Truth To Power wrote:
It isn't a commodity now.
But it *is* - - labor-power (the capacity to work) is *bought-and-sold*, and the products of labor are expropriated by the employer, in return for a wage, and are sold on the market for more than was paid for them in wages.
Truth To Power wrote:
No.
Truth To Power wrote:
No.
Truth To Power wrote:
No.
Truth To Power wrote:
Markets work by mutual voluntary consent, courts don't.
Truth To Power wrote:
No.
Truth To Power wrote:
No, it's the market.
On all of this, I'm asking what your conception of *government* should be, in relation to market functioning. You seem oblivious to the term 'market failure', which is an inherent feature of capitalism, as we're *currently* seeing with the government bailouts of the stock market.
What kind of *oversight* should government have, over the economic sphere, as for handling disputes and (hopefully) dispensing justice?
Truth To Power wrote:
It's not unproductive in the judgment of those doing the borrowing.
As I covered above, though, private funds collect interest the way private land property collects rent, and are *not commodity-productive* themselves. They are a *financial service* for those who may possibly *leverage* such funds.
Truth To Power wrote:
Consensually: in the market.
Hmmmm, you're not understanding - - what if Employee A goes to the employer and says 'You underpaid me on my paycheck this week' and the employer says 'No I didn't.'
How exactly is 'the market' supposed to handle this kind of dispute? (This is why government, though bourgeois, exists.)
Truth To Power wrote:
If you reward need, you will have no shortage of needy people.
Philosophically I have no problem with this - - let's call it 'aggregated incentive for economic growth'.
A post-capitalist socialism would see aggregated need / want / whim either *fulfilled* from the communistic gift economy of uncoerced voluntary liberated-labor, or else it wouldn't be - - the easiest, most-common mass needs would be far more likely to be fulfilled in this way, especially if fully-automated, once-and-for-all.
Truth To Power wrote:
It's wasteful because it's so productive.
Yes, the capitalism dynamic tends to *overproduction*, but that just begs the question - - isn't earth's collection of conscious human beings collectively *smart enough* to *democratize* economic dynamics (as in the way I just mentioned), so that supply and demand match-up appropriately, from a pre-planned production plan, over worldwide-collectivized productive assets, so that capitalist overproduction becomes a thing of the past?
Truth To Power wrote:
Is it better to have 2X production and X waste, as in socialism, or 5X production and 2X waste, as in capitalism?
Well, I'm not *suggesting* any blueprint-type socialist-state planning, or Stalinism - - see my 'Emergent Central Planning' diagram for an outline of what I *do* propose.
Also, your focus on strict productivity is to the detriment of *workers'* interests for quality-of-life issues. Many would argue for some *output* inefficiencies if it meant that workers could be in collective *control* of production, if at the expense of overall productivity and even consumers' interests for luxury / specialty goods.
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Truth To Power wrote:
And on Planet Zondo, the population of naked mole rats might live just that way. It won't work with human beings because Darwin.
ckaihatsu wrote:
You've been *vacillating* on this issue, sometimes saying that the social environment is social-Darwinist, sometimes saying it's not.
Truth To Power wrote:
I've never said it's social Darwinist.
You may want to clarify what you meant, then, mentioning 'Darwin' within a human-being social context.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
My original point remains intact and standing, that the rich have been receiving according to their needs / wants / whims, for centuries now.
Truth To Power wrote:
No, according to their privileges.
Okay, it's practically the same thing, with the point that the privilege of wealth *confers* a far greater range of satisfying personal needs, wants, and whims.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
We need to make this the worldwide standard, for *everyone* - - receipt according to people's needs, wants, and whims, from social production, which is the goal to work-backward from. (See my model.)
Truth To Power wrote:
No, we need justice.
You shouldn't be contradicting me on this point since the two are *related*.
And you should clarify what you mean by 'justice', regarding government and governance.
Truth To Power wrote:
It's not accurate, because it blames the factory owner for what the landowner does to the worker (capitalism blames the worker).
You're still ignoring the economic *exploitation* of commodified wage-labor, by equity capital. It's *all* capital / exchange-values that are to blame, and not just rentier-type capital, or land.
Truth To Power wrote:
No, it is not a privilege, because it does not deprive anyone of anything they would otherwise have.
Factory / equity / all capital ownership *are* privileges. Equity ownership deprives the worker of *surplus labor value*, which is the value from their work, above and beyond that which is materially required to maintain and sustain the labor pool going-forward, into the future (wages, basically).
Profits are directly realized from this expropriation of surplus labor value, from workers.
Truth To Power wrote:
There is nothing subjective or arbitrary about the objective difference between offering the worker access to economic opportunity that he would not otherwise have and depriving the worker of access to economic opportunity he would otherwise have.
Again, this is *bias* and *favoritism* on your part, regarding equity capital versus rentier capital. Equity capital economically *exploits* the wage-worker, which you'd rather ignore. You *are* being subjective here.
Truth To Power wrote:
Try to find a willingness to know the difference between genetic advantages, which do not deprive anyone else of anything they would otherwise have, and legal privileges, which do deprive others of things they would otherwise have.
I think you're overemphasizing the role of genetics in our modern workplace environment. Certainly I'd think that *personal subjective interest* is a far more powerful factor in personal success than any nominal phenotypical advantages or disadvantages one may have from one's genetic lineage.
Truth To Power wrote:
But you're wrong.
I could use your own subscription to *eugenics*-type beliefs as an example - - science discovered genetics and the class composition of our society *adopted* this kind of genetics-based reasoning about social dynamics into its ruling-class culture, and here you are. You didn't make it up on your own, it already existed in the world and you've adopted it into your way of thinking about the world.
Truth To Power wrote:
It's got nothing to do with eugenics.
I know that genetics *plays a part* in our biological makeup, even into our personalities, as you indicated with that Minnesota study of identical twins separated at birth. But the real question is *how significant* this factor is in the mix of our modern society. I
Truth To Power wrote:
Again, this is crushingly long, so I can only hit the important points.
That's not what Marxism says.
Yes, Marxism is concerned with how production takes place in society - - it's political economy. The social production doesn't *have* to be industrial, but that's what was taking place at the time of Marx's writing - - industrialization - - and that's how regular everyday household items are produced today.
You're being obtuse, as usual - - what is it that you *object* to about Marxism, exactly?
Truth To Power wrote:
It's political economy.
No it isn't - - anytime that you resort to childish insults, going off of the subject matter, you're *not* doing politics or political economy.
Truth To Power wrote:
Garbage. The world remained almost entirely rural, as it had been for thousands of years, until the 19th century.
Now *you're* thinking of industrialization, but the excerpt I included was about the initial breakaways from feudal estates, into rudimentary towns, and well before industrialization.
Truth To Power wrote:
Precisely because that publicly created value should be recovered for the purposes and benefit of the public that creates it, rather than being appropriated by rich, greedy, privileged parasites.
We're in agreement on this point, but you're sidestepping the initial thing you said in this part:
[J]ust as production and population have moved from rural to urban, so has land value.
This part doesn't reconcile with what you just said - - if public natural resources ('the commons') need to be resocialized to the common good, what does that have to do with *land values*?
Perhaps I'm being too critical though - - perhaps you just mean it as a *measurement*.
Truth To Power wrote:
No, sciences that study human behavior do.
No, there are social sciences, particularly sociology, that *do not have to* examine social dynamics at the scale of the individual. Statistics would be another one, which is closer to a *hard* science, being mathematical, though its subject matter tends to be social dynamics.
Truth To Power wrote:
No, because it is provably incorrect.
Do tell - - how is Marxism 'provably incorrect'?
Truth To Power wrote:
Because they are not rentier assets. They yield no economic rent because their value comes from their producers, not from a legal entitlement to deprive others of what they would otherwise have without making just compensation.
But they *do* yield 'economic rent' in the form of asset value *appreciation* over time - - that's why people use them as financial vehicles for the hoarding of wealth. This increase in value ultimately has to be provided by the overall economy somehow, once the asset is cashed-out for the capital gains realized.
Also, you're making a *Marxist* argument, in that the economic ('exchange') value of any given asset is sourced from work done by laborers to produce it in the first place (along with any speculative, market-price-pushing bidding activity).
You still haven't provided any theory or ideology on how land *should* be distributed, if the way it's *been* done has been so alienating to the working class.
Truth To Power wrote:
Huh? What nonsense. Products of labor are no longer natural resources. As soon as a physical material is extracted from nature by labor, it is no longer a natural resource but a product of labor, and thus rightly owned by its producer. You know this.
But under capitalism it's the *owner* who has bought the commodity (land, etc.) from the previous owner or government, and has paid for the human labor power to make it a usable, saleable product, and so deprives the worker of the *product* of his or her labor. The *laborer* does not walk-away with the product, it's the *owner* that does, contrary to what you're indicating.
Truth To Power wrote:
By securing and reconciling the equal individual rights of all to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor.
But then who 'manages' any given commodity, say, a parcel of land? If someone within your 'community' worked a piece of previously unclaimed land and then called it their own, could they then *sell* it? If so, then that parcel of land would be *commodified*, and it would have a private-property *owner*, separate from the original labor, and any additional labor used, as for landscaping and buildings on that property.
This is why, above all other subissues, I'd like to hear your take on how to reconcile 'private', with 'public'. When would privatization be allowed, according to you, and when would it *not* be allowed?
Truth To Power wrote:
On payment of just (market) compensation to the community of those deprived of it (obviously can't be retroactive).
Okay, here it is, but I maintain that this treatment of yours *conflicts* with your prior axiom of 'rights to one's products of labor'. All someone has to do is say 'I have enough money to pay someone to do something for me', and that commodification of labor immediately *nullifies* the laborers "rights" to keep the products of their labor.
The laborer could say 'I did the landscaping, and so the land should be mine', but the owner will say 'I paid someone for the land itself, and I paid the laborer to landscape it, so I get to keep the full value of what the landscaped land is worth on the market.' This, by the way, is *capitalism*, which commodities labor *and* labor-value, for those who have capital to invest in such processes. The laborer is *alienated* from whatever it is they produce, for the payment of a wage, for the necessities of life and living.
You may have good intentions, but your politics don't account for how things *currently* get done under capitalism, as just described, and you're not proposing anything that's much different, realistically.
Truth To Power wrote:
One would have to extract it, or arrange and pay for its extraction. A location can't be extracted, and thus can't become property.
I remember running into this subissue with you in the past - - you were not-acknowledging that even *land* is commodified, because it is bought-and-sold. Only those who can *afford* to buy land will ultimately have access to it, because it *is* a commodity and has market-pricing. No, it can't be physically relocated, but that's spurious to its commodification anyway.
Truth To Power wrote:
No. Nature can only be privatized by the act and labor of extraction.
You *just* said that land can't be extracted, yet it's still commodified (bought-and-sold), so it's privatized through private property ownership currently. How would your politics alter this default treatment of commodification of land?
Truth To Power wrote:
Assuming you paid the market compensation to the community of those deprived of it. Of course, compensation is only due if someone else wants to use the resource at that time, not retroactively if someone later decides that it would have been nice if the resource were still there.
So, with this, you're merely describing how private property ownership operates *today* - - any laborer who produces a commodity, or makes improvements to a commodity (land), will just be paid a wage and deprived of the *product* of their labor, correct?
Truth To Power wrote:
There are lots of different kinds of socialism, from the state socialism of Stalin or Mao to the Israeli kibbutzim and the Mondragon cooperative. The latter kind are voluntary, and can thus work well enough. The former aren't and can't.
My concern with your politics, though, has to do with the previously-expressed aspect of 'owner / manager versus laborer'. As soon as *anything* can be bought-and-sold, it has exchange-value (on the markets) and is a commodity.
If a bunch of workers in a coop of whatever sort complete their group task, say building a car, *who decides* how the revenue from the sale of that car is to be used? What if there are internal disputes and factions form around differing, conflicting policy trajectories (the build-more-infrastructure faction vs. the compensate-workers-more faction)?
The reason why I'm for bottom-up emergent central planning is so that problems can be *distributed* as geographically widely as possible - - with *all* productive infrastructure under collective workers control there'd be more *latitude* and maybe some things could be more readily 'outsourced', with more complex and interdependent supply chains resulting.
The problem with any given 'workers coop' today is that [1] market valuations and competitive pressures still exist, and [2] it's *incompatible* as an entity with much else in the market landscape because the collective interest is to keep revenue constrained *locally* to within the entity, while *business* dynamics will press to force an *outward* outlook, to keep investing in the *business* so as to stay up to industry standards. In other words so-called 'market socialism' is an internal *contradiction*, the way the former U.S.S.R. was as a *country* within a greater sea of geopolitical capitalism.
Workers coops do *not* challenge capitalism at all, and so are *not* anti-capitalist - - they're too apolitical.
Truth To Power wrote:
Georgism is too narrow a concept -- basically Henry George's proposed Single Tax of the 19th century. The broader concept of geoism (private ownership of the fruits of labor, including producer goods, and public administration of natural resources in trust for all) more accurately and comprehensively distinguishes itself from socialism (collective ownership of both producer goods and natural resources) and capitalism (private ownership of both producer goods and natural resources).
Okay, I appreciate this succinct description / comparison of your politics.
What I *don't* get is why you *advocate* for it (Georgism / geoism), and *how* it's conceivably better than either socialism or capitalism, in structure.
Truth To Power wrote:
That's the crux of the issue, where all of civilization and human history have gone down the wrong path, a path of robbery, slavery, oppression, war, starvation, despair and death. The solution is simple: if no one else is willing to pay to use a resource, one can use it for free. If someone else is also willing to pay to use it, the high bidder gets to use it, paying its market value (his voluntary bid) to the community of those whom he deprives of it.
Again, I don't see how this model is significantly different from the status quo - - moreover, once something is *privatized*, it's the owner's *private property* - - including commodified labor-power, and will be protected / defended as such despite any other human *need* for it, even if it's functionally *inactive*.
This status-quo approach - - private property (capitalism) - - is what *brought* humanity to robbery, slavery, oppression, war, starvation, despair and death.
I'd invite any clarification from you as to how your *debatably* different approach would make any significant difference for humanity.
Truth To Power wrote:
The producer owns it. When one picks -- i.e., extracts -- naturally growing fruit, it is no longer a natural resource but a product of labor.
But is there any unclaimed land anymore? I think the whole world was completely carved-up in the early 20th century, and it's this geopolitical competition over a finite planetary surface area that led into World War I.
Now practically *everything* is private property, and people can't simply find unclaimed orchards from which to pick fruit for daily sustenance - - this issue cropped up in the U.S. during the Great Depression, on the West Coast, regarding oranges.
Truth To Power wrote:
That is always government's job anyway, by definition. The only question is whether it will discharge that function in the interest of and to secure and reconcile the equal individual rights of all its citizens, or only in the narrow financial interest of a rich, greedy, privileged, parasitic elite.
Well, we *know* the answer to that already, don't we? How would *your* approach steer clear of favoring moneyed elites, exactly, if the government is funded through taxes on private gainful economic activity (a growing economy) ?
Truth To Power wrote:
Governance and legitimation is a different issue. I'm still just trying to educate people as to where their best interests actually lie.
So what you're saying is that you want government to 'keep the peace' (in civil society) while conventional, current business practices continue to go on, at the expense of the working class. You *claim* to want laborers to keep the product of their labor, but you don't explain *how* (in relation to ownership) and you don't acknowledge that labor *itself* is treated as a commodity, and exploited, under capitalism. Are you a professional politician?
Truth To Power wrote:
No. Like Marx, you have not the slightest understanding of how money works under finance capitalism. Almost all our money is created by private commercial banks, not the government, and most of the rest is created by central banks like the Fed, not government mints. In essence, almost all the money we use from day to day consists of outstanding bank loan principal.
I just said that the U.S. government works *with* the Federal Reserve. I don't dispute your description here - - the U.S. *outsources* its currency creation, which is fairly common practice, anyway, though *dramatized* by libertarians / left-nationalists in the case of the Fed. There are many, many government contracts available, as even for military suppliers, which is dominated by a certain oligopoly. At these levels, though, the closeness between government and private sectors is so tight as to effectively make it all a single entity, anyway - - the 'military-industrial complex', for example.
Truth To Power wrote:
I don't see a practical alternative to accountable democratic governance of peoples within their sovereign territories, and it works pretty well compared to, as Churchill observed, "all the alternatives that have been tried from time to time."
With statements like these you're just reinforcing the *nationalism* aspect of your politics, which is *not* compatible with the nobler / progressive portions of your expressed politics. I think you're giving working-class interests *lip service* by not-addressing those interests in any kind of *detail*. (I'll remind that workers do not have *any* national interests because workers can organize *internationally*, on a *class* basis.)
Truth To Power wrote:
The geoist paradigm renders such maneuvers useless. Land can't move, and it can't hide.
But land-as-a-commodity would still exist, and such land values would be measured in *exchange values* (money, finance) - - it wouldn't be any different than the capitalism of today.
Truth To Power wrote:
To some extent it's just a matter of terminology. Some people might call what I propose "nationalization." But IMO there is a useful distinction to be made between considering land as public property and considering it as a public trust. In particular, nationalization is often thought to imply public management and use of land, as in collectivized agriculture, etc. I favor management, control, and use of land by competing private landholders in a free market who are required to make just compensation for what they take from the community.
If land is still private property then it's *not* nationalized. The 'trust' you mention is simply state control, possibly outsourced to a private management firm. You're still basically describing the status quo and are not proposing anything different.
Truth To Power wrote:
Secure, exclusive tenure is required for efficient productive use in any economy above the hunter-gatherer and nomadic herding stages.
See - - this is your ideology showing through - - what happened to 'the workers keeping their product', and ['the commons'] ?
By upholding private property you're leaving the economic exploitation of workers in-place, with both land (and all rentier-type assets) and labor being commodified and exploited.
Truth To Power wrote:
The democratically accountable local government that secures the user's exclusive tenure for him and provides the desirable public services and infrastructure that make the land economically advantageous enough that he is willing to pay for it.
Again, status-quo.
Truth To Power wrote:
That's up to competing, private, for-profit producers because that gets the incentives right.
Status quo.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
I'm *all for* public services and public infrastructure, to the point that *everything* should be public services and public infrastructure, and run by the workers themselves.
Truth To Power wrote:
But public monopoly provision is only efficient in cases of market failure or natural monopoly, where there is nothing to be gained from private competition, such as transport infrastructure, police and fire service, etc. Most goods and services aren't like that, and are better provided by competing private producers.
Your yardstick of 'efficient' is only in terms of *exchange values* (money / currency / finance).
You've already admitted (the sports industry) that markets are very *inefficient* in terms of human effort invested, the height of the social pyramid, selective payoffs, etc. - - these are *material* factors / inputs and outputs, but are not measured by capitalism's exchange values. (They're 'externalities'.)
Truth To Power wrote:
I'm opposed to private landownership and the private appropriation and retention of publicly created rent.
However, you just said, a few segments ago, that:
Truth To Power wrote:
I favor management, control, and use of land by competing private landholders in a free market who are required to make just compensation for what they take from the community.
So - - tell me if I'm parsing correctly - - government secures land through military imperialism, and then leases or sells this newly created private property commodity to private owners, thus making it into a commodity.
Are you *opposed* to private landownership, or are you *for* competing private landholders in a free market?
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ckaihatsu wrote:
But you're okay with *other* kinds of rentier-based rents, like the accumulation of interest for sitting, non-productive ('saved') private funds.
Truth To Power wrote:
That's not rentier-based or a rent because it is obtained by contributing, not by depriving. I don't know how many more times I will have to explain that obvious point.
But in both cases, land and liquid capital, an asset-type economic *service* is being provided, that being the leased usage of physical land, for rent payments, and the usage of capital, presumably for investments, respectively. The sources of value themselves, land and capital, etc., are *non-productive* because they just sit there until rented. And, once rented, they have to be paid for, with rent and interest, respectively, for their leasing, regardless of what happens during the time of their leasing.
Borrowed capital receives interest payments because the asset, capital, is being used by a second party.
You're trying to make a false distinction when *all* rentier-type assets are the same, namely non-commodity-productive themselves, including the land underneath *productive* (equity) goods like factories and machinery immediately say that personal *health* is a far more important factor, which is a 'nurture' / social factor.
*Whew*, that was a lot, as usual - - head out for some beers now? (grin)