Origina of Value - Page 7 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Discourse exclusively on the basis of historical materialist methodology.
Forum rules: No one line posts please. This forum is for discussion based on Marxism, Marxism-Leninism and similar revisions. Critique of topics not based on historical materialism belongs in the general Communism forum.
User avatar
By ingliz
#15326665
Truth To Power wrote:<yawn>

Aggravated criminal damage is an offence that carries a custodial sentence. And as those who do not work do not eat, you will serve your sentence in a work camp.

So the elderly and disabled go to the gulag.

I don't know why you are getting in a tizz.

Capitalist America has its gulags.

It's a growing industry run amok.

So the elderly and disabled go to the gulag.

Criminals are sent to work camps.

elderly and disabled

If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.


:)
#15326688
Potemkin wrote:If other people do it they’re evil parasites, but if you do it it’s okay, because Jefferson. Awesome. 8)

The genius of institutionalized evil is that first it makes its victims participate in it in self-defense; then it makes them dependent on it; finally, it recruits them as its most fanatical defenders. I was in the first stage, and if I do return to it, I won't be leaving it: I'm never going to allow myself to become dependent on landowner privilege, let alone ever defend it. Almost all small landowners are deep into the third stage.

In a typical advanced capitalist economy, landowners extract 20%-30% of GDP in land rent, depending on the country. For the USA, that amounts to ~$15-$18K per capita per year (on the low end because it is not a crowded country like European or East Asian capitalist countries, and there are large areas where land rents are low). That is the size of the subsidy to landowners that the productive are forced to provide, through both their taxes and the uncompensated deprivation of their liberty rights, by the institution of private landowning. So that's ~$60-$70K/yr that landowners take from a family of four. The small landowner who just owns the little postage stamp of land under his suburban SFD house gets back maybe $10K/yr in land rent. And he thinks because he is a landowner, the system of landowner privilege is working to his benefit! He'll never consent to give back the $10K, even though he would get back $50K-$60K under a system of justice in public revenue and land tenure arrangements.

Not one person in 1000 is intelligent enough to understand this economic relationship, and of those who are, most are small landowners in the final stage, where they have been completely suborned by evil.
#15326691
ingliz wrote:Aggravated criminal damage is an offence that carries a custodial sentence.

Not to your own rightful property it isn't, and I will thank you to remember it.
And as those who do not work do not eat, you will serve your sentence in a work camp.

The most consistent characteristic of the socialist mentality is an intense, almost sexual desire to exercise irresponsible power over their economic, moral, and intellectual superiors. Your desire to inflict suffering on me for having the temerity to always prove you wrong is almost palpable.
I don't know why you are getting in a tizz.

Capitalist America has its gulags.

It's a growing industry run amok.

I don't advocate or defend capitalism, much less the American system of penal slavery.
Criminals are sent to work camps.

It's not a crime to destroy your own rightful property. Disposition is one of the four defining characteristics of property, along with exclusion, control, and benefit.
If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.

It's not a crime to destroy your own rightful property. Disposition is one of the four defining characteristics of property, along with exclusion, control, and benefit.

Of course, in a socialist society, peaceful exercise of one's property rights is made into a criminal offense by law so that the socialists in authority can satisfy their desire to exercise irresponsible power over their economic, moral, and intellectual superiors.
User avatar
By ingliz
#15326694
@Truth To Power

In a socialist society, your house is not your property.

You are merely the tenant.

It belongs to us, to do with as we will.


:lol:
Last edited by ingliz on 08 Oct 2024 17:33, edited 2 times in total.
#15326696
Hakeer wrote:From your perspective, you are taking back some of the money evil parasites have taken from you, and you are doing it by exploiting people who can only afford to rent rather than get in the land owning business themselves. This is a choice you made.

They are going to be exploited anyway. At least I make sure I treat them better than the average landlord. I have had tenants who returned years later and thanked me for the best tenancy experience of their lives.
Are you saying you feel no guilt when you think of it this way?

It's more sadness that that is how the system works. They are better off for being my victims rather than someone else's, much like Jefferson's slaves. Jefferson had the power to free his slaves, but he could not guarantee they would not be re-enslaved by someone who would treat them far worse (see "12 Years a Slave"), and it would do nothing for any other slave. The problem was with the institution, not Jefferson.

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." -- Thomas Jefferson
#15326697
wat0n wrote:So how do you determine use values?

You mean utility? What would it mean to "determine" the capacity of something to satisfy human desires? Everyone has a more or less vague notion of how much they would like to enjoy various things, but this changes by the hour, sometimes the minute. The marketing industry -- by far the world's largest -- is based on the fact that it can to a great extent be manipulated by others.
By wat0n
#15326698
Truth To Power wrote:You mean utility? What would it mean to "determine" the capacity of something to satisfy human desires? Everyone has a more or less vague notion of how much they would like to enjoy various things, but this changes by the hour, sometimes the minute. The marketing industry -- by far the world's largest -- is based on the fact that it can to a great extent be manipulated by others.


I want Marxists to explain how.
#15326699
ingliz wrote:@Truth To Power

In a socialist society, your house is not your property.

I thought it was only the means of production that would be stolen by the collective.
You are merely the tenant.

So the idea is to charge me rent for permission to use what I created myself, and the collective did not create?

Somehow, I kinda figured it'd be something like that...
It belongs to us, to do with as we will.

Just like your economic, moral, and intellectual betters, whom you fantasize about torturing to death in your gulag. Check.
User avatar
By Hakeer
#15326700
Truth To Power wrote:They are going to be exploited anyway. At least I make sure I treat them better than the average landlord. I have had tenants who returned years later and thanked me for the best tenancy experience of their lives.

It's more sadness that that is how the system works. They are better off for being my victims rather than someone else's, much like Jefferson's slaves. Jefferson had the power to free his slaves, but he could not guarantee they would not be re-enslaved by someone who would treat them far worse (see "12 Years a Slave"), and it would do nothing for any other slave. The problem was with the institution, not Jefferson.

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." -- Thomas Jefferson


You are like the boxing promoter, Don King. He once said, “It’s okay to fuck a boxer so long as you use Vaseline.” No guilt.
#15326701
wat0n wrote:I want Marxists to explain how.

Blah blah blah bourgeois blah blah abstractulated laborificness blah blah historical relations of production blah blah capitalist exploitation blah blah crisis of overproduction blah blah blah...

There. Saved you a lot of wasted time.
User avatar
By ingliz
#15326702
@Truth To Power

Why do you think it is your 'rightful' property? It's as if you foolishly believe you have a natural right to own a house when rights are privileges granted by government.


:lol:
#15326703
Hakeer wrote:You are like the boxing promoter, Don King. He once said, “It’s okay to fuck a boxer so long as you use Vaseline.” No guilt.

Well, if they would otherwise be fucked without....
User avatar
By Hakeer
#15326704
Truth To Power wrote:Well, if they would otherwise be fucked without....


I wonder whether scammers who swindle naive elderly people out of their savings tell themselves the same thing. No guilt.
#15326705
ingliz wrote:@Truth To Power

Why do you think it is your 'rightful' property?

Because I either caused it to exist, or paid someone (who paid someone who paid someone...) to cause it to exist, and my ownership of it therefore does not deprive anyone else of anything they would otherwise have, while depriving me of it would deprive me of something I would otherwise have. We have rights to the things we would have if others did not deprive us of them, mainly life, liberty, and property in the fruits of our labor -- of which a house is one, while land is not.
It's as if you foolishly believe you have a natural right to own a house

I only have a natural right to own a house I built, or paid someone (who paid someone who paid someone...) to build, as explained above.
when rights are privileges granted by government.

Wrong. "... to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men..."

You are claiming that slaves had no right to liberty before governments emancipated them. But why would governments emancipate them if they had no right to liberty?

Rights must pre-exist government, or there would be no basis on which government could grant them. Indeed, if we have no rights without government, why would we even want government? We have the natural individual rights I enumerated above because they are implied by our biological identity as human beings: communities whose people have such rights reliably outcompete communities whose people don't -- and I can explain why -- leading to emergence of those rights by Darwinian selection.
#15326706
Hakeer wrote:I wonder whether scammers who swindle naive elderly people out of their savings tell themselves the same thing. No guilt.

They might, just as soulless, amoral Wall Street greed robots tell themselves that their victims are suckers and losers born to be fleeced by the "smartest guys in the room." Of course, the difference is that I am not the one who is making the landless landless. You merely have to prevent yourself from knowing that fact because you have already realized that it proves your beliefs are false and evil.
User avatar
By ingliz
#15326709
Truth To Power wrote: Why would governments emancipate them if they had no right to liberty?

Industrialisation.

Wage slavery is a more economically efficient way to manage labour. The workers keep and clothe themselves, you can hire and fire at will, and wages are kept low in a competitive labour market.

Trebles all round, what ho!


:lol:
User avatar
By Wellsy
#15326718
wat0n wrote:So how do you determine use values?

As in how to Marxists think of what constitutes a use value?
Use-value is what meets human needs which are historically variable as new human needs arise with the complexity of society. Humans have always necessary changed the material world to their needs, from the first spear up to the modern iPhone. Of course many would argue one doesn't 'need' a iPhone to survive but it is also a poor notion of human beings that is reduced to bare biological necessity as if we don't develop within a society.
Humans need water but I don't drink it out of the gutter but out of glasses, bottles, and such. I don't need to do so to survive but it becomes important in my functioning within society.
The emphasis on use-value is always it's properties in the material world to meet human needs. How we transform that material is always dependent on what humans do to function in modern life.
With even an iPhone, many homeless people may even access phones and wifi.
A use-value isn't the psychological satisfaction in consuming a commodity, but the way in which consumption of the commodity actually satisfies a human being.
And with the historically developing quality of human beings is also the great potential for the expansion of production under capitalism to meet greater human needs so we are further away from bare necessity and thus can develop in other ways. That is the great merit of capitalism that it creates the potential to provide materially for the great mass of people so that they need not survive like animals but can develop a richer and well rounded life.
By wat0n
#15326719
Wellsy wrote:A use-value isn't the psychological satisfaction in consuming a commodity, but the way in which consumption of the commodity actually satisfies a human being.


Can you elaborate on this?
User avatar
By Hakeer
#15326720
wat0n wrote:Can you elaborate on this?


Why can't it be both? We enjoy the taste of a good meal while eating, but also enjoy feeling our hunger is satisfied when we're done.

I'm ready for Thanksgiving just thinking about it!
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