[Truth To Power]

Again, this is stupefyingly long, so I can only hit the salient points.

what is it that you *object* to about Marxism, exactly?

It is based on refusal to know self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality, especially the fact that the factory owner has no power to take anything from the worker, or do anything but offer him access to economic opportunity he would not otherwise have.

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

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

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

They do if they want to understand, and understanding is the goal of all genuine science.

Statistics would be another one, which is closer to a *hard* science, being mathematical, though its subject matter tends to be social dynamics.

Statistics is a much broader discipline that has application throughout the natural and behavioral sciences as well as business, sports, etc., etc.

how is Marxism 'provably incorrect'?

Don't get me started. I already identified one way, above. Another is the M-C-M' nonsense, which is factually incorrect about how money relates to production.

But they *do* yield 'economic rent' in the form of asset value *appreciation* over time - - that's why people use them as financial vehicles for the hoarding of wealth.

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

This increase in value ultimately has to be provided by the overall economy somehow, once the asset is cashed-out for the capital gains realized.

If there is any appreciation of such assets, it just reflects how the market values them, not -- UNlike rentier assets -- something taken out of the economy just by owning them.

Also, you're making a *Marxist* argument, in that the economic ('exchange') value of any given asset is sourced from work done by laborers to produce it in the first place (along with any speculative, market-price-pushing bidding activity).

No, I am not. I am stating the anti-Marxist FACT that value -- what a thing would trade for -- comes entirely and exclusively from the combination of its scarcity (supply) and utility (demand).

You still haven't provided any theory or ideology on how land *should* be distributed, if the way it's *been* done has been so alienating to the working class.

Yes I have: payment of the market rent (the high bid) by whoever gets secure, exclusive tenure to the community of those thus excluded, with a universal individual exemption to ensure everyone has free, secure, exclusive tenure on enough of the available advantageous land of their choice to have access to economic opportunity.

But under capitalism it's the *owner* who has bought the commodity (land, etc.)

If you want to continue this discussion, you will have to somehow find a willingness to know the difference between land and products of labor. I do not know how to communicate with someone who refuses to know the most self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality. It's completely pointless as well as frustrating, like trying to discuss a plumbing problem with someone who insists that air and water are the same thing and refuses to know the fact that they are not.

from the previous owner or government, and has paid for the human labor power to make it a usable, saleable product,

No; in the case of LAND, that's false. It was already usable and salable, which is why he had to pay the previous owner so much for it, and it is the taxpayer who has had to pay for the desirable public services and infrastructure whose value the landowner is privileged to appropriate for himself.
In the case of products of labor, the initial owner, the producer, created the product by his decision and initiative to bring together all the necessary factors -- including labor, but also resources, location, plan, design, direction, etc. -- for it to exist rather than not exist. And any subsequent owner has paid, however indirectly or through however many intermediate transactions, for that act of creating the product.

and so deprives the worker of the *product* of his or her labor.

No, the worker agreed to exchange the product of his labor for wages. The employer therefore hasn't deprived him of anything. It was the LANDOWNER who deprived him of his liberty, his options, and thus his bargaining power vis-a-vis the employer. Marxism/socialism consists in blaming the factory owner for what the landowner does to the worker (neoclassicalism/capitalism consists in blaming the worker).

The *laborer* does not walk-away with the product,

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

it's the *owner* that does, contrary to what you're indicating.

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

But then who 'manages' any given commodity, say, a parcel of land?

Whoever has paid the appropriate party for it.

If someone within your 'community' worked a piece of previously unclaimed land and then called it their own, could they then *sell* it?

No. Merely calling something yours doesn't make it rightly yours. He had his turn using the land for free when no one else wanted it. Now that others are willing to pay to use it, he has to make just compensation to the community of those he excludes from it.

If so, then that parcel of land would be *commodified*, and it would have a private-property *owner*, separate from the original labor, and any additional labor used, as for landscaping and buildings on that property.

This is why, above all other subissues, I'd like to hear your take on how to reconcile 'private', with 'public'. When would privatization be allowed, according to you, and when would it *not* be allowed?

That is the central problem of property rights on which all of human history has turned, and whose correct solution would have saved thousands of years of poverty, injustice, robbery, enslavement, starvation, despair and death: how to separate rightful property in fixed improvements produced by labor from wrongful property in the land nature provided for all. But that correct solution can never be implemented, or even described, as long as socialists and capitalists refuse to know the difference.

The correct solution is for the producer of fixed improvements to own them as his rightful property, and the exclusive holder of the land to make just (market) compensation to the community of those whom he excludes from the land. That is normally quite trivial to implement, and in practice is only problematic when the two are no longer the same person. In the latter case, the new landholder would normally just pay the previous one an agreed price for the improvements -- this is obviously done all the time in real estate transactions -- and use them himself.

The remaining -- and only really difficult -- case is when the previous landholder and owner of the improvements is no longer willing or able to make just compensation to the community for depriving everyone else of the land, but the prospective new landholder who is willing to pay the community for the land does not want to pay the improvements' owner as much for them as the latter wants.

This irreducible conflict of rights is most fairly resolved by reference to the market: the improvements' owner can only demand to be paid the assessed market value for them. If no prospective new landholder wants to pay that much, the owner retains tenure at the current rent but is prohibited from making additional improvements. When a prospective new landholder is willing to pay the assessed market value for the improvements or the community land authority determines that the improvements are worth less than the increased rent a new holder would pay, the improvements' owner is paid the assessed market value for them and loses tenure to a new landholder.

Okay, here it is, but I maintain that this treatment of yours *conflicts* with your prior axiom of 'rights to one's products of labor'. All someone has to do is say 'I have enough money to pay someone to do something for me', and that commodification of labor immediately *nullifies* the laborers "rights" to keep the products of their labor.

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

The laborer could say 'I did the landscaping, and so the land should be mine',

But he would be wrong both because he was already paid for his labor and because land cannot rightly be anyone's property.

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

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

This, by the way, is *capitalism*, which commodities labor *and* labor-value, for those who have capital to invest in such processes. The laborer is *alienated* from whatever it is they produce, for the payment of a wage, for the necessities of life and living.

No, what makes it capitalism is that the land as well as the improvement is owned as property.

You may have good intentions, but your politics don't account for how things *currently* get done under capitalism, as just described,

False. See above.

and you're not proposing anything that's much different, realistically.

False. You have not the slightest understanding of what I propose or how radically different it is from capitalism, because you insist that air and water are the same thing, and refuse to know the fact that they are not.

I remember running into this subissue with you in the past - - you were not-acknowledging that even *land* is commodified, because it is bought-and-sold.

This notion of "commodification" is like claiming that air and water are the same thing because they can both flow through a pipe. What is being bought and sold in the case of land is the privilege of secure, exclusive tenure. That is entirely different from a product of labor.

Only those who can *afford* to buy land will ultimately have access to it, because it *is* a commodity and has market-pricing.

In the geoist system land is held under secure, exclusive tenure in return for voluntary payment of the market rent to the community, not bought, and everyone has a right to free, secure, exclusive tenure on enough of the available advantageous land of their choice to have access to economic opportunity.

No, it can't be physically relocated, but that's spurious to its commodification anyway.

What is really spurious is the concept of commodification. It has no relevance, and adds no information. It's just a ridiculous Marxist red herring.

You *just* said that land can't be extracted, yet it's still commodified (bought-and-sold), so it's privatized through private property ownership currently. How would your politics alter this default treatment of commodification of land?

The default treatment of land is the equal individual liberty rights of all to use it non-exclusively, as our ancestors did for millions of years. Its appropriation as private property under capitalism is an innovation only a few thousand years old: before appropriation of land as private property was implemented in Roman law, land was never considered an individual's property, but only held under some kind of conditional institution of exclusive tenure.

The difference between private property in land and its market allocation ("commodification") under a framework that secures and reconciles the equal individual rights of all to use it through the system of just compensations may seem trivial or superficial, but is actually profound, and completely alters economic relationships to the benefit of all but a tiny minority of wealthy landowners.

So, with this, you're merely describing how private property ownership operates *today* - - any laborer who produces a commodity, or makes improvements to a commodity (land), will just be paid a wage and deprived of the *product* of their labor, correct?

Voluntarily trading his product for wages is not being "deprived" of it anymore than you are being "deprived" of your money when a baker charges you for a loaf of bread. Duh.

If a bunch of workers in a coop of whatever sort complete their group task, say building a car, *who decides* how the revenue from the sale of that car is to be used? What if there are internal disputes and factions form around differing, conflicting policy trajectories (the build-more-infrastructure faction vs. the compensate-workers-more faction)?

That's my question to you.

Workers coops do *not* challenge capitalism at all, and so are *not* anti-capitalist - - they're too apolitical.

I agree. It's just a different form of private ownership, a kind of socialism-within-capitalism.

What I *don't* get is why you *advocate* for it (Georgism / geoism), and *how* it's conceivably better than either socialism or capitalism, in structure.

Because it restores people's rights to liberty, which capitalism removes, they are free to produce without having to pay landowners just for permission to produce. And because it secures people's property rights in the fruits of their labor, which socialism removes, it is just, and gets the incentives right. It thus creates a freer, fairer society than capitalism, and a more productive and prosperous one than socialism. It retains the best of both, while removing the worst of both.

Again, I don't see how this model is significantly different from the status quo - - moreover, once something is *privatized*, it's the owner's *private property* - - including commodified labor-power, and will be protected / defended as such despite any other human *need* for it, even if it's functionally *inactive*.

Production relieves scarcity. The right to keep what one produces is the price of accurate production incentives. If you think people's needs will not be met if the producer gets to keep what he produces, try NOT letting the producer keep what he produces, and see how well people's needs are met.

How would *your* approach steer clear of favoring moneyed elites, exactly, if the government is funded through taxes on private gainful economic activity (a growing economy) ?

The geoist model relieves production of the burden of taxation. It taxes people for what they TAKE from the community, not what they MAKE.

So what you're saying is that you want government to 'keep the peace' (in civil society) while conventional, current business practices continue to go on, at the expense of the working class.

No, because PRODUCTION, which geoism encourages, RELIEVES SCARCITY and is therefore NOT at the expense of the working class. Conventional capitalist business practice is more focused on RENT SEEKING, which INFLICTS scarcity on others by legally requiring them to pay for PERMISSION, and thus IS at the expense of the working class.

GET IT???

You *claim* to want laborers to keep the product of their labor, but you don't explain *how* (in relation to ownership) and you don't acknowledge that labor *itself* is treated as a commodity, and exploited, under capitalism.

<sigh> As I have explained to you several times, labor is exploited under capitalism because LANDOWNERS deprive workers of their liberty, their options, and thus their bargaining position, NOT because EMPLOYERS hire them to work.

GET IT???

Are you a professional politician?

I'm too honest.

With statements like these you're just reinforcing the *nationalism* aspect of your politics, which is *not* compatible with the nobler / progressive portions of your expressed politics. I think you're giving working-class interests *lip service* by not-addressing those interests in any kind of *detail*.

I don't have any particular attachment to the nation-state; it's clearly dysfunctional in many cases, especially where colonial legacies are still in place. I just don't see a viable alternative. People have a sense of geographic, linguistic, cultural and historical as well as economic and political community that they are not comfortable giving up. See the problems with the EU.

(I'll remind that workers do not have *any* national interests because workers can organize *internationally*, on a *class* basis.)

How is that working out for you?

But land-as-a-commodity would still exist, and such land values would be measured in *exchange values* (money, finance) - - it wouldn't be any different than the capitalism of today.

It would be utterly different. You just refuse to know the difference between paying a baker for a loaf of bread and paying a thief who stole the bread from the baker because they both involve "exchange values, money, finance."

If land is still private property then it's *not* nationalized.

Land is never rightly private property.

The 'trust' you mention is simply state control, possibly outsourced to a private management firm.

Why would it be outsourced to a private management firm?

You're still basically describing the status quo and are not proposing anything different.

Garbage. You just refuse to know that air and water are not the same thing.

See - - this is your ideology showing through - - what happened to 'the workers keeping their product', and ['the commons'] ?

Workers trade their product for wages. They have an equal right to the commons, and to just compensation for abrogation of that right.

By upholding private property you're leaving the economic exploitation of workers in-place,

False. See above for how workers are exploited.

with both land (and all rentier-type assets) and labor being commodified and exploited.

Labor is not exploited if the workers have their rights, and "commodification" is ridiculous, uninformative, anti-economic gibberish.

Status quo.

Bald falsehood. The status quo entitles the private landowner to keep the publicly created value of the land.

Your yardstick of 'efficient' is only in terms of *exchange values* (money / currency / finance).

Because value is what something would exchange for, that is inherently how value is measured.

So - - tell me if I'm parsing correctly - - government secures land through military imperialism,

Oh, give it a rest. If we are to have an economy above the hunter-gatherer or nomadic herding level, someone has to secure exclusive tenure. It just happens to be government's job.

and then leases or sells this newly created private property commodity to private owners, thus making it into a commodity.

No, it does not sell it to owners. It requires just payment to the community for what the exclusive holder is taking from the community.

Are you *opposed* to private landownership, or are you *for* competing private landholders in a free market?

Both.

But in both cases, land and liquid capital, an asset-type economic *service* is being provided, that being the leased usage of physical land, for rent payments, and the usage of capital, presumably for investments, respectively.

No. The landowner is not providing anything, just charging the user for permission to access the advantages government, the community and nature already provided. The owner of saved money, by contrast, is providing the borrower with purchasing power that would not otherwise have been available to him: purchasing power he earned but did not consume.

The sources of value themselves, land and capital, etc., are *non-productive* because they just sit there until rented.

No. They are no more unproductive than the laborer who just sits there until hired. They all contribute to production when applied to production. The difference is that the laborer contributes his labor, which would not exist but for his contribution of time and effort, and the saver contributes his savings, which would not exist but for his contribution of time and effort and thrift, but THE LAND WAS ALREADY THERE ANYWAY, READY TO USE, with no help from the landowner whatever. You have merely decided not to know that fact.

And, once rented, they have to be paid for, with rent and interest, respectively, for their leasing, regardless of what happens during the time of their leasing.

Irrelevant. The fact that you legally have to pay someone for something does not mean they are necessarily the source of it. You had to pay a slave owner for the cotton his slaves grew and picked, but that doesn't mean it was the owner who did the work and not the slaves.

You're trying to make a false distinction when *all* rentier-type assets are the same, namely non-commodity-productive themselves, including the land underneath *productive* (equity) goods like factories and machinery.

No, it's the OWNER of the land who is non-productive, not the land, and the OWNER of the factories, machinery, etc. who IS productive because the factories and machinery WOULD NOT BE THERE if he had not arranged and paid for them to be. You have merely decided not to know that fact because you have already realized that it proves your beliefs are false and evil.

Your treatment of land / natural resources / natural monopolies is no different from the status quo, though.

That is a bald falsehood.

You *acknowledge* the historical social ills of [plutocracy], robbery, slavery, oppression, war, starvation, despair and death, but in the end you're saying 'stay the course'.

That is also a bald falsehood. It is a waste of time trying to discuss these issues with you. You just refuse to know self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality and make $#!+ up about what I have plainly written in clear, grammatical English. IOW, you are a Marxist. Karl would be proud of you.

[Truth To Power]

But it *is* - - labor-power (the capacity to work) is *bought-and-sold*, and the products of labor are expropriated by the employer, in return for a wage, and are sold on the market for more than was paid for them in wages.

You are aware of the fact that payment of the agreed sum for an item is not expropriation. Why pretend you are not?

On all of this, I'm asking what your conception of *government* should be, in relation to market functioning.

To secure the equal individual rights of all to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor.

You seem oblivious to the term 'market failure', which is an inherent feature of capitalism, as we're *currently* seeing with the government bailouts of the stock market.

That is because the markets are rigged. There is no necessary market failure in stocks or debt instruments.

What kind of *oversight* should government have, over the economic sphere, as for handling disputes and (hopefully) dispensing justice?

Such as to secure the equal individual rights of all to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor.

As I covered above, though, private funds collect interest the way private land property collects rent,

False. The rent of land is publicly created. Interest is earned by placing one's saved purchasing power in the service of the borrower.

and are *not commodity-productive* themselves.

Gibberish.

They are a *financial service* for those who may possibly *leverage* such funds.

Which unlike land, would not otherwise have been available. Try to find a willingness to know that fact.

Hmmmm, you're not understanding - - what if Employee A goes to the employer and says 'You underpaid me on my paycheck this week' and the employer says 'No I didn't.'

How exactly is 'the market' supposed to handle this kind of dispute? (This is why government, though bourgeois, exists.)

Do you know what a "contract" is? Do you know what a record of employment is?

A post-capitalist socialism would see aggregated need / want / whim either *fulfilled* from the communistic gift economy of uncoerced voluntary liberated-labor, or else it wouldn't be - - the easiest, most-common mass needs would be far more likely to be fulfilled in this way, especially if fully-automated, once-and-for-all.

That is an admirably honest expression of the basic tenet of Marxism: the desire to have one's desires fulfilled by others without the need to contribute anything in return.

Yes, the capitalism dynamic tends to *overproduction*, but that just begs the question - - isn't earth's collection of conscious human beings collectively *smart enough* to *democratize* economic dynamics (as in the way I just mentioned), so that supply and demand match-up appropriately, from a pre-planned production plan, over worldwide-collectivized productive assets, so that capitalist overproduction becomes a thing of the past?

No. Not even close.

Also, your focus on strict productivity is to the detriment of *workers'* interests for quality-of-life issues. Many would argue for some *output* inefficiencies if it meant that workers could be in collective *control* of production, if at the expense of overall productivity and even consumers' interests for luxury / specialty goods.

Like you, they don't understand what production is. It exists purely to enable consumption, not to provide workers with a sense of autonomy, satisfaction, or solidarity.

Okay, it's practically the same thing, with the point that the privilege of wealth *confers* a far greater range of satisfying personal needs, wants, and whims.

Privilege can confer or add to wealth -- indeed, these days wealth is little else -- but they are not the same thing.

And you should clarify what you mean by 'justice', regarding government and governance.

Same thing it always means: rewards commensurate with contributions and penalties commensurate with deprivations.

You're still ignoring the economic *exploitation* of commodified wage-labor, by equity capital.

Because payment of the agreed sum for an item is not exploitation. If there is exploitation of labor by employers, it can only be because LANDOWNERS or other privilege holders have deprived the worker of his liberty, his options, and thus his bargaining power.

It's *all* capital / exchange-values that are to blame, and not just rentier-type capital, or land.

False. The factory owner has no POWER to DEPRIVE the worker of anything. The landowner DOES. Why do you refuse to know that fact?

Factory / equity / all capital ownership *are* privileges.

False. Privilege requires abrogation of rights, depriving others of something they would otherwise have. Owning a factory or one's savings does not deprive anyone of anything they would otherwise have. Owning land does. You have merely decided not to know that fact, because you have already realized that it proves your beliefs are false and evil.

Equity ownership deprives the worker of *surplus labor value*, which is the value from their work, above and beyond that which is materially required to maintain and sustain the labor pool going-forward, into the future (wages, basically).

No it doesn't. They are paid the exact market value of their work, and they don't produce any more value than that. It is the entrepreneur whose contribution produces any value above what is spent on production.

Profits are directly realized from this expropriation of surplus labor value, from workers.

No they aren't. They are realized from what the entrepreneur contributes.

Again, this is *bias* and *favoritism* on your part, regarding equity capital versus rentier capital.

No, it is willingness to know the fact that they are not the same thing, any more than air and water are the same thing.

Equity capital economically *exploits* the wage-worker, which you'd rather ignore.

I ignore it because it is a Marxist fabrication.

You *are* being subjective here.

No, I am stating self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality.

I think you're overemphasizing the role of genetics in our modern workplace environment. Certainly I'd think that *personal subjective interest* is a far more powerful factor in personal success than any nominal phenotypical advantages or disadvantages one may have from one's genetic lineage.

Where do you think that personal subjective interest comes from?

I could use your own subscription to *eugenics*-type beliefs as an example - - science discovered genetics and the class composition of our society *adopted* this kind of genetics-based reasoning about social dynamics into its ruling-class culture, and here you are. You didn't make it up on your own, it already existed in the world and you've adopted it into your way of thinking about the world.

But I haven't said class is genetic. It's not. It's based on privilege, which is legal, not genetic. What's (largely) genetic is people's personalities, attitudes and choices, which influence their success at work.

[QatzelOk]

I'd like to *ask* you about this, Qatzel, if you don't mind -- my understanding is that the European refugees were validly fleeing persecution from the church. That doesn't make any murders legitimate, of course, but my understanding has been that the earliest explorers / settlers got along fine with the indigenous populations in North America, and it wasn't until later that settlers became more like land speculators and had an economic interest in fomenting genocide.

To say "they got along fine" is an exaggeration. But my knowledge mainly concerns my corner of North America, where the French were "invited" to set up towns along the St. Lawerence River during the Great Tobacco of Tadoussac of 1603.
English link

This "alliance" was with some of the indigenous groups, who were at war with other indigenous groups. Once again, don't forget that disease (covid-19 after covid-19) had already decimated most nations by 1603.

Later, this alliance between the local French settlers and the native population was cemented in the Great Peace of 1701, a treaty which ended all wars and violence between 41 nations including France.

Peace was totally possible then, and this great peace was a Wendat-Huron initiative, and not a French one. It ended with repetive wars from the British parts of the continent. "Must make money. Must eliminate 'threats'!"

The huge difference between the French and English settlement of N.A. was that the British eventually started to export their "trash" to North America, something the French never could do, because almost no French people wanted to come to N.A.. Life in France was much better than in the British Isles, for the 99%.

So in much the same way as Modern North Americans spent the last few decades exporting their toxic trash to Asian countries, the first modern nation (the UK) exported its own toxic social problems to North America.... and armed them.

[Truth To Power]

my understanding is that the European refugees were validly fleeing persecution from the church.

They were mostly fleeing enslavement by landowners. That's how they knew that if they could just get ownership of the land in the New World, they would be legally entitled to take everything from everyone else.

[QatzelOk]

They were mostly fleeing enslavement by landowners. That's how they knew that if they could just get ownership of the land in the New World, they would be legally entitled to take everything from everyone else.

Our History books don't acknowledge how much of these crazy "religious minorities" from the UK were actually homeless families, or starving to death families, who went mad.

The madness that their suffereing caused, made them unbearable to those who weren't suffering so badly. So a "solution" naturally arose: pack them onto ships and send them to the Americas to kill the locals and expand the empire. Win-win (with genocides on the side).

[ckaihatsu]

Again, this is stupefyingly long, so I can only hit the salient points.

It is based on refusal to know self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality, especially the fact that the factory owner has no power to take anything from the worker, or do anything but offer him access to economic opportunity he would not otherwise have.

Yeah, we keep spiralling around this, so it must be the crux of our disagreement.

Equity capital *exploits* the worker of his or her economic labor value, so it's no less culpable than non-commodity-productive, asset-based rentier capital is.

Your phrasing of 'economic opportunity' for the worker, with a job, is *disingenuous* because all workers, by definition not-having capital, *need* jobs so as to get wages, so as to get the necessities of life and living. If it's not one job here then it has to be another job somewhere else, so finding one is not a vaunted 'opportunity' as much as it is a *necessity*.

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

A worker who is sufficiently productive can produce an output value greater than what it costs to hire him. Although his wage seems to be based on hours worked, in an economic sense this wage does not reflect the full value of what the worker produces. Effectively it is not labour which the worker sells, but his capacity to work.

Imagine a worker who is hired for an hour and paid $10 per hour. Once in the capitalist's employ, the capitalist can have him operate a boot-making machine with which the worker produces $10 worth of work every 15 minutes. Every hour, the capitalist receives $40 worth of work and only pays the worker $10, capturing the remaining $30 as gross revenue. Once the capitalist has deducted fixed and variable operating costs of (say) $20 (leather, depreciation of the machine, etc.), he is left with $10. Thus, for an outlay of capital of $30, the capitalist obtains a surplus value of $10; his capital has not only been replaced by the operation, but also has increased by $10.

The worker cannot capture this benefit directly because he has no claim to the means of production (e.g. the boot-making machine) or to its products, and his capacity to bargain over wages is restricted by laws and the supply/demand for wage labour.

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

[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show

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

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

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

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

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

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


---

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

They do if they want to understand, and understanding is the goal of all genuine science.

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

Let me put it *this* way -- your adherence to the *geneticist* / eugenicist approach means that *you're* depersonalizing around this method that you subscribe to. If people are *overwhelmingly* determined in their phenotypical composition by their genetics then there's really little or no free-will or individuality involved, much less free markets.

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

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

From a very different perspective, Friedrich von Hayek, the favourite economist of Margaret Thatcher, complained that humans have ‘long-submerged innate instincts’ and ‘primordial emotions’ based on ‘sentiments that were good for the small band’, leading them to want ‘to do good to known people’. 23

‘Human nature’ is, in fact, very flexible. In present day society it enables some people, at least, to indulge in the greed and competitiveness that Hayek enthused over. It has also permitted, in class societies, the most horrific barbarities—torture, mass rape, burning alive, wanton slaughter. Behaviour was very different among foraging peoples because the requirements of obtaining a livelihood necessitated egalitarianism and altruism.

Hunters and gatherers were necessarily intensely dependent on one another. The gatherers usually supplied the most reliable source of food, and the hunters that which was most valued. So those who specialised in hunting depended for their daily survival on the generosity of those who gathered, while those who specialised in gathering—and those who were temporarily unsuccessful in the hunt—relied for valued additions to their diet on those who managed to kill animals. The hunt itself did not usually consist of an individual male hero going off to make a kill, but comprised a group of men (sometimes with the auxiliary assistance of women and children) working together to chase and trap a prey. At every point, the premium was on cooperation and collective values. Without them, no band of foragers could have survived for more than a few days.

Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 7-8

Economic sociology

Main article: Economic sociology

The term "economic sociology" was first used by William Stanley Jevons in 1879, later to be coined in the works of Durkheim, Weber and Simmel between 1890 and 1920.[137] Economic sociology arose as a new approach to the analysis of economic phenomena, emphasizing class relations and modernity as a philosophical concept. The relationship between capitalism and modernity is a salient issue, perhaps best demonstrated in Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) and Simmel's The Philosophy of Money (1900). The contemporary period of economic sociology, also known as new economic sociology, was consolidated by the 1985 work of Mark Granovetter titled "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness". This work elaborated the concept of embeddedness, which states that economic relations between individuals or firms take place within existing social relations (and are thus structured by these relations as well as the greater social structures of which those relations are a part). Social network analysis has been the primary methodology for studying this phenomenon. Granovetter's theory of the strength of weak ties and Ronald Burt's concept of structural holes are two of the best known theoretical contributions of this field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology ... _sociology

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Statistics is a much broader discipline that has application throughout the natural and behavioral sciences as well as business, sports, etc., etc.

Don't get me started. I already identified one way, above. Another is the M-C-M' nonsense, which is factually incorrect about how money relates to production.

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

Capitalist society is epitomized by the so-called circuit of commodity production, M-C-M' and by renting money for that purpose where the aggregate of market actors determine the money price M, of the input labor and commodities and M' the struck price of C, the produced market commodity. It is centered on the process M → M', "making money" and the exchange of value that occurs at that point. M' > M is the condition of rationality in the capitalist system and a necessary condition for the next cycle of accumulation/production. For this reason, Capitalism is "production for exchange" driven by the desire for personal accumulation of money receipts in such exchanges, mediated by free markets. The markets themselves are driven by the needs and wants of consumers and those of society as a whole in the form of the bourgeois state. These wants and needs would (in the socialist or communist society envisioned by Marx, Engels and others) be the driving force, it would be "production for use". Contemporary mainstream (bourgeois) economics, particularly that associated with the right, holds that an "invisible hand",[4] through little more than the freedom of the market, is able to match social production to these needs and desires.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalis ... ist_theory)#Distinguishing_characteristics

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But they *do* yield 'economic rent' in the form of asset value *appreciation* over time - - that's why people use them as financial vehicles for the hoarding of wealth.

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

So you're not contradicting me, though you're pointing to certain *equity* values -- *not* rentier-type capital values -- that themselves depreciate in value, though are *productive* to the production process, by exploiting labor power for surplus labor value, from wage work.

You're acknowledging that some (necessarily non-productive) assets *appreciate* in value over time, and so profits can be made in the form of capital gains due to market speculation, anticipating a market increase in value though no commodities have been produced from that asset, and no sales have been made (because no commodities have been made, to sell).

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

If there is any appreciation of such assets, it just reflects how the market values them, not -- UNlike rentier assets -- something taken out of the economy just by owning them.

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

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

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

Why is the market *rewarding* the owner of the appreciating rentier asset, by *legitimizing* that rise in market value, enabling the cashing-out of that asset for a profit, when that asset has *done nothing* / *produced no commodities* during that time period? Obviously the price is reflecting relative *supply and demand* at two different time-points, in dollars / currency, while the *equity*-capital, commodity-*productive* process actually produces *real goods and services* as a result, and takes profits from sales revenue, over and above the costs of private productive infrastructure, raw material inputs, and wages paid out for labor.

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

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

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

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

No, I am not. I am stating the anti-Marxist FACT that value -- what a thing would trade for -- comes entirely and exclusively from the combination of its scarcity (supply) and utility (demand).

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


---

You still haven't provided any theory or ideology on how land *should* be distributed, if the way it's *been* done has been so alienating to the working class.

Yes I have: payment of the market rent (the high bid) by whoever gets secure, exclusive tenure to the community of those thus excluded, with a universal individual exemption to ensure everyone has free, secure, exclusive tenure on enough of the available advantageous land of their choice to have access to economic opportunity.

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

From what I can see you're just upholding existing status quo conditions, and you haven't denied such. Your entire politics is a sham.

If you want to continue this discussion, you will have to somehow find a willingness to know the difference between land and products of labor. I do not know how to communicate with someone who refuses to know the most self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality. It's completely pointless as well as frustrating, like trying to discuss a plumbing problem with someone who insists that air and water are the same thing and refuses to know the fact that they are not.

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

Land is a commodity. The service of labor that makes land *saleable* as a commodity is *also* a commodity, one that's human and that's *exploited* for labor value.

Your efforts at communication are worthless because they're too one-sided -- if you're not going to interact with the *content* of what I'm positing then there's no real discussion in existence anyway.

No; in the case of LAND, that's false. It was already usable and salable, which is why he had to pay the previous owner so much for it, and it is the taxpayer who has had to pay for the desirable public services and infrastructure whose value the landowner is privileged to appropriate for himself.

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

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

Finally, there could not have been the obsession with private property that we take for granted today. The normal size of foraging bands was always restricted by the need to find enough food each day in the area of the camp. Within that area, the individual members were continually moving from one source of plant food to another, or in pursuit of animals, while the band as a whole had to move on every so often as the food supplies in a locality were used up. Such continual movement precluded any accumulation of wealth by any band member, since everything had to be carried easily. At most an individual may have had a spear or bow and arrow, a carrying bag or a few trinkets. There would be no concept of the accumulation of personal wealth. The material conditions in which human beings lived conspired to produce very different societies and very different dominant ideas to those taken for granted today.

Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 8-9

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In the case of products of labor, the initial owner, the producer, created the product by his decision and initiative to bring together all the necessary factors -- including labor, but also resources, location, plan, design, direction, etc. -- for it to exist rather than not exist. And any subsequent owner has paid, however indirectly or through however many intermediate transactions, for that act of creating the product.

How did the *initial* owner obtain the land?

No, the worker agreed to exchange the product of his labor for wages. The employer therefore hasn't deprived him of anything. It was the LANDOWNER who deprived him of his liberty, his options, and thus his bargaining power vis-a-vis the employer. Marxism/socialism consists in blaming the factory owner for what the landowner does to the worker (neoclassicalism/capitalism consists in blaming the worker).

Well *I* blame *both* factions of capital, both rentier and equity, because *both* factions lay claim to the worker's labor value, through leasing land (housing), for rent payments from wages (rentier capital), *and* through the economic *exploitation* of the worker's labor power, by the employer (equity capital).

Karl Marx is considered the most classical and influential theorist of exploitation. Marx's theory explicitly rejects the moral framing characteristic of the notion of exploitation and restricts the concept to the field of economics. In analyzing exploitation, economists are split on the explanation of the exploitation of labour given by Marx and Adam Smith. Smith did not see exploitation as an inherent systematic phenomena in certain economic systems as Marx did, but rather as an optional moral injustice.[2]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's that entry again:

A worker who is sufficiently productive can produce an output value greater than what it costs to hire him. Although his wage seems to be based on hours worked, in an economic sense this wage does not reflect the full value of what the worker produces. Effectively it is not labour which the worker sells, but his capacity to work.

Imagine a worker who is hired for an hour and paid $10 per hour. Once in the capitalist's employ, the capitalist can have him operate a boot-making machine with which the worker produces $10 worth of work every 15 minutes. Every hour, the capitalist receives $40 worth of work and only pays the worker $10, capturing the remaining $30 as gross revenue. Once the capitalist has deducted fixed and variable operating costs of (say) $20 (leather, depreciation of the machine, etc.), he is left with $10. Thus, for an outlay of capital of $30, the capitalist obtains a surplus value of $10; his capital has not only been replaced by the operation, but also has increased by $10.

The worker cannot capture this benefit directly because he has no claim to the means of production (e.g. the boot-making machine) or to its products, and his capacity to bargain over wages is restricted by laws and the supply/demand for wage labour.

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

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Whoever has paid the appropriate party for it.

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

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

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

No. Merely calling something yours doesn't make it rightly yours. He had his turn using the land for free when no one else wanted it. Now that others are willing to pay to use it, he has to make just compensation to the community of those he excludes from it.

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

That is the central problem of property rights on which all of human history has turned, and whose correct solution would have saved thousands of years of poverty, injustice, robbery, enslavement, starvation, despair and death: how to separate rightful property in fixed improvements produced by labor from wrongful property in the land nature provided for all. But that correct solution can never be implemented, or even described, as long as socialists and capitalists refuse to know the difference.

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

You're proving that you have to resort to subjective *moralizing* to confer a *qualitative* valuation over the initial capitalist procurement of natural resources, like land ('rightful' and 'wrongful').

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

Gordon Childe described the transformation which occurred in Mesopotamia between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago as people settled in the river valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. They found land which was extremely fertile, but which could only be cultivated by ‘drainage and irrigation works’, which depended upon ‘cooperative effort’. 48

More recently Maisels has suggested people discovered that by making small breaches in the banks between river channels they could irrigate wide areas of land and increase output considerably. But they could not afford to consume all the extra harvest immediately, so some was put aside to protect against harvest failure. 49

Grain was stored in sizeable buildings which, standing out from the surrounding land, came to symbolise the continuity and preservation of social life. Those who supervised the granaries became the most prestigious group in society, overseeing the life of the rest of the population as they gathered in, stored and distributed the surplus. The storehouses and their controllers came to seem like powers over and above society, the key to its success, which demanded obedience and praise from the mass of people. They took on an almost supernatural aspect. The storehouses were the first temples, their superintendents the first priests. 50

Harman, _People's History of the World_, p. 19

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The correct solution is for the producer of fixed improvements to own them as his rightful property, and the exclusive holder of the land to make just (market) compensation to the community of those whom he excludes from the land.

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

With this model of yours the landowner would have to pay for nominal ownership while also having to pay-off any random individual who makes any arbitrary claim to access that land for free but is denied. Once word got out everyone would probably just willfully roam anywhere and everywhere, collecting compounding payments for a repeated legal maneuver and a little traveling.

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

Hard pass.

That is normally quite trivial to implement, and in practice is only problematic when the two are no longer the same person. In the latter case, the new landholder would normally just pay the previous one an agreed price for the improvements -- this is obviously done all the time in real estate transactions -- and use them himself.

In other words, 'Land for sale.'

The remaining -- and only really difficult -- case is when the previous landholder and owner of the improvements is no longer willing or able to make just compensation to the community for depriving everyone else of the land, but the prospective new landholder who is willing to pay the community for the land does not want to pay the improvements' owner as much for them as the latter wants.

In other words, 'No deal.'

This irreducible conflict of rights is most fairly resolved by reference to the market: the improvements' owner can only demand to be paid the assessed market value for them. If no prospective new landholder wants to pay that much, the owner retains tenure at the current rent but is prohibited from making additional improvements. When a prospective new landholder is willing to pay the assessed market value for the improvements or the community land authority determines that the improvements are worth less than the increased rent a new holder would pay, the improvements' owner is paid the assessed market value for them and loses tenure to a new landholder.

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

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

And, non-mockingly, how does the 'community' establish its 'authority'? How is membership determined?

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

But being paid a wage is economically *exploitative* -- you're content to allow private land ownership to exploit workers who, out of material necessity, *must* find jobs and wages.

Here's this corroborating excerpt again:

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

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

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

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But he would be wrong both because he was already paid for his labor and because land cannot rightly be anyone's property.

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

No; in the case of LAND, that's false. It was already usable and salable, which is why he had to pay the previous owner so much for it,

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

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

Moralizing.

Status quo.

No, what makes it capitalism is that the land as well as the improvement is owned as property.

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

False. See above.

This is ambiguous -- I don't know what you're referring to.

False. You have not the slightest understanding of what I propose or how radically different it is from capitalism, because you insist that air and water are the same thing, and refuse to know the fact that they are not.

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

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

This notion of "commodification" is like claiming that air and water are the same thing because they can both flow through a pipe. What is being bought and sold in the case of land is the privilege of secure, exclusive tenure. That is entirely different from a product of labor.

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

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

In the geoist system land is held under secure, exclusive tenure in return for voluntary payment of the market rent to the community, not bought, and everyone has a right to free, secure, exclusive tenure on enough of the available advantageous land of their choice to have access to economic opportunity.

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

Let me ask you these:

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

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

- How does the 'community' initially procure land that is to be brought into the geoist / local-collectivist public administration? What if going market prices for land are too prohibitive for a community to purchase it in any significant quantities?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is really spurious is the concept of commodification. It has no relevance, and adds no information. It's just a ridiculous Marxist red herring.

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

In economics, a commodity is an economic good or service that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them.[1][2][3]

The price of a commodity good is typically determined as a function of its market as a whole: well-established physical commodities have actively traded spot and derivative markets. The wide availability of commodities typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price.

Most commodities are raw materials, basic resources, agricultural, or mining products, such as iron ore, sugar, or grains like rice and wheat. Commodities can also be mass-produced unspecialized products such as chemicals and computer memory.

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

Okay, this is all I have time for, for today. I'll leave off here and pick-up with the remainder of this first post (of two).

[ckaihatsu]

The default treatment of land is the equal individual liberty rights of all to use it non-exclusively, as our ancestors did for millions of years. Its appropriation as private property under capitalism is an innovation only a few thousand years old: before appropriation of land as private property was implemented in Roman law, land was never considered an individual's property, but only held under some kind of conditional institution of exclusive tenure.

Okay, noted, but now look at what you're *advocating*, from just a few paragraphs ago:

In the geoist system land is held under secure, exclusive tenure in return for voluntary payment of the market rent to the community, not bought, and everyone has a right to free , secure, exclusive tenure on enough of the available advantageous land of their choice to have access to economic opportunity.

You're being unclear about whether personal usage of 'community' land would be exclusive or non-exclusive. I'd also welcome any terms and conditions *around* such public-leasing, meaning *administrative* guidelines / rules -- what would the *limits* to usage be, since such personal leasing is *temporary* and the land must ultimately be returned to the commons, to be made available again. How are these rules then decided-on and finalized, etc.

(Could some asshole just lease a spot for free and suck massive oil reserves out of one tiny location where the well is built, and leave the commons there without any hydrocarbon resources for the foreseeable future?)

The difference between private property in land and its market allocation ("commodification") under a framework that secures and reconciles the equal individual rights of all to use it through the system of just compensations may seem trivial or superficial, but is actually profound, and completely alters economic relationships to the benefit of all but a tiny minority of wealthy landowners.

Okay, it's good that you're finally acknowledging the capitalist institution of commodification, or commodity-production.

So you see the demographic of the tiny minority of wealthy landowners as being like a modern-day 'aristocracy', correct?

While I advocate the term 'neo-feudalism' to describe our current world, I *don't* think that agricultural production is nearly as front-and-center as it once was. Yes, it's still important, and yes, it, under present-day industrial techniques, still produces food-type commodities, but I think it's crucial to see that food is now materially just an *input* for proletarian consumption, so as to enable work for *commodity* production, meaning the output of goods and services from factories and workplaces.

Food, and all other material inputs to proletarians, like education, transportation, health care, housing, etc., should really, 'morally', be *free* and universal, for the sake of capitalism's mode of production, which is to produce modern-day *commodities*. Increasing the price of these necessary inputs to the workforce, as with vaccines against Covid-19, for example, and all of the aforementioned examples, is really *profiteering* since they're working-class *necessities* and only effectively *decrease wages* (higher costs) for an already-constantly-economically-exploited work force.

I say all of this to intentionally shift the *relevance* away from your depiction, which is that of a purported 'land aristocracy'. Your focus on this demographic segment is *misguided*, I think, since, for the reasons just stated, land is not really 'productive' under modern capitalism. Capitalism *transcends* the past feudal-type importance of agricultural production as the core purpose of the economy. The proof is in the capitalist commodification of *labor*, meaning that it treats human labor as a fungible *input*, along with all other fungible material inputs, to the private productive process, for the sake of commodity production.

I maintain that your continued emphasis on (necessarily non-commodity-productive) *land* is historically *backward* and anachronistic, and thus not really topical regarding current treatments for political economy. (I'll note that you're blithely *ignoring* the present-day wealthiness of *equity* capital owners, like those of the tech sector.)

Voluntarily trading his product for wages is not being "deprived" of it anymore than you are being "deprived" of your money when a baker charges you for a loaf of bread. Duh.

Yes, certainly I understand -- you're implicitly acknowledging the commodification of labor, then, and I have to add that all workers are *compelled* to sell their labor power for wages, for the unavoidable necessities of life and living. The particularity of the employer is of no consequence to the proletarian, so there are no specific, personal 'opportunities' for the worker, other than the generic, categorical job position itself due to time constraints that the capital owner does *not* suffer from.

You're also continuing to ignore that the worker is *economically exploited*, for each and every hour of work, under capitalism.


---

If a bunch of workers in a coop of whatever sort complete their group task, say building a car, *who decides* how the revenue from the sale of that car is to be used? What if there are internal disputes and factions form around differing, conflicting policy trajectories (the build-more-infrastructure faction vs. the compensate-workers-more faction)?

That's my question to you.

You're *missing the point* -- my statement is a *critique* of the proferred 'worker co-op' proposal / politics. I've stated that this formulation is flawed and unworkable because [1] the issue of *how the workers are to procure ownership* is not-adequately-addressed by proponents, and [2] the formulation is too *apolitical* and *not* anti-capitalist, because internal policy decisions would not be appropriately politicized / democratized -- presumably the implementation would use a typical capitalist elitist 'board of trustees' which would operate on the basis of proportionate shareholder value, which then is *no different* from existing private ownership, just that it would happen to be workers, demographically, who would necessarily have to *self-exploit* for the sake of the business, instead of *being exploited* from without.

I agree. It's just a different form of private ownership, a kind of socialism-within-capitalism.

Thank you, and even this critique is being generous since we're not really given a thorough presentation of *how* these somehow-funded worker-owners are to make decisions internally.

Because it restores people's rights to liberty, which capitalism removes, they are free to produce without having to pay landowners just for permission to produce. And because it secures people's property rights in the fruits of their labor, which socialism removes, it is just, and gets the incentives right. It thus creates a freer, fairer society than capitalism, and a more productive and prosperous one than socialism. It retains the best of both, while removing the worst of both.

Well, I certainly don't share your enthusiasm, or even your imprimatur, for the geoist position -- you continue to ignore the problematics of *equity* capital, instead preferring to imply that it's clean and blameless, while it actually *expropriates* surplus labor value from the workers, which is economic *theft*, every hour of every workday.

Your slight here at socialism is actually *unfounded* because your meaning is that of *Stalinism* -- if the workers at any and all given workplaces really *controlled* all matters of their own collective production, over fully de-privatized / collectivized means of industrial mass production, then they would simply be *transcending* your limited, land-circumscribed geoist implementation, to the collectivization of *all* rentier and equity capital as well, particularly production goods / means of mass industrial production.

Production relieves scarcity. The right to keep what one produces is the price of accurate production incentives. If you think people's needs will not be met if the producer gets to keep what he produces, try NOT letting the producer keep what he produces, and see how well people's needs are met.

Yeah, great and everything, but you're still ignoring the claims of *equity* capital -- what will the typical *investor* say to what you're saying?

Your line sounds *very* disingenuous as a result -- the laborer-producer will *not* be able to keep the products of their own, working-class production -- as you've already acknowledged -- because they've had to *sell* their labor power as a commodity to the employer upfront. This fact would *not* change under your geoist implementation -- it does not change the commodification of labor, nor the claims of equity ownership to the resulting social product, or commodity.

The geoist model relieves production of the burden of taxation. It taxes people for what they TAKE from the community, not what they MAKE.

Fine, whatever. I don't *oppose* your approach but it definitely doesn't go *far enough*.

No, because PRODUCTION, which geoism encourages, RELIEVES SCARCITY and is therefore NOT at the expense of the working class. Conventional capitalist business practice is more focused on RENT SEEKING, which INFLICTS scarcity on others by legally requiring them to pay for PERMISSION, and thus IS at the expense of the working class.

GET IT???

No, this *is* false and disingenuous for the reasons I just stated.

You've already *admitted* that the worker does not get to keep both a wage *and* the products of their labor:

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

Your geoist position does not address the exploitation of the worker, as a commodity, by equity capital, under capitalism. (And your critique of rentier-type capital is limited to only the specific instance of *land*, while all other kinds of rent-seeking, as with housing, for example, remains unaddressed by your politics.)

<sigh> As I have explained to you several times, labor is exploited under capitalism because LANDOWNERS deprive workers of their liberty, their options, and thus their bargaining position, NOT because EMPLOYERS hire them to work.

GET IT???

But you're *incorrect* -- the villain here isn't simply the landowner, it's also the *employer* who utilizes *equity* capital (which you don't object to), to sell the products of commodified, bought labor power for more than is paid to the worker in the form of a wage. This is economic *exploitation* by the capitalist employer, separate from the rent-seeking economic interests of the land owner.


---

Are you a professional politician?

I'm too honest.

I'll note that professional politicians -- even Bernie Sanders -- don't go as far as you do with your geoist position.

I don't have any particular attachment to the nation-state; it's clearly dysfunctional in many cases, especially where colonial legacies are still in place. I just don't see a viable alternative. People have a sense of geographic, linguistic, cultural and historical as well as economic and political community that they are not comfortable giving up. See the problems with the EU.

Okay, nationalist-by-default. Noted.

Btw, any internationalism expressed on my part is strictly *political*, and doesn't necessarily have any *cultural* implications for the culture of any given nation-state. Changing the 'base', though, would obviously inevitably have knock-on effects for the 'superstructure', which *includes* cultural aspects.


---

(I'll remind that workers do not have *any* national interests because workers can organize
*internationally*, on a *class* basis.)

How is that working out for you?

It's a *struggle*. (Get it???) (grin)


---

But land-as-a-commodity would still exist, and such land values would be measured in *exchange
values* (money, finance) - - it wouldn't be any different than the capitalism of today.

It would be utterly different. You just refuse to know the difference between paying a baker for a loaf of bread and paying a thief who stole the bread from the baker because they both involve "exchange values, money, finance."

Hmmmm, I don't think your analogy holds up -- both of the instances you cite *do* involve exchange values, both *explicit* (the sale of bread), and *implicit* (the theft of bread).

I'll admit that I *do* favor use values, particularly for dire human needs, over exchange values, but I don't necessarily condone theft for just *anything*, since both human labor value and 'dead' human labor value (capital) have been invested.

That said, I think your proferred example is rather trivial, and if you're *really* into 'true crime', of the financial kind, you should look into the past Libor scandal, which is the *real* eye-opener.

Land is never rightly private property.

Okay, at least you're consistent.


---

To some extent it's just a matter of terminology. Some people might call what I propose "nationalization."

But IMO there is a useful distinction to be made between considering land as public property and
considering it as a public trust. In particular, nationalization is often thought to imply public management and use of land, as in collectivized agriculture, etc. I favor management, control, and use of land by competing private landholders in a free market who are required to make just compensation for what they take from the community.

The 'trust' you mention is simply state control, possibly outsourced to a private management firm.

Why would it be outsourced to a private management firm?

You said you favor management, control, and use of land by competing private landholders in a free market -- this is the *private* sector, sanctioned by the state. It's Hong Kong, basically.

Garbage. You just refuse to know that air and water are not the same thing.

Okay, whatever -- feel free to tell me the difference between air and water, both literally and metaphorically.


---

See - - this is your ideology showing through - - what happened to 'the workers keeping their product', and ['the commons'] ?

Workers trade their product for wages. They have an equal right to the commons, and to just compensation for abrogation of that right.

By not-addressing the everyday economic exploitation of commodity wage-workers, you're defending the privileges of equity capital *to* exploit the labor-power of the working class. You cannot make political claims to 'the workers keeping their product' when they're *compelled* to sell their labor power *and* their product, to an employer for a wage, for the sake of affording the necessities of life and living.

In our present conditions land is just a means to an end, for those who have capital to invest -- the working class, even *with* access to constrained portions of 'the commons' / land, would *not* automatically or necessarily benefit from such, the way an owner of *capital* does, because land is an *illiquid asset* that may or may not yield returns, like any other business investment. You're in effect calling for everyone to be in business, and to take up financial risks that could / will readily lead many to personal bankruptcy, given the odds that come with being in business.

The *implications* of what you're proposing are actually *horrifying* -- you're calling for a historically-backwards *backsliding* to a quasi-*feudal* mode of production that encourages individually-constrained "self sufficiency" -- a massive duplication-of-effort and *agricultural* mode of production for the dispossessed while equity capital would continue to reign supreme and would continue to commodify and exploit labor power, just as today.

Basically this is a forced quasi-privatization of all land, in order to get it all into the private sector, for economic activity. Presumably it would extend to *education*, *public parks*, *public facilities*, etc., thereby effectively *eliminating* whatever public property and facilities are remaining.

I'd rather be *skeptical* and *pessimistic* about the trajectory of your politics, because it's only a technical *reform* at best, and, at worst, sounds more like a *scheme* than a fully-thought-out *politics*.

False. See above for how workers are exploited.

Please address the function of equity capital in relation to the labor commodity.

Labor is not exploited if the workers have their rights, and "commodification" is ridiculous, uninformative, anti-economic gibberish.

You're flip-flopping on 'commodification' -- here's what you said earlier in this post:

The difference between private property in land and its market allocation ("commodification") under a framework that secures and reconciles the equal individual rights of all to use it through the system of just compensations may seem trivial or superficial, but is actually profound, and completely alters economic relationships to the benefit of all but a tiny minority of wealthy landowners.

So here you're *acknowledging* commodification, but then you're deriding and dismissing it as being invalid. Which *is* it? (Hint: It's valid, and happens every day.)


---

Bald falsehood. The status quo entitles the private landowner to keep the publicly created value of the land.

Allow me to rephrase: Your geoism is *so close to* the status quo that it can be treated *as* the status quo for all real-world intents and purposes. I'm going to continue using the term 'status quo' to describe your politics, as a shorthand.

Because value is what something would exchange for, that is inherently how value is measured.

'Inherently' -- ? Really?

You've already acknowledged a human past *prior* to the development of capitalist market relations, a past, by the way, in which exchange values *did not exist*, so it's obvious that (use) values were handled in some manner that was appropriate, for it to have lasted as long as it did, 100,000+ years of human social relations.

I'll add that my own proferred model framework of 'labor credits' uses a daily individualized self-ranked *prioritization* (#1, #2, #3, etc.) of personal material and/or socio-political 'needs', so there's *another* approach to the social aspect of how to distribute the end products.


Emergent Central Planning

Spoiler: show

labor credits framework for 'communist supply & demand'

Spoiler: show

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


---

Oh, give it a rest. If we are to have an economy above the hunter-gatherer or nomadic herding level, someone has to secure exclusive tenure. It just happens to be government's job.

Wow. Really. You're an unapologetic, unrepentant *apologist* for Western military imperialism and colonialism.

'Someone's got to do the dirty work', in other words, and we as a society need professional assholes to go to other countries and commit acts of genocide so that we can have post-hunter-gatherer economic conditions. There's just no other way, huh? Can I quote you on the back of any eventual book cover of mine?

And, by the way, you're flip-flopping again regarding your approach to land usage -- is it to be *exclusive* tenure, or *non-exclusive* tenure?

No, it does not sell it to owners. It requires just payment to the community for what the exclusive holder is taking from the community.

I'm still waiting to hear what the *details* of any given land-leasing would be, according to your geoist approach. To put it bluntly, how much can I take and how little is it going to cost me?


---

Are you *opposed* to private landownership, or are you *for* competing private landholders in a free market?

Both.

And is it both night and day right now?

No. The landowner is not providing anything, just charging the user for permission to access the advantages government, the community and nature already provided. The owner of saved money, by contrast, is providing the borrower with purchasing power that would not otherwise have been available to him: purchasing power he earned but did not consume.

But if land is incontrovertibly a commodity, and is to be treated as an asset / commodity within your geoist framework, then what's the difference, really? This is why I call your approach 'status quo' because even if the government is the sole administration over the public leasing of all necessarily-government land, it has to *acquire* it from existing private ownership in the first place -- a factor you haven't given a solution for (is it the *military conquest* thing?) -- *and* all 'saved money' / rentier capital / equity capital can be called 'dead labor' (past labor), itself, so, again, what's the economic distinction between the land commodity and any other commodified form of value, under capitalism?

I think you'd really need to *go further* with your politics to make it realistically viable -- full *nationalization*, meaning that all land would be fully *de-commodified* and parceled out for strictly *individual*, *personal* (non-private-accumulation) use without charging *anyone* any rents, since government, being so hegemonic, can *afford* to do so anyway. (See the recent Trump government-deficit spending, for example.)

Of course once *this* is done it would beg the question as to why all *equity* capital / means of mass industrial production couldn't be nationalized as well, and also the *labor* commodity so that there's a single, state employer. And then, at that point, why would the workers even need an employer / state-type bureaucracy *at all* when they could more-easily just run the nationalized productive machinery *themselves*, collectively, thereby cutting-out both *private* *and* government / state interests in management / administration?

Any questions? (grin)

No. They are no more unproductive than the laborer who just sits there until hired. They all contribute to production when applied to production. The difference is that the laborer contributes his labor, which would not exist but for his contribution of time and effort, and the saver contributes his savings, which would not exist but for his contribution of time and effort and thrift, but THE LAND WAS ALREADY THERE ANYWAY, READY TO USE, with no help from the landowner whatever. You have merely decided not to know that fact.

Again, I don't *oppose* your radical-reformist geoism, but I'll continue to point out that it's no more than a *reform* -- the *producers* / workers would *still* be treated as a commodity by equity capital, so this capitalist system of middleman-type *private appropriation* (profit-making) of surplus labor value would continue ubabated, which is problematic.


---

And, once rented, they have to be paid for, with rent and interest, respectively, for their leasing, regardless of what happens during the time of their leasing.

Irrelevant. The fact that you legally have to pay someone for something does not mean they are necessarily the source of it. You had to pay a slave owner for the cotton his slaves grew and picked, but that doesn't mean it was the owner who did the work and not the slaves.

You're going off on a *tangent* -- I maintain that the land asset / commodity *does not produce commodities*. (Food is a necessary material input for proletarian wage labor, which actually produces commodities, under capitalism -- goods and services.) (Food is more of a *consumable* rentier-type *asset*, that detracts from wages, like rent payments for housing for the worker.)

You're empirically describing the institution of private property, under capitalism.

I'm *actually* anti-capitalist, so I *don't defend* these economic practices, including chattel slavery and wage-slavery, unlike you. You're *pro-commodity-production*, and I'm *anti-commodity-production*.

Note that you're describing the slave owner / [equity owner] as the 'source' / [legal owner] of something, but they're *not* the ones who actually physically *produced* that something, it's the slaves / [workers] who did it. The 'something' can be called 'dead labor' (the produced materials of past labor), because without that past labor the 'something' would not be in existence in the first place. It's only due to prevailing *class-based* social conditions that the financial 'owner' is the 'source' of something, and not the workers who actually brought that 'something' into existence.

No, it's the OWNER of the land who is non-productive, not the land, and the OWNER of the factories, machinery, etc. who IS productive because the factories and machinery WOULD NOT BE THERE if he had not arranged and paid for them to be. You have merely decided not to know that fact because you have already realized that it proves your beliefs are false and evil.

I just addressed this, and I'll add that you're still not-acknowledging the economic exploitation of labor, every hour of the day, by equity capital ('owner of the factories, machinery, etc.').

As I stated above, it's the *employer* who utilizes *equity* capital (which you don't object to), to sell the products of commodified, bought labor power for more than is paid to the workers in the form of wages.


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show

---

Your treatment of land / natural resources / natural monopolies is no different from the status quo, though.

That is a bald falsehood.

Okay, *technically* it's not, because the government would be the sole landlord, but *effectively* it would be the same, because equity capital would still dominate the economic landscape, exploiting labor, for commodity-production.


---

You *acknowledge* the historical social ills of [plutocracy], robbery, slavery, oppression, war, starvation, despair and death, but in the end you're saying 'stay the course'.

That is also a bald falsehood. It is a waste of time trying to discuss these issues with you. You just refuse to know self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality and make $#!+ up about what I have plainly written in clear, grammatical English. IOW, you are a Marxist. Karl would be proud of you.

Well, thanks, I guess, but look: If we factor-in your default-nationalism, and your support for government militaristic imperialism for the initial procurement of lands and natural resources, then where's the significant difference?

Would you tell our neighbor, Qatzel over there, that the genocide of Native Americans was 'economically necessary', and not to fret about it?

[Hindsite]

To say "they got along fine" is an exaggeration. But my knowledge mainly concerns my corner of North America, where the French were "invited" to set up towns along the St. Lawerence River during the Great Tobacco of Tadoussac of 1603.
English link

This "alliance" was with some of the indigenous groups, who were at war with other indigenous groups. Once again, don't forget that disease (covid-19 after covid-19) had already decimated most nations by 1603.

Later, this alliance between the local French settlers and the native population was cemented in the Great Peace of 1701, a treaty which ended all wars and violence between 41 nations including France.

Peace was totally possible then, and this great peace was a Wendat-Huron initiative, and not a French one. It ended with repetive wars from the British parts of the continent. "Must make money. Must eliminate 'threats'!"

The huge difference between the French and English settlement of N.A. was that the British eventually started to export their "trash" to North America, something the French never could do, because almost no French people wanted to come to N.A.. Life in France was much better than in the British Isles, for the 99%.

So in much the same way as Modern North Americans spent the last few decades exporting their toxic trash to Asian countries, the first modern nation (the UK) exported its own toxic social problems to North America.... and armed them.

How much do you know about the French and Indian War?

[QatzelOk]

How much do you know about the French and Indian War?

It's called "the French and Indian war" for the same reason that other attempted genocides were called "the Korean War" and "the Vietnam War": that's who the empire was killing - the French and First Nations.

When it ended, the British decided to give the Ohio Valley to "the French and Indians" rather than to their helpful killers in the 13 colonies. And that's why these colonies fought for 'independence' from England: so that they could genocide the First Nations of the Ohio Valley. (it happened right after independence)

[Hindsite]

It's called "the French and Indian war" for the same reason that other attempted genocides were called "the Korean War" and "the Vietnam War": that's who the empire was killing - the French and First Nations.

When it ended, the British decided to give the Ohio Valley to "the French and Indians" rather than to their helpful killers in the 13 colonies. And that's why these colonies fought for 'independence' from England: so that they could genocide the First Nations of the Ohio Valley. (it happened right after independence)

You would make a good comedian. I found that very funny.

[QatzelOk]

You would make a good comedian. I found that very funny.

If you think genocides are funny, your Hallelujahs take on a completely different light.

[ckaihatsu]

It's not controversial to call the pre-Revolutionary fighting in the colonies an outgrowth of the ongoing European wars, which are even continuing to this day, as evidenced with Brexit and the difficulties of keeping the EU together economically.

The French and Indian War (1754–1763) pitted the colonies of British America against those of New France, each side supported by military units from the parent country and by American Indian allies. At the start of the war, the French colonies had a population of roughly 60,000 settlers, compared with 2 million in the British colonies.[4] The outnumbered French particularly depended on the Indians.

The European nations declared a wider war upon one another overseas in 1756, two years into the French and Indian war, and some view the French and Indian War as being merely the American theater of the worldwide Seven Years' War of 1756–63; however, the French and Indian War is viewed in the United States as a singular conflict which was not associated with any European war.[5] French Canadians call it Guerre de la Conquête ('War of the Conquest').[6][7]

The British colonists were supported in the war by the Iroquois Six Nations and also by the Cherokees, until differences sparked the Anglo-Cherokee War in 1758. In 1758, the Province of Pennsylvania successfully negotiated the Treaty of Easton in which a number of tribes in the Ohio Country promised neutrality in exchange for land concessions and other considerations. Most of the other northern tribes sided with the French, their primary trading partner and supplier of arms. The Creeks and Cherokees were subject to diplomatic efforts by both the French and British to gain either their support or neutrality in the conflict.[citation needed]

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

And here's from Zinn, which I'd been meaning to get to:

In the North American English colonies, the pattern was set early, as Columbus had set it in the islands of the Bahamas. In 1585, before there was any permanent English settlement in Virginia, Richard Grenville landed there with seven ships. The Indians he met were hospitable, but when one of them stole a small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned the whole Indian village.

Jamestown itself was set up inside the territory of an Indian confederacy, led by the chief, Powhatan. Powhatan watched the English settle on his people's land, but did not attack, maintaining a posture of coolness. When the English were going through their "starving time" in the winter of 1610, some of them ran off to join the Indians, where they would at least be fed. When the summer came, the governor of the colony sent a messenger to ask Powhatan to return the runaways, whereupon Powhatan, according to the English account, replied with "noe other than prowde and disdaynefull Answers." Some soldiers were therefore sent out "to take Revenge." They fell upon an Indian settlement, killed fifteen or sixteen Indians, burned the houses, cut down the corn growing around the village, took the queen of the tribe and her children into boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard "and shoteinge owit their Braynes in the water." The queen was later taken off and stabbed to death.

Twelve years later, the Indians, alarmed as the English settlements kept growing in numbers, apparently decided to try to wipe them out for good. They went on a rampage and massacred 347 men, women, and children. From then on it was total war.

Not able to enslave the Indians, and not able to live with them, the English decided to exterminate them. Edmund Morgan writes, in his history of early Virginia, American Slavery, American Freedom:

Since the Indians were better woodsmen than the English and virtually impossible to track down, the method was to feign peaceful intentions, let them settle down and plant their com wherever they chose, and then, just before harvest, fall upon them, killing as many as possible and burning the corn... . Within two or three years of the massacre the English had avenged the deaths of that day many times over.

Zinn, _People's History of the United States_, p. 10

[QatzelOk]

At the start of the war, the French colonies had a population of roughly 60,000 settlers, compared with 2 million in the British colonies.[4] The outnumbered French particularly depended on the Indians.

Not only that, but the "Indians" weren't worried about the French importing their undesirables and genociding the First Nations in order to steal their land to create farmland and other industrial projects in horrendous "Trails of Tears" types of ethnic-cleansing projects.

The French immigration was welcomed by First Nations (Tadoussac 1603) and sustainable (allowed First Nations to continue traditional lifestyle unimpeded). Likewise, the Acadian hybrid society had the French reclaiming ocean to create farmland - thus not impacting the hunting or fishing of their First Nations colleagues.

On the other hand, the pre-existence of First Nations wars in NE North America - especially the vicious domineering role of the handful of First Nations allied with Britain- created a pre-existing condition that the French had no way of avoiding. Though they certainly tried by signing the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701.

[ckaihatsu]

But it *is* - - labor-power (the capacity to work) is *bought-and-sold*, and the products of labor are expropriated by the employer, in return for a wage, and are sold on the market for more than was paid for them in wages.

You are aware of the fact that payment of the agreed sum for an item is not expropriation. Why pretend you are not?

You need to read what I wrote -- profits come from the *economic exploitation* of the wage-worker, for every hour of the workday.

To secure the equal individual rights of all to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor.

You should support *full nationalization* of all economic activity with this line of yours, or Stalinism / national-liberation. I would term your geoism (state landlordship) as being *partial* nationalization.

Your previously stated 'morality' / ethos / philosophy is perfectly compatible with Stalinism, or elitist bureaucratic rule.


Ideologies & Operations -- Fundamentals

Spoiler: show

Claiming themselves to be at a "lower stage of communism" (i.e. "socialism", in line with Marx's terminology),[20] the Soviet Union adapted the formula as: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work (labour investment)".[21] This was incorporated in Article 12 of the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union, but described by Leon Trotsky as "This inwardly contradictory, not to say nonsensical, formula". [22]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each ... n_the_idea

Also, your 'equal individual rights of all to [...] property in the fruits of their labor' still allows for the persistence of *equity capital* / exchange values, which is just the privatization and financialization of 'dead labor' (past labor results). Since workers are materially *compelled* to sell their labor as a commodity for the sake of a wage, so as to afford the necessities of life and living, it's *not* a fair exchange, with those who possess capital and use it to extract profits from surplus labor value.

In other words your stated principle is *meaningless* in a real-world context since 'the fruits of [workers'] labor' are *expropriated* by private ownership, for a profit, for the cost of paying out a wage to the worker. In reality the worker *doesn't get to keep* the fruits of their labor, and don't *dare* to say that a wage is economically equivalent to what they're giving up in exchange, the final produced commodity, because it's *not*. It's *exploitation* of labor.

The labour put forth toward production is embodied in the goods and exploitation occurs when someone purchases a good, with their revenue or wages, for an amount unequal to the total labour he or she has put forth.[6]

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

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That is because the markets are rigged. There is no necessary market failure in stocks or debt instruments.

Yet the current Trump bailout of the stock market is *exactly* that -- a market failure in the stock market (equities), which required government intervention, using public funds.

Such as to secure the equal individual rights of all to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor.

Tell me this, then -- why doesn't government oversight / regulation seek to end the economic exploitation of the working class, if this is its guiding principle?


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As I covered above, though, private funds collect interest the way private land property collects rent,

False. The rent of land is publicly created. Interest is earned by placing one's saved purchasing power in the service of the borrower.

Yet you support private use of land, as leased from a single-administration government landlord over all land, meaning that military violence, killings, and conquest are acceptable for initial land procurement, making the rest of the world an 'externality' to any given country.

Both private funds *and* private land are *rentier*-type (necessarily non-commodity-productive) assets, so funds collect interest and land collects rent. Under your geoist framework there would be a single-administration government landlord over all land, thus making it 'public' but still resulting from past imperialist / colonialist conquest and mass murder.

Gibberish.

Here it is -- I'm not just making it up....

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

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

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

Also:

The emergence of the new oil states and their increasing importance in world trade in the 1970s brought a renewed interest in thinking on rentier economies in the aforementioned disciplines of political science and international relations.[11] Examples of rentier states include oil-producing countries in the MENA region[12] including Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Qatar, Libya and Algeria as well as a few states in Latin America, all of whom are members of OPEC.[11][13] African states such as Nigeria, Gabon, Angola, Ghana, Uganda and South Sudan are also important oil producers with rentier economies, earning income from trading natural resources.

Rentier state theory has been one of several advanced to explain the predominance of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and the apparent lack of success of democracy in the region.[14][15] While many states export resources or license their development by foreign parties, rentier states are characterized by the relative absence of revenue from domestic taxation, as their naturally occurring wealth precludes the need to extract income from their citizenry. According to Douglas Yates,[16] the economic behavior of a rentier state

embodies a break in the work-reward causation ... [r]ewards of income and wealth for the rentier do not come as the result of work but rather are the result of chance or situation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rentier_state#Examples

Your *land*-oriented politics is economically equivalent to any *petroleum*-based national economy, since both are *rentier*-type assets -- and food / agricultural production, and real estate, too.

You want to quasi-nationalize the land resource, and all natural resources and natural monopolies, but still allow *equity* capital to feed-off of these Stalinized resources. I appreciate the 'national liberation' political aspect of it, but it still falls far short of what is actually possible, which is the *collective* administration of all non-productive and productive assets, by the world's working class.


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They are a *financial service* for those who may possibly *leverage* such funds.

Which unlike land, would not otherwise have been available. Try to find a willingness to know that fact.

No, I'm not going to be agreeing with you on this. You're touting *equity* capital as being above-the-fray, when in fact it's only able to accumulate to the extents that it does through the *exploitation* and *expropriation* of surplus labor value, from workers. This means that equity capital is just as culpable, economically, as rentier capital is.


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I have no a priori objection to big government, only to government that abrogates people's rights without just compensation.

If *labor* is only to be rewarded to the extent that it's productive, then how will this 'productivity' be decided-on - - by the 'free markets', by 'big government', or by some combination of the two? What if there's a *dispute* (by labor) over how this reward is being measured? How will that dispute be handled, according to you?

Consensually: in the market.

Hmmmm, you're not understanding - - what if Employee A goes to the employer and says 'You underpaid me on my paycheck this week' and the employer says 'No I didn't.'

How exactly is 'the market' supposed to handle this kind of dispute? (This is why government, though bourgeois, exists.)

Do you know what a "contract" is? Do you know what a record of employment is?

Any 'contract' is *meaningless* and *worthless* without government enforcement -- they're no more than 'gentlemen's agreements' otherwise.

Your politics is *dependent* on an overarching, bourgeois-type *government*, for enforcement between / among private parties. If there's ever any dispute, the *market* *won't* be able to resolve such disputes because all private entities are *legally* equivalent -- even the term 'legal' implies some kind of government regulation of whatever, which you term 'big government'. The only alternative to overarching, 'big' government would be a return to medieval-type private *warfare*, which still exists, anyway, in the unregulated / illegal / 'black' markets, like that of drugs.

Here's how things *were* done, left to private interests alone:

Spoiler: show

Cosimo de' Medici earns for himself the posthumous title pater patriae ('father of the fatherland'). It acknowledges his great contribution to the enhanced status of Florence. But it also contains, to modern ears, a hint of the method behind his power - with its echo of a mafia godfather. Cosimo never occupies an official position as head of state. He remains a private citizen, running affairs by a network of behind-the-scenes alliances which benefit his own faction and ruin his enemies.

Pater patriae: 1434-1464

From 1434 Cosimo de' Medici is unmistakably the most powerful man in Florence, even though his family's cause has suffered a severe setback in the previous year. In 1433 he is arrested by a rival faction. Bribes and well-placed friends save him from death. He is exiled for ten years, but from Venice he controls a Florentine party working for his return. It is only a year before they succeed. Cosimo is invited back, and his rivals are banished - more effectively - for life.

During a reign of 30 years, Cosimo uses his fortune to maintain absolute control over the internal affairs of Florence. Opponents find themselves squeezed to financial extinction.

Within the city this control is discreet. Outside, in relations with other powers, it is generally acknowledged that Cosimo is the ruler of Florence - by now a city state of considerable significance.

The expansion of Florentine control over the surrounding region accelerates before and during Cosimo's lifetime. Arezzo falls to a Florentine army in 1384. Pisa, a great prize, is taken in 1406. Livorno, of immense value as a seaport, is purchased in 1421.

These expansionist tendencies are mirrored by similar appetites in powerful neighbours to the north, Milan and Venice. Of the two Milan, at the turn of the century, is the more aggressive under the leadership of Gian Galeazzo Visconti. In 1402 Gian Galeazzo's sudden death saves Florence at the last moment from attack and probable capture by a Milanese army.

Four decades later, under Cosimo's leadership, Florence has her revenge. The Visconti are decisively defeated at Anghiari in 1440.

The defeat of the Milanese at Anghiari is soon followed by the end of the Visconti dynasty. The next ruler in Milan (from 1450) is a soldier of fortune, Francesco Sforza. Cosimo de' Medici now reverses the previous Florentine policy and makes an alliance with Milan (Sforza happens also to be a customer of the Medici bank). This is practical diplomacy between calculating statesmen. The encroachments of Venice are now seen by both rulers as the main threat in northern Italy.

Cosimo is interested in maintaining a balance of power between the Italian states, enabling commerce and the arts of peace to flourish in Florence. In this policy he is remarkably successful.

http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/Pla ... oryid=aa24

Spoiler: show

Lorenzo the Magnificent: 1469-1492

Cosimo de' Medici dies in 1464. He is succeeded for five years by his son Piero, on whose death the leading citizens of Florence invite Piero's son Lorenzo, aged only twenty, to occupy the same informal position as ruler of the city. Lorenzo accepts what seems now almost a hereditary role. But he lacks his grandfather's skill either in running the family bank or in using his wealth to neutralize opposing factions.

The result, in 1478, is a conspiracy which nearly ends his rule.

A plot against Lorenzo and his younger brother Guiliano is hatched by a dangerous coalition. The conspirators include the Pazzi family (rival bankers), the archbishop of Pisa (a city restless under Florentine control) and a nephew of the pope, Sixtus IV. The pope has recently transferred the papal account from the Medici bank to the Pazzi and would prefer a more docile ruler in Florence.

The plot involves sacrilege and murder. The Medici brothers are to be struck down as they kneel before the altar during high mass in the cathedral in Florence. The signal for the assassination is to be the raising of the host.

In the event Giuliano is killed by one of the Pazzi clan, but Lorenzo escapes with a wound after fighting his way out of the cathedral. Florence remains loyal to the Medici. The conspirators are rounded up. By nightfall three of the Pazzi, together with the archbishop of Pisa in his ecclesiastical attire, are hanging from windows of Florence's government building, the Signoria.

But this is not the end of the crisis. The pope excommunicates Lorenzo de' Medici and persuades the king of Naples, Ferdinand I, to mount an expedition against Florence. During 1479 war drags painfully on, with losses of territory and the expense of maintaining a mercenary army in the field.

In December 1479 Lorenzo takes a step so bold that it would justify in itself the phrase by which history knows him - Lorenzo the Magnificent (in reality Il Magnifico is a title given quite commonly at the time to non-princely rulers of states). He travels secretly with a small party to Naples, placing himself recklessly in the king's power.

He argues to Ferdinand I that warfare between Italian powers increases the likelihood of a French invasion (the French claim upon Naples). Ferdinand is by now weary of a campaign more in the pope's interest than his own. Lorenzo returns to Florence with a peace treaty.

For the remaining twelve years of Lorenzo's life, Florence is stable and calm. But his proudest achievement, he writes in 1489, is an event of that year which could only have happened during the Renaissance papacy. He persuades the pope (by now Innocent VIII) to make his second son Giovanni a cardinal. Giovanni is thirteen.

In the long run Lorenzo is proved right. This event is of great significance in the Medici story. Giovanni becomes the first of two Medici popes, as Leo X, and the link with Rome greatly benefits the family. But in the shorter term, almost immediately after Lorenzo's death in 1492, the family fortunes crumble.

http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/Pla ... oryid=aa24

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A post-capitalist socialism would see aggregated need / want / whim either *fulfilled* from the communistic gift economy of uncoerced voluntary liberated-labor, or else it wouldn't be - - the easiest, most-common mass needs would be far more likely to be fulfilled in this way, especially if fully-automated, once-and-for-all.

That is an admirably honest expression of the basic tenet of Marxism: the desire to have one's desires fulfilled by others without the need to contribute anything in return.

Well, that's your *own* interpretation, of course -- what you're describing is actually *class privilege*, as it exists today.

My politics call for this kind of material-economic practice to be continued *post-capitalism*, to benefit *everyone*, in a classless, stateless society. With full automation there wouldn't have to be *anyone* doing the labor -- we could all finally benefit from the productivity ('slavery') of *machines*, fully, instead of from any human labor of any kind.

The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of everyone else. There will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... /soul-man/

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Yes, the capitalism dynamic tends to *overproduction*, but that just begs the question - - isn't earth's collection of conscious human beings collectively *smart enough* to *democratize* economic dynamics (as in the way I just mentioned), so that supply and demand match-up appropriately, from a pre-planned production plan, over worldwide-collectivized productive assets, so that capitalist overproduction becomes a thing of the past?

No. Not even close.

Yet your own proposed political reforms only go so far as Stalinizing *land*, and little else.

We now have the *communications technology* to mass-aggregate individual demands for goods and services on a *realtime* basis (I suggest daily), so *technologically* we don't need money / exchange-values anymore because everything can now be done on a fully *intentional* basis, eliminating the 'middleman' of money entirely.


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Also, your focus on strict productivity is to the detriment of *workers'* interests for quality-of-life issues. Many would argue for some *output* inefficiencies if it meant that workers could be in collective *control* of production, if at the expense of overall productivity and even consumers' interests for luxury / specialty goods.

Like you, they don't understand what production is. It exists purely to enable consumption, not to provide workers with a sense of autonomy, satisfaction, or solidarity.

But again, this is only *your own* personal, *subjective* interpretation talking. Your politics being what they are, all you're going to get from your *opinions* is a nod from your own mirror reflection, which you'll have to be providing yourself.

*You* think that labor can just be used-up without any regard to its humanity, and personal human needs, but guess what? Current conditions, with the coronavirus lockdown, are functionally equivalent to a *mass labor strike*, worldwide, and public opinion is now swinging over to *sympathize* with the remaining, 'essential' workforce:


America Is About to Witness the Biggest Labor Movement It’s Seen in Decades

https://marker.medium.com/america-is-ab ... a47f0edf52


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My original point remains intact and standing, that the rich have been receiving according to their needs / wants / whims, for centuries now.

No, according to their privileges.

Okay, it's practically the same thing, with the point that the privilege of wealth *confers* a far greater range of satisfying personal needs, wants, and whims.

Privilege can confer or add to wealth -- indeed, these days wealth is little else -- but they are not the same thing.

You're making it sound as though wealth ownership is 'all business', and dull and boring, when that's *not* the case -- the wealthy are *known* for their extravagance and ostentation.


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And you should clarify what you mean by 'justice', regarding government and governance.

Same thing it always means: rewards commensurate with contributions and penalties commensurate with deprivations.

Spoken like a true Stalinist. Congratulations on your mastery of statecraft.


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You're still ignoring the economic *exploitation* of commodified wage-labor, by equity capital.

Because payment of the agreed sum for an item is not exploitation. If there is exploitation of labor by employers, it can only be because LANDOWNERS or other privilege holders have deprived the worker of his liberty, his options, and thus his bargaining power.

No, this is too land-centric, and you're ignoring the empirical economic *exploitation* of labor, by equity capital.

False. The factory owner has no POWER to DEPRIVE the worker of anything. The landowner DOES. Why do you refuse to know that fact?

Why do *you* refuse to acknowledge equity capital's exploitation of the labor commodity (like any other commodity) -- ?

Here it is again, copied-and-pasted from above:

The labour put forth toward production is embodied in the goods and exploitation occurs when someone purchases a good, with their revenue or wages, for an amount unequal to the total labour he or she has put forth.[6]

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

What this is *saying*, is that the wage-laborer cannot afford to buy the very thing that they have just produced, because the wages they're paid are not enough to actually *pay for* that item. If that isn't *theft* -- for you 'true crime' types out there -- I don't know what is.


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It's *all* capital / exchange-values that are to blame, and not just rentier-type capital, or land.

False. Privilege requires abrogation of rights, depriving others of something they would otherwise have. Owning a factory or one's savings does not deprive anyone of anything they would otherwise have. Owning land does. You have merely decided not to know that fact, because you have already realized that it proves your beliefs are false and evil.

Copy-and-paste:

The labour put forth toward production is embodied in the goods and exploitation occurs when someone purchases a good, with their revenue or wages, for an amount unequal to the total labour he or she has put forth.[6]

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

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Equity ownership deprives the worker of *surplus labor value*, which is the value from their work, above and beyond that which is materially required to maintain and sustain the labor pool going-forward, into the future (wages, basically).

No it doesn't. They are paid the exact market value of their work, and they don't produce any more value than that.

This is *incorrect*.

If what you're saying were *true* then there wouldn't be any profits -- which you've acknowledged in the past -- because it would just be a straight pass-through of value from revenue, to fixed costs (infrastructure and raw materials), and to labor (wages), and maybe a small fee to the capitalist for their 'labor', the costs of management / social-organization (or it might be outsourced).


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show

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It is the entrepreneur whose contribution produces any value above what is spent on production.

Here you're *apologizing* for the capitalist's role in production, and *exaggerating* it.

What is the glorified entrepreneur doing except the same thing that *any* capitalist does -- providing capital and social-organization, and maybe internal management (or outsourcing it) -- ?

So it's the *equity capital* / 'dead labor' that's providing the *real* value, to initiate the exploitation of labor, for the commodity-production process. The capitalist's role *should* be treated as no more than any regular white-collar work role in the process, like that of an accountant, yet due to capitalism's social norms, the capitalist is allowed to be the 'independent variable', and to command the private structure / enterprise as they see fit, and to derive potentially *limitless* profits from the sales revenue.


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Profits are directly realized from this expropriation of surplus labor value, from workers.

No they aren't. They are realized from what the entrepreneur contributes.

I'll reiterate:

If what you're saying were *true* then there wouldn't be any profits -- which you've acknowledged in the past -- because it would just be a straight pass-through of value from revenue, to fixed costs (infrastructure and raw materials), and to labor (wages), and maybe a small fee to the capitalist for their 'labor', the costs of management / social-organization (or it might be outsourced).

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Again, this is *bias* and *favoritism* on your part, regarding equity capital versus rentier capital.

No, it is willingness to know the fact that they are not the same thing, any more than air and water are the same thing.

Yes, both 'rentier' *and* 'equity' capital are *privileges* because they are *savings* / surpluses, compared to the wage-worker who has nothing but their own ability to work, to use economically.


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Equity capital economically *exploits* the wage-worker, which you'd rather ignore.

I ignore it because it is a Marxist fabrication.

Well, your repeated dismissive name-calling certainly isn't convincing. I've consistently at least provided *backing* for my claim (whether you want to call it 'Marxist' or not), that equity capital economically exploits the wage-worker. Here it is again, hopefully for your edification:

If what you're saying were *true* then there wouldn't be any profits -- which you've acknowledged in the past -- because it would just be a straight pass-through of value from revenue, to fixed costs (infrastructure and raw materials), and to labor (wages), and maybe a small fee to the capitalist for their 'labor', the costs of management / social-organization (or it might be outsourced).

And:

The labour put forth toward production is embodied in the goods and exploitation occurs when someone purchases a good, with their revenue or wages, for an amount unequal to the total labour he or she has put forth.[6]

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

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No, I am stating self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality.

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I think you're overemphasizing the role of genetics in our modern workplace environment. Certainly I'd think that *personal subjective interest* is a far more powerful factor in personal success than any nominal phenotypical advantages or disadvantages one may have from one's genetic lineage.

Where do you think that personal subjective interest comes from?

I could use your own subscription to *eugenics*-type beliefs as an example - - science discovered genetics and the class composition of our society *adopted* this kind of genetics-based reasoning about social dynamics into its ruling-class culture, and here you are. You didn't make it up on your own, it already existed in the world and you've adopted it into your way of thinking about the world.

But I haven't said class is genetic. It's not. It's based on privilege, which is legal, not genetic. What's (largely) genetic is people's personalities, attitudes and choices, which influence their success at work.

Okay, so you *acknowledge* that the class divide exists, and also that it's a *human-social* dynamic, and *not* genetically determined.

Do you think that we have conscious *free will*, despite the qualitative inclinations / predispositions we may get from our genetic makeup?

[ckaihatsu]

Not only that, but the "Indians" weren't worried about the French importing their undesirables and genociding the First Nations in order to steal their land to create farmland and other industrial projects in horrendous "Trails of Tears" types of ethnic-cleansing projects.

The French immigration was welcomed by First Nations (Tadoussac 1603) and sustainable (allowed First Nations to continue traditional lifestyle unimpeded). Likewise, the Acadian hybrid society had the French reclaiming ocean to create farmland - thus not impacting the hunting or fishing of their First Nations colleagues.

On the other hand, the pre-existence of First Nations wars in NE North America - especially the vicious domineering role of the handful of First Nations allied with Britain- created a pre-existing condition that the French had no way of avoiding. Though they certainly tried by signing the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701.

Noted, thanks.

[Hindsite]

If you think genocides are funny, your Hallelujahs take on a completely different light.

My wife also thinks I have a weird sense of humor. However, I wasn't laughing at genocide, but the way you presented it. You know, like it is not funny that a person falls and gets hurt, but the way the person falls is sometimes funny.
Praise the Lord.

[ckaihatsu]

Speaking as a mingy little beast, and, germane to the thread's topic, here's a gratuitous post for (yet-another) new diagram:


Components of Social Production

Spoiler: show

[ckaihatsu]

Also, is there someone I can *pay* to get my corruption level lowered?


x D

[QatzelOk]

I wasn't laughing at genocide, but the way you presented it.
Praise the Lord.

Well then, here's another way of presenting the genocides that were foundational to the creation of the United States:

The first wave of colonizer occupation and displacement took place from 1492 until 1776. It is rarely acknowledged, but the motives of the white, male property owners seeking independence from the British were not entirely as pure as our national myths proclaim.

Among the incentives for overthrowing British rule was a bitter dispute over westward expansion beyond the 13 original colonies. An aspect of this is captured in the Declaration of Independence. ...

Grievance 7. He has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

Grievance 27. “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

To summarize these two very important grievances :

7. The King of England prevented the continuation of genocide and annexing of the continent westward (Ohio Valley)

27. That the King of England promised the First Nations the right to stay on the lands they occupied west of what was already genocided - and "we the people" are racist as hell against them so they have to go.

[SolarCross]

@QatzelOk

^ I think the founders also feared that slavery would be outlawed if the colonies became formally under the rule of King George.

"Knavery* seems to be so much a striking feature of it's inhabitants that it may not in the end be an evil that they will become aliens to this kingdom" - King George III of England speaking of the colonists of the 13 colonies.

* knavery means something like criminality or immoral conduct.