[wat0n]

Both. OPEC decided to lower production, hence the scarcity. Note that it was a government decision, but it could have been for another reason.

[ckaihatsu]

Both. OPEC decided to lower production, hence the scarcity. Note that it was a government decision, but it could have been for another reason.

You can just *say* it -- it was about *politics*:

In October 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC, consisting of the Arab majority of OPEC plus Egypt and Syria) declared significant production cuts and an oil embargo against the United States and other industrialized nations that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War.[20][21]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEC#1973 ... il_embargo

[wat0n]

The cuts were on the table before the Yom Kippur War though. That was just a great cover, the real reason being they wanted a greater share of the profits for their governments. It's not surprising, OPEC has been profitable for its members after all.

[late]

You're repeatedly referencing a *capitalism* framework / political economy, but the workers of the world don't *require* any artifacts from the (current) period of bourgeois class hegemony.

This *isn't* a build-a-better-mousetrap kind of situation, late, it's about *which class* controls society's social production.

The way I would put it, it's about who it's for.

In my country, the rich are basically royalty in everything but title, but I expect that to come along eventually. But in Europe, to varying degrees, there is less income inequality, and a much better social safety net. Norway, in particular, has policies that would really help us. Their secondary education is terrific. I'd like to see us copy the way they handle oil.

[ckaihatsu]

The way I would put it, it's about who it's for.

Would this be analogous to Potemkin's mention of 'distribution' under capitalism -- ?

[late]

Would this be analogous to Potemkin's mention of 'distribution' under capitalism -- ?

I have no idea what he said.

[ckaihatsu]

The cuts were on the table before the Yom Kippur War though. That was just a great cover, the real reason being they wanted a greater share of the profits for their governments. It's not surprising, OPEC has been profitable for its members after all.

Here's what *preceded* 1973:

Military spending

Another explanation for this period is the theory of the permanent war economy, which suggests that the large spending on the military helped stabilize the global economy; this has also been referred to as "Military Keynesianism". This also goes into hand with retired WWII vets with pensions to spend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%8 ... y_spending

And then (from earlier in the thread):

However, despite the temporary recovery from the 1973-75 recession, the most vital indices of world capitalism showed that there was no return to the boom conditions of the Bretton Woods era. The term “stagflation” came into use during the late 1970s, referring to high rates of inflation and low rates of growth.

The most significant statistic is that relating to the rate of profit, which declined steadily throughout the 1970s. Both in Europe and the United States, the rate of profit fell sharply after 1974. By 1976, the average rate of return on invested capital was 9.2%, compared with 13.4% in 1966. The profit rate for nonfinancial companies in the United States fell from 15.5% in 1963-66 to 12.7% in 1967-70, 10.1% in 1971-74, and 9.7% in 1978. In 1965, profits amounted to 14% of the national income. By 1970, they had fallen to 8.8%. In 1980, the figure was 8.2%, and it fell to a low of 6.7% in 1982.

viewtopic.php?p=15211676#p15211676

[ckaihatsu]

The way I would put it, it's about who it's for.

Would this be analogous to Potemkin's mention of 'distribution' under capitalism -- ?

I have no idea what he said.

---

Marx of course proved that under capitalism machines (which I would suspect include robots) can't really replace labor power, as surplus value is the basis of all profits. Capitalists are of course coerced into replacing humans with machines, but the machines produce no surplus value.

A society based on robotic production would therefore have to be post-capitalist.

This is of course a point which most utopians who talk about a leisure society based on robots doing all the work don't understand, for good or bad, but they usually don't grasp this point.

Precisely, which is why they are utopianists rather than serious commentators. Any such "leisure society" would have huge implications for the mode of economic production. If robots do all the work, then who will be able to earn any money to buy any of this abundance of goods and services? There is a glaring distribution problem. This thought never seems to occur to them. It's weird. Are they really that dim?

viewtopic.php?p=15209881#p15209881

[late]

robots

Huh?

I wasn't talking about the future...

But I was talking about what makes a country good. We had a shootout last nite in Arizona. Some cops were shot or killed (64 last year in Az). The crazy guy also killed his wife. That's not good.

So.. is this what you mean?:

[ckaihatsu]

In my country, the rich are basically royalty in everything but title, but I expect that to come along eventually. But in Europe, to varying degrees, there is less income inequality, and a much better social safety net. Norway, in particular, has policies that would really help us. Their secondary education is terrific. I'd like to see us copy the way they handle oil.

Back to the dreamy 'social democracy' ideal, huh -- ?

It took a wrong turn in Germany....

Instead of obeying their orders to begin preparations to fight the British, German sailors led a revolt in the naval ports of Wilhelmshaven on 29 October 1918, followed by the Kiel mutiny in the first days of November. These disturbances spread the spirit of civil unrest across Germany and ultimately led to the proclamation of a republic to replace the imperial monarchy on 9 November 1918, two days before Armistice Day. Shortly thereafter, Emperor Wilhelm II fled the country and abdicated his throne.

The revolutionaries, inspired by liberalism and socialist ideas, did not hand over power to Soviet-style councils as the Bolsheviks had done in Russia, because the leadership of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) opposed their creation. The SPD opted instead for a national assembly that would form the basis for a parliamentary system of government.[1] Fearing an all-out civil war in Germany between militant workers and reactionary conservatives, the SPD did not plan to strip the old German upper classes completely of their power and privileges. Instead, it sought to peacefully integrate them into the new social democratic system. In this endeavour, SPD leftists sought an alliance with the German Supreme Command. This allowed the army and the Freikorps (nationalist militias) to act with enough autonomy to quell the communist Spartacist uprising of 4–15 January 1919 by force. The same alliance of political forces succeeded in suppressing leftist uprisings in other parts of Germany, with the result that the country was completely pacified by late 1919.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Re ... %80%931919

[late]

It took a wrong turn in Germany....

1918???

That was a different country.

You badly need to do better than that.

[ckaihatsu]

1918???

That was a different country.

You badly need to do better than that.

The *point* of it is that Germany had its chance to put the country on a firm footing after the overthrow of the monarchy. Its embrace of your championed 'social democracy' led to alliances with the former royal / aristocratic sections, and with the military. And we all know how *that* turned out, in WWII.

[late]

The *point* of it is that Germany had its chance to put the country on a firm footing after the overthrow of the monarchy. Its embrace of your championed 'social democracy' led to alliances with the former royal / aristocratic sections, and with the military. And we all know how *that* turned out, in WWII.

That was worse than dead on arrival.

It's lying. I expect that from Right wing lunatics, but not from people I don't hold in contempt.

[ckaihatsu]

That was worse than dead on arrival.

It's lying. I expect that from Right wing lunatics, but not from people I don't hold in contempt.

Okay, let me bottom-line it for you, late -- you need to stop going on about your gauzy hazy parliamentary-type promises and political marketing, when the actual *history* of intended social-democracy has been so abysmal.

That's all.

[Rugoz]

Back to the dreamy 'social democracy' ideal, huh -- ?

It took a wrong turn in Germany....

A successful communist revolution in Germany 1918 was impossible.

Instead I suggest you blame the KPD (communist party of Germany), without which the Nazi party would never have gained such strength.

[late]

Okay, let me bottom-line it for you, late

Your trying to ride a dead horse, and you know it.

You wouldn't stoop to calling nazis socialists if you weren't desperate...

First Rule of Holes, when you're in one, stop digging.

[ckaihatsu]

Your trying to ride a dead horse, and you know it.

You wouldn't stoop to calling nazis socialists if you weren't desperate...

First Rule of Holes, when you're in one, stop digging.

You're mistaken. If you look back I never conflated Nazis with socialism.

Here -- this is you:

A whole school of ex-Maoist ‘New Philosophers’ emerged in France, who taught that revolution automatically leads to tyranny and that the revolutionary left are as bad as the fascist right.

Harman, _People's History of the World_, p. 576

[ckaihatsu]

A successful communist revolution in Germany 1918 was impossible.

Instead I suggest you blame the KPD (communist party of Germany), without which the Nazi party would never have gained such strength.

Nope -- it was the SPD that was the definitive sell-out, because it was pro-war:

In January 1918 a wave of strikes swept through Austria-Hungary and Germany, involving half a million metal workers in Vienna and Berlin. The strikers were to a considerable degree inspired by the Russian Revolution, and they were subject to vicious police attacks. Yet the Berlin workers still had enough illusions in the pro-war SPD leaders Ebert and Scheidemann to give them places on the strike committee. They used their influence to undermine the strike and ensure its defeat, with massive levels of victimisation.

Rosa Luxemburg, in prison in Breslau, had foreseen the dangers facing Russia in a letter to Karl Kautsky’s wife, Luise, on 24 November:

Are you happy about the Russians? Of course they will not be able to maintain themselves in this witches’ sabbath, not because statistics show economic development in Russia to be too backward, as your clever husband has figured out, but because social democracy in the highly developed West consists of miserable and wretched cowards who will look quietly on and let the Russians bleed to death.80

Harman, _People's History of the World_, p. 425

---

As huge crowds stormed through the streets of Vienna, demanding a republic and tearing down imperial emblems,87 power in the German-speaking part of Austria passed into the hands of a Social Democrat led coalition with the bourgeois parties.

Germany’s own high command, desperate to rescue something from the debacle, ordered its fleet to sail against Britain in the hope of a sudden, redeeming, naval victory. But its sailors were not prepared to accept certain death. Their mutiny the year before had been crushed and its leaders executed because it had been too passive—they had simply gone on strike, allowing the officers and military police to hit back at them. This time they did not make the same mistake. Sailors in Kiel armed themselves, marched through the town alongside striking dockers, disarmed their opponents and established a soldiers’ council. They lit a fuse for the whole of Germany.

Huge demonstrations of workers and soldiers took control of Bremen, Hamburg, Hanover, Cologne, Leipzig, Dresden and scores of other towns. In Munich they took over the royal palace and proclaimed an anti-war reformist socialist, Kurt Eisner, prime minister of a ‘Bavarian Free State’. On 9 November it was Berlin’s turn. As vast processions of workers and soldiers with guns and red flags swarmed through the capital, the recently released anti-war revolutionary Karl Liebknecht proclaimed a ‘socialist republic’ and the ‘world revolution’ from the balcony of the imperial palace. Not to be outdone, the pro-war SPD minister in the Kaiser’s last government, Scheidemann, proclaimed a ‘republic’ from the balcony of the imperial parliament. The Kaiser fled to Holland, and the two Social Democrat parties presented a ‘revolutionary government’ of ‘people’s commissars’ for endorsement by an assembly of 1,500 workers’ and soldiers’ delegates. It symbolised the fact that soldiers’ and workers’ councils were now the arbiters of political power everywhere in Germany, and in German-occupied Belgium. The forces of revolution embodied in such councils, or soviets, seemed to be sweeping across the whole of northern Eurasia, from the North Sea to the North Pacific.

But the German councils had given revolutionary power to men determined not to use it for revolutionary ends. Ebert, the new prime minister, was on the phone to General Groener of the military high command within 24 hours. The pair agreed to work together—with the support of Hindenburg, the wartime ‘dictator’—to restore order in the army so that the army could restore order in society as a whole.88

Social Democrat politicians who had stood for reform via the capitalist state had logically supported that state when it came to war in 1914. Now, just as logically, they tried to re-establish the power of that state in the face of revolution. For them the old structures of repression and class power were ‘order’; the challenge to those structures from the exploited and dispossessed represented ‘anarchy’ and ‘chaos’.

The living embodiments of this challenge were the best-known opponents of the war—Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Liebknecht in particular had massive support among the soldiers and workers of Berlin. The Social Democrat leaders manoeuvred with the military high command to destroy this. They provoked a rising in the city in order to crush it with troops from outside, blaming the bloodshed on Liebknecht and Luxemburg. The pair were seized by army officers. Liebknecht was knocked unconscious and then shot. Luxemburg’s skull was smashed by a rifle butt, she was shot in the head and then thrown in a canal. The Social Democrat press reported that Liebknecht had been shot ‘while trying to escape’ and that Luxemburg had been killed ‘by an angry crowd’. When respectable members of the middle class read the news, they ‘jumped for joy’.89 Nothing had changed since the days of the Gracchus brothers and Spartacus in the attitude of the ‘civilised’ rich towards those who resisted their rule.

However, subduing the revolutionary ferment was not an easy task for the alliance between the Social Democrats and the military. Historians have often given the impression that the German Revolution was a minor event, ended easily and rapidly. This is even the message conveyed by Eric Hobsbawm’s often stimulating history of the 20th century, The Age of Extremes. He writes that after a few days in November ‘the republicanised old regime was no longer seriously troubled by the socialists…[and] even less by the newly improvised Communist Party’.90 In fact the first great wave of revolutionary ferment was not brought to an end until the summer of 1920, and there was a second wave in 1923.

As with every great revolution in history, that of November 1918 led to vast numbers of people becoming interested in politics for the first time. Talk of revolution and socialism was no longer confined to the core of workers who had voted socialist before 1914. It spread to millions of workers and lower middle class people who had previously voted for the Catholic Centre Party, the liberal Progressives, the illiberal ‘National Liberals’, or even the agrarian party run by the Prussian landowners. In the course of the war many of the old Social Democrat workers had begun to identify with the left wing opponents of the pro-war leaders—around half the members of the old SPD went over to the left wing Independent Social Democrats. But for every one of these, there were many other people who had moved to the left from the bourgeois parties and still saw the Social Democrat leaders as socialists. Where in the past they had opposed the Social Democrats for this, now they supported them.

The Social Democrat leaders played on these feelings, continuing to make left wing speeches but insisting that left wing policies could only be introduced gradually, by maintaining order and resisting revolutionary ‘excesses’. They claimed it was Luxemburg and Liebknecht who endangered the revolution, while secretly arranging with the generals to shoot down those who disagreed.

They were helped in putting across this message by the leaders of the Independent Social Democrats. These had not been happy about the war, but most remained committed to reforming capitalism. Their ranks included Kautsky, Bernstein, and Hilferding—who would be economics minister in two coalition governments with the bourgeois parties in the next decade. For the crucial first two months of the revolution the party served loyally in a government led by the majority SPD and helped sell its policies to the mass of workers and soldiers.

But, as the weeks passed, people who had been enthusiastic supporters of the Social Democrat leaders began to turn against them. Troops, sent to Berlin to help the government assert control in November, rose against it in the first week of January, and many of the workers and soldiers who helped suppress the January rising were themselves in revolt in the capital by March. Elections in mid-January gave the SPD 11.5 million votes and the Independent Social Democrats 2.3 million. Yet in the next few weeks workers who had voted solidly for the Social Democrats in the Ruhr, central Germany, Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin and Munich went on general strike and took up arms against the policies of the government. By June 1920 the SPD vote was only 600,000 higher than that of the Independent Social Democrats.

The Social Democrat leaders rapidly discovered that they could not rely simply on their own popularity to ‘restore order’. Late in December 1918 the Social Democrat minister of the interior, Noske, boasted that ‘someone has to be the bloodhound’, and agreed with the generals to set up a special mercenary force, the Freikorps. Drawn from the officers and ‘storm battalions’ of the old army, it was thoroughly reactionary. ‘It was as if the old order rose again,’ observed the conservative historian Meinecke. The language of the Freikorps was vehemently nationalistic and often anti-Semitic. It banners were often adorned with an ancient Hindu symbol for good luck, the swastika, and many of its members went on to form the cadres of the Nazi Party.

The history of Germany in the first half of 1919 is the history of the march of the Freikorps through the country attacking the very people who had made the November Revolution and voted Social Democrat in the January election. It met repeated armed resistance, culminating in the proclamation in April of a short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic with its own Red Army of 15,000.

Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 430-434

[late]

You're mistaken. If you look back I never conflated Nazis with socialism.

"Its embrace of your championed 'social democracy' led to alliances with the former royal / aristocratic sections, and with the military. And we all know how *that* turned out, in WWII."

That's still crazy talk..

You are throwing labels around as if the labels conferred equivalence. That's not only not intellectual, it's anti-intellectual.

[ckaihatsu]

"Its embrace of your championed 'social democracy' led to alliances with the former royal / aristocratic sections, and with the military. And we all know how *that* turned out, in WWII."

I've since posted corroborating material for my claim, to this thread:

The Kaiser fled to Holland, and the two Social Democrat parties presented a ‘revolutionary government’ of ‘people’s commissars’ for endorsement by an assembly of 1,500 workers’ and soldiers’ delegates. It symbolised the fact that soldiers’ and workers’ councils were now the arbiters of political power everywhere in Germany, and in German-occupied Belgium. The forces of revolution embodied in such councils, or soviets, seemed to be sweeping across the whole of northern Eurasia, from the North Sea to the North Pacific.

But the German councils had given revolutionary power to men determined not to use it for revolutionary ends. Ebert, the new prime minister, was on the phone to General Groener of the military high command within 24 hours. The pair agreed to work together—with the support of Hindenburg, the wartime ‘dictator’—to restore order in the army so that the army could restore order in society as a whole.88

The Social Democrat leaders rapidly discovered that they could not rely simply on their own popularity to ‘restore order’. Late in December 1918 the Social Democrat minister of the interior, Noske, boasted that ‘someone has to be the bloodhound’, and agreed with the generals to set up a special mercenary force, the Freikorps. Drawn from the officers and ‘storm battalions’ of the old army, it was thoroughly reactionary. ‘It was as if the old order rose again,’ observed the conservative historian Meinecke. The language of the Freikorps was vehemently nationalistic and often anti-Semitic. It banners were often adorned with an ancient Hindu symbol for good luck, the swastika, and many of its members went on to form the cadres of the Nazi Party.

viewtopic.php?p=15211953#p15211953

---

That's still crazy talk..

You are throwing labels around as if the labels conferred equivalence. That's not only not intellectual, it's anti-intellectual.