So this is the Socialist Argument In A Nutshell - Page 3 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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As either the transitional stage to communism or legitimate socio-economic ends in its own right.
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#14793929
Senter wrote:And it says something about a person when they so willfully misrepresent the facts and vilify those who are working to solve the problem such a person is choosing to ignore. Speaking of hypocrisy.

Who are you talking about?
Senter wrote:You took great care to avoid thinking of A.L.E.C. and the huge influence of thousands and thousands of lobbyists and the promise of campaign support in the millions of dollars.

I have never heard of it till you mentioned it and then I googled it. What is the problem with it?
Senter wrote:The sad part of it is your betrayal of your own class in your scramble to trip all over yourself to defend and excuse the greed and corruption of the capitalist class that is wrecking both the U.K. and the U.S.

So much that is wrong here. I am not betraying anyone, least of all myself, by calling out scammy socialists. The US and UK are doing just fine and where they are doing well is a lot because of people like Richard Branson and Bill Gates however you choose to slander them. Socialists are invariably useless parasites in comparison. What did you ever do you for your country?
Senter wrote:But you presented no argument, ... just character assassination and huge factual errors.

Lol you don't get to go around accusing unspecified persons of being corrupt and greedy then posturing yourself as the great white saviour of all us poor oppressed shoppers and earners and then claim anyone who fails to believe your pathetic mythos is just committing character assassination when character assassination is all of your "argument".

Furthermore my argument was clear: having a substantial amount of money gives you some influence in a democracy if you choose to use it but it is not power. Power grows out of the barrel of gun.

The other argument is that a cult such as socialism which is based on exploiting envy can hardly be the antidote to avarice.
#14794302
Truth To Power wrote:It is: the successful at gaining power.


What else should be a test for those who should wield it? If you do good in law school you become a lawyer, if you do well in medical school you become a doctor, if you do well in gaining power then you should be powerful...
#14794669
Oxymoron wrote:What else should be a test for those who should wield it?

Wisdom, intelligence, honesty, responsibility, empathy, courage, integrity, honesty, respect, consideration, and honesty.
If you do good in law school you become a lawyer,

Lawyers are your model for who should be trusted with power??!?
if you do well in medical school you become a doctor,

No, you also have to serve an internship that shows you can handle the responsibility with professionalism, as well as the qualities listed above.
if you do well in gaining power then you should be powerful...

History is one long refutation of that claim.
#14796629
SolarCross wrote:I have never heard of it (A.L.E.C.) till you mentioned it and then I googled it. What is the problem with it?

Only that it is a direct attack on democracy, making corporations a direct and organized dominating influence on "democratic" government.


Socialists are invariably useless parasites in comparison. What did you ever do you for your country?

I served in the Navy on submarines among other things. What did you ever do?


Lol you don't get to go around accusing unspecified persons of being corrupt and greedy then posturing yourself as the great white saviour of all us poor oppressed shoppers and earners and then claim anyone who fails to believe your pathetic mythos is just committing character assassination when character assassination is all of your "argument".

Spin it!! LOL!!! You misrepresented the truth and I pointed it out, and contrary to your nonsense I get to post what I post. You can go whine at someone who cares.


Furthermore my argument was clear: having a substantial amount of money gives you some influence in a democracy if you choose to use it but it is not power. Power grows out of the barrel of gun.

You ignore that the government is the power and the corporate elite wield that power through dominating influence purchasing it.


The other argument is that a cult such as socialism which is based on exploiting envy can hardly be the antidote to avarice.

Again you misrepresent. But I'm sure, based on your participation thus far, that you would shy away from an honest, open, principled debate of that statement.
#14944506
Truth To Power wrote:
The fundamental challenge of economics -- which socialists are simply incompetent to meet, and they know it -- is to create an economic environment where the ineradicable individual desire for success and material reward serves the wellbeing of society as a whole.



This is an inherent *contradiction*, and a poor basis for any kind of post-class-divide, collectivist-oriented material-economy. You situate 'individual desire for success' as being somehow inherently paramount in human nature, when in fact it's merely symptomatic of the private-property-based system of capitalism.

I've come to the conclusion that common-good work efforts *cannot* be materially rewarded, as we're so used to seeing under the capitalist commodity ethos, because that practice inherently gives rise to the realm of exchange-values, which then compete in parallel with use values.

Instead, I argue for the 'communist gift economy', wherein all contributions of necessarily-voluntary liberated-labor, post-capitalism, are exactly that -- *contributions*, with no direct, individualized socio-political-material recompense whatsoever. Of course the main denotation / implication of a communist gift economy, though, is that *all* have free-access to the full bounty of collectivized / socialized social production -- so as long as social productive activity is at a certain critical mass, the resulting material-economy will be sufficient, complex-enough, and responsive-enough to formally expressed mass human need and demand.

'Success' and 'material reward' are *commodity*-based abstract goals that *define* the inherently-corrupted ethos of capitalism, and these personalized goals would be explicit barriers to an *egalitarian*-type, post-capitalist socialist social ethos.

That said, I do include a type of 'societal material incentive' in my own socialist-type framework model, to address potential situations of liberated-labor scarcity, such as for work roles that would be particularly hazardous, difficult, or distasteful, but these incentives revolve around liberated-labor work *hours*, per qualitative work role, while nothing is commodified in the process.


Labor credits Frequently Asked Questions

[url]tinyurl.com/labor-credits-faq[/url]

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


---


Truth To Power wrote:
By refusing to know the difference between publicly and privately created value, capitalism and socialism both disqualify themselves from the process of designing such an environment. They have nothing to contribute, but they won't shut up and let those of us who do have something to contribute get on with it.



This is a vague overgeneralization -- you may want to specify *how* you think that capitalism and socialism both '[refuse] to know the difference between publicly and privately created value'. I think you're stepping outside of materialism altogether with this erroneous contention, since *any* approach to material-economics would be reducible to the issue of how goods and services are provided / distributed.

And, of course, socialism by definition wouldn't allow-for, or include, the private sector whatsoever -- private property would be summarily abolished by the workers state during the transitional period.


Truth To Power wrote:
No, not the capitalist (in the classical economics sense of the provider of capital goods), but the privileged owner of land, bank licenses, IP monopolies, etc. The latter abrogate people's rights to liberty. The former does not.

Do not ascribe to the provider of productive capital the privilege of the landowner, bankster or IP monopolist.

No, it should secure and reconcile the equal individual rights of all, not favor the interests of collective organizations over those of individuals.



You're obviously a libertarian, and you're arguing a *reformist* line, because you don't like the corporatization and governmental authority that *favors* corporate conglomerations of capital within the context of capitalism. This position is understandable, but it unfortunately conflates political 'liberty' with *small-scale* productivity, and such a line is basically mixing apples-and-oranges, because we all know that mass-scale, corporate-sized international production techniques are *empirically* far superior to any possible arrangement of lateral small-scale supply-chain productive groupings.

Socialists -- like myself -- argue for the full *expropriation* of these existing productive organizations (corporations), to be used by the *working class* itself.


SolarCross wrote:
It says something about a person when they cook up a crappy crypto-religion (socialism) as an excuse to persecute people with loads of cash on the basis that they have commited the sin of avarice when the very basis of socialism and the motivation for persecuting rich people is avarice.



You're using strawman tactics here -- the "socialism" that you're referring to is really more akin to capitalist-reformist *liberalism*, and not to true workers control of social production.

This is why it 'feels' like a 'crappy crypto-religion', because such pseudo-leftism relies too heavily on *groupthink* -- like religions with their mythological narrative frameworks -- for the sake of in-group social cohesion and overall common culture.

I agree that socialist-type efforts shouldn't summarily persecute *individuals* -- such actions would be inappropriate given that the *entire system* of capitalism needs to be done away with, altogether, at the global scale -- we're supposed to be acting *politically*, and not as localist moralists over matters of lifestyle.

I *don't* agree, though, that socialism is about *avarice* -- the defining motivation and ethos for it should be *egalitarianism* in social treatment, post-capitalism.
#14944713
ckaihatsu wrote:This is an inherent *contradiction*,

No. Economics is all about trade-offs, but there is a difference between a trade-off and a contradiction.
and a poor basis for any kind of post-class-divide, collectivist-oriented material-economy.

Elimination of the privileges that create class does not necessitate collectivism.
You situate 'individual desire for success' as being somehow inherently paramount in human nature,

Not necessarily paramount, but certainly a major preoccupation.
when in fact it's merely symptomatic of the private-property-based system of capitalism.

No, that's just silly, anti-scientific Marxist garbage. We know from studies of animal behavior that individual success and status are natural human goals for perfectly sound evolutionary reasons.
I've come to the conclusion that common-good work efforts *cannot* be materially rewarded, as we're so used to seeing under the capitalist commodity ethos, because that practice inherently gives rise to the realm of exchange-values, which then compete in parallel with use values.

More silly Marxist garbage. Exchange value is based exclusively on use value (demand) and scarcity (supply) at the margin. Marginalism is one of the few genuine conceptual advances neoclassical economics offers over classical economics.
Instead, I argue for the 'communist gift economy', wherein all contributions of necessarily-voluntary liberated-labor, post-capitalism, are exactly that -- *contributions*, with no direct, individualized socio-political-material recompense whatsoever.

I.e., you incorrectly imagine that silly Marxist fantasies can be implemented on a societal scale.
Of course the main denotation / implication of a communist gift economy, though, is that *all* have free-access to the full bounty of collectivized / socialized social production -- so as long as social productive activity is at a certain critical mass, the resulting material-economy will be sufficient, complex-enough, and responsive-enough to formally expressed mass human need and demand.

I.e., you couldn't learn from the Paris Commune's failure, the USSR's failure (and democide), Maoist China's failure (and democide), Castro Cuba's failure, socialist Vietnam's failure, or Pol Pot Cambodia's failure (and democide), and now you can't learn from Venezuela's failure either, even as it happens right before your eyes. That is called, "refusal to know."
'Success' and 'material reward' are *commodity*-based abstract goals that *define* the inherently-corrupted ethos of capitalism,

Nope. Flat wrong. Capitalism is defined as private ownership of the means of production (land and capital goods), the only corrupt part of which is private landowning. But there is no logical link between success or material reward and landowning.
and these personalized goals would be explicit barriers to an *egalitarian*-type, post-capitalist socialist social ethos.

Yes, the fact that human beings are not ants is an explicit barrier to a socialist social ethos.
That said, I do include a type of 'societal material incentive' in my own socialist-type framework model, to address potential situations of liberated-labor scarcity, such as for work roles that would be particularly hazardous, difficult, or distasteful, but these incentives revolve around liberated-labor work *hours*, per qualitative work role, while nothing is commodified in the process.

I.e., you propose to pay people (and especially want to be paid) for wasting time, not for producing anything. Thought so.
This is a vague overgeneralization

Nope. It's a factual description.
-- you may want to specify *how* you think that capitalism and socialism both '[refuse] to know the difference between publicly and privately created value'.

I have done so many times. Both refuse to know the fact that the factory owner contributes to production while the landowner does not because the factory's value is privately created while the land's value is publicly created.
I think you're stepping outside of materialism altogether with this erroneous contention,

And you are objectively incorrect.
since *any* approach to material-economics would be reducible to the issue of how goods and services are provided / distributed.

Which depends on where you think value comes from. So how is that immaterial?
And, of course, socialism by definition wouldn't allow-for, or include, the private sector whatsoever -- private property would be summarily abolished by the workers state during the transitional period.

You can't abolish private value creation by abolishing private property -- though you will get close to abolishing value creation.
You're obviously a libertarian,

I'm certainly an advocate of liberty (and justice, and truth), but most soi-disant "libertarians" are more accurately described as propertarians, and what they actually advocate is feudalism (VS is correct on that score).
and you're arguing a *reformist* line, because you don't like the corporatization and governmental authority that *favors* corporate conglomerations of capital within the context of capitalism.

No, I don't like the government-issued and -enforced privileges that enable the privileged, corporate or individual, to take from everyone else, corporate or individual. Corporate limited liability is an issue, but not a major one. Privilege would be just as egregious if there were no corporations and business was all conducted by individual capitalist entrepreneurs.
This position is understandable, but it unfortunately conflates political 'liberty' with *small-scale* productivity,

No, it simply recognizes the fact that production is a private activity. Political liberty is a tangential issue.
and such a line is basically mixing apples-and-oranges, because we all know that mass-scale, corporate-sized international production techniques are *empirically* far superior to any possible arrangement of lateral small-scale supply-chain productive groupings.

Individual does not imply small scale, nor does corporate imply large scale.
Socialists -- like myself -- argue for the full *expropriation* of these existing productive organizations (corporations), to be used by the *working class* itself.

And ignore Venezuela, etc.
You're using strawman tactics here -- the "socialism" that you're referring to is really more akin to capitalist-reformist *liberalism*, and not to true workers control of social production.

Socialism has sometimes worked on a small-scale, voluntary basis, but has never worked on a large-scale, compulsory, societal basis, and never will.
I *don't* agree, though, that socialism is about *avarice* -- the defining motivation and ethos for it should be *egalitarianism* in social treatment, post-capitalism.

Egalitarianism is for rights and opportunities, not treatment or outcomes.
#14944916
Truth To Power wrote:
The fundamental challenge of economics -- which socialists are simply incompetent to meet, and they know it -- is to create an economic environment where the ineradicable individual desire for success and material reward serves the wellbeing of society as a whole.



ckaihatsu wrote:
This is an inherent *contradiction*,



Truth To Power wrote:
No. Economics is all about trade-offs, but there is a difference between a trade-off and a contradiction.



If you'd rather term the dynamic a 'trade-off', that's fine -- the principle at-work is the same as seen in the economic dynamic of *deflation*, or *over-valuation*: The more an individual desires *personal* success and material reward, the more they're willing to economically address, and participate-in, *exchange values*, rather than use-values (as for addressing unmet human need). Under capitalism's profit-making motivation, costs are *socialized* -- collectivized government tax receipts paid for food stamps for the working poor -- while rewards are *privatized*, with business ownership benefitting from the exploitation of both workers and government.

Yes, I'll readily acknowledge that there *can* be overlap, where one's efforts happen to benefit society as well, as with a novel invention like insulin, but it tends to be the *exception* to the rule, since the steady, hour-by-hour expropriation of surplus labor value is the economic *norm*.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
and a poor basis for any kind of post-class-divide, collectivist-oriented material-economy.



Truth To Power wrote:
Elimination of the privileges that create class does not necessitate collectivism.



You're implicitly describing the class divide as simply existing on a few feudal-lord-like *privileges*, when in fact it's a daily, hourly process that systematically robs the worker of their labor and time -- merely consider that whatever the worker produces is invariably sold for more on the market, by the employer, than what is paid back to the worker in the form of wages.

Here's a particular depiction of the economic dynamic that happens to be empirically accurate:


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show
Image



If class were eliminated there would no longer be any differentiation of *class interests* -- everyone would be in the same boat, empirically, and would have to work things out materially *in common*, or 'collectively'.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You situate 'individual desire for success' as being somehow inherently paramount in human nature, when in fact it's merely symptomatic of the private-property-based system of capitalism.



Truth To Power wrote:
Not necessarily paramount, but certainly a major preoccupation.



Whereas the *revolutionary*-material perspective sees that we're all *socially* determined, meaning that the pre-existing human world is what objectively gives shape to ourselves as individuals as we grow-up and develop within the bounds of that world -- if private property relations didn't exist (as chattel slavery and serfdom now no longer exists), we would see far less of the 'individual desire for success' [based on the private accumulation of wealth] because such a yardstick would no longer even *exist* anymore.


Worldview Diagram

Spoiler: show
Image



[6] Worldview Diagram

Spoiler: show
Image



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ckaihatsu wrote:
when in fact it's merely symptomatic of the private-property-based system of capitalism.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, that's just silly, anti-scientific Marxist garbage. We know from studies of animal behavior that individual success and status are natural human goals for perfectly sound evolutionary reasons.



But such studies presuppose a determining factor of *scarcity* -- what if society, post-capitalism, was able to realistically produce an *abundance* of close to 100% of everything that everyone needed and wanted -- ? (Technologically this capacity exists *today*.) Human behavior and goals would change *drastically*, for the better, if lower-level material needs could be summarily satisfied, as by the products of full-automation (unrealizable within the bounds of capitalism's *commodity*-based production).


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
I've come to the conclusion that common-good work efforts *cannot* be materially rewarded, as we're so used to seeing under the capitalist commodity ethos, because that practice inherently gives rise to the realm of exchange-values, which then compete in parallel with use values.



Truth To Power wrote:
More silly Marxist garbage. Exchange value is based exclusively on use value (demand) and scarcity (supply) at the margin. Marginalism is one of the few genuine conceptual advances neoclassical economics offers over classical economics.



Demand for use values within the context of capitalism, though, are hardly left untainted -- one has to have the use-value need, *as well as* the exchange-value *money*, to be able to *purchase* that good or service.

*Precluding* the conventional rewards-for-labor practice would eliminate the entire 'realm' of exchange-values altogether, because then labor would no longer be *commodified* -- no reward / payment / wages for labor, no labor-commodification.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Instead, I argue for the 'communist gift economy', wherein all contributions of necessarily-voluntary liberated-labor, post-capitalism, are exactly that -- *contributions*, with no direct, individualized socio-political-material recompense whatsoever.



Truth To Power wrote:
I.e., you incorrectly imagine that silly Marxist fantasies can be implemented on a societal scale.



You're just repeating your dismissiveness here -- you're not at all saying *why* you think my line is unrealistic.

It's not unrealistic to contend that society can be productive on the whole without commodifying its labor -- as long as there's a 'critical mass' of necessarily-voluntary labor efforts for the common good, then individuals will all have their basic biological and social material needs provided-for, thereby freeing-up higher-level (qualitative) efforts, endlessly going-forward -- all without having to use exchange-value (monetary) measurements, per-individual, since that's an exploitative scheme, by design.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Of course the main denotation / implication of a communist gift economy, though, is that *all* have free-access to the full bounty of collectivized / socialized social production -- so as long as social productive activity is at a certain critical mass, the resulting material-economy will be sufficient, complex-enough, and responsive-enough to formally expressed mass human need and demand.



Truth To Power wrote:
I.e., you couldn't learn from the Paris Commune's failure, the USSR's failure (and democide), Maoist China's failure (and democide), Castro Cuba's failure, socialist Vietnam's failure, or Pol Pot Cambodia's failure (and democide), and now you can't learn from Venezuela's failure either, even as it happens right before your eyes. That is called, "refusal to know."



No, you're basically saying that 'Might makes right' -- that whenever the U.S. / Western nations use imperialist military might to crush uprisings and take over non-aligned territories, then that prevailing history is somehow automatically the correct one. (Not that I agree with the political motivations and trajectories of all of the instances in your list.)


---


Truth To Power wrote:
The fundamental challenge of economics -- which socialists are simply incompetent to meet, and they know it -- is to create an economic environment where the ineradicable individual desire for success and material reward serves the wellbeing of society as a whole.



ckaihatsu wrote:
'Success' and 'material reward' are *commodity*-based abstract goals that *define* the inherently-corrupted ethos of capitalism,



Truth To Power wrote:
Nope. Flat wrong. Capitalism is defined as private ownership of the means of production (land and capital goods), the only corrupt part of which is private landowning. But there is no logical link between success or material reward and landowning.



Let's generalize this status to 'property-owning', whether it's land, means of mass production, capital, goods, bank receipts, investments, etc.

Just because someone owns some property of some type doesn't automatically mean that they're also serving the wellbeing of society as a whole -- more likely, they're actually *not* because most individuals in society are probably *not able* to participate at that same level / magnitude of economic involvement, with like sums.

How *do* you measure 'success', then, if it's *not* linked to material reward and landowning [property-owning] -- ?

You sound like you're firmly on the side of equity capital, and simultaneously distancing yourself from rentier capital. Are you aware that both types of capital are only possible due to the past exertions of laborers ('dead labor')?


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ckaihatsu wrote:
and these personalized goals would be explicit barriers to an *egalitarian*-type, post-capitalist socialist social ethos.



Truth To Power wrote:
Yes, the fact that human beings are not ants is an explicit barrier to a socialist social ethos.



To *clarify*, there's nothing wrong with personal goals, whatever the political-economy context, but the problem with the *capitalist* political economy is that formal societal measures of 'value' (exchange-value) are what's used to *commodify* *every* labor-effort, from every individual worker, worldwide, in the global market economy.

It's this *commodification* of labor-efforts, into the private-property holdings of ownership -- like the previous *enslavement* of slave-labor before -- that's the grinding, unavoidable societal issue of today.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
That said, I do include a type of 'societal material incentive' in my own socialist-type framework model, to address potential situations of liberated-labor scarcity, such as for work roles that would be particularly hazardous, difficult, or distasteful, but these incentives revolve around liberated-labor work *hours*, per qualitative work role, while nothing is commodified in the process.


Labor credits Frequently Asked Questions

[url]tinyurl.com/labor-credits-faq[/url]

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



Truth To Power wrote:
I.e., you propose to pay people (and especially want to be paid) for wasting time, not for producing anything. Thought so.



No, your facile mischaracterization of my approach into a Stalinistic stereotype, is not at all constructive here -- if you take a little time to *understand* my proposed framework, you'll see that it's quite appropriate to a potential post-capitalist functioning political economy.


---


Truth To Power wrote:
By refusing to know the difference between publicly and privately created value, capitalism and socialism both disqualify themselves from the process of designing such an environment. They have nothing to contribute, but they won't shut up and let those of us who do have something to contribute get on with it.



ckaihatsu wrote:
This is a vague overgeneralization



Truth To Power wrote:
Nope. It's a factual description.



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
-- you may want to specify *how* you think that capitalism and socialism both '[refuse] to know the difference between publicly and privately created value'.



Truth To Power wrote:
I have done so many times. Both refuse to know the fact that the factory owner contributes to production while the landowner does not because the factory's value is privately created while the land's value is publicly created.



While you *wish* to arbitrarily validate equity capital while *invalidating* only rentier-type valuations, what you're missing is that as soon as capital accumulates to any significant degree it *automatically* becomes rentier-type capital -- asset valuations. Since you haven't denounced capitalism at all, you're *stuck* with asset-type valuations / rentier-capital, as much as you would personally prefer to *excise* it from the overall system of capitalism.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
I think you're stepping outside of materialism altogether with this erroneous contention,



Truth To Power wrote:
And you are objectively incorrect.



(See the previous segment, where I've just addressed the equity-vs.-rentier capital issue.)


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ckaihatsu wrote:
since *any* approach to material-economics would be reducible to the issue of how goods and services are provided / distributed.



Truth To Power wrote:
Which depends on where you think value comes from. So how is that immaterial?



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
And, of course, socialism by definition wouldn't allow-for, or include, the private sector whatsoever -- private property would be summarily abolished by the workers state during the transitional period.



Truth To Power wrote:
You can't abolish private value creation by abolishing private property -- though you will get close to abolishing value creation.



Yes, without the state-military-enforced societal institution of private property, new private value creation would be impossible because it would have no existing precedents of valuation to refer to. Value creation -- as in *use* values -- *could* continue to occur, as in socially necessary production -- but without the historical baggage-weight of *exchange* values, which are prone to speculation, booms and busts, and outright inoperation if profitability happens to be lacking. In the absence of private property / exchange values, social production could continue on a communist-gift-economy basis, wherein all infrastructure, resources, and goods would have to be approved on a consciously mass-*political* basis, instead of on an individuated, *commodity*-economic one.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You're obviously a libertarian,



Truth To Power wrote:
I'm certainly an advocate of liberty (and justice, and truth), but most soi-disant "libertarians" are more accurately described as propertarians, and what they actually advocate is feudalism (VS is correct on that score).



Well, *advocating* for rentier-type capital -- as in the direction of outright feudalism -- is definitely historically-backward.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
and you're arguing a *reformist* line, because you don't like the corporatization and governmental authority that *favors* corporate conglomerations of capital within the context of capitalism.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, I don't like the government-issued and -enforced privileges that enable the privileged, corporate or individual, to take from everyone else, corporate or individual. Corporate limited liability is an issue, but not a major one. Privilege would be just as egregious if there were no corporations and business was all conducted by individual capitalist entrepreneurs.



Okay, noted.


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Truth To Power wrote:
No, not the capitalist (in the classical economics sense of the provider of capital goods), but the privileged owner of land, bank licenses, IP monopolies, etc. The latter abrogate people's rights to liberty. The former does not.

Do not ascribe to the provider of productive capital the privilege of the landowner, bankster or IP monopolist.

No, it should secure and reconcile the equal individual rights of all, not favor the interests of collective organizations over those of individuals.



ckaihatsu wrote:
This position is understandable, but it unfortunately conflates political 'liberty' with *small-scale* productivity,



Truth To Power wrote:
No, it simply recognizes the fact that production is a private activity. Political liberty is a tangential issue.



No, you're clearly indicating that you see non-productive, rentier-type ownership as being an abrogation of 'liberty'. Your politics, though, are *biased* since you only acknowledge *equity*-capital-enabled production as being legitimate, while awkwardly dismissing the inevitably resultant *rentier* type of capital.

For your political perspective to work in practice the economy would somehow have to *never* have a surplus, or savings, of any kind. Productive infrastructure -- capital goods -- though, would still have to be valuated as capital, which, if *not* actively used as equity would be synonymous with rentier capital, so then you're fucked anyway.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
and such a line is basically mixing apples-and-oranges, because we all know that mass-scale, corporate-sized international production techniques are *empirically* far superior to any possible arrangement of lateral small-scale supply-chain productive groupings.



Truth To Power wrote:
Individual does not imply small scale, nor does corporate imply large scale.



*Of course* 'individual' is small-scale because it's quantitatively *lesser* than a conglomeration of productive assets, labor, and resources -- as in a corporation, which is quantitatively *large scale*.

My point about the proportionally more-efficient and more-effective *corporate* scale stands, which is why such productive organizations need to be expropriated by the world's working class, so as to use such modern proven techniques to *humane* ends, instead of continuing to systematically exploit labor for the ends of increasing asset valuations, as into national currencies.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Socialists -- like myself -- argue for the full *expropriation* of these existing productive organizations (corporations), to be used by the *working class* itself.



Truth To Power wrote:
And ignore Venezuela, etc.



What are you talking about?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You're using strawman tactics here -- the "socialism" that you're referring to is really more akin to capitalist-reformist *liberalism*, and not to true workers control of social production.



Truth To Power wrote:
Socialism has sometimes worked on a small-scale, voluntary basis, but has never worked on a large-scale, compulsory, societal basis, and never will.



Good -- it doesn't have to.

By my estimations not everyone would even *have* to work -- the productivity leveraging of current mechanical technology is often overlooked, so the real issue is 'How much goods and services are people missing out on as consumers due to near-fully-automated, nearly-labor-free technological productive processes?'

Unlike in 1917 Russia, today's society is nowhere *near* at a loss for productive machinery and operations -- at this point it's sheerly a matter of *social organization*, and we can now do such without even needing *money* or abstract exchange-value-type valuations of any kind. With existing communications technology everything material could be listed *qualitatively*, for empowered social factionalism, and ultimately bottom-up social determination, for the realistic realization of a fully-inclusive, mass-based production of everything that's socially necessary.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
I *don't* agree, though, that socialism is about *avarice* -- the defining motivation and ethos for it should be *egalitarianism* in social treatment, post-capitalism.



Truth To Power wrote:
Egalitarianism is for rights and opportunities, not treatment or outcomes.



Well, it *would* also apply to 'treatment', but I agree that 'outcomes' could vary greatly person-by-person, which wouldn't be a problem as long as *sufficient* general productivity existed to meet all people's needs and most of their wants as well.
#14945197
Davea8 wrote:I mean really, which should be held as more important, -business success and profits, or the wellbeing of society as a whole?


Truth To Power wrote:The fundamental challenge of economics -- which socialists are simply incompetent to meet, and they know it -- is to create an economic environment where the ineradicable individual desire for success and material reward serves the wellbeing of society as a whole. By refusing to know the difference between publicly and privately created value, capitalism and socialism both disqualify themselves from the process of designing such an environment. They have nothing to contribute, but they won't shut up and let those of us who do have something to contribute get on with it.


What if the well-being of society "was" the goal?...
In a realised socialist society, where the basic needs of human beings are met, without the problems generated by 'exchange values', 'money' 'exploitation', and so forth; there is no reason for the individuals to compete with one another to gain material success.
The circumstances created by such society, will be of favourable nature to the individuals, and not in conflict with their motivations/drives for 'Self-actualisation' - See 'Maslow's hierarchy of needs' here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_ ... y_of_needs

Therefore, any competition amongst the individuals, should there be any; will be within the humane domain: Striving to realise one's own potentials, to contribute better to the society, to create an even more favourable environment for the growth of the individuals, ... and certainly will not take the brutal forms it does today.
#14945462
Stardust wrote:What if the well-being of society "was" the goal?...

We can take it as a societal goal, but not the goal of individuals. We are not ants.
In a realised socialist society, where the basic needs of human beings are met, without the problems generated by 'exchange values', 'money' 'exploitation', and so forth; there is no reason for the individuals to compete with one another to gain material success.

Of course there is: status. All social mammals compete for status, and there can never be enough of it to go around.
The circumstances created by such society, will be of favourable nature to the individuals, and not in conflict with their motivations/drives for 'Self-actualisation' - See 'Maslow's hierarchy of needs' here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_ ... y_of_needs

Self-actualization comes after social status.
Therefore, any competition amongst the individuals, should there be any; will be within the humane domain: Striving to realise one's own potentials, to contribute better to the society, to create an even more favourable environment for the growth of the individuals, ... and certainly will not take the brutal forms it does today.

There's nothing brutal about competing to produce more than others and thus earn greater rewards than others. Production benefits everyone. That's why socialism can't provide a solution to the problem of economics. While capitalism is a bad solution to the problem of economics, at least it's better than socialism, because when socialists steal capital, it reduces the amount of capital available for production, but when capitalists steal land, the amount of land available for production stays exactly the same.
#14945497
ckaihatsu wrote:If you'd rather term the dynamic a 'trade-off', that's fine -- the principle at-work is the same as seen in the economic dynamic of *deflation*, or *over-valuation*:

How so?
The more an individual desires *personal* success and material reward, the more they're willing to economically address, and participate-in, *exchange values*, rather than use-values (as for addressing unmet human need). Under capitalism's profit-making motivation, costs are *socialized* -- collectivized government tax receipts paid for food stamps for the working poor -- while rewards are *privatized*, with business ownership benefitting from the exploitation of both workers and government.

Your analysis is incorrect and economically naive. It is not business owners who benefit, it is privilege owners, especially landowners (see the Henry George Theorem). That is why most businesses fail, but no one ever went broke owning land. Even Marx himself came to understand this late in life (it's mentioned in Vol. 3 of "Capital"), but could not bring himself to admit that he was wrong, and Henry George was right.
Yes, I'll readily acknowledge that there *can* be overlap, where one's efforts happen to benefit society as well, as with a novel invention like insulin, but it tends to be the *exception* to the rule, since the steady, hour-by-hour expropriation of surplus labor value is the economic *norm*.

No, production in general benefits society: it relieves scarcity by definition. The notion of "surplus labor value" is incoherent. The "expropriation" effect is simply the result of landowners depriving workers of their liberty, and thus their bargaining power.
You're implicitly describing the class divide as simply existing on a few feudal-lord-like *privileges*,

That is in fact what creates class.
when in fact it's a daily, hourly process that systematically robs the worker of their labor and time -- merely consider that whatever the worker produces is invariably sold for more on the market, by the employer, than what is paid back to the worker in the form of wages.

The worker is underpaid because he has been deprived of his right to liberty by privilege, not because his employer makes a profit. You are falsely assuming no one but the worker contributes to production. The capital provider also contributes, and thereby earns a return.
Here's a particular depiction of the economic dynamic that happens to be empirically accurate:
[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show
Image

It doesn't show any exploitation such as you claim, nor does it depict the effects of privilege.
If class were eliminated there would no longer be any differentiation of *class interests* -- everyone would be in the same boat, empirically, and would have to work things out materially *in common*, or 'collectively'.

That's the idea of a free and equal society. It does not imply collective ownership.
Whereas the *revolutionary*-material perspective sees that we're all *socially* determined,

Which is known to be false. Our individual identity (person-ality) is known to be largely genetically determined.
meaning that the pre-existing human world is what objectively gives shape to ourselves as individuals as we grow-up and develop within the bounds of that world --

Nope. Genetics. Marx actually never came to terms with Darwin.
if private property relations didn't exist (as chattel slavery and serfdom now no longer exists), we would see far less of the 'individual desire for success' [based on the private accumulation of wealth] because such a yardstick would no longer even *exist* anymore.

Yes, and the result would be the sort of grisly pre-human existence seen among a troop of chimpanzees or a pack of wolves.
But such studies presuppose a determining factor of *scarcity* -- what if society, post-capitalism, was able to realistically produce an *abundance* of close to 100% of everything that everyone needed and wanted -- ?

Fine. Status would not be dependent on contribution to production. But there can never be enough status to go around.
(Technologically this capacity exists *today*.)

No. You're talking about something like Iain Banks's Culture series.
Human behavior and goals would change *drastically*, for the better, if lower-level material needs could be summarily satisfied,

I'm not sure that is the case. People seem to need something productive to do.
as by the products of full-automation (unrealizable within the bounds of capitalism's *commodity*-based production).

No, capitalism is moving in the direction of full automation. The barrier to satisfaction of needs is still going to be privilege.
Demand for use values within the context of capitalism, though, are hardly left untainted -- one has to have the use-value need, *as well as* the exchange-value *money*, to be able to *purchase* that good or service.

And...? Earn it.
*Precluding* the conventional rewards-for-labor practice would eliminate the entire 'realm' of exchange-values altogether, because then labor would no longer be *commodified* -- no reward / payment / wages for labor, no labor-commodification.

And thus no labor, and no production, and living like chimps or wolves.
You're just repeating your dismissiveness here -- you're not at all saying *why* you think my line is unrealistic.

It's absurd, and ignores the facts of biology. People are not ants. They are individuals who pursue their own interests, not society's interests.
It's not unrealistic to contend that society can be productive on the whole without commodifying its labor -- as long as there's a 'critical mass' of necessarily-voluntary labor efforts for the common good, then individuals will all have their basic biological and social material needs provided-for, thereby freeing-up higher-level (qualitative) efforts, endlessly going-forward -- all without having to use exchange-value (monetary) measurements, per-individual, since that's an exploitative scheme, by design.

Like Marx, you haven't even understood what Adam Smith described so memorably as the invisible hand. The solution to the problem of economics is enabling people to labor for the common good BY laboring for their own good. Socialists don't understand that.
No, you're basically saying that 'Might makes right'

Nonsense.
-- that whenever the U.S. / Western nations use imperialist military might to crush uprisings and take over non-aligned territories, then that prevailing history is somehow automatically the correct one. (Not that I agree with the political motivations and trajectories of all of the instances in your list.)

No, that's just excuse-making. While the USA has certainly tried to impede such countries economically, and sometimes by intervening militarily, their economic failures were their own doing. The example of China is instructive: they got nowhere with socialism, but as soon as they combined private capital with public ownership of land, as in Hong Kong, their economy soared.
Let's generalize this status to 'property-owning',

No, let's not, because that elides the very crux of the matter as I already explained.
whether it's land, means of mass production, capital, goods, bank receipts, investments, etc.

Owning land deprives others of what they would otherwise have. Owning those other things does not. Owning land abrogates others' rights; owning the fruits of one's labor does not.
Just because someone owns some property of some type doesn't automatically mean that they're also serving the wellbeing of society as a whole -- more likely, they're actually *not* because most individuals in society are probably *not able* to participate at that same level / magnitude of economic involvement, with like sums.

Irrelevant. Owning what you produce does not deprive others of anything they would otherwise have. So it does not HARM them. Owning land DOES harm them.

Can you find a willingness to know this fact?
How *do* you measure 'success', then, if it's *not* linked to material reward and landowning [property-owning] -- ?

Success is not an economic quantity. A person can be successful at producing, at manipulating, or at stealing. Totally different effects.
You sound like you're firmly on the side of equity capital, and simultaneously distancing yourself from rentier capital.

Whereas you are trying to pretend that there is no difference between ownership of what one produces and ownership of others' rights: you call them both "capital."
Are you aware that both types of capital are only possible due to the past exertions of laborers ('dead labor')?

That's objectively false. No laborer ever produced land. That is very much the point.
To *clarify*, there's nothing wrong with personal goals, whatever the political-economy context, but the problem with the *capitalist* political economy is that formal societal measures of 'value' (exchange-value) are what's used to *commodify* *every* labor-effort, from every individual worker, worldwide, in the global market economy.

That's a feature, not a bug, as it gives everyone a metric to decide how worthwhile any given effort is. It helps people avoid wasting their time. Socialism short-circuits that benefit, pretending that all labor is equally worth performing.
It's this *commodification* of labor-efforts, into the private-property holdings of ownership -- like the previous *enslavement* of slave-labor before -- that's the grinding, unavoidable societal issue of today.

Garbage. Slavery is labor compelled by force. Exchange of labor for wages occurs by mutual consent. The problem is not that people exchange their labor for wages, but that they have been forcibly deprived of their other options by privilege, placing them in a disadvantageous bargaining position. Say you need some medicine. A generic manufacturer could sell it to you for $5, but only the patent holder is allowed to sell it, and he charges $500. You and the generics manufacturer have been deprived of your liberty to deal with each other consensually, and your bargaining position is consequently weak. YOu need the medicine, so you have to pay the $500. Is the problem that you buy from the patent holder, or that you are not allowed to deal with the generic manufacturer? Similarly, people need the opportunity to earn a living. But landowners have forcibly deprived them of their liberty to use land to support themselves, and so they must deal with employers, and accept whatever wages they can get in a market crowded with others likewise deprived of options.
No, your facile mischaracterization of my approach into a Stalinistic stereotype, is not at all constructive here -- if you take a little time to *understand* my proposed framework, you'll see that it's quite appropriate to a potential post-capitalist functioning political economy.

No, it's only appropriate to a dreamworld.
While you *wish* to arbitrarily validate equity capital

There is nothing arbitrary about it. The provider of the factory makes a contribution to production. What is really arbitrary is aggregating the value of CONTRIBUTIONS -- what is provided -- with the value of PRIVILEGES -- what is taken -- under the term, "capital."
while *invalidating* only rentier-type valuations,

The rentier is not making a contribution to production. He is just charging the producer for access to economic opportunity that would otherwise have been accessible: a legalized protection racket. That is what makes "rentier capital" invalid.
what you're missing is that as soon as capital accumulates to any significant degree it *automatically* becomes rentier-type capital -- asset valuations.

No, that's just objectively false. It is not asset valuation that makes rentier capital invalid, but what it is the value OF: what is taken from production, rather than what is contributed to it. The rentier's return is obtained by DEPRIVING others of access to poortunity they would otherwise have; the factory owner's return is obtained by PROVIDING people with access to opportunity they would NOT otherwise have.

You have simply decided not to know that fact.
Since you haven't denounced capitalism at all,

I most certainly have. I stated in this thread that capitalism as well as socialism had disqualified itself from proposing solutions to the problem of economics, and that the private landowning aspect of capitalism was inherently corrupt.
you're *stuck* with asset-type valuations / rentier-capital, as much as you would personally prefer to *excise* it from the overall system of capitalism.

That is absurd garbage. What makes an asset a source of rent rather than a return earned by commensurate contribution is not the fact that it has value as an asset, but that its value is based on what it legally entitles the owner to take, not on what he contributes.
(See the previous segment, where I've just addressed the equity-vs.-rentier capital issue.)

You haven't addressed it at all. All you have done is pretend there is no difference between giving and taking.
Yes, without the state-military-enforced societal institution of private property,

Private property in the fruits of labor antedates the state. Private property in land requires it. You are again pretending there is no difference between owning what you produce, and therefore do not deprive anyone else of, and owning what would otherwise be available for others to use -- i.e., owning their rights to liberty.
new private value creation would be impossible because it would have no existing precedents of valuation to refer to.

Nonsense. Value is what a thing would trade for. Producing something others are willing to trade for creates value where none existed before.
Value creation -- as in *use* values -- *could* continue to occur, as in socially necessary production --

"Socially necessary" is Marxist gibberish.
but without the historical baggage-weight of *exchange* values,

It's not historical. It's what a thing would trade for NOW.
which are prone to speculation, booms and busts, and outright inoperation if profitability happens to be lacking.

More garbage. Speculation in products of labor aids allocation by providing information about what is valued. Booms and busts are an artefact of the banking/monetary system.
In the absence of private property / exchange values, social production could continue on a communist-gift-economy basis, wherein all infrastructure, resources, and goods would have to be approved on a consciously mass-*political* basis, instead of on an individuated, *commodity*-economic one.

How is that working out for you in Venezuela?
No, you're clearly indicating that you see non-productive, rentier-type ownership as being an abrogation of 'liberty'.

Correct. That does not contradict what I said.
Your politics, though, are *biased* since you only acknowledge *equity*-capital-enabled production as being legitimate, while awkwardly dismissing the inevitably resultant *rentier* type of capital.

I have explained why they are radically and permanently different. You have not explained how a contribution magically turns into a privilege.
For your political perspective to work in practice the economy would somehow have to *never* have a surplus, or savings, of any kind.

False. That's just your false assumption that a sum of positives must somehow total a negative.
Productive infrastructure -- capital goods -- though, would still have to be valuated as capital, which, if *not* actively used as equity would be synonymous with rentier capital,

No, that's just more absurd garbage with no basis in fact or logic. I have explained the radical and indelible difference between rentier "capital" and productive capital.
*Of course* 'individual' is small-scale because it's quantitatively *lesser* than a conglomeration of productive assets, labor, and resources -- as in a corporation, which is quantitatively *large scale*.

That's just false. There are individual entrepreneurs who run very large-scale enterprises, and corporate enterprises that are small scale.
My point about the proportionally more-efficient and more-effective *corporate* scale stands,

The difference is one of legal structure, not scale, although the whole purpose of the corporate structure is to enable aggregation of capital on a larger scale.
which is why such productive organizations need to be expropriated by the world's working class, so as to use such modern proven techniques to *humane* ends, instead of continuing to systematically exploit labor for the ends of increasing asset valuations, as into national currencies.

You still refuse to understand the mechanism of labor exploitation, so your prescribed solutions are worthless.
What are you talking about?

The historical record of unrelieved failure whenever your "remedy" has been tried.
Good -- it doesn't have to.

Then it's not a useful solution to the economic problem.
By my estimations not everyone would even *have* to work -- the productivity leveraging of current mechanical technology is often overlooked, so the real issue is 'How much goods and services are people missing out on as consumers due to near-fully-automated, nearly-labor-free technological productive processes?'

The problem is how to get there from here. Your socialist prescriptions have always gone in the other direction, towards lower production.
Unlike in 1917 Russia, today's society is nowhere *near* at a loss for productive machinery and operations --

From 1905-1914, Russia had been growing faster than any other European country. The evil Marxist Bolsheviks destroyed what had been an emerging advanced economy, and Russia has still not recovered.
at this point it's sheerly a matter of *social organization*, and we can now do such without even needing *money* or abstract exchange-value-type valuations of any kind.

Without exchange, you can't value, and without value, you can't allocate.
With existing communications technology everything material could be listed *qualitatively*, for empowered social factionalism, and ultimately bottom-up social determination, for the realistic realization of a fully-inclusive, mass-based production of everything that's socially necessary.

Absurd Marxist gibberish.
Well, it *would* also apply to 'treatment', but I agree that 'outcomes' could vary greatly person-by-person, which wouldn't be a problem as long as *sufficient* general productivity existed to meet all people's needs and most of their wants as well.

Whose wants would get priority, and why?
#14945612
Stardust wrote:What if the well-being of society "was" the goal?...

Truth To Power wrote:We can take it as a societal goal, but not the goal of individuals. We are not ants.


So according to your statement, insects, such as ants; could be motivated to contribute towards the well-being of their society/species... but the intelligent human beings, can't see the reason or act to attain a goal larger than that confined within the boundaries of their own, individual lives.
What a logical notion!

Stardust wrote:In a realised socialist society, where the basic needs of human beings are met, without the problems generated by 'exchange values', 'money' 'exploitation', and so forth; there is no reason for the individuals to compete with one another to gain material success.


Truth To Power wrote:Of course there is: status. All social mammals compete for status, and there can never be enough of it to go around.


You cannot possibly compare humans with the other mammals in many ways, for the simple reason that humans, as they are today and have been for centuries; are the result of complex natural evolutionary processes. Human can speak, think logically, and make decisive plans; whilst all those things are beyond the capacities of all other mammals.
Unfortunately, one of the issues resulted from capitalism, is that the vast majority of humans today only make use of a fraction of their actual brain capacities; but even so; there is dramatic differences between theirs and other mammals’ behaviours.

People will contribute in different ways to the society, according to their abilities; however, ‘Status’ within the context of a 'classless' society; will not have the same implications as today. There will be no privileges, no one will be materially disadvantaged; hence with the elimination of the conflict of interests, fighting for ‘status’ will make no sense at all.

Stardust wrote:Therefore, any competition amongst the individuals, should there be any; will be within the humane domain: Striving to realise one's own potentials, to contribute better to the society, to create an even more favourable environment for the growth of the individuals, ... and certainly will not take the brutal forms it does today.


Truth To Power wrote:There's nothing brutal about competing to produce more than others and thus earn greater rewards than others. Production benefits everyone.


Production in the existing system does not benefit ‘everyone’… The actual process of 'production' is carried out by the 'workers' who own nothing; but their own labour to sell to those how own all 'the means of production'; but practically contribute 'zero' in that process. However, they also have power: government, army, law, etc. on their side, acting in any brutal way necessary for the rich to hold on 'for as long as they wish' to what they claim to be rightfully theirs, i.e. the Capital; whilst it really, truly never is.

Truth To Power wrote:That's why socialism can't provide a solution to the problem of economics.


Has Capitalism found the real solution to that problem? I should think not!

Truth To Power wrote:While capitalism is a bad solution to the problem of economics, at least it's better than socialism, because when socialists steal capital, it reduces the amount of capital available for production, but when capitalists steal land, the amount of land available for production stays exactly the same.


Socialists will not 'steal' the capital, they merely aim to 'demolish' it along with the system that creates it, to create a new system of society based on the 'common ownership of the means of production' and free access to the products of labour; so that the humans’ time and potentials will be used for far better things than competing to gain material success.
#14945679
Stardust wrote:So according to your statement, insects, such as ants; could be motivated to contribute towards the well-being of their society/species...

Not that they "could be" but that they in fact ARE motivated to act in the interest of their society (not species).
but the intelligent human beings, can't see the reason or act to attain a goal larger than that confined within the boundaries of their own, individual lives.

They might or might not see such reasons, but in fact ARE motivated by self-interest and the interests of people they have reasons to care about, not society's interests.
What a logical notion!

Yep. It is a clear implication of evolutionary psychology. Marx never really came to grips with Darwin, and Marxists never have, either.
You cannot possibly compare humans with the other mammals in many ways, for the simple reason that humans, as they are today and have been for centuries; are the result of complex natural evolutionary processes.

Garbage. I can and do compare them, because they share billions of years of evolutionary history with all other mammals, only a comparatively short time of millions of years of separation from them (depending on species), and their conditions for reproductive success were largely similar even after those separations.
Human can speak, think logically, and make decisive plans; whilst all those things are beyond the capacities of all other mammals.

Yes, but they are MOTIVATED to use those capacities by evolutionary forces that seek reproductive success. That means material benefits and social status, not some Marxist fool's idea of the abstract good of society.
Unfortunately, one of the issues resulted from capitalism, is that the vast majority of humans today only make use of a fraction of their actual brain capacities;

Such claims are risible.
but even so; there is dramatic differences between theirs and other mammals’ behaviours.

Not really.
People will contribute in different ways to the society, according to their abilities;

So you ignore their desires. Thought so.
however, ‘Status’ within the context of a 'classless' society; will not have the same implications as today. There will be no privileges,

That would be nice.
no one will be materially disadvantaged;

Sure they will. They will be disadvantaged by differences in ability, temperament, the vicissitudes of life, accidents of illness and circumstance, height, looks, etc.
hence with the elimination of the conflict of interests, fighting for ‘status’ will make no sense at all.

You are not talking about human beings. The fight for status is universal among human societies, and indeed among all social mammals. The notion that Marxist twaddle can somehow reform such basic aspects of mammalian nature is cretinous.
Production in the existing system does not benefit ‘everyone’…

Yes, it does. Production by definition relieves scarcity, which flows through to lower prices all round.
The actual process of 'production' is carried out by the 'workers' who own nothing;

Wrong again. They own their wages, to the extent that evil Marxists don't tax them away as "income."
but their own labour to sell to those how own all 'the means of production'; but practically contribute 'zero' in that process.

Garbage. The landowner contributes zero (though capitalists refuse to know that fact), but the factory owner contributes the factory (which Marxists refuse to know). These are self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality.
However, they also have power: government, army, law, etc. on their side, acting in any brutal way necessary for the rich to hold on 'for as long as they wish' to what they claim to be rightfully theirs, i.e. the Capital;

See? You have to pretend there is no difference between land, which the landowner definitely does not contribute, and factories, which factory owners definitely do contribute.
whilst it really, truly never is.

The product is really, truly the property of the producer.
Has Capitalism found the real solution to that problem? I should think not!

I stated that socialism and capitalism are both unqualified to solve it.
Socialists will not 'steal' the capital,

They always have so far.
they merely aim to 'demolish' it along with the system that creates it, to create a new system of society based on the 'common ownership of the means of production'

Which means stealing from those who produce it.
and free access to the products of labour;

By stealing them from the producers.
so that the humans’ time and potentials will be used for far better things than competing to gain material success.

What would be wrong with competing for material success if it were gained by production rather than privilege? Oh, wait a minute, that's right: socialists know they would lose such a competition just as surely as a competition for privilege.
#14945876
Truth To Power wrote:Not that they "could be" but that they in fact ARE motivated to act in the interest of their society (not species).


It's true that ants are social insects, and there are different kinds of them performing different tasks in each colony. However, their behaviours are 'instinctive'. Their organism is not advanced enough for them to be 'consciously' motivated, make decisions and act on that basis.
Ants, plants, and bacteria don't 'choose' to live, they inherently choose survival.

Animals with more complex organisms, can be motivated to behave in different ways. But only as far as their biological needs, sensory system and immediate environment are concerned. Not farther than that.

https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowled ... r-13883114

Only humans, with complex thoughts and emotions, can question the purpose of their existence, understand, set goals and make efforts to obtain them.

As for the rest of your argument, I have come to the conclusion that out of spite for Socialism and the Socialists; you deliberately refuse to be reasonable. Therefore, I do not wish to continue our discussion. However, I have two last questions for you. You say:

Truth To Power wrote:I stated that socialism and capitalism are both unqualified to solve it.


And by 'it' you were referring to the economic issues.
However, according to your arguments here you are a Capitalist, you defend the Capital; but not the system of society that creates and protects it.
So, how is that..?

It was suggested in the earlier posts, that you were a libertarian capitalist, but you didn't agree with that. How do you describe your political ideology?
#14945900
Stardust wrote:Ants, plants, and bacteria don't 'choose' to live, they inherently choose survival.

They can't choose survival; they just behave according to their biological program. Sometimes that leads to survival, sometimes it doesn't. That's part of evolution.
Animals with more complex organisms, can be motivated to behave in different ways. But only as far as their biological needs, sensory system and immediate environment are concerned. Not farther than that.

https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowled ... r-13883114

It's not clear how much the most intelligent animals' behavior can transcend their biology.
Only humans, with complex thoughts and emotions, can question the purpose of their existence, understand, set goals and make efforts to obtain them.

Yes, they can, but why would they set your goals for themselves?
As for the rest of your argument, I have come to the conclusion that out of spite for Socialism and the Socialists; you deliberately refuse to be reasonable.

I am very reasonable. A reasonable person is willing to understand why socialism is even worse than capitalism.
And by 'it' you were referring to the economic issues.

I was referring to the fundamental problem of economics: designing institutions that help people relieve scarcity through production, allocation and exchange.
However, according to your arguments here you are a Capitalist,

No. Capitalism is defined as private ownership of the means of production: capital and land. I reject all claims to ownership of land for the same reason I reject claims to ownership of slaves: others' rights to liberty are not rightly ownable. Modern finance capitalism also includes other privileges that make people's individual rights to liberty into the private property of the privileged: bank licenses, IP monopolies, etc. I also reject claims to ownership of such "capital" for the same reason.
you defend the Capital;

Yes, but capital defined classically, as products of labor devoted to production, not neoclassically (based on accounting definitions), as assets devoted to obtaining income.
but not the system of society that creates and protects it.

Just because that system has created and protected capital up to now doesn't mean it is the only, let alone the best, system that could do so.
So, how is that..?

Unlike capitalists and socialists, I am willing to know the difference between capital and land, and between production and privilege.
It was suggested in the earlier posts, that you were a libertarian capitalist, but you didn't agree with that. How do you describe your political ideology?

It's just the truth. I advocate liberty and justice based on willingness to know the self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality.
#14947435
Truth To Power wrote:
The fundamental challenge of economics -- which socialists are simply incompetent to meet, and they know it -- is to create an economic environment where the ineradicable individual desire for success and material reward serves the wellbeing of society as a whole.



ckaihatsu wrote:
This is an inherent *contradiction*,



Truth To Power wrote:
No. Economics is all about trade-offs, but there is a difference between a trade-off and a contradiction.



ckaihatsu wrote:
If you'd rather term the dynamic a 'trade-off', that's fine -- the principle at-work is the same as seen in the economic dynamic of *deflation*, or *over-valuation*:



Truth To Power wrote:
How so?



You're basically describing *capitalism* as it exists, and I'm emphasizing the system's inherent dynamic towards *income inequality*, and/or *deflation*. Wealth becomes locally concentrated and stagnant while *ownership* of wealth is rewarded with interest and rent payments, instead of going to socially needed production and/or wages for the workers actually doing the requisite work.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
The more an individual desires *personal* success and material reward, the more they're willing to economically address, and participate-in, *exchange values*, rather than use-values (as for addressing unmet human need). Under capitalism's profit-making motivation, costs are *socialized* -- collectivized government tax receipts paid for food stamps for the working poor -- while rewards are *privatized*, with business ownership benefitting from the exploitation of both workers and government.



Truth To Power wrote:
Your analysis is incorrect and economically naive. It is not business owners who benefit, it is privilege owners, especially landowners (see the Henry George Theorem). That is why most businesses fail, but no one ever went broke owning land. Even Marx himself came to understand this late in life (it's mentioned in Vol. 3 of "Capital"), but could not bring himself to admit that he was wrong, and Henry George was right.



I'll *readily* acknowledge the real distinction between *productive* / equity capital, and non-productive *rentier* capital, as I covered at-length at this thread at RedMarx:

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/redmarx ... t1241.html


That said, though, a key (revolutionary and otherwise) leftist argument is about what governmental spending priorities (policies) actually *go to* -- the bourgeois government's quasi-collectivization of funds (tax receipts) *do* primarily go to non-humane empire-building activities like military warfare and corporate welfare, to generally benefit the demographic of private property owners, against the interests and well-being of the working class.

These government funding priorities are *elitist* because they don't (necessarily) build up infrastructure in common, like the Internet and expressways, nor do these status quo politics strive to overcome the material inequalities that result from capitalist economics' inherent functioning. Capitalism's inbuilt system of *exchange values* become the prevailing economic concern, over that of parallel *use* values, as for satisfying unmet human need.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Yes, I'll readily acknowledge that there *can* be overlap, where one's efforts happen to benefit society as well, as with a novel invention like insulin, but it tends to be the *exception* to the rule, since the steady, hour-by-hour expropriation of surplus labor value is the economic *norm*.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, production in general benefits society: it relieves scarcity by definition.



Only in the overgeneralized abstract -- scarcity can be alleviated only by those who can *afford* to purchase goods and services that they need, while those who *don't* have the required money aren't even formally counted as 'demand' within the context of capitalist economics.


Truth To Power wrote:
The notion of "surplus labor value" is incoherent. The "expropriation" effect is simply the result of landowners depriving workers of their liberty, and thus their bargaining power.



The reality-based principle that I'll invoke here is that regarding *revenue* -- if both capital and labor are objectively required for the production of goods and services in the economy then why isn't there an even-handed *co-management* of asset owners and workers over the resulting *revenue* -- ?

You may want to specify exactly what 'liberty' workers are deprived of, since your statement is vague and ambiguous. The *expropriation* of labor power / value *is* real, though, because the price received by ownership for the products of labor-power is always greater than what is paid to those workers *for* that labor-power.


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show
Image



Also:


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

Spoiler: show
Image



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You're implicitly describing the class divide as simply existing on a few feudal-lord-like *privileges*,



Truth To Power wrote:
That is in fact what creates class.



Roughly speaking -- the capitalist 'superstructure' obviously favors private property owners, and moreso on the *rentier* capital side of things, which is then comparable to the conditions of past feudalism and slavery, since direct expropriation of labor's fruits was enabled simply by pre-existing asset ownership.

The more *modern* definition, in today's world of commodity-fetishism, has to do with labor's own collective reproduction of its labor-power, going-forward, compared with how many more hours they / we work for the business owners, with the business owners pocketing the difference. In other words, the baseline is that labor has to exist more-or-less steadily going into the future, and the number of hours of work for the sustenance and reproduction of that global labor force is easily calculable -- basically wages -- which *should* imply a limited number of work hours, limited to that material sustenance and reproduction going-forward. But capitalism doesn't stop there -- it *expropriates* the *extra* labor hours worked that are *not* needed by the laborer him- or herself.

So effectively it's just as bad a form of class exploitation as feudalism or slavery was, as in the expropriation of a serf's farming goods based on a set proportion of crops or on labor-days in the week versus Sunday's productivity for the serf himself (with unpaid *domestic* labor by the womenfolk).


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
when in fact it's a daily, hourly process that systematically robs the worker of their labor and time -- merely consider that whatever the worker produces is invariably sold for more on the market, by the employer, than what is paid back to the worker in the form of wages.



Truth To Power wrote:
The worker is underpaid because he has been deprived of his right to liberty by privilege, not because his employer makes a profit.



It's not 'either-or', it's *both* -- you're trying to create a false dichotomy between the _political_ and _economic_ aspects of oppression and exploitation, respectively.


Truth To Power wrote:
You are falsely assuming no one but the worker contributes to production. The capital provider also contributes, and thereby earns a return.



No, I'm *not* making any erroneous assertions that only workers make material inputs into the production process, but it's important to note that *all* material and value derive from labor-power -- all commodities / assets, throughout all of class history, could not have been created unless *someone* toiled to produce them. Once created by laborers and expropriated by property-owners, such assets and goods and services can accurately be called 'dead labor'.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Here's a particular depiction of the economic dynamic that happens to be empirically accurate:

[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show
Image



Truth To Power wrote:
It doesn't show any exploitation such as you claim, nor does it depict the effects of privilege.



It's not a regular *Marxian* approach, but it *does* correspond to reality and makes the point, as I stated above, that though both labor and ownership have inputs into the productive process, only ownership alone *controls* the resulting revenue, which is a clear imbalance that then ripples (socio-political) inequality through the whole process, and society.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
If class were eliminated there would no longer be any differentiation of *class interests* -- everyone would be in the same boat, empirically, and would have to work things out materially *in common*, or 'collectively'.



Truth To Power wrote:
That's the idea of a free and equal society. It does not imply collective ownership.



Well, 'collective ownership' wouldn't *quite* be the correct term to describe such a society, but it *would* be *casually* descriptive, in the sense that no one would be an 'owner' / controller of anything large-scale potentially any more than the next person.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Whereas the *revolutionary*-material perspective sees that we're all *socially* determined,



Truth To Power wrote:
Which is known to be false. Our individual identity (person-ality) is known to be largely genetically determined.



Hmmmm, we're not on the same page here -- the dependent variable isn't 'identity', or even 'personality', but rather something more like 'personal social experience', and possibly 'personhood'. And none of these conceptions are so dependent on *genetics*, as you claim, because genetics doesn't adapt quickly enough to the vicissitudes of class-based social life. So it really is 'nurture', rather than 'nature', which is most deterministic of our 'selves' as we grow up and develop, and consciously integrate more-fully into larger social life as adults.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
meaning that the pre-existing human world is what objectively gives shape to ourselves as individuals as we grow-up and develop within the bounds of that world --



Truth To Power wrote:
Nope. Genetics. Marx actually never came to terms with Darwin.



Yeeeeaaaaahhhh -- again, this is a monumental misnomer. You seem to be using an individually-constrained, *psychological*-type definition of 'personal identity', or 'personality', when the *point* of the social-reality-determines-our-being argument is that we have more *in common* with each other, due to society-regulated *socialization*, rather than us each being unique butterflies or whatever due to miniscule differences in genetic makeup from one to the next.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
if private property relations didn't exist (as chattel slavery and serfdom now no longer exists), we would see far less of the 'individual desire for success' [based on the private accumulation of wealth] because such a yardstick would no longer even *exist* anymore.



Truth To Power wrote:
Yes, and the result would be the sort of grisly pre-human existence seen among a troop of chimpanzees or a pack of wolves.



No, you're missing the point -- the advent of *collectivized full automation* of productive machinery / means would mean that individual material desires would *more easily* be satisfiable, compared to conditions today, so it would be a paradoxical combination of more-enabled *individualization*, as through personal selection ('consumption'), with more-enabled *collectivization*, by combined consent, particularly over socially-necessary *productive* ('production') processes.

As an illustration, consider a feasible scenario in which technology progresses and brings about a world in which everyone has their own advanced 3D printer, thanks to capitalism's markets. These 3D printers of the future can produce *anything* designed, whether organic or inorganic -- the only catch is the *feedstock* required, and so a radical-type populistic social norm prevails that values these feedstocks, and their ready production, as much as the planet's *water* supplies.

Private ownership is at a loss to proprietize and commodify the natural resources that go into these feedstocks, because now that's all that *anyone* needs -- a few basic ingredients from nature, subjected to fully-automated machine processes that spit out the required array of feedstocks, for *anyone* to use and individually benefit from, similar to the treatment of water today. So society is much more *collectivized*, yielding simplicity and cooperation by default, but is also much more *individualized*, since people can realize their own personal goals and 'successes' without having to depend on any traditional / conventional social-group / tribal / nationalistic kind of dynamic.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
when in fact it's merely symptomatic of the private-property-based system of capitalism.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, that's just silly, anti-scientific Marxist garbage. We know from studies of animal behavior that individual success and status are natural human goals for perfectly sound evolutionary reasons.



ckaihatsu wrote:
But such studies presuppose a determining factor of *scarcity* -- what if society, post-capitalism, was able to realistically produce an *abundance* of close to 100% of everything that everyone needed and wanted -- ?



Truth To Power wrote:
Fine. Status would not be dependent on contribution to production. But there can never be enough status to go around.



You're merely making assumptions / idealism-type constructions about human capabilities -- you just admitted that 'success' and 'status' are dependent on larger empirical material conditions, but then you ignore your own heightened consciousness, to baselessly reiterate your 'human nature' line.

So here's the point: What if the social conditions changed to such an extent that 'status' and 'success' were completely *obliterated* -- ? -- !

Nothing that any person could do, because of prevailing abundance, could *not* be done by the next person -- the only differentiation remaining would be that of *willingness*, so that all anyone could say would be 'Well, I didn't want to go in that particular direction.' Everyone would have their own, individualistic 'successes' and 'status', but so would *everyone else*, as direct consequences of fully self-realized lives, and perhaps that reality alone would obliterate the conventional, social-group-type norms of 'status' and 'success' -- in short, there would no longer be 'leaders' and 'hangers-on' / followers, because no one would want to waste their *own* time on the coattails of anyone else.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
(Technologically this capacity exists *today*.)



Truth To Power wrote:
No. You're talking about something like Iain Banks's Culture series.



While unfamiliar with that cultural product in particular, I think I get the gist of what you're saying -- unfortunately you're too dismissive of *social* improvements that are due to *technological* advances, such as cell phones and email, that take the inconvenience and drudgery out of socially-crucial activities like coordination and cooperation. (I would personally put the nascent driverless cars in this category, too.)


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Human behavior and goals would change *drastically*, for the better, if lower-level material needs could be summarily satisfied,



Truth To Power wrote:
I'm not sure that is the case. People seem to need something productive to do.



Well, what's 'productive', exactly -- maybe higher-level artistic and engineering creations -- ?

Your response is too casual and facile. My point stands that less gruntwork for everyone means a more-empowered *self-determination* for all individuals.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
as by the products of full-automation (unrealizable within the bounds of capitalism's *commodity*-based production).



Truth To Power wrote:
No, capitalism is moving in the direction of full automation. The barrier to satisfaction of needs is still going to be privilege.



I *don't* disagree with this -- can we agree that 'privilege' is currently based upon the pedestal of 'capital ownership'?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Demand for use values within the context of capitalism, though, are hardly left untainted -- one has to have the use-value need, *as well as* the exchange-value *money*, to be able to *purchase* that good or service.



Truth To Power wrote:
And...? Earn it.



Well, this contention isn't fair, due to prevailing income inequality -- ownership of strong equity values, made from capital gains, has *nothing* to do with 'earned rewards'. It's closer to a 'good bet' within casino capitalism, or ownership of a good expert-system automatic algorithm that tips the scales with faster-than-human buying and selling, 24/7/365.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
*Precluding* the conventional rewards-for-labor practice would eliminate the entire 'realm' of exchange-values altogether, because then labor would no longer be *commodified* -- no reward / payment / wages for labor, no labor-commodification.



Truth To Power wrote:
And thus no labor, and no production, and living like chimps or wolves.



Nope -- this is pure supposition on your part. Even today we already see solid evidence for the existence of your dreaded, ideologically-undesired 'altruistic' behavior on the part of millions and billions of people, as into disaster relief or everyday charitable activities. The expansion of the conventional 'public sector', to *de-*privatize much material-economic activity, could yield a reality of the model 'communist gift-economy', where the private sector just couldn't *compete* with freely-given, massively parallelized cooperative inputs, for anyone's free-access, as we *already* see in the open-source software movement.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You're just repeating your dismissiveness here -- you're not at all saying *why* you think my line is unrealistic.



Truth To Power wrote:
It's absurd, and ignores the facts of biology. People are not ants. They are individuals who pursue their own interests, not society's interests.



If you acknowledge *family* at all you'll see the most-regular social institution of pay-it-forward altruism -- why should *anyone* sacrifice their *own* time and life for an infantile creature that's only going to increasingly assert its own individuality, rebuffing its benefactors, as it grows up -- ?

So the only thing remaining in this calculus is the dimension of *scale* -- a worldwide 'human family' attitude is *certainly* realistically realizable, if only we could decisively, collectively do away with the institution of private property ownership, once and for all.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
It's not unrealistic to contend that society can be productive on the whole without commodifying its labor -- as long as there's a 'critical mass' of necessarily-voluntary labor efforts for the common good, then individuals will all have their basic biological and social material needs provided-for, thereby freeing-up higher-level (qualitative) efforts, endlessly going-forward -- all without having to use exchange-value (monetary) measurements, per-individual, since that's an exploitative scheme, by design.



Truth To Power wrote:
Like Marx, you haven't even understood what Adam Smith described so memorably as the invisible hand. The solution to the problem of economics is enabling people to labor for the common good BY laboring for their own good. Socialists don't understand that.



You're making it sound as though *all* labor is *necessarily* socialized, when that's *far* from the reality -- much corporate wealth, for example, just sits stagnant and is *not* available for any potentially productive usage whatsoever. The 'primitive accumulation of capital' dynamic continues unabated and *balkanizes* ownership into endlessly subdivided specialized scales of magnitude, the *opposite* direction from societal *collectivization*


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Truth To Power wrote:
I.e., you couldn't learn from the Paris Commune's failure, the USSR's failure (and democide), Maoist China's failure (and democide), Castro Cuba's failure, socialist Vietnam's failure, or Pol Pot Cambodia's failure (and democide), and now you can't learn from Venezuela's failure either, even as it happens right before your eyes. That is called, "refusal to know."



ckaihatsu wrote:
No, you're basically saying that 'Might makes right'



Truth To Power wrote:
Nonsense.



Well, these well-guided or otherwise socialist-nationalist developments did *not* happen in political incubators -- there were overarching socio-political developments, like imperialist Western invasions, that surrounded them, so you're taking the historical results to be necessarily *correct* outcomes, and you're placing all blame on those nascent national reconfigurations themselves (and/or their particular guiding ideologies), which boils down to a 'might-makes-right' mindset, since the strongest player in each geopolitical contest ultimately prevailed, with the left-leaners being 'losers'. That's what you're saying.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
that whenever the U.S. / Western nations use imperialist military might to crush uprisings and take over non-aligned territories, then that prevailing history is somehow automatically the correct one. (Not that I agree with the political motivations and trajectories of all of the instances in your list.)



Truth To Power wrote:
No, that's just excuse-making. While the USA has certainly tried to impede such countries economically, and sometimes by intervening militarily, their economic failures were their own doing. The example of China is instructive: they got nowhere with socialism, but as soon as they combined private capital with public ownership of land, as in Hong Kong, their economy soared.



So you'd prefer to see the political-collectivist aspect take a back-seat to the existing status-quo *economic* aspect -- that's just being ideological, and is also apologizing for Western imperialism and its military invasions. Might-makes-right, according to you.


---


Truth To Power wrote:
[C]apitalism is defined as private ownership of the means of production (land and capital goods), the only corrupt part of which is private landowning. But there is no logical link between success or material reward and landowning.



ckaihatsu wrote:
Let's generalize this status to 'property-owning'



Truth To Power wrote:
No, let's not, because that elides the very crux of the matter as I already explained.



You really think that the difference between equity capital and rentier capital is so great as to be like a *valid* form of capitalism ('equities'), and an *invalid* form of capitalism ('rentier') -- ?

What happens if productive equity investments suddenly yield more than expected or planned-for, thus generating a material *surplus* -- ? Where would that surplus *go* -- ? Unless *every cent* of gains was automatically, immediately plowed-back into more equities, there would be an empirical *need* for inactive piles and hoards of rentier-type wealth that would just be sitting there.

You seem to think that you can just personally summarily pick which is 'good' capital and which is 'bad' capital, to fuel your custom ideology where only *productive* capital exists. What about *capital goods*, like bank loans -- ? Then you have an objective need for the existence of *rentier*-type capital, for availability to *equity*-type activities, as with any type of financial leveraging.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
whether it's land, means of mass production, capital, goods, bank receipts, investments, etc.



Truth To Power wrote:
Owning land deprives others of what they would otherwise have. Owning those other things does not. Owning land abrogates others' rights; owning the fruits of one's labor does not.



So then what's your solution here -- how *should* land be managed, or co-managed, especially within the framework of productive equity-type investments?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Just because someone owns some property of some type doesn't automatically mean that they're also serving the wellbeing of society as a whole -- more likely, they're actually *not* because most individuals in society are probably *not able* to participate at that same level / magnitude of economic involvement, with like sums.





This is *absurd*, because what's the point of engaging in productive equity-type investment activity, if not to realize a *return* and *profit* on such activity -- ? Once someone has that profit in-hand, it's *automatically* rentier-type capital that could command a return of interest just for existing in a bank account somewhere. Ditto for land, or any other non-productive asset. You're wanting to squirm your way around and out of this resulting implication of the institution of private property, but you cannot.

(Can farm owners make material improvements to their owned land / fields -- ? If they can, then they've just increased the market cap of that non-equity / non-productive asset. If they *can't* then what material incentive do they have to make any improvements to the productivity of that asset -- ?)


---








This is a dodge -- how do you measure 'success' in the context of what you're talking about?? It's going to necessarily be a quantitative-material-economic *number*, as with cash.


---








The deprivation of working-class 'liberty' (your term) is not due to the existence of rentier-type capital -- it's due to the worker being objectively *exploited* of his or her labor-power while trying to obtain the material means for biological and social survival.

And, besides, the worker under capitalism doesn't even *get* ownership of what he or she produces, anyway -- the resulting product or service becomes the private property of the business owner(s), known as Marx's 'alienation'.


---








Land isn't worth *shit* in productive terms unless it's been worked-on by some kind of labor -- it needs tilling, planting, watering, fertilizing, pest control, harvesting, etc.

Try again.


---


This is getting too time-consuming -- I'll pick-up where I left off, when I have the time.
#14947667
ckaihatsu wrote:
To *clarify*, there's nothing wrong with personal goals, whatever the political-economy context, but the problem with the *capitalist* political economy is that formal societal measures of 'value' (exchange-value) are what's used to *commodify* *every* labor-effort, from every individual worker, worldwide, in the global market economy.



Truth To Power wrote:
That's a feature, not a bug, as it gives everyone a metric to decide how worthwhile any given effort is. It helps people avoid wasting their time. Socialism short-circuits that benefit, pretending that all labor is equally worth performing.



I'm still against the commodification of *anything*, particularly labor, but I do happen to agree that there's a historical, standing shortcoming in the conventional socialist mindset regarding collectivist / non-commodity labor:


ckaihatsu, at RevLeft wrote:
[N]ot all work roles *are* the same, though they may all be 'socially-necessary' (requested by *someone* for humane ends). It's only fairly recently that, through the benefits of online discussion, I devised the following generic 'scenario', or universal issue of any political economy:


[T]he layout of *work roles* would be the 'bottom' of 'top-down' (though collectivized) social planning, and would be the 'top' of 'bottom-up' processes like individual self-determination.



My *own* approach to this issue is to track liberated-labor work hours, and to attach a *multiplier*, per work role, to those labor hours, to arrive at the number of 'labor credits' due to the liberated laborer:


ckaihatsu, at RevLeft wrote:
Any potential *scarcity* of liberated labor itself can be addressed with the labor credits system -- any available-and-willing liberated labor, once brought-on in accordance with a prior-established, detailed 'policy package', would benefit from receiving a certain rate of labor credits per hour for scheduled-and-completed work according to that policy package, and would in turn amass a pool of labor credits for themselves that they could use in future projects to likewise 'fund' self-chosen available-and-willing liberated-labor, going-forward, to the extent of that quantity of labor credits (or the pool could be split-up in any number of portions, towards any combination of labor-credits-funding-required work roles).

Each work role, as specified in a policy package, would have a *multiplier* (rate of labor credits per hour) attached to it, so that work roles that are objectively more hazardous / difficult / distasteful would yield *higher rates* of labor credits per hour. Multipliers for any and all possible work roles would be in a publicly available index, based on liberated worker exit-surveys from those work roles (minimum 1 year of participation, or whatever), and would also 'float' depending on actual conditions around a specific work role implementation.

One possible 'baseline' could be established according to the *easiest* possible work role in existence, that of being a 'mattress tester', which would yield 1 labor credit per hour of mattress-testing.

If a purely 'communist gift-economy' could be sustained indefinitely, meaning *zero* labor credits for *all* socially-necessary work roles, then that would obviously obviate the need for the labor credits system *entirely*, which would be fine.



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



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
It's this *commodification* of labor-efforts, into the private-property holdings of ownership -- like the previous *enslavement* of slave-labor before -- that's the grinding, unavoidable societal issue of today.



Truth To Power wrote:
Garbage. Slavery is labor compelled by force. Exchange of labor for wages occurs by mutual consent. The problem is not that people exchange their labor for wages, but that they have been forcibly deprived of their other options by privilege, placing them in a disadvantageous bargaining position. Say you need some medicine. A generic manufacturer could sell it to you for $5, but only the patent holder is allowed to sell it, and he charges $500. You and the generics manufacturer have been deprived of your liberty to deal with each other consensually, and your bargaining position is consequently weak. YOu need the medicine, so you have to pay the $500. Is the problem that you buy from the patent holder, or that you are not allowed to deal with the generic manufacturer? Similarly, people need the opportunity to earn a living. But landowners have forcibly deprived them of their liberty to use land to support themselves, and so they must deal with employers, and accept whatever wages they can get in a market crowded with others likewise deprived of options.



I still haven't heard of your own approach to the question of *land* -- how exactly should it be distributed, and why shouldn't a more-equitable approach to land *also* be used for all *other* commodities, too, like the products of mass industrial production?


---


Truth To Power wrote:
I.e., you propose to pay people (and especially want to be paid) for wasting time, not for producing anything. Thought so.



ckaihatsu wrote:
No, your facile mischaracterization of my approach into a Stalinistic stereotype, is not at all constructive here -- if you take a little time to *understand* my proposed framework, you'll see that it's quite appropriate to a potential post-capitalist functioning political economy.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, it's only appropriate to a dreamworld.



See -- this isn't *discussion* anymore. You're *imputing* false characterizations onto my politics instead of dealing with it for what it is. I have an entire model framework, with illustrations, that I advocate, detailed at the link above (http://tinyurl.com/labor-credits-faq), which you can either address or ignore, but all you're doing here is to caricature my politics as being Stalinistic. Just don't bother, then.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
While you *wish* to arbitrarily validate equity capital



Truth To Power wrote:
There is nothing arbitrary about it. The provider of the factory makes a contribution to production. What is really arbitrary is aggregating the value of CONTRIBUTIONS -- what is provided -- with the value of PRIVILEGES -- what is taken -- under the term, "capital."



You're *still* trying to make an arbitrary, subjective distinction within the context of capitalism -- what are you going to say to someone who *argues* for things like intellectual property and patent protections, just because their ownership of built-up capital (from R&D, past sales of other stuff, whatever) isn't bricks-and-mortar -- ?

You're obviously anti-state, but you're still validating the process of profit-making, done on the backs of workers exploited for their labor-power under capitalism. If you find bourgeois government favoritism ('privilege') to be invalid, then why shouldn't the working class be allowed to remedy their / our own debased position in relation to revenue -- ? You've been ignoring the *value* and *contributions* of the workers throughout *all* of your commentary.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
while *invalidating* only rentier-type valuations,



Truth To Power wrote:
The rentier is not making a contribution to production. He is just charging the producer for access to economic opportunity that would otherwise have been accessible: a legalized protection racket. That is what makes "rentier capital" invalid.



Well, I happen to *agree* on this one point, and will add that it's like having an economic remnant of *feudalism* / slavery still around in our 'modern' capitalist economy *today*.

But you're still only going halfway with your critique because you haven't divulged your *own* approach to how land and the means of production *should* be handled societally.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
what you're missing is that as soon as capital accumulates to any significant degree it *automatically* becomes rentier-type capital -- asset valuations.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, that's just objectively false. It is not asset valuation that makes rentier capital invalid, but what it is the value OF: what is taken from production, rather than what is contributed to it. The rentier's return is obtained by DEPRIVING others of access to poortunity they would otherwise have; the factory owner's return is obtained by PROVIDING people with access to opportunity they would NOT otherwise have.

You have simply decided not to know that fact.



No, I just *agreed* with your critique of rentier-capital above, and now I'm agreeing with *this* one, too -- but the problem is that your critique doesn't go *far enough*, to encompass *all* types of capital, since capitalism is now antiquated and could be readily surpassed as a mode of social production by *socialism*, or *workers control* of social production.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Since you haven't denounced capitalism at all,



Truth To Power wrote:
I most certainly have. I stated in this thread that capitalism as well as socialism had disqualified itself from proposing solutions to the problem of economics, and that the private landowning aspect of capitalism was inherently corrupt.



Well, what *I'm* hearing is that you're anti-rentier-capital but *pro*-equity-capital, which is basically pro-half-of-capitalism.

If equity capital is still such hot shit then why did we have the financial crisis of 2008-2009 -- ? When things slow down and investors get more desperate for 'opportunities', they make increasingly risky bets, such as into the subprime housing market -- another financial bubble, endemic to capitalist markets, that then blew up in their faces and caused an elitist call for government bailouts, which were obliged.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
you're *stuck* with asset-type valuations / rentier-capital, as much as you would personally prefer to *excise* it from the overall system of capitalism.



Truth To Power wrote:
That is absurd garbage. What makes an asset a source of rent rather than a return earned by commensurate contribution is not the fact that it has value as an asset, but that its value is based on what it legally entitles the owner to take, not on what he contributes.



Sure -- again, I *agree* with your critique of rentier capital, but the *entire* capitalist system is dysfunctional itself, anyway, as with the crisis of 2008-2009, and many others in economic history.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
(See the previous segment, where I've just addressed the equity-vs.-rentier capital issue.)



Truth To Power wrote:
You haven't addressed it at all. All you have done is pretend there is no difference between giving and taking.



I'm not arguing for the *reforming* of capitalism, as you implicitly are -- I understand your position, but I'm a *socialist*, a *revolutionary* one, saying that the *workers* need to be the ones to collectively administrate over social production, and that money and commodification are no longer objectively required for a healthy, functioning material-economy.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Yes, without the state-military-enforced societal institution of private property,



Truth To Power wrote:
Private property in the fruits of labor antedates the state. Private property in land requires it. You are again pretending there is no difference between owning what you produce, and therefore do not deprive anyone else of, and owning what would otherwise be available for others to use -- i.e., owning their rights to liberty.



The transaction between the owner (of productive infrastructure) and the worker is *not* an even-handed, equitable one, as you're implying.

The owner of *productive infrastructure* (land, factories) can 'contribute' that relatively-reusable fixed capital / 'constant capital' *over* and *over* and *over* again, without lifting a finger, while the laborer is paid *only* for new, discrete efforts of labor-power, per hour of work 'contributed'.

You're critical of private *land* ownership, but not of private *factory* ownership, which defines modern, *industrial* productivity.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
new private value creation would be impossible because it would have no existing precedents of valuation to refer to.



Truth To Power wrote:
Nonsense. Value is what a thing would trade for. Producing something others are willing to trade for creates value where none existed before.



And, physically, *who* exactly is producing the 'something' that others would trade for -- ? It's the *workers*, of course, using productive assets like land and factories that themselves are *privately* owned, enabling the *exploitation* and *expropriation* of those laborers' labor-power.

What good is land without agricultural labor to make it grow crops, and what good is an inert factory without labor to put the parts into motion, to produce tangible finished products (and services) -- ?

Your ignoring of wage-labor is just as privileged a social position as those rentier-capitalists that you selectively rail against.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Value creation -- as in *use* values -- *could* continue to occur, as in socially necessary production --



Truth To Power wrote:
"Socially necessary" is Marxist gibberish.



No, 'socially necessary' has definite meanings, across mode-of-production contexts.

In the current context of capitalism, 'socially necessary' can only be discerned through money-backed demand -- those who can afford to pay the cost of private profit, like a bribe to private ownership, to put the wheels of production into motion, to produce what's being demanded by those who can afford to demand it.

In the context of a mass-planned future *socialism*, 'socially necessary' refers to *anyone* and *everyone* who formally express *organic* demand for humane human needs and wants. If even *one* person would demand to travel to Andromeda, that individual demand would have to be taken seriously, in proportion to the quantity of demand (one person's worth) being expressed.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
but without the historical baggage-weight of *exchange* values,



Truth To Power wrote:
It's not historical. It's what a thing would trade for NOW.



The problem with exchange values is that they're prone to *distortion*, as with speculative market activities -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania -- booms and busts in the economy, etc. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
which are prone to speculation, booms and busts, and outright inoperation if profitability happens to be lacking.



Truth To Power wrote:
More garbage. Speculation in products of labor aids allocation by providing information about what is valued.



Sure, but only because there's no official economic *alternative* -- speculative pricing takes place at the cost of distorting the underlying *use values*. Perhaps millions could *use* food or medicine, for example, but since those people *can't afford* such commodities, they don't *receive* them:


25,000: The average number of children dying each day is 25,000

https://www.unicef.org/factoftheweek/index_53356.html


Truth To Power wrote:
Booms and busts are an artefact of the banking/monetary system.



Also known more generally as 'capitalism' -- if you're going to dismiss some particular *feature* of capitalism you should also have some proposed 'reform' in mind, otherwise you're stuck with the whole package by default.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
In the absence of private property / exchange values, social production could continue on a communist-gift-economy basis, wherein all infrastructure, resources, and goods would have to be approved on a consciously mass-*political* basis, instead of on an individuated, *commodity*-economic one.



Truth To Power wrote:
How is that working out for you in Venezuela?




“Socialism doesn’t work, just look at Venezuela,” is an all too common trope. It is rare that anyone with a public platform reveals a simple truth. Venezuela’s problems were created by the United States government, first during the Obama administration and now continuing under Trump’s.



https://www.blackagendareport.com/freed ... as-economy



Truth To Power wrote:
[T]he USA has certainly tried to impede such countries economically, and sometimes by intervening militarily



viewtopic.php?p=14945497&sid=2ed24cd40f9143f6e7cad0c5f7606121#p14945497



---


Truth To Power wrote:
No, not the capitalist (in the classical economics sense of the provider of capital goods), but the privileged owner of land, bank licenses, IP monopolies, etc. The latter abrogate people's rights to liberty. The former does not.

Do not ascribe to the provider of productive capital the privilege of the landowner, bankster or IP monopolist.

No, it should secure and reconcile the equal individual rights of all, not favor the interests of collective organizations over those of individuals.



ckaihatsu wrote:
This position is understandable, but it unfortunately conflates political 'liberty' with *small-scale* productivity,



Truth To Power wrote:
No, it simply recognizes the fact that production is a private activity. Political liberty is a tangential issue.



ckaihatsu wrote:
No, you're clearly indicating that you see non-productive, rentier-type ownership as being an abrogation of 'liberty'.



Truth To Power wrote:
Correct. That does not contradict what I said.



Okay, so you *also* go so far as to extend the problematic of rentier-type ownership up into the larger-scale organization of capital by *corporations*, which obviously have rentier-type assets in *abundance*.

Now let me ask you *this* -- are you just as objection-making to *small-scale* / mom-and-pop ownership of rentier-type assets, like land, as you are to *corporate*-sized ownership of the same?

Here's the material contradiction contained within your political-material position:


ckaihatsu wrote:
[W]e all know that mass-scale, corporate-sized international production techniques are *empirically* far superior to any possible arrangement of lateral small-scale supply-chain productive groupings.



Truth To Power wrote:
Individual does not imply small scale, nor does corporate imply large scale.



ckaihatsu wrote:
*Of course* 'individual' is small-scale because it's quantitatively *lesser* than a conglomeration of productive assets, labor, and resources -- as in a corporation, which is quantitatively *large scale*.

My point about the proportionally more-efficient and more-effective *corporate* scale stands, which is why such productive organizations need to be expropriated by the world's working class, so as to use such modern proven techniques to *humane* ends, instead of continuing to systematically exploit labor for the ends of increasing asset valuations, as into national currencies.



viewtopic.php?p=14944916&sid=2ed24cd40f9143f6e7cad0c5f7606121#p14944916



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Your politics, though, are *biased* since you only acknowledge *equity*-capital-enabled production as being legitimate, while awkwardly dismissing the inevitably resultant *rentier* type of capital.



Truth To Power wrote:
I have explained why they are radically and permanently different. You have not explained how a contribution magically turns into a privilege.



I do *not* defend rentier capital ownership, nor *any* capital ownership, for that matter. I'm politically on the side of the world's working class.

But, to address your formulation, if by 'contribution' you mean the investment of equity capital, and by 'privilege' you mean the private ownership of rentier-type assets, then the answer is 'capital gains', where the initial investment of equity capital increases in exchange-value due to market appreciation, with the increase being a realized *gain* of capital value. Unless that capital gain is automatically, immediately plowed back into another equity capital investment, it will, by-default, be a non-productive, rentier-type asset valuation.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
For your political perspective to work in practice the economy would somehow have to *never* have a surplus, or savings, of any kind.



Truth To Power wrote:
False. That's just your false assumption that a sum of positives must somehow total a negative.



Well, which *is* it -- is *savings*, as from a capital gain realized from equity capital, to be considered as *rentier*-type capital, or isn't it?

Because as soon as any kind of *savings* accrues from your beloved equity capital, it's then a 'surplus' compared to the pool of actually active capital goods, and thus is a rentier-type asset valuation.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Productive infrastructure -- capital goods -- though, would still have to be valuated as capital, which, if *not* actively used as equity would be synonymous with rentier capital, so then you're fucked anyway.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, that's just more absurd garbage with no basis in fact or logic. I have explained the radical and indelible difference between rentier "capital" and productive capital.



No, you haven't. You haven't referenced *anything* of yours here that describes either one.

You've simply used your own favored *shorthand* for each, namely 'privilege' and 'contribution', respectively.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
*Of course* 'individual' is small-scale because it's quantitatively *lesser* than a conglomeration of productive assets, labor, and resources -- as in a corporation, which is quantitatively *large scale*.



Truth To Power wrote:
That's just false. There are individual entrepreneurs who run very large-scale enterprises, and corporate enterprises that are small scale.



This is beside the point -- 'large-scale' and 'small-scale' are measured by *market capitalization*. You're trying to dodge the issue, so my point about greater material leveraging in larger-scale corporate organization, stands.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
My point about the proportionally more-efficient and more-effective *corporate* scale stands,



Truth To Power wrote:
The difference is one of legal structure, not scale, although the whole purpose of the corporate structure is to enable aggregation of capital on a larger scale.



It's actually a the-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts kind of characteristic, which I why I brought up the dimension of scale in the first place.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
which is why such productive organizations need to be expropriated by the world's working class, so as to use such modern proven techniques to *humane* ends, instead of continuing to systematically exploit labor for the ends of increasing asset valuations, as into national currencies.



Truth To Power wrote:
You still refuse to understand the mechanism of labor exploitation, so your prescribed solutions are worthless.



No, I've mentioned the dynamic of labor exploitation *repeatedly*, and certainly more than yourself, so your statement here is erroneous.

For the record, I'll reference the following:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_the ... or_process

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_ ... alienation


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Socialists -- like myself -- argue for the full *expropriation* of these existing productive organizations (corporations), to be used by the *working class* itself.



Truth To Power wrote:
And ignore Venezuela, etc.



ckaihatsu wrote:
What are you talking about?



Truth To Power wrote:
The historical record of unrelieved failure whenever your "remedy" has been tried.



Again you're *stereotyping* -- you're mischaracterizing modern *non-Western* nation-states as somehow being *examples* of 'socialism', when, in the greater prevailing context of world capitalism, they can *at best* simply be anti-imperialist.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You're using strawman tactics here -- the "socialism" that you're referring to is really more akin to capitalist-reformist *liberalism*, and not to true workers control of social production.



Truth To Power wrote:
Socialism has sometimes worked on a small-scale, voluntary basis, but has never worked on a large-scale, compulsory, societal basis, and never will.



ckaihatsu wrote:
Good -- it doesn't have to.



Truth To Power wrote:
Then it's not a useful solution to the economic problem.



By 'socialism' *you* mean 'Stalinism', and that's not the *point* of socialism -- socialism means a permanent displacement of bourgeois, ruling-class control of social production, with the world's *working class* taking over such control.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
By my estimations not everyone would even *have* to work -- the productivity leveraging of current mechanical technology is often overlooked, so the real issue is 'How much goods and services are people missing out on as consumers due to near-fully-automated, nearly-labor-free technological productive processes?'



Truth To Power wrote:
The problem is how to get there from here. Your socialist prescriptions have always gone in the other direction, towards lower production.



See -- this is just more of your stereotyping and mischaracterization. The whole *world* needs to be revolutionized in its organization of social production, so that *workers* control it -- not some evil-clown, Stalinistic *caricature* of 'socialism'.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Unlike in 1917 Russia, today's society is nowhere *near* at a loss for productive machinery and operations --



Truth To Power wrote:
From 1905-1914, Russia had been growing faster than any other European country. The evil Marxist Bolsheviks destroyed what had been an emerging advanced economy, and Russia has still not recovered.



Bullshit. Here's what *really* happened:



Foreign forces throughout Russia

The positions of the Allied expeditionary forces and of the White Armies in European Russia, 1919
Numbers of Allied soldiers who were present in the indicated regions of Russia:

• 600 French and British troops landed in Arkhangelsk[17]

• A number of British troops in Vladivostok

• A number of Romanian troops in Bessarabia

• 23,351 Greeks, who withdrew after three months (part of I Army Corps under Maj. Gen. Konstantinos Nider, comprising 2nd and 13th Infantry Divisions, in the Crimea, and around Odessa and Kherson)[18]

• 13,000 Americans (in the Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok regions)[14][15]

• 11,500 Estonians in northwestern Russia[12]

• 2,500 Italians (in the Arkhangelsk region and Siberia)[19]

• 2,300 Chinese (in the Vladivostok region)[20]

• 150 Australians (mostly in the Arkhangelsk regions)[21]

• 15,000 Japanese soldiers in the Eastern region

• 4,192 Canadians in Vladivostok, 600 Canadians in Arkhangelsk[22]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_in ... out_Russia



And:



Results

Military

War communism was largely successful at its primary purpose of aiding the Red Army in halting the advance of the White Army and in reclaiming most of the territory of the former Russian Empire thereafter.

Social

In the cities and surrounding countryside, the population experienced hardships as a result of the war. Peasants refused to co-operate in producing food. Workers began migrating from the cities to the countryside, where the chances to feed themselves were higher, thus further decreasing the possibility of barter of industrial goods for food and worsening the plight of the remaining urban population. Between 1918 and 1920, Petrograd lost 72% of its population, while Moscow lost 53%.[citation needed]

A series of workers' strikes and peasants' rebellions broke out all over the country, such as the Tambov rebellion (1920-1921). A turning point came with the Kronstadt rebellion at the Kronstadt naval base in early March 1921. The rebellion startled Lenin, because Bolsheviks considered Kronstadt sailors the "reddest of the reds". According to David Christian, the Cheka (the state Communist Party secret police) reported 118 peasant uprisings in February 1921.[citation needed]

Christian, in his book "Imperial and Soviet Russia", summarises the state of Russia in 1921 after years of War communism:

A government claiming to represent the people now found itself on the verge of being overthrown by that same working class. The crisis had undermined the loyalty of the villages, the towns and finally sections of the army. It was fully as serious as the crises faced by the tsarist government in 1905 and February 1917.[8]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_communism#Results



Recall:


Truth To Power wrote:
[T]he USA has certainly tried to impede such countries economically, and sometimes by intervening militarily



viewtopic.php?p=14945497&sid=2ed24cd40f9143f6e7cad0c5f7606121#p14945497



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
at this point it's sheerly a matter of *social organization*, and we can now do such without even needing *money* or abstract exchange-value-type valuations of any kind.



Truth To Power wrote:
Without exchange, you can't value, and without value, you can't allocate.



Nope -- this is a misnomer.

All that's objectively needed is some kind of mass-*surveying*, as in everyone having a *shopping list*, with all 'shopping lists' *aggregated* by geographic area, as in a specific locality (or greater, by combined consent).

Here's from my 'labor credits' FAQ:



Note that this method *aggregates* / tallies all personally prioritized demands lists *and* formal list items for a locality or pre-defined larger geographic area, on a *daily* basis, per rank position (#1, #2, #3, etc.), so that *no* standing institutional 'administration' is ever needed, and neither are political representatives of any kind required, either -- (no elections or voting processes are ever used). This daily mass-prioritization of material and socio-political demands is the information most needed by society, and by liberated labor in particular, a mirror-reflection of total verbatim collective consciousness, through compiled data. Liberated labor -- as available-and-willing, and as formally requisitioned through defined work roles in policy packages, and potentially funded with labor credits -- then itself flexibly collectively decides which finalized policy package(s) to take-up and implement, to completion, or not. (Greater-aggregatively-tallied, higher rank positions are populist-type *advisements* to liberated labor, but they do not *obligate* it in any way.)



http://tinyurl.com/labor-credits-faq



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
With existing communications technology everything material could be listed *qualitatively*, for empowered social factionalism, and ultimately bottom-up social determination, for the realistic realization of a fully-inclusive, mass-based production of everything that's socially necessary.



Truth To Power wrote:
Absurd Marxist gibberish.



Nope -- you're simply *clinging* to exchange-values as the basis for a material-economy, when I've already shown that such a measurement is inherently too inaccurate, faulty, and prone to crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure).

Go and take a look at my labor credits FAQ page, to see a solid proposed communism-compatible *alternative* method to exchange-values.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Well, it *would* also apply to 'treatment', but I agree that 'outcomes' could vary greatly person-by-person, which wouldn't be a problem as long as *sufficient* general productivity existed to meet all people's needs and most of their wants as well.



Truth To Power wrote:
Whose wants would get priority, and why?



It's beyond me as to specifics, since the world isn't at that point yet -- I can't simply make predictions in a vacuum.

Here's from the FAQ, though:



Labor credits are *not* money / currency, because no items are ever *commodified*. Labor credits are not exchangeable for any goods / resources / materials, because that would be equivalent to the *commodification* of those items. Communism is supposed to be about fulfilling unmet human needs (and wants), so what counts from the consumer is *how badly* they want something to be produced, by active liberated laborers, if not already immediately available. Under capitalism this takes the form of *increasing* exchange-values -- a material incentive -- by funneling demand-by-money, as into auctions and bidding wars, which has *nothing* to do with the serving of outstanding human needs.

Labor credits, differently from currency and commodification, measure *how badly* consumers need / want something (some form of socially necessary production), by *standardizing* everyone's demands to a person-by-person 'daily demands list' according to relative *priority*, through intentional rankings (#1, #2, #3, etc.). This means that exchange values / money is no longer necessary for the function of measuring relative demand.

Here's from the model:


consumption [demand] -- Every person in a locality has a standard, one-through-infinity ranking system of political demands available to them, updated daily

consumption [demand] -- Basic human needs will be assigned a higher political priority by individuals and will emerge as mass demands at the cumulative scale -- desires will benefit from political organizing efforts and coordination

https://tinyurl.com/labor-credits-faq
#14947714
ckaihatsu wrote:You're basically describing *capitalism* as it exists, and I'm emphasizing the system's inherent dynamic towards *income inequality*, and/or *deflation*.

No, you are either conflating economics and capitalism or assuming a false dichotomy between capitalism and socialism. I said socialists know they are incompetent to solve the problem of economics. Capitalists are too, but they don't know it.

Capitalism does aggravate income inequality, but the effect you describe:
Wealth becomes locally concentrated and stagnant while *ownership* of wealth is rewarded with interest and rent payments, instead of going to socially needed production and/or wages for the workers actually doing the requisite work.

is an over-generalization. The success of capitalism is precisely that it DOES direct purchasing power to productive investment (though not wages) better than competing systems such as socialism and feudalism.
I'll *readily* acknowledge the real distinction between *productive* / equity capital, and non-productive *rentier* capital, as I covered at-length at this thread at RedMarx:

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/redmarx ... t1241.html

OK, so why don't we make the distinction explicit by using "producer goods" to mean productive capital, "privilege" to mean what you call rentier capital, and "purchasing power" to mean the undifferentiated fungible assets that could be devoted to either one?
That said, though, a key (revolutionary and otherwise) leftist argument is about what governmental spending priorities (policies) actually *go to* -- the bourgeois government's quasi-collectivization of funds (tax receipts) *do* primarily go to non-humane empire-building activities like military warfare and corporate welfare, to generally benefit the demographic of private property owners, against the interests and well-being of the working class.

That's a valid enough historical observation, but it doesn't address the theoretical economic issue I'm talking about. Governments can choose not to engage in military adventures and corporate welfare. They CAN'T choose not to benefit landowners exclusively when they spend tax revenue on desirable services and infrastructure. They CAN'T choose not to benefit IP monopolists when they confer IP monopoly privileges. They CAN'T choose not to benefit banksters when they enable banks to treat loan proceeds as newly issued money.
These government funding priorities are *elitist* because they don't (necessarily) build up infrastructure in common, like the Internet and expressways,

That infrastructure is common only in name, as it exclusively benefits landowners who own the locations from which it can be accessed.
nor do these status quo politics strive to overcome the material inequalities that result from capitalist economics' inherent functioning.

There is a difference between the choices that particular governments make and the inherent effects of institutions.
Capitalism's inbuilt system of *exchange values* become the prevailing economic concern, over that of parallel *use* values, as for satisfying unmet human need.

No, exchange value is based on use value (utility) at the margin.
Only in the overgeneralized abstract -- scarcity can be alleviated only by those who can *afford* to purchase goods and services that they need, while those who *don't* have the required money aren't even formally counted as 'demand' within the context of capitalist economics.

But the existence of more products means less money is required to afford them. There is a problem with increases in production being taken as land rent, but that problem does not alter the fact that relieving scarcity by production is the basic point of economic activity, and investment in producer goods is a contribution to it.
The reality-based principle that I'll invoke here is that regarding *revenue* -- if both capital and labor are objectively required for the production of goods and services in the economy then why isn't there an even-handed *co-management* of asset owners and workers over the resulting *revenue* -- ?

Because as I already explained, the balance of bargaining power is broken by privilege: legal entitlements to benefit from the abrogation of others' rights without making just compensation.

Consider a simple example: Landowners own all the land in a certain area, and rent it out to tenant farmers. A tenant farmer with no capital but seed corn can grow ten bushels of corn in a year on an acre of land, of which he has to pay five in rent, eating the other five. A tenant farmer who also has a horse can grow 20 bushels a year, paying five in rent, eating four (he doesn't have to work as hard), feeding eight to his horse, and having three left as a surplus.
Now, a particular tenant farmer who has acquired two horses arranges to rent two acres, and hires another tenant to work the other acre in return for wages of six bushels of corn, paying five in rent, feeding eight to the horse, and keeping one bushel as profit. The hired employee now has a surplus of two bushels (he only eats four now, remember), but socialists claim he is somehow being exploited by his employer because the horse enables him to double his production, but he only gets to keep two more bushels out of the additional ten. They ignore the fact that his employer actually makes him better off, and it is the five bushels in rent taken by the landowner in return for nothing that places the hired farmer at a disadvantage, not his employer, who only provides him with an opportunity he would not otherwise have.
You may want to specify exactly what 'liberty' workers are deprived of, since your statement is vague and ambiguous.

The liberty to do what they would be at liberty to do if that liberty had not been removed by privilege: use land and other natural resources to support themselves; deal with their fellows by mutual consent using money without having to pay interest to banksters for exercising their privilege of creating it; use the knowledge and ideas that have entered the public domain without paying monopolists for permission to do so; etc.
The *expropriation* of labor power / value *is* real, though, because the price received by ownership for the products of labor-power is always greater than what is paid to those workers *for* that labor-power.

First of all, that claim is just objectively false. If price were always greater than labor cost, no firm would ever take a loss, let alone go bankrupt. Second, you incorrectly assume there is no production input to be paid for but workers' labor. Third, you incorrectly assume that labor earns the full exchange price of what is produced, and wages less than that amount constitute "exploitation." See above for the refutation of those claims.
[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show
Image

I'm not going to read long, ill-considered and uninformed tracts, sorry. If you think you have something relevant to say, quote the relevant passage.
Roughly speaking -- the capitalist 'superstructure' obviously favors private property owners, and moreso on the *rentier* capital side of things, which is then comparable to the conditions of past feudalism and slavery, since direct expropriation of labor's fruits was enabled simply by pre-existing asset ownership.

See above. Owning an asset that consists of others' rights to liberty enables exploitation. Owning an asset that only offers additional opportunity does not.
The more *modern* definition, in today's world of commodity-fetishism, has to do with labor's own collective reproduction of its labor-power, going-forward, compared with how many more hours they / we work for the business owners, with the business owners pocketing the difference.

You have obviously never worked in business, let alone owned one.
In other words, the baseline is that labor has to exist more-or-less steadily going into the future, and the number of hours of work for the sustenance and reproduction of that global labor force is easily calculable -- basically wages -- which *should* imply a limited number of work hours, limited to that material sustenance and reproduction going-forward. But capitalism doesn't stop there -- it *expropriates* the *extra* labor hours worked that are *not* needed by the laborer him- or herself.

Who is doing the expropriating in the above example, the employer who increases the worker's wages by his contribution, or the landowner who takes them in return for nothing?
So effectively it's just as bad a form of class exploitation as feudalism or slavery was, as in the expropriation of a serf's farming goods based on a set proportion of crops or on labor-days in the week versus Sunday's productivity for the serf himself (with unpaid *domestic* labor by the womenfolk).

Yes, the requirement that workers pay landowners full market value just for PERMISSION to work effectively enslaves them. It is only massive government intervention in the form of minimum wages, welfare, labor standards laws, union monopolies, public education and health care, etc. in advanced capitalist countries that prevents the enslavement of workers by landowners.
It's not 'either-or', it's *both* --

No, it is not, as explained above. The employer INCREASES the workers' wages; the landowner reduces them. I'm not sure there is any clearer or simpler way to explain that to you.
you're trying to create a false dichotomy between the _political_ and _economic_ aspects of oppression and exploitation, respectively.

It's not a false dichotomy. Profiting by relieving scarcity is completely different from profiting by imposing it. The latter is oppression and exploitation, the former is not.
No, I'm *not* making any erroneous assertions that only workers make material inputs into the production process, but it's important to note that *all* material and value derive from labor-power -- all commodities / assets, throughout all of class history, could not have been created unless *someone* toiled to produce them.

No, it's completely irrelevant. The fact that A paid B to produce something does not give anyone else any claim to it whatsoever. The fact that B was a worker does not give any other worker any claim to it whatsoever just because he is also a worker.
Once created by laborers and expropriated by property-owners,

Paying someone the market rate to produce something is not expropriation, stop lying.
such assets and goods and services can accurately be called 'dead labor'.

No, they cannot. Labor is human effort devoted to production. It cannot be alive or dead.
It's not a regular *Marxian* approach, but it *does* correspond to reality

No, it does not. Privilege is a dominant factor in reality. Depending on the country, the rents of privilege may absorb half or more of GDP.
and makes the point, as I stated above, that though both labor and ownership have inputs into the productive process, only ownership alone *controls* the resulting revenue, which is a clear imbalance that then ripples (socio-political) inequality through the whole process, and society.

No, the business owners control the revenue because they are the cause of production. The product is rightly owned by its producer: the one whose action causes the product to exist rather than not exist. That is the owner, not the worker. The worker is merely another production factor employed by the owner.
Well, 'collective ownership' wouldn't *quite* be the correct term to describe such a society, but it *would* be *casually* descriptive, in the sense that no one would be an 'owner' / controller of anything large-scale potentially any more than the next person.

Not necessarily. Sometimes one person can build up a production system to a large scale.
Hmmmm, we're not on the same page here -- the dependent variable isn't 'identity', or even 'personality', but rather something more like 'personal social experience', and possibly 'personhood'.

But they aren't socially determined either. All experience passes through the lens of the individual's genetic constitution. This is utterly obvious to anyone who has ever been a parent to more than one child. However much you may try to treat them the same, they are different from birth.
And none of these conceptions are so dependent on *genetics*, as you claim, because genetics doesn't adapt quickly enough to the vicissitudes of class-based social life.

Genetics is what gives us our greater or lesser abilities to adapt quickly: some are fast adapters, others struggle. It's genetic, and largely linked to the "Big Five" traits known as neuroticism, agreeableness and openness, all of which are known to have strong genetic components.
So it really is 'nurture', rather than 'nature', which is most deterministic of our 'selves' as we grow up and develop, and consciously integrate more-fully into larger social life as adults.

Get back to me when you have raised some kids. Marx's pre-modern view of the human psyche as determined by modes of production has been proved flat wrong by psychological research.
Yeeeeaaaaahhhh -- again, this is a monumental misnomer.

In what way?
You seem to be using an individually-constrained, *psychological*-type definition of 'personal identity', or 'personality', when the *point* of the social-reality-determines-our-being argument is that we have more *in common* with each other, due to society-regulated *socialization*, rather than us each being unique butterflies or whatever due to miniscule differences in genetic makeup from one to the next.

But the individuality of identity and how genetics colors individual experience of the social milieu is just established empirical fact. Marxist zombies still engage in a rear-guard action to try to rescue Marx's theory of human nature from brutal physical facts, but their efforts are doomed to failure.
No, you're missing the point -- the advent of *collectivized full automation* of productive machinery / means would mean that individual material desires would *more easily* be satisfiable, compared to conditions today, so it would be a paradoxical combination of more-enabled *individualization*, as through personal selection ('consumption'), with more-enabled *collectivization*, by combined consent, particularly over socially-necessary *productive* ('production') processes.

That's never been the case yet, though it might happen in the future. I would venture that such productive powers would lead to a more individualistic society as people were freed from the need to please or even deal with others in order to live.
As an illustration, consider a feasible scenario in which technology progresses and brings about a world in which everyone has their own advanced 3D printer, thanks to capitalism's markets. These 3D printers of the future can produce *anything* designed, whether organic or inorganic -- the only catch is the *feedstock* required, and so a radical-type populistic social norm prevails that values these feedstocks, and their ready production, as much as the planet's *water* supplies.

Again, that's landowning.
Private ownership is at a loss to proprietize and commodify the natural resources that go into these feedstocks,

Don't you believe it. The something-for-nothing guys are nothing if not relentless.
because now that's all that *anyone* needs -- a few basic ingredients from nature, subjected to fully-automated machine processes that spit out the required array of feedstocks, for *anyone* to use and individually benefit from, similar to the treatment of water today.

You think private interests aren't trying to get even more ownership of water resources?
You're merely making assumptions / idealism-type constructions about human capabilities --

It's not an assumption. It's anthropological and psychological fact.
you just admitted that 'success' and 'status' are dependent on larger empirical material conditions, but then you ignore your own heightened consciousness, to baselessly reiterate your 'human nature' line.

It's not baseless.
So here's the point: What if the social conditions changed to such an extent that 'status' and 'success' were completely *obliterated* -- ? -- !

As in the ant society? Would we still be human?
Nothing that any person could do, because of prevailing abundance, could *not* be done by the next person -- the only differentiation remaining would be that of *willingness*, so that all anyone could say would be 'Well, I didn't want to go in that particular direction.' Everyone would have their own, individualistic 'successes' and 'status', but so would *everyone else*, as direct consequences of fully self-realized lives, and perhaps that reality alone would obliterate the conventional, social-group-type norms of 'status' and 'success' -- in short, there would no longer be 'leaders' and 'hangers-on' / followers, because no one would want to waste their *own* time on the coattails of anyone else.

Dreaming.
While unfamiliar with that cultural product in particular, I think I get the gist of what you're saying -- unfortunately you're too dismissive of *social* improvements that are due to *technological* advances, such as cell phones and email, that take the inconvenience and drudgery out of socially-crucial activities like coordination and cooperation. (I would personally put the nascent driverless cars in this category, too.)

We don't know where technology is going to go, and Marxist claims of certainty and inevitability are groundless, risible, and roundly refuted by their consistent record of failure to date.
Well, what's 'productive', exactly -- maybe higher-level artistic and engineering creations -- ?

Relief of scarcity.
Your response is too casual and facile. My point stands that less gruntwork for everyone means a more-empowered *self-determination* for all individuals.

That's how it has worked out so far; it does not resemble Marx's predictions; and we could do a lot better if socialists and capitalists could be persuaded to give up fighting over their false dichotomy.
I *don't* disagree with this -- can we agree that 'privilege' is currently based upon the pedestal of 'capital ownership'?

No. See above. Your use of "capital" nomenclature is not an aid to clarity. Privilege is based on law, and is not necessarily something that can be owned at all (though the privileged typically want to own it somehow). Consider white privilege under Jim Crow. Nothing to do with capital ownership.
Well, this contention isn't fair, due to prevailing income inequality --

No, it's only unfair because of the prevailing injustice of the capitalist privilege system. Some income inequality is just.
ownership of strong equity values, made from capital gains, has *nothing* to do with 'earned rewards'.

Very little, true, because returns obtained by earning can be competed away; returns to privilege cannot.
It's closer to a 'good bet' within casino capitalism, or ownership of a good expert-system automatic algorithm that tips the scales with faster-than-human buying and selling, 24/7/365.

Ownership of superhuman AI is not a privilege. Being able to outcompete others is not a privilege. Being legally entitled to benefit from the abrogation of others' rights is a privilege. You don't seem willing to come to grips with the difference between winning the competition to produce and winning the competition to take without producing.
Nope -- this is pure supposition on your part.

No it's not. That's how our remote ancestors actually lived under the conditions you specify.
Even today we already see solid evidence for the existence of your dreaded, ideologically-undesired 'altruistic' behavior on the part of millions and billions of people, as into disaster relief or everyday charitable activities.

Now who's engaging in pure supposition? I have nothing special against altruism. I just don't think it's very practical or natural as a human motivation.
The expansion of the conventional 'public sector', to *de-*privatize much material-economic activity, could yield a reality of the model 'communist gift-economy', where the private sector just couldn't *compete* with freely-given, massively parallelized cooperative inputs, for anyone's free-access, as we *already* see in the open-source software movement.

Software (information) is naturally abundant. Land and goods aren't. You think the communist model is an ideal. I beg to differ.
If you acknowledge *family* at all you'll see the most-regular social institution of pay-it-forward altruism -- why should *anyone* sacrifice their *own* time and life for an infantile creature that's only going to increasingly assert its own individuality, rebuffing its benefactors, as it grows up -- ?

Because Darwin says that's what will exist rather than not exist. The existent wins the contest of existence.
So the only thing remaining in this calculus is the dimension of *scale* -- a worldwide 'human family' attitude is *certainly* realistically realizable, if only we could decisively, collectively do away with the institution of private property ownership, once and for all.

Nonsense. It's not private property that divides people. It's privilege, and the associated massive, systematic, institutionalized injustice.
You're making it sound as though *all* labor is *necessarily* socialized, when that's *far* from the reality

No, but relief of scarcity helps everyone.
-- much corporate wealth, for example, just sits stagnant and is *not* available for any potentially productive usage whatsoever.

I'm much more concerned that most of it is by its inherent character a legal entitlement to take rather than a power to produce.
The 'primitive accumulation of capital' dynamic continues unabated and *balkanizes* ownership into endlessly subdivided specialized scales of magnitude, the *opposite* direction from societal *collectivization*

Marxists are permanently unable to understand economic processes like accumulation and increasing inequality because they refuse to distinguish between rightful and wrongful ownership.
Well, these well-guided or otherwise socialist-nationalist developments did *not* happen in political incubators -- there were overarching socio-political developments, like imperialist Western invasions, that surrounded them, so you're taking the historical results to be necessarily *correct* outcomes,

If by "correct" you mean inevitable.
and you're placing all blame on those nascent national reconfigurations themselves (and/or their particular guiding ideologies),

Not all, but most.
which boils down to a 'might-makes-right' mindset, since the strongest player in each geopolitical contest ultimately prevailed, with the left-leaners being 'losers'. That's what you're saying.

No, I'm saying they were all losers because they were intellectually weak, and thus inherently incompetent to address their nations' economic problems: they could not relieve scarcity.
So you'd prefer to see the political-collectivist aspect take a back-seat to the existing status-quo *economic* aspect --

No, I'd prefer to see complete abandonment of both the Marxist political-collectivist aspect and the status-quo capitalist aspect.
that's just being ideological,

That's a strange thing for a Marxist to be accusing anyone of...
and is also apologizing for Western imperialism and its military invasions.

No. When did the West invade socialist China? Oh, no, wait a minute, that's right: it was socialist China that invaded, conquered, and colonized Tibet. When did the West invade or attack Venezuela, hmmmm? Socialists need to man up and own their failures.
Might-makes-right, according to you.

No, right makes might.
You really think that the difference between equity capital and rentier capital is so great as to be like a *valid* form of capitalism ('equities'), and an *invalid* form of capitalism ('rentier') -- ?

I do indeed, and I've proved it, if by "equity capital" you mean ownership of producer goods and by "rentier capital" you mean ownership of privileges.
What happens if productive equity investments suddenly yield more than expected or planned-for, thus generating a material *surplus* -- ?

We are happy.
Where would that surplus *go* -- ?

To those who were willing and able to pay for it.
Unless *every cent* of gains was automatically, immediately plowed-back into more equities, there would be an empirical *need* for inactive piles and hoards of rentier-type wealth that would just be sitting there.

Nonsense. Surplus production cannot be converted into privilege, let alone somehow automatically morphing into it.
You seem to think that you can just personally summarily pick which is 'good' capital and which is 'bad' capital,

I have told you how to tell the difference. You just refuse to do so.
to fuel your custom ideology where only *productive* capital exists.

That's the idea. No more taking by owning privileges.
What about *capital goods*, like bank loans -- ?

Banksters' privilege of creating money de novo as loan proceeds is not a capital good.
Then you have an objective need for the existence of *rentier*-type capital, for availability to *equity*-type activities, as with any type of financial leveraging.

No. Owning a privilege of creating money to charge interest on it is not the same as saving money and charging interest for its use.
So then what's your solution here -- how *should* land be managed, or co-managed, especially within the framework of productive equity-type investments?

Everyone should have free, secure tenure on enough of the available advantageous land of their choice to have access to economic opportunity, and those who want to deprive others of more than that should pay the market rent for the extra to the community of those thus deprived. Basically a land value tax with a modest, universal individual exemption.
Land isn't worth *shit* in productive terms unless it's been worked-on by some kind of labor -- it needs tilling, planting, watering, fertilizing, pest control, harvesting, etc.

No, that's just objectively false, as proved by the astronomical market value of raw, unimproved land in advantageous locations. You are blatantly contradicting yourself by claiming that land is useless until someone has used it. But... why would anyone use it unless it were already useful, hmmmmmmmmm?
Try again.

I already won, junior.
#14947890
DeadPresidents wrote:So, socialism is in a nutshell, a fuck you to the Entrepreneur/Capitalist and giving all power to the laborer...

Nope. Not even remotely. You have an extremely curious view of the world. Have you even worked a single day yet ?

Entrepreneurs are not capitalists.

Capitalists are people who put nothing but money into a company, and espect profit from that. They offer zero aside from their money and they certainly dont have any own ideas. They usually have inherited their money, or have become rich on money operations alone, like the guy in my signature, Warren Buffett.

And entrereneur is somebody who actually starts a company by himself and will actually lose everything if that company fails. Still doesnt give you the right to exploit the workers you employ, but that in itself isnt incompatible with socialism.

Also it needs to be added that in any real company that isnt doing really dull work, all workers are entrepreneurs, too. Meaning they too work on ideas. For example any real car company nowadays has hordes of engineers who will do the designing of the cars and work out how they will be produced. The management wont do it, they wouldnt know how. The owners of the company, the actual capitalists, wont do it either, since they are even more clueless than the management. Of course young car companies had looked differently, when the boss himself was an engineer and did the actual work.

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