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#15003390
SolarCross wrote:
@ckaihatsu

You'd be an hilariously bad CEO; the workers want money so you would give them exhaust pipes, the customers want exhaust pipes and so you would give them their money back. :lol:



You're mixing-up economic paradigms -- a CEO is specific to *capitalism*, whereas a post-capitalist, socialist-type social order has no need for hierarchies *whatsoever* (arguably so, though, for the task of repressing the ruling class bourgeoisie during a global proletarian revolution).

The workers can collectively decide for themselves and wouldn't need *me* specifically (or anyone else) to substitutionally determine what they do or don't do.

Your scenario here is therefore *not realistic* and is too contrived / subjective to be taken seriously.
#15003391
ckaihatsu wrote:You're mixing-up economic paradigms -- a CEO is specific to *capitalism*, whereas a post-capitalist, socialist-type social order has no need for hierarchies *whatsoever* (arguably so, though, for the task of repressing the ruling class bourgeoisie during a global proletarian revolution).

The workers can collectively decide for themselves and wouldn't need *me* specifically (or anyone else) to substitutionally determine what they do or don't do.

Your scenario here is therefore *not realistic* and is too contrived / subjective to be taken seriously.


If *you* don't "substitutionally determine" what they do then they will just reinvent capitalism. :lol:
#15003458
ckaihatsu wrote:Bullshit

I tell the truth, and I will thank you to remember it.
-- alienation is an *economic* dynamic, one which separates the products of labor from the workers who created them, just like the Wikipedia article covers.

Garbage. That's just division of labor. Same under socialism.
First off, you're *not* a socialist, so you have no *credentials* to speak on behalf of socialism, or on historical Stalinism.

Unlike you, I have never presumed to speak on behalf of socialism, only about socialism. As for "historical Stalinism," maybe you should go read a little history yourself, which will show you that socialists all over the world were rejoicing in Stalin's socialist "successes" for decades starting in the 1920s, and claiming them for socialism. Somehow, it was socialism until the horror and utter failure of it became undeniable. Then, magically, it had never been socialism at all, but "Stalinism" all along....
It's funny that you're deliberately avoiding *economic* issues here on an *economics* thread --

Stop makin' $#!+ up. I'm just identifying the fact that alienation isn't one of them.
you're blaming 'modern life and work' for people being alienated from the work that they do, when in fact the problem is the *social hierarchy* of classes, in which the ruling class preys on the labor efforts of the working class.

Garbage. It's high technology and the division of labor.
The *timeline* of class society doesn't matter -- it could be feudal lords over serfs, slavemasters over slaves, the aristocracy over governments, or Silicon Valley over our present-day use of computer technologies. What all of these scenarios have in common is that technology is *incidental* to the social relations of dominance by ownership over labor.

Wrong again. You still refuse to know the difference between dominance enforced by legally taking away others' rights and mere status achieved by being more productive.
So again you're *wrong* -- social relations *are* economic / material, leading to alienation, and are *not* due to century or decade, technology, or social psychology.

According to your fallacious Marxist definitions.
Sure, no one can disagree with you *empirically* here, but you're only using an abstraction, off on a tangent, as usual -- the *issue* at-hand is whether Marxist definitions aim to confuse and obscure instead of clarifying and illuminating.

They definitely do, because they do not refer to empirically observable facts.
Since Marxist definitions are from the perspective of the *working class*,

Look, sonny, I don't presume to speak on behalf of socialism, and I will thank YOU -- and your lying idol Marx -- not to presume to speak on behalf of the working class, of which neither of you are members, clear?
*you* deride such as being 'confusing' and 'obscuring', since you're politically partisan to the interests of the *merchant class*

More blatant nonsense. There is no "merchant class."
and its quantitative economic scheme of 'pricing' (exchange values), while ignoring the actual human labor that *produced* such exchange values.

You are makin' $#!+ up again. I have never ignored labor and you know it. I am merely willing to know the fact that labor is more productive when the owner of producer goods contributes them to the production process.
Recall that you once *admitted* this -- that the price of the product sold *has* to be greater than the wage paid to the worker for *producing* it, otherwise there's no point in private ownership of the productive process under capitalism:

No. As the quote makes clear, I stated that there was no point in production if the value produced was no greater than the value of labor consumed in the process. That is one reason socialism is stupid garbage: it has no way to determine if production is worthwhile or wasteful.
So here you acknowledge that labor inputs *value* into the final commodity, and that that labor is not paid the full market value ('pricing') from the sale of the product produced by that labor.

Right, because that labor is not the only input. There are also natural resources, which must be paid for out of production if they are to be allocated efficiently, and the fruits of PREVIOUS labor, which the owner of producer goods contributes to the production process.
This discrepancy can be called -- in Marxist terms -- 'exploitation'. The worker is ripped-off, in material terms, for every hour of labor, which is a type of *alienation* in economic / material terms.

No, that's just an outright fabrication on your part. Providing workers with opportunity they would not otherwise have does not and cannot rip them off. What stops them from just declining the offer? Oh, wait a minute, that's right: LANDOWNERS stripped them of their liberty to support themselves any other way. Socialism consists in blaming factory owners for what landowners do to workers; capitalism consists in blaming the workers for it.
*You're* the one making assertions without any underlying evidence, and without providing any reasoning, like 'why' or 'how'.

Everyone reading this knows that is false, including you. I have identified the relevant indisputable facts of objective physical reality. You just refuse to know them, because you have already realized that they prove your beliefs are false and evil.
This is *yet another* baseless contention from you -- here you are, on a *discussion* board, but you're preferring to favor sounding like some kind of authoritative 'expert', while unable to make the sale because you're not providing any objective basis for your facile claims.

I have identified the relevant indisputable facts of objective physical reality. And you know it.
Bullshit -- you've repeatedly touted equity values and profit-making, which is all solidly proof of your ideological agreement with capitalism.

False. Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production -- land and producer goods -- and I have stated that land cannot rightly be private property. While there are many other sources of privilege and injustice in modern finance capitalism, it is private ownership of land that is the indelible injustice inherent in all capitalism.
This is more ideological propaganda on your part -- you situate 'productivity' as being the machinations of elitist capitalist ownership over mass-industrially-productive private property (factories), while it's the *workers* who actually have to work on the machines, to produce finished products, while being materially *exploited*.

Wrong. They don't "have to" work on the machines, and if they are being exploited by factory owners, it is only because landowners have forcibly deprived them of their bargaining power. There is nothing inherently exploitative in a consensual agreement to mutual benefit such as selling one's labor for wages.

Again, consider buying a loaf of bread from a bakery. No one is being exploited. Both parties gain from the trade. But if the local mafia stop customers from dealing with a rival bakery that didn't pay them protection money, then the first baker will raise his prices to balance supply and demand. To a socialist fool who doesn't know any economics, this looks like the baker is exploiting his customers by overcharging them; but he is actually just responding to market conditions. It's the mafia that is causing people to pay too much for bread, by removing their access to alternatives. That's also what the landowner, but not the factory owner, has done to the worker. Socialist fools who don't understand any economics think the baker is exploiting his customers when all he is doing is providing them with bread on mutually agreeable terms.
'Success' to you is this ruling class dominance over the social-productive process,

Nonsense and gibberish. Success is earning the just reward of superior productive contribution, which has nothing to do with class or dominance, and the productive process is immutably private.
through the ownership of private property, including the capitalist state's use of violence to *enforce* these class relations.

There is no violence involved in the producer having property in his product. The violence is introduced by socialists taking it from him.
There's no 'merit' to private property,

False. Private property -- i.e., rightful private property in the fruits of one's labor -- inherently requires the merit of productive contribution.
and 'material success' only comes from this productive monopolization over the heads of the working class.

No, it comes from earning more by contributing more.
Since you *do* acknowledge privileged parasitism, you'd do well to *emphasize* this empirical reality,

I do. Very much.
and the objective interests of the working class for the collective *seizing* and *controlling* of all socially productive machinery.

That is a blatant and absurd non sequitur such as one expects from socialists. Why would I advocate worker seizure and control of producer goods when their current ownership has no relation to privilege or parasitism?
'Opportunity' is an overstatement since *all* working-class people are empirically *under duress* to sell their labor power as a commodity to this-or-that private property owner, for a necessarily exploitative wage.

<sigh> Simple question: is the baker who inadvertently benefits from the mafia's removal of a rival offering customers an opportunity to buy bread that they would otherwise have to do without, or not?
There's no 'contribution' when all financial investments into the productive process are done *strategically* for the sake of making private profits.

That's just obviously and indisputably false. When the baker buys a new oven to increase production, relieving the mafia-imposed scarcity that has raised prices, with the result that PRICES ARE LOWER for his customers, but PRODUCTION AND HIS PROFITS are HIGHER, he is making a contribution to production. Because socialists have to refuse to know all facts of economics to preserve their false and evil belief system, they refuse to know the fact that the baker's higher profit is EARNED by providing unambiguous benefits for his customers.
You somehow think that you're *refuting* Marxism with your groundless claims when all you're really doing is pinning medals on yourself and buying trophies for yourself.

The above example of the baker just outright refutes all of Marxism, sorry.
Nope -- I've provided many points, including reasoning, that you're unable or unwilling to respond to.

I have to earn a living, so I don't have time to respond to all your repetitive nonsense, which consists almost exclusively of strawman fallacies, nonsensical Marxist boilerplate, and refusals to know indisputable facts.
This reveals *much* about your own viewpoint and worldview -- you're a *biological determinist*, and now you've projected this worldview into *cultural* human development.

I'm a biological realist because unlike you, I am willing to know facts of objective physical reality. Free will vs determinism is a pseudo-issue.
By this premise you're stuck in a kind of 'genetic predestination' -- since society is allegedly 'based on our genes', and, according to you, based on the process of natural selection, there's no space left for the exercise of one's own *free will*, since all of our personhood and decision-making is already pre-determined *genetically*.

Thank you for regurgitating the pseudo-issue.
You're again imputing your own opinions onto socialism, which is *inappropriate* since you ideologically defend capitalist exchange-relations, or 'commodity production'.

Try to remember the definition of capitalism. It is ONLY about OWNERSHIP, not markets, exchange, production, or anything else.
You're missing that social values like 'power', are a function of the society's *productive relations* -- class --

Class is based on ownership, not productive relations.
and with the mass-conscious *overthrow* of the class divide there will be an opening for *other* productive relations and values to emerge, ones based on a new reality of *material abundance* instead of capitalism's artificial scarcity, and of full social *cooperation* instead of class-based hierarchical *rule*.

See? Nonsensical Marxist boilerplate. Sorry, but I'm not a fan of replacing capitalism's artificial scarcity of natural resources -- which are all still there -- with socialism's much more harmful artificial scarcity of producer and thus consumer goods, which are NOT still there.
#15003516
Truth To Power wrote:Alienation is a psychological or social phenomenon, not an economic one.

Dividing the "economic" from the "psychological" or "social" is missing the point. Marx believed in the dependence of social conditions on the economic mode of production:
Marx, in The German Ideology, wrote:This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.

Insofar as our social conditions are determined by the way in which we reproduce our material existence, alienation is as much a social phenomenon as it is an economic phenomenon. If you want to attack the material basis of Marx's theory of alienation, it is not sufficient to identify alienation as "social" in contrast to "economic." You'd be better off arguing that social conditions are not the product of economic, or material, conditions; that alienation has nothing to do with the way individuals reproduce their existence day by day. This is difficult. In fact, you argue the opposite later on when you identify alienation with "improved technology," which is material.

Truth to Power wrote:To the extent that modern life and work are alienating because they are unnatural, and quite unlike the life and work of our hunter-gatherer forebears, that is a matter of improved technology, not economic system, and would not be -- and hasn't been -- any different under socialism.

Vapid. Humans use tools and technology to shape their environment, and this has never not been the case. The adaptation of technology is not in and of itself an alienating activity, unless you're ready and willing to explain to me how spearing down a mammoth is somehow alienating.

Alienation does not inhere in the level of technological development. It is produced through the separation of the worker from their labor, through their labor's belonging to somebody else, i.e. to the capitalist.

Truth to Power wrote:Wrong again. Definitions that are intended to obscure rather than clarify are dishonest and worthless.

You have no way of proving that Marxist definitions are intended to obscure rather than clarify. You refuse to give a generous reading because doing so would make your opinions seem less than self-sufficient. You don't want to be proven wrong.

Truth to Power wrote:Wrong again. If definitions don't make sense, or don't match useful concepts, that refutes them.

This isn't wrong, but you haven't even remotely shown how Marxist definitions don't make sense. The most you've done is project onto them your own bad faith, without any reasoning beyond "this is garbage." I doubt you understand Marxist alienation, and I doubt you understand your own slipshod theory of alienation, either. It isn't very clear.

Truth to Power wrote:I can be accused of many things, but being unclear is not one of them.

You're not very clear.
#15003577
SolarCross wrote:
@ckaihatsu
I think you should actually leave the house now and again and go and meet some real "working class" people before you assume you know what they want.



That's funny, but also *condescending*.

You and others of your ilk constantly want to pretend that I just came along the other day and *invented* all this stuff *myself*, which, upon reflection, you'll see is not the case at all -- this class-consciousness stuff was already around long before I was born, and it happens to deal with not *me* personally, but with the state of affairs that the world happens to be in, since roughly the late 1700s (industrialization).


SolarCross wrote:
If *you* don't "substitutionally determine" what they do then they will just reinvent capitalism. :lol:



Well, this latter part is true, anyway -- yes, some people's politics can't fathom a world without exchange values, so they just posit 'barter' in the place of currency, leading to implicit exchange values and capitalism all over again, just at more-localized, balkanized scales.

I think this is a major shortcoming of anarchism, for example, in that it doesn't have a sufficient model for post-capitalist material economics. How are various kinds of post-commodity social production to be considered in relation to one another, and *qualitatively* valued, for respective prioritizations of implementation, without resorting to (capitalist) exchange values to fill in the gaps from one geographical location to the next?

My own answer is the 'labor credits framework' that I created and linked to earlier:

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... -Questions
#15003578
ckaihatsu wrote:That's funny, but also *condescending*.

You and others of your ilk constantly want to pretend that I just came along the other day and *invented* all this stuff *myself*, which, upon reflection, you'll see is not the case at all -- this class-consciousness stuff was already around long before I was born, and it happens to deal with not *me* personally, but with the state of affairs that the world happens to be in, since roughly the late 1700s (industrialization).

No I am saying people of your ilk invent this stuff without a clue or care for what actual "working class" people want or what could work in the real world because you are not well acquainted with either. Hence why I say you should remedy that fault before inventing imaginary systems.

ckaihatsu wrote:Well, this latter part is true, anyway -- yes, some people's politics can't fathom a world without exchange values, so they just posit 'barter' in the place of currency, leading to implicit exchange values and capitalism all over again, just at more-localized, balkanized scales.

I think this is a major shortcoming of anarchism, for example, in that it doesn't have a sufficient model for post-capitalist material economics. How are various kinds of post-commodity social production to be considered in relation to one another, and *qualitatively* valued, for respective prioritizations of implementation, without resorting to (capitalist) exchange values to fill in the gaps from one geographical location to the next?

My own answer is the 'labor credits framework' that I created and linked to earlier:

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

Two questions:
1. What do you imagine is wrong with "capitalist exchange values"?

2. How is "labor credits" not just another kind of money? (I am not in hurry to read your FAQ thing because my long experience of leftists is that they do not write very well and get everything wrong on purpose consequently my expectation is that your piece will be silly and tedious.) I may read it later if you can appear less obtuse and stupid than most leftists in this conversation.
#15003581
SolarCross wrote:No I am saying people of your ilk invent this stuff without a clue or care for what actual "working class" people want or what could work in the real world because you are not well acquainted with either. Hence why I say you should remedy that fault before inventing imaginary systems.

I don't understand how you don't recognize this as fluff. You didn't even acknowledge @ckaihatsu's point, you just repeated what you said with an even more presumptuous slant. Snarky attitude doesn't make up for lack of clear thinking, or for lack of willingness to address what people are saying. This is just careerist gibberish.
#15003591
ckaihatsu wrote:
Bullshit



Truth To Power wrote:
I tell the truth, and I will thank you to remember it.



More bullshit -- you care more about your own equity-capital capitalist faction than anything else, including the larger truth of the class divide.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
-- alienation is an *economic* dynamic, one which separates the products of labor from the workers who created them, just like the Wikipedia article covers.



Truth To Power wrote:
Garbage. That's just division of labor. Same under socialism.



Strange -- you're dismissive of the Marxian / economic / material term 'alienation', even though you agree with its definition, semantically. Do you *like* arguing with dictionaries -- ??

Here are the two terms, side-by-side, for comparison:



Division of labour, instead, refers to the allocation of tasks to individuals or organizations according to the skills and/or equipment those people or organizations possess.



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




tacos_4_all

7 points
·
4 years ago

It dehumanizes workers, turns us into cogs in a machine. It de-skills us too since it doesn't take much skill to repeat one small task all day. Capitalist class structure is a historical result of the division of labor process, or at least partially so. Industrial division of labor is what created the proletariat though right?

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. link





Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the estrangement (Entfremdung) of people from aspects of their Gattungswesen ("species-essence") as a consequence of living in a society of stratified social classes. The alienation from the self is a consequence of being a mechanistic part of a social class, the condition of which estranges a person from their humanity.

The theoretical basis of alienation within the capitalist mode of production is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of said actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists.



And, socialism would *have no* division of labor because there would be no elitist capitalist-like *state* to 'govern', or 'administrate' over all of it, contrary to your Stalinistic imaginings.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
First off, you're *not* a socialist, so you have no *credentials* to speak on behalf of socialism, or on historical Stalinism.



Truth To Power wrote:
Unlike you, I have never presumed to speak on behalf of socialism, only about socialism. As for "historical Stalinism," maybe you should go read a little history yourself, which will show you that socialists all over the world were rejoicing in Stalin's socialist "successes" for decades starting in the 1920s, and claiming them for socialism. Somehow, it was socialism until the horror and utter failure of it became undeniable. Then, magically, it had never been socialism at all, but "Stalinism" all along....



Well, at the time a degenerated workers state in Russia / USSR was *preferable* to Western imperialist hegemony (in geopolitics), despite Stalin's insufferability and deal-making with the West. A parallel could be made with Assad today, in Syria.

Of course revisionism is a bad thing, as you're pointing out.

Unfortunately you're unable to make the distinction between Communist-Manifesto socialism, and the historical accident of Stalinism as it happened, a kind of emergent political-material 'compromise' between the nascent soviet control of industrial production, and the Western imperialist invasions of the same, that hampered the soviets' long-term success.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
It's funny that you're deliberately avoiding *economic* issues here on an *economics* thread --



Truth To Power wrote:
Stop makin' $#!+ up. I'm just identifying the fact that alienation isn't one of them.



I'm *not* making anything up -- you *just* acknowledged the validity of Marx's 'alienation', as expressed in the term 'division of labor':


Truth To Power wrote:
['Alienation'] [is] just division of labor.



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
you're blaming 'modern life and work' for people being alienated from the work that they do, when in fact the problem is the *social hierarchy* of classes, in which the ruling class preys on the labor efforts of the working class.



Truth To Power wrote:
Garbage. It's high technology and the division of labor.



The 'division of labor' means that people who need a wage are made to do very circumscribed, repetitive tasks as a small part of an overall assembly line of production. The class hierarchy means that *others* benefit by *not* having to do those menial, repetitive work roles for the sake of their own life and living -- the privileged ownership elite.

Maybe you don't want to use the term 'preying', but that's what it *is*, empirically, regardless -- privileged elites are favored under capitalism with social *control* over what gets produced, according to the political commands of elitist wealth ownership.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
The *timeline* of class society doesn't matter -- it could be feudal lords over serfs, slavemasters over slaves, the aristocracy over governments, or Silicon Valley over our present-day use of computer technologies. What all of these scenarios have in common is that technology is *incidental* to the social relations of dominance by ownership over labor.



Truth To Power wrote:
Wrong again. You still refuse to know the difference between dominance enforced by legally taking away others' rights and mere status achieved by being more productive.



Okay, so now you're relenting and recognizing the class privilege and political hegemony of the (legalistic) social *superstructure*.

But you're -- ironically -- *ignoring* the privilege of production-goods / technological *ownership*, as measured by the yardstick of 'productivity'.

*Of course* I know the difference between the power of the state and the benefits of technological ownership, particularly that of the means of mass industrial production. What *you're* overlooking is that these two material positions in society are actually *interdependent*, symbiotic, and mutually self-reinforcing. Who controls the state under capitalism? The bourgeoisie. And *why* is this? Because of the bourgeoisie's ownership of the means of mass industrial production, which confers the legal right to expropriate surplus labor value from the workers employed by that wealth ownership, through the production process.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
So again you're *wrong* -- social relations *are* economic / material, leading to alienation, and are *not* due to century or decade, technology, or social psychology.



Truth To Power wrote:
According to your fallacious Marxist definitions.



You're too hung-up on *terms*, to the point that you're ignoring the underlying *meanings*. You can adopt or dismiss whatever *terminology* you like, but you're still showing that you do understand the actual *content* involved, as with 'alienation = division-of-labor', or 'social relations [of production] = economics / control of the material world'.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Sure, no one can disagree with you *empirically* here, but you're only using an abstraction, off on a tangent, as usual -- the *issue* at-hand is whether Marxist definitions aim to confuse and obscure instead of clarifying and illuminating.



Truth To Power wrote:
They definitely do, because they do not refer to empirically observable facts.



Incorrect, as you yourself have shown previously, with your understanding of Marxist meanings. (The robbery of workers' surplus labor value through the expropriation of their / our product, while being paid a lesser-value wage, than what the commodities themselves are sold for on the market.)


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Since Marxist definitions are from the perspective of the *working class*,



Truth To Power wrote:
Look, sonny, I don't presume to speak on behalf of socialism, and I will thank YOU -- and your lying idol Marx -- not to presume to speak on behalf of the working class, of which neither of you are members, clear?



You don't get to instruct on the content of what socialism is or is-not, and you don't get to instruct *me*, either.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
*you* deride such as being 'confusing' and 'obscuring', since you're politically partisan to the interests of the *merchant class*



Truth To Power wrote:
More blatant nonsense. There is no "merchant class."



The *ruling* class of merchants -- the bourgeoisie.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
and its quantitative economic scheme of 'pricing' (exchange values), while ignoring the actual human labor that *produced* such exchange values.



Truth To Power wrote:
You are makin' $#!+ up again. I have never ignored labor and you know it. I am merely willing to know the fact that labor is more productive when the owner of producer goods contributes them to the production process.



Again, there's no 'contribution' of anything on the part of capital ownership because the capitalist production process benefits ownership by adding expropriated labor-value to the initial assemblage of materials (production goods and raw materials).

The term that's appropriate here is capitalist *exploitation* of workers and their surplus labor value.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Recall that you once *admitted* this -- that the price of the product sold *has* to be greater than the wage paid to the worker for *producing* it, otherwise there's no point in private ownership of the productive process under capitalism:



Truth To Power wrote:
No. As the quote makes clear, I stated that there was no point in production if the value produced was no greater than the value of labor consumed in the process.



Correct -- that's what I just said.

This *discrepancy* between what labor's products are worth on the market when sold, and the value of the *wage* paid for those products, equals *exploitation* of labor because workers are not getting the full value of what the products of their labor are actually *worth* on the market.


---


Truth To Power wrote:
That is one reason socialism is stupid garbage: it has no way to determine if production is worthwhile or wasteful.



This is an incorrect characterization -- under socialism determinations would be made *consciously* and *qualitatively*, instead of being bound to capitalist commodity values that take-place *unconsciously* and *quantitatively* (according to the realm of exchange-values). Some call this 'economic democracy', meaning that *material* matters could be collectively determined, as well as any socio-political matters, without relying on any kind of specialist substitutionist bureaucratic administration.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
So here you acknowledge that labor inputs *value* into the final commodity, and that that labor is not paid the full market value ('pricing') from the sale of the product produced by that labor.



Truth To Power wrote:
Right, because that labor is not the only input. There are also natural resources, which must be paid for out of production if they are to be allocated efficiently, and the fruits of PREVIOUS labor, which the owner of producer goods contributes to the production process.



Natural resources are *free* to the capitalist, through the production process, as enabled by bourgeois governments, and 'dead labor' has already been claimed as private property by the capitalist -- so these two categories that you've mentioned are not really *significant* costs to the capitalist, mostly due to the stealing of surplus labor value from all workers employed. And again, 'contribution' is an inaccurate term to use because the benefits of production go right back to the capitalist owner -- nothing is 'contributed' to anyone.


[23] A Business Perspective on the Declining Rate of Profit

Spoiler: show
Image



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
This discrepancy can be called -- in Marxist terms -- 'exploitation'. The worker is ripped-off, in material terms, for every hour of labor, which is a type of *alienation* in economic / material terms.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, that's just an outright fabrication on your part. Providing workers with opportunity they would not otherwise have does not and cannot rip them off.



You're being *presumptuous*, though -- employment at this-or-that workplace isn't an 'opportunity' to the worker, it's a *necessity* for the biological and social needs of life and living, for the individual.

You've already acknowledged that there's a discrepancy between what a labor-product is sold for on the market, and the lesser value of the wage paid-for to *produce* that commodity -- this discrepancy *equals* exploitation of labor-value.


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show
Image



---


Truth To Power wrote:
What stops them from just declining the offer?



What stops workers from declining this-or-that job offer is the reality that the worker has to have money to *purchase* the means of life and living, like food and housing, etc. This, then, is social *coercion* because the worker has no options outside of the capitalist system of buying and selling with which to procure material necessities.


Truth To Power wrote:
Oh, wait a minute, that's right: LANDOWNERS stripped them of their liberty to support themselves any other way.



The problem with this line of yours, that *separates* (rentier-type) land ownership, from (equity-type) capital investments into the production of commodities, is that you're failing to see that these both are all *commodities*, whether land or factory / equity ownership.

Yes, capitalists *have* stripped workers of their 'liberty' -- if you like -- to support themselves / ourselves in any self-sufficient manner. Commodities for biological and social life *must* be procured by the workers through selling the only thing one has: the ability to work, or 'labor power'.


Truth To Power wrote:
Socialism consists in blaming factory owners for what landowners do to workers; capitalism consists in blaming the workers for it.



There's not even any private property (ownership) under socialism, so you're just blatantly *misrepresenting* socialism, as usual.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
*You're* the one making assertions without any underlying evidence, and without providing any reasoning, like 'why' or 'how'.



Truth To Power wrote:
Everyone reading this knows that is false, including you. I have identified the relevant indisputable facts of objective physical reality. You just refuse to know them, because you have already realized that they prove your beliefs are false and evil.



You're not addressing what I've said. I don't agree with what you're saying because you're just side-stepping the issues I've raised, and you're continuing to mischaracterize my politics.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
This is *yet another* baseless contention from you -- here you are, on a *discussion* board, but you're preferring to favor sounding like some kind of authoritative 'expert', while unable to make the sale because you're not providing any objective basis for your facile claims.



Truth To Power wrote:
I have identified the relevant indisputable facts of objective physical reality. And you know it.



No, I don't agree. You *suck* at describing objective physical reality because all you do is make baseless opinions. Such isn't welcome or accepted by me because I fundamentally don't agree with your propertarian political views.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Bullshit -- you've repeatedly touted equity values and profit-making, which is all solidly proof of your ideological agreement with capitalism.



Truth To Power wrote:
False. Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production -- land and producer goods -- and I have stated that land cannot rightly be private property. While there are many other sources of privilege and injustice in modern finance capitalism, it is private ownership of land that is the indelible injustice inherent in all capitalism.



Nope -- you can't arbitrarily *separate* rentier-type capital (assets) ownership from equity-type capital (investments) ownership, because capitalism is all about creating a *surplus* in capital / exchange-value valuations, through the expropriation of workers' surplus labor value.

Not all profits can always be continuously perfectly re-invested into new equity vehicles -- at some point some capital is going to need to be dormant, at which point it becomes *rentier*-type capital, like real estate values, for example.

Land itself is *not* economically productive, because it's not treated as equity values -- it's a real-estate, rentier-type *asset* that can command interest and rent payments, which is *not* productive activity. It's *parasitic*, the way the ruling class was during feudalism.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
This is more ideological propaganda on your part -- you situate 'productivity' as being the machinations of elitist capitalist ownership over mass-industrially-productive private property (factories), while it's the *workers* who actually have to work on the machines, to produce finished products, while being materially *exploited*.



Truth To Power wrote:
Wrong. They don't "have to" work on the machines, and if they are being exploited by factory owners, it is only because landowners have forcibly deprived them of their bargaining power. There is nothing inherently exploitative in a consensual agreement to mutual benefit such as selling one's labor for wages.



But you're missing the fact that the 'playing field' isn't level -- workers and employers do *not* have equal power at the bargaining table, as you're implying. The owner of capital can *live off* of capital, but the worker, *without* capital, cannot. Workers only have their own potential to work -- labor power -- which they are obliged to sell to the employer for the sake of a wage, for the sake of procuring the necessary commodities for consumption (food, housing, etc.), for the sake of life and living.

And I've already explained how capitalist exploitation of labor power operates, which you yourself have already acknowledged.


---


Truth To Power wrote:
Again, consider buying a loaf of bread from a bakery. No one is being exploited. Both parties gain from the trade. But if the local mafia stop customers from dealing with a rival bakery that didn't pay them protection money, then the first baker will raise his prices to balance supply and demand. To a socialist fool who doesn't know any economics, this looks like the baker is exploiting his customers by overcharging them; but he is actually just responding to market conditions. It's the mafia that is causing people to pay too much for bread, by removing their access to alternatives.



This is your own strawman-type construction because I haven't been discussing any purported "exploitation" of the *consumer*, but rather the implicit exploitation of the *laborer* within the capitalist productive process. This is 'apples-and-oranges' on your part.


---


Truth To Power wrote:
That's also what the landowner, but not the factory owner, has done to the worker. Socialist fools who don't understand any economics think the baker is exploiting his customers when all he is doing is providing them with bread on mutually agreeable terms.



Strawman.

And you think that the markets automatically provide a perfectly level playing-ground, which is *not* the case.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
'Success' to you is this ruling class dominance over the social-productive process,



Truth To Power wrote:
Nonsense and gibberish. Success is earning the just reward of superior productive contribution, which has nothing to do with class or dominance, and the productive process is immutably private.



You're ignoring / side-stepping the role of the *state*, which *favors* ruling-class interests over the interests of the *working* class. You're also unable to address the emergence of *monopolies* / oligopolies, which confer special advantages due to the lionizing of market-share.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
through the ownership of private property, including the capitalist state's use of violence to *enforce* these class relations.



Truth To Power wrote:
There is no violence involved in the producer having property in his product. The violence is introduced by socialists taking it from him.



Nope -- you're *projecting* again, onto your strawman *Stalinistic* conception of 'socialism'.

Just look at Venezuela today, which is beset by U.S. imperialism's *sanctions* on Venezuela's trade relations. This is the power of the bourgeois imperialist *state*, which overwhelmingly affects economic matters and dynamics, while you seem to think that the state is somehow neutral and almost inert.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
There's no 'merit' to private property,



Truth To Power wrote:
False. Private property -- i.e., rightful private property in the fruits of one's labor -- inherently requires the merit of productive contribution.



That's not a quality of moral-type 'merit' -- it's the objective material interest of capital towards *profit-making*, as established by the social relations of capitalism itself. And there's no 'contribution' involved on the part of private-property, since its own private interests are for self-aggrandizement.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
and 'material success' only comes from this productive monopolization over the heads of the working class.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, it comes from earning more by contributing more.



Bullshit. We've been over this subject matter already. You still haven't provided any proof or reasoning for your reckless opinionating.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Since you *do* acknowledge privileged parasitism, you'd do well to *emphasize* this empirical reality,



Truth To Power wrote:
I do. Very much.



No, you don't. You seem to think that *equity* capital is angelic, while rentier-type capital is to be disdained in particular, but then at other times you *validate* rentier-type capital anyway, showing the inconsistency and unseriousness of your politics.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
and the objective interests of the working class for the collective *seizing* and *controlling* of all socially productive machinery.



Truth To Power wrote:
That is a blatant and absurd non sequitur such as one expects from socialists. Why would I advocate worker seizure and control of producer goods when their current ownership has no relation to privilege or parasitism?



It's *not* a non-sequitur, and you *don't* have to advocate worker seizure and control of producer goods. It's clear which side you're on.

Also, you *just said* that capitalist-type privileged ownership is parasitic:


ckaihatsu wrote:
Since you *do* acknowledge privileged parasitism, you'd do well to *emphasize* this empirical reality,



Truth To Power wrote:
I do. Very much.



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
'Opportunity' is an overstatement since *all* working-class people are empirically *under duress* to sell their labor power as a commodity to this-or-that private property owner, for a necessarily exploitative wage.



Truth To Power wrote:
<sigh> Simple question: is the baker who inadvertently benefits from the mafia's removal of a rival offering customers an opportunity to buy bread that they would otherwise have to do without, or not?



You're talking about the *protection racket*, which the United States has mastered internationally -- the protection racket is at the core of the international acceptance of the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency.

Competition within the ownership class, as depicted in this scenario of yours, is just a knock-on effect of capitalism and its inherent carving-up of the material world into balkanized national private-property interests. The greatest examples are World War I and World War II.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
There's no 'contribution' when all financial investments into the productive process are done *strategically* for the sake of making private profits.



Truth To Power wrote:
That's just obviously and indisputably false. When the baker buys a new oven to increase production, relieving the mafia-imposed scarcity that has raised prices, with the result that PRICES ARE LOWER for his customers, but PRODUCTION AND HIS PROFITS are HIGHER, he is making a contribution to production. Because socialists have to refuse to know all facts of economics to preserve their false and evil belief system, they refuse to know the fact that the baker's higher profit is EARNED by providing unambiguous benefits for his customers.



Now you're erroneously conflating socialists with being members of a mafia -- socialists do not participate in the furtherance of capitalist social relations except under duress since there's no other system outside of commodities to turn to.

You sound like fucking Ronald Reagan with your 'evil empire' rhetoric, even though no Stalinist nation-states even *exist* anymore. It's 2019, not the redbaiting 1950s.

And private ownership doesn't earn *shit* -- it expropriates the labor-power of workers in the furtherance of its own private aims.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You somehow think that you're *refuting* Marxism with your groundless claims when all you're really doing is pinning medals on yourself and buying trophies for yourself.



Truth To Power wrote:
The above example of the baker just outright refutes all of Marxism, sorry.



No, it doesn't, ideologue.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Nope -- I've provided many points, including reasoning, that you're unable or unwilling to respond to.



Truth To Power wrote:
I have to earn a living, so I don't have time to respond to all your repetitive nonsense, which consists almost exclusively of strawman fallacies, nonsensical Marxist boilerplate, and refusals to know indisputable facts.



But you can't even *address* my points -- you twist-and-turn to *avoid* responding in kind.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
This reveals *much* about your own viewpoint and worldview -- you're a *biological determinist*, and now you've projected this worldview into *cultural* human development.



Truth To Power wrote:
I'm a biological realist because unlike you, I am willing to know facts of objective physical reality. Free will vs determinism is a pseudo-issue.



Nope -- by thinking that we create human culture according to our genetics, you're implicitly positing a kind of genetic / biological *predestination*, since you're not including *cognitive functioning* within the individual's process of everyday decision-making.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
By this premise you're stuck in a kind of 'genetic predestination' -- since society is allegedly 'based on our genes', and, according to you, based on the process of natural selection, there's no space left for the exercise of one's own *free will*, since all of our personhood and decision-making is already pre-determined *genetically*.



Truth To Power wrote:
Thank you for regurgitating the pseudo-issue.



It's *not* a pseudo-issue -- it's one or the other, genetic-predestination vs. non-genetic-predestination individual *free will*.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You're again imputing your own opinions onto socialism, which is *inappropriate* since you ideologically defend capitalist exchange-relations, or 'commodity production'.



Truth To Power wrote:
Try to remember the definition of capitalism. It is ONLY about OWNERSHIP, not markets, exchange, production, or anything else.



Bullshit.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You're missing that social values like 'power', are a function of the society's *productive relations* -- class --



Truth To Power wrote:
Class is based on ownership, not productive relations.



Ownership *is* a productive relation, since under capitalism only private-property ownership is legitimized with the right to exploit the labor power of the working class.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
and with the mass-conscious *overthrow* of the class divide there will be an opening for *other* productive relations and values to emerge, ones based on a new reality of *material abundance* instead of capitalism's artificial scarcity, and of full social *cooperation* instead of class-based hierarchical *rule*.



Truth To Power wrote:
See? Nonsensical Marxist boilerplate. Sorry, but I'm not a fan of replacing capitalism's artificial scarcity of natural resources -- which are all still there -- with socialism's much more harmful artificial scarcity of producer and thus consumer goods, which are NOT still there.



You don't understand what capitalism's 'artificial scarcity' even *is* -- and, you're just *presuming* to know how a potential future 'socialism' would operate, without providing any reasoning. It's just baseless opinionating on your part, sorry.



Artificial scarcity is the scarcity of items that exists even though either the technology for production or the sharing capacity exists to create a theoretically limitless abundance or at least a greater quantity of production than currently exists. The most common causes are monopoly pricing structures, such as those enabled by laws that restrict competition or by high fixed costs in a particular marketplace. The inefficiency associated with artificial scarcity is formally known as a deadweight loss.


Background

In a capitalist system, an enterprise is judged to be successful and efficient if it is profitable. To obtain maximum profits, producers may be restricting production rather than ensuring the maximum utilisation of resources. This strategy of restricting production by firms in order to obtain profits in a capitalist system or mixed economy is known as creating artificial scarcity.[1]

Artificial scarcity essentially describes situations where the producers or owners of a good restrict its availability to others beyond what is strictly necessary. Ideas and information are prime examples of unnecessarily scarce products given artificial scarcity [...]



Economic actions that create artificial scarcity

Cartels, monopolies and/or rentier capitalism
Copyright, when used to disallow copying or disallow access to sources. Proprietary software is an example. Copyleft software is a counterexample (where Copyright is used to guarantee the right to copy the object and access source code).
Patent
The Agricultural Adjustment Act
Hoarding, including cornering the market
Deliberate destruction
Paywalls[3]



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


[KS mod edit: Rule 2]
#15003677
Trying to describe Darwin's Evolution, Truth To Power wrote:It's about genes and the individuals who pass them on or fail to pass them on. That's all.

Nope.

You are regurgitating the prevailing thinking on "evolution" that was popular in Europe BEFORE his theory became well known, and remained popular among the upper classes right up to this day.

Before Darwin, "social theory" regarding evolution was that if rich people bred themselves according to their own social values, a super-species of upper-class James Bonds with spiderman powers would emerge.

Important was how the upper classes thought things like "big houses," "name-brand colleges," "trophy brides" and "strict sexual discipline" would be what would eventually create "a better human animal."

Darwin's theory basically says that humans don't have a clue what they will need to survive, and that our religious behaviorism and magical technology, are just harmful distractions.

Sure, one school-shooter might out-survive his peers (because of technology (ex. AK-47) and religion (ex. white supremacist), but according to Darwin, this kind of "survival" doesn't in any way contribute to our species ability to withstand future diseases, climates, and bacteria.

Likewise, this kind of "angry, competitive fighting" risks making our species less cooperative, and thus, reducing our chances of long-term survival as a species to zero.

The rich thought that if they bred other humans (and themselves) the way that humans had created flowers and dogs, we'd be set. This is the fake "evolution" that you are defending, a kind of transformation that might more accurately be described as transmogrification, or perversion.

Modern Economics follows the "breeding flowers" school of fake evolution, and contributes to societal breakdown and violence. These are not survival-oriented things.
#15003773
ckaihatsu wrote:
That's funny, but also *condescending*.

You and others of your ilk constantly want to pretend that I just came along the other day and *invented* all this stuff *myself*, which, upon reflection, you'll see is not the case at all -- this class-consciousness stuff was already around long before I was born, and it happens to deal with not *me* personally, but with the state of affairs that the world happens to be in, since roughly the late 1700s (industrialization).



SolarCross wrote:
No I am saying people of your ilk invent this stuff without a clue or care for what actual "working class" people want or what could work in the real world because you are not well acquainted with either. Hence why I say you should remedy that fault before inventing imaginary systems.



You're not correct -- much of what pertains to working class interests is in the political literature, which is also why I'm a *Marxist*, because Marxist revolutionary theory *does* speak to objective working class interests.

My 'labor credits framework' isn't just an 'imaginary system' -- it actually takes various empirical variables and dynamics into account, to propose the premise that it does, of mass-aggregation of daily individually prioritized demands, for the sake of providing society with real-world information about what people need and want. This survey-type information also serves to inform liberated-labor about project possibilities, something that capitalism *can't* do since it relies on the abstract intermediary of exchange-values, a crude method for ascertaining organic demand.


SolarCross wrote:
Two questions:
1. What do you imagine is wrong with "capitalist exchange values"?



The problem with money / currency / exchange-values is that it's merely a messy, crude *abstraction* of underlying values. One of the main problems occurs with the dynamic of *speculation*, in which initial prices fluctuate, sometimes wildly, due to buying and selling activity over the commodity itself, rather than reflecting real-world *input* values into the *production* of the commodity. The market pricing variable is expected to do far too much in this way, supposedly reflecting input valuations *and* the pricing balance between actual buying and selling prices, all in one price number.

This use of this intermediary abstracted exchange-values realm is far too antiquated for the world we currently live in, where commodity production could be done away with altogether, in favor of communism-type *free-access* and *direct-distribution* -- the communistic 'gift economy', in other words.



Is a tulip bulb really worth two lasts of wheat, four lasts of rye, four fat oxen, eight fat swine, twelve fat sheep, two hogsheads of wine, four tuns of beer, two tuns of butter, 1,000 lbs. of cheese, a complete bed, a suit of clothes, and a silver drinking cup -- ?



viewtopic.php?p=15001643#p15001643



---


SolarCross wrote:
2. How is "labor credits" not just another kind of money? (I am not in hurry to read your FAQ thing because my long experience of leftists is that they do not write very well and get everything wrong on purpose consequently my expectation is that your piece will be silly and tedious.) I may read it later if you can appear less obtuse and stupid than most leftists in this conversation.



Well you're certainly not encouraging any good will with your insulting characterizations, which provide a *disinclination* for me to respond.

Read the FAQ -- that's the best thing I can say. Do a search on the page for 'money' since I *have* addressed this point already there:



-> So labor credits are just *money*! Communism is supposed to be moneyless!

No, the labor credits are actually *not* money, because they don't *function* like money -- there's no commodity-production, no finance, and no M-C-M' cycle of exchange-use valuations for profit-making. The work done by liberated labor per hour can simply be *fully valuated* in relation to other kinds of work-role-efforts, through the use of circulating labor credits being paid-forward for each work role, typically specified in a finalized policy package. All of the output of goods and services, to supply chains and the end-user / consumer, have already been planned-out in advance, through the iterations of proposals and then finalized policy packages that specify all work roles required, per project, with pooled labor credits to *organize* the participation of available-and-willing liberated laborers themselves.



https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... -Questions
#15003779
ckaihatsu wrote:You're not correct -- much of what pertains to working class interests is in the political literature, which is also why I'm a *Marxist*, because Marxist revolutionary theory *does* speak to objective working class interests.

My 'labor credits framework' isn't just an 'imaginary system' -- it actually takes various empirical variables and dynamics into account, to propose the premise that it does, of mass-aggregation of daily individually prioritized demands, for the sake of providing society with real-world information about what people need and want. This survey-type information also serves to inform liberated-labor about project possibilities, something that capitalism *can't* do since it relies on the abstract intermediary of exchange-values, a crude method for ascertaining organic demand.

The "political literature" is written by anti-social unemployed people, either lumpenproles sponging of the working class through tax funded unemployment benefits or the untalented slug-a-bed scions of successful people living off of a trust fund. The cream of the literature was written by middle class criminal masterminds like Lenin, Trotsky and Mao. Not a working man anywhere to be seen.

It is an imaginary system because it exists and can only exist in your mind.

ckaihatsu wrote:The problem with money / currency / exchange-values is that it's merely a messy, crude *abstraction* of underlying values. One of the main problems occurs with the dynamic of *speculation*, in which initial prices fluctuate, sometimes wildly, due to buying and selling activity over the commodity itself, rather than reflecting real-world *input* values into the *production* of the commodity. The market pricing variable is expected to do far too much in this way, supposedly reflecting input valuations *and* the pricing balance between actual buying and selling prices, all in one price number.

This use of this intermediary abstracted exchange-values realm is far too antiquated for the world we currently live in, where commodity production could be done away with altogether, in favor of communism-type *free-access* and *direct-distribution* -- the communistic 'gift economy', in other words.

You don't understand what goes into assessing demand. Real world producers don't just look at price data they also do market research and consider unit sales. Real world producers have brought market analysis up to a fine art and they get very close results. The point of money is not solely as a data point for assessing demand, its main purpose is to be a convenient reward to incentivise altruistic behaviour. If you are not aware of that then you don't understand human nature very well.

Speculation is much misunderstood even by competent people so I wouldn't expect you to get it. The vast majority of speculation helps smooth out prices because the speculators bid up low prices and sell down high prices in order to make a profit. A million trades happen this way every minute of every single day all year long today but no bubbles or crashes occur the vast majority of the time. When bubbles and crashes do happen it is usually because a bunch of amateur speculators jumped in to the market with more enthusiasm for easy money than skill. The famous tulip bubble of the 17th century was an example of that but it is atypical not normal. By analogy a million cars carry people safely to their chosen destination every day but that doesn't grab the attention the way a rare multi car pile up does. Accidents will happen because to err is human.
#15003784
SolarCross wrote:
The "political literature" is written by anti-social unemployed people, either lumpenproles sponging of the working class through tax funded unemployment benefits or the untalented slug-a-bed scions of successful people living off of a trust fund. The cream of the literature was written by middle class criminal masterminds like Lenin, Trotsky and Mao. Not a working man anywhere to be seen.



Hmmmm, whether you realize it or not, you're just playing identity-politics here, without addressing the *substance* of the Marxist-type literature at all, like 'labor theory of value' (LTV), for example.


SolarCross wrote:
It is an imaginary system because it exists and can only exist in your mind.



And this is just an unkind disparaging of the *model* *framework* I developed. You're being presumptuous, anyway.


SolarCross wrote:
You don't understand what goes into assessing demand. Real world producers don't just look at price data they also do market research and consider unit sales. Real world producers have brought market analysis up to a fine art and they get very close results. The point of money is not solely as a data point for assessing demand, its main purpose is to be a convenient reward to incentivise altruistic behaviour. If you are not aware of that then you don't understand human nature very well.



There's no social altruism in the activity of profit-seeking and profit-making, both of which have nothing to do with a purported 'human nature', but have *everything* to do with the way that capitalism empirically functions.

I don't deny that computerization has enabled more-comprehensive use of real-world data, but when this technological trajectory just winds up feeding into 'high-frequency trading' -- making profits off of microsecond fluctuations in prices -- this result just begs the question of what exchange values are even *for* when they can instead be empirically *eliminated* in favor of a communist-type 'gift economy', *without requiring* exchange values.


SolarCross wrote:
Speculation is much misunderstood even by competent people so I wouldn't expect you to get it. The vast majority of speculation helps smooth out prices because the speculators bid up low prices and sell down high prices in order to make a profit. A million trades happen this way every minute of every single day all year long today but no bubbles or crashes occur the vast majority of the time. When bubbles and crashes do happen it is usually because a bunch of amateur speculators jumped in to the market with more enthusiasm for easy money than skill. The famous tulip bubble of the 17th century was an example of that but it is atypical not normal. By analogy a million cars carry people safely to their chosen destination every day but that doesn't grab the attention the way a rare multi car pile up does. Accidents will happen because to err is human.



Sure -- I'm not dismissive of the gains that capitalism has brought us to, but it's come at a *very* expensive *human* toll, mostly due to the goals of accompanying *imperialism*:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_g ... death_toll


In other words, capitalism can only operate with the involvement of the nation-state, which provides centralization and standardization. Unfortunately the global patchwork of nation-states is a *competitive* landscape, and the shifting alliances act in a plate-tectonics kind of way, with the resulting friction causing all of the casualties of imperialist (and lesser) wars.

I don't think your defense of market movements, through speculative activity, is *sufficient*, though -- we can look to the more recent example of the subprime housing market in 2007-2009 to see that destructive large-scale dynamics will inevitably manifest, with hoarded capital chasing after riskier market opportunities, with market-failures (crashes) resulting, all because of capitalism's dynamic of overproduction.
#15003790
ckaihatsu wrote:Hmmmm, whether you realize it or not, you're just playing identity-politics here, without addressing the *substance* of the Marxist-type literature at all, like 'labor theory of value' (LTV), for example.

I can see why you think so but I would say playing identity politics is the game you are playing too. If we were boxing instead would you really be surprised if I were also to throw some punches too? If I engage with you I must play the same game. That said I think it remains a fair point that people such as yourself are happy to spend all day telling other people in your bubble all about how you can speak for the working class and assume you know what they want when in fact you don't really have anything to do with any of them. You are the flea who thinks he speaks for the dog.

ckaihatsu wrote:And this is just an unkind disparaging of the *model* *framework* I developed. You're being presumptuous, anyway.

I just want you to be clear that it is an imaginary system based on a faulty understanding of human nature, economics and history. If anything I am being generous in taking the time to point that out. But don't take my word for it, go to the pub meet some actual working class people and try to sell this idea to them. You won't find any working class people on revleft :lol: If you really mustn't leave the house try facebook because unlike revleft it actually has working class people actively posting there.

ckaihatsu wrote:There's no social altruism in the activity of profit-seeking and profit-making, both of which have nothing to do with a purported 'human nature', but have *everything* to do with the way that capitalism empirically functions.

It is actual altruism to lend money to a stranger or work for a stranger and that is against human nature but getting paid incentivises and makes altruism tolerable. Civilisation depends on incentivised altruism to work. If you take away the incentive then you must resort either to wholesale slavery as the soviets did, which is the just darker incentive of terrorism, or watch everything fall apart completely.

ckaihatsu wrote:I don't deny that computerization has enabled more-comprehensive use of real-world data, but when this technological trajectory just winds up feeding into 'high-frequency trading' -- making profits off of microsecond fluctuations in prices -- this result just begs the question of what exchange values are even *for* when they can instead be empirically *eliminated* in favor of a communist-type 'gift economy', *without requiring* exchange values.

HFT is just speculation done at the speed of light. It is an example of the kind of excellence produced by people chasing a profit. It is far more than is needed for making a market, in the 11th century speculators operated at far slower speeds and that did well enough, but why settle for good enough when excellent is possible?

And it begs no such question because HFT in no way suggests that people have lost in interest in getting paid for the sacrifices they make. HFT is not a contravention of the law of reciprocity, indeed it exemplifies it.

ckaihatsu wrote:Sure -- I'm not dismissive of the gains that capitalism has brought us to, but it's come at a *very* expensive *human* toll, mostly due to the goals of accompanying *imperialism*:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_g ... death_toll

Okay this must be some sick joke because the top 6 genocides in that list were commited by crazy socialist regimes and had absolutely nothing to do with "capitalism". :( :x


ckaihatsu wrote:
In other words, capitalism can only operate with the involvement of the nation-state, which provides centralization and standardization. Unfortunately the global patchwork of nation-states is a *competitive* landscape, and the shifting alliances act in a plate-tectonics kind of way, with the resulting friction causing all of the casualties of imperialist (and lesser) wars.

Capitalism operates with or without nation states. War will never go away, if you ever got your global totalitarian police state the wars would still continue they would all just be internal wars. Wars happen because people enjoy fighting and some problems can be solved with violence.

ckaihatsu wrote:I don't think your defense of market movements, through speculative activity, is *sufficient*, though -- we can look to the more recent example of the subprime housing market in 2007-2009 to see that destructive large-scale dynamics will inevitably manifest, with hoarded capital chasing after riskier market opportunities, with market-failures (crashes) resulting, all because of capitalism's dynamic of overproduction.

The sub-prime housing market was directly caused by the money counterfieting of the fiat money system. It had nothing to do with "hoarded" (saved) capital. It is however a flea bite, and the solution to a flea bite is not amputation. Some "cures" are far worse than the disease.
#15003969
SolarCross wrote:
I can see why you think so but I would say playing identity politics is the game you are playing too. If we were boxing instead would you really be surprised if I were also to throw some punches too? If I engage with you I must play the same game. That said I think it remains a fair point that people such as yourself are happy to spend all day telling other people in your bubble all about how you can speak for the working class and assume you know what they want when in fact you don't really have anything to do with any of them. You are the flea who thinks he speaks for the dog.



Here's the difference: This *isn't* a game -- it's about the lives and wellbeing of workers all over the world, and as the vast majority of humanity. Economically, workers' own collective interests are *not* identity politics in any way because workers power is actually a *class interest*, and not a single-issue, identity-based grouping, although those are usually valid, too.

I'm not a political proselytizer -- the overwhelming bulk of my political activity these days is from my ongoing participation on these discussion boards.

If one recognizes that surplus labor value is being ripped-off from billions of workers every hour of the day, then it follows that all workers have a common, collective class interest in running production, and society, in our own best interests -- this is regardless of me, personally.


SolarCross wrote:
I just want you to be clear that it is an imaginary system based on a faulty understanding of human nature, economics and history. If anything I am being generous in taking the time to point that out. But don't take my word for it, go to the pub meet some actual working class people and try to sell this idea to them. You won't find any working class people on revleft :lol: If you really mustn't leave the house try facebook because unlike revleft it actually has working class people actively posting there.



Well, thanks for the info, but you're following in the footsteps of TTP by making these blanket, baseless assertions while not-addressing the actual content at-hand, namely my model framework. My advice to *you* is to be less abstract and superficial, and to get *your* hands dirty with the material content of what proletarian interests objectively *are*.


SolarCross wrote:
It is actual altruism to lend money to a stranger or work for a stranger and that is against human nature but getting paid incentivises and makes altruism tolerable. Civilisation depends on incentivised altruism to work. If you take away the incentive then you must resort either to wholesale slavery as the soviets did, which is the just darker incentive of terrorism, or watch everything fall apart completely.



You're *waffling* -- which *is* it, is investment / equity capital a matter of private *profit-making*, or is it somehow 'altruistic' with *no* ulterior motives of profit-making? (I really doubt it's the latter, because that would be *charity*, and different from investments for capital gains.)

You're mischaracterizing the past Stalinist regimes which were *far more* historically-progressive even though run by a separatist administrative bureaucracy with a paramount leader -- many of the workplaces *continued* to be mostly run in a bottom-up way, by the workers themselves, but there were also top-down dictates and production goals.


SolarCross wrote:
HFT is just speculation done at the speed of light. It is an example of the kind of excellence produced by people chasing a profit. It is far more than is needed for making a market, in the 11th century speculators operated at far slower speeds and that did well enough, but why settle for good enough when excellent is possible?

And it begs no such question because HFT in no way suggests that people have lost in interest in getting paid for the sacrifices they make. HFT is not a contravention of the law of reciprocity, indeed it exemplifies it.



Hmmmm, you're missing the point -- speculative market activity is *not automatically* a good thing. The extraction of value from the markets through the HFT technique just means that algorithms are being used to open a 'back door' for paths of private aggrandizement.

The problem isn't the *speed* of the transactions, the problem is with the elitist edge in the marketplace due to *use* of these algorithms -- any private elitist advantage, like that of the more-conventional demographic-elitist racist sexist culture of the hegemonic group (white males), confers special advantages in the marketplace and *unbalances* the playing-field even more.

My point stands that the realm of capitalist exchange values can be 'gamed' with technology, as by those behind these HFT computer algorithms do, with elitist practices over a monumentally *uneven* playing-field -- with socialism this middle-layer of exchange values can be obliterated altogether, in favor of free-access and direct-distribution, with no exchanges needed anymore.


SolarCross wrote:
Okay this must be some sick joke because the top 6 genocides in that list were commited by crazy socialist regimes and had absolutely nothing to do with "capitalism". :( :x



My indictment is of the world's *nation-state* system -- Stalinist regimes, like the ones you're referring to, were still encompassed within this global capitalist nation-state system, and must function in that mode. The classic example was the USSR, of course, which couldn't keep up with the Western arms race, and ultimately imploded.


SolarCross wrote:
Capitalism operates with or without nation states. War will never go away, if you ever got your global totalitarian police state the wars would still continue they would all just be internal wars. Wars happen because people enjoy fighting and some problems can be solved with violence.



The existing international patchwork of nation-states is a historically-*emergent* property of capitalism that's still with us today. It's highly *unlikely* -- unimaginable, even -- that capitalism could continue to function *without* its landscape of competing nation-states.

I'm certainly not *calling* for a monolithic totalitarian capitalist world police state, or any other kind, and I agree that warfare *would* continue under capitalism because of the inherent nationalist goal to maximize a country's slice of the world's pie (market share).

Capitalist warfare happens because of the prevailing political consciousness of leaving things to the hands-off *market* mechanism, which leads competing claims to the same land, etc., to have to be solved through the means of last resort, meaning violence and war. Today there's increasing U.S. trade friction with China which is making an increasingly dangerous world for everyone.

You're -- predictably -- still trying to make global-societal dynamics sound *personal*, when they're not. Capitalist warfare is because of *capitalism*, not because of the implosion of Stalinist nation-states, 'enjoyment of fighting', or the 'might makes right' ethos.


SolarCross wrote:
The sub-prime housing market was directly caused by the money counterfieting of the fiat money system. It had nothing to do with "hoarded" (saved) capital. It is however a flea bite, and the solution to a flea bite is not amputation. Some "cures" are far worse than the disease.



Okay, I'll spell this one out for you, as well -- when there's too much money (from whatever source) chasing too few market opportunities due to an economic environment of prevailing *deflation* / overvaluation, those with idle capital will be much more likely to invest in *riskier* assets (like subprime mortgages) even though the risk of default becomes greater. The term for this is 'casino capitalism' since nothing is actually getting *produced*, but rather capital owners become increasingly willing to make riskier 'bets' since there's not much else going on.

This failing financial system of 2008-2009 was only able to stabilize itself at the expense of public funds -- the U.S. government relented and used tax dollars to *bail out* many banks, but not all banks.



The housing bubble preceding the crisis was financed with mortgage-backed securities (MBSes) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which initially offered higher interest rates (i.e. better returns) than government securities, along with attractive risk ratings from rating agencies. While elements of the crisis first became more visible during 2007, several major financial institutions collapsed in September 2008, with significant disruption in the flow of credit to businesses and consumers and the onset of a severe global recession.[4]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis
#15004103
QatzelOk wrote:Nope.

Yep.
You are regurgitating the prevailing thinking on "evolution" that was popular in Europe BEFORE his theory became well known, and remained popular among the upper classes right up to this day.

Nope. They didn't even know about genes.
Before Darwin, "social theory" regarding evolution was that if rich people bred themselves according to their own social values, a super-species of upper-class James Bonds with spiderman powers would emerge.

Stop makin' $#!+ up.
Important was how the upper classes thought things like "big houses," "name-brand colleges," "trophy brides" and "strict sexual discipline" would be what would eventually create "a better human animal."

Yes, they believed in "breeding." Not that it would grant them supernatural powers.
Darwin's theory basically says that humans don't have a clue what they will need to survive, and that our religious behaviorism and magical technology, are just harmful distractions.

I don't care what you incorrectly imagine Darwin's theory to have been. I am talking about what evolution is in FACT.
Sure, one school-shooter might out-survive his peers (because of technology (ex. AK-47) and religion (ex. white supremacist), but according to Darwin, this kind of "survival" doesn't in any way contribute to our species ability to withstand future diseases, climates, and bacteria.

Evolution is precisely the emergence and extinction of species by genetic changes in INDIVIDUALS. It has nothing to do with "contributing" to a species's fitness.
Likewise, this kind of "angry, competitive fighting" risks making our species less cooperative, and thus, reducing our chances of long-term survival as a species to zero.

There is an equilibrium level of aggression that is most adaptive under a given set of conditions. Cooperation and aggression are both good to a point.
The rich thought that if they bred other humans (and themselves) the way that humans had created flowers and dogs, we'd be set. This is the fake "evolution" that you are defending, a kind of transformation that might more accurately be described as transmogrification, or perversion.

Nonsense. It has nothing to do with deliberate intervention. It's simply what has emerged because of what we have become.
Modern Economics follows the "breeding flowers" school of fake evolution, and contributes to societal breakdown and violence. These are not survival-oriented things.

More nonsense. Modern mainstream neoclassical economics is indeed fake, but it has nothing to do with evolution.
#15004131
Truth To Power wrote:Evolution is precisely the emergence and extinction of species by genetic changes in INDIVIDUALS. It has nothing to do with "contributing" to a species's fitness.


Image
And yet the document is called "The Origin of Species" and not "The Origin of Super Strong Individuals." :lol:

(Please read a few Sparks Notes on this document to improve your understanding of what Darwin meant by "strong" and by "selection.")

Genetic changes occur very slowly, and don't necessarily make an individual organism "stronger" from a survival point of view. These changes can't be induced or choreographed by people. We will never "select" for the correct criteria.

It is the natural elimination (by nature) of certain individuals that creates a strong species that will survive NATURE. See, Ak-47s won't help defend against bacteria, disease, or climate change. These will just help certain people to kill other people. Being able to kill other people (with technology) will not make your offspring more apt to survive disease or bacteria.

Humanity is facing extinction with all our nuclear bombs, Ak-47s and video games. None of this technology has made any of us stronger, and many of these technologies have permitted the "weak" to survive and eliminate "the stronger." Meanwhile, bacteria, which has no technology, is in no danger. It is (survival) stronger than mankind currently.
#15005368
QatzelOk wrote:Image
And yet the document is called "The Origin of Species" and not "The Origin of Super Strong Individuals." :lol:

(Please read a few Sparks Notes on this document to improve your understanding of what Darwin meant by "strong" and by "selection.")

<yawn> Please read, "The Selfish Gene." It's a little more up-to-date than Darwin. :lol: :roll: :knife: :D 8)
Genetic changes occur very slowly, and don't necessarily make an individual organism "stronger" from a survival point of view. These changes can't be induced or choreographed by people. We will never "select" for the correct criteria.

Wrong again. Genetic changes occur suddenly in discrete increments, which then may or may not slowly become predominant in a population through natural selection.
It is the natural elimination (by nature) of certain individuals that creates a strong species that will survive NATURE.

No, species are also temporary, just not as temporary as individuals.
See, Ak-47s won't help defend against bacteria, disease, or climate change. These will just help certain people to kill other people. Being able to kill other people (with technology) will not make your offspring more apt to survive disease or bacteria.

But it might well make them more able to survive scarcity. Which is kinda the point of economics, isn't it? :lol: :roll: :knife:
Humanity is facing extinction with all our nuclear bombs, Ak-47s and video games.

Nope. Wrong again. The only possible risks to our existence as a species in the short to medium term are SAI, self-reproducing nanotech, and bioweapons.
None of this technology has made any of us stronger,

Flat false. Vaccination, for one, has made us a lot stronger.
and many of these technologies have permitted the "weak" to survive and eliminate "the stronger."

Not the stronger in fact, only the stronger in your opinion. Survival defines who is actually the stronger.
Meanwhile, bacteria, which has no technology, is in no danger. It is (survival) stronger than mankind currently.

Bacteria are thousands of species, not just one. And so far we have been surviving and reproducing far better than any bacterial species -- other than the ones that live in our intestines.
#15005418
About shooting your classmates with an AK-47, Truth to Power wrote:But it might well make them more able to survive scarcity.

Like the scarcity we will soon experience from our stripped down and poisoned environment?

Seriously, you are really good out of arguing against the survival of our species. None of your points above are credible - some of them are just empty plays on words (discrete increments as opposed to slowly), and other points are just industry propaganda from 40 years ago.

Your texts demonstrate that mankind's worst form of pollution has been complexity, as this has rendered him incapable of understanding science or the reality around us.

And the complex number-games of Economics - usually divorced from any comprehension of their inevitable side effects - is one of those complex stupidities that masquarades as "smart."
#15005501
Just saw a good video on cultured meat (which has seen more art and read more literature than *I* have -- !) (heh).

They say that the raising of animals in factory farms produces more carbon dioxide emissions than everything else, so this is a 'must' and a 'win-win' in terms of global warming:


How clean meat will change the food industry - Docu

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