not exhibit uniform or predictable periodicity. The common or popular usage boom-and-bust cycle refers to fluctuations in which the expansion is rapid and the contraction severe.[2]

The current view of mainstream economics is that business cycles are essentially the summation of purely random shocks to the economy and thus are not, in fact, cycles, despite appearing to be so. However, certain heterodox schools propose alternative theories suggesting that cycles do in fact exist due to endogenous causes.[3]

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

---

Here's the relevant past exchanges -- I'm not making anything up. You blamed 1929 on 'regulatory' factors, meaning the government's progressive tax structure at the time.

No, actually the regulatory factors I was referring to was the poor financial and banking regulation of the time. The tax structure wasn't all that progressive at the time anyway.

Okay, you may want to elaborate on that. Yes, I misspoke, I was thinking of the New Deal '30s.


---

Here's the data, again:




https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/ ... d-piketty/

And there's the other research showing there is no trend, again.

Okay, you may want to *provide* that info, so that it can be considered here.


---

No, you haven't -- all you've done is *deny* that profit has a tendency to decline over the decades and centuries.

Yes I did. I even gave you the citation for you to educate yourself.

No, you haven't provided any kind of counterargument or evidence for a contrary view.


---

Your number ('60%') was made-up because it doesn't exist in Figure 4-4 in the document that you provided.

Yes it does, as easy as it is to look at it.

You mentioned something about providing a screenshot, and then you didn't.


---

No, the individual 'demands' rankings that I just outlined are *not* about production, they're about *demand*. Put on your reading glasses this time.

Any centralization from my 'labor credits' model framework would be on the basis of cross-consensus, over two or more localities, or larger geography, *per-item*.

Yes, post-capitalist production could yield its own statistics, for public oonsumption, as through journalism.

How would such demand be satisfied without the corresponding production?

Socially-necessary production is a *requirement* to fulfill (organic) demand.

Then you are yet to address my earlier point on this matter.

And which point is that?


---

Those who control the means of mass industrial production are the world's working class, collectively, post-capitalism. The social production for the common good will have to take place using *fixed assets* -- factories -- which will have to be appropriately *scheduled* according to one plan or another. This is exactly what my 'labor credits' model framework *addresses*:


labor credits framework for 'communist supply & demand'

Spoiler: show

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... ost2889338

This does not address the question of how would you prevent part of the working class from taking over the means of production for their own collective benefit.

Sure, I have no doubt that there could be post-capitalist *factionalism*, but nothing 'cultural' would disrupt the overall ethos of no-private-property. Maybe one half of the world would be more technologically-oriented, while the other half prefers a *simpler* way of life, and such would be *fine*. Or maybe these lifestyle preferences would be *admixed*, *everywhere*.

The point is that nothing *anti-social*, like private accumulations, would be allowed, because of the larger societal, post-revolution, post-capitalist ethos.


---

Well, that's where you're *wrong* -- history shows us *several* examples of on-the-ground working-class self-organizing. Take a look at labor history.

Are you seriously comparing unionization within a capitalist economy with a socialist revolution?

Yeah, I am, because both have workers power as the common denominator.

Hardly comparable in terms of the scope of the changes they were aiming for.

Sure, the *scopes* are different, and trade-union consciousness is not the same as *revolutionary* consciousness, but they happen to be on the same leftwards political *trajectory*, in asserting workers power over the vicissitudes of *capital's* management priorities / politics.


Ideologies & Operations -- Fundamentals

Spoiler: show

---

This is a baseless accusation -- when have I said that I want to 'take other people's property', and when have I said that I want to 'take the law [into] my own hands' -- ?

Neither of these characterizations are a part of who I am.

Right, you want others to do that for you

No, this isn't correct at all -- you're implying a *slandering* of my person, which is both incorrect and doesn't describe my *politics* either. Watch yourself.


---

It arises *all the time* -- it's a part of living in *society*. For example, why weren't face masks being provided to everyone initially, at the time of Trump's CARES Act that bailed out the stock market with trillions of dollars?

Journalism picked up on the fact that in-person service workers like grocery workers and nurses weren't being provided with adequate PPE. That became part of the current social consciousness, that the Trump Administration was *negligent* regarding the distribution of PPE.

So? It has little to do with the social consciousness required for people to act for the common interest instead of their own.

Right -- that's why there needs to be a *proletarian revolution*, so that the social consciousness of 'common interest' can supersede *private* interests, like those of wealthy individuals and/or corporations.


[10] Supply prioritization in a socialist transitional economy

Spoiler: show

---

You're implying that there would be *scarcity*, when that would *not* be the case due to full collective implementation of industrial mass-production techniques, to provide for the common good, post-capitalism.

Wrong. There would be a scarcity of labor to fix and maintain machines, since most people don't take that as a hobby.

*Or* workers could invent / develop machines that make and/or fix the regular mass-production-type *industrial* machines, so that whenever there's a breakdown the AI robots can fix things and get production running again. Also you're being indefensibly *pessimistic*, since industrial mass-production techniques and capacities are well-established already, and would be *worth* fixing, post-capitalism.

Not everything would have to be a 'hobby', as you're contending. Recall the following list of *various* personal motivations for doing liberated-labor, *without* any work-reciprocated monetary incentive. Also there's my own model of *socio-politically-incentivized* 'labor credits' for any post-capitalist liberated labor efforts.

Craft. Social consciousness. Wanting to see the end product. Experimentation. Wanting to provide for others. Escaping boredom. Pushing the envelope. Personal goals. Wanting to be self-sufficient. Social networking. Mixing work with pleasure. Being productive. Being creative. Access to social leadership. Wanting to be a part of collective self-determination. Stewardship over the earth's resources. Wanting consumption of a very specific kind of product. Hobbyism.

---

No, you *skipped* my response -- weapons require *supply chains*, and if some faction took over a factory it would be news and the ongoing 'social revolution' of mass liberated-workers political sentiment would *resent* that action, and would *disable* it by cutting off supply chains *to* it, like the cutting off of nutrients to a tumor in the body.

Also, if things escalated and this group holed-up in a non-productive factory decided on *violence*, such violence could be readily matched from *without*.

That could indeed strain the production of new weapons, but it would not make the currently existing stock disappear. A more realistic scenario would be one in which many worker societies have their own weapons, and basically fight a civil war.

A 'civil war' over *what*, exactly?


---

But even though that's happened *historically*, you're not saying what it is *within* the ideology itself that purportedly *causes* Stalinism, or failure. You're just *scapegoating*.

Well, that depends on the branch you consider. Stalinists argued they were still in the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that the time was not ripe for the next stage.

Okay, well now you know enough to tell them otherwise.

They may call you a Trot in response

I basically *am* a Trotskyist, because Trotsky developed the theory of Permanent Revolution, which is at-odds with Stalinism's 'socialism-in-one-country'.

The Permanent Revolution is a political theory book by communist leader Leon Trotsky.[1] Its title is the name of the concept of permanent revolution advocated by Trotsky and Trotskyists in opposition to the concept of socialism in one country as advocated by Joseph Stalin and Stalinists.[2] It was first published by the Left Opposition in the Russian language in Germany in 1930.[3]

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

---

And why aren't such laws being *enforced* -- the summary executions at the hands of cops *continue*, which is why there's protests and riots.

Indeed, that is one great question. Why do you think that is the case? And to what extent is that actually true?

It's *not* a question -- it's the capitalist government defending its use of violence, through the numerous *police* departments.


---

No, you're *misunderstanding* -- this is how *government*, of *any* kind, operates -- it *has* to be monolithic (single policy) or else it's not really government because it still has factional fighting within and lack of a clear policy decision.

This shows a misunderstanding of how the Federal system works. The US does have differing policies in the different levels of government in some cases (the very existence of sanctuary cities is a good example of this).

You're thinking of 'federalism'. For any given locality, though, the policy is clearly *defined* since it's either based on *federal* law, or on *state* law.


---

In the case of school desegregation there *was* a clear monolithic policy that came down from Eisenhower, and this is a *precedent* for how killer cops should be handled.

At the Federal level, yes, but there was indeed resistance from several State Governments.

Well, then that's a *shortcoming* of the federalist approach to government because the *wrong* policy is being upheld by certain states, allowing killer cops to roam free.


---

According to whom, BLM rioters? As I said, they would still riot even if the issue of police brutality did not exist, and will still do so when it ceases to be a problem. Even more so if they somehow believe rioting will give them what they want.

Now you're being *biased*, and you're *scapegoating* the activists, instead of looking at the *issue*, meaning *why* they're protesting / rioting.

No, it's a simple inference from what even you have said here.

No, you're still excluding the actual *politics* at-hand, which is BLM's *anti-police-brutality* stance. You're *demonizing* the protestors / rioters as being politically 'greedy'.


---

I really don't know. You could ask the UN.

Can the UN do that?

I don't know, why don't you ask them?


---

Again, you mean *Stalinists*, or countries that are *state capitalist*.

Even *one* summary execution at the hands of cops is one too many. You're making the death toll sound *inevitable*, instead of supporting a politics to *address* these preventable killings.

No, it's not inevitable but there is quite evidently a difference between having a single police killing compared to the killing of thousands or millions.

Now what about the government's established practice of not-prosecuting cops who kill, also known as 'qualified immunity' -- ?


---

Marxism isn't a religion, either -- it's based on *historical materialism*:

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

Marxists will never admit to it, of course.

No, you're showing that you don't understand Marxism -- here's from that entry:

It is principally a theory of history which asserts that the material conditions of a society's mode of production or in Marxist terms, the union of a society's productive forces and relations of production, fundamentally determine society's organization and development. Historical materialism is an example of Marx and Engels' scientific socialism, attempting to show that socialism and communism are scientific necessities rather than philosophical ideals.[2]

Historical materialism looks for the causes of developments and changes in human society in the means by which humans collectively produce the necessities of life. It posits that social classes and the relationship between them, along with the political structures and ways of thinking in society, are founded on and reflect contemporary economic activity.[5] Since Marx's time, the theory has been modified and expanded by some writers. It now has many Marxist and non-Marxist variants. Many Marxists contend that historical materialism is a scientific approach to the study of history.[6]

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

---

The Chomsky stuff you'd have to look into yourself, but it's not a conspiracy theory -- it's an examination of the media industry.

A conspirational one at that.

No -- again you're not familiarizing yourself with the *content*:

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, in which the authors propose that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.[1]

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

---

Now you're *abandoning* your accusation that these historical results are due to the workers-of-the-world ideology itself -- you're citing *historical* factors, and not an *ideological* cause for these historical results.

Should ideologies match the behavior of societies themselves?

Okay, now you're *confirming* that you've abandoned your accusation / scapegoating of the workers-of-the-world ideology itself.

On this new, *philosophical* direction I have no comment.


---

Or there may be a *socialist revolution*, crystal-ball-guy.

Okay, you can be blinkered if you like. There's *historical precedent* for it.

Which one?

I tend to name the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Hungarian Revolution.

We are going back in circles.

---

Yeah, *still* not a Stalinist, and killings is just a *tactic*, as we see from the police in their support of white supremacy.


Anatomy of a Platform

Spoiler: show

Indeed, the end justifies the means. This is a lot older than Marxism.

No, the end doesn't *always*, *automatically* justifiy the means, otherwise I'd be in support of killer cops since they allegedly maintain civil society, which I *am* in support of.

You may want to fill out this chart so that you can see the difference in *politics*:


Means and Ends CHART

Spoiler: show

---

Oh, you seem to think that U.S. policing is *not* racist. It is.

According to The Washington Post, police officers shot and killed 1,001 people in the United States in 2019. About half of those killed were white, and one quarter were black, making the rate of deaths for black Americans (31 fatal shootings per million) more than twice as high as the rate for white Americans (13 fatal shootings per million).[83][84] The Washington Post also counts 13 unarmed black Americans shot dead by police in 2019.[85]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Liv ... sive_force

No, it is not. And I can cite research regarding shootings in particular if you want, the fact that the people killed don't look like the racial makeup of the US is not evidence of racism in itself.

Yes, that's *exactly* institutional racism because the proportion of blacks killed by cops does *not* match the proportion of blacks in the U.S. as a whole.

If so, then policing is misandric too, since the vast majority of those killed are male. Do you want to get into that sort of reasoning (which is wrong)?

Sure -- I have no doubt that there are *gender disparities* as well as *institutional racism* in the practice of policing in the U.S.


---

No, your reasoning is *incorrect* -- just because there are *use values* to what humanity produces doesn't automatically mean that every object has the *same* use value to any and all people. Consider a gardening *rake* -- some people could use that implement more than others.

Sure, so...?

So use values can be quite *subjective*, and/or *inter-subjective*, as with mass consumer items like DVR machines.

I know, but how does this support your point?

Okay, so then you agree that use values are *subjective* and that they vary from person to person.


---

Regardless of the *level* of government, the decades-long trend in government social services spending has been a *downward* trend of *austerity*.

Indeed, but that has been the result of a political decision since people have not been too willing to pay the taxes necessary to fund a stronger social safety net.

Bullshit. It's about government *spending* priorities. The money can be taken out of military and policing budgets.

There are limits to what can be done by simply reassigning spending. At some point, the Government needs to spend more as a percent of GDP.

This isn't *quantitative*, it's *qualitative*, as in what should government spending be spent *on*?

Both are important, why not raise taxes (for instance) to fund government spending? I do believe this is warranted to some extent.

Because it's not a matter of *quantity*, it's a matter of *priority* -- there's plenty of (tax) money that the government wields, but it spend too much on the military and policing. Those budgets can be rerouted to fund a stronger social safety net.


---

Figure it out, and then make sure that your politics and efforts yield the *correct result*, given whatever 'procedures' you favor.

Hint: It's not the Federal Government.

---

Or, if I'd been in *Kenosha*, I would've let the police *there* know, since they were informed by *others* and did nothing anyway:


Rittenhouse subsequently walked towards police with his hands up and the semi-automatic rifle strapped across his chest; they allowed him to leave or appeared not to acknowledge Rittenhouse, though several witnesses and other protesters shouted for him to be arrested.[83][7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenosha_protests#Shooting

Yeah because they had just arrived to even see what had happened.

No, the activists were *pro-active* and they had *followed* Rittenhouse to monitor him.


---

I gave you my position on that example.

The 'problems of minorities' are actually the problems of *oppression*, due to capitalist imperialism.

Doesn't the following sound like vigilantism -- ?


Imperialism is a policy or ideology of extending the rule or authority of a country over other countries and people, often by military force or by gaining political and economic control.[2] While related to the concepts of colonialism and empire, imperialism is a distinct concept that can apply to other forms of expansion and many forms of government.

The concept of imperialism arose in the modern age, associated chiefly with the European colonial powers of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries and New Imperialism.

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

No, it doesn't. And no, capitalism is not the source of all problems - as the history of communist states shows for that matter.

So-called 'communist states' were actually *state capitalist*, because they participated in the *geopolitical* economy of capitalism, as nation-states.

Yes, capitalism *is* the source of all problems because people's basic biological needs aren't *guaranteed* by capitalism's productivity even though that productivity / capacity is *sufficient* for providing for everyone's needs for modern life and living.


---

Even accepting that argument, it would only show workers-of-the-world socialism has so far been failed to be implemented even when it has been tried.

Well, this is a *mischaracterization* of history, since you're making it sound like it was the *ideology itself* that's prone to failure, when, historically, there were many other social factors at-work, from *without*, that impacted on this-or-that revolution from below, like Western imperialism and its invasions in the Russian Revolution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_in ... _Civil_War

On the contrary, it shows that - for starters - it doesn't allow for military organizing to be able to repel foreign invasions.

You're showing again that you don't know the history of what you're talking about:

The army was established immediately after the 1917 October Revolution. The Bolsheviks raised an army to oppose the military confederations (especially the various groups collectively known as the White Army) of their adversaries during the Russian Civil War.

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

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Again, your intent is to *scapegoat* the workers-of-the-world ideology *itself*, but you're not even making any *argument* as to what part of the ideology supposedly makes it prone to failure.

What you're doing is called *propaganda*.

I think I've provided a few of them.

No, you're made no arguments against the workers-of-the-world-socialism ideology itself.


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I *said* it's a *model*, or framework. I don't control the whole real-world.

You don't need to, but one would think its proposals would be grounded in how agents have shown to behave in the past.

Oh -- you're trying to *psychologize* politics, as though history is entirely due to the actions of participants within various events.

Even more, you're making it sound as though the personal quality of 'character' is what shapes history. No, you're *mixing scales*. Yes, some individual decision-making, particularly from those in official positions of *power*, have been key in historical trajectories, but mostly there have been much *larger forces* already in-motion, such as the buildup of empires on a finite globe that led into the international conflicts of World War I.

You, in particular, need to look at 'mode of production', in your future examinations of history and what makes the world go-'round.


[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

Spoiler: show

It's not just a matter of individual psychology - there is also the issue of collective phenomena on this matter. But my comment goes beyond simply psychology.

No, you only mentioned 'agents' as being the determiners of history, while my 'History, Macro Micro' framework illustration shows *many* other levels of historical factors for any given slice of history, with the *most* deterministic factors being *class struggle* and *mode of production*.


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*Or*, contrary to your linear thinking, perhaps the *removal* of all police departments would set an *encouraging example* and people would be *less stressed* and live *better lives*, contrary to the 'Mad Max' propaganda scenario that *you* have in mind.

Would they? Because I provided examples that undermine this narrative.

Examples? Then why aren't you *naming* / listing these so-called examples?

The events here in Chicago, not in the posh neighborhoods but in places like Little Village, aren't actual examples of 2020?

What events?

Gangs engaging in vigilantism.

Yeah, you're just invoking the 'Mad Max' propaganda, for your policing-at-any-human-cost status-quo line. *No other group* matches the killer cops with their 1000+ killings per year in the U.S. so *that's* the priority.


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Well, let's make a *list*, as you've started to do.

We have food, housing, health care, education, and utilities, so far. Anything else? (I'd add 'transportation', and 'household items'.)

I would not say education is necessary to simply remain alive. Neither is transportation.

You do need both to have a good life, but if you just want to live... Well, you don't.

The *point* is that society can produce *all* of these materials and services *in abundance* because we don't live under feudalism -- there are *factories* that use *industrial* processes to *mass produce* stuff that people need and want.

The capitalist *economy* is bullshit these days, as has been for over 20 years, at least. Capitalism isn't an appropriate system of economics for the *industrial* age that we live in.


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Okay, good point.

Socialism is only concerned with the *basic necessities* of modern life and living, so once that's accomplished the rest beyond that could be whatever the fuck the people of that society want to do at that point -- it would be more 'lifestyle' than 'necessity' at that point.


History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show

Right, but it's your view on this. Others may disagree.

No, this is the *politics* of workers-of-the-world socialism.

[ckaihatsu]

Finance can be *eliminated*, because it's non-productive (is all just *overhead*, producing zero commodities). A world of workers in collective control of social production would *not need* finance since all decisions would be based on *use values*, with no need for exchange values whatsoever.

Finance helps greatly with specialization of labor, and specialization helps greatly with productivity.

You're talking within the context of *capitalism*, though, and such finance *still* isn't *productive* at all -- it's not creating any new commodities (goods and/or services).

My point stands that finance is *overhead* for capital, and is not materially productive work.

NOTE: I'm generally not participating in these discussions, because I find your quoting style almost unreadable. You requote yourself in your response to someone, requote them, requote yourself, leave inordinant amounts of white space, etc. For example:

Well many times -- especially from wat0n -- the segment responses I get don't indicate the previous trajectory of points in the segment. Oftentimes there's no mention of the main *subject*, much less the larger discussed *context* of the segment.

My reiterative quoting allows for a quick review of the segment's subject matter and context. I separate the segments with a triple-hyphen, to keep the segments separate and more readable from segment to segment.

I find no value in this type of thing at all. What's that all about? Notwithstanding the discussion is somewhat off-topic, why all the whitespace and requoting?

(See the previous.)


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If there was a widespread social consciousness for needing a *brand-new* factory for making face masks, to make more face masks, that would be reflected in high 'face mask' positioning (top-ten) on people's daily individual 'demands' ranking lists, for that locality, or across *many* localities.

That's already handled very well in supply-chain management systems. I mean, what you are describing sounds archaic. For example, WalMart knows that if it's 60F or cooler in the South of the United States and rainy, they will anticipate selling more strawberry-flavored pop tarts--not blueberry, strawberry. You would simply not believe how incredible supply chain management systems are at this point. This idea of yours is so far behind, it's amazing that you'd even post it.

What you're referencing, though, is simply the management *data* for supply chains -- I'm sure that kind of information would be used, and would be useful, even in a *post*-capitalist context, for similar purposes. The difference would be that there would be no separate 'management' function -- the workers of the world could collectively 'co-administrate' in parallel to their respective liberated-labor work roles.

Nonetheless, you're *confusing* demand, with supply. What *you're* talking about is on the *management* side of things, while what I described from my model is on the *demand* side of things -- it's a way to replace the market aspect of 'cost', with a *self-prioritized* list of demands, daily (optional), by *ranking positions* (#1, #2, #3, etc.).

Whatever liberated-labor could do to *fulfill* the most highest-ranked 'demands', as for mass-production, would be what's done. The mass-aggregated ranked lists from individuals, collated by rank position (#1, #2, #3, etc.) would become publicly available information, and active liberated laborers could *review* that information but they wouldn't be *bound* / obligated to it.


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It's existed during *several* presidential administrations, despite the various kinds of voting that put those respective presidents in office.

Police brutality has next to nothing to do with who is president of the United States. Police are controlled by local municipalities under State law. The president only has federal authority.

The president could *override* state laws, as Eisenhower did for the sake of desegregation. The same could be done to overturn the common 'qualified immunity' practice that protects killer cops from prosecution.


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I could just as easily say that issues like defunding the police are better dealt by the Federal Government, as are festering issues like COVID-19, unemployment, hazardous workplace conditions due to COVID-19, rent, etc.

States can and do deal with all those issues. Of course, the Federal Government can participate too, at least in terms of providing funding.

That's what this is all about -- that the federal government should be able to address *domestic* issues, with funding.

You need to look up the definition of "federal." A federation is more like a broker between a plurality of states than it is a master state or super state.

The U.S. federal government has the most *funding*, which is what's at-stake, in nationalist politics. My point stands that the federal government could provide *funding* to cover the current shortfalls in unmet domestic spending needs, as wat0n concurred with.

Here's the U.S. federal budget for 2019:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governmen ... ted_States


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Okay, so how are you going to address getting killer cops off the streets, as in shutting down *all* police departments, so as to prevent 1000+ killings per year.

Police unions have to go.

I'd *welcome* it, but I don't think it would be *enough* -- it's *tangential* to the issues of *power* that are at-stake, like qualified immunity, police department funding, and *prosecution* of killer cops.